Response to Benjamin Sommer’s
“Yehezkel Kaufmann and Recent Scholarship on
Monotheism”
Othmar KEEL
Most of the elements of the position presented here are developed and
argued at length in my two-volume work Die Geschichte Jerusalems und
die Entstehung des Monotheismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2007). A very short version of this extensive publication (1384 pages, 725
illustrations) will be edited by Brent Strawn and published in 2015 by
Fortress Press, Minneapolis.
Two Preliminary Remarks
Remark 1: Sommer follows Kaufmann and others in distinguishing
different kinds of monotheism, such as qualitative vs. quantitative
monotheism—a distinction which I can generally agree. I propose,
however, to distinguish also exclusive and inclusive or cumulative
monotheism, a distinction which, in my view, is crucial for understanding
YHWHism in a satisfactory way. A prominent example of exclusive
monotheism is Echnaton’s (Achenyati’s) Aton-Monotheism. Only Aton is
God, all other deities are irrelevant and insubstantial. On the other hand,
YHWHism is at least at its beginnings a highly inclusive monotheism.
Consider, for example, the deluge story in Genesis, whose Mesopotamian
parallels are many centuries older than the biblical ones. In Mesopotamian
deluge stories different deities are involved, including Enlil, Adad, Enki/Ea,
and a female deity—each deity assuming a distinct role. In the Israelite
versions YHWH plays all the parts. The result is a not very coherent figure,
but a rich figure. In contrast, that is not the case with Aton-Monotheism.
For example, Aton does not respond in a satisfactory way to many aspects
of life, such as the problem of death and afterlife which is considered to be
highly important in Egypt. Therefore, the Egyptians went back to Osiris
and the other deities important for the afterlife. Thanks to a cumulative
monotheism YHWH answered an increasingly wide spectrum of needs.
Only later, under the influence of Assyrian loyalty oaths, does YHWH
come to assume features of an intolerant, violent, exclusive monotheistic
deity. This kind of deity remains a god of a particular people of Judah, and
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OTHMAR KEEL
is not the deity of all other peoples and nations. I shall address the relation
between this particularistic and a fully developed “ripe” monotheism in
section 3 below.
Remark 2: Kaufmann and Sommer combine the word historicism
regularly with “shallow”. Just the word “historicism” is already pejorative.
“Historiography”, however, is anything except “shallow.” It tries to
describe how reality became what it is. Whatever happens in our
universe—be it natural-biological or human—it is related to time and
space. Even the everlasting mountains have their history. They are far from
being “everlasting.” History is, like any kind of reality, immensely
complex. Good history writing is based on material, so-called sources and
their interpretation by an interpreter conscious of his/hers subjective
position. The source-material of the second half of the second and the first
two thirds of the first millennium for Palestine are in comparison to other
historical periods extremely scarce. Most of it is lost. The six AmarnaTablets from Jerusalem survived by chance and were found by chance. The
scribe of Abdikhepa produced probably hundreds of texts and not just six
letters. The same is true of all the other “sources.” The consequence should
be that good history writing dealing with periods characterized by such a
scarcity of “sources” has to take into account as many as possible of the
available “sources,” including, of course, textual sources, such as biblical,
extra-biblical, epigraphic, iconographic, and archaeological, as Ziony Zevit
has done in his major and meticulous work The Religions of Ancient Israel
(2001).
Outlines of a History of YHWHism
I agree with my colleagues Adrian Schenker and Benjamin Sommer that
the YHWH-monotheism is (finally) a qualitative monotheism whose view
of god is characterized by his independence of matter and destiny, a
monotheism of transcendental sovereignty. In contrast to Kaufmann and his
conscious or unconscious followers I think that YHWH ascended gradually
to this position.
YHWH as a Proper Name
YHWH was not right from the beginning this type of a transcendental
monotheistic god. This contention is based mainly on the fact that YHWH
is a proper name. A monotheistic god is the only one of its kind. There is
no need to have a proper name to be a “person.” Mohammed’s Allah is
clearly conceived as a “person,” but has just a generic name. “There is no
other god than God.” In a polytheistic world a proper name is
indispensable. In the story of the burning bush YHWH appears to Moses
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and gives him the order to bring his people out of Egypt. Moses says: “If I
come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent
me to you,’ they will ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to
them?” God’s answer is a double one: First he says: “God said to Moses, ‘I
am who I am.’ He said further, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am’
has sent me to you’” (Exod 3:14). The second answer is: “God also said to
Moses, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘YHWH’ the God of your
ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has
sent me to you’: This is my name forever,
and this my title for all
generations” (Exod 3:15).
The interpretation as “I am who I am” in the first answer is highly
sophisticated. It does not render the original meaning of the name as we
will see. At the origin YHWH was a god similar to Kemosh, the god of the
Moabites, with whom together he appears in the Mesha-Stela Inscription
and in Judg 11:24.
Once YHWH had become a true monotheistic deity the proper name
YHWH became obsolete. A deity who is the only one of his kind can be
called by a generic name, such as Elohim. Gen 1:1: “In the beginning when
God (Elohim) created the heavens and the earth . . .” The generic
designation Elohim is here in a monotheistic context used as a kind of
proper name. That supposes a unique and only god as the designation ho
ouranos used for the god of Israel in the Books of the Maccabees or adonay
or kyrios respectively in the Septuagint. Jewish texts of the period when
YHWH had ascended to the position of a unique and only god avoid more
and more the proper name.
