In bringing heathen tribes into the fold, the early church found it expedient to co-opt their temples and festivals rather than force them to embrace an alien faith outright. An explicit statement of this policy occurs in a letter written by Pope Gregory the Great in 601 to the Abbot Mallitus who was en route to visit Bishop Augustine in Canterbury. Tell the bishop, Gregory wrote, “that I have long been considering with myself about the case of the Angli; to wit, that the temples of idols in that nation should not be destroyed, but that the idols themselves that are in them should be.... And since they are wont to kill many oxen in sacrifice to demons, they should have also some solemnity of this kind in a changed form.... For it is undoubtedly impossible to cut away everything at once from hard hearts, since one who strives to ascend to the highest place must needs rise by steps or paces and not by leaps.”157
Religions are composite cultural creations in that they generally consist of a core of beliefs or rituals derived from a preceding religion, combined with new material. The new component may be supplied by the founding prophet’s revelation, or by borrowing and co-opting material from the religions of neighboring or conquered peoples.
Religions can seldom, if ever, be entirely new because of the way they are learned. People commit to religion during the formative years of puberty, often during emotionally searing initiation rites. In these rites a young man is taught, says the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, “the sacred traditions under the most impressive conditions of preparation and ordeal and under the sanction of Supernatural Beings—the light of tribal revelation bursts upon him from out of the shadows of fear, privation and bodily pain.”158
Modern religions have reduced the element of pain in initiation rites but their procedures ensure that the sacred texts and symbols that are taught at that time have lasting significance throughout a person’s adult life; it is this sense of emotional familiarity that makes one’s own religion feel so natural, whereas most other religions seem far-fetched or deluded. Although conversions do of course occur, though usually between similar religions, most people are very unwilling to abandon the religion they learned in childhood and adolescence. This is also likely to be the religion of their family and friends, another reason for regarding it with attachment, but the emotional tie to a religion learned at an impressionable age is probably even stronger.
Religion is a language of a special kind. It is a form of communication, expressed in the form of gestural or verbal symbols that register their meaning emotionally as well as consciously. If this special language changes and splits in much the same pattern as the ordinary kind of language, as is argued above, then it should be possible in principle to construct a tree of all the world’s religions, comparable to the tree one could in principle draw up for all the world’s languages.
A major recent branching of the tree is evident enough in the derivation from Judaism of Christianity, Islam and Mormonism. Judaism itself, as discussed below, developed from the religion of the ancient Canaanites, whose rites were centered around agricultural festivals. The specific names of religions that existed before then have been lost, but the general nature of the tree’s growth can be reconstructed. The tree would start with the religion of the ancestral modern human population that lived in northeast Africa prior to 50,000 years ago. Its trunk would be the hunter gatherer religions that endured until the first settled societies of 15,000 years ago and the institution of religious officialdom.
With the development of agriculture, beginning some 10,000 years ago in the Old World, the new hierarchical religions seem to have been focused on agricultural festivals, such as those of spring planting and fall harvest. Through the festivals, religion helped coordinate people’s activities and entrain them to the rhythm of the seasons, reducing the risk that crops would be planted or harvested at the wrong time. Early peoples developed a deep knowledge of astronomy and from Stonehenge to Mesoamerica oriented their temples on axes that marked significant events such as the sun’s position at the spring equinox.
These early agricultural religions would still have emphasized ritual over belief, but dancing and ecstatic trances were suppressed as priesthoods worked to make themselves the sole intermediaries between the real and the supernatural worlds.
With the advent of literacy some 5,000 years ago, the character of religion changed yet again. With the help of written texts, beliefs could be shaped to more specific purposes, like nation building. The sacred texts further increased the distance between believers and the supernatural. Direct experience of the interface with the supernatural world, as experienced by hunter gatherers in their trance dances, was long gone. The evidence of the supernatural world increasingly came from sacred texts recording revelations held to have occurred in the distant past.
Hunter gatherer religion sprang from a few behaviors, presumably genetically prompted, such as a belief in supernatural agencies which set rules of social behavior, fear of divine punishment for breaking these rules, and confidence that the supernatural powers could be manipulated through ritual and sacrifice. This relatively simple set of evolutionary behaviors proved capable, as settled societies grew larger and more sophisticated, of supporting the cultural development of more elaborate religions, such as the three Judaic-related monotheisms. The emergence of these religions is worth exploring in some detail because they demonstrate the power of cultural innovation to improvise systems of belief that transformed the dance and trance rituals of hunter gatherer religions into creeds that could bind not a tribe but a state or empire.
