I am God, and there is not another.
(Isaiah 45:22)
How do we get from the exodus to monotheism? The probability that we have raised is: the Levites left Egypt, they spent some period of time in the region of Midian, they came to Israel and became part of it, and they became its priests. And their deity Yahweh and the land’s deity El came to be seen as one God. In Chapter 2, I cited Professor Noegel, who wrote of the gradual fusion of the god El with Yahweh; and Professor Cross, who wrote of there being no conscious distinction between El and Yahweh in ancient Israel; and Professor Smith, who wrote that at an early point Israelite tradition identified El with Yahweh. And I added the significance of the doctrine that two Levite authors developed in the Bible’s story: that God revealed to Moses that El and Yahweh were one and the same. I said there in Chapter 2 that we would definitely return to this fusion of El and Yahweh because its implications are potentially tremendous.
Tremendous indeed. The implications of this consolidating of El and Yahweh are of historic significance:
Literary: it was the main clue that led to working out the documentary hypothesis. Even in this present period of scores of proposals and struggles over consensus, this remains the single most viable and accepted explanation for the composition of the Bible’s first books.
History: it joins the other evidence pointing to the exodus of a Levite group of Yahweh-worshippers who came to Israel and integrated with its population.
But perhaps most civilization-changing of all: it means an early birth of monotheism in Israel (and, at some point, in Judah). From wherever it came, this impulse toward one God was present in this very early stage of Israel’s history, before Israel and Judah even had their first kings. Both the biblical text and archaeology testify that monotheism took a long time to win, by which we mean: to catch on with the masses. That is why the scholarly debate over when Israel became monotheistic has gone on for so long and has been so difficult. We have been looking for at least two things: when the idea emerged, and when it caught on. The historical development of monotheism is hard to get at because we have so many texts from so many periods, so we argue over when someone first had the idea, when it became the view of the priests, or the prophets, or the kings, or the population. So scholars have rightly looked at a number of passages in the Bible, and many have concluded that Israel was not monotheistic until a very late stage in the biblical world. To name a few examples of what the scholars saw:
The Song of the Sea says, “Who is like you among the gods, Yahweh!”1
Sometimes in the Bible God speaks in the plural. (“Let us make a human in our image.”2)
The book of Job has an assembly of the gods meeting with Yahweh: “And the sons of the gods [Hebrew bĕnê ’ĕlōhîm] came to assemble upon God.”3
Even the Ten Commandments say, “You shall have no other gods before me,”4 which, many people have observed, seems to acknowledge that other gods do, in fact, exist.
Now, every one of these passages could be interpreted in some other way that still leaves the door open to a monotheistic possibility. But we can plainly see why people read these lines and a fair number of others like them and had reasonable doubts about whether the Bible was entirely monotheistic.
Exile in Babylon
A common view among Bible scholars for a long time has been that this idea—one God—was a late development in Judaism. They say that it was a product of exile: the Jews had no monotheism until after the Babylonians drove them out of their country in 587 BCE and deported thousands of them to Babylon. Until then, not only the masses, but the leaders, the priests, the writers, maybe even the prophets, all still had the gods. They were polytheists, or at most henotheists, meaning they followed one god but still believed that the other deities existed too. So, for example, a law in an early5 text known as the Covenant Code says:
One who sacrifices to gods shall be completely destroyed—except to Yahweh alone.
(Exodus 22:19)
It does not say that other gods do not exist. It just says that one should not sacrifice to them. So, the scholars said, as in the four passages I quoted above, this was not monotheism. Monotheism was not native, not homegrown. It was not a product of Israel nor of Judah. It was born in exile, in Babylonia. This is an understandable view: As long as the people were in their homeland, Yahweh was their chief god, their national god; but once they were out in the world they had to explain how Yahweh could be in power and watching over them there. As their psalmist asked in a famous psalm that begins “By the rivers of Babylon,”
How shall we sing a song of Yahweh on foreign soil?
(Psalm 137:4)
And they also had to answer the question of how the Babylonians had defeated them. Were the Babylonian gods more powerful than Yahweh?! So they promoted Yahweh in their theology to being the one and only God, the God of all the earth: of Judah, Babylon, everywhere. In the biblical scholarship of recent centuries, Babylon is the great equator of the Hebrew Bible. Everything is before Babylon or after Babylon. Pre-exilic or post-exilic. Everything, including monotheism. Yes, this is understandable, a reasonable speculation. After all, many things really did change then. The monarchy was over. The Temple was destroyed. But our contemplation of the fusion of Yahweh and El in the wake of the exodus already suggests that this common view of when monotheism started must at least be modified. So does our observation of the distribution of the element “Yahweh” or “Yahu” in people’s names in pre-exilic inscriptions from Israel and Judah that we saw in Chapter 3. The names overwhelmingly specify Yahweh and sometimes El as their God, but rarely any other deity’s name. Monotheism was early, and it was present in Israel and Judah for centuries before the Babylonians showed up, not born in exile on foreign soil. We still have all those passages that refer to the gods. But at the same time an array of texts from the Bible are blatantly monotheistic long before the Babylonian exile. We have to explain this.
Second Isaiah
If you ask my colleagues among Bible scholars when and where monotheism started, most (not all) will say Second Isaiah. That will be confusing to some readers because there is no such book as Second Isaiah in the Bible. The book of Isaiah says in its first verse that it contains the vision of Isaiah son of Amoz, a prophet in Jerusalem in the eighth century BCE. People observed long ago that these prophecies appear in the first thirty-four chapters of the book of Isaiah but that then the book suddenly changes. Chapters 35 to 39 are no longer the words attributed to Isaiah. They are instead a history about events in Isaiah’s lifetime. And then, after this history, the rest of the book, chapters 40 to 66, returns to containing prophecies, except now they appear to be the words of a different prophet. This “second Isaiah” is writing two centuries later, and he is speaking to Jews in exile in Babylon, not in Jerusalem. Instead of the eighth century, it is the sixth. Instead of Judah, it is Babylonia. It appears that two prophetic works are combined into one book. So we call them First Isaiah and Second Isaiah. We also call the latter work Deutero-Isaiah (which is Greek for Second Isaiah).
That is the short version. Scholars have proposed multiple theories about why someone combined these two into one book. And some scholars divide the second Isaiah into two works, making both a Second Isaiah and a Third Isaiah. Don’t get scholars started.6
The existence of this Second Isaiah and its location in the Babylonian exile are very widely accepted conclusions in biblical scholarship. I too find the case for this persuasive. But what does it have to do with monotheism?
In Second Isaiah, God says:
I am Yahweh, and there is not another.
Except for me there is no God.
(Isaiah 45:5)
And:
I am first, and I am last, and outside of me
(Hebrew mibbal‘āday) there is no God.
(Isaiah 44:6)
And:
Who has made this heard from antiquity?
Who has told it from then?
Is it not I, Yahweh?
And there is not another god outside of me
(Hebrew mibbal‘āday).
A righteous and saving god: there is none except me.
Look to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth,
For I am God, and there is not another.
(Isaiah 45:21–22)7
And:
Before me no god was formed,
And after me there will not be.
I, I am Yahweh,
And outside of me (Hebrew mibbal‘āday) there is no savior.
(Isaiah 43:10–12)8
And:
I am God (Hebrew El), and there is not another,
God (Hebrew Elohim) and there is none like me.
