It is a mistake, therefore, to expect this saga to be historically accurate in our sense. But it is, however, true that the biblical authors were more interested in human history than most of their contemporaries. J and E paid little attention to the cosmological myths that fascinated their Syrian and Mesopotamian neighbors and were not responsible for the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis, which was not written until the sixth century. J’s account of Yahweh’s creation of Eden is very perfunctory, and E did not contribute at all to the “prehistory” of Israel in the first eleven chapters of Genesis but begins his chronicle with the Patriarchs, when Israel’s history really begins. There were certainly tales in Israel about Yahweh creating the cosmos by fighting sea dragons, like other Middle Eastern deities, but J and E pass them by. At the very beginning of the monotheistic tradition, therefore, the doctrine of divine creation, which would later become so important, seems somewhat peripheral. If they did refer to the old cosmological myths, the biblical authors used them to supplement the meaning of historical events. One of the most famous miracle stories in the Hebrew Bible is the tale of the Israelites’ crossing of the sea during their escape from Egypt, with Pharaoh’s army in hot pursuit. When they reached the shore, Moses had stretched his hand over the water and Yahweh sent a fierce east wind that “made the sea into firm ground; thus the waters split.” The Israelites were able to walk dry-shod across the seabed, “the waters a wall for them on their right and on their left.”18 Once they reached the opposite side, the waters closed over the heads of the Egyptians, not one of whom escaped. There have been several well-intentioned attempts to prove that this story can be explained by a tsunami or the flash flooding that was common in the region. But this entirely misses the point, because the story has been deliberately written as a myth. As we know, there were many tales in the ancient Middle East about a god splitting a sea in two to create the world, but this time what is brought to birth was not a cosmos but a people.
Immediately after the story of the crossing, the editors introduced into the narrative a much older text known as the Song of the Sea, a tenth-century poem, and put it on the lips of Moses.19
I will sing to YHWH,
For he has triumphed, yes, triumphed,
The horse and chariot he flung into the sea!20
But a closer reading shows that originally the song celebrated an entirely different event, a victory at the River Jordan on the borders of Canaan. It describes Yahweh leading his people through the Promised Land and striking dismay not into the hearts of the Egyptians but into the inhabitants of Canaan and the kingdoms on the Jordan’s east bank:
Writhing seized Philistia’s settlers,
and then terrified Edom’s chieftains,
Moav’s “rams”—trembling did seize them;
then melted away all Canaan’s settlers.21
Scholars think that the song was originally sung during the spring festival at Gilgal, where, it was said, the waters of the Jordan had miraculously parted before the Israelites to enable them to enter the Promised Land22—an event that utterly confounded “the kings of the Amorites on the west bank of the Jordan and all the kings of the Canaanites in the coastal region.”23 Every year, when the Jordan flooded its banks, this crossing (pesah) was ritually reenacted at Gilgal. Priests and laypeople would process past the floodwaters and enter the temple, where they ate unleavened bread (mazzoth) and roasted corn in memory of their ancestors, who had “tasted the produce of the land there for the first time.”24 It seems, therefore, that not only did the old cosmological myths shape the Israelites’ understanding of their history but that the rituals of Gilgal helped to form the myth of the exodus from Egypt.
