Reviewed by Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein
(Rachack Review)
As Bible
scholars, archeologists, and historians learn more about the Ancient Near East,
they increasingly paint a picture wherein various ancient nations understood
their own deity/deities as uniquely powerful and potent in similar ways that
the Bible describes God. The book under review deals with the theological
consequences of this view of history, questioning if and how the Bible’s God differed
from all the other gods of the Ancient Near East. It also addresses what the
possible theological consequences of these scholarly findings might be for the
contemporary religious community. It is an edited volume with contributions
from thirteen different scholars, each of whom touches on these questions from
a slightly different angle.
THE PROBLEM OF LOOKALIKES
To better state
the problem, the Bible presents God as different in kind from all the other so-called
“gods” of the ancient world. Yet, many of the same descriptions used in the
Bible in reference to God — including claims of His uniqueness — have
parallels in other texts from the Ancient Near East in describing those other
gods. For example, just as the Bible depicts God as aiding the Israelites in
conquering the Holy Land, so does the Mesha Stele similarly depict Chemosh as
aiding the Moabites in freeing Moabite lands from the Israelites. The attentive
reader may even catch whiffs of these parallels in passages like Jephthah’s
assertion that Chemosh gave the Ammonites/Moabites their land in the same way
that God gave the Israelites their land (Jud. 11:24). Additionally, scholars
have pointed to the struggles between Marduk and Tiamat in Babylonian mythology
as reminiscent of the battle between God and the Leviathan in the Bible (Isa.
27:1, Ps. 74:14). In fact, there is even some evidence that the God of the
Bible was recognized in ancient non-Biblical sources as a legitimate entity — just
not as the One God, rather as one of a multitude of deities. So what makes Him
different?
For secular
non-believers who do not view the Bible as theologically binding, these
parallels and lookalikes pose no problems, as it is simply a historical oddity
that the writers of the Bible claimed the same things about their God that the
writers of other ancient literatures claimed about their god(s). In fact, to
such people these parallels merely reinforce their unfavorable conceptions of
religion and the Bible. But religious Jews and Christians believe in the revelatory
message presented by the Bible of a Single God who created the world, guides
history, and gives laws (to name but a few of His roles). For us, these
parallels in extra-Biblical texts are not a mere oddity, but may pose a
theological problem. How can God be described as unique and unlike all other
gods, if in fact the Bible’s descriptions of Him are not all that different
from the ways ancient pagans described their respective gods? All of the essays
in this book try to address this question in one form or another.
THE
COMPARATIVE APPROACH
The first essay
featured in this book is written by Patrick D. Miller Jr., who approaches the
issue at hand from the point of view of comparative religion. He, like many of
the other contributors to this volume, focuses on how God as depicted in the
Bible is both similar to and different from the gods of the neighboring peoples
(“convergence and differentiation”). In that paradigm, Miller follows Frank
Moore Cross’ understanding that the Bible’s conception of the One God stems
from the Israelite’s Canaanite milieu, seeing that One God as the merging of the
ancestral God (often referred to with El epithets) and YHWH. These similarities
to Canaanite divinities are tempered by the ways in which God in the Bible
differs from other gods in the neighborhood (for example, in His lack of female
consort, His aniconic worship, and the meaning of His name as a conjugation of
the verb “to be”), which mark the Bible’s God as different from the rest.
Brent A. Strawn
similarly finds it too simplistic to argue that the One God of the Bible is
simply just another one of “the gang.” Yet, he also finds it
unsophisticatedly-apologetic to argue that parallels between the Bible’s God
and other ancient deities are actually the results of a Biblical polemic that
sought to clarify that whatever epithets or events idolaters attributed to
other gods should actually be attributed to God. That happens to be the
approach championed by Shadal, and is described by M. E. Indik as the prophets
of the Bible “trolling” idolaters. But in rejecting this approach, Strawn (like
Miller) chooses to affirm that there are similarities and dissimilarities
between God and the other ancient gods, which he justifies by way of various
arguments from Christian theology. I freely admit that I did not quite follow
the fine points of his arguments.
Another
contributor, J. Andrew Dearman, offers a similar discussion that centers on the
nomenclatures (i.e., names/epithets) used by the Bible to describe God, and how
they compare and contrast with those applied to other deities.
