The Dome of the Rock | Jerusalem, 2022

Overview

A murdered election, an Islamicate map that runs from the Atlantic to the Indus, and a brand-new capital drawn as a perfect circle. Part 9 opens Module III, The Golden Age (Parts 9, 10, and 11). Module II read the Qur’an: how it is interpreted (Part 6), what it demands in peace and war (Part 7), and what it says is real (Part 8). Now the Ummah becomes an empire. This Part traces the turn from the elective caliphate to dynasty under the Umayyads, follows the conquest map from Jerusalem to Tours, and watches the Abbasid revolution raise its black banners, ending at the gates of Baghdad.

Assigned Reading
Ansary, Destiny Disrupted, chapters 5 & 6

Damascus • al-Maghreb • the Dome of the Rock
waqf• Abu Muslim • al-Mansur • Islamicate • Baghdad

9.1 | From Ummah to Empire

The Last Shura

Around 676 (56 AH), the shura that convened to debate the next caliph after the Umayyad Mu’awiya (cf. Part 4) was an absolute farce.

In the circle of those gathered to discuss it, one of Mu’awiya’s henchmen openly threatened to kill anyone who dared raise an objection to Mu’awiya’s son, Yazid, becoming the next caliph.

And Yazid did end up as the next caliph. It was under his rule that Husayn and most of his household were killed at Karbala (cf. Part 5), with the seat of power held from Damascus. There would never again be another shura to debate the caliph.

From here on out, the Islamicate empire would be dynastic.

The Prophet Muhammad may have started the Ummah as a religious entity, but as of the leadership of Mu’awiya and Yazid, the Caliphate had become a political empire. The Umayyad empire was the first of many Islamic empires. Some would be Sunni and some Shia. Some Arab, others Persian or Turkish. Some housed in the Middle East, others in places as far-flung as India, Iran, North Africa, or even Spain.

But the Umayyads came first.

The Umayyad Inheritance

Their empire marks the beginning of Islamicate civilization.

Its court language was Meccan Arabic, and its principal ethnicity was Arab. Back in Muhammad’s time, the Umayyads had been the wealthy élite clan whom the Prophet had railed against for their mistreatment of the poor (cf. Part 2). Back then, they ran the city of Mecca. Now, having converted to Islam en masse, their enormous wealth ran not just a city but an empire that spanned continents.

The charitable view is that the Umayyad penchant for wealth made them the perfect inheritors of the Islamic throne. They had the trade networks, the know-how, and the ambition needed to grow the first Islamic civilization across the 7th and 8th centuries.

And, like all the world’s empires, the Umayyads had no compunction about aggressing against their neighbors in a perpetual state of border war. While the Qur’an limits the casus belli (the justifiable grounds for war) narrowly (cf. Part 7), the fact is that the Umayyad dynasty kept pushing at its frontiers through military means. Growing up next to their regional counterparts, the Christian Byzantines and the Zoroastrian Persians, this was simply the political reality of the times.

The machinery of the empire tells the same story. Around 697, the caliph Abd al-Malik (the builder of the famous Dome of the Rock, below) made Arabic the language of imperial administration. In 696–697 he also struck a new gold dinar that carried no images at all, only words quoting the Qur’an. Yet the clerks who kept the empire’s books, from Morocco to Iran, were still largely Greek- and Persian-trained administrators, many of them Christian and Zoroastrian.

3 Empires, 3 Stories

Those three powers were remarkably alike.

In the halls of each king’s court, the dangerous ‘Other’ was warned about, and every ruler reminded his subjects that the sacred peace they enjoyed within their borders was owed in large part to the armies they raised and sent to the frontier.

Christians, Muslims, and Zoroastrians all played this same game — and played it effectively. And each intended, eventually, to rule the others in the name of God.

Each of the three empires had a narrative around which its soldiers gathered. The Zoroastrian Persians praised themselves, rightly, as the most ancient and civilized culture on earth, defending itself against more recent regional upstarts (heirs to a grandeur that reached back long before any of their rivals existed). The Byzantine Christians upheld the gospel and the miracles of Jesus, while remaining tied culturally to the ancient greatness of Rome. Theirs was the story of an empire that had already conquered the world once and been baptized into a new faith.

But the Umayyad Muslims had a far more compelling narrative than history lessons and stories of days gone by. The Muslim forces rallied behind a simple story: a new miracle. They were winning. By leaps and bounds, the Islamicate civilization just kept seeing victory after victory.

And a people who are winning need no ‘ancient pedigree’ to explain themselves.

Critically, all three narratives did the same work: each told a people that history, or God, or destiny had chosen them, and that the empire next door was the threatening godless Other. The Persian looked at his rivals and saw barbarous newcomers. The Byzantine saw heretics and infidels. The Muslim saw a world not yet brought to submission. Three expansionist empires, each certain God was on its side, and one of them (for now) riding a wave of success the other two could not match.

What follows is a description of that wave.

9.2 | Mapping the Conquest: Jerusalem to Tours

Jerusalem, Alexandria, & Persia

First, the Byzantine Christians lost the Levant: Jerusalem itself fell to Caliph Omar in 638 (cf. Part 4). Within a century, the map of the Mediterranean world was redrawn.

• 638 | Jerusalem falls to the Ummah
• 642 | Christian Alexandria falls, and with it, Egypt
• 651 | The last Sasanian king of Persia is killed
• 670 | Kairouan is founded as the forward operating base for North Africa
• 691 | The Dome of the Rock is completed in Jerusalem
• 698 | Carthage (today, Tunisia) is taken
• 711 | The Iberian peninsula (ie. Spain) and the Sindh are invaded
• 732 | The Battle of Tours halts the Muslim advance into France

The famous Temple Mount is the hill where King Solomon had once built the Jewish Temple, and where, in Islamic tradition, the Prophet Muhammad had taken his Night Journey more than a thousand years later. By the 7th century, the Mount had been used as a trash dump under Christian rule. The Mount itself was cleaned up by the Ummah, and around the Foundation Stone was built the glittering Dome of the Rock in 691, under the caliph Abd al-Malik. As the empire expanded, Christians and Jews would live within it as protected communities, and Jerusalem itself would remain a shared holy city for all three traditions.

The Dome still carries its founding inscription, dated 72 AH (691–692), in a long band of gold mosaic, and the choice of text is striking. At the heart of newly conquered Jerusalem, the empire’s first great monument quotes the Qur’an’s words about Jesus:

People of the Book, do not exaggerate in your religion. The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was God’s messenger and His word, given to Mary. So believe in God and His messengers, and do not speak of a Trinity. God is one God. Qur’an 4:171 (paraphrased)

The first great monument of Islamic architecture honors Jesus as God’s messenger.
In gold, on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

After Syria and the Levant came the Christian province of Egypt (essential to the Byzantines for grain, for ships, and as the European gateway to Africa). The Ummah mounted a 3-year campaign to wrest the strategic Nile from Byzantine hands, and in 642, with the fall of Christian Alexandria, the once-Coptic province of Egypt passed under full Islamic control. From then on, if drought came to Arabia, the breadbasket of the Nile would guard the Ummah against famine.

Next came Persia. The once-united Persian empire (today, Iran) had already begun to fold, in large part from overextending itself in endless wars with the neighboring Byzantines. By the mid-7th century, the Zoroastrian Persians were economically, politically, and socially unprepared for a major Arab incursion from the south (cf. Part 4). In 628, the Persian king was executed, and no fewer than ten kings replaced him over the next four years!

Civil war tore the thinly-spread empire apart just as the Arab Muslim forces were poised to strike. In 633, the Ummah invaded Persian-controlled Mesopotamia (today, Iraq). By 636, the Persians had lost the entire west of Iran. Sheltered behind the Zagros Mountains, the rest of Persia held out until 651 before it fell militarily.

Still, Persia would always be a special case. Conversion from Zoroastrianism came over centuries. (Iran’s famous Shia identity is a later story, cf. Part 12.) The Persians never embraced Arabic. They kept their own non-Semitic language, their Iranian traditions, and much of their pre-Islamic culture.

In many ways Arab Islam and Persian Islam would always remain distinct. The former spread west from Arabia across North Africa. The latter traveled north and east from Persia into the lands of the Turks, the Central Asians, and India.

That fault line will matter for the rest of the course.

From the Atlantic to the Indus

And so it was that in 661 (40 AH), the Umayyad caliph Mu’awiya was able to hand his family Egypt (the gateway to Africa), Persia (the gateway to Asia), and naval control of most of the formerly Roman Mediterranean. One point deserves emphasis: these lands were controlled by Muslims, but only 10 to 20 percent of the population identified as Muslim at the time.

This was minority rule.
There was a thin governing class atop a vast and largely non-Muslim populace.

By 670, the Tunisian city of Kairouan was serving as a forward operating base for North Africa (in Arabic, al-Maghreb, ‘the west’). By 698 the Maghrebi forces had taken the city of Carthage, and in 708 the Moroccan city of Tangiers fell as well.

Islam was now an Atlantic civilization.

East of Persia, the Turkic-Buddhist region of Transoxiana (today Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan) was pried open slowly: first raids, striking Bukhara (673) and Samarqand (675), then conquest in earnest under the general Qutayba ibn Muslim (705–715). From the Far East, China grew alarmed at the prospect of losing authority over the priceless Silk Road and backed the Turkish defenses. The contest was settled only in 751, when Abbasid and Tang armies met at the Talas River and the Chinese were turned back. Transoxiana would belong to the Islamicate world.

South of Transoxiana, the Ummah took the Indian province of Sindh (today part of Pakistan) in 711, and by 714 controlled the entire lower Indus Valley. A word about a word: the name ‘Hindu’ that the Muslim forces used for the local non-Muslims was itself inherited, not invented. Persian speakers had long called the peoples and lands beyond the Indus ‘Hindu’ (from Sindhu, the Sanskrit name of the river), and the conquerors spread that usage. It would be many more centuries before the full extent of Islamicate dominance in India took hold.

Back in the west, the Islamic conquest of Christian Spain came rapidly. The local forces were mostly North African Berbers (Amazigh, as they call themselves), not Arabs, unified from Kairouan to Tangiers. The Maghrebi incursion was dramatic. As in Persia, the fall of Spain was preceded by the death of a monarch: the Germanic Visigoth king Wittiza died in 710, and internal division among the Gothic kingdoms triggered the Islamic conquest in 711. The capital city of Toledo surrendered peacefully, and the local Spanish Jews welcomed the egalitarian Muslims as long-prayed-for liberators.

By 716, most of Iberia (today Spain and Portugal) was under Islamic control (the mountainous north of Asturias never fell). Muslim rule would last, shrinking over the centuries, until Granada, the last emirate, surrendered in 1492. The Islamic advance into Western Europe ended famously at the northern Battle of Tours in 732, when the Frankish general Charles Martel repelled the Muslim forces. Though Spain left Christendom for seven hundred years, France would remain Catholic.

Damascus & the Waqf

The unprecedented wealth that came pouring into Damascus from across the world ushered in an age of prosperity and public works the Middle East had frankly never seen. Lavish building projects (the Dome of the Rock among them) went up, and the blending of Roman, Persian, and Arab sensibilities became the very basis of Islamic art and architecture. Ambitious public works, schools, roads, and charitable endowments were paid for at no cost to citizens.

Beyond the Middle East, an Arab nouveau riche sought its fortune by establishing grand estates in garrison cities throughout the young empire. These motivated families would become the silk-swaddled landed nobility of Islamic society for centuries.

One of the ways the new Islamic lords displayed both their greatness and their piety was by funding a local waqf. The word comes from the Arabic root w-q-f, ‘to stop, to stand’: the endowed property is ‘stopped,’ held out of sale for good (plural awqaf). A waqf was a philanthropic religious foundation that worked autonomously for the good of the community. It was never owned or operated by its donors. It functioned instead as an independent, non-profit charity: collecting donations for the poor, building mosques, and running schools, hospitals, and orphanages.

Critically, once a waqf was founded, its own donor could not shut it down. It was legally self-perpetuating, insulated by design from the whims of the wealthy family that had endowed it. In Europe, charitable efforts of this kind were centrally organized through the Catholic Church, under the Pope and his subordinates. In the Islamicate world, the waqfs were independently and regionally controlled.

It was from the charitable work of the waqfs that local Muslims across the empire could, if they were pious and clever, rise from nothing to become Islamic scholars. Many did exactly that, and the Islamicate world flourished as a result of this focus on education and social development, the very seedbed of the ulama, the scholarly class of the age (cf. Part 10).

9.3 | The Abbasid Revolution

An Arab Aristocracy

The Umayyad empire’s greatness was also its most dangerous liability. As the empire grew in size, so too did the distance between those who could afford to participate in the new civilization and those who could not. Historically, the price of political stability has often been the rich growing richer while the poor grow poorer.

Arabization and Islamification of the local ethnic groups within the Caliphate occurred haphazardly and unevenly. North Africa, for example, Arabized quickly, since there had been no unified culture there to resist it. The Persians, as we have seen, were the most resistant of all. But whatever level of assimilation a local population reached, one thing was clear. From the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, the Arabs were the aristocrats now.

The Umayyad class structure took shape primarily along religious strata.

At the very top of society were pure-blood Arab Muslims. Within the borders of the Islamicate world, from Morocco to Iran, Arabs were generally treated with royal deference. The second tier were Muslims with one Arab parent. Beneath them came the rest of the world’s Muslims (those with no Arab heritage who nonetheless held to the Prophet’s message).

Then, across a harder line, came the Jews and Christians — the People of the Book. These dhimmi (the ‘protected peoples’ of Part 3) were not treated as co-equals with Muslims, but they held opportunities others did not. And who were those others? In a word, the polytheists and pagans. At least the Jews and Christians knew the prophets and had some sense of what Islam promised. When Muslims spoke of God, the People of the Book understood what was meant! The polytheists had none of that shared background, and so they generally stayed at the bottom rung. Until they converted (to Islam, or at the very least to Christianity), they had virtually no legal rights.

Eventually this classist arrangement produced a growing theological problem. One of the core promises of Islam was that Muslims lived in a brotherhood of equals. The Qur’an had set that standard itself:

God created humanity from a single pair and made it into nations and tribes, so that they might come to know one another. The noblest among them, in God’s sight, is the most mindful of Him. Qur’an 49:13 (paraphrased)

The Islamic origin story told of a simple, rugged people who braved the hot desert sands together and fought valiantly, side by side, for the good of all. The Prophet Muhammad famously slept on a single sheet folded four times, serving as both his mattress and his cover. Caliph Omar was known to sit at his cobbler’s bench and mend his own worn shoes.

Now, though, the Ummah seemed to stand for the perfumed few hoarding most of society’s wealth, while most non-Arabs scrapped for whatever the Umayyads left out for them.

This became a recipe for revolution.

Abu Muslim & the Black Banners

There was a particular sting to this friction. The Arabs now lording it over the empire were mere upstarts in the eyes of many they governed: a desert people grown suddenly and fabulously rich on the spoils of conquest. The Persians, by contrast, were the heirs of one of the oldest and most sophisticated civilizations on earth, a culture that had been building cities and for a thousand years before Mecca’s caravans.

To be ruled as a second-class subject by the nouveau riche was galling enough — to be ruled by nouveau riche who claimed the sanction of God Almighty for the arrangement was intolerable. This is the grievance at the center of the age: not merely poverty, but the humiliation of the once-great made to bow to the newly-arrived.

That grievance did not smolder evenly everywhere. In the Persian east, the anger over Husayn’s death and the massacre at Karbala had never cleared away, and the widening wealth gap between Arab Muslims and Persian Muslims only sharpened it. The Persians saw themselves twice over as underdogs: an ancient people facing an Arab aristocracy, and partisans of the Prophet’s family facing the dynasty that had cut that family down in cold blood.

Never Arab enough, never the right family — always second-class while the Umayyads ruled.

From this discontent, two very different opposition movements took shape. Only one would matter in the end. The Kharijites (the fierce, uncompromising purists of Part 4, who held that any sinning caliph forfeited his office) ultimately fizzled as a political force. Their absolutism was too extreme to build the broad coalition a revolution needs, and they spent their energy in scattered, doomed risings.

The Shia were the real threat. After Karbala they possessed the two things the Kharijites lacked: a concrete grievance the whole east could feel, and a legitimate bloodline claim to the caliphate through the family of the Prophet. They would remain the Umayyads’ most dangerous opponents, and, in the end, the instrument by which the dynasty was finally brought down.

The leader who finally turned that discontent into a revolution was a mysterious figure who went by the nom de guerre Abu Muslim — which means, plainly, ‘a Muslim man’ (more literally, ‘father of Muslim,’ an Arabic byname). The anonymity was deliberate. It is fitting that history barely knows who he really was, because he was, in every sense, a professional revolutionary.

Khorasan, in the Persian east, was the far frontier, distant enough from Damascus that an organizer could work for years without the caliph’s spies catching the scent. From there, Abu Muslim built his movement the way a modern insurgent builds one: patiently, in cells, arming and training a cadre hellbent on purging the Caliphate of Umayyad control, and drawing on the ready reservoir of Shia and Persian resentment.

What is striking is what he did not do. He was studiously vague about who, exactly, would sit on the throne once the Umayyads fell. Name a specific candidate too soon, and every faction with its own preferred claimant would peel away. But keep the question open, and everyone who hated the Umayyads could march under one banner.

So the cadre was told only that the caliphate would be restored to its rightful house —the house of the Prophet. That doctrine, the Hashemite claim, was drilled into them until it became an article of faith. The claim ran through the Banu Hashim, the Prophet’s own clan. The revolutionaries even gave the ambiguity a slogan: al-riḍā min āl Muḥammad, ‘the one acceptable from the family of Muhammad.’

But which one? The slogan, very deliberately, never said.

And here the revolution’s careful ambiguity paid a strange dividend: with no willing descendant of Ali stepping forward to lead, the movement could quietly enlist Abu al-Abbas, a descendant not of Ali but of Muhammad’s uncle. He was a man of the Prophet’s clan, technically, though not of the line the Shia had bled for.

The banners went up black. The Umayyads, for their part, reflexively flew the white banner. What they failed to appreciate, back in Damascus, was that white is the Persian color of death.

• 747 | Abu Muslim raises the black banners
• 750 | The revolution wins and the last Umayyad caliph is run down in Egypt
• 754 | al-Saffah dies of smallpox
• 755 | Abu Muslim is murdered on al-Mansur’s orders
• 762 | Baghdad is founded

Of course, the Abbasid authorities made much of that omen. But in truth, this was not a simple fight over right and wrong. It was about Umayyad hegemony. It was about broken promises. And, of course, it was about Ali’s line, cut down at Karbala.

In 750 (132 AH), the armies of black and white met for the future of the empire at the Great Zab River. Though outnumbered, the black army of Khorasan won a stunning victory that sent the last Umayyad caliph fleeing to Egypt. Within the year, he had been found and executed.

In his place, the Abbasid dynasty was born.

The Red Feast

The Hashemites declared Abu al-Abbas the new, rightful caliph of the Ummah.

Then came a gesture of goodwill. The new regime invited the leading members of the Umayyad clan to a lavish dinner. No expense was spared. The Umayyads laughed with the new Abbasid leadership, draped across plump cushions as servants brought them their every culinary desire.

It was a feast indeed — until it wasn’t. When the signal was given, the servants dropped their waiters’ garb to reveal the armor beneath. This had never been a dinner. It was an execution.

In the aftermath of that bloody affair, Abbas proudly took the name al-Saffah, ‘the Slaughterer’. There’s every indication he relished the infamy, however short-lived: soon after, Abu al'-Abbas contracted smallpox and died. Stepping out from behind the Slaughterer’s shadow to lead was Abbas’s brother, al-Mansur, ‘the one made victorious.’ This was the actual beginning of the Abbasid dynasty.

Fooled you, didn’t I?

Except they were fooled too! One Umayyad escaped: the young princeling Abd al-Rahman, who fled west across North Africa, crossed into Spain, and was embraced as their new leader! From 756 he ruled from Córdoba, where the Umayyad house would outlive its own fall by nearly 300 years.

Al-Mansur left nothing to chance. He set about cutting every loose end, killing off his enemies (both real and imagined). He even sensed a looming threat in the sheer popularity of Abu Muslim, the revolution’s own general.

So al-Mansur threw a campfire dinner for the famous commander and his men. The first night was a rollicking good time! However, by the end of the next evening, Abu Muslim’s throat had been slit and his body thrown in the river. His closest lieutenants and advisors were also killed for good measure. Al-Mansur wanted absolutely no one left who might threaten his claim to the throne.

The new boss was the same as the old boss…

For all of their revolutionary rhetoric out of Persia, the Abbasids generally ran things exactly as the Umayyads had. Both dynasties were run by secular rulers who kept control through spies and secret police rather than through the holy authority of religious scholars.

In truth, the Abbasid élite had little interest in matters of religion. Once they held the empire, they quickly dropped all pretense of any association with Shia Islam. Instead, the scholars already in the halls of power kept their vaunted positions. The Abbasid rulers honestly did not care one way or the other.

If anything, the long-standing distrust of the Shia in the east led the Abbasids to hunt down Shia leadership and kill anyone with even a remote connection to Ali, Fatima, or the imams. This is how the dream of a Shia caliph of Islam died — in the dark, hidden chambers of the paranoid Abbasid palace.

9.4 | Baghdad: The Crown Jewel of the Age

A Capital from Scratch

And yet, for all the treachery, there was also an historic greatness and an unparalleled vision among the Abbasids. Like the Umayyads before them, they presided over an era of prosperity, culture, and art. When al-Mansur needed a new capital, he did not repurpose an old city — he designed one from scratch.

He found the perfect site on the west bank of the Tigris, at the point where it and the Euphrates run closest to each other, joined by canals. There, the Middle World’s most fertile fields spill toward the strategic waters of the Indian Ocean. And in 762 (145 AH), the city of Baghdad was founded.

The chronicler al-Tabari preserves the caliph’s own reasoning at the site:

“This is the Tigris. There is no obstacle between us and China. Everything on the sea can come to us from it.” Al-Tabari, History

The Round City

It was, in its original design, a marvel of geometry. Al-Mansur’s architects laid out a perfectly circular city: Madinat al-Salam, the ‘City of Peace’. It measured about a mile and a half across, ringed by a round wall that medieval accounts make some 98 feet high and, at its base, nearly 145 feet thick. Four great gates pierced the wall at equal intervals, each opening onto a road to a corner of the empire, so that the whole realm seemed to converge on this single point.

Inside, the city radiated outward in concentric rings, and at the dead center (insulated from the bustle by ring after ring of the plan) sat the caliph’s palace and the great mosque, the twin poles of Abbasid power.

Over the next twenty years, Baghdad would become, by many estimates, the largest city in the world — the first on Earth to grow past a million inhabitants since Ancient Rome. Blacksmiths and goldsmiths, florists and cloth merchants, philosophers, poets, and artists all streamed toward the Abbasid capital, the gem of the eighth century

(We’ll pick up on this story in Part 10.)

“Islamicate”

The Abbasids were an Islamicate (cultural) rather than a purely Islamic (religious) empire. This word is a modern coinage (cf. Hodgson, 1974), built on the model of ‘Italianate’: in the style of a civilization, not the religion itself. The Abbasid empire was Islamicate in exactly that sense, run by largely secular rulers, staffed by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and defined more by a shared civilization than by devotion.

Much of this age is still visible. The Dome of the Rock that Abd al-Malik raised over the Foundation Stone in 691 still crowns the Temple Mount in Jerusalem today, one of the oldest surviving works of Islamic architecture on earth.

The Sunni–Shia divide that ran beneath the Abbasid revolution, and the split between Arab and Persian Islam that opened during these conquests, are not museum pieces. They remain live categories in the modern Middle East and in the scholarship that studies it. And the very distinction Part 9 has drawn (between an Islamicate civilization and an Islamic religion) is a working tool that historians still reach for when they describe the achievements of this world, precisely because so much of what came next was the work of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Muslims alike, living under one sprawling empire.

Baghdad now stands at the center of that world, poised to become the beating heart of a golden age. Four gates, four roads, the four corners of the empire, all converging on one round city. For the next two hundred years, this is where the roads of the world will run. Until they suddenly don’t…

Last Section: Qur’anic Ontology: Evil & the Afterlife
This Section: Umayyads & Abbasids
Next Section: Islamic Intellectualism & Mysticism

Celebration of the Eucharist | 2020

Key Terms for this Section
Christ · Epistle · Gospel · Ecclesia
The Nicene Creed · Trinity · Canon · The Great Schism

9.1 | Galilee & the Messiah

A Jewish Movement in Galilee

2,000 years ago, in a Roman-controlled, impoverished district in the north of Israel, a rabbi from the small village of Nazareth gathers a following of women and fishermen. It is the Jewish historian Josephus who is the first outsider to take note of this rabbi, six decades after his death (c. 93 CE), when he describes James’ execution as “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ.” The first Romans to mention this rabbi (Pliny around 112 and Tacitus about 115) do so three generations after the events of his life. Rome hardly took any notice of Jesus during his lifetime.

And yet more than half of humanity today belongs to a tradition that honors him —
Christians as Lord. Muslims as prophet. Both call him Messiah (cf. Sec. 10).

• 6 CE | Judas of Galilee calls tribute money to Caesar a betrayal of God
• ca. 33 | A Roman prefect has Jesus of Nazareth tortured to death by crucifixion
• 40s | Barnabas and Paul teach Jews and Gentiles together. First called "Christians."
• ca. 49 | James and Peter agree with Paul: Gentile believers need not be circumcised
• 70 | The Second Temple in Jerusalem falls during the First Roman-Jewish War.

Christianity did not start out as a Western European religion, written in Greek and centered on Rome. That all comes much later. The movement eventually called Christianity began as a grassroots movement of Jews in the Roman-occupied Galilee. This first generation had no Christian Bible (and did not discuss having one), no church building, and no priesthood to define correct belief (Gr. orthodoxy). Many doctrines that are today considered essential to Christianity (eg. Original Sin, a formal theory of atonement, even Christmas) would take centuries to develop.

Put simply, the first followers of Jesus were Jewish.

Jesus certainly counts himself among the Jews. And as we zoom in on the activities of that first generation, we find his followers in Jewish activities, for Jewish reasons, following Jewish prophecies, led by a Jewish rabbi. When John baptizes, he is performing an immersion (Gr. baptisma) akin to a Jewish mikveh (cf. Sec. 8.4). When Jesus and his followers quote “scripture,” they are quoting the Hebrew Bible. Jesus often speaks of “the Law and Prophets...“ This is the Torah and Nevi’im of the Hebrew Bible we discussed in Sec. 8.1. Jesus quotes or alludes to the Hebrew Bible dozens of times in the Gospels, including the Psalms and all five Torah scrolls (particularly Exodus). In fact, he begins his public ministry reading Isaiah 61 in a synagogue.

Three social pressures we’ve already discussed shape this generation of Jews: the ongoing Roman occupation of Israel, the Jewish hope for a Messiah to end that occupation, and a Hellenistic apocalyptic expectation for a new beginning. The inner circle of Jesus arose out of those first-century pressures.

• Fishermen like Peter & Andrew and James & John were being taxed to the bone
• Philip & Nathanael hope for a Messianic future King of Israel “as the Nevi’im foretold”
• Mary of Magdala came a fish-salting town under the same economic pressures
• Jewish tax collectors like Matthew impoverished fellow Jews at the behest of Rome
• While Simon was a Zealot, fighting for Israelite independence from Rome

As a symbol of commerce and regional pride, fish became a powerful totem for early Christians. It represented everything the Jews of that region worked for, and what the Romans took from them to feed their occupying army. By the 200s, the ichthys fish will be the predominant totem of Christianity, centuries before the Latin cross.

The Christ

Herod the Great establishes a port at Caesarea (lit. ‘Caesar’s city‘) on Israel’s coast, later home to Rome’s governors. In Galilee, his son Herod Antipas rebuils Sepphoris, just four miles from Nazareth. Wealth flowed into these cities, leaving rural villages like Nazareth economically drained. Heavy taxation and Roman violence prompted a variety of political responses among the Jews.

Section 8 already introduced the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Zealots.

• The Sadducees collaborate with Rome, negotiating Jewish regional autonomy
• The Pharisees (out in the countryside) criticize Romans and Sadducean collaboration
• The Zealots assassinate Romans and collaborating Jews, aiming for Israelite independence through armed struggle

Here, in Section 9, we add two more factions to the board.

• The Essenes retreat to the desert, away from Roman and Sadducean influence
• The messianic movements hope for an anointed leader who will end the occupation

Some messianic and Zealot ideals overlapped: both hoped for a heroic figure (like Joshua, King David, or Judah Maccabee) who could lead a successful rebellion against Rome. The Zealot ideals of Judas of Galilee held that paying taxes to Caesar was a betrayal of God, Israel’s only king. In the spirit of fighting men like King David, the Zealots arm themselves and kill in defense of Israel, fighting the ongoing Hellenization of the Holy Land.

But under the yoke of imperial subjugation, the Biblical prophets had also leaned into the notion of radical pacifism — swords beaten into plowshares, a king who breaks the bow and speaks peace to the nations, and nations looking to Jerusalem for moral guidance. Later tradition gathered these hopes around a coming Messiah (Heb. mashiach, ‘anointed one’), in Greek Christos, the Christ. In that Messianic Age, the exiles return, their fortunes are restored, and the Jewish People know everlasting joy.

This is the context of the story of Jesus of Nazareth, whom Christians claim as the Messiah of Jewish prophecy. Jesus proclaims the Kingdom of God before the Romans have him tortured and killed, mocking him as ‘King of the Jews‘ — a rival to their Lord, Caesar (cf. John 19:12).

Born to a Jewish mother, Mary, Jesus was raised in the Jewish tradition of the Second Temple period (circumcised, studied Torah, and keeping its festivals). At about 30 years old, Jesus seeks out the ministry of John the Baptist. John is an apocalyptic figure admired by Jesus. John draws Jews out of the Hellenized cities of Israel, back to the purity of the Judean desert to proclaim a message far removed from the Roman mode of civilization. John’s message is that the Kingdom of God is here — in radical opposition to the Empire of Caesar (cf. Sec. 7.4).

For his defiance, John is beheaded by Herod Antipas, Rome’s client, who feared his popularity among Jews.

But John’s arrest does not end the Kingdom Movement. Jesus takes up the message. Whereas the crowds went out to John, Jesus goes to them, sending out (Gr. apostello) those he teaches to spread the message. After the Romans kill Jesus, his all-Jewish movement calls itself “the Way,” while opponents call it “a sect of the Nazarenes.” After Jesus is killed, the movement continues to meet in Jerusalem under Peter and, later, Jesus’ aforementioned brother, James (cf. Sec. 9.2).

The Letters of Paul | 47-64 CE

The earliest Christian writings describing Jesus are teaching letters, or epistles (Gr. epistolē), written by a Pharisee outside of Jesus’ inner circle, a man who never met Jesus in life, the Apostle Paul. Paul claims to have been sent (Gr. apostello) by the resurrected Jesus in a mystical revelation. He makes it very clear that he “did not confer with any human, nor did [he] go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before [him]” (Gal. 1:16–17), for three years. Instead, Paul claims his authority (ie. apostleship) comes directly from his mystical encounter with the Christ.

Throughout his epistles, Paul never mentions a virgin birth or any of Jesus’ miracles. Paul’s Jesus is simply “born of a woman, born under the law.” What Paul does emphasize is that Jesus is the prophesied Messiah and Son of God. Rejecting Caesar’s world of idolatry, strife, and envy, Paul envisions the Kingdom of God succeeding Rome with righteousness, peace, and joy. He attributes Jesus’ death to “the rulers of this age.” Of his fellow Jews, the Pharisee Paul heaps endless praise.

For Paul, everyone in the world can now be united in the Kingdom of God through their faithfulness (Lt. fides) to Jesus. His epistles outline Jesus’ movement as dedicated to morality, faithfulness, and an apocalyptic sense that Jesus would soon return. But, most radically, Paul’s Jesus welcomed everyone into the Kingdom of God, not just Jews. By the mid-first century, Paul’s message had spread across the eastern Mediterranean, carrying the treasonous conviction that Caesar did not hold ultimate authority over the world.

Today, while some of Paul’s letters are lost, the surviving letters of Paul and his associates make up nearly half the books of the New Testament canon.

Key Terms for this Lesson: Christ · Epistle

9.2 | The Church in a Roman World

Paul & Jerusalem Meet | ca. 50 CE

At home in the Roman Empire, the Pharisee Paul interacts with Gentiles (non-Jews) who seek a relationship with the God of Israel but do not wish to commit to full Jewish practice (above all, circumcision). The covenant's mark (Sec. 8) carries real social cost: in a culture where Roman masculinity was paramount, circumcised men face ridicule for their covenant with God, and for most Gentiles the demands of the Jewish law were simply too much. So we have records of Gentiles who attended synagogues, were interested in the God of Israel, yet remained non-Jews. The book of Acts calls them Phoboumenoi, the "God-Fearers." Paul's message to them was simple: through Jesus, you do not have to become Jewish (ie. bound to the "works of the law") to belong to God's Kingdom.

So Paul stood up and with a gesture began to speak: “Fellow Israelites and others who fear God: listen!” Paul, Acts 13:16

Following Paul’s mystical encounter with Jesus, he goes off to Arabia for 3 years. After Jesus’ death, the remnant of the old Nazarene movement was in Jerusalem, initially led by Peter. However, over time, the Jerusalem leadership moved to Jesus’ more Torah-observant brother, James. The two sides meet in Jerusalem, where James outlines four requirements, in line with the Noahide Laws (Sec. 8.2), that Gentile converts must follow, but says “not to trouble” them with the rest of Torah. The peace is uneasy. When Peter later visits Antioch, Paul “opposed him to his face” for withdrawing from eating with non-Jews. Still, Paul’s ecclesia (Gr. ekklesia, ‘assembly,’ the word English Bibles translate ‘church’) and James’ Jerusalem church remain in fellowship. Within decades, their movement is known as Christianity.

The Synoptic Gospels | 70-85 CE

The 20 years after the Jerusalem Council were decisive.

Paul leaves for his third mission, writing epistles to the Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans. Paul is eventually arrested and shipwrecked, writing more epistles from prison. Around 64 CE, Peter and Paul are executed under Emperor Nero in Rome. The First Jewish-Roman War begins two years later in 66. And the first Gospel story of Jesus is committed to writing.

When the Romans declared victory over another devastated city, runners carried the “good news“ back to the Empire. That announcement was called an evangelion. It was Caesar’s word: an inscription of 9 BCE calls Augustus’ birthday the beginning of “good news” for the world. Paul and then Mark take this word for Jesus. The Old English translation of evangelion is gōdspel, our Gospel.

Thus, the Gospels are the Christian message of the good news of Jesus Christ.

Written against the backdrop of the Temple’s destruction, the Gospel of Mark is the first Gospel written. While dozens of gospels were written, only four are in the New Testament canon: the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and later John.

The Gospel of Mark (or gMark) is short, direct, and written in plainer Greek than Paul’s schooled prose. Like Paul, this first Gospel omits Jesus’ birth and childhood. Instead, it opens with John the Baptist, and Jesus comes from Nazareth to be baptized by him. Unlike Paul’s letters, gMark’s Jesus is a healer and exorcist (performing 4 exorcisms and over a dozen other miracles). gMark’s Jesus also shows great concern for the poor, urging a rich man to sell what he owns and telling his disciples to feed the hungry crowd.

Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” Gospel of Mark 10:21

The Gospels of Luke and Matthew each use gMark’s foundation but adapt it for distinct audiences. gLuke tends to emphasize poverty and marginalized women, while gMatthew frames the story of Jesus in the context of Jewish royalty. These two gospels hold the only birth narratives (Lat. nativitas) of Jesus in the New Testament. In gLuke, the angel Gabriel announces to Mary (Jesus’ mother) that she will give birth to the Messiah (in gMatthew an angel tells her betrothed, Joseph, in a dream). In gLuke, Mary lays her newborn in a lowly manger. In gMatthew, Jesus receives kingly gifts from visiting Persian priests.

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Gospel of Luke 6:20

The first three gospels (Mark, Luke, and Matthew) are known as the synoptic Gospels, as they can be “seen together“ (Gr. synopsis). All three share a similar portrait of Jesus’ last week: his arrest, trial, and crucifixion under the mocking Roman charge of “King of the Jews.” As the Romans torture Jesus to death, gMark and gMatthew show the soldiers making him a parody of imperial power, dressing him in a purple robe, crowning him with thorns, and (in gMatthew) putting a scepter in his hand.

The soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole cohort around him. They stripped him and put a purple robe on him, and after twisting some thorns into a crown they put it on his head. They put a reed in his right hand and knelt before him and mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” Gospel of Matthew 27:27-29

Though gMark ends with an empty tomb, gLuke and gMatthew each add extended resurrection narratives. Women are the first witnesses at the tomb, and both accounts culminate in Jesus' physical reappearance among his followers. gLuke also describes Jesus later ascending into heaven.

The Gospel & the Romans | 100 CE

About three decades after the Jewish Temple’s destruction, the Gospel of John emerged with a markedly different perspective. About 90% of gJohn is found nowhere else in the Gospels. Why? Because 35 years after Jesus’ death, the second generation of Christians lived through the Roman-Jewish War (66–70). That was the audience of the Gospel of Mark. gMark’s generation was a mix of fewer Jews and more Gentiles, with dwindling access to the disciples (tradition places the disciple John in Ephesus into the 90s). While gMark and gLuke tend to lean more toward a Gentile audience, gMatthew leans more Jewish. However, the third generation of Christians was mostly Greek-speaking Gentiles, with no ties to the vanished Temple or the disciples.

The text of gJohn has no Jewish genealogy, birth story, or baptism. Instead, gJohn portrays Jesus as the Logos, a word at home in Greek philosophy. gJohn’s unique approach reflects an audience with a predominantly Greek worldview. In gJohn, Jesus speaks in long discourses and metaphors rather than the Jewish parables of the synoptic Gospels. This final gospel narrative stresses Jesus’ cosmic mission as Savior of the World rather than focusing on his Jewish ties to King David’s lineage (cf. gMatthew) or Jewish struggles against Caesar’s occupying empire (cf. gMark).

Lastly, while the synoptic depiction of Jesus shuns grandiose titles, gJohn’s Jesus speaks declaratively and unreservedly about his divine role. In seven “I am” sayings, the Gospel of John proclaims Jesus as “The Light of the World,” “The Good Shepherd,” “The Way, the Truth, and the Life,” and so on.

Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me. Gospel of John 14:6

For another century, the Christian movement remains small and largely hidden (less than 1% of all Romans).

A few times in those first centuries, Rome turned on the Christians. Why? Well, Rome could tolerate almost any god. After all, Jews had lived throughout the Roman Empire successfully, with an ancient exemption from sacrificing to Rome’s gods. Gentile Christians had no such standing. They shunned the Imperial Cult of Caesar, often at the edge of a sword, the mouth of a lion, or the flame of a torch. In imitation of Christ, they prayed for those who persecuted them and died without resistance.

Under Emperor Nero, when a fire broke out in 64 CE, Nero made the Roman Christians scapegoats for the blaze and had the believers killed in his gardens and circus (Tacitus). Persecution then flared locally for two centuries, turning empire-wide under Decius (250) and in the Great Persecution of Diocletian (ca. 303). However, within ten years, the Roman view of Christianity would be dramatically reversed.

Key Terms for this Lesson: Ecclesia · Gospel

9.3 | Constantine & the Creed

The Constantinian Shift | 313

For three centuries the Christians had been a small, sometimes hunted minority.
Their fortunes turned when a warlord had a dream.

• 312 | Constantine takes the Roman throne under the sign of the Christ (XP)
• 313 | The Edict of Milan: Christianity becomes legal across the empire
• 325 | The Council of Nicaea: the Son is “of one substance” with the Father
• 367 | Athanasius’ list: The 27 books of the Christian New Testament are decided
• 380 | Nicene Christianity: Theodosius makes Christianity the Rome’s official religion

In 312 CE, on the eve of battle at Milvian Bridge outside Rome, the warlord Constantine (d. 337) saw a sign of the Christ. He saw a sign blazing in the sky with the words “Under this sign, you shall conquer.” A dream then told him to mark his shields. Constantine awoke and painted the first two Greek letters of Christ (XPISTOS), the chi-rho (“XP”), on them.

He won the battle, the day, and soon after, the entire Roman Empire.

Following Constantine’s dramatic victory, he declared in the Edict of Milan that Christian identity and worship were legal. His changes had an enormous theological effect on Christianity known as the Constantinian Shift. While the early Church Fathers argued for Christian pacifism (cf. Sec. 9.2), Constantine recast the Christian God as the God of Military Victory. Moreover, Constantine began favoring Christians for high-ranking positions, Roman governorships, and even judicial roles. The emperor also took major funding from pagan temples and put it toward building massive Christian structures in tribute to his victory. When the requirements for pagan ritual in the Roman military ended, the enriched Roman Christian bishops decreed that, from now on, any Christian who refused to serve in the Roman legions could be excommunicated. Over the next century, half the empire joined the religion of their emperor. Led by Christian military officers, pagan ritual was banned entirely from the legions. By 416 CE, the Roman military was an exclusively Christian organization.

In short,
when the Roman empire became Christian, European Christianity largely became imperial.

Several Christianities

Outside of 4th century Rome, there had been different local Christianities with their own texts. Here are a few of the larger communities...

• The Ebionites (Hb. Poor Ones) traced their lineage back to the Nazarene Movement led by James (cf. Sec 9.2). Following their Gospel, they taught Jesus was Messiah but not God. They viewed Jesus as ‘adopted’ by God at baptism. Adoptionism was a popular theology among early Jewish-Christians. After the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70, many Ebionite Jewish-Christians fled east across the Jordan, toward Arabia, and carried their message there.

• The Marcionites taught Jesus was a divine manifestation of the God of Love, unrelated to the God of the Hebrew Bible. The lasting effect they had was their insistence on the development of a superior “New Testament” for Christian use.

• The Modalists (ie. Sabellianism) were nontrinitarian Christians who taught that Jesus was a ‘mode’ of God, not a divine persona, because God is inherently One. The Ebionites and other pre-Nicene Christian groups also did not subscribe to the later Nicene concept of the Trinity.

• The Gnostics (ie. mystics) taught Jesus was a divine being who only appeared human to give humanity secret knowledge of its own divine nature. Among their scriptures was the Gospel of Thomas (parts of which may predate gMark). Their movement eventually went east into Persia.

• The Arians, the most popular rival to the Nicene caucus, taught Jesus was God’s Son, created by God and subordinate to God. The theology of Arius travelled north and west of Rome, where it gained traction among the Goths in France and Spain well into the 500s.

• And there was the Roman Church, who had the support of the emperor. The Church in Rome, who traced their lineage to Peter, taught that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. This claim is foundational to the theology of the Trinity.

The Nicene Creed | 325-381

Turning back to Constantine: in 324, Constantine defeated his co-claimant to the throne in the Roman East. In this way, Constantine unified the fracturing empire politically. But the people’s hearts were still divided.

So in 325, Constantine called on all Christian bishops throughout the empire to meet at Nicaea (today, a city in Türkiye). There, the divisions among Christians were debated and decided on. Out of that debate came the Nicene Creed, the central statement of correct Christian belief, backed by the Roman emperor and intended for all of Christendom.

In the Council’s wording, Jesus is “of one substance” (Gr. homoousion) with God. For Nicene Christians, Jesus the Son shares God’s very being (ie. “begotten, not made”). *However, the first draft of the Creed ends simply on the Holy Spirit. By the 360s, a new heresy had developed which taught that the Holy Spirit was a kind of ministering angel subordinate to God. So, in 381, the Nicene Creed was expanded. Part of that expansion explained that the Holy Spirit “with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified.” This is the theology of the Trinity, that God is three consubstantial persons: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit.

The 381 Creed, authored at the First Council of Constantinople, also affirms belief in “one holy catholic and apostolic church.” Note here that the Greek word ‘catholic’ simply means universal in this case. The four marks of the Church thereafter are:

• One: There is only one true Church
• Holy: The One Church is set apart (ie. sacred) by God for a special purpose in the world
• Catholic: The One Holy Church is universal (Gr. katholikos) — for all people
• Apostolic: The One Holy Catholic Church is derived from Jesus and the bishops

Key Terms for this Lesson: The Nicene Creed · Trinity

9.4 | Canon & Schism

Christian Canon | 367-397

After the Nicene Creed had been decided in 325, Christian theologians spent the next seventy years debating Marcion’s notion of a unified Christian scripture. For the first three centuries of Christianity, each regional church had largely curated its own scripture. There were dozens of gospels and scriptures beloved by diverse communities of believers.

Syrian Christians taught from the Didache and the Clementine Writings. Christians in Egypt read the Gospel of the Egyptians, often alongside the more esoteric Apocryphon of John and the Gospel of Mary. Christians in Rome read the Shepherd of Hermas which served as an allegory of repentance. Christians in Israel read the Apocalypse of Peter. In Greece, the church at Corinth read 1 Clement aloud. And in France, Christians learned from the writings of Irenaeus of Lyons, who cited the Shepherd as scripture.

Before there was a unified Church, there was little need for a unified canon. But that changed after the Council of Nicaea.

A canon is a set of texts agreed to be authoritative for a community. Over the centuries, agreed upon criteria for a Christian canon began to surface in theological debates. A Christian text could be considered scripture if it had apostolicity (roots in the apostles), catholicity (used by the whole church, not one region), and orthodoxy (agreement with the rule of faith).

By the mid-200s, the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had been more or less decided upon (first championed by the aforementioned Irenaeus). In 367, the bishop Athanasius was the first to list 27 particular books as belonging to the Christian canon. North African bishops then held a Synod in Hippo (an African port city) in 393 to decide on the canon officially.

The gathered bishops kept the Greek ordering of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint’s, cf. Sec. 7.4), placing the prophetic writings at the end (in the earlier Jewish canon, the Nevi’im are in the middle of the Bible). The four Gospels then headed the New Testament, followed by the Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s Epistles, and then the General Epistles. The decided arrangement was thematic rather than chronological. A later meeting at Carthage, in 397, confirmed the list, including the long-disputed Book of Revelation.

Some adherents who revered non-canonical texts objected, but under Roman authority, the official list prevailed. Eventually, the Western churches coalesced around this canon, while older communities, like those in Syria or Egypt, held onto their books (eg. the Didache) as edifying scripture.

Today, there are several authoritative lists of Christian canon, though near universal consensus on the inclusion of the same 39 Old Testament texts and 27 New Testament texts.

• Roman Canon, 397: 73 books
  (39 Hebrew + 27 New Testament + 7 Deuterocanonical books)

• Syriac Canon, 411: 61 books
  (39 Hebrew + 22 New Testament, omits Rev., 2 Peter, 2 & 3 John, and Jude)

• Armenian Canon, 506: 77-79 books
  (39 Hebrew + 27 New Testament + 11-13 Intertestamental books)

• Ethiopian Canon, 640 (fall of Egypt): 81 books
  (39 Hebrew + 27 New Testament + 15 additional books, eg. 1 Enoch)

• Orthodox Canon, 692: 76-81 books
  (39 Hebrew + 27 New Testament + 10-15 Greek additions, eg. 3 Maccabees)

• Protestant Canon, 1534 (Luther Bible): 66 books
  (39 Hebrew + 27 New Testament; Apocrypha set apart, later dropped)

Original Sin & Atonement

After centuries of serious debate over scriptural authority, Western Christian theology began to stabilize with the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo (d. 430). Among his influential ideas was the theology of Original Sin, the claim that humanity inherits a sinful disposition from Adam and Eve’s original disobedience. This fundamental theological view posits that baptism and God’s grace are essential to overcoming one’s moral corruption (ie. you can’t be a good person without God). With the Christian doctrine of Original Sin in place, the atonement of sin became a critical question for the Church.

While there was no question how the Romans crucified Jesus, the ultimate, theological reason why he was crucified was far from settled. The Early Church Fathers like Irenaeus and Origen championed Ransom Theory: claiming that humanity was held captive by Satan due to our sinful nature and the crucifixion set us free. But later theologians would argue this made Satan too powerful. A later Medieval theologian, Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), introduced Satisfaction Theory, where Christ repays the honor owed to God that humanity could not. This set the stage for Peter Abelard (d. 1142), who systematized the long-held Moral Influence Theory idea that Jesus’ suffering was a vivid demonstration of divine love meant to inspire moral change in believers. Finally, in the modern era, two new theological views arose. The lawyer John Calvin (d. 1564) described Penal Substitution Theory, asserting that Christ bore the penalty owed by humanity for sin, thus satisfying God’s justice so that believers would be saved from eternal damnation. Later, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (d. 1645) developed Governmental Theory, arguing that Christ’s death served as a profound demonstration of divine justice, showing us by example that forgiving sin does not compromise the moral order of society.

We will further explore the theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin in Section 11.

Medieval Church & Schism

In 410 CE, the Germanic Goths sack Rome. Constantinople then becomes the preeminent Christian city in the world.

In 431, the Church of the East (ie. Persian and Indian Christians) splits off from the imperial Church over theological and political differences. In 451, the Oriental Orthodox Church (incl. the Egyptian Coptic, Syriac, and Armenian churches) does the same. What’s left of the Church in the 500s are the Latinate Western Christians (answering to Rome) and the Greek Eastern Christians (answering to Constantinople).

In 527, Emperor Justinian takes the Constantinopolitan throne, seeking to recapture lost territories and strengthen Christianity’s clout. He closes Plato’s Academy (529), marking the beginning of the Middle Ages. He also creates the famous Justinian Law Code (with principles like contract law, property rights, and procedural fairness), fusing the old Roman laws with the growing body of Christian law.

In the 600s, the Muslim world begins to show up on Christian maps (cf. Sec. 10). In 711, a Muslim army crosses from North Africa and takes Spain from the Christian Goths, developing Islamic culture in Spain for nearly 800 years. For much of the Middle Ages, Mediterranean power would be balanced between:

• Eastern Christians: the Byzantine Empire centered in Constantinople (Türkiye)

• Eastern Muslims: the Abbasid dynasty centered in Baghdad (Iraq)

• Western Muslims: the Umayyad dynasty centered in Córdoba (Spain)

• Western Christians: the Latin Church centered in Rome (Italy)

Despite constant antagonism from neighboring tribes, the Bishop of Rome continues to press his advantage. Having established missions in Ireland (400s) and England (600s), Rome presses on with successful missions to Germany in the 700s and Northern Europe in the 800s. On Christmas Day, 800, the Bishop of Rome crowns king Charles of the Franks as the first emperor of what became known as the “Holy Roman Empire.” Charlemagne (Fr. Charles the Great) then provides Rome with converts and tax revenue, while Rome provides Charles with an authentic claim to the long-lost Roman throne of Caesars and emperors. Constantinople was not amused.

What was once One Church was now a bitter rivalry between the Latinate West and the Byzantine Greek East. The title “Pope” (Papa) had been an honorary title of respect for senior bishops. Leo the Great (d. 461) was the first to build a legal argument that the Bishop of Rome held supreme authority over the Church (cf. Matt 16:18). Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) then rebuked Constantinople’s patriarch for the title “universal bishop.” After the crowning of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III (d. 816), it was clear that Rome no longer needed Constantinople.

In 1054, the inevitable finally happened.

What began as a theological dispute ended with the legates of the Roman Pope and the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicating one another from Christendom. Afterward, the Christian West recognized the Pope as the undisputed head of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church. The Western Church came to be known as the Roman Catholic Church.

Meanwhile, the patriarch of Constantinople continued to work with other cities’ patriarchs as his office had always done, believing they continued to serve Christendom with the “correct beliefs” (Gr. orthos doxa). The Eastern Church came to be known as the Orthodox Church. The earth-shattering split between the Catholic West and the Orthodox East became known as the Great Schism of 1054.

Key Terms for this Lesson: Canon · The Great Schism

Recommended Sources

Robert Louis Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity
Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction
Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way
Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought
Larry W. Hurtado, Destroyer of the gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World

Last Section: Judaism
This Section: Christianity, Pt. 1
Next Section: Islam

The Kaaba | Mecca, Saudi Arabia, 2018

For more on Islam:
See my 14-Week Islam Course

Key Terms for this Section
Kaaba · Hijra · S-L-M root · Qur’an
Sunni & Shia · Sharia · The Five Pillars · Mosque

10.1 | Arabia & the Messenger

Arabia & the Kaaba

Arabia in the 500s was a world unto itself: a vast desert rimmed by trading coasts, wedged between the two superpowers of the age — the Christian Byzantine Empire lay to the northwest and the Persian Empire to the northeast. Along the western caravan road, the Hijaz, sat two towns that matter for the rest of this section:
Mecca, and, to its north, the older town of Yathrib, soon renamed Medina.

• 610 | The first revelation happens in a cave on Mount Hira (cf. 10.2)
• 615 | Persecuted followers of Muhammad find refuge under a Christian king
• 622 | The Hijra, the community migrates to Medina. Year 1 of the Islamic calendar
• 630 | Muhammad and the Believers return to Mecca and clear out the idols
• 632 | Muhammad dies in Medina with no clear line of succession

Islam did not arrive in an empty desert. Long before Muhammad ﷺ, Mecca was a pilgrimage and trading city built around an ancient shrine, the Kaaba, a cube-shaped sanctuary that Arab tradition held had been raised by Abraham and his son Ishmael, the ancestor (in that tradition) of the Arab people. It will become the shrine toward which all Muslims face in prayer.

This phrase, which follows the prophet’s name at the beginning of this section, is the Arabic blessing “peace be upon him.” It is the honorific observant Muslims traditionally add to their prophets, notably to Muhammad. It is placed here, once, so you’ll know what it is when you see it elsewhere online.

Arabia knew the God of Abraham.

However, Arabia was also a polytheistic society to its core. In the late 500s, the Kaaba housed 360 idols. Meccan prosperity ran on those idols. Arab culture and honor code let warring tribes trade in peace on holy ground, and Mecca had every idol in the peninsula. Everyone was welcome to trade!

During the Jahiliyah (the ‘time of ignorance’ before Muhammad), The families who kept the Kaaba grew very wealthy from the trade in their area. The Qur’an, the scripture of Islam, remembers the arrangement. It’s 106th surah is named for the Quraysh, the tribe that kept the shrine.

For the security of the Quraysh, their security on the journeys of winter and summer, let them worship the Lord of this House, who fed them against hunger and made them safe from fear. Surah Quraysh, Qur’an 106:1–4

Scattered through Arabia were Jews, some with communities reaching back to the First Temple era, and many more arriving after Rome destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE (Secs 7–8). Three Jewish tribes (the Qaynuqa, the Nadir, and the Qurayza) lived in Yathrib in Muhammad’s day. There were Christians, too, of several rival kinds, some of whom honored Jesus as a prophet rather than as God. And there were the hanifs, Arab monotheists who worshipped the God of Abraham and rejected the idols without belonging to either older tradition. One of them, Waraqa, cousin of Muhammad’s wife, will reappear in a moment.

Mecca & the Messenger

The Prophet Muhammad was born around 570 into the Arab clan of Banu Hashim (part of Mecca’s leading tribe, the Quraysh). But his road was one of hardship, not Quraishi wealth. Orphaned young, he was raised first by his grandfather and then by his uncle Abu Talib (d. c. 619). Muhammad worked the caravan trade, earning among Meccans the nickname al-Amin, “the Trustworthy One.”

In his 20s, his excellent character caught the notice of Khadija (d. 619), a self-made older woman and widow, who ran her own caravan business. She hired Muhammad, and later proposed marriage. Their marriage would last about 25 years, until her death. The marriage brought Muhammad security and standing and, by the tradition’s account, a settled prosperity that only sharpened his unease at the gulf between Mecca’s haves and have-nots. He took to spending nights alone in a cave on Mount Hira, above the city, in prayer and reflection.

There, in 610, Muslims hold that the angel Jibril (Gabriel) came to him with a single command, “Recite,” and that what he began to recite was the word of God (cf. Sec. 10.2). He came down from the mountain shaken, and it was Khadija who first believed him. Among the earliest to follow were his young cousin and son-in-law Ali (d. 661) and his friend Abu Bakr (d. 634).

The message Muhammad began to preach was unsparing and, to Mecca’s establishment, dangerous: there is only one God, the idols are nothing, and the rich and powerful must answer for how they treat the poor. If Mecca took that seriously, the whole idol-and-pilgrimage economy (and the families who ran it) stood to lose everything.

The Quraysh leadership answered the first Muslims with ridicule, then pressure, then persecution. In 615 some Believers were driven into exile across the Red Sea to Christian Abyssinia, while Abu Bakr spent his wealth buying the freedom of enslaved converts. Then, in 619, Khadija and Abu Talib both died. Muslims remember it as the Year of Sorrow, and with his uncle went the clan protection that had shielded him.

To Medina & Back Again

When a delegation from the Arab-Jewish city of Yathrib invited Muhammad north to arbitrate an old feud between two of the cities tribes, the Believers went with Muhammad. In 622 CE the community migrated from Mecca to Yathrib in a moment known as the Hijra (Ar. emigration). This event now marks Year One of the Islamic calendar (1 AH), a reckoning the caliph Umar instituted circa 638. Yathrib became known to the tradition as Medina, “the City.”

At Medina, the movement became a community. Muhammad drew up the Constitution of Medina, a compact binding the town’s Muslims, Jews, and others into a community defined by mutual-defense and aid. The years that followed brought open conflict with Mecca, remembered in the battles of Badr (624) and Uhud (625).

In 630 CE Muhammad returns to Mecca at the head of 10,000 followers and takes the city with little bloodshed.

A general amnesty is declared for the whole city. He and Ali went straight to the Kaaba and cleared it of its idols, restoring it, in the tradition’s understanding, to the worship of the one God for which Abraham had first raised it. Then the Believers circled it seven times, as Muslims on pilgrimage still do.

Two years later, in 632, after a final illness during which Abu Bakr led the prayers in his place, the Prophet died at Medina. Muslims hold him to be the last — the Seal of the Prophets (Qur’an 33:40). Over the decades that followed, the recitations he had delivered were gathered into a single book, the Qur’an.

Key Terms for this Lesson: Kaaba · Hijra

10.2 | The Qur’an & Its World

Recite & Salaam

According to Islamic tradition, while alone in the cave, Muhammad experienced a transformative event. The angel Gabriel (the same messenger who came to Daniel and to Mary) visited him and commanded that there is only one God. Moreover, Muhammad was told to go to the people of Mecca, renounce their idol worship, and recite the word of God to them. The first words he was given were these:

“Recite! In the name of your Lord, who created — created humanity from a clinging clot. Recite, for your Lord is Most Generous — who taught by the pen, taught humanity what it did not know.” Qur’an 96:1–5

He came down from the mountain shaken, and was comforted by his wife Khadija, who took him to her Christian cousin Waraqa, a man who knew the earlier scriptures (Sahih al-Bukhari 3). Waraqa confirmed that Muhammad bore all the signs of prophethood. For the next 23 years, until his death, Muhammad continued to recite the words as he received them.

The Arabic word for “recitation” is Qur’an. It shares its root (Q-R-ʾ) with the angel’s first command, iqra’ (recite).

While we’re on Arabic etymology, it would benefit us to also look to the word root for Islam and Muslim. Both words share an S-L-M Semitic root (س ل م). From this same root, we derive:

• Salaam, peace (also a greeting)
• Salamah, safety
• Salim, whole/unbroken

Because all triliteral Semitic roots share a family of meaning, we may best understand Islam as invoking peace (salaam), safety/refuge (salamah), and wholeness (salim). In Arabic, if you add “mu-” to the beginning of a word, it means ‘one who does.’ So “mu-SLM’ simply means one whose aim is ‘S-L-M’ (peace/safety/wholeness/Islam).

In short, the Islamic tradition takes its own name from the Arabic root for peace.

The Qur’an & Its Guardians

The Qur’an, the chief scripture of Islam, is about the size of the New Testament,
and it defies most of our literary expectations.

The Qur’an has little narrative continuity and almost no chronological order. It is made of 114 chapters called surahs arranged (after the short opening) mostly from longest to shortest. Surahs are not arranged by story or theme. Each surah is labelled as Meccan or Medinan, according to where Muhammad was when the message was revealed. There are 86 earlier Meccan and 28 later Medinan surahs.

Mary, the mother of Jesus (Ar. Isa) is the only woman the Qur’an names, and Surah Maryam is the only surah named for a woman, a measure of her honor in the tradition. To many Muslims, the fact that the Qur’an is not shaped like an ordinary book is part of the point: its form is held to be beyond human convention.

Two features matter most for understanding how Muslims hold their scripture. First, the language is the revelation. The Qur’an was revealed in Meccan Arabic, and Muslims hold that the Arabic is the scripture. That is, any translation is regarded as an interpretation — useful but secondary. That is why the Qur’an is recited in Arabic in mosques from Indonesia to Ohio, whether or not the worshippers speak Arabic as their first language.

To memorize the entire Qur’an in Arabic is among the most honored achievements in a Muslim life. Doing so earns one the title hafiz, “guardian.” There are millions alive today, many of them children. It is a text that could survive the loss of every printed copy and still be recited.

Finally, the text was standardized early. Within a generation of Muhammad’s death (ca. 650), under the caliph Uthman, a single authoritative written version was established and copies sent across the growing community.

The Qur’an & the Bible

The Qur’an alludes to and sometimes retells stories from the Bible, rather than introducing them whole cloth.

Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus all appear as prophets in its pages, though many times without details a Bible reader might expect. For example, the Garden’s serpent and the visit of the shepherds to Jesus go unmentioned. This is due to the Qur’anic interest aiming for the moral of the account, not its chronology or details.

Jesus (Isa) is particularly honored in the Qur’an.

The Qur’an affirms the virgin birth (19:20) of Jesus, calling him Messiah and prophet (3:45). On the crucifixion, the Qur’an reads the story differently than the Gospels do: “they did not kill him and did not crucify him, but it was made to seem so to them” (4:157). The next verse reads:

Rather, Allah raised [Jesus] up to Himself. And Allah is Almighty, All-Wise.
Qur’an 4:158

What the Qur’an will not grant is that Jesus is God’s son in the Christian sense. Its deepest insistence is the one it shares with the Jewish tradition: God is one, without partner or equal. In theological moments like this, where the Bible and the Qur’an differ, Islamic teaching holds that the earlier texts were altered in transmission over the centuries (tahrif), and that the Qur’an is the final, unaltered clarification.

The disciplined study of the Qur’an’s meaning (verse by verse, drawing on Muhammad’s example and the Arabic itself) is called tafsir. This tradition of commentary compares well to the Talmudic commentary Section 8 described concerning the Torah.

Speaking of comparison: there is a well-worn warning given to students focused on interfaith dialogue and understanding. At first, it may seem that the Qur’an is to Muslims what the Bible is to Christians, but this is not the case. Rather, each of the three Abrahamic traditions has a central ‘miracle’ that holds it together.

• The central miracle of Judaism is the Promised Land, Israel
• The central miracle of Christianity is Jesus, the Son of God
• The central miracle of Islam is the Qur’an (framed as the perfect text of God’s word)

Just as Christians hold that God entered the world in a person, Muslims hold that God’s word entered the world as a recitation. God’s speech made audible to humanity.

The Qur’an remains unchanged from its original Arabic across 1,400 years and 5 continents. A book you can put on a shelf can gather dust, but a recitation lives only in being spoken. It opens with seven verses, spoken at least 17 times a day by every practicing Muslim:

In the name of God, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to God, Lord of all worlds — the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful, Master of the Day of Judgment. You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help. Guide us along the Straight Path — the path of those You have blessed, not those who have gone astray. Al-Fatiha, the opening of the Qur’an

Key Terms in this Section: S-L-M root • Qur’an

10.3 | Divisions, Law, & the Golden Age

Sunni & Shia | 632-680

From the death of Muhammad in 632 to the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, the community’s story opens out to the whole Mediterranean and Near Eastern world: Damascus, Baghdad, Córdoba.

• 632 | The Succession Crisis: Abu Bakr becomes the first caliph
• 680 | Muhammad’s grandson Husayn is killed at Karbala, Iraq
• 750 | The Abbasid Revolution occurs wherein a new dynasty takes the caliphate
• 1258 | The Mongols sack Baghdad, ending the Abbasid Golden Age

When Muhammad dies in 632, there is no written rule of succession. The community divides over the question that day, and has never recovered. The larger group held that leadership should pass to the most capable and respected of Muhammad’s Companions. They accepted Abu Bakr, and then a line of early leaders known as the Rightly Guided Caliphs (the Rashidun), as his rightful successors (Ar. khalifa, “successor,” and so caliph). This caucus became the Sunni (the ‘majority’).

A second group held that leadership belonged by right within Muhammad’s own family, beginning with Ali, his cousin and son-in-law, and passing through his descendants, the Shiatu Ali, (the ‘Party of Ali’), today known as the Shia.

The division was sealed in grief. What happened?

In 680 at Karbala, in Iraq, Muhammad’s grandson Husayn (d. 680), Ali’s son, was killed with his small band by the forces of the Umayyad caliph Yazid. For Shia Muslims, Husayn’s death is the defining sorrow of their history, mourned every year on Ashura.

Today, the Islamic Community is roughly 90% Sunni and about 10% Shia. The Shia are the majority in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain, and Sunnis nearly everywhere else. But do not lose sight of the fact that Sunni and Shia are two branches of one religion.

Both revere the same Quran and the hadith, the reported words and deeds of Muhammad.

Sharia & Fiqh

Within a generation of Muhammad’s death, the young caliphate needed exactly what the Qur’an does not supply: a codified set of standards for conduct. So, the community turned to the customs and practices of Muhammad and the early days. By combining Islamic belief (Sunnah) and behavioral norms (Hadith), the community was able to build a set of Islamic moral conventions called Sharia.

Sharia is not a set of laws. In Islam, Sharia is an ideal: perfect justice, perfect peace, centered on a perfect religion. But because it’s an ‘ideal,’ true Sharia has never been attained. Rather, the set of Islamic laws that arise from debates about Sharia are called Fiqh. In brief, Fiqh is what imperfect scholars, arguing with one another, have made of religion. They may be doing their best, but it is far from perfect.

Put another way: Sharia is the horizon. Fiqh is the walking.

As to Fiqh (ie. Islamic Law), Sunni Islam classically recognizes four schools of law: the Hanafi, the Maliki, the Shafi’i, and the Hanbali, each named for an 8th or 9th-century jurist. Shia Islam has its own: the Jafari school. And running alongside these branches of Fiqh are devotional and reform movements, Sufism and Salafism among them, that are not ‘schools of law’ but orientations toward it.

So, what do the schools argue about?

Above all, Islamic sources. Did the Prophet really say this? Did he really do that? The study of answering is isnad — the chain of transmission from Muhammad down to the reader, and the schools differ sharply in how strong a chain of custody they demand. Some accept only the most rigorously attested reports. Others admit weaker chains or supplement them with theological or historical reasoning.

There are many fiqhs. There is one sharia.

One further distinction settles a question American readers often ask. Sharia has two dimensions: religious duties and legal codes. It’s only religious duties that bear on Muslims living in the United States, and for a reason internal to Sharia itself. Sharia holds that Muslims are to obey the law of the land in which they live. The legal-code dimension governed medieval Córdoba; it has no standing in Texas, and Muslim jurists say so. Recall the Constitution of Medina, in which Muhammad’s community guaranteed freedom of religion to the Jews of the city in exchange for their loyalty. The reciprocity runs the other way too: wherever freedom of religion is promised, the Muslims who live there owe that government their allegiance. That is not a modern accommodation. It goes all the way back to Medina.

The Islamic Golden Age | 636-1258

The century after Muhammad’s death saw one of the most rapid expansions in history.

Arab-Muslim armies held Damascus by 636 and took Jerusalem in 638, then Egypt, then North Africa, and in 711 crossed the strait into Iberia (Spain). Conquered Jews and Christians, called “People of the Book,” were generally granted protected status (dhimmi). They kept their religious traditions and governed their own communities in return for a special tax (the jizya) and a subordinate legal standing.

What the conquests built was one of the world’s great intellectual civilizations: the Islamicate civilization (scholars call Islamicate those lands and cultures defined by Muslim rule); this is set apart from Islamic, the religion. The Umayyad dynasty ruled from Damascus from 661. The Abbasids who followed took power in 750, and in 762 Baghdad was founded and became the intellectual capital of the world.

In Baghdad, at the House of Wisdom, scholars gathered and translated the learning of Greece, Persia, and India, and then evolved past it. Al-Khwarizmi (d. c. 850) gave his name to the algorithm and his book’s title, al-jabr, to algebra. In Persia, Ibn Sina (Latinized Avicenna, d. 1037) wrote a medical encyclopedia, the Canon of Medicine, used in Europe for some five centuries. Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 1198), in Córdoba, wrote the commentaries on Aristotle that would reintroduce the philosopher to the Latin West.

The Greek philosophy Europe had largely lost came back to it through Arabic, by way of translators at Toledo in reconquered Spain, and it arrived in time to set European thought alight. In Muslim Spain, Córdoba at its height was a city of libraries, street lamps, and physicians. The long era Spain remembers as convivencia, the centuries between 711 and 1492 when Muslims, Christians, and Jews shared the peninsula, was both a real and remarkable coexistence and an unequal one.

And the tradition suffered as well as flourished. In 1258 the Mongols sacked Baghdad, slaughtered its people, and threw the libraries of the House of Wisdom into the Tigris until the river ran black with ink.

Key Terms for this Lesson: Sunni & Shia · Sharia

10.4 | The Pillars, the Mosque, & Muslims in America

The Architecture of a Muslim Life

So what does a Muslim actually do? The answer, everywhere in the world, rests on five practices: the Five Pillars of Islam. They are not a creed to be argued but a life to be built, and a Muslim in Jakarta, Cairo, Lagos, or Dearborn builds it from the same five.

Shahadah • The Declaration of Faith
Rooted in the Arabic "to testify," the Shahada is the Islamic creed: There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger. It states the absolute monotheism of Islam and names Muhammad as the last of the prophets. It is the first thing whispered to a newborn and the last thing a dying Muslim hopes to say; to say it sincerely, before witnesses, is to become a Muslim.

Zakat • Almsgiving
Rooted in the Arabic "to purify," zakat is the yearly giving of a portion of one's accumulated wealth: customarily 2.5 percent of one's excess wealth (nisab) to those in need. It is not a tax (it does not fund a government) and not a tithe (it does not fund a religious institution). It is alms, redistributed to the poor, the debt-burdened, and the traveler. It is the direct counterpart of the Jewish tzedakah Section 8 taught, giving understood not as optional charity but as an obligation of righteousness.

Sawm • Fasting
Through the month of Ramadan, Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. No food, drink, or bodily indulgence is permitted during daylight, as a discipline of gratitude, self-restraint, and solidarity with the hungry. The fast is eased for the sick, the traveling, the pregnant, and the young. Ramadan ends in the feast of Eid al-Fitr, one of the two great festivals of the Muslim year.

Hajj • Pilgrimage
Once in a lifetime, every Muslim (who is able) is to make the Hajj, the great pilgrimage to Mecca, in the pilgrimage month. Pilgrims put on ihram, plain white garments that erase every mark of wealth and rank, and circle the Kaaba seven times, walking between the hills of Safa and Marwah, and cast stones in a symbolic "stoning of the devil." About 2,000,000 pilgrims converge on Mecca each year, the largest annual gathering of human beings on earth.

Salat • Prayer
Five times a day — dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset, and night — a Muslim stops and prays, facing Mecca, in a sequence of standing, bowing, and prostration, with recitation from the Qur'an at each step. Prayer is preceded by wudu, a ritual washing. The five daily prayers are the "tent pole" of Islam, the structure the day is pitched around, and a small daily rehearsal of all five pillars at once.

The Mosque

The building where Muslims gather is the mosque (Arabic masjid, “place of prostration”). Its layout is typically functional and spare: a minaret (tower) from which the adhan (the famous call to prayer) is sounded five times a day; and inside, a niche in one wall, the mihrab, marking the direction of Mecca that all prayer faces. From most of the United States, that direction is northeast (the shortest path to Mecca arcs over the North Atlantic).

Worshippers leave their shoes at the door. There are no pews and no chairs, only carpet, and the congregation prays in rows, shoulder to shoulder. There are no images of people or animals, either. A mosque is decorated with geometric pattern and calligraphy, verses of the Qur’an written as art.

The gathering of the week is Jummah, the Friday midday prayer, when a sermon (khutbah) is preached from a raised pulpit, the minbar. It is the counterpart to the Jewish Shabbat service on Friday evening and the Christian service on Sunday morning.

Leading the congregation is the imam, a prayer leader and teacher, not a priest. He performs no sacrament and holds no power to mediate between a worshipper and God. In Sunni Islam especially, the imam is simply the one who stands in front, often the most learned or respected present.

Islam in America

Islam is not new to America, nor is it foreign to it.

Of the approximately 12.5 million Africans who arrived in America as slaves, about one-third of them were Muslim. Islam has been a part of the African continent’s history from the time of Muhammad in countries like Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Benin, and Nigeria. It is not Muslims who are new to America. Rather, it is the recognition of their contributions that is new.

American politicians like James Oglethorpe (GA), Thomas Jefferson (VA), and John Quincy Adams (MA) all spoke with and wrote about Black American Muslims who came to our country as slaves. They observed 19th-century African-American Muslims in Islamic prayer, abstaining from pork, and covering their heads in traditional Islamic regalia. Some carried hard-won Islamic talismans brought from Africa on slave ships, like amulets and gris-gris bags, some of which are still being passed down.

The majority of African-American slaves who could read were Muslim and were often given supervisory roles on plantations. Some literate Muslims like Ayuba Suleyman Diallo and Abdul Rahman Ibrahima Sori wrote letters to secure their freedom. Diallo eventually met the British royal family after securing his freedom. Similarly, Sori, a prince, penned a letter in 1826 that reached President John Quincy Adams, resulting in his freedom as well. Millions more, of course, were not so lucky.

Of the millions who remained in America, some maintained their Islam. Omar ibn Said was an Islamic theologian who feigned conversion to the Christian religion of his masters while continuing to write and instruct on Islam during his enslavement in North Carolina. His is the only autobiography written by a Muslim American slave. The vast majority of African Muslim slaves were forced to convert to Christianity. While the Christian Bible does speak of freedom, a Slave Bible was published in 1807 and distributed to plantations. In it, the Biblical verses extolling freedom from captivity were removed.

While several expressions of Black Muslim identity developed independently in the United States, the 1960s Civil Rights leader Malcolm X is recognized as the first theologian to encourage African Americans to return to Islam. Many African-Americans followed Malcolm (ie. Malik el-Shabazz) on his journey to Sunni Islam. Today, 20% of the Muslim population of America is African-American (half of which are converts), while only 3% of African-Americans are Muslim (Pew Research).

We close Module 3 here, with the youngest of the Abrahamic traditions taking its place beside the two we met before it. The same one God, the same Abraham, the same insistence that how we treat the poor is the measure of our fidelity, told a third way. What every one of these traditions faces next is the modern world: the pressures of science, the nation-state, reform, and revival that have reshaped all of them.

Key Terms for this Lesson: The Five Pillars · Mosque

Recommended Sources

Michael Sells, Approaching the Qur’án: The Early Revelations
Jonathan A. C. Brown, Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction
Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Vol. 1
Edward E. Curtis IV, Muslims in America: A Short History
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam

Last Section: Christianity, Pt. 1
This Section: Islam
Next Section: Christianity, Pt. 2: Reformed

Delivered to the Peace of Mind Regional Psychiatric Conference
October 2025 | Tyler, Texas

Let me begin with a little humility.

One afternoon, in the middle of a faculty meeting on Zoom, I leaned back in my chair a little too far. The whole thing gave way. The chair went over backwards, and all my colleagues saw on their screens was my ceiling fan and my shoes waving in the air.

For a moment there was nothing but stunned silence. Then, trying to salvage some dignity, I muttered, “Well, I guess I was really leaning into remote work.”

A beat. Then laughter. I laughed too, though my pride was a little battered.

The Inner Critic

When the camera clicked off, my inner critic clicked on. You know the voice. “Really, Jae? You can’t sit in a chair for a few minutes without making a spectacle? You’ve become the department clown.”

That voice convinced me my whole reputation had gone over with the chair. I was finished. My time in academia was over. I could expect a call from the college president before dinner.

And yet, if a colleague had taken the same tumble, I’d have checked that they were all right, and maybe cracked a joke to ease the sting. I would never have called them unfit for their job. When it was me, the verdict was instant and without mercy.

The harshest judge I face doesn’t sit across the desk.
He sits inside my head.

What was really at stake? Not the chair (I tightened the bolts later). It was pride. I worried that one slapstick moment had erased years of professional credibility. In that silence I could hear the air conditioner and my own heart pounding in my ears. I felt less like a seasoned professor and more like an impostor, unmasked by gravity.

But there is a difference between embarrassment and ruin. A single fall doesn’t define a career. The truth was far simpler: I had an accident. It happens.

The cruelty was optional.

My colleagues chose laughter over pitchforks, and the mishap has since become an office legend. If they could laugh with me, why couldn’t I? Self-compassion, it turns out, is not an indulgence. It is a discipline. It means telling the truth (”That was embarrassing”) without piling cruelty on top of it (”And I’m a fool”).

A Shared Struggle

I first told that story to a room of counselors, psychiatrists, nurses, and teachers, people who sit with trauma, triage crises, and lead teams for a living. Every one of them knew the voice.

We speak to others with clarity and generous regard. Then we speak to ourselves with a blunt instrument. How many of us have offered a client or a student a compassionate reframe at two in the afternoon, and then told ourselves at six, “I wasn’t enough”?

Too much perfection. Too little mercy.

Would we ever say to a patient, a student, or a friend, “You’ll never get it right. You’re failing. You’re not enough”? Of course not. We would call that unprofessional, even cruel. Yet when the voice is our own, we tolerate it. Somewhere along the way we mistook self-criticism for self-discipline, as if being hard enough on ourselves would make us strong.

The research on self-compassion points the other way. People who meet their failures with kindness tend to recover from them and learn from them better than people who meet them with contempt.

What happens when the inner critic runs unchecked? Burnout. Compassion fatigue. Joy worn down to a thread. Surveys of mental health professionals keep finding burnout among the people whose work is healing it, and college faculty report much the same. Those most devoted to healing others often neglect their own healing.

This is not one person’s flaw. It is a shared condition, and it is not a new one.

Widen the Frame

The question underneath all of this is very old.
How do we live with our flaws without losing sight of our worth?

I gave this talk on the first of October 2025, the day Yom Kippur began at sundown. It seemed a fitting day to ask it.

Across the world’s great wisdom traditions, the answer tends to arrive as a paradox. Our worth is not erased by our flaws. Sometimes it is revealed through them. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism each say it in their own language: though we stumble, we remain worthy.

They do not say it the same way, and the differences are where the wisdom lives. So let’s take them two at a time.

Flawed, Yet Worthy

From its opening chapter, the Hebrew Bible describes human life as a paradox. Every person is created b’tzelem Elohim (in the image of God), a phrase that grants every human being an inviolable dignity (Genesis 1:27). And almost at once, Adam and Eve stumble.

The message is not that failure erases our worth. It is that imperfection is woven into the story from the start. Again and again Israel falters in the wilderness, and again and again God calls the people back, forgives, and renews the covenant.

On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Jews stand together and confess their failings aloud, in the plural and in public. They do it not in shame but in hope. The very act of admission affirms a dignity: I am flawed, but I am not finished. And the same liturgy returns, over and over, to the words God speaks of Himself at Sinai: “a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6, NJPS).

The tradition’s greatest figures embody this. After his moral failure with Bathsheba, King David pours out his heart in the 51st Psalm: “Fashion a pure heart for me, O God; create in me a steadfast spirit” (Psalm 51:12). David is not erased by his sin. He becomes more human in his repentance of it.

In Judaism, error does not end the story. It opens the door to teshuvah (return), repair, and renewal.

Christianity was born inside that same scripture, and it gives the same paradox its own accent: the language of grace. The Gospels speak to the need for reassurance in the face of imperfection, and they tell it as mercy that meets us before we have risen.

The most famous telling is the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32). A son squanders his inheritance and comes home in disgrace, rehearsing his apology as he walks. But “while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20, NRSV). No scolding and no conditions. What was lost is found.

The pattern repeats. Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners (Mark 2:15–17). Faced with a leper whom no one would go near, he is “moved with pity” and stretches out his hand and touches him (Mark 1:41). Those no one else would touch were touched, and welcomed home.

In the language of a clinic, we might call this unconditional acceptance: the experience of being received as we are. Both traditions command us to “love your fellow as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18, NJPS, and Mark 12:31), and the command quietly presupposes a healthy regard for the self. It is hard to love another while you despise yourself. Acceptance is the ground of change. People who know they are worthy of love are more willing to grow.

Taken together, these two scriptures guard against twin dangers. On one side is denial, pretending we are flawless. On the other is despair, collapsing under the weight of our shame. Between them runs a narrow and livable path:

I am accountable.
And I am acceptable.

Surrender & Discovery

If the Bible holds that we are flawed and worthy at once, a practical question follows. How do we actually quiet the inner critic? By letting go of the self, or by digging deeper into it?

Here Islam and Hinduism offer complementary answers. One quiets the critic by yielding. The other quiets it by looking within.

The word Islam means “surrender,” and it shares a three-letter root (S-L-M) with salaam, peace. The Qur’an knows the restless ego well. It calls it the nafs, the self that pulls us toward pride and error (Qur’an 12:53). Peace comes by yielding that restless self to God.

Think of the posture of Muslim prayer: kneeling, bowing, forehead to the ground, several times a day. It is a bodily reminder that we are not the center of the universe. In that yielding there is release. Not everything is ours to control. Not every burden is ours to carry.

You can hear the same spirit in ordinary speech. A farmer facing drought plants his seed and says insha’Allah, “if God wills” (cf. Qur’an 18:23–24). A mother anxious for her child’s future says the same. It is not resignation. It is release. Effort matters, and the outcome rests elsewhere.

Nearly every chapter of the Qur’an opens by naming God ar-Rahman, ar-Rahim, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. “My mercy encompasses all things,” God says (Qur’an 7:156). An inner critic can argue with a great many things. It has a hard time arguing with that.

If the Qur’an points us upward, one great strand of Hindu thought turns us inward. (Hinduism has its own deep traditions of surrender, too. The Bhagavad Gita’s devotion is one.) In the Upanishads, the philosophical texts that close the Vedas, peace comes not by yielding but by discovery. They speak of the atman, the self within, and of its unity with Brahman, the ground of all reality.

In the Chandogya Upanishad, a father teaching his son returns again and again to three words: tat tvam asi, “that thou art” (Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7). The self and ultimate reality are not two things. In the reading of the Advaita school, we are always already part of the larger whole.

That sounds abstract. Its meaning is eminently practical. If my deepest self is joined to something vast and enduring, my passing failures cannot define me. They are real, but they are not final. Beneath the scars, the truest self remains whole.

Set side by side, the two can sound opposed. One says, “Bow, and let go.” The other says, “Look within, and endure.” Yet both are answering the same restless ego, and both insist that peace means moving beyond the anxious surface of the self that criticizes, compares, and condemns.

Some days, peace comes by admitting our limits. Other days, it comes by remembering a strength that was already there.

Striving & Accepting

Even if we accept that we are more than our inner critic, one question remains. How do we live it out? By striving to improve, or by accepting life as it is?

In India, the Buddha (traditionally dated to the sixth century BCE, though many scholars now place him in the fifth) taught that discipline, practice, and effort lead to peace. In China, tradition holds that Laozi, the Old Master of Daoism (whose historical existence scholars still debate), counseled something close to the opposite: to rest, to yield, to go with the flow.

We all know the tension. A setback arrives at work or at home. Some of us double down and push harder. Others step back and say, “It’s okay. I can only do so much.” As a professor, I watch students do both every semester.

Buddhism is often called the Middle Way, a path that avoids both indulgence and punishing austerity. Inner peace, the Buddha taught, requires steady and deliberate work. In the Dhammapada, one of the oldest collections of his sayings, we read: “You yourselves must strive; the Buddhas only point the way” (Dhammapada 276). No one can walk the path for us.

