We can trace an instance of the movement from group to individual responsibility in Mesopotamian culture in the story of the primordial Flood. That story is known at least from the Old Babylonian period around 1800 bce, but it is set in a mythical earlier time. It appears in a Sumerian story and as part of the Atra-hasis composition and the Gilgamesh Epic, all from roughly the same period. Atra-hasis narrated that the god brought on the flood because of the collective human sins of being too loud; a god said, ‘‘The noise of mankind has become too intense for me, with their uproar I am deprived of sleep. Cut off supplies for the peoples, Let there be a scarcity of plant-life to satisfy their hunger’’ (Lambert, Millard, and Civil 1969: 72-3). The creator goddess Nintu, however, lamented her having gone along with the other gods to impose that punishment (94-5). It is unclear whether individual responsibility was asserted in the Sumerian story, but in the Akkadian Atra-hasis the god was advised to ‘‘impose your punishment on the wrongdoer (only)’’(100-1). Also in the flood story in Gilgamesh there was an explicit declaration about this, and the god of wisdom advised the high god who had brought on the flood:
How could you, irrationally, have brought on the flood?
Punish the wrongdoer for his wrongdoing,
Punish the transgressor for his transgression,
But be lenient, lest he be cut off... (Foster 2001: 90 XI lines 186-90)
The high god did as the god of wisdom advised, and he rewarded the flood hero with long life and implicitly agreed not to inflict a world-destroying flood again.
First millennium bce prayers and incantations sometimes asked gods to disregard the earlier communal sins:
What is my guilt? ...
Dispel, drive off the guilt of my mother and father! (Foster 1993a: 554)
And similarly:
... [lest] I offend,
[On account of the heed]less deeds of my ancestors and kinfolk, who heedlessly neglected [the rites.] (Foster 1993a: 613)
These texts asked gods to free the individual from bad things, diseases or mental afflictions, and they make sense when the person perceived himself to be relatively blameless. If I did nothing wrong, it must be some collective responsibility that leads to my present misfortune.
Within the traditions of law in the Bible, one can see both an emphasis on collective responsibility as well as an emphasis on individual responsibility. The very mentioning of particular incidents that might be subject to court inquiry or to punishment appears to imply that the individual was seen by lawgivers as a separate person who ought to know better than to transgress the promulgated norms. The custom of blood guilt continued to be important when a murder had been committed; the murderer himself would be seen as responsible, but so also was his family, even when no malice or planning was present. The family might have to pay ransom for the life of an accidental murderer to avoid a further extension of a vendetta to other members of the family. These customs are compatible with periods when the state is non-existent or weak, and smaller units like the family had to regulate their members’ behavior in ways that would not lead to ongoing bloodshed. If the community could not reestablish harmony, religious and economic cooperation would be difficult. The provisions for cities of refuge in Exodus 21: 13, Numbers 35: 9-15, Deuteronomy 4: 41-43, and 19: 1-13 gave a mechanism for avoiding such conflict over manslaughter. Here the individual unintentionally committed murder, and lawgivers were trying to recognize the individual case and the actual innocence and protect the slayer from reprisal. The avenger of the blood who pursued him as in Numbers 35:19 could be seen as a communal representative, but the manslayer was not.
Although the Ten Commandments are imperatives in the masculine singular in Hebrew, implying an individual responsibility to adhere to norms, one of the clauses giving a reason for behavior explicitly invoked corporate punishment. Exodus 20: 5 reads, ‘‘Do not bow down to [statues] and do not serve them for I am the Lord your God, a jealous god, visiting the sin of fathers on sons on thirds and fourths of my haters (6) doing kindness to thousands of those who love me and who keep my commands.’’ The thirds and fourths apparently refer to generations. Corporate responsibility was the key assumption, but again the individual was the one who decided to do or not to do the initial evil action. The thousands refer to thousands of generations, so the blessing was also corporate. The dating of legal sections is difficult and controversial, but it seems possible that the Ten Commandments predated the rise of the Israelite state around 1000 bce. They imply that one cannot rely on state mechanisms for the enforcement of norms, though in later legal material there is not much reference to state and police functions either. A linking of the idea that good deeds are rewarded and bad deeds punished and empirical observation leads to the conclusion that proper retribution does not always show up in an individual's life, so maybe it does in a group over a longer time (J. Assmann 2002: 164).
The issue of individual responsibility was posed acutely in the discussion of the prophet Ezekiel during the exile to Babylon after 593 bce. Chapter 18 seems to be a unit to itself and rather unlike other statements of the prophet. The context is discussions among upper class persons who had been exiled to Babylonia by the Mesopotamian kings to subvert the tendency to rebellion in the kingdom of Judah. Questions were opened by this exile and the later ones, including especially the role of the land as a blessing from God in reward for doing what He wanted. But the prophet wished to underscore that new conditions obtained, and in those new conditions, corporate responsibility was abrogated.
The section starts with a quotation of a proverbial saying, which we also find in Jeremiah 31: 29: ‘‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’’ This saying could be seen merely as an argument for genetics over environment, but Ezekiel applied it, as did Jeremiah, to whether individuals were responsible and were to be punished for the sins of the fathers. The Lord in Ezekiel’s view banned the proverb and declared, ‘‘Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sins shall die.’’ The rest of the chapter spins out the implications of this declaration of individual responsibility while continuing to assert that reward and punishment, as in most of the rest of the Hebrew Bible, would be carried out in this world. A person who ‘‘does what is lawful and right...he is righteous, he shall surely live...’’ But if his son is bad, the son shall die. Ezekiel also reviewed the case of someone who was bad but turned away from evil; such a person would not die for the sins. Similarly when a good man turned from righteousness, he would die for his recent sins. So deathbed reform was very much encouraged, even though Ezekiel’s critics carped at the injustice of this. They said, ‘‘The way of the Lord is not just,’’ but the Lord countered, ‘‘Is it not your ways that are not just?’’
Ezekiel was constructing an ethical system for people who might easily have felt that they could now act without regard to morality since they were already suffering the worst fate imaginable short of death, being landless in a foreign land. His emphasis on the individual, as on the continued relevance of the God of Israel even in exile, contributed to his pleas for right behavior and underscored the importance of the old norms, some of which he carefully listed in a negative confession, reminiscent of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (J. Assmann 1990: 150, chapter 125). Ezekiel 18: 6 reads, ‘‘ ...ifhe does not eat upon the mountains [= sacrifice to other gods] or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, does not defile his neighbor’s wife or approach a woman in her time of impurity, (7) does not oppress any one, but restores to the debtor his pledge, commits no robbery, gives his bread to the hungry and covers the naked with a garment, (8) does not lend at interest or take any increase, withholds his hand from iniquity, executes true justice between man and man, (9) walks in my statutes, and is careful to observe my ordinances - he is righteous, he shall surely live, says the Lord God.’’
Perhaps in simpler times the extended family and the tribe were the units that really counted, but when the religiously minded elite saw that the responsibility was simply too great to be extended to the third and fourth generation, and when such leaders wished to give their fellows hope, they concentrated more on the results of one’s own actions.
Corporate references seem to diminish after the advent of the state, and David’s reign may be the last one in which much attention is paid to tribal identity. But the tribe that had the least land though perhaps the strongest occupational identity, the Levites, did continue to be mentioned and to function as a source of identity long after late antiquity. The growth of state power after the Assyrian depopulation of Judah’s countryside in 701 bce may have diminished the power of clans and increased the emphasis on the individual (Halpern 1991). Later legal material used both the singular and the plural.
World History
