The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  The first prophet of consequence, Elijah, came to prominence at a time when Israel was faced by drought. Elijah saw this as a defining moment and insisted that the Israelites must choose between Yahweh and Baal. He devised a famous divine contest, in which two bulls were placed on two altars, one dedicated to Yahweh and the other to Baal. Yahweh won. When called upon, he sent fire from heaven, which consumed both the bull and the altar, followed by much-needed rain which fell in torrents.46

  But Elijah’s Yahweh was a new kind of deity: he was hidden, ‘no longer manifest in the violent forces of nature, but in a thin whisper of sound’, the still small voice of conscience. The prophets were almost always concerned with social justice and the protection of the weak and this informed the spirituality of the new deity. The catalyst of change, here as elsewhere, was the eruption of violence in the region, which provoked the reaction of building a more ethically based society, and the realisation that the rituals that characterised traditional religions did little in that direction. On top of that, literacy was spreading through the western Semitic world, thanks to the invention of the alphabet, enabling an archive to be created to record ancient stories: the first writings of what would become the Pentateuch were begun.

  At that time, politics, social affairs and religion were all mixed in together. Therefore, as the gulf between the rich and poor became sharper, the prophets interpreted this in a religious way. Amos and Hosea, for example, mounted attacks on the government – the king – for not doing more to help the poor, for putting their own interests above those of the people. In such circumstances, they said, Yahweh did not want ritual and sacrifice: he wanted spiritual reform, self-surrender, the abandonment of egotism.47

  It was not a simple or straightforward process. The evolution of the Jewish God is seen through the coexistence of two sources in Genesis, known as E (for Elohist), that being the name he used for God, and J (for Yahweh or Jehovah). E is regarded as earlier, for at times J appears to be responding to E. J describes God in personal terms, as an individual ‘who strolled through the Garden of Eden like a potentate, enjoying the cool evening air’. But in E, God never appeared to human beings, contacting them indirectly either via his ‘angels’ or as a burning bush. These two styles mark an important transition. It is J who refers to the special relationship between God and the Jews, though there is no mention of the Covenant, suggesting this was a later invention of the sixth century when, during the exile, the Jews became aware of Zoroastrian beliefs in Babylon.48

  Another new element related to the concept of sacrifice. In the ancient world, firstborn children, or first-appearing crops, were often regarded as the ‘property’ of a god – and this is why they were ‘returned’ to him in sacrifice. But in the bible Elohim demands that Abraham sacrifice his son, as a test of faith. This was quite new, partly because it was arbitrary but the test element stands out too. Hitherto, sacrifices had been performed to send energy to the gods, so that they could continue their divine duties (as is true, by and large, in New World religions). But Elohim/Yahweh was an all-powerful God who did not require any input of energy: the test he set Abraham broke new ground. And, at the very last moment, of course, Elohim sent an angel to stop the killing, instructing Abraham to sacrifice a ram instead. This episode may well mark another important transition, when animal sacrifice was substituted for its human equivalent.49

  This was important also because it opened up a gap between the human and the divine that was much greater than had existed before. Beforehand, the gods of the palace states had been smaller entities: there were more of them, they ruled specific realms, or places, or activities. Now, there was one god, all-powerful, and transcendent. ‘Yahweh was no longer the holy one of Israel alone but the ruler of the world.’ This idea, that Yahweh could control the gods of other nations, clearly reflected a defiant patriotism that could only have existed in a small nation surrounded by larger more powerful neighbours.50

  And this was the context out of which, in the seventh century BC, the beginnings of Judaism emerged. Manasseh (687–642) ruled as a loyal vassal of Assyria. He built altars to Baal, transferred an effigy of Asherah into Jerusalem and continued with child sacrifice. The prophets who urged the people to worship Yahweh alone insisted that He would be angered by Manasseh’s actions and eventually those actions were overthrown by Hosiah. The house of male prostitutes was sacked, as was the furnace where children had been sacrificed. The rural shrines were closed. A further set of changes was brought about by the Deuteronomists. Possibly assembled by a small coterie of scribes, Deuteronomy was written in the sixth century BC. This book determined that sacrifice could be offered only at one shrine, ‘where Yahweh had set his name’. It followed that other temples, outside Jerusalem, where Yahweh had been worshipped for centuries, had to be destroyed. This gave great power to the central cult, which determined that although individuals were permitted to sacrifice animals in their home town, they were not allowed to drink the blood (the life force), which had to be poured away reverently into the ground. The Deuteronomists also established special courts to judge religious cases and the king was stripped of some powers: he was no longer looked upon as a sacred figure. ‘His only duty was to read the written Torah; he was subject to Law.’

  As Karen Armstrong says, Deuteronomy is in some ways a modern document: it established a secular sphere, an independent judiciary, a constitutional monarch and a centralised state. More important, arguably, God was an abstraction – you could not see Him, nor could you seek His favour by offering sacrifice. He did not live in the temple, as early versions of the Yahweh cult had supposed; the temple now became simply a place of prayer.51

  All these developments were happening anyway. Then, in 597 BC the Israelites went into exile. Led by King Nebuchadnezzer, the Babylonians besieged Jerusalem, and wreaked even more havoc in 586, when as many as 20,000 Jews may have been taken away. Having lost everything – everything material as well as their self-confidence – it was natural that some of the people of Israel should turn inward. Deprived of everything, the Israelites had to learn to live as a homeless minority. In such terrible circumstances, God had become incomprehensible – and this confined Him and confirmed Him as utterly transcendent, ‘beyond human categories’.52

  Ezekiel now made the most of this desperate plight. Rather than arguing that their God had let the Israelites down, he turned such reasoning on its head and insisted on the opposite: the Israelites had let their God down. Only if they fully repented would God bring them home. And out of this grew the new spirituality. In the P section of the bible (P for ‘priestly’, who is believed by many historians to have pulled the E and J versions together), all the people must live ‘as though they were serving the divine presence in the temple, because God was living in their midst’. This, a new ethical revolution, was based on the experience of displacement. In this way the concept of ‘holy’ as utterly separate was born. In our contemporary, post-modern terminology, Yahweh was ‘other’. An important component of this was respect for the sacred ‘otherness’ of every creature. ‘Nothing could be enslaved or owned, not even land.’ Suffering in exile sharpened the appreciation of other people’s pain. This was not the same as the Indian idea of ahimsa but it was close.

  Now the act of sacrifice was changed again, P ruling that the Israelites could sacrifice and eat only their domestic animals, sheep and cattle. P reasoned that these animals were ‘clean’ or ‘pure’ because they were part of the community and therefore shared in God’s covenant with Israel.53 ‘Unclean’ animals that lived in the wild must not be killed.

  A final twist to all this was given after the Israelites’ return from exile, with the emergence of the Pharisees, a lay group obsessed with ritual purity. The Pharisees were extremely spiritual, believing that all of Israel should aim to be a nation of priests. This too implied that God could be experienced in the humblest home as well as the temple. Moreover, the Pharisees held that sins could be atoned by acts of kindness, not
sacrifice, another turn inward. The Golden Rule – do as you would be done by – became the guiding principle. Rabbis taught the scriptures but had no higher status, no greater access to God. In this Rabbinic Judaism, says Karen Armstrong, the Jewish Axial Age came of age. Study became a ‘dynamic encounter’ with God and revelation could occur at any time a Jew – any Jew – had an encounter with the traditional texts.

  Judaism therefore went through various stages of evolution. As we shall see in chapter twenty-two, Christianity itself began as yet another way of being Jewish.54

  PAGAN MONOTHEISM: ‘ONE UNIFORM MASS’

  In defining and describing the Axial Age, Karl Jaspers had concentrated on the aspect he thought was most significant, and newest – the identification of a new spirituality, based upon the idea of compassion, non-violence, the Golden Rule, ahimsa, essentially the discovery of morality, and the equal access of all – not just the elites – to the new understanding. But, in a sense, that was only half the picture. A second element was the invention, or advent, of the idea of one God, one jealous God who insisted He was totally transcendent.

  Throughout history, the Israelites/Jews have become famous for their invention of monotheism, another intellectual development that never occurred in the New World. However, recent scholarship has suggested that such a development was not quite the unique event it has sometimes been made to appear.

  The modern concepts, ‘polytheism’ and ‘monotheism’, date from the seventeenth century and may well have served to obscure what actually happened.55 A conference was called at Oxford, in the United Kingdom, in the late 1990s, to consider the ideas and context surrounding the emergence of monotheism, and was published in 1999 as Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity.56 This showed that the idea of monotheism was increasingly widespread by late antiquity, for the most part quite independently of Judaism or Christianity, and particularly among the educated in the Greek east. The difference between paganism and Christianity, for instance, say Polyminia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede, is not stark and simplistic. ‘The second century BC was a natural watershed: a break with the Hellenistic past and a new beginning. “God being one has many names” permeates Greek religious theory.’ The Stoic Cleanthes and Plotinus both adapted traditional worship to a belief in one god only. ‘Aelius Aristedes and Celsus both likened heaven to human administration in which many satraps and governors were subject to the Emperor or Great King.’57

  Nor should we overlook the fact that Christian monotheism (if not Judaism) was articulated in Platonic terms. According to Olympiodorus: ‘We . . . are aware that the first cause is one, namely God; for there cannot be many first causes.’ A close reading of the epigraphic and literary evidence on oracles also shows that the theological interest of the enquirers was dominated by two issues – monotheism and cult (i.e., ritual practices). The priests of Apollo at Claros took the view that the traditional gods of paganism were not God, but his angels. Both Hypsistarian worship and the Chaldean Revelation suggested that there was a ‘first principle’ and that it was fiery, being identified with the sun. Both Platonists and Aristotelians defined god ‘as absolutely immaterial and therefore transcending the world of the senses’. Indeed, this view informed Christian ideas. In fact, say Athanassiadi and Frede, a very substantial portion of late antique pagans was consciously monotheistic, and Christian monotheism is, historically speaking, part of this broader development as much as it was, to begin with, another way of being Jewish.58

  Society was moving in the monotheistic direction, they say, even as early as Homer, where Zeus is, as they put it, ‘a master mind’. The existence of other gods is not denied but they are reduced in status: this is known as henotheism, a precursor of monotheism. Even earlier, in the Babylonian Creation Epic, Enūma eli, dating to the latter part of the second millennium BC, Marduk comes forward as the saviour of the gods from the oppression of Tiamat and her followers and, as his fee, demands supreme power.59 Among other pagans of antiquity, Anaximander may be regarded as a monotheist in that he derived everything from a single divine principle. Xenophanes, too, talked of One God, ‘not the only god that exists but one that towers above the others’. Parmenides conceived of a goddess who ‘steers’ everything but he also envisaged lesser deities. Empedocles’ system of four divine elements were periodically absorbed under the influence of Love ‘into one uniform mass’, becoming a single god called Sphairos or Sphere. Herodotus also had the idea of a divine agency which has organised the world ‘with intelligent forethought’.60

  It is by no means easy to distinguish the Christian position from that of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno and their followers. The Stoics made reference to the god and Plato’s demiurge recognised three principles: God, ideas and matter.61

  There is, then, say Athanassiadi and Frede, ‘a clear sense’ in which Platonists, Peripatetics and Stoics ‘and thus the vast majority of philosophers in late antiquity’ believed in one God. ‘They believed in a god who not only enjoys eternal bliss, but in a god who as a god is unique and that he is a first principle which determines and providentially governs reality.’62 They go so far as to distinguish between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ monotheism. ‘Hard’ monotheism includes Judaism and Islam, whereas ‘soft’ monotheism applies to the Greeks (Zeus is supreme but there are lesser deities too, with a divine substance permeating all objects). On this account, Christianity is midway between the two – a ‘masterly combination of monism and pluralism’.63 Perhaps the strongest plank in this argument was the cult of Theos Hypsistos in the second and third centuries AD, Hypsistos being a single, remote deity, worshipped in preference to the anthropomorphic figures of conventional paganism. Theos Hypsistos was worshipped in Thrace from AD 25 on, in and around the Black Sea and Macedonia, and by Jews as early as the third century BC. (The cult was mentioned by Mark in the New Testament.) In an appendix, Athanassiadi and Frede give 293 examples of documentary references to Theos Hypsistos all over the eastern Mediterranean.64

  THE SPECIAL STATUS OF THE JEWS AS PASTORALISTS

  We have slightly jumped ahead of ourselves here. Although Athanassiadi and Frede make a good case for saying that monotheism was emerging in general across the Middle East in the first millennium BC, they do little to explain why this happened. The emergence of male gods, who defeat or take precedence over female goddesses, as happened in the Bronze Age/Iron Age transition (see above, chapter sixteen), need not by itself have led to monotheism, though perhaps the great military battles of the late Bronze Age did offer a context for conceiving God as a supreme commander. The general move towards compassion, a more egalitarian morality, and the search within for greater self-understanding, as reflected in Buddhism, the Upanishads and Confucianism, may also have spawned the idea of transcendence. But, according to Daniel Hillel, there was a more specific reason so far as the Israelites were concerned.

  His view is as follows: ‘Because the Hebrews were pastoralists, who inhabited and occupied several ecological realms, they were best placed to perceive the over-arching unity of all creation, a central tenet of monotheism, and to combine the separate deified “forces of nature” into an overall “Force of Nature”.’ At the same time, he says, a loose assemblage of tribes became a coherent nation and this further underlined the idea of monotheism. A further factor was the failure of both child sacrifice and animal sacrifice to prevent the Jews’ misfortune, which eventually produced a change of view among the Jews, with the result that eventually Yahweh told them he didn’t need sacrifice.65

  Pastoral societies, Hillel says, differed from the agricultural societies in that they tended to emphasise and worship ‘the brute and procreative prowess of dominant male animals, such as bulls and rams’. As they also depended on rain, they also worshipped a pantheon of animal and rain gods. ‘They achieved their overarching unity because they, as pastoralists, experienced more than anyone else the disparate domains of the ancient Near East.’ The patriarchs began as herders of flocks of goats and sheep but were forced to migrate
by drought and other calamities and, in so doing, encountered other environments, other landscapes. Sheep and goats, Hillel reminds us, must always be within six miles of water – this is the distance they can traverse twice and day, to and from a water source, leading them to cross differing types of countryside. Pastoralists are also more selective than hunter-gatherers in what they kill – males rather than females – and this would have made them more aware of gender and the value of their animals. This may have had something to do with the fact that child sacrifice, so prevalent in the ancient Near East, was eventually replaced by animal sacrifice, when the angel of Yahweh told Abraham to substitute a ram. Because pastoralists limit their population by weaning their children more slowly, children would have been scarcer among them, and correspondingly more valuable. In any case, it was a major step forward towards a more humane view, and an important stage in the evolution of sacrifice.66

  We can find other aspects of pastoral life in the Old Testament. For example, trade between pastoralists and farmers was well established, but it was always uneasy and the encounter between Cain and Abel may represent a memory of the ancient clash between farmers and pastoralists, which we have already seen as a major force in history.67 In the same way, as was discussed earlier, the expulsion from Eden is a folk memory of the beginning of agriculture – humans partook of the tree of knowledge, rather than the tree of life. With that transition, humans no longer dwelled idyllically as pastoralists but had become ‘the toilsome cultivators of cereals’. It is also known that vendettas feature in pastoral societies – cattle rustling was regarded as a sacred activity, since cattle were the main form of wealth. An ‘eye-for-an-eye’ is a familiar attitude from the Old Testament and so too is Yahweh’s claim that the Israelites shall make no graven image of Him. Pastoralists, always on the move, had much less need of craft or art objects, and a God with no image would have suited them.68