For Buddhists that means meditation, moral discipline, and the pursuit of wisdom. These are not punishments. They are a form of care. To strive is not to scold yourself. It is to invest in yourself.

Even so, the striving is balanced. When a monk named Sona pushed his practice so hard that he despaired of it, the Buddha asked him about the lute he had played before he became a monk. When the strings were too tight, did it play in tune? No. Too loose? No. Only when they were tuned just right (Anguttara Nikaya 6.55). In meditation, that means you focus, and when the mind wanders you bring it back without blame. In the classical order of metta (loving-kindness) practice, you begin with yourself: “May I be happy. May I be at peace.”

Growth without gentleness turns harsh. Gentleness without growth leaves a life without music.

Daoism leans the other way. Laozi taught wu wei, effortless action. It does not mean doing nothing. It means not forcing what will not be forced, not yanking at a knot that only tightens when pulled. Laozi looked to rivers, trees, and seasons, and saw that each fulfills its nature not by strain but by flowing with it.

The Dao De Jing is full of such paradoxes. In Stephen Mitchell’s popular rendering: “If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial” (ch. 22). And: “True mastery can be gained by letting things go their own way. It can’t be gained by interfering” (ch. 48). Water is the softest and most yielding of things, and nothing is better at wearing away stone (ch. 78).

One of China’s best-known stories of acceptance comes from a Han-dynasty book, the Huainanzi, and it has been retold for two thousand years. An old man’s horse runs away. “What bad luck,” say his neighbors. “Maybe so,” he says. The horse returns leading a fine wild horse. “What good luck!” “Maybe so.” His son tries to ride the new horse, falls, and breaks his leg. “What terrible luck.” “Maybe so.” Then war comes, and the army takes the young men of the village. The son, lame, is spared.

Fortune shifts. Labels mislead. For the Daoist, peace means meeting life, and meeting ourselves, with equanimity.

Like the earlier pairs, Buddhism and Daoism seem at first to stand opposed. One says train, discipline, keep practicing. The other says stop forcing, loosen your grip. The wisdom is in the rhythm. There are moments when effort is the most compassionate choice, like confronting a harmful habit. And there are moments when acceptance is the more merciful one, like forgiving ourselves for what we cannot change.

Striving without acceptance can break us.
Acceptance without striving can hollow us out.

The task is not to choose one voice for good. It is to learn when each should be heard.

Six Practices

Six traditions, then, each wrestling with the same human need: to live at peace with ourselves. Different languages, different centuries, and a shared insight. Peace of mind means charting a deliberate course through paradox.

Wisdom preserved for centuries only matters if it can still change how we live on a Tuesday. Knowing the path is not the same as walking it. So here are six practices, one from each tradition, each with a single sentence you can carry.

Truth is an honest accounting, the courage to name what is real. On Yom Kippur, Jews stand together and name their failings aloud, not to wallow but to open the door to repair. We can borrow the practice in one question: "What is broken, and how might I repair it?" Truth is not self-condemnation. It is clarity. Naming reality without cruelty gives us back our agency. It says, I can face what is real, and I can begin again.

Grace is the assurance that our worth is not erased by our failures. The father runs to the prodigal before he can finish his apology: acceptance before achievement, love before perfection. You can practice it in one sentence: "I am more than my worst moment." That phrase plants a different voice in the mind, not the critic who condemns but the friend who welcomes you home. Grace does not excuse us from growth. It gives us the strength to face the truth and grow.

Release is loosening your grip on what you cannot hold. The Qur'an knows how the restless self strains for control and frets over outcomes. Insha'Allah answers it. You can practice release by telling your inner critic, plainly, "Not everything is under my control." I will give my effort. I will not be ruled by the outcome.

Remembering is turning inward to what cannot be broken. In the Upanishads, peace is found not by escape but by discovery. Beneath the noise lies a core joined to something far larger. You can practice it with one line: "I will connect with others through my deepest values." When you remember, you are not inventing your worth. You are recognizing it.

Striving is self-compassion in motion. "You yourselves must strive," the Buddha said, and he also tuned the strings. So in a hard moment, ask one question: "What is one small effort I can make right now?" Not ten things. Not perfection. One.

Striving is self-compassion in motion. “You yourselves must strive,” the Buddha said, and he also tuned the strings. So in a hard moment, ask one question: “What is one small effort I can make right now?” Not ten things. Not perfection. One.

Accepting is the gentle art of letting life be what it is. Water does not hammer its way through stone. It flows, and over time the stone yields. When the critic insists you must control every detail, pause and say, “Let it be enough.” Acceptance is not giving up. It is giving room to everything that is not you.

You won’t need all six at once. Some days call for Truth, to separate what is real from what is fear. Other days call for Grace. At times you will need to Release, and at other times to Remember that you belong to something wider and older than your worst afternoon. Some days Striving will carry you forward. Some days Accepting will bring the most lasting peace.

It takes practice. It takes prudence. It takes a good deal of intentional care.

I still hear the judge. He hasn’t moved out.
But he is no longer the only voice in the room.

Which of the six will you reach for tomorrow? And if most of us manage to be capable on most days without any mercy for ourselves, what might we be capable of with it?

You can find more at scribespark.com, including my college courses and public talks.

Torah Scroll | showing Exodus15:22-16:36, 2019

Key Terms for this Section
Rabbinic Judaism · Talmud · Israel · Mitzvot
Passover · The High Holy Days · Shabbat · Tzedakah

8.1 | From Temple to Talmud

Greece, Hellenism, & the Maccabean Response | 332-63 BCE

When Alexander the Great and his Macedonian-Greek armies take Persia in 332 BCE, the response in Israel split in two. Over the next century and a half, the split hardened into two political factions.

• The Jewish Sadducees (wealthy urban elites)
embrace Greek assimilation for their own material gain

• The Jewish Pharisees (rabbis out in the countryside among the people)
resist Hellenization much longer

The Pharisees are the faction from which Rabbinic Judaism arises. The Pharisees (the later Apostle Paul among them) are the party of the people, and the tradition this lesson describes is theirs.

• 332 BCE | The European Alexander the Great arrives, bringing Hellenism to Israel
• 167 BCE | The Maccabean Revolt of the Jews against Greece
• 70 CE | The Fall of the Second Jewish Temple during the First Jewish-Roman War
• 132-5 | Bar Kochba leads the 2nd Jewish-Roman War, the last revolt until 20th century
• 500s | The completion of the Talmud, the official rabbinical commentary on the Torah

Greek influence ran deep, from the Greek names given to Jewish children to the development of gymnasiums. The gymnasiums were a particular scandal in Israel. Like the Greek public bathhouses, the gymnasium was a place to be undressed (that’s literally what the word means in Greek). Due to the European ridicule of Jews in bathhouses and gymnasiums, some Jewish families stopped circumcising their boys. Hebrew lessons began to disappear. Eventually, the Hellenic influence in Israel became so great that the Greeks placed a statue of Zeus in the Temple. That statue was the last straw...

He extended the glory of his people. Like a giant, he put on his breastplate; he bound on his armor of war and waged battles, protecting the camp with his sword. 1 Maccabees 3:3

In 167 BCE, Judah Maccabee (Heb. ‘Judah the Hammer’) wages a guerrilla war against Greek rule and takes the Temple back! The Greeks retaliate by defiling the Temple with pig’s blood, a powerful taboo in Jewish culture. The Maccabees eventually win, take the Temple back, cleanse and rededicate it. The Hebrew for ‘Rededication’ is Hanukkah. Jewish independence is forever after celebrated by that holiday. By 140 BCE, the Maccabees had founded the Hasmonean dynasty, and local self-rule returned for the second time to Israel since the days of King David. Ezra’s Great Assembly was replaced by the Sanhedrin, a council of rabbinic sages who could now weigh in on civil matters the Greeks used to decide for Jews.

Over a short time, however, the Hasmoneans grew corrupt and Hellenized too, and their dynasty fell under its own weight.

Rome & the Burning of the Temple | 63 BCE - 135 CE

Rome takes Jerusalem in 63 BCE, under Pompey (Julius Caesar’s brother-in-law), and thereafter rules through intermediaries.

These puppet-kings, Herod the Great (37- 4 BCE) chief among them, were Jewish traitors who chose personal enrichment over the Jewish rule of Israel. The reaction was powerful. Against Roman imperialism (and Jewish collaboration!) rose the Zealots, a faction of Israelite fighters who, like the Maccabees of old, sought to defeat their imperial masters by force.

Their struggle became the First Roman-Jewish War (66-73 CE). It ends with the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. Today, the Western Wall, an outer retaining wall of the original temple mount complex, remains the focal point of Jewish prayer today. For Jews, the losses in the Roman-Jewish war were the most cataclysmic loss in their history until the Holocaust.

A last revolt flared in 132 CE, when Simon bar Kochba rose against Roman plans to remake the Temple Mount a shrine to Jupiter!

Bar Kochba’s first victories with the Zealots won a third brief span of local self-rule for the region, and his followers hailed him as the Messiah. However, within 3 years, Rome crushed the uprising (135 CE), and Bar Kochba was killed. From there, Israel became a possession of several different empires. The land became a Roman province (135), a Byzantine province (390), then it became a district ruled from Baghdad (636) until European Crusaders took it (1099). Then it became a colony ruled from Cairo (1187), then the Turkish Empire had it for four centuries (1517) until the British took it from the Turks in the First World War (1917). Then, in May 1948, home rule returned to the Levant for the fourth and final time with the founding of the State of Israel.

Scattered by several successive empires, the world’s Jews formed into three distinct flavors: Ashkenazi (European), Sephardi (Spanish and North African), and Mizrahi Jews (Middle Eastern). Today about half the world’s Jews live in Israel, the majority of whom have Mizrahi heritage. Most of the other half of the world’s Jews — the Jewish Diaspora — live in the United States.

The Western Wall (2020), part of the Temple Mount complex
with the Islamic Dome of the Rock atop it, where the Temple once stood.

Rabbinic Judaism: Bible & Talmud

With the Temple gone from the City of David, Jewish life turned to the Pharisaic tradition in the countryside.

• The Temple in Jerusalem was succeeded by synagogues (Gr. assemblies).
• The Temple priesthood was succeeded by rabbis (Hb. revered).
• The Temple sacrifices were succeeded by the study of the Torah

In these ways, after the Temple, Rabbinic Judaism was born: focused on Torah study, rabbinic tradition, and synagogue attendance.

The text of the Hebrew Bible is almost entirely ancient Hebrew (98.8%), with the remaining 1.2% composed in Aramaic. Within its Hebrew: 4% of that vocabulary (320 words) comes from other languages. 133 words from Egyptian (eg. pharaoh), 85 Persian (eg. decree), 85 Babylonian (eg. palace), 7 Greek (eg. lute), 5 Hittite (eg. armor), 3 Hurrian (idolatrous priest), and 2 from India (eg. ape and peacock).

Particular focus is given to Hebrew here because the Torah is presented overwhelmingly in Hebrew, known in Rabbinic Judaism as the “Leshon HaKodesh” (the Holy Language). For many believers, to study the word of God requires one to invest in the language that God revealed Godself in. Within the Bible there are riddles, word play, puns, and acrostics that can only be revealed with Hebrew study.

• In Genesis, Isaac (Yitzhak) comes from “laughter” (tsachak). When his 90-year-old mother learned she would have Isaac, she laughed.
• Word play: The serpent, the most crafty (arum) of all creatures, tests Adam and Eve while they are naked (arummim).
• Another: God shows Jeremiah an almond branch (shaked) as a sign that God likewise watches (shokad) over Israel.
• Psalm 119 is an acrostic of the Hebrew alefbet: 22 stanzas in praise of Torah study, starting in Hebrew A, B, G, D...

While riddles and puns are fun, rabbis take Torah study quite seriously.

After the fall of the Temple (70 CE), the rabbis spend the next 400 years developing the Talmud — an enormous body of Biblical commentary that adjudicates on serious questions posed by Jews. The first layer of the Talmud was the Mishnah, completed around 200 CE. It carried rulings on rabbinical questions from Torah study. For example, while the Torah commands Jews to leave part of their harvest to the poor (Deut. 24:19), the Mishnah adds that these gleanings are for Jews and non-Jews alike. Why? Because Jews should “promote the ways of peace” for the sake of social harmony and human dignity (Peah 4:9).

Over the next 300 years, Torah commentary continued with even more real-world questions and answers in an additional layer of Talmud called the Gemara. For example, the Torah commands the return of lost property (Deut. 22:1), and the Mishnah later responds — yes, but if you can’t find the owner, you can keep the item. However, a story of a rabbi living in Iraq added another layer of commentary summarized below.

A rabbi hires workers to transport barrels of wine for him. While moving, the workers break a barrel and lose its wine. Under the law, the workers are expected to compensate the man for the lost wine. But because these workers are poor and cannot pay for the wine, they are asked to give up their cloaks instead. However, a sage later adjudicates the situation and tells the owner to give the cloaks back. Why? Because Proverbs says to “walk in the way of good people” and the Mishnah likewise says we should seek the “ways of peace.” Further, because the workers had worked all day, the sage ordered the owner to pay them their full wages and return their cloaks. Here, the Gemara establishes “acting beyond the letter of the law,” because true ethics often requires a compassionate bending of the law in order to prioritize human dignity. (Bava Metzia 83a)

In sum, the Talmud is essentially the Mishnah (ca. 200 CE) and the Gemara (ca. 500 CE).
Representing layers of adjudication of Jewish life after the Temple, the Talmud remains the cornerstone of Rabbinical Judaism.

Key Terms for this Lesson: Rabbinic Judaism · The Talmud

8.2 | Peoplehood & the Path

A People called Israel

While Christians and Muslims find their traditions primarily through believing the right things, Jewish identity is less about believing than it is about belonging. Jews were a people long before they had any sort of creed. Remember, the Hebrew Bible has no word for ‘religion.’ Instead, the ancient Israelites called themselves after a man renamed Israel. His descendants, the Jews, have been called a tribe, a nation, and even a race. However problematic those labels are, one underlying point remains: a person’s Jewishness comes from their parents, not their beliefs.

A person can fully believe every word of the Hebrew Bible, or be unobservant and ignorant of the scripture. Their beliefs have no bearing on their identity as a Jew.

Outside of the corridors of religion, the Jewish People have their own languages, foods, calendar, clothes, texts, art, music, land, history, traditions, totems, taboos, humor, customs, and holidays. They are a small people, about 16 million or so (about 0.2% of the world). Yet they have changed the world immeasurably. In the last century, Jews discovered general relativity (Einstein) and psychoanalysis (Freud). They invented aspirin (Eichengrün) and the defibrillator (Zoll), Google searches (Page & Brin), USB flash drives (Moran), and word-processing (Berezin). They gave the world the ballpoint-pen (Bíró), instant cameras (Land), Barbie (Handler), and Levi’s jeans. Jewish comic book writers gave us the moral tales of Superman, Spiderman, and the X-Men. Jews founded Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros Studios. There have been 8 Jewish-American supreme court justices. And, since WWII, there have been about 30 Jewish heads of state outside of Israel, including the presidents of Mexico, Ukraine, and Switzerland, as well as the prime ministers of France, Belgium, and Austria.

In the 1950s, a Jew cured the world of polio then gave the vaccine away for free. If he’d sold it, he’d be worth billions. He chose to save lives instead. And though they make up 0.2% of the world’s population, Jews represent 22% of all Nobel Prize laureates. Outside of religion, the impact of Jewish creativity, intelligence, and leadership is hard to compare.

Then there is also a Jewish religious tradition, called Judaism. The ways ancient Jews framed the moral landscape — with covenant, scripture, forgiveness, the sabbath, and a God without image — remain fundamental to over half the religious adherents and foundational to Western civilization. After all, Jesus, his disciples, and the apostle Paul were also Jews and identified as such.

So where did this identity begin? The name carries the ethos. Israel comes from the story of Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, who wrestles through the night with a mysterious figure at a river crossing and will not let go:

“You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have struggled with God and man and prevailed.” Genesis 32:28

Israel means, literally, to struggle with God.
And struggle turns out to be central to Jewish life rather than a lapse from it: questioning, arguing, wrestling with the tradition to reach a deeper truth. Abraham argues with God to spare the city of Sodom for the sake of its righteous few. Moses, who answers God’s call with a single word (“Hineni,” Here I am), goes on to argue God out of destroying the people at the foot of Sinai. Like Abraham, Moses changes God’s mind. The name Israel has attached itself to a person, a people, a land, and a modern state, but it has never lost the verb inside it.

For Jews, to wrestle with God is not a failure of faith. In the Jewish tradition,
it is the definition of faith.

Covenant & Mitzvot

Underneath the peoplehood is the covenant, the “everlasting“ bond traced from Abraham between his descendants and God Almighty. Its sign, given in Genesis 17, is circumcision, a mark on the body of a people ‘set apart.’ That covenantal otherness will matter a great deal to Paul and the story of early Christianity (Sec. 9). Today, Christians read the Jewish covenant primarily in one of two ways. Some hold to dual-covenant theology, in which God’s covenant with the Jews still stands alongside the Christian one. For example, the Catholic Church has held, since the Second Vatican Council in 1965, that God’s covenant with the Jews still stands. Others hold to replacement theology, in which the newer covenant under Christ supersedes God’s covenant with Abraham.

From a Jewish perspective, the covenant with God made through Abraham is absolute.

For each Jew, the choice of how to follow that covenant is a deeply personal decision. But, regardless of their choice, a Jew is a Jew, whether or not she is observant of the Jewish religion. In Judaism, the choice to observe the Hebrew Bible’s tenants is not about escaping eternal punishment (Jews do not have this concept) but about living a blessed life that honors thousands of years of Jewish tradition. Those who do choose to observe must decide how closely they follow traditional Halacha. Literally “the Path,” Halacha is generally translated “Jewish Law” — the sum of all Jewish wisdom and tradition, centered on the 613 mitzvot (Hb. commandments) of the Torah. These commandments turn chiefly on repentance, prayer, and charity in the service of repairing a world broken by sin.

That “repair of the world“ (Hb. tikkun olam) is the great work of Rabbinic Judaism.
It’s the “why” of modern Judaism.

Righteousness for the Nations

One question remains: if Halacha is binding only to Jews, what of everyone else? To Jewish thinking, the commandments given to Adam and Noah are binding on all people, since all are “children of Adam.” These are the Seven Laws of Noah:

• Prohibition of murder | Sanctity of human life
• Prohibition of theft | Honesty and the balance of private property and public good
• Prohibition of idolatry | Worship belongs to God alone — not to power or fame
• Prohibition of sexual immorality | Fidelity and the family
• Prohibition of blasphemy | Reverence toward God
• Prohibition of cruelty to animals | Humane stewardship of the natural world
• Establishment of courts of justice | A fair system of law for every people

Non-Jews who keep these seven are, in Jewish tradition, counted righteous. Halacha binds Jews only. The nations have their own path to righteousness, a universal moral framework, and what it asks of them is conduct.

Key Terms for this Lesson: Israel · Mitzvot

8.3 | They Tried to Kill Us: History & Holidays

As Judaism bills itself as a “religion of life,” a tour of the empires who tried to end the Jewish people doubles as a tour of Jewish holidays! Or, as the late, great comedian Alan King once opined:

They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat!
Jewish-American comedian Alan King, summarizing all Jewish holidays in 9 words

Ancient Egypt | Passover, Shavuot, & Sukkot

In the Book of Exodus, Passover is liberation from Egyptian bondage, the Israelites’ escape from Pharaoh’s rule. Its central ritual is the Seder, a meal that follows a prescribed order of prayers, symbolic foods, and readings from the Haggadah, the book that dramatically retells the Exodus at the dinner table.

On the plate sits a roasted shank bone for the paschal lamb, bitter herbs for the bitterness of slavery, and matzah, the unleavened bread of a people who left in too much of a hurry for the dough to rise. Everyone at the Seder table recounts the ten plagues, spilling a drop of wine for each. The youngest child asks why this night is different from all other nights. The answer takes the rest of the evening.

Two more festivals grow out of the same story. Shavuot marks the giving of the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai, the covenant between God and Israel made law. Its customs include all-night Torah study, dairy treats, and the reading of the Book of Ruth, the story of a Moabite woman who chose to make the Jewish people her own.

Additionally, Sukkot remembers the 40 years in the wilderness at the fall harvest. Families build a temporary hut (a sukkah) with a roof loose enough to see the stars through, share their meals in it for a week, and wave Four Species: a palm frond, myrtle, and willow bound together, held with a citron.

Together, Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot are the three ancient Temple festivals, the pilgrimages on which, while the Temple stood, the whole of Israel shared when they went up to Jerusalem.

Persia & Greece | Purim & Hanukkah

Purim remembers a plot to annihilate the Jews of ancient Persia, and its undoing by the cleverness of Queen Esther and her cousin Mordecai. The whole Book of Esther (ie. the whole megillah) is read aloud in the synagogue, and every time the villain Haman’s name is read, the congregation drowns it out with noisemakers.

Gifts of food go to friends and gifts of money go to the poor. Children come in costume, and the adults are told, by the Talmud’s own instruction, to drink until they can no longer tell the hero from the villain. It is the one day of the Jewish year given over to laughter.

As stated in Sec. 8.1, Hanukkah remembers the Maccabean Revolt against the Greeks in the 100s BCE. When the Maccabees took back the defiled Temple and rededicated it, the tradition holds, they found only one day’s worth of pure oil for the Temple lamp, and it burned for eight. That is the miracle the holiday keeps.

Each night for eight nights, one more candle is lit on the menorah, a nine-branched candelabrum, from the ninth candle, the shamash (the ‘helper’), whose only job is to light the others. Families exchange gifts, spin a four-sided top called a dreidel, and eat what can be fried in oil: potato pancakes (latkes) and jelly doughnuts (sufganiyot).

Hanukkah is a minor holiday in the tradition’s own ranking (this surprises many students). It became a major one in America, where it sits across December from Christmas.

Days of Awe & Mourning

On Tisha B’Av (Hb. 9th of the month of Av), Jews mourn the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem: the first, by Babylon (586 BCE), and the second by Rome (70 CE). Tradition states the destruction happened on the same day of the year. Other catastrophes have gathered onto the date since. Observant Jews fast on Tisha B’Av for 24 hours, sitting on the floor (as mourners do), and read the Book of Lamentations by candlelight. The synagogue dims its lights, and the curtain is taken down from the Ark that holds the Torah scrolls.

However, not every holiday remembers an empire.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur stand at either end of the ten High Holy Days, when Jews reaffirm the covenant between God and the Jewish people. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year, opened by the shofar, a ram’s horn, blown in the synagogue in long and broken blasts. What follows are the Ten Days of Awe — given to introspection, repentance, and the renewal of one’s commitments to God and to one’s neighbors. The liturgy pictures a Book of Life, opened on Rosh Hashanah and sealed on Yom Kippur, and the greeting of the season asks that one be inscribed in it for a good year.

The tradition holds that a wrong done to another person cannot be forgiven by God until it has been set right with that person, so the ten days are spent intentionally repairing the relationships in one’s life. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, closes them with a full day’s fast, prayer from morning to nightfall, and the reading of the Book of Jonah, the story of a reluctant prophet and a city that repented.

The final holiday is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, established after the birth of the modern State of Israel.

It is the day of collective mourning and reflection on the atrocities of the Holocaust, during which six million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators from 1939 to 1945. This solemn day commemorates the strength and resilience of Jewish survivors and honors the memory of those lost. Activities include memorial ceremonies, candle-lighting, survivor testimonies, and educational events to ensure that the horrors of the Holocaust are never forgotten and that future generations understand the importance of tolerance, empathy, and vigilance against discrimination and genocide.

This video shows Israelis on Yom HaShoah getting out of their cars and standing together at the sound of the bomb sirens. This moment is shared across Israel in an act of solidarity against the unprecedented genocide perpetuated by the Holocaust.

Run the tour back and a pattern stands out: the Jewish year is a map of the empires Jews have outlived — Egypt, Persia, Greece, Babylon, Rome, and Nazi Germany. The holidays remember. But memory is only half of a Jewish life. The other half is practice: the weekly rest of Shabbat and the daily round of the mitzvot.

For that, we turn to lesson 8.4.

Key Terms for this Lesson: Passover · The High Holy Days

8.4 | A Modern Jewish Life

Jewish Practice | Shabbat & Tefillah

It’s sundown on Friday.
A Jewish wife lights two candles, covers her eyes, and says the blessings. Someone lifts a cup of wine and blesses it, then uncovers two loaves of braided bread (challah) and blesses those. There is a meal with speaking parts. And no one is looking at a phone.

This is the beginning of Shabbat, the sacred day of Jewish rest and the most important holiday on the Jewish calendar. It comes every week! In the Genesis narrative, God made the world in 6 days and rested on the 7th, sanctifying it as a day of rest for all humanity. Shabbat begins at sundown Friday and ends at nightfall Saturday, a 25-hour pause from the demands of everyday life for reflection, family, synagogue, and community.

Work and commerce are set aside. Devices are put away. For six days, Jews work to “repair the world.” But on the 7th they rest inside a weekly foretaste of the Messianic Age — the “World to Come” — when everyone has enough (Micah 4:4), no one studies war anymore (Isaiah 2:4), there are no more weapons (Ezekiel 39:9), and peace is held in unbroken perpetuity (Isaiah 11:6–9).

The blessings and prayers recited on Shabbat must be done with intention (Hb. kavanah): with sincerity, focus and personal commitment. Intention sits at the core of all Jewish prayer (Hb. tefillah). Observant Jews perform tefillah (prayer) three times each day — morning, afternoon, and evening — asking God for success, wisdom, forgiveness, healing, justice, righteousness, and peace. The prayers are proscribed in a specific set of actions, following a Jewish prayer book (Hb. siddur).

Jewish Life | Ritual & Charity

Observant Jewish communities also maintain a mikveh: a ritual bath for spiritual purification. According to Torah, the bath must draw from a natural water source such as rainwater (Lev. 11:36). This ritualized washing was around long before Christians took up the practice (cf. John the Baptist). Torah is also the source of kashrut: the Jewish dietary laws describing kosher food. These mitzvot govern which foods are permitted and how they are prepared: meat and dairy kept separate, and certain meats such as pork and shellfish prohibited. Many modern Jews keep kosher as a mode of intentional living, bringing a spiritual dimension to the ordinary act of eating and affirming the holiness of daily life.

Of course, the search for holy and righteous living goes beyond the dinner table.

The search for righteousness is a specific goal for Jews, insofar as the word righteousness in Hebrew (tzadik) is a cognate of tzedakah, or charity. For Jews, righteousness and charity are connected at the level of grammar. Tzedakah is the Jewish obligation to act righteously toward those in need. It is the Torah’s duty to do justice. It is bound up intimately with one’s accountability to their community. The well-being of each is bound to the welfare of all. Tzedakah asks that one give, and that one teach others to give, and it binds everyone, rich or poor alike.

Jewish Movements in Brief

With the coming of modernity and the European Enlightenment, Jewish communities had to decide how they would carry their traditions forward. As Jews often do, they argued and they argued well.

Broadly, two families of responses emerged.

Jews who hold that ancient Halacha remains binding on modern Jews are known as Orthodox. Jewish Orthodoxy itself has two broad divisions of its own: the Haredi, who seek a full separation from modern culture, and the Modern Orthodox, who try their best to balance full ritual observance with modern life. About 9% of American Jews are some form of Orthodox.

The other camp, the majority of Jews who embraced modern change, are today’s Progressive Jews.

Progressive movements read Halacha more dynamically. Among progressives, Reform Judaism stresses personal choice in ritual observance (ie. some eat bacon and some don’t). Conservative Judaism seeks a balance of tradition and choice. The smaller Reconstructionist and Renewal movements offer newer perspectives still. About 37% of American Jews are Reform, 17% Conservative, and 4% belong to the smaller other movements in progressive Judaism.

However, it must be stressed that although these different movements have vastly different views on piety, no movement questions another’s place as a contributing member of the Jewish family. Walk into any synagogue, in Brooklyn, Tel Aviv, Dallas, or London, and the room looks very nearly the same. At the front stands the ark, within it is a Torah scroll. There is a ner tamid (eternal lamp) and Jewish prayer books set out for the congregation. The congregation faces Jerusalem. And on Friday night the Shabbat candles are lit in remembrance of God’s word.

