Ben Hur, the novel -- pt. 6

So Lew Wallace. We’re up to Chapter 8 of Ben Hur and he gets into something he should have left alone.

Joseph and Mary are in Jerusalem talking to somebody who knows that Joseph is descended from David. So Joseph’s children of his body could be candidates for Moshiach. But Jesus was not the son of his body. Every Christian will tell you that. It means that Joseph’s ancestry is irrelevant. But Christian scripture wants to claim that Jesus was descended from David. Seriously, how many people do you know who have read Ben Hur and of them, how many know that Moshiach must be a genetic descendant of David?

But it’s worse. Almost none of the people who read Ben Hur know that Talmud discusses two Moshichim. One is descended from Joseph ben Yaaqov, the ancestor of Joshua who was Mosheh’s aide-de-camp and led the Israelites when they began to occupy the Holy Land. This Moshiach will come first and “will die”. The other, descended from David, “will not die”.

This could be a metaphor. It could be a tacit recognition that the Samaritans do not have a viable culture. Persecution of Samaritans under Hadrian impacted them differently from Jews; you have to be born a Samaritan but you can be a convert to Judaism.

This is like the situation in Greece, which the Talmudic rabbis didn’t know or care about. You had to be born a Spartan, one of the Equals. You had to belong to a mess club, and if you were expelled you were no longer an Equal. The birth rate was low and weak children were killed at birth; some died during the brutal training regime. When 300 Equals died at Thermopylae, that was a disaster but it was not felt for a hundred years. At the end of the Peloponnesian War, when the Athinaians captured 142 Equals, that pretty much ended the Spartans as a force.

But Athins gave citizenship to its colonies and to some slaves, so it could always recruit its population. In Athins, military service was compulsory across the ten tribes, and they had no trouble recruiting as long as the population stayed steady or increased. And it did increase, up to the plague in the Peloponnesian war, and then recovered afterwards.

Whatever Talmud means by “moshiach ben Yosef”, it is also a nod to the northern kingdom which did go down to disaster under the Assyrians, and a recognition that in Talmudic times the Samaritans underwent great persecutions after about 200 CE, after the death of their great sage Bar Rabbah. The Jews went out into the Diaspora, collecting converts along the way, until the disastrous decrees of Theodosius II, but Christians and later Muslims decimated the Samaritans.

So. The other mistake in this chapter is that Mary’s descent is also irrelevant. As with priests, descent in the male line is required for moshiach.

And then the bigoted “Jews all look alike”.

People banned Huckleberry Finn because it used a word that Sam Clemens grew up hearing all the time. Wallace grew up hearing about “the hook-nosed Jew”; have any of you looked at a photo of the painting of the Duke of Wellington lately? He was known to his troops as “Old Beaky”, among other things. Or “the long-nosed Jew”, like the recent caricature of Zelenskyy about which one person on Twitter said “I didn’t think he had a nose like that” and I tweeted a reply pointing out that this was a classic anti-Semitic slur.

And it’s a European Christian slur, as you ought to realize if you know what the term “Roman nosed” means, whether you’re talking about horses or people. So if you’re going to ban an American book that happens to record an American reality, what are you going to do about an American book that is woefully ill-informed and repeats European racial slurs?

On my Gibbon thread I pointed out that he pretends to write history when he really writes tabloid trash, and we have good reason for kicking him to the curb because 200 years of research makes him irrelevant. Wallace is writing fiction and he knows it. Are you going to treat him equally with Mark Twain or not? That’s what you have to decide.