The Chosen and the Ordinary: The Myth of Jewish Exceptionalism

Every civilization has told itself a flattering story about its moral superiority. The Jews told theirs through a covenant with a singular God, the Hindus through a moral cosmos of karma and dharma, the Chinese through harmony between Heaven and Earth, the Greeks through reason and virtue, and the Romans through law and order. But moral superiority is not proven by revelation; it is demonstrated by conduct, by reason, and by the civilization’s measurable achievements in knowledge and human welfare. The claim that the ancient Israelites were morally exceptional or scientifically advanced collapses under empirical scrutiny.

The Jewish moral code is usually identified with the Mosaic Law — the Ten Commandments and the hundreds of commandments scattered through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. It is praised as the foundation of Western ethics. Yet nearly every clause in that code had a precedent. The prohibitions against murder, theft, perjury, and adultery are all explicit in the Code of Hammurabi, written centuries earlier in Babylon [1]. Hammurabi’s justice was contractual and civic, designed to protect the weak from the strong. Mosaic law narrowed the moral field from social justice to divine obedience. Where Hammurabi’s ethics were human-centered, Moses’s were theocentric. The shift from human fairness to divine command did not advance morality; it sacralized it and thus froze it.

The real revolution in ethics was not the invention of monotheism but the discovery that good and evil can be judged without invoking a deity. In India, the Upanishads and Buddhist Nikāyas already taught that ethical conduct arises from awareness, not from fear of punishment [2]. In China, Confucius grounded virtue in empathy and reciprocity [3]. In Greece, Socrates made reason the midwife of moral truth [4]. These systems derived ethics from observation and reflection. The Mosaic code derived it from revelation. The difference is not minor: one invites argument, the other demands obedience.

The moral circle of the Hebrew Bible is narrow. “Thou shalt not kill” applied within the covenant community, not beyond it. The same scripture commands extermination of Canaanites and Amalekites and mandates death for idolaters and blasphemers [5]. Yahweh is moral toward his own and merciless to outsiders. By contrast, the Buddhist and Jain traditions made compassion universal; Confucianism made humanity relational rather than tribal; Stoicism made moral reason the birthright of all [6]. These are cosmopolitan moralities. The Hebrew code is particularist — ethical for insiders, annihilative toward others.

Prophets like Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah are often celebrated as voices of social justice. Yet their anger is theological, not philosophical. Their grievance is not with the morality of God but with Israel’s failure to obey Him [7]. They never question whether a righteous God could command cruelty. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son is praised as faith, though in any rational moral system it would be barbarism [8]. Obedience elevated above conscience is the first form of moral totalitarianism. In that moment, ethics became a function of power disguised as piety.

The Mosaic code contributed a crucial but limited innovation: it bound law to morality. Yet that bond was double-edged. Once moral law became divine, it could no longer evolve. The result was stability without progress. Other civilizations, freer of revelation, allowed moral reflection to grow through argument. The Hindu concept of dharma acknowledged moral ambiguity [9]. The Buddhist precepts forbade killing and lying not because a god forbade them but because they caused suffering [10]. The Confucian virtue of ren required constant self-correction. Socratic ethics demanded debate. These are living moral systems, open to revision. Mosaic morality was fossilized perfection.

Every major ethical advance in later history — abolition, secular education, gender equality, freedom of conscience — was achieved not by obedience to divine law but by rebellion against it [11]. The Hebrew Bible normalized slavery; it sanctified patriarchy; it legislated purity codes that made women ritually unclean [12]. Only when the Enlightenment dethroned revelation did morality become rational and universal. It was Spinoza, not Moses, who separated ethics from theology [13]. It was Kant, not any prophet, who sought a moral law valid for all rational beings. When morality ceased to be Jewish, it became human.

If we now turn from ethics to empirical science, the contrast becomes categorical. Ancient Israel produced no astronomy, no mathematics, no medicine, no engineering, and no natural philosophy [14]. The Hebrew Bible’s cosmology is pre-scientific: a flat earth under a solid firmament holding the waters above [15]. Disease is caused by sin; drought by divine wrath. Knowledge is moralized, not investigated. The curiosity that built telescopes and measured stars was absent because inquiry itself was suspect. To question creation was to challenge the Creator.

By contrast, India, China, Egypt, Greece, and Persia each built empirical traditions that transformed human understanding. Āryabhaṭa calculated π, measured the Earth’s rotation, and conceived of heliocentrism centuries before Copernicus [16]. Sushruta described surgical instruments and procedures unmatched until modern times [17]. Pāṇini’s grammar anticipated formal logic. The Chinese observed eclipses, recorded comets, and invented the compass, seismograph, and paper [18]. The Greeks defined geometry, physics, and biology; the Romans turned theory into engineering [19]. The Egyptians developed anatomy, calendar science, and monumental architecture through experiment and measurement. The Israelites developed none of these. Their genius lay in covenant and law, not in reason and observation.

Defenders of Jewish exceptionalism often argue that monotheism itself prepared the ground for science — that belief in one rational Creator implied an ordered universe governed by discoverable laws. But this is theological hindsight. The biblical God is a legislator, not a mathematician [20]. His laws are moral edicts, not natural constants. Rain falls because He opens the heavens; the sea parts because He wills it. The Hebrew cosmos is miraculous, not lawful. The notion of natural law came not from Sinai but from Aristotle, Archimedes, and the later rationalists who secularized causality [21]. Science began not with faith in one God but with doubt about all gods.

Nor does Jewish moral history stand alone in virtue. Every civilization developed its own moral architecture: Egyptian Ma’at as balance and truth; Persian Asha as cosmic order; Hindu Ahimsa as nonviolence; Chinese Li as social harmony; Greek Arete as excellence [22]. None claimed divine monopoly on morality. Only the Hebrew conception fused ethics with identity, making goodness an ethnic privilege. To be righteous was to be chosen. This fusion produced moral intensity but also moral exclusion. Compassion became conditional. The others universalized virtue without revelation.

