Loading...As you may know, members who join the blog at the Platinum level are allowed to write posts for Platinum members, and the members periodically vote on one of the submissions to go on the blog at large — and on all my social media. It’s a great way to get your views widely disseminated. Are you interested? Check out the perks of the Platinum level (click on Join and see the various tiers and what each entails).
Our most recent winner in this endeavor was Platinum member Dan Kohanski, who has written on an intriguing and, well, rather world-shattering/history-changing topic! Please feel free to make comments!
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The early Israelites were polytheists — worshipers of many gods — just as all the nations of the Ancient Near East were, though their pantheon may have been smaller than some. We know of El, Yahweh, Astarte (Asherah), and Baal for certain. Possibly the oldest god in the Israelite pantheon was El — the very name “Israel” can be translated as “he who strives with (the god) El.”[1] Belief in the god Yahweh — who would eventually become the only god of the Israelites — may have originated in Edom or Seir to the southeast of Canaan. Sometime early on, El and Yahweh achieved a common identity, but Baal and the other gods whom the early Israelites worshiped came to be seen as competitors with Yahweh.[2]
Scripture (the Hebrew Bible) is filled with stories of the Israelites worshiping different gods. But the pattern that emerges is not, as the theology would have it, one of Israel backsliding from a covenant they had made with Yahweh at Sinai. Over and over, from sacrifices to a local Baal in the book of Judges to Jeremiah’s complaint about worship of the Queen of the Heavens a half-millennium later, the Israelites didn’t behave at all like a people who had made a covenant they had momentarily forgotten. They behaved exactly like all the other peoples of the Ancient Near East around them: they had a number of gods and goddesses, and prayed to whichever one they favored or was likely to help them in their current troubles.
Some scholars believe that cult of Yahweh first took hold in the northern kingdom of Israel (notwithstanding Yahweh’s origin in Edom). The Biblical record shows that Yahweh-worship made less headway in Israel than in the southern kingdom of Judah — though we have to bear in mind that Israel and Judah were rivals and that the book of Kings was written by Judahites who had nothing good to say about their northern relatives. More to the point, Jerusalem was not only the capital of Judah but the site of Yahweh’s Temple and the headquarters of Yahweh’s priesthood. It’s not clear when the Yahwists first decided they wanted to eliminate all competing gods and their priesthoods from among the Israelites, but for much of the history of Judah, the Levitical priests of Yahweh tried to get its kings to get rid of all traces of other gods in the kingdom.
They had only intermittent success. King Hezekiah, who reigned from the late eighth to early seventh century BCE, took away the “high places” where the local gods were worshiped. His son Manasseh not only put them back, he also set up altars to other gods in the very Temple. In 622 BCE, Manasseh’s grandson Josiah embarked on a campaign to wipe out any trace of other gods whose worship his grandfather had encouraged. He threw the “vessels made for Baal and Asherah” out of the Temple and burned them. All around Judah he tore down pillars and poles dedicated to local gods and killed their priests. He smashed altars to Ashtoreth and Khemosh and Milcom that had stood on the hills around Jerusalem since Solomon’s day (2 Kings 23:4-13).[3]
Josiah’s reforms mark a high point in the Yahwist cult’s domination of the kingdom, but they didn’t last. Pharaoh Neco killed Josiah in battle in 609 BCE and put Josiah’s son Jehoahaz in his place. Three months later, Neco deposed that king and replaced him with Jehoiakim, who reigned for eleven years, during which time he too “did what was evil in the eyes of the Lord as all his fathers had done” (2 Kings 23:37). To put it in more neutral language: “Down to the Babylonian captivity, Israelite religion tolerated some cults within the larger framework of the national cult of Yahweh.”[4]
The Babylonian captivity was the consequence of Judah’s rebellions against its vassalage to the Babylonians. Judah lay in the pathway between Babylonia and Egypt and was from time to time vassal to each. In 597 BCE, the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem, took much of the elite of the city off to exile in Babylon, including some of the Yahwist priests, and installed a new king, Zedekiah, as his vassal. In 586, Zedekiah tried to switch his allegiance to Egypt (against Jeremiah’s advice), and this time Nebuchadnezzar had had enough. He burned Jerusalem and the Temple of Yahweh to the ground, killed Zedekiah’s sons in front of him and then put out Zedekiah’s eyes, and sent the king and the rest of Jerusalem’s elite into exile.
The Yahwists in Babylon probably lived a comfortable material life in exile, but they struggled with an existential theological problem. Their god, Yahweh, had sworn a covenant to protect and sustain them, and yet for all their worship of him, they had been deported from the land Yahweh had given them. Worse than that, the Babylonian worshipers of the god Marduk had burned down Yahweh’s own house, his Holy of Holies, and Yahweh had done nothing to stop them. How could El Elyon — the Most High God, the chief of all the gods — let this happen to him?
