Monotheism: Judaism

Monotheism: Judaism. History and concepts. Monotheism (monos = one, single, only; theos = god) is the exclusive worship of one God. It originated with the ancient Jews. However, there are two approaches as to how it originated: the traditional religious narrative, and the modern revised scholarly narrative. Most Jewish and Christian denominations have no problem recognizing the scholarly account. However, 'fundamentalist' streams, such as ultra-Orthodox Judaism or Evangelical Christianity, generally reject the modern account, and try to give a scholarly defense of the traditional version, not usually very successfully. The accounts are not contradictory in all their details, though. 1. Traditional account and concepts According to the traditional account, which can be found in the first five books (Pentateuch) of the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible, or the Torah, Abraham received a revelation from the One God in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq). This God told him to stop worshiping his ancestral idols, to leave his homeland, Ur of the Chaldees, and to set out for a land in the West under God's guidance. Abraham settled in Palestine and there he began to bring up his family in the worship of the Supreme God. He gave birth to two sons, Isaac and Ishmael. When Isaac was still a young boy, God's angel came to Abraham and told him to sacrifice him. Abraham set out with Isaac and under God's guidance arrived at Mt Moriah, said to be the site of the future Jerusalem temple. There he bound Isaac on the altar and brought the knife down to slaughter him. At this point, an angel of the Lord intervened and told Abraham that this was just a test. (In Hebrew this is called the Aqeidah, or the binding of Isaac. It plays a vivid role in Christianity and the Western religious imagination, too). The story can be interpreted as a further weaning away of Abraham from pagan traditions, such as child-sacrifice: the one God of Abraham, Lord of the Universe, does not want his devotees to engage in such immoral practices. The story continues with an expansion of the belief in the One God to the members of Abraham's growing family. Isaac had a son, in turn, called Jacob. On one of his travels, Jacob encountered an angel of the Lord, who wrestled with him. Jacob refused to let the angel go until he had extracted a blessing from him. He succeeded, and after their encounter, the angel renamed Jacob Israel. This, of course, is the name of the Jewish nation, and it means 'one who struggles with God'. The story thus encapsulates the idea that Israel is God's blessed representative in the world, but is also a nation that struggles with the conception of the divine, and what the divine means for human consciousness and human history. Israel the nation is also called by the prophet Isaiah 'a light unto the nations', meaning that Israel is the messenger to give news of the One Supreme God to the other non-Jewish nations of the world. Jews themselves saw this as bringing the message of ethical monotheism to the nations, while not insisting that they themselves become Israelites or Jews with full observance of the ritual aspects of Judaism. Christians later believed that the conversion of the nations to monotheism had to take the form of belief in the resurrected Jewish Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, believed by them to be the 'Son of God'. We will talk about this in another lecture. We will also talk about the expansion of monotheism in Islam in another lecture: the first Muslims were Arabs, who self-consciously identified themselves as ‘Ishmaelites’, that is, as descendants of Abraham’s other son, Ishmael, mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. In other words, the broader story of monotheism as a mass religious movement, is tied up with Abraham, which is why monotheistic religions are sometimes called the Abrahamite or Abrahamic faiths. Returning to the traditional Biblical-Judeo-Christian narrative, however: Israel-Jacob had twelve sons, and each of these sons bear the name of a tribe of Israel. The oldest son, for example, is Judah, from whom the name Jew ultimately derives. The reason why 'Israelites' are now called 'Jews' is because this tribe was one of the only two tribes to survive the destruction of the Israelite and Judahite state after the Assyrians and Babylonians laid waste to them in the 8th and 6th centuries b.c.e. The next important milestone on the traditional story of the Jewish patriarchs is the exile in Egypt. Jacob's oldest son, Joseph, was sold by his jealous brothers to bedouin traders who sold him on to the Egyptian pharoah. Under God's guidance, he rose to become a prince in Egypt, and ultimately helped his repentant brothers to escape a famine in their (now) homeland of Canaan (Palestine/the Land of Israel). However, when the friendly Pharoah died, a hostile pharoah came to power and enslaved the Israelites in Egypt for 430 years. After this time, God again revealed himself to the Jews through the prophet Moses. Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt and towards Canaan. This story has become the paradigm in Western culture for national and personal liberation, partly due to its adaptation by Christians later. Due to the rebelliousness of the Israelites, though, Moses was not permitted to lead them into Canaan itself. Instead, they remained in the desert for 40 years until the rebellious generation had died off. Then under the guidance of Joshua, Moses' successor, the Israelites entered Canaan and conquered it from the various pagan tribes, destroying and subjugating many of them in the process. This laid the foundation for the first monotheistic state, to speak a little anachronistically. At first the Israelite people were ruled by local judges, but gradually the twelve tribes were forged into one unity by King David and King Solomon. The Exodus from Egypt is narrated in the second book of the Torah (Hebrew: Law, Teaching, Guidance). The other great event there is the giving of the Torah, or divine law, to the Jews at Mount Sinai. This consists of intermixed ritual and ethical precepts. The former lay out in detail the sacrificial cult, i.e. all the sacrifices which atone for sins, deliberate and accidental, and which express gratitude to God, and so on. The latter is best exemplified by the 10 commandments. The idea is that this ethical-ritual Torah would be the document by which the Israelite kingdom would be ruled: it would be a model theocracy, to be emulated by other nations, or to be spread by Israelite conquest. The third element, as should clear by now, is the narrative element: the Torah and the larger Hebrew Bible, contains the narrative of the creation of the world and humanity by one God, and especially the narrowing down of history until Abraham and the Jews are chosen to bear this God’s message. The narrative also contains the story of how the Jews permanently rebelled against God’s message, and then repented and returned to the worship of the one God. This narrative element is an important aspect of the monotheistic message: history for the Hebrews has sacred meaning. That is, history and the passage of events on earth, is not cyclical or accidental: it is moving towards a goal, and each event has significance in hastening on this goal. With monotheism, to some extent, there enters the idea of human progress, albeit in light of the divine. It’s a concept to keep in mind. What then is history driving towards? The model for Hebrew history and eschatology (the ‘science of the end-time’) comes from the events of the Israelite kingdom. Hebrew history is seen as moving towards a time when the nations of the earth will be united under a great Israelite king, the Messiah, in the worship of the one God. This was a devout wish. In reality, events were far from the ideal, as one might imagine. Israel was a tiny kingdom stuck between two super-powers: Egypt and Assyria (later: Babylon, Persia – same territory, different ethnic rulers). For most of its history, even the small Israelite kingdom was disunited and squabbling. In fact, the united Israelite kingdom lasted only for about 100 years under David and Solomon. Before them, as mentioned, each tribe partook in a not very cooperative confederation of tribes; after them, civil war broke out between Solomon's successors and the Israelite kingdom broke up into a northern kingdom, the Israelite kingdom consisting of 10 tribes, and the Judahite or Judean kingdom, consisting of 2 tribes (Judah and Benjamin). In 787 b.c.e. the Israelite kingdom was conquered and destroyed by the Assyrians; in 583, the Judahite kingdom was exiled en masse to Babylon by the Babylonians. However, about 70 years later, the Judeans were permitted to return by the Persians (who had conquered the Babylonians). Judea was thus the sole survivor of Abraham's monotheistic project. It was at this stage that eschatological visions start being developed: the brief united Israelite kingdom under David and Solomon is deeply mourned for and now envisioned as the ideal kingdom towards which history is moving. In the future, this kingdom will be a refuge for all the returned Israelite exiles, and it will be a beacon of light for all the nations of the world. Its ruler, the Messiah, will be a just world ruler, presiding over Jerusalem, which will contain a temple where the whole world will worship the one God. Peace (shalom) will rule; the wolf will lie with the lamb, swords will be beaten into plough-shares (Isaiah). This vision was stated in different forms, while history itself continued to get worse for the small Jewish nation. After the Persians, it was their lot to be conquered by new super-powers, this time from the West: first the Greeks, then the Romans. The contrast between ideal visions of history and grim reality further fueled the Messianic dream, and indeed the nature of the dream takes much of its substance from the very smallness of the Jewish nation as compared with the vastness and power of all the nations that conquered it. Judea really was on the cross-roads of world power. Its visions of liberation have thus always had what might now be called an ‘anti-imperialist’ bent: Abraham flees Babylon, home of the tower of Babel; Moses flees Egypt, home of the dictator-pharoahs; the Maccabees rebel against the Hellenic imperialism of Alexander’s successors [see below for details]; and the last empire is the biggest: the Romans. It was the Romans who in fact destroyed the Jewish temple for good (the locus of the Messianic vision) and forbade Jews to settle in Judea. For two thousand years, until the 1948 creation of the State of Israel, Jews thus existed exclusively as a diaspora nation. Jews interpreted this as a punishment for not following God's law, but also as an opportunity to spread Judaic monotheism to the nations. Christians interpreted it as God's punishment of the Jews for not accepting Jesus, the Jewish Messiah and Son of God. They developed the Hebrew Messianic vision in a different direction. In order to understand the Hebrew and Christian visions of history, we should explain a bit more about this concept of the Messiah, mentioned several times already. The word comes from the Hebrew root M-SH-KH (mashakh/mashiakh), meaning 'to anoint with oil'. It referred primarily to the king of Israel, who was anointed with oil at his coronation by the high priest. But even more specifically it referred to the figure of David, the first king to unite all the Israelite tribes. After the subsequent break-up and destruction of first Israel and then Judah, the Messiah-king thus became a potent symbol not just from the past, but for the future: the Messiah will be a ruler who will reinstitute unity for Israel, and finally complete the mission of extending monotheism, knowledge and love of the one God, to the whole world. Jews and Christians differ about the identity of the Messiah: for Jews he is still a figure to come. For Christians, Jesus of Nazareth was the awaited Messiah figure. He was killed by the Romans, it is true. This, for Jews, argued against his being the awaited savior-figure. For Christians, though, the monotheistic kingdom brought by Jesus was 'not of this world': i.e. it wasn't an earthly Judaic kingdom, but a spiritual kingdom now accessible through following the life-model of Jesus. Even among Christian kingdoms, though, and especially after Christianity became an imperial Roman religion under Constantine, the earthly element of Messianism played a strong role: conquest and conversion of pagans to Christianity and rule by an anointed holy Roman emperor takes many aspects from the Judaic vision of the Messiah-king. 2. Revisions to the traditional account and concepts The modern scholarly revised narrative sees the history of monotheism a bit differently. Firstly, the traditional narrative sees the entire Pentateuch as being written 'by the finger of God' (etsba’ Elohim), and revealed to Moses in the Sinai desert all at once. Thus knowledge of one supreme God starts all at once in human history. The revised narrative notes that there are several strands in the Pentateuch and the rest of the Hebrew Bible. They explain this by position a “documentary hypothesis”, namely that the Torah consists of several documents and not just one Mosaic document. Scholars have long noted contradictions in narrative and legal portions of the text, and they have theorized that the Pentateuch is a composite text consisting of older and later traditions, which with careful analysis can yield a chronological history of the development of Israelite religion. These traditions are partly oral folklore, partly the writings of different priestly, prophetic, and monarchical schools in ancient Israel. Often the sources are called by scholars by the name used in the text for God: J for the parts of the Pentateuch that use the ancient name Jehovah (or Yahweh) for the Israelite deity, E for the parts that use Elohim (God); but there is also P, for the parts that concentrate on Priestly elements of religion, and so on. One of the most ancient strands is J, the one that depicts Yahweh, the Israelite God, as one among several gods, albeit the most powerful. That strand also allows for Israelites to worship and sacrifice to Yahweh at different places in Canaan, while P insists that there can only be one place of sacrifice which is controlled by a priestly caste. There even seem to be quite a few native Canaanite elements in this early Yahweh-worship: casting of lots, the use of bulls as symbols of the divine, a female consort to Yahweh called Ashera, and maybe also a cult of the deification of the Israelite king. Yahweh himself is depicted in anthropomorphic terms: he walks in the Garden of Eden, and he appears sitting on a throne like a super-human figure in prophetic writings like Amos. Many of the Psalms that praise his might are highly similar to Phoenician and Canaanite hymns praising Baal and other local gods - which have been found in archeological digs on tablets. Based on the analysis of the composite text of the Hebrew Bible, scholars have created a revised history of monotheism and Israelite theocracy. They call early Israelite religion henotheism [hena = one vs mono = only], the worship of one special God among other gods, which however still believes in the existence and even power of lesser deities. Some scholars maintain that Egyptian henotheism, found in the cult set up Akhenaten [d. 1336 b.c], may have been influential on Israelite religion. Scholars also see Israelites gradually rather than suddenly emerging as a state and religious entity among the Canaanites: instead of a sudden entrance to and conquest of the land, they see a small band of outsider nomads entering the land and then mixing with the local inhabitants to produce different degrees of henotheism that mingle native and outside elements in the emerging Israelite religion. At first, their native god can be sacrificed to at any ‘high place’ [Hebrew: bama], i.e. at any sacred location marked by natural beauty, say a spring, a mountain, an ancient oak-tree, a spring etc. In other words, this worship differs little from pagan or shamanic worship, with its emphasis on the sacredness of the natural world. Then, however, Hebrew prophets and priests polemicize against this free worship, where every family father is his own priest (i.e. can slaughter animals to expiate his family’s sins or express their gratitude to the god). Now only a handful of places are sacred to Yahweh, usually those associated with the Israelite patriarchs; the other places are forbidden and dangerous. Furthermore, only one tribe (the sons of Levi) can perform sacrifices in these sanctioned temples. Ultimately, with the passage of time, only one sacred cult is permitted, the Jerusalem temple, where the king of all the Israelite tribes now resides from the time of David. Scholars maintain that the Hebrew Bible and Torah, especially the Deuteronomist, rewrite the history of Israelite religion to make it seem as if this end result of a long religious evolution was sanctioned by God from even before the Israelites settled in Canaan. In their opinion, however, this full-blown centralized theocratic temple cult at Jerusalem comes not with Moses (1200 bce) but with a later king, Hezekiah or even Josiah, who ruled in c.700 bce, and perhaps, according to some, even after the return of the Jews from Babylon with Ezra in 520. The Babylonian exile, for these scholars, is crucial in the shift from henotheism to monotheism: now the Judeans began to think of their local god Yahweh not just as a god whose power was effective within Canaan, but as a god who had followed them into exile and who controlled the fates of all people. They also even more begin to see themselves as separate and distinct from the other Canaanite peoples, and therefore rewrite or reconceive their history to give a narrative of themselves as people who were never native to the land. (This is quite a radical account of the origins of Biblical narrative, however, and some accuse it of having an anti-Jewish bias). Undoubtedly, the effect of the Babylonian exile can be seen on the Bible, if not maybe in as radical a way as this account suggests. For example, when the Persians conquered Babylon, Jews encountered the ideas of Zoroaster, who believed the universe was ruled by two equal powers, Ahriman the good and Ahuramazda the evil. A Hebrew prophet preaching in Persia and known as Trito-Isaiah [the 3rd section of the Biblical book of Isaiah, seen by traditionalists as written before the exile, but by scholars as dating from Babylon] says that Yahweh is "the creator of light and darkness, of good and evil". This may be a polemic against Zoroastrianism: the Israelite god, says the prophet, controls everything. Yahweh is the single power in the universe. Even non-Israelite rulers like Darius, a Persian emperor, are controlled and used by Yahweh1. In many ways this development is similar to the conclusions reached by the Greek philosophers at roughly the same time: there is one principle to the universe, the Logos, or rational principle. By it all the confusing diversity of life can be analyzed and understood. One other development of the exilic experience of the Israelites is a further universalization of their henotheism. The same Isaiah now says that all the nations of the world will flock to Jerusalem to know Yahweh and they will worship him there. This also falls on the spectrum of a shift from early henotheism to pure monotheism: if Yahweh is the one and only god, if all the other gods are now simply figments of people's imagination, there can only be one true religion - the religion which worships the creator of the heavens and the earth (the universe). Eventually, henotheism merges into true monotheism: the gods of the other nations are now considered figments of the imagination, having no reality. In rare passages of the later prophets, there is even reference to the idea that Yahweh may have spoken to prophets of other nations, and that in some sense the historical development of other nations is also a sacred narrative. Generally, though the history of other nations is still seen as sacred only inasmuch as it interacts with the history of the Israelites. For example, Persian history is meaningful as Yahweh uses Persian emperors to punish and the reinstate the Jews. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [no need to read following section for Ancient Israel lecture] After the Jews moved back to Jerusalem, thanks to permission from the Persian emperor, they set up a small state which was run by priests and run according to the law of Moses, as well as a growing body of interpretation of that law, which tried to iron out the contradictions in the Torah. [Of course, scholars see these contradictions as arising from the fact that the Torah is not one ancient entity given to Moses, but a collection of laws and narrative from different periods in the evolution of Israelite religion]. This state existed for just over a century and a half, when the territory of Palestine and the Near East came under the power of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, successors of Alexander the Great, who brought Hellenistic culture to the East. Some of the contradictions of post-exilic Judaic monotheism now came to the fore: was Judaism a universal religion of ethical monotheism suitable for all humanity? Or was it a special cult restricted to one nation, where other nations would have a subordinate role? Jews split into purists and Hellenizers. Purists saw Greek religion as polytheistic and immoral, and there is a sense in which that argument is easy to make. After all, Socrates and other Greek philosophers also criticized Greek myth and popular religion as being irrational and childish. The most significant representatives of anti-Hellenistic Jews were the Maccabees, after whom a book in the Bible is named: they took up arms against the Syrian Hellenistic Seleucids, led by king Antiochus Epiphanes (whose name means ‘a god revealed’), who had desecrated the Jerusalem temple by installing a statue of the king there. For the Maccabees, Hellenism was synonymous with idolatry and the persecution of Jewish law and belief (Hellenistic Jews who supported Epiphanes and opposed the Maccabees even tried to reverse their circumcision, the sign of the covenant between God and Israel). Their story formed an important part in the development of Judaic consciousness, and is one side of what is sometimes called the clash between “Athens [later Rome] and Jerusalem” (i.e. Greek philosophy and Semitic monotheism). However, the Athens-Jerusalem contrast was not seen as a split by everyone. Other Jews began to be interested in precisely this philosophical element of Hellenistic culture: Greek-speaking Jews in Palestine, but mostly outside of Palestine, and especially in Alexandria, Egypt, began to highlight the similarities between Greek universalistic philosophy and their own Mosaic religion. After about 150 years of Greek-Jewish intellectual synthesis, Judaism produced Hellenistic Jewish scholars like Philo. His commentary on the Torah takes Jewish rituals, practices and stories and explains them through Greek concepts. So for example, when in the Hebrew Bible it is written: "And the word of the Lord came to Moses..." Philo sees the Word as the Logos, the rational principle of the universe as described by the Stoic philosophers. In fact, the Hebrew Bible was even translated into Greek by Alexandrian scholars in c. 150 b.c. This version came to be known as the Septuagint (version of the 70). It is not just a translation, but in many ways also an interpretation. And the idea that the sacred Hebrew scriptures could be read in another language was deeply radical: for purists Hebrew is the first language of Adam; it is the language of Yahweh, really; to touch a Hebrew scroll of the Law required ritual purity, while to touch Greek writings did not: they were profane (non-sacred). So translation was not just a linguistic exercise; it had cultic and cultural meaning, imbuing the Greek language with potential sacred meaning. Furthermore, the Septuagint is not always just a simple translation, but also an interpretation. For example, anthropomorphic parts of the Yahwistic narrative portions are given philosophical glosses: instead of angels or Yahweh himself appearing to Moses or other prophets, the Logos of God is said to appear to them. Other Hellenistic devices included the allegorical interpretation of Scripture: e.g. the plague of darkness that overcame the Egyptians in Moses’ time is seen as spiritual darkness; circumcision is a cleaning of the spirit from materialism etc. Of course, the question arises whether the allegorical meaning replaces the literal meaning: i.e. if you have cleaned yourself of materiality, say through prayer, do you need to be physically circumcised? If your soul is at rest with the Logos, do you need to literally observe the Sabbath day of rest? Philo himself carried on observing the literal commandments of the Jewish Torah, but some Egyptian Jews did not: the Septuagint and the torrent of change it unleashed took Judaism further along the line to accommodation with Greek ideas of religion and culture – and the question of ‘Athens and Jerusalem’ would gain new urgency when the Christian movement began to spread round the Roman empire, as we will see. This encounter of Judaism and Hellenism represents an isolated Hebrew culture and religion coming to terms with other patterns of thought and trying to extract new meaning from their religious experience - another important stage in the development of monotheism. In terms of non-Jewish reactions to Judaism, there were also different attitudes. Some Hellenistic gentiles were impressed with Judaism: they saw the theocratic Jerusalem state as a Platonic republic, ruled by philosopher-priests who believed in the One. On a popular level, in the late Hellenistic-Roman period gentiles in some cities even became ‘God-fearers’: that is, they would attend synagogues throughout the diaspora, without fully become Jews. They believed in Judaic monotheism without following the main rituals of kashrut (dietary regulations), strict Sabbath and festival observance, and circumcision. In a way, then, this represents a universalization of Judaism: it is for all nations, and the specific national elements are removed. In a sense, the God-fearers had managed to create a pure philosophical religion a little bit like the Greek philosophical ‘schools’. However, some God-fearers did later convert fully to Judaism. And perhaps even in philosophical ‘God-fearing’ a residual non-Greek Judaic element is the remaining emphasis the Logos, or God, or the One is still personal, and interacts in history. Greek thought tended to see the One God more as a principle than a person; for Judaism the One was also a person who cared about individual humans and could intervene to change their fates – a comforting element that pure philosophy could not offer.