The lexicology of chu 出
Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Harran. (Gen 12:4)
As the politics of our current cultural moment in America becomes more and more unhinged from substantive questions of justice and truth, we are starting to see—particularly among the nouvelle-droite white Protestants of the Temple, TX set—an insistence on a warped and distorted ‘natural law’ theology that idolises ‘natural relations’. By this phrase they do not mean the relations of parent and offspring, and only tangentially those of male and female. Primarily, they point instead to the nation, the state and the civilisation, none of which are ‘natural’. Ultimately, such a theology can only be a return to idolatry and an act of rebellion against the Scriptural God.
The God of the Tanakh, after all, is the one Who instituted the prelapsarian Law that יעזב־אישׁ את־אביו ואת־אמּו ודבק בּאשׁתּו והיוּ לבשׂר אחד ‘a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh’ (Gen 2:24). The God of the Tanakh is also the one who made provision for the three sons of Noah.
The repetition in the lists of the names of sons of ‘the Name’ (Šēm שם) and the sons of ‘Ire’ (Ḥām חם), suggests that they are in fact the same people[1]. They are not established as different ‘groups’ or ‘natural’ families: as Tarazi says, ‘the difference between them is not racial, but rather behavioural’[2]. The Hamites are builders: they erect cities and civilisations (Gen 10:11). The Semites are sojourners who ‘dwell’ in the land (Gen 10:30) but who do not make permanent cities for themselves. The sons of ‘Enticement’ (Yefet יפת), by contrast, live on the sea, and are given the coastlands and islands of the sea for their home (Gen 10:5).
The new ‘natural law’-loving nouvelle-droite Protestants claim that the most basic of tenets of the natural law is the right of human beings to form like-minded communities of people with shared characteristics and a shared way of life. Scripture has a plain answer to this asserted ‘human right’ in Genesis 11, though it isn’t one which the nouvelles-droites would like. Rather than merely dwelling on the plain, the sons of Noah decided to build for themselves just such a ‘community’ in order to make a name for themselves (Gen 11:4). The result was that God came down, put an end to their work, confused their language, and scattered them over the face of the earth (Gen 11:7-8). And the central tale of Genesis, following this prologue, is not of someone who founds a city, a community or a civilisation. Rather it is the tale of someone who ‘went out’ (yēṣ’û יּצאוּ) of the (Hamite) city of Ur and sent to live as a (Semite) sojourner, merely on the strength of a promise from God.
There is actually nothing ‘natural’ about civilisation. The artifice of civilisation is a truth that the society which produced the Tanakh captured in its mythopoeic perspective, but which we moderns are largely loath to recognise. For the vast majority of our 300,000 years of existence as a biological species, human beings have subsisted as hunter-gatherers. The emergence of farming (9000 BC) and nomadic pastoralist economies (8500 BC) occupies a very narrow recent window of the history of the human race. That of civilisations, palaces and temples (7000 BC) occupies an even narrower one—and that of nation-states with fixed territorial borders and ethnolinguistic identities (1649 AD), a narrower one still. The anthropological perspective advanced by the New Christian Right, obsessed with reclaiming the Westphalian nation-state as the ‘natural’ inheritance of humanity, is at best naïve… and at worst, Satanic.
The primordial rivalry between the nomadic pastoralist (‘Semitic’) and the farming (‘Hamitic’) economies is attested even in the Chinese Classics. As I have noted before, among the chief enemies of the pre-dynastic Zhou were the Xian-yun 獫狁 people of the upper Yellow River plain. This rivalry is adroitly described in the Book of Odes:
六月棲棲、戎車既飭。
四牡騤騤、載是常服。
玁狁孔熾、我是用急。
王于出征、以匡王國。In the sixth month all was bustle and excitement.
The war carriages had been made ready,
With the four steeds [of each], strong and eager;
And the regular accountrements had been placed in the carriages.
The Xian-yun were in blazing force,
And thence was the urgency.
