the battles in w hieh our own still-living relatives fought, is it surprisingrnthat so few remember who toppled the towers of Ilium,rnor threw down the walls of Jericho?rnOne of the reasons for the loss of historical mcmor) is thernfact that our culture has turned awa)^ from print to the electronicrnmedia. Books are permanent, or somewhat so; the imagesrnon the screen like the sounds from speakers vanish whenrnthe current dies. Over 2,500 years ago, a book changed a societ;rnduring the intervening centuries that one book, expandedrn60-fold, became the foundation of the society of which we arernthe latest and perhaps—God forbid—the last inheritors.rnhi the seventh century B.C., wc have the first explicit accountrnof a book that made history. According to the account inrnJoshua, after the Hebrews crossed the Jordan into the PronrisedrnLand, they erected 12 stones taken from the river as “a memorialrnto the sons of Israel forever” (Joshua 4:7). The memory ofrnthat land-taking has survived more than 3,000 }ears, and hasrnled to the establishment of modern Israel on much of the samernland that Joshua conquered. After Joshua’s stones, for severalrncenturies Israel continued to cherish sacred objects, mannarnfrom the wanderings in the desert, Aaron’s rod, and the Tablesrnof the Covenant (Hebrews 9:4), but such things could be plunderedrnand disappear. What could not be plundered so casilvrnand made to disappear was the Word held fast in Scripture:rn”The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our Godrnstands forever” (Isaiah 40:8).rnBefore those holy relics of Israel’s pilgrimage disappeared inrnsuccessive plunderings and devastations of the Temple, somethingrnmore lasting had taken their place. The stones set up bvrnJoshua as well as those given at Sinai to Moses were to disappear,rnbut not the words that tell of them. A single incident—itrnmav be familiar onlv to historians of Judaism and zealous Biblernreaders—mav be taken as svmbolie of the impact that ta Biblia,rnliterally, “the Books,” and in our parlance, the Bible, wouldrncome to have in the wodd: establishing, and to a great extentrnpreserving, what we now call Western or Judeo-Christian civilization.rnWithout the Bible there would still be a geographicrnWest, but there would be no Western civilization as we know it.rnExactly what happened 26 centuries ago in Jerusalem?rnJudah, the smaller of the two branches of the divided kingdomrnof Solomon, had just witnessed the conquest of its sistcrkingdomrnIsrael. The protection that God had granted a fewrndecades earlier was not repeated, and Assyria took the tribes ofrnthe north into captivitv. Jerusalem still stood intact, but its societyrnwas demoralized, its temple neglected. The young KingrnJosiah determined to change things, and ordered the refurbishmentrnof the sacred building. The cleanup produced unexpectedrnresults: instead of a mere renovation of its temple, the wholernsociety vas reived. A priest found a book, a scribe read it to arnking, and society went through a salutary if short-lied transformation.rnThe Hebrew Scriptures of the Old Testament were notrneven to be completed until three centuries later, after the returnrnof the Jewish exiles from Babylon, but even before the fall ofrnJerusalem, when Israel’s sacred objects were lost, the writtenrnbook, or rather scroll, had begun to show what a written textrncould do to a whole society, to gi’e a foretaste of the formativerninfluence that the Bible was to have during the next 25 or morerncenturies. The Hebrew texts of Scripture were complete aboutrnfie centuries before Christ, according to Orthodox Jewish tradition,rnalthough according to many critics, the last elements ofrnthe Hebrew Scriptures, such as major elements of Daniel, wererncomposed much later, as late as the second century B.C.; conservativernscholars dispute this late dating. The Greek-languagernbooks included in the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodoxrncanon of the Old Testament, such as Maccabees, clearly daternfrom second century before Christ.rnA little book—assumed b’ manv to have been the textrnof Deuteronomy, the “second” presentation of the Law—rnreformed a nation. The impact that one small portion of thernBible had on a little nation has been multiplied many timesrno’er by the impact the whole Book has had on 20-odd centuriesrnof world history.rnWhen King Josiah was 26 ears old and began to repair thernneglected Temple of Jerusalem—the northern Kingdom of Israelrnwas already devastated bv AssTia—I hlkiah the high priestrnreported to the scribe Shaphan, “I have found the book of thernlaw in the house of the Lord.” Shaphan took it to the king andrnread it in his presence. “And it came about that when the kingrnheard the words of the book of the law, that he tore his clothes”rn(II Kings 22:7, 10-11). He tore his clothes and followed therntearing with a series of incisive moral and spiritual reforms.rnJosiah was killed 1 > years later in an ill-ad’ised confrontationrnwith an advancing Egyptian army. Soon all that had been accomplishedrnin his reform was lost (II Kings 23:29); Nebuchadnezzarrnconquered Jerusalem. According to Scripture, this wasrnthe consequence of trusting in military alliances rather than inrnthe Word of the Lord. Israel came under foreign dominationrnfor most of the next 25 centuries.rnAfter 70 years’ exile m Babylon, the returning Jewish exilesrnwere determined to be more attentic to the Book. A symbolicrnaffirmation of this determination took place at the Water Gaternof the partialk rebuilt former Jevish capital. In what must havernbeen an almost unique occasion in human history, the scribernEzra read for the better part of seen days from the “book of thernLaw of Moses” to the people assembled at the gate. Becausernthe text was in I lebrew, after being read from the book, it wasrntranslated for the people into Aramaic vernacular. In contrastrnto Josiah’s reaction of dismay, the people responded to this affirmationrnof God’s constant and reliable providence with rejoicing:rnthis was the time of the reintroduction of the Feast ofrnTabernacles (Nehemiah 8:1-16). Echoes of Ezra’s reading ofrnthe Law at the Witer Gate were heard two millennia later, inrnthe famous Senate Watergate hearings, when Presbyterian SenatorrnSam Ervin repeatedK’ quoted from that same book of lawrnto the immense satisfaction of even the secular critics ofrnRichard Nixon.rnDuring almost tvNO millennia of exile, dispersion, and foreignrnrule in Israel, from the subjugation of Jerusalem b Pompey thernGreat in 63 B.C. to the establishment of the modern state ofrnIsrael almost exactly 2,000 years later, the Hebrew Biblernremained the enduring source of strength and unmovable referencernpoint for the Jews. There is no parallel in all of historyrnfor a people so few in number and suffering so much adversityrnas the Jewish people preserving its identity through millennia.rnThe onlv comparable story of national and cultural longevit)’ isrnthat of the Chinese, and they are by far the most numerousrnpeople on earth. The Hebrew language came to be largely confinedrnto ritual purposes as long ago as the time of Ezra—whichrnis wh the readings at the Water Gate had to be interpreted,rnand why the Jews of Egypt translated the Scriptures into thernGreek of the Septuagint. Nevertheless, the Book remained; thernlanguage was studied by the scholars, and learned in at leastrnsome fashion by the young. The variant of medieval GermanrnSEPTEMBER 1996/21rnrnrn