I am the first and I am the last;
And there is no god but Me.
—Isaiah 44:6
This quotation is taken from Second Isaiah, a prophet whose sayings occupy chapters 40–55 of the book of Isaiah. The author, whose real name is unknown, lived after Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. With the Temple in ruins and much of the nation living in exile, it would have been natural for the people to feel despondent and ask, “Has God forgotten us?” In the face of such despair, Second Isaiah preaches a message of hope and consolation. God has not forgotten Israel. On the contrary, God loves Israel and, in time, will redeem it. Thus the first verse attributed to Second Isaiah reads:
Comfort, oh comfort My people,
Says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
And declare to her
That her term of service is over,
That her iniquity is expiated;
For she has received at the land of the LORD
Double for all her sins. (40:1–2)
As it happens, Babylonia fell to Cyrus of Persia in 539 BCE, after which Cyrus allowed the exiles to return to Jerusalem and practice their religion. Although not everyone chose to return, those who did began work on a Second Temple, which was completed around 515 BCE.
Second Isaiah is noteworthy for his explicit commitment to monotheism. Although monotheism is often regarded as Judaism’s greatest contribution to world culture, like most blockbuster ideas, it did not emerge all at once. Tradition has it that Abraham was the first monotheist and distinguished himself by smashing his father’s idols.1 The truth, however, is that the Torah says nothing about this, and almost nothing about Abraham’s theology. Did he think that his God was the only one, or that his God was the most powerful and important one among a group of gods? All we know is that Abraham trusted in God and was willing to sacrifice his son at God’s command.
The same ambiguity affects the song the Israelites sing to celebrate safe passage through the Red Sea: “Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods?” (Exod. 15:11).2 At first reading, this verse seems to imply that the God who just rescued Israel from the Egyptian army is one among a number of deities, albeit the most important. While the NJPS translation substitutes “celestials” for “gods,” this does little to clear up the issue. Who or what are these celestials? Are they immortal? If so, why should we not consider them gods?
Even the Second Commandment leaves room for doubt. Exodus 20:3–5 proclaims: “You shall have no other gods besides me. You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.” As discussed in chapter 2, the commandment tells us that we should have no other gods before us, but not why. Is it because no other gods exist and therefore worship of them amounts to folly, or is it because the true God insists on having our undivided attention? By the same token, the text does not tell us why we cannot make images of God. Is it because it is impossible to capture God’s likeness in a piece of wood or stone, or because God does not want to be worshiped by having people bow down to statues? Or is it something else?
Later passages leave us just as puzzled. Exodus 24:10 says quite clearly that Moses, Aaron, and the elders of Israel saw God. Similar sentiments are expressed by First Isaiah (6:1) and Ezekiel (1:26). If a person can see God, especially God in the form of a human being, then one should be able to sculpt an image of God. This implies that the prohibition against doing so is more a matter of divine preference than of metaphysical necessity. On the other hand, Deuteronomy 4:12 says that the people saw no form at Sinai; there was only a voice. This is often taken to mean that God has no form that could be captured in a material medium. Which view is right?
It is not until Second Isaiah that we get the wherewithal to answer some of these questions. In fact, it could be said that he is the first person to see the full import of monotheism. Later thinkers refer back to him when they try to say what monotheism amounts to—in effect, what we are committing ourselves to when we say the Shema. We shall see, however, that the doctrine is both more complicated and more controversial than people normally think.
Properly understood, monotheism involves two claims: (1) God is the one and only deity who exists, and (2) God is incomparable to anything else. The first claim can be found in the quotation that opens this chapter, when the prophet says that there is no other god but the true one.3 It is not that the gods recognized by polytheistic religions are inferior to God but that they do not even exist. Accordingly, “See, they are all nothingness, / Their works are nullity, / Their statues are naught and nil” (Isa. 41:29). Note that whereas Hosea saw idolatry as a moral failing comparable to adultery (see chapter 2), for Second Isaiah, idolatry is more the intellectual failing of trusting in a figment of the imagination. He says several times that the statues people have erected to their gods cannot say anything, do anything, or think anything. Thus, anyone who prays to them or bows down to them is basically a fool who “never says to himself, / ‘The thing in my hand is a fraud!’” (44:20).
