76 A History of Judaism
Such preoccupation left little space for speculation on God’s relation
to the rest of humankind. The God of Israel was also Lord of the Uni-
verse, but what, in the eyes of Jews, this meant for the behaviour of
non- Jews was left unclear. In the exodus from Egypt, the suffering of the
Egyptians is simply background to God’s demonstration of his care for
his people. God is said to harden Pharaoh’s heart again and again in
order to make this demonstration more impressive; the narrative has no
interest in the spiritual wellbeing of Pharaoh himself. But the lack of a
coherent universalist theology did not prevent the inclusion in the bib-
lical corpus of many stories and notions with universalist implications,
from the rainbow which signalled God’s promise to humankind never
again to flood the world as in the time of Noah to the notion of Israel
as a ‘light to the nations’, teaching God’s morality to other peoples. The
Bible contained hopes for a gathering of the nations in Jerusalem in the
last days to worship the God of Israel, and celebrated the successful
preaching of the prophet Jonah to the gentile inhabitants of Nineveh
which led them to repent. The development of a clear set of moral and
religious rules for non- Jews was complicated by the assumption that the
most moral gentiles could demonstrate their virtue by worshipping the
God of Israel, as in the story of the Moabitess Ruth, whose reward for
her faithfulness to her mother- in- law Naomi was to become the great-
grandmother of King David. Such was the power of Ruth’s affirmation
that ‘your people shall be my people, and your God my God’. Accept-
ance of the potential of non- Jews for religious perfection cohabits in the
Bible alongside the suspicion of gentiles which spurred Ezra to insist
that those who had returned to Israel from Babylon and married foreign
women from the peoples of the land should send those wives away
with their children, demonstrating that the primary concern at least of
this narrative was Israel and the covenant: ‘We have broken faith with
our God.’^9
Six of the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God on Mount
Sinai relate to human behaviour in relation not to God but to other
humans: ‘Honour your father and your mother ... You shall not mur-
der. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not
bear false witness against your neighbour. You shall not covet your
neighbour’s house ... or anything that belongs to your neighbour.’ The
biblical laws, expanded at considerable length elsewhere in the Penta-
teuch, cover civil and criminal law, laying down penalties for theft or
murder and rules for deciding property disputes, but they also legislate
in many areas that in other societies would be considered more matters