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Pagan Monotheism and the Two Evils

“DAD, LET’S STOP READING THIS,” said my daughter, then eleven. “I don’t think I’m old enough yet.”

The work in question was the Bible. I had taken to reading it to Eleanor as a bedtime book. Whatever religious import one may or may not take from it, the Bible brims with great stories—way more compelling than your average preteen novel, at least to an academic father in his fifties. It is, of course, a major work of world literature. Contemporary culture references the “Good Book” constantly. I thought Eleanor should know more about it. I hoped as well she’d have a more informed basis for coming to her own view of the Bible’s theological significance.

So we had been reading the Bible, right from the beginning, every evening for some weeks. It was slow going, with lots of pauses for questions and discussion. Eventually, we got through Genesis—albeit not without a few complaints about the sections she said had given her nightmares. We got stuck for a bit early on when we hit the story of Cain murdering his brother Abel because he was jealous that the Lord preferred Abel’s offering of lamb to Cain’s offering of vegetables. We made a few jokes about the Lord seeming to prefer meat to a vegetarian diet, and that helped. But soon after that we got to the story of the Lord’s anger over the “wickedness of humankind” and his resolution to bring about a huge flood to “blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”1 That passage was pretty hard for Eleanor to process. The Lord being sorry for making humans and other living creatures? What about being a loving god? And how could he have messed up to begin with? Isn’t God supposed to be all-powerful and all-knowing?

Eleanor was also troubled by the Lord’s testing of Abraham to the brink of sacrificing his son, and by his odd treatment of Ishmael. Rebekah’s scheme for her son Jacob—a deception that leads Esau to lose his firstborn right to inherit Isaac’s wealth and position—led to another long talk. Most disturbing was the story of Lot, supposedly a righteous man, trying to protect two angels sheltering in his house by offering a mob at his door that they take his “two daughters who have not known a man” to “do to them as you please.”2 Rape. Murder. Jealousy. Plagues. Famine. Annihilation of whole cities by a rain of “sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven.”³ Genesis is not a gentle book. I hadn’t read it with any care in some time. I’d forgotten how much shocking stuff it contains.

We probably should have stopped there (if not earlier). But Eleanor insisted we continue. Genesis often horrified her but also fascinated her. Reluctantly, I agreed, and we started in on Exodus.

It went reasonably well at first. Eleanor knew the general outlines of the escape from Egypt and the Passover story. So she was prepared for all the carnage there—Moses’s murder of an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew, the slaying of the firstborn, and the drowning of Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea—although Exodus was more direct and matter-of-fact about the bloodshed than she had expected or I had remembered. She positively liked the Lord wrapping Mount Sinai in smoke and fire, blasting his trumpet, and answering Moses through thunder, although it did seem to her a bit much to decree that “any who touch the mountain shall be put to death.”⁴ The giving of the Ten Commandments was fine too. But Eleanor puzzled over the subsequent passages. About when and when not it is appropriate to buy or sell a slave.⁵ About the need to maintain the “food, clothing, and marital rights” of the first wife if a man takes a second one.⁶ About the Lord’s very specific requirements for how to worship and obey him—from not boiling a kid in its mother’s milk, to the layout and furnishings of his Tabernacle, to the vestments that his priests should wear, to the proper way for performing animal sacrifices. About how if an owner strikes a slave so hard that the slave dies immediately, the owner is to be punished, “but if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner’s property.”⁷ About how “whoever strikes father or mother” or “curses father or mother shall be put to death.”⁸ About how “whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall be put to death” as well.⁹

This was scary and strange enough. Then we got to the section where the Lord fumes over the casting of the Golden Calf, and the passages that immediately follow. “I have seen this people, how stiff-necked they are,” the Lord tells Moses. “Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them.”10

Moses does his best to calm the Lord down, and asks, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?” Moses points out that it would look pretty bad. “Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’?” And he implores the Lord to “Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people.”¹¹

Remarkably, for arguing with God is not commonly advised, Exodus reports “the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.”¹² Eleanor cheered at that.

But then Moses loses his own temper. He heads down the mountain with the Ten Commandments carved onto two stone tablets, sees the people dancing around the Golden Calf, and infamously dashes the tablets on the ground, breaking them. Eleanor knew that part. She didn’t know what happens next. First Moses grinds up the Golden Calf, scatters the powder into water, and makes everyone drink it. Alarmed, his brother Aaron tries to settle Moses down. Moses ignores him, goes over to the gate of the Israelites’ camp, and shouts, “Who is on the Lord’s side? Come to me!”¹³ Here’s what ensues:

And all the sons of Levi gathered around him. He said to them, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side, each of you! Go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill your brother, your friend, and your neighbor.’ ” The sons of Levi did as Moses commanded, and about three thousand of the people fell on that day. Moses said, “Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of a son or a brother, and so have brought a blessing on yourselves this day.”¹⁴

After this slaughter, Moses then goes back up the mountain to plead the Israelites’ case with the Lord. The Lord tells Moses not to worry. He is content, and tells Moses to “lead the people to the place about which I have spoken to you; see, my angel shall go in front of you.”¹⁵ Even so, the Lord sends a plague on the remaining Israelites before they depart—not because they killed three thousand of their brothers, friends, and neighbors, but “because they made the calf.”16

That was it. Eleanor was done. The Bible may be the Good Book, but it’s not a bedtime story.

The tough-guy god of the Old Testament, full of pride, resentment, anger, and callous violence even against his own followers, jars pretty strongly with the common contemporary image of the divine as kindly, loving, and good. The god of the good, like the goodness of nature, would develop eventually. But the inspiration for these passages was both older and different. The context of life for the overwhelming majority of Israelites at the time was not Athens. It was not Rome. It was not the life of the elites of the Chinese state of Zhou. It was not New York, Berlin, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Tehran, or Beijing. Understanding the ancient Israelite context, though, has much to show us about why the Old Testament, especially the early books, now frequently feels odd, and even immoral.

Because of this oddness, religious leaders in the Abrahamic traditions—the largest being Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—usually clean up the Old Testament stories, or simply skip over the stranger passages. It is a rare pulpit that thunders with Bible quotes like “whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall be put to death.” Many traditions counsel their faithful to take a day every week for rest, reflection, devotion, and communion with one another. But death if you don’t? Few highlight that line today.

Of course, most followers of the Abrahamic traditions—even the devout—haven’t read the Bible with much thoroughness. People are busy, and the Bible is long and often dull. In 2014, some 19 percent of Americans reported reading the Bible at least four times a week, and some 45 percent reported reading the Bible at least once a month.¹⁷ But most return again and again to their favorite passages. Americans report to survey researchers that they gain feelings of peace, encouragement, hope, direction, and happiness when they read the Bible.¹⁸ Likely not from reading about the sons of Levi murdering three thousand of their friends and kin, and winning the blessing of the Lord for doing so.

More thorough reading practices confront one with a wide range of other oddities as well—oddities that provide important clues as to how the ancient Israelites encountered the divine in their lives. Take its occasional polytheistic and poly-divine description of divinity.¹⁹ The Old Testament frequently rails against polytheism, as we might expect for a work that urges the acceptance of a monotheistic conception of the divine. So it comes as some surprise to encounter passages like these from Genesis, Deuteronomy, and Psalms:

Then the Lord God said, “See, the man has become like one of us,

knowing good and evil.”20

When the Most High apportioned the nations,

when he divided humankind,

he fixed the boundaries of the peoples

according to the number of the gods;

the Lord’s own portion was his people,

Jacob his allotted share.²¹

God has taken his place in the divine council;

in the midst of the gods he holds judgment …²²

One of us. According to the number of the gods. The divine council. Maybe in that first quote from Genesis the Lord speaks in the “royal we,” referring to his singular self in the plural, and does not intend to imply that he is only one of many gods. But the line about “the number of the gods” is a little harder to pass by so quickly. It comes from a famous passage in Deuteronomy known as the “Song of Moses.” Moses sings this song to an assembly of the entire people of Israel just before ascending Mount Nebo, looking on the promised land that he himself would never enter, and dying. Scholars have long remarked on these lines. The passage seems to contrast a deity called “the Most High” with a “number” of other gods, one of whom is “the Lord.” The original Hebrew makes the contrast between different gods clearer. “The Most High” is the traditional translation for a deity named Elyon or El Elyon, and “the Lord” is the traditional translation for a deity whose name is spelled , which is roughly equivalent to YHWH in English.²³ In this passage, Elyon sounds like a chief god, sort of a Zeus figure, presiding over a group of less powerful gods like YHWH, each of whom Elyon assigns to the job of taking care of a specific group of people.²⁴ YHWH’s assignment, his “own portion,” is the people descended from Jacob, the Israelites.

The third quote—the “divine council” passage (which is from Psalms)—continues the holy board of directors theme. It concerns a deity called “God,” which is the traditional translation for Elohim in the original Hebrew. And it describes how Elohim is but one member of a group of gods who regularly get together to deliberate on the problems of the world. Moreover, the very word Elohim is the plural form of the name El—another term for the divine in the Bible, and perhaps the oldest—although the biblical text treats Elohim as if it were a grammatically singular name, making for an entity who is both plural and one.25

None of which sounds terrifically monotheistic. Let me put it this way: If you read the Bible in English, you might well accept the varying terms like “Most High,” “the Lord,” and “God” as literary license for the same powerful divinity. But if you go back to the original Hebrew for these terms, and ponder the lines where they appear just a minute more, you’ll find yourself pondering them for quite a bit longer as well.²⁶

The Old Testament has plenty more to puzzle the attentive reader, providing more clues about the context of ancient Israel.

Take the transcendence of God, one of the hallmarks of common contemporary understandings of the divine. The Old Testament God can be transcendent but is also often very much here, bound in the real, present in daily life, a god of places, immanent in them. True, the Old Testament God is none too fond of idols. But there he is walking around the Garden of Eden. There he is in the burning bush.²⁷ There he is in the pillar of fire and the pillar of smoke, leading the Israelites along and throwing the Egyptian army into confusion.²⁸ He doesn’t just send the pillar of fire and the pillar of smoke; he’s actually in them.

The Lord went in front of them in a pillar of cloud by day, to lead them along the way, and in a pillar of fire by night, to give them light, so that they might travel by day and by night.²⁹

And there he is, right at the top of Mount Sinai, summoning Moses up to talk to him and establishing that stern guideline about putting to death anyone other than Moses who touches the mountain, thus offending God’s presence by coming closer than he allows. There he is once again in the fire and the cloud after all the conflict over the Golden Calf, when the Israelites have finally constructed the Tabernacle—a kind of special tent that could be packed up and moved around—to his specifications. “My presence will go with you,” he promises, once Moses “did everything just as the Lord commanded him.”³⁰ True to his word,

Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle … the cloud of the Lord was on the tabernacle by day, and fire was in the cloud by night, before the eyes of all the house of Israel at each stage of their journey.31

Much later on, Solomon finally replaces the Tabernacle. No more movable tent of meeting. Solomon builds a true temple out of stone and wood in Jerusalem, and the presence of God enters in the form of a cloud again. His cloud descends right after the priests finish transferring all the holy vessels and the two tablets of the Ten Commandants out of the now unneeded Tabernacle and into the inner sanctuary of “the house of the Lord” that Solomon commanded to be built.³² Then,

a cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord. Then Solomon said, “The Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness. I have built you an exalted house, a place for you to dwell in forever.”³³

In short, the “house of the Lord” really is his house. He lives there. It’s where God “dwells,” back there in the “thick darkness” of the inner sanctuary. It’s where he is present and where the faithful can encounter him. There is no idol, however. God does not inhabit a statue, such as one quite likely would have encountered for Ishtar in her temple at Uruk in the time of Gilgamesh. But he is present, right there, nonetheless—just as he had been present, right there, in the Tabernacle. Indeed, the ancient Hebrew word for Tabernacle, mishkan, means a “dwelling place.”

A quick recap. The Old Testament’s portrayal of the divine seems out of step with contemporary notions in several ways. Instead of being a god of the good, the Old Testament god is often violent and scary. Instead of monotheism, the Old Testament often seems to describe a polytheistic divine. Instead of just transcendence, we read a lot of discussion of God as a concrete and immanent presence.

Plus there’s more to puzzle over.

Consider how the Old Testament god is also often a god of what we today consider attributes of nature. That is, he is a god of nature before nature—literally, for the word nature does not ever appear in the Old Testament.³⁴ God is not over and above nature. He is nature, an immanent part of it—especially some attributes of nature common to many nature before nature divinities. Like Zeus and other commanding figures that people have seen in the heavens, the Old Testament god is a storm god, ready to fire away with his thunderbolts at humans he judges need a little disciplining. Take this passage from Job:

See, he scatters his lightning around him

and covers the roots of the sea.

For by these he governs peoples;

he gives food in abundance.

He covers his hands with the lightning,

and commands it to strike the mark.

Its crashing tells about him;

he is jealous with anger against iniquity.

At this also my heart trembles,

and leaps out of its place.

Listen, listen to the thunder of his voice

and the rumbling that comes from his mouth.

Under the whole heaven he lets it loose,

and his lightning to the corners of the earth.

After it his voice roars;

he thunders with his majestic voice

and he does not restrain the lightnings when his voice is heard.

God thunders wondrously with his voice;

he does great things that we cannot comprehend.35

This passage also connects the Old Testament god to another characteristic of nature before nature: to sustenance needs and the rhythms of agricultural prosperity. By his lightning and, we presume, his rain, God “gives food in abundance.” God can also give “a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground … like coriander seed, white” and with a taste “like wafers made with honey.” That sweet substance is the manna, the “bread from heaven” he provides the Israelites in the wilderness.³⁶

God does not only provide, however. He also punishes those he finds wicked by attacking their sustenance capabilities. When God wants to free his people from Egypt, he sends the Ten Plagues, most of which directly undermine the ability of Egyptians to provide for themselves. He turns water into blood so that the Nile is undrinkable and its fish die. He sends frogs, gnats, and boils that torment humans and animals alike. He sends livestock disease, hail, and locusts that kill cattle and damage crops. For the ninth plague, he sends darkness so thick no one can see to move and do what needs to be done to sustain their livelihoods. And the most fearsome, the tenth plague, the slaying of the firstborn, God applies to humans and livestock alike.

God not only punishes foreign powers through undermining ecology and agriculture. He also disciplines the Israelites with ecological and agricultural threats.

But if you will not obey me, and do not observe all these commandments, if you spurn my statutes, and abhor my ordinances, so that you will not observe all my commandments, and you break my covenant, I in turn will do this to you: I will bring terror on you; consumption and fever that waste the eyes and cause life to pine away…. I will break your proud glory, and I will make your sky like iron and your earth like copper. Your strength shall be spent to no purpose: your land shall not yield its produce, and the trees of the land shall not yield their fruit.37

Terror. Consumption. Fever. Broken pride. Land which no longer produces. Trees which do not yield. Tough words from a tough God—even toward his own people.

Happier connections to sustenance are the Old Testament god’s directives for ensuring agricultural sustainability through rest. His injunction to “remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy” includes livestock “so that your ox and your donkey may have relief.”³⁸ Even happier, it also includes required rest for slaves and “resident aliens.” But not only a sabbath day: God directs the Israelites to have a sabbath year for the land, presumably in rotation, field by field—a shmita, as the Israelites called it, derived from the Hebrew word for “release.”

Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in their yield; but in the seventh year there shall be a sabbath of complete rest for the land, a sabbath for the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your unpruned vine: it shall be a year of complete rest for the land.³⁹

Rotating a period of rest for one’s land is sound agronomic advice. But the shmita also promoted economic and ecologic justice, for God remembers both the needs of wildlife and of the poor—which, frankly, I think is pretty cool.

For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard.40

God also organizes three agricultural harvest holidays: the festivals of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. The climate of the Mideast leads to quite a different pattern of agriculture than in more temperate regions, and three periods of harvest were the norm in biblical times. Many Jews today still honor these festivals—especially Pesach, better known today as Passover—although with little of their original agricultural meaning. Pesach is the early spring festival of unleavened bread, today widely celebrated as a freedom holiday focused on the Exodus story. (Increasingly, some Christians also celebrate a version of Pesach.) In an earlier day, Jews also appreciated Pesach as a metaphor for release from winter and the re-leavening of the world with the return of warmth and plant growth. Central to Pesach was the ritual of the Cutting of the First Sheaf, a sheaf of barley—which is a winter crop in these regions—indicating the barley was ripe and ready for harvest, and that spring had arrived.⁴¹ Shavuot is a late spring holiday, originally focused around the wheat harvest. And Sukkot is a fall holiday, originally focused around the harvesting of tree and fruit crops like olives and grapes.

All three were major festivals during biblical times, not only Pesach. At each of these holidays, every Jewish male in the land was even expected to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, fulfilling God’s commandment that “Three times in the year all your males shall appear before the Lord God” at his house, the Temple.⁴² If we blink over this practice’s sexism for a moment, it is also pretty cool: everyone (every man, that is) coming together in one place three times a year to celebrate their connections with each other through agriculture.⁴³

Although there is a certain romantic appeal to these agricultural rituals of social and ecological unity, archaeologists doubt that most ordinary Israelites actually did all the things the Old Testament demanded of them—which is likely much of why the Old Testament writers felt they had to make those demands.⁴⁴ Plus the sociological economist would be right to point out that no one was supposed to arrive at the Temple empty-handed. Everyone was supposed to bring a substantial offering from the season’s harvest. These offerings weren’t all burned up on the Temple’s altars. Only a small amount was, for ceremonial purposes. The city folk, even though they were few, needed to eat too. More on that later: For now, I want to emphasize a different implication. These were offerings to a God of what we today call nature and of our agricultural connections to ecology.

The Old Testament’s accounts of God’s personality offer more clues about the context of ancient Israel and its people’s understandings of the divine.

First, you can argue with the Old Testament god. Consider the story of Moses arguing with God and convincing him not to obliterate the Israelites for being a “stiff-necked people” and casting the Golden Calf. The Lord listens and changes his mind.

Plus the Lord makes mistakes and has regrets. He is not omniscient, infallible, and omnipotent, as Eleanor noted concerning the story of Noah’s ark when God confesses that “I am sorry that I have made” human beings and decides to clean the slate with a huge flood. God goofed and felt the world needed a reset. Another example is when God makes Saul the first king of the Israelites, but he doesn’t turn out so well, in the Lord’s view. (Saul refuses to “utterly destroy” the Amalekites, as the Lord commanded, and spares their king and the best of their sheep and cattle.) The Lord goes to Samuel and says “I regret that I made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me, and has not carried out my commands.”45 He does a reset on that one too, and brings in David to be king.

The Old Testament god is capable of apology, too, telling Jeremiah to tell the people that “I am sorry for the disaster that I have brought upon you,” meaning the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Babylonians in 587 BCE.⁴⁶ That was quite a major misstep as it devastated not only his “own portion,” his people, but even his own house, the Temple. And God is remorseful.

As well, the Old Testament god can be quite emotional. His most common emotional response, though, is what my daughter called his “anger management problem” when we were reading the Bible together. The Lord spends quite a bit of the Old Testament in a very sour mood, taking great offense at the Israelites’ transgressions of the covenant he established with them to follow his laws. He frequently thunders at the Israelites that “I the Lord your God am a jealous God.”⁴⁷ He’s not often given to forgiveness either. As Joshua warns the Israelites, “He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins.”⁴⁸ You might even call “Jealous” another of his names, suggests Moses to the Israelites in this passage: “You shall worship no other god, because the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.”⁴⁹

These characteristics manifest a much more interactive conception of the divine than Abrahamic tradition generally promotes today. The interactiveness of the Old Testament divine with humans even extends to sexual relations, as the divine does in Gilgamesh and in ancient Greek and Roman religion. Genesis and some of the Apocrypha speak of the “sons of God” (contrary to the New Testament’s description of Jesus as God’s “only son”).50 God’s sons lust after human women and descend to the Earth to take them as wives and have intercourse with them, leading to a race of semidivine superheroes called the Nephilim.⁵¹ Here’s the passage from Genesis. It’s short and often overlooked, but pretty striking if you slow your eye for a moment and take it in:

When people began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that they were fair; and they took wives for themselves of all that they chose. Then the Lord said, “My spirit shall not abide in mortals forever, for they are flesh; their days shall be one hundred twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went in to the daughters of humans, who bore children to them. These were the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown.⁵²

Plural, immanent, concrete, bound to place, immersed in ecology and sustenance needs, fallible, emotional, violent, interactive, and sexual: the Old Testament divine is a very human divine.

These characteristics all sound very much like the pagan, nature before nature deities of Greece, Mesopotamia, and the Popol Vuh, as well as the semidivinities of ancestor veneration in South Africa. But there is much that differs as well. The Old Testament God occasionally has his transcendent moments, like when he speaks the world into existence from the formless void. Even though some poly-divine passages remain, YHWH generally strongly opposes the thought that one might worship other gods. While not all-powerful and all-knowing, he is certainly extremely powerful and very knowing. Although there are hints of divine sex in the Old Testament, they don’t directly involve

YHWH.

Scholars sometimes call the Old Testament’s not-quite-full-on monotheism monolatry—the idea that you ought to worship one god but don’t necessarily discount the possibility of other gods out there that you or others might worship.⁵³ Jacob is the allotted share of YHWH, but other gods have other peoples to look after. Think of it as a kind of football coach vision of the divine: Each people has their own god to lead them, and for whom that god is responsible, as they are responsible to Him or Her. (Some monolatrous beliefs focus on a female divine.) Then we all have it out on the field of human struggle and combat, and we see whose god is better and stronger by who wins.

Yet monolatry does not exactly fit the Old Testament god, as least in most of the Bible.54 No doubt many peoples in biblical times had such views. The Old Testament also shows considerable awareness that other groups worship other gods. And there are definite hints of the divine coach vision of YHWH in the passage from the Song of Moses with the line about YHWH’s “allotted share,” and in a few other spots. But far more common is a distinctive theological innovation: The Old Testament contention that when Israel loses to another army it is not because YHWH wasn’t as strong as the god or gods of that other people. It is because YHWH is mad at the Israelites for not keeping his covenants and for worshiping other gods. Like the Golden Calf. Or perhaps the god Ba’al or the goddess Asherah, two other divinities the Old Testament often rails against. Therefore YHWH decides to punish the Israelites by having them lose in warfare, even to the point of causing the Babylonians to destroy Jerusalem and the Temple, God’s own home, leading to the exile of the Jews to Babylon, even though he later regrets instituting such a hard punishment on the Israelites. YHWH is so powerful, so much in control, he can as easily tip the scales so that the Israelites lose as he can ensure their victory. This is a thoroughly transcendent move, however unpleasant.

This is also a move that speaks to the overriding moral message of the Old Testament. It would be hard to characterize the Old Testament god as good—powerful and scary, jealous and angry, a deity to fear, but really not especially good—and the Old Testament doesn’t much try to make such a case, at least in the early books.⁵⁵ It’s not where its main concerns lie. Rather, its primary moral principle is loyalty, and, correspondingly, its main notion of evil is disloyalty. The Lord has established a covenant with the Israelites, and they had better stick to it. He is their god now, and they are his chosen people. Don’t try to get out of it. The costs will be huge.

Take the time when the wandering Israelites sojourn in Shittim, a city in Moab, the kingdom across the Dead Sea from the Promised Land. “The people” fall for some Moabite women and for the main Moabite god, the Ba’al of Pe’or—Pe’or being a mountain in Moab revered locally as Ba’al’s home.⁵⁶ The Lord is not happy, and the consequences are gruesome.

While Israel was staying at Shittim, the people began to have sexual relations with the women of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods. Thus Israel yoked itself to the Ba’al of Pe’or, and the Lord’s anger was kindled against Israel. The Lord said to Moses, “Take all the chiefs of the people, and impale them in the sun before the Lord, in order that the fierce anger of the Lord may turn away from Israel.” And Moses said to the judges of Israel, “Each of you shall kill any of your people who have yoked themselves to the Ba’al of Pe’or.”57

The Lord ordering the impalement of the chiefs of the Jews—and Moses following up with ordering the killing of anyone who worshipped Ba’al of Pe’or, not just the chiefs. I’m glad Eleanor already had had enough of the Old Testament before this story appears.

Note the framing of disloyalty in this story. The Old Testament here and many other places ties disloyalty to god with disloyalty to the group, and vice versa. The crime at Shittim was not just following the Ba’al of Pe’or, the Moabite god. It was also having sex with Moabite women, who in turn induce the Israelites to make sacrifices to the Ba’al of Pe’or. The god of the group dictates the group of the god. And if you forget, your own people will come against you. Foreign armies will come against you. Storms, drought, and pestilence will come against you.

Disloyalty is not the only basic evil that the Old Testament discusses. The Old Testament also takes up the evil of desire that so concerned the ancient Greek, Roman, and Chinese writers from about the fifth century BCE on, and which we will shortly hear much more about in this book. Our moralities suggest to us the dangers of two basic evils, disloyalty and desire, the one focused on the integrity of the group and the other on the integrity of the individual. But it is the former that most concerns the Old Testament—another important clue to the context of life in ancient Israel.

I find it telling that the order of the Ten Commandments resonates with the priority the Old Testament lays on the problem of disloyalty. The first five of the Big Ten are concerned with various forms of disloyalty, while the second five weigh in on the many problems of desire.

Here’s a reminder of the first five, in order:

You shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol.

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God.

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy.

Honor your father and your mother.

The first four commandments all focus explicitly on loyalty to God, while the fifth focuses on loyalty to one’s parents and kin. The fifth also ties the reasoning back to loyalty to God if we look at the full commandment, which reads: “Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” Note here, too, the appeal to the Israelite’s self-interest in showing commitment to the group and its kin relations, as well as to God, for that commitment is the basis of your right to land.

Here’s a reminder of the second five:

You shall not murder.

You shall not commit adultery.

You shall not steal.

You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

You shall not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.

In these commandments, the focus is on bad things that untempered desire can lead to: murder, illegitimate sex, theft, lying, and jealousy. Given the opening five commandments, I find myself hearing an echo of the problem of disloyalty even in the second five: that these interpersonal issues might sow discord in the group. The god of the Old Testament repeatedly frames the problem of their violation as a challenge of loyalty to him and his covenant with Israel, as when the Israelite men have sex with the Moabite women, not as a problem of desire in and of itself.

Eleanor was puzzled by this ordering. After I read through the Ten Commandments section of Exodus—we never got to the section in Deuteronomy where the Ten Commandments get a repeat—Eleanor asked, “So why isn’t ‘thou shalt not murder’ the first commandment? Murder seems like the biggest sin to me. A lot bigger than making idols or working on the sabbath.”

Apparently not to the god of the Old Testament.

So what is going on here? Why would disloyalty be the bigger evil? And why is there such a pagan, nature before nature vibe in the Old Testament?

I often found myself telling Eleanor that “It’s a very old book. Times have changed a lot.” But that is true only as far as it goes. These notes of the Old Testament divine show a difference in instrumentation, key, and variations, but not in the basic melody of human affairs: our preoccupation with politics.

Politics is one of the central concerns of the Old Testament. From when Cain kills Abel in the fourth chapter of Genesis, hardly a page goes by without mention of a righteous conflict between different human interests. One could argue that the politics start even earlier, in the garden of Eden, with the conflict of Adam with Eve—not to mention the conflict of Adam and Eve with the serpent, and the conflict of God with Adam and Eve. These politics are not easy to sort out, though. Literally thousands of scholars in our universities and seminaries have worked on the problem, looking for hints in the Bible and other ancient Israelite texts, in the texts of nearby peoples like the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, and in the archaeological record. Based on this work, we can piece together something like the following general history, and its associated political challenges.58

The Old Testament describes a religious tradition in transition, associated with a people in transition. A nature before nature world was beginning to split nature from supernature, and to split them both from the human community. The ancient triangle was beginning to form, although it had not yet fully taken shape. Conceptual gulfs were forming and widening as the Israelites struggled to shift from a kin-based, tribal, and agrarian society to a small state and empire with significant growth of cities. Nature still did not exist as a concept. (As I noted earlier in passing, the word nature does not ever appear in the Old Testament in the original Greek and Hebrew.) And a fully transcendent concept of the divine, abstracted and removed from the human, had not yet developed. But the ancient triangle began to divide as soon as it began to form. It began to divide because of attempts to unify—as I’ll describe.

Scholars argue over how much we can trust the Bible’s political history, sometimes calling each other biblical “maximalists” or biblical “minimalists,” not altogether kindly. The biblical maximalists say we can trust the Bible a lot, and the biblical minimalists say we can’t trust it very much at all, and ask us to look more toward the archaeological evidence.⁵⁹ Yet there seems to be consensus on a few basic points about the transition that was under way, and the political debates that ensued.

Here’s one: For a thousand years or more, this little corner of the world found itself pinched between one empire after another, rising and falling on one side or the other. The Egyptians to the southwest. The Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians to the East. The Hittites, Greeks, and finally the Romans to the north. Meanwhile, the Israelites harbored imperial ambitions of their own, and at various times achieved some small success—generally to be followed shortly afterward by disaster at the hands and swords of their bigger neighbors, or due to the casualties of their own infighting. And some of both.

Another point of consensus is that the early Israelites, both in the Old Testament and in the archaeological record, are a more agrarian and pastoral people, little urbanized at first, but gradually developing villages, small towns, and eventually small cities.60 Researchers dispute when and how that settling down happened, and the reliability of the Bible’s account of it. For example, archaeology shows that Jericho was unoccupied around 1200 BCE, the time the Old Testament says Joshua and the Israelites attacked it.⁶¹ Some scholars have even proposed that rather than the Israelites taking over and absorbing the Canaanites, the historical flow went more the other way.⁶² Instead of being conquered, the Canaanites may have actually developed into the Israelites, more or less in place. Careful study of Canaanite religion—which we know a fair bit about, principally from cuneiform tablets discovered in the ruins the Canaanite city of Ugarit, as well as other sources—actually shows few significant differences from early Israelite religion.⁶³ But scholars agree that the early Israelites were mainly farmers and pastoralists, not urbanites.

One possible exception to the dominance of rural livelihoods in the lives of ancient Israelites was their sojourn in Egypt, and their later Exodus—if and how that even happened. If it did happen, some of the distinctive features of ancient Israelite worship, especially its largely monotheistic take on a mainly nature before nature orientation, possibly developed at this time. Here we enter very contested scholarly terrain. First, let’s consider what we know pretty much for sure.

There is a striking archaeological coincidence with the Exodus story. The timing the Bible gives for the Israelites’ exit from Egypt corresponds closely with one of the most dire moments in human history: the Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE. Urbanism had already begun in the bronze age, as I discussed in chapter 2 concerning the rise of Mesopotamian civilizations like that of the Sumerians, and their passion for the story of Gilgamesh, king of great-walled Uruk. Plus the Egyptians, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Hittites, Mittani, Aramaeans, Amorites, and more, including the Canaanites, were all having an early try at building cities and states. But most of these urbanizing civilizations wink out within a few short decades of 1200 BCE, and apparently with special force in the year 1177 BCE, the culmination of a series of coastal attacks by the mysterious “sea peoples,” who seem to have been displaced from further west.⁶⁴ Abandoned and burnt cities show up about this time in the archaeological record all around the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. We even have preserved in cuneiform a desperate letter from the king of Ugarit to the king of Cyprus asking for help fending off the sea peoples. “My father,” he writes, using a term of honor, one king to another,

now the ships of the enemy have come. They have been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land. Doesn’t my father know that all of my infantry and chariotry are stationed in Khatte, and that all of my ships are stationed in the land of Lukka? They have not arrived back yet.65

The king of Cyprus didn’t send help in time, apparently, for this letter was discovered in the burnt ruins of Ugarit. Because of the burning, this letter and thousands of the city’s other cuneiform tablets were unintentionally fired from clay into something hard enough to last until archaeologists could dig them up, adding greatly to our understanding of Canaanite culture and society. Either what we have is a copy of the letter or, quite possibly, the city was attacked before the king of Ugarit could even send it.

Who were the “sea peoples,” and are they really to blame for the Bronze Age collapse? Now the uncertainty dials up many notches. Many archaeologists now suspect that the collapse may have had as much to do with climate change, famine, and economic collapse as direct attacks by displaced peoples—a “perfect storm of calamities,” as the historian Eric Cline puts it.⁶⁶ But it does seem that there was a significant opening for new groups like the Israelites to arise. The Philistines also suddenly appear in the archaeological record at this time, establishing a string of small cities along the coast of what is now Israel. In fact, many archaeologists suspect that the Philistines may have been one of the “sea peoples.”⁶⁷

Most archaeologists think the Israelites weren’t, however. Perhaps aside from an absence of pig bones, the Israelites’ archaeological traces seem little different from those of the earlier Canaanites, who were also a Semitic group.⁶⁸ The earliest inscription to mention a people called “Israel”—the Merneptah Stele, which records a series of victories of the Pharaoh Merneptah over the sea peoples and others around 1208—appears to regard the Israelites as different from the sea peoples, and perhaps as related to the Canaanites.⁶⁹ Plus we do know a significant population of Semitic peoples lived in Egypt before the Bronze Age collapse and before the rough timing of the Exodus story. There isn’t a shred of bona fide evidence of the Exodus itself.⁷⁰ Many have searched for old encampments in the Sinai, or for evidence of a large battle in the right place and time, and have found nothing that professional archaeologists can accept. But Semites were definitely in Egypt, as well as in many other areas of the Mideast. Semites were not a new group in the region, like the Philistines. The archaeological record is definitive on that score.

In fact, Semites ruled much of Egypt for a while. This was during what archaeologists call the “Intermediate Period” that followed the “Middle Kingdom,” stretching from roughly 1800 BCE until Pharaoh Ahmose I restored the traditional royal lineage around 1539, ushering in the “New Kingdom.” Elites with Semitic names continued to have prominent positions in Egypt as late as Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, the pharaoh who imposed a controversial and short-lived new religion based on worship of one god, the sun god Aten, and changed his own name to Ahkenaten, meaning “beloved of Aten.” A man named Aper-el, whose name contained the name of the god El—much as do Old Testament names like Israel, Daniel, Samuel, Raphael, and my own name, Michael—served as Ahkenaten’s vizier for a while. But when Ahkenaten died in 1336 BCE, leaving his nine-year-old son Tutankhaten as pharaoh, Atenism rapidly collapsed. Elites led a successful countermovement—elites who likely were allied with the political forces that lost out during Atenism. These elites ran the show during Tutankhaten’s reign. They even changed the young monarch’s name to what is surely the best known of all pharaoh names: Tutankamun, changing the Aten to Amun, a deity in the older tradition of Egyptian religion.

The timing of the Exodus story seems to land right about then, or shortly afterward. Did a group of Semites leave Egypt during this period of political turmoil, seeking to rejoin their Canaanite kin, perhaps led by a Semitic former high official in Ahkenaten’s administration or a high priest of Atenism? Did the story of Moses and the tale that he spoke Hebrew poorly because of a speech impediment from eating a hot coal as an infant somehow loosely derive from having a Semitic leader who was from the Egyptian elite and a nonnative speaker of Hebrew?71 Were most Egyptian Semites oppressed following the coming of the New Kingdom and the restoration of the traditional royal lineage, including being made into slaves? Did many Semites embrace Atenism during its short tenure, perhaps in hopes of regaining royal favor? Did these Semites retain a few monotheistic ideas from Atenism after its fall? Did they drift around for a time, from community to community, generally on the outskirts, looking for the right political opportunity to win some land for themselves? Like the Bronze Age collapse?

It’s conceivable—or some now much-muddled version of all of this. But if so, it’s more likely that it was a small group that left, a few hundred at most, too small to leave an archaeological trace of their departure, not the 603,550 enumerated in Exodus and Numbers.72 And it is more likely that they were driven out, heretics and outcasts, rather than escaping. The story later became more glorious in generations of retelling.

But I’m being wildly speculative, joining the cacophony of many centuries of conjecture on these matters. Let’s go back to what we actually know.

First, as I discussed earlier, there’s a long history in this area—the coastal lands of the southeast corner of the Mediterranean—of efforts to create and maintain states and governments, while being squeezed between much bigger imperial players. Second, whatever the connection to the Bronze Age collapse, scholars agree that the peoples of the region were, from around 1100 BCE, coming together into ever bigger settlements. Archaeologists have done a staggering amount of work on the history of urbanization in biblical times, in part because of the region’s unusual cultural importance. Literally thousands of biblical sites have felt the archaeologists’ trowel, sieve, and horsehair brush. As a result, we can make pretty good assessments of population numbers.⁷³ Archaeologists currently estimate that Bronze Age Jerusalem was only about eleven or twelve acres and perhaps five to seven hundred people—a largish village. Following the Bronze Age, it began to grow, but not very fast. Between the tenth and the eighth centuries BCE, around the time the Bible says Kings Saul, David, and Solomon ruled and continuing on for another century or so, Jerusalem grew to about forty acres and roughly two thousand people. By the end of the sixth century BCE, Jerusalem had grown to a fairly substantial hundred sixty acres and six to eight thousand people, and an attractive prize for the imperial ambitions of others.⁷⁴ Nonetheless, the bulk of the population remained rural. Some 75 percent lived in settlements of three hundred people or fewer, or singly or in tiny hamlets in the countryside. Twenty percent lived in settlements of three hundred to a thousand people, and only 5 percent lived in settlements of a thousand or more.⁷⁵

Here’s the third point of scholarly consensus: The people the Bible calls the Israelites used to be two separate but closely aligned kingdoms, not just one state. To the north was the Kingdom of Israel with its capital at Samaria, and to the south was the Kingdom of Judah with its capital at Jerusalem.⁷⁶ (The word “Judaism” derives from the name Judah.) The Bible describes a unified monarchy of both under kings Saul, David, and Solomon, ruled from Jerusalem, and lasting through to Solomon’s death around 931 BCE. Biblical maximalists generally accept the existence and timing of the united monarchy as largely true. The minimalists can’t see this in the archaeological record so they don’t trust this description.77 It could well be a myth, they suggest, invented later to legitimate claiming both territories as one.⁷⁸ Minimalists contend that, in fact, the Bible in general should be largely read as an exercise in the political creation of a cultural tradition with a sense of a common past, rather than as a work of history as we understand that term today.⁷⁹ But everyone agrees that at one time there were two separate kingdoms. The Bible talks extensively about the two kingdoms, we can see it in the archaeological record, and there is independent textual confirmation in the records we have from Mesopotamia—although many minimalists think the Kingdom of Judah was far smaller, more agrarian, and less consequential than the Bible describes it.⁸⁰

The Kingdom of Israel had a harder time of things, however. If you are a king from Mesopotamia and you march your army northwest up the Euphrates River valley—where there is a continual water supply and a green thread of farmers’ fields to raid to keep your forces going—and then turn south when you get close to the Mediterranean coast, you could reach Israel without having to deal with much desert. Go a little further south, and you’ll march into Judah too. But you’ll hit Israel first. And as an Egyptian pharaoh coming up from the south, you’ll have to get your army around the Sinai desert. You can do it, but you won’t find any farms along the way to raid for provisions for your army. So you’ll have to get your supply lines worked out pretty carefully. As a result, the Kingdom of Judah enjoyed some geographic protection from the major powers of the time. Israel and its capital Samaria fell first.⁸¹ The Assyrian king Shalmaneser V laid siege to Samaria for three years, finally taking it in 722 BCE. Shalmaneser V died that year, and his successor, Sargon II, immediately followed up on his predecessor’s victory and consolidated the conquest, deporting the elites back to his own capital, as was commonly done.

A century later, in 605 BCE, the Assyrians themselves were vanquished by an alliance of the Babylonians and the Medians, who ran a huge empire of their own for a while, covering most of what is now Iran and Afghanistan. The Babylonians didn’t waste much time and seized the opportunity to claim the territory that the Assyrians had controlled, and to push the borders a bit further. The Judeans tried to hold the Babylonians off with a series of alliances with Egypt (albeit largely forced on them by the Egyptians). Then in 599 BCE the Babylonians invaded, led by King Nebuchadnezzar II. In 597 BCE, the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem but—probably hoping to gain a nice stream of taxes from a functioning economy—did not destroy it. As Shalmaneser V had earlier done with the elites of Israel, Nebuchadnezzar deported the elites of Judah to his capital, Babylon, in order to clear the stage for the puppet government he thought he had established.82 The puppets later tried to rebel, so Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem once again. It fell for the second time in 587 BCE. After this, the Babylonians took no chances and totally devastated the city and the Temple, such that no unambiguous trace of the temple Solomon is reputed to have built remains to this day.

Then in 539 BCE, just forty-eight years later, the Babylonians themselves fell when the Persians, led by Cyrus the Great, defeated them at the Battle of Opis. Cyrus allowed the Jewish elites to return, as long as they respected the Persian Empire (including paying taxes). A great many did return, and they promptly rebuilt the Temple, what has come to be called the Second Temple. Many Jews today believe the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem was part of the foundation of this Second Temple.

