Response to Benjamin Sommer s. Yehezkel Kaufmann and Recent Scholarship on Monotheism

Transcription

1 Response to Benjamin Sommer s Yehezkel Kaufmann and Recent Scholarship on Monotheism Othmar KEEL Most of the elements of the position presented here are developed and argued at length in my two-volume work Die Geschichte Jerusalems und die Entstehung des Monotheismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). A very short version of this extensive publication (1384 pages, 725 illustrations) will be edited by Brent Strawn and published in 2015 by Fortress Press, Minneapolis. Two Preliminary Remarks Remark 1: Sommer follows Kaufmann and others in distinguishing different kinds of monotheism, such as qualitative vs. quantitative monotheism a distinction which I can generally agree. I propose, however, to distinguish also exclusive and inclusive or cumulative monotheism, a distinction which, in my view, is crucial for understanding YHWHism in a satisfactory way. A prominent example of exclusive monotheism is Echnaton s (Achenyati s) Aton-Monotheism. Only Aton is God, all other deities are irrelevant and insubstantial. On the other hand, YHWHism is at least at its beginnings a highly inclusive monotheism. Consider, for example, the deluge story in Genesis, whose Mesopotamian parallels are many centuries older than the biblical ones. In Mesopotamian deluge stories different deities are involved, including Enlil, Adad, Enki/Ea, and a female deity each deity assuming a distinct role. In the Israelite versions YHWH plays all the parts. The result is a not very coherent figure, but a rich figure. In contrast, that is not the case with Aton-Monotheism. For example, Aton does not respond in a satisfactory way to many aspects of life, such as the problem of death and afterlife which is considered to be highly important in Egypt. Therefore, the Egyptians went back to Osiris and the other deities important for the afterlife. Thanks to a cumulative monotheism YHWH answered an increasingly wide spectrum of needs. Only later, under the influence of Assyrian loyalty oaths, does YHWH come to assume features of an intolerant, violent, exclusive monotheistic deity. This kind of deity remains a god of a particular people of Judah, and

2 2 OTHMAR KEEL is not the deity of all other peoples and nations. I shall address the relation between this particularistic and a fully developed ripe monotheism in section 3 below. Remark 2: Kaufmann and Sommer combine the word historicism regularly with shallow. Just the word historicism is already pejorative. Historiography, however, is anything except shallow. It tries to describe how reality became what it is. Whatever happens in our universe be it natural-biological or human it is related to time and space. Even the everlasting mountains have their history. They are far from being everlasting. History is, like any kind of reality, immensely complex. Good history writing is based on material, so-called sources and their interpretation by an interpreter conscious of his/hers subjective position. The source-material of the second half of the second and the first two thirds of the first millennium for Palestine are in comparison to other historical periods extremely scarce. Most of it is lost. The six Amarna- Tablets from Jerusalem survived by chance and were found by chance. The scribe of Abdikhepa produced probably hundreds of texts and not just six letters. The same is true of all the other sources. The consequence should be that good history writing dealing with periods characterized by such a scarcity of sources has to take into account as many as possible of the available sources, including, of course, textual sources, such as biblical, extra-biblical, epigraphic, iconographic, and archaeological, as Ziony Zevit has done in his major and meticulous work The Religions of Ancient Israel (2001). Outlines of a History of YHWHism I agree with my colleagues Adrian Schenker and Benjamin Sommer that the YHWH-monotheism is (finally) a qualitative monotheism whose view of god is characterized by his independence of matter and destiny, a monotheism of transcendental sovereignty. In contrast to Kaufmann and his conscious or unconscious followers I think that YHWH ascended gradually to this position. YHWH as a Proper Name YHWH was not right from the beginning this type of a transcendental monotheistic god. This contention is based mainly on the fact that YHWH is a proper name. A monotheistic god is the only one of its kind. There is no need to have a proper name to be a person. Mohammed s Allah is clearly conceived as a person, but has just a generic name. There is no other god than God. In a polytheistic world a proper name is indispensable. In the story of the burning bush YHWH appears to Moses