We can see the need for the second claim by recognizing that worship of a God who resembles a human being and whose likeness can be captured in material form—a god such as Zeus or Thor—would not count as monotheistic as we now understand the term. Cohen expresses this point by saying that the issue at stake in monotheism is not so much “oneness” (einheit) as “uniqueness” (einzigheit).4 In essence, there is more to monotheism than simple arithmetic. In addition to recognizing only one God, it holds that God is special, in a class to which nothing else belongs.
To understand what is behind Second Isaiah’s commitment to uniqueness, recall the wording of the Second Commandment: “You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth” (Exod. 20:4). In other words, there is no such thing as a good versus a bad likeness, because they are all doomed from the start.
Second Isaiah expresses this point when he asks, “To whom, then, can you liken God, / What form compare to Him?” (40:18). As he tells us in the same chapter (40:15–17), “The nations are but a drop in a bucket, / Reckoned as dust on a balance; . . . / All nations are as naught in His sight; / He accounts them as less than nothing.” This could be understood to extend to the mightiest rulers, warriors, castles, tidal waves, thunderbolts, sea monsters, or heavenly bodies: All are as nothing before God as well. Although mighty in their own way, they are part of the created order, and therefore incomparable to the creator.
The biblical scholar Marc Brettler objects that Second Isaiah has gone too far in his criticism of idolatry. After all, people who thought their gods could be represented in material form were not so stupid as to believe that a statue is the god, only that the statue stands for the god.5 For example, Zeus was supposed to reside on Mount Olympus, but statues and drawings of him could be found throughout the Greek world. By the same token, the ruler of a country may be represented in pictures installed in public buildings, but no one supposes that the picture is the ruler. Nonetheless, it would be natural to suppose that people who show disrespect to the picture also disrespect the ruler, while people who honor the picture honor the ruler. As applied to a god such as Zeus, even if he did not occupy a statue erected in his temple, it could be said that he would take a good deal of interest in how people responded to it.
In defense of Second Isaiah, I submit that a statue can stand for a god only if there is a discernable connection between the two. In most cases, that connection is a physical resemblance. Thus, Zeus, god of the sky and thunder, was often depicted with a muscular torso and a strong, serious facial expression; Aphrodite, the goddess of love, with a gorgeous figure; Marduk, the patron god of Babylonia, as a fearsome snake dragon; and the mother goddess Asherah with protruding breasts. All these representations were intended to convey salient features of the deity and inspire an appropriate response.
Against this, Second Isaiah is telling us that muscles, breasts, body type, or facial expressions have nothing to do with divinity. That is why there is no such thing as a good versus a bad likeness—all are distortions. Ditto for lions, birds, reptiles, or other animals. If he is right, then the statues erected for gods and goddesses are objectionable no matter how much attention they command.
In time, the insights provided by Second Isaiah would play a decisive role in the thought of Maimonides. Like the prophet, Maimonides regarded idolatry as an intellectual error: worshiping a figment of the imagination rather than a genuine reality. At one point, he went so far as to say that the imagination is identical to the evil impulse (yetzer ha-ra) in human beings because of its power to draw people away from reality and lead them to the world of make-believe.6 He went on to say that there is only one way to counter the allure of a make-believe world: to develop the human intellect to its fullest extent. In addition to study of the Torah, he recommended the study of secular subjects such as logic, mathematics, biology, and astronomy. In his view, only a lifetime of learning would prepare one to see how dangerous the imagination can be.
Like Second Isaiah, Maimonides stressed that any comparison between God and humans is faulty. Biblical passages that describe God as having arms or feet, sitting on a throne, descending on Mount Sinai, or displaying bursts of anger are not to be read as literal descriptions but rather as metaphors designed to acquaint readers with some aspect of divinity. For example, if a biblical passage portrays God as sitting on a throne in heaven, it seeks to communicate that God is sovereign of the universe. If it says that God saw what was happening on earth, it seeks to communicate that God knows everything that happens, not that God has sense organs. With respect to knowledge, Maimonides insisted that God’s knowledge is incomparable to ours—not only greater than ours, but of an entirely different order. If humans gain knowledge by observing things external to ourselves, as the creator of heaven and earth, God has knowledge by looking within the divine self.
With his usual tendency to carry insights to their logical conclusion, Maimonides went on to maintain that it is not true that God is wiser than we are, more powerful than we are, better than we are, or will last longer than we will.7 Why not? Because to say that God is wiser than we are implies that there exists a common measure of comparison—as if God has a higher IQ score than we do. Such a comparison—indeed any comparison—conflicts with Second Isaiah’s insight by violating the principle of divine uniqueness. Casting an image of God in stone violates this principle at a rudimentary level. Maimonides’ point is that we also violate it if all we do is form an image of God in our minds. Like a figure carved in stone, a mental image is a distortion.