Key Terms for this Lesson: Shabbat · Tzedakah

Recommended Sources

• Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Literacy
• The Jewish Study Bible (Oxford University Press)
• Robert Alter, The Literary Guide to the Bible
• Jonathan Sacks, Covenant & Conversation
• Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath

Last Section: The Biblical World
This Section: Judaism
Next Section: Christianity, Pt. 1

Pictured: Light Flowing Forth from the Blackness | Robert Fludd, 1617

Delivered to Temple Beth El
Yom Kippur 2017

Good Yontif.

Someone asked me recently how I got started down the path of serious Jewish study. The honest answer is a single course. In 2005, at the University of Central Florida, I enrolled in Dr. Ken Hanson’s History of the Jewish People, Part 1. (Spoiler: Part 2 has completely different characters, and it’s a lot funnier.)

That course almost 20 years ago was my first deep look at the Jewish story, and I fell in love with it. At the time I had no idea I would go to graduate school. No one in my family had done so, and no one I knew well. Even if I’d known, I couldn’t have told you what I would study.

But that course settled it. Thank you, Dr. Hanson.

I was that student. I did the readings. I asked too many questions. I asked for more readings. When the term papers came back, amid a good deal of grumbling around the room, mine carried a 100. The professor had told us plainly that he never gave 100s. So, naturally, I went to ask him about it.

The conversation that followed changed my life. By now it has changed the lives of hundreds of my own students.

We got to talking about Jewish philosophy and what it means to study Torah. Like so many young academics, I was hunting for the Truth, with a capital T. I wanted to know what was really the case. How did history really shake out? What was the meaning and purpose of scripture?

We were talking about the Talmud, and the long chain of commentary that has grown out of it, when he leans back in his chair, holds his arms wide, and says simply, “Jae, there’s no bottom.”

There’s no bottom to Jewish thought. You never arrive. No one closes the book and says, “Oh, I get it now.” The discussion continues. The truth, as it were, keeps being revealed.

Until that moment I had thought of wisdom as the guarded secret of old men. Somewhere, in some ancient book, the answers must lie hidden. Somewhere high in the mountains, or across some far desert, someone must have it all figured out.

Jewish wisdom doesn’t work that way at all.

For Jews, wisdom comes out of conversation and debate. “As iron sharpens iron,” says Proverbs, “so a man sharpens the wit of his friend” (27:17).

The Talmud is that proverb built into a library. Page after page, the Sages set their opinions side by side, and each is tested for its logic and its consistency. Often, in the ancient world as now, two rabbis reach views that are each internally sound and still contradict each other. If Judaism held only one Truth, that would be a crisis. But in this tradition, it is the expected outcome. When the schools of Hillel and Shammai argued for three years, the Talmud records a heavenly voice declaring that both were “the words of the living God,” though the law, in the end, follows Hillel (Eruvin 13b). Ask two Jews a question and you’ll get three opinions.

This is why there’s no bottom.

In the synagogue, we ask the hard questions, and we ask them of God. Abraham, bargaining for the lives of Sodom: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” (Genesis 18:25). Moses, after Pharaoh has made the people’s labor harsher still: “O Lord, why did You bring harm upon this people?” (Exodus 5:22). Jeremiah: “Why does the way of the wicked prosper?” (Jeremiah 12:1). The habit is written into our very name. Israel, often rendered “one who wrestles with God,” was the name given to Jacob after a night of wrestling, “for you have striven with beings divine and human, and have prevailed” (Genesis 32:29).

Out of this comes a culture unlike any other: a “stiff-necked people” who ask a great many questions. Every spring, at the Seder, we invite our children to ask what the night means. To the child who asks, we answer. For the child who doesn’t yet know how to ask, the Haggadah tells us to open the question ourselves. The lesson is plain. Asking is a righteous act.

The physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi, who won the Nobel Prize in 1944, was once asked why he became a scientist rather than a doctor or a lawyer like the other immigrant kids in his neighborhood. As a friend later retold his answer, every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn asked her child after school whether he’d learned anything that day. Rabi’s mother asked something else: “Izzy, did you ask a good question today?” That difference, he said, made him a scientist.

In the Mishnah, Ben Zoma asks, “Who is wise?” His answer: “One who learns from every person” (Pirkei Avot 4:1). A mentor of mine at UT Dallas, the Holocaust scholar David Patterson, ends every semester the same way: “It was a pleasure learning from you.” He means it. I try to teach in that spirit, and the highest praise I give in my own classroom is simply, “That’s a really good question.”

An old friend once asked me why the Jewish people have endured for thousands of years while so many other peoples died out or were absorbed. First, that’s an excellent question. My answer is that we have been willing to ask hard questions and to face them, without assuming there is one great big Truth out there that fits everyone.

Sometimes a student hears this and mistakes rigorous openness for moral relativism. “So, anything goes in Judaism?” Here is how I’ve come to answer.

The Torah is the foundation of all Jewish wisdom. Think of it as the space between 7 and 8. Between those two numbers lie an infinite number of points. None of them is 9.

There are countless readings of the Torah, and countless more still to come.
None of them permits idolatry, or theft, or murder.

The great sea of Jewish tradition may have no bottom.
But it has a shoreline.

Plumbing the depths of the Jewish tradition has been one of the great privileges of my life as a scholar, and I hope you’ll keep plumbing your own. We have a great deal to learn from one another. My own spiritual path has been strengthened by people who never once thought of themselves as teaching me anything.

That’s how it goes. “From strength to strength.” “As iron sharpens iron…”

Yom Kippur is the day we turn the hardest questions on ourselves. So on this day of all days, I want to leave you with a reminder: we are the heirs of a singular wisdom tradition. In my darkest moments and on my most difficult days, I am steadied by the sheer depth of Jewish questions, and by the roaring sea of answers that keeps rising from them.

In God in Search of Man, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel warned against the day faith becomes “an heirloom rather than a living fountain.” His warning holds. The truth isn’t an heirloom waiting in a drawer to be found, as I once thought it to be. It’s a living fountain, and all of us draw from it and add to it.

Good Yontif.

You can find more of my sermons and reflections at scribespark.com.
My college courses and public talks can also be found there.

Map of Bible Lands | Library of Congress, 1913

Key Terms for this Section
Covenant · Canaan · The Babylonian Exile · The Torah
Monotheism · The Second Temple · Apocalypse · Messiah

7.1 | Before Israel: Mesopotamia & Egypt

Law & Covenant

Welcome to Module III. Our course now moves into the Ancient MENA: the Middle East & North Africa.

To the east lies Mesopotamia (~Iraq)
To the west lies Egypt, the Nile, and North Africa
Between those two civilizations was the ancient land of Canaan.
The former Canaanite territories are found in modern Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, and parts of modern Jordan & Syria.

• 1754 BCE | The Law Code of Hammurabi creates a covenant between Mesopotamia and the god Shamash
• 1500s BCE | The earliest mention of Canaan in the archeological record
• 1200s BCE | The Collapse of the Bronze Age creates opportunities for smaller groups to rise
• 1208 BCE | The earliest mention of Israel in the archeological record (on an Egyptian victory stele)
• 800s BCE | The earliest mention of the House of David in the archeological record

Israel and the surrounding area is the location of the Hebrew Bible, the stories of Jesus Christ, and remains fundamental to the Islamic tradition. Israel is mentioned over 40 times in the Qur’an, over 70 times in the New Testament, and over 2,000 times in the Hebrew Bible. Outside of scholarship, many folks will treat the Biblical scripture as something floating above the modern Middle East. For them, the Bible is filled with timeless stories that one either takes on faith or not. This course speaks from the opposite view. In every lesson, we will meet something pulled from the ground (a stone, a scroll, a coin) that pins a page to a place and date.

About 3,800 years ago, in Mesopotamia (~Iraq), the Code of Hammurabi was cut into a tall stone pillar (a stele) and set up for all to see. Its 282 laws make up one of humanity’s earliest legal frameworks. But the laws are only half the monument. Alongside them, King Hammurabi kept a covenant, a sacred two-way agreement, between his people and Shamash, the Mesopotamian god of justice. The king promised to honor Shamash, uphold justice, and protect the weak. In return, the god Shamash pledged his divine protection and support.

That bargain mirrored the politics of the age. A small vassal state offered its allegiance to a great king in exchange for protection, and a king offered his own state the protection of a patron god.

It is the same shape the Bible will eventually give to the relationship between God and Israel.

Flood, Creation, & Patriarch

Collective punishment by the gods appears in Mesopotamia’s most famous literary work, the Epic of Gilgamesh, written in the 1700s BCE.

A great flood is sent to punish humankind’s wrongdoing. One virtuous man is warned, builds an ark, and saves his family and some animals. When the waters subside, a dove finds land, and the survivor is rewarded.

You probably know this story. In Gilgamesh the survivor is Utna. In Genesis he is later called by the Hebrew name Noah. Both narratives spare the faithful few from divine judgment, and they share the same core images: watery chaos, the ark as refuge, and renewal after the waters recede. Each keeps its own distinct features. But the recurring flood motif points to shared cultural currents across the ancient Near East.

The Mesopotamian Epic of Creation runs the same way. Primordial waters are ordered by divine acts, a god is slain so that humanity can be formed from his blood, and a hidden sacred garden is reserved for the gods. The Hebrew book of Genesis also has creation emerging from a watery void and a psychodrama set in a sacred garden. But there is one massive difference between the earlier Mesopotamian narratives and the later Hebrew one. Where the Mesopotamian gods quarrel, scheme, and war among themselves, Genesis presents one God acting alone, with divine moral purpose.

Much of the setting and plot of Mesopotamia’s cultural narratives is shared with what will one day become Israel. No where is that more evident than in the story of the Israelite patriarch, Abraham. In Genesis, Abraham and his family are led out of Mesopotamia, from Ur of the Chaldeans (Ur Kaśdim), into the Land of Canaan (ie. Israel). Abraham’s Mesopotamian setting shows in more than his hometown. The covenant Abraham makes with God in Genesis 17 is the same two-way, Hammurabian bargain we just read. In this “everlasting“ covenant, Abraham’s children are promised the Land of Canaan forever, and that God in turn will protect those children, the Israelites.

Cana'an & the Emergence of Israel

The ancient Land of Canaan is first attested in the 1500s BCE. Canaan takes in all of modern Israel (Shechem, Jerusalem), Palestine (Jericho, Bethlehem, Shiloh), and parts of Jordan (Gilead, Rabbah), Lebanon (Tyre, Sidon), and Syria (Hazor, the Golan). Its indigenous people were the Canaanites, and their language was an early member of the Semitic language family. Modern Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic all descend from it. As we saw in Section 1.2, the early Israelites emerged from within this Canaanite world and its many gods — among them Ba’al the storm god, Asherah the queen consort, the agrarian god Dagon, the war goddess Anat, and Mot, the god of death. All of these gods (‘ilm, cognate with the Hebrew Elohim) were subordinate to El, the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon.

South of Canaan lay the New Kingdom of Egypt (ca. 1570-1069 BCE). The Hebrew Bible preserves a cultural memory of Israel’s God, Yahweh, arriving from Seir, a southern region between Egypt and Canaan.

The LORD came from Sinai, and dawned from Seir upon us.
Deuteronomy 33:2

In the 1300s BCE, about a century before any mention of Israel, Egyptian records describe Seir as the homeland of the Shasu people, a nomadic Midianite tribe whom Egypt enslaved. According to Egyptian history, the Shasu (meaning ‘those who walk’) worshipped a god named Yahu. There’s no scholarly consensus on where the name Yahu comes from. Still, the name Yahu (with no Canaanite origin) and the story elements of enslavement, Midianites, and walking rhyme with alluring precision with the later Book of Exodus. In Exodus, the figure Moses (an Egyptian name) marries a Midianite woman, then leads his people out of Egyptian enslavement through the Seir and into Canaan at the behest of Yahweh.

Over the next century, natural disasters and invasions brought the Bronze Age civilizations to utter ruin.
The next era of history will be known as the Iron Age (1200-500 BCE).

At the outset of the Iron Age, when Egypt withdraws from Canaan, a power vacuum opens, and in the central hill country a highland culture begins to present itself as distinct from its Canaanite neighbors: its language is Hebrew, its God is Yahweh (YHVH), and its name for itself is Israel. That people would endure for thousands of years and eventually call their religion Judaism.

It’s during the Iron Age that the Biblical tradition tells of Israelite tribes consolidating into two kingdoms, each with its own priestly keepers of memory. In the larger Northern Kingdom, Levite priests preserved and passed down the stories of Moses’ flight from Egypt with his family and his people’s journey to Canaan. In the Southern Kingdom, Zadokite priests preserved and passed down the Mesopotamian-rooted stories of Abraham and his family leaving Ur for Canaan. Carried across generations, these two streams of memory would later form the backbone of the texts of Genesis (Abraham) and Exodus (Moses).

Key Terms for this Lesson: Covenant · Canaan

7.2 | Babylon: Kingdom, Temple, & Exile

The House of David

Within four centuries of the Bronze Age Collapse, the archaeological record attests to an Israelite dynasty called the House of David. The words turned up in 1993 on a broken slab of basalt at Tel Dan, in northern Israel, carved by an enemy king boasting of the Davidic kings he had killed. The biblical narrative gives David humbler beginnings. He grows up under King Saul, who is at war with an Aegean people settled on the coast around present-day Gaza, the Philistines. The shepherd boy ends the Philistine threat by killing their champion, Goliath, with a slingshot, is claimed by divine providence, and is made king. As Israel’s leader, David moves the capital from Hebron to Jerusalem, thereafter the ‘City of David.’ Jews today still consider Jerusalem the capital of Israel for this reason. Once he is anointed (Heb. mashiach, messiah) as king, David becomes a formidable warrior who spends his reign fighting the Philistines, and late in life plans a permanent Holy Temple in Jerusalem.

• 800s BCE | The earliest mention of the House of David in the archeological record
• 722 BCE | Assyria takes the Northern Kingdom, consolidating power in the south
• 586 BCE | Babylon (Iraq) takes the Southern Kingdom, causing the Babylonian Exile
• 538 BCE | Persia (Iran) ends the Exile; the Jewish written record begins

Because David is said to have “blood on his hands,” Jewish tradition holds he is not fit to build the Temple. The task falls to his son Solomon, who builds a Temple whose stone walls, quarried steps, and complex subterranean chambers are still preserved. This is the Great Temple of Solomon (ca. 957-586 BCE), whose focal point is the Holy of Holies (Kodesh HaKodashim), which once held the Ark of the Covenant — the golden chest containing the Ten Commandments. This remains the holiest place on earth for the Jewish People.

The First Temple fell when it was destroyed by the invading Babylonians in 586 BCE.

Exile & the Jews

After the Temple’s destruction, the Babylonian Empire (~Iraq) resettled a substantial number of Israelites eastward in Babylonian lands in an event known as the Babylonian Exile. The captives remembered what they had lost:

By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat down, and we wept
as we remembered Zion (Israel).
There on the poplar trees
we hung our harps,
when our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded joyous music.
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

But how can we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
may my right hand wither.

Psalm 137:1-5

During their time in Babylon, the old tribal differences among Israelites began to fade. The Ten Tribes of the Northern Kingdom had long since assimilated or drifted from history. It was the Tribe of Judah that had held the recently sacked Southern Kingdom, and for this reason those who faced this exile were henceforth called Judeans — and later, with the rise of Rome, the Jews.

The Torah Written Down

The end of the Babylonian Exile marks the beginning of Jewish History, as the priests who were taken to Babylon begin to compile and write down the many oral traditions of the Israelites. These written traditions and laws became known as the Torah — the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The exile made the writing urgent: it became incumbent on the Jews to tell their stories, first to satisfy their captors and, more importantly, to preserve their own values and identity within a sprawling empire. And the earliest physical trace of that scripture pays off this lesson’s second artifact: the Ketef Hinnom silver scrolls, dated to about 580 BCE — two tiny rolls of silver inscribed with the Priestly Blessing, the earliest surviving fragment of any biblical text.

Consider the summaries of some of the Torah’s key figures below,
noting how exiled writers found relevance in these stories for preserving Israelite identity.

Summaries of some of the Torah’s Key Figures

Adam • God loves us and created a “good” world.
Noah • God protects the righteous and destroys the wicked.
Abraham • God has promised us our former territory in Canaan.
Isaac • God will provide for us in our hour of need.
Jacob • The fragmented tribes of Israel are brothers.
Joseph • In-fighting among the tribes will only hurt us.
Moses • God has delivered us from imperial bondage before (ie. Egypt).
Joshua • Despite the odds, God will give us victory over our enemies.

These sixth-century stories were written in Hebrew, a Semitic language, and because the Akkadian of Babylon and the Hebrew of the Israelites were both Semitic, the two peoples could understand one another. Many Akkadian words entered the Hebrew Torah as a result of the exile: for example, the words for overseer, silver, decree, steal, burn, anger, and hope. Even the Babylonian ziggurats left their mark, becoming the Jewish story of hubris and the frailty of empire in the Tower of Babel.

Key Terms for this Lesson: Babylonian Exile · the Torah

7.3 | Persia: Temple & Torah

Cyrus, God’s Anointed

After the fall of the Babylonian Empire by the victorious Persians, Jewish scripture pays an astonishing compliment to a foreign king. The Persian Cyrus is the only non-Jew whom the Bible calls God’s messiah, God’s anointed.

“Thus says the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him...” Isaiah 45:1

It was the Persians who broke the Babylonian chains binding the Israelites, and the Bible frequently presents Cyrus as God’s chosen instrument, liberating the Jewish people, funding their return, and supporting the rebuilding of the Temple.

• 538 BCE | Persia ends the Exile; the Jewish written record is codified (ie. the Torah)
• 516 BCE | The Second Temple is completed, paid for by the Persian Empire
• 458 BCE | The Jewish-Persian prophet Ezra brings the Torah to Jerusalem
• 332 BCE | Alexander the Great arrives, bringing Hellenism to Israel

Not since the pharaoh held sway over Israel had the Jews seen a leader like the Persian king, Cyrus. His own people called him the King of Kings: one king over many kingdoms. And a people who can envision one king for the world can envision one God for the world. Since the time of the Persian prophet Zoroaster (Persian: Zarathustra), Persia had turned from the pantheon of proto-Vedic culture to Zoroastrianism, a monotheistic tradition honoring God Almighty with the title Ahura Mazda (”Lord of Wisdom”). The careful reader will notice the word ahura (lord) from Section 2.2. Zoroaster is celebrated as the prophet responsible for reframing the shared pantheon of the Indo-Iranian region (cf. Sec. 4) into a cosmic battle of good and evil supernatural forces.

Today, Zoroastrianism is a monotheistic religion still practiced in India and Iran. Monotheism is a modern classification (cf. Henry More, 1660), representing a spectrum of belief centered on one God. It is a spectrum insofar as most forms of monotheism hold inclusive space for multiple forms or personae of God (eg. avatars, the holy spirit, etc.), lesser gods, divine children, angels and demons, etc. While monotheistic, the Zoroastrianism the Jews would have encountered during the Persian period (538-332 BCE) also included:

• a six-era Creation narrative
• a world genealogy founded on three sons
• the revelation of God’s word on a mountain to their prophet
• the world framed as a cosmic battle between good and evil (cf. dualism)
• God has angels, yazatas, who fight the forces of darkness, devas
• a prophesied future savior, born of a virgin, who redeems the world
• a belief in a final battle for the world in the End Times
• a belief in compensatory justice in an afterlife (ie. heavenly rewards)
• a belief in a general resurrection and uniting with God

Before the Babylonian Exile, rival gods vied for the Israelites’ attention. In Section 1, we identified the early Israelites as monolatrists, acknowledging other gods while generally holding Yahweh* supreme. Pre-Exile Yahwist prophets like Elijah had to contend with prophets of Ba’al and Jews who turned from Yahweh (eg. 1 Kings 18). The archeological record reflects this: studies that dig below the 500s BCE layers of Israel find a variety of idols and indigenous practices. However, all of that ends after the 500s BCE. When the Jews begin living under Persian rule, the archeology reflects an Israel laser-focused on monotheism.

The Second Temple & the Torah

Now rebuilt with Persian funds, the Second Temple was completed in Jerusalem in 516 BCE and has forevermore been the focal point of Jewish worship. This is the Temple that King Herod will one day refurbish and that Jesus will walk in (cf. Sec. 8 & 9). It will stand for nearly six centuries before its destruction at the hands of the Romans.

During the Second Temple period, the Persian-Jewish scribe Ezra brings the written Torah from the Persian court to Jerusalem and establishes a Jewish culture of literacy that mirrors Persian literary practice. From tales of palace intrigue (eg. Esther) to apocalyptic visions of the future (eg. Daniel), the mode and style of Persian storytelling is found throughout the Jewish text. We even find parallels in Royal Persian inscriptions.

Thus says King Cyrus of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Let any of those among you who are of his people (may their God be with them!) go up to Jerusalem in Judah and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel; he is the God who is in Jerusalem.
Ezra 1:2-3

(Line 12) He [God] took a righteous king, his favorite, by the hand, he called out his name: Cyrus, king of Anšan; he pronounced his name to be king all over the world. (Line 32) ...”I returned to [their] sanctuaries the gods who had lived therein... I gathered all their inhabitants and returned to them their dwellings.”
The Cylinder of Cyrus

We also find Persian concepts and vocabulary in Post-Exilic practice. The Persian word for a walled garden, pardes, enters the Bible as “paradise,” the same word that, centuries later, Jesus speaks from the cross to the man beside him: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). And the iconic sacred flame alight in Zoroastrian temples finds an echo in the eternal lamp (the ner tamid) that still burns in every synagogue today. In these ways, the Jewish people became a literary community with a written sacred scripture, forged in a Persian world and sharing themes with the wisdom traditions prized across it.

Persia & Cosmic Conflict

Interestingly, before the Exile, the God found in the Torah does not contend with an Evil Other — unlike the Persian framing of the world as a battle between light and dark. Most of the Torah’s stories involve either God’s own test (eg. the sacrifice of Isaac) or humanity’s own inclination toward wickedness (eg. the Flood). Herein, God is described as both ‘wounder and healer‘ and ‘bringer of disease and life.’ In the Jewish telling, there is no power or character opposing God Almighty in any supernatural sense. The famous serpent in the Garden of Eden, for Jews, is simply another “beast of the field.”

However, before the Exile, there is a member of God’s Heavenly court called “the adversary“ (Heb. ha-satan) who challenges humanity. But his challenge is that of a duty-bound prosecutor challenging an accused person, in an effort to discover the truth (cf. Job 1). Pointedly, this figure operates by God’s command. The Hebrew word for the adversary (ha-satan, השטן) is used in a myriad of other contexts. King David is called an adversary (satan) to the Philistines, just as a rival adversary (satan) is later raised up against his son, Solomon.

However, after the Exile, the Bible will show sharper distinctions between the forces of light and darkness.

Ancient Persian scripture envisioned history as a cosmic struggle between the Lord of Wisdom and the Spirit of Destruction, ending in the triumph of good. In turn, the Jewish writings of the later Persian and Greek eras (Daniel, Chronicles, Enoch) portray cosmic conflict with the same vividness. These latter texts give names and elaborate descriptions to angels and demons. In the Hebrew Chronicles (a later Greek-era text), there is a figure named Satan, who will later serve as the chief antagonist of the New Testament and Quran.

*Note on the Jewish name of God: while modern scholars may write YHVH as “Yahweh,” this pronunciation is not used in Jewish practice. Observant Jews respectfully avoid pronouncing “YHVH” altogether, and often say “HaShem“ (Hebrew for “the Name”) when referring to God casually, or “Adonai“ (”Lord” in Hebrew) in sacred contexts like synagogue worship. The term “Jehovah“ is a later medieval Christian attempt to vocalize YHVH, and is also not used by Jews.

Key Terms for this Lesson: Monotheism · the Second Temple

7.4 | Greece & Rome in the Holy Land

From Hebrew to Greek

In ancient Greece, across the Mediterranean from Israel, the philosopher Plato (d. 348 BCE) described the afterlife in ways that would later share deep similarity with Christian and Islamic thought.

In Plato’s Republic, a Greek warrior dies in battle, is revived, and reports what he saw beyond death: a judgment of souls (Gr. psychē) in which the good are rewarded and the wicked punished. Pointedly, this is a Greek story not found in the Hebrew Bible. Jewish tradition does not split a person into a temporal body and an immortal soul. The Torah instead speaks of the nefesh (נפש), ‘the breath of life,’ the whole living creature, body included. This is why traditional Jewish practice permits burial but not cremation: the body is part of the divine breath of life. Where the Greek imagined an immortal soul surviving the body, the Hebrew Bible pictured mortals descending down to Sheol, ‘the grave,’ from which no one returns and where, the Psalms say, the dead give God no praise.

• 332 BCE | Alexander the Great arrives, bringing Hellenism to Israel
• 200s BCE | The Hebrew Bible is translated into Greek for Hellenized Jewish readers
• 63 BCE | The Roman Empire takes control of Israel
• 31 BCE | Augustus Caesar becomes emperor of Rome
• 70 CE | During the Roman-Jewish War, the Romans destroy the Second Temple

However, with the coming of Hellenization (ie. the colonial spread of Greek culture and language) into Israel in the 300s BCE, Greek ways of seeing the world began to shape the literature and imagination of the region.

For example, the Greeks had an underworld, Hades, and a heavenly abode, Uranus (lit. the sky). In the Greek works of Plato, the good dead go to a celestial realm in the sky (Uranus) while the unjust suffer in the pit (Hades). 300 years after Plato, when the New Testament is written in Greek, Hades and Uranus will be the final destinations of the dead. Around 1380, the Wycliffe Bible translates Hades as “Hell” (from ‘Hel,’ daughter of Loki) and the sky realm Uranus/Ouranos as “Heaven” (from ‘Heofon,’ the Old English word for sky).

The Greek word demon enters the Bible’s vocabulary in a similar way. When the Hebrew Bible is translated into Greek, the monolatric phrase “other gods” (‘ilm) gets translated as daimon, the Greek cognate of the Persian deva (cf. Sec. 7.3). The Psalmist then warns (in translation):

All the gods of the nations are daimons, but the L-RD made the heavens.
Psalm 96:5

During the Hellenistic period, ‘demons’ become recognized as the evil intermediary beings fighting God’s ‘messengers’ (angels in Greek). This is repeated by the Apostle Paul when he tells the Corinthians that pagan offerings go to ‘demons,’ and not to God. Other Greek concepts like logos (the rational principle of the universe), agape (unconditional love), and soteria (salvation) become the philosophical bedrock of Christianity. The word christos (anointed), from which the religion is named, is also Greek.

Greek Bibles & Frameworks

In the 200s BCE, a group of Jewish scholars in Ptolemaic Egypt (tradition says there were seventy) produced a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible called the Septuagint (lit. the ‘Seventy’). Later, with the advent of Christianity, most second and third generation Christians were not Jewish and could not read Hebrew. But nearly all of them could read or understand Greek. For this reason, the Septuagint became the lens through which most Christians read the Hebrew Bible.

Now, long before the Greeks, Israel’s prophets had described a coming age of peace: a righteous king from David’s line, a ruler who ends war, and a day when nations “beat their swords into plowshares.” That hope was native to the Hebrew Bible. What the Greek world added was a genre. Greek culture prized apocalyptic literature, an ‘unveiling’ (Gr. apokalypsis) of secret knowledge about the end of history, and the Hellenized-Jewish writers of the era recited their ancient hope in this new idiom. The visions of Daniel and, later, the Christian Book of Revelation both belong to the Greek apocalyptic genre, both unveiling a final reckoning.

It is out of this marriage — the native hope of Israel and the apocalyptic visions of the Greeks — that a first-century expectation of a Jewish Messiah (Hebrew for anointed one) arose. Desires for a Israelite Messiah ran the gamut. Some hoped for a holy warrior. Others hoped for a healer. We will pick up this thread again when we introduce Jesus of Nazareth in Sec. 9.1.

