Tribes, States, & Empires: Scripture’s Vision for a Virtuous Political Order (Yoram Hazony) Ep. #212

Center For Hebraic Thought (00:00)
If the ancient Israelites were nationalists, should we be also nationalists? And nationalists to whom? And what is a nation or a state? In this episode, we return to our guest Yoram Hazoni, a good friend of mine who has written on the virtue of nationalism. And we actually took questions from viewers and listeners like you, and we put them to Yoram to make him defend his claim a little bit more. You will find his answers fascinating and agree or not.

He is going to make you think more about nationalism than you have ever thought in your life from a biblical perspective. Stay tuned.

Dru Johnson (00:39)
We’re not going to hear a bunch of dinging in the background. we’ll record the introduction afterwards. ⁓ So I’ll go ahead and get us started. Yoram, ⁓ we had the first talk ⁓ maybe a month ago where we talked about the book, The Virtue of Nationalism, some of the ideas in there, specifically about the biblical foundations for ⁓ this virtue that you talked about. We didn’t talk as much about how much of it that you laid it out that it was a virtue.

You weren’t just saying nationalism as natural, or sorry, nationalism as nationalism, but you’re really talking about this virtue. Maybe you could just say just a little bit about why is the term virtue used there and why is that important and what you’re trying to say.

Yoram Hazony (01:22)
Sure. Well, let’s begin with something really, really basic is that there’s a, know, as we discussed the last time, there’s a big biblical issue. The prophets ⁓ see the idea of empire as being something that’s inherently unjust. And, ⁓ you know, like they’re not saying that, you know, if you’re an independent nation state, that makes you good. Like you can be

small potatoes and be perfectly evil too. But by the time you’ve got people who are saying, yeah, we’re going to conquer the whole earth and we’re going to impose peace on prosperity according to our view, the prophets all seem to think that you can’t do this without at the same time just being involved in wholesale ⁓ murder and theft and all sorts of other horrific things. ⁓

even though it’s thousands of years later, that still seems to be somewhat the case. And the question is what kind of an attitude is being inculcated when you tell people ⁓ you have borders? like we talked about the last time, like Moses, he’s speaking to God, creator of heaven and earth, but he’s

He’s the only guy in the Middle East who’s talking to a god that’s saying, you have borders, you’re not allowed to conquer the neighbors. ⁓ I think that there is, fact, a, I mean, I think you could say there’s a complex of virtues, but let’s start with the most basic thing, which is that the willingness to say,

I’m talking to God, I know the truth. I know what’s right, I know what’s best, but it’s not my job to conquer the neighbors. It’s not my job to try to conquer the whole world and impose it on them. So one of the central arguments in the book is that that itself, that attitude is a virtue. It’s not identical to the virtue of

Dru Johnson (03:17)
Hmm.

Yoram Hazony (03:41)
complete pacifism and you never should be at war with anybody. But still the fundamental position is leave other people alone. You need to take care of your neighbors and your family and your people and your nation. And others are going to do things their way. And you need to put up with people use words like tolerance or toleration.

But the fundamental ⁓ idea is that there’s something wrong with the person who can’t be satisfied with trying to bring God God’s teachings into his own community and has to force it on other people. Okay, so this is not the same thing as, I mean, obviously you can be a light unto nations without invading other countries, but the…

The attitude of, I’ve got to invade other countries because I know what’s right and they don’t. I think that that is deeply problematic and the ⁓ approach to looking at things where you say, it’s not my job to conquer the world and make it in God’s image. I think that that certainly is from a biblical perspective of virtue.

Dru Johnson (04:58)
Yeah, and that’s, you know, you’re talking in terms of political and political thought and policy ⁓ and how you treat other nations. I think it’s fair to say that most nations throughout history around the world have had that kind of disposition, right? We’re not here to tell everybody else how to live because they’ve been small and powerless. ⁓ The question came up from a lot of people because we solicited to our listeners, we said, hey, what questions, what more questions you have for Yoram? And like any really good thesis, it generated a ton of questions.

⁓ But one of the main ones was, well, what is a nation in biblical language? Because you very quickly said a people ⁓ and then a nation. So when you say nation, do you just mean the same thing as like Am in Hebrew, which is what we call people, a people group? Or do you have a much more scaffolded thinking about what constitutes a nation today?

Yoram Hazony (05:50)
Well, first of all, the word Am is, the word Am which is usually translated as people, like Am Israel, the Jewish people. ⁓ That’s a pretty versatile word. ⁓ sometimes ⁓ an Am is something that looks like a nation, but also, know, families can be Amim

You know, like the way in English, kind of in slang, people say my people and sometimes they’re talking about, you know, people from my city or people of my point of view. It’s kind of slang, but in biblical Hebrew, the word Am really does have this range that can go from a small group up to a very large group. ⁓ there are other words, the most common word ⁓ that’s

almost always used for a large, substantial ⁓ mass of people with their own language and their own political and military abilities. The word that’s used for that is usually Goy. And Goy, Goyim the nations, people are familiar with that word, but they don’t realize that the word Goy is also applied to Israel. That it doesn’t mean non-Jews, it means nations. ⁓

in Exodus ⁓ when Moses refers to, ⁓ quoting God, refers to the Jewish people as a holy nation, goykadosh, there it’s Goy and Goy is, it is not so often used for small groupings. So when we’re talking about, you know, like

the United Nations, know, that kind of big usage of big peoples were usually using the word Goy. So let’s go do a little bit of ⁓ defining. the Bible, is no, I mean, there’s no such thing as a genetic, as a people that’s strictly completely genetically

grown, that it is biological and has no other aspects to it. ⁓ The nations in ⁓ the Bible, ⁓ certainly they have a basis in families and in lineage and descent, for sure, but they’re also described ⁓ as having their own languages, their own religion, their own law.