(Isaiah 46:9)
My colleagues whom I have mentioned look at these verses, and they say, “Now that is monotheistic.” To them these are the first clear-cut, properly monotheistic statements in the Bible.9 I put on a conference about twenty years ago, to which I invited some twenty-five of the best scholars I knew in the United States, Europe, and Israel. I questioned this idea that monotheism starts with Second Isaiah and the Babylonian exile, and I soon found that I was swimming upstream. A lot of very smart people were absolutely persuaded: Look to Babylon. Look to Second Isaiah. I did not believe it then, and I am even more certain now. We have also looked to Egypt, to Midian, and to earliest Israel. We have seen that at least the monotheistic impulse ignited from that very early stage when the Levites arrived from Egypt, and Israel identified Yahweh and El as one and the same God. And this evolved from an impulse into a religious doctrine.
Early Poetry
When Cross and Freedman identified the earliest texts in the Bible, which were all in poetry, they included “A Royal Song of Thanksgiving.” This poem appears in two different places in the Bible: in 2 Samuel 22 and again in Psalm 18. Cross and Freedman held that it was written down not later than the ninth to eighth centuries BCE, and they added that a tenth-century date is not at all improbable.10 According to this text, which comes from early in Israel’s history:
Who is a god outside (mibbal‘ădê) of Yahweh,
And who is a rock outside (mibbal‘ădê) of our God.
(2 Samuel 22:32 = Psalm 18:32)
This wording is incredibly close to the wording above from Isaiah 44:6—“outside of me (Hebrew mibbal‘āday) there is no God”—the passage that so many people were saying is fully monotheistic. Yet those words in the Royal Song of Thanksgiving were written hundreds of years earlier—certainly long before the Babylonian exile.
Another early composition is the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32). Some scholars have dated it to the eleventh or tenth century BCE.11 Noel Freedman wrote that “the dating of this poem has proved a difficult problem to scholars, who have tested an assortment of dates from Moses to the exile and beyond.” But he went on to list considerable evidence that it was archaic, and he concluded that he would date it to the latter tenth century BCE at the earliest or in the ninth century.12 Others have shown that the song is quoted by the prophets Hosea and Jeremiah.13 That is, the Song of Moses had to be an earlier work, already written in an archaic Hebrew before the Babylonian exile. And here is what God says in this song:
I, I am He, and there are no gods with me.
(Deuteronomy 32:39)
How different is that from the passages in Second Isaiah? If we were given this text and the lines from Isaiah without being told from where they all came, we might even guess that they were all from the same work. If we are looking for monotheistic passages in the Bible, we do not need to wait for the Babylonians to show up.
Early Prose
These have all been examples from the early poetry of Israel, from the eleventh through the ninth centuries BCE. Prose texts that others and I trace to the seventh century BCE are just as explicit about there being no god other than Yahweh.14 Here is what the texts say:
Yahweh: He is God. There is no other outside of Him.
(Deuteronomy 4:35)
And:
And you shall know today and store it in your heart that Yahweh: He is God in the skies above and on the earth below. There is not another.
(Deuteronomy 4:39)
And perhaps the most famous line of all from this text:
Hear, O Israel. Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is one.
(Deuteronomy 6:4)
“Yahweh (or: the LORD) is one.” For many, this is the ultimate biblical declaration of the unity of God. For Judaism, it appears in the prayer book to be said every day. For Christianity, in the New Testament Jesus declares it to be the first among commandments (Mark 12:29). Yet we frequently hear denials that the verse means this. Some translate it rather as “Yahweh is our God. Yahweh alone.” By this rendering it does not necessarily mean that God is one but rather that Yahweh alone is Israel’s God—while not denying that other gods may exist. There is a problem with this rendering, however: There is no basis for it at all in the Hebrew Bible. The word is Hebrew ’eḥād, which every school child would know to mean “one.” It occurs in 546 verses in the Hebrew Bible, and there is not a single one in which it would clearly mean “alone.” Those who translate ’eḥād as “one” everywhere else it occurs in the Bible and then suddenly take it to mean “alone” in this single case appear to be resisting the verse’s patent meaning. That is its meaning especially in its context following the other two passages we have seen from this same author just two chapters earlier, which are visibly monotheistic.
We attribute passages in other biblical books to this same historian. We call this person the Deuteronomistic historian because his work starts with Deuteronomy—which we have just read—and he writes his history from the perspective of the laws and views in Deuteronomy. But we see his hand, editing and collecting sources, through the next six books as well: Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings.15 I attribute all of the texts that I am citing here either to this historian himself in the seventh century BCE or to his sources—which are even older. Thus in 2 Samuel the historian attributes a prayer to King David, and David says there:
For there is none like you,
and there is no God except for you.
(2 Samuel 7:22)
Is this really less monotheistic than those passages we read from Second Isaiah? Recall the passage in Isaiah 46:9:
there is none like me
and the passage in Isaiah 45:5:
Except for me there is no God.16
Likewise in 1 Kings, King Solomon blesses the people at his Temple dedication, saying:
So that all the peoples of the earth will know that Yahweh He is God. There is not another.
(1 Kings 8:60)
How different is that from what we read in Isaiah 45:21–22:
For I am God, and there is not another.
Farther on in the Deuteronomistic history comes the story of the prophet Elijah’s duel with prophets of the Baal on Mount Carmel (in present-day Haifa). Elijah introduces the duel with these words to the people:
If Yahweh is the God, follow him; and if the Baal [is], follow him.
(1 Kings 18:21)
They prepare two sacrificial altars, one for Yahweh and one for the Baal. (The word Baal is preceded by the definite article: the Baal. It is not a god’s name. It is a standard term for a male pagan deity.) But they do not light fires. Rather, Elijah says, “The god who will respond with the fire, he is the God” (18:24). The prophets of the Baal get no response to their prayers. Elijah gets fire. The people fall on their faces and say, “Yahweh, He is the God! Yahweh, He is the God!” (18:38f.). The story does not leave room for two gods. The declared point of its duel is not whether Yahweh is greater than the Baal; it is which one is God. And this story must be even older than the last few passages we considered, because it is not traced to the Deuteronomistic historian himself. It is part of an older work that the historian used as one of several sources for his history.17
Prophets
How many more examples of monotheistic texts prior to Second Isaiah do we need? We can also turn to prophets who precede Second Isaiah. Hosea precedes Second Isaiah by a couple of centuries. In the book of Hosea, God is quoted as saying:
I am Yahweh your God from the land of Egypt,
and you shall know no god except me,
there is no savior but me.
(Hosea 13:4)
Again, this is reminiscent of words that we read above in Second Isaiah:
A righteous and saving god: there is none except me.
(Isaiah 45:21)
Jeremiah as well, preceding Second Isaiah, chides his people over and over for still worshipping other gods. At minimum Jeremiah is assuming an uncompromising henotheism, not allowing the worship of any other gods even if they exist. And at maximum, he is assuming monotheism. Propp writes, comparing Jeremiah to Second Isaiah:
But even Second Isaiah does not compare monotheism and polytheism as systems. Jeremiah, on the other hand, mocks the Judeans for the multitude of their gods (Jer 2:28; 11:13) and so has a better claim as Israel’s first self-conscious monotheist.18
We might say that Hosea’s and Jeremiah’s criticism of the people shows that at least some of those people (a minority? a majority? all? the leaders?) were not in fact practicing monotheism. That is true. But it also means that Jeremiah himself and Hosea himself were monotheistic. And it means that monotheism was out there enough that these prophets could imagine criticizing the people for doing anything else.
Some scholars attribute some of these passages of history and narrative and prophecy to later periods, after the Babylonian exile. But these texts cannot all be that late. They cannot all be archaizing that successfully. And we shall see even more of such texts below.