The problem
with this line of discourse is that talking about influence and/or
differentiation implies a conception of the Divine that is wholly manmade. In
other words, if Israelites’ conception of God was formed as a result of their
interactions with other peoples like the Canaanites — whether to imitate them
or obviate them — as opposed to pure direct Divine revelation, then those
theological conceptions were created by people and do not necessarily reflect
any actual ontological/metaphysical reality. While this approach might satisfy
students interested in the “history of religion,” an approach that focuses too
heavily on the comparative aspect cannot solve any theological problems
for an orthodoxically religious person. Some of the contributions to this book
raise this issue, but do not offer a compelling answer to the quandary.
NEW
THEOLOGIES
Robert
Goldenberg — one of only two Jewish contributors to this edited volume — follows
a self-styled “Midrashic” approach that argues that Biblical statements about
God’s uniqueness reflect rhetorical exaggeration aimed at swaying Israelites
away from worshipping other gods and remaining within the covenantal fold of
worshipping only the God of Israel. While Goldenberg devotes much space to
showing how the rabbis in the Midrash would sometimes interpret individual passages
in the Bible against their prima facia reading, he fails to realize that
his reading totally upends the Bible’s overall monotheistic message; he is not
simply downplaying the impact of select passages.
Goldenberg also
neglects to flesh out what sort of theological viewpoint he is ultimately advocating.
Does Goldenberg mean that the Bible maintains that other deities besides for
the One God exist and are potent, but that Israelites should simply not worship
them due to their covenant with the One God? Are non-Israelites then free to
worship whomever and however they want? What does this mean for the possibility
of a universalist message in the Bible?
In some ways,
Goldenberg’s essay is similar to the point made by Jon D. Levenson — the other
Jewish contributor to this volume. Levenson argues that the Bible purposely
reduced its presentation of idolatry to a ridiculous sort of fetish with no
coherent theology in order to preclude its possibility as a viable alternative
to the worship of God. He implies that the prophets of the Bible would really
admit that alternate, equally-potent gods exist, but that they downplayed that
reality as a way of rejecting Canaanite paganism out of a sort of racist
anti-Canaanite ideology. The bulk of his essay draws parallels between the
Israelite rejection of Canaanite paganism and the Christian rejection of
Judaism.
Othmar Keel’s essay
is explicitly built on Levenson’s perspective. It deals with the issue of the
aforementioned parallels by emphasizing how Judaism and Christianity could
learn from the pagan mindsets with which they broke by renewing the pagan
celebration of nature and eroticism that has been downplayed by Judeo-Christian
thought. This particular essay does not actually answer the problem of
lookalikes, but rather seeks to partially reconcile Biblical religion with
paganism. Essentially, it turns the question on its head and instead of
problematizing the similarities between ancient deities and the God of the
Bible, he seeks to use those similarities as a springboard for reintroducing
some of the previously-rejected pagan ideals into organized religion. This
reviewer is left unsatisfied with Keel’s approach because instead of offering a
descriptive resolution to the established, normative theologies, the essayist
simply proposes a radically-new theology that may or may not be compatible with
the old.
Bob Becking
reacts to the issue that this book raises by noting that there are three
theological models broadly found in the Bible: “intolerant monotheism,” which
views the worship or acknowledgement of other gods as abominable; “conditional
acceptance,” which acknowledges the existence of other deities, but calls for
exclusive worship of God (often called monolatry); and “lending deities,” which
is a pluralistic perspective whereby one’s theological affiliations can be more
fluid and one can be loyal to multiple gods at the same time.
The implication
of Becking’s presentation is that the problem at the heart of this book is only
significant if one follows the first approach, but if one followed the latter
two approaches, parallels between God and other ancient deities pose no theological
issues. However, this resolution too is insufficient because the Bible
overwhelming favors the first approach and that has become the normative
theology. In fact, the “conditional acceptance approach” is only mentioned in
the Bible when being rejected, and the syncretic “lending deities” approach is
only really seen in post-Biblical sources (like the Elephantine Papyri, to which
Becking refers). So like Keel, Becking is essentially evading the issue by
calling for the acceptance of an alternate theology.
CONTINUITY
AND SURVIVAL
In his
contribution to this volume, M. Patrick Graham offers a learned
compare/contrast essay between God and the Moabite god Chemosh using Moral
Foundations Theory as a framework. Ultimately, he deals with the question of
Divine lookalikes by noting that only God continues to survive and be the
center of worship for a living community, while other ancient deities — no
matter how similar to God they might have been in ancient times (like Chemosh)
— are outdated and barely remembered nowadays. This approach very much
resonates with me, as the related phenomenon of Jewish continuity and survival
has maintained a prominent place in Jewish Thought (or apologetics, if you
prefer).
MANMADE
REVELATION
The book’s
editor Collin Cornell penned an essay that outlines and rejects two approaches,
before proposing a third view. Firstly, he cites the idea that the deities of
old appear to resemble God due to demonic trickery meant to entice man towards
the sin of idolatry. He rejects this idea on the grounds that it remains
unsupported within the text of the Bible itself. Secondly, he cites and
dismisses the idea that God and (all or some of) the pagan deities of the
ancient world reflect “rays of truth” and could all be subsumed within a
greater Deity above them all. This idea is rejected because it essentially
admits that He is but one of many similar gods who are all part of a greater
truth, which runs counter to the Bible’s claims of God’s incomparability. As I
will explain below, I believe that we can tweak Cornell’s second approach to
come up with a perspective that jibes with traditional sensibilities.
The third
approach — which Cornell seems to adopt — argues something along the lines that
all gods described by ancient texts including the Bible are simply made up by
people (which is why they resemble each other in so many ways), but by dint of
His own Divine decision, the One Real God chose to reveal himself precisely as
depicted in the Bible.
The problem
with this idea is that it aligns too closely with the secular or atheist
perspective that God and religion are merely man-made phenomena. Moreover,
overly stressing the notion that God uses human-created conceptions and
languages to reveal Himself could lead to a problematic relativism. In other
words, if any human conception or language could be seen as a revelation of
God, then it becomes difficult to discern which religious texts or beliefs
genuinely reflect Divine Truth and which do not, leading to a potentially
circular and unreliable understanding of theology.
Perhaps some of
this criticism of Cornell’s approach may be alleviated by appealing to the idea
often taught by R. Dr. Dovid Gottlieb (in his updated version of the Kuzari
Principle) that no other God besides the One depicted in the Bible has ever
been claimed to have revealed Himself in a mass revelation to people who
survived. This might be the “smoking gun” that makes Him different from all the
other gods, but does not resolve the
problems with Cornell’s proposal.
A
TRADITIONAL APPROACH
As an Orthodox
Jew, I asses the problem that this book attempts to address and the various
approaches taken therein from a traditionalist perspective. Instead of looking
for a new theology that obviates the problem, I would instead seek out a resolution
that respects the accepted contours of Jewish theology, but still answers as
much as possible. Some might consider this apologetics.
My favored
approach draws on Jewish traditions about an Urmonotheismus that existed
before the advent of idolatry. In the time of Adam, it was abundantly clear to
mankind that there is only One God, and that He alone is all-mighty and worthy
of man’s worship. However, subsequent to Adam’s death — in the lifetime of his
grandson Enosh — the worship of multiple deities was introduced (for various
theological, political, sociological, and/or psychological reasons).
Essentially, these early pagans balkanized the powers and purviews of the One
God into independent deities, each of whom was limited to a specific role. Some
of those gods were said to rule/represent elements of nature (like war,
fertility, weather, wisdom, or death), while other gods were said to function
as guardians of specific nations, cities, or geographic regions.
Despite the
spread of polytheism and paganism, there always remained a few stalwart
monotheists who recognized the uniqueness of the One God. We are familiar with
such characters in the Bible as Noah, Melchizedek, and Abraham who preserved
that early tradition and became the earliest heroes of Judaism which continues
in that vein. Perhaps the most famous Jewish source which formulates this view
of history is Maimonides’ Laws of Avodah Zarah (ch. 1).
In the pagan
conception of divinity, “the gods” are always limited by something that the
Greeks called Fate and the Romans called Fortune. Those limitations on the Divine
may be tacit admissions that there really is One God under whom all the other
gods reign, much like some Eastern Religions claim that their multitude of gods
are really inflections of a single god. Indeed, the Talmud (BT Menahot
110) claims that even idolaters recognized God as “the God of gods,” which
might be an allusion to this paradigm. Yehezkel Kaufmann dubs this pagan
conception the “primordial realm,” wherein the ancient deities were said to not
have final say. This often plays out in the ancient mythologies when the gods’
plans are ultimately thwarted by a power above them. Some of these points are
made in Stephen B. Chapman’s essay in this volume, which argues that the God of
the Bible differs in kind from all the other deities in the ancient world in
that He was not understood to be subservient to fate, but instead controlled
it.
