The Exodus

by Richard Elliott Friedman

  When we dealt with the Exodus, we looked at the Song of Sea, which is one of the two earliest things in the Bible. We have witnessed that one of the famous lines of that song is:

  Who is like you among the gods, Yahweh!

  (Exodus 15:11)

  That seems pretty clear. Most English translations correctly translate the Hebrew that way. A few have made it “Who is like you among the mighty?” or “Who is like you among the celestials?” or “Who is like you among the gods who are worshipped?” But all of these translators are just plain struggling not to translate the words that they see in front of them: “Who is like you among the gods!” Their discomfort, and their attempts to translate their way out of it, just highlights how significant this is.

  The same thing happens with Psalm 29. The first verse says:

  Give to Yahweh you children of the gods (Hebrew bĕnê ’ēlîm)

  That is a literal translation. But look at the range of English translations rather than “children of the gods”:

  King James Version: “ye mighty”

  Jewish Publication Society: “sons of might”

  New Jewish Publication Society: “divine beings”

  New International Version: “heavenly beings”

  Revised Standard Version: “heavenly beings”

  but with a footnote saying, “Hebrew sons of gods”

  New English Bible: “you gods”

  Revised English Bible: “you angelic powers”

  New American Standard: “sons of the mighty”

  but with a footnote saying, “or sons of gods”

  No two the same. Just as with the Song of the Sea, the translators are struggling with the plain meaning of their text. Their problem is not linguistic. They know Hebrew. Their problem is theological. They are struggling over what to do with a psalm in the Bible that addresses the gods and tells them to give something to Yahweh.

  The same thing happens with the famous opening chapters of the book of Job:

  And the children of God (or children of the gods) came to stand before Yahweh.

  (Job 1:6; 2:1)35

  Again, some translators have made it “the divine beings,” which is not necessarily wrong, but their meaning is uncertain.36 Most have left it as the sons of God. As I said above, the Greek translator in the Septuagint again changed it to “angels of God.” But there is honestly no way around what it says. The Hebrew is bĕnê ’ĕlōhîm, which is a standard term for the gods. The eminent Yale scholar Marvin Pope, in his commentary, which has been a particularly respected one on Job, just translated it as what it means: “the gods.”37 The book of Job clearly and unapologetically begins with an assembly of the gods presenting themselves before Yahweh. Yahweh is the highest, but the gods exist.

  The sons of God (or sons of the gods) come up very near the Bible’s beginning in the book of Genesis as well. It is one of the strangest stories in the Bible. Here is the whole thing:

  And it was when humankind began to multiply on the face of the ground and daughters were born to them: and the sons of God saw the daughters of humankind, that they were attractive, and they took women, from all they chose. And Yahweh said, “My spirit won’t stay in humankind forever, since they’re also flesh. And their days shall be a hundred twenty years.” The Nephilim were in the earth in those days and after that as well, when the sons of God came to the daughters of humankind, and they gave birth by them. They were the heroes who were of old, people of renown.

  (Genesis 6:1–4)

  Here gods have sex with human women and give birth to some sort of superior humans, the Nephilim. Much later, in the book of Numbers, Moses sends scouts into the land of Canaan, and the scouts come back with a report that terrifies everyone. They say:

  We saw the Nephilim there, sons of giants from the Nephilim, and we were like grasshoppers in our eyes, and so were we in their eyes.

  (Numbers 13:33)

  The sex between deities and humans has apparently produced giants. God limits the divine element in humans by decreeing that humans are not to live more than a hundred twenty years. (And so the text notes later that Moses lives to be a hundred twenty. That is, he gets the maximum.38) Now all of this would be right at home in Greek or ancient Near Eastern myths, where there are stories about gods and goddesses having sex with humans and producing superhumans like Achilles and Gilgamesh. But it is not what we expect in the Bible. We know that there are plenty of passages in the Bible where the people of Israel are forbidden to worship other gods. And there are passages that deny that the gods exist. We have seen several of them. So what are we to do with these passages that say the opposite? How can the Bible have these other gods? And: where did they go?

  Psalm 82—The Myth of the Death of the Gods

  Here is the text of Psalm 82 with commentary. It is not some obscure little chapter of the Bible. As a song in the book of Psalms, it was probably sung at the Temple in Jerusalem in biblical times. And to this day it is read every Tuesday in the traditional Jewish prayers as the “Psalm of the Day.” It says:

  1 God is standing in the divine assembly

  He judges among the gods.

  That is about as explicit as you can get. There are gods. They meet in a divine assembly, as in Job. And one God, the highest of them, has the authority to judge them. Here is what He says to them:

  2 “How long will you judge falsely

  and favor the wicked?

  3 Judge the weak and the orphan.

  Justify the humble and the poor.

  4 Adjudicate the weak and the needy,

  Save them from the hand of the wicked.”

  The highest God criticizes them for failing to act correctly as gods. They should defend the weak, but they favor the wicked. He concludes:

  5 They don’t know.

  They don’t understand.

  They walk in darkness.

  All the foundations of the earth melt!

  The gods pervert justice, and the very foundations of the earth are dissolving. And so He renders a terrible judgment on them:

  6 I had said, “You are gods

  and children of the Highest, all of you.”

  7 But: like a human you will die,

  and like one of the rulers you will fall.

  The judgment is: death. The gods, His children, are to lose their immortality. They will die just like humans. The psalmist then concludes:

  8 Arise, God. Judge the earth.

  Because you give legacies among all the nations.

  Notice the final verses, identifying God as “the Highest” (Hebrew Elyon) and saying that He is the one who “gives the legacies among all the nations.” These are the very words of the passage in the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32:8–9) where we started: “When the Highest gave nations legacies.” The American biblical scholar Peter Machinist, Hancock Professor of Hebrew at Harvard, wrote that “every interpreter of Psalm 82” has made some connection between Psalm 82 and that passage in the Song of Moses.39

  Now what if we could walk up and ask ancient Jews singing this at the Temple in Jerusalem, or even ask the poet who composed the psalm, “Do you mean this literally? Do you think that there really used to be gods but they were condemned to death? Or do you mean this as a metaphor, that we used to believe in such things, but now we reject them?” It is hard to know what their answer would be. But, literally or figuratively, Psalm 82 contains their myth of the death of the gods.

  3. WHY DOES GOD SPEAK IN THE PLURAL?

  There is more. It is one of the classic mysteries of the Bible, and it turns out to relate directly to this idea that there used to be gods and goddesses who died. The mystery is: why, in the Bible’s monotheism, does God sometimes speak in the plural? For example, in the creation story in the Bible’s first chapter, God says:

  Let us make a human, in our image, according to our likeness.

  (Genesis 1:26)

  And in the story of the garden of Eden two chapters later, after the humans have eaten fruit from the
tree of knowledge of good and bad, Yahweh says:

  Here, the human has become like one of us, to know good and bad.

  (Genesis 3:22)

  And in the story of the tower of Babylon (also called Babel; it is the same word in the Hebrew, bābel, the Hebrew for Babylon), Yahweh says:

  Come on, let us go down and babble their language there . . .

  (Genesis 11:7)

  If the Bible is monotheistic, why picture the one God talking like this? People have proposed various answers over the years. Some have suggested that it might be that God is pictured as using the “Royal We” like kings and queens and popes. Thus a popular attribution to the Queen of England is the line, “We are not amused.” We scholars have our own special version of this. A scholar never says, “I don’t know.” A scholar says, “We don’t know”—graciously sharing the ignorance with our colleagues. Another suggestion is that God speaks in the plural because God is addressing the angels or some other heavenly creatures in the divine court.40 But the problem for all of these answers is that the three examples I gave here of God’s speaking in the plural are the only three examples in the Hebrew Bible!

  Some say that God speaks in the plural one time in the book of Isaiah as well, but that is not clear at all. In that passage God says:

  Whom shall I send?

  And who will go for us?

  (Isaiah 6:8)

  “Whom shall I send?” Definitely singular, not plural. The reason people misunderstand the verse to be a plural is that God then says, “And who will go for us?” There is no way that the “us” refers to God Himself. He has clearly already said “I.” When He asks, “And who will go for us?” He is talking to heavenly creatures (only to creatures called seraphim, not to gods) who are present and who have already been referred to explicitly twice in this passage. It is as if I needed to send one of the students in my class to get something at the office and I said, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” No one would have thought that by “us” I meant for myself alone. And no one would have read the Isaiah passage and thought that God was referring to Himself there in the plural except under the influence in their minds of those three passages in Genesis where God does so.

  So God is pictured as speaking in the plural only at creation, the garden of Eden, and the tower of Babylon. Then it is over. And we are only at the eleventh chapter of the first book of the Hebrew Bible. There are still thirty-nine more chapters to go in Genesis and then thirty-eight more books of the Hebrew Bible after that. Why stop using the plural at the tower of Babylon? Interpreters have not addressed this question—why does the plural occur only three times, why are all three at the beginning of the earth’s story, and why stop at, of all possible places, the story of the tower of Babylon? I think that we have been missing the crux of the whole thing. We need to ask: what happens in the story of the tower of Babylon? What happens there is: God disperses humankind. At the beginning of the story, all humans are together, and all speak the same language. But God creates different languages, so humans scatter and cluster into different nations. Professor Theodore Hiebert of McCormick Theological Seminary makes a particularly clear and strong case for seeing the dispersal of humankind into separate cultures as the primary point of the story of Babel in Genesis 11, more than as a narrative of pride and punishment, as it has often been seen.41 The text just before the Babel story says:

  The nations were dispersed from these in the earth.

  (Genesis 10:32)

  And the text at the end of the story says:

  Yahweh scattered them from there over the face of all the earth.

  (Genesis 11:9)42

  What happens there in Genesis 11 is what we saw happen in the Song of Moses:

  When the Highest gave nations legacies,

  when He dispersed humankind.

  What happens there in Genesis 11 is also what we saw in Psalm 82:

  Arise, God. Judge the earth.

  Because you give legacies in all the nations.

  God speaks in the plural in these three primordial stories because there are still others to whom to speak. Thus the German biblical scholar Gerhard von Rad, commenting on the plural in the story of Babel, wrote, “The ‘we’ in God’s mouth presupposes the idea at one time of a pantheon, a council of the gods.” But von Rad did not make the next step, to deal with the fact that the “we” ends here.43 There are gods, children of the Highest. But sometime after the event at the tower of Babylon these others start to die off. The disappearance of the divine plural occurs right there, 100 percent consistent with the demise of the gods.

  Thus the story of the sons of the gods (or sons of God) having sex with human women comes in Genesis 6, which is in the middle of that primordial age when the gods still exist. It comes five chapters before the tower of Babylon.

  And thus it is immediately after the tower of Babylon story that Yahweh is first said to appear to a human: “And Yahweh appeared to Abram” (Genesis 12:7). That is the beginning of Yahweh’s defined relationship with Abraham and his descendants, to be their God. And that too is consistent with the picture in the Song of Moses. There, as we read above, God distributes the peoples’ borders according to the various gods, but in the very next verse He keeps Jacob/Israel, Abraham’s descendants, as His people:

  When the Highest gave nations legacies,

  when He dispersed humankind,

  He set the peoples’ borders

  to the number of the children the gods.

  But Yahweh’s portion is His people.

  Jacob is the lot of His inheritance”

  (Deuteronomy 32:9)

  And thus God later says to Moses in the exodus story:

  I shall make judgments on all the gods of Egypt.

  (Exodus 12:12)

  People have struggled with this verse as well. It seems to be recognizing that Egypt’s gods exist. So some have interpreted it to mean that God is saying that He will show that they are not really gods. But the wording there in the book of Exodus is the same as in Psalm 82. That psalm said, “He judges among the gods” and “Arise God. Judge the earth.” And Exodus now says, “I shall make judgments on all the gods of Egypt.”44 Like the other gods and goddesses, Egypt’s deities now die as well. The Levite authors of the account of the plagues were consistent with what comes before that account, at the beginning of Genesis. Thus the most prominent god of Egypt, the sun, is blacked out for three days in the last plague before the slaying of the firstborn. That is more than an eclipse. Eclipses do not last three days. It is a defeat of the sun god, a removal of the sun’s divinity. It becomes just an object, not a god. And so the other plagues produce the gods’ demise, with Yahweh defeating the divinities of nature: turning the waters to blood, controlling disease and storm. And so the Song of the Sea, coming just a few chapters later, is right to say, “Who is like you among the gods!” At the time that this song was composed, its poet may have really believed in the existence of those other gods. But as the song stands now in the context of Genesis and Exodus that precedes it, this line takes on a new meaning: it now refers to the failure of those gods and to their demise. Their time has come to an end. Indeed, the point of the explicit reference to “judgments on all the gods of Egypt” may be that, in our texts, the Egyptian gods are the last to go. That fits with everything else we have seen in the texts that connects the arrival and merger of Yahweh and El with the period following the exodus from Egypt.

  People have also struggled with the verse “Let us make humans in our image” in another way. Does it mean that humans are created in the physical image of God, with faces and hands and feet? Or the spiritual image, or the intellectual image? If it did in fact refer to the physical image, then this raised the question of how both male and female humans were created in the divine image. But if Genesis 1 pictures an age when the gods and goddesses are still alive, then this answers that classic question as well. The text says that God created humans in the image of ’ ĕlōhîm, which can mean “in t
he image of God” or “in the image of gods,” and that He created them male and female. This could simply mean that he created the females in the image of the goddesses and created the males in the image of the male gods.

  Now who wrote these things? In the study of the sources of the Bible, we attribute the creation story in Genesis 1 to the Priestly source (P). This story is where God says “Let us make a human, in our image.” And we attribute the stories of the Garden of Eden and the tower of Babylon to the source called J. These stories are where God says “The human has become like one of us” and “Let us go down and babble their language.” The point is that two different authors, two of the major authors of the Bible’s first books, both had this idea that God speaks in the plural only at the beginning of their story and then never again.45 In the past, when people read those authors’ divine plurals, they concluded that these authors were not monotheistic. And when they read the story of the male gods having sex with human women, this seemed to confirm that these authors were not monotheistic. But all of those things end after the tower of Babylon story. The author of J and the author of P and the poets of Psalm 82 and the Song of Moses all reflect this idea that there used to be gods, but no more. That is why that Song of Moses could say that God apportioned the nations to the gods in verse 8, but the very same song could say “I, I am He, and there are no gods with me” in verse 39. The theology is consistent: Once there were gods. Now there are not.

  This is consistent with the book of Job as well. There we saw the assembly of the gods. Scholars debate the date of when the book of Job was written. But whenever it was written, the fact remains that the story that it tells is understood to take place early in human history. The prophet Ezekiel groups Noah, Daniel, and Job as three righteous men of old.46 Noah of course comes early in the flood generation. And the Daniel whom Ezekiel mentions is not the person in the book of Daniel. He is rather another Daniel (Dan’il) known in Ugaritic myth as an ancient righteous man. Job is not an Israelite. Like Noah and Daniel, he is a man of high antiquity.47 In his day, as in Noah’s day, there are still gods.