Monotheism had arrived. It had been preached. It was the way the story was told.19 The battle was on. The fight over monotheism was in play. Its biggest victory may have come in the wake of the Babylonian exile, but that is just geography and politics. The idea and the texts and persons who championed it: all of these were in place before the Babylonians arrived.
The Ten Commandments
One more item to clear up: at the beginning of this chapter, we acknowledged that even the Ten Commandments say: “You shall have no other gods before me,”20 and that some say that this commandment is not monotheistic. They say that its words in fact prove the opposite: it recognizes that other gods exist, but it just forbids Israel from worshipping them. That is called henotheism or monolatry, not monotheism. We must admit it: the commandment does indeed say “other gods.” But we must also be cautious of what we derive from that. For years I have been telling my students, as an exercise, to think of five ways to command people to be monotheistic without mentioning those gods in whom they are not supposed to believe. Try it. It is possible but really hard. We should simply recognize a fact of linguistics that it is difficult to formulate a command against doing something without mentioning the something that is not supposed to be done. The issue is more likely to be linguistic than theological. The command against having “other gods” is just an example of this linguistic phenomenon, probably the most famous example of it in all literature.
Another point: the text says “before me.” The Hebrew is ‘al pānāy, which, more carefully, means “in my presence.” Literally, it translates as “in my face.” The old, usual English translation “before me” in fact originally meant just this: “in my presence.” It became misunderstood when the phrase “before me” came to be taken also as meaning “ahead of me.” That meaning is not present in the original Hebrew for this word. So, since it means “in my presence,” then the question is: where exactly is not in God’s presence? The implied answer is: nowhere.
Now if an early text like the Ten Commandments did in fact imply henotheism, that would not be a crisis. The original meaning of “Who is like you among the gods” in the Song of the Sea might be the same. This would just reflect the stages that we have been tracing on the stairway to monotheism. It need not ruin anyone’s day. But still, we should recognize that the words of the Commandment may very well be genuinely monotheistic in the light of these linguistic considerations.
Centralization
Finding signs of monotheism before the exile to Babylon is not just a matter of the text’s words. It is also a matter of what is happening in the text. The words themselves, like “The LORD is one” and “He is God; there is no other outside of Him” appear to reflect and promote a monotheism in Deuteronomy. But we should look at the content of Deuteronomy as well. The book contains a code of laws. They appear in Deuteronomy 12 to 26. The Deuteronomic Law Code begins, in its very first chapter, with a commandment that all sacrifices must occur at one place, and only one place, out of all Israel’s tribes. This central place is called “the place where Yahweh tents His name.” (Older, less literal translations make it “The place where Yahweh causes His name to dwell.”) In the Deuteronomistic history, this place is always where the ark is, a place originally located in a tent or Tabernacle and later located in the Temple. All kinds of sacrifices and ceremonies are limited to this single location. One cannot offer a sacrifice in Beth-El or Beer Sheba or Bethlehem or Dan. The law code says:
the place that Yahweh, your God, will choose to tent His name there: there you shall bring everything that I command you, your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and your hand’s donation and every choice one of your vows that you’ll make to Yahweh.
(Deuteronomy 12:11)
It repeats this with a strong caution:
Watch yourself in case you would make your burnt offerings in any place that you’ll see. But, rather, in the place that Yahweh will choose in one of your tribes: there you shall make your burnt offerings, and there you shall do everything that I command you.
(Deuteronomy 12:13–14)
The book of Leviticus contains a code (or codes) of laws as well. It comes from a different group of priests from those who wrote the Deuteronomic Law Code, and the two codes have different histories and sometimes have different laws. But not on this point. They both require centralization of worship. The commandment in Leviticus phrases the rule differently. It focuses the commandment on the Tabernacle itself, not on the divine name that it houses. But the bottom line is the same—and even more emphatic:
Any man from the house of Israel who slaughters an ox or a sheep or a goat in the camp or who slaughters outside the camp and has not brought it to the entrance of the Tent of Meeting to bring forward an offering to Yahweh in front of Yahweh’s Tabernacle: blood will be counted to that man. He has spilled blood. And that man will be cut off from among his people.
(Leviticus 17:3–4)
The idiom “to spill blood” refers elsewhere in the Bible to murder.21 According to this law, if someone kills an animal anywhere and does not bring it as an offering at the Tabernacle, this act is as if that person had murdered a human being.
This commandment is taken so seriously that, since the last Temple was destroyed by the Romans and never rebuilt, leaving no more central place, Jews have not offered sacrifices for nearly two thousand years. Why was this commandment so prominent, its penalty so severe? Why could one not offer a sacrifice anywhere but one place on earth? We might be cynical and say that writing this commandment was a move by the central priests to bring all the wealth and authority to themselves. But I think that centralization of worship was about more than money. Today, when we see Christians go to thousands or perhaps millions of churches in the world, we do not imagine that they worship different gods in those different buildings: the Jesus of Paris versus the Jesus of London or Sydney. Likewise, when we see Jews go to thousands of synagogues we do not think that some are worshipping the Yahweh of Haifa and others are worshipping the Yahweh of New York or Toronto. But the reason why this is so obvious and that these examples are so preposterous is that monotheism has won. Monotheism triumphed in the Western world and much of the Eastern world long ago, solidly, decisively, over polytheism. But when the law codes of the Bible were being written, this was not the case. The battle was still on. Multiple temples at multiple locations could mean multiple respective gods. The Levitical priests of Israel and Judah were vigilant not to leave room for that possibility. One Temple. One central altar. One God. Do anything else, and “that man will be cut off from among his people.” Centralization to a single nucleus expressed monotheism as much as the words “I am God, and there is not another.”
And all of this preceded the Babylonian exile. Others and I have collected the evidence that the law codes of both Deuteronomy and Leviticus were pre-exilic. But even for those who disagree about those dates, there is also the report of the books of Kings and Chronicles. Those histories report that two kings of Judah in particular promulgated the centralization of worship. They were Hezekiah and Josiah.22 Hezekiah ruled at the end of the eighth century BCE. Josiah ruled at the end of the seventh. So if we are right about centralization being connected to the implementation of monotheism, this too was well before the Babylonians arrived in 587 BCE.
Postscript
I wrote in Chapter 2 about the strange state of the field of Hebrew Bible studies at present. It sometimes feels as if everyone has his or her own theory, and, worse, it seems that many scholars are not addressing one another’s evidence, evidence that challenges their own theories. This is not entirely their fault. It is partly the result of an explosion of information—and publication—on our subject. It is happening in other fields as well. There are simply so many books and articles coming out all the time that no one can read them all. I admit that I too have sometimes missed published works, some that challenged me and some that would have supported me. On the question that we are addressing here, though, the question of when various texts were written, this state of the field has been particularly vexing. People date more and more of the Bible later and later. For every text that I have quoted from the early centuries of ancient Israel, one can find scholars who date them late. There are some who date practically everything past the time of the Babylonian empire. Forty years of research on the Hebrew language (a biblical number) has gone against their late dates. We can distinguish between the Classical Biblical Hebrew of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, on the one hand, and the Late Biblical Hebrew of Judah after the exile, on the other. The dividing line is essentially pre-exile versus post-exile Hebrew. Just as the English of Shakespeare’s time is different from the English that I am writing right now, so Hebrew went through the natural development that all languages do over centuries. I have written about the challenge of getting the late-daters even to address all this evidence.23 If it is right, they are wrong. So one would think that they would have pounced all over it to challenge it. And one would think that they would have addressed it before they published their books and articles claiming that so many of the biblical texts were late—when those texts have been shown to be written in Classical Biblical Hebrew. It would be as if they claimed that a Valley girl wrote Hamlet. I have described sessions at international conferences in which they simply refused to discuss it. I have compared their dating of the Bible without taking Hebrew into account to someone writing about diabetes without mentioning sugar. I have listed a major sampling of unrefuted research on Biblical Hebrew here in earlier chapters.24
Besides being poorly defended—actually undefended—these works as a whole paint a surreal history. Israel and Judah existed as nations in a land from at least 1205 BCE until 587 BCE. These works picture those nations producing almost nothing significant during the 618 years of their existence in their land. They picture the Jews producing practically everything important—monotheism, history-writing, nearly all of their literature—only after they were thrown out of their land. I recognize that crises can give birth to innovations and creativity in human history. But this attribution of so many texts to the centuries after the crisis, and so little to the centuries before it, is extreme by any standard. As Professor Hendel wrote in reviewing some of these works: “It seems arbitrary to define ‘Israel’ as a Persian period phenomenon and to leave the tenth–sixth centuries as a blank, with no memories or literate thinkers to be found.”25 And, again, the evidence of the stage of the Hebrew language of the texts goes completely against it.
