Fredy Perlman Archive
Written: 1983.
Source: Originally published by Red and Black.
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: Scanned by NobleSavage; HTML and Code by RevoltLib.com (2021); Proofreading by TheAnarchistLibrary.org
The book at the origin of today’s Civilizing Religions does not begin with Civilization-builders, say with Sumerians who launched the first Leviathan. Its first chapter tells of an earthly garden, Eden, a place reminiscent of the state of nature. Its second chapter tells of the withdrawal of people from the entrails of a large Leviathan. The book then uncritically describes these people’s attempt to launch a Leviathan of their own, but the Book goes on to tell of painful and often insupportable captivities in the bowels of other worms. The overall impression it gives is that the wonders of Civilization are not positive, life-enhancing wonders.
Withdrawals from Civilization are so numerous and so frequent that the life-eating worms appear to be in a continual state of decomposition.
The exodus of Israel from Egypt is not a major withdrawal, but it is a well-documented one, so that we can get an inside view of some of the actions and even some of the thoughts of the participants.
The subjects of the exodus are zeks in Egypt, but they seem relatively privileged zeks. They are pre-literate. They are not people of a single mind, as they reveal later in the story, and if they are not even of a single tribe, they will be welded into one by their later common experiences.
They have not been in Egypt long, only a few generations, so that they remember there’s a world outside of Egypt. Their reference to the earthly garden may even be a memory of a world outside Leviathan. Turner will suggest that the only garden they remember is the Mesopotamian garden of the Lugal and his Akkadian successors.
This may actually be the case with some of them, but I suspect that most of them have something else in mind.
Forty generations after their exodus from Egypt, these people’s scribes will write their Book; in it they will accurately tell of political and military events described on tablets and scrolls available to modern scholars, but not available to the scribes. The memories of pre-literate people are long. People who remember the deeds of Pharaohs, Hittites and Assyrians can also remember that their own ancestors once lived in communities of free human beings, whether in Yemen or Ethiopia, and that these ancestors communed with animals, with Earth, with the spirit of the sky and the spirit of the apple tree.
I suspect that they remember, and call Eden, what others remember as the Golden Age. And if they are uncomfortable in Egypt, the memory that there is an outside, even a pleasant, idyllic outside, must stimulate in them a desire to leave the greatest and wealthiest of all ancient Civilizations.
Despite their nostalgia for what Morgan and Engels will call a more primitive stage of existence, a stage that was not a mode of production, these relatively privileged zeks are not unaware of the material and social conditions of their own age. They know that the Egyptian Leviathan is only one monolith among others, and they seem to know a great deal about the others. This is not surprising, since they remember recent ancestors more vividly than they remember Eden’s Adam, and at least one of these recent ancestors, a man called Abram, hailed from Harran, a town at the very crossroads between the world’s major Leviathans. Even if this Abram did not live near the governor’s palace or the Temple but on the outskirts, he was surely familiar with the inner city and its gardens, and probably with the gardens of other cities as well.
Abram must have been even more familiar with the merchants and soldiers of the great Leviathans, since Harran lay on the road taken by Assyrian traveling salesmen seeking windfall profits in Anatolia, and the salesmen’s peaceful daytime commerce led almost inevitably to clashes of ignorant armies by night, transforming Harran’s outskirts into a darkling plain.
Abram’s kin were surely swept into the confused alarms of struggle and flight. They might even have fought alongside Egyptian or Hittite armored men as auxiliaries. It is unlikely that they were ever auxiliaries to Assyrians, since their Book will express only horror and fear of the death squads sent out by the tyrants of Ashur and Nineveh.
The scribes will write that their ancestor Abram already worshiped only Yahweh, but this is surely wishful thinking on their part, since Abram’s grandchildren will still be honoring several nature gods in their later captivity in Egypt.
We are not told exactly when or why Abram’s kin made their way, or were taken, to Egypt, but there were many occasions when such a journey would have been opportune or even necessary.
* * *
The repeated attempts of Lugalzaggizi’s Akkadian and Amorite successors to set the world-embracing Leviathan back into motion had the unintended effect of setting many of the world’s peoples into motion.
We’ve already seen how disturbing a visit by a merchant, the merchant’s cousin and a few armored men could be. Communities of seed planters and communities of pastoral nomads took up arms, either to protect themselves from future visits or to try to recover their captured kin.
