Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  In their demand for the worship of Yahweh alone, the prophets were a distinct minority as is evident from the Bible itself where generation after generation of both kings and people are condemned for worshipping other gods. Ziony Zevit suggests that the evidence for the worship of several gods, and of Yahweh with his consort in particular, is widespread in the archaeological record, not only in the “high places” of popular worship, but in the Jerusalem temple: “The Jerusalem temple itself reflected this polydoxy. Along with the YHWH cult, for most of the history of the institution, other deities were also worshiped.“88 But if, at least until the exile and perhaps even then, only a minority heeded the prophetic admonition, it was, nonetheless, a significant minority, one with the capacity to elaborate the tradition well beyond what the early literary prophets themselves had said. Although 1 and 2 Kings suggest that several kings, in Judah though not in Israel, notably Hezekiah and Josiah, were sympathetic to the Yahweh-alone movement and instituted reforms in accordance with its program, the first clear indication that such a movement had been gathering strength comes during the reign of Josiah, when, during renovations to the temple, a book was discovered that is widely believed to be an early draft of what we know as the fifth book of Moses, Deuteronomy.

  The Deuteronomic Revolution

  The book of Deuteronomy as we have it has certainly gone through several recensions, but the text is distinct enough in both form and content that it is a critical reference point for looking back at the first four books of Moses and forward to the historical books. What have come to be called “the Deuteronomists” have been seen as contributing a central, perhaps the central, strand of Israel’s faith, but who were the Deuteronomists? Who exactly created the tradition that took its first definitive form with the discovery of “Deuteronomy” in the temple in 621 BCE we cannot know, but Geller, following 2 Kings 22, gives us an important indication: “It is worth noting that the committee that brought the Book of the Law to Josiah’s attention consisted of Hilkiah the high priest and Shaphan the scribe. It was then confirmed as true by Huldah the prophetess. The list may be viewed as an indication of the major wings of the Deuteronomic coalition.“89 The prophetic background is clear, for the zeal that characterized the prophetic Yahweh-alone movement was at the center of Deuteronomic faith. But the presence of the high priest and a royal scribe is also significant. Each was located within a tradition that overlapped with the prophetic tradition but was not wholly absorbed into it. The priestly tradition with its focus on the temple, the sacrifice and the actual encounter of the high priest with the presence of God in the Holy of Holies in the temple, gave rise to its own literary tradition, one that perhaps completed the editing of the Torah. And royal scribes were educated in the Israelite form of the ancient Near Eastern tradition of wisdom, handed down in such biblical books as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job. The wisdom tradition was above all one of instruction, of teaching, and of the relation of teacher and student, all of which were taken up into the Deuteronomic understanding of Israelite religion.

  The very core of the Deuteronomic tradition, one that gave the religion of ancient Israel its fundamental definition, was the Covenant. Where did this idea come from and what did it mean? We have already seen how central the idea of covenant was in the Judahite royal theology, where the covenant was above all between Yahweh and the house of David. Covenant was a widespread feature of ancient Near Eastern ideology. At one time it was thought that the Hittite suzerainty treaty of the second millennium BCE provided the model on which the Mosaic covenant was based.90 More recent work, including the exhaustive study of Moshe Weinfeld, suggests that it was the Assyrian treaty model that had the decisive influence on Deuteronomy.9’ The possibility of a powerful Assyrian model for central elements in Israelite religion requires that we back up for a moment to consider the international situation that gave rise to both the literary prophets and the Deuteronomists.

  The Assyrian Empire (more properly the Neo-Assyrian Empire, 934-610 BCE) represented a new level of intensity, both militarily and ideologically, compared to previous Near Eastern empires.92 By the eighth century the ferocity of the Assyrian conquest, involving wholesale destruction and deportation, roused both fear and a desperate desire to resist in all the Levantine states, including Israel and Judah. The military menace of Assyria was paralleled by intense ideological pressure. Although the Assyrians worshipped more than one god, Assur was the god of king and empire, par excellence, and all subject peoples were required to recognize his predominance. The enormous creativity of Israelite religion from Hosea to Jeremiah and including the early versions of the Pentateuch (that is, late eighth through the seventh centuries) must be seen, then, as in part responses to the Assyrian challenge.

