From an objective standpoint, then, there is no reason to assume that the advent of Israelite monotheism took place anywhere other than Canaan, after centuries of immersion in Canaanite culture; no reason to doubt that Israelite religion is exactly the kind of organic outgrowth of the local culture that Kaufmann and Albright said it wasn‘t. It’s even possible that Yahweh, who spends so much of the Bible fighting against those nasty Canaanite gods for the allegiance of Israelites, actually started life as a Canaanite god, not an import.
The test of this evolutionary hypothesis -or at least the first test of it-is whether it is illuminating. Does it help clear up murky parts of Yahweh’s history? If we examine the Bible’s scattered, cryp~ tic clues about Yahweh's origins in light of it, do they then appear less jumbled, more coherent? The answer is yes.
Consider the “divine council” that seems at odds with the basic theology of the Bible, and yet turns up in the Bible more than once. As we‘ve seen, various ancient states, such as Egypt and China, seem to have modeled their pantheons at least partly on governmental structures. And Mesopotamia featured, more specifically, a deliberative assembly of gods-a council. Given that Mesopotamia is in the general vicinity of Canaan, it wouldn’t be shocking to find some such assembly in the early Canaanite tradition.
And, indeed, that’s what we find in Ugarit, the ancient city in northern Canaan whose translated texts have so illuminated the context of Israelite religion. There, at the end of the Bronze Age, on the eve of Israel’s birth, is a divine council. And the god most often depicted as its chief -a god named El (pronounced ale or el) bears a curious resemblance to Yahweh. Both gods were strong yet sensitive. El was seen as a “bull,” yet was also called “Kind El, the compassionate." Similarly, Yahweh, even in that early appearance as a warrior god, was driven by his compassion for the Israelites-~“thy steadfast love” for “the people whom thou hast redeemed.” Both gods appeared in dreams, became the patrons of the dreamers, and spoke often through prophets.“ And both were paternalistic creator gods: El was “creator of creatures” and “father of humanity.” As Smith has put it, El was “the divine father par excellence.”
The literal meaning of the Ugaritic term for the Canaanite “divine council” is, not surprisingly, “Council of El.” A bit more surprising is that if you peer beneath English versions of the Bible and examine the Hebrew rendering of the “divine council” on which God sits in Psalm 82, you find this phrase: adat El -which can be translated as “Council of El.” Hmmm.
And that’s just the beginning. It turns out that if you peer beneath the English word “god” in some parts of the Bible, you will find not the Hebrew word for Yahweh, but rather the Hebrew word El. Given that the Canaanite El appears on the historical record before the Israelite god Yahweh, it is tempting to conclude that Yahweh in some way emerged from El, and may even have started life as a renamed version of El.
There is cause for at least preliminary resistance to that temptation: the Hebrew word El is like the English word “god”-it can refer either to deities in general (“Hermes, a god of ancient Greece”) or to a particular deity (God with an uppercase G). The difference is that ancient Hebrew didn’t use the uppercase/lowercase convention to keep things clear. So you can’t infer, every time you see the Hebrew god called El, that his name is El.
Still, there are a few times in the Bible when the “El” applied to the Hebrew god indeed seems to be a proper noun. According to Genesis, Jacob “erected an altar and called it El-Elohe-Israel.” This could be translated as “god, the god of Israel,” but if you don’t capitalize the first “god” it doesn’t make much sense; it would be like dedicating an altar to “deity, the deity of Israel.” In other words, the first “god” has to be a specific god, and the specific god named El that we know of in that part of the world was head of the pantheon in northern Canaan. (Indeed, some English translations of Genesis render “El-Elohe-Israel” unabashedly as “El, God of Israel.”) If that’s not a close enough link between Israelite religion and El, look at the “uni "Israel“ itself." In ancient times names were often inspired by gods. and names ending in “el” typically referred to the god El.