The Roman Worldview

While the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Greeks each took their turn on the world stage, the Romans proved the greatest colonial power of the ancient world. Theirs was a hierarchical society, with clear distinctions between the élite, freemen, foreigners, and slaves, and a vision of ‘empire without end’ (imperium sine fine), as the Aeneid famously promised them. From Rome, the legions would conquer and exploit every territory they could keep, extracting tribute, labor, and taxes from local populations. Largely henotheists (we prefer our gods but don’t discount the existence of others), the Romans nonetheless expected cultural assimilation wherever they could impose it.

One of the principle ways the Romans maintained control over occupied territory was through ideology.

In any empire, one must hold power over a people’s economy, military, politics, and ideology (cf. Michael Mann). The first three are managed through labor, violence, and institutions. Ideology is harder. Symbols are difficult to control.

We return now to the time of Julius Caesar, who, returning from Gaul with an economy-disrupting flood of slaves and plunder, was honored with a triumph in Rome. Hail, Caesar! For one day, Julius Caesar was declared a living god, and the common people loved him for it! An Imperial Cult began to grow around him, legitimizing his rule. But it did not save him. Caesar was assassinated by senators who missed their power. After his death in 44 BCE, the Senate voted to declare Julius Caesar a god in perpetuity (his official deification followed in 42 BCE) to placate his supporters. Caesar then left behind his right-hand man, Marc Antony, and his adopted son, Octavian, and soon the two set their armies against each other for the throne. Antony’s claim was simple: he had been Caesar’s closest companion on every battlefield. Octavian had no armies and no experience. He had a name. Octavian was Julius Caesar’s adopted son. So, as Julius Caesar had been named a ‘god,’ Octavian began styling himself publicly as the “Son of God.” He had coins minted and everything.

After defeating Marc Antony, Octavian took the title Augustus Caesar and kept the title ‘Son of God.’ Throughout the empire, Augustus was heralded as the Lord and Savior of the world, on the theory that symbolic control over ideology could pacify restless territories. This bit of imperial propaganda survives on a coin from Augustus’s reign.

On the left, we see “Augustus,” and on the right, we see “Divi Filius,” which is Latin for “Son of God.”

Now, since the time of the Persians, Israel had developed a Savior narrative. One day, an anointed leader (messiah) would arrive to vanquish evil and redeem the world. From the Greeks, Israel had learned to write of their salvation in an apocalyptic register. However, Rome was quick to respond to such seditious teachings with torture and crucifixions. In an effort to maintain their power, the Romans kill Jesus of Nazareth in the 30s, Peter and Paul in the 60s, and, in 70 CE, the empire burns the Second Temple to ash.

Out of this catastrophe came two of the world’s most enduring religious traditions. A Jewish life centered on rabbis and Torah rose to succeed the practices of the Second Temple called Rabbinic Judaism (Section 8). And the followers of the crucified Nazarene became Christianity (Section 9). Six centuries after Jesus, a popular uprising of Arab believers, united with Jews and Christians, will begin the advent of Islam (Section 10) in Arabia and across the MENA.

Recommended Sources

The Cambridge History of Judaism
Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions
Peter Green, The Hellenistic Age
Walter C. Kaiser Jr., A History of Israel: From the Bronze Age through the Jewish Wars

Last Section: Chinese Religion
This Section: The Biblical World
Next Section: Judaism

Pictured: Temple of Heaven, Beijing (2018)

Key Terms for this Section
The Dao · Wuwei · The Five Relationships · Ren & Li
The Mandate of Heaven · Neo-Confucianism · Qi · New Confucianism

6.1 | The Dao & Wuwei

China's Legendary Beginning

Last week the Buddhist dharma reached China.
However, it did not enter in an empty room.

Buddhism fell into conversation with two teachers already at work in the Chinese imagination, and from that meeting came what the Chinese call the Three Mountains of Wisdom: the Buddha alongside Laozi and Confucius. This week we visit the other two mountains.

A note on spelling: this course renders Chinese in pinyin — so you will read Dao not Tao, Laozi not Lao Tzu, Qi not Ch’i.

• 1046 BCE | The Zhou Dynasty. King Wu founds China’s earliest historically verified dynasty; the Yi Jing (Book of Changes) takes shape
• 500s BCE | The Axial Age. (late Zhou) Confucius teaches the restoration of social harmony; the Daodejing is compiled
• 206 BCE | The Han Dynasty. Emperor Wu adopts Confucianism; the Five Classics of Confucian thought are canonized in 136 BCE
• 100s CE | Buddhism Arrives. The dharma reaches China along the trade routes, carrying its promise of nirvana
• 960 | The Song Dynasty. Neo-Confucianism revitalizes Confucian teaching by absorbing Daoist and Buddhist ideas
• 1313 | The Four Books replace the Five Classics as Confucianism’s core curriculum

What follows is China’s own sacred narrative of its origins. The legendary history the culture tells about itself, not a chronicle of dated events.

In the Chinese account of the beginning, everything starts in a primordial chaos. From that formless state emerges Pangu, who separates the universe into the receptive and active forces known as yin and yang. As his body grows and disintegrates, it becomes the world: his breath the wind, his eyes the sun and moon, his limbs the mountains. Heaven and earth remain out of harmony, so Nüwa, a half-serpent being, mends the sky with five-colored stones, and alongside her husband Fuxi she fashions the first people from clay. Fuxi reigns as the first sovereign, credited with a gift that echoes through the whole of Chinese culture: the Eight Trigrams, stacked sets of broken (yin) and solid (yang) lines that became the basis of the ancient Yi Jing (the Book of Changes). A later sage-figure, Shennong, is said to have given humanity agriculture and the first herbal medicines (a thread we pick up in Lesson 6.4). These narratives are not verifiable history; they are the culture’s way of saying that heaven and earth, male and female, chaos and order are held in a single balance — the balance the tradition will come to call the Dao. It was in the middle years of the Zhou, around the 5th century BCE, that the eighty-one chapters of the Daodejing were compiled into the form we have today.

Embracing the Mystery

The Daodejing, the foundational text of Daoist thought, begins:

道可道 非常道
“Dao k’e dao fei ch’ang dao”

So what does this text mean? The Daodejing is an esoteric text, which is to say it does not lend itself to a clear and obvious reading. Sure, we can take each of these ideograms and, one by one, transliterate them. I can gesture toward 道 and call it “Dao,” but that’s just the phonetic sounds associated with this ideogram. None of these ideograms have a straightforward translation into English. The best we can do is to offer a variety of ways to understand each ideogram and then place those meanings together. For instance, 道 (Dao) can imply “way,” “path,” or even the Platonic concept of “logos.” While 可 (k’e) can mean “can,” “enable,” or “permit,” and 非 (fei) commonly negates something, like “not” or “opposed.” The Chinese 常 (ch’ang) can signify “constant,” “eternal,” or “absolute.”

Scholars have rendered this opening verse in different ways:

• A way that can be walked is not The Way.

• Words and names are not the Way.

• The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.

My own translation is:

道可道 非常道 “The way that can be explained is not the Eternal Way.”
Dao Jing, Ch. 1, verse 1

While simple translation eludes us, it’s fair to point out that that’s part of the point. The Dao defies clear explanation. Rather than offering a rigid set of doctrines, the Daodejing encourages its readers to dwell in wonder, approaching wisdom as an experience. The Dao isn’t something you label and pick apart. It’s something you feel. So let’s embrace the mystery and find out what we can say about it as scholars.

The Daodejing is traditionally attributed to the ancient sage Laozi (Ch. the “Old Master”), though its dating is uncertain; it was probably compiled in the 500s BCE by multiple sages. It comes in two parts: the Dao Jing (the Book of the Way, chapters 1–37) and the De Jing (the Book of Power, chapters 38–81). It is, incredibly, the second-most-translated book of all time, behind only the Bible. One block of verse may serve us as an example of the tradition’s attempt to point at what it insists cannot be pointed at:

Look for it, and you cannot see it. It’s beyond form and color. Listen for it, and you cannot hear it. It’s beyond sound. Reach for it, and you cannot grasp it. It’s beyond shape. Above, it isn’t bright; below, it isn’t dark. Unbroken continuity, unnamed and unceasing. It returns to nothingness, the shape of no-thing. Dao Jing, Ch. 14

For my money, the closest popular analog to the Dao today may be the Force of the Star Wars films. The Force is “an energy field created by all living things” that “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.” A fictive Jedi knight whose “ally is the Force” is, in effect, living in harmony with the Dao. There are other analogues as well. In India, the Dao has similarities with Brahman insofar as it is the ultimate reality beneath everyday appearances. In Greece the Dao can be compared favorably with the logos, the ordering, reasoning principle of world. In Jewish mysticism the Dao shows parallels with the Ayn Sof, the infinite, unknowable aspects of the Divine.

What sets the Dao apart is that it is a process, not a product. You can name a bowl of soup — “Hey, that’s clam chowder!” — while love is something you feel and can never quite pin down. The Dao is like love (a process), and unlike soup (a thing): constantly shaping reality, different at each encounter, glimpsed in nature the way you recognize the light in a friend’s eyes without being able to describe exactly what they feel. Such is the Dao.

Yin, Yang, & Wuwei

The two forces whose interplay is the Dao’s movement are yin and yang.

Yin is the receptive aspect: night, softness, stillness, the earth; in the Yi Jing it is the broken line.
Yang is the active aspect: day, hardness, motion, the sky; the solid line.

They are interconnected, mutually necessary, and never found without each other. Critically, just so there’s no misunderstanding, yin and yang are NOT good and evil. Both are essential and necessary. In Daoism, evil arises from an imbalance of yin or yang; good is when the two move in accordance with the Dao. The famous yin/yang symbol is a picture of balance, each half already carrying a seed of the other.

Closely tied to the Dao is De (once spelled “Te”), usually translated “virtue.” Joined together, “Daode” (道德) is the Chinese word for ethics. But De is not a checklist of rules. Rather, De is the quiet power that arises naturally in a person aligned with the Dao.

Proper, moral engagement with the Dao occurs when folks minimize overthinking and allow circumstances to unfold without forcing an outcome. A popular, though apocryphal anecdote illustrates this principle.

During the Space Race, American engineers realized that normal pens would not work in zero gravity because ink relies on downward flow. According to the story, NASA spent large sums of money and countless hours inventing a pressurized “space pen.” The Soviet cosmonauts, facing the same problem, simply brought pencils.

Real or contrived, the story makes a compelling point. Working organically, without a lot of unnecessary contrivances, often yields simpler, more elegant results than forcing a more complicated solution.

In Daoist teaching, this approach is called Wuwei. Literally “non-action,” Wuwei is not laziness or passivity. Rather, it describes action so closely aligned with the flow of life that it feels effortless. Daoist texts explain that by restraining our impulse to control every detail, we leave room for situations to develop organically. Just as the pencil in the old anecdote functioned without elaborate contraptions, Wuwei suggests that much of our best thinking and doing emerges when we step back and trust the larger currents at play.

At the heart of Wuwei is the cultivation of spontaneity. Rather than plotting out every step, Daoists encourage a quiet openness that allows one to see opportunities as they arise. The Daodejing explains that the Dao has no fixed plan — it can strike like lightning or roll in like soft fog. Attempting to harness it through detailed schemes is a fool’s errand. Athletes describe a similar state of being “in the zone,” where their actions feel fluid and unforced, and time seems to blur. Whether shooting a basketball or composing a poem, one experiences a sense of flow that emerges when over-analysis drops away.

Key Terms for this Lesson: The Dao · Wuwei

6.2 | Confucius: Bond & Virtue

The Rectification of the Names

Confucius lived in the turbulent centuries of the late Zhou, when the dynasty’s old order was fraying and rival states continually challenged one another across China. Into that disorder Confucius brought a single, steadying aim: to restore social harmony. Where the Daoist looked past our society to the rhythms of nature, Confucius focused straight at our society and asked why it had come apart.

His answer was that we had forgotten who we are to one another.

Confucius was born near Qufu in the small state of Lu, held minor offices, and taught any student willing to learn. Tradition says his fee could be as little as a bundle of dried meat. For years he wandered from court to court, seeking a ruler who would govern by his way. Spoiler: none did. In the end, Confucius died believing he had failed. But his students gathered his sayings into the Analects, and within a few centuries China gave him the title Kong Fuzi, “Master Kong,” Latinized by later translators as Confucius.

He remains the most influential teacher in 5000 years of Chinese history.

He was not alone in asking how to mend the age. The late Zhou became an era of wandering teachers, remembered as the Hundred Schools of Thought, when rival courts collected advisers the way they collected territory. The Legalists answered with law and punishment: make the penalties harsh enough, and order will follow. The Mohists answered with impartial care for everyone alike. The Daoists, (cf. Sec. 6.1) answered by stepping back from politics altogether. Confucius’s answer began somewhere more intimate: with the names we have for one another.

Confucius taught that we live in disharmony because we’ve forgotten our roles, or “names.” In what he called the Rectification of the Names, he argued that society holds together only when each person understands and honors the particular bonds they stand within. Get the names right — parent, child, ruler, subject, friend — and harmony follows. Confuse them, and the whole structure falls apart. From this insight he drew five essential relationships.

The Five Relationships

The Five Relationships are, for Confucius, the path back to a stable society. Each is a bond of reciprocal duty. Each side owes the other something, and each is distinct and cannot be confused with another.

Ruler | Subject
The ruler must protect and provide for all subjects equally, ensuring their well-being and security; in return, subjects serve with loyalty and contribute to society. A virtuous leader safeguards the interests of all citizens, while citizens follow the laws and add to the common good. (This bond will matter again in Sec. 6.3, where it grows into a whole political cosmology.)

Parent | Child
The foundational bond of society. Parents are entrusted to nurture, guide, and educate their children through both discipline and unconditional love. Children are supposed to respond with respect, obedience, and gratitude.

Spouse | Spouse
A bond of mutual love, respect, and support, in which each partner is tasked with provision, protection, and devotion, cherishing and honoring the other, forsaking all others.

Elder Sibling | Younger Sibling
A relationship of guidance and protection, the elder offering wisdom and the younger offering respect. But, unlike parents, elder siblings do not hold disciplinary authority. The bond is like a babysitter’s: care and protection, without the parent’s role.

Friend | Friend
A bond of equality and mutual understanding — companions on life’s journey who support and rely on one another, offering emotional support without the formal obligations of family or marriage.

The Five Virtues & a Confucian Life

If the Five Relationships are the structure,
the Five Virtues are the character that fills them.

Ren (仁), often translated empathy or benevolence, lies at the core of Confucian ethics. It is the internal feeling of love and compassion toward others, especially those in need. In his Analects, Confucius held that those who lose this sense of empathy have essentially lost their humanity. Ren is the inner virtue.

Li (礼), or propriety, is its outward expression. Li is found in proper social conduct, from great rites and ceremonies down to everyday courtesy. Confucianism prizes these social forms, even at the expense of personal gain, as the means of maintaining harmony and showing respect for others. If Ren is the feeling within, Li is the form it takes externally in the world. The two are a matched pair, inner virtue and outer form.

Xiao (孝), or filial piety, is the reverence a person owes their family, and above all their parents. Confucius stressed repaying our parents’ kindness with the utmost respect and care, and this reverence extends to grandparents and to one’s dead ancestors. One must never bring dishonor to one’s family. Xiao is the root from which the other bonds grow. The first virtue learned.

Two further virtues round out the set. Zhi (智), wisdom, is the capacity to discern right from wrong and so to act on the goodness one feels. And Yi (义), justice, is the art of balancing reciprocity with mercy, of letting go of personal vengeance and instead choosing the best outcome for the community as a whole.

The person these virtues build has a name. In the old aristocratic order, they were a junzi (literally a “lord’s son”). In Confucius’ teaching, a junzi is something you become: the common person made noble by their excellent character. Being a junzi is open to anyone who cultivates ren and li with enough patience.

A century after Confucius, the tradition’s second sage grounded those virtues in human nature itself.

Mencius (Mengzi, d. 289 BCE) argued that the virtues are not grafted onto us but grow from seeds native to the heart, and he offered a famous test: anyone who suddenly sees a child about to fall into a well feels alarm before any thought of reward, reputation, or blame. That flash of feeling, he taught, is the seed of ren, proof that goodness needs cultivating, not better bloodlines.

Confucianism’s ideals are lived and carried in the everyday rites of family life.

Chief among those ideals is ancestor veneration (jìng zǔ, 敬祖): families across China and the diaspora honor their forebears through offerings, incense, and memorial rites, a direct expression of Xiao that treats each generation as standing on the shoulders of those who came before. The same reverence shapes the milestones of a life. The hairpin ceremony (ji li) marked a girl’s coming of age, historically around fifteen, when a respected elder arranges her hair before the gathered family. The capping ceremony (guan li) marked a young man’s, around twenty, when an elder places a cap on his head to signal his readiness to serve family and society. While Modern China has largely moved past these rites, some families keep them as a living link to a deep Confucian heritage. In each, the message is the same one Confucianism returns to again and again: the family is the primary educator, shaping character from childhood and preparing the next generation to carry its obligations.

The reverence a child owes a parent, the loyalty a subject owes a ruler — Confucius claimed they scaled all the way up, from the household to the empire itself. In the next lesson we watch that scaling happen, as Daoist and Confucian ideas meet a third arriving teaching and together shape how China imagined power, heaven, and the right to rule.

Key Terms for this Lesson: The Five Relationships · Ren & Li

6.3 | Heaven, Earth, & the State

Dao & the Mandate of Heaven

Daoist thought has played a considerable role in shaping governance across China’s history, especially with their ideas involving cosmic order and legitimacy. Remember how we talked about the Dao guiding the balance of Heaven and Earth? Well, to understand how this relates to Chinese politics, it helps to keep in mind that “Heaven” (Ch. Tian) in ancient Chinese culture differs markedly from Biblical depictions. Rather than a distant divine realm, Heaven (Tian) in Chinese culture is woven together with Earth (Ch. Di) in a cosmic equilibrium. In ancient Chinese cosmology, Heaven and Earth reflect two halves of the natural world, each complementing the other within a grand, interlocking system. Early rulers looked to these cosmic forces for guidance, claiming that if the cosmos is in harmony, then society should aim for the same.

Accordingly, the Mandate of Heaven (Ch. 天命) emerged as a traditional Chinese political doctrine indicating the right for a leader to rule.

The Mandate suggests that a good leader governs with Heaven’s approval, which is proven by the prosperity and stability under that ruler’s domain. If unrest or calamities persist, it can be interpreted as a sign that the ruler has lost the mandate. From a Daoist perspective, a wise leader remains aligned with the Dao by promoting a fair distribution of resources, avoiding corruption, and responding thoughtfully to the needs of the people. If a leader strays from this path, natural and social disruptions may ensue, signaling a discord that legitimizes the rise of a new ruling house. Over centuries, many dynasties in China justified their ascension by claiming the previous rulers had abandoned virtue, thus forfeiting the Mandate of Heaven. Daoist wisdom further suggests that the sovereign must cultivate personal virtue to safeguard this cosmic approval, recognizing that any lapse could bring imbalance. In this worldview, moral conduct and political authority become inseparable, binding the ruler’s behavior to the cosmic framework of yin and yang.

While the Mandate of Heaven addresses how power is gained or lost, Daoism also shaped imperial expectations for governance itself. The Emperor was not merely a political figure but a caretaker of cosmic harmony, obligated to observe signs in the natural world (eg. eclipses, unusual weather, and famines) and interpret them as feedback on his rule. Maintaining the realm’s stability depended on ensuring balanced relations among social classes, economic activities, and even the environment. If a ruler acted cruelly or neglected the welfare of the people, the cosmic balance might tilt, inviting disasters that showed Heaven’s displeasure. From this perspective, government policy was was an extension of the Dao, meant to harmonize the realm’s operations with the broader pattern of nature.

Within this framework, administrators and advisers were tasked with offering counsel that upheld moral integrity. A minister who reminded the Emperor to act gently and justly did so not only for political reasons but also to honor the cosmic order. Meanwhile, taxation and military campaigns had to be justified by appealing to the broader principle of maintaining stability for the people. Ambition and greed risked disturbing the delicate scale of yin and yang, so Daoist advisers often called for restraint, frugality, and benevolence. By the same token, complacency and passive governance could cause stagnation and invite decay, so a ruler had to stay alert and decisive.

Confucian Thought & the State

If Daoism gave the throne its cosmology, Confucianism gave it a bureaucracy.

Under the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), Emperor Wu adopted Confucianism as the guiding philosophy of the imperial government, and Confucian ethics became the training of every official. In 136 BCE the Five Classics were canonized as the core of that learning, and among them sat the Yi Jing, living its remarkable double life: the same Book of Changes whose trigrams reach back to Fuxi in Daoist legend now stood as the first of the Confucian classics. Mastery of these texts became the path into government through civil-service examinations, a system that would shape Chinese life for 2,000 years.

Then, in the 100s CE, a third current reached China along the trade routes: Buddhism, carrying its promise of nirvana. For a time, Confucianism took a backseat as Chinese Buddhism flourished. Then, under the Tang dynasty (618–907), Confucian learning revived and the examinations were restored. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam also arrived along the ancient Silk Road, establishing small communities in a multi-ethnic and pluralist society.

That habit, of holding several views at once is captured in the famous story of the vinegar tasters. Three masters taste from a single vat of vinegar. The Confucian frowns: it is sour, as life is sour, in need of correction and order. The Buddhist grimaces: it is bitter, as existence is bitter with suffering to escape. But Laozi smiles. To the Daoist the vinegar is neither good nor bad; it is simply what it is, and the sage’s task is to taste it as it comes and live in harmony with its nature. One vat, three tastes, three teachings.

The Vinegar Tasters. Edo Period Japan.

Neo-Confucianism

From that centuries-long conversation came a genuine synthesis.

Beginning in the Song dynasty (960–1279), a movement we call Neo-Confucianism revitalized classical Confucian teaching by absorbing what it found useful in Daoism and Buddhism. Its foremost figure was Zhu Xi (d. 1200), who recast the Daoist wuwei as spontaneous virtue: refine your character through study and reflection long enough, and right action begins to flow effortlessly. This synthesis (alongside other contributions) became the state ideology of the Song and the new basis of its civil service examinations. In 1313, the older Five Classics were formally replaced at the center of the curriculum by the Four Books, among them the famous Analects, the collected sayings of Confucius.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.
Analects (Book 2, Ch. 15), Confucius

Take the wisdom teaching quoted above. Memorizing facts with understanding them is a waste of time. However, trying to reason without knowing the facts is dangerous and fruitless. These are the kinds of teachings that Chinese Civil Service workers had to study.

The examinations for texts like the Analects were the sole path to government office, which made mastery of the approved texts the only road to power. The same tradition that could counsel a ruler toward gentleness could also close every other door to advancement. A cold reminder that no tradition in this course is only its best self.

Heaven’s mandate, Confucius’ bonds, the Buddha’s promise, Zhu Xi’s synthesis... In China, these have not stayed in separate rooms. A single person, across a single life, might bury a parent with Confucian rites, seek the Buddhist temple in grief, and keep a Daoist eye on the balance of things. In the final lesson we follow those living practices into the present.

Optional Video: Scholar of Religion explains Neo-Confucianism (auto-generated CC).

Key Terms for this Lesson: The Mandate of Heaven · Neo-Confucianism

6.4 | Modern Chinese Practice

Qi & its Practices

Imagine a stone dropped into calm water. The splash is the meeting of two forces: yin, the receptive bend inward, and yang, the outward rush of energy. As the ripples spread and the water settles, a pattern of activity and stillness emerges. In Daoist thought, nature unfolds continuously like this in a mystical flow of Qi (氣). Qi (chi) is the vital energy that animates ying and yang (the opposing forces in all living and nonliving things), weaving them into a cosmic dance. Because qi can be balanced (or unbalanced), those observant of Daoist tradition attempt to practice working with qi in a variety of ways.

The best known is Tàijí (Tai Chi), a Daoist artform of slow, deliberate movement.

Practitioners align their breathing with each measured gesture, shifting weight from one leg to the other and turning gently at the waist (like water circling a stone) so that qi moves freely throughout their bodies. Often practiced outdoors in parks and gardens, Tàijí looks tranquil but trains real agility. Outside of Daoism, Tàijí is widely recognized for benefiting circulation and stress levels.

A related practice, Feng Shui, attends not to the body but to space: the idea that the placement of objects, furniture, and pathways can help or hinder the flow of qi through a home or workplace. An open, ordered room is said to welcome fresh currents of qi, while a crowded, disordered space can stifle them.

Communism & the New Confucianism

Modernity certainly brought challenges to China and its religious identity. The late Qing dynasty (1644–1912) faced Western challenges to Confucian authority, the Opium Wars, and the Taiping Rebellion. Then, during the recent Maoist era (1949–1976), China’s religious traditions became targets of the Communist state: Confucian temples were destroyed, scholars were persecuted, and the teaching was denounced as a relic of the old order. Here, the Chinese traditions we’ve studied appear as victims (much as Tibetan and Vietnamese Buddhism did last section) of a suppression campaign carried out by a modern government. After Mao’s death the pressure eased and a revival followed. In the twentieth century, thinkers such as Xiong Shili, Mou Zongsan, and Tu Weiming developed what became known as the New Confucianism, seeking to carry Confucian ethics into modern China alongside modern Western concepts and worldviews.

As a living movement, New Confucianism centers on moral self-cultivation, developing virtues like benevolence, propriety, and wisdom in daily life. Together with ethical leadership and cultural renewal, these virtues adapt classical Confucian values to the demands of modern life. Its advocates argue that these ideals can coexist with modern democratic life, and the movement gives particular attention to the well-being of all members of society, calling on those in positions of influence to lead as moral examples.

It is not the official ideology of the Chinese state, which remains Communist, but it has gained real traction among intellectuals seeking cultural grounding in a fast-changing society.

The Art of War

The greatest influence Daoist political thought has had on the modern world may be, perhaps surprisingly, in military strategy.

During the Warring States Period, continuous conflict across China propelled philosophers to consider how best to resolve warfare efficiently. The most enduring text of this era is The Art of War, attributed to Sunzi (Sun Tzu). Daoist threads of wisdom run through his teachings, beginning his text with the question, “Which ruler has the Dao?” Sunzi argued that moral integrity and a deep understanding of the Dao could make all the difference in war. In warfare, the goal was to triumph swiftly with minimal harm, a reflection of the Daoist ideal to act in harmony with nature rather than forcing outcomes through brute violence. He upheld qualities like wisdom, honor, compassion, courage, and discipline — Daoist principles that value balanced and ethical conduct.

Sunzi’s guidelines proved influential far beyond ancient China. Modern generals who have studied The Art of War note how it addresses planning, adaptability, and unity of command. The text instructs leaders to deceive opponents when necessary, maneuver decisively, and maintain clarity of purpose to avoid a protracted struggle. Some modern military figures like Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and Gen. Colin Powell drew upon Sunzi’s insights during the First Gulf War (1990-91), to ensure a speedy victory. American business and law schools also incorporate these teachings, reflecting the view that the balanced strategies of The Art of War can apply to competition in many spheres. By rooting conflict resolution in ethical principles, Sunzi’s legacy resonates with the broader Daoist commitments to maintaining balance, suggesting that even in the midst of discord, one should strive for actions that reflect the flexible, harmonious flow of the Dao.

Key Terms for this Lesson: Qi · New Confucianism

Recommended Sources

To be filled in…

Last Section: Buddhism
This Section: Chinese Religion
Next Section: The Biblical World

Lucifer | Franz von Stuck, 1890

Overview

Ask what the Qur’an teaches about Heaven and Hell and the answers come quickly. Gardens and couches. Fire and boiling water. Rivers of milk, and a tree whose fruit looks like the heads of devils. But here’s the wrinkle: the Qur’an itself insists those pictures are not the point. This is the last of three parts spent inside the Qur’an. Part 6 asked how the scripture is read. Part 7 asked what it demands in peace and war. Now, Part 8, asks what it says is real, and what it admits it cannot say. This part focuses on the Qur’an’s ontology (ie. its account of what is real): evil and the freedom behind it, death and what follows, and the two destinations the tradition calls the Garden and the Fire.

Assigned Reading
Haleem, Understanding the Qur'an, chapters 7 & 8

Shaytan • the Problem of Evil • al-Dunya & al-Akhirah
barzakh • adalah • al-Jannah • Jahannam • mathal

8.1 | Evil & the Adversary

The Gift of Freedom

In the Qur’an, evil is not a rival power set against God at the beginning of things.
It enters the world through a door God Himself opened.
That door is human freedom.