The Jews spent the next six hundred years trying to put their unified state of Israel and Judea back together—if it ever really existed, some minimalists would insist—amid the constantly changing tidal forces of one empire and warring party after another. Alexander the Great’s empire. The wars between Alexander’s generals when he died in 323 BCE. The battles between the Seleucid Empire to the East (named for one of Alexander’s generals, Seleucus) and the Ptolemaic Empire to the West (named for another of Alexander’s generals, Ptolemy), with Judea in between.⁸³ Meanwhile, an even mightier empire was growing. By the middle of the second century BCE, the Romans were putting a lot of pressure on the Seleucids, who then controlled Judea. The Jews seized this moment of Seleucid weakness, and between 167 and 160 BCE launched the Maccabean Revolt. Although the Seleucids eventually put down the revolt, the resulting politics nevertheless worked out such that, starting around 140 BCE, the Jews finally once again enjoyed a Jewish-controlled kingdom. It was led by the Hasmonean Dynasty of Jewish monarchs (about whom we’ll hear more in the next chapter).

The Roman Senate even officially recognized Jewish control in 139 BCE. But the Romans were biding their time, and took over Judea in 63 BCE during a moment of political instability. The Jews fought the Romans on and off for another two hundred years, without much success. The final blow was the Roman defeat in 135 CE of the revolt led by Simon Bar Kokhba and his short-lived independent Jewish state, leading the Romans to ban Jews from Jerusalem.

It’s dizzyingly complex stuff—even at the level of detail we’re sure about—like human politics generally are. But now let’s imagine the situation of the leadership of this querulous bunch of tribes and descendants of tribes, trying to create a bulwark against the constant wash of empire and ambition on all sides. Likely the leadership wanted not only to protect the Israelites but also to advance its own interests. (Leaders can be like that today, and I very much doubt it’s a new motive.) With either goal in mind, a theology of unity would be mightily attractive. The biblical historian Tamara Prosic describes this attractive theology as based on the unity of “three great unities, one people, one god, one temple.”84 Getting people to commit to one god for all—and to downplay the localized household and tribal poly-divinities that the Old Testament lambastes and that archaeology shows people at the time did indeed follow—would be a tradition worth the hard, hard work of establishing.⁸⁵ Theological concern for the evil of disloyalty has obvious political advantages in such circumstances.

Biblical scholars have long picked up on some striking textual evidence of this drive for unity. For example, the early books of the Old Testament frequently give two versions of the same story, what scholars call “doublets,” sometimes with substantial differences. (There are even a few triplets.) Many scholars argue that the two (and sometimes three) versions reflect an effort to patch together different traditions and their peoples.

Consider the account of creation at the beginning of Genesis. In chapter 1, a transcendent God speaks the world into existence from out of the void over the course of six days. “God said,” we read, “and it was so.” Day by day creation unfolds: light and darkness; water and sky; land and vegetation; the sun and moon; the animals of water and air; and then, finally, land animals, including humans. This famous account is immediately followed by a second creation story, starting at Genesis 2:4, in which a much more immanent and embodied God—a God who walks around in the Garden of Eden and interacts directly with humans, forming Adam out of dust and breathing into his nostrils—appears to create everything on a single day.⁸⁶ The passage is worth quoting in full:

In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground—then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.⁸⁷

“In the day” that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens: Is Genesis just taking a bit of literary license with itself? Maybe, but there’s more. Since the eighteenth century, Old Testament scholars have painstakingly tracked how writing style, narrative continuity, consistency of content, stage in the historical development of Hebrew, and even the names used to refer to God all change together, discrete passage to discrete passage.88 They have identified five main “voices” in the early books, what scholars call the Yahwist voice, the Elohist voice, the Priestly voice, the Deuteronomist voice, and the Redactors voice, often abbreviated as simply the J, E, P, D, and R voices. The Yahwist (as in YHWH) or J voice (“J” because the German transliteration of YHWH begins with a “J”) pretty much always calls the divine YHWH and clearly represents the concerns of Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Judah. The Elohist or E voice pretty much always calls the divine Elohim and represents the concerns of the Kingdom of Israel, which even contains a version of Elohim in its name: Yisra-el, meaning “ruled by El.” These are the oldest voices, perhaps dating from around 900 to 700 BCE, but based on far older materials.⁸⁹ The Priests, the reformers associated with Deuteronomy (which means “second law”), and the Redactors (meaning “editors”)—the P, D, and R voices—all come later.⁹⁰

The five voices present compelling evidence of a long-standing effort to bring the two kingdoms of Judah and Israel and their different traditions together, and to keep that solidarity going through the vicissitudes of invasions and deportations, with the constant thunder of divine jealousy as the connecting electricity. Take the opening, six-day account of creation again. Scholars identify it with the Priestly voice.⁹¹ As fits the interests of the priests in a centralized religion, God in this account is abstract and transcendent, and thus hard for adherents to encounter on their own, concretely in their own localities. The second account—the one-day version—is in the J voice.⁹² It gives a much more immanent and embodied vision of the divine, walking in the garden and talking directly to Adam and Eve, and seems to be a more popular version of creation that resonated with the experiences of the agrarian majority, less attracted to an abstract and transcendent rendering of the divine. The priests and other editors apparently felt they needed to include the second account to win the allegiance of the masses, although they gave it second billing.

Intriguingly, the name for the divine suddenly changes when the second creation story begins. At Genesis 2.4, God’s name shifts from Elohim, usually translated into English as “God,” to YHWH Elohim, usually translated into English as “the Lord God,” combining the name preferred by the people of the northern Kingdom of Israel with that of the southern Kingdom of Judah. The second story is otherwise in the J voice, however. What scholars think is that a later editor inserted Elohim immediately after every appearance of YHWH, creating the construction YHWH Elohim.93 There is no third creation story in the E voice—at least in the versions of the Bible that have come down to us. Nonetheless, this merging of YHWH and Elohim in the more popular version of the creation story gave everyone, north and south, an immanent god with whom they could identify from their own traditions.

For in order to bind people into a state, it is best to appeal to their values and beliefs, instead of relying only on force—if I may say, instead of relying on thugs like the sons of Levi, as Moses did. If nothing else, it’s just plain easier for the powers that be. The Old Testament has to tread a fine moral line to do so. At least initially, most people’s lives remained driven by the rhythms of agrarian subsistence. Most still lived by what they grew. Theirs was a nature before nature world for whom an abstract and distant god likely made little intuitive sense. Monotheism in itself does not answer the great questions of agrarian life—Why don’t we have any rain? Why are pests eating up our crops? And how can we ensure that neighbors and kin help each other through these troubles? An abstract god likely made both political and personal sense to the priests and other elites living in town. After all, they relied on an expansive sense of the divine to ensure their livelihoods—a territorial expansiveness that resonated with a transcendent god, unconfined to a particular locality—to ensure that people paid their taxes and brought in produce and animals for sacrifices, which the priests, scribes, and other elites later ate and used to build their wealth. The elites are the people who wrote down the biblical texts, after all. They would have wanted what they wrote to reflect their beliefs and needs. But there were very few urban folk like themselves, at least in the early centuries of biblical times. There had to be ways to appeal to the agrarian situation of the vast majority during ceremonies and readings from the book of their traditions.