An especially intriguing biblical appearance of the word El is in the phrase El Shaddai, famously rendered in English as “God Almighty.” As it turns out, “Almighty" is a mistranslation; though the exact meaning of Shaddai remains cloudy, it seems to refer to mountains not omnipotence-but that‘s another story.‘‘ For present purposes. what‘s interesting is the way this name is used in the sixth chapter of Exodus. during one of Moses’s conversations with God. God says. “I am Yahweh. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai. but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them." Even Yahweh himself says that he started life with the name Ell”
Of course. Yahweh doesn't explicitly say he started life as the Canaanite god El. And at the time he is speaking, the Israelites (in the Bible‘s telling of the story) haven‘t yet gotten to Canaan. But this story may have entered Israel’s historical narrative much later than it is said to have happened. And if there is one lesson of modern biblical scholarship, it‘s that stories often say more about the era of their creation than about the era they claim to describe.
So what does Exodus 6 suggest about the era of its creation? If you were crafting a history of your god, why would you add such an odd twist. saying that he used to go by another name? Theories abound. One is this: you are trying to meld two religious traditions; you are trying to convince two groups of people-one that worships a god called Yahweh and another that warships a god called El-that they actually worship the same gods"
Supporters of this theory sometimes invoke a pattern in the Bible that was famously emphasized by the nineteenth-century scholar Julius Wellhausen. According to Wellhausen’s “documentary hypothesis.” the early phases of the biblical narrative from creation through the time of Moses-come largely from two authors (or two groups of like~minded authors), one known as the J source and one known as the E source. The E source refers to the Hebrew god as either El or Elohim (hence the E). The J source refers to the Hebrew god as Yahweh (and is known as J because of the way Yahweh is spelled in German, the language of much pioneering biblical scholarship, including Wellhausen’s).
The documentary hypothesis suggests that at some point in Israelite history there were indeed two geographically distinct traditions to reconcile, one worshipping a god named El and one worshipping a god named Yahweh. Adherents of this scenario say the J author(s) lived in the south, in the part of Israel known as Judah, and the E author(s) lived to the north-which, notably, is closer to the heartland of El worship.
Wellhausen’s scheme doesn’t enjoy the near universal esteem it had in the mid-twentieth century, but there’s no denying that the Bible features different vocabularies for Israel’s god. And if indeed the Hebrew god was the result of a merger-perhaps between a faction whose main deity was a creator god named El and another faction that worshipped a war god named Yahweh-this would be nothing new. As we’ve seen, the ancient world was full of politically expedient theological fusions. A common catalyst was that the two parties had a somewhat non-zero-sum relationship. Specifically: both felt they could get more from cooperation, even consolidation, than from conflict.
Certainly the Bible holds hints of once separate groups having united. It describes Israel at the end of the late second millennium BCE, before it evolved into a state-level society complete with a king, as a confederation of twelve tribes. In the Bible’s earliest list of tribes, however, some of the twelve are nowhere to be found. The missing tribes are southern; apparently the tribes that constituted Israel at this early date were in northern Canaan, where worship of El would be most likely. Hence, perhaps, the name Israel.
The merging of Israel’s tribes may be dimly reflected in the story of the patriarchs--Abraham who begat Isaac who beg-at Jacob. Few scholars think this lineage is accurate, but most think it is significant. Matty buy some variation on a theory put forth in 1930 by the German scholar Martin Noth: the different patriarchs had once been sacred ancestors of different tribes; one tribe claimed Abraham as founder, another Isaac, another Jacob.
and
the strange story behind another part of this verse: the phrase “children“ of Israel.”
The King James edition got this phrase from the “Masoretic Text,” a Hebrew edition of the Bible that took shape in the early Middle Ages, more than a millennium after Deuteronomy “as written. Where the Masoretic Text-the earliest extant Hebrew Bible got it is a mystery. The phrase isn’t found in either of the two much earlier versions of the verse now available: a Hebrew version in the Dead Sea Scrolls and a Greek version in the Septuagint. a pre-Christian translation of the Hebrew Bible.