And a special important point is that people in scripture can join another nation. So I think we talked about this last time also that there are many cases where non-Jews become part of the Jewish nation and presumably could also go in other directions. But the textbook case is Ruth ⁓ a Moabite

who says explicitly, your people will be my people and your God will be my God. there the word that’s used is Am, is a people. ⁓ But joining is not a matter of, know, people say today that she’s an immigrant, like that’s really missing the point. You know, an immigrant, the way the word term is used today could be just like anybody who like moves into your territory. ⁓

somebody who just moves into your territory for a while or for a long time, it’s called a Ger, is somebody who ⁓ is transient, he’s outside of the community. But the ⁓ point with Ruth is that she adopts the faith, the ideas, the destiny of Israel as her own. She becomes a part of

Dru Johnson (09:39)
Right.

Yoram Hazony (10:02)
⁓ of this people, so converting is possible, but you can’t do it while retaining all of the characteristics of some other nation.

Dru Johnson (10:10)
Great.

Mike Tolliver (10:12)
So Yoram, I could kind of press into that a little bit because certainly, I think it was Richard Hayes did this great survey of the Bible and how the nations as it were, the Goyim are never out of focus. However, it does seem like the Jewish people

genetically defined are pretty well in focus the entire time as this special people with a special law. And so I’m curious, even in the case of Ruth or there are several others that we might talk about. ⁓

you know, at no point that I’m aware of, is there any provision for them to become landowners? Is there a provision for them to start administering in the temple? Is there a provision for them to administer in the government? So how would you address that?

Yoram Hazony (11:13)
Well, first of all, it’s not a few examples. mean, when the Jews leave Egypt, ⁓ we’re told that the multitude was mixed, that there were people who were non-Jews who went up to Sinai and stood at Sinai, received the law, and became part of the Jewish people. There’s many, many examples like this. Some of them are more pleasant than others.

No, seriously, in the case of ⁓ Shimon and Levi, the sons of Jacob, who, you know, like they conquered this city and massacred the men, and then the women and children, they become part of the Jewish people. They’re simply adopted, so there’s good examples and bad examples.

all the way through, including during the conquest of the land in Joshua, where there are tribes that are kind of like adopted and they have this kind of in-between status. So on the one hand, you’re right ⁓ that ⁓ there is a tendency to preserve ⁓ the core people. Again, I would not use the word genetic because I don’t think that there’s any kind of

⁓ I don’t think that there is any kind of ⁓ racial awareness in ⁓ scripture. But you’re absolutely right that there is an awareness of the Ezraq. The Ezraq is someone who is like native born to the people and that’s somebody who is for sure distinguished for a while even from people who are adopted. The point of, I mean, really the, you know,

not the non subtle point of the book of Ruth is that that Ruth the Moabite is the progenitor of King David and the Davidic line. And so, you know, you can definitely say that’s in tension with other sources. But ⁓ but that that tension is is also clear the possibility for people who are converts to to

absolutely integral to the Jewish people is always there.

Mike Tolliver (13:40)
I appreciate that. ⁓ Going back to Genesis 10 and 11, which in the first interview that we did, you kind of discussed what’s going on in there. And if we were to take a look at how the concept of nation is maybe developed from that.

know, chunk of text. ⁓ You could say that there is a genetic element, that there is a geographic element, that there is a linguistic element, and that there’s a religious element to what makes a cohesive nation. And I’m curious, it sounds like you’re less comfortable saying that that genetic piece is there.

Yoram Hazony (14:27)
No,

I’m not uncomfortable. There’s nothing like that there at all. There is such a thing, obviously, as kinship, as family. You you marry somebody and you have children and they have children and they have children. They’re marrying other people and bringing them in all the time. But the concept of biological race or

Mike Tolliver (14:32)
Okay.

Yoram Hazony (14:57)
or I think what you mean by genetics ⁓ is completely modern. It doesn’t exist in the Bible. are the prophets, is scripture aware of the fact that human beings by nature, they form groups and that those groups have certain characteristics? ⁓ For sure they are.

There’s no question. It’s not just that nations are different from one another, but tribes are different from one another. And families are, I mean, the idea that there are ⁓ distinguishing traits that make one nation different from another and one tribe different from another, that’s completely assumed. That’s like bedrock. The idea that these traits are

passed through ⁓ genes or blood or something like that and that they cannot be eradicated, ⁓ which is something that you find in modern race theory. That doesn’t exist in scripture at all. mean, the assumption is that, ⁓ as you said, language is important, law is important.

who you marry is important, like what family you’re from and what family, who your ancestors are, all of those things, they’re all part of the mix. But when people start talking about genetics or race today, almost inevitably what they’re saying is there’s like an indelible ⁓ form or program that has to run because you’re born in a certain place.

And that we do not see. In fact, I I would go further than just observing that it doesn’t exist anywhere in scripture. I think we should add that ⁓ it violates ⁓ both the metaphysical foundations of Hebrew scripture. What I mean by that is that Hebrew Bible, Dru and I have

talked about this endlessly over the years. Hebrew Bible is not Aristotle. Aristotle thinks that there are all of these eternal things. And part of what happens when people start talking about people born to slavery or people born to sin and all these kinds of ⁓ assertions about stasis, like fate determines who and what you are. Those things are very,

Mike Tolliver (17:19)
you

Yoram Hazony (17:47)
They’re extremely, they’re like radically alien to ⁓ scripture, which is based on ⁓ a very, on relatively fluid world where everything rises and fall, everything. There’s nothing, other than God, there’s like, there’s nothing that’s eternal. Everything is created, everything decays, everything can be brought back, but in the end it falls again. That’s the metaphysical foundation.

