There
is, as one might expect from the foregoing survey, a considerable body of
evidence to indicate that early Israel believed in the existence and even the
puissance of deities other than YHWH. Along with numerous allusions in early
poetry to YHWH’s council of gods, testimonies that Israel at large understood
this council to be YHWH’s medium for administering the cosmos have generated a
substantial scholarly literature on the subject (e.g., Ps. 29:1; 82:1; Deut.
33:2-3 and 1 Kings 22:19-22; Job 1-2; 33:23; Isa. 6:1-10). The multiplicity of
early Israel’s gods has rarely been called seriously into question. Moreover,
not all the evidence implies that all the gods were universally regarded as
mere extensions of YHWH’s will. Kaufmann sees YHWH’s regarded as mere extensions
of YHWH’s will. Kaufmann sees YHWH’s battles with such figures as Rahab and Leviathan
as isolated vestiges of Israel’s Canaanite cultural heritage, but such
liturgical specimens as Pss. 74:12-17 and 89:10-15 illustrate how closely bound
to cosmogonic myth these battles remained in the Israelite consciousness. Thus,
to the primordial era, at least one strain of thought comprised struggles for
the mastery of the cosmos. These on one strain of thought comprised struggles
for the mastery of the cosmos. These struggles were not necessarily on the
order of those depicted in Babylonian (Enuma Elish) or Canaanite myth,
but they were nevertheless comparable in type. The reports of these battles do
not, of course, imply the existence of a Yahwistic theogony. Still, taken together
with the rhetorical comparison of YHWH with the other gods (Exod. 15:11; Ps.
89:7), the texts testify that challenges to YHWH’s mastery were, if foredoomed
to fail, at least conceivable. This is consonant with the implication in such
texts as 1 Kings 22:19-22 and Isa. 6:8 that the heavenly beings actually exerted
independent powers of thought (the coup of the Morning Star in Isa. 14:13 may
have similar implications). Genesis 6:1-4, that mystifying text which describes
the descent of the gods and their miscegenation with primordial women, confirms
that in the Israel of the Yahwist (J), independent thought was very much the
case among heavenly beings. Of course, this is only to be expected in a
tradition that ascribes disobedience to primordial humans ensconced like an
angel in YHWH’s presence (Genesis 2-4; see also Ezek. 28:11-18 and Psalm 82). (Baruch
Halpern, “’Brisker Pipes than Poetry’: The Development of Israelite Monotheism,”
in Judaic Perspectives in Ancient Israel, ed. Jacob Neusner, Baruch A. Levine,
and Ernest S. Frerichs [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987], 82)