If we accept Maimonides’ interpretation, then we have a difficult task ahead of us if we are going to be true monotheists. In particular, we have to accustom ourselves to think in conceptual rather than pictorial terms. That is why he stressed the need to study logic, mathematics, biology, and astronomy. As with Second Isaiah, one could object that Maimonides has gone too far. Putting aside relatively easy cases such as passages that describe God as having arms, feet, or sitting on a throne, certain passages (particularly those early on in the Bible) do imply that God occupies space and sometimes takes on human form. To understand what is at stake, we must proceed to the next level.
If, as Second Isaiah claims, God is the only deity and nothing else can be compared to God, then the prophet is asking us to look at the world on the basis of two completely separate categories: God and the created order. Nothing in the created order, whether on earth, in the sea below, or the heavens above, resembles God or can stand as a rival to God. If it weren’t for God, the created order would not even exist. If the mightiest of the mighty are as nothing before God, then the line between God and the created order is absolute.
This worldview contrasts sharply with that of mythology, where the line between the divine and the human is crossed all the time. Mighty kings or great warriors become gods, and gods descend to earth to have sexual relations with humans. Second Isaiah is telling us that the mythological way of looking at things is wrong. Nothing can pass from one category to another or straddle the fence between them. As clear as this distinction may be to us, several passages in the Bible seem to ignore it. Genesis 6, which tells of sons of gods having sexual relations with mortal women and producing offspring called Nephilim (often translated as “giants”), is a good example. Although this passage may belong to an old, mythological tradition, it is hardly the only one that could be cited. The Nephilim are mentioned at Numbers 13:33 and Ezekiel 32:27 as well. Furthermore, as the biblical scholar James Kugel has shown, our ancestors did not always view the spiritual as something that occupies a separate realm but rather as something capable of entering our realm.8 According to this view, nothing would prevent God from taking on human form and talking to people in the same way that people talk to one another.
The most prominent example of God taking on human form can be found at Genesis 18:1–14, when God suddenly appears to Abraham at the oak trees of Mamre. As Abraham looks up, he sees three strange men standing near him. He prepares a meal for them and learns that they know the name of his wife. In fact, one of the visitors predicts that Sarah, who is past childbearing age, will give birth to a child in the following year. Sarah laughs, but then something remarkable happens. Without any warning, God speaks and says that nothing is too difficult for God to do. This has led many commentators to speculate that one of the three visitors who came to Abraham was in fact God in human form.
A similar episode is reported at Genesis 21:15–19, when an angel speaks to Hagar in the desert. At first the angel speaks of God in the third person, saying that God has heard Ishmael’s voice, but then, without warning, the text shifts to the first person: “I will make a great nation of him.” This seems to imply that the angel has somehow morphed into God. Later, at Genesis 32:24–30, we learn that Jacob wrestles with an angel during the night. But when dawn breaks, he names the place where this occurred Peniel (the face of God), indicating that he has actually struggled with God.9 At Exodus 3:2, an angel appears to Moses out of the burning bush—but once again, with no warning, the text (3:6) shifts into the first person; God speaks to Moses directly, saying “I am the God of your father.” Finally, there is Judges 6:11–23, where an angel appears to Gideon while he is hiding from the Midianites. First the angel speaks of God in the third person; immediately thereafter the text shifts to the first person: “The Lord said to him, ‘I will be with you.’”
With these passages in mind, Kugel argues that God can crop up anywhere and speak to a person whenever God determines it is advisable to do so.10 In other passages, God, or a manifestation of God, seems to enter the earthly realm and occupy space. The most prominent of these is Exodus 40:34, which says that the glory (kavod) of God filled the Tabernacle so that Moses could not enter it. Admittedly, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what is meant by the glory of God in this context.11 Elsewhere in the Bible the expression refers to God or to something intimately connected to God—sometimes to a blinding light that emanates from God, and sometimes to the honor or respect due to God. Despite this ambiguity, it is likely that much of the original audience took the passage to mean that God had taken up physical location because God’s glory prevented Moses from occupying the same place.
