So Jesus does not fight for the correct politics or the right form of the state but instead for fraternity and sorority in the people of God. He struggles not for power and for freedom from Rome but for the overturning and remaking of what power is. And that is certainly a political agenda. He knows that peace and justice, feeding on true fear of God, must grow from below.
Jesus certainly desires the revolution—he wants “new wine in new wineskins” (Mark 2:22)—but a completely different kind of revolution. The usual sort of revolution requires masses of people and must happen quickly. Jesus counts on the leaven that, almost unnoticeably, raises the whole mass of dough (Matt 13:33), and he compares the coming of the reign of God to a mustard seed, which is very tiny and yet grows into a great shrub (Mark 4:30-32), in the version in the Sayings Source even into a World Tree (Matt 13:31-32 // Luke 13:18-19).
And for this particular point of view, which no longer counts on the state or expects salvation from kings, Jesus had a monumental share of the Old Testament behind him: namely, the Torah, the first five books of Moses. The Torah had grown out of the history of the failure of the kingship in Israel and the experience of the catastrophe of exile. In order to give a true evaluation of the significance of the Torah in the context we are talking about here I must broaden the perspective somewhat.
To begin with, the structure of the Hebrew Bible does not follow the model of a continuing “biblical history.” Older readers, remembering the so-called School Bibles or Bible History books of an earlier time, may still be familiar with the image of an ongoing biblical narrative. It began with the creation of the world, continued with Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and their children, through Abraham, Moses, the judges, David, Solomon, until finally it reached the Maccabees. This all took place in as homogeneous a narrative as possible incorporating everything to be found in the Old Testament. Prophets such as Amos, Isaiah, or Jeremiah were introduced at appropriate places. Where the Old Testament itself revealed some holes in the story they were filled in, at least as far as possible.
But that picture in no way does justice to the structure of the Hebrew Bible. The real Old Testament does not offer a continuous history of events. Taken as a whole, it is not history at all. Its first and most important part is the “Torah,” followed by the “Nebiim,” the prophets. The books of Joshua, Judges, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings were also counted among the prophets—because of the fact that the prophets Nathan, Ahijah, Micah ben Imlah, Elijah, Elisha, Isaiah, and Huldah play an important part in them.15 Finally, the third block is made up of the “Kethubim,” the “writings.” The reason for mentioning all this is that the Torah, in Jewish understanding—an understanding that was being shaped already in Old Testament times—is the foundation, the basis of all Sacred Scripture. The “prophets” and the “writings” are by no means sections with equal weight; they exist with reference to the Torah and are understood to be a kind of commentary on the Torah. The fact that this is really so is indicated by the synagogal liturgy, in which the Torah is always recited first and as the reading that determines all the rest.
The Torah in its present form originated, at the earliest, toward the end of the Babylonian exile, but more probably soon after the end of the exile. It was intended to secure Israel’s identity and rescue it from a total rupture of continuity. This is true, of course, only of the Torah “in its present form,” for many texts of the Torah are older than that. It contains songs, narratives, and collections of laws that belong to older strands of tradition. But in the context of our question we are not concerned about those ancient traditions that were worked into the Torah; we are considering the overall composition, that is, the final form we know today. The Sitz im Leben of the Torah as a whole composition is the crisis, indeed catastrophe, of the exile. And the Torah is not simply a collection of laws; rather, its law collections are framed by and interwoven with stories.
An important question for us is: when does the story end, the one that constitutes the frame for Israel’s history and repeatedly interrupts it? The answer is amazing.16 The frame of the story is not extended to the entry into the Promised Land under Joshua, much less to David’s kingship, and certainly not as far as the Maccabees. Rather, the Torah ends with the death of Moses (Deut 34). He sees the land of promise from a distance, but he is not allowed to enter it. And with him Israel also stands on the borders of the land, but it may not enter. When the annual recitation of the Torah reaches this point it stops and begins again from the beginning.
Christians for the most part do not perceive this break in the text because they have a wrong idea about the Hebrew Bible. They still have something like the “Bible history” of the old school Bibles in their heads, and those simply continued the story without interruption after the death of Moses.
Of course, we have to ask why the basic text for Israel’s identity ends with the death of Moses. Why doesn’t it end after the people have entered the Promised Land? Or with the building of Solomon’s temple? Or with the reforms under King Josiah? Why is Israel’s history interrupted? Why does Israel’s fundamental text accept an open ending? A border situation? An unfinished narrative?
The answer can only be: because the ongoing history of Israel, especially that of its period as a nation-state, was not regarded as a time that lent Israel its identity. The final redactors of the Torah were of the opinion that what Israel was in its innermost self, what constituted it, what it was for, was revealed not under David and Solomon but under Moses, and, more precisely, it revealed itself in Israel’s liberation from Egypt and the covenant with its God at Sinai.17
It only becomes clear what that ultimately means when we keep in mind that, at the time when the Torah was created as a unit, the royal period was already in the past. People could look back at that period in its entirety, and in the eyes of the final redactors of the Torah, who were seeking God’s true will in and for history, the royal period was not only an unlucky era but a theological catastrophe. That period could in no way be one that created identity. It could only be a time of warning against going that way again. Therefore it was not included in Israel’s basic text. Instead, the identity of the people of God was sought in Israel’s early period, in the time of the “patriarchs,” the time when a covenant was made with God, the time when Israel was still on its way, the time of its testing in the wilderness.
Consequently, the Torah shows little interest in an earthly king. The covenant God forges with Israel makes every worldly king a spectator, and so the legal materials in the Torah for the most part say nothing about a king or a state. If we sift through the concrete law in the Torah we see immediately that the king plays an insignificant role; in most of the law collections he does not appear at all. There are cultic laws, social laws, family law, but scarcely any law applying to political institutions. The only partial exception is Deuteronomy 17:14-20, a law concerning the king:18
When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,” you may indeed set over you a king whom the LORD your God will choose. One of your own community you may set as king over you; you are not permitted to put a foreigner over you, who is not of your own community.
Even so, he must not acquire many horses for himself, or return the people to Egypt in order to acquire more horses, since the LORD has said to you, “You must never return that way again.”