The Age of Abraham and Israel

One of the most contentious areas in the archaeology of the Ancient Near East today is the debate between the ‘maximalist’ and ‘minimalist’ archaeologists regarding the foundation of Israel. The maximalists consider that the Hebrew Bible – the Old Testament – is a more or less accurate description of the history of the Hebrew people and ancient Israel. The minimalists, on the other hand, largely reject the accuracy of the Old Testament narrative, viewing it as too late and ideologically tainted to be an accurate representation of events. Thus, archaeologists like R.B. Coote and K.W. Whitelam have deliberately adopted a policy of ‘minimal recourse to Biblical texts’ in the words of another leading minimalist, Norman Gottwald. 1 A crucial part of this debate has been over the nature of the emergence of Israel in the late Bronze Age. Although most archaeologists thirty years ago considered that Israel emerged through the settlement of nomadic tribes c. 1200 BC, this consensus was seriously challenged in 1979 by the Marxist scholar, Norman Gottwald. 2 Gottwald instead considered that ancient Israel was the product of a revolution by indigenous peasants against the domination of the Canaanite city states.

In 1985 Gottwald’s ‘Peasant Revolt’ model was attacked in turn by the Danish scholar, Nils Lemche. Lemche was particularly critical of Gottwald’s assumption that sedentary farmers and nomads stood in opposition to each other. He noted several examples where some nomads settled down, so that the settled peoples and nomads of an area were actually related to each other. He also cited examples of where cities and villages were part of a continuum with mutual interaction, and concluded ‘that there is no instance in teh anthropological literature of the existence of the type of opposition between peasants and city presumed by Gottwald.’ 3

Lemche himself is certainly no maximalist, and is strongly critical of the historical accuracy of the Bible. Not all scholars share this view, however. The German scholar Udo Worschech in 1983 used the results of anthropology to argue for the historical reliability of the traditions about the patriarch Abraham. 4 Interestingly, despite his opposition to the historical reliability of the Bible, Lemche’s demonstration of the lack of a opposition between city dwellers, farmers and nomads actually supports an ancient date for the composition of Genesis.

I was discussing the date of Genesis with a friend a little while ago, who pointed out that the type of semi-nomadic lifestyle described in Genesis was typical of the type of society depicted in the Mitanni texts. The Mitanni were a people situated roughly northeast of present day Syria, whose civilisation reached its zenith between 1450 and 1350 BC before being destroyed by the Hittites and Assyrians. 5 Although some of the names of the towns mentioned in Genesis belong to a later period, the society described is the same semi-nomadic culture as that of the Mitanni, and there are technical legal terms in the Hebrew that also belong to this period. Contrary to the minimalist hypothesis, which saw Genesis as a late development projected back into the past by the Israelites to support their nationhood, the similarities between the culture of the Mitanni and the semi-nomadism of Abraham and his descendents indicates a very early origin for the book of Genesis. The accuracy of this depiction would seem to be supported by Lemche’s own observation of the lack of a dichotomy between sedentary and nomadic peoples. Thus, paradoxically, Lemche’s observations in this area could actually support the historicity of the Bible, despite his own rejection of the Bible as an accurate record of historical events.

Notes

1. J.B. Martin, ‘Israel as a Tribal Society’ in R.E. Clements, ed., The World of Ancient Israel: Sociological, Anthropological and Political Perspectives (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1989), p. 114.

2. J.W. Rogerson, ‘Anthropology and the Old Testament’, in Clements, ed., Ancient Israel, p. 27.

3. J.W. Rogerson, ‘Anthropology and the Old Testament’, in Clements, ed., Ancient Israel, p. 29.

4. J.W. Rogerson, ‘Anthropology and the Old Testament’, in Clements, ed., Ancient Israel, p. 31.

5. ‘1380-1200 The New Hittite Kingdom’ in Hermann Kinder and Werner Hilgemann, translated by Ernest A. Menze, maps designed by Harald and Ruth Bukor, The Penguin Atlas of World History – Volume 1: From the Beginning to the Eve of the French Revolution (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1978), p. 35.

Religious Similarities and Continuity between Jews and Christians in Ancient Palestine

Going through the latest issue of the Oxbow Books catalogue, I found an interesting item on the similarities and continuity between Judaism and Christianity in Byzantine Palestine. Oxbow Books are an Oxford bookseller which specialises in books on history and archaeology. Their stock ranges from popular history and archaeology, like Channel 4’s Time Team to very detailed, academic works, such as technical treatises on the precise significance of the prehistoric megafauna found at a particular cave from the standpoint of a particular archaeological school.

The piece that caught my eye was Eliya Ribak’s Religious Communities in Byzantine Palestina: The Relationship Between Judaism, Christian and Islam AD 400-700. The blurb for this states:

‘This study is an archaeological analysis of the relationship between religious communities in Byzantine Palestina, based on a catalogue of excavated Byzantine sites in teh region (forming an appendix to the work). This shows that, although there are clear-cut examples of Jewish and Samaritan synagogues and Christian churches, these buildings are often so similar that it is difficult to differentiate between them. It is also shown that Jewish and Christian burial practices were so similar that, unless accompanied by inscriptions or symbols, the religious identity of burials is often difficult to recognise. This evidence is used to argue for closer and more peaceful co-existence between religious communities in Byzantine Palestina than is usually supposed’.