Their first answer was that, clearly, all previous efforts to persuade the Israelites to give up their other gods and worship Yahweh alone had not been enough. The prophets had issued warning after warning, Yahweh had inflicted plagues and famines and defeats in battle, for centuries, and they hadn’t listened. Ezekiel, a priest who had been part of the first wave of exiles, blasted the Israelites for their refusal to be faithful to Yahweh: “You . . . spread your legs for every passerby and multiplied your whorings. And you played the whore with the Egyptians, your big-membered neighbors, and multiplied your whorings to vex Me” (Ezek. 16:25-26).[5] A variation on that answer is that Yahweh had been so angry specifically at Manasseh — who had placed idols in the very Temple — that he was going to “wipe out Jerusalem as one wipes a bowl clean, wiping and turning it on its face” (2 Kings 21:13). (Explaining the sixty-year gap between Manasseh’s death and the destruction of Jerusalem was left as an exercise for the Chronicler.)
But this argument still leaves open the question of why Yahweh had let Marduk’s Babylonians punish Judah instead of doing it himself. Their solution is that Yahweh hadn’t “let” the Babylonians destroy Jerusalem; he had ordered them. Marduk had not defeated Yahweh; Marduk did not even exist.[6] Yahweh was God, the God of the Babylonians as much as of the Israelites, the only God for everyone. “I am the first and I am the last, and apart from Me [וּמִבַּלְעָדַ֖י] there are no gods” (Isa. 44:6, my translation), wrote Second Isaiah as the Persians were conquering Babylon.
Nebuchadnezzar, whether he knew it or not, was acting on the orders of God. Same with Cyrus of the Persians: when he let the Israelites go home to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple, it was not because that was general Persian policy (which it was), but because, in Isaiah’s words, Cyrus was God’s messiah, his anointed one.
Powerful rulers who did not believe in or even know of Yahweh acted not on their own volition but because Yahweh the god of Israel was also the God of all, and he had willed their actions. A new idea had now taken shape: Yahweh was the One and Only God who rules everything on Earth and in the heavens.
[1] See Mark Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, 2nd ed (Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 32.
[2] See Smith (32-43, 43-47, 65-91). On Yahweh’s probable origin point in the south, see, e.g., Nadav Na’aman, “Out of Egypt or Out of Canaan? The Exodus Story between Memory and Historical Reality,” in T.E. Levy, T. Schneider, and W.H.C. Propp, eds., Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text, Archaeology, Culture, and Geoscience, 527-33 (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing), 529-30.
[3] All translations from Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible, except as noted.
[4] Smith (192).
[5] גִּדְלֵ֣י בָשָׂ֑ר (“big-membered”) literally means “great of flesh.”
[6] This argument relies on Thomas Römer, “Le Problème du Monothéisme Biblique,” Revue Biblique Vol 1 124:1, (2017), 12-25, and Christos G. Karagiannis, “The Time of the Establishment of Biblical Monotheism,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 10:2 (2019), 184-98.
How trustworthy are Chronicles and Kings as historical documents?
Well, that depends.
Personally, I’m more inclined to trust Kings over Chronicles, partly because Chronicles copied a lot of material from Kings. Where Chronicles differs from Kings, it appears that the author of Chronicles was uncomfortable with the Kings version and changed it. I particularly have in mind the passage in 2 Chr. 33:9-18, which claims (unlike Kings) that Manasseh was captured by the Assyrians and repented of his “evil ways” while he was a captive, so God forgave him. This is a rather significant incident which would totally change our view of Manasseh, but it’s missing in Kings. I suspect that the author of Chronicles was uncomfortable with blaming the destruction of the Temple on Manasseh, since 60 years had elapsed. The author of Kings, however, was not troubled by that gap (2 Kings 23:26-27).
Whether I trust a passage in Kings at all (or Chronicles) depends on the usual rules of Occam’s Razor, Hume’s Maxim (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence), and on common sense, also on whether it’s contradicted by external evidence.
Excellent article! I remember when I was about 25 years old, reading the bible from cover to cover. I found Hebrew Text to be confusing; leaving so many questions unanswered. Why would Israelites be worshipping other gods when they had been given the law of Moses? Why did Yahweh call down such fierce judgment on the only people that knew him? Not just once, but over and over.