Why and How YHWH Ascended to the Status of a Transcendental Only
God
There is not one clear reason, why YHWH in contrast to Kemosh and
similar national deities ascended to a transcendental status. But there are
elements that, up to a certain point, render plausible and understandable
why and how this happened to YHWH and not to Kemosh.
MOTIF/REASON 1: YHWH came from far away, from a region foreign and
alien to Palestine and this fact survived in the collective memory of Israel.
We have quite a number of “sources” and arguments confirming this
assumption.
− Argument 1.1: The complete name of the deity YHWH does not
occur in pre-Israelite Levantine texts, neither in the Amarna tablets,
nor in the texts from Ugarit, nor in the toponyms of pre-Israelite
Palestine.
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OTHMAR KEEL
− Argument 1.2: A list of toponyms from Soleb from the time of
Amenophis III (1390-1353 BC), quoted in two temples of Ramses II
(1279-1213 BC) in Amara Ouest and Aksha, however, mention tashasu yahw, “The land of the Shasu of Jahu”. Yahu is probably the
name of a deity identical with YHWH. The shasu were a tribe in
Northwestern Saudi Arabia, modern Hijaz, the biblical Midian. They
were pushing north to biblical Seïr/Edom. The “shasu of Yahu” were
probably a group of the shasu worshipping the god Yahu.
− Argument 1.3: According to Deut 33:2 YHWH comes from Sinai,
from Seïr, from Har Paran; according to Judg 5:4 from Seïr and
Edom; Hab 3:3 and 7 enumerate Teman (South), Har Paran, Kushan
and Midian. YHWH from Teman is mentioned already at the
beginning of the 8th century BC in the Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions.
− Argument 1.4: In the light of the later Judean animosity against the
Midianites e.g. in Numbers 31, it is highly surprising that Exodus 18
presents the father in law of Moses as a Midianite priest and teacher
of Moses.
− Argument 1.5: The biblical descriptions of YHWH’s theophanies
include many volcanic elements. The “pillar of cloud by day and the
pillar of fire by night” in Exod 13:21 is one of these. Another one is
the fire and smoke of a kiln (tannur) in Exod 19:18; another one
“mountains melting like wax before YHWH” (Ps 97:5). Phenomena
like these are never found in descriptions of theophanies in Egypt,
Ugarit or Mesopotamia. The only region in the Near East with
volcanoes still active in biblical times is the Hijaz.
− Argument 1.6: A sixth and last argument is the proper name YHWH
which is most probably a preformative 3rd person masculine form.
According to E. A. Knauf divine names of this type are found only in
preislamic Arabia. The etymology is probably from hawah “to blow,
wave (of the wind)”.
MOTIF/REASON 2: In the oldest traditions in Judges and the Books of
Samuel YHWH is a god of war and tempest, not of fertility, similar to the
Egypto-Canaanite Baal-Seth or the Moabite Kemosh. The including and
cumulative tendency of YHWHism led apparently early to a deity not
related only to one single natural or cultural phenomenon but to several
ones. Thus the deity related to them has to be above and independent of
them. A god who is responsible for the manifestations of the sun and at the
same time of clouds and tempests cannot anymore be very close to the one
or to the other of these phenomena. The more parts he assumes, the less he
can be close or let alone be identified with the one or the other. He gets a
status of sovereignty and transcendence. There are again quite a number of
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“sources” and arguments confirming the hypothesis of accumulation of
several parts.
− Argument 2.1: There are several cultic representations of YHWH.
The oldest one known of seems to be the “ark of YHWH” brought by
Abiathar, David’s priest, from the south to Jerusalem (1 Kgs 1:26).
There, YHWH was apparently identified with El.
− Argument 2.2: In the Jerusalem temple stood a second cultic symbol,
an empty throne, typical of sun deities. Beside the priest Abiathar
who came with David to Jerusalem, David “inherited” in Jerusalem a
second priest, Zadok (2 Sam 8:17 and 20:25). The most probable
interpretation is that Zadok was a priest of the sun-god whose
sanctuary with the empty throne as divine symbol YHWH shared,
represented by the ark. The Solomonic temple was oriented to the
East, the raising sun. The empty throne was later appropriated by
YHWH. So was a story originally told of Shemesh as main actor, the
Sodom story. The two messengers of the sun-god are Zedeq and
Mishpat, the steady attendants of the sun-god as a judge. They are
not able to spend unharmed one single night (lîn; cf. Gen 19:2 and
Isa 1:21 and 26) in the city. This is the reason why Shemesh-YHWH
destroys the city when he raises in the morning.
− Argument 2.3: In the sanctuary in Bet-El established by Jeroboam I,
YHWH is represented by the image of a bull. The bull is in this case
not a symbol of fertility but of aggressiveness. It represents the
YHWH who brought Israel out of Egypt (1 Kgs 12:28; cf. Num
23:22; 24:8). The story of the “Golden Calf” in Exodus 32 is at its
origin probably the Hieros Logos of the Jeroboam sanctuary in BetEl, later transformed in Judah into a polemