It quickly became clear to me, as it did to others of my Biblical and Ancient Studies colleagues at the time, as it clearly did to earlier students of modern Biblical Studies, that to understand and comprehend the Tanakh one had to grasp the cultural, political, demographic, and economic contexts of the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean world of which it was a part. It quickly became apparent to me, for example, that Ancient Judea, when it was conquered by the Persians in 538 BCE, was impacted extensively by imperial Persian culture and that the nascent Judaism that developed out of the Ancient Hebrew faith around this time was impacted by the Persian Zoroastrian faith, particularly its dualistic monotheism, its manicheaniam, and its apocalypticism. All of these, of course, became important and central parts of the Jewish faith that developed after the Persian conquest of Judea, the Hellenistic conquest of Judea, and the Roman conquest of Judea. One can readily see these Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman influences not only in the Masoretic Tanakh but in the so-called Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha and in the "scriptures" of other Hellenistic and Roman syncretic religious groups like the Gnostics, the devotees of Mithraism, and the devotees of Early Christianity including Paul of Tarsus.
It wasn't only about the broader Mediterranean contexts of Ancient Israel and later Judea that I learned about. Sometime in the 1970s and 1980s I learned, about Alexander the Great's excursions into Persia and India. I learned about the trade routes between the Mediterranean, India, and China including the famous Silk Road. I learned about the trading and cultural centre of Dilmun in parts of what are today Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. I learned, in other words, that there were economic, political, cultural, and demographic contacts between the Mediterranean, the Indus Valley, and China, and that there was a kind of large-scale geographic area characterised by economic, political, and meaning culture interactions before there was modern and postmodern globalisation, a fact seemingly forgotten by many of the analysts of globalism and the polemists and apologists for globalisation these days.
Eventually, though I
don't know exactly when this happened--sometime in the late 1970s and
1980s, I suspect--I learned that there was a period some scholars
referred to as the axial age. According to scholars like Karl Jaspers
the axial age ran from the 8th century BCE to the 3rd century BCE (and
perhaps beyond to Platonism and neo-Platonism). The axial age, I
learned, was the era of Zoroaster, the age of samsara and karma, the era
of the Buddha, the age of Jainism, the era of the Hebrew Nevi'im or
Prophets (that sect within early Judaism that appealed to me), the age
of Confucius, the era of the mysterious Lao-tse, and the age of the
Greek Presocratics, Socrates, Plato (who, so the argument goes, was
impacted by Indus Valley meanings systems), and Aristotle. The axial age
was an era of cultural interaction, culture change, and cultural
hybridity, a hybridity that is reflected in, for example, Mediterranean
Mithraism and Early Christianity in the Hellenistic and Roman eras. It
was also an era that some have seen as proto-modern or postmodern given
its diversity, its syncretism, and its critique of animism, animatism,
and theism, a kind of proto-secularism.
I didn't stick with Biblical and Mediterranean Studies. After a brief fling with the idea of becoming a rabbi, hardly a realistic profession for a misanthropic introvert like me, I moved beyond Biblical and Ancient Studies. I learned a lot from my engagement with Biblical Studies, however. Biblical Studies forced me to ask historical, ethnological, and sociological questions about the origins of the Hebrew and Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible and those questions, in turn, led me to hermeneutics. I will never forget sitting in James Ackerman's seminar on the Tanakh book of Exodus at Indiana University in Bloomington, and reflecting on the many interpretations of that book that revealed themselves in that class of non-Jewish Jews like me, Reform Jews, high church Christians, and evangelical Christians. I was fascinated by the fact that those brought up in largely the same America could interpret the text of Exodus in such a variety of different ways, interpretations I tied, at the time, to the various religious and non-religious cultures of the participants in this seminar. Biblical hermeneutics, in turn, led me to Max Weber, one of the fathers of hermeneutic social theory, and to social theory in general. I was particularly thrilled by and enthralled with the semiological theory and practise and structuralist theory and practise that were at the height of their influence and impact when I was an undergraduate in university. This, in turn, heightened my interest in cultural anthropology--which I had already done extensive course work in--and in sociology and history. All these, in turn, foregrounded for me the necessity of comparative study and research because, as I learned, you can't understand Ancient Israel and Judea without understanding their historical contexts and you can't understand a British settler society like the United States without comparing and contrasting it with other British settler societies like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
I learned a lot of things
from all these intellectual experiences. One of the things I learned
from all this social theorising and comparative research was that
notions such as exceptionalism, be it Jewish, Chinese, American,
Canadian, Australian, or Pakeha exceptionalism, are more ideologies, are
more the products of culture than they are a representation of
"reality". Humans do like to fetishise and universalise after all,
something that should be apparent to any of those embedded in the
examined life in this brave new digital delusional world.
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