If we can speak of a royal theology it is because the king is at the center of it: God’s chosen king, in the temple, on the holy mount, in the sacred city, in the land that, by extension, can as a whole be called Zion. We can see-less in the narrative accounts of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, more in many of the psalms-the image of a king who is so close to the Lord that he is (almost) divine, that is, we can see in Judah what was common in the archaic Near At one place only in all the Hebrew scriptures, Psalm 45, verse 6, the king is addressed as God:
If the king is only once called God, his closeness to divinity is affirmed repeatedly: he is begotten by God (Psalm 2:7); he is the firstborn of God (Psalm 89:27); he is seated at the right hand of God (Psalm 110:1)?4 The notion of divine kingship in Israel is contrary to our preconceptions and is almost always denied. Steven Holloway, writing about a similar tendency among scholars of ancient Mesopotamia where divine kingship has also often been denied, writes, “The problem is not the elastic conception of the divine in ancient Mesopotamia but our modern rigid notion of the meaning of godship, and the misleading translations and interpretive shortfalls it occasions.“75 For us, and in good part because of later developments in the religion of Israel to which we are heir, there is an ontological chasm between the divine and the human that simply wasn’t there in the archaic mind. There was a whole hierarchy of gods: high gods, their wives, children, and grandchildren, their messengers-even the spirits of the dead were called “gods.” If mountains could be divinized, so could extraordinary humans, and who more likely than the king? That “David,” meaning David’s lineage, should be chosen for kingship “forever” is already so extraordinary that it points to a significant difference that puts the king “beyond your companions,” as Psalm 89 has it. I don’t mean to deny that the king was often depicted as the servant of God, or that the king could be chastised by God. In that same Psalm 89 which so exalts the king, God says that if David’s children “violate my statutes,” he will “punish their transgression with the rod,” but still God says, “I will not remove from him my steadfast love … I will not violate my covenant” (Psalm 89:30-33).76 The promise of “forever” transcended the sins of those to whom it was made, raising the question of conditional versus unconditional covenants that will have to be considered later. The destruction of the dynasty by the Babylonians caused a crisis for ancient Israelite theology, but one they were able to surmount, as we will see.
There is clearly a tension between the narrative account of the origin of kingship in ancient Israel and the symbolism of kingship as reflected in psalms that were perhaps written for enthronement ceremonies in the temple. In the narrative, kingship had a quite specific historical beginning. In the coronation hymns, not only will the kingship last forever, its origins are in the creation itself. Jon Levenson finds that “the cosmic-mythological symbols of creation,” so closely linked to ancient Near Eastern kingship, but supposedly absent in Israel, were in fact present there as well. He quotes Psalm 89:25 in this regard:
In the ancient Ugaritic myths, the high god El overcame the chaos of the waters, seas and rivers, in the act of creating the world (fragments of this version of creation are found in various places in the Hebrew scriptures, and even alluded to in Genesis 1:1 which suggests that chaos was present at the beginning of time and that God brought order into it). In Psalm 89:26 the king is described as participating in this divine act of creation, leading Levenson to note, “Creation, kingship, and temple thus form an indissoluble triad, the containment of the sea is the continuing proof of their eternal validity (e.g., Psalm
Some scholars interpret these mythological overtones to the Zion complex as a result of the absorption of Jebusite beliefs by the Israelites after their conquest of Jerusalem, which was an old Canaanite city. The point is not that the Israelites absorbed ethnically alien ideas, but that tribal Israel was becoming an urban kingdom, and absorbing an urban kingly ideology. There may already have been a temple in Jerusalem before the conquest, and Zadok, David’s choice as one of the two high priests, may already have been the Jebusite priest of that temple (though he was later given an Aaronic lineage). The other high priest was Abiathar, who had served as David’s high priest before the conquest. In any case, Psalm 48:2 identifies Zion with the Peak of Zaphon, the mountain of the gods in northern Syria known from the Ugaritic texts, and not with
There are two further implications of the cosmic-mythological nature of the Zion-temple-city-king complex that require noting. One is the idea of inviolability-concretely, the inviolability of Jerusalem. Levenson suggests that the cryptic statement of the Jebusites just before David’s attack on Jerusalem that “you will not come in here, even the blind and the lame will turn you back” (2 Samuel 5:6) implies that the Jebusites already had the idea that Jerusalem was impregnable, an idea that the Israelites would take over from them. Levenson writes, “The note of absolute security in the face of the grimmest military facts becomes a central theme in the hymns of Zion that were sung in the days of the Judahite monarchy.“79 The eventual destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in 587 BCE was traumatic and had enormous consequences, but the inviolability of Zion could be maintained if Zion and the city of Jerusalem were seen as transhistorical realities.