So, yes, there is a big debate over when Israel became monotheistic. Was it early or late in the biblical world? But what we have found about the exodus gave us a starting point. What we have said thus far is, first, that the impulse, the idea, was early. The merger of El and Yahweh was a first step, a very early first step, on that stairway. That merger is what the Levite priests taught all of Israel and Judah from some of the earliest known texts, and it never went away: one God. And it continued to surface in texts that we have seen from before, during, and after the Babylonian exile—from the eleventh century to the end of the biblical period.
So monotheism arrived. One won. How did that work? How did some priests and teachers and prophets and kings gradually persuade the people to embrace this belief? One God. When there had always been many gods. How must that have felt? We have seen signs that Israel, Judah, and the Levites kindled the flame of monotheism in the era following the exodus. That energy persisted through centuries. And whenever most of the community became monotheistic, whenever there was the first generation to which we could point and say now that is properly monotheistic, what did people think of their parents or grandparents who had worshipped the gods? What did they think happened to the gods—and the goddesses? What did they tell their children? How did their writers depict it in the Bible?
We do have the answer to this. What they did was: they said that the gods used to exist, but they died.
The Song of Moses
Near the end of the Torah comes a song. The text attributes it to Moses. It may not in fact be by Moses, but it is in fact very old. It says:
When the Highest gave nations legacies,
when He dispersed humankind,
He set the peoples’ borders
to the number of the children of Israel.
(Deuteronomy 32:8)
What in the world is that supposed to mean? When God created the nations with their respective borders, He set them according to the number of Israelites? That is a lot of nations! People already were puzzled by this passage two millennia ago. One proposal was that it refers to the story at the beginning of the book of Exodus. There the patriarch Jacob is said to have gone down to Egypt with seventy (male) persons in his family.26 Since Jacob’s other name in the Bible is Israel, the “children of Israel” in the Song of Moses was interpreted to refer to these seventy people. And, these interpreters said, there were seventy nations in antiquity.27 There are three things wrong with this. First, the phrase “children of Israel” occurs 593 times in the Hebrew Bible. Why pick out this one line in Exodus and decide that that is the meaning of the passage in Deuteronomy 32? Second, we do not know of any time in the history of the world when there were exactly seventy nations. The interpreters were just referring to a list of names of individuals, families, and nations in Genesis 10. Mixing and matching those names and counting all of them as nations, they arrived at seventy. But the list comes from another source (or sources) than either the song in Deuteronomy 32 or the text about the seventy people who went down to Egypt in Exodus.28 And third, the wording of that text in Exodus is uncertain anyway. One Hebrew manuscript says seventy persons, but other ancient manuscripts say seventy-five.29
So we did not know what the passage meant. And then this goat made the greatest archaeological discovery of the twentieth century: the Dead Sea Scrolls. Among these scrolls at Qumran we found portions of every book of the Hebrew Bible (except Esther). They are in bad condition. Only the book of Isaiah is complete. If you have ever seen photographs of them, you know that they are often just fragments, shreds. But before that goat, our oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible was the Leningrad Codex. It is now a little over a thousand years old (1008 or 1009 CE).30 The Dead Sea Scrolls had been sitting in those caves for two thousand years, so they gave us texts that are a thousand years older than the Leningrad Codex.
I have to stop a moment and take in the irony: With the end of the Soviet era, the Russians changed the name of the city of Leningrad back to its old name, Saint Petersburg. So now the most prominent thing that retains the communist name of the city is: the Bible. (The Lord moves in strange ways.)
So do we have our passage (Deuteronomy 32:8) in the Scrolls? We do. And instead of “the children of Israel” (Hebrew bĕnê yiśrā’ēl), it says, “the children of the gods” (Hebrew bĕnê ’ĕlōhîm).31 (This can also mean “the children of God” because Elohim, the Hebrew word for God, can have a singular or plural meaning, depending on the context.) This phrase, bĕnê ’ĕlōhîm, is a term for the gods in the Bible.32 So the passage in the Song of Moses would mean that when God created the nations, He set them according to the number of the gods. That is, He made Greece and gave it to Zeus, He made Babylon and gave it to Marduk, He made Assyria and gave it to Ashur, and so on. Each people had its god. But, the next verse of the Song of Moses says, “Yahweh’s portion is His people. Jacob is the share of His legacy.” So Yahweh, the Highest God, assigned countries to the various gods, but He kept Israel for Himself. This makes a good deal more sense than making one country for every person in Israel.33
Can we refine this any further? There is a third ancient witness to the original text of the Hebrew Bible. It is the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation. It is important because it is not a translation of the Hebrew that we have in the Leningrad Codex, and it is not a translation of the Hebrew that we have in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is a translation of a third Hebrew text that is now lost. So we have to read the Greek, figure out what Hebrew it is translating, and then compare that to the other two Hebrew texts. For this passage in the Song of Moses, the Septuagint says that when the Highest gave the nations their legacies, He set their borders according to the number of the angels of Elohim rather than the children of Elohim. There is no way that the Greek translator would have mistaken the word for “children” and written “angels.” We generally understand, therefore, that the translator was uncomfortable with a reference to gods in Moses’ song, and so he changed the word to “angels,” which may well be what he thought these children of Elohim might be. The Greek translation has the exact same thing in two other places, where the Hebrew text had children of Elohim but the translator made it angels of Elohim (Job 1:6; 2:1). But, whatever the translator’s motives were, he apparently had a Hebrew text that was like the Dead Sea Scrolls text. It had gods, not Israelites.
Now, that is two out of three texts, but this is not math, and it is not something that one settles by a democratic vote. We are trying to get at the original meaning of a text.34 The meaning of “gods” makes vastly more sense than the meaning of “Israelites.” What makes the former meaning even more likely, though, is that we have other passages in the Bible that confirm this, passages that refer to the existence of the gods.
When we dealt with the Exodus, we looked at the Song of Sea, which is one of the two earliest things in the Bible. We have witnessed that one of the famous lines of that song is:
Who is like you among the gods, Yahweh!
(Exodus 15:11)
That seems pretty clear. Most English translations correctly translate the Hebrew that way. A few have made it “Who is like you among the mighty?” or “Who is like you among the celestials?” or “Who is like you among the gods who are worshipped?” But all of these translators are just plain struggling not to translate the words that they see in front of them: “Who is like you among the gods!” Their discomfort, and their attempts to translate their way out of it, just highlights how significant this is.
