Professor Christine
Hayes: I mentioned in the opening lecture that this course
is going to examine the biblical corpus from a variety of
different viewpoints and take a variety of approaches,
historical, literary, religious, cultural.
And today we are going to begin
our appraisal of the first portion of the Bible as the
product of a religious and cultural revolution.
The Bible is the product of
minds that were exposed to and influenced by and reacting to
the ideas and cultures of their day.
And as I suggested in the opening lecture,
comparative study of the literature of the Ancient Near
East and the Bible reveals the shared cultural and literary
heritage at the same time that it reveals great differences
between the two. In the literature of the Bible
some members of Israelite society--probably a cultural
religious and literary elite--broke radically with the
prevailing norms of the day. They mounted a critique of
prevailing norms. The persons responsible for the
final editing and shaping of the Bible, somewhere from the
seventh to the fifth or fourth century BCE--we're not totally
sure and we'll talk more about that--those final editors were
members of this group. And they had a specific
worldview and they imposed that worldview on the older
traditions and stories that are found in the Bible.
That radical new worldview in
the Bible was monotheism. But why, you might ask,
should the idea of one God instead of many be so radical?
What is so different?
What's different about having
one God, from having a pantheon of gods headed by a superior
god? What is so new and
revolutionary about monotheism? Well according to one school of
thought there isn't anything particularly revolutionary about
monotheism; and the classical account of
the rise of monotheism, that has prevailed for a very
long time, runs as follows,
and I have a little flow chart here to illustrate it for you.
The argument goes that in every
society there's a natural progression: a natural
progression from polytheism, which is the belief in many
gods--usually these are personifications of natural
forces--to henotheism--"heno," equals one, god--or monolatry,
which is really the worship of one god as supreme over other
gods, so not denying the existence of
the other gods, ascribing reality to them,
but isolating one as a supreme god,
and onto monotheism, where essentially one believes
only in the reality of one god. And in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries this progression was viewed as an
advance, which is not very surprising
because the whole theory was put forward by scholars who were
basically western monotheists. And these scholars maintained
that certain elements of biblical religion represented
pure religion, religion evolved to its highest
form, no longer tainted by pagan and polytheistic elements of
Canaanite religion generally. So applying an evolutionary
model to religion carried with it a very clear value judgment.
Polytheism was understood as
clearly inferior and primitive. Monolatry was an improvement.
It was getting better.
It was getting closer.
But monotheism was judged to be
the best and purest form of religion.
And at first the great archeological discoveries that I
talked about last time in the nineteenth century seemed to
support this claim--that Israelite monotheism had evolved
from Ancient Near Eastern polytheism.
Cuneiform tablets that were inscribed with the great
literature of Mesopotamian civilizations were uncovered and
when they were deciphered they shed astonishing light on
biblical religion. And these discoveries led to a
kind of "parallelomania"--that's how it's referred to in the
literature. Scholars delighted in pointing
out all of the parallels in theme and language and plot and
structure between biblical stories and Ancient Near Eastern
stories. So more than a thousand years
before the Israelite legend of Noah and the ark you have
Mesopotamians telling the stories Ziusudra,
or in some versions Utnapishtim who also survived a great flood
by building an ark on the instruction of a deity,
and the flood destroys all life, and he sends out birds to
scout out the dry land, and so on.
So with parallels like these, it was argued,
it was clear that the religion of the Israelites was not so
different from the religions of their polytheistic or pagan
neighbors. They also had a creation story.
They had a flood story.
They did animal sacrifices.
They observed purity taboos.
Israelite religion was another
Ancient Near Eastern religion and they differed from their
neighbors only over the number of gods they worshiped:
one or many. It was just a more refined,
more highly evolved, version of Ancient Near Eastern
religion. Well, this view,
this evolutionary view, or evolutionary model,
was challenged by man a named Yehezkel Kaufmann in the 1930's.
And Kaufman argued that
monotheism does not and cannot evolve from polytheism because
the two are based on radically divergent worldviews,
radically divergent intuitions about reality.
And in a multivolume work which was later translated and
abridged, and you've got a selection of reading from the
translated abridgment, so it's translated by Moshe
Greenburg, an abridged version of his massive work The
Religion of Israel Kaufman asserted that the monotheism of
Israel wasn't, it couldn't be,
the natural outgrowth of the polytheism of an earlier age.
It was a radical break with it.