In Anatolia, influential women urged the Pankuš, the council of all, to defend their ways from the onslaught of Death’s merchants, and the more powerful consorts of influential women began to build walls. Later Hittite scribes will refer only to the powerful consort on their tablets, and will refer to him as King Labarnash the first, but they will remember that the king was a mere consort because the women will remain proud and strong into the Scribes’ time. Anatolian women will not be debased so easily; over fifty generations later, Herodotus will speak of Anatolian “Amazons,” and there will still be powerful women in Anatolia into Rome’s patriarchal age.
While the more settled communities resisted the monster by walling themselves in, more mobile pastoral nomads did as the Guti had done and stormed the gates of the cheating Leviathans. By this time the grasping tentacles of the various Leviathans had disrupted the great grandparents of virtually all the peoples who would storm the gates of Leviathans in later ages, great grandparents of Sanskrit and Iranian speakers, of Tungus and Turkish speakers, of Mongols, Finns and Magyars. The Mesopotamians called them Kassites, Hurrians and Mittani. The Egyptians called them Hyksos. The Anatolian-adopted Hittites are said to have originated among them.
Many of these kingless people rode horses and some wielded iron implements, but this did not make them any more Civilized than the copper-using ancestors of the Ojibwa on the Great Lakes; the horses and iron became productive forces, they became Civilization’s technology, only after they became part of Leviathan’s armory.
These peoples were not afraid to attack cities, and fury drove many of them to make a complete mess of their disrupters’ urban centers. Sanskrit-speaking Kassites federated with Elamites razed most of the Amorites’ empire to the ground and reached the very threshold of Babylon.
The Kassites’ cousins, called Hurrians by the Assyrians, former their own federation of mounted men in the Armenian highlands and harassed Ashur as well as Ashur’s Levantine outposts.
The people or peoples called Hyksos federated with Egyptian armies and chased Assyrians from the entire Levant.
The Hittite army allied with Hyksos, Hurrians and Kassites sacked commercial Aleppo, the jewel of the Levant, as well as distant Babylon itself, helping the Kassites impose on Amorites the very burdens the Amorites had imposed on Kassites.
It may be that Abram’s kin helped Hyksos oust Assyrian outposts from the Levant and accompanied some of their fellow-auxiliaries to big brother’s homeland on the Nile, where life would be less swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight. Or it may be that they sought refuge on the Nile a generation later, when mounted Mittani did to Assyria’s realm what the Kassites had done to Babylon’s.
It is also possible that Abram’s kin were captured by the victorious Amoses. Or, a couple of generations after that, they might have been taken to the Nile by a zek-hunting expedition sent out by the second Tutmoses.
It seems likely that Abram’s heirs were already established zeks on the outskirts of Karnak or even further south when Menelaus and his Myceneans fortified their towns on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, when a volcanic eruption in Crete flattened the communal stone lodge which would later be called Minos’s Palace.
They probably saw, and may even have helped build, Queen Hatshepsut’s palace on the Nile’s other shore, one of the most beautiful architectural wonders anywhere, before or since—a palace surrounded by lush tropical gardens which would later revert to desert sands. But they were not impressed by this wonder. Like zeks elsewhere, they probably felt pains in their joints when they viewed the great monuments of their masters. For this same reason they couldn’t have been thinking of the Lugal’s garden when they remembered Eden, and they could hardly have thought their ancestors had originated in a Lugal’s garden.
They were still in Egypt when Queen Hatshepsut was murdered by her successor, when scribes rubbed her name off the cartouches, manufacturing positive evidence that proved there had never been a woman Pharaoh. The zeks must have wondered if all this really had to be done to erase the memory of a woman who had never claimed to be anything other than a man.
The captives could not have known that while Hatshepsut’s name was being besmirched and forgotten in Egypt, the woman-hating Theseus, a Basileus or commander of a band of Myceneans, was defeating Anatolian Amazons, killing Antiope, enslaving her sisters, and entrenching himself in fortified Troy.
* * *
The Israelites in Egypt were by no means ignorant of the ways and deeds of the great Leviathans of their time. We can even suppose they were not of one mind about these ways and deeds. Some among them, like some among the Hyksos, were probably modernizers who thought Lugalzaggizi and other pacifiers of enormous regions brought peace and not the spear. The modernizers were undoubtedly a minority. The majority must have been what we would call Primitivists, people who looked back nostalgically to the ancient garden and its nature gods.