And so in this much more fluid ⁓ description of reality, the assertion that their entire nations that are programmed and they’re like robots and they can’t repent and they can’t give up their sins and they can’t change, that’s just not where they’re coming from and that’s not where they’re going.

Mike Tolliver (18:42)
So I love that. And I’m thinking in your book, you sort of give these concentric circles of social building blocks, the family, the clan, the tribe, the nation, and then the empire, whether or not that is good, which you say it is not. ⁓ But with that initial building block being the family and then the tribe, these are…

terms that in the common parlance might indicate a genetic heritage. And so if not that, then what?

Yoram Hazony (19:17)
Well, see, again, I don’t understand why the word genetic keeps coming up. Because I’m giving you like a perfectly good ⁓ terms like family and kin and lineage. And I don’t know what’s wrong with those words. Those are all biblical words that reflect the biblical worldview. Dru sorry, you want to?

Dru Johnson (19:22)
Yeah, can I interject here?

Mike Tolliver (19:24)
Sure. ⁓

Yeah, go

Dru Johnson (19:39)
Yeah,

no, I’m sorry to interrupt. ⁓ Because I feel the same. So ⁓ when I hear I hear like genetically pure race theory kind of in the background here, which comes out of European and then evolutionary thought and then this again, the idea of stability, but also even kinship, I think, or your I think when somebody is saying family, ⁓ therefore you mean genetic. ⁓

Mike Tolliver (19:40)
for it. ⁓

Dru Johnson (20:04)
Well, my family has, my brother and sister, I’m not genetically, well, none of us are genetically related to, we’re adopted in. ⁓ Some of my children I’m not genetically related to, we adopted, right? So I think that actually is closer to the model that Yoram is describing that I think is inherent to scripture. You that mixed multitude is no throwaway line because you get a hint in Exodus two that there, sorry, not Exodus chapter two, but also you get a hint in Exodus.

that there are people who feared the voice of Moses because they knew what he was saying was connected to this God. And I’m going to guess those were the same people who walked out of their own volition with ⁓ Israel from Egypt. So I think this idea that there’s like this genetically pure goal, ⁓ as Yoram has said, is just a modern idea that is so out of source with what’s being actually described in the text and assumed that I think, yeah, go ahead.

Yoram Hazony (20:57)
I mean, let’s

just get another example. So, Yitro, Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law. So he he seems like like a wise man and some kind of influential and powerful figure. And he shows up and he greets Moses after they’ve they’ve left Egypt. And Moses basically says to him, listen, you know, we could really use it. We could really use a man like you wanted to stay with us. And that

Dru Johnson (21:04)
Right.

Yoram Hazony (21:25)
look, what does that mean? Stay with us. And he says, no, I can’t. Then he goes back to his people. Stay with us is that there’s no reason for, you for for you and your followers to be something separate. You could be part of us. And there’s there’s no inkling of an indication that the fact that he that he that he was not born to the right mother and father.

makes him somebody undesirable if Moses can get him on board. So I don’t mean to turn it into something that’s really simple because it’s never simple, but the awareness of, ⁓ you’re genetically impure, you’re from the wrong stock, you have to work really hard to find that in Old Testament.

Mike Tolliver (22:20)
And to be clear, I’m leaning into this primarily because I want to disambiguate what it is that you are advocating from what people might say that you’re advocating. ⁓ And so it is super helpful to get the clarification that this concept of family is a much broader concept than some narrow, who did you come out of and why does that matter? And so I think that that is very, very helpful.

Dru Johnson (22:49)
And Mike has done a

lot of work on familial relations in the Bible here. So he’s building his thesis here as well.

Yoram Hazony (22:54)
You know what,

Mike Tolliver (22:57)
Hahaha.

Yoram Hazony (22:58)
maybe I can ⁓ add a concept here that might make it a little bit easier or if not, then we’ll just drop and go to something else. one of the words that is very frequently used when people talk about nations and racists today is the word homogeneity. that’s a word. It’s like less nasty than saying, like purity, which is like, think,

Mike Tolliver (23:23)
Hmm.

Yoram Hazony (23:24)
you know, like only Germans like the word purity in this kinds of context, historically. But homogeneity is like, it’s like the polite way of saying purity. And I don’t believe that nations are, that they can be homogenous. They are always mixed in their foundations. Most, you know, most nations ⁓ have like a historical memory of, you know, what are the tribes that came together to create us as a nation? the

Mike Tolliver (23:27)
you

Yoram Hazony (23:53)
the English, the French, the Poles, I mean, they’re all like Israel in that they have this ⁓ memory that at the beginning, the original source is not a pure source. There’s different people coming together. And so I try in my ⁓ books and my explanations to emphasize.

that a nation is always, it’s always a collection of tribes. those tribes are more or less distinct from one another. They’re always distinct. They always have different characteristics. When you read in the Bible, the tribe of Levi is not like the tribe of Joseph, and neither of them is like the tribe of Judah, and neither of them are like the tribe of Dan, and you can keep going. You can… ⁓

take the way that these names are used in scripture and build like a profile of, know, like a stereotype kind of, of like what are the characteristics that are assumed for this particular group? And again, you know, it varies among individuals, but those characteristics are there. So if your assumption is that no tribe is homogenous, right? No nation is homogenous. There’s no such thing as

as pure human beings. The only place in Hebrew scripture, the only place you get something that approaches purity is when you’re talking about the cleansing yourself for the temple service or other aspects of ritual purity, like preparing yourself for marital relations. So there are these moments where ⁓ a person strives to become pure and

you know, relative to being human can achieve it. But that concept of ⁓ of purity for, you know, an entire nation being homogeneous and pure in a certain as a certain thing, that is it’s just again, it’s it’s modern and it’s completely alien. And so if you if you keep in mind that from a biblical perspective, which I think is a

I think you could call this a realistic perspective. No nations are homogenous. They’re always mixed in different ways. The question is, you know, is how mixed? You how foreign are the things that you’re adding? And can that work? Can you make it work? Those are important questions. I don’t mean to downplay them at all. There’s not like a, you know, a multicultural, yeah, anything goes. Anybody can be Jewish. Anybody can join any nation and it’s all just fine. I don’t believe anything like that.