It was a total cultural and
religious discontinuity. It was a polemic against
polytheism and the pagan worldview.
That's implicit, he says, throughout the
biblical text. It's been said that Kaufman
replaces the evolutionary model with a revolutionary model.
This was a revolution not an
evolution. Now one advantage of Kaufman's
model is that we can avoid some of the pejorative evaluations of
polytheism as primitive, as necessarily earlier and
primitive and inferior. We're simply positing the
existence of two distinct orientations,
two divergent worldviews. They each have their
explanatory merits and they each have their specific problems and
difficulties. It's not to say that Kaufman
wasn't clearly judgmental but at least the potential is there for
us to understand these as two distinct systems,
each again, as I say, with its explanatory merits.
But as we'll see some of the
things that monotheism solves only invite other sorts of
problems that it has to wrestle with throughout its long life.
Now in Kaufman's view the
similarities, therefore, between the
Israelites and Ancient Near Eastern religion and cultures
that everyone was so busily finding and celebrating,
these were in the end similarities in form and
external structure, appearance.
They weren't essential similarities.
They differed in content. Sure they both have animal
sacrifice. Sure they both have ritual
purity laws. Sure they share certain stories
and legends. But these have been adopted by
the Israelites and transformed, transformed into vehicles that
convey the basic ideas of the monotheistic worldview.
So a similarity in form doesn't
mean a similarity in function; and in this,
Kaufman is anticipating arguments made by
anthropologists. The ritual cult of the
Israelites may look like that of their neighbors but it
functioned very differently; its purpose was drastically
different from that of Israel's neighbors.
The Israelites like their neighbors may have set up a king
over themselves. But Israelite monarchy differed
from Canaanite monarchy in significant ways because of
their monotheism. These are all things we will
test and explore. So the meaning and function of
Israel's cult, of Israel's king,
of its creation stories or any of its other narratives--they
derive from the place of those items within the larger cultural
framework or worldview of Israel and that larger framework or
worldview is one of basic monotheism.
So let's turn then to Kaufman's description of the fundamental
distinction between the polytheistic worldview and the
revolutionary monotheistic worldview that took root in
Israel. And I am going to be rehearsing
and then critiquing the arguments that are in that
hundred-page reading that I assigned for you this week.
This is the only time something
like this will happen in the course.
And I do that because these ideas are so fundamental and we
are going to be wrestling with them throughout the course,
so it's important to me that you absorb this stuff right from
the beginning and think about it and be critical of it and engage
it. Kaufman's ideas are very
important. They're also overstated in some
ways and that's why we're going to be wrestling with some of
these ideas throughout the course.
So, let's begin with Kaufman's characterization of what he
calls pagan religion--that's the term that he uses.
The fundamental idea of pagan
religion, he says, and I quote,
is "the idea that there exists a realm of being prior to the
gods and above them, upon which they gods]
depend, and whose decrees," even "they must obey" --the
metadivine realm. This is the realm of supreme
and ultimate power and it transcends the deities.
The deity or the deities emerge
from and are therefore subject to the laws of the metadivine
realm, the forces and powers of the metadivine realm.
And the nature of this realm
will vary from pagan tradition to pagan tradition.
It might be water.
It might be darkness.
It might be spirit.
Or in ancient Greek religion,
a more sort of philosophical polytheism, it might be fate.
Even the gods are subject to
the decrees of fate; they have no control over that.
Kaufman asserts,
therefore, this belief. Once you posit a primordial
realm, some realm that is beside or beyond the gods,
that's independent of them and primary, you have automatically
limited the gods. So what I've done is I've
spelled out here for you, consequences,
logical consequences of positing a metadivine realm.
Once you have a metadivine
realm all of these things are going to follow.
The gods are going to be limited.
They are not the source of all.
They are bound by,
they're subservient to, this metadivine realm.
There can therefore,
be no notion of a supreme divine will, an absolute or
sovereign divine will. The will of any one god
ultimately can be countered by the decrees of the primordial
realm and the will of all the gods can be thwarted by the
decrees of the primordial realm. The will of any one god can be
thwarted by perhaps another god. So the gods are limited in
power. They're also limited in their
wisdom: that falls under this as well.
They're not going to be all-knowing or all-wise because
of the existence of this realm that's beyond them and which is
in many ways mysterious to them as well.