So make it a unity of four great unities, not just three: one people, one god, one temple, one state. If there is a single god, and that god resides in his special temple in the capital city, built for him by the monarch, then the people must come to the state to worship. Even better from the point of view of the state, if there is only one god anywhere for anyone, then the state is morally free to consider its borders as wherever it thinks it can get away with putting them—a point I will revisit in chapters to come.

The result was a blended divine, a divine with agrarian powers that spoke to the daily concerns of Jews in the countryside but also a divine with a transcendent reach. The Old Testament gives a distinctive twist to these powers, however. In most nature before nature faiths, politics among the gods commonly explains why the rains haven’t come and why pests have invaded the crops. A monotheistic, universal god can’t have politics with other gods, though, because there aren’t any other gods. But he—and I do mean he—can have politics with humans.94 He can have conflict with his stiff-necked mortal subjects. And the Old Testament god does, frequently, especially over their commitment to him. The same divine explanation for why the Israelites win or lose in war the Old Testament also applies to the sustenance troubles of agrarian life: disloyalty. The three harvest festivals give people a clear way to show that loyalty: by sending the men on a pilgrimage to God’s Temple in Jerusalem, his only house, bearing offerings of grain, fruit, and animals.

This is theological brilliance.⁹⁵ It gives agrarian people an explanation for their woes, and a way to resolve them, while at the same time centralizing political control—and ensuring that the people of the city get fed.

Notably, then, the Old Testament god is not beyond or above politics. He makes little attempt to establish what in the previous chapter I called a “natural conscience”—a sense of the good that is beyond politics and the play of interests. Such a sense of the nonpolitical good would in time come to have many bases, including both the natural and the supernatural. But, as I also noted earlier, in the period of the Old Testament, nature does not yet exist as a concept. The divine does exist, but this is a divine that is still very human and still largely immanent within what we would come to call nature. The ancient triangle is stretching out and taking shape, but has yet to stabilize into distinct points. It is the notion of the goodness of nonpolitical absolutes that eventually would do that. But there is no nonpolitical absolute here. Rather, the Old Testament god is a supremely political god. He has an agenda. He has projects he is struggling to accomplish in a resisting world, for he is not all-powerful and all-knowing. But that struggle is only with humans, not also other gods. And that struggle is mainly over securing human loyalty to him and his statutes. His techniques include shaping the vicissitudes of both war and ecology.

It was definitely a struggle, though. The archaeological evidence for continued Israelite allegiance to a pagan, poly-divine theology makes plain the ideological foot-dragging. The Temple-based, urban religion of the one God with many names—YHWH, El, Elohim, YHWH Elohim, Adonoi, El Shadai, and more—was not immediately to everyone’s liking.⁹⁶ For example, archaeologists have dug up from the homes of ordinary Hebrews over three thousand terracotta statues of the goddess Asherah, the local version of a mother goddess widespread in ancient Middle Eastern cultures.97 The lack of success is plain in the Old Testament too.⁹⁸ Why else would the one God so continually complain that the Hebrews aren’t being loyal to him, except that they aren’t?

Consider this passage from Second Kings, describing some of the reforms instituted by King Josiah, whom the Bible records as monarch of Judah shortly before the Babylonian invasion:

The king commanded the high priest Hilkiah, the priests of the second order, and the guardians of the threshold, to bring out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels made for Ba’al, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven; he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron, and carried their ashes to Bethel. He deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places at the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem; those also who made offerings to Ba’al, to the sun, the moon, the constellations, and all the host of the heavens. He brought out the image of Asherah from the house of the Lord, outside Jerusalem, to the Wadi Kidron, burned it at the Wadi Kidron, beat it to dust and threw the dust of it upon the graves of the common people.⁹⁹

The strong implication here is that earlier religious leaders—the “kings of Judah”—brought pagan practices right into the Temple itself, likely in an effort to secure the allegiance of the great bulk of Hebrews. The god Ba’al was being worshipped there. The goddess Asherah was being worshipped there. The “sun, the moon, the constellations, and all the host of the heavens” were being worshipped there. (Indeed, a minimalist might suggest that maybe it had even been that way since the Temple was constructed—that the Temple was originally built as a center of poly-divine worship—even though the passage implies that previous kings of Judah had corrupted an originally monotheistic religion.)¹⁰⁰ And throughout much of the Old Testament, we hear other complaints about people’s immanent worship of idols and the local sacred spots this passage calls the “high places.”

But maybe the tactic of centralizing the pagan poly-divine wasn’t working very well. Maybe it allowed for too much fragmentation, too much local control. Or maybe poly-divinity really did seem morally wrong to Josiah, a member of the urban elite, in comparison to ideas derived from Atenism, more monotheistic visions of YHWH and Elohim, and other sources.101 So he ground up the image of Asherah, and threw “the dust of it upon the graves of the common people,” making plain the association between pagan belief and agrarian non-elites.

This passage also highlights another transformation that the monotheistic centralizers of the Old Testament sought, a point I alluded to earlier: masculinizing the divine. If you are going to have one god, you are faced with three choices on the question of the god’s gender. That one god could be male, female, or neither. The priests of the Temple went with the first option. There can be no doubt but that ancient Israelite society was highly patriarchal. Plus the Jewish state was assembled and maintained through warfare, like all states at the time, and I suspect the men trying to establish a new monotheistic centralized religion felt that a masculine god resonated with the aggressive tone they found helpful for sanctioning militarism and male dominance.¹⁰²

Couldn’t such an aggressive masculine god have a wife? Or couldn’t a female god have a warlike husband? Or, given the sexual variety in pagan traditions, couldn’t either a female or a male god have a same-sex or sexually diverse partner as long as one of the partners was combative and bellicose? Couldn’t there be a duotheism, based around a divine couple? Apparently, yes. Duotheism seems to have been more than a theological possibility. There is good archaeological evidence, and some strong hints in the Bible itself, that Asherah was God’s divine consort for a time during the development of Old Testament religion.¹⁰³ But it didn’t last. If there is to be single god, and moreover a single god who is male and powerful—a patriarchal god for a patriarchal time—evidently he had best be maritally single too, with no partner who might have her, his, or their own ideas and powers. Thus divine sexuality went by the wayside too, apart from a few curious stories, as monotheism masculinized.

The result of all this? A pagan monotheism—a monotheism that continues to speak, in the main, to the ecological and local concerns of an agrarian majority, while also struggling to bind them into a unified state, capable of collecting taxes and supporting a small urban elite, and marshaling an army in times of need and imperial ambition.

There was some ideological trouble, though, with such a vision of pagan monotheism. Brilliant it may have been, but not brilliant enough. For a great transition in social life was still under way. This jealous and violent concept of god really doesn’t make for good stories for middle-class city children going to bed, or for other folks in need of comfort. It doesn’t now, and it didn’t then. The moral questions that people increasingly faced—questions about a different sense of evil, as states and cities expanded and as different concerns about life arose—led them to seek a more comforting and stable divine. Something else was needed, a different form of conscience, if the one god everywhere was to actually have an appeal as wide as his realm.

In the first century CE, a figure arose on the Israelite landscape who seemed to many to provide exactly that needed something else.