When Judaism’s moral structure was absorbed by Christianity and Islam, its exclusivity metastasized. The chosen tribe became the chosen church, then the chosen ummah. The logic of obedience expanded into global theology. The same moral architecture that held a small community together now armed empires with the certainty of divine right. The purity laws of Leviticus mutated into inquisitions, crusades, and jihads [23]. What began as covenantal morality ended as cosmic authoritarianism. The Mosaic legacy became the template for total faith.

Meanwhile, in civilizations untouched by Abrahamic revelation, inquiry remained a virtue. In India, knowledge itself was sacred; in China, the study of nature was a form of moral cultivation; in Greece, to reason about the cosmos was an act of reverence toward the rational order of existence [24]. These cultures produced philosophies that led naturally to science because they saw the universe as intelligible, not inscrutable. When Jewish and Christian scholars later encountered Greek and Indian thought, they baptized or censored it but never generated it. The empirical spirit arrived from outside theology and survived in spite of it.

None of this diminishes the later intellectual brilliance of Jewish thinkers. But their achievements emerged after the collapse of biblical authority. Spinoza was excommunicated for his rationalism; Freud dismantled the soul invented by religion; Einstein’s God was the impersonal harmony of nature, not the tribal legislator of Sinai [25]. The modern Jewish genius for science was born not in obedience but in emancipation. The diaspora produced reason precisely because revelation had failed to explain the world.

To claim exceptionalism on moral or scientific grounds is to misunderstand the nature of both. Morality becomes exceptional only when it transcends obedience; science becomes exceptional only when it rejects certainty. Ancient Israel achieved neither. Its moral law was absolute, its worldview static. Its prophets were eloquent, its ethic fierce, but its curiosity bounded by faith. When measured against India’s speculative breadth, China’s pragmatic intelligence, Greece’s rational daring, or Egypt’s architectural empiricism, Israel’s achievement is spiritual rather than intellectual — the creation of a moral narrative, not a science of nature.

Every civilization chooses its sacred object. The Jews sanctified law, the Hindus consciousness, the Chinese harmony, the Greeks reason, the Romans order. Only one of these sanctifications hindered inquiry — the one that made doubt a sin. Where there is sin in curiosity, there can be no science. Where revelation is infallible, observation becomes irrelevant. That is why the empirical age had to begin in rebellion against revelation. Galileo’s telescope and Newton’s calculus were the final vindication of the heretics [26].

The myth of Jewish exceptionalism endures because the West inherited Jewish moral vocabulary but replaced its theology with Greek reason. Modern liberalism still speaks of justice, mercy, and conscience in the language of prophets but with the epistemology of scientists [27]. The moral achievements of the modern world — rights, equality, humanitarianism — were not gifts of Yahweh but conquests of reason. The Ten Commandments became universal only when stripped of their theocratic foundation. The light that guides the modern conscience shines from Athens and the Enlightenment, not from Sinai.

Ancient Israel’s greatness lies in moral intensity, not moral universality; in theological imagination, not empirical discovery. It forged the grammar of faith but not the language of reason. Its covenant with God became the prototype for moral absolutism. It offered passion, identity, endurance — but not knowledge of nature, not the curiosity that liberates the human mind. That is not condemnation. It is historical classification. In ethics, Israel was one moral tribe among many; in science, it was a spectator among innovators. Its legacy has moved hearts and hardened dogmas, but it did not move the stars.

Measured by the twin standards of ethics and empirical science, the civilization of ancient Israel was neither superior nor exceptional. It was morally earnest, theologically creative, but intellectually confined. The true revolutions of humanity — in conscience and in science — came from those who questioned revelation rather than those who revered it. Moral universality was the gift of philosophers, not prophets. The laws of nature were written not by God on stone but by human reason on the cosmos itself. To see that clearly is to end the myth of the chosen and to begin the story of the ordinary — of humankind freed from obedience, finally capable of wonder.

Citations

1. The Code of Hammurabi, trans. L.W. King (Babylon, c. 1750 BCE).
2. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.5; Dhammapada 183–187.
3. Analects 12.2–12.5.
4. Plato, Apology 38a–b; Republic Book IV.
5. Deuteronomy 7:1–2; 1 Samuel 15:3; Leviticus 24:16.
6. Acaranga Sutra 1.3.1–3; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations VI.44.
7. Isaiah 1:16–17; Amos 5:21–24.
8. Genesis 22:2–12.
9. Mahābhārata, 12.110.11: “Dharma is subtle.”
10. Vinaya Pitaka I.101; Anguttara Nikāya V.57.
11. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford, 2001).
12. Exodus 21:20–21; Leviticus 15:19–24.
13. Spinoza, Ethics (1677).
14. W.G. Lambert, “Ancient Israel and the Near Eastern Scientific Tradition,” Iraq, Vol. 36 (1974).
15. Genesis 1:6–8.
16. Āryabhaṭīya, I.10–18.
17. Sushruta Samhita, I.6–9.
18. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1954).
19. Euclid, Elements c. 300 BCE; Vitruvius, De Architectura.
20. Exodus 19–20.
21. Aristotle, Physics II.3; Archimedes, On the Equilibrium of Planes.
22. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. II (Berkeley, 1976).
23. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (Oxford, 1957).
24. Confucius, Great Learning 1; Chāndogya Upanishad 7.1–7.26.
25. Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670); Albert Einstein, “Religion and Science,” NY Times Magazine, 1930.
26. Galileo, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615); Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica (1687).
27. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard, 2007).