ABSTRACT
To the ardent nationalist crushed by an imperial power, the inversion of Vince Lombardi’s famous quote is more than a bon mot : Losing isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
In the ancient world, the Hebrew Bible (half of which is poetry) contrasted with other civilizations of the fi rst millennium BCE as the creation of a defeated people, aristocrats of the spirit, knowing the bitter taste of
exile, poverty, and oppression. Defeat meant not extinction but rebirth as a ‘chosen people’, intoxicated with its divine mission and national identity. The Jews, defeated by Babylonia and Rome, scattered through the world, were united by trauma. Their history of persecution in Europe was the chief force driving them to rediscover their national identity and reawaken their will for independence.2 Other ancient peoples – the Assyrians, Babylonians, Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites and Elamites, for example – believed that if they were conquered so were their gods. These peoples vanished from history. In the Hebrew Bible, though, national defeat is not the defeat of God: exile is not the exile of God; conquest by one’s enemies is not the end of the nation but a warning to be heeded, a lesson to be learned, a punishment to be expiated, a defeat given meaning by hope of moral revival and return from exile. Empires fall; nations that keep the Bible survive.