The modernizers among them could not have felt at ease either among their fellow immigrants or among their Egyptian hosts, since numerous Hyksos had been expelled for their foreign views and ways at the time when respectable Egyptians replaced their former confederates as administrators of the Sinai and the Levant. The modernizers could only have felt resentment when the third Tutmoses sent Egyptians ignorant of all Canaanite languages to administer the Pharaoh’s lands in the Levant and to protect these lands from the cruel Mittani, and the would-be ambassadors must have been enraged when the second Amenophis married the daughter of the Mittani Artatama and then formed an alliance with these charioteers against the Hittites.
The children or grandchildren of modernizers as well as primitivists must have been repelled by the third Amenophis, who not only continued the hated alliance with the Mittani and sent embassies to horrid Assyria, but who also married his own daughter. This unspeakable tyrant’s rule went on for almost two generations; fortunately the Ishtar sent by Mittani to help the tyrant live yet longer failed.
Modernizers must have breathed freely for the first time when a royal modernizer rose to the office of Pharaoh as the fourth Amenophis and changed his name to Akhenaten. If this Pharaoh was not the first totalitarian, he was the first revolutionary totalitarian.
It will be said in our day that the grandfathers of Moses learned their monotheism from Akhenaten, who will be thought to have invented it. I think this Pharaoh did not have to invent what had been the common practice his Ziggurat-raising neighbors for more than fifty generations. He could have learned some of the details of this practice from the Semitic immigrants in and near his palace.
The Pharaoh decreed that just as he was the king of kings and lord of lords, so Aten the Sun would henceforth be the god of gods. The revolution was not in the decree but in what followed. Armed bands of newly constituted Priests of Aten, escorted by the Pharaoh’s armies and probably by modernizing immigrants, stormed the Temples of all other gods and expropriated all other priesthoods, giving all the lands and palaces to Aten. This was a forerunner of the more famous religious wars which would devastate Europe at a later age. Egypt had never before experienced such iconoclasm, such persecution, such internal violence.
Unfortunately for the modernizers, conservative priests loyal to the ousted gods, squadrons of them, rose up against the usurpers and against their god Aten. If any of the immigrants had found favor with Akhenaten, they were in trouble now. After placing nine-year old Tutankhamun on the throne, the idol-worshiping priests proceeded to treat the monotheist’s partisans as they had been treated. A new purge of foreigners began. This was a good time to leave Egypt.
If Akhenaten did not give the Israelites monotheism, he did do them a different favor: he had abandoned the Levant when he had called his armies home to smash idols. But the persecuted quickly learned that the Hittites had replaced the Egyptians as the Levant’s occupiers, so the Levant might not be safe for Egyptianized Semites yet.
So the Israelites stayed where they were and lay low while army commander Horemheb besmirched Akhenaten’s name, claiming the monotheist’s administration had been corrupt, his tax collections fraudulent, his requisitions arbitrary, and his army a band of pillagers.
The Israelites might have heard that zeks allied with nomadic Arameans had recently ousted Babylon’s tyrant and that Assyrian death squads had promptly invaded Babylon and inflicted abominable mutilations on the rebels. So still the Israelites stayed where they were while the first and then the second Ramses did to the memory of Akhenaten what the third Tutmoses had done to the memory of Hatshepsut: erased it.
* * *
At last the awaited day approached.
The second Ramses, a megalomaniac who ordered mountain sized statues of himself built all over Egypt, decided to conquer the world. This Pharaoh drained Egypt of food and supplies in order to provision his armies. He marched westward and reduced free Libyan tribes to tribute-paying subjects. Then he marched east and north, toward the Levant, with the largest army ever assembled. This army, which provisioned itself on route by plundering every community along its line of motion, gave rise to undying resentment along the entire southeastern Mediterranean coast.
Meanwhile, the forewarned Hittites conscripted the largest army ever assembled north of Egypt and prepared to face the invaders, their army giving rise to resentments along the middle sea’s entire northeastern shore.
The two slouching armored giants met at Kadesh on the Orontes. The scribes of the Egyptian and those of the Hittite both claimed their Lord had been victorious, but the Leviathans of each began to decompose the day after the victory.