The king had ordered the expedition,
To deliver the royal kingdom.(Book of Odes 《詩經》, Decade of Tong Gong 彤弓之什, ‘Sixth Month’ 六月 1)
The Chinese word chu 出, used here in the compound chuzheng 出征 ‘expedition’, is a syssemantograph (huiyi 会意) which portrays a foot (zhi 止) stepping out of an enclosure (kan 凵). Xu Shen, not having access to the oldest forms of this character, misinterpreted it as a sprout of grass or a tree (caomu 艸木) growing out of the ground. It has a broad plethora of modern compound applications: chukou 出口 ‘exit’; chulai 出来 ‘come out’; chuqu 出去 ‘go out’; chuxian 出现 ‘to appear’; tichu 提出 ‘to bring up, to mention’; zhichu 指出 ‘to indicate, to point out’.
In the Classics, chu 出 can be used in both transitive and intransitive verbal functions. Transitively, as ‘to send, to utter’: 「惟口出好興戎，朕言不再。」 ‘It is the mouth which sends forth what is good, and raises up war. I will not alter my words.’ (Book of Documents 《尚書》, Book of Yu 虞書, ‘Counsels of the Great Yu’ 大禹謨 13) Or: 既出我車、既設我旟。 ‘We had sent forth our chariots; we had displayed our falcon-banners.’ (Odes, Decade of Dang 蕩之什, ‘The Jiang and the Han’ 江漢 1) And intransitively, as ‘to leave, to go, to go forth’: 韓侯出祖、出宿于屠。 ‘When the marquis of Han left the court, he sacrificed to the Spirit of the road; he went forth, and lodged for the night in Tu.’ (Odes, Decade of Dang, ‘Grandeur of Han’ 韓奕 3) It can also be used as an abstract noun, ‘exit’ or ‘leave-taking’: 昊天曰明、及爾出王。 ‘Great Heaven is intelligent, and is with you in all your goings.’ (Odes, Decade of People’s Birth生民之什, ‘Reversal’ 板 8) It is also used as a preposition, ‘outside’: 終日射侯、不出正兮。 ‘Shooting all day at the target, and never lodging outside the bird-square!’ (Odes, Odes of Qi 齊風, ‘Alas for Him’ 猗嗟 2)
More specialised functions follow from these basic ones. It can be used as ‘to appear, to manifest’: 首出庶物，萬國咸寧。 ‘(The sage) appears aloft, high above all things, and the myriad states all enjoy repose.’ (Book of Changes 《易經》, ‘Qian’ ䷀乾 1) It can be used as ‘to issue’, as water from a spring or a river: 東出于陶丘北，又東至于菏 ‘Eastward, (the river Ying) issued forth on the north of Tao-qiu, and flowed farther east to (the marsh of) Ge.’ (Documents, Book of Xia 夏書, ‘Tribute of Yu’ 禹貢 20) And also as ‘to bear, to beget, to produce’: 王者禘其祖之所自出，以其祖配之。 ‘At the great royal sacrifice to all ancestors, the first place was given to him from whom the founder of the line sprang, and that founder had the place of assessor to him.’ (Book of Rites 《禮記》 15.9) It can be used as the compound churi 出日 in the sense of ‘sunrise’: 「丕冒海隅出日，罔不率俾。」 ‘… And from the corners of the sea, and the sunrising, there shall not be one who is disobedient to the rule (of Zhou).’ (Documents, Book of Zhou 周書, ‘Prince Shi’ 君奭 8) It also has a political usage, chuben 出奔 ‘to flee, to go into exile’: 十有一月，衛侯朔出奔齊。 ‘During the eleventh month, the Marquis of Wei, Shuo, quit his state and fled to the state of Qi.’ (Spring and Autumn Annals 《春秋》, ‘The Sixteenth Year of Duke Huan’s Reign’ 桓公十六年 1)
The Chinese Classics do not have quite the same exilic sensibility as the Semitic Tanakh. The God of the Tanakh adopts as His own a sojourning people from the Two Rivers region, whose earthly ‘successes’ in Canaan send them (yōṣ’ê יצאי) into Egypt (Gen 46:26), a land which is not their own, where they are subsequently held in bondage. That same God promises to them a land of His choosing, under His proprietorship. But this same sojourning people go out chasing after other gods, settle themselves in the land of Canaan, evict and exploit and abuse their neighbours, and forget that they were once a sojourning people. In short: the Semites become Hamites. As a result, God exacts His vengeance using the Babylonians as His instrument against them, sending them (yeṣe’ יצא) back into the exile they deserve (2 Kgs 24:12-13).
The Classics, although as a corpus of literature they are set within the same group of Central States, and have an agrarian-sedentary orientation rather than a nomadic-pastoralist one, nevertheless give voice to a teaching which resonates strongly with that of their West Asian counterparts. Human beings, who dwell (ju 居) between Heaven and Earth, must pay reverence to both. Heaven gives its blessings to one man (Yu the Great, Tang of Shang, Ji Fa of Zhou) who pays that reverence, and the Earth submits to his rule. Yet time after time, the children and grandchildren of this one man grow greedy, quarrelsome and indolent. Heaven withdraws its blessings and sends down its terrors. Another ‘one man’ is chosen to punish (chuzheng 出征) the wicked children and send them into exile (chuben 出奔). He is given the blessing from Heaven to rule the Earth. And the cycle begins anew.
Both bodies of sacred text, however, teach definitively that man is not the (true) ruler of the earth. Even the ‘one man’ who is chosen by Heaven in the Documents—whether that is Tang of Shang or Ji Fa of Zhou—refers to himself as xiaozi 小子 ‘the little child’. A child cannot claim inheritance from a parent while that parent is alive (Rites 2.82); it follows that the tianzi 天子 ‘child of Heaven’ is not the actual ruler. From this point, so warn the Rites, ao bu ke zhang 敖不可長 ‘pride should not be allowed to grow’ (Rites 1.2), so that when the great way is followed, Tian xia wei gong天下為公 ‘all under Heaven is common to all’ (Rites 9.1). This Documents-Rites teaching about the absolute fee-simple sovereignty of Heaven and the conditional tenancy of the ‘one man’, runs parallel to the teaching explicitly proclaimed in the Psalter: lǝYHWH hā’āreṣ wǝmlô’â ליהוה הארץ וּמלואהּ ‘to Yahweh (belong) the earth and (everything) that fills it’ (Psalm 23:1); and melek kol-hā’āreṣ ’Elōhîm מלך כּל־הארץ אלהים ‘’Elohim is the proprietor over every earth’ (Psalm 46:8).
Rival claimants to God are not permitted, whether that rival claimant is a singular hereditary prince, or a res publica joined by bonds of kinship and common purpose. In fact, in certain ways, the latter is worse because it gives licence to ’îš hayyāsār bǝ‘ênāyû ya‘asê אישׁ היּשׁר בּעיניו יעשׂה ‘man to do (what is) right in his own eyes’ (Judg 17:6). The idea that a heredity, or a culture, or a homeland, has a prior ‘natural’ right over one’s allegiance, is precisely the same form of idolatry and rebellion against God (1 Kgs 11:8-13) that led to the sundering of ancient Israel from Judah (1 Kgs 11:26-40), and the ultimate fall of both kingdoms.
To me, it simply goes without saying that the billionaire Davos clique’s programme of global neoliberal rapine, manipulating and embezzling the wealth of entire nations by directing monetary and financial policy like pawns on a chessboard, is even more so a project of hubristic revolt against God’s sovereignty. But it is bitter irony that the nouvelle-droite Temple, TX set—not to mention their Butte, MT analogues in the Orthodox churches!—are erecting a tower out of all of these ‘natural’ idols (heritage, culture, homeland) and calling for the faithful to mobilise and defend that tower’s ramparts against globalist manipulation. In doing so, like Solomon’s concubines, they crowd God’s sovereignty entirely out of the picture.
Both the Chinese Scriptural tradition and the Semitic one invite the hearer to come out (chu 出, ṣǝ’û צאו) of such delusions. The self-serving talk of courtiers and insincere plans of kings are no safeguard against Heaven’s terrors (Odes, Decade of People’s Birth, ‘Reversal’ 板), and the claims of blood-kinship and communal purity are no refuge against the law of God (Num 12:1-15). Scripture is the ultimate ‘red pill’; the ‘desert of the real’ may be an austere- and inhospitable-looking place, but it’s better than the self-serving mirages and power-fantasies of the Matrix.
[1] Fr Paul Nadim Tarazi, The Rise of Scripture (OCABS Press, 2017), 262-263.
[2] Ibid., 268.