The same ambiguity applies to the Rabbinic concept of God’s indwelling presence or Shekhinah. At Exodus 25:8 God says, “Let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.” The Rabbis took the biblical Hebrew word for “dwell” (shakhon) and converted it into the noun Shekhinah (which itself never appears in the Bible). Like the glory of God, the Shekhinah in Rabbinic literature is said to shine down on earth and occupy space.12 Sometimes the Shekhinah is said to take on human characteristics, such as feeling pain, shedding tears, or crossing back into the heavenly realm.13 Any time you turn a verb into a noun, you create the impression that the noun is a thing or separate entity in its own right. What does it mean to say that God is present to a person or group of people? Is it that God has crossed the line and entered the created order? Is it that an offshoot of God, what theologians call a “hypostasis,” has crossed the line?14 Or, once again, is there some other possibility?
As indicated above, monotheism did not emerge all at once. What distinguishes Second Isaiah is his insistence that the line separating God and everything else is inviolate. Separation does not mean that God takes no interest in what happens in the created order—quite the contrary—but that the creator remains unlike anything in the creation. Like most of the prophets, he uses anthropomorphic language to describe God. For example, at 41:10 and 41:13, he speaks of God’s hand; at 44:3 he says that God pours water on thirsty soil. As discussed in chapter 2, though, the Bible often uses metaphorical language to drive home a point. In no sense do these passages compromise his commitment to divine uniqueness and exclusivity.
Still, the monotheistic view of the world presents a challenge. As Heschel articulated: “Monotheism is at variance with powerful human instincts.”15 These instincts reduce to two: (1) the belief that the only things we can trust are those we can see or put our hands on, and (2) the belief that in times of crisis or misfortune, we can find a simple way to curry favor with God. Put the two together and you get the desire to identify a visible or tangible thing that does straddle the fence.
The list of proposed fence-straddlers is long and varied. The most obvious candidates are the heavenly bodies, which appear to occupy a midpoint between heaven and earth. For millennia, people all over the world believed that the position of the stars and planets had a decisive effect on human destiny. If you studied the zodiac carefully enough, it was thought, you could decipher what God intended for crop cycles, military engagements, political campaigns, stock market movements, love affairs—in fact, almost anything one could name.
Many Jews used the zodiac to predict when the Messiah would come. The ancient historian Josephus writes that misinterpretation of astrological signs was one of the causes inciting Israel to revolt against Rome.16 The talmudic tractate Shabbat 53b says that every person is born under the protection of a star. Later (156a) it says that the planets determine the character of the people born under them, so that a person born under the protection of Jupiter will be just while one born under the protection of Mars will spill blood. Gersonides (1288–1344), a prominent Jewish philosopher and scientist in his day, believed that heavenly bodies control the thoughts and actions of people.17 Numerous references to astrological phenomena appear in Shakespeare’s plays, showing that whether or not he believed in astrology himself, he must have been well versed in its theory and methods.18
Against all of this, Maimonides argued some eight hundred years ago that astrology has no scientific basis and is just another form of idolatry.19 Although he studied the movement of the stars and planets and believed in the existence of disembodied heavenly intelligences, he held that just like everything else in the created order, the stars and planets are not worthy of worship, and there is no reason to turn to them for guidance.
Another obvious candidate for fence-straddlers are angels. In the Torah, angels come down to earth, talk to people, and carry messages from God. For example, an angel tells Abraham not to lay a hand on Isaac at Genesis 22. Like their Christian counterparts, Jewish art and literature contain elaborate angelologies. Although the ancient Rabbis debate when the angels were created (Genesis Rabbah 1.3), the important point is that they were created at all and thus not eternal. Although it is customary to think of angels as perfect, sometimes in Rabbinic literature they are portrayed as jealous or short-sighted.20 With minor exceptions (e.g., a night prayer and the Shalom Aleichem hymn), no prayers are directed to them.21 In fact, a talmudic source (J. Berachot 9.13a.) has God say: “If trouble befall someone, let him not cry to Michael or Gabriel; let him cry to Me and I will answer him.” In the traditional Passover Haggadah God famously says: “I will pass through the land of Egypt: I Myself and not an angel. And I will smite every firstborn: I Myself and not a Seraph. And on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I Myself and not a messenger. I, the Eternal, I am the One, and none other.” Needless to say, “I and none other” echoes the words of Second Isaiah.
Just below the angels stands Moses, who, according to Exodus 33:11, speaks to God “face to face.” Earlier on (20:16), he is asked to intercede between the people and God because the people are too afraid to go near the mountain on which God has descended. Nonetheless, Moses is prohibited from entering the Promised Land. No prayers are addressed to him, and despite his major role in the Exodus, no traditional Haggadah mentions him. We are never told where he died, so that to this day, there is no possibility of erecting a temple or shrine to commemorate his death.
