Yesterday I showed that beings other than God could be called God in the Old Testament and other ancient Jewish literature.  It seems strange, but there it is.   I continue now with an especially important case in point: the king of Israel.  In this case there doesn't seem to be much ambiguity about the matter. Again, this is from my book How Jesus Became God. ****************************** Hebrew Bible scholar John Collins points out that the Israelite notion that the human king could be considered in some sense divine ultimately appears to derive from Egyptian ways of thinking about their king, the Pharaoh.[1]   Even in Egypt, where the king was God, it did not mean that the king was on a par with the great gods, any more than the Roman emperor was thought to be on a par with Jupiter or Mars.  But he was a God.   In Egyptian and Roman circles, there were levels of divinity.   So too, as we have seen, in Jewish circles.   Thus we find highly exalted terms used of the [...]

In order to explain how Jesus came to be seen as his followers as God – the first step to understanding where the doctrine of the Trinity came from – I have been discussing a widespread view in the Greek and Roman worlds, that other very special human beings were thought to have become divine, considered and worshiped as immortal gods, for example by being taken up to heaven at the end of their lives. You might well wonder, though, what “pagan” beliefs have to do with early Christian beliefs.  Jesus and his followers were Jews, so why would it be relevant what polytheists believed?  It’s a good question, but there’s also a good answer.  The belief that humans could be divine is found not only in ancient Greek and Roman circles (and Egyptian circles and others!), but also in Jewish. That may come as a surprise.  Jews who were monotheists thought that others could be God, along with the one God?  Uh, how does *that* work? As it turns out, you can find it [...]

The first thing to stress in considering the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is that even though the orthodox view (that is, the one that got declared “right”;  “Orthodoxy” literally means “right opinion”) claimed there were three persons in the godhead, there was only one God.  That is, Christians insisted they were monotheists.  No doubt they did so because they quite consciously came out of the Jewish tradition and wanted to retain its monotheistic emphasis.  But that in itself needs to be thought about for a minute. Just about everyone thinks that Jews are and always have been strictly monotheistic.  As it turns out, the matter is hotly debated and not all that simple.  There are indeed passages in the Hebrew Bible that stress there is only one God, most importantly in some parts of Isaiah, especially the parts called “Second Isaiah” (chapters 40-55); they are called this because this part of the book was not written by “Isaiah of Jerusalem,” the prophet of the 8th c. BCE, but by a later author with many [...]

In my previous post I pointed to the "Wisdom" literature of the Old Testament (usually said to comprise Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes), suggesting that this is a good time for all of us to ingest some wisdom from those who went before.  The book of Ecclesiastes has long been my favorite in the Old Testament.  It seems so modern in so many ways.  Even though written over 2000 years ago, it considers ageless questions about what the *point* of it all is. If you don't know it, it's worth reading; it won't take long.   If you do know it, it's worth reading again.   To provide some orientation to the overall theme of the book, here is what I say about it in my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction,  (I begin with the final paragraph from the last post) ******************************************************************** Of the Wisdom books found in the Hebrew Bible, one, the book of Proverbs may be considered a representative of what we might call “positive wisdom.”  This is the more typical form of [...]

In response to my recent posts about the historical accuracy of the Hebrew Bible, especially in the opening five books, the “Pentateuch” (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) I have had several members of the blog ask about the “Documentary Hypothesis” which postulates that one reason for the discrepancies is that whoever published these five books was not a single author (Moses or anyone else) but an editor who combined earlier sources of information together, without smoothing out their differences. Like just about all scholars of the Bible, I agree with the basic premise of the documentary hypothesis, though these days most real experts think it is much more complicated than what we present to our first-year students.  If you’re interested in a bird’s eye view of it, I have a discussion in my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction.  If you want an intriguing full presentation written for lay folk, in a convincing fashion, see Richard Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible. The traditional form of the documentary hypothesis was most famously promoted [...]

Yesterday I argued that the Old Testament account found of the "Conquest of Canaan," as found in the book of Joshua, cannot be historically accurate.  This is one of those matters that matter.   As we all know full well, the dispute over the land has been going on for millennia, and continues to create trauma and disaster, war and suffering, all the time -- no matter which side you stand on.  And please, in your comments, do not make polemical political remarks that are hostile to those who disagree with your position; there are huge problems everywhere you look.... Our question here, for the purposes of this blog, right now, is not about legitimacy -- who should own what, and on what grounds? -- but history.  If Israel was not in fact a pre-existing entity that emerged out of Egypt at the Exodus and then entered the land God had promised the ancestors, wiping out the native population to take over what by divine right was theirs -- then where then did Israel come from?  [...]

A couple of weeks ago I was in the middle of a thread on historical problems with the Hebrew Bible, and somehow ancient forgery intervened -- as it does, I suppose -- and I got sidetracked.  But I have a couple of more posts on the topic, that are complete "stand-alones" (you don't need to see what I earlier said to make sense of these) (though hey, why not take a glance?). In this post: after the exodus in the book of, well, Exodus, and the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai, in Exodus, Leviticus, (Numbers), and Deuteronomy, comes the stories of the Israelites taking over the Promised Land (promised by God to Abraham, the father of the nation), by wiping out all the Canaanites who were already there, as found in the book of Joshua -- one of the great books of the Hebrew Bible. Extermination of indiginous populations is not exactly the political policy most of us advocate these days (well, at least not me), but those were different contexts [...]

In response to a question from years ago about the problems posed to critical scholars by the Hebrew Bible I have so far provided two posts, one involving the surviving manuscripts (do we know what the authors originally said?) and the other with apparent discrepancies (where accounts appear to be at odds with one another).   I will now provide a couple of posts dealing with the equally big problem that the Hebrew Bible narrates events that probably did not take place, at least as described. Today I will provide a chunk from my forthcoming book on the Bible about the exodus event under Moses, in which Moses led the children of Israel out from their slavery in Egypt and a great miracle transpired at the parting of the Sea of Reeds (traditionally called the Red Sea), where the children of Israel were allowed to cross on dry land before the waters rushed back destroying Pharaoh's entire army (as narrated in Exodus 14).  It's an absolutely amazing, terrific story.  But it does not appear to [...]