Not the least of the intellectual legacies of Judaism is the tenacity of the conviction that history must have a meaning. Even the most secular among us wince when Shakespeare tells us the Gods just use us for their sport; even the most imaginative wonder quite how the Greeks coped with the conviction that the Gods intervened in human history to prove a domestic point or fend off boredom. The thought that history needed a plot, that it had purpose, an author and a destination, seems to have been a leap of the Jewish imagination which took the Jews into realms where no other people in classical antiquity had been. Other peoples had founding myths; innumerable petty kings claimed to govern with the assistance of one or a dozen local deities. Somehow, the Jews uniquely seem to have hit on the thought that there was one history, guided by one deity, starring one central collective actor - the Jewish people.

LRB 4 August 1988 | PDF Download