The Hebrew Bible and Plato

An interesting tweet thread about the Tower of Babel led me to an even more interesting article: The Dignity of Difference: Avoiding the Clash of Civilizations:

However, for almost 2,500 years, in Western civilization, there was an alternative to tribalism, offered by one of the great philosophers of all time: Plato. I am going to call this universalism. My thesis will be that universalism is also inadequate to our human condition. What Plato argued in The Republic is that this world of the senses, of things we can see and hear and feel, the world of particular things, isn’t the source of knowledge or truth or reality. How is one to understand what a tree is, if trees are always changing from day to day and there are so many different kinds of them? How can one define a table if tables come in all shapes and sizes — big, small, old, new, wood, other materials? How does one understand reality in this world of messy particulars? Plato said that all these particulars are just shadows on a wall. What is real is the world of forms and ideas: the idea of a table, the form of a tree. Those are the things that are universal. Truth is the move from particularity to universality. Truth is the same for everyone, everywhere, at all times. Whatever is local, particular, and unique is insubstantial, even illusory.

This is a dangerous idea, because it suggests that all differences lead to tribalism and then to war, and that the best alternative therefore is to eliminate differences and impose on the world a single, universal truth. If this is true, then when you and I disagree, if I am right, you are wrong. If I care about truth, I must convert you from your error. If I can’t convert you, maybe I can conquer you. And if I can’t conquer you, then maybe I have to kill you, in the name of that truth. From this flows the blood of human sacrifice through the ages.

Let us read the Bible again and hear in it a message that is both simple and profound, and, I believe, an important one for our time. We will start with what the Bible is about: one man, Abraham, and one woman, Sarah, who have children and become a family and then in turn a tribe, a collection of tribes, a nation, a particular people, and a people of the covenant.

What is striking is that the Bible doesn’t begin with that story. For the first eleven chapters, it tells the universal story of humanity: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, Babel and the builders, universal archetypes living in a global culture. In the opening words of Genesis 11, “The whole world was of one language and shared speech.” Then in Genesis 12, God’s call to Abraham, the Bible moves to the particular. This exactly inverts Plato’s order. Plato begins with the particular and then aspires to the universal. The Bible begins with the universal and then aspires to the particular. That is the opposite direction. It makes the Bible the great counter-Platonic narrative in Western civilization.

The Bible begins with two universal, fundamental statements. First, in Genesis 1, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.” In the ancient world it was not unknown for human beings to be in the image of God: that’s what Mesopotamian kings and the Egyptian pharaoh were. The Bible was revolutionary for saying that every human being is in the image of God.

The second epic statement is in Genesis 9, the covenant with Noah, the first covenant with all mankind, the first statement that God asks all humanity to construct societies based on the rule of law, the sovereignty of justice and the non-negotiable dignity of human life.

It is surely those two passages that inspire the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights… .” The irony is that these truths are anything but self-evident. Plato or Aristotle wouldn’t know what the words meant. Plato believed profoundly that human beings are created unequal, and Aristotle believed that some people are born to be free, other to be slaves.

These words are self-evident only in a culture saturated in the universal vision of the Bible. However, that vision is only the foundation. From then on, starting with Babel and the confusion of languages and God’s call to Abraham, the Bible moves from the universal to the particular, from all mankind to one family. The Hebrew Bible is the first document in civilization to proclaim monotheism, that God is not only the God of this people and that place but of all people and every place. Why then does the Bible deliver an anti-Platonic, particularistic message from Genesis 12 onwards? The paradox is that the God of Abraham is the God of all mankind, but the faith of Abraham is not the faith of all mankind.