But in the Bible, nations are diverse internally. And ⁓ that opens up a whole bunch of questions of who can join and how far can they join and how deep can they join, all relevant questions. But purity is not the goal.

Dru Johnson (27:05)
Yeah, on that exact topic. So Caleb Campbell, who’s written on Christian nationalism, we’ve had him on the podcast before, ⁓ he actually submitted quite a few questions that he was very interested in what you said and thought it was ⁓ very helpful in explaining lots of things that had not been explained by other people well. But he was very interested in this issue of kind of like, okay, now that you have a nation, ⁓ and now it’s heterogeneous, there’s lots of different people vying for how do we run this nation, how do we make decisions?

He framed it, a lot of his questions as, well people are gonna use religious, they’re gonna tie a religious form of nationalism, so Jewish nationalism in America, or Christian nationalism, Islamic nationalism, we’re seeing that rise in some countries as well. And he sees that as kind of a, just basically a way to build a power block within a country ⁓ in order to help shape that country or to rule in some ways. I guess, what do you think of the idea that

Yoram Hazony (27:52)
Houston.

Dru Johnson (28:03)
nationalisms within that heterogeneous groups or that heterogeneous nation just becomes a form of power blocking.

Yoram Hazony (28:12)
Well, I think there’s some truth to it. I wouldn’t use the word just. I wouldn’t say it’s merely a form of pursuing power. But I don’t think that he’s wrong in saying that it’s connected to power. once you agree that the nations are internally diverse, then you also have to ask the opposite question.

Mike Tolliver (28:18)
.

Yoram Hazony (28:40)
If they’re internally diverse, what holds them together? Both of these principles are crucial. If you don’t allow for the ⁓ diversifying ⁓ aspect of ⁓ nationality, ⁓ then maybe you don’t notice how crucial the unifying aspect is. ⁓

take this out of the scripture for just a moment. The ⁓ U.S. ⁓ begins, the preamble begins by saying, ⁓ order to more, like what are the goals here? We the people, and then there’s like a list of like why are we doing this? The first goal is in order to form a more perfect union. Okay, and that is, know, individual liberties are there and justice is there and all sorts of things are there.

But the first thing that’s there is we need to pull together. The purpose of what we’re doing is to create a unity within the nation. And by the way, the E pluribus unum is exactly that. It’s that there is a diversity, there is a multiplicity, and what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to make one out of it. Okay, now if you read that as an insistence of trying to impose homogeneity, then you’re misunderstanding

the biblical spirit, which I think that many among the American founders were pretty attuned to in this regard and in others. That spirit is a spirit that says ⁓ we cannot allow an infinite degree of diversity because that means ⁓ civil war and civil war means external conquest, just like you see over and over again in the book of Judges.

If the people are not capable of being loyal, the tribes can’t be loyal to one another, that’s the same thing as just giving up and being conquered by some empire. So there has to be sufficient unity, sufficient mutual loyalty to be able to pull together ⁓ for the sake of great purposes like the Constitutional Convention or for the sake of war. We need to be able to pull together just like a family needs to be able to pull together. That does not mean that everybody in the family needs to, you know, needs to…

be the same or do the same or think the same. I understand people want, you some people want, no, nationalism is about homogeneity. And other people like, no, multiculturalism is the best. This is a different way. This is a way that says there has to be a center. You can have diversity. You can have a periphery. You can have groups that are more in the center and less in the center.

But what you can’t do is you can’t not have some kind of unifying dominant stream in the center. If there’s no unifying dominant stream, then in the end there’s no nation. It’s just the whole thing’s going to fall apart. So in biblical terms, there’s a struggle between Judah and Joseph.

You can go further. can say Judah, Joseph and Levi, but Levi gets knocked out of the political contention, gets put in, okay, you guys, we understand you’re very aggressive. You’re very, very zealous. So you get the temple, you get the purity stuff, no land, no armies. Right. We got a good, have I got a mission for you? But the debate about whether the center

Dru Johnson (32:21)
We need some guys like you guarding. Yeah.

Mike Tolliver (32:22)
You

Yoram Hazony (32:33)
is going to be ⁓ the Judah-like rule or Israel, Joseph-like rule. The main, the biggest competition is between Judah and Joseph. And Joseph is, those are the tribes that they know administration, they know waging war, they know building empires. And Judah’s not as good at that, but they’re closer to repentance and to God.

So that’s a struggle for what is the center, the dominant center that’s going to hold the whole thing together. What’s it going to be like? And that’s legitimate. If you’re leading an important part of your people and you think that your tribe would be best at governing and leading and unifying, then it’s your responsibility to try and make that happen.

for sure is in part it’s a contest over power.

