The Great Shift

by James L. Kugel

  The very existence of a pantheon, in which a given society’s various divinities are considered to make up an established collectivity, also bears witness to a certain hesitation between the One and the many. A collectivity obviously bespeaks a polytheistic inclusiveness; but a pantheon usually also features one supreme deity, whose existence makes (or once made) possible the collective functioning of the other gods and goddesses. In theory, of course, conceiving of such a divine company was not logically necessary: indeed, the phenomena to which its gods and goddesses were connected—a fruitful harvest, success on the battlefield, human fertility, various heavenly bodies—did not seem to be working in any coordinated fashion. If not, then wasn’t the existence of a supreme deity ruling over the others a kind of quest for unity in the midst of diversity, for the One over all the others?14 It is striking, in any case, that in the Semitic lands, specific deities named El, Il, Ilu, Elohim, Allah—all derived from the basic word for “god”—seem to head (or to have headed) the pantheon, as if to say that this “generic” deity, who lords it over all those other ones beneath him, is somehow the very essence of divinity. Noteworthy as well is the pedigree and distribution of a similarly generic “god” name in the Indo-European world, beginning with the hypothetical proto-Indo-European deity Dyeus, as in Sanskrit Dyàuṣpítaḥ (the pítaḥ part means “father”), whose form is paralleled in Latin Jupiter; meanwhile the same root is reflected in the Greek Zeus, Latin deus, “god,” Germanic Tues- day, and perhaps even Greek eudia, “fair weather” (presumably, for sailing the Aegean).15

  At Ugarit, a council of gods held sway; it was known as the “assembly of the gods” or “assembly of El,” who headed it. Strikingly, the same phrase occurs in Psalm 82, which relates how Israel’s God long ago dissolved this assembly and took over as the reigning One:16

  God stands in the divine assembly, He rules among the gods.

  “How long will you [gods] judge falsely, showing favor to the guilty party?

  Give justice to the poor, the orphan; find in favor of the needy, the wretched.

  Rescue the poor and the lowly, save them from the wicked.”

  (But they* did not know or understand, walking about in darkness; the earth’s foundations tottered.)

  “I used to think that you all were gods, sons of the Almighty;

  and yet you will die like humans, and fall like the falling stars.”

  Arise, O God, rule over the earth, since all the nations are Yours.

  Here is a scenario designed to explain how the many became the One; it all came about because the lesser gods were not doing their job, specifically, not joining together in the fair administration of justice. As a result, the very foundations on which the earth rests were in danger of collapse. So God condemned his former subalterns to oblivion and took over all their previous functions for Himself. (But these “previous functions,” as we shall see shortly, presented a sharp challenge to any such deity.)

  True Monotheism, But . . .

  So when, finally, can one speak of pure monotheism in Israel? A number of biblical passages that scholars date to the sixth and later centuries BCE are frequently cited as evidence of Israel’s espousal of monotheism in its purest form, for example:

  So you shall realize today and keep ever in mind that the LORD is God in the heavens above and on the earth below: there is no other. (Deut 4:39)

  I am the first and I am the last, and there is no God but Me. (Isa 44:6)

  I am the LORD and there is no other; there are no gods save for Me. (Isa 45:5)

  All this seems quite unambiguous: there is only one God, ours. Nevertheless, passages just adjacent to these seem to endorse the idea that other, lesser divinities do exist:

  And when you look up at the sky and see the sun and the moon and the stars and the whole host [i.e., army] of heaven, do not be led astray into bowing down before them and worshiping them. These the LORD your God has assigned to all the [other] peoples under the heavens, but the LORD took you and brought you out of Egypt—that iron smelting pot!—to be His own people, as [you are] this day. (Deut 4:19–20)

  The “whole army of heaven” had, from time immemorial, been considered to be gods. Thus the sun, the moon, and the stars were, as we have seen, identified with various Babylonian and Assyrian deities. In the above passage, God is said to have arranged for other peoples to worship these heavenly bodies. Was He just tricking them? Rather, it would seem that these heavenly bodies are indeed real beings with real powers, something like demigods or “godlings.” As such, they were put in charge of the other peoples, and it is altogether legitimate for these other peoples to worship them. But God adopted Israel as His own people (this is basically a restatement of Deut 32:8–9), as demonstrated by His intervention in the exodus from Egypt. So it is wrong for Israel to worship those lesser deities; they should worship God directly. Similarly:17

  Lift up your eyes on high and look! Who created these [heavenly bodies]?

  He [God] summons their hosts [i.e., armies] by [a specific] number, He calls all of them by name,

  Because of His great strength and power, not one of them fails to appear. (Isa. 40:26)

  Here too, those heavenly bodies are real, active beings. God is of course their superior, indeed, He created them, so that they are utterly submissive to His power; but they are nonetheless heavenly beings. This may be a kind of monotheism, but it is not one that denies the category of divinity to all but one God.

