Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People - Rafapal

THE INVENTION OF THE EXILE 151
narrative. The Judean society must have been quite small then, and when the
inquisitive Herodotus passed through the country in the 440s BCE he missed it
altogether.
What we do know is that, while the abundant biblical texts during this Persian
period promoted the tribal principle of an exclusive "sacred seed," other authors
wrote works that ran counter to the hegemonic discourse, and some of those
works entered the canon. The Second Isaiah, the Book of Ruth, the Book of Jonah
and the apocryphal Book of Judith all call for Judaism to accept gentiles, and even
for the whole world to adopt the "religion of Moses." Some of the authors of the
Book of Isaiah proposed a universalist telos for Judaic monotheism:
And it shall come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the Lord's house
shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above
the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many people shall go and say,
Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the
God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths
(Isa. 2:2-3).
Ruth the Moabite, great-grandmother of King David, follows Boaz and
marries him without any problem. 49 Similarly, in the Book of Judith, Achior
the Ammonite, influenced by Judith, converts to Judaism. 50 Yet both of them
belonged to peoples that Deuteronomy strictly prohibited: "An Ammonite or
Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to their tenth
generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the Lord for ever"
(Deut. 23:3). The creators of these proselytized characters depicted them to
protest against the overweening isolationism of Ezra and Nehemiah's priests,
those authorized agents of the Persian kingdom.
Every monotheism contains a potential element of mission. Unlike the
tolerant polytheisms, which accept the existence of other deities, the very
belief in the existence of a single god and the negation of plurality impels the
believers to spread the idea of divine singularity that they have adopted. The
acceptance by others of the worship of the single god proves his might and
his unlimited power over the world. Despite the isolationist caste tendency
49 "So Boaz took Ruth, and she was his wife: and when he went in unto her, the Lord
gave her conception, and she bore a son ... and they called his name Obed: he is the father
of Jesse, the father of David." Ruth. 4:13, 17.
50 fdt. 14:6. Curiously, even the isolationist authors of the Book of Joshua acknowledge
the services of Rahab, the Canaanite harlot of Jericho, by permitting her to remain among
the special people that conquered the country by force: "And Joshua saved Rahab the harlot
alive, and her father's household, and all that she had; and she dwelleth in Israel even unto
this day." Jo. 6:25.