Dru Johnson (33:38)
gonna talk about method just for a second, just to note what you did very, ⁓ you said it very simply, but ⁓ you noted a few things that the founding fathers were actually using the biblical narratives and law to frame some of their political thinking, in some cases for better and for worse. ⁓ But, ⁓ and I think.

you know, some people could read that as a really wonky move, like, oh, they’re using the Bible to interpret the world or to create, you know, their ideas of nations or whatever. But, you know, maybe you could just give a quick pitch for why the biblical literature, why it wasn’t just some hocus pocus superstition, hey, we’re gonna rebuild Israel and America kind of thing, which it actually was for some people. Some people lean that way. But why it actually is…

full of vigorous political thought that, mean, the reason why the smartest people we know and Americans found him, like, went to this book is one of

Yoram Hazony (34:32)
⁓ Well, this is a really, it’s a really big and important subject. So, I mean, let me just start with a caveat that, ⁓ that our, and this is, you remember this, maybe some of the listeners, if they’re interested, can look at the introduction to my book, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, which deals with the question of why is it that we, that there’s such a consistent drumbeat

Dru Johnson (34:53)
Right.

Yoram Hazony (35:02)
to say that ⁓ America and Britain and Western nations, that it all grew out of Greece and Rome. I mean, ⁓ it’s a little bit strange because you can’t have Christianity without ancient Israel and you can’t have ⁓ the Western world without Christianity. So there’s a very simple

connection. You know, I saw people like arguing about this on Twitter yesterday. Somebody said Western civilization begins on Mount Sinai and other people start saying, no, it starts in the steps of, you know, of Russia or something. Look, people can take all sorts of positions, but I think that a ⁓ sort of ⁓ balanced reasonable position would not be able to ⁓ describe, sorry about that.

would not be able to describe Western civilization ⁓ without Israel, Greece, and Rome in that order, meaning in that chronological order. also, mean, this is a very long discussion, just let’s, if you just take something simple like one nation under God, like that slogan in Pledge of Allegiance.

Dru Johnson (36:08)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Tolliver (36:09)
Okay.

Yoram Hazony (36:28)
One nation under God has no source whatsoever in the Greek roots or the Roman roots of the West. That is simply an Old Testament, know, it’s a modern phrasing of an Old Testament idea. What is ancient Israel trying to do? They’re trying to be one nation, meaning a united nation. The tribes should stop warring against one another and bring themselves under God.

So there are many, many, many examples like this that you could name. just really quickly, I think that up until the Enlightenment, up until the 1700s, I don’t think anybody would seriously have questioned this idea that Christendom is formed on a basis of Israel and then has all of these Greek and Roman

ideas and influences that become a part of it. I think that’s just like a normal thing to think. Now today, people don’t want to say that. You sound like a kook if you say that. No, you really do. there’s like elite education in America and in the West is about, implicitly, but it really is. It’s about

Mike Tolliver (37:34)
you

Yoram Hazony (37:49)
coming to leave behind childish things, where childish things is defined as, you’re not going to quote Bible anymore, like, you know, either you’re going to quote enlightenment thinkers, or if you really want to be like a snob, then you’ll quote Greek and Roman thinkers. But the Bible is like for Neanderthals. That’s the way it is in our society. I want to change it, but that’s the way it is right now. And so

⁓ As far as I’m concerned, I don’t think there’s any chance of something called the West surviving without its Christian heritage, which means without its biblical heritage, which means, you know, a lot of that is the Old Testament heritage, which is the ⁓ bulk of the political and moral teachings within Christianity come from the Old Testament. And I don’t see how you can do without that. And if we were to

We could spend a whole hour just hitting points throughout Christian history where the Old Testament aspects of the political moral thinking become crucial and direct things. This idea of an independent nation is just one of them. But if you’re…

trying to understand ⁓ even the early modern period, you’re trying to understand Protestantism. ⁓ You can’t do that without understanding that for all of them, I mean also for Aquinas, but let’s focus for a second on the birth of Protestantism. All of them think that ⁓ all human beings created in God’s image is bedrock.

⁓ that God’s plan involving a family of man and woman, that that’s bedrock, be fruitful and multiply, or ⁓ the yearning for peace, or the idea of a law that is a natural law that applies to everyone. there’s lots of people running around who think you can derive natural law from reason, but that’s not the way

that the church thought about it. The church, you read these great thinkers and they say, look, this is, I’m paraphrasing Matthew Hale, there in the middle of civilization, God has given us the 10 precepts and these tell us what civilization is about. And they were given so that…

all the nations of the world could have like a basic idea of what civilization is about. And he’s not sitting there saying there was no point in giving the Ten Commandments because we all can exercise reason and if we all make sense. But no, that’s not how it worked. The way it worked was that there is a ⁓ privileged body of knowledge that is associated with the prophets and with God’s Word. And that body of knowledge is something that

It’s taken as this tremendous gift. Maybe a few people can figure out some of it through reason, but that’s not what it really does. What it does is it’s God’s Word that gives shape to our civilization.

Dru Johnson (41:16)
Good luck finding that in any Greco-Roman sources. I think Mike wants to talk about empire now. That would be my guess. Or no.

Mike Tolliver (41:18)
You

Yoram Hazony (41:19)
you

Mike Tolliver (41:23)
Well,

yes, but this is…

Open up another line of thinking that I think is also important. Yoram, remember being in grade school, learning about the birth of America as a nation and being told that when the separation of powers was built into the US Constitution, this was a unique thing in the history of the world. And then I clearly remember reading Deuteronomy 17 and 18 and seeing here the separation of powers.

⁓

very clearly in what would be the ancient Israelite constitution. And so our indebtedness to the Hebraic intellectual tradition, you you just cannot deny. But I’m curious to lean into this, you know, potential sleight of hand that some people who will declare America as a Christian institution, that there’s a distinction to make between the separation of church and state.

and the separation of religion and politics. ⁓ Can you talk about that distinction there and what that might mean for us?