  Religious resistance to Assyria took the form of an exclusive reliance on Yahweh, as against the pressure to recognize Assur; if the Yahweh-alone movement originated before the period of intense Assyrian pressure, it was greatly strengthened in response to it. Isaiah’s advice to Judah’s kings Ahaz and Hezekiah to avoid both anti-Assyrian alliances and submission to Assyria, but instead to rely on Yahweh alone, is an expression of an intense, if not entirely realistic, religious resistance.

  Once Hezekiah submitted to Assyria, followed in the same course by his son, the long-lived Manasseh, they were linked by a suzerainty treaty to accept not only the Assyrian king as ruler, but the primacy of his god, A99ur.93 Such a treaty involved stipulations that the vassal must follow, and also blessings and curses, often most terrible curses, for any breach of the treaty, any disloyalty. Further, it was the obligation of the vassal to “love” his suzerain, a love not reciprocated by the Assyrian king, for love in this case meant loyalty, required of the vassal but not of the It is this kind of treaty, particularly the vassal treaties of Esarhaddon, that Deuteronomy took over and transformed, as we will consider shortly.95

  Weinfeld contrasts the vassal treaty, which sets up obligations on the part of the vassal and is thus conditional, with the grant treaty, which is an unconditional grant from the suzerain to a follower given as a reward for faithfulness. He finds the covenant with Abraham, involving the promise of land and progeny, as well as the covenant with David, involving the permanent succession of David’s house, to be examples of grant covenants, but in both cases he finds that biblical language follows Assyrian models. Thus when God commends Abraham for having “kept my charge” (Genesis 26:5), the language echoes that of Assurbanipal’s grant to a servant, as does the language of “serving perfectly,” having “walked before me,” and so forth. The language of covenant is, as noted above, ancient in the Near East it goes back to Sumer and is found among the Hittites and others besides the Assyrians-but the biblical language is especially close to the Assyrian prototypes. This suggests something about the dating of even the apparently “early” covenants with figures such as Abraham and David. We must not, however, overlook the sea change in the Israelite usage: Assyrian covenants were between ruler and subject; Israelite covenants were between God and human beings.96

  Though the unconditional grant covenants were fundamental to Israel’s identity, it was the vassal covenants that provided the basic structure of Deuteronomy and its central formulation of Israelite religion. In both Assyrian and Israelite versions of the vassal covenant the subordinate must keep the stipulations of the treaty or face the most disastrous consequences: in Israel God, in Assyria the gods, will inflict leprosy, blindness, violent death, rape, and invasion by “a nation you have not known” if the subordinate is disloyal.97 In short, Deuteronomy (and perhaps most of the Pentateuch) comes out of a situation of unparalleled violence in which the northern kingdom had already been destroyed and many of its inhabitants deported, and Judah hung by an uneasy thread in a vassal relation to Assyria. In one reading, Judah, too, had felt the terrible wrath of Assyria in Sennacherib’s campaign against Hezekiah in 701 BCE. Baruch Halpern argues for the historicity of the Assyrian claim that they destroyed the whole Judean countryside and
all forty-six fortified towns except for Jerusalem, depopulating the rural areas in so doing.98 Thus, when Hezekiah finally submitted to Assyrian suzerainty, Judah was only a shadow of its former self. Although the countryside was denuded, the population of Jerusalem was swollen with refugees from the northern kingdom after its fall in 722 and from rural Judah from the campaign of 701. Inevitably such drastic population shifts shattered the already weakened kinship ties still further.99 The memory of the Assyrian horror would linger, and dread of a new catastrophe that would finally engulf Jerusalem itself, would grow. If the prophets often threatened “terror,” one of Jeremiah’s favorite terms, the Assyrian example, in Jeremiah’s time replaced by the equally merciless Babylonians, was all too ready at hand.