In light of
this understanding, parallels to Biblical depictions of the One God in
extra-Biblical pagan literature may be rooted in earlier descriptions and
conceptions of the One God that predated the advent of idolatry. Idolaters used
those expressions and ideas for their own purposes, mythologizing various
aspects of God in the tales they told about the trials of their deities.
Yet, the Bible
preserves those verbiages as reflecting their original monotheistic intent.
Indeed, although rabbinic tradition ascribes the Book of Psalms to King David,
it also states that he included in the book psalms written by pre-Mosaic
monotheists Adam, Melchizedek, and Abraham (BT Bava Batra 14b). Thus,
even if some of the verbiage used in Psalms resembles notions that contemporary
pagans were saying about their gods, it could be argued that Psalms was not simply
mimicking them but rather harkening back to a tradition that predated them and
restoring their original intent. If this could be said about Psalms, the same
could be said about other parts of the Bible. That could explain, for example,
why Isaiah depicts the One God as riding on a light cloud (Isa. 19:1),
which very much resembles Ugaritic descriptions (that seemingly predate Isaiah)
of Baal doing the same.
Moreover, there
is ample room in Jewish theology to view the ancient pagan deities as real
entities in ways that do not detract from God’s potency and uniqueness. In this
view, those ancient deities would function much like Satan, angels, demons,
astrological forces, or the like — as cogs in a sort of neo-Platonic system that
God uses to administer the world. These characters or forces are differentiated
from God by their lack of freewill. They cannot make decisions on their own and
may not be worshipped; they simply function like tools used to carry out God’s
will (this has been studied by Jewish scholars like Benjamin D. Sommer). Some
might take this idea a step further in viewing those ancient deities as parts
of the Divine whole, or at the very least imperfect reflections of the Divine. This
is a more polished version of the second approach that Cornell rejected. Such views
are advocated by Jewish Universalists in the mold of Benamozegh and Christian
thinkers like Schlimm (whose iteration of this idea is explicitly rejected in Strawn’s
essay).
FAKE
NEWS
Perhaps the simplest
approach to the questions at the heart of this book might be to revive a controversial
idea proposed by Jan Assmann known as the “Mosaic Distinction.” He argued that
the Bible introduced a new way of assessing the deities of the ancient world
that was totally inconsistent with the more liberal polytheistic milieu: the
Bible differentiates between the One God and all other gods by simply labelling
the latter as false. All the literary or poetic parallels between Him and other
deities cannot sidestep the simple assertion that those deities are merely
false, non-entities, while only the God of the Bible actually exists. To put it
in contemporary terms, assertions along the lines that Chemosh gave the
Moabites their land are simply “fake news” because there is no such thing as
Chemosh outside of the imaginations of its worshippers and other tolerant
polytheists who were willing to go along with them. Yet those people who came
up with these lies have a vested interest in making them sound believable,
hence the similarities between the fake gods and the Real God.
Ultimately — as
Josey Bridges Snyder writes in the conclusion to her essay — no data unearthed
from the ancient world could prove or disprove the existence of God. That is
why belief in Him is called “faith.” Yet, God gave us brains and He fully
expects us to use them. The fact that ancient lookalikes existed does not
detract from our belief and devotion to God, it is simply an interesting
historical tidbit that can potentially help us better understand the
religio-cultural milieu in which our ancestors lived and with what outside temptations
the Ancient Israelites had to contend.
CONCLUSION
Many of the
contributions to this fascinating volume touch on my concerns, but do not fully
flesh them out. This book is addressed to believing Jews and Christians who are
bothered by the above-described questions from a theological perspective and
seek to square the findings of Biblical studies and archeology with their own
religious beliefs. Because of that, I — as an observant Jew — am within the
book’s target audience, and I therefore felt that my responses are fully
warranted.
Essentially,
this book presents a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between
the God of the Bible and the deities of the Ancient Near East — a topic that is
both challenging and essential for those of us who take our faith seriously,
but also interact with the scholarly world. While some essays may not have
fully addressed my concerns, the diversity of perspectives offered here is
invaluable. All in all, I found most of the essays to be quite scholarly and
erudite, and even those which only tangentially touched on the issues at the
core of this book contributed to the discussion.
The contributions encourage readers to engage deeply with the material and to confront these theological questions with both intellectual rigor and spiritual introspection. As an Orthodox Jew, I appreciate the respectful and scholarly manner in which these thorny issues are handled, even if the answers are not always clear-cut or even acceptable to me.