  It was not easy to deny that those heavenly bodies, however inferior to God they might be, were nonetheless something like minor deities. After all, the sun goes across the sky day after day. In an era when machines were not yet dreamt of, it must have seemed obvious that the sun had some sort of animate being inside it or behind it who was driving it through its daily course. So the most one could say was that God had ordered the sun’s driver to do what he does—but this hardly negated his existence as a heavenly power in his own right. The same was true of the moon and its nightly waxing and waning, as well as of the planets and stars, whose sometimes irregular movements through the sky had long been studied. Sure, God was in charge, but these other powers were nonetheless undeniably up there, lesser divine beings who obeyed His orders.

  Another argument in favor of the existence of multiple, albeit lesser, deities was simply the matter of efficiency. If there was only one God—who, as we have seen, was deemed to have a body very much like our own—how could He do absolutely everything at the same time? He had not only to move all those heavenly bodies through the sky (in different directions), but also to cause the rain to fall or not to fall (or to fall here and at the same time fall there, hundreds of miles away); indeed, the one true God had to run everything on land and sea, control rivers and streams, forests and deserts and all their animal inhabitants, and in addition to all this, observe the actions of human beings, each and every one of them at the same time, so as to be able to punish the guilty and reward the virtuous? It was fine to say that God did see everything, as some late biblical texts maintained:

  These seven [branches of a lampstand represent] the eyes of the LORD, which range throughout the whole earth. (Zech 4:10)

  The eyes of the LORD range throughout the whole earth, to strengthen those whose heart is true to Him. (2 Chron 16:9)

  But in practice this was hard to imagine. How could one God have anything resembling our own, physical eyes and still be looking at everything all the time and all at once?

  God’s Helpers

  One obvious answer was to imagine that God really didn’t do all this personally, but that He delegated the responsibility to others. He might be the only true deity, but He could nonetheless have created invisible helpers—angels or spirits—who would faithfully carry out His orders. So it was that the late biblical period saw the emergence of a cadre of independent angels, the first angels to have names, such as Gabriel (Dan 8:16), Michael (Dan 12:1), Raphael (Tobit 12:15), and a host of others (for some bad angels, see, for example,
those named in 1 Enoch 6).18 On reflection, however, this again is not far from polytheism. By the common understanding, angels were themselves divine creatures. But then, what was the difference between a monotheistic God ordering His angels to do this or that and a polytheistic El ordering various lesser deities to take on their regular tasks?19

  The existence of such semi-independent, heavenly operators might also answer what was a fundamental problem with the whole idea of monotheism. A verse in the book of Isaiah posed the problem succinctly, describing a God who “forms light and creates of darkness, who makes well-being and creates evil—I, the LORD, make all of these” (Isa 45:7). This is monotheism at its most severe: everything bad that you can think of, the bubonic plague, devastating earthquakes, and famine-induced mass starvation, as well as humanity behaving at its most sadistic, murderous worst—all these, God says, come from Me alone. (Indeed, this same verse’s evocation of light and darkness is certainly not irrelevant. Whatever a world that consisted solely of light might be like, it is nothing like our world; the mixture of light and dark is the essence of our existence “down here.” So too with well-being and evil.)

  Yet how can one conceive of such a God as “good,” or even as “ours”? If He is responsible for everything, indiscriminately alternating the bad with the good, He might as well just be a personification of randomness, Lady Luck, or the “way of the world.” There must be some other way of understanding reality. Zoroastrianism is often credited with the creation of the first theological dualism, whereby two divine beings, one good and one evil, are locked in eternal combat—a conception that is said to have influenced later Judaism and Christianity.20 Indeed, the demonic “spirits” sent out by Satan in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs may be one reflection of this belief. But whether God’s opponent was a single divine being (known eventually as Satan, but also called by other names in late biblical times: Satanel, Gadreel, Beliar, Sammael, and others)21 or consisted of an entire army of evil spirits (as in such Second Temple period Jewish books as 1 Enoch and Jubilees),22 the result was the same: good and evil both came from heaven, but from different divine beings. So in various ways, what was identified above as Isaiah’s “severe” monotheism was in practice modified by the theoretical presence of other heavenly causers, the makers of evil who might ultimately (and repeatedly) be defeated by God, but not before causing a lot of human misery. So this, too, brings us back to an only slightly disguised form of polytheism. In theory, God was in charge of everything, including good and bad angels. But how different was this from saying that He was the head of a polytheistic pantheon?

  Considering all of the foregoing, it would seem that Israelite monotheism per se was really not such an innovation after all. The hesitation between the One and the many had existed long before Israel itself existed, and while some biblical texts proclaim Israel’s God to be the only true God, those same texts assert in the same breath that other gods were created to take care of all nations other than Israel. Then, in the late biblical period, there appeared a profusion of angels who sometimes seem to be semi-autonomous agents, actors with a will of their own; in fact, some of them are downright evil, like Satan and his army of evil spirits, found in such late texts as 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. The existence of independent angels came so close to polytheism in this period that still later texts are at pains to say that no, they really are not independent at all, but were doing exactly what God tells them to do, “obedient,” “tireless” in performing their various tasks, and “never deviating from the path which He commanded them.”23 All this attests to what might rightly be called the weakening of biblical monotheism—and just at the very moment when, as a slogan, “one God alone” was being championed by Jews and Christians in the strongest terms.