The same thing happens with Psalm 29. The first verse says:
Give to Yahweh you children of the gods (Hebrew bĕnê ’ēlîm)
That is a literal translation. But look at the range of English translations rather than “children of the gods”:
King James Version: “ye mighty”
Jewish Publication Society: “sons of might”
New Jewish Publication Society: “divine beings”
New International Version: “heavenly beings”
Revised Standard Version: “heavenly beings”
but with a footnote saying, “Hebrew sons of gods”
New English Bible: “you gods”
Revised English Bible: “you angelic powers”
New American Standard: “sons of the mighty”
but with a footnote saying, “or sons of gods”
No two the same. Just as with the Song of the Sea, the translators are struggling with the plain meaning of their text. Their problem is not linguistic. They know Hebrew. Their problem is theological. They are struggling over what to do with a psalm in the Bible that addresses the gods and tells them to give something to Yahweh.
The same thing happens with the famous opening chapters of the book of Job:
And the children of God (or children of the gods) came to stand before Yahweh.
(Job 1:6; 2:1)35
Again, some translators have made it “the divine beings,” which is not necessarily wrong, but their meaning is uncertain.36 Most have left it as the sons of God. As I said above, the Greek translator in the Septuagint again changed it to “angels of God.” But there is honestly no way around what it says. The Hebrew is bĕnê ’ĕlōhîm, which is a standard term for the gods. The eminent Yale scholar Marvin Pope, in his commentary, which has been a particularly respected one on Job, just translated it as what it means: “the gods.”37 The book of Job clearly and unapologetically begins with an assembly of the gods presenting themselves before Yahweh. Yahweh is the highest, but the gods exist.
The sons of God (or sons of the gods) come up very near the Bible’s beginning in the book of Genesis as well. It is one of the strangest stories in the Bible. Here is the whole thing:
And it was when humankind began to multiply on the face of the ground and daughters were born to them: and the sons of God saw the daughters of humankind, that they were attractive, and they took women, from all they chose. And Yahweh said, “My spirit won’t stay in humankind forever, since they’re also flesh. And their days shall be a hundred twenty years.” The Nephilim were in the earth in those days and after that as well, when the sons of God came to the daughters of humankind, and they gave birth by them. They were the heroes who were of old, people of renown.
(Genesis 6:1–4)
Here gods have sex with human women and give birth to some sort of superior humans, the Nephilim. Much later, in the book of Numbers, Moses sends scouts into the land of Canaan, and the scouts come back with a report that terrifies everyone. They say:
We saw the Nephilim there, sons of giants from the Nephilim, and we were like grasshoppers in our eyes, and so were we in their eyes.
(Numbers 13:33)
The sex between deities and humans has apparently produced giants. God limits the divine element in humans by decreeing that humans are not to live more than a hundred twenty years. (And so the text notes later that Moses lives to be a hundred twenty. That is, he gets the maximum.38) Now all of this would be right at home in Greek or ancient Near Eastern myths, where there are stories about gods and goddesses having sex with humans and producing superhumans like Achilles and Gilgamesh. But it is not what we expect in the Bible. We know that there are plenty of passages in the Bible where the people of Israel are forbidden to worship other gods. And there are passages that deny that the gods exist. We have seen several of them. So what are we to do with these passages that say the opposite? How can the Bible have these other gods? And: where did they go?
Psalm 82—The Myth of the Death of the Gods
Here is the text of Psalm 82 with commentary. It is not some obscure little chapter of the Bible. As a song in the book of Psalms, it was probably sung at the Temple in Jerusalem in biblical times. And to this day it is read every Tuesday in the traditional Jewish prayers as the “Psalm of the Day.” It says:
1 God is standing in the divine assembly
He judges among the gods.
That is about as explicit as you can get. There are gods. They meet in a divine assembly, as in Job. And one God, the highest of them, has the authority to judge them. Here is what He says to them:
2 “How long will you judge falsely
and favor the wicked?
3 Judge the weak and the orphan.
Justify the humble and the poor.
4 Adjudicate the weak and the needy,
Save them from the hand of the wicked.”
The highest God criticizes them for failing to act correctly as gods. They should defend the weak, but they favor the wicked. He concludes:
5 They don’t know.
They don’t understand.
They walk in darkness.
All the foundations of the earth melt!
The gods pervert justice, and the very foundations of the earth are dissolving. And so He renders a terrible judgment on them:
6 I had said, “You are gods
and children of the Highest, all of you.”
7 But: like a human you will die,
and like one of the rulers you will fall.
The judgment is: death. The gods, His children, are to lose their immortality. They will die just like humans. The psalmist then concludes:
8 Arise, God. Judge the earth.
Because you give legacies among all the nations.
Notice the final verses, identifying God as “the Highest” (Hebrew Elyon) and saying that He is the one who “gives the legacies among all the nations.” These are the very words of the passage in the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32:8–9) where we started: “When the Highest gave nations legacies.” The American biblical scholar Peter Machinist, Hancock Professor of Hebrew at Harvard, wrote that “every interpreter of Psalm 82” has made some connection between Psalm 82 and that passage in the Song of Moses.39
Now what if we could walk up and ask ancient Jews singing this at the Temple in Jerusalem, or even ask the poet who composed the psalm, “Do you mean this literally? Do you think that there really used to be gods but they were condemned to death? Or do you mean this as a metaphor, that we used to believe in such things, but now we reject them?” It is hard to know what their answer would be. But, literally or figuratively, Psalm 82 contains their myth of the death of the gods.
3. WHY DOES GOD SPEAK IN THE PLURAL?
There is more. It is one of the classic mysteries of the Bible, and it turns out to relate directly to this idea that there used to be gods and goddesses who died. The mystery is: why, in the Bible’s monotheism, does God sometimes speak in the plural? For example, in the creation story in the Bible’s first chapter, God says:
Let us make a human, in our image, according to our likeness.
(Genesis 1:26)
And in the story of the garden of Eden two chapters later, after the humans have eaten fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and bad, Yahweh says:
Here, the human has become like one of us, to know good and bad.
(Genesis 3:22)
And in the story of the tower of Babylon (also called Babel; it is the same word in the Hebrew, bābel, the Hebrew for Babylon), Yahweh says:
Come on, let us go down and babble their language there . . .
(Genesis 11:7)
If the Bible is monotheistic, why picture the one God talking like this? People have proposed various answers over the years. Some have suggested that it might be that God is pictured as using the “Royal We” like kings and queens and popes. Thus a popular attribution to the Queen of England is the line, “We are not amused.” We scholars have our own special version of this. A scholar never says, “I don’t know.” A scholar says, “We don’t know”—graciously sharing the ignorance with our colleagues. Another suggestion is that God speaks in the plural because God is addressing the angels or some other heavenly creatures in the divine court.40 But the problem for all of these answers is that the three examples I gave here of God’s speaking in the plural are the only three examples in the Hebrew Bible!
Some say that God speaks in the plural one time in the book of Isaiah as well, but that is not clear at all. In that passage God says:
Whom shall I send?
And who will go for us?
(Isaiah 6:8)
“Whom shall I send?” Definitely singular, not plural. The reason people misunderstand the verse to be a plural is that God then says, “And who will go for us?” There is no way that the “us” refers to God Himself. He has clearly already said “I.” When He asks, “And who will go for us?” He is talking to heavenly creatures (only to creatures called seraphim, not to gods) who are present and who have already been referred to explicitly twice in this passage. It is as if I needed to send one of the students in my class to get something at the office and I said, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” No one would have thought that by “us” I meant for myself alone. And no one would have read the Isaiah passage and thought that God was referring to Himself there in the plural except under the influence in their minds of those three passages in Genesis where God does so.