Yoram Hazony (42:34)
Yeah,

these are all great subjects. Just a quick word about the separation of powers. I completely agree with you that the separation of power is part of the Mosaic Constitution. It’s right there in Deuteronomy. I think you have to be willfully blockheaded to not see that it’s there. But ⁓ you don’t need to win that argument in order to be able to figure out where the Americans got it because the

⁓ the Anglo-Constitut- the English constitutional tradition, ⁓ not only, you know, does it have the separation of powers going back all the way to the beginning, but it also explicitly invokes Old Testament in order to justify going all the way back to the beginning. Okay, so mean, we can take this all the way back to Alfred, but the easiest place to, I think, to see this

Mike Tolliver (43:27)
Hmm.

Yoram Hazony (43:32)
There’s a book called ⁓ John Fortescue in Praise of the Laws of England. And it’s from the Middle Ages. It’s from like the 1470 or something. There’s a new edition of it from Cambridge. It’s really easy to read. It’s short. Everybody should just buy it and read it. You open it up. The first thing that he’s telling you is that the King of England ⁓ needs to study Deuteronomy.

Mike Tolliver (43:38)
Hmm.

Yoram Hazony (43:58)
because Deuteronomy already tells you what it is that you need to know. And the next thing that he’s telling you about is about the separation of powers, about why the English Constitution is superior to the French and the German Constitution, why, because we go according to the Bible and we understand that you can’t have the king have all the power, and some of the power has to go to the parliament and the people. And it’s all right there.

Mike Tolliver (44:05)
Hahaha

Yoram Hazony (44:26)
That’s 300 years before Montesquieu. I mean, it’s just ignorance. It’s just simple ignorance. People just don’t know. I’m sorry. that was… But that wasn’t… asked me… Right, right, separation of churches. So here, look, I don’t know if I’m going to make you happy with this. ⁓ I just published together with a Protestant…

Mike Tolliver (44:32)
Hmm.

That’s great. So separation of church and state and then separation of religion and politics.

Ha

Yoram Hazony (44:55)
colleague, Timon Klein, and another Jewish scholar, Josh Hammer, we just published this 20,000-word essay on separation of church and state, which came out two weeks ago in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. And if you remind me, I’ll email it to you. ⁓ But the argument of this essay is that separation of church and state

Not only was it not in the original American Constitution, but it wasn’t invented as a doctrine, as a legal doctrine, as something that anyone on the Supreme Court would recognize as part of American constitutional history or Anglo-American constitutional history until 1947. Meaning there’s an actual case, Everson versus Board of Education, where for the first time the Supreme Court says,

That’s it. ⁓ America was born out of the desire to get away from the incessant bloodshed and persecution because of religion. So the goal is to have a neutral state that’s not going to support any particular religion, it’s even illegal for it to support all religions. So any degree of support for any religion whatsoever, even if you’re being totally tolerant and having a whole bunch of…

all, it’s all unconstitutional. This theory, comes from 1947 and, ⁓ you know, I won’t, you I know we have other things to talk about, but I think it’s the American founders, ⁓ with, you know, with the possible exception of Jefferson and Payne, you the most radical, but the American founders who, like the framers of the Constitution,

which did not include Jefferson or Payne, there’s no chance on earth that they ever would have dreamed of separation of church and state. Their idea of the First Amendment, which is historically, it’s clear as day because there was only one view of it. There was no competing view that, you know, no, that’s wrong. The only view of it that the founders were advancing was the states, most of the states have established churches.

Right? Either they have like formally established churches, you know, like the Congregationalists in Massachusetts, or they’ve established Protestantism. Like most of them have established Protestantism. And even where they don’t explicitly say that, which is most places, they have Sabbath laws and blasphemy laws and religious tests for holding office. I mean, the idea that there could be a, you know, no Christian

Mike Tolliver (47:19)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Yoram Hazony (47:48)
standard in politics was, it was just completely unthinkable. And so they didn’t think it. ⁓ so we’re in this bizarre situation where the purpose of the First Amendment was to protect the state religious establishments from meddling by the national government, by the federal government. That’s what it was for.

the idea that now we’ve turned it upside down and now we think that its purpose is to protect individuals from the existence of state religious establishments, which is the whole thing that the First Amendment was trying to protect. This is crazy and at this time, think America is just, I don’t know, somebody desperately wants to talk to me here.

Mike Tolliver (48:26)
.

No worries. Well, I’m excited to read that. If you would please send that my way. I also think it’s very timely in light of some of the things that have been happening ⁓ stateside at least. ⁓ Dru is right though. I do want to shift gears a little bit to this concept of empire as you’ve set up these concentric circles of building block. ⁓

you know, social building blocks of the family, the clan, the tribe, the nation, and then the empire. And in the first interview that we did, you’d mentioned that there’s sort of this wrestling match with God on the establishment of a centralized nation. ⁓ And so I’m curious if we could talk a little bit more about that. But then the question behind that is, why can that not be the case also for empire?

Yoram Hazony (49:29)
Right?

⁓ Before directly answering, let me say that you can also, there are groupings of nations, which we don’t have a good word for it, but sometimes people talk about families of nations. So, when people talk about the English speaking peoples, for example, or the Christian peoples, or the Hindu peoples, I mean, there’s the possibility of a larger loyalty group

that’s larger than the nation. ⁓ It exists all the way back in scripture. We find the prophets saying some of the neighboring peoples, they’re more family than other neighboring peoples. So just to keep that in mind. well, look, the big wrestling, I think what we’re talking about is

is over the question of whether there should be a state. Now let’s be careful. The state is not the nation. The nation is either it’s part of the natural or the original natural order, like as soon as people have children, human beings become diverse and they have different ⁓ traditions and different languages. That’s one way to read the beginning of Genesis.