The other implication of the Zion complex worth noting is empire. In retrospect David and Solomon were said to have ruled from the river (the Euphrates) to the borders of Egypt. But if the king of Judah was the Lord’s anointed, and Yahweh ruled over all the gods, then, in principle, all the nations must bow down to Zion. The Lord of hosts rules “to the ends of the earth”; he is “exalted among the nations, exalted in the earth” (Psalm 46:10). In the Near Eastern royal tradition, the great king, the king of kings, is, in principle, the ruler of the cosmos. That Judah was a small state, often subservient to powerful empires, did not keep the Davidic royal theology from making universal claims, claims that would eventually be seen as to be realized only in the end times.80
Yahweh Alone
What we have seen so far is the emergence in Israel, or at least in Judah, of a classic Near Eastern monarchy, with all its attendant ideology. Israel has moved from being a tribal society to being an archaic society with an early state. As secondary states, Israel and Judah did not need to invent archaic culture from scratch-they could take much of it over from the surrounding high cultures, giving what they borrowed a new twist, the dominance of the god Yahweh for example, though his uniqueness is not evident from the early monarchical period. But if the early Israelite states were typically archaic, of what interest would they be in trying to understand the axial age? Something did happen to shake the archaic pattern to its foundations, something that would restructure it, though not destroy it. It is to that change that we must now turn.
If one read only the five books of Moses, the Torah, the heart and soul of Israelite and Jewish religion since the fifth century BCE, one could discern the archaic pattern only with difficulty, only as a shadow. The shadow cast over the archaic pattern, and over Mount Zion, is the shadow of Sinai, and the shadow cast over the figure of David is that of Moses.81 I am quite aware that the Bible says that Sinai and Moses long preceded Zion and David, and I would not deny that some fragmentary knowledge may be quite old, though more likely of Moses than of Sinai. But the great edifice of the Torah is late monarchical at the earliest and probably much of it is exilic or postexilic. Because the Bible has no interest in showing us how the Torah evolved, we must look to other, more perilous, means to discern the process.
The most obvious place to look is the emergence of the idea of Yahweh as the only God that it was legitimate for Israelites to worship, in place of the cosmopolitan theology that, although placing Yahweh first among the gods, did not deny that other gods could still legitimately receive their due. What we see here is what Mark Smith calls differentiation, in contrast to the convergence that seems to have been characteristic of the royal theology. El, as we have noted, was never conceived as “foreign,” and was
accepted by all parties as a synonym for Yahweh; other gods, certainly Baal and Asherah, came to be denounced as alien, and their worship as a rejection of Yahweh, who was to be differentiated from them. Although this process has often been characterized as “the growth of monotheism,” it is probably better to refer to it with the term introduced by Morton Smith, the Yahweh-alone movement, for devotion to Yahweh did not mean the denial of other gods, only the obligation not to worship them.82
The data as usual are highly problematic, but it would seem that the Yahwehalone movement appeared first in the north, in the kingdom of Israel. What historical reality lies behind the legends of Elijah and Elisha in ninth-century Israel is hard to say-they exist in a world of remarkable miracles-but their devotion to Yahweh and their fierce hostility to all other gods is the most notable thing about them. The stories about them seem to float free from the Deuteronomistic framework in which 1 and 2 Kings place them. They denounce above all the Baal worship of King Ahab’s wife Jezebel, and warn of the punishments that will follow such disloyalty, thus following the pattern of Deuteronomistic history that characterizes all the books from Joshua to 2 Kings, but the ecstatic intensity of their hostility seems to transcend the interpretive framework and to suggest the early emergence of an extreme devotion to Yahweh alone. An adequate explanation for this development is beyond us, but there are a few background factors that might give us some context for such a development.