It all makes sense when we realize that biblical history is written as apology to frame the Israelite situation within the parameters of the God they wanted their legacy to reflect. It is only then that the Israelites truly take on legitimate humanity as opposed to the “stiff-necked people” caricature that came out of that reframing. I find it sad that the roots of Jewish “bad press” originated with their own corporate “biographers”.
I am so thankful for good scholarship that sheds light on “the rest of the story”. I don’t think the bible can really be appreciated for what it is without it.
Thanks for your comment. I tend to think of the prophetic messages to the Israelites as a sort of “internal memoranda” not really intended for external distribution, as it were. The “bad press” that you speak of comes from the first Christians (the “Jesus Movement”), who were all Jews, and who were trying to convince their fellow Jews to believe in Jesus. When they failed at that, they broadcast those “internal memoranda” to the world at large as part of their campaign to persuade that world to ignore their fellow Jews and believe in Jesus anyway. They also manipulated those “memoranda” to fit their new theology.
(That’s a short summary of a very complex issue!)
Is there any documentation as to how non-jewish kings, priests or thinkers reacted to these theories? Being told that your gods don’t really exist, that you acted according to the commands of a god you don’t even know…
I’m not aware of any (but my unawareness covers an awful lot of territory!), but I’m inclined to think they didn’t notice it, or if they did notice it, didn’t care. They were, after all, the winners.
Very thorough! But, my belief has always been that the Yahwists during the captivity are the ones who magnified the importance of Yahweh worship far beyond what it actually was. Note that during/after the captivity there is a focus on the “remnant” of true believers (who are, of course, Yahweh worshippers) that God would save and restore. This whole theology seems to me to have been created during the captivity. Like the situation after Rome destroyed Jerusalem, where the Pharisaic leadership is all that survived and therefore became the voice of the Jews, I think the Yahwists were the surviving leadership of the ancient Israelites and reframed their history in terms of their relationship with Yahweh. Perhaps that is actually what you are saying here. Can you comment?
The theology wasn’t “created” during the captivity; it existed before that, but it was solidified then. The Babylonian conquest did not leave only a “remnant” (unlike the Assyrian conquest of Judah); as far as we know, only the elite were carried into exile while much of the population remained in Judah, and indeed became a source of concern when the exiles returned. It does appear, though, that the Yahwists were the only surviving Israelite cult. It’s also likely that for some time before the exile, the Yahwist cult was the major cult in Judah (some scholars call it the national one), but the priesthood wanted it to be the only one.
The parallel to the Pharisees after 70 CE is a good one, though of course it’s not exact. For one thing, the Jesus cult also survived, though they never had any real influence on the Jews.
What I meant was that they preserved their Yahwist theology and amplified it because they maintained that theology with respect to the nation of Judah, so that when they reemerged from exile it was what remained, and so became the de facto identity of the nation. What I should have said was that they created the national identity as exclusively Yahwist, and not that they created the theology itself.
After the Bar Kokhba revolt was put down in the 130s CE, it was the pharisaic leadership that forged the Jewish identity, similar to the Yahwists and the exile. By then, the Jews (as far as I understand anyway) had pretty much dissociated from the Jesus cult, so I would not consider that to be relevant to the future Jewish identity at all.
The Pharisees were a major player in the development of Judaism prior to the Bar Kochba revolt. When the revolt started, they held major debates over whether or not to support it. (Rabbi Akiva was one of his few supporters). Actually, by about that time the Pharisees had given way to the rabbis (who can be said to be their spiritual descendants). But it took several hundred years for Jews generally to accept rabbinic authority.
It’s also not as easy as we might think to separate Judaism from Christianity; each continued to react to the other and influence the other for hundreds of years. That’s one reason why I don’t accept the argument that there was a “split” between the religions at the end of the first century.
I think by the time of Bar Kockhba there certainly were Jewish-Christian churches (as exemplified by the Didache), but those would not have been acceptable to the Jewish community as a whole, would they? I don’t know of any documentation regarding the relationship between the Jewish and Christian communities during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, but by the time of Constantine and following there certainly was a major split, where persecutions began to fall on the Jews as they once had on the Christians – at least that’s what I got from Ehrman’s “The Triumph of Christianity”. Yes, in their defense Christians claimed descent from the Jews. In the mid 2nd century you have Marcion teaching the the God of the Jews wasn’t the God of the Christians. I think that the division between Jews and Christians began as early as Paul’s letters and widened afterwards.
Dankoh
Would we not say that the Trumpist cult (a focused form of white American evangelicalism) has now become the dominate religious cult in American. In other words, this is sort of a standard process to gather around something…. The hypostatic Christology/trinitarian theology in the 4th/5thC – Luther in the 17th, Trump in the 21st…. Obviously the seeds of the various “I am Paul, I am of Apollos” etc were already there – but one tends to become dominate….