It's unpredictable to them too. It's not in their control or in
their power. Individual gods might be very
wise; they might be wise in
particular crafts. There might be a god of
healing, very very wise in healing, or a god of some other
craft or area of knowledge. But they possess wisdom as an
attribute, not as an essential characteristic.
Kaufman asserts that mythology is basic to pagan religions.
Mythologies are the lives or
tales of the lives of gods, tales of the lives of the gods.
In pagan religions the gods are
born, and they live lives very similar to human lives but on a
grand scale and then they die. They might be reborn too.
Pagan religions contain
theogonies, birth of a god, "theogony", accounts of the
births of gods. Now this impersonal primordial
realm, Kaufman declares, contains the seeds of all
beings. Very often in these creations
stories there is some sense of some realm from which life
begins to emerge usually beginning with gods.
So these cosmogonies and
theogonies will describe the generation of sexually
differentiated divine beings; also the generation of the
natural world; also the generation of human
beings and animals: in other words,
this is the primordial womb for all that is--divine,
human and natural. It is the source of everything
mundane and divine. What that means,
Kaufman asserts, is that in pagan religion
there's very often a fluid boundary between the divine,
the human, and the natural worlds.
They blur into one another because they all emerge
ultimately from the same primordial world stuff.
These distinctions between them
are soft. We see this in the fact that
the gods are very often associated with natural powerful
forces, right? The sky is a god;
the fire is a god; fertility--a natural
process--is a god. So there's no real distinction
between the worship of gods and the worship of nature.
Second, he says,
because humans also emerge ultimately from this primordial
realm there's a confusion of the boundary between the divine and
the human that's common, he says--he chooses the word
"confusion"--that's common in pagan religion.
And so we often have in pagan religions unions between divine
beings and human beings. Kaufman argues,
and I quote, that "the continuity the divine
and human realm is the basis of the pagan belief in apotheosis"
[Kaufman 1972, 36]--humans becoming gods;
perhaps after death for example becoming immortal,
or very often kings when they ascend to the throne become
gods. Whatever power the gods have,
Kaufman says, is not due to the fact that
their will is absolute or their spirit is absolute.
The realm that transcends the
gods, this metadivine realm, is that which has ultimate
power and the stuff of which it is made is what has ultimate
power. So power is materially
conceived. It inheres in certain things,
in certain substances, particularly substances or
materials that are deeply connected to whatever this
primordial world stuff is. So if it's blood,
then blood that courses through the veins of living creatures is
seen to have some deep and powerful connection with the
metadivine realm and that is where power resides.
If it is water,
then water will be viewed as particularly materially powerful
in that particular system. So gods have power only insofar
as they are connected with that primordial world "stuff," a
technical term that I use throughout this lecture!
That means that magic is
possible in such a system. Because power is materially
conceived--in other words, since it is believed to inhere
in certain natural substances that resemble or are connected
to the primordial world stuff that's the source of all
power--then magic is possible by manipulating those material
substances in certain ways. It might be clay.
It might be water.
It might be blood.
Then whatever is believed to
hold the power of this primordial life force,
humans can tap into, and influence the activities of
the metadivine realm. So through manipulation,
magical manipulation of certain substances, they can harness,
Kaufman says, they can harness these forces,
these independent self-operating forces.
And so the human magician is
really a technician and he can make these forces come to bear
on even the gods, to coerce the gods to do his
will and so on. So magic in a pagan system,
Kaufman claims, is a way of getting around the
gods, circumventing the capricious will of the gods and
demons. His magic is directed at the
metadivine realm, trying to tap into its powers.
It's not directed at the gods.
It's trying to tap into the
ultimate source of power to use that power to influence the gods
in a particular way or protect oneself against the gods.
Similarly, divination.
Divination is an attempt to
discern the future that, once again, heads right to the
source of power. It's not directed at the gods,
unless you're hoping to use them as a medium through which
to get access to the metadivine realm,
but ultimately most divination is aimed at tapping the secrets
of the metadivine realm and not the gods.
Discerning the will of the gods is really of little use,
because even their will can be thwarted or overthrown by other
gods or by the decrees of the metadivine realm.
The pagan cult,
Kaufman claims, is a system of rites.
Now I use the word "cult" and
every year people look at me and say "what is cult?
I don't even understand what
that means." We'll learn more about "cult,"
but it refers to a system of rites, okay?
A system of rites, and we'll be looking at the
Israelite cult later. So the pagan cult,
he says, is a system of rites that involves a manipulation of
substances--again, blood, animal flesh,
human flesh, precious metals and so on--that
are believed to have some kind of inherent power,
again, because of their connection to whatever the
primordial world stuff may be in that tradition.
So according to Kaufman there's always an element of magic in
the pagan cult. It's seeking through these
rituals and manipulations of certain substances to,
again, let loose certain powers, set into motion certain
forces, that will coerce a god to be propitiated,
for example, or calmed or to act favorably
or to vindicate the devotees, and so on.
Some of those cultic acts might be defensive or protective so
that the god cannot harm the worshiper.
Many of the cultic festivals are keyed in to mythology,
the stories of the lives of the gods.
Many of the cultic festivals will be reenactments of events
in the life of the god: a battle that the god had…the
death of the god. Usually in the winter,
cultic rituals will reenact the death of the god and then,
in spring, the rising or resurrection of the god.
These are all reenactment
festivals that occur very often. And it's believed that by
reenacting these festivals in this cultic way,
one brings magical powers into play and can in fact ensure and
maintain the reemergence of life in the spring.
So it's essential for the maintenance, preservation of the
world. One final and very important
point, and we're going to wrestle with this quite a bit
during the year: Kaufman claims,
again, in the polytheistic worldview, the primordial realm
contains the seeds of all being: everything is generated from
that realm, good and bad.
So just as there are good gods who might protect human beings
there are also evil gods who seek to destroy both humans and
other gods. Death and disease are consigned
to the realm of these evil demons or these impure evil
spirits, but they are siblings with the good gods.
Human beings are basically
powerless, he says, in the continual cosmic
struggle between the good gods and the evil demons,
unless they can utilize magic, divination, tap into the powers
of the metadivine realm, circumvent the gods who might
be making their lives rather miserable.
But what's important is that Kaufman insists that in the
pagan view evil is an antonomous demonic realm.
It is as primary and real as the realm of the holy or good
gods. Evil is a metaphysical reality.
It is built into the structure
of the universe. That's the way the universe was
made. The primordial stuff that
spawned all that is, spawned it good and bad and
exactly as it is, and it's there and it's real.
Salvation, he says,
is the concern of humans. The gods aren't interested in
human salvation from the capricious forces and powers in
the world because they're trying to save themselves.
You know, the good gods are
being attacked by the evil gods; the powers and decrees of the
metadivine realm are hassling them as well as anybody else.
So they can't be worried about
humans; they're worried about
themselves. Salvation is attained through
magic or gnostic means--gnosticism refers to
knowledge of secrets that can in some way liberate one from the
regular rules--and so as long as one can somehow circumvent the
gods, tie oneself into the powers of
the metadivine realm to be beyond the reach of the demons
and the capricious gods who make life on earth a misery,
that is the path for salvation. So, Kaufman says that the pagan
worldview is one of an amoral universe somewhere around
here…there we go. Amoral universe.
Not a moral universe; not an immoral universe;
but an amoral universe. It is morally neutral.
There are gods who are
legislators and guardians of social order and justice.
But their laws aren't absolute:
they can be leveled by the decrees of this supreme
metadivine realm. And since the knowledge and
wisdom of each god is limited, morality can be defined as what
a particular god likes or desires and that may be
different from what another god likes or desires.
And there's no absolute
morality then. And it's that picture of the
universe, Kaufman wants to argue, that is challenged by the
monotheistic revolution. Again he sees this as a
revolution of ancient Israel. So according to Kaufman the
fundamental idea of ancient Israelite writing,
which receives no systematic formulation but permeates the
entire Bible in his view, is a radically new idea of a
god who is himself the source of all being--not subject to a
metadivine realm. There's no transcendent cosmic
order or power. He does not emerge from some
preexisting realm and therefore he is free of all of the
limitations of myth and magic--we'll go through these
one by one--but a God whose will is absolute and sovereign.
All right?
So what then are the implications of the elimination
of this metadivine realm? Just as these points flowed
logically from positing a metadivine realm,
what flows logically from eliminating a metadivine realm
and positing simply a god that does not emerge from any
preexisting power or order or realm?
Well, first of all there's no theogony or mythology in the
Bible. God isn't born from some
primordial womb; he doesn't have a life story.
There's no realm that is
primary to him or prior to him and there is no realm that is
the source of his power and wisdom.
So in the opening chapters of Genesis, God simply is.
He doesn't grow,
he doesn't age, he doesn't mature,
he doesn't have in the Bible a female consort.
God doesn't die. So in the Hebrew Bible,
Kaufman claims, for the first time in history
we meet an unlimited God who is timeless and ageless and
nonphysical and eternal. That means that this God
transcends nature. Which means we're going to get
rid of number three as well, right?
As the sovereign of all realms, God isn't by nature bound to
any particular realm. He's not identifiable as a
force of nature or identified with a force of nature.
Nature certainly becomes the
stage of God's expression of his will.
He expresses his will and purpose through forces of nature
in the Bible. But nature isn't God himself.
He's not identified .
He's wholly other.
He isn't kin to humans in any
way either. So there is no blurring,
no soft boundary between humans and the divine,
according to Kaufman, in the Bible.
There's no apotheosis in the Bible.
No life after death in the Bible either.
Did you know that? Have to wait a few centuries
for that idea to come along, but certainly not in the Hebrew
Bible: people live 70 years and that's it.
So there's no process by which humans become gods and certainly
no process of the reverse as well.
Magic in the Hebrew Bible is represented as useless.
It's pointless.
There's no metadivine realm to tap into.
Power doesn't inhere in any stuff in the natural world.
So the world is sort of
de-divinized. Demythologized.
Power isn't understood as a material thing or something that
inheres in material substances. God can't be manipulated or
coerced by charms or words or rituals.
They have no power and cannot be used in that way,
and so magic is sin. Magic is sin or rebellion
against God because it's predicated on a whole mistaken
notion of God having limited power.
There are magical conceptions throughout the Bible--you're
going to run into them. But interestingly enough the
editors of the stories in which they appear will very often
hammer home the conclusion that actually what happened happened,
because God willed it to happen. The event occurred because God
wanted it to occur. It didn't occur independently
of his will or by virtue of some power that's inherent in the
magician's artifices. So Kaufman argues that magic in
the Bible is recast as a witness to God's sovereignty,
God's power. And they're stripped--magical
actions are stripped--of their autonomous potency.
Again, they're serving as
vehicles then for the manifestation of the will of
God. Divination is also
unassimilable to the monotheistic idea,
according to Kaufman, because it also presupposes the
existence of some metadivine realm, some source of power,
knowledge or information that transcends God.
And again, it's an attempt to reveal God's secrets in an
ungodly way, predicated on a mistake.
It is permitted to make inquiries of God through
oracular devices but God only conveys information at his own
will. There's no ritual or
incantation, Kaufman says, or material substance that can
coerce a revelation from God. So, we will see things that
look like magic and divination and oracles and dreams and
prophecy in the pagan world and in ancient Israel.
But Kaufman says the similarity
is a similarity in form only. And it's a superficial,
formal, external similarity. Each of these phenomena he says
is transformed by the basic Israelite idea of one supreme
transcendent God whose will is absolute and all of these things
relate to the direct word and will of God.
They aren't recourse to a separate science or lore or body
of knowledge or interpretive craft that calls upon forces or
powers that transcend God or are independent of God.
By the same token the cult,
Kaufman says, has no automatic or material
power. It's not just sort of a place
where certain kinds of magical coercive acts happen.
The cult isn't designed to
service the material needs of God, either.
It doesn't affect his life and vitality by enacting certain
rituals: you don't ensure that God doesn't die and so on.
No events in God's life are
celebrated--the festivals that are carried out in the cultic
context. So the mythological rationales
for cult that you find amongst Israel's neighbors are replaced,
and they're replaced very often by historical rationales.
This action is done to
commemorate such and such event in the history of the nation.
So pagan festivals in Israel,
Kaufman says, are historicized,
commemorating events in the life of the people and not in
the story of the god's life since we have no mythology.
But we are going to be spending
a fair amount of time talking actually about the meaning and
the function of Israel's purity laws and cultic laws in a later
lecture. Now since God is himself the
transcendent source of all being and since he is good,
in a monotheistic system there are no evil agents that
constitute a realm that opposes God as an equal rival.
No divine evil agents.
Again, in the pagan worldview
the primordial womb spawns all sorts of beings,
all kinds of divinities, good and evil that are in equal
strength. They're sort of locked in this
cosmic struggle. But in the Israelite worldview,
if God is the source of all being, then they're can't be a
realm of supernatural beings that do battle with him.
There's no room for a divine
antagonist of the one supreme God, which is leading us down
here to this point: that sin and evil are
demythologized in the Hebrew Bible.
And that's very interesting. It's going to lead to a lot of
interesting things. It's also going to create a
really huge problem for monotheistic thought they're
going to struggle with for centuries and actually still do
struggle with today. But again, in the pagan
worldview, sin is understood very often as the work of a
demon or an evil god that might possess a person,
might have to be exorcised from that person by means of magic.
If you tap into some of these
substances then you can use the magical, the powers in those
substances, to coerce the demon to be
expelled from the person's body. These are things that are very
common in polytheistic and pagan practices.
But in Israel we have no metadivine realm to spawn these
evil beings, these various gods. So Israelite religion did not
conceive of sin as caused by an independent evil power that
exists out there in the universe and is defying the will of God.
Instead evil comes about as a
result of the clash of the will of God and the will of humans
who happen to have the freedom to rebel.
There's nothing inherently supernatural about sin.
It's not a force or a power
built into the universe. Kaufman is claiming therefore
that in Israel evil is transferred from the
metaphysical realm (built into the physical structure of the
universe) to the moral realm. I've put it up here for you.
Evil is a moral and not a
metaphysical reality. It doesn't have a concrete
independent existence. And that means that human
beings and only human beings are the potential source of evil in
the world. Responsibility for evil lies in
the hands of human beings. In the Hebrew Bible,
no one will ever say the devil made me do it.
There is no devil in the Hebrew Bible.
That's also the invention of a much later age.
And that is an important and critical ethical revolution.
Evil is a moral and not a
metaphysical reality . You had a.
Student: What about the serpent in the Garden of Eden?
Professor Christine
Hayes: Great. That's what you get to talk
about. Wonderful question.
Well what about when Eve is
tempted by the serpent? Who is the serpent?
What is he doing?
What's going on?
What is Kaufman claiming? Okay.
That's exactly the kind of stuff that should be popping
into your head----What about...what about?--okay,
and in section, you're going to be discussing
exactly that story. Okay?
And that's one of those texts... and in a minute if I haven't at
the end of a lecture, ask again if I haven't kind of
gotten to part of an answer to your question.
Okay? But again, this emphasis on
evil as a moral choice--think of Genesis 4, where God warns Cain,
who's filled with anger and jealousy and is thinking about
doing all kinds of horrible things to his brother,
and God says, "Sin couches at the door;
/ Its urge is toward you, / Yet you can be its master".
This is a question of moral
choice. Final point then is...and we're
not going to talk about salvation right now...but we're
going to talk about the fact that the only supreme law is the
will of God, because God is a creator God
rather than a created God. He's imposed order,
an order upon the cosmos. And so the pagan picture of an
amoral universe of just competing powers,
good and evil, Kaufman says,
is transformed into a picture of a moral cosmos.
The highest law is the will of
God and that imposes a morality upon the structure of the
universe. So in sum, Kaufman's argument
is this: Israel conceived of the divine in an entirely new way.
Israel's God differed from the
pagan gods in his essential nature.
The pagan gods were natural gods.
They were very often associated with blind forces of nature with
no intrinsic moral character, he says.
And the god of Israel was understood to transcend nature
and his will was not only absolute, it was absolutely good
and moral. A lot of people say,
well in a way didn't we just rename the metadivine realm God?
No.
Because the difference here is that it's posited not only that
this God is the only power but that he is only good.
And that was not the case with
the metadivine realm. Right?
That was morally neutral. But there's a moral claim
that's being made by the writers of the Hebrew Bible about this
supreme power, this God.
God is depicted as just, compassionate.
Morality therefore is perceived as conforming to the will of
God. And there are absolute
standards then of justice and reverence for life.
Now Kaufman says God is
demythologized, but even though he's
demythologized he's not rendered completely impersonal.
He's spoken of
anthropomorphically, so that we can capture his
interaction with human beings. This is the only way,
Kaufman says, you can write in any meaningful
sense about the interaction between God and humanity.
So he has to be
anthropomorphized. But the interaction between God
and humans, he says, happens not through nature but
through history. God is not known through
natural manifestations. He's known by his action in the
world in historical time and his relationship with a historical
people. I just want to read you a few
sentences from an article Kaufman wrote,
a different one from the one that you read.
