Scholars today are quite divided on our ability to find an answer to the problem of consciousness. Some are rather optimistic about finding a purely physical solution, searching for its components in different brain systems;36 others (sometimes called mysterians) maintain that the question is, for one reason or another, unsolvable;37 yet others say that “consciousness” is an impossibly vague term that must be broken down into its components, some (or possibly all) of which can be explained in terms of neural systems.38 Who’s right?
Trapped in Our Humanity
Part of the problem is that we humans are not exactly objective observers. We all seem to have a particularly human sort of consciousness, but this may not be the only kind of consciousness around. It certainly might be possible that other sorts of creatures—a man from Mars, for example, or even some undeniably conscious beings who already exist right here on earth—have a form of consciousness that we can never fathom, precisely because our consciousness is so human and thus incapable of entering into another sort of consciousness entirely different from our own.39
The philosopher Thomas Nagel has posed the problem in a provocative essay entitled “What’s It Like to Be a Bat?”40 Consciousness, he asserts, is what makes the mind-body problem inevitably intractable. If someone were to ask, “What’s it like to be a rock?” the answer would be quite straightforward. It’s not like being anything, because—at least as far as we can guess—a rock doesn’t perceive its own existence or anything else, which is to say, it has no consciousness. But could one say the same for a fellow mammal of ours, say, a bat? Surely bats have brains; they perceive the outside world, find food, mate, nurse their young, and do many of the other things that mammals do. It seems likely that, given all this, bats are in some sense aware of their own existing (as perhaps are dogs and lions and pigeons and all sorts of other creatures).41 But are human beings capable of understanding what it’s like to be a bat? Bats are not reading this book, and the minute you begin to attribute to bats your own mental processes, you’re not talking about real bats. They do have brains, but what goes on in them is clearly very different from what goes on in ours. Among other things, bats’ nighttime vision is very different from ours; they perceive the outside world by issuing high-pitched little shrieks and then “seeing” their surroundings (or seeing as much of their surroundings as is important to them) by a process called echolocation, gauging the distances embodied in the echoes of those shrieks as they come back to the bats’ ears. They are different from us in other ways too: they spend the daylight hours sleeping, hanging upside down from the branches of trees or other perches. Is there any significant way in which we can be said to know what their existence is like? Nagel argued that our consciousness inevitably has a subjective character: we don’t just experience things, but we experience them in a certain, human way. We can generally understand the character of each other’s experiencing precisely because we are all humans.42 But we really have no access to an objective account of consciousness, if such a thing can even be said to exist.
Homo Orans
All this suggests that we may know a lot less than we think about what happens when humans turn to God in their prayers. By this I do not mean what happens to people, whether their pulse rates go up or down, or if various areas on a brain scan suddenly light up or go dark.43 Rather, I am speaking about the reality of this interaction as our human consciousness perceives it, and the certainty that our consciousness is as subjective in this respect as in all others. Perhaps an objective consciousness, or a Martian’s consciousness, would reveal this interaction with God (and God Himself) to be as different from what is really taking place as our colorful picture of a sunny afternoon is different from what we now know about those different wavelengths being reflected off objects and our brain’s step-by-step transformation of them into colors. We certainly know that all sorts of humans, equipped with very different senses of self, have prayed in the past to all manner of divinities, and that millions, nay billions, of people also pray now. In this sense, our species might well be called—modern naysayers notwithstanding—Homo orans (the praying human). But what is implied about the reality underlying this praying, and who the praying “I” truly is, seem to be matters likely to remain unfathomable for some time.44
PART III
Transformations
Thus far we have seen some of the ways in which humans encountered God in biblical times. The texts themselves seem to describe these as real events: there is a real God “out there” who, on this or that occasion, somehow crossed over into our world to speak with patriarchs and prophets. All this suggests that these biblical accounts presume a different sense of self from ours today. God could penetrate the minds of human beings and cause them to see or hear things in a way that we no longer can.
But not all biblical texts presume the same sort of human self. Alongside Abraham’s encounters with God are Joseph’s non-encounters. Indeed, sometimes we can see how a particular practice or institution changed within the biblical period. Old ways of encountering God turned into new ways, or sometimes ceased to be encounters at all.
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To Monotheism . . . and Beyond
MONOTHEISM AND MONOLATRY; THE QUEST FOR ONE GOD; DIVINE OMNIPRESENCE?
We have seen that God is depicted in Scripture in various ways, but for later generations, His enduring depiction was that of the Supreme Being, the one true God in the world. Biblical scholars know that this depiction is accurate only to a certain extent. Not only is this representation not how He was first understood, but it is also not, on closer inspection, a very accurate reflection of the God of later times.
