THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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the Promised Land of course, after they had settled down, the communal life quickly came to an end. From the conquered Canaanites, who had long reached the
agricultural and urban stage, farming and wine­growing were adopted; crafts and trades, rich and poor developed, in glaring class distinctions, and debtors were sold
abroad as slaves by their creditors. The two Books of Kings are as full of famine as of the glitter of wealth which produced it. On the one hand: ‘And there was a sore
famine in Samaria’ (1 Kings 18, 2), on the other hand, King Solomon ‘made silver to be in Jerusalem as stones’ (1 Kings 10, 27). In the midst of this exploitation, and
thundering against it, the prophets appeared, drew up the notion of judgment, and in the same breath the oldest outlines of social utopia. And they did this — giving
proof of continuity with the semi­communist Bedouin period — in connection with semi­nomadic opponents still close to the Bedouins, with cumbersome and isolated
figures, the so­called Nazarites. There was also a connection with the Rechabites, a tribe in the south, which had held aloof from the opulence and money economy of
Canaan, and remained faithful to the old desert god. The Nazarites themselves were also externally recognizable by their desert clothing, their hair cloaks and unshorn
hair, and they abstained from wine; their Yahweh, still a stranger to private property, became for them the god of the poor. Samson, Samuel, and Elijah were Nazarites
(1 Samuel 1, 11; 2 Kings 1, 8), but so was John the Baptist (Luke 1, 15): all of them enemies of the Golden Calf, and also of the opulent masters' Church which
stemmed from the Canaanite Baal. Thus a single line, full of twists and turns, but recognizably the same, runs from the half­primitive communism remembered by the
Nazarites to the preaching of the prophets against wealth and tyranny, and to the early Christian communism founded on love. It runs almost unbroken in the
background, and the famous prophetic depictions of a future kingdom of social peace take their colour from a Golden Age which was not just a legend. Similarly their
criticism of the ‘apostasy’ from Yahweh takes its bearings from Nazaritism: for this apostasy is a turning from the precapitalist Yahweh so to speak towards Baal, and
also towards that masters' Yahweh who conquered Baal at the price of becoming a god of luxury himself. Accordingly, prophets arose in times of great internal and
external tension, admonishing people to change their ways. Amos, who says of himself that he is a poor cowherd who picks mulberries, is the oldest of the prophets
(around 750 B.C.), and perhaps the greatest: and his Yahweh sets things alight. ‘But I will send a fire upon Judah, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem …
because they sold the righteous for silver, and