Fair analysis?
I prefer not to get into political discussions on Bart’s blog.
Another great resource is Mark Smith’s The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts.
Speaking of fundamental things nobody (aka, me!) knows about, I recently became aware (on Netflick’s dumb show, Lucifer) of Adam’s first wife, Lilith. This little factoid was just tossed out as though common knowledge. What’s the deal there?
Hey! I liked Lucifer!
Lilith is not mentioned in the Scripture. (There is one mention of a “Lilith” in Isa. 34:14, but it’s not connected to Adam.) Lilith as Adam’s first wife is one of those myths that became popular over time, possibly because some people have interpreted Gen 1:27 to mean Adam had a different wife before Eve.
Video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F90C4cByhA
“How could El Elyon — the Most High God, the chief of all the gods — let this happen to him?”
“Powerful rulers who did not believe in or even know of Yahweh acted not on their own volition but because Yahweh the god of Israel was also the God of all, and he had willed their actions. A new idea had now taken shape: Yahweh was the One and Only God who rules everything on Earth and in the heavens”.
A classic example of cognitive dissonance resolution in the OT. It ranks up there with the premier example of CDR in the NT, namely, the Resurrection. Thanks for pointing out that excellent OT example.
I have a question that may be more semantic than substantive, but would you say it is more accurate to say that ancient Judaism was a polytheistic (or henotheistic?) religion which involved into monotheism; or is it more accurate to say that Judaism is a monotheistic religion that emerged from earlier polytheistic beliefs? It seems to me the former is more accurate, but I do not know if that is how historians view things.
The ancient religion of the Israelites was polytheistic, that is, they had a number of gods. It does appear that various writers, for example in the Psalms, explored a henotheistic theology – there are many gods, but we worship only one. That’s where you get names like El Elyon – the most high God.
I’m hesitating to go to the rest of your question because it’s not clear (to me, and to some of the scholars I’ve read) just when we can call the religion of the Jews “Judaism.” (See especially Shaye Cohen.) I do find that even after the Yahwists achieved their goal of getting rid of the competing priesthoods, their ability to prevent Jews from worshiping other gods was a long time developing. I think particularly of the Maccabean period, when a number of Jews (how many is unknown) were willing to go along with Antiochus’s forced Hellenization program. However, by the first century CE the Roman world knew that Jews were strict monotheists (and thought they were peculiar for it).
Here is a point of view that I believe no one noticed it before.
An interesting point is that Yahweh name is an afterthought many years to fix a problem the Pentateuch created.
The Pentateuch author/s wanted a nameless invisible Eloh (god).
Many years later, scribes made up a name from within the text & tampered with it (Exodus 3:14) to be able to identify the eloh they refer to. The same Mohammed (Islam’s Prophet) picked up & added the Arabic The & became Allah.
I see no evidence that the authors wanted a “nameless” God. In Exod. 6:3, God tells Moses that the patriarchs did not know God’s name שםי – “My name” – as Yod-Heh-Wah-Heh. “Adonai” is not a name; it’s a substitute pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton. In English translations, it is often rendered “the Lord.”
Are there any prophetic writings of the time relative to Baal’s wants and wishes? Something akin to a Baal version of Ezekiel or Isaiah as an example.
Not that I know of. There is the Mesha Stele (c. 840 BCE) in which Mesha, the king of Moab, records how he fulfilled the commands of his god, Kemosh, so there may well be similar artifacts about Baal. We can also get some hints (viewed with suitable skepticism) from the Biblical references to the Baal cult.
Nice article. When I read through the Old Testament I noted a lot of polytheistic tendencies. Like in 1 Samuel 19 where it appears that David himself had a household idol on hand. I think the later monotheistic Jews inserted monotheistic teachings into older writings, but didn’t completely erase the traces. I suspect that’s why the plural word Elohim (gods, or sons of god?) became a name for their singular god.
How does the christology of Johns gospel relate to the trinity? Is Jesus status already the same as in the trinitarian doctrine there?
Thanks so much for the post; it was really interesting!
Were there any other remnants of this polytheistic stage that made it through into the New Testament? For instance, do any New Testament concepts of angels, demons, and so on have their origins in the pantheon of Yahweh, El, etc?
Angels in Hebrew are messengers of God (the word מַלְאָךְ (mal-ach) means either an angel or a messenger. In most of Scripture, they are what you might call avatars of God, having no free will but having been sent to carry out a specific task, such as testing Abraham. In the book of Job, Satan is an angel – the Hebrew word satahn means to oppose (the angel stood in from of Bilaam to oppose him – l’satayn lo). So there are some origin points, and there is probably some remnant of polytheism attached.
