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By
Mark S. Smith
Skirball Professor of Bible and Near Eastern Studies
New
York University
For decades, scholars have tried to penetrate the Bible's story about
Israelite monotheism. According to traditional interpretations of the Bible,
monotheism was part of Israel's original covenant with Yahweh on Mount Sinai,
and the idolatry subsequently criticized by the prophets was due to Israel's
backsliding from its own heritage and history with Yahweh. However, scholars
have long noted that beneath this presentation lies a number of questions. Why
do the Ten Commandments command that there should be no other gods
"before Me" (the Lord), if there are no other gods as claimed by
other biblical texts? Why should the Israelites sing at the crossing of the
Red Sea that "there is no god like You, O Lord?" (Exodus 15:11).
Such passages suggest that Israelites knew about other gods and did not simply
reject them. It seems that Israelites may have known of other deities and
perhaps various passages suggest that behind the Bible's broader picture of
monotheism was a spectrum of polytheisms that centered on the worship of
Yahweh as the pantheon's greatest figure.
In the past, the question of Israelite polytheism has been
approached by looking for evidence of specific deities worshipped by
Israelites in addition to Yahweh. These would include biblical criticisms of
the worship of other deities, such as the goddess Asherah in 2 Kings 21 and
23, as well as apparent references to this goddess or at least her symbol in
the inscriptions from Kuntillet 'Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom in the eighth
century. In the Kuntillet 'Ajrud inscriptions, the symbol is treated
respectfully as part of the worship of Yahweh. The gods Resheph and Deber
appear in Habakkuk 3:5 as part of the military retinue of Yahweh. Other
deities who gain some mention in the Bible include the "hosts of
heaven" criticized in 2 Kings 21:5, but mentioned without such criticism
in 1 Kings 22:19 and Zephaniah 1:5. Scholars have also noted that the god El
is identified with Yahweh in the Bible, again with no criticism. The
criticisms of Yahweh's archenemy, the storm god, Baal, also seem to reflect
Israelite worship of this god. While many of these deities are not well known
from the Bible, they are described sometimes at considerable length in the
Ugaritic texts, discovered first in 1928 at the site of Ras Shamra (located on
the coast of Syria about 100 miles north of Beirut). As a result of comparing
biblical and inscriptional evidence with the Ugaritic texts, we can see how
the worship of other deities lasted for quite a long time in Israel down to
the Exile in ca. 586.
This approach to the study of specific deities in ancient
Israel was summarized in Smith's earlier book, The Early History of God
(which is due to be published in 2002 in a revised version by Eerdmans), and
it reached its apex in the valuable collection, Dictionary of Deities and
Demons in the Bible (edited by Karel van der Toorn et al.; second edition;
Leiden: Brill; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999). On the whole, Smith's book
-- following a number of other scholars-- shows how Israelite polytheism was a
feature of Israelite religion down through the end of the Iron Age and how
monotheism emerged in the seventh and sixth centuries. It is in this period
when the clearest monotheistic statements can be seen in the Bible, for
example, in the apparently seventh-century works of Deuteronomy 4:35, 39, 1
Samuel 2:2 (earlier?), 2 Samuel 7:22, 2 Kings 19:15, 19 (= Isaiah 37:16, 20),
and Jeremiah 16:19, 20 and the sixth-century portion of Isaiah 43:10-11, 44:6,
8, 45:5-7, 14, 18, 21, and 46:9. Because many of the passages involved appear
in biblical works associated with either Deuteronomy, the Deuteronomistic
History (Joshua through Kings) or in Jeremiah (with its similar language and
ideas as these other works), most scholarly treatments until recently have
suggested that a deuteronomistic movement of this period developed the idea of
monotheism as a response to the religious issues of the time. The question has
remained: why in the seventh and sixth centuries?
In his newest book, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism,
Smith tries to address this question, but from a different angle in regards to
monotheism and polytheism. Beginning with the Ugaritic texts, Smith asks what
is monistic about polytheism and how the answer to this question might help
make the emergence of Israelite monotheism more intelligible. Ugaritic
polytheism is expressed as a monism through the concepts of the divine council
or assembly and in the divine family. The two structures are essentially
understood as a single entity with four levels: the chief god and his wife (El
and Asherah); the seventy divine children (including Baal, Astarte, Anat,
probably Resheph as well as the sun-goddess Shapshu and the moon-god Yerak)
evidently characterized as the stars of El; the head helper of the divine
household, Kothar wa-Hasis; and the servants of the divine household, who
include what the Bible understands to be "angels" (in other words,
messenger-gods).
This four-tiered model of the divine family and council
apparently went through a number of changes in early Israel. In the earliest
stage, it would appear that Yahweh was one of these seventy children, each of
whom was the patron deity of the seventy nations. This idea appears behind the
Dead Sea Scrolls reading and the Septuagint translation of Deuteronomy 32:8-9.
