History may be written by the victors, but the world’s most influential text comes from antiquity’s biggest losers.
The Moshiach came to Madison Avenue this summer. All over a not particularly Jewish neighborhood, posters of the bearded, Rembrandtesque Rebbe Schneerson appeared, mucilaged to every light post and bearing the caption “Long Live the Lubavitcher Rebbe King Messiah forever!” This was, or ought to have been, trebly astonishing.
The “secondary cause” for the Bible’s triumph, in Wright’s view, can be put simply: losers rule. More people remember the record-losing ’62 Mets than the pennant-winning ’62 Yankees. Division and defeat, Wright explains, made the Bible memorable. Successive expulsions and exiles forced the Jewish poets and prophets, like Red Sox fans of yore, to imagine defeat as a virtue, dispossession as a gift, failure today as a promise of victory tomorrow.
The divisions that Wright speaks of are less familiar, and—this is perhaps the chief originality of his book—just as decisive. The southern Kingdom of Judah and the northern Kingdom of Israel, which we might have imagined as agreeable sister kingdoms, were, in the centuries around 900-700 B.C.E., warring adversaries, though a single deity, one of many names, was shared between them.
Wright is both an analyst of Biblical texts and an apologist for them. His analysis is often brilliant and persuasive, leading us to see ideological fractures in texts that we thought we knew. And though much of the textual history will be familiar to scholars who have gone deep into the weeds, or the bulrushes, Wright does a terrific job of bringing it forward for his readers.
than glory in the Greeks’ victory, and made the humane family man Hector at least as attractive as the triumphant Achilles; and we ourselves volubly commemorate losses, from the Alamo to 9/11. “Here’s to the losers, bless ’em all!” Sinatra sang, and, often enough, we call down God’s blessing on the losers, since they so clearly do not have man’s.
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