Terminology
is difficult since individual scholars employ the terms in a variety of ways.
My discussion is designed to be useful, but not necessarily representative of
all academic viewpoints. ‘Henotheism’ can be understood to mean belief in ‘my’
god while at the same time not excluding the possibility that ‘your’ god exists
as well. In ancient context, this was expressed frequently as belief that ‘my’
god is highest of the gods: god of gods and lord of lords (cf. Deut. 10.17; Ps.
29.1-2, etc). (K.L. Noll, Canaan and Israel in Antiquity: An Introduction [The
Biblical Seminar 83; London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001], 135 n. 8)
Monotheistic
passages are rare in the Bible. For example, the famous Shema, a fundamental
Jewish confession of faith found in Deut. 6.4, is grammatically ambiguous in
the original Hebrew, but no matter how this grammar is interpreted or translated,
the passage does not affirm monotheism. Either the text says that Yahweh is ‘one
god’ (perhaps a polemic against the high god’s absorption of lesser gods?) or
it affirms that Yahweh ‘alone’ is Israel’s god (which is monolatry, not
monotheism). The only portion of the Bible with a relatively high cluster of
monotheistic affirmations is the second half of Isaiah (chs. 40-66), which many
scholars call Deutero-Isaiah, and date to the late-sixth century BCE. The
remainder of the Bible contains random monotheistic statements among
monolatrous and henotheistic passages.
A very
good example of monolatry in the Bible is the dual stipulation in the first two
of the famous Ten Commandments, a stipulation that presumes the existence of
lesser gods, but prohibits worship of them because the high god is ‘jealous’ of
them (Deut. 5.7-10). Years after the Ten Commandments had been formulated, a
scribe interpreted them to mean that Yahweh is the only god who exists, and so
added Deuteronomy 4, a chapter that includes two explicitly monotheistic verses
(4.35, 39). When a biblical text was updated in this way, biblical scholars
call it ‘redaction’ (or ‘editing’) of the text. In this instance, Deuteronomy 4
offers ‘redactional’ reinterpretation of Deuteronomy 5. Sometimes the redaction
is such a short addition that it is better to call it a ‘gloss’ on the text.
Here
is an example of a monotheistic gloss in a henotheistic biblical poem found at1
Sam. 2.2:
Verse 2a:
None are holy like Yahweh
Verse
2b: For none exists except you
Verse
2c: And there is no rock like our god
The
first and last portions are henotheistic. The poet proclaims that Yahweh is
supreme over other gods. The middle portion (v. 2b) is clearly monotheistic,
affirming that there is no god except Yahweh. But this phrase does not exist in
some ancient manuscripts of the passage, which suggests that it was a later addition
that failed to make its way into some manuscript copies. In those manuscripts
that include the phrase, there is a grammatical indication that it was not part
of the original poem. Notice that v. 2a and v. 2x are written in the third
person but v. 2b is in the second person. Applying the historical method called
textual criticism the middle portion is judged to be a monotheistic gloss, a
later addition to an originally henotheistic poem. (Ibid., 249-50)
A
cryptic biblical passage hinting that Yahweh began his career as a lesser god
in someone else’s pantheon has survived-barely survived—reactional activity by
later scribes. This text, Deut. 32.8-9, appears in two versions among the best ancient
manuscripts:
The
Common Hebrew Version:
When Elyon
gave peoples their inheritance,
When he divided up humanity;
When he fixed the boundaries of countries,
According to the number of the sons of Israel;
Then the portion for Yahweh was his people,
Jacob, the allotment of his inheritance.
An Alternate
Hebrew Version:
When
Elyon gave peoples their inheritance,
When he divided up humanity;
When he fixed the boundaries of countries,
According to the number of the sons of god;
Then the portion for Yahweh was his people,
Jacob, the allotment of his inheritance.
According
to the alternative version of this poem, Elyon (an alternate name for El), as
highest god, divided all the people of the Earth into political groups and
assigned each group an inheritance (of land) and a patron go (one of his divine
sons). At Bronze Age Ugarit, El had 70 divine sons, so we can assume the poet
has quite a few kingdoms in mind. One of the divine sons, Yahweh, received the
people Jacob, an alternate name for Israel. Thus Yahweh is a son of Elyon, a
lesser god in the high god’s pantheon.
The
common version is a ‘doctored’ version of the poem. Apparently, in a later
period, it was no longer acceptable to assign Yahweh a lesser status in the Canaanite
pantheon. So the scribe changed one word. Hebrew bene-elohim (‘sons of
god’) became bene-yisrael (‘son of Israel’). This one small change did
away with any hint of multiple gods in the poem, and therefore permitted a
reader to equate Elyon in the first line with Yahweh near the end of the
segment. Now it is Yahweh-Elyon who divides the people, and retains one of
those groups, Israel/Jacob, for himself. Of course, the scribe who made this
small change has introduced a small problem as well. The passage in the common
version makes no sense. Literally it means that the number of political units
on earth equals the number of Israelites! Nevertheless, the scribe has
accomplished what mattered most to him; he has brought Deut. 32.8-9 into line
with the henotheism of other biblical passages, such as Mic. 4.5: ‘As each of
the peoples walk in the name of their god, so we will walk in the name of
Yahweh our god, for all time’.
The
value of Deut. 32.8-9 to a historian is that it offers a glimpse of Yahweh’s
status in Israel prior to his rise as high god. Yahweh was a part of the
Israelite pantheon as a son of the high god; only later was he equated with the
high god. The high god was El, sometimes called Elyon, and also called El
Shaddai. Biblical authors remembered quite clearly that this was the case. For
example, in Gen. 33.20, the ancestor Jacob is reported to declare ‘El is the go
of Israel’. The name El Shaddai in the key passage of Exodus 6.2-3 also
suggests that Israelite scribes remembered, and were satisfied with, the
deliberate fusion of Yahweh and El: ‘God spoke to Moses, “I am Yahweh, I
appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai. But my name, Yahweh, I did
not reveal to them.”’ (It is possible that Yahweh was an epithet for El in an
early period, as frequently suggested in the scholarship. If this was the case,
the epithet had become detached from El as an independent deity well before traditions
recorded in the Bible were conceived. The reuniting of El and Yahweh in the
Iron Age is not surprising since Yahweh would have retained much of El’s personality,
making fusion natural.)
Interestingly,
the book of Psalms preserves an alternate ‘explanation’ for Yahweh’s ascent to
high god, one that is far more entertaining, and may have been preserve for
precisely that reason. Psalm 82 tells a delightful tale that seems to
presuppose the tradition of Deut 32.8-9:
God
stool in El’s courtroom,
Among the gods, he judged.
‘How long will you gods judge wickedly?
how long will you favor dishonestly?
Bring justice to the weak and the orphan,
Favor the oppressed and impoverished,
Release the weak and the poor.
From the power of the wicked, rescue!
‘They do not know and they can’t perceive,
In darkenss they all walk about,
So the foundations of the earth will stagger.
‘I declare, “Gods are you!
Sons of Elyon, all of you!
Yet, like humans you shall die.
As any ruler, you will fall!”’
Rise, O god, judge the earth!
You shall inherit all peoples!
This
poem presents a minor deity in revolt against all his divine siblings, the son
of El. He kills them as though they were merely human, then he ‘inherits’ their
allotments of humanity. The poet has in mind the myth we encountered in Deut.
32.8-9, in which El parcels out the peoples of the Earth, assigning a patron
god to each. The allotments had been made, but the sons of El had ruled their
fiefs corrupt. The one just god convicts them and overthrows them. Who was that
one just god? He is called, simple, ‘god’. The poem was preserved in a portion of
the book of Psalms that is called the Elohim Psalter (Pss. 42-89). It is called
Elohim because these psalms usually substitute the generic elohim (‘god’)
for the person name yhwh (‘Yahweh’). It is probable, therefore, that before
it was gathered into the Elohim Psalter, the original poem identified ‘god’ as
Yahweh. This psalm records the myth in which Yahweh ascends from a minor deity
in the pantheon to only god of the cosmos. Yahweh has created monotheism by
deicide!
So the
Bible preserves at least two version of Yahweh’s rise to high god. In one
version, Yahweh was simply equated with El Shaddai, In the other, Yahweh killed
El and his sons and took over, thus becoming the sole god, not just the high
god. Perhaps the creators of the biblical anthology saw these two traditions as
steps in a single progression. Yahweh reveals that he is El, then El-Yahweh
kills his own sons. (Ibid., 253-56)