So God is pictured as speaking in the plural only at creation, the garden of Eden, and the tower of Babylon. Then it is over. And we are only at the eleventh chapter of the first book of the Hebrew Bible. There are still thirty-nine more chapters to go in Genesis and then thirty-eight more books of the Hebrew Bible after that. Why stop using the plural at the tower of Babylon? Interpreters have not addressed this question—why does the plural occur only three times, why are all three at the beginning of the earth’s story, and why stop at, of all possible places, the story of the tower of Babylon? I think that we have been missing the crux of the whole thing. We need to ask: what happens in the story of the tower of Babylon? What happens there is: God disperses humankind. At the beginning of the story, all humans are together, and all speak the same language. But God creates different languages, so humans scatter and cluster into different nations. Professor Theodore Hiebert of McCormick Theological Seminary makes a particularly clear and strong case for seeing the dispersal of humankind into separate cultures as the primary point of the story of Babel in Genesis 11, more than as a narrative of pride and punishment, as it has often been seen.41 The text just before the Babel story says:
The nations were dispersed from these in the earth.
(Genesis 10:32)
And the text at the end of the story says:
Yahweh scattered them from there over the face of all the earth.
(Genesis 11:9)42
What happens there in Genesis 11 is what we saw happen in the Song of Moses:
When the Highest gave nations legacies,
when He dispersed humankind.
What happens there in Genesis 11 is also what we saw in Psalm 82:
Arise, God. Judge the earth.
Because you give legacies in all the nations.
God speaks in the plural in these three primordial stories because there are still others to whom to speak. Thus the German biblical scholar Gerhard von Rad, commenting on the plural in the story of Babel, wrote, “The ‘we’ in God’s mouth presupposes the idea at one time of a pantheon, a council of the gods.” But von Rad did not make the next step, to deal with the fact that the “we” ends here.43 There are gods, children of the Highest. But sometime after the event at the tower of Babylon these others start to die off. The disappearance of the divine plural occurs right there, 100 percent consistent with the demise of the gods.
Thus the story of the sons of the gods (or sons of God) having sex with human women comes in Genesis 6, which is in the middle of that primordial age when the gods still exist. It comes five chapters before the tower of Babylon.
And thus it is immediately after the tower of Babylon story that Yahweh is first said to appear to a human: “And Yahweh appeared to Abram” (Genesis 12:7). That is the beginning of Yahweh’s defined relationship with Abraham and his descendants, to be their God. And that too is consistent with the picture in the Song of Moses. There, as we read above, God distributes the peoples’ borders according to the various gods, but in the very next verse He keeps Jacob/Israel, Abraham’s descendants, as His people:
When the Highest gave nations legacies,
when He dispersed humankind,
He set the peoples’ borders
to the number of the children the gods.
But Yahweh’s portion is His people.
Jacob is the lot of His inheritance”
(Deuteronomy 32:9)
And thus God later says to Moses in the exodus story:
I shall make judgments on all the gods of Egypt.
(Exodus 12:12)
People have struggled with this verse as well. It seems to be recognizing that Egypt’s gods exist. So some have interpreted it to mean that God is saying that He will show that they are not really gods. But the wording there in the book of Exodus is the same as in Psalm 82. That psalm said, “He judges among the gods” and “Arise God. Judge the earth.” And Exodus now says, “I shall make judgments on all the gods of Egypt.”44 Like the other gods and goddesses, Egypt’s deities now die as well. The Levite authors of the account of the plagues were consistent with what comes before that account, at the beginning of Genesis. Thus the most prominent god of Egypt, the sun, is blacked out for three days in the last plague before the slaying of the firstborn. That is more than an eclipse. Eclipses do not last three days. It is a defeat of the sun god, a removal of the sun’s divinity. It becomes just an object, not a god. And so the other plagues produce the gods’ demise, with Yahweh defeating the divinities of nature: turning the waters to blood, controlling disease and storm. And so the Song of the Sea, coming just a few chapters later, is right to say, “Who is like you among the gods!” At the time that this song was composed, its poet may have really believed in the existence of those other gods. But as the song stands now in the context of Genesis and Exodus that precedes it, this line takes on a new meaning: it now refers to the failure of those gods and to their demise. Their time has come to an end. Indeed, the point of the explicit reference to “judgments on all the gods of Egypt” may be that, in our texts, the Egyptian gods are the last to go. That fits with everything else we have seen in the texts that connects the arrival and merger of Yahweh and El with the period following the exodus from Egypt.
People have also struggled with the verse “Let us make humans in our image” in another way. Does it mean that humans are created in the physical image of God, with faces and hands and feet? Or the spiritual image, or the intellectual image? If it did in fact refer to the physical image, then this raised the question of how both male and female humans were created in the divine image. But if Genesis 1 pictures an age when the gods and goddesses are still alive, then this answers that classic question as well. The text says that God created humans in the image of ’ ĕlōhîm, which can mean “in the image of God” or “in the image of gods,” and that He created them male and female. This could simply mean that he created the females in the image of the goddesses and created the males in the image of the male gods.
Now who wrote these things? In the study of the sources of the Bible, we attribute the creation story in Genesis 1 to the Priestly source (P). This story is where God says “Let us make a human, in our image.” And we attribute the stories of the Garden of Eden and the tower of Babylon to the source called J. These stories are where God says “The human has become like one of us” and “Let us go down and babble their language.” The point is that two different authors, two of the major authors of the Bible’s first books, both had this idea that God speaks in the plural only at the beginning of their story and then never again.45 In the past, when people read those authors’ divine plurals, they concluded that these authors were not monotheistic. And when they read the story of the male gods having sex with human women, this seemed to confirm that these authors were not monotheistic. But all of those things end after the tower of Babylon story. The author of J and the author of P and the poets of Psalm 82 and the Song of Moses all reflect this idea that there used to be gods, but no more. That is why that Song of Moses could say that God apportioned the nations to the gods in verse 8, but the very same song could say “I, I am He, and there are no gods with me” in verse 39. The theology is consistent: Once there were gods. Now there are not.
This is consistent with the book of Job as well. There we saw the assembly of the gods. Scholars debate the date of when the book of Job was written. But whenever it was written, the fact remains that the story that it tells is understood to take place early in human history. The prophet Ezekiel groups Noah, Daniel, and Job as three righteous men of old.46 Noah of course comes early in the flood generation. And the Daniel whom Ezekiel mentions is not the person in the book of Daniel. He is rather another Daniel (Dan’il) known in Ugaritic myth as an ancient righteous man. Job is not an Israelite. Like Noah and Daniel, he is a man of high antiquity.47 In his day, as in Noah’s day, there are still gods.
My point is that the death of the gods is not a remote, hypothetical little phenomenon. It plays a crucial role in the works of several of the major authors of the Bible. Professor Machinist wrote about Psalm 82 that there is a “legion of scholarly studies of it.”48 And, as I said above, people have recited it regularly for centuries. These passages have been there for all to see for millennia. Yet most people, even fairly knowledgeable people with regard to the Bible, have not heard about this matter of the death of the gods. And now we can add how the passages all fit together: how exquisitely the connection between the death of the gods and the distribution of the nations coincides with the end of God’s use of the plural after that distribution of the nations at the story of the tower of Babylon in Genesis.49 All of these biblical authors knew it. Maybe everyone in ancient Israel who read these stories and sang these songs knew it. The gods had died.
How Do Gods Die?
