Scripture and Israeli Secular Culture 305To be sure, many of us feel more comfortable reading Judges than
Joshua, since Joshua relates the conquest of a land that is inhabited by
another people, though it was promised by God to Israel’s patriarchs. In
Judges, on the other hand, all of Israel’s wars constitute their defending the
land from enemies who were brought by God to punish Israel for straying
aft er idols (Judges 2:13 – 16). Th e book of Judges is the expression of our
guilt feelings: each Israelite victory is proof of God’s mercy, evidence of
God granting another opportunity to Israel to cling to God and follow in
His ways.
Turning to the topic of returning to the land, we feel more comfortable
with the return to Zion from Babylonian exile than we do with the return
from Egyptian servitude, since the return from Babylon was accompanied
by many hardships and diffi cult tests that sprung from the unworthy be-
havior of Israel’s enemies: “When Sanballat and Tobiah, and the Arabs, the
Ammonites, and the Ahdodites heard that healing had come to the walls
of Jerusalem, that the breached parts had begun to be fi lled, it angered
them very much, and they all conspired together to come and fi ght against
Jerusalem and to throw it into confusion” (Nehemiah 4:1 – 2). We readily
identify with Nehemiah’s response, a combination of construction and de-
fense: “From that day on, half my servants did work and half held lances
and shields, bows and armor. . . . Th ose building the wall and the basket-
carriers were burdened, doing work with one hand while the other held a
weapon” (ibid., vv. 10 – 11).
It was thus no coincidence that when the minister of education at the
time of the founding of the state, Ben-Zion Dinur, sought to shape the ob-
servance of erev Yom Ha-Atzmaut (the evening of Israel’s Independence
Day) as a seder like on Passover eve, a family ritual to be observed around
the holiday table that would be set, in this case, with the “Holiday Reader
for Independence Day Meal,”13 the “haggadah” that celebrated the miracle
of Israel’s resurrection in its land and the establishment of the state con-
tained no references to Joshua. Th e biblical style of the reader harbors
echoes of Nehemiah’s language, not Joshua’s: “And they have come from
all the countries to revive the Land and to inherit it, and our enemies have
conspired against us, and they rose against us, together, to fall upon us and
to stop us from our work. From that day on half our servants did work and
half held weapons and the night was for guarding and the day for work.”14
Th e question of which biblical texts we feel more comfortable with is, in
the end, irrelevant, since it would be disturbing were a book (or, really, li-
brary), written over two thousand years ago, to refl ect contemporary beliefs