  A Physical Body

  Monotheism had two sides to it. The first, the idea that a single God is responsible for everything in the world, was contradicted by the very existence of those lesser divine creatures, the good and wicked angels who, as we have just seen, accompanied monotheism in all but its purest form, a form rarely espoused in practice. In this sense, there really wasn’t any difference between monotheism and monolatry; in fact, not much difference between monotheism and polytheism.

  But monotheism’s other aspect was indeed significant and ultimately, over the course of centuries, helped lead to a most significant change in the whole way humans came to perceive God. This change did not have to do with God’s singleness as such, but with a different way in which human beings gradually came to conceive of His actual being. (In fact, “conceive” does not tell the whole story. It was not only that people began to think about Him in a new way; they eventually report that they came to perceive Him, encounter Him, in a whole new register.) This all-important change had to do with a subject already discussed in passing, the fact that a great many biblical texts seem to presume that God had a physical existence, an actual body.

  As we have seen, some parts of the Bible depict God’s body as not much bigger than an ordinary human’s. God “walked about” in the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:8), spoke with Moses and others “face to face” (Exod 33:11, cf. Deut 34:10, Jdg 6:22) and even “mouth to mouth” (Num 12:8). In fact, God’s physical body was, according to some texts, altogether visible, so that seeing God, even if it was not something that happened every day, was sometimes presented as the hallmark of any true encounter with Him. Thus, Moses worries that people won’t believe he truly encountered God, which meant seeing Him: “But suppose they don’t believe me or pay me mind, but say: ‘The LORD did not appear* to you’” (Exod 4:1). Perhaps for the same reason, other biblical figures take care to assert that they actually did see God. Jacob tells his son Joseph, “God Almighty appeared to me at Luz, in the land of Canaan, and He blessed me” (Gen 48:3). On Mount Sinai, Moses, Aaron, and others “saw the God of Israel . . . they beheld God, and they ate and drank [to seal their covenant with Him],” Exod 24:10–11). “I saw the LORD standing next to the altar,” Amos recounts (9:1). For a time at least, encountering God meant, or could mean, actually seeing Him, and He apparently had a body that was basically the same size as that of a human being.

  Of course, it is hard to know what this seeing meant. Was it some sort of vision or waking dream, such as those described above in chapter 1? Was seeing sometimes used as a sort of metaphor or shorthand for “truly encountering the presence of God”? This may have been the case with a God presumed to reside in one or more sanctuaries or temples. Thus, the psalmist asks, “When will I enter [the Temple] and see the face of God?” (Ps 42:3). This may mean merely, “When will I get to the place where God resides and truly be in His presence?” Similarly, God decrees in the book of Exodus, “Three times a year, all your males will see the face of the lord, YHWH” (Exod 23:17), that is, be in His actual presence.* But however it was understood (and probably it was understood differently in different contexts), seeing God was for some time the hallmark of a true encounter.

  Along with such statements, however, others suggest that seeing God’s body was profoundly dangerous. “Woe is me, I am lost,” says Isaiah, “for my own eyes have beheld the King, the LORD of Hosts” (6:5). Manoah says to his wife, “We will surely die, because we have seen God” (Judg 13:22). At Mount Sinai, God “went down in a cloud,” where He “stood with him [Moses]” and then “passed in front of him” (Exod 34:5–6). Presumably, God’s human-sized body ought to have been altogether visible, but if He “went down in a cloud” in this passage, it seems that the cloud was there to protect Moses from actually catching sight of Him. Later, Moses’s appearance was physically affected (perhaps disfigured) by speaking with God (Exod 34:29–35).24 On another occasion, Moses’s ability to actually see God’s face became the subject of a respectful disagreement between the two.25 Moses asks to see God outright, but God turns him down:

  [God said:] “You cannot see My face, since no one can see Me and live.” [Moses accepts this news with a stony silen
ce.] But then the LORD said, “Look, over there is a place near Me; stand up on that rock, and while My being** passes by, I will put you in the cleft of that rock and shield you with My hand until I have passed by. Then I will take My hand away, so that you can see Me from behind, but My face will not be visible. (Exod 33:20–23)

  In other words—and despite all that was said above—this text says that while you can’t see God face-to-face, the greatest of prophets, Moses, came as close as anyone could: he caught a glimpse of God from behind.

  With time, however, even this attenuated sort of seeing disappeared. Ezekiel begins his book by saying that “In the thirtieth year, on the fifth day of the fourth month . . . the heavens opened and I saw the appearance26 of God” (1:1). Isn’t the “appearance of God” a kind of undercutting reservation? Continuing on, the prophet says he beheld the “semblance of a throne.”

  And above this semblance of the throne was the semblance of the appearance of Someone upon it . . . Like the appearance of the rainbow in the cloud[s] on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the radiance all around. This was the appearance of the semblance of the LORD’s substance, and when I saw it, I fell on my face. (Ezek 1:26–28)

  Whatever else may be learned from this passage, the profusion of “semblances” and “appearances” seems to be stressing that this was really not seeing God’s body directly, not even from behind or below.27