  Though the book of Deuteronomy was “discovered” in 621 at the time of King Josiah, its beginnings might well date from the time of King Manasseh (687-643) when Esarhaddon (681-669) was ruling and his vassal treaty would have been known in Judah. It is worth noting that the great early prophets for whom texts survive-Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah-are all late eighth century, the time of the first great Assyrian onslaught. During the seventh century, however, no major literary prophet appeared until Jeremiah began his preaching in 627, when Assyrian power was in decline and new upheavals were on the horizon. It might not be too wildly hypothetical, therefore, to imagine that while public prophecy was in abeyance under the long, repressive rule of Manasseh, circles of those who would come to be called Deuteronomists were already privately at work creating a counter-text to the dominant Assyrian ideological order.

  The critical turn, and we can find the beginnings of it in the eighth-century prophets, was the claim that though the kings of Israel and Judah were subordinate to the great kings of Assyria, Yahweh was by no means subordinate to Assur. On the contrary, Assyria was in Yahweh’s control, not Assur’s. Levantine kings often broke their covenant with Assyria, usually with disastrous results. But for the incipient Deuteronomists, the covenant that counted was the covenant between Yahweh and the Children of Israel, and it was the betrayal of that covenant by the Israelites that gave them into the power of the Assyrians, who could only act in accord with the will of Yahweh.

  What the eighth-century prophets held about the primacy of Yahweh was spelled out in detail not only in Deuteronomy but in Exodus. The figure of Moses, shadowy and marginal before, took on heroic proportions, narratively in Exodus and “theologically” in Deuteronomy. Eckart Otto points out how much of the Moses story derives from Assyrian sources, the episode of Moses in the bulrushes based on the birth legend of Sargon,100 for example-yet was given a dramatically different meaning:

  Transferring the structure of events derived from the neo-Assyrian account to the people of Israel under Moses’ guidance, the authors of the Hebrew account denied prestige and authority to the Assyrian king. In the Moses-Exodus account, Moses figured as his anti-type due to the fact that it was Moses who, as a figure of Israel’s primeval history, mediated between his people and the divine realm. That means that the royal function of mediation was transferred to an ideal figure of Israel’s past. With the denial of the concept of sacral kingship, its corresponding ideas of society and its constituents were rejected. For the authors of the Moses-Exodus account, “Israel” was constituted not by a state hierarchy with the king as its central personality but by a covenant between YHWH and his people. This was not an idea of Judaean groups during the exile but a Judaean counter-programme of the seventh century BCE, which rejected Assyrian claims to loyalty.‘0’

  What the Deuteronomists created was surely motivated by a desire to resist Assyrian ideological domination, but it went far beyond that. The Moses who emerged at the center of the new movement was not only the antitype of the Assyrian (and Egyptian) kings, but of Israelite kings as well.

  No one has spelled out the pivotal role of Moses better than Michael Walzer. The great institutional achievement of Israel was to found a society not on the rule of one man who claimed to unite heaven and earth, but on a covenant between God and a people. That is the significance of the events at Sinai after the Exodus from Egypt. But such a new community, like the old one, had to be simultaneously political and religious-there was as yet no clear distinction between these realms-and therefore had to have a leader. But in starkest contrast with Pharaoh, Moses was no divine king. He was God’s prophet, nothing else. Yet his sheer responsibility as leader in so desperate an enterprise made him at times look like a king and even act like a king. Walzer points out that there were two sides to Moses as leader: a Leninist side and a social-democratic side.102

  The Leninist side is most clearly evident in the incident following Moses’s discovery that while he was on the mountain receiving the commandments of the Lord, the people had made for themselves a golden calf which they proceeded to worship, an indication of disloyalty, of failure to “love” God, at the very beginning of the formation of Israel as a people. Moses called to those “on the Lord’s side” and the sons of Levi gathered around him. Then Moses said to them:

  Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, `Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor.”’ The sons of Levi did as Moses commanded, and about three thousand of the people fell on that day. Moses said, “Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of a son or a brother, and so have brought a blessing on yourselves this day. (Exodus 32:27-29)

  The Exodus narrative insists that Moses was not a king, a critically important point, but in Exodus 32 he acts like a king. As David Malo, a member of the old Hawaiian aristocracy, put it with respect to the Hawaiian king:

  The edicts of the king had power over life and death. If the king had a mind to put someone to death, it might be a chief or a commoner, he uttered the word and death it was.

  But if the king chose to utter the word of life, the man’s life was spared.103

  Moses claimed that the word was the Lord’s, but its human voice was Moses’s, and on this earth it is the state that authorizes the word of life and death; the spokesperson of the state is always, somehow or other, a king.

  Exodus 32 is not the only place in the Exodus narrative where terrible things happen to those who oppose Moses, but Walzer insists the Leninist side is not the whole story. There is another Moses, a social-democratic Moses, who leads by teaching, exhortation, and example, not by violence; who defends the people from the wrath of God, asking the Lord not to make a catastrophic end to the project that He had initiated.104 Most important, however, what emerged was a new political form, a people in covenant with God, with no king as ruler. Moses is a teacher and a prophet, not a king, and the Torah underscores this point, not only by God’s prohibition of Moses’s reaching the promised land, but by the account of his death. Moses died in the land of Moab, and “no one knows his burial place to this day” (Deuteronomy 34:6). Walzer points out that there could be no greater contrast to the Egyptian Pharaoh, whose tomb was so central to his identity. Moreover, Moses was not the father of kings-the Bible tells us almost nothing about his descendants.105 Machiavelli famously asked whether former slaves could have been transformed into a covenant people without the rule of a prophet armed.106 If, however, we see the Moses narrative not as a historical account but as a charter for a new kind of people, a people under God, not under a king, an idea parallel to Athenian democracy though longer lasting, then we might see Moses as a kind of “transitional object,” as a way for people who knew only monarchical regimes to give up the king and begin to understand what an alternative regime might be like.

  In the end it was Moses as the one who mediated the covenant who eclipsed Moses as ruler, for covenant was the key to the new society that these proto-Deuteronomists envisioned as coming into being. If Exodus recounts the story of the Exodus and the revelation at Sinai, the covenant and the core terms to which the people must adhere, it is Deuteronomy that spe
lls out the implications of the covenant, its meaning for king, prophet, and people.

  It is because Deuteronomy is explicit about these matters that it can be called “theology,” but the term must remain in quotation marks because Deuteronomy is rhetoric rather than philosophy-it is the farewell speech of Moses before the children of Israel enter the promised land and he must be left behind to die. Its purpose is persuasion rather than logical argument. Deuteronomy sums up the sense in which the Torah represents something new relative to the old Near Eastern royal theology, Israelite or other. Although the point of the new dispensation is to recognize God and only God as king, there is reserve even in the use of this basic Hebrew metaphor for God: out of the forty-seven times the metaphor of God as king is used in the Bible, only twice in the Torah is God referred to as king-once in Numbers, once in Deuteronomy-though he is frequently depicted in terms of a majesty that must suggest royalty.107

  Deuteronomy recognizes the necessity of human kingship, but of so remarkably circumscribed a character, indeed, as something like a “constitutional monarchy,” that it is hardly recognizable in ancient Near Eastern terms. In Deuteronomy 17:14-15 Moses says to the people, “When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, … [you] may indeed set over you a king whom the Lord your God will choose.” Not “you will” but “you may.” The king must be an Israelite, not a foreigner, must not acquire many horses, many wives, or much silver and gold. Thus not exactly a David or a Solomon. But most importantly: