God or gods?
June 19,
2020
Jews are monotheists,
right? They believe in one God, Creator of heaven and earth, right? In Judaism
there are no other gods. God is God. Period. These statements are certainly
true of contemporary Judaism, and they have been true of Judaism for a very
long time. Judaism is one of the world’s three great monotheistic faiths.
Indeed it is the mother faith of the other two, Christianity and Islam. We owe
the Jews a great deal in that regard.
The Jews have always been
monotheists, right? The Hebrew Bible, which is the Protestant Old Testament and
most of the Roman Catholic Old Testament, expresses nothing but monotheism,
right? The Jews always knew that there is only one true God, right? Well, actually
no. These statements about Judaism are not right. I want here to examine what
ancient Israel’s relationship to God and the gods actually was, and in the
beginning it wasn’t monotheistic.
Scholars tell us that for
centuries before Judaism became monotheistic it was what we call henotheistic.
Henotheism fully accepts that there are lots of gods and goddesses, it just
asserts that a particular people has and is to worship only one God. The texts
of the Hebrew Bible that were written before the mid-sixth century BCE express
henotheism not monotheism. The matter can get a bit confusing because in a few
places a later monotheistic editor has inserted monotheistic verses into texts
that were originally henotheistic. There’s nothing we can do about that. We are
so used to considering Judaism always to have been monotheistic that we read
the Old Testament as though all of its texts were monotheistic when many of
them really aren’t. I’ll illustrate that point with just a few examples.
Consider for starters
Psalm 86:8a. It reads: “There is none like you among the gods, O Lord.” We have here a clear reference to
the existence of gods other than Yahweh, the god of the early Hebrew people.
Notice how the word Lord is
printed here. It’s printed in what’s called “small caps.” Many translators of
the Old Testament from the Hebrew into English put Lord printed that way in their translation when the Hebrew
text has the four letters YHVH. YHVH is the name of the god of the ancient Israelites.
It isn’t a word that means God. It was originally the name of a god. The
name is usually transliterated into English as Yahweh (and sometimes for
inexplicable reasons as Jehovah) with a w in Yahweh rather than a v because for
reasons I’ve never really understood we use the German transliteration in which
the Hebrew letter vav becomes w. Many translators put “Lord” there rather than Yahweh out of respect for the Jewish
tradition of never speaking the sacred name of God. Be that as it may, Psalm 86
accepts that there are many gods. It names one of them, the god named Yahweh.
Yahweh was the only god the ancient Hebrews were supposed to worship and to
obey. Psalm 86 is henotheistic not monotheistic because it accepts the reality
of many gods but names only one, Yahweh, as the one to Whom the psalmist prays
in the psalm.
Next consider the rather
obscure story of Jacob which appears at Genesis 35:1-4. In that story God tells
Jacob to relocate to Bethel and to build an altar there. We read:
So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, ‘Put
away the foreign gods that are among you….’ So they gave to Jacob all the
foreign gods they had, and the rings that were in their ears [though Jacob hadn’t
asked for those]; and Jacob hid them under the oak that was near Shechem.
There are several striking things
about this story. Most important for our purposes is the fact that Jacob’s
people had “foreign gods” among them. Notice how Jacob, one of the great
patriarchs of Israel, relates to those foreign gods. He doesn’t call them false
gods. He doesn’t call them idols. The people clearly gave him physical objects
that Jacob at least called foreign gods. He could have destroyed them, but he
didn’t. He buried them under a tree apparently for save keeping. He had known
that some of his people had had foreign gods for some time. How else would he
have known to ask the people to give them to him? There is no suggestion that
Jacob was angry at or even upset with his people for having had foreign gods.
We must conclude I think
that Jacob fully accepted the reality of gods other than his god Yahweh. He
worshiped only the one god of his Hebrew people, but in this story at least it
seems that he had no problem with other people worshiping other quite real
gods and goddesses. Jacob behaves here like a henotheist not a monotheist.
Jacob lived many centuries before Judaism discovered monotheism, so that he was
a henotheist not a monotheist is not surprising.
For a final example let’s
look at one of the more famous passages from the Old Testament. At Genesis
20:2-3, part of the Ten Commandments, we read: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of
the land of Egypt, our of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods
before me.” If you’re like most Christians you probably hear this verse as an
expression of monotheism. It isn’t. Notice that so far from denying the reality
of gods other than Yahweh it tacitly accepts that there are such gods. The
verse doesn’t have Yahweh say “there are no other gods besides me.” It
says only that Yahweh’s Hebrew people are to have only Yahweh as their one and
only god.
There really is no doubt
that before the mid-sixth century BCE the Hebrews were henotheists not monotheists,
but Hebrew faith changed during the Babylonian Exile.[1]
We see that change happening in the part of the book of Isaiah that scholars
call Second Isaiah. Roughly speaking Second Isaiah is chapters 40 to 55 of
Isaiah. It was written by any unknown author during the Babylonian Exile. At
Isaiah 45:5a we find one of the earliest statements of true monotheism in human
history:
I am the Lord, and there is
no other;
besides me there is no god.
There’s another statement of true
monotheism at Isaiah 46:9b,c
Remember this, and consider,
recall it to
mind you
transgressor,
remember the
former things
of old;
for I am God, and there is no
other;
I am God, and
there is no one
like me.
In verses like these from Second
Isaiah we see human beings discovering to discerning their way to true
monotheism in human history. The great Jewish faith transitioned from
henotheism to true monotheism.
Does the truth that the
ancient Hebrews were henotheists not monotheists for much of their history
matter to your faith? Does it matter to you that the Ten Commandments state
henotheism rather than monotheism? Let me assure you that it shouldn’t. We
Christians know full well that there is no God but God even if we say that God
is somehow Three in One. My point here is more historical than spiritual. I
believe that we really should read the Bible for what it actually says rather
than for what we think is says, or what we have been told it says, or that we
want it to say. In many but not all of its verses the Hebrew Bible expresses a
henotheistic faith not a monotheistic one. Our Jewish forbears in the faith got
to monotheism eventually. I for one thank God that they did.
[1] For
a more complete discussion of the development of monotheism during the
Babylonian Exile see Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s
Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Revised Edition, Volume Two, The Old
Testament, Coffee Press, Briarwood, NY, 2019, pp.281-290.
No comments:
Post a Comment