Surah al-Baqarah narrates the creation of Adam as God’s vicegerent on earth (2:30). The Arabic word is khalifa, a deputy who acts in the owner’s stead. Adam is the one appointed to act, and therefore is capable of both good and of evil (cf. Sec. 6). Adam’s success or failure is then of his own making (2:30, 76:3, 90:10, 91:8–10).

Put simply, the Qur’an does not treat evil as an accident that befalls a passive creature. It treats the human being as a moral agent, and evil as one of the things an agent can choose. Evil is therefore a possibility folded into the gift of freedom itself.

What follows is that the capacity that makes righteousness possible is the same capacity that makes evil possible. One cannot be granted without the other, and the Qur’an grants both together.

Iblis Refuses

Against that freedom the Qur’an sets an adversary of its own: Shaytan, the figure known in the Christian tradition as Satan.

It’s important to point out the Qur’an did not merely borrow a ‘Christian Satan’ from the Bible whole cloth. The Islamic notion of Shaytan bears its own narrative and origin. The scene runs like this. God commands the angels to bow before the newly created Adam. One angel refuses. Iblis will not prostrate himself before a creature of clay when he himself was made of fire. His pride hardens into an enmity toward humanity, and he asks for (and is granted) respite to pursue that enmity until the Day of Judgment (2:34, 7:11–18).

From that initial refusal, Iblis takes up the role of the Shaytan of Islamic scripture: the deceiver, the whisperer, the one who works to lead human beings astray. The Qur’an’s word for that whispering, waswasa, is an onomatopoeia — it’s the seductive hiss of Iblis’ sinful suggestions. In the Qur’an, it is Iblis he who tempts Adam and Eve in the Garden, and through them their descendants ever after.

Yet the Qur’an’s portrait remains somewhat balanced. Shaytan is a deceiver, yes, but he is only that. He can suggest, but he cannot seize. We, for our part, are granted an inborn ability to resist Shaytan. The temptation is real, but so is the resistance. In the Qur’an’s moral universe, nothing about the human situation is left without a defense. The same creation who can be tempted is the creation who can say no.

The whisper can always be refused.

The Problem of Evil: Islamic Edition

Behind the figure of Shaytan lies an older and more fundamental question — one that every theistic tradition eventually confronts. Philosophers call it the Problem of Evil.

The problem is philosophical, and belongs as much in the philosopher’s seminar as to the mosque. This series will not adjudicate it. What we can do, however, is briefly describe the two responses that recur across the tradition’s reflection on the question.

The first is an appeal to the limits of human understanding. On this view, God’s wisdom simply exceeds human comprehension, and the believer is asked to accept that the full purpose behind suffering may not be graspable from within our limited point of view. What follows from this premise is that a creature who cannot see the cosmic whole is in no position to declare that the whole is unjust. So, what may appear like unredeemed evil from where we stand may be ordered within a design we are not equipped to survey. This is the appeal to mystery. No one denies that suffering is real. The claim is that suffering’s final meaning lies beyond us.

The second classic Islamic response is the greater-good response. It is more ambitious. Here, the claim is that evil is permitted precisely because it serves a higher end — a world of free agents who can fail is a greater thing than a world of automata who cannot, even though that freedom comes at the price of real suffering. The good, it argues, simply could not be logically reached any other way.

Together, these two answers (the appeal to mystery and the appeal to purpose) are the classical shape of what philosophers call theodicy, from the Greek theos (God), and dikē (justice). The attempt herein is to put God on rhetorical trial and argue the defense. Different thinkers across the tradition have reached for one answer or the other to the question of theodicy, and sometimes for both at once. The task in our nonsectarian reading remains to see what each response is claiming and why.

Whatever weight one gives the problem, the Qur’an does not leave the human being alone with evil and its adversary. Against both the Qur’an sets God’s mercy, His forgiveness, and the standing possibility of redemption. Surah al-Zumar offers one of the scripture’s most expansive reassurances: no sin, however grievous, lies beyond the reach of God’s mercy for the one who sincerely repents (39:53). Indeed, in the Qur’an’s own frame, God’s mercy encompasses all things (7:156).

8.2 | Death, Resurrection, & Judgment

The Near & the Last

Each of the three Abrahamic traditions holds that a life is made meaningful by filling one’s days with good works.

The Psalms tell the Jewish reader to “turn away from evil and do good, so you shall dwell forever” (Psalm 37:27). Matthew enjoins the Christian to “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in Heaven” (Matthew 5:16). And the Qur’an promises that “whoever comes [to Judgment] with a good deed will have ten times its worth [to their credit]” (6:160).

In each case, the good done here is redeemed in eternity.

Belief in the Afterlife is a fundament of Islam. Nearly every page of the Qur’an makes some reference to it, and the tradition holds that the world to come was central to Muhammad’s message, as it was to every prophet before him. Again and again, belief in the Afterlife is named in the same breath as belief in God. The two convictions travel together for Muslims.

Then comes the Arabic, and the theology it shapes. Al-Dunya is the life of this world. The word grows from a root meaning ‘near’: this world is, quite literally, ‘the nearer life’. Al-Akhirah is the Afterlife, ‘the last’ or latter life. Arabic does not name the two as places. It names them as positions in a chronological sequence — the near and the last.

The Qur’an binds the two so tightly that its own language makes them nearly impossible to speak of apart. Neither term stands alone. Each is always named in reference to the other. And fittingly, each word occurs exactly 115 times in the Qur’an.

The symmetry itself is a kind of teaching.

The practicing Muslim is therefore called to stay mindful of the Judgment to come. The Fatiha, recited 17 times a day across the canonical prayers, names God “Master of the Day of Judgment” (1:4, a line Part 6 lingered over), while inattention to that Day is marked as the sign of the unbeliever (30:7). To live well in al-Dunya is to live with al-Akhirah always in view.

And the reason for the whole architecture (resurrection, Judgment, eternity) is justice. According to the Qur’an, God did not create the heavens and the earth “without a true purpose — the Hour will certainly come” (15:85). That Hour is the resurrection. The resurrection exists so that the labor asked of human beings is, in the end, justly rewarded. Islam claims people are created with an innate sense of right and wrong, a conscience the Qur’an calls the ‘reproachful soul’, that moves them toward the good and reproaches them for evil. The one judged to have lived well is rewarded in eternity. To Islamic thinking, without a final reckoning, the moral life would be a demand without a resolution.

Resurrection Ontology

The nature of the resurrection is a hotly debated subject within the tradition.

The Sufis, Islam’s mystical dimension (cf. Part 10), have long held the resurrection to be ‘spiritual’, reading every reference to a bodily rising as poetic allusion to a truth that is not, at bottom, physical. Other sources have held it to be ‘bodily’, an actual raising of the person, flesh and all.

The Qur’an offers credence to both possibilities. It calls resurrected bodies “new” creations (56:35, 61). It says that things in the world to come are “like” what they are here, and that its food merely “appears similar” (13:35, 47:15, 2:25). Muhammad’s Companion Ibn Abbas (counted among the tradition’s earliest authorities on the Qur’an’s meaning) maintained this world and the next share nothing at all except the names of things. The words carry over. The substance behind them does not.

The 1100s philosopher Ibn Rushd (a working judge in Cordoba, known to the Latin West as Averroes) resolved the tension by focusing on the reader. Most people need simple, concrete explanations, Ibn Rushd reasoned. While scholars can bear a more complex and abstract eschatology. And so the Qur’an supplies both registers at once. It is a striking early statement of an idea we will meet again in Part 13: that a text can rightly mean different things to different readers, and that the authority to say which is which is itself a question.

The Qur’an’s first audience included deniers who found the whole idea simply absurd. Scattered bones, gathered and made to live again? To them the book answers with an argument, not merely a promise.

Does man think We shall never put his bones together again?
...Yes indeed: We can remold his very fingers. QUR’AN 75:1–4

A fingerprint today is a kind of signature. No two are alike, not even in identical twins. For the modern Muslim: the God who can fashion a thing so fine, so individual, and so unrepeatable once can surely fashion it again. The reasoning turns the skeptic’s own intuition against them. The very intricacy of the human body, which seems at first to make its reconstitution unthinkable, becomes instead the evidence that its Maker could do it twice.

Barzakh & the Day of Judgment

Death, of course, is the natural conclusion of all life.
The Qur’an acknowledges this poetically (”every soul will taste death,” 31:85).
The Qur’an also acknowledges this conclusion as a gateway of return to God (6:61–62).

The first stage of that return is barzakh, an intermediate state between this life and the Afterlife. The word itself means a barrier or a partition. The Qur’an uses it elsewhere for the unseen barrier between two seas, the fresh and the salt, which meet and do not mix (25:53). This is what the dead inhabit — a partition between two waters.

Souls in barzakh already receive a measure of reward or punishment (3:169–171, 16:32, 40:45–46, 71:25). Yet at the resurrection, the whole of that interval will feel “no longer than an hour” (10:45). Barzakh is a threshold rather than a destination. A waiting that, from the far side, will seem to have taken almost no time at all.

The Islamic resurrection itself falls at the End of the World, whose hour is known to God alone (7:187). No prophet was given the date. No believer claims to have it either.

Far less debated than the resurrection’s nature is the Judgment that follows it. Each person is shown a complete record of their deeds: “Read your record; today your own soul is enough to calculate your account” (17:14). The accounting requires no witness beyond the soul itself. No one bears another’s account. No one is spared the reckoning.

Whoever has done an atom’s weight of good will see it, and whoever has done an atom’s weight of evil will see that. QUR’AN 99:7–8

In Islam, Judgment is what gives the moral life its stakes.
It is the reason the choices of al-Dunya finally matter.

And yet (this surprises many first-time readers) the weight the Qur’an gives to the Afterlife never devalues this life. Muslims are commanded not to “neglect [their] rightful share in this world” (28:77). Asceticism is not counted a virtue in Islam, and celibacy is unknown to the Qur’an. Believers are encouraged to take pleasure in life. To learn, to build a family, to bring joy to others. The tradition even recounts Muhammad affirming the value of good-humored joking with relatives (Sahih al Bukhari 81).

This life is to be enjoyed, but never at the cost of one’s soul.
The world is good, and it is not the end. The two truths are meant to be held together.

8.3 | The Hidden Garden

Cosmic Justice

The Ancient Greek image of justice is a familiar one. Lady Justice, blindfolded, a set of scales in one hand and a sword in the other. She captures a deep and widely shared intuition: every deed warrants its reward or its punishment — and the accounts must, somehow, be balanced.

Different traditions give that intuition different names. Hindu eschatology calls it karma. Arabic calls justice adalah. The distinction between them is structural, not necessarily a ranking. Karma is assessed in the background of a life by unseen cosmic forces, an impersonal law woven into the fabric of the universe, running on its own without a judge. Adalah is assessed by God alone, the act of a personal being Who sees, weighs, and decides.

The blindfold marks the difference too. Lady Justice wears it to promise impartiality: she will not see who stands before her. The Qur’an’s Judge makes the opposite promise, yet arrives at the same place. God sees everything and is partial to no one.

Here, cosmic impartiality achieved not by seeing less but by seeing everything.

The reckoning must be deferred because justice in this world is manifestly incomplete. We have all watched evil go unpunished and seen the lives of righteous people cut short. The Qur’an itself acknowledges as much: worldly justice is neither complete nor lasting, because this world is imperfect (42:30, 3:165, 87:17). The balance the Greek scales promise is not, for Muslims, struck here.

And so the full reckoning is carried forward to Judgment Day, after which those who have tipped the divine scales toward righteousness receive an eternal reward. The Garden and the Fire are the tradition’s answer to a problem everyone recognizes: in this life, the accounts simply do not add up. Islam’s response? They will after death.

The Hidden Garden

The Arabic word for eternal Paradise is al-Jannah, literally ‘the Garden’. Its etymology is one of the two keys to Part 8 of this series.

Al-Jannah grows from the native Semitic root J-N-N, ‘to hide, to cover, to conceal’ (the same three-consonant root device Part 7 walked through with S-L-M). What makes the J-N-N root so illuminating is that its entire family of derivatives carries the same thread of hiddenness through it. From J-N-N comes:

• janīn, the embryo (hidden in the womb)
• majnūn, a madman (whose mind is hidden somewhere we cannot follow)
• jinn, beings of fire (hidden from everyday human sight)

There is also an old saying in Arabic: when night falls, jannat al-layl.
The night has hidden everything.

Womb, madness, spirit, nightfall. Each names something present but unseen. Arabic wears its theology in its grammar (Part 7 made the same point with the mu- of Muslim). The same is true for Paradise, Jannah, a hidden garden. A place that is both real and concealed from the living.

Notably, our own English word ‘Paradise’ also comes from the Middle World, starting as Old Persian pairidaēza (‘enclosed garden’) then moving into Hebrew as pardes (the ‘orchard’ of Song of Songs 4:13), then into Greek as paradeisos, which is how it finally arrived in English as paradise. The Old Persian pairidaēza also travelled south into Arabia, where it became firdaws (فِرْدَوْس), which is also a Qur’anic name for Paradise.

Describing Paradise

In the Qur’an, entering Paradise is an auspicious occasion (39:73). The very act of ‘entering’ al-Jannah recurs some 57 times, each occurrence bound up with peace, security, and delight. Light shines before the righteous as they enter, and the angels are there to greet them (57:12, 39:73).

The ontology of Islamic Paradise is elaborate and detailed.

Al-Jannah is as wide as the cosmos (3:133, 57:21). And although ‘the Garden’ in the singular names the single abode of the righteous, the Qur’an also speaks of multiple Jannat, for there is a private garden for each believer and their family. A home of one’s own within the whole. The residents are free to move wherever they wish (39:74), and wherever they go, their homes are peaceful and pleasant (9:72). Within those homes, large extended families relax on couches, hold pleasing conversation, and recall happy memories with shining faces (80:38–39). While spending time with their loved ones, attending servants offer them whatever they desire (76:15–19).

The picture is domestic as much as it is paradisal.
Less a reward earned than a household restored.

But the food and drink of Paradise, the Qur’an is careful to say, are not for sustenance. They are tokens of honor. The true reward of Paradise is not the sensual delight so vividly described but the honor God bestows on the righteous. The position of being welcomed, received, and held in favor by God.

The feast is a meant as a sign. It doesn’t serve a need.

8.4 | Damnation & the Limits of Language

The Valley of Gehinnom

The second etymological key of Part 8 is the name of the Fire, and like the first, it carries us back through the shared vocabulary of the Abrahamic traditions.

The Arabic Jahannam traces to the Hebrew Gehinnom, which is a real place in ancient Israel. Gehinnom (the Valley of Hinnom) is just outside of the walls of Jerusalem. The Hebrew Bible remembers it as cursed ground, the place where evil kings of Judah burned their own children in sacrifice — an atrocity that left the whole valley under a curse (Jeremiah 7:31, 19:2–6). 600 years later, the valley was still known as the ‘burning place’ by the Jewish locals. The lowest point in Jerusalem. Where the city’s refuse was dumped and set alight. A fire that seemed never to be quenched.

Over time, the vision of a smoking, smoldering pit at the edge of the holy city became the image of final cosmic punishment.

Later, in the Gospel era, Jesus warns that the unrighteous risk having their bodies cast into Gehinnom (Mark 9:43–48). Across the Greek of the New Testament, three different terms come to name the same dreadful destination: Gehenna (straight from the Hebrew Gehinnom), Hades (Matthew 11:23), and Tartarus (2 Peter 2:4). Today, all three are rendered in modern English by a single Old Norse word, ‘Hell’ (from Hel, the name of the underworld of Germanic myth).

Over time, geography became theology. By the time the Qur’an speaks of Jahannam, the word already carried centuries of cosmic freight. The Islamic Fire inherits both the name and the smoke of that valley outside Jerusalem.

A Theology of Contrasts

The Qur’anic Jahannam (in parallel with the Christian concept of Hell) offers no respite, mercy, or help to those consigned to it (2:161–162, 4:52). It is a place of “intense heat” (52:27). Its fires are fueled by men and stone (2:24). Its waters are boiling and fetid (14:16). Boiling water is poured over the heads of the damned while the water within their bodies boils, and they are beaten with maces (22:19–21). The Qur’an says many will regret the lives they lived the instant they face this eternal torment — but there will be no second chances (2:167).

Qur’anically, the Fire is nearly always drawn against the Garden.

Where al-Jannah has fruit, milk, and shade, Jahannam offers only the fruit of the Tree of Zaqqum, which springs from Hell’s floor, its fruit like the heads of devils (37:64–65). The damned eat it, drink boiling water on top of it, and are returned to the fire (37:68). The place is named a “torment for wrongdoers” (37:63), and against it the Garden stands as protection: “Which is better, this or the lasting Garden that those who are mindful of God have been promised…?” (25:15).

The full set of contrasts runs deep. Hell is “an evil home, a foul resting place” and Heaven “a happy home and a happy resting place” (25:66–76). The residents of Heaven are spared not only the fire but every “harm,” “fear,” “shame,” “malice,” and “grieving” (39:61, 66:8, 15:47, 10:62). Their food brings no discomfort or intoxication (37:47, 56:19). Their drink brings no idle talk or sin (52:23). There is no end to their gifts, their fruit, or their belonging (38:54, 56:32, 35:35). While the cries of the tormented are silent to those in the Garden (21:102).

And where each soul in Hell suffers alone, the righteous are reunited with generations of their loved ones. The solitude of the Fire is part of its punishment.

One makes one’s home in Heaven forever. The thought of leaving, the Qur’an says, never so much as crosses one’s mind (18:108).

The last and most important contrast is not sensory but spiritual. For all the vividness of the imagery, the Qur’an gives primacy to the spiritual reward over the material. It signals that primacy in the very order of its phrasing. Mention goes first to the righteous “brought nearest to God,” and only then to “the Gardens of bliss” (56:10–11). The command is to enter first “among My servants,” and then “into My Paradise” (89:29–30). The Heavenly spouses are named “good natured” and only afterward are they “beautiful” (55:70).

Each time, the moral or relational good is placed ahead of the sensual one. In a book this attentive to its own language, word order is no accident. The order is the teaching. The physical delights of the Garden are secondary to the nearness they signify.

The reward of Paradise is, finally, closeness to God.

Mathal: Analogical Description

Our Module on the Qur’an (Parts 6, 7, and 8) closes where the tradition itself closes the question: by admitting the limits of its own descriptions.

The 10th-century philosopher al-Amiri explains that the rewards of the Garden must be rendered “in a way which is pleasing,” and that the nature of Paradise “cannot be apprehended except by giving a standard or gauge for it of what human senses have experienced.” In other words, al-Amiri is pointing to the claim that we can only picture Paradise in the borrowed terms of what we already know. Every tradition that speaks of eternity or perfection eventually meets this wall.

What is striking, is how plainly the Qur’an ‘breaks the fourth wall’ as it were, by pointing out the limits of its own use of language.

The Qur’anic descriptions of the Garden are given as mathal — a similitude, analogy, or parable “of what is actually the case” (13:35, 47:15) — because language cannot carry the reality of a perfect and eternal abode. The similitudes are offered, the Qur’an says, “so that they may reflect” (59:21). This is the same book that calls the resurrected bodies “new” creations and says the food of Paradise merely “appears similar” to the food of earth. The Qur’an is uniquely self-aware among Abrahamic scripture.

So, the graphic imagery of the preceding lessons should not be read as reportage. From the boiling water and the Tree of Zaqqum, to the couches and the shining faces — the Qur’an works with what human senses can know, to describe a theological reality that lies beyond its grasp. Islamic tradition holds that no living person has direct knowledge of the Afterlife. The Fire and the Garden are figures for a truth no text can finally hold.

What remains, in the end, is not a cosmic geography for the reader to paw at. Rather, the Qur’an is presented as a way of orienting a life in al-Dunya toward an al-Akhirah that can be named only in analogy, and reached only by the choices made here.

The Garden is hidden. But the road is written.

Last Section: Qur’anic Ethics: War & Tolerance
This Section: Qur’anic Ontology: Evil & the Afterlife
Next Section: Umayyads & Abbasids

The Collision of Moorish Horsemen | Eugène Delacroix, 1844

Overview

Most folks think they know what Islam says about war. That’s the first problem.

Many come to Islamic Ethics with an already settled picture before any serious reading actually starts. A religion of the sword, carried by conquest, hostile to the outsider by design. However, Part 3 argued that the question behind this picture is posed in bad faith. Here, in Part 7, we look to the verses in question specifically. We will also look to the concept of religious tolerance and how Qur’anic language frames this question.

Assigned Reading
Haleem, Understanding the Qur'an, chapters 5 & 6

The S-L-M root • salaam • fi sabilillah • Just War Theory • tasamuh
People of the Book • antisemitism • apostasy

7.1 | Peace as the Social Norm

The Missing Sword

It comes as a surprise to many: the word ‘sword’ does not appear in the Qur’an.
Not even once...

Moreover, the Qur’an acknowledges war as a hateful enterprise, ordained for believers though hated nonetheless (2:216). The Qur’an also acknowledges that the world is filled with a wide variety of peoples, traditions, and folkways. This variety is not condemned by the Qur’an; it is acknowledged as God’s very intention (5:48). Further, the Qur’an flatly denies the goal of enjoining everyone into one community (11:118). In sum, religious differences are not a failure of Islam. According to the Qur’an, religious differences are part of God’s plan.

It is good, the Qur’an teaches, for different tribes to know one another (49:13).

However, the Qur’an also acknowledges the difficulties that can arise when encountering tribal differences (6:65). When those encounters come to war, the scripture promises tranquility for those who keep the faith when under attack (24:55). In any event, the Qur’an is clear that Islamic war is a contingency, permitted only in self-defense and to check an evil that would otherwise spread unchecked (2:251). Scripturally, war is forbidden as a tool of empire or acquisition. To wit, there is, in the Qur’an’s own terms, no such thing as a ‘holy war’. The phrase makes no sense in Arabic (as Part 3 argued at length).

So, the first thing to say about Qur’anic ethics and war is that Islam treats war as the exception. It is not a goal, a good, or necessary to the Islamic tradition except as a means of self-preservation.

Peace in Arabic

Peace is central to the Qur’an, in both theology and language.

Like Hebrew and Aramaic before it, Arabic is a Semitic language. Most Semitic words are built on a three-letter root — a spine of three consonants from which a whole family of related words grows. The root carries a core, shared meaning. The words branch off it, each one bending that meaning in a new direction.

The root at the center of the Islamic tradition is the S-L-M root, three consonants written س ل م in Arabic. From it grows:

• Salaam, peace (also a greeting)
• Salamah, safety
• Salim, whole/unbroken

Salaam is the first of these and the one the others lean on: not merely the absence of war, but the safety and wholeness its two cousins name. It is the condition the Qur’an prizes above all others, and the reward it promises the righteous.

From those same three letters comes the word Islam, and the word Mu-slim, the one who performs S-L-M. (The mu- prefix is Arabic’s way of marking the doer of an action, so a Muslim is, quite literally, one who does Islam.)

This may seem like a theological boast at first, but it’s literally welded into the grammar. A speaker of Arabic does not need to be told that Islam and salaam are relatives, the way an English speaker may be told that ‘peace’ and ‘pacify’ share a distant Latin parent. In Arabic, the kinship is right there in the consonants, impossible to miss.

In short, the Islamic tradition takes its own name from the Arabic root for peace.

You can hear it in the ordinary greeting a Muslim gives: as-salamu alaykum, ‘peace be upon you’, the same three consonants offered across a billion doorways each day. The word for the religion and the word for hello share the same root.

In the Way of God

When the Qur’an does permit war, it attaches one primary condition that governs all the rest. The fighting must be fi sabilillah, ‘in the way of God’ (9:60).

For the observant Muslim, to fight in the way of God is to fight from a righteous intention — for devotion, not plunder.

In a famous hadith (a report of Muhammad’s words, not on the level of the Qur’an, but trusted by Muslims as part of the larger tradition), the Prophet is asked about men who go to war for different reasons. One fights for treasure and spoils. One fights for personal glory. One fights so that others will call him a hero. Which of them, the questioner asks, is fighting in the way of God?

None of them, the Prophet answers. The one who fights ‘in the way of God’ is the one who fights so that the word of God is highest, and for nothing else at all.

So, the Islamic criterion for a just war is not the outcome, the spoils, or the gain of reputation. For Muhammad, the sole test of a warrior fighting ‘in the way of God’ is what sits in his heart before he lifts his fist. Pointedly, a man can keep every law of war and still fail, because the Qur’an counts him as having fought for nothing. Such is the standard for the fighting Muslim.

7.2 | Islamic Just War Theory

A Shared Inheritance

Long before the Islamic tradition, there was a massive, detailed history of Jews and Christians wrestling over the theological justifications for war. This field of ethics continues to the present day and is known as Just War Theory.

From a Jewish standpoint, the Hebrew Bible is already full of just war claims. Deuteronomy lays down rules for warfare, among them the duty to offer a city terms of peace before laying siege to it (Deut. 20:10–12), and to spare its fruit trees even in the taking of the city. The Jewish prophets return repeatedly to justice and mercy in the middle of a war.

Christianity took up the same work. St. Augustine, in The City of God, set out the conditions under which a war could be just (a rightful cause, legitimate authority, the aim of restoring peace), the cluster of questions later writers would file under jus ad bellum, ‘the right to war’. In the 1200s, St. Thomas Aquinas pressed on the conduct of the fighting itself, jus in bello, ‘justice in war’. Here, both Christian philosophers tackle two central questions of just war theory: when may you fight and how you may fight.

Islam answers these two questions narrowly.
War becomes an obligation in only a handful of situations.

• In defense of religious freedom (22:39–41)

• In self-defense against an attack (2:190)

• And to aid oppressed people who ask for help (4:75), though even that last duty can be deferred if the aggressor happens to be a Muslim ally, since the Qur’an will not make a man break faith with his own people to keep faith with a stranger (8:72)

Lastly, the Prophet is told to urge the believers to fight (4:84), never to force them. Even the summons to a just war is an appeal, not an order, and the decision stays with each fighter’s conscience.

The Limits of Just Islamic War

Permission to fight, once granted, is fenced in by two major limitations.

• The people you may fight are the people actively fighting you, never civilians (2:190)
• The force you may use is limited to the harm done to you (2:194)

Read strictly, those two conditions rule out both first strikes and waging war with weapons that cannot tell a soldier from a child. The nuclear and biochemical arms of the modern world fail this test outright. A weapon that kills the combatant and the infant in the same blast violates the immunity of the one and the proportion owed the other.

After the Qur’an, Islamic commentators drew the boundaries even tighter.

From a single verse (2:190) the 1200s Persian exegete al-Baydawi, whose Qur’anic commentary became one of the most studied in the Sunni world, derived a whole list of prohibitions.

• A Muslim may not begin a war
• A Muslim may not break a treaty
• A Muslim may not attack without first offering peace
• A Muslim may not destroy crops
• A Muslim may not kill certain protected classes of people

These restraints are not a pious varnish later brushed onto Islam. This is found in the very grammar of the Qur’an itself. Across 2:190–195, the text keeps circling back to one phrase, “do not transgress the limits,” and pairs it, time after time, with a warning. God does not love the aggressors. The verses that look like a license to fight are hedged, clause by clause, with the language of restraint.

Which is where the first of two notorious verses sits. Directly after that restraint language comes 2:191.

…slay them wherever you find them.
a portion of QUR’AN 2:191

Lift it clear of its surroundings and it sounds horrific. But look at what ‘them’ points back to. The verse before it named them. ‘Those who fight against you’ (2:190).

So, the sentence says slay those who are attacking you, wherever you find them. And the ‘wherever’ answers a real question the early Muslims were asking. Could they defend themselves even inside the sacred precincts of Mecca, the sanctuary they had been shut out of? The verses on either side (2:189, 2:196) are about exactly that. The pilgrimage. The holy ground. The holy city. Yes, you are permitted to defend yourselves.

Read whole, 2:191 is not a battle cry. It is a reassurance. You may defend yourselves even here, even where you would have hesitated to raise a hand because this place is holy. It is a rule about where self-defense holds, not a permit for aggression anywhere.

The Sword Verse

The second notorious verse has been called the Sword Verse, which is rich, given that ‘sword’ is a word the Qur’an never uses. We look now at 9:5.

