37. Jan Assman, Moses the Egyptian, p. 148.
38. Donald Redford writes, “The parallels are to be taken seriously. There is, however, no literary influence here, but rather a survival in the tradition of the northern centers of Egypt’s once-great empire of the themes of that magnificent poetic creation” (Akhenaten the Heretic King [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984], pp. 232–33). Miriam Lichtheim of the Hebrew University writes: “The resemblances are, however, more likely to be the result of the generic similarity between Egyptian hymns and biblical psalms. A specific literary interdependence is not probable” (Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 2, The New Kingdom [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006], p. 100). Sirje Reichmann, Bei Übernahme Korrektur? Aufnahme und Wandlung ägyptischer Tradition im Alten Testament anhand der Beispiele Proverbia 22–24 und Psalm 104, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 428 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2016). James K. Hoffmeier gives all the verses from both texts that are thought to be parallel. He concludes, “Problems on the connection between the two pieces abound” (Akhenaten and the Origins of Monotheism [New York: Oxford University Press, 2015], pp. 247–48). Mark Smith gives a fair and thorough discussion of the scholarly treatment of the Hymn and Psalm 104 in God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), pp. 69–76.
39. “The Hymn to the Aton,” translated by John A. Wilson, appears in ANET, pp. 369–71; and in Victor Matthews and Don Benjamin, Old Testament Parallels (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2006), pp. 275–79.
40. See Hoffmeier’s discussion in “Is Atenism Monotheism?” in Akhenaten and the Origins of Monotheism, pp. 193–210.
41. Baruch Halpern writes, “Monotheism, in short, as the modern monotheist imagines it, was neither original to nor practiced in the historical Israel of the Bible,” From Gods to God (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), p. 117.
42. Hoffmeier, Akhenaten and the Origins of Monotheism, pp. 245–46.
43. A recent example is Eckart Frahm, a professor of Assyriology at Yale. Frahm uncritically accepts an assumption by unnamed Bible scholars that the Joseph story was written later than Esarhaddon (who reigned from 681 to 669 BCE), and then he writes, “Even though there is no proof, these parallels suggest that the author(s) of the Joseph story borrowed a number of key motifs from the story of Esarhaddon’s rise to power” (“‘And His Brothers Were Jealous of Him’: Surprising Parallels Between Joseph and King Esarhaddon,” Biblical Archaeology Review 42/3 [May/June 2016]: 45). He does not address or even show awareness of all the evidence that both the J and the E versions of the Joseph story had to have been written before 722 BCE, when Judah and Israel were two separate kingdoms, long before Esarhaddon. And so he arrives at the unjustified conclusion that the Bible’s authors “borrowed” from Assyria.
44. Henri Frankfort et al., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946); Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel, translated and abridged by Moshe Greenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); G. Ernest Wright, The Old Testament Against Its Environment (London: SCM, 1950).
45. G. Ernest Wright, God Who Acts (London: SCM, 1952), p. 43.
46. Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel, p. 224.
47. See Chapter 2, note 48. The very name yiśrā-’ēl may mean “May El rule.” The Genesis story understands it differently (something like “he struggles with El”), but whatever its precise meaning, “the name is clearly non-Yahwistic and presupposes a time when the population worshipped God as El.” (R. A. Mullins, IETP, p. 523; see also Mark Smith, The Early History of God, 2nd ed. [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002], p. 32).
CHAPTER FIVE
The Mysteries of Babylon
1. Exodus 15:11.
2. Genesis 1:26.
3. Job 1:6; 2:1.
4. Exodus 20:3; Deuteronomy 5:7.
5. “A text commonly dated to the pre-monarchic era.” Baruch Halpern, From Gods to God (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), p. 26; Shalom Paul, Studies in the Book of the Covenant in the Light of Cuneiform and Biblical Law (Leiden: Brill, 1970).
6. The bibliography on First, Second, and a possible Third Isaiah is now vast. For an introduction and bibliography, the Anchor Bible Dictionary entry on Isaiah is divided into respective sections, each with bibliography, authored by Christopher Seitz, William Millar, and Richard Clifford (vol. 3, pp. 472–507). The most compelling treatment of the composition and redaction of Isaiah that I have seen is by H. G. M. Williamson, Regius Professor of Hebrew Emeritus at Oxford, The Book Called Isaiah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). The Anchor Bible commentary series includes both a Second Isaiah volume by John L. McKenzie (1969), and a three-volume treatment by Joseph Blenkinsopp: Isaiah 1–39 (2000), Isaiah 40–55 (2002), and Isaiah 56–66 (2003). Other commentaries on Second Isaiah include Shalom Paul, Isaiah 40–66: A Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), which rejects the need for a Third Isaiah; and Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 40–66 (Lexington, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1998), who writes of both a Second and Third Isaiah. Paul Hanson, Isaiah 40–66 (Lexington, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012), explicitly divides his commentary between a Second and Third Isaiah.
7. Tryggve Mettinger, In Search of God: The Meaning and Message of the Everlasting Names (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988; original Swedish edition, 1987), p. 42, cites this passage from Isaiah and quotes the equivalent passages in Deuteronomy 4:35 and 39 and 1 Kings 8:60 and says, “We later find the same idea in the writings of the exilic Prophet of Consolation (Isa 45:21–22).”
8. Paul Hanson writes, “With these magisterial words monotheism enters the disarray of a world long mired in the confusion of contentious gods” (Isaiah 40–66, p. 69).
9. John F. Kutsko, Between Heaven and Earth: Divine Presence and Absence in the Book of Ezekiel (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2000), p. 37, affirms that scholars have most commonly identified Deutero-Isaiah as the first monotheistic voice; Brent Strawn, “Commentary on Isaiah 44:6–8,” https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=990 https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=990. Cf. Mark Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 181.
10. Frank Cross and David Noel Freedman, Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 85.
11. In this case, interestingly, Cross dated it later than the others, “not earlier than the ninth century” BCE. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 264n. Cross acknowledges strong arguments by Eissfeldt and Albright for the eleventh century BCE.
12. Freedman, Pottery, Poetry, and Prophecy (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1980), pp. 100–101 and citations of other views on p. 123n. In my own work I observed that this Song of Moses was quoted and used by a writer whom we call the Deuteronomistic historian in an edition of his history that he composed in the very early years of the Babylonian exile—so the song had to be composed before that time. See R. E. Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), p. 360n.; “From Egypt to Egypt: Dtr1 and Dtr2,” in B. Halpern and J. Levenson, eds., Traditions in Transformation (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1981), pp. 178–79. See also Paul Sanders, The Provenance of the Song in Deuteronomy 32 (Leiden: Brill, 1996); he provides a survey of scholarship on the provenance of the song; he concludes that a pre-exilic date is extremely likely for the song in its entirety. Likewise see George Ernest Wright, “The Lawsuit of God: A Form-Critical Study of Deuteronomy 32,” in B. Anderson and W. Harrelson, eds., Israel’s Prophetic Heritage (New York: Harper, 1962).
13. Matthew Thiessen, “The Form and Function of the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32:1–43),” Journal of Biblical Literature 123 (2004): 423; William Holladay, “Jeremiah and Moses: Further Observations,” Journal of Biblical Literature 85 (1966): 17–27.
14. Much of the book of Deuteronomy has signs of coming from Judah in the reign of King Josiah (640�
��609 BCE). Following the terminology of Frank Cross, others and I use the term Dtr1 for the sections we trace to Josiah’s reign. Other scholars have used other terms, and we have seen many different proposals and dating for the Deuteronomic text. I acknowledge that there are those among my colleagues who date it later. So I will just say here that at minimum, according to the Bible’s own report, this text was found at the Jerusalem Temple during Josiah’s reign, so this is a case where both pious and many critical readers of the Bible can agree on at least this much: the portions of the Bible under discussion here come from not later than King Josiah’s time. For those who date them later, these portions do not apply one way or another to dating monotheism.
15. Martin Noth, The Deuteronomistic History, trans. J. Doull (Sheffield: JSOT, 1981); original German edition, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1943); Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 274–89; Baruch Halpern, The First Historians (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), especially pp. 114, 120 n. 19; R. E. Friedman, “The Deuteronomistic School,” in Astrid Beck et al., eds., Fortunate the Eyes That See; David Noel Freedman, Festschrift (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 70–80; Friedman, The Exile and Biblical Narrative, Harvard Semitic Monographs (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1981); Richard Nelson, The Double Redaction of the Deuteronomistic History (Sheffield: JSOT Supplement Series, 1981); Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972); Hans Walter Wolff, “Das Kerygma des deuteronomistischen Geschichtswerks,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 73 (1961): 171–86; Iain Provan, Hezekiah and the Books of Kings: A Contribution to the Debate About the Composition of the Deuteronomistic History, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 172 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988); David Noel Freedman, “The Deuteronomistic History,” in Freedman, Divine Commitment and Human Obligation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), vol. 1, pp. 279–85; Helga Weippert, “Die ‘deuteronomistischen’ Beurteilungen der Könige von Israel und Juda und das Problem der Redaktion der Königsbücher,” Biblica 53 (1972): 301–9.
16. These words also appear in the source of the Chronicler in 1 Chronicles 17:20.
17. The story of Elijah at Carmel does not contain the many terms and phrases that are visibly characteristic of the Deuteronomist’s own writing.
18. William Propp, Exodus 19–40, p. 777.
19. In J, E, P, and Dtr1 at the very least. See below.
20. Exodus 20:3; Deuteronomy 5:7.
21. Genesis 9:6; Numbers 35:33; 2 Kings 21:16; 24:4; Ezekiel 22:27.
22. 2 Kings 18:4; 23:8, 15, 19–20; 2 Chronicles 31:1; 34:3.
23. R. F. Friedman, “Late for a Very Important Date,” Bible Review 9/6 (1993): 12–16; “Some Recent Non-arguments Concerning the Documentary Hypothesis,” in Michael Fox et al., eds., Texts, Temples, and Traditions, Menahem Haran Festschrift (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1996), pp. 87–101; The Hidden Book in the Bible (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), pp. 361–78; “Solomon and the Great Histories,” in Ann Killebrew and Andrew Vaughn, eds., Jerusalem in Bible and Archaeology: The First Temple Period (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003); “An Essay on Method,” in Richard Elliott Friedman and William Henry Propp, eds., Le-David Maskil, Biblical and Judaic Studies from the University of California, San Diego (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003), pp. 7–8; “Response to Lemche’s ‘Writing Israel out of the History of Palestine,’” in The Bible and Interpretation, http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/fri368024.shtml. And see the collection of essays in John Day, ed., In Search of Pre-exilic Israel, JSOT Supplement Series 406 (London: Clark, 2004).
24. See Chapter 2, note 97, and Chapter 3, note 43.
25. Ronald Hendel, review of D. Edelman and E. Ben Zvi, eds., Memory and the City in Ancient Israel (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2014), Review of Biblical Literature, April 21, 2014, http://www.bookreviews.org.
26. Exodus 1:5.
27. So Rashi. See his comment on Deuteronomy 32:8.
28. Israel Knohl, “Nimrod Son of Cush, King of Mesopotamia, and the Dates of P and J,” in Chaim Cohen, V. A. Hurowitz, et al., eds., Birkat Shalom, Shalom Paul Jubilee Volume (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), pp. 45–52.
29. The Masoretic Text says seventy. The Septuagint and the Qumran (Dead Sea Scrolls) texts say seventy-five.
30. David Noel Freedman, “Introduction to the Leningrad Codex,” in The Leningrad Codex: A Facsimile Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans; Leiden: Brill, 1998); Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992).
31. Scroll 4QDeutj.
32. Genesis 6:2, 4; Job 1:6; 2:1; 38:7. See also the variant bĕnê ’ēlîm in Psalms 29:1 and 89:7.
33. Thus Deuteronomy 29:25 (Dtr2) says, “They went and served other gods and bowed to them, gods whom they had not known and He had not allocated to them.” This, too, is consistent with Deuteronomy 32 (“When the Highest gave nations legacies . . .”).
34. On the methods and standards of doing responsible textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, especially in poetry, see Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible; P. Kyle McCarter, Textual Criticism (Guides to Biblical Scholarship Old Testament Series) (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2001); Frank Moore Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976); Theodore Lewis, “The Textual History of the Song of Hannah: 1 Samuel II 1–10,” Vetus Testamentum 44 (1994): 18–46; and the important collection of essays in Frank Moore Cross and Shemaryahu Talmon, eds., Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). For a good demonstration of the practice of textual criticism plus a helpful bibliography of works, see Ronald Hendel, The Text of Genesis 1–11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
35. The full verse says: “And the sons of the gods came to stand before Yahweh, and the satan also came among them.” That can mean that the satan is one of the gods or that the satan is not a god itself but it comes and is present with the gods on this occasion. It is hard, perhaps impossible, to say. It makes quite a difference. If the satan is a god, then we should understand it, in Israel’s theology or mythology, to be dead, like all the other gods. But if the satan is not a god, then in that mythology it could still be alive.
The satan makes few appearances in the Hebrew Bible. Only later in Judaism and Christianity did people come to see it as a specific person, and the word satan became a proper name of that person, Satan. In the Hebrew Bible the word is preceded by the definite article the, like the Asherah and the Baal, except in 1 Chronicles 21:1; but there it can mean “a satan,” not a proper name, and the picture is further muddied by the fact that the equivalent passage in 2 Samuel 24:1 says Yahweh instead of satan. The satan is not its name. The satan is what this being is. We commonly understand the term to mean “the adversary” or “the accuser.” We derive this meaning from what the satan does in the few instances where it occurs. The most famous occurrence is here in the book of Job, where it accuses/criticizes/hurts Job.
We could compare the other, most similar, case where the satan figures, which is in Zechariah 3:1–2. We should be cautious because there it is in a vision that the prophet Zechariah has, while in Job it is pictured as an actually occurring event. But in any case, in Zechariah’s vision Yahweh reprimands the satan. Again it is not clear what the satan is. At this late point in Israel’s history (about five hundred years after the exodus), we would expect that all of the gods have already died, but we cannot be sure of that. And in any case, it is only a vision, so, as in a dream, persons and events from different times can be mixed. These cases are treated in Peggy Day, An Adversary in Heaven: “Satan” in the Hebrew Bible, Harvard Semitic Monographs 43 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988); and in Victor Hamilton, “Satan,” ABD, vol. 5, pp. 985–89.
36. C. L. Seow’s recent commentary on Job, which is well regarded, translated it
as “divine beings” (Job 1–21: Interpretation and Commentary [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013], pp. 249, 290).
37. Marvin Pope, Job, The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 1, 9.
38. Deuteronomy 34:5. These texts are in the J source. In the P source and in the Book of Records, much longer lives are attributed to people in the early generations of humans.
39. See note 48 below.
40. A recent summary appears in John Day, From Creation to Babel: Studies in Genesis 1–11 (Bloomsbury: T&T Clark, 2014), pp. 11–12.
41. Theodore Hiebert, “The Tower of Babel and the Origin of the World’s Cultures,” Journal of Biblical Literature 126 (2007): 29–58. Hiebert writes that in its context “it is a foundational part of the theme of cultural differentiation” (p. 53). In noting “God’s call to the divine council to put an end to homogeneity,” Hiebert brings together the deity’s plural address and the dispersal of humankind (pp. 46–47).
42. The first text (Genesis 10:32) comes from the P source. The second (Genesis 11:9) comes from the J source. That is, two different authors both had the dispersal of humans take place at this point, and both never had God speak in the plural again after this point.
43. Gerhard Von Rad, Genesis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961), p. 145; original German edition, Das erste Buch Mose, Genesis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956).
44. William Propp makes this connection in his Exodus 1–18, p. 400.
45. And in my reckoning, J and P were both composed long before the exile, which provides us with two more major texts that are monotheistic before the Babylonian exile.
46. Ezekiel 14:14, 20.
47. Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20, The Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), pp. 257–58.
48. Peter Machinist, “How Gods Die, Biblically and Otherwise: A Problem of Cosmic Restructuring,” in Beate Pongratz-Leisten, ed., Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), p. 190.
The Exodus Page 24