Origins of Judaism
Judaism is a religion whose formation from roots in the agricultural past is now understood in some detail. The language, religion and culture of the ancient Israelites were derived from those of the Canaanites, the West Semitic peoples who inhabited the southern Levant, now Syria, Jordan and Israel. Hebrew is a dialect of Canaanite. The earliest known Hebrew inscriptions are written in the Old Canaanite script of the Late Bronze Age (1500—1200 B.C.). Several festivals of the Israelite and Jewish liturgical calendar are adaptations of Canaanite agricultural festivals. Rosh Ha-Shanah marks the onset of the fall rains, heralded in Canaanite mythology by the resurrection of the storm god Ba‘al. Sukkot is the Canaanite fall harvest festival, adapted in Judaism to commemorate the wandering in the desert after the exodus from Egypt. Pesach was a Canaanite spring feast at which young lambs, born the previous fall, were sacrificed; in Judaism Pesach has become Passover and historicized to mark the exodus from Egypt, with the lambs’ blood translated for the Israelites into a rite commemorating the sparing of their first-born children from the tenth plague sent against the pharaoh. Shavu’ot, 50 days after Passover, is a late spring festival that marks the conclusion of the wheat harvest.159
Canaanite texts of the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries B.C. from Ugarit in Syria describe the Canaanite religion in some detail, including its gods El and Ba’al and the tradition of animal sacrifice. The Israelites adopted animal sacrifice and their early name for the deity is elohim, the plural of El. The opening words of Genesis are customarily translated “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” but the Hebrew text says elohim—the gods created heaven and earth—and in verse 26 of the first chapter of Genesis it is the elohim, the gods, who say “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Though elohim can also be singular in Hebrew, its plural form may reflect the polytheism that preceded the monotheism associated with Yahweh, according to the biblical archaeologist William Dever.160
Early Israelite religion seems to have been polytheistic just as was its Canaanite predecessor. Monotheism was imposed much later by the priestly caste in Jerusalem and during the Babylonian captivity, but the priests then devised an ancient pedigree for their new religion which back-projected its origins into the distant past. “Virtually all mainstream scholars (and even a few conservatives) acknowledge that true monotheism emerged only in the period of the exile in Babylon in the sixth century B.C., as the canon
of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, was taking shape,” writes Dever.161 The Hebrew Bible’s frequent imprecations against the worship of Ba’al, golden calves and other idols were required because that was indeed the prevailing religion among the general population.
Much is now known about the development of the Hebrew Bible, from textual analysis, from archaeology and from the independent records of other contemporary civilizations, such as those of Egypt and Assyria. Textual analysis by the nineteenth-century German scholar Wilhelm de Wette showed that of the first five books of the Bible, known as the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy had been written much later than the others. He identified it with the book of law said in the Bible to have been discovered during a renovation of the temple in the eighteenth year of the reign of King Josiah of Judah, namely in 622 B.C.162
Another German scholar, Julius Wellhausen, laid out evidence for supposing that the Pentateuch seemed not to be the work of a single author—traditionally held to have been Moses—but was based on four different sources, each with a specific perspective, and some using different names for God (Yahweh or elohim).
More than a century of study by textual scholars and archaeologists has established that the Bible is indeed a composite document. Some of its sources are drawn from legends of the great Babylonian civilization on Israel’s eastern borders. Some are historical accounts. Some are folklore explanations of how a certain place or people got its name. The complex of materials has been skillfully shaped, probably to forge a political and religious identity for a small nation buffeted between two powerful neighboring states.
The story of Noah illustrates the composite nature of the biblical narrative. In the late nineteenth century archaeologists began to recover Mesopotamian versions of a very similar story. A man, called Utnapishtim in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, was advised by the gods to load his family, possessions, and living creatures onto a boat to escape a great flood. The Mesopotamian versions of the story are much older, and the Bible’s version is clearly derived from them, not vice versa. Besides, the hilly countryside of Israel is not a plausible place for everything to be washed away in a flood, unlike the flat plains of Mesopotamia.
The biblical scholar James L. Kugel notes that both the Sumerian and Hebrew versions of the story contain the same curious anthropomorphic vignette of the deities savoring the smell of the sacrifice made to thank them at the end of the voyage.163 After Utnapishtim’s sacrifice, the Epic of Gilgamesh reports, “The gods smelled the savor, the gods smelled the sweet savor, the gods crowded round the sacrificer like flies.” After Noah’s, “the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake ... neither will I again smite any more everything living, as I have done.”164
The borrowed nature of the Noah story is underlined by the fact that it seems itself to be composed of two different versions of the Mesopotamian myth. In one version, Kugel notes, Noah is directed by the deity in person to load seven pairs of every clean species of animal on the ark, presumably needing the extra six for sacrifice: “And the Lord said unto Noah ... Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean, by two, the male and his female.”165 But the second version of the story reports specifically that Noah embarked with only one pair of each clean species: “And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life. And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him: and the Lord shut him in.”166
The Hebrew words for the deity also differ between the two versions. The passage calling for seven pairs of animals cites Yahweh, but El/elohim, the usual word for god, is used in the second version. “Scholars have little doubt that the biblical narrative was ultimately based on one or another version of this Mesopotamian legend,” Kugel concludes.