…when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever you find them.
QUR’AN 9:5

Our author M.A.S. Abdel Haleem calls the verse “much referred to but notoriously misinterpreted.” I agree with him.

That passage is not about idolaters or idolatry in general. It is about one specific enemy at one specific moment of Islamic history: the hardened polytheists of Arabia who would settle for nothing less than the Muslims’ expulsion or their return to polytheism, who broke their treaties, backed others against the Muslims, struck first, blocked would-be converts, and drove Muslims from their homes and their mosque. The Qur’anic passage recites those offenses at least eight times over.

Even against that enemy, no one is simply turned loose. An ultimatum goes out, and four sacred months are granted (a season of grace in which the enemy may reconsider) before any fighting can begin. The same passage then exempts the polytheists who kept their word and kept the peace (9:7), and orders that any enemy asking for safe conduct must be protected and escorted all the way to the place where he will be safe (9:6).

Some readers pull the middle clause loose, ‘kill the polytheists’, and let it stand for the whole of Islam’s attitude to war. A few go further and claim it cancels every other verse on the subject, that this one line quietly repealed the hundred verses of restraint that came before it. Haleem’s verdict on that is blunt. He calls it a “pure fantasy,” built by inappropriately isolating and mischaracterizing a single scrap of a sentence.

7.3 | Tolerance & Tasamuh

Western Tolerance

In English, when the enlightened among us reach for a word to describe their disposition toward foreign religions, you will often hear the word ‘tolerance’ invoked.

Tolerance comes to us from the Latin tolerāre, to bear, to endure. Its Greek cousin tolmáō similarly means to endure. Buried in the word tolerance is the act of putting up with something unpleasant. Carrying a weight you would rather set down. Enduring a person you have already judged to be in the wrong.

Tolerance also assumes a hierarchy. That is, tolerance is something the powerful grant to the different. It flows downhill, where the ‘tolerated’ live on sufferance, dependent on the goodwill of the powerful.

By its own standard, Europe was slow to endure or tolerate its ‘lesser’ others — even in the modern period.

Jews lived across Christian Europe for millennia with no legal toleration to speak of, the standing targets of antisemitism: a collective hostility toward Jews, whether dressed as theology, as economics, or, later, as race. In France, Jewish emancipation came only with the modern French Revolution, in 1791. Even so, European antisemitism long outlived the modern laws meant to end it.

Historically, Christians also often did not tolerate other kinds of Christians. After the modern Reformation, Christian wars of religion tore Europe apart, with as much as a third of the population dead in the worst-hit German lands. Religious dissenters in England had no legal standing until the Toleration Act of 1689 — and even that act pointedly withheld its protection from Catholics. Irish Catholics were officially persecuted by the British establishment until Catholic Emancipation in 1829.

In America, the theologian Roger Williams founded Rhode Island as a refuge for the religiously unwelcome, and his experiment fed the freedom of religion the First Amendment would later promise. In short, the social reality lagged behind the ‘ideal of tolerance’ for most of Western history — for groups like Jews, Catholics, the Amish, the Latter-day Saints, and the beliefs of Indigenous and enslaved peoples.

However, while the West speaks of the modern virtues of ‘tolerance,’ the Islamicate world has always operated from a different foundational thought.

Tasamuh in the Middle World

The closest Arabic word to ‘tolerance’ is tasamuh. But it does not mean to endure. Instead, it grows from the root S-M-Ḥ, in Arabic س م ح. Just as S-L-M gives us salaam (peace), salamah (safety), and salim (unbroken), S-M-Ḥ, the root of tasamuh, gives us:

• Samaḥa, to allow
• Samuḥa, to be generous
• Sammaḥa, to walk softly/act kindly

Put together, tasamuh enjoins Muslims not to merely ‘endure’ Christians and Jews but to allow (samaḥa) their freedom and dignity, and to do so generously (samuḥa). Again, like salaam, the behavior of the Muslim next to his monotheistic cousins is written into the very fabric of his language. Moreoever, tasamuh is a reciprocal concept. That is, it is not something one side extends to a lesser. The generous allowance runs mutually between parties.

Breaking Down Assumptions

So, no. The Qur’an does not enjoin the Muslim to merely ‘tolerate’ the Jew and the Christian. The language of the Qur’an expects the generous allowance of the Other, next to whom the Muslim ought to walk softly and act with lovingkindness.

Compare this to modern ‘tolerance,’ by which we generally mean putting up with something unpleasant. It’s the same word we use for over-spiced food. What level of heat can you tolerate?

However, in the language of the Qur’an, tasamuh is centered on communal generosity, an ease shared by all sides at once.

Put another way, tolerance is vertical. It is a forbearance handed down from the powerful to the weak. Tasamuh is horizontal, a rough equality of regard, each party generous to the other. The first requires a hierarchy. The latter dissolves the hierarchy as its opening move.

In the end, the two concepts, one Latinate and one Arabic, are asking for different things of a person. One asks you to endure your neighbor. The other asks you to be generous with him.

That being said, the point here is not to prove which civilization behaved better in history — a question that centuries of historians and theologians have battled over and will not be settled here. The point is that the two vocabularies reach for different things while often assuming the other means what they mean.

Much religious strife starts not in the differences,
but in the assumptions we begin with.

7.4 | The People of the Book

Ahl al-Kitab

Another way we can see the regard that Islam has for Jews and Christians can be found in the collective Arabic name it gives them: ahl al-Kitab.

This famous Arabic phrase, ahl al-Kitab, means ‘the People of the Book.’ The ones who received the earlier scriptures. In Islamicate society, the People of the Book are not ‘minorities’ to be managed, nor a problem to be administered. They are the people with the book, the Bible, which in Islam is one of the highest honors the Qur’an bestows on a people. Also, keep in mind that what you call someone sets the range of how you may regard them. The name ‘People of the Book’ forecloses a great deal.

First, the Qur’an does not flatten all the People of the Book into one type. “They are not [all] the same,” the Qur’an says, which then singles out among them “a staunch community” who recite God’s words through the night, who believe in God and the Last Day, who call for good and forbid wrong and hurry to do it (3:113–115). Here we see a category of respect, with room still left for theological difference.

But the text goes well past respect, to a kind of shared intimacy.

The Qur’an allows for Muslims to eat with, befriend, and even marry Christians and Jews (5:5). The tradition recounts that Muhammad himself married across these lines: Safiyya, a Jewish woman who converted, and, by some accounts, Mariya, a Coptic Christian (though her status as wife is disputed). Additionally, Muslims are enjoined not to argue all day about their differences with the People of the Book, except to say, “We believe in what was revealed to us and in what was revealed to you. Our God and your God is One” (29:46).

Let us arrive at a statement that is common to us all: we worship God alone, we ascribe no partner to Him, and none of us takes others beside God as lords.
QUR’AN 3:64

You may recognize here the reach for a monotheistic common ground that we saw in the Opening (al-Fatiha) in Section 6. Where real differences persist, the Qur’an is content to leave them for God to settle on the Last Day (5:48). Until then, the instruction is peace.

The fifth surah puts the obligation about as sharply as it can be put. “You have no true basis unless you uphold the Torah, the Gospel, and what has been sent down to you from your Lord” (5:68). Protecting the Jews’ rights and protecting the Church is not a mere modern tolerance, grudgingly extended. On this reading it is a Muslim’s sacred duty.

Islamic history gave the principle a test.

When Caliph Umar (Omar) took Jerusalem from the Byzantines in 638 (cf. Sec. 4), the assurance preserved in the later sources had him guarantee the city’s Christians security for their lives, their property, and their churches, and promise that none would be harmed and none forced from their faith.

Now set that against what came after. In 1099 the Crusaders retook Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. When Saladin, the Kurdish general who commanded the Muslim armies, won the city back 88 years later, he did not answer the massacre in kind. He spared the Christians and let nearly all of them go free. Section 11 will tell that story more fully.

Obligations & Taxes

The same Muslim ethic that governs the start of a war governs its end: the moment an enemy stops fighting, the Muslim must stop too.

If they incline towards peace, you must also incline towards it.
QUR’AN 8:61

A state might find itself in any of several conditions. Open war against an aggressor. A lasting peace. A temporary truce. A safe-conduct extended to an enemy who has come to negotiate. Whichever it is, one rule binds them all. Always keep your word.

“Fulfil your obligations” (5:1). “Fulfil any pledge,” and do not “break oaths after you have sworn them” (16:91). To break a sworn oath, the Qur’an says, sinks a person below the animals (8:55). Prisoners of war are to be treated humanely, fed and clothed, and then freed outright or ransomed once the fighting ends (76:8–9). The dignity of the defeated is written into Islamic law, not offered as a modern courtesy.

When a war ended, the conquered could leave or stay. Those who stayed kept their lives, their property, and their freedom to worship. They could join the new community, as many did, or remain Jews and Christians on payment of the jizya.

Section 3 introduced the jizya tax. The jizya tax stood in place of two duties that fell on Muslims but not on the People of the Book — almsgiving (zakat) and military service. Those two together, Haleem argues, cost more than the jizya did, which would make it the lighter burden of the two.

However, it should be noted that other historians have weighed the actual practices found in later centuries and find them differing widely from the Qur’anic teaching, and the history of the jizya is genuinely contested. What can be said without dispute is that the Jewish and Christian poor and elderly were exempt, monks and women and children were exempt, and the tax bought a protection that, when it failed, the treasury was expected to refund.

Compulsion & Apostasy

Of course, Qur’anic ethics reach well past the People of the Book — to Buddhists, Hindus, Daoists, Indigenous people, etc. While the special standing of Jews and Christians rests on their scriptures, the wider rules of Islamic conduct do not necessarily depend on a shared theology. The sheer variety of peoples on the earth is, the Qur’an says more than once, something God intended (30:22, 49:13). And it all comes down to this:

There is no compulsion in religion.
QUR’AN 2:256

It is not a Muslim’s task to force anyone into Islam. The Qur’an nowhere endorses conversion by pressure of any kind. Not in war, as the first lesson showed. Not in peace, as it insists here.

In sum: a person cannot be forced to be a Muslim, a Muslim ought to be generous to non-Muslims, and cultural variety and distinctiveness are ordained by God.

But there’s one issue left out here, and it’s critical. What about the Muslim who wishes to leave Islam? This act is called apostasy — when one leaves their religion. The Islamicate world’s history with apostasy is not flattering.

There is a hadith (cf. Bukhari), whose provenance measures up by the tradition’s own standards, in which Muhammad says, “whoever changes his religion, kill him.” It was on that report, not on any verse of the Qur’an, that classical Islamic law built its penalties for apostasy. The penalties were real, and their footing in the tradition was equally real.

While the Qur’an itself prescribes no worldly punishment for a change of belief, there are at least eight countries in the world today where leaving Islam is, on the books, a capital offense — including Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Yemen. Some counts also include the UAE, the Maldives, and the sharia-code states of Malaysia and northern Nigeria.

However, there is also push-back in these countries. Mauritania, though the law against apostasy is on the books, has never carried out an execution for it. In Malaysia, apostasy is a state matter, and only two states, Kelantan and Terengganu, prescribe death (which federal Malaysian law bars in any case). In Nigeria, sharia criminal codes run in 12 of the 36 states, all in the Islamic north, binding on Muslim Nigerians only. Meanwhile, Sudan repealed its apostasy laws in 2020.

Our author Haleem reads the classical penalties as often punishing treason (the abandoning of the community and the taking up of arms against it), rather than the private act of ceasing to believe in Muhammad’s prophethood and the Qur’an. Critics answer that such a distinction was rarely observed in practice, and the modern statutes above do not observe it at all. Both things are true, and the second is why national laws against leaving Islam remain a very real condition in parts of the Islamicate world. It is one reason of many that some Muslims choose to live in the secular West, where religion, creed, and practice are a person’s own decision.

What, then, is a Muslim to do in a place like ours: a liberal society full of other faiths and of none? Five Qur’anic injunctions guide her.

• Seek the good and forbid wrong (16:125).
• Live by the law of the land, so long as the law leaves you free to be Muslim.
• Compel no one to religion and let no one compel you (2:256 again).
• Let those who wish to believe, believe. Let those who wish to refuse, refuse (18:29).
• And when the difference simply will not close, answer with generosity, with tasamuh, but without giving up your own religion.

You have your religion and I have mine. QUR’AN 109:6

It is a generous picture. An ideal held out, whatever the mixed record of histories and governments. May we all one day live up to our best ideals.

Last Section: Hermeneutics & the Qur’an
This Section: Qur’anic Ethics: War & Tolerance
Next Section: Qur’anic Ontology: Evil & the Afterlife

Immanuel Kant | Gottlieb Doebler, ca. 1791

Key Terms for this Section
Moral Absolutism · Maxim/Axiom · Categorical Imperative
Moral Pluralism · Prima Facie Duties

7.1 | Universal Ethics • Spinoza

An Ethics for Everyone?

According to Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679), ethics is dependent on the culture in which one lives. That is, the “social contract” that I live under in Texas is notably different from the rights and laws of North Korea. In North Korea, it is illegal to speak against the nation’s leader. But in Texas, political criticism is defended by the First Amendment. In this way, our Constitution is the supreme social contract Americans have with one another. But as we saw in Sec 5.1, imagining ethics being dictated by one’s culture leads to a number of problems. Not only does cultural relativism halt moral progress, but it denies the existence of human rights. So, as the early modern Wars of Religion came to an end and the modern world shrank in size, moral philosophers looked for ways to ground ethics in universal, absolute conditions outside of the Church (cf. Sec. 6.1).

The principle behind Universal Ethics is Moral Absolutism — the notion that there are objective moral rules applicable to all moral agents. Surely, we can understand the appeal of such an idea. If everyone followed the same ethical norms, we could eliminate unjust practices like favoritism, nepotism, and discrimination. Is such an idea possible? Well, despite our many cultural and geographical differences, we can see that most societies share fundamental values such as protecting children, promoting truth-telling, and prohibiting harm to individuals without just cause.

To make an absolutist moral claim, there must be an objective basis for determining right and wrong. The three most notable Ethical Frameworks that aim for this are Divine Command Theory (Sec. 5.4), Deontology (Sec. 7.3), and Utilitarianism (Sec. 8.3). In Divine Command Theory, whatever the gods command is good because the gods are objective and wise. Deontology, which we’ll be looking at closely in Sec. 7, argues that individuals ought to act based on their universalizable duty. And Utilitarianism, which we’ll be exploring in Sec. 8, argues that actions ought to be chosen based on the most optimific outcome (ie. what makes the most people happiest).

While each of these moral frameworks has its strengths and weaknesses, they all share in the fundamental idea that there is a universal moral good that all individuals should follow. The central claim of Universal Ethics is that by adhering to universal principles, we ensure that our actions are based on objectivity and reason, rather than subjective opinions or cultural biases. The aim of this view is to engender a more just and equitable world for everyone.

Developing Secular Ethics | Spinoza

From the Crusades to the birth of the United States, two Jewish philosophers stand apart — the medieval Maimonides, the Great Eagle of the Talmud, and the early modern Dutch master, Baruch Spinoza (d. 1677). In Sec. 3.1, we see how Maimonides (d. 1204) focuses on the use of reason to understand both God and the natural world, arguing that natural law and divine law are ultimately the same. After the Renaissance and the turn toward European Rationalism, Spinoza retains the high place of reason as the keystone of human understanding. However, Spinoza secularizes the concept — finding moral truths in nature itself rather than divine revelation. How?

Well, take for example St. Aquinas (d. 1274). The medieval monk claims that moral principles are an inherent part of the structure of reality, discoverable through reason (cf. Sec. 5.5). Fair enough — Spinoza thinks so, too. But where St. Aquinas says that these natural laws are ordained by a transcendent God, Spinoza doesn’t agree. Spinoza counters St. Aquinas by claiming that belief in a personal God is an anthropomorphic error. That is, we humans project our insecurities onto a divine Father and declare Him our Lawgiver. But Spinoza claims this unnecessarily limits God. For Spinoza, there is not a bearded, male, jealous Deity Who creates nature, prescribes our behavior, and judges morality like the saints describe. Rather, for Spinoza, God is transcendent and impersonal — manifesting Godself through the natural order and structure of reality. In other words, God and Nature are the same.

For Spinoza, God is the structure of the universe and the ultimate cause of everything that happens. Everything in nature follows the same necessary laws as an expression of God. So, to his thinking, praying for miracles makes no sense because this would be an aberration from God’s own natural law. Rather, our task as rational thinkers is to discover natural laws (cf. Sec. 3.5), including the ethical principles embedded therein.

We can see this same appeal to rationalism in Spinoza’s contemporary, René Descartes (d. 1650). Descartes argues that reason alone reveals universal truths about reality. Spinoza extends Descartes’ rationalism into moral philosophy — asserting that human beings can discover the inherent, universal moral laws of nature through reason.

The Modern Ethical Project

In Hobbes’ work, the Leviathan (1651), the English philosopher and contemporary of Spinoza seeks to ground moral and political obligations in the framework of the social contract, removing them from the realm of religious authority (cf. Sec. 6.1). To review, Hobbes finds human beings to be fundamentally selfish and driven by self-preservation, which leads them into conflict in the state of nature. To avoid this chaos and violence, we enter into a social contract (ie. a government), agreeing to obey a powerful king who ensures our peace and security (cf. Sec. 6.2). In Hobbes’ view, moral laws are not divine commands but agreements made to avoid the destructive consequences of unrestrained human behavior. Thus, ethics for Hobbes is rooted in political control and the enforcement of order rather than religious authority.

However, in Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), the Jewish philosopher veers away from Hobbes’ reliance on coercive political authority. In brief, Spinoza is a far more optimistic political thinker than Hobbes. For Hobbes, the purpose of government is to make sure we don’t kill each other. Spinoza is also concerned about the religious wars and religious persecution of 17th-century Europe — especially as a religious minority in the Spanish-owned, Protestant Netherlands. However, Spinoza claims that governments exist primarily to promote the necessary conditions for developing our reason to our fullest potential. In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), Spinoza posits that rational citizens who understand their own nature and interests would logically support the collective good. No Hobbesian coercion necessary.

And so, after the passing of Europe’s Jewish and Anglican moral juggernauts — Spinoza (d. 1677) and Hobbes (d. 1679) — Europe was left with a secular ethical project.

7.2 | Ethics after Hobbes

Criticizing Hobbes

The Social Contract Theory found in Hobbes’ 1651 Leviathan is a selfish, goal-oriented ethics. If you want to remain in our city, then you must follow our rules. Hobbes imagines this to be the basis of morality. Kant strongly disagrees.

When criticizing Hobbes, we could have a go at the implicitness of the consent Hobbes is promoting (ie. do natural-born citizens actually sign a contract stating they’ll abide by the Constitution?). Locke argues this when he explicitly states that lawful governance only arises from the consent of the governed. Or, we could argue that Hobbes doesn’t explain how we should address disagreements in our society — particularly between minorities and the ruling majority. That is, if a minority group disagrees with the majority’s decisions, should they simply accept the majority’s will, or should they be allowed to form their own contract? Or, we could dive into the quagmire that is Hobbesian mutual benefit. To wit, Hobbes states that citizens obey laws in exchange for the government’s protection. But this quid pro quo formula clearly marginalizes vulnerable populations that cannot reciprocate — such as infants, animals, recent immigrants, or future generations. Hobbes gives us no reason to be good to those who can’t benefit us — which would render ethics into nothing more than a transaction.

Yet Kant starts somewhere even more fundamental. For the Prussian philosopher, Hobbes’ entire ethical project of goal-oriented ethics is wrong from the start. Kant dismissively refers to goal-oriented ethics as following hypothetical imperatives. The “hypothetical” in this phrasing refers to “if/then” thinking. In other words, in a hypothetical imperative, a person is motivated by a reward. But this isn’t ethics, Kant says.

“If you want good grades, then you should study. If you want to lose weight, then you should diet. If you want to maintain a good reputation, then you should act well.” These are all examples of hypothetical imperatives. And Kant hates them all. After all, if a person is only behaving because they don’t want to get in trouble, we can hardly call such a person ‘good.’ The ‘good’ person isn’t the person who slows down at the sight of a patrol car or the person who puts their phone away when the usher goes by in a theater. That’s just the self-serving behavior of someone who doesn’t want to get caught. Instead, Kant wants us to think about how our duties should shape our behavior before we ever consider how the outcome affects us.

A Duty-Based Ethics

Deontology is a form of Universal Ethics that focuses on the study of moral duties rather than moral virtue or consequence. The word deontology comes from the Greek words “deon” (Gr. duty) and “logos” (Gr. reason). You’ll recall from our study of Aristotle (Sec 5.2), that teleology is the philosophical study of goals or ends. Well, some, like John Stuart Mill (Sec 8.3) will take a teleological view of ethics — focusing on the ends or consequences of moral actions. But deontology is different than these two. In a deontological view of ethics, one focuses on the moral principles that underlie the fulfillment of one’s duties. That is, in contrast to character (cf. Aristotle) or outcome (cf. Mill), the deontologist concentrates on the reasoning that grounds our duties.

The Centrality of Duty | Kant

Let’s return now to Hobbes’ goal-oriented duties (ie. hypothetical imperatives).

If you’re just being good to get a treat, then you’re not really a moral person after all (cf. Hobbesian selfishness). Behaving well for a tasty treat is how we train animals and toddlers. Goal-oriented, hypothetical imperatives like this are conditional. If you want this, then do that… But that’s not how ethics works, according to Kant. We should do right solely because it’s the right thing to do. The same goes for punishment. If we only behave out of fear of punishment, then we’re not good at all — in such a moment, we’re only working with duty, not from duty. See? If your neighbor refrains from throwing eggs at your car out of fear of the police, does that make her a good person? Of course not. Or if your partner helps you bring groceries into the kitchen so you’ll later watch the show they like, was their assistance a morally praiseworthy act? Not at all.

Here, we see that our motives (ie. reasons for acting) are essential to living ethically. What Kant wants from us is to do the right thing out of a sense of duty. In this way, we are good when we act out of a sense of moral duty, not out of personal gain or self-interest, as Hobbes would have us do. When you think about it, there are many actions that could be considered good but be performed for the wrong reasons — like picking up trash, joining a volunteer organization, or taking your grandmother grocery shopping. If you do them because it’s the right thing to do, then Kant thinks that’s great! But if you’re picking up trash because you owe the city community service hours, or you’re volunteering to earn a scholarship, or helping grandma so she’ll keep you in her will — well, you’re not doing anything good, really. The only way to truly be a moral person, according to Kant, is to act from a sense of duty.

Now, you may ask, “Is it still acting with duty if I enjoy doing it? What if I like to shop for groceries for my partner? What if I like taking my family to church? What if I like volunteering at the animal shelter?” Yes, this is ok for Kant. But we must be clear — the underlying motivation for performing an action must begin from a sense of moral obligation to have moral worth. In other words, the fact you enjoy it or possibly get something out of it must be incidental.

In other words, you’d be doing it whether you enjoy it or not, as it’s the right thing to do.

7.3 | Maxims & Reason - Kant

Good Maxims | Kant

For Kant, the worth of a moral action cannot be derived from its purpose or outcome but only from the moral axiom that it follows. This means that even if an action’s outcome or purpose seems positive (eg. it saves a life), it does not have moral worth unless it was done out of a sense of duty. By prioritizing the duty to do the right thing, Kant places emphasis on the importance of personal responsibility and ethical behavior regardless of external factors.

So what is a moral axiom? Here, Kant is using the German word maxim (Lt. axiom). A maxim is a principle of action for a moral problem. This principle determines the action’s moral worth. That is, if an action arises from a good maxim, then the action is praiseworthy. If an action arises from a bad maxim, it is not praiseworthy.

For example, let’s say that we live by the maxim that “lying is wrong.” So when someone asks our opinion about their new haircut, we’re honest about it. In general, Kant would say such honesty is morally praiseworthy when it arises from a sense of duty to the truth (ie. our action arises from a good maxim, namely that “lying is wrong”). But if you tell your boss that you like his haircut to curry favor with him, then this would be wrong. Why? Because your action arose from a bad maxim (ie. “I should manipulate my boss, so he looks on me favorably”). In another situation, let’s say a friend is going through some difficult stuff and gets a bad haircut. He then asks your opinion. The maxim, “lying is wrong,” may do more harm than good here. So, we might amend our maxim to, “lying is wrong, except when it’s a little white lie to boost a sad friend’s feelings.” Such additional details can aid in building better maxims (ie. the principles by which we act). Just keep in mind — the moral worth of an action (eg. praising someone’s haircut) is determined by whether the action arose from a sense of duty and whether its maxim is sound.

Bad Maxims | Kant

But suppose your friend works in the back kitchen of a busy restaurant. One night, a kitchen fire breaks out, and he goes running for the exit. On his way out, he attempts to push another guy out of his way but accidentally pushes the guy out the door to safety. Was this a morally praiseworthy action for Kant? In a word: No. The consequence or outcome of your friend’s reckless behavior was that the other guy’s life was saved. Sure. But, saving the guy’s life was not on your friend’s mind when he went running for the exit. In short, your friend didn’t push the guy out the door from a sense of duty. He saved a life totally by accident! Here, your friend was operating from a maxim that says, “If there’s a kitchen fire, push people down if you have to in order to reach safety.” This is clearly not a moral maxim. So, a deontologist would call your friend’s pushing immoral because it arose from a bad maxim, even though it also incidentally saved a life. Note here that a consequentialist (cf. Sec 8) will think the action praiseworthy because the outcome (which is their focus) was saving a life.

Commanded by Reason | Kant

In ancient times, we were commanded by the gods (ie. Divine Command Theory). But since the time of Hobbes and Spinoza, we’ve walked away from God-talk in normative ethics (cf. European Wars of Religion). Still, Kant thinks there’s something to those ancient commands or ‘imperatives.’ He thinks ethics works best when focused on commands, but neither divine commands nor goal-oriented, hypothetical imperatives are sufficient (cf. Sec 7.2). Kant thinks there’s a more reasonable, modern answer.

Unlike Hobbes, Kant insists that ethics is never conditional on your selfish, subjective goals. Instead, Kant maintains that ethics is an absolute, immutable part of our reality. For deontologists like Immanuel Kant or W.D. Ross (cf. Sec 7.5), ethics is not something we agree upon but is instead a deep-set part of reality that is as undeniable as the speed of light or the theory of gravity. We don’t agree on ethics. We discover ethics. For Kant, ethical principles have the structure of immutable universal laws. Chief among these laws is the ultimate, absolute law from which all other laws arise: the Categorical Imperative.

If our ethical imperatives are based on universal principles, consistent and applicable to everyone, then there can be no stench of self-interest or favoritism in our maxims. In fact, the only maxims (ie. principles of moral actions) we ought to follow are those we can also impose equally on everyone else. This is what Kant refers to as the Categorical Imperative. In Kant’s words, “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” Kant’s Categorical Imperative has four formulations. In the following lesson (ie. Sec 7.4), we will discuss two of these formulations.

7.4 | Deontological Principles • Kant

The Categorical Imperative: Kant's Principle of Universality

At the very core of Deontology is the claim that everyone must be treated equally in ethics. There cannot be exceptions in Universal Ethics (otherwise, they wouldn’t be universal!). Taking into consideration all we’ve discussed, we may then understand Kant as claiming: I know right from wrong because of the duties that reason can determine should be universally applied [equally and to everyone].

The Categorical Imperative is the ultimate law of ethics for Immanuel Kant. One of its four formulations (ie. the Principle of Universality) involves testing the morality of an action to see if it can be made into a universal law. This involves three steps.

2. ) Determine the maxim of the action. For example, imagine someone is running late to pick up their friend and decides to speed down the highway. Their maxim would be, “It’s ok to speed if you’re late picking up a friend.”

3. ) Imagine everyone adopts this maxim. In a world where speeding is ok if you’re late picking up a friend, our roads would become irrevocably dangerous. This is far worse than what we have now.

4. ) Ask if it’s reasonable to will this maxim on the world. Would it be reasonable to will onto the world the maxim “it’s ok to speed if you’re late picking up a friend,” given that this would make our roads far more dangerous than they are now? No! Well, then, you have your answer. Logic commands you not to speed to pick up your friend because you cannot reasonably will everyone else to behave that way.