3 RESPONSE TO BENJAMIN SOMMER 3 and gives him the order to bring his people out of Egypt. Moses says: If I come to the Israelites and say to them, The God of your ancestors has sent me to you, they will ask me, What is his name? what shall I say to them? God s answer is a double one: First he says: God said to Moses, I am who I am. He said further, Thus you shall say to the Israelites, I am has sent me to you (Exod 3:14). The second answer is: God also said to Moses, Thus you shall say to the Israelites, YHWH the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you : This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations (Exod 3:15). The interpretation as I am who I am in the first answer is highly sophisticated. It does not render the original meaning of the name as we will see. At the origin YHWH was a god similar to Kemosh, the god of the Moabites, with whom together he appears in the Mesha-Stela Inscription and in Judg 11:24. Once YHWH had become a true monotheistic deity the proper name YHWH became obsolete. A deity who is the only one of his kind can be called by a generic name, such as Elohim. Gen 1:1: In the beginning when God (Elohim) created the heavens and the earth... The generic designation Elohim is here in a monotheistic context used as a kind of proper name. That supposes a unique and only god as the designation ho ouranos used for the god of Israel in the Books of the Maccabees or adonay or kyrios respectively in the Septuagint. Jewish texts of the period when YHWH had ascended to the position of a unique and only god avoid more and more the proper name. Why and How YHWH Ascended to the Status of a Transcendental Only God There is not one clear reason, why YHWH in contrast to Kemosh and similar national deities ascended to a transcendental status. But there are elements that, up to a certain point, render plausible and understandable why and how this happened to YHWH and not to Kemosh. MOTIF/REASON 1: YHWH came from far away, from a region foreign and alien to Palestine and this fact survived in the collective memory of Israel. We have quite a number of sources and arguments confirming this assumption. Argument 1.1: The complete name of the deity YHWH does not occur in pre-israelite Levantine texts, neither in the Amarna tablets, nor in the texts from Ugarit, nor in the toponyms of pre-israelite Palestine.

4 4 OTHMAR KEEL Argument 1.2: A list of toponyms from Soleb from the time of Amenophis III ( BC), quoted in two temples of Ramses II ( BC) in Amara Ouest and Aksha, however, mention tashasu yahw, The land of the Shasu of Jahu. Yahu is probably the name of a deity identical with YHWH. The shasu were a tribe in Northwestern Saudi Arabia, modern Hijaz, the biblical Midian. They were pushing north to biblical Seïr/Edom. The shasu of Yahu were probably a group of the shasu worshipping the god Yahu. Argument 1.3: According to Deut 33:2 YHWH comes from Sinai, from Seïr, from Har Paran; according to Judg 5:4 from Seïr and Edom; Hab 3:3 and 7 enumerate Teman (South), Har Paran, Kushan and Midian. YHWH from Teman is mentioned already at the beginning of the 8th century BC in the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions. Argument 1.4: In the light of the later Judean animosity against the Midianites e.g. in Numbers 31, it is highly surprising that Exodus 18 presents the father in law of Moses as a Midianite priest and teacher of Moses. Argument 1.5: The biblical descriptions of YHWH s theophanies include many volcanic elements. The pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night in Exod 13:21 is one of these. Another one is the fire and smoke of a kiln (tannur) in Exod 19:18; another one mountains melting like wax before YHWH (Ps 97:5). Phenomena like these are never found in descriptions of theophanies in Egypt, Ugarit or Mesopotamia. The only region in the Near East with volcanoes still active in biblical times is the Hijaz. Argument 1.6: A sixth and last argument is the proper name YHWH which is most probably a preformative 3 rd person masculine form. According to E. A. Knauf divine names of this type are found only in preislamic Arabia. The etymology is probably from hawah to blow, wave (of the wind). MOTIF/REASON 2: In the oldest traditions in Judges and the Books of Samuel YHWH is a god of war and tempest, not of fertility, similar to the Egypto-Canaanite Baal-Seth or the Moabite Kemosh. The including and cumulative tendency of YHWHism led apparently early to a deity not related only to one single natural or cultural phenomenon but to several ones. Thus the deity related to them has to be above and independent of them. A god who is responsible for the manifestations of the sun and at the same time of clouds and tempests cannot anymore be very close to the one or to the other of these phenomena. The more parts he assumes, the less he can be close or let alone be identified with the one or the other. He gets a status of sovereignty and transcendence. There are again quite a number of

5 RESPONSE TO BENJAMIN SOMMER 5 sources and arguments confirming the hypothesis of accumulation of several parts. Argument 2.1: There are several cultic representations of YHWH. The oldest one known of seems to be the ark of YHWH brought by Abiathar, David s priest, from the south to Jerusalem (1 Kgs 1:26). There, YHWH was apparently identified with El. Argument 2.2: In the Jerusalem temple stood a second cultic symbol, an empty throne, typical of sun deities. Beside the priest Abiathar who came with David to Jerusalem, David inherited in Jerusalem a second priest, Zadok (2 Sam 8:17 and 20:25). The most probable interpretation is that Zadok was a priest of the sun-god whose sanctuary with the empty throne as divine symbol YHWH shared, represented by the ark. The Solomonic temple was oriented to the East, the raising sun. The empty throne was later appropriated by YHWH. So was a story originally told of Shemesh as main actor, the Sodom story. The two messengers of the sun-god are Zedeq and Mishpat, the steady attendants of the sun-god as a judge. They are not able to spend unharmed one single night (lîn; cf. Gen 19:2 and Isa 1:21 and 26) in the city. This is the reason why Shemesh-YHWH destroys the city when he raises in the morning. Argument 2.3: In the sanctuary in Bet-El established by Jeroboam I, YHWH is represented by the image of a bull. The bull is in this case not a symbol of fertility but of aggressiveness. It represents the YHWH who brought Israel out of Egypt (1 Kgs 12:28; cf. Num 23:22; 24:8). The story of the Golden Calf in Exodus 32 is at its origin probably the Hieros Logos of the Jeroboam sanctuary in Bet- El, later transformed in Judah into a polemical story. Argument 2.4: Only in the time of Hosea, in the second half of the 8 th century, did YHWH take over the part of a weather and fertility god from Baal. In Hosea 2:8 YHWH complains: She (Israel as a woman) did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine and the oil. Argument 2.5: Not only in the story of the Deluge YHWH inherits the part of a female deity. The ʿaštěrōt haṣṣōʾn are as the name says originally a blessing granted by Astarte (cf. the Latin veneres gregis). In Deut 7:13; 28:4, 18, 51 they are mentioned as a blessing of YHWH. Argument 2.6: In the 7 th century BC under Assyro-Aramean influence the cult of the moon god of Harran became very important in the Levant. In the vision of Zechariah 4 the lampstand between two trees, one of the symbols of the moon god of Harran, is used in its new context to make visible YHWH s promise of a new beginning with his people.

6 6 OTHMAR KEEL MOTIF/REASON 3: Besides the foreign and alien origin of YHWH and the somehow enigmatic and long lasting process of YHWH taking over the parts of more and more deities, there seems to be as a third motif/reason a single event and its interpretation, actually its misinterpretation which is at the origin of sentences in the Hebrew Bible which can definitively considered as monotheistic in a strict sense. Argument 3.1: This event was the attack and the siege of Jerusalem by the Assyrians under Sennacherib which failed to conquer the city. Different biblical and Assyrian texts agree in that fact. Normally the Assyrians pushed to the end and didn t stop their attacks before they had punished the rebel. The fact that Sennacherib did not follow this policy in the case of Hezekiah and Jerusalem can be explained by different historical circumstances. For the prophet Isaiah the destruction of all Judean cities except Jerusalem was a catastrophe. One hundred years later a completely different view was predominant. A cluster of stories transmitted twice in the Hebrew Bible (2 Kgs 18:17-19:37 and Isa 36:1-37:38) ascertains that the event was a great victory and that it was a miracle and exclusively the consequence of an intervention of YHWH or his angel. Many other and more important cities were not saved by their protectordeities, because according to the story, they were not real deities at all. YHWH alone is god and has demonstrated it by this event that contains most probably the oldest strictly monotheistic formulae (Isa 37:16; 2 Kgs 19:19). The stories were told at the time when the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar threatened the city. There was a lively debate between two factions. The one argued for military opposition advocating the Sennacherib and the David and Goliath stories to support their view. The main representatives of the other party were the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel who pushed to submit. The political leaders followed the advice of prophets who as Hananiah (Jeremiah 28) recommended military action. They were convinced of YHWH s intervention in favor of Jerusalem as at the time of Sennacherib and Hezekiah. After the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple of YHWH by Nebuchadnezzar, Hananiah and his colleagues were considered pseudo-prophets and Jeremiah and Ezekiel as true and reliable prophets. The monotheistic Credo, however, of the pseudoprophets survived, although their argument was no more valuable. Usually the so-called Deutero-Isaiah is considered the first representative of a clearly articulated not just a latent monotheism. Deutero-Isaiah takes up the monotheistic formulation of the Sennacherib stories, but without the unambiguous argument the latter

7 RESPONSE TO BENJAMIN SOMMER 7 had to present. After the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple their argument was no longer valuable. Argument 3.2: Deutero-Isaiah combines the monotheistic formula of the Sennacherib/Hezekiah stories with latent but fully developed monotheism. According to this view the one God is in charge of all peoples and nations not just of Israel or Judah respectively. This view may have been favored by the topographical / geographical situation of Jerusalem, which rendered possible the encounter with many cultures and nations, being however less vulnerable than Gaza, which had the disadvantage to be right on the main road between Egypt and the Levant and Mesopotamia and so exposed to the devastating attacks of different armies. An observation point a certain distance away in the mountains, such as Jerusalem, favored the view that one single deity governed the movements of the different peoples and nations. Already for Isaiah Assyria is an instrument in the hands of YHWH (Isa 7:20; 10:5). For Jeremiah Nebuchadnezzar is a servant of YHWH (Jer 27:6; 43:10) and for Deutero-Isaiah the Persian king Cyrus is even his anointed (Messiah; Isa 45:1), a view absolutely unthinkable for Deuteronomic/Deuteronomistic theologians with their one God only in charge of Israel. Despite the different reasons, motifs, and arguments which can be listed in favor of a certain historical development as, for example, the fact that the history of European philosophy starts in the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, there always remains in history an element of arbitrariness due to the multiplicity of influences and their multiple possibilities of interactions.