We might say that Hosea’s and Jeremiah’s criticism of the people shows that at least some of those people (a minority? a majority? all? the leaders?) were not in fact practicing monotheism. That is true. But it also means that Jeremiah himself and Hosea himself were monotheistic. And it means that monotheism was out there enough that these prophets could imagine criticizing the people for doing anything else.
Some scholars attribute some of these passages of history and narrative and prophecy to later periods, after the Babylonian exile. But these texts cannot all be that late. They cannot all be archaizing that successfully. And we shall see even more of such texts below.
Monotheism had arrived. It had been preached. It was the way the story was told.19 The battle was on. The fight over monotheism was in play. Its biggest victory may have come in the wake of the Babylonian exile, but that is just geography and politics. The idea and the texts and persons who championed it: all of these were in place before the Babylonians arrived.
The Ten Commandments
One more item to clear up: at the beginning of this chapter, we acknowledged that even the Ten Commandments say: “You shall have no other gods before me,”20 and that some say that this commandment is not monotheistic. They say that its words in fact prove the opposite: it recognizes that other gods exist, but it just forbids Israel from worshipping them. That is called henotheism or monolatry, not monotheism. We must admit it: the commandment does indeed say “other gods.” But we must also be cautious of what we derive from that. For years I have been telling my students, as an exercise, to think of five ways to command people to be monotheistic without mentioning those gods in whom they are not supposed to believe. Try it. It is possible but really hard. We should simply recognize a fact of linguistics that it is difficult to formulate a command against doing something without mentioning the something that is not supposed to be done. The issue is more likely to be linguistic than theological. The command against having “other gods” is just an example of this linguistic phenomenon, probably the most famous example of it in all literature.
Another point: the text says “before me.” The Hebrew is ‘al pānāy, which, more carefully, means “in my presence.” Literally, it translates as “in my face.” The old, usual English translation “before me” in fact originally meant just this: “in my presence.” It became misunderstood when the phrase “before me” came to be taken also as meaning “ahead of me.” That meaning is not present in the original Hebrew for this word. So, since it means “in my presence,” then the question is: where exactly is not in God’s presence? The implied answer is: nowhere.
Now if an early text like the Ten Commandments did in fact imply henotheism, that would not be a crisis. The original meaning of “Who is like you among the gods” in the Song of the Sea might be the same. This would just reflect the stages that we have been tracing on the stairway to monotheism. It need not ruin anyone’s day. But still, we should recognize that the words of the Commandment may very well be genuinely monotheistic in the light of these linguistic considerations.
Centralization
Finding signs of monotheism before the exile to Babylon is not just a matter of the text’s words. It is also a matter of what is happening in the text. The words themselves, like “The LORD is one” and “He is God; there is no other outside of Him” appear to reflect and promote a monotheism in Deuteronomy. But we should look at the content of Deuteronomy as well. The book contains a code of laws. They appear in Deuteronomy 12 to 26. The Deuteronomic Law Code begins, in its very first chapter, with a commandment that all sacrifices must occur at one place, and only one place, out of all Israel’s tribes. This central place is called “the place where Yahweh tents His name.” (Older, less literal translations make it “The place where Yahweh causes His name to dwell.”) In the Deuteronomistic history, this place is always where the ark is, a place originally located in a tent or Tabernacle and later located in the Temple. All kinds of sacrifices and ceremonies are limited to this single location. One cannot offer a sacrifice in Beth-El or Beer Sheba or Bethlehem or Dan. The law code says:
the place that Yahweh, your God, will choose to tent His name there: there you shall bring everything that I command you, your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and your hand’s donation and every choice one of your vows that you’ll make to Yahweh.
(Deuteronomy 12:11)
It repeats this with a strong caution:
Watch yourself in case you would make your burnt offerings in any place that you’ll see. But, rather, in the place that Yahweh will choose in one of your tribes: there you shall make your burnt offerings, and there you shall do everything that I command you.
(Deuteronomy 12:13–14)
The book of Leviticus contains a code (or codes) of laws as well. It comes from a different group of priests from those who wrote the Deuteronomic Law Code, and the two codes have different histories and sometimes have different laws. But not on this point. They both require centralization of worship. The commandment in Leviticus phrases the rule differently. It focuses the commandment on the Tabernacle itself, not on the divine name that it houses. But the bottom line is the same—and even more emphatic:
Any man from the house of Israel who slaughters an ox or a sheep or a goat in the camp or who slaughters outside the camp and has not brought it to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting to bring forward an offering to Yahweh in front of Yahweh’s Tabernacle: blood will be counted to that man. He has spilled blood. And that man will be cut off from among his people.
(Leviticus 17:3–4)
The idiom “to spill blood” refers elsewhere in the Bible to murder.21 According to this law, if someone kills an animal anywhere and does not bring it as an offering at the Tabernacle, this act is as if that person had murdered a human being.
This commandment is taken so seriously that, since the last Temple was destroyed by the Romans and never rebuilt, leaving no more central place, Jews have not offered sacrifices for nearly two thousand years. Why was this commandment so prominent, its penalty so severe? Why could one not offer a sacrifice anywhere but one place on earth? We might be cynical and say that writing this commandment was a move by the central priests to bring all the wealth and authority to themselves. But I think that centralization of worship was about more than money. Today, when we see Christians go to thousands or perhaps millions of churches in the world, we do not imagine that they worship different gods in those different buildings: the Jesus of Paris versus the Jesus of London or Sydney. Likewise, when we see Jews go to thousands of synagogues we do not think that some are worshipping the Yahweh of Haifa and others are worshipping the Yahweh of New York or Toronto. But the reason why this is so obvious and that these examples are so preposterous is that monotheism has won. Monotheism triumphed in the Western world and much of the Eastern world long ago, solidly, decisively, over polytheism. But when the law codes of the Bible were being written, this was not the case. The battle was still on. Multiple temples at multiple locations could mean multiple respective gods. The Levitical priests of Israel and Judah were vigilant not to leave room for that possibility. One Temple. One central altar. One God. Do anything else, and “that man will be cut off from among his people.” Centralization to a single nucleus expressed monotheism as much as the words “I am God, and there is not another.”
And all of this preceded the Babylonian exile. Others and I have collected the evidence that the law codes of both Deuteronomy and Leviticus were pre-exilic. But even for those who disagree about those dates, there is also the report of the books of Kings and Chronicles. Those histories report that two kings of Judah in particular promulgated the centralization of worship. They were Hezekiah and Josiah.22 Hezekiah ruled at the end of the eighth century BCE. Josiah ruled at the end of the seventh. So if we are right about centralization being connected to the implementation of monotheism, this too was well before the Babylonians arrived in 587 BCE.
Postscript
&nb
sp; I wrote in Chapter 2 about the strange state of the field of Hebrew Bible studies at present. It sometimes feels as if everyone has his or her own theory, and, worse, it seems that many scholars are not addressing one another’s evidence, evidence that challenges their own theories. This is not entirely their fault. It is partly the result of an explosion of information—and publication—on our subject. It is happening in other fields as well. There are simply so many books and articles coming out all the time that no one can read them all. I admit that I too have sometimes missed published works, some that challenged me and some that would have supported me. On the question that we are addressing here, though, the question of when various texts were written, this state of the field has been particularly vexing. People date more and more of the Bible later and later. For every text that I have quoted from the early centuries of ancient Israel, one can find scholars who date them late. There are some who date practically everything past the time of the Babylonian empire. Forty years of research on the Hebrew language (a biblical number) has gone against their late dates. We can distinguish between the Classical Biblical Hebrew of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, on the one hand, and the Late Biblical Hebrew of Judah after the exile, on the other. The dividing line is essentially pre-exile versus post-exile Hebrew. Just as the English of Shakespeare’s time is different from the English that I am writing right now, so Hebrew went through the natural development that all languages do over centuries. I have written about the challenge of getting the late-daters even to address all this evidence.23 If it is right, they are wrong. So one would think that they would have pounced all over it to challenge it. And one would think that they would have addressed it before they published their books and articles claiming that so many of the biblical texts were late—when those texts have been shown to be written in Classical Biblical Hebrew. It would be as if they claimed that a Valley girl wrote Hamlet. I have described sessions at international conferences in which they simply refused to discuss it. I have compared their dating of the Bible without taking Hebrew into account to someone writing about diabetes without mentioning sugar. I have listed a major sampling of unrefuted research on Biblical Hebrew here in earlier chapters.24
Besides being poorly defended—actually undefended—these works as a whole paint a surreal history. Israel and Judah existed as nations in a land from at least 1205 BCE until 587 BCE. These works picture those nations producing almost nothing significant during the 618 years of their existence in their land. They picture the Jews producing practically everything important—monotheism, history-writing, nearly all of their literature—only after they were thrown out of their land. I recognize that crises can give birth to innovations and creativity in human history. But this attribution of so many texts to the centuries after the crisis, and so little to the centuries before it, is extreme by any standard. As Professor Hendel wrote in reviewing some of these works: “It seems arbitrary to define ‘Israel’ as a Persian period phenomenon and to leave the tenth–sixth centuries as a blank, with no memories or literate thinkers to be found.”25 And, again, the evidence of the stage of the Hebrew language of the texts goes completely against it.
So, yes, there is a big debate over when Israel became monotheistic. Was it early or late in the biblical world? But what we have found about the exodus gave us a starting point. What we have said thus far is, first, that the impulse, the idea, was early. The merger of El and Yahweh was a first step, a very early first step, on that stairway. That merger is what the Levite priests taught all of Israel and Judah from some of the earliest known texts, and it never went away: one God. And it continued to surface in texts that we have seen from before, during, and after the Babylonian exile—from the eleventh century to the end of the biblical period.
2. THE DEATH OF THE GODS
So monotheism arrived. One won. How did that work? How did some priests and teachers and prophets and kings gradually persuade the people to embrace this belief? One God. When there had always been many gods. How must that have felt? We have seen signs that Israel, Judah, and the Levites kindled the flame of monotheism in the era following the exodus. That energy persisted through centuries. And whenever most of the community became monotheistic, whenever there was the first generation to which we could point and say now that is properly monotheistic, what did people think of their parents or grandparents who had worshipped the gods? What did they think happened to the gods—and the goddesses? What did they tell their children? How did their writers depict it in the Bible?
We do have the answer to this. What they did was: they said that the gods used to exist, but they died.
The Song of Moses
Near the end of the Torah comes a song. The text attributes it to Moses. It may not in fact be by Moses, but it is in fact very old. It says:
When the Highest gave nations legacies,
when He dispersed humankind,
He set the peoples’ borders
to the number of the children of Israel.
(Deuteronomy 32:8)
What in the world is that supposed to mean? When God created the nations with their respective borders, He set them according to the number of Israelites? That is a lot of nations! People already were puzzled by this passage two millennia ago. One proposal was that it refers to the story at the beginning of the book of Exodus. There the patriarch Jacob is said to have gone down to Egypt with seventy (male) persons in his family.26 Since Jacob’s other name in the Bible is Israel, the “children of Israel” in the Song of Moses was interpreted to refer to these seventy people. And, these interpreters said, there were seventy nations in antiquity.27 There are three things wrong with this. First, the phrase “children of Israel” occurs 593 times in the Hebrew Bible. Why pick out this one line in Exodus and decide that that is the meaning of the passage in Deuteronomy 32? Second, we do not know of any time in the history of the world when there were exactly seventy nations. The interpreters were just referring to a list of names of individuals, families, and nations in Genesis 10. Mixing and matching those names and counting all of them as nations, they arrived at seventy. But the list comes from another source (or sources) than either the song in Deuteronomy 32 or the text about the seventy people who went down to Egypt in Exodus.28 And third, the wording of that text in Exodus is uncertain anyway. One Hebrew manuscript says seventy persons, but other ancient manuscripts say seventy-five.29
So we did not know what the passage meant. And then this goat made the greatest archaeological discovery of the twentieth century: the Dead Sea Scrolls. Among these scrolls at Qumran we found portions of every book of the Hebrew Bible (except Esther). They are in bad condition. Only the book of Isaiah is complete. If you have ever seen photographs of them, you know that they are often just fragments, shreds. But before that goat, our oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible was the Leningrad Codex. It is now a little over a thousand years old (1008 or 1009 CE).30 The Dead Sea Scrolls had been sitting in those caves for two thousand years, so they gave us texts that are a thousand years older than the Leningrad Codex.
I have to stop a moment and take in the irony: With the end of the Soviet era, the Russians changed the name of the city of Leningrad back to its old name, Saint Petersburg. So now the most prominent thing that retains the communist name of the city is: the Bible. (The Lord moves in strange ways.)
So do we have our passage (Deuteronomy 32:8) in the Scrolls? We do. And instead of “the children of Israel” (Hebrew bĕnê yiśrā’ēl), it says, “the children of the gods” (Hebrew bĕnê ’ĕlōhîm).31 (This can also mean “the children of God” because Elohim, the Hebrew word for God, can have a singular or plural meaning, depending on the context.) This phrase, bĕnê ’ĕlōhîm, is a term for the gods in the Bible.32 So the passage in the Song of Moses would mean that when God created the nations, He set them according to the number of the gods. That is, He made Greece and gave it to Zeus, He made Babylon and gave it to Marduk, He made Assyria and gave it to Ashur, and so on. Each peopl
e had its god. But, the next verse of the Song of Moses says, “Yahweh’s portion is His people. Jacob is the share of His legacy.” So Yahweh, the Highest God, assigned countries to the various gods, but He kept Israel for Himself. This makes a good deal more sense than making one country for every person in Israel.33
Can we refine this any further? There is a third ancient witness to the original text of the Hebrew Bible. It is the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation. It is important because it is not a translation of the Hebrew that we have in the Leningrad Codex, and it is not a translation of the Hebrew that we have in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is a translation of a third Hebrew text that is now lost. So we have to read the Greek, figure out what Hebrew it is translating, and then compare that to the other two Hebrew texts. For this passage in the Song of Moses, the Septuagint says that when the Highest gave the nations their legacies, He set their borders according to the number of the angels of Elohim rather than the children of Elohim. There is no way that the Greek translator would have mistaken the word for “children” and written “angels.” We generally understand, therefore, that the translator was uncomfortable with a reference to gods in Moses’ song, and so he changed the word to “angels,” which may well be what he thought these children of Elohim might be. The Greek translation has the exact same thing in two other places, where the Hebrew text had children of Elohim but the translator made it angels of Elohim (Job 1:6; 2:1). But, whatever the translator’s motives were, he apparently had a Hebrew text that was like the Dead Sea Scrolls text. It had gods, not Israelites.
Now, that is two out of three texts, but this is not math, and it is not something that one settles by a democratic vote. We are trying to get at the original meaning of a text.34 The meaning of “gods” makes vastly more sense than the meaning of “Israelites.” What makes the former meaning even more likely, though, is that we have other passages in the Bible that confirm this, passages that refer to the existence of the gods.
The Exodus Page 14