Demon is a Greek word – daimon – meaning a lesser divine being. Socrates had his daimon. When Paul speaks of demons, he means that sort, not the evil demon we mean today.
This point about what NT authors meant when they spoke of demons and satan is fascinating to me. Not least because so much of the theology I grew up in is based on reading “demon” in the new testament as “Satan’s helpers from the center of the earth.” And I was originally taught to read the NT as a coherent story about some kind of great invisible spiritual war that man is also involved in, to this current day. There must millions of American Christians who see it exactly this way.
Two questions: When Jesus is accused of casting out daimons using the power of Beelzebub, and he replies about a house divided, and says something about Satan can’t cast out Satan (capitalized in the translation) For a layperson Christian that would read just as i described above, but how does the author actually relate “beelzebub and “satan” to daimons?
I think I saw on this blog, maybe from Bart (could be wrong), that the jews thought of “demons” as the souls of dead evil giants? Is that at all what the NT author saw them as?
Enjoyed the post. Thanks!
I’m off on my own thing here, but if anyone is also interested I found this:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25765960?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Although it still doesn’t explain NT authors intention in connecting “demons” with “satan.”
Very nice summary. I have Smith’s Early History of God in my reading stack after it was highly recommended to me by an OT specialist friend. Just need to get around to, you know, actually *reading* it…
Excellent post dankoh. Thanks for sharing, enlightening.
Mark S. Smith’s book is a great and relatively easy read for us lay people. He, Smith, has a few lectures on Youtube worth watching.
Thank you for this fascinating post. It made perfect sense to me and answered a lot of nagging questions. In my humble opinion, if this is not the way it was, then it should have been 🙂
What do you make of the frequently used plural form of El or rather Eloh, that is Elohim? Is it a fossil from Israel’s polytheistic past? You have mentioned above that Adonai became a substitute for YHWH. Independent of that use, does Adonai not mean my lord or my master, even when used of a human superior? Is Adonai a plural form of Adon? Like Elohim, is Adonai yet another fossil of polytheism when applied to Israel’s Divinity?
Yes, it’s hard to know why they use the plural of El. Is it a plural of majesty? To show the God of Israel is superior than the Canaanite El? I’m afraid I don’t know. Adon does mean something like lord or master and can apply to humans; the -ai on the end is the Hebrew way of adding the first person possessive pronoun: “My lord”
As Bart said, “adon” is just a word that means “lord” or “master.” David is addressed as “adoni ha-melekh” – my lord the king. In modern Hebrew, “adoni” means “mister.” “Adonai” technically uses the first person singular possessive plural – “my lords” – but it has become a substitute for “Yahweh” because religious Jews don’t like to say the actual name of God (and aren’t sure of its pronunciation). The plural form is probably just to distinguish it from “adoni.” Orthodox Jews add an additional layer of substitution by saying “Adoshem” (a made-up word) or “ha-shem” (the name) instead of “Adonai,” which they only say during prayers.
“Elohim” is trickier. Yes, it’s plural, but it’s used with a singular verb form when it means the god of Israel. (When used with plural verbs and adjectives, it means the “other” gods, who don’t exist, at least in the later books.) It appears to have become another name for God at some point, just as El did, possibly because El was absorbed into the Israelite idea of God (while Baal was rejected).
I just joined the blog (Platinum, even) because of this post and being a fan of Mark Smith’s scholarship. I hadn’t recalled the explanation for the transition from polytheism through monolatry into monotheism being at the described point as a form of undermining any competition about who’s god was greater. Is the suspected borrowing from Persian religions just too diffuse and unknown (I think Bart made this case at one point) to claim they were influential on the transition to monotheism?
Mark Smith is only one of the scholars I relied on; see footnote 6. The transition to monotheism involved many factors, of which the need to explain why God let his temple be destroyed was only one. As for the Persians, the problem there is the lack of definitive evidence for influence, including who influenced whom – and that includes Hellenistic influence on Persia. As far as I know, no one has been able to come up with more than speculation.
Understood. I went down the rabbit hole with Jenny Rose’s Oxford Bibliography on the topic after posting, as well as Yahwism After the Exile: Perspectives on Israelite Religion in the Persian Era. There are some interesting confluences of archaeology (mass dumps of shrine figurines) and the importation of Achaemenid marriage practices, but nothing definitive as you note.
The point of YHWH coming from Edom hearkens back to the Kenite Hypothesis, which I believe goes back to the 19th century. How alive is it today? Do scholars still consider it to be a workable framework for the origin of YHWH in Israel?
I don’t recall ever hearing it, actually!