Apart from a lack of interest in cosmogony, the religion of ancient Israel did not at this date differ markedly from that of its neighbors. J and E present Abraham worshipping El, the local High God, and it seems that originally Yahweh was simply one of the “holy ones” in El’s retinue.25 But the Israelites also worshipped other gods until the sixth century, despite the campaign of a small group of prophets and priests who wanted them to worship Yahweh alone.26 Israel would later condemn the pagan religion of the native Canaanites in the strongest terms, but at the time of J and E there seems to have been no such tension. Both, for example, record the founding myth of the temple of Bethel, which is one of the most famous of the Genesis stories.27 Because of a family feud, Jacob was forced to flee Canaan and take refuge with relatives in Mesopotamia. On the first leg of his journey, he spent the night at Luz on the border of the Promised Land in what seemed an unremarkable spot but was in fact a Canaanite shrine, a maqom.28 That night, perhaps because he used one of its sacred stones as a pillow, Jacob had a numinous dream: “A ladder was set up on the earth, its top reaching the heavens, and here: messengers of God were going up and down on it. And here: Yahweh was standing over against him.”29 Jacob awoke in astonishment: “Why, Yahweh is in this place and I did not know it!” he exclaimed. “How awe-inspiring is this maqom! It is none other than a house of God (beth-El) and that is the gate of Heaven!”30 Before continuing his journey, Jacob upended the stone to make it a “standing pillar” (matzebah) and consecrated it with a libation of oil. Later generations of Israelites would try to eradicate such cult places as idolatrous and tear down the local matzeboth, but in this early story, these pagan symbols nourished Jacob’s vision of Yahweh, and Bethel became one of their own sacred “centers.”
The story shows how impossible it is to seek a single, consistent message in the Bible, since a directive in one book is likely to be countermanded in another. The editors did not eradicate potentially embarrassing early teachings that clashed with later doctrines. Later Jews would be shocked to imagine God becoming manifest in a human being, but J described Yahweh appearing to Abraham in the guise of a traveler at Mamre, near Hebron.31 Standing in the entrance of his tent during the hottest part of the afternoon, Abraham had seen three men approaching. Strangers were dangerous people, because they were not bound by the local vendetta, but Abraham ran out to meet them, bowed before them as if they were kings or gods, brought them into his camp, and gave them an elaborate meal. Without any great fanfare, it transpires in the course of the ensuing conversation that one of these visitors was Abraham’s god. The act of compassion had led to a divine encounter. Abraham’s previous encounters with Yahweh had been somewhat disturbing and peremptory, but at Mamre Yahweh ate with Abraham as a friend—the first intimacy with the divine that humans had enjoyed since the expulsion from Eden.
J and E were not writing edifying morality tales, however. The characters of Genesis have moments of vision and insight, but they are also presented as flawed human beings who have to contend with a perplexing God. This is particularly evident when Yahweh commands Abraham to take his only remaining son, Isaac, to a mountain in the land of Moriyya and sacrifice him there.32 Hitherto Abraham had not hesitated to question Yahweh’s arrangements, but this time he obeyed without voicing a single objection. Perhaps he was too shocked to speak. The God he had served so long had turned out to be a heartless slayer of children, who was also cynically breaking his promise to make him the father of a great nation. At the last moment, of course, Isaac is reprieved, God renews his promise, and Abraham sacrifices a ram in Isaac’s stead. This disturbing story has traditionally been related to the Jerusalem temple, which was said to have been built on Mount Moriyya. Yahweh was, therefore, making it clear that his cult must not include human sacrifice. But E’s painful story goes further. Moriyya means “Seeing,” and the Hebrew verb ra’o (“to see”) sounds insistently through the Abraham stories.33 Although Abraham is presented to us as a man of vision, the Genesis narratives show how difficult it is to see or understand the divine as we struggle with life’s cruel dilemmas.
There is no clear, consistent image of God in Genesis. In the famous first chapter, the Creator God appears center stage, with no rival, supremely powerful and benign, blessing all the things that he has made. But the rest o
f Genesis seems to deconstruct this tidy theology. The God who was supremely powerful in chapter 1 has lost control of his creation within two chapters; the utterly fair and equitable God who blessed everything impartially is later guilty of blatant favoritism, and his somewhat arbitrary choices (the chosen ones are rarely paragons) set human beings murderously against each other. At the time of the Flood, the benign creator becomes the cruel destroyer. And finally the God who was such a powerful presence in chapter 1 fades away and makes no further appearances, so that at the end of the book, Joseph and his brothers have to rely on their own dreams and insights—just as we do. Genesis shows that our glimpses of what we call “God” can be as partial, terrible, ambiguous, and paradoxical as the world we live in. As Abraham’s plight on Mount Moriyya shows, it is not easy to “see” what God is, and there are no simple answers to life’s perplexities.
