The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels.

In 1996, a short book with a long title became a surprise bestseller. Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe told the story of the Christianization of Ireland and of the subsequent effort of the island's warrior-monks and scribes to preserve the literature of the classical world - indeed literacy itself - while the rest of Europe succumbed to waves of book-burning barbarians. An energetic blend of scholarly erudition and storytelling flair, the book was widely and justly celebrated for shedding light on the Dark Ages and for honoring Ireland's unacknowledged role in the history of Western civilization. It turns out to have been just the first in a planned seven-book series called the Hinges of History. Apparently, Cahill wants to be the next Jacob Bronowski, the next great popularizer of Western history, the messenger who carries the news from the library to the cocktail party. It's an honorable calling, so long as readers understand that Cahill is less interested in telling them what happened than he is in telling them the meaning of what happened.

In The Gifts of the Jews, the second book in the series, Cahill calls the Jews "the inventors of Western culture." The new book is even better than the first, largely because the history he addresses accommodates Cahill's strengths as an interpreter without calling too much attention to his shortcomings as a chronicler. Cahill's Jews are the prophetic Jews of the Torah. He doesn't take his reader beyond the destruction of the Second Temple or into the subsequent development of rabbinical Judaism. He doesn't even take us up to the time of Jesus. He confines himself to the Hebrew Bible, and then only to the good parts (mercifully skipping, for example, all the ritualistic prescriptions of Leviticus). The one great flaw of How the Irish Saved Civilization was that, in moving so fluidly between history and myth for the sake of narrative cohesion, Cahill played loose with the distinction between recorded event and legend - at one point, in the midst of a passage dealing with presumably factual events, portraying Brendan the Navigator "supping on the back of a whale in mid-ocean." In The Gifts of the Jews, however, Cahill openly treats the Bible as a literary document, a narrative that reveals the heart of the evolving Judaic world view. While even people exposed to a good college core curriculum might scratch their heads at the mention of the sixth-century Irish monks Columcille and Columbanus, nearly everyone has some notion, however incomplete or muddled, of Abraham and Moses. We know these stories, and we're ripe for a learned and personable articulation of their place at the heart of our own culture.

To this end, Cahill emphasizes three features in particular as the gifts of the Jews: the notion of historical time; the individual sense of self; and the moral foundation laid down by the Ten Commandments.

While it's neither particularly provocative nor even new to attribute these "gifts" to the Jews, Cahill brings to the task of illustrating them a winning enthusiasm. He starts his narrative in ancient Sumer to show us the pagan world. The Sumerians, Cahill tells us, viewed time as cyclical and saw themselves not as autonomous individuals capable of free will but as shadows of a higher reality transpiring in the heavens above them. Cahill spends twenty pages recounting the Epic of Gilgamesh in order to say of the Sumerians that "Even their stories miss a sense of development: they begin in the middle and end in the middle." But stories, and the way people viewed themselves, changed forever with Genesis and Exodus. "In the two great narratives of the first two books of the Bible," writes Cahill, "Israel invents not only history but the New as a positive value." Cahill makes fine work of describing how revolutionary it was for Abraham - a "skeptical, worldly patriarch" - to leave the urban comforts of Ur for the unknown frontier simply because a disembodied voice told him to, and he notes that God's promises to Abraham - that he will have a son, that his descendants will flourish - imply a revolutionary sense of the future. He further develops this idea in his discussion of the scene in Exodus in which God reveals his name to Moses. Rather than the King James Bible, which translates YHWH as "I am who I am," Cahill uses Everett Fox's translation (published by Schocken in 1997 as The Five Books of Moses), which reads "I-will-be-there-with-you."

While both Abraham and Moses engaged in distinct relationships with God, it is King David who, in Cahill's reading, emerges as the first fully individualized character in the Bible. "We know him," he writes, describing David in language we can almost hear as a voice-over for a future PBS documentary on Bill Clinton: "David's endless vitality and enthusiasm are the very qualities that endear him to the common people. . . . But a man who loves a crowd is seldom as effective in intimate relationships as he is in the midst of the throng. The histories of politics, sports, and entertainment are replete with such figures, triumphant in public, tragic in private." Indeed, the Bible does depict David as a man with very particular virtues and flaws, and many of the first-person Psalms are attributed to David himself. Cahill revels in this, seeing the Bible's discovery of individual character (which he identifies not only in David but also in Job and Ruth) as a revolutionary step forward from the static archetypes of pagan myth. It's this notion of self, he asserts, which makes the biblical moral vision so profound. Borrowing from Martin Buber, Cahill writes: "the people who became the Jews could begin to go from the I of David to the I of the spirit to the I of the individual to the I of compassion-for-the-I-of-others." From there, it's a very small step for Cahill to make the final, universalizing point that - whether or not we believe in God - the voice heard by Abraham and Moses, the "still, small voice" heard by the prophet Elijah, is "the Conscience of the West."

Some readers may object that Cahill universalizes what is properly the story of a particular tribe and that he offers the classic Christian reading according to which the drama of the Bible concerns not the redemption of the Jews but, ultimately, the redemption of the individual soul. He does universalize, and he does offer a Christian reading. But he's up front about it and makes no claims to be writing a history of Jews, Judaism, or even the Bible. In this age of clamorous identity politics, there's something refreshingly big-hearted about the first two Hinges of History books, both of which manage to give cultural particularity its due while eloquently embracing the respective contributions of the Jews and the Irish as part of the common inheritance of the West.

Paul Gediman's reviews have appeared in the Boston Review and the Forward.