But it sums up his idea that there's an abyss that separates
monotheism and polytheism and he says that it would be a mistake
to think that the difference between the two is
arithmetic--that a polytheistic tradition in which there are ten
gods is a lot more like monotheism than a polytheistic
tradition in which there are 40 gods,
because as you get smaller in number it gets closer to being
monotheistic. He says the pagan idea,
and I quote, "does not approach Israelite
monotheism as it diminishes the number of its gods.
The Israelite conception of
God's unity entails His sovereign transcendence over
all." That's the real issue.
"It rejects the pagan idea of a
realm beyond the deity, the source of mythology and
magic. The affirmation that the will
of God is supreme and absolutely free is a new and non-pagan
category of thought". That's in an article in the
Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People.
And he goes on again to say
that this affirmation isn't stated dogmatically anywhere but
it pervades Israelite creativity, biblical texts.
He also asserts that the idea
kind of developed over time, but that basically there was a
fundamental revolution and break,
and then within that there was some development of some of the
latent potential of that idea. So, which is it,
which is part of the question that came from over here,?
You have on the one hand the
claim that Israelite religion is essentially continuous with
Ancient Near Eastern polytheism. It's merely limiting the number
of gods worshipped to one, but it houses that God in a
temple. It offers him sacrifices and so
on. And then on the other hand we
have Kaufman's claim that Israelite religion is a radical
break from the religions of the Ancient Near Eastern.
Well, the value of Kaufman's
work, I think, lies in the insight that
monotheism and polytheism in the abstract--now I'm not sure they
exist anywhere in the world--but in the abstract are predicated
on divergent intuitions as systems.
They do seem to describe very different worlds.
And therefore as a system,
the difference between Israel's God and the gods of Israel's
neighbors was not merely quantitative.
It was qualitative. There's a qualitative
difference here. However when you read his work
it's clear that he often has to force his evidence and force it
rather badly. And it's simply a fact,
that practices and ideas that are not strictly or even
strongly monotheistic do appear in the Bible.
So perhaps those scholars who stress the continuity between
Israel and her environment are right after all.
And this impasse I think can be resolved to a large degree when
we realize that we have to make a distinction between--well
let's do it this way first. We're going to talk about a
distinction between the actual--I hate to say that as if
I can somehow show you a snapshot of what people did
3,000 years ago--but between the actual religious practices and
beliefs of the actual inhabitants of Israel and Judah,
we're going to call that Israelite-Judean religion:
what somebody back in the year 900 BCE might have done when
they went to the temple; and what they might have
thought they were doing when they went to the temple,
because I'm not sure it was necessarily what the author of
the Book of Deuteronomy says they were doing when they go to
the temple; so there's a difference between
what actual people, the inhabitants of Israel and
Judah, did--we'll call that Israelite
Judean religion--and the religion that's promoted,
or the worldview, I prefer that term,
that's being promoted by the later writers and editors of
biblical stories who are telling the story of these people--we'll
call that biblical religion, the religion or the worldview
that we can see emerging from many biblical texts.
That distinction is found in an
article in your Jewish Study Bible, an article by Steven
Geller (Geller 2004,2021-2040). You're going to be reading that
later on in the course. But be aware of that
distinction and that article. What second millennium Hebrews
and early first millennium Israelites or Judeans,
Judahites, actually believed or did is not always retrievable,
in fact probably not retrievable, to us.
We have some clues.
But in all likelihood Hebrews
of an older time, the patriarchal period,
the second millennium BCE--they probably weren't markedly
different from many of their polytheistic neighbors.
Archaeology would suggest that.
In some ways that's true.
We do find evidence in the
Bible as well as in the archaeological record,
of popular practices that are not strictly monotheistic.
The worship of little household
idols, local fertility deities, for example.
Most scholars conjecture that ancient Israelite-Judean
religion, the practices of the people in the kingdoms of Israel
and Judah in the first millennium BCE,
was maybe monolatrist. They might have promoted the
worship of one God, Yahweh, without denying the
existence of other gods and still kept their little idols
and fertility gods or engaged in various syncretistic practices.
It was probably monolatrist
rather than monotheistic, really asserting the reality of
only one God. Moreover our evidence suggests
that Yahweh was in many respects very similar to many of the gods
of Canaanite religion. And we'll be talking about some
of those at the appropriate time.