The Bible traces the long process whereby this confusing deity became Israel’s only icon of the sacred.34 Traditionally in the Middle East, it was impossible to confine the holiness of ilam (“divinity”) to a single symbol. Any image of the divine is bound to be inadequate, because it cannot possibly express the all-encompassing reality of being itself. If it is not balanced by other symbols, there is a danger that people will think of the sacred too simplistically. If that symbol is a personalized deity, they could easily start to imagine “him” functioning as if he were a human being like themselves writ large, with likes and dislikes similar to their own. Idolatry, the worship of a human image of the divine, would become one of the besetting problems of monotheism. In the Bible, we see that the Israelites were deeply vexed by the idolatry of the “foreign nations” (goyim), whose gods were merely “gold and silver, products of human skill.”35 But Israel’s sensitivity to idolatry may have sprung from a buried anxiety. Once people forget that a particular image of the sacred can only be proximate and incomplete, there is a danger that it will cease to point to the transcendent and become an end in itself.
This became clear during the seventh century, when a group of priests, prophets, and scribes in the court of King Josiah of Judah tried to reform the religion of Israel. They are known as the Deuteronomists, because in their scriptures they presented Moses delivering a “second law” (Greek: deuteronomion) to the assembled people shortly before his death on Mount Nebo. For over two hundred years the region had been terrorized by the Assyrian empire, which had brought down the northern Kingdom of Israel and deported large numbers of the population. But when young Josiah became king in 649, Assyria was in decline and the Egyptians were forcing their troops to leave the Levant. At this point, the pharaoh was too fully occupied to pay much attention to Judah, where there was a surge of nationalism and eagerness for independence. Josiah’s predecessors had found it perfectly acceptable to pacify the Assyrians by incorporating their gods into the temple cult, but the Deuteronomists insisted on the exclusive worship of Yahweh. They “discovered” a scroll purporting to be the lost Book of the Law (sefer torah) written by Moses, which had never yet been implemented. It was probably an early version of the book of Deuteronomy.36 When they read it to Josiah, he rent his garments in distress. No wonder Israel had suffered such disasters! For centuries its kings had condoned practices that Yahweh had explicitly forbidden. The sefer torah revealed that he had commanded Israelites to have no dealings with the natives of Canaan, to make no treaties with them, and to wipe out their religion: “Their standing pillars (matzeboth) you are to smash, their sacred trees you are to cut-to-shreds and their carved images you are to burn with fire!”37
Josiah carried out these instructions to the letter, wiping out all traces of rival religion in Jerusalem, and also abolishing Yahweh’s old rural shrines lest idolatrous practices lurk there undetected. Then, in what amounted to a reconquista, he invaded the territories of the former Kingdom of Israel recently vacated by Assyria, and not only destroyed every single Canaanite maqom as well as Yahweh’s temples in Bethel and Samaria but also massacred the rural priests and contaminated their altars. Henceforth, Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem would be the only legitimate national shrine.38 Not content with this orgy of destruction, the Deuteronomists (D) also rewrote the history of Israel, making major additions to the JE narrative that gave even greater prominence to Moses, who had liberated the people from Egypt at a time when Josiah was trying to become independent of the pharaoh, and extending the saga to include the story of Joshua’s conquest of the northern highlands, to which Josiah (the new Joshua) had just laid claim.
In some respects, Deuteronomy reads like a modern document. Had it been implemented, the reformers’ program would have included the establishment of a secular sphere and an independent judiciary separate from the cult;39 a constitutional monarchy, which made the king subject to the Torah like any other citizen;40 and a centralized state with a single, national shrine.41 The reformers also rationalized Israelite theology to rid it of superstitious mythology.42 You could not manipulate God by sacrifice, and God certainly did not live in his temple, which instead of being a sacred “center,” as of old, was merely a house of prayer.43
But a rational, secular ideology is not necessarily any more tolerant than a mythical one. The Deuteronomists’ reform revealed the greatest danger of idolatry. In making their national God, now the only symbol of the divine, endorse the national will, they had crafted a god in their own image. In the past, Marduk’s power had always been challenged by Tiamat’s, Baal’s by Mot’s. For J and E, the divine was so ambiguous that it was impossible to imagine that Yahweh was infallibly on your side or to predict what he would do next. But the Deuteronomists had no doubt that they knew exactly what Yahweh desired and felt it a sacred duty to destroy anything that seemed to oppose his/their interests. When something inherently finite—an image, an ideology, or a polity—is invested with ultimate value, its devotees feel obliged to eliminate any rival claimant, because there can be only one absolute. The type of destruction described by the Deuteronomists is an infallible indication that a sacred symbol has become idolatrous.
The vision of the Deuteronomists had been affected by the violence of their time. At about the same time as the sages of India had started to make ahimsa, “nonviolence,” essential to the religious quest, the Deuteronomists depicted Joshua slaughtering the inhabitants of Canaan like the Assyrian generals who had terrorized the region for over two hundred years. In the event, the Deuteronomists’ divinely articulated nationalism ended in tears. Their belligerent theology had blinded them to practical realities on the ground. It was only a matter of time before the great powers turned their attention to Judah. In 611 Pharaoh Necho II marched through Canaan in a bid to counter the rising power of Babylon. In a futile show of defiance, Josiah intercepted the Egyptian army at Megiddo and was killed in the very first encounter.44
Henceforth the tiny Kingdom of Judah would become the pawn of the great powers of Egypt and Babylon, and their foreign policy veered erratically in favor of one or the other. Some of the Israelites insisted that because Yahweh was their God, Judah could not be defeated and urged their rulers to assert their independence. But the prophet Jeremiah and others tried to force them to face facts—to no avail. Twelve years after Josiah’s untimely death, a tragedy of far greater magnitude occurred. Judah rebelled against Babylonian supremacy, and in 597 Jerusalem was brought to its knees by King Nebuchadnezzar, who deported the elite—the king, the nobility, scribes, priests, the military, and artisans—to Babylonia and installed a puppet king in the Holy City. Eleven years later, in 586, after another senseless revolt, Jerusalem was destroyed and Yahweh’s temple, his objective correlative on earth, was burned to the ground.
The Deuteronomists had made violence an option in the Judeo-Christian religion. It would always be possible to make these scriptures endorse intolerant policies. But the Deuteronomists did not have the last word because other biblical writers worked hard to counter this idolatrous tendency. When the redactors had put the JE document together, they used E’s
more transcendent image of Elohim to modify J’s unabashedly anthropomorphic vision of Yahweh. In E’s account of the first meeting between Moses and the God who speaks to him from the burning bush, Yahweh reveals his name: “Ehyeh asher ehyeh”: “I am what I am.”45 Later Jews and Christians would interpret this to mean that God was being itself, He Who Is. But E did not yet think in these metaphysical terms. In his narrative, God may have been saying something far simpler. Ehyeh asher eyheh is a Hebrew idiom that expresses deliberate vagueness. The remark “they went where they went,” for example, means “I have no idea where they went.” So when Moses asked God who he was, Yahweh in effect replied: “Never mind who I am!” There must be no discussion of God’s nature, and no attempt to manipulate God, as the pagans did when they called on their deities by name. Eventually Jews would refuse to pronounce the name Yahweh, as a tacit admission that any attempt to express the divine reality would be so limiting as to be almost blasphemous.
Where the very earliest accounts suggest that Moses had actually seen God on Mount Sinai,46 later authors would declare this to be impossible. When Moses begged to see Yahweh’s “glory” (kavod), Yahweh told him that no mere mortal could look upon the holiness of God and live.47 In a scene that would become emblematic, when Moses climbed Mount Sinai to meet with God, a thick cloud and a blanket of impenetrable smoke hung over the summit. There was thunder and lightning and what sounded like deafening trumpet blasts. Moses may have stood in the place where God was, but he had no lucid vision of the divine.48 The biblical writers made it clear that the kavod of Yahweh was not God himself; it was, as it were, a mere afterglow of God’s presence on earth, essentially and crucially separate from the divine reality itself, which would always be beyond human ken.
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