The victorious Hittites returned to Anatolia and were beset by resentful Mycenean and other bands of armed adventurers. None of the Hittites’ Anatolian subjects were willing to keep supporting Khatushilish’s palace or his army.
On the Levant, the Hittites still held Carchemish, but Assyrians led by Shalmaneser put an abrupt end to Hittite Carchemish. The Assyrians went on to “slay the host of the Mittani” and might have swallowed the entire Levant if they had not had to turn eastward against resurgent Babylonians aided by Elamites.
Phoenician mercantile cities, particularly Tire and Sidon, free at last to feed their own Baal and Moloch instead of the gods of their Hittite overlords, dispatched their large ships to Libya and elsewhere in Africa, to the Aegean and the Adriatic, in fact all the way across the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic. They left signs of their visits in many parts of the world, but they did not reveal their destinations to competitors.
By the sheerest coincidence, at the opposite side of the globe, across an ocean that would not be officially sailed until a certain Columbus performed the feat, colossal heads were sculpted, heads of people who look nothing like anyone who ever lived anywhere near Tehuantepec, the so-called Olmec heads. It would of course be insulting to suggest to present-day Nahuatl and Maya people that their ancestors did not invent practices like the building of Ziggurats or the feeding of human victims to Baal. But such a suggestion would not have been insulting to those people’s ancestors, who actually insisted they had learned much from strange-looking foreigners who hailed from the sea.
Be that as it may, on the Mediterranean the great ships’ merchants gave rise to defensive leagues equipped with small ships, and these soon set out on plundering expeditions of their own.
The whole world seemed to have been set in frantic motion.
The second Ramses returned to the Nile in time to celebrate his feat, and he ordered his sculptors to portray the victory at Kadesh on the walls of every new Temple, a different moment of the battle on every wall.
But soon Ramses’ Leviathan decomposed as surely as his foe’s. A palace conspiracy almost did the Pharaoh in. Zeks in labor gangs refused, simply refused to perform their assigned tasks. This was an early recorded instance of a strike. The concern expressed by the scribes suggest it might even have been a general strike. And then news came that seaborne Libyan and other mysterious foreigners were raiding the Nile’s delta.
If the Israelites were ever going to withdraw from their Egyptian captivity, this was surely the time.
* * *
The withdrawing captives place themselves in the charge of a Moses, an Egyptian at least on his mother’s side. (In Egypt names and wealth are still passed through the female line, an ancient custom the scribes and Pharaohs could abolish with no better success than the Anatolian Hittites.)
Moses may be a minor palace official who fails to rise because of his family connections among the foreigners. The man’s later utterances are fanatically patriarchal, and this fanaticism cannot be explained by pointing to the patriarchal tendencies of pastoral nomads; materials will be found which show Israelite pastoral nomads worshiping female as well as male deities in Egypt. His father was probably an official during Akhenaten’s reign, lost his office when the monotheistic Pharaoh fell, and has since been grumbling and airing his modernist views to his compatriots. The son, Moses, obviously rejects his mother as well as her people and chooses to become a champion, a deliverer, of his father’s and half-brother’s people.
We will have no good reason to undermine Moses’ motives, to attribute his choice to resentment. The Book portrays him as a principled member of the ruling class who casts his lot with the oppressed, and we can accept that and start with it. He’s as ideally suited for the task of leading the captives out of Leviathan as any Ensi’s cousin. He has merely to say, “Let my people go,” and his former fellow-officials and even relatives will issue the necessary orders and passports.
The destination is clear. Moses will lead the captives to Canaan, which has recently been vacated by all the large armies, and at least two of the occupiers are not likely to return soon: the Egyptian is tied up by strikers, conspirators and raiders, and the Hittite seems, from all reports Moses must have heard, to be decomposing altogether, beset by continual famines and hostile raiders. The third large army, the Assyrian, is busy elsewhere; its tyrant Tukulti Ninurta is on the Tigris subduing Babylonians and Elamites and proclaiming himself King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Sun of all the peoples. So Canaan seems like a safe place of refuge, at least for the time being.
But to Moses’ followers, at least to the “primitivists” among them, Canaan means something else; it means a common language, an original common home; it probably means something like the Eden they’ve wanted to return to. Why else would they call a war-torn Levantine province “the promised land”?
