Scripture and Israeli Secular Culture 301Christians and secular Zionists. In Israel, the Bible made its way from the
realm of the holy to the temporal, becoming an earthly Bible devoid of
heaven. If the Bible is a story of a nonequilateral triangle whose sides rep-
resent the people of Israel, the land of Israel, and the God of Israel, the tri-
angle’s longest side, God, for the secular Zionists, had faded from the story
(similar to God’s disappearance at that time from the kibbutz movement’s
Passover haggadah).
Th e generations born in the land of Israel sought to “live with the Bible,”
as in the title of a book by Moshe Dayan (the fi rst child born at Kibbutz
Deganya and later a legendary Israeli general and politician),5 and gazed at
its views through biblical lenses, as Yigal Allon (another legendary general
and politician in early Israel) poetically did in My Father’s House:
Under the infl uence of the biblical stories, a new dimension was added to
my hikes on Mt. Tabor, known to me from the day I fi rst opened my eyes.
Of course, nothing was diminished from its concrete reality. Th e church
structures continued to billow on its peak, foreign, not my own, but now
when I climbed up, or when I slid down, there rose up before me the great
deeds of Deborah and Barak the son of Abinoam; here, I would say to my-
self, here stood, then, ten thousand men from the tribes of Naphtali and
Zebulun . . . ; wandering on the Gilboa or its environs brought to my mind
the life, glorious heroism, and death of Saul and Jonathan; and, as if to
complete the tragic picture, from the window of my home I could see the
Arab village Ein Dor, and before me: the saddened King Saul, most beloved
of all Israel’s kings, to me. More than once, fi nding ourselves in Ein Dor, we
looked, wordlessly, for the hut of the ghost-consulting woman of En-dor. 6Th e Zionist secularization of the Bible, with its earthly emphasis and
the negation of the Diaspora, provided fertile ground for the creation of a
movement of secular Israelis in the 1950s who called themselves “the Ca-
naanites.” “We are Hebrews and not Jews,” claimed the Canaanites, recall-
ing the Christian distinction between Israel and Judaism. It is an amusing
paradox that it was Canaanism — which suckled from the Bible’s breast —
that granted legitimacy to idolatry, the Bible’s most hated adversary.7
More recently, a dramatic change has occurred in the secular Jewish-
Israeli society’s culture and in its relation to the Bible. We, Israel’s secular
Jews, severed the umbilical cord that connected us to the Bible.8 Many fac-
tors have contributed to this change, which has become more and more
evident in the past few decades: