CHAPTER FIVE
THE MYSTERIES OF BABYLON
The Emergence of One God
The Death of the Gods
Why God Speaks in the Plural
I am God, and there is not another.
(Isaiah 45:22)
1. THE EMERGENCE OF ONE GOD
How do we get from the exodus to monotheism? The probability that we have raised is: the Levites left Egypt, they spent some period of time in the region of Midian, they came to Israel and became part of it, and they became its priests. And their deity Yahweh and the land’s deity El came to be seen as one God. In Chapter 2, I cited Professor Noegel, who wrote of the gradual fusion of the god El with Yahweh; and Professor Cross, who wrote of there being no conscious distinction between El and Yahweh in ancient Israel; and Professor Smith, who wrote that at an early point Israelite tradition identified El with Yahweh. And I added the significance of the doctrine that two Levite authors developed in the Bible’s story: that God revealed to Moses that El and Yahweh were one and the same. I said there in Chapter 2 that we would definitely return to this fusion of El and Yahweh because its implications are potentially tremendous.
Tremendous indeed. The implications of this consolidating of El and Yahweh are of historic significance:
Literary: it was the main clue that led to working out the documentary hypothesis. Even in this present period of scores of proposals and struggles over consensus, this remains the single most viable and accepted explanation for the composition of the Bible’s first books.
History: it joins the other evidence pointing to the exodus of a Levite group of Yahweh-worshippers who came to Israel and integrated with its population.
But perhaps most civilization-changing of all: it means an early birth of monotheism in Israel (and, at some point, in Judah). From wherever it came, this impulse toward one God was present in this very early stage of Israel’s history, before Israel and Judah even had their first kings. Both the biblical text and archaeology testify that monotheism took a long time to win, by which we mean: to catch on with the masses. That is why the scholarly debate over when Israel became monotheistic has gone on for so long and has been so difficult. We have been looking for at least two things: when the idea emerged, and when it caught on. The historical development of monotheism is hard to get at because we have so many texts from so many periods, so we argue over when someone first had the idea, when it became the view of the priests, or the prophets, or the kings, or the population. So scholars have rightly looked at a number of passages in the Bible, and many have concluded that Israel was not monotheistic until a very late stage in the biblical world. To name a few examples of what the scholars saw:
The Song of the Sea says, “Who is like you among the gods, Yahweh!”1
Sometimes in the Bible God speaks in the plural. (“Let us make a human in our image.”2)
The book of Job has an assembly of the gods meeting with Yahweh: “And the sons of the gods [Hebrew bĕnê ’ĕlōhîm] came to assemble upon God.”3
Even the Ten Commandments say, “You shall have no other gods before me,”4 which, many people have observed, seems to acknowledge that other gods do, in fact, exist.
Now, every one of these passages could be interpreted in some other way that still leaves the door open to a monotheistic possibility. But we can plainly see why people read these lines and a fair number of others like them and had reasonable doubts about whether the Bible was entirely monotheistic.
Exile in Babylon
A common view among Bible scholars for a long time has been that this idea—one God—was a late development in Judaism. They say that it was a product of exile: the Jews had no monotheism until after the Babylonians drove them out of their country in 587 BCE and deported thousands of them to Babylon. Until then, not only the masses, but the leaders, the priests, the writers, maybe even the prophets, all still had the gods. They were polytheists, or at most henotheists, meaning they followed one god but still believed that the other deities existed too. So, for example, a law in an early5 text known as the Covenant Code says:
One who sacrifices to gods shall be completely destroyed—except to Yahweh alone.
(Exodus 22:19)
It does not say that other gods do not exist. It just says that one should not sacrifice to them. So, the scholars said, as in the four passages I quoted above, this was not monotheism. Monotheism was not native, not homegrown. It was not a product of Israel nor of Judah. It was born in exile, in Babylonia. This is an understandable view: As long as the people were in their homeland, Yahweh was their chief god, their national god; but once they were out in the world they had to explain how Yahweh could be in power and watching over them there. As their psalmist asked in a famous psalm that begins “By the rivers of Babylon,”
How shall we sing a song of Yahweh on foreign soil?
(Psalm 137:4)
And they also had to answer the question of how the Babylonians had defeated them. Were the Babylonian gods more powerful than Yahweh?! So they promoted Yahweh in their theology to being the one and only God, the God of all the earth: of Judah, Babylon, everywhere. In the biblical scholarship of recent centuries, Babylon is the great equator of the Hebrew Bible. Everything is before Babylon or after Babylon. Pre-exilic or post-exilic. Everything, including monotheism. Yes, this is understandable, a reasonable speculation. After all, many things really did change then. The monarchy was over. The Temple was destroyed. But our contemplation of the fusion of Yahweh and El in the wake of the exodus already suggests that this common view of when monotheism started must at least be modified. So does our observation of the distribution of the element “Yahweh” or “Yahu” in people’s names in pre-exilic inscriptions from Israel and Judah that we saw in Chapter 3. The names overwhelmingly specify Yahweh and sometimes El as their God, but rarely any other deity’s name. Monotheism was early, and it was present in Israel and Judah for centuries before the Babylonians showed up, not born in exile on foreign soil. We still have all those passages that refer to the gods. But at the same time an array of texts from the Bible are blatantly monotheistic long before the Babylonian exile. We have to explain this.
Second Isaiah
If you ask my colleagues among Bible scholars when and where monotheism started, most (not all) will say Second Isaiah. That will be confusing to some readers because there is no such book as Second Isaiah in the Bible. The book of Isaiah says in its first verse that it contains the vision of Isaiah son of Amoz, a prophet in Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE. People observed long ago that these prophecies appear in the first thirty-four chapters of the book of Isaiah but that then the book suddenly changes. Chapters 35 to 39 are no longer the words attributed to Isaiah. They are instead a history about events in Isaiah’s lifetime. And then, after this history, the rest of the book, chapters 40 to 66, returns to containing prophecies, except now they appear to be the words of a different prophet. This “second Isaiah” is writing two centuries later, and he is speaking to Jews in exile in Babylon, not in Jerusalem. Instead of the eighth century, it is the sixth. Instead of Judah, it is Babylonia. It appears that two prophetic works are combined into one book. So we call them First Isaiah and Second Isaiah. We also call the latter work Deutero-Isaiah (which is Greek for Second Isaiah).
That is the short version. Scholars have proposed multiple theories about why someone combined these two into one book. And some scholars divide the second Isaiah into two works, making both a Second Isaiah and a Third Isaiah. Don’t get scholars started.6
The existence of this Second Isaiah and its location in the Babylonian exile are very widely accepted conclusions in biblical scholarship. I too find the case for this persuasive. But what does it have to do with monotheism?
In Second Isaiah, God says:
I am Yahweh, and there is not another.
Except for me there is no God.
(Isaiah 45:5)
And:
I am first, and I am last, and outside of me<
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(Hebrew mibbal‘āday) there is no God.
(Isaiah 44:6)
And:
Who has made this heard from antiquity?
Who has told it from then?
Is it not I, Yahweh?
And there is not another god outside of me
(Hebrew mibbal‘āday).
A righteous and saving god: there is none except me.
Look to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth,
For I am God, and there is not another.
(Isaiah 45:21–22)7
And:
Before me no god was formed,
And after me there will not be.
I, I am Yahweh,
And outside of me (Hebrew mibbal‘āday) there is no savior.
(Isaiah 43:10–12)8
And:
I am God (Hebrew El), and there is not another,
God (Hebrew Elohim) and there is none like me.
(Isaiah 46:9)
My colleagues whom I have mentioned look at these verses, and they say, “Now that is monotheistic.” To them these are the first clear-cut, properly monotheistic statements in the Bible.9 I put on a conference about twenty years ago, to which I invited some twenty-five of the best scholars I knew in the United States, Europe, and Israel. I questioned this idea that monotheism starts with Second Isaiah and the Babylonian exile, and I soon found that I was swimming upstream. A lot of very smart people were absolutely persuaded: Look to Babylon. Look to Second Isaiah. I did not believe it then, and I am even more certain now. We have also looked to Egypt, to Midian, and to earliest Israel. We have seen that at least the monotheistic impulse ignited from that very early stage when the Levites arrived from Egypt, and Israel identified Yahweh and El as one and the same God. And this evolved from an impulse into a religious doctrine.
Early Poetry
When Cross and Freedman identified the earliest texts in the Bible, which were all in poetry, they included “A Royal Song of Thanksgiving.” This poem appears in two different places in the Bible: in 2 Samuel 22 and again in Psalm 18. Cross and Freedman held that it was written down not later than the ninth to eighth centuries BCE, and they added that a tenth-century date is not at all improbable.10 According to this text, which comes from early in Israel’s history:
Who is a god outside (mibbal‘ădê) of Yahweh,
And who is a rock outside (mibbal‘ădê) of our God.
(2 Samuel 22:32 = Psalm 18:32)
This wording is incredibly close to the wording above from Isaiah 44:6—“outside of me (Hebrew mibbal‘āday) there is no God”—the passage that so many people were saying is fully monotheistic. Yet those words in the Royal Song of Thanksgiving were written hundreds of years earlier—certainly long before the Babylonian exile.
Another early composition is the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32). Some scholars have dated it to the eleventh or tenth century BCE.11 Noel Freedman wrote that “the dating of this poem has proved a difficult problem to scholars, who have tested an assortment of dates from Moses to the exile and beyond.” But he went on to list considerable evidence that it was archaic, and he concluded that he would date it to the latter tenth century BCE at the earliest or in the ninth century.12 Others have shown that the song is quoted by the prophets Hosea and Jeremiah.13 That is, the Song of Moses had to be an earlier work, already written in an archaic Hebrew before the Babylonian exile. And here is what God says in this song:
I, I am He, and there are no gods with me.
(Deuteronomy 32:39)
How different is that from the passages in Second Isaiah? If we were given this text and the lines from Isaiah without being told from where they all came, we might even guess that they were all from the same work. If we are looking for monotheistic passages in the Bible, we do not need to wait for the Babylonians to show up.
Early Prose
These have all been examples from the early poetry of Israel, from the eleventh through the ninth centuries BCE. Prose texts that others and I trace to the seventh century BCE are just as explicit about there being no god other than Yahweh.14 Here is what the texts say:
Yahweh: He is God. There is no other outside of Him.
(Deuteronomy 4:35)
And:
And you shall know today and store it in your heart that Yahweh: He is God in the skies above and on the earth below. There is not another.
(Deuteronomy 4:39)
And perhaps the most famous line of all from this text:
Hear, O Israel. Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one.
(Deuteronomy 6:4)
“Yahweh (or: the LORD) is one.” For many, this is the ultimate biblical declaration of the unity of God. For Judaism, it appears in the prayer book to be said every day. For Christianity, in the New Testament Jesus declares it to be the first among commandments (Mark 12:29). Yet we frequently hear denials that the verse means this. Some translate it rather as “Yahweh is our God. Yahweh alone.” By this rendering it does not necessarily mean that God is one but rather that Yahweh alone is Israel’s God—while not denying that other gods may exist. There is a problem with this rendering, however: There is no basis for it at all in the Hebrew Bible. The word is Hebrew ’eḥād, which every school child would know to mean “one.” It occurs in 546 verses in the Hebrew Bible, and there is not a single one in which it would clearly mean “alone.” Those who translate ’eḥād as “one” everywhere else it occurs in the Bible and then suddenly take it to mean “alone” in this single case appear to be resisting the verse’s patent meaning. That is its meaning especially in its context following the other two passages we have seen from this same author just two chapters earlier, which are visibly monotheistic.
We attribute passages in other biblical books to this same historian. We call this person the Deuteronomistic historian because his work starts with Deuteronomy—which we have just read—and he writes his history from the perspective of the laws and views in Deuteronomy. But we see his hand, editing and collecting sources, through the next six books as well: Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings.15 I attribute all of the texts that I am citing here either to this historian himself in the seventh century BCE or to his sources—which are even older. Thus in 2 Samuel the historian attributes a prayer to King David, and David says there:
For there is none like you,
and there is no God except for you.
(2 Samuel 7:22)
Is this really less monotheistic than those passages we read from Second Isaiah? Recall the passage in Isaiah 46:9:
there is none like me
and the passage in Isaiah 45:5:
Except for me there is no God.16
Likewise in 1 Kings, King Solomon blesses the people at his Temple dedication, saying:
So that all the peoples of the earth will know that Yahweh He is God. There is not another.
(1 Kings 8:60)
How different is that from what we read in Isaiah 45:21–22:
For I am God, and there is not another.
Farther on in the Deuteronomistic history comes the story of the prophet Elijah’s duel with prophets of the Baal on Mount Carmel (in present-day Haifa). Elijah introduces the duel with these words to the people:
If Yahweh is the God, follow him; and if the Baal [is], follow him.
(1 Kings 18:21)
They prepare two sacrificial altars, one for Yahweh and one for the Baal. (The word Baal is preceded by the definite article: the Baal. It is not a god’s name. It is a standard term for a male pagan deity.) But they do not light fires. Rather, Elijah says, “The god who will respond with the fire, he is the God” (18:24). The prophets of the Baal get no response to their prayers. Elijah gets fire. The people fall on their faces and say, “Yahweh, He is the God! Yahweh, He is the God!” (18:38f.). The story does not leave room for two gods. The declared point of its duel is not whether Yahweh is greater than the Baal; it is which one is God. And this story must be even older than the last few passages we considered, becau
se it is not traced to the Deuteronomistic historian himself. It is part of an older work that the historian used as one of several sources for his history.17
Prophets
How many more examples of monotheistic texts prior to Second Isaiah do we need? We can also turn to prophets who precede Second Isaiah. Hosea precedes Second Isaiah by a couple of centuries. In the book of Hosea, God is quoted as saying:
I am Yahweh your God from the land of Egypt,
and you shall know no god except me,
there is no savior but me.
(Hosea 13:4)
Again, this is reminiscent of words that we read above in Second Isaiah:
A righteous and saving god: there is none except me.
(Isaiah 45:21)
Jeremiah as well, preceding Second Isaiah, chides his people over and over for still worshipping other gods. At minimum Jeremiah is assuming an uncompromising henotheism, not allowing the worship of any other gods even if they exist. And at maximum, he is assuming monotheism. Propp writes, comparing Jeremiah to Second Isaiah:
But even Second Isaiah does not compare monotheism and polytheism as systems. Jeremiah, on the other hand, mocks the Judeans for the multitude of their gods (Jer 2:28; 11:13) and so has a better claim as Israel’s first self-conscious monotheist.18
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