The Byzantine Empire was the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which survived the Fall of Rome in 415 until its capital at Constantinople was finally conquered by the Turks in 1454. Palestine and the other Byzantine provinces in the Levant and Egypt, were conquered in a series of campaigns by the Muslim Arabs in the 630s and 640s. Basically the book is discussing the relationship between Jews and Christians in Palestine under the Christian Byzantine Empire and very roughly the first half century of Muslim Arab occupation.

I can’t say I’m particularly surprised at the similarities between the places of worship and the burial practices of Jews and Christians in Palestine at this time. Christianity was originally a Jewish sect, and St. Paul, the pharisee and a son of pharisees, preached in synagogues. The language of the Peshitta, the version of the Bible used in the Maronite Catholic Church, the Syrian Catholic Church, the Syrian Jacobite Church,and the Nestorian Church, is Syriac, descended from Aramaic, the language of the Jews and other nations of the ancient Near East at the time of Christ. One particular dialect of Syriac, that spoken by communities around the village of Malula, north of Damascus and Mardin, east of Urfa in Turkey, is still called Aramaic today. The Roman Catholic priest and archaeologist, Carsten Peter Theide, in his book Jesus: Man or Myth? mentions an early Jewish Christian synagogue discovered by archaeologists in Palestine. Now used by an Orthodox Jewish community, the synagogue-church was identified by ancient Christian inscriptions on its walls and by the fact that the niche for the scrolls of the Torah was aligned not towards Jerusalem, but towards Golgotha, the site of Christ’s execution by the Romans.

Other archaeologists I’ve heard speak have also remarked on the continuity between places of worship in Palestine, even after the Muslim conquest. Last year I was fortunate enough to hear an archaeologist who had excavated such places of monuments in the Near East talk at Uni. He remarked on a particular Christian site he had excavated in one Middle Eastern state in the region, dedicated to the veneration of a local mar or saint. Excavating it, he found an inscription giving peace to all who entered the shrine’s precincts in Arabic, indicating that Muslims too had found sanctuary and spiritual benefit at the shrine. There were also indications that the pilgrims to this Christian shrine also included Jews.

Speaking of the transition from Paganism to Christianity in Egypt, the same archaeologist stated that while pagan temples in the towns were destroyed after the conversion, in the countryside they were largely respected and left untouched. In fact architectural elements from some ancient Egyptian temples even ended up in some Christian Coptic churches. One example of this which he showed was a slide of a beautifully decorated interior of a Coptic church in Cairo.

It was a fascinating lecture, and important because of the way the history of the relationship between the monotheist religions has often been presented as entirely violent. Yet despite the conquest of Palestine by Islam, relations between the Jewish, Christian and Muslim inhabitants appear to have been peaceful and respectful in this period. As for the continuity between ancient and Christian Egypt, this was in strong contradiction to the image presented by one of the BBC’s programmes on the subject. In the last of his series on Ancient Egypt about a year ago, Dan Cruikshank dwelt on the Christian destruction of pagan monuments and temples after the country’s conversion. Now that clearly occurred, but elsewhere the change was far less violent. However, that doesn’t make such dramatic television as images of angry mobs of fanatical Christians desecrating temples.

Now while as a Christian I think there are dangers with religious syncretism, I thought nevertheless that these indications of continuity and community between Jews, Christians and Muslims needed to be more widely known. The charictature of religious interaction that has become the received wisdom since the Enlightenment is that it is nearly always violent, a charicature that has taken on renewed relevance after 9/11. The evidence from archaeology shows otherwise. Violence is there, true, but so is respect and veneration, especially amongst Jews and Christians, who in Byzantine Palestine would have been the descendents of Jews, worshipping a Jewish saviour, in the language they shared with their Jewish friends and neighbours.

Just a Bronze Age Text

One of the most common sneers I’ve come across about the Bible is dismissive comments about its supposed origins in the Bronze Age. These are mostly offhand statements that the Bible is Christians’ and Jews ‘favourite Bronze Age text’ or that it’s just ‘Bronze Age mythology’. Such sneers are so common that they’re actually something of a cliché. Rather than being any kind of meaningful criticism of the Bible and its relevance, these dismissive references to the Bible’s ancient origins are based on nothing more than cultural chauvinism and a simplistic belief that the value of a belief system can be judged solely on the scientific knowledge of the culture that produced it. More specifically, it tries to dismiss the Bible and its witness to God’s actions in history based on the technical competence of the Israelites in one particular area: metallurgy. Because the Israelites at the time some Biblical texts were written could only smelt bronze rather than iron, this is somehow taken as a decisive indicator of their stupidity, a technological limitation that is indicative of the invalidity of their worldview as a whole. They believed in God, but could only work in bronze, while we now have science and have a metallurgical skill they could only dream about. This is somehow supposed to refute belief in God.