In this passage, El is the head of the divine family, and each member of the
divine family receives a nation of hi s own: Israel is the portion of Yahweh.
The Masoretic Text, evidently uncomfortable with the polytheism expressed in
the phrase "according to the number of the divine sons," altered the
reading to "according to the number of the children of Israel" (also
thought to be seventy). Psalm 82 also presents the god El presiding in a
divine assembly at which Yahweh stands up and makes his accusation against the
other gods. Here the text shows the older religious worldview which the
passage is denouncing.
By some point in the late monarchy, it is evident that the
god El was identified with Yahweh, and as a result, Yahweh-El is the husband
of the goddess, Asherah. This is the situation represented by biblical
condemnations of her cult symbol in the Jerusalem temple (evidently) and in
the inscriptions mentioned above. In this form, the religious devotion to
Yahweh casts him in the role of the Divine King ruling over all the other
deities. This religious outlook appears, for example, in Psalm 29:2, where the
"sons of God" or really divine sons or children are called upon to
worship Yahweh, the Divine King. The Temple, with its various expressions of
polytheism, also assumed that this place was Yahweh's palace which was
populated by those under his power. The tour given by Ezekiel 8-10 suggests
such a picture. This picture of royal power was further developed with the
monotheism of the eighth to the sixth centuries. The other gods became mere
expressions of Yahweh's power, and the divine messengers became understood as
little more than minor divine beings expressive of Yahweh's power. In other
words, the head god became the godhead. Why at this time?
Two major sets of conditions can be suggested. The first
involves the changes in Israel's social structure of the family. At Ugarit,
social identity was strongest at the level of the family. Legal documents were
often made between the sons of one family and the sons of another. The divine
situation followed suit. The divine family was expressive of Ugarit's social
structure. The same was true in ancient Israel through most of the monarchy.
Hence, the story of Achan in Joshua 8 suggests a picture of the extended
family as the major social unit. However, the family lineages went through
traumatic changes beginning already in the eighth century with major social
stratification, followed by Assyrian incursions. In the seventh and sixth
centuries, we begin to see expressions of individual identity (Deuteronomy
26:16; Jeremiah 31:29-30; Ezekiel 18). A culture with a diminished lineage
system (deteriorating over a long period from the ninth or eighth century
onward), one less embedded in traditional family patrimonies, might be more
predisposed both to hold to individual human accountability for behavior (as
suggested by the passages just cited) and to see an individual deity
accountable for the cosmos (as suggested by monotheistic statements in this
period). In short, the rise of the individual as a social unit next to the
traditional family unit provided intelligibility to the rise of a single god
rather than a divine family.
The second major set of conditions apparent in forming this
change involved the rise of the neo-Assyrian and neo-Babylonian empires. As
long as Israel was, from its own perspective, on par with the other nations,
it made sense to have a religious outlook that saw Israel on par with the
other nations, each one with its own patron god. (This is the basic picture
described above with Deuteronomy 32:8-9.) The assumption behind this worldview
was that each nation was as powerful as its patron god. However, the
neo-Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom in ca. 722 altered this
religious way of looking at the world, for, if the neo-Assyrian empire were so
powerful, so must be its god; and conversely, if Israel could be conquered
(and later Judah ca. 586), it would imply that its god in turn is hardly as
powerful as Israel had traditionally taught. As a result, new thinking
separated the correlation of heavenly power and earthly kingdoms. Even though
Assyria and later Babylon were so powerful, the new monotheistic thinking in
Israel reasoned that despite its own weakness, its god was not weak. Moreover,
just as Israel's fortunes fell, those of Assyria and then Babylon rose;
inversely, Israel's monotheists now reasoned that Yahweh stood at the top of
divine power, and correspondingly, the gods of Mesopotamia were reckoned to be
nothing. As a result, Assyria had not succeeded because of the power of its
god; instead, it was Yahweh now directing all the nations. In short, the
conditions of human empires provided the model for divine empire; the Assyrian
and Babylonian empires pointed now not to their own power and the power of
their divine patrons but to Yahweh’s guiding all the events of Israel's
life. Their exile was not their shame from the power of other nations and
their deities, but rather was seen now as Yahweh's plan to punish and purify
the one nation which Yahweh had chosen. Accordingly, the notion arose that the
new king who might help redeem Israel might not be a Judean as traditionally
thought in older biblical literature (see Psalm 2). Now, even a foreigner such
as Cyrus the Persian could serve as the Lord's anointed (Isaiah 44:28, 45:1).
One god stood behind all these world-shaking
events.
See
Mark S.Smith's Untold Stories: The Bible and Ugaritic Studies in the Twentieth
Century (Peabody,MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2001).
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