The Bible’s version of the Noah story seems clearly the work of an editor who pasted together two versions of a Mesopotamian myth, and there are many other parts of the Pentateuch where the narrative contains two or even three traces of the same story.
While literary scholars were sorting out problems in the Bible’s text, archaeologists were trying, with increasing frustration, to match its assertions to the evidence on the ground. The Bible offers a long historical narrative in which many of the events that occurred after 622 B.C. can be corroborated by documents from ancient Egypt and Assyria. But earlier episodes in the Bible, such as the deeds of the patriarchs, the exodus from Egypt, the conquering of the promised land of Canaan by Joshua, the glorious reign of King David, the magnificent palace of Solomon, have left almost none of the traces that archaeologists had expected to find.
Some details even conflict with the evidence outright. From dates given in the Bible, principally that the exodus from Egypt took place 480 years before the start of construction of Solomon’s temple, the period of the patriarchs can be placed between 1000 and 2000 B.C. A well-known episode in that period is when Joseph’s jealous brothers, about to kill him, decided instead to sell him to passing Ishmaelites riding camels in a spice caravan headed for Egypt. But camels were not domesticated until shortly before 1000 B.C. and did not become common until well after that time. Trade with Arabia in balm and myrrh flourished between 900 and 600 B.C. These telling details would have been familiar to someone writing around 622 B.C., say, but are an anachronism when set in events alleged to have occurred some 1,400 years earlier.167
The most substantive evidence contradicting the story of the promised land comes from archaeology. Joshua’s conquest of Canaan and sacking of its cities should have left telltale ruins datable to around 1200 B.C. Some 40 cities that the Bible says were conquered by Joshua have now been identified and excavated. Only at three have archaeologists found possible evidence of pillage at the right date. Jericho at that time had no walls to fall at the blast of Joshua’s trumpet. “There was simply no Israelite conquest of most of Canaan,” says Dever.168
But if there was no conquest of Canaan, there was no exodus from Egypt. Perhaps a small group of people escaped, and their story became extended to apply to everyone, but the Israelites as a people did not escape from captivity in Egypt. They did not spend 40 years traversing the Sinai desert nor did their army conquer Canaan. There is no need for a Moses, and the fact that his name is not mentioned in the earliest reference to the exodus, Miriam’s song of the sea (Exodus 15), could suggest he is a later construct. The same may be true of Joshua, given that his feat of conquering the promised land seems to belong to legend, not history.169
So if the Israelites never invaded Canaan, how did they come to occupy it? Because they were Canaanites and always had been. That is the conclusion at which archaeologists have finally arrived after many decades of bafflement. “The recent archaeological evidence for indigenous origins of some sort is overwhelming,” says Dever.170 According to Kugel, “As contemporary scholars have wrestled with earlier theories, as well as with new archaeological data, most of them have come to agree on one point: at least a good part of what was to become the future nation of Israel had probably always been there—or, to put it somewhat sharply, ‘We have met the Canaanites and they are us.’ ”171
The central theme of the Hebrew Bible is that Yahweh intervened in history in order to free the Israelites from captivity in Egypt, lead them across the desert and deliver the promised land into their hands. But this uplifting theme is not supported by the available historical and archaeological evidence.
What is going on here? What were those who put the Bible together trying to accomplish? A recent interpretation that combines new archaeological data with the scholars’ textual analysis has been offered by two archaeologists, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. Their thesis may not persuade all of the experts in the field, but it makes sense of many of the known facts.
First, they believe it was not just Deuteronomy that was “found” during the temple renovation in 622 B.C. but
rather the whole first half of the Hebrew Bible comprising both the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) and the group of books known as the Deuteronomic History (Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings).
This collection of works appeared at a special moment in history. During the Iron Age (1150—586 B.C.), the Israelites lived in two small kingdoms, those of Israel and Judah, set in the region’s central hill country. The two kingdoms led a precarious existence because they lay in a buffer zone and battleground between the two regional superpowers of the time, ancient Egypt to the west and Assyria to the east.
In or around 722 B.C., the kingdom of Israel was destroyed after Hoshea, the last king, defied the Assyrians. The Assyrian king Sargon II records how he resettled 27,000 Israelites in Assyria and repopulated Samaria, the capital of Israel, with people from elsewhere in his empire. Many other Israelites migrated to the southern kingdom, Judah, and the population of its capital, Jerusalem, then a modest highland town, increased fifteenfold.
A century later a major shift in the balance of power in the region led Assyria, between 640 and 630 B.C., to withdraw from Palestine. Seeking to take advantage of the new situation, Jerusalem planned to regain the territory of the northern kingdom and unite it with Judah’s. The Bible was its political and religious strategy for doing so.
On the political front, the Bible presented a stirring nationalist theme, that the Israelites had left Egypt in the exodus, conquered Canaan, and established a glorious unified kingdom under kings Saul, David and Solomon. It would be legitimate for the current king of Judah, Josiah, to take over the remnants of Israel, ran the Bible’s message, because he would be reestablishing the united kingdom of David.
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