THE FOUNDATIONS

You must not molest the stranger or oppress him, for you lived as strangers in the land of Egypt.

There can be few sentences which express so briefly, but at the same time so clearly, the essence of Hebrew and Jewish religion: relationship with God has, in immediate terms, practical rather than speculative consequences; and the imperative (or in this case the prohibition) is based on an appeal to history, not on an appeal to authority or to revelation in abstract form. Among the many cultures and religions of the ancient world, Israel stands out as distinct and different from them all. The religion of Israel drew on many alien sources, and it often made use of foreign practices and ideas, but always it constructed out of them something distinctively its own. The distinctive genius of Israel lay in its realisation and acceptance of the possibility that God might disclose himself in the events of history. It would be absurd to say that no one else in the ancient world believed that that might be so, just as it would be absurd to say that in Israel there was no other way in which God was believed to reveal himself. In point of fact, God was believed to make himself known in a great variety of ways—in creation, for example, or in the natural order, in the lives of exemplary men, in the words and actions of inspired individuals, in carefully ordered rituals, or even in the chance occurrences and accidents of life.