Less exalted than angels and heavenly bodies are magical names, magical numbers, rabbit’s feet, four-leaf clovers, silver bullets, crystal balls, and a host of other things thought to possess occult powers. We can well imagine God saying that, in times of need, we should not turn to these things either. The same applies to religious implements like Kiddush cups, kippot, tefillin, or mezuzot. Aside from their aesthetic or historical value, these objects serve an important function: They help us to perform rituals that direct our attention to God. To the degree that they do this, they deserve respect—not as good luck charms, but as implements of worship. For example, a mezuzah serves as a reminder that we have pledged to think about, obey, and teach God’s commandments. But, left to its own devices, it has no power to protect someone from sickness or misfortune. In the words of Second Isaiah, it is the work of human craftsmen. To endow it with special powers would be to treat it as an idol.
Last but not least are people in high places. In the ancient world, the pharaohs of Egypt and some of the emperors of Rome were worshiped as living gods. In our world, movie stars, athletes, political figures, and, in some cases, religious leaders, demand and often receive adulation from their followers. If adulation leads to the belief that these people are demi-gods that straddle the fence between the divine and the human, then idolatry has reemerged. In the words of the scholar and educator Rabbi Solomon Schechter: The establishment of an intermediary is really the setting up of another god and hence the cause of sin.22
Perhaps there is no better gloss on Second Isaiah’s claim that everything is as nothing before God than the twentieth-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s observation that what Judaism has done is to de-charm the world.23 This does not mean that one cannot take pleasure in a sunrise, gaze at the stars in wonder, or admire the size and majesty of a redwood tree. It means instead that these things are part of a natural order that owes its existence and its power to something else. Gone are the days when local deities inhabited rivers, forests, or mountain tops, when magical incantations could turn pieces of wood into objects of worship, when people searched the entrails of birds for clues about human destiny. It was the Hebrew prophets, and most importantly Second Isaiah, who taught the world that all of this is folly.
More than 2,500 years separate Levinas from Second Isaiah. But the difference in time should not deter us from seeing that they are allies in a war against illusion and superstition. Heschel is right to say that the enemy is formidable. Jewish folklore still ascribes magical powers to the Ark of the Covenant, amulets, curses, demons, and magical numbers. Perhaps the best rallying cry in this struggle are Second Isaiah’s words: “The thing in my hand is a fraud!” So, too, we might add: the thing before my eyes or dancing around in my imagination.
No doubt problems can arise when we try to apply sayings from past ages to our lives today. The Torah asks Israel to fight a bitter war against the gods of other nations. Thus Deuteronomy 7:5 says that when the Israelites enter the land God is giving them, they should break down the altars of the native population, smash their pillars, hew down their sacred poles, and burn their idols. Throughout the Rabbinic period and the Middle Ages, Jewish authorities debated whether Christianity counted as idolatry. Although nothing was known about Buddhism, Hinduism, or Taoism, we can well imagine people asking the same questions about them. In a pluralistic society like ours today, these views have to be modified. Similarly, although the Rabbis went to great lengths to insulate Jews from what they perceived as the idolatry of the Greco-Roman world, few people today would argue that modern Jews should ignore the art and literature of this period.
To this point, we can note that even in antiquity, the door to religious pluralism was not entirely shut. Rabbi Joshua is famous for saying that the righteous of every nation will have a share in the world to come; in other words, even non-Jews can attain salvation (Tosefta Sanhedrin 13:2). Granted, he probably understood “righteous” (tzaddikim) to refer to gentiles who abided by the seven Noahide Laws, one of which prohibits idolatrous worship. Still, nothing prevents us from taking “righteous” in a broader sense to include people who live a morally upright life.24 This parallels the opinion of the famous medieval Rabbi Menachem Meiri (1249–1306), who thought that “idolatry” referred to ancient cults that tolerated or encouraged lawless or immoral behavior, not to Christianity or Islam.25 Maimonides was steeped in Islamic thought, and readily acknowledged his debt to it. He also acknowledged his debt to Aristotle, a pagan. Cohen, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig all learned from Christianity. Finally, there is the view of Heschel, who wrote that God’s voice speaks in many languages.26 We can admit all of this, be tolerant of other religions, and still maintain that Judaism stands on the insights that Second Isaiah articulated.