The Song of the Greys by Nigel Kerner

Author:Nigel Kerner [Kerner, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: non-fiction
Publisher: Holder and Stoughton
Published: 1997-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

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to the Jews during the Second World War. I am not, of course, suggesting that this is a direct equivalent, for it would have been the Nazis themselves, not the Jews whom they persecuted, who would have qualified for that ‘mark’. But the marking process may. instead have been an acted-out memory of past interceptions, an anachronism reawakened maybe by the alien intentions that may indeed have driven the Nazi ethos.

The worship of the God Yahweh, the God of Israel, did not begin, scholars now believe, until the time of Moses. Various other epithets for God were used before that time and this has been taken by scholars as an indication that patriarchal religion (that is, the religion of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) differed from the worship of Yahweh that began with Moses. They have found more evidence for this conclusion in the fact that distinctive features of post-Mosaic religion are absent in the God of the patriarchs. The God of the patriarchs shows nothing of Yahweh’s ‘jealousy’; no religious tension or contrast with their neighbours appears, and idolatry is scarcely an issue. He also provides his people with no obligations to fulfil as a condition of their happiness, unlike the Mosaic God who makes such demands upon his people continually.

God, apparently, was originally the personal tutelary deity of each of the patriarchs, called by a variety of names and later unified into the one God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but only in hindsight. The hindsight of Jewish tradition that identifies Yahweh as the Creator of the world, who had been known to and worshipped by men from the beginning of time. It seems instead to be the case that the three ‘patriarchs’ may have each been communicating with different sources of inspiration, different Gods. Then later an amalgam was made of all these sources and identified as the ‘God of Israel’.

The key to it all lies in an answer to the question: Who or what was the God of Israel of common Mosaic institution? The Old Testament is a catalogue of a God who seems more like a Lord of the Manor. Not an entity that dispensed volumes of warmth and love and encouragement to bring together, to bind, to add the whole aegis of Mankind, not a tiny part of it that exclusively belonged to this so-called God. In a quote from the Good Book this God admits to being a jealous God. Strategies and ploys

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