The Israelites clearly saw a divine force at
work in their history. In their declaration of independence [from Egyptian bondage], they had something
extraordinary. Peasants were usually doomed to lifelong serfdom, but Israel had
defied the laws of probability and, against all odds, had not only survived but
prospered. They may have concluded that this success could only be attributed
to a superhuman power – something –
had marked them out for an exceptional destiny.
The Israelites personified this sacred force
that had propelled their astonishing bid for freedom. They were not yet
monotheists but shared many of their neighbours’ traditions, regarding Yahweh
as one of the ‘holy ones or ‘sons’ of El, the Most High God of Canaan, and a
member of El’s divine assembly. In one of the earliest texts of the Hebrew
Bible, we read that at the beginning of time, El had assigned a ‘holy one’ to
teach of the seventy nations of the world and appointed Yahweh to be the ‘holy
one’ of Israel:
When the Most High gave the nations their
inheritance
He fixed their bounds according to the sons of El;
But Yahweh’s portion was his people,
Jacob [i.e. Israel] his share of the inheritance. (Deuteronomy 32:8-9)
He fixed their bounds according to the sons of El;
But Yahweh’s portion was his people,
Jacob [i.e. Israel] his share of the inheritance. (Deuteronomy 32:8-9)
The idea of a divine council of equal gods
made sense after the collapse of the Near Eastern empires, because they
reflected the small kingdoms—Israel, Edom, Moab, Aram and Amman—that had
emerged in their wake, all on a par and all competing for arable territory. The
Hebrew term Elohim, usually translated as ‘God’, expressed everything that the
divine could mean for human beings. The ‘holy ones’ of the Near East
participated in and reflected the luminosity and brilliance of a power that
transcended the ‘gods’ and could not be tied to a single, distinct form (Mark
S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical
Monotheism, 93-96). This was a right-hemispheric intuition of the numinous
forces that pervaded the whole of reality: a perception of the relatedness of
all things and inspired the emphatic passion for justice that Israel shared
with the other societies in the region. As a later point, Yahweh would merge
with El, but in Psalm 82, he is still one of El’s ‘sons’. Here he is already
beginning to rebel, because, unlike the other ‘sons of El’ who served the
richer and more powerful states, he is portrayed as the champion of the oppressed
peasants, who denounces his fellow gods in the council:
No more mockery of justice
No more favouring of the wicked!
Let the weak and orphan have justice,,
Be air to the wretched and the destitute;
Rescue the weak and needy,
Save them from the clutches of the wicked. (Psalms 82:2-5)
No more favouring of the wicked!
Let the weak and orphan have justice,,
Be air to the wretched and the destitute;
Rescue the weak and needy,
Save them from the clutches of the wicked. (Psalms 82:2-5)
From the start, the religion of Israel was
focused on the state of society, with a mandate of care for the weak and needy.
(Karen Armstrong, The Lost Art of
Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts [London: The Bodley Head, 2019], 23-24; the first comment in square brackets added for clarification)