There is no reason to assume Moses is a modernizer like his father, especially in view of the fact that he does leave Egypt with the zeks. The Book makes it clear that there are no modernizers in the entire band of wanderers. In fact, these people’s disgust with the amenities of Civilization is so profound that it will be felt by the Civilized urban scribes who forty generations later will still write with revulsion of the “fleshpots” of Egypt and the “harlot” Babylon.
Moses was clearly no modernizer in Egypt. But once he’s out on the desert sands, and some of the people pull toward Yemen, others toward the Red Sea and Ethiopia, Moses has to decide just exactly who and what he is.
The Moses of the Book is not a modernizer. He does not think that the lubrication and streamlining of a Leviathan can have any human meaning. He’s as repelled by Ashur, Khatti and Ur as any of his followers.
But where is the promised land? Most of his followers are apparently primitivists. And apparently they are either weak or blind, since it should be clear to them that once they safely reach the desert, Moses can do nothing more for them. They cling to him, either because of loyalty or because they are still intimidated by the former member of the Egyptian palace staff.
Moses is neither a modernizer nor a primitivist. It is clear that he is an armored man who is unable to remove his armor. He is like Lenin. He seeks within, but finds no destination there; all he finds in himself is bits of Leviathanic armor. He hates Ur and Ashur, and his contemporary Tukulti Ninurta makes him shake with rage. But the only voice inside him is the voice of Lugalzaggizi, the voice of the Almighty, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Male of Males. Lenin will hear the voice of Electrification. Yet Moses hates every specific King of Kings, just as Lenin will hate capitalists. Moses abstracts the King, makes him a god, just as Lenin will abstract Electrification and make it Communism.
By this act Moses projects his inner emptiness, his armor, his own dead spirit, into the very Cosmos.
If any in that group think of Eden as a Lugal’s garden, it is Moses. The gods are all dead for this upper class Egyptian. For him there is no Eden, there is only Leviathan.
It is ironic that this man for whom there is no outside should have been the one to lead the others out.
Of course he hadn’t thought all this out before he left Egypt, and perhaps he expected the armor to come off, perhaps he hoped some glimmer in him would come alive. But nothing does. Only an abstraction stirs inside him, bodiless, sexless, neuter and immortal. The abstraction is Leviathan itself, as concept.
We will all know that his followers do not like what they hear. As soon as he turns his back they form the ancient, sacred circle of the old community. They abandon themselves. They dream. They are possessed. They honor a golden calf, not because she’s golden but because she’s feminine, because she gives birth to life, because she’s Earth’s and because she is Earth.
The people know the difference between the dead idols of the Egyptians and the living symbols of their own ancestors. The remember. Their insides haven’t gone dead. They are zeks and children of zeks. They always knew the armor was a burden they would shed one day, and when the day comes, they are able to shed it.
Moses is challenged. He can respond by going to them, by listening to their voices. He’s still Moses the man, the potential human being. He’s free. He can let the living glimmer inside him open up, like an egg; he can choose to come alive.
But Moses responds by turning his back to them. He lets the armor take over. He stiffens. W. Reich will say he becomes rigid. He chooses to let the potential remain Nothing, to let the armor extinguish the little glimmer of Life there was. He lets Leviathan speak through him. And the voice that speaks is not that of Akhenaten, the Sun, but that of Lugalzaggizi, the Lord of Lords.
The armor speaks of no garden. It expresses “a vision of life that is spiritually light years removed from the mythic community,” as Turner will put it. The voice of Leviathan speaks of Commandments and Punishments. It does not speak of ways, of paths to Being, but of laws, of closed gates. It does not say: Thou canst and Thou shalt Be. It says: Thou shalt not.
And woe to those who disobey. Just as the thing, Leviathan, has its police to persecute, torture and execute those who stray from its justice, so the concept of Leviathan, Yahweh, has its police.
But the concept’s police is not itself a concept. Moses gives this task to the life-giver herself, to Nature—not all of Nature, but only her irruptions, only her violence, all condensed and concentrated as in Lugalzaggizi’s own god in the Ziggurat. Earthquakes, storms, floods and plagues are Yahwehs’s instruments of persecution, torture and execution. The goddess worshiped in the calf is turned against her worshipers.