Now I have an interest in the literature and culture of the ancient Near East, and comments about the Bible being just a ‘Bronze Age text’ and the like aren’t rational rebuttals to the Bible’s truth, but simple statements of prejudice. There’s an underlying assumption that people that far back in time were either so stupid that their ideas aren’t worth listening to today, or else they suffered from a mythopoeic mindset which does not related to the objective reality revealed by science. In fact what is abundantly clear when you start to read texts from the ancient world is not how alien the peoples who wrote them were, but how little different they are. They knew less, and their culture was profoundly different to our own, but at the same time they were as intelligent as we are and were capable of making the most profound statements about the human condition through their mythology and secular literature. And if our science and mathematics are better than theirs, it’s because they laid their foundations. So let’s examine the intellectual and cultural world of the ancient Near East to see if the Bible’s background in the Bronze Age really does make it meaningless in today’s technological world of space travel, atomic power and cloning.

Firstly, the point needs to be made that the Bible is not just a Bronze Age text. If one takes the view that the various books of the Bible were written between c. 1000 B.C. to c.100 A.D., that’s a period of about 1,100 years of revelation and theological reflection, going from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age. It’s roughly the same period that produced the ancient Sceptical texts that produced modern atheism when they were printed and began to circulate more widely in the 17^th century. Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who argued that the gods could not and did not interfere in nature, and that this cosmos was only one of a number of cosmoi that had arisen by chance through the fall of atoms in a cosmic void, lived from 341 to 270 BC. Pyrrho of Elis, the founder of methodical Scepticism who attacked all statements about the gods as nonsensical and taught a ‘suspension of disbelief’, lived from 365 to 275 BC, and his noted successor, Carneades, from c. 214 to 129 BC. If sneering at the Bible as just ‘Bronze Age’ myth constitutes an effective refutation, then it is just as valid to dismiss Scepticism and atheism as mere Iron Age thinking. Clearly dismissing the validity of either theological or philosophical perspective, based solely on when it was being formulated, doesn’t count as an effective refutation of either God and the Bible, or atheism and the arguments of the ancient Epicurean and Sceptical philosophers who produced it.

So how stupid, or technologically and culturally inferior were the peoples of the Bronze Age?

Firstly, although their technology was vastly inferior to ours, they were certainly not stupid. They knew how to build great temples and public monuments using tools very little different from those used by masons today. If you look at the hammers, mallets, saws and chisels used by the Egyptian craftsmen, what actually strikes you is how little they have changed. The metal used might be copper and bronze, rather than iron and steel, but their form and function has hardly changed in millennia. When you come to the tools in use in the Roman period, there’s very little difference between them and those of modern craftsmen.

Both ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia were highly sophisticated civilisations with an advanced mathematics. The Babylonians used a system of base 60, before moving to base 10, the system used today, about the time of Seleucid kings. They were acutely interested in geometry because of the necessity of accurately assessing field sizes for the correct payment of tribute and taxes. One common school exercise to provide training in this was the ‘six brothers problem’. This involved dividing a trapezium in strips between three pairs of brothers. The area of the strip each pair of brothers received was to be equal, while the strips declined in length. Although an exercise in solving a practical problem, it’s been suggested that this shows that the Babylonians were also interested in knowledge for its sake. 1 Amongst the 8,000 or so square metres of streets and houses excavated in 1930-1 by Sir Leonard Woolley in Ur was a private school, whose headmaster, Igmil-Sin, taught writing, religion, history and mathematics, recording his pupil’s work, their timetable, achievements, competitiveness, and also their truancy and physical punishment. 2 Babylonian civilisation also included academies, termed bit mummi – ‘house of knowledge’, a particularly fine example being that of Nineveh. Although the ancient Greeks’ admiration for the Babylonians as magicians has coloured the modern perception of them as superstitious, modern scholars of Babylonian civilisation have been impressed by their scientific skill and cast of mind. ‘Far from being the last word in Babylonian wisdom, witchcraft and popular astrology developed as a sign of decay in a dying civilisation, and we now know for certain that Sumerians and Assyro-Babylonians alike were blessed with almost all the qualities required for a truly scientific attitude of mind.’ These scholars point to the Babylonians’ insatiable scientific curiosity, a curiosity which saw them collect ancient tablets, establish museums of antiquities and collect rare and unusual plants and animals from foreign countries. 3 They understood with astonishing precision the lunar cycle, drew up observations of Venus, detailed star catalogues and could accurately predict eclipses of the moon and sun. The astronomer Kidunu (Cidenas), active in about 375 BC, calculated the length of the solar year with an error of only 4 minutes and 32.65 seconds. His calculations were more accurate than that of Oppolzer in 1887. And this is despite the fact that these astronomers possessed as technological guides only a primitive sundial, the waterclock and the polos. This last was a device for registering the shadow projected by minute ball suspended over a hemisphere. 4

In medicine, as well as the baru-priest who divined the sin responsible for the sufferer’s sickness, and the ashipu-priest who used magico-theological rites to treat it, there was also a tradition of rational, pragmatic medicine, asutu. 5 There were manuals of symptoms and their prognosis, including treatments for depression. They also possessed a pharmacopaeia’ of medicines and their preparation. Some of these medical procedures would still be considered good medicine today after all these centuries. One scholar has said of the treatment for epistaxis recommended by king Ashurbanipal’s personal doctor, Arad-Nama, who stated that the nose should be blocked to its end to stop bleeding that ‘modern physicians would not change a word of this procedure.’ 6

The ancient Egyptians too were skilled mathematicians, scientists and doctors. They were interested in probability theory, and had a number system based on ten which advanced to a million. 7 They had an excellent grasp of the mechanics of buildings and were well able to calculate the frustrum of a pyramid.8 While the Egyptians did not recognise the year as possessing 365 days, they knew that it took the sun this long to return to its original mythological birthplace in the south-eastern horizon at the winter solstice in 4500 BC. 9 They used a precursor of the theodolite, a notched palm rib called a bay, along with an L-shaped instrument with a plumb-bob, which measured the vertical, the merkhet, for surveying. 10 The ancient Egyptians too have won the admiration of contemporary scholars for the advanced state of their medicine. They new how to set bones, perform surgical operations to remove the parasitic guinea worm, and cataracts with thorns. They also valued oratory and intelligence. The Instruction for King Merikare of c. 2020 BC includes the advice ‘Be a craftsman in speech that you may be strong … Speech is more valorous than any fighting.’ 11

So we are dealing here with sophisticated, complex civilisations, which valued science and mathematics, and considered intelligence more important than skill in war. And in their personal observations on politics some of their comments are both acute and timeless. The modern tax-payer who feels that his hard-earned money is being squandered by greedy officials on themselves, rather than providing material results, can readily appreciate this complaint from ancient Egypt:

‘Seizers! Robbers! Plunderers! Officials! – and yet appointed to punish evil! Officialdom is the refuge of the arrogant – and yet appointed to punish falsehood!’

As well as

‘The land is diminished, but its rulers are increased. The land is bare, but its taxes are heavy. The grain is little, but the grain measure is large and measured by the tax officials to overflowing.’ 12

Similar the person who today feels that the law protects only the rich and powerful, and punishes the victim while protecting the criminal can find such sentiments expressed millennia earlier in Jewish legend. For example, in the legends that grew up about Sodom, the town was reviled as the epitome of evil and criminality because of the predatory avarice of its citizens and the extreme corruption of their judges. If a stranger entered the city, he was immediately robbed of his property and clothes by the citizens, who sent him naked and poor on his way. Their judges and rulers even passed an act which outlawed charity. Anyone who gave something to another for free, even if it was giving a piece of bread to a starving beggar, was to die. Even physical assault was rewarded under their perverted laws. If a man wounded another man in a quarrel, the wounded man was obliged to pay his assailant for performing the medical operation of bleeding him. 13

Obviously the complaint of the ordinary, tax-paying citizen against civic corruption and criminality is timeless, going down the centuries. The cry of the ancient Egyptian or Israelite can be heard today in London, New York and a million other great cities.

So the people of the Bronze Age were sophisticated, with an interest in science, mathematics and wisdom, and whose attitudes in many ways were very similar, if not identical to those of today. In reply to this, it can be stated that this does not mean that their religious ideas were correct, and that science has not overturned them.

Actually, this reply makes the same mistake. It has a mistaken view of the nature of religion, and ignores the continued existence of supernatural experience amongst contemporary people. Or rather, it stigmatises it as a mental aberration, or perhaps a false evolutionary vestige in human cognition that science has shown to be false. And it still overestimates the difference between modern people and their ancient forebears.

Firstly, positivists who see science as undermining religion by correctly explaining the objects of the natural world make the mistake of seeing religion solely as providing an explanation for events. But this is not the case. Religion is not merely about providing an explanation for a particular phenomenon, but about experiencing that phenomenon as a ‘Thou’, a mind, according the view of the great German Jewish scholar, Martin Buber. This ‘Thou’ was encountered by the whole man, as life confronting life, involving every faculty of man in a reciprocal relationship. 14 The particular images of Mesopotamian myth ‘had already become traditional at the time when we meet them in art and literature, but originally they must have been seen in the revelation which the experience entailed. They are products of imagination, but they are not mere fantasy. It is essential that true myth be distinguished from legend, saga, fable and fairy tale. All these may retain elements of the myth. And it may also happen that a baroque or frivolous imagination elaborates myths until they become mere stories. But true myth presents its images and its imaginary actors, not with the playfulness of fantasy, but with a compelling authority. It perpetuates the revelation of a ‘Thou’. 15 Thus in ancient Egypt contradictory explanations for the same phenomenon could appear in myth at the same time without apparent friction. The sun was conceived as both the boat of the god Ra travelling across the sky, and as rolled across the heavens by a giant scarab beetle. Both myths explained the phenomenon, but both looked deeper to a transcendental experience, a ‘Thou’, which the myth encapsulated. It is this transcendental experience, which is the essence of myth and religion.

And such supernatural and mythopoeic experiences still occur today. Scholars of Contemporary Legends – the mythic rumours and stories which circulate today – note that humans are also Homo Religiosus – religious, as well as rational, and that the legends that circulate may also be narrated by those to whom a supernatural experience personally occurred. 16 Sceptics and secularists such as Charles Krauthammer decry the increased interest in the paranormal as ‘a flight to irrationality, a retreat to pre-scientific primitivism in an age that otherwise preens with scientific pride.’ 17 Yet this is to make the same mistake of seeing religion and science as somehow performing the same role, whereas they operate in separate, but overlapping spheres. Moreover, it underestimates just how sceptical ancient people actually were. Denyse O’Leary in her excellent ID blog, Post Darwinist, has remarked on how the great Anglo-Polish anthropologist, Boleslaw Malinowski, was surprised at how many sceptics there were about the gods in the primitive societies he studied. Even amongst believers in antiquity, not all were at all pious. Some considered themselves far more intelligent than their supernatural masters. One ancient Egyptian scribe reproached another for his impiety thus: ‘I am astonished when thou sayest: “ I am more profound as a scribe than heaven, or earth, or the underworld!’ 18 The ancient Israelites were concerned to account for the origin of the false religions around them, and sought them in what we would recognise as rational explanations. For the writer of the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, the origin of idolatry lay in the manufacture of images by the grief-stricken parents of dead children, and subjects to impress their kings with their devotion:

‘For a father afflicted with untimely mourning, when he hath made an image of his child soon taken away, now honoured him as a god, which was then a dead man, and delivered to those that were under him ceremonies and sacrifices. Thus in process of time an ungodly custom grown strong was kept as a law, and graven images were worshipped by the commandments of kings. Whom men could not honour in presence, because they dwelt far off, they took the counterfeit of his visage from far, and made an express image of a king whom they honoured, to the end that by this their forwardness they might flatter him that was absent, as if he were present. Also the singular diligence of the artificer did help to set forward the ignorant to more superstition. For he, peradventure willing to please one in authority, forced all his skill to make the resemblance of the best fashion. And so the multitude, allured by the grace of the work, took him now for a god, which a little before was but honoured as a man. And this was an occasion to deceive the world: for men, serving either calamity or tyranny, did ascribe unto stones and stocks the incommunicable name.’ 19 Looking at the evidence of contemporary interest in the paranormal, and the rationalist scepticism of the ancient Israelites towards the false religions of the surrounding nations, there seems much less supposed difference between credulous, mythopoeic Bronze Age people and their scientific modern descendents.

It also has to be considered that the Bible isn’t a typical Bronze Age text, and its view of God and the process of creation is radically different from the mythologies of the contemporary peoples of the ancient Near East. While scholars have pointed to the similarities between the Biblical account of creation in Genesis and that of the Babylonians, there are several crucial differences.

Firstly, in the mythologies of ancient Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia, the gods are created from a long chain of personified natural forces. In Genesis, this process is reversed. God comes before nature, and all nature is the result of God’s creative action. 20

Secondly, there is a plurality of gods in the other, pagan myths. In Genesis, there is only the One God, who acts alone. And Genesis is structured to deny any kind of divinity to the objects of His creation. The sun and moon, for example, which were worshipped as gods in Babylonia, are merely described as the greater and lesser lights. It’s a rationalist restructuring of pagan myth to bring out the point that the various objects of the created universe are only that – created objects. The true power lies behind it.

Thirdly, the actual process of creation in Genesis is rather different from the very anthropomorphic account in contemporary paganism. While the Enuma Elish gives a very graphically anthropomorphic account of the gods knotting veins when they create the first man, for example, Genesis is much less anthropomorphic. It doesn’t describe how God creates the objects of the universe, only that He does. ‘The language of Genesis 1 tells us nothing about the mechanism or mode of ‘creation’.’ 21 Clearly the description of Adam being formed from the ‘dust of the earth’ and having life blown into him by God is anthropomorphic, but less compared to the surrounding myths.

Apart from the physical act of creation, God acts in history in a way that transcends the mythological time of contemporary paganism. The Babylonian myth of Adapa has been compared to the Genesis account of the creation of Adam. In the Babylonian myth, Adapa is created by the gods to serve them. Travelling to heaven to clear himself after he angers them by breaking the wing of the south wind with a curse, he loses the opportunity of immortality by refusing the bread and water of life offered him by the gods, mistaking them for the bread and water of death. It is similar to the Biblical story of the creation of Adam by narrating how the gods create a man, and how this man then loses the opportunity for immortality. However, the Adapa myth is set in an ahistorical mythological time. It does not have the genealogies present in Genesis, which link the events in Eden to the figures of Israelite history.22 In Genesis the story moves from myth into history, pointing to the effects of the primal theological events in the contemporary world of historical experience.

This experience of God as apart from nature, and acting in history, set ancient Israel profoundly apart from the neighbouring peoples, their mythologies and ideologies.

‘Not cosmic phenomena, but history itself, had here become pregnant with meaning; history had become a revelation of the dynamic will of God. The human being was not merely the servant of the god as he was in Mesopotamia; nor was he placed, as in Egypt, at a pre-ordained station in a static universe which did not need to be – and, in fact, could not be questioned. Man, according to Hebrew thought, was the interpreter and the servant of God; he was even honoured with the task of bringing about the realization of God’s will.’ This task saw humanity ‘possessed of a new freedom, and of a new responsibility’. 23

Whatever one believes about the literal truth of the account of Creation in Genesis, the movement away from God as the personification of natural forces, as a transcendent being active in time and yet apart from it, paved the way for modern science and was far superior to the pagan cults of nature. Franz Cumont, the great pioneering scholar of the Roman cult of Mithras, observed that if the cult of Mithras had survived.

‘it would not only have preserved from oblivion all the aberrations of pagan mysticism, but would also have perpetuated the erroneous doctrine of physics on which its dogmatism reposed. The Christian doctrine, which broke with the cults of nature, remained exempt from these impure associations, and its liberation from every compromising attachment assured it an immense superiority. Its negative value, its struggle against deeply-rooted prejudices, gained for it as many souls as did the positive hopes which it promised.’ 24

Thus attempts to discredit the truth of the Bible by pointing to its origins in the Bronze Age are profoundly wrong and inadequate. The peoples of the Bronze Age weren’t stupid or uninterested in science and mathematics, even if their knowledge in these areas was much less than ours. They were capable of profound philosophical insights and expressing timeless truths of human existence in their myth and wisdom literature. The same period that saw the formation of the Bible also saw the formulation of the classic atheist arguments. Furthermore, the Bible and ancient Israel in their view of God and His relationship with the world transcended the mindset of the other ancient Near Eastern peoples to create a view of the world that was both deeply religious and rational and sceptical. Rather than sneer at the Bible for being just a ‘Bronze Age text’ or ‘Bronze Age mythology’, the arguments and experiences recorded in the Bible need to be judged according to their own merits as the result of timeless human experience.

And despite the claims that modern science has somehow disproved them, the arguments against the Bible’s truth are all deeply flawed. The testimony of the Bible still stands, and the glory of the Lord does indeed proceed from age to age, from the Bonze Age into our own.

Notes

1. Ivor Grattan-Guinness, The Fontana History of the Mathematical Sciences (London, Fontana Press 1997), p. 30.
2. Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (London, Penguin 1992), pp. 220, 223.
3. Roux, Ancient Iraq, p. 358.
4. Roux, Ancient Iraq, pp. 365-6.
5. Roux, Ancient Iraq, p. 367.
6. Roux, Ancient Iraq, p. 370.
7. Grattan-Guinness, Mathematical Sciences, p. 32.
8. Grattan-Guinness, Mathematical Sciences, pp. 34-6.
9. Ronald A. Wills, ‘Astronomy in Egypt’ in Christopher Walker, ed., Astronomy before the Telescope (London, British Museum Press 1996), p. 34.
10. Wills, ‘Astronomy in Egypt’ in Walker, Astronomy, pp. 36-7.
11. Esmond Wright, ed., History of the World: Prehistory to the Renaissance (Feltham, W.H. Smith 1985), p. 57.
12. John A. Wilson, ‘The Function of the State’ in Henri Frankfort, Mrs. H.A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson and Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books 1949), p. 97.
13. Angelo S. Rappaport, Ancient Israel: Myths and Legends (London, the Mystic Press 1987), pp. 264-5.
14. H. and H.A. Frankfort ‘Introduction: Myth and Reality’ in Frankfort, Frankfort, Wilson and Jacobsen, Before Philosophy, p. 14.
15. H. and H.A. Frankfort ‘Introduction: Myth and Reality’ in Frankfort, Frankfort, Wilson and Jacobsen, Before Philosophy, p. 14.
16. Linda Degh, Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre (Bloomington, Indiana University Press 2001), p. 68.
17. Degh, Legend and Belief, p. 267.
18. John A. Wilson, ‘The Nature of the Universe’ in Frankfort, Frankfort, Wilson and Jacobsen, Before Philosophy, p. 69.
19. Wisdom of Solomon 14: 15-21, The Apocrypha, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), p. 68.
20. Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Chicago, University of Chicago Press 2003), pp. 40-45.
21. Roger Forster and Paul Marston, Reason, Science and Faith (Crowborough, Monarch 1999), p. 276.
22. Roux, Ancient Iraq, p. 107.
23. H. and H.A. Frankfort, ‘The Emancipation of Thought from Myth’ in Frankfort, Frankfort, Wilson and Jacobsen, Before Philosophy, p. 245.
24. Franz Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithras, Thomas J. McCormack, trans., (Chicago, The Open Court Publishing Company 1910), p. 198.

Yahweh – Tribal War God or Only God?

Vigilante, one of the great guys who posts his comments and observations over at Frank Walton’s awesome blog Atheism Sucks, has remarked on the need for a resource to counteract some of the claims regularly made against God and Christianity by atheists. One of these claims, which he recommends should be specifically addressed, is the statement that the God of the Bible, Yahweh, is really only a tribal war god. Now I’ve also come across this type of comment before, and absolutely agree. It’s one of those statements, which is blandly made as if it were obviously true. However, like many such statements, it is only partially correct and needs to be carefully critiqued.

Now there is clearly some truth in that statement. The Bible clearly describes Yahweh as the God of Israel. The other nations surrounding Israel also had their own national gods – Qos was the god of Edom, Asshur of the Assyrians, and Chemosh of Moab. These gods were believed to reside in their temples and shrines, and bring victory in battle to their worshippers. The Babylonian Weidner Chronicle, supposedly correspondence between from king Damiq-ilisu of Isin to Apil-Sin of Babylon or Rim-Sin of Larsa, stresses the power of Marduk in giving sovereignty and victory to his worshippers: ‘Naram-Sin ravaged the populace of Babylon, and twice he (Marduk) called up the Gutian armies against him [He/They put to flight (?)] his people as with a donkey-goad [and] he (Marduk) gave his royal sovereignty to the Gutian armies.’ (from ‘Late Bronze Age Inscriptions from Babylon, Assyria, and Syro-Palestine’, Frans van Koppen, Kyle Greenwood, Christopher Morgan, Brent a Strawn, Jeff Cooley, bill T. Arnold, Eva von Dassow, and Yoram Cohen, Historical Sources in Translation: The Ancient Near East, Mark W. Chavalas, (ed.) (Oxford, Blackwell 2006), p. 167.

Similarly, the Bible often describes the Lord in very martial language, as expressed in 2 Samuel 7:26 ‘And let thy name be magnified for ever, saying, The Lord of hosts is the God over Israel; and let the house of thy servant David be established forever’. This very martial conception of God is also expressed in Psalm 18: 34-50, which has the lines ‘He teacheth my hands in war, so that a bow of steel is broken by mine arms. Thou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation; and thy right hand hath holden me up, and thy gentleness hath made me great’. Psalm 68 also describes the Lord’s warlike prowess in delivering His people and raising them to a position of international honour and rule: ‘The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels’, (v. 17); ‘But God shall wound the head of his enemies, and the hairy scalp of such an one as goeth on still in his trespasses.’(v.21); ‘because of thy temple at Jerusalem shall kings bring presents unto thee’ (v. 29), and ‘Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. Sing unto God, ye kingdoms of the earth; O sing praises unto the Lord; Selah; To him that rideth upon the heavens of heavens, which were of old; lo, he doth send out a voice, and that a mighty voice. Ascribe ye strength unto God: his excellency is over Israel, and his strength is in the clouds. O God, thou are terrible out of thy holy place; the God of Israel is he that giveth strength and power unto his people. Blessed be God.’ (vv. 31-5).

Scholars of the Old Testament, such as Helmer Ringgren have also pointed out how God’s spirit in the Book of Judges gives Gideon, Jephtha and Samson the power to defeat the Israelite’s enemies. (see H. Ringgren, Israelite Religion (London, SPCK 1966), pp. 46-7). In these passages God ‘is the war god who leads the holy wars of his people’. (Ringgren, p. 46). However, scholars stress that these passages should be read within the context of the situation they describe, and that these martial traits are only one aspect of God’s character. ‘This does not simply mean that Yahweh was only or even primarily a warlike national god with atmospheric traits. It is the situation that leads to emphasis on these characteristics.’ (Ringgren, p. 46).

It should be noted that some of the warlike language describing Yahweh is ambiguous, and that contrasting images of God may appear in the same passage. The passage from Psalm 18 quoted above, verse 35 moves from God as the martial defender of the singer to stressing God’s gentleness: ‘Thou has also given me the shield of thy salvation: and thy right hand hath holden me up, and thy gentleness hath made me great.’ This is part of the strong motif of God’s righteous mercy declared in verse 25: ‘With the merciful though wilt shew thyself merciful; with an upright man thou wilt shew thyself upright.’

This ambiguity even extends into some of the epithets describing God in the Old Testament. One of the common phrases for God, which has traditionally been taken as indicating His warrior aspect, is ‘Lord of Hosts’, in Hebrew, Yahweh Sabaoth. These hosts are often considered to be the Israelite armies, based on the role of the Ark as a war shrine, such as in Samuel 6:2

‘And David arose, and went with all the people that were with him from Baale of Judah, to bring up from thence the ark of God, whose name is called by the name of the Lord of hosts that dwelleth between the cherubims.’

In this connection, it’s noted that ‘Lord of Host’s is explicitly linked with Yahweh as God of the armies of Israel in Samuel 17:45

‘Then said David to the Philistine, thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou has defied.’

However, in contrast to this, scholars like Ringgren have also pointed out that ‘the ark, as we have seen, is also connected with the conception of Yahweh as an enthroned king; and the vast majority of occurrences of “Yahweh Sabaoth” as a divine name are found in the prophets, where emphasis upon the warlike aspects of Yahweh is not suggested by the context.’ (Ringgren, p. 68). The hosts therefore described may also refer to the stars, as in Isaiah 40: 26

‘Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hat created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he called them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth.’

The hosts may also be the Lords’ angels in heaven, as described in Psalm 103:19-22:

‘The Lord hath prepared His throne in the heavens; and his kingdom ruleth over all. Bless the Lord, ye His angels, that excel in strength, that do His commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word. Bless ye the Lord, all ye His hosts; ye ministers of His, that do His pleasure. Bless the Lord, all His works in all places of His dominion: bless the Lord, O my soul.’

Thus, the epithet is used not simply to describe God as warlike, but to emphasise His immense power and majesty. ‘In any case, “Sabaoth” is used particularly in those contexts that speak of Yahweh as the almighty Lord and king. The Septuagint accordingly often translates it as pantokrator, “all-powerful”.

Even within these passages extolling the warlike qualities of the Lord are verses indicating that Yahweh is far more than simply a god of war solely guarding Israel. For example, verse 30 of Psalm 68 asks God to ‘rebuke the company of spearmen, the multitude of the bulls, with the calves of the people, till every one submit himself with pieces of silver: scatter thou the people that delight in war’. The ‘people that delight in war’ are Israel’s enemies, here seen very much as militaristic aggressors in contrast to Israel. Furthermore, although Yahweh is God of Israel, He is far more than that. He is the God of all the Earth, whose kingdoms will come to praise Him. Indeed, Scripture makes it clear that God is sovereign over all the Earth who will eventually establish a reign of peace and justice amongst the nations as the Earth’s peoples worship Him. Isaiah 2:2-4 prophesises that

‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.

And many people shall go and say, Com ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’ The same revelation is given, in almost identical words, by the prophet Micah, in chapter 4: 1-3 of his book. This promise of universal salvation granted to gentiles as well as Jews is at the heart of the prophet Jonah’s ministry. God commanded Jonah to preach to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, powerful and hostile towards Israel. The book contrasts God’s mercy on Nineveh, whose king and people repent so that God does not destroy them, with Jonah himself, who runs from the Lord to avoid giving the prophetic message, and thus the opportunity to avoid God’s punishment, to the people of Nineveh, preferring that God’s salvation should be kept only to Israel. This universalism is present from the very beginning of the Bible. The covenant God makes with Noah not to destroy the world again is described as between God and ‘every living creature of all flesh that is on the Earth’, (Genesis 9: 16). As for war, Genesis states that God destroyed the world with the Flood because it ‘was filled with violence’. (Genesis 7: 11). This is very far from the idea of a God who delights in violence and warfare.

So, although Yahweh is the God of Israel, He is also the Lord of all the earth, and even within the Old Testament God is seen to call gentiles to communion with Him along with His chosen people. Jewish scholars such as Louis Jacobs and I. Heinemann have pointed to the universalistic framework in which the Jewish people were chosen by God to show the profound differences between God as the God of Israel and the idea of a tribal god. For these scholars the crucial difference is choice: Yahweh, the Lord of the universe, made a deliberate choice of Israel to be His people. This doesn’t occur in the relationship between a tribal people and their god.

‘The Biblical conception of the election of Israel has nothing in common with the idea of a tribal god protecting his people, responding to their attempts to buy his favour and capable of suffering defeat at the hands of some more powerful deity. The relation of a tribal god to his people is a ‘natural one’. He does not ‘choose’ his people any more than they are members of the tribe by choice. In the Bible it is the universal God who ‘chooses’. (Louis Jacobs, ‘The Chosen People’, in Whitfield Foy, ed., The Religious Quest:A Reader (London, Routledge/ The Open University Press 1978), pp. 410-11.

The profound difference between the conception of Yahweh as the only God and the national gods of Mesopotamia is shown in the different attitudes towards national defeat and subjugation in Israel and Babylon. For ancient Israel, defeat and oppression by nations such as the Babylonians, Assyrians or Greeks could only be part of God’s unfolding plan, occurring through the Almighty’s will. No other gods existed, and so the foreign forces that conquered, enslaved and deported them could only be acting through the will of God. For the other nations in the Ancient Near East, such as the Sumerian city states, defeat by an enemy was the result of their national or city god being stronger. Israel’s entire conception of itself was informed by the knowledge that the Lord wasn’t just the God of the Jewish people, but the God of all the world who chose them as part of a wider plan for the world’s salvation. For scholars such as Jacobs and Heinemann, this has been made particularly clear in Isaiah 42: 5-7: ‘Thus saith God the Lord, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it; he that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein: I the Lord have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles; To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.’ Talmudic legend also stresses God as the God of all the Earth’s peoples. In one legend, the status of the Jews as God’s chosen people is explained as a result of the rest of the Earth’s nations rejecting God’s offer of communion except Israel.

The universal mission within Judaism to call gentiles as well as Jews to knowledge and love of God was taken over and developed in Christianity, so that as St. Paul said, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’ (Galatians 3:28).

As the only God, Yahweh is clearly more than just a war god as the Bible also makes abundantly clear. The violent imagery used of God reflects not only the turbulent history of the ancient Near East, but also the fundamental nature of human political life. For many political theorists, states have their origin in warfare and the need for military protection against enemies, and until very recently kings were war-leaders, expected to lead their nation’s armies into battle to defend their people. The violent depictions of God as a warrior scattering Israel’s enemies are part of a general picture of what kings have traditionally been expected to do: use their military prowess and resources to safeguard their realm and establish justice. Rather than being simply the activities of a war god, a specialised member of a wider pantheon of gods, the martial imagery and descriptions of the Lord in the Bible do so to illustrate the Lord as the monarch of the universe, scattering and destroying the wicked to establish peace and justice, in which God as the ‘Lord of Hosts’ is a compelling symbol of God as the true, almighty sovereign of the Universe, the pantokrator of the Septuagint.