But continuities with Canaanite and Ancient Near Eastern
religions are apparent in the worship practices and the cult
objects of ancient Israel and Judah as they're described in
the biblical stories and as we find them in archaeological
discoveries. The Hebrew Bible also contains
sources that exhibit features of what Kaufman has described as
contemporary polytheisms. In Genesis 6--I mean,
the text you pointed out is a good one but even better,
go look at Genesis 6 where you have these nephilim,
these divine beings who descend to earth and they mate with
female humans. That's a real fluid boundary
between the divine and human realms, if you ask me.
But it only happens there,
in one spot. In many passages too Yahweh is
represented as presiding over a counsel of gods.
Certainly in the Psalms we have these sort of poetic and
metaphoric descriptions where God is, "Okay guys,
what do you think?" presiding--or he's one of them,
actually. In one Psalm--it's great--he's
one of the gods and he says, "You know, you guys don't know
what you're doing. Let me take over."
And he stands up in the council
and takes over. And there are other passages in
the Bible too that assume the existence of other gods
worshipped by other nations. So there's certainly stuff like
that in there you have to think about.
Now nevertheless, the most strongly monotheistic
sources of the Bible do posit a God that is qualitatively
different from the gods that populated the mythology of
Israel's neighbors and probably also Israelite- Judean religion.
In these sources the
Israelites' deity is clearly the source of all being.
He doesn't emerge from a
preexisting realm. He has no divine siblings.
His will is absolute.
His will is sovereign.
He's not affected by magical
coercion. And biblical monotheism,
biblical religion, assumes that this God is
inherently good. He's just.
He's compassionate. And human morality is
conformity to his will. Because certain texts of the
Bible posit this absolutely good God who places absolute moral
demands on humankind, biblical monotheism is often
referred to as ethical monotheism, so it's a term that
you'll see quite a bit: ethical monotheism.
Beginning perhaps as early as
the eighth century and continuing for several
centuries, literate and decidedly
monotheistic circles within Israelite society put a
monotheistic framework on the ancient stories and traditions
of the nation. They molded them into a
foundation myth that would shape Israelite and Jewish
self-identity and understanding in a profound way.
They projected their monotheism
onto an earlier time, onto the nation's most ancient
ancestors. Israelite monotheism is
represented in the Bible as beginning with Abraham.
Historically speaking it most
likely began much later, and probably as a minority
movement that grew to prominence over centuries.
But that later monotheism is projected back over Israel's
history by the final editors of the Bible.
And that creates the impression of the biblical religion that
Kaufman describes so well. But the biblical text itself,
the biblical record, is very conflicted,
and that's part of the fun of reading it.
And you will see the biblical record pointing to two different
and conflicting realities. You will find religious
practices and views that aren't strictly monotheistic and you'll
find later religious practices and views that are.
And the later sources,
which we might best call biblical religion,
are breaking therefore not only with Ancient Near Eastern
practices but also with Israelite-Judean practices,
with other elements within their own society.
So biblical religion as Kaufman
describes it, isn't, I think,
just a revolution of Israel against the nations.
I think it's also a civil war
of Israel against itself. And that's an aspect that is
really not entertained by Kaufman.
And I think it's an important one for us to entertain so that
we can allow the biblical text to speak to us in all its
polyphony. And not try to force it all
into one model: "Well, I know this is
monotheistic text so, gosh, I'd better come up with
an explanation of Genesis 6 that works with monotheism,"
You're going be freed of having to do that;
you're going to be freed of having to do that.
Let the text be contradictory
and inconsistent and difficult. Let it be difficult.
Don't homogenize it all.
So the differences between the
god of the monotheizing sources of the Bible and the gods of
surrounding Mesopotamian literature and older Israelite
ideas, perhaps, they're apparent from
the very first chapters of Genesis.
That's a creation story in Genesis 1, we're going to see,
a creation story that's added to the Pentateuch,
Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible,
Genesis through Deuteronomy. This creation story is added to
the Pentateuch probably in one of the last rounds of editing,
probably sixth century perhaps, we don't really know.
But Genesis 1 is a very
strongly monotheistic opening to the primeval myths that are then
contained in the next ten chapters of Genesis.
So next time we're going to
start with a close reading and examination of Genesis 1 through
4. We're going to read these
stories with an eye to Israel's adaptation of Near Eastern
motifs and themes to sort of monotheize those motifs and
themes and express a new conception of God and the world
and humankind.