If the traditions concerning Jeroboam have any validity, Israel (as opposed to Judah) was religiously conservative, rejecting the incipient royal theology centered on Jerusalem, its temple and its king. The Bible denounces Jeroboam for setting up “golden calves” at Bethel and Dan. It is very possible that these old Israelite sanctuaries already had such images. The “molten sea” in Solomon’s temple was said to stand on “twelve oxen” (1 Kings 7:25), but no one claimed they were worshipped, which was the charge against the images at Bethel and Dan, hard to adjudicate at this remove. In any case Yahweh was the national God of Israel, and, calves or not, was the God worshipped at Bethel and Dan. But monarchy was less firmly established in Israel than in Judah: assassination followed assassination; dynasty followed dynasty, many too brief even to be called dynasties. Internal troubles were matched with external troubles. Israel was exposed to attack from the Arameans of Damascus, and the growing threat of Assyrian imperial power from the ninth century. On top of all this, enmity with Judah was constant, broken only by occasional truces.
The legends of Elijah and Elisha indicate fervent devotion to Yahweh and bitter opposition, not only to the worship of other gods, particularly Baal, but to any worship of Yahweh that involved images or other practices similar to the worship of other gods. Although Elijah refers to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, often thought to be ancestors of various northern lineages, combined in one line of descent only later, there is no mention of Moses or Sinai. Elijah was famously called to go south to Mount Horeb (Deuteronomy’s term for Sinai) to receive a revelation, one that comes not through storm or earthquake but through the “still, small voice” of Yahweh, yet there is no explicit reference to Moses at Horeb, and some have even suggested that the Moses story was based on the Elijah story rather than the other way around.83 The traditions indicate severe tension between the prophets and the royal house, particularly Ahab and even more, his queen, Jezebel. It is possible that the practices sanctioned by the royal house were quite ancient and it was the prophets who were the radical innovators, but the social location of the struggle between prophet and king/queen is difficult to reconstruct from the evidence we have.
From the middle of the eighth century BCE, when prophets appeared who for the first time left written records, the social situation in both Israel and Judah was showing signs of severe stress. All across the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean the eighth century seems to have been a time of considerable economic growth, the social consequences of which were destabilizing. The commercialization of agriculture meant that large land holdings were profitable, whereas smallholdings devoted solely to subsistence, were becoming anachronistic. In times of drought or other difficulty, small farmers had to resort to moneylenders, often large landholders. The laws of credit were such that small farmers became in effect debt slaves, or were even sold into slavery to meet their creditors’ demands. All of this greatly undermined the effectiveness of the extended kinship system. Because Israel was larger and richer than Judah, these conditions may have been worse in the north. In addition, Assyrian intervention in the Levant, sporadic since the ninth century, was growing more intense in the closing decades of the eighth. The literary prophets were reacting strongly both to the growth of social injustice and to the problems of foreign policy.84
Two of the early literary prophets, Amos and Hosea, appeared first in the north, though Amos came originally from Judah. They are just as concerned with the proper worship of Yahweh and just as hostile to his rivals as were the Elijah/Elisha legends, but there is a new note of personal intensity because we have their own words (of course it is always difficult to know what are their own words and what was added later). I have already noted the importance of family or personal religion in the ancient Near East and in early Israel,85 but that is not what Amos and Hosea are expressing. Rather they are describing a personal relation between Yahweh and the children of Israel that seems strikingly different from anything before. Hosea’s metaphors are particularly intense: Israel is the unfaithful wife of Yahweh, rejecting Yahweh’s love, although Yahweh is willing to take her back in spite of her unfaithfulness. God tells Hosea to enact the relation of Yahweh and Israel by taking a prostitute as his wife as a parable to the people: “And the Lord said to me, `Go again, love a woman who is beloved of a paramour and is an adulteress; even as the Lord loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods”’ (Hosea 3:1).
Even more poignant is Hosea’s picture of God as a rejected parent:
Although I think such passages are essential to understanding Hosea, they are quantitatively outweighed by far by invective against the sins of the people and the description of the judgments that will come down upon them, as is true of all the prophets. The prophets were angry men speaking for an angry God, yet, critically, a loving God, willing to forgive the truly repentant.
Although the sins that provoked Elijah and Elisha were almost entirely cultic, there is a significant new note in the literary prophets, most clearly discerned early in Amos, though characteristic of all of them: the sins they denounce are not just cultic, but ethical, especially the oppression of the weak and the poor by the strong and the rich. Amos, like Hosea, stresses the special relation between Yahweh and Israel, making Israel’s unfaithfulness all the more terrible: “You only have I known/ of all the families of the earth;/ therefore I will punish you/ for all your iniquities” (Amos 3:2). Among those iniquities are the following:
Not only did Amos and the other prophets criticize cultic sins, they were critical of ritual altogether if people imagined it could outweigh ethical failures. In a famous passage Amos transmits the word of God:
And Amos sees God as the God of all peoples, even if the relation with Israel is special:
As noted above, prophecy coexists with monarchy in the history of ancient Israel (we will have to consider the special case of Moses below) as part of the same syndrome. Can we see a struggle for the very definition of the relation between Yahweh and people going on between prophets and kings? The royal theology, in classic archaic form, sees the relation of God and people as necessarily mediated by the king. Individuals and families may have their own cults, but the kingdom as a whole relates to God only through the king. It is this understanding that the prophets challenge: for them God relates directly to the people. From the beginning, prophets kept their distance from the king; had their own channel to Yahweh, so to speak. Samuel criticized Saul; even David was criticized by Nathan. It would be wrong to see the prophets as simply opposed to the kings: they existed together in an uneasy symbi
osis. What the prophets insisted on was that the king had no monopoly in relation to Yahweh. At times the conflict was intense, as between Elijah and Jezebel, but only Hosea in the last catastrophic moments of the northern kingdom rejected kingship altogether:
The prophets, the earliest exponents of the Yahweh-alone position, claimed that they were more truly “called” by Yahweh than were the kings. Prophecy in the sense of a personal call, or even possession by the divinity, is widespread, not only in the Near East, but among tribal and archaic peoples generally, as we have seen.86 But in most cases prophets were marginal, answering the needs of the common people, or offering advice and support to rulers, as many prophets did in Israel. The capacity of the great prophets of Israel to challenge kings directly is an indication of the weakness of monarchy, especially in the north, both internally and in face of external threat, and the consequent inability of kings to control various groups of their literate subjects. The great prophets claimed to be called, but the message with which they were entrusted was one of judgment and hope directed to both kings and people, and it was above all the demand to worship Yahweh alone.
So far we have concentrated on the prophets oriented to the northern kingdom, Amos and Hosea, and Hosea is important not only in himself but also for the strong continuity between his language and that of Deuteronomy. Still, we cannot forget Isaiah, also a late eighth-century prophet. Isaiah, in many senses the quintessential prophet, was of Jerusalemite priestly background and, rather than rejecting the Davidic royal theology, managed to transcend it from within. His call, as recounted in Isaiah 6, occurred in a magnified vision of the temple, but it was Isaiah as prophet, not the king, who was called. Nonetheless Isaiah, whose denunciations of kings and people for both ethical and cultic sins were no less emphatic than his northern confreres, remained loyal to the ideal of Zion, the inviolability of Jerusalem, and the continuation of the Davidic kingship, even if only as an ideal projected into a future “Day of the Lord,” when all things would be put right. How much of this goes back to Isaiah himself and how much was developed later by the tradition stemming from him is hard to say, but it is in good part due to Isaianic tradition that the idea of King/Jerusalem/Zion was never wholly replaced by the idea of Moses/Sinai/Covenant.87
Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age Page 42