Mike Tolliver (50:30)
Hmm. ⁓

Yoram Hazony (50:57)
Another completely legitimate way to read it is it wasn’t like that to begin with, but God imposes that nature after the Tower of Babel. So both of those, you can defend both of those readings, but in any case, mankind’s nature, at least after the Tower of Babel, mankind’s nature is that we’re sticky and we have inherited traditions and they differ from one another. And so there are different tongues in different nations and you know,

It says that clearly at the beginning of Genesis and that’s fundamental. It’s fundamental for us too. Everywhere in history that you look, it doesn’t matter what time period, it doesn’t matter what part of human history, if you’re looking, you will identify different nations. That’s not the same thing as saying that a given nation should have an independent state.

The state is something different. The state is not a natural thing. Nobody thinks the state is a natural thing. Human beings, no, seriously, human beings, the state, what is the state? The state is a centralized standing government. It’s a government that functions 24 hours a day. There’s always somebody in charge. That somebody always has an army or a police force to take care of invaders or rebels or criminals.

And in order to be able to maintain standing professional armies, you need to be able to feed them. These are not militias. These are not people who, like they’re farmers most of the time, but then, know, there’s invaders, so they pick up a pitchfork or they, you know, they beat their plow into something sharp. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the invention of the professional army, which requires taxation, a very, very high level of taxation to feed these troops.

so that they can train year round and be responsible for security. That’s only possible with mass agriculture. Like when you have the breakthrough, know, whatever it was, five, six, 7,000 years ago, whenever it is that you think it happened, a few thousand years ago, the techniques for cultivating the soil and irrigating very, very large territories became good enough so that you could amass

Mike Tolliver (52:58)
Hmm. ⁓

Yoram Hazony (53:19)
tremendous wealth and that wealth then can be used to do things like, you know, building palaces and maintaining standing armies. That thing, that centralized standing machinery of, you know, of justice and defense and also to a degree of oppression, that thing is the state. And what ⁓ the Old Testament is wrestling with is the following problem.

Mike Tolliver (53:39)
Thank

Yoram Hazony (53:50)
There ⁓ are city states that are familiar, like the Sumerian city states, like the Canaanite city states. There’s Philistines. The city states all over the place, just like in Greece. It’s a city and it’s a state, but with limited territory. But then there’s the invention of ⁓ these big standing armies.

which leads to the ability to conquer all the city-states. And so at the moment that ⁓ Abraham leaves civilization in Urqas-Thiam and moves with his family to Canaan, the moment that he’s doing that and pitching his tent and he’s going to sit there, you

with his tent and his family. And we see examples of like they’re attacked and he gathers together some other people with their tents and their families and they get a couple hundred guys. So, you know, so they’ll go and chase and chase the people who raided them. That old life, the life of the order of clans and tribes, an order in which every family basically has its own foreign policy. Every clan, every bunch of families can decide when they want to go to war.

And they do justice. Notice there’s no state. They have traditions, they have customs, what justice is, but there’s no state. So what do you do when it turns out that some of these city states, they figure out that they can conquer all the other city states and draft their guys. Now they start talking about conquering the whole world. And when they do that, you have an imperial state. And the prophets are looking for, they…

They already know that, you know, much as, you know, there are all sorts of things maybe to admire about, you know, about living the free life of, ⁓ you know, of a tribesman, you know, with nothing between him and God, you know, they admire that for all sorts of reasons, but they also know it’s finished. They know that that life is not like the millions and millions of people who are now being fed by, you know, by the wealth.

Mike Tolliver (56:00)
Hmm.

Yoram Hazony (56:09)
of agriculture, there’s no way that they’re all going to live a shepherd’s life on a hillside anymore. So what do they do? so they come up with first, in the Book of Judges, there’s this attempt to take the Israelites who’ve left Egypt and to live without a state. That’s the story of the Book of Judges, is now we’ve conquered the land in Joshua.

Mike Tolliver (56:27)
you

Yoram Hazony (56:39)
We don’t need, we have God. know, God tells us what to do. He gives us, you know, he tells us what justice is. He tells us we should protect one another. He tells us that we shouldn’t oppress one another. So what do we need a king for? King is idolatry. King is like what these empires, like all the empires, they’ve got kings and the kings are telling them, you know, go enslave the whole world. And so what do we need this for? But it fails because

because human beings aren’t good enough to live without that. That’s the thesis. You don’t have to agree with it. But that’s when you get to the end of the book of Judges and the beginning book of Samuel, that’s the drumbeat is that in those days, every man did what was right in his own eyes because there was no king in Israel. And this is the biblical justification for the king, which is fundamentally in some ways an idolatry. It’s because it’s interposing a man between us and God.

And the compromise that you end up with is God says, okay, look, this is in ⁓ the first book of Samuel chapter eight. And God says to Samuel who’s saying, this is crazy, this is crazy. We don’t want to set up a state. A state is an instrument of oppression. It’s gonna take everything from people. We’re gonna be just like theodologists. We’re gonna be just like Egypt.

And God tells them, look, you’re right, but you’re going to do what they say anyway. And ⁓ this is out of an understanding that human beings can’t do what Samuel wants them to do. And so there’s a compromise and Israel is going to have a king. And then they try to do it with a king. And that has some very great advantages.

You know, like as soon as Saul is king, he starts defeating all the enemies all around. And it’s really, really impressive. But, you know, there’s all sorts of bad things that come with having a king, too.

Mike Tolliver (58:42)
you

Dru Johnson (58:45)
It’s also really impressive that the text of 1 Samuel 10 includes, or 8 and 10, ⁓ he describes to them what kind of a king you’re going to get. And it’s just straight up oppression. And they say, yeah, that’s what we want. ⁓ Which has to be where the phrase, the people get the government they deserve, has to originate somewhere in that paragraph. ⁓ And so I think.

