The Circle vs. The Line

Thucydides vs. The Prophets (Redux)

Athens vs. Jerusalem

I first published this short post (below) almost two years ago, long before anyone began reading this Substack. I’m posting it again because the book I highlight — Amos Elon’s Jerusalem: City of Mirrors — opened my eyes to a new way of understanding history, religion, and the Bible. Although the passage below might be old news to you, it was and still is a revelation to me.

---

Back in 1995, I spent a month in Jerusalem on assignment for National Geographic magazine. I was there to write a story about the “three faces of Jerusalem” — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which consider the city pivotal to their histories and identities.

One evening, after a long day of interviews, I went back to my apartment, ate dinner, and started reading this book:

This passage stopped me in my tracks:

In the land of Israel, “the Jews begin to  live morally — as the Japanese have done literally — in a house of paper: the Bible.... 

Here, probably long before the Greeks, they achieved the intellectual feat of composing a connected narrative of history — their own and that of the world — enmeshed in the five books of Moses. Here, a national identity was defined, perhaps for the first time, by articulating a philosophy of history. 

And here, the idea of progress was first broached. In its time it was an absolutely sensational idea. Thucydides still thought it was worth writing the history of the Peloponnesian war because its events inevitably would be repeated. The scribes and prophets of Jerusalem challenged the prevailing notion that history necessarily moved in circles, repeating itself again and again. They invented utopia, the possibility of a better world. They enunciated hope on a grand scale. They postulated the possibility of a linear progression toward a better, more worthwhile life.”

I’m embarrassed to admit this was news to me.

I don’t remember any history or Sunday school teacher ever distilling Western civilization quite this way. That the ancient Greeks believed the same thing is going to happen to us, over and over again, no matter what. (Hence, Greek tragedies.) Whereas Jews (and Christians & Muslims) say: History does not repeat itself, which means every moment is unique, every person is one-of-a-kind, and progress is possible.

Put another way: Judaism [and its Scriptural siblings] is the principled rejection of tragedy in the name of hope.

There are many other “master narratives” that suggest history is linear, of course. Darwinism via evolution. Marxism via the class struggle. The Enlightenment via Reason. Race theory via… actually, I never understood that one. Self-help books (e.g., The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). Mindfulness meditation. The Second Law of Thermodynamics. The marketing efforts of the Milwaukee Brewers’ front office (“this could be the year!”). And many more.

The two questions I keep pondering are: Which narrative(s) point to a world we might want to inhabit? And which ones have the best odds of getting us there?