As everyone knows, biblical Israel’s great gift to the world was monotheism, the belief that there exists only one God and that all other gods are simply an illusion, a mistake. As of today, there are an estimated 2.18 billion Christians and 1.7 billion Muslims, all of whom profess to believe in one God alone. As “daughter” religions of ancient Israel and the teaching of its reputed spiritual leaders, Abraham and Moses in particular, these nearly 4 billion people—more than one out of every two people on earth—all owe this central tenet to a tiny nation that once inhabited a small strip of territory on the eastern Mediterranean, a people whose population probably never went beyond that of a medium-sized modern city, that is, 2 or 3 million souls at the most. Quite an achievement!
No Other Gods
There is little agreement, however, as to when, why, and under what circumstances Israel came to this belief. To some, the answer seems obvious. Did not God order Israel to be monotheists in the Ten Commandments promulgated at Mount Sinai?
You shall have no other gods beside Me.* You shall not make any statue or representation of what is in the skies above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth—you shall not bow down to these or worship them, since I, the LORD your God, am a particularly zealous deity, one who punishes children for the sins of their fathers, in fact, up to the third or fourth generations of those who reject Me, while showing kindness to the thousands of those who love Me and keep My commandments. (Exod 20:3–6)
For many centuries the first sentence above was indeed taken to mean something like “there are no other gods except Me.” But scholars know that this isn’t quite what the words are saying. To begin with, the Hebrew phrase ‘al-panai doesn’t mean “except for Me.” This phrase generally has a spatial sense; it means “in front of Me” or “in My presence,” and it is really this that God is outlawing in the Ten Commandments. “You can’t worship Me and some other deity in the same sanctuary,” or perhaps more generally (although even this is a bit of a stretch), “You can’t worship Me and also worship some other god or gods,” in a sanctuary or anywhere else. Apparently in connection with this,1 God goes on to forbid worshiping statues or likenesses, since that form of worship was indeed common to other gods, but apparently not to Him.2
In any event, this commandment is not saying what it has often been taken to say, that the
re is only one true God in the world, the God whose name in Hebrew letters is YHWH.** If that were its intention, the text could have easily, and far more clearly, said, “You are to have no other gods besides Me, because I am the only God—thinking that there are any other gods is just stupid!” What God is really saying—that He does not permit people to worship Him along with any other god—seems to be an endorsement of what scholars call monolatry, worshiping one deity principally or exclusively while not denying the existence or efficacy of other deities. To this demand God adds a none-too-subtle warning: “I, the LORD your God, am a particularly zealous deity,” punishing not only the sinner himself but his or her descendants, down to the fourth generation. God’s declaration that He is an el qanna (a zealous deity) thus has the ring of a concession, “Okay, I am an unusually demanding deity,” He says, since He is asking of His worshipers something that most gods would never think of requiring: exclusive loyalty.
Elijah at Mount Carmel
Monolatry is a pretty good description of what the Bible presents as God’s demand for most of the biblical period: “Worship Me exclusively, and let other people worship their own gods.” This falls short of monotheism, strictly speaking. Certainly Abraham,3 Isaac, and Jacob nowhere proclaim that theirs is the one, true God; moreover, as we have just seen, the Ten Commandments don’t do so either. A bit later, in the ninth century BCE, the prophet Elijah is represented as rebuking the people for not giving their exclusive loyalty to the God YHWH: pure monotheism is not even on the table. In fact, all Elijah demands is that people stop “hopping from one branch to another” like birds, sometimes worshiping YHWH and sometimes Ba‘al. He wants King Ahab, and all his Israelite subjects, to come out unambiguously in favor of YHWH as their deity, but even this was apparently asking too much of the king. In fact, their encounter is quite revealing:
When Ahab caught sight of Elijah, Ahab said to him, “Is that you, you trouble-maker of Israel?” He answered, “I’m not the one who’s troubling Israel—it’s you and your family; you’re the ones who have disobeyed the LORD’s commandments and followed the Be‘alim. Now therefore have all Israel come together for me at Mount Carmel, with the four hundred and fifty prophets of Ba‘al and the four hundred prophets of Asherah, who eat at the table of Jezebel [Ahab’s wife].”
So Ahab sent orders to all the Israelites, and assembled the prophets [of Ba‘al] at Mount Carmel. Then Elijah came up to all the people and said, “How long will you keep hopping from one branch to another? If the LORD [that is, YHWH] is God, follow him; but if it’s Ba‘al, then go and follow him.” But the people did not answer him a word. (1 Kgs 18:17–21)
What ensues is a theological contest between Elijah and the prophets of Ba‘al. Each side is to prepare an altar along with a sacrificial bull as an offering. But of course, an animal sacrifice has to be burned, so each side is further required to call upon its deity to send down the fire from heaven. The god who does so will be the winner.
At first, this test must have seemed rigged. As we have seen, Ba‘al was the storm god who rode the rain clouds and thereby fertilized the arid farmlands of Canaan. The “fire” that was to come down from heaven was obviously a bolt of lightning, Ba‘al’s trademark; clearly, he should win this contest. But according to this biblical account, he didn’t. Ba‘al’s prophets certainly tried; they danced around the altar and gyrated and cried aloud—all to no avail. They also slashed their bodies with swords and lances “until the blood gushed out over them,” but this too was of no use. Meanwhile Elijah watched from the sidelines, occasionally mocking their efforts, until late in the afternoon. Then, finally, he went into action:
At the time of the offering of the [afternoon] sacrifice, the prophet Elijah came near and said, “O LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that You are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding. Answer me, O LORD, answer me, so that this people may know that You, O LORD, are God, and that You have turned their hearts back.”
Then the fire of the LORD came down and consumed the sacrifice, the wood, the stones, and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench [around the altar]. When all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, “The LORD is indeed God; the LORD is indeed God.” (1 Kgs 18:36–39)
It is hard to know how to take this last sentence. No one, I think, really doubted that YHWH was a god. The issue at hand was rather if He was the only god worthy of worship by the people of Israel, or if, on the contrary, the worship of Ba‘al could coexist with His. In the first sentence of the paragraph cited above, Elijah asks of God that this test prove that “You are God in Israel,” apparently without denying that other peoples might perfectly well worship Ba‘al. In light of this, even the closing affirmation, “the LORD is indeed God,” seems intended to assert that God is the deity of this land and its people, the only god that Israel should worship.
A century later, the prophet Hosea was, as we have seen, still trying to get the Northerners to stop worshiping Ba‘al, but without any notable success. Many of Israel’s later prophets similarly denounced the worship of “foreign” gods; they too seemed to be aiming at a single-minded devotion to Israel’s God without necessarily denying the efficacy of placing an offering to Ba‘al or Asherah on their altars. Apparently, professing monotheism only became a requirement in Israel at some later point. But when, and why, did this happen?4 To answer this question, it is necessary to reconsider monolatry itself, which, in the larger perspective, must appear to be a rather strange form of worship. After all, if Ba‘al was the go-to god for rain, why would anyone limit his or her worship to another God, YHWH, especially since His original specialty seems to have been warfare, not precipitation?5 (It was precisely this that must have made monolatry a particularly hard sell for Elijah, Hosea, and others to transmit to a skeptical Israelite public.) Why should anyone espouse monolatry—and how did the whole idea get started?
Various explanations have been proposed. Perhaps limiting Israel’s worship to a single deity was necessary to distinguish the Israelites from their Canaanite neighbors—worshipers of El, Ba‘al, Asherah, and other deities—especially if, as some scholars have proposed, some of those Canaanite neighbors ended up constituting a good part of early Israel’s population.6 Indeed, aspects of both El and Ba‘al seem to have preceded and played a role in the characterization of Israel’s God—in a sense, they merged into YHWH.7 Monolatry would thus be a kind of line in the sand, a way of saying, “our God of Israel had nothing to do with the Canaanites and their religion.” A bit later on, the need for political unification may have also worked in favor of monolatry. David’s mighty empire was, in the view of many scholars, cobbled together from disparate peoples or “tribes,” some of them having been persuaded to join with David under threat, if not at actual sword-point. (This rambunctious federation lasted scarcely two generations before breaking apart into northern and southern halves, Israel and Judah, but even the composition of these two entities was more likely based on coalitions of convenience than on tribal groupings of longstanding.) Under these circumstances, devotion to a single God, YHWH, may also have served as the religious glue binding Israel and Judah, first jointly and then severally.8
The Anxiety of Multiplicity
All this may be so, but there is another aspect of monolatry that may have played a crucial role—and which in any case is, from the standpoint of the present study, the most interesting phenomenon connected to it. To understand this side of monolatry, we must move from the mundane domain of politics to the realm of the divine, since this is, after all, what monolatry is all about.
In the human heart, something there is that loves the One. Perhaps it had always been so.9 No one knows who the first deity was, or if such a deity started off alone or as part of a whole group of divine beings, a company that might have included deified ancestors, all the wandering stars of heaven, plus marauding evil spirits and goblins and sprites, the inha
bitants of this sacred tree or that stone. But it is not hard to imagine that the very first personification of what had previously been the great, undifferentiated Outside was barely even that: some sort of lone divine being who could be thought of as such, a usually hidden, human-like causer of all things whose cause was unknown. Whether or not this is so (and of course we shall never know), the fact is that—at least with regard to the ancient Near East—scholars have demonstrated that any sharp differentiation between a primordial polytheism and a much later monotheism is not altogether descriptive of what really existed.10 Here and there, in ancient Egypt,11 Assyria,12 Greece,13 and elsewhere, “the gods” often had a way of sliding into “the god,” the One whose shimmering unity encompassed all the manifestations of specific deities and their personal domains and functions.
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