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[ First posted in 2015. Is there a difference between the terms ‘God’ and ‘Lord’? The English generic term for deity is simply ‘god’ so there’s no confusion as to what it refers to, but ‘lord’ is not necessarily applied only to deity but also to human masters or lords (British Parliament is full of them).
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This post explains—featuring Chapter 8 of our MUST READ/MUST OWN Sinai and Zion by Jon D. Levenson, downloadable as ebook from amazon.com. Reformatting and highlights added.—Admin1]
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Not so long ago, the great revolution manifest in the religion of Israel was seen to lie in the idea of monotheism. Israel gave the world the belief in one God, a belief that was supposed to testify to the genius of Israel.
“The religion of the unity of God was a new cultural creation,” wrote the Israeli scholar, Yehezkel Kaufmann, “…and since it was born and grew up only in Israel, we must add this: it was born of the creative spirit of the people Israel.”
The problem is that the world seems to have rejected the fruit of this genius—
- for most people in it today are atheists or agnostics or polytheists of some sort. They do not believe in any god, or are unsure of the existence of the divine, or they believe in many gods.
- And, in fact, monotheism is a doctrine with problems. For the monotheist must see a principle of unity beneath the diversity of experience, and, if he is a Jewish or a Christian or a Muslim monotheist, he must believe that ultimate reality is not only a unity, but a benevolent one: one God wills what is good.
- But when everyone can see that experience is multifarious, it is difficult to understand how the monotheist dares to attribute everything ultimately to one principle.
- For monotheism obligates one to see the work of God not only in the splendor of a summer sunset or the majesty of snow-capped mountain, but also in the birth of a deformed child or in the multiplication of cancer cells in an innocent person.
- Thus, monotheistic religions have had to confront head-on the issue of theodicy, the justice of God, while other worldviews have sometimes been able to evade it or to face it with less at risk.
- Of course, one can save his monotheism by postulating that God is indeed benevolent, although we cannot understand his benevolence in the light of our experience—in other words, by an act of faith, we can no longer speak of Israel’s “creative spirit.” Only of the appearance in her of a mysterious revelation, beyond anything the mind of even a genius can fathom.
But there are reasons to doubt whether the religion of Israel was really monotheistic. Consider an illustration:
Once there were two gods. One held high hopes for creation and would not tolerate evil in it; the other was more a realist and was prepared to bear with man, even though the latter’s impulses were evil from his youth on. The first god brought a flood to destroy the world with the exception of one family of righteous people, for he regretted having created the world. But, after a while, he was overcome by the second god, who caused the flood to subside and swore that he would never allow such a thing to recur, even though man is still evil. Now this story is surely polytheistic; there are two gods.
But is it essentially different from the story of Noah in Genesis 6-9? In the latter, God determines to destroy the whole world, except for Noah and his family, because of its corruption (6:13), but then he promises that he will not bring a flood again, even though man has not reformed.
“The inclinations of man’s mind are [still] evil from his youth” (8:31).
In other words, God changes his mind twice in the story of Noah.
- First, he regrets having created the world (6:7),
- and then he decides that he will not bring another flood even though man’s evil, the cause of the flood, continues.
My question is this:
- Is this one God or more than one?
- Does one relate to God differently before and after he changes his mind?
- If so, then in what sense is this one God and not two?
- Wherein lies the continuity of identity?
Here is another example, more troubling.
In 1 Kings 22, YHWH convenes his “host of heaven” (v 19), and sends out one member of it, who becomes a “lying spirit” (v 22), whose false message will bring about King Ahab’s death.
The problem is that another prophet, Micaiah ben Imlah, delivers an oracle from YHWH, in which he discloses to the king what has happened in heaven (vv 19-23). In other words, YHWH here authorizes simultaneously two messages, one true and one false, and it is the false one whose acceptance he decrees in advance and accomplishes (vv 22, 29ff).
Is this monotheism or dualism?
- It is monotheism in that both messages come from YHWH, but it is dualism in that the messages clash. The “lying spirit” wins this one, although not without being exposed.
- Is there an essential difference between saying there are two gods within one pantheon (“paganism,” polytheism) and two conflicting spirits subject to one God (1 Kings 22)?
When a psalmist calls upon YHWH to “remove [or cancel] your anger from us” and, instead, to “show us your favor” (Ps 85:5, 8), is he not recognizing a plurality within his one God akin to the plurality within one pantheon of a polytheistic religion?
My point is not that Israelite monotheism and polytheism were the same; they were not. Rather, I stress the need to look beneath the surface of terminology and to examine the underlying spiritual experience of the worshipper. When we do so, we see that the two were not so distant as they are usually portrayed. And, more importantly, we become aware of the possibility that there may be elements in Israel’s environment which helped develop her monotheism. Not that there was a revulsion against the culture of the other peoples, as Jewish tradition has tended to think for thousands of years, but that Israelite religion was, in part, a continuation of it.
Did Israel recognize the existence of other gods than YHWH? It is surely true that she called her God by names other than YHWH. Now whether these different names were thought to denote different gods, at least in the earliest period, is difficult to say.
When Exod 6:2 tells us that YHWH is El Shaddai, it is reasonable to suspect that there had been cause to think otherwise. In the deep prehistory of this verse may lie an effort to subsume El Shaddai into YHWH. Henceforth, these words will be treated as two names for the same God. In short, the question of whether Israel was monotheistic cannot be answered until another question has been answered:
Of what period is one speaking?
The idea that YHWH is the only God appears unambiguously many times in the Hebrew Bible, for example:
You shall know this day and keep in mind that it is YHWH who is God in the heaven above and on earth beneath; there is no other! (Deut 4:39)
There are other passages, however, which speak just as plainly of “other gods.” Best known among them is what Jews count as the second of the Ten Commandments:
You shall have no other gods before me. (Exod 20:3)
The commandment forbids Israel to “have” other gods or, at least, to have them “before” YHWH, whatever this enigmatic expression means.
- But does it deny the existence of the rival deities?
- In what realistic sense can one put them before YHWH if they have no reality?
- If they are purely imaginary, then why not say so?
In another passage from Exodus, one can deny the reality of the other gods only by depriving a moving hymn of its power:
Who is like you, YHWH, among the gods, Who is like you, majestic in holiness, Worthy of awe and praise, Wonder-worker? (Exod 15:11)
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The question, of course, is rhetorical. No one is like YHWH, not even the other gods. But if the latter do not exist, then what force does this great verse of praise have? It is like telling someone that he is more brilliant than a unicorn. But if one believes that the Torah is a monolith, with no historical development or doctrinal variety, and if he is a monotheist himself, then he must interpret this verse in light of the affirmations of monotheism of verses like Deut 4:39.
Thus, there is a long history in Judaism of providing verses like Exod 15:11 with translations far removed from the plain sense. For example, an ancient Aramaic translation, which came to attain an authoritative status among Jews, renders as follows:
There is none beside you. It is you who are God, Adonai. There is no God beside you. You are majestic in holiness, worthy of awe and praise, a wonder-worker.
In the repetition of the assertion of monotheism here, one can detect something close to panic at the thought that the verse might be taken to mean what it says. The denial of the plain sense continued into the Middle Ages, when to give only one example, the great commentator Rashi (1040-1105) rendered “gods” here as “the mighty.” In fact, it continues today. The new Torah translation of the Jewish Publication Society (1962) reads “the celestials” in place of “the gods,” although with a note drawing attention to another reading, “the mighty,” as if that were the most significant alternative. The New English Bible (1970), which is less constricted by doctrine, renders the word “the gods,” but notes that “in might” is also possible. And, in fact, “the mighty” (or “in might”) is a possible translation.
My point is that the Jewish preference for this possibility over the other is owing not to philology, but to theology, specifically the theology that says the Torah is homogeneous and self-referential and is to be interpreted, even translated, everywhere according to the monotheism that became the only legitimate Jewish way of viewing divinity.
In the process, as I hope to show, something of the power and the dynamism of the earlier, biblical faith has been lost.
It can be argued that, although parts of the Hebrew Bible acknowledge the existence of other gods, all the power remains in the hands of YHWH. From a logical point of view, of course, it does not make much sense to speak of a powerless god. Isn’t God almighty? And if he is, then there can be only one; two entities cannot each be endowed with omnipotence. Here, logic provides an argument for monotheism, just as the experience of innocent suffering provides an argument against it. Whatever the implications of logical analysis, however, there is ample support in the text of the Hebrew Bible for the notion that YHWH is ruler of the gods:
For a great God is YHWH, The great king over all gods. (Ps. 95:3)
There are texts, moreover, which tell how YHWH became the unchallenged ruler of the gods. One psalm, for example, speaks even of his having decreed the deaths of the others.
“God takes his stand in the assembly of El” (Ps 82:1) and then proceeds to indict the gods for injustice (vv 2-4). Finally, he sentences them to death (vv 6-7). Is this psalm polytheistic or monotheistic? It is polytheistic for two reasons.
- First, it is by no means certain that the “God” (elohim) who takes his stand is the same as the “God” (‘el) in whose assembly he speaks (v 1), nor is it at all clear that these two are identical to the “Most High” (elyon) whom v 6 identifies as the father of the gods. fact, the context is redolent of the polytheism that we see in a scene from a Canaanite poem from not later than about 1400 B.C.E., when mighty Baal takes his stand in the divine assembly and spits in defiance.
- The second reason to think Psalm 82 is polytheistic is that God plainly acknowledges in v 6 that those upon whom he pronounces sentence are divine. In short, Psalm 82 is witness to a plural concept of divinity.
The problem is that in the very next verse (v 7) God is depicted as stripping the others of their divinity and immortality. Once again, it will do no good to attempt to harmonize this idea with logic. It is surely true that one cannot lose his immortality; if he dies, he was never immortal. But Psalm 82 is not a treatise in philosophical theology, but a document from the history of a living community of persons, and one which seems to reflect the transition from polytheism to monotheism. The psalm that begins with a scene familiar to any student of (polytheistic) Canaanite religion ends with the death of the other gods and the assertion that “God” will take possession of all the nations, whoever it is they worship. Psalm 82 thus opens in polytheism and closes in monotheism.
The trajectory in the theology of ancient Israel that Psalm 82 represents is one which portrays the kingship (or uniqueness) of God not as something postulated, but as something won. God humiliates the gods. If they had never posed a challenge to him, his humiliation of them would be sadism. Instead, it is the pivotal stage in his assumption of universal dominion. In this particular theology—and I do not say it is the only one in the Hebrew Bible—monotheism is seen as dynamic rather than static, as more like a drama than a treatise in logic.
Everything is at stake here. The very foundations of the earth quake as God pronounces his verdict (v 5). The simple statement that Israel was monotheistic or polytheistic cannot do justice to the spiritual dynamics at work in the Hebrew Bible. Nor will the old cliché about Israelite monotheism as a revolution in consciousness do justice to the relationship between this dynamic monotheizing drama and the literature of the rest of the ancient Near East, the culture from which Israel is supposed to have effected an absolute break. “Paganism” is not quite so simplistic as the proponents of the Israelite “revolution” tend to assume. Herbert Farmer points out an element of monotheism in the religious experience of one whom we may classify as a polytheist:
…there is, in the act of prayer and worship, an inherent tendency towards what may be called concentration…We may surmise that at moments of living prayer and worship there is in primitive man a turning to a god as if he were in fact the one and only God, though without any expressly formulated denial of the existence of others; for the time being, the god worshipped fills the whole sphere of the divine….
I should add that the spiritual experience of one form of prayer, praise, is especially akin to that of the monotheist. One’s heart moves one to attribute uniqueness to the object of praise. This attribution of uniqueness need not be taken as an indication that in a context other than one of praise, the speaker would still deny the existence of others. A hymn does not speak in the same language as a philosophical treatise. Thus, most of the statements of the uniqueness or kingship of YHWH are actually affirmations of his incomparability; they tend to occur in a context of hymnody.
“Who is like you, YHWH, among the gods? (Exod 15:11).
Israel did not assert the oneness of her God with the dispassion of a philosopher. She praised God for being unique, incomparable, a source of embarrassment to his rivals, their master. Something precious is lost when we convert this language of hymnody into a matter of doctrine. That there comes a moment in the history of religion when philosophical reflection is necessary cannot be gainsaid. But we generate grave misunderstandings when we read that moment back into an era when it had not yet occurred.
The hymnic affirmation of the incomparability of YHWH has been found to be paralleled nicely in other literature of the ancient Near East, for example, in this Old Babylonian hymn to the god Sin:
Lord, who surpasses thee? Who can equal thee?
Great hero, who surpasses thee? Who can equal thee?
Lord Nanna, who surpasses thee? Who can equal thee?
And of the god of the sun and justice, Shamash, we read:
Thou shinest, thou alone! None among the gods equals thee.
In Egypt in the fourteenth century B.C.E., the worship of the solar disc Aton attracted a theology that has been regarded as monotheistic:
O sole god, like whom there is no other!
Thou didst create the world according to thy desire,
Whilst thou wert alone.
We also find, again in Mesopotamia, strong parallels to the notion that one God came to be supreme in what had been a more “democratic” pantheon. For example, the god of Babylon itself, Marduk, acquired kingship over the (other) gods through his defeat of Tiamat, the sea monster who had cowed the rest of the pantheon. His praise sounds a note familiar to any student of the Hebrew Bible:
Who restored all the ruined gods, as though they were his own creation. Who is highly exalted among the gods, his brothers, the lord of them all.
The utterance of his mouth no god can change.
In short, if one wishes to define monotheism as the idea that one god is supreme over the others, one must still acknowledge that in this Israel was not unique. To be sure, I have not established that Israel borrowed the language of incompatibility. If Farmer is right about the unitive element in even the rankest polytheism, and if I am correct in positioning a monotheizing dimension to praise, then one can easily speak of a parallel development between Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Israel. Either way, it is clear that the ascription of supremacy and incompatibility to YHWH was not a revolution in consciousness in the ancient world.
There are, however, dimensions to Israelite “monotheism” that are not (yet) documented elsewhere. Chief among these is the fact that Israel developed prohibitions upon the worship of the other gods. Generally, the other cultures of the biblical world were, by comparison to Israel, remarkably tolerant. Their pantheons absorbed gods with ease. Even where one god was hymned as incomparable and supreme, the others were still worshipped. With the possible exception of the Aton cult, the supremacy of one god was not regarded as a derogation of the others or a judgment upon service to them.
But Israel, as we have seen, was to “have no other gods before me” (Exod 20:3). In fact, some passages make it clear that Israel was to have no other gods at all:
He who sacrifices to a god other than YHWH alone shall be proscribed. (Exod 22:19)
Laws such as this bespeak a worldview incompatible with the free and easy attitude to divinity and cult that obtained generally in the rest of the ancient Near East. YHWH was intolerant of the gods to the point that he continually warns his votaries against situations in which they might be led away from him.
For example. Deut 13:2-19 warns against following a prophet or diviner, even one who works miracles, if he advocates the service of any deity other than YHWH. Note that nothing in Deuteronomy 13 suggests that the other gods do not exist.
The fear is not that Israel will be led into philosophical error, but that another deity will claim her service, and the assumption is that, if this occurs, she will have abandoned the service of YHWH, which is concretized and realized only in observance of his commandments. What is striking here is precisely the unstated assumption that one cannot combine the service of YHWH with that of the other gods; the two are mutually exclusive. This is the element for which we cannot account by comparison with the monotheizing tendencies within the pantheons of Israel’s neighbors.
On the other hand, parallels to the ideas and even the language of the chapter do appear in extra-biblical literature. Moshe Weinfeld draws attention to a section of a Hittite suzerainty treaty in which the vassal is obligated to report and to extradite anyone guilty of sedition against the emperor. The goal of such stipulations is the suppression of insurrection. Like the vassal of the Hittite suzerain, the Israelite is required to report the apostate charismatic (Deut 13:10). To fail to do so is to breach covenant and thus to undermine the value of whatever stipulations are still observed. In each case, the Hittite and the biblical, the great king obliges his ally not only to observe the terms himself, but to act affirmatively against any situation which weakens the alliance. The implication for the Israelite prohibition upon worshipping other gods is evident:
YHWH the suzerain cannot tolerate rivals.
His famous jealousy is the jealousy of the liege lord who demands,
as all lords do, the exclusive loyalty of his vassals.
It is this which underlies the prohibition upon covenant-making, joint worship, and intermarriage with Gentiles, as in Exod 34:12-16. In this passage, we find all the ingredients of the covenantal component of Israelite monotheism. A covenant with the Canaanites, presumably of the parity kind, will oblige Israel to recognize the pantheon of these new allies. But to do so is to grant legitimacy to the other gods, in fact, to absorb them into the institution of covenant, which until now has involved only one deity, the suzerain YHWH.
To the nation whose God is its suzerain, a potential paramour with whom the slightest contact harbors the ominous capacity to destroy the covenant. Hence, the fear of “whoring” after the other’s gods, a fear certain to be realized where one brings the others into his home through intermarriage. The prohibition on polytheism is a corollary of the exclusivity of the suzerain-vassal relationship.
My interpretation of the biblical view of polytheism finds confirmation in an observation by a scholar with some very different views.
Yehezkel Kaufmann argued that Israel’s religion was so utterly discontinuous with the traditions of her neighbors that she literally did not understand the nature of polytheism.
In support of his position, he noted that the Hebrew Bible reported no myth about any god. Instead of polemicizing against the myth, Israel polemicized against the gods themselves. The war on myth and the war on the gods were entirely separate.
Kaufmann’s observation is largely correct, but his conclusion is not.
It is true that Israel attacked the gods more than their mythologies. But why? The reason is that, as regards the covenant theology, the myth is neutral. It will not raise a serious challenge against YHWH’s suzerainty. The god, however, might; every god is a potential suzerain, who might displace YHWH. Therefore, the brunt of the polemic falls upon the other deities. They must be shown to be unworthy of lordship.
This need to discredit the other gods is the last component in Israelite monotheism. Central to it is the assertion that the other gods are not real.
A fine example is Jer 10:2-10. In these verses, we do not hear the covenantal proscription of polytheism, but, rather, an attack upon the gods that centers upon an identification of the deities with their images.
In Kaufmann’s thinking, this view of the gods as fetishes was proof positive that Israel’s religion was so distant from that of her neighbors that she could not even understand theirs.
In Part 2, I shall argue that statements made in the heat of interreligious polemic cannot bear the weight which Kaufmann place upon them. Even here in Jeremiah 10, we must not miss both the atmosphere of fevered polemic against the gods and that of praise for YHWH, a praise that, again, stresses his incomparability (vv 6-7). Still, it is imperative to note that the hymnic assertion of YHWH’s incomparability here entails a savage derogation of the rest of the pantheon, as it does not in Mesopotamia or in texts like Exod 15:11. Jeremiah 10 has its being in a world of either/or, either YHWH or the gods. In that sense, it recalls Deuteronomy 13, with its interpretation of the worship of other gods as a defection from YHWH.
The precise connection between the prohibition of practical polytheism and the attack upon the gods as unreal is unclear. I suggest, however, that it is the need to discredit other deities who might be imported into a status of suzerainty which leads from the one to the other.
To summarize: we have examined three aspects of Israelite monotheism.
- The first is the statement of YHWH’s incomparability, which seems connected with his emergence into a commanding position in the pantheon. This element is nicely paralleled in the hymnic and epic literature of Mesopotamia.
- The second element is the prohibition upon the worship of the other gods and upon any situation that might lead to such service. The Near Eastern source for this lies in the suzerainty covenant, which demands of the vassal exclusive allegiance to his suzerain.
- Finally, we have examined the polemical identification of the gods and their icons. Texts like Jeremiah 10:2-10 are the closest to genuine monotheism, the belief in the reality of only one deity, although we noted that the hyperbolic tone of such polemics inhibits our ability to say much about what the author believes about the gods he here insults.
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This discussion has shown that, although no other religion has been discovered with the same “monotheism,” almost all the elements of Israel’s belief in the oneness/uniqueness of YHWH show convincing parallels in the Gentile world. The most important of the parallels in my opinion, the one that sheds light on the most biblical texts, is the covenantal proscription on intercourse with other suzerains and their agents. Why, precisely, Israel should have taken one of the gods as her suzerain, thus dooming the others, is unclear.
C. B. Labuschagne suggests that the answer lies in the uniqueness of Israelite historical experience:
By his intervention in history, of which the deliverance from Egypt is the example par excellence, YHWH did something that no other god ever did: He delivered a nation for himself in a miraculous manner.
Labuschagne is surely correct that YHWH’s control of history often appeared to Israel as the decisive difference between him and the gods (e.g., Isaiah 44). But I doubt whether we can go farther and claim that it was Israel’s unique experience of deliverance that generated her exclusive fidelity to YHWH as the one lord among the gods.
- For one thing, the historical experience of Israel could have been explained within the mechanism of a thorough-going polytheism. The Exodus, for example, could have been presented in terms of a theomachy, a war among the gods, in which one side freed the other’s slaves. Historical events are mute. They do not bespeak any given metahistorical interpretations; the interpretation explains the event, not vice versa. Israel’s belief in the incomparability/lordship/exclusive reality of YHWH does not derive from her theology of history; her theology of history follows from her “monotheism.”
- There is another reason why it is unlikely that a reflection on history generated Israel’s “monotheism.” The truth is that historical consciousness was to be found in Mesopotamia as well. There it was less central and less developed than in Israel, but the fact remains that the Mesopotamians also believed that their gods intervened in history. They even celebrated such interventions in their cults. In short, the sense of history as open to the divine is not a sufficient explanation of the rise of Israel’s covenantal faith. How the idea of God as exclusive suzerain was born thus remains cloaked in mystery. Historians may never pierce that cloak.
What is clear in light of the covenant theology is the connection between the profession of the uniqueness of YHWH and the performance of his commandments.
- To believe that he alone is lord is to do his will;
- to do his will is to enthrone him in lordship.
- The belief in the one God, the love of God, and the observance of his commandments are inextricable;
- they are all ways of stating one fact, his suzerainty.
The Near Eastern material sheds light on the roots of what is perhaps the central affirmation of Judaism,
- that the Torah is the way to life with God,
- and God, the source of the Torah.
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