Why did they come up with this concept? Gods dying. How did it get started? How did people come to accept it? In part the grounds were already set for it in the ancient Near East because in pagan religion there were known myths of gods dying. Professor Machinist at Harvard and Professor Mark Smith at Princeton have addressed this. Machinist, in an article titled “How Gods Die, Biblically and Otherwise,” summarized:
In Ugarit itself, to restrict ourselves to some examples from the ancient Near East, the Ba‘al cycle of texts depicts the death, the violent death, of three of its divine principals: Yamm/Nahar; then his killer, Ba‘al; who, in turn, is masticated by his killer, Mot; who himself is later dismembered. The Mesopotamian mythic text of Enuma Elish, likewise, treats the death and, at points, dismemberment of the deities Apsu, Tiamat, and Qingu. And in Mesopotamia as well, dead gods can be referred to as a category.50
Smith titled an article “The Death of ‘Dying and Rising Gods’ in the Biblical World,”51 which is just one treatment out of a collection of publications of Smith’s on the relationship of Israel’s religion and the pagan religion of the ancient Near East.
My point: the stage was set. When monotheism began to catch on in Israel, when the prophets no longer had to browbeat people to stop worshipping all those other gods, when the Israelite moms and dads and Sunday (or Saturday) school teachers were teaching their children that there is only one God—whenever things reached that point—they had to explain what had happened to the gods. The idea of the death of the gods was already a known concept in the ancient Near East. I think that the answer to the question of why they were drawn to that idea in Israel lies in the questions with which I began this chapter: What did people think of their parents and grandparents who had worshipped the gods? What did they think happened to the gods—and the goddesses? What did they tell their children? When the children were taught that there is only one God, and they asked, “But Grandma worshipped lots of gods. Was Grandma bad?” the parent could answer, “No, dear. Grandma wasn’t bad. There used to be those gods, but they were bad, and they died. And now there is only one God.” What I have simplified here as a little conversation between a parent and child must have existed as a real theological issue that needed an answer. And, actually, it may well have occurred in numerous family and school conversations like this as well. Religious changes require religious explanations. And the mythological background of gods dying in the ancient Near Eastern pagan religions made this religious explanation fit right in.52 It was not even necessarily a radical idea. Gods die. What was radical was getting the number down to one.
The Mystery of Babylon
The story of the tower of Babylon has been the missing piece of the puzzle all along.53 It is the culminating story of the Primeval History (Genesis 1–11, also known to scholars by its German name, the Urgeschichte). Why? Because, from the biblical author’s point of view, it is the end of the old world of the gods. What follows is not the beginning of monotheism in history. It is the beginning of the monotheistic story. It is the story of the relations between Yahweh and humankind. It will take up the entire rest of the Bible.
In Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, that story starts with Abraham. There is a traditional story (a midrash), not found in the Bible, that Abraham’s father was an idol maker, that Abraham arrived at monotheism on his own, and that Abraham smashed the idols in his father’s house. Why does the monotheism story start with Abraham and not with Adam, Eve, Cain, Lamech, Enosh, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, or anyone else? The instincts of the three religions were precisely right. Abraham comes after—immediately after—the story of the tower of Babylon. The tower of Babylon tale comes in Genesis 11, and the first words of Genesis 12 are: “And Yahweh [or: the LORD] said to Abraham . . .” From the time of Babylon, the gods are condemned to death. And, instead of the gods, the one highest God now makes humans His companions to whom He speaks.54
The logical progression between these two chapters is even stronger than that. In the tower of Babylon story in Genesis 11, separate languages and lands are formed. In the Abraham story in Genesis 12, God’s first words to Abraham are a direction to leave his land and go to a new land:
And Yahweh said to Abram, “Go from your land and from your birthplace and from your father’s house to the land that I’ll show you.”
Everything else in the story, all the adventures of this man, his family, and their descendants, will follow from this move. And, as we know well from our previous observations, the longest and largest of their adventures will be their stay in Egypt and their exodus from it and their return to the land. Languages, geography, and history are all intimately, intricately tied to theology. Choose the metaphor you prefer: a network, a tapestry, a lentil stew. But the bottom line is: arrival at belief in one God.
So, many scholars among my colleagues and my teachers attributed monotheism to the Babylonian exile. We can understand that. They naturally saw great revolutions in thought coming as a result of great, catastrophic events in human history. That is often the case. Of course big events have big consequences in a culture. But in this case, the exodus from Egypt and the uniting of the Levites with the rest of Israel was at least as monumental an event as the Babylonian defeat of Judah.
The scholarly attraction to Babylon is not exactly wrong. The biblical authors did connect the gods’ demise to Babylon, but to the ancient Babylon of mythology, not to the Babylonian empire of history that would conquer the Jews centuries later.
The Queen of the Heavens
We are not quite done. Until now we have spoken of either one god or many gods. But there is another possibility that rounds out this picture: two gods.
In the English-speaking culture in which I grew up, when we learned grammar—I mean in the good old days when they still taught grammar in school—we learned that the grammatical number of a word was either singular or plural. That is how we think: one or many. But not all languages work that way. In Hebrew—both Biblical and Modern—there are three forms to indicate number: singular, plural, and dual. The dual is used when there are two of something. It is formed by adding the syllables -ayim to the end of a word. It is especially useful for body parts that come in twos. Thus an arm in Hebrew is a yad. A person’s arms are yadayim. A leg in Hebrew is a regel. A person’s legs are raglayim. If you own two Cadillacs, I guess you have Cadillacayim. Now the point is not just about grammar. It is about a different concept of number. Two of something is as different from nine or ten as it is from one. Now I bring this just as an example, not to prove anything. I mean to convey that this conceptual difference of number can apply to grammar, but it can also apply to theology. In other words: to gods. We know from both text and archaeology that Israelites and Jews in the biblical period conceived of Yahweh as male, and they sometimes worshipped a goddess alongside Yahweh. She was apparently His consort, His wife. In the text, the prophet Jeremiah criticizes the people because they worship “the Queen of the Heavens.” The text is ironic. Jeremiah reprimands the people for worshipping her and predicts terrible things to come.55 Later, when all the terrible things that Jeremiah prophesied have come true, the people declare the opposite: that they were fine as long as they worshipped the Queen of the Heavens but that things turned bad only when they listened to Jeremiah and stopped worshipping her:
The thing that you spoke to us in the name of Yahweh: we’re not listening to you. But we shall do everything that has proceeded from our mouth: to burn incense to the Queen of the Heavens and to pour libations to her, as we’ve done, we and our fathers, our kings, and our officials in Judah’s cities and in Jerusalem’s streets, so we had plenty of bread and were well and saw no bad. But since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring libations to her, we’ve been lacking everything, and we’ve been consumed by the sword and by the famine.
(Jeremiah 44:16–18)
In archaeology, too, we have found direct evidence of a female consort along with Yahweh. At a location called Kuntillet ‘Ajrud along Judah’s border, the archaeologist Z. Meshel of Tel Aviv University found inscriptions in the 1970s that refer to “Yahweh of Samaria and His Asherah.”56 An Asherah is a goddess. Some have taken it to be the goddess’ name, Asherah, but actually it is simply the word for a goddess. It normally is preceded by the Hebrew definite article—the Asherah, like the Baal—indicating that it is the general term for a goddess, not any particular goddess’ name.57 The inscription “Yahweh of Samaria and His Asherah” on the side of a giant jar from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud is consistent with the picture in Jeremiah: the people worshipped Yahweh, but they also worshipped a queen goddess alongside Him.
Back to the text: One of the relevant Bible stories that we considered earlier was the account of the prophet Elijah and the prophets of the Baal at Mount Carmel. There Elijah challenges 450 prophets of the Baal to the duel. The prophets of the Baal pray fervently, but nothing happens. Elijah prays to Yahweh, and the fire falls and consumes the sacrifice. But I left out the next part of the story there. Elijah has the people slaughter the 450 prophets of the Baal. Now, an interesting thing is that people often leave out a significant detail when they retell this story. There are not just the 450 prophets of the Baal present. There are also 400 prophets of the Asherah.58 But the prophets of the Asherah do not have an altar or an offering and do not pray. And the prophets of the Baal all get killed, but nothing at all happens to the prophets of the Asherah. Why not? Because, as the great biblical scholar David Noel Freedman put it, “The winner gets the girl.” The duel was between the two male deities. The female deity was not challenged and was not, like the Baal, shown not to be a true deity. She was the spouse of the triumphant God. The story is set in the kingdom of Israel, and its capital at this time was the city of Samaria. Recall that the inscription at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud refers to “Yahweh of Samaria and His Asherah.”59
It appears that even when the struggle was going on between monotheism and polytheism, that revolution was going to take an extra step to get people to give up the goddess. Human males had wives. Why would they not expect their God to have a divine wife as well? Now you might say, “What about Psalm 82 and the whole matter of the death of the gods?” Did not all the goddesses die too? Why would this one queen goddess live? But in Psalm 82 the Highest God, Yahweh, condemns all the children of the Highest (the bĕnê ‘elyôn) to die like humans. But the Queen of the Heavens, the Asherah, is not one of His children. She is His wife. So, the fact is, we do not ever really find out what became of her. We have no mythic text that addresses it. What we can say is that people continued to feel a need for a female presence somewhere in their religious picture, even if it was not a goddess. Mariology developed in Catholicism. And Biblical Judaism at one point identified the nation itself as God’s wife.60 Later Judaism developed the idea of the shechinah, a term for the divine presence. The word shechinah never occurs in the Hebrew Bible, but in the Jewish mystical system known as Kabbalah it acquired a status of its own. The word is grammatically feminine, and perhaps because of this it is treated as a feminine aspect of the deity. These and other terms and persons are not the equivalent of a divine wife, but they reflect a perfectly understandable feeling among some that both masculine and feminine must exist in the divine world just as they do in the human world. In the pagan world, this was not a problem. There were both gods and goddesses. And in Israel the Asherah was the last one to go.61
The biblical accounts of the kings of Israel and Judah convey the struggle over her exit. They refer to Israel’s tenth-century BCE king Ahab, who ruled in Samaria, making an Asherah, which stood in Samaria through several kings’ reigns.62 That fits with the archaeological discovery of the “Yahweh of Samaria and His Asherah” inscription. They report that King Asa of Judah (c. 918–873 BCE), whose reign may have overlapped near its end with Ahab’s, removed his mother from her royal status because she had made a “monstrosity” (some sort of idol?) to the Asherah. He burned the Asherah.63 If that report is correct, the Asherah must have been reestablished, however, because around two hundred years later, King Hezekiah of Judah destroys it again.64 But that is not the end of the Asherah. The book of 2 Kings reports that Hezekiah’s son, King Manasseh, put a statue of the Asherah in the Temple!65 But then Manasseh’s grandson, King Josiah, took it out of the Temple and burned it at the same place where King Asa had burned one about three hundred years earlier.66 And still, as we saw above, the prophet Jeremiah continues to struggle against those who wanted to continue burning incense to her.
Those references in Jeremiah are the last ones to the Asherah or the Queen of the Heavens. There are none in the books that tell the later destiny of the Jews: the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Daniel, and the prophets Haggai and Zechariah. So at some point after Jeremiah, the acceptance of monotheism also came to include the demise of the last goddess. When, where, and why: we just do not know. The text does not say. What the people believed to have come of her is a mystery.
When Monotheism Won
By the end of the biblical period, monotheism had won.
Monotheism had won so much so that on the whole we have forgotten what pagan religion was about. Most people could not tell you what the word “pagan” means.
Monotheism had won so much so that even educated people think that pagan religion involved idol worship.
Monotheism had won so much so that college Departments of Religion today usually do not offer a course on pagan religion. Departments and programs of religious studies commonly offer Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Hinduism. Only Hinduism might come close insofar as it involves multiple gods, but a course on it would not aim to shed light on pagan religion as such. If you want a course on Greek or Roman pagan religion, go to the Classics Department. If you want a course on ancient Near Eastern pagan religion, go to the Near Eastern Studies Department or the Oriental Institute. But to find this in a Religion Department would be rare, even though pagan religion is the longest-lasting religion on earth.
Monotheism had won so much so that rabbis in antiquity turned to a new sort of explanation for why the Second Jerusalem Temple was destroyed. When the first Jerusalem Temple had been destroyed in the wake of the Babylonian conquest in 587 BCE, the biblical interpretation of that catastrophe was that the people had worshipped other gods. But when the second Jerusalem Temple fell to the Romans in 70 CE, the rabbis’ interpretation of the catastrophe was moral rather than worship of other gods. The people had accepted monotheism enough by that time that one could not trace the disaster to apostasy. So the rabbis taught that it was because of “pointless hatred” (Hebrew śin’āt ḥinām). Monotheism was no longer the issue.
The triumph of monotheism has changed everything, probably even the nature of atheism. Today more people than ever believe in God. And more people than ever don’t. How different would this be if the difference were not between atheists and those who believe in God, but instead were between atheists and those who believe in the gods and goddesses? Would books like those of Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great), for example, look different if they had had to frame the argument this way?67 Would the evidence on both sides be different? We shall never know. Monotheism won.
The Exodus and Monotheism
We have seen a movement from many deities to two to one. Whether you take that movement to be fact, mythology, or theology, it is the story of how we got to where most (Western) religions are now. And, as I said, it even defines where atheism is at. Have you heard the old joke about the Jewish man who was left on a desert island for years? When a ship found him, they saw two large huts that he had built on a hill. They asked him what they were. He said, “That one’s my synagogue. I go there and pray and celebrate holidays.” And they asked him what the other hut was. He said, “That’s the synagogue I don’t go to!” (You can change this to churches or any house of worship you like when you tell the joke.) So we hear people say, “Do you believe in God?” But we do not generally hear people say, “Do you believe in the gods?” The religion that atheists don’t go to is monotheism—by default. Or, better: by history. Is the idea of one God higher than the idea of many? Is it more logical? More attractive? The idea of many gods—polytheism—served humankind for about three or four millennia before monotheism came along. Pagan religion was the most successful religion of all time (in terms of how long it lasted; Christianity is the most successful in the number of adherents). I have read and heard it said many times that monotheism has done more harm than polytheism. The claim is that monotheism is exclusive—“If my belief is right, then everybody else’s beliefs must be wrong”—so monotheists are more likely than polytheists or atheists to exclude, persecute, and purge others. We can admit that there is some logic to that claim, but still the evidence of history goes both ways. Polytheist and atheist nations and empires have done their share of atrocities. I would not want to take a side in a depressing debate over which has done more horrible things. My task here has not been to argue that monotheism is higher or lower than other ideas. It has just been to track how it came about and to recognize that it succeeded. Monotheism won. One won.
Which brings us back to the point about why the exodus matters to the emergence of monotheism: Monotheism prevailed, but if the exodus had not happened, monotheism would have developed either (1) later, or (2) completely differently, or (3) it might never have happened at all.