Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] The Evolution of Jewish Monotheism Platinum Post by Daniel Kohansky Every time we receive four guest contributions from our Platinum members, available to Platinum members only, we open up the floor for Platinum members to vote on one to share with the entire blog community. It's our way of spotlighting the thoughtful, high quality work being done by members and and inviting wider discussion.
[00:00:31] We recently caught up on a backlog of Platinum submissions. Thank you to all who voted and we're excited to present the winning post from the first round of voting.
[00:00:41] In this post, Dan Kohansky tackles a foundational question in the study of ancient were the Israelites always monotheists? And if not, how did monotheism evolve over time?
[00:00:55] It's a fascinating, historically grounded look at how the idea of one God developed across centuries of Israelite and Jewish history.
[00:01:05] Read on and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
[00:01:10] The Evolution of Jewish Monotheism this article is derived from my book A God of Our invention, Apocrypha Press, 2023.
[00:01:22] Monotheism, the idea that there is one and only one divine being in the universe, is the underlying foundation of Judaism. Jews reaffirm this twice a day by reciting Nesh, the basic statement of the Jewish hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.
[00:01:43] This belief is said to have started with Abraham and established for all by Moses at Sinai as one of the Ten Commandments, you shall have no other gods besides me.
[00:01:56] But is this really the way it happened in history? Even in biblical history?
[00:02:01] I suggest that the idea of monotheism evolved only gradually among the ancient Israelites, and even after it was generally accepted by their descendants, the Jews, it was not completely so. Until Roman times, the Israelites were the tribes that settled in Canaan and eventually coalesced into the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Jews, from the word Judah, are the descendants of the remnants of the Kingdom of Judah who went into exile in Babylon and there formed what became the Jewish religion. There is a continuing debate among scholars as to exactly or even approximately when to start calling them Jews.
[00:02:44] See especially Shay JD Cohen2069 106.
[00:02:50] Here, then, is a scenario that to my mind, describes this evolution.
[00:02:55] In the beginning, the Israelites were polytheists, just as all their Semitic kinfolk and Canaanite neighbors were.
[00:03:03] They may have had a smaller pantheon than some of the others, but we do have archaeological and biblical records of El baal, Moloch, Ashtoreth, Milcom, Chemosh, and the gods of Aram, among others, all in addition to Yahweh the Book of Kings, records how Manasseh rebuilt the high places to other gods that Hezekiah his father had torn down. 2 Kings 21:3 Then another king, Manasseh's grandson Josiah, tore them down again.
[00:03:45] Then Josiah's son Jehoahaz did evil in the eyes of the Lord, as all that his fathers had done. 2 Kings 23:32 the LORD is the standard translation of Yahweh, the most likely pronunciation of the Hebrew YHVH.
[00:04:05] Chapter 17 of 2 Kings, which was written by members of the court of the southern kingdom of Judah, record how the destruction of the northern kingdom was brought about because the Israelites had offended the Lord their God and they had feared other gods.
[00:04:26] Robert Alter comments on this passage that it is notable that all the transgressions are cultic. There is no mention of ethical failings or injustice justice.
[00:04:36] None of this reads like a record of a people much impressed by Yahweh's demands at Sinai.
[00:04:42] At most it shows a tendency toward Henotheism. We have only one God for us, but other nations have their gods. In Judges, Jephthah argues with the Amorites, do you not take possession of what Chemosh your God gives you to possess, and all that the Lord our God has given us to possess of that which we shall take possession?
[00:05:08] Another way the Israelites saw Yahweh was as the chief among the gods and the judge of the other gods. As, for example, God takes his stand in the divine assembly in the midst of the gods he renders judgment.
[00:05:26] Then there is the political aspect of the religion. The headquarters of the Yahwist cult was the temple in Jerusalem, which was also the capital of the kingdom of Judah. The Yahwists tried to influence the Judahite kings to minimize and if possible eliminate the competing cults of BAAL and the others. They were spectacularly successful with Josiah and spectacularly unsuccessful with Manasseh, and they also seem to have gradually won at least partial adherence to from the general Judahite population.
[00:05:58] But in the days of the First Temple, the Yahwist cult takes a stand closer to Henotheism than monotheism, as we see with Psalm 82 and Psalm 97. For example, after the prophet Elijah defeated the prophets of Baal in a magic contest, he proclaimed about Yahweh this day let it be known that you are God in Israel.
[00:06:24] In Israel, but not necessarily elsewhere. It is also noteworthy that while 400 prophets of Asherah were also present at the contest, Elijah never challenged them, only ordering that the prophets of BAAL be seized and slaughtered.
[00:06:45] There are a few hints in some older texts of a belief in Yahweh as the one and only God of all.
[00:06:52] When the prophet Elisha cured the Aramean general Naaman of a skin disease, the general exclaimed, now I know that there is no God in all the earth except in Israel.
[00:07:05] When the Assyrians were massing to destroy Jerusalem, King Hezekiah prayed to Yahweh, saying, you alone are God of all the kingdoms of the earth.
[00:07:18] Some of the First Temple period prophets, Amos in particular, made similar claims. But as Hezekiah's own son Manasseh proved, Yahwist monotheism, or even Yahwist Henotheism, did not have a strong hold on the Israelites.
[00:07:34] Then came the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple of Yahweh and the Babylonian exile.
[00:07:40] This could have been a death blow to the cult of Yahweh. The Babylonians who worshiped Marduk had destroyed the sacred sanctuary of the Israelite God. Didn't this mean Marduk was more powerful than Yahweh? The answer that the prophets came up with is that Yahweh hadn't allowed Marduk's worshipers to destroy his own house. He had ordered them to do it, and he did so in order to punish the Israelites for continuing to worship other gods.
[00:08:08] I am indebted to Karagianus and to Rumer for this argument.
[00:08:13] Jeremiah, writing at the time of the destruction, has Yahweh announced that I myself have given all these lands into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar, my servant.
[00:08:27] Furthermore, Yahweh is about to make Judah a horror for all the kingdoms of the earth because of Manasseh, son of Hezekiah, for what he did in Jerusalem.
[00:08:37] Jeremiah 15:4. In Rumer's explanation, the destruction of Yahweh's temple clearly signifies that Yahweh's power is not limited to his own people. He is the master even of the enemies of Judah.
[00:08:52] This attempt to explain the national catastrophe in a way that would preserve Yahweh's status as the God of the Israelites has had a number of significant consequences, principally in reinforcing the idea that the natural disasters and defeat in war are God's way of punishing us for something we did or didn't do.
[00:09:12] But the more immediate consequence, for my purposes, is that it gave historical as well as theological grounding to Yahwist monotheism.
[00:09:20] Yahweh was no longer just the God of Israel he was the God even of Israel's enemies, the God even of nations that had never heard of Israel. Second, Isaiah, writing about the time the exile ended, made this explicit.
[00:09:36] I am the first and I am the last, says Yahweh to Isaiah, and apart from me there is no God.
[00:09:46] But this is not the end of the story.
[00:09:49] Almost 400 years after Isaiah's proclamation of Yahweh as the only God forever, the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV put this proposition to the test by ordering his Jewish subjects in Judea to worship a statue of a God, probably Zeus, that he had set up in Jerusalem, in the temple itself, in 167 BCE the story of the Maccabean revolt against this idolatry is well known, celebrated each year in the minor festival of Hanukkah. What is less well known is that some Jews went along with Antiochus demands.
[00:10:26] All the Gentiles accepted the command of the king. Many, even from Israel, gladly adopted his religion. They sacrificed to idols and profaned the Sabbath.
[00:10:42] Maccabean propaganda may have exaggerated the numbers, but if there were no basis in fact for this claim, it would not have passed muster. Mattathias and his sons had to flee into the hills and conduct a guerrilla war against the Seleucids, indicating there was not a widespread willingness to take up arms against apostasy.
[00:11:02] Contrast that hesitancy with the reaction a little more than a hundred years later when the Romans tried to impose a similar idolatry on Judea. Josephus tells how Pontius Pilate, around the year 30 CE brought Caesar's effigies into Jerusalem. Whereas our law forbids us the very making of images, for many days the people petitioned Pilate to remove them, but he refused.
[00:11:27] When Pilate threatened to send his soldiers out among the protesters, the Jews then threw themselves on the ground and laid their necks bare and said they would take their death very willingly, rather than that the wisdom of their laws should be transgressed.
[00:11:42] This, says Josephus, so impressed Pilate that he backed down and had the images removed.
[00:11:48] The belief in Yahweh alone had finally taken hold.
[00:11:53] But even then it was not a complete monotheism. For one thing, while the Jews hoped that in the end of days all nations would come to worship Israel's God, they never, with perhaps one or two exceptions, attempted to impose this belief on any non Jew. They even attended as spectators, not as worshippers. Various Roman ceremonies honoring the state gods. They probably did so for practical political reasons. But in any event they went.
[00:12:20] It would fall to Christians in their takeover of the Roman Empire to use its mechanisms to enforce their version of monotheism, or an outward acceptance of it, at least over its domains.