Why would some editor have invented the phrase? Was some thing being covered up?
Some scholars who have used the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint to reconstruct the authentic version of the verse say that “children of Israel” was stuck in as a replacement for “sons of El.” With that lost phrase restored, a verse that was cryptic suddenly makes sense: El-the most high god, Elyon-divided the world‘s people into ethnic groups and gave one group to each of his sons. And Yahweh, one of those sons, was given the people of Jacob. Apparently at this point in Israelite history (and there’s no telling how long ago this story originated) Yahweh isn’t God, but just a god-and a son of God, one among many.
So how does Yahweh rise through the ranks? How does a god initially consigned to a lower level of the pantheon eventually merge with the chief god, El, and even, in a sense, supplant him? To judge by other examples of divine upward mobility in the ancient world, one likely explanation would be a shift in the relative power of northern and southern Israel, of El’s heartland and Yahweh’s heart~ land. Such an increase in southern Israel’s relative power may well have been under way during the eighth century BCE-and certainly it assumed dramatic form near the end of the century, when, as we’ll see in the next chapter, the north fell to Assyrian conquest. It was after this consolidation of power in the south that most of the Hebrew Bible was written, so southern scribes who were champions of Yahweh would have had a chance to augment his stature and to downplay a northern El-centric perspective.
and
Yahweh’s Sex Life (and Other Myths)
Still enough remains visible to complicate the task of those who claim to see large and sharp differences between the Abrahamic god and other gods in the vicinity. One oft-claimed difference for example. is that whereas the pagan gods had sex lives, Yahweh didn‘t “Israel‘s God." as Kaufmann put it, “has no sexual qualities or desires." It‘s true that there's no biblical ode to Yahweh that Compares with the Ugaritic boast that Baal copulated with a heifer 77 times,” even “88 times,” or that El’s penis “extends like the sea?” And it seems puzzling: If Yahweh eventually merged with El, and El had a sex life, why didn’t the postmerger Yahweh have one? Why, more specifically, didn’t Yahweh inherit El’s consort, the goddess Athirat?
Maybe he did. There are references in the Bible to a goddess named Asherah, and scholars have long believed that Asherah is just the Hebrew version of Athirat. Of course, the biblical writers don’t depict Asherah as God’s wife-this isn’t the sort of theological theme they generally championed-but rather heap disdain on her, and on the Israelites who worshipped her. However, in the late twentieth century, archaeologists discovered intriguing inscriptions, dating to around 800 BCE, at two different Middle Eastern sites. The inscriptions were blessings in the name not just of Yahweh but of “his Asherah.” The word “his” puts a suggestive spin on a passage in 2 Kings reporting that, near the end of the seventh century, Asherah was spending time in Yahweh’s temple. A priest who didn’t favor polytheism “brought out the image of Asherah from the house of the Lord, outside Jerusalem, to the Wadi Kidron, burned it at the Wadi Kidron, beat it to dust and threw the dust of it upon the graves of the common people.” In the next chapter we’ll see what a crucial moment in the evolution of monotheism this was.
The question of Yahweh’s sex life is part of a larger question that has high stakes: How mythological was Yahweh? Not “mythological” in the sense of not being true, but rather in the sense that Greek gods were mythological: Were there stories about Yahweh’s dramatic dealings with other extraordinary beings? Did he fight some gods or demigods and pal around with others? Was he part of a supernatural soap opera?
Many scholars have said no. Indeed, in Kaufmann’s View, the “non-mythological” nature of Yahweh “is the essence of Israelite religion" and sets Israelite religion “apart from all forms of paganism," cenainly including native Canaanite religion.
There is doubly bad news for those who, like Kaufmann, would hail Yahweh as a clean break from pagan myth. First, there are signs that the break wasn’t so clean-that, like so much else in the his tory of religion, it was more evolutionary than revolutionary. Second, when you try to trace this evolution, you see that Yahweh’s family tree may contain something even more scandalous than an early fusion with the Canaanite deity El. It may be that Yahweh, even while inheriting El’s genes, somehow acquired genes from the most reviled of all Canaanite deities: Baal.
Baal was of course immersed deeply in myth. He did battle with Yamm, the god of the sea, and Mot, the god of death. One Ugaritic text even says that he “smote Lotan,” a seven-headed “dragon.” Talk about mythological!
Then again, the Bible pays this tribute to Yahweh: “You broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan.” And the ancient Hebrew word underlying Leviathan- Livyaton-is, so far as we can tell, just Hebrew for “Lotan”; apparently Yahweh not only slew multiheaded dragons, but slew the very multiheaded dragon that Baal slew. That same chapter of Psalms credits Yahweh with subduing the sea. Or, perhaps, Sea: some translators capitalize the word, because underlying it is yam, the ancient Hebrew word for the sea god that Baal smote. The Bible also promises, in the book of Isaiah, that Yahweh will “swallow up death forever”---and underlying “death” is the Hebrew word for Mot, the god of death with whom Baal struggled dramatically.
So why do English translations of the Bible say “sea” instead of “Yamm” and “death” instead of “Mot”? Ancient Hebrew didn’t have capital letters. When you see the Hebrew word mawet in isolation, you can’t say whether it is the proper noun meaning Mot or the generic noun meaning death. So the Bible’s translators can take their pick, and as a rule they’ve picked generic nouns. But you have to wonder about this choice. In deciding whether Yahweh was “swallowing up” Mot or merely death. for example: surely it is no coincidence that in Canaanite mythology Mot was famous for “swallowing” people at the end of their lives and delivering them to “Sheol,” the afterlife underworld or that Mot had once swallowed Yahweh’s rival, Baal.
Or consider the Bible’s puzzling reference to Yahweh’s “wrath against the rivers” and his “rage against the sea.” Why would Yahweh be upset with rivers and sea? How could he blame water for flowing? Wouldn’t these passages make more sense if the Hebrew words for “rivers” and “sea” (nahar and yam) were translated as Nahar and Yamm, the supernatural beings with whom Baal had fought in such mythological fashion? (Perhaps feeling a pang of conscience, the translators of the New Revised Standard Version obscurely acknowledge this possibility, with tine-print footnotes that say “or against River” and “or against Sea”) The case for a mythological translation only grows when you see how Yahweh himself appears in these passages. He conquers the forces of nature in a chariot (“You trampled the sea with your horses”). He brandishes a bow and intimidates the moon and the sun with “the light of your arrows” and the “gleam of your flashing spear.”
These last two images are generally taken to refer to lightning, and here lies yet another blurring of the line between the myths of those pagan Canaanites and the religion of ancient Israel: Yahweh, in addition to fighting the very forces of nature that Baal fights against and being himself depicted in anthropomorphic terms, as mythological gods often are, is depicted as the particular type of mythological god that Baal was: a storm god. In Psalm 29, Yahweh is the source of thunder and lightning: “The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders. . . .The voice of the LORD flashes forth flames of fire.”
In 1936, H. L. Ginsberg, a lecturer at the Jewish Theological Seminary, suggested that this poem had originally been a hymn to Baal. Ginsberg’s initially eccentric theory has moved toward the mainstream as evidence for it has grown. One scholar, for instance, changed all the “Yahweh”s in the poem to “Baal”s and found that the amount of alliteration grew radically.
The eminent biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross has argued that one of the keystone events of the entire Bible-the crossing of the Red Sea-has roots in Baal mythology.” He notes that this episode features, in a sense, the sea submitting to God’s will, a faint echo of Baal‘s dominating Sea (Yamm) in battle. And certainly there is a mythic air about the account of the event in Exodus 15. Here the scene is nothing like the (probably later) account in Exodus 14 that is the one depicted in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments; the waters don’t just part majestically at Moses’s request and then reunite to drown the Egyptians. Rather, God is conspicuously, anthropomorphically, involved, and his mastery over the sea commensurately vivid: “At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up, the floods stood up in a heap.”
But, whatever the parallels between the Red Sea episode and the myths of Baal, there is one big difference. Whereas the Baal myths take place in a supernatural ‘realm, the biblical story is fun- damentally about human history. Yes, the story is crucially shaped by intervention from on high, but the real action is on the ground. As Cross puts it, Yahweh’s battles, unlike the typical Baal battle, are “particularized in place and time.” A “mythic pattern” has been replaced by an “epic pattern.” Hence the title of his influential 1973 book, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic.
Even when Yahweh acts in plainly mythological fashion-slaying a multiheaded dragon, say-the biblical reference is fleeting; there is no lengthy plotline. “Mythic imagery is abundant in the Bible,” observes Mark S. Smith, yet “myth as narrative” is nearly absent. Smith’s explanation for the dearth of narrative myth involves, among other things, deletion. Toward the middle of the first millennium BCE, he says, mythological motifs fell out of fashion; Hebrew scriptures composed then depict God in less anthropomorphic form than before, and sometimes as formless. Smith argues that during this period, when myth was frowned on, earlier texts were being edited and re-edited; maybe priests found their View of Yahweh at odds with earlier accounts of his exploits and “chose not to preserve them, thereby functionally censoring them ”
But why go to the trouble? Even if myth had grown unfashionable, why bother to erase memory of its previous vogue? Probably because there were great theological stakes. After all, mythological gods deal with other formidable gods and sometimes find their will thwarted; but if you’re the one, all-powerful God, your will can’t be thwarted! Mythology, in other words, meant polytheism. So a project to strip early mythic narrative from scripture might have been part of a larger project: reworking the scriptures to imply that from the dawn of Israelite religion Yahweh was all-powerful and worthy of exclusive devotion. (The scholar Marjo Christina Annette Korpel compared Ugaritic and biblical descriptions of the divine and found “spectacularly” similar language “where strength, honour, dignity and compassion are concerned,” whereas “everything implying weakness, humiliation or desire is shunned in the Old Testament”)
This motivation would explain the kinds of mythological moments that did survive the editing. More than once, a plotline lasts just long enough to suggest that, if a basis for polytheism ever existed, it is now gone. In Psalm 82-the aforementioned divine council scene, in which God takes his seat among other gods-the scene ends with him predicting their death; or, in one common interpretation, sentencing them to death for their misdeeds.
Similarly, Yahweh’s encounter with the gods Sea and River lasts just long enough for him to casually subdue these pesky remnants of a bygone polytheism. Leaving that part of Baal’s legacy attached to Yahweh was theologically safe. But what about Baal’s setbacks, such as being “swallowed” by Mot, the god Death? Such humiliation wouldn’t befit a god worthy of exclusive devotion, and indeed the scriptures, as edited, don’t show Yahweh inheriting this part of Baal’s identity. Instead, we see that promise in the book of Isaiah that eventually Yahweh will “swallow up” Mot “forever,” a pointed assertion of Yahweh’s superiority not just to Mot but to Baal.‘
In a sense, then, the mid-first-millennium editors who in Smith’s account helped to demythologize the Bible weren’t bent on extirpating myth per se. Indeed. it was only later translators who changed Sea to sea and River to river and Death to death. The enemy, rather was myth in which gods other than the star of the show were formidable. And since narrative holds interest only when its ooutcome is sin doubt, that is when there is more than one formidable character-the death of these motifs meant the death of true mythic narrative.
This joint demise of polytheism and mythic narrative can be glimpsed, refracted, through shards of myth that remain in the Bible. A verse in the book of Habakkuk, as commonly translated, reads “God came from...Mount Paran" and “before him went pestilence. and plague followed close behind.”But the Hebrew words underlying “pestilence" and ‘plague” are the words for the gods of pestilence and plague, Deber and Resheph. In the Canaanite pantheon Deber and Resheph had been fiercely destructive,‘ but, as Smith has noted, that part of their identity doesn‘t make it into the Bible Rather, they appear as unassuming members of Yahweh’s retinue. And later translators, by turning the names of these gods into generic nouns, converted Pestilence and Plague from minor deities to men aspects of Yahweh’s power, and abstract aspects at that. Yahweh here seems to be repeating the strategy we saw Marduk exercise in the previous chapter. moving toward monotheism through subtle con quest, assimilating other gods into his being.
This passage from Habakkuk illustrates Smith‘s account of hot Canaanite polytheism got streamlined into Israelite monotheism. Gods that had ranked below El in the pantheon, such as Deber and Resheph, shrank in stature and eventually disappeared altogether. With the midlevel management now gone, all that was left of the downsized pantheon was a deity at the very top-now known at Yahweh-and supernatural beings at the very bottom: the divine messengers, or angels.
Maybe he did. There are references in the Bible to a goddess named Asherah, and scholars have long believed that Asherah is just the Hebrew version of Athirat. Of course, the biblical writers don’t depict Asherah as God’s wife-this isn’t the sort of theological theme they generally championed-but rather heap disdain on her, and on the Israelites who worshipped her. However, in the late twentieth century, archaeologists discovered intriguing inscriptions, dating to around 800 BCE, at two different Middle Eastern sites. The inscriptions were blessings in the name not just of Yahweh but of “his Asherah.” The word “his” puts a suggestive spin on a passage in 2 Kings reporting that, near the end of the seventh century, Asherah was spending time in Yahweh’s temple. A priest who didn’t favor polytheism “brought out the image of Asherah from the house of the Lord, outside Jerusalem, to the Wadi Kidron, burned it at the Wadi Kidron, beat it to dust and threw the dust of it upon the graves of the common people.” In the next chapter we’ll see what a crucial moment in the evolution of monotheism this was.
The question of Yahweh’s sex life is part of a larger question that has high stakes: How mythological was Yahweh? Not “mythological” in the sense of not being true, but rather in the sense that Greek gods were mythological: Were there stories about Yahweh’s dramatic dealings with other extraordinary beings? Did he fight some gods or demigods and pal around with others? Was he part of a supernatural soap opera?
Many scholars have said no. Indeed, in Kaufmann’s View, the “non-mythological” nature of Yahweh “is the essence of Israelite religion" and sets Israelite religion “apart from all forms of paganism," cenainly including native Canaanite religion.
There is doubly bad news for those who, like Kaufmann, would hail Yahweh as a clean break from pagan myth. First, there are signs that the break wasn’t so clean-that, like so much else in the his tory of religion, it was more evolutionary than revolutionary. Second, when you try to trace this evolution, you see that Yahweh’s family tree may contain something even more scandalous than an early fusion with the Canaanite deity El. It may be that Yahweh, even while inheriting El’s genes, somehow acquired genes from the most reviled of all Canaanite deities: Baal.
Baal was of course immersed deeply in myth. He did battle with Yamm, the god of the sea, and Mot, the god of death. One Ugaritic text even says that he “smote Lotan,” a seven-headed “dragon.” Talk about mythological!
Then again, the Bible pays this tribute to Yahweh: “You broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan.” And the ancient Hebrew word underlying Leviathan- Livyaton-is, so far as we can tell, just Hebrew for “Lotan”; apparently Yahweh not only slew multiheaded dragons, but slew the very multiheaded dragon that Baal slew. That same chapter of Psalms credits Yahweh with subduing the sea. Or, perhaps, Sea: some translators capitalize the word, because underlying it is yam, the ancient Hebrew word for the sea god that Baal smote. The Bible also promises, in the book of Isaiah, that Yahweh will “swallow up death forever”---and underlying “death” is the Hebrew word for Mot, the god of death with whom Baal struggled dramatically.
So why do English translations of the Bible say “sea” instead of “Yamm” and “death” instead of “Mot”? Ancient Hebrew didn’t have capital letters. When you see the Hebrew word mawet in isolation, you can’t say whether it is the proper noun meaning Mot or the generic noun meaning death. So the Bible’s translators can take their pick, and as a rule they’ve picked generic nouns. But you have to wonder about this choice. In deciding whether Yahweh was “swallowing up” Mot or merely death. for example: surely it is no coincidence that in Canaanite mythology Mot was famous for “swallowing” people at the end of their lives and delivering them to “Sheol,” the afterlife underworld or that Mot had once swallowed Yahweh’s rival, Baal.
Or consider the Bible’s puzzling reference to Yahweh’s “wrath against the rivers” and his “rage against the sea.” Why would Yahweh be upset with rivers and sea? How could he blame water for flowing? Wouldn’t these passages make more sense if the Hebrew words for “rivers” and “sea” (nahar and yam) were translated as Nahar and Yamm, the supernatural beings with whom Baal had fought in such mythological fashion? (Perhaps feeling a pang of conscience, the translators of the New Revised Standard Version obscurely acknowledge this possibility, with tine-print footnotes that say “or against River” and “or against Sea”) The case for a mythological translation only grows when you see how Yahweh himself appears in these passages. He conquers the forces of nature in a chariot (“You trampled the sea with your horses”). He brandishes a bow and intimidates the moon and the sun with “the light of your arrows” and the “gleam of your flashing spear.”
These last two images are generally taken to refer to lightning, and here lies yet another blurring of the line between the myths of those pagan Canaanites and the religion of ancient Israel: Yahweh, in addition to fighting the very forces of nature that Baal fights against and being himself depicted in anthropomorphic terms, as mythological gods often are, is depicted as the particular type of mythological god that Baal was: a storm god. In Psalm 29, Yahweh is the source of thunder and lightning: “The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders. . . .The voice of the LORD flashes forth flames of fire.”
In 1936, H. L. Ginsberg, a lecturer at the Jewish Theological Seminary, suggested that this poem had originally been a hymn to Baal. Ginsberg’s initially eccentric theory has moved toward the mainstream as evidence for it has grown. One scholar, for instance, changed all the “Yahweh”s in the poem to “Baal”s and found that the amount of alliteration grew radically.
The eminent biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross has argued that one of the keystone events of the entire Bible-the crossing of the Red Sea-has roots in Baal mythology.” He notes that this episode features, in a sense, the sea submitting to God’s will, a faint echo of Baal‘s dominating Sea (Yamm) in battle. And certainly there is a mythic air about the account of the event in Exodus 15. Here the scene is nothing like the (probably later) account in Exodus 14 that is the one depicted in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments; the waters don’t just part majestically at Moses’s request and then reunite to drown the Egyptians. Rather, God is conspicuously, anthropomorphically, involved, and his mastery over the sea commensurately vivid: “At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up, the floods stood up in a heap.”
But, whatever the parallels between the Red Sea episode and the myths of Baal, there is one big difference. Whereas the Baal myths take place in a supernatural ‘realm, the biblical story is fun- damentally about human history. Yes, the story is crucially shaped by intervention from on high, but the real action is on the ground. As Cross puts it, Yahweh’s battles, unlike the typical Baal battle, are “particularized in place and time.” A “mythic pattern” has been replaced by an “epic pattern.” Hence the title of his influential 1973 book, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic.
Even when Yahweh acts in plainly mythological fashion-slaying a multiheaded dragon, say-the biblical reference is fleeting; there is no lengthy plotline. “Mythic imagery is abundant in the Bible,” observes Mark S. Smith, yet “myth as narrative” is nearly absent. Smith’s explanation for the dearth of narrative myth involves, among other things, deletion. Toward the middle of the first millennium BCE, he says, mythological motifs fell out of fashion; Hebrew scriptures composed then depict God in less anthropomorphic form than before, and sometimes as formless. Smith argues that during this period, when myth was frowned on, earlier texts were being edited and re-edited; maybe priests found their View of Yahweh at odds with earlier accounts of his exploits and “chose not to preserve them, thereby functionally censoring them ”
But why go to the trouble? Even if myth had grown unfashionable, why bother to erase memory of its previous vogue? Probably because there were great theological stakes. After all, mythological gods deal with other formidable gods and sometimes find their will thwarted; but if you’re the one, all-powerful God, your will can’t be thwarted! Mythology, in other words, meant polytheism. So a project to strip early mythic narrative from scripture might have been part of a larger project: reworking the scriptures to imply that from the dawn of Israelite religion Yahweh was all-powerful and worthy of exclusive devotion. (The scholar Marjo Christina Annette Korpel compared Ugaritic and biblical descriptions of the divine and found “spectacularly” similar language “where strength, honour, dignity and compassion are concerned,” whereas “everything implying weakness, humiliation or desire is shunned in the Old Testament”)
This motivation would explain the kinds of mythological moments that did survive the editing. More than once, a plotline lasts just long enough to suggest that, if a basis for polytheism ever existed, it is now gone. In Psalm 82-the aforementioned divine council scene, in which God takes his seat among other gods-the scene ends with him predicting their death; or, in one common interpretation, sentencing them to death for their misdeeds.
Similarly, Yahweh’s encounter with the gods Sea and River lasts just long enough for him to casually subdue these pesky remnants of a bygone polytheism. Leaving that part of Baal’s legacy attached to Yahweh was theologically safe. But what about Baal’s setbacks, such as being “swallowed” by Mot, the god Death? Such humiliation wouldn’t befit a god worthy of exclusive devotion, and indeed the scriptures, as edited, don’t show Yahweh inheriting this part of Baal’s identity. Instead, we see that promise in the book of Isaiah that eventually Yahweh will “swallow up” Mot “forever,” a pointed assertion of Yahweh’s superiority not just to Mot but to Baal.‘
In a sense, then, the mid-first-millennium editors who in Smith’s account helped to demythologize the Bible weren’t bent on extirpating myth per se. Indeed. it was only later translators who changed Sea to sea and River to river and Death to death. The enemy, rather was myth in which gods other than the star of the show were formidable. And since narrative holds interest only when its ooutcome is sin doubt, that is when there is more than one formidable character-the death of these motifs meant the death of true mythic narrative.
This joint demise of polytheism and mythic narrative can be glimpsed, refracted, through shards of myth that remain in the Bible. A verse in the book of Habakkuk, as commonly translated, reads “God came from...Mount Paran" and “before him went pestilence. and plague followed close behind.”But the Hebrew words underlying “pestilence" and ‘plague” are the words for the gods of pestilence and plague, Deber and Resheph. In the Canaanite pantheon Deber and Resheph had been fiercely destructive,‘ but, as Smith has noted, that part of their identity doesn‘t make it into the Bible Rather, they appear as unassuming members of Yahweh’s retinue. And later translators, by turning the names of these gods into generic nouns, converted Pestilence and Plague from minor deities to men aspects of Yahweh’s power, and abstract aspects at that. Yahweh here seems to be repeating the strategy we saw Marduk exercise in the previous chapter. moving toward monotheism through subtle con quest, assimilating other gods into his being.
This passage from Habakkuk illustrates Smith‘s account of hot Canaanite polytheism got streamlined into Israelite monotheism. Gods that had ranked below El in the pantheon, such as Deber and Resheph, shrank in stature and eventually disappeared altogether. With the midlevel management now gone, all that was left of the downsized pantheon was a deity at the very top-now known at Yahweh-and supernatural beings at the very bottom: the divine messengers, or angels.
No comments:
Post a Comment