And now comes the crowning touch. Now Moses becomes an actual forerunner of Lenin. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” This is something Moses may well have learned from Akhenaten. This is modern. No Sumero-Akkadians have yet been able to impose the “no other.” Moses does not put on mere bits of armor; he wears the whole thing.
The Commandment still has a Sumerian form, but its modern meaning is spelled out:
And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it with fire, and ground it to powder, and strewed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.
The Pharaoh’s former official knows that captives from free communities have to be made over into zeks; they have to be domesticated, they have to be forced to eat their freedom.
But the calf-worshipers still resist. They rebel. They are ready to withdraw again, this time from their own Leader’s Leviathan.
So the armored man drops the veil and makes the armor visible to all. He stops being a medium though whom Lugalzaggizi speaks. He becomes Lugalzaggizi. He sets in motion a general purge with a police which is neither a concept nor Earth’s concentrated wrath:
“Put ye every man his sword upon his thigh, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.” And the sons of Levi [they will later form a Defense League] did according to the word of Moses; and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.
This massacre is the first Holocaust perpetrated in the name of Yahweh. And there is neither human recourse nor human justification. “I am that I am.” This is Dogma.
The anti-human, anti-natural face of what will later be called Totalitarianism, has to be worn together with the rest of the armor. Every last speck of human skin has to be concealed. Leviathan has neither life nor soul. It is that it is. It is its own sole goal. It is Death, unmitigated, unjustified, unexplained.
We will get used to Science, Technology and the Secular State; we will not be horrified by the inhumanity of this man’s vision; some of us will even be impressed by the progressive, nay prophetic, character of it.
But those who left Egypt, those of them who are still alive, cannot stomach the monstrous regression, and Moses knows it. If he doesn’t act quickly, the mass murder will be followed by mass suicide or by an Exodus of those who are left. “I am that I am” is not enough for people who still remember.
So he brings out the famous Covenant. He has already told them, “if ye will hearken unto My voice... then ye shall be Mine own treasure...” Now, like a horse trainer, he tells them how they will be treasured, what reward their obedience will yield them. They will reach the Promised Land. But in this land they will remain zeks. The curse of toilsome labor will not be lifted from them. The land will not be Eden, a place which no longer exists for this armored man (just as women don’t exist for him; only the sons exist; women are nothing but childbearing machines, vessels which might as well be made of clay, the stuff to which Earth herself has been reduced, stuff which is to be manipulated and mutilated).
The Promised Land is a new Leviathan, and the treasured will be rewarded as Lugalzaggizi’s Ensis are rewarded. Thou shalt expropriate the others. Thou shalt inherit great and goodly cities which though buildest not, and houses full of good things which thou filledst not, and vineyards and olive trees which thou plantedst not.
This is the land of milk and honey, and Moses’ troops are to storm it like Pioneers:
And I will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, The Hivite and the Jebusite...
It is significant that the Canaanite, the cousin, is to be the first victim. Leviathan has no kin. Whoever stands in the way, whatever lives outside it, is its enemy. All beings not encased in its entrails, whether people or animals or trees, are its enemy.
...Replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
This, as Turner points out, is a declaration of war against the Wilderness, and this word has now taken on an awesome meaning: it refers to “every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” This is Leviathan’s declaration of war against all Life.
Moses dies, but the “sons of Levi” actually reach the Promised Land, the land of their one-time kin. And they do not arrive as kin; they do not form the ancient circle or revive the lost community. They arrive like Tukulti Ninurta’s armed Assyrians, as the Nemesis of their former kin. One of the sons of Levi, a man called Deborah, a forerunner of the armored Joan of Arc, fills the Pioneers with genocidal hatred. She, or rather he, exhorts, raves and gesticulate to enrage the sons against every last Moabite, Hazorite and Canaanite in the Promised Land.
Moses dies, but the Leviathan he sets in motion is immortal, and if in time it, too, will be swallowed, its Concept will one day light the way of monstrosities undreamed by Lugalzaggizi or Moses.
And thou shalt consume all the peoples that the Lord thy God shall deliver unto thee; thine eye shall not pity them...
As Turner will observe, this is a description of things to come; this already foresees the “dark clouds over Africa, the Americas, the Far East, until finally even the remotest islands and jungle enclaves are struck by fire and sword and by the subtler weapon of conversion by ridicule.” This is already the discovery of the New World.
* * *