Mike Tolliver (58:54)
Mm-hmm.

Hahaha

Yoram Hazony (59:00)
Rice.

Mike Tolliver (59:08)
Hmm.

Dru Johnson (59:12)
This bigger question of why not empire? I think you’ve covered that by basically rolling through that storyline of ⁓ that movement. seems to me that David then, Saul actually is not the initiation of the state. David is actually the first one who formally, he starts a standing army, he amasses wealth. He does all the anti-deuteronomy 17 stuff and then Solomon does worse even. And so we saw the failure of no state.

Mike Tolliver (59:17)
Hmm.

Yoram Hazony (59:30)
Yeah.

Right. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (59:42)
And then first in second Samuel’s and the first king, well, all of the whole king scroll is the establishment of the failure of the state. And I think this leads to what will have to be our last question because of time, even though I think we could go about two more hours on this ⁓ is I think, I noticed several people notice like, what about the eschaton for Christians is the big deal. You think about how what the final state is going to, no, sorry, no pun intended.

Mike Tolliver (59:45)
Hahaha

Yoram Hazony (59:49)
Yes.

Mike Tolliver (1:00:08)
Hahaha

Yoram Hazony (1:00:08)
Yeah.

Dru Johnson (1:00:09)
Well, it is. It’s a vinyl state. There’s a king and there’s a political force. But that informs a lot of what we think we should be doing now. ⁓ Where does ⁓ Isaiah 55, 56, Isaiah 66, the new heavens, new earth, how does that feature in your thinking? Or is that just kind of like, we’ll get there when we get there?

Mike Tolliver (1:00:12)
Yeah.

Yoram Hazony (1:00:29)
well, certainly there’s a little bit of we’ll get there when we get there, you know, because I don’t I think it’s pretty hard to to turn Hebrew Bible to turn turn Old Testament scripture into like a like a blueprint of what’s going to happen in the later days. And the prophets don’t all completely agree with one another. But but roughly, I would say that the like the

the key to the later days according to the simple reading of the Old Testament before you start reading in light of the New Testament. The simple reading is that ⁓ there will come a time when people will be sufficiently humbled and be sufficiently close to God so that powerful nations will no longer

feel that it’s their job or that they need to or they want to conquer all the others and murder them and take their land and take their women and torment them. So this is, you know, said many places explicitly like Isaiah has this famous passage, I think it’s in 25, where he says, you know, in that day,

Israel will become a third together ⁓ with Egypt and Assyria. And there’ll be a highway, meaning these these two universal empires that spend their time like vying, like to take over the whole planet. And Israel’s in between them. And they’re saying, well, Israel’s gonna be big enough to be like considered an equal, but that’s not the heart of it. The heart of it is that there’s gonna be a highway that’s gonna connect them all. And they’ll visit one another and they’ll worship together.

Mike Tolliver (1:02:00)
you

Yoram Hazony (1:02:27)
meaning that yes, the wolf is going to lie down with the lamb. The aggressive, murderous empire is going to lie down with the smaller, ⁓ more peaceable nations. But this lying, when you take these metaphors and you unpack them and turn them into like an explicit political description, what they’re talking about is there’s still going to be independent nations, ⁓ some more powerful than others.

but they’re going to allow a space for a small people like Israel to flourish ⁓ without having to be conquered and destroyed. that’s the ⁓ simple, easy to understand ⁓ political horizon. And you know.

I understand that lots of people have good reasons for finding all sorts of other things ⁓ in that, but that’s the foundation.

Dru Johnson (1:03:32)
Well, I think if you build on that and find all those little nooks and crannies of details, you could sell that to Christians, because they would certainly buy it.

Yoram Hazony (1:03:40)
Okay, we’ll work on it. You know, it seems to me we have more work to do.

Mike Tolliver (1:03:44)
you

Dru Johnson (1:03:45)
Yeah, a bit. Well, Yoram

Hazony, thank you for your wisdom. The book we’ve been talking about is The Virtue of Nationalism. There’s an expanded edition coming out with basic books here.

Yoram Hazony (1:03:54)
It’s out,

yes, there’s a second edition, seven years in with response to critics and an essay about the impact of the book over the last seven years. And it’s in paperback now, it’s in audiobook now. So the book’s doing good. They wouldn’t let me, you know what happened was that my wife, no, my wife said, you gotta read for the audiobook. Yeah, nobody’s gonna do it as well.

Dru Johnson (1:04:11)
Did you read for the audio book?

Mike Tolliver (1:04:12)
you

Hahaha

Dru Johnson (1:04:15)
What

Yeah, your voice.

Yoram Hazony (1:04:22)
And so I practiced and I calculated and I figured out it would take me eight hours. And I was like, okay, okay, eight hours I can do. And then I wrote to my publisher and he said to my editor, said, no, no, I made a mistake. We don’t allow authors to read their own books. I should never have offered that to you. So.

Mike Tolliver (1:04:26)
Ha!

Dru Johnson (1:04:39)
American.

Mike Tolliver (1:04:43)
Okay.

Dru Johnson (1:04:44)
Well, that’s too bad. I mean, your voice is indelibly impressive.

I’ll hear your voice no matter who else is talking. But, Yoram, thank you very much for it.

Mike Tolliver (1:04:48)
You

Yoram Hazony (1:04:50)
Okay, thank you very much. Good to see you.

And Mike, congratulations on the crucial revival of the Center for Hebraic Thought. May it live long and prosper.

Mike Tolliver (1:04:59)
Thank you.

Dru Johnson (1:05:04)
Thanks, Yoram