Individuality is a relatively recent idea, historically speaking. It seems not to have appeared anywhere on earth in any substantial way, except as an aspect of royalty, much before 4000 BCE. Among the Hebrews it seems to have become a powerful idea much later, making its way into Scripture in a clear form, as I have previously suggested, in the writings of Ezekiel. Prior to the rise of individualism, the tribe was thought of as the basic unit of life. A tribe was a corporate singularity. It was not a collection of individuals. One stood before God as a people, not as individuals. The people of the tribe were interrelated, interdependent, and mutually responsible. It was their destiny to thrive or to perish together. When evil was in their midst, the whole of the people suffered. When faithfulness marked their common life, the whole of the people were blessed.
Sin itself was conceived of corporately. The sins of the fathers "shall be visited upon the children to the third and fourth generations" proclaimed the commandments (Exod. 20:4-6). When Achan sinned at Ai, his whole family was destroyed and no one thought that to be unjust Joshua 7). Even the first Jewish messianic thought was corporate rather than individual. Through the descendants of Abraham all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Only later, in the postexilic period, did the messianic vocation of Israel come to be thought of as a vocation of the supreme Israelite. The servant passages from Second Isaiah could be interpreted either corporately or individually, but when Ezekiel wrote "the soul that sins shall die" (Ezek. 18:46), individualism had dawned as a dominant idea among the Hebrew people. It was destined to grow in importance, and it received the fullest biblical expression in the wisdom literature of the Hebrew people, especially in such biblical works as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and in the apocryphal books of Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon. In these works a radical individualism was assumed.
"Wisdom" in the Jewish tradition was defined as the ability to discern the pattern of God in the world and the ability to conform the individual self to that pattern. Wisdom for a person began with the acknowledgment of God as the primary reality of the cosmos. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Provo 9:10). The wise men of Israel taught that those who seek wisdom conform to that wisdom and will be rewarded by God without qualification. There were no extenuating circumstances out of the past, no connecting antecedents, no web of relationships. Each person was a solitary individual who by seeking wisdom would be led to happiness. He or she would by wisdom discover God's plan and then, by an act of the will, would conform to it. To the degree that a person was successful, God's blessing would be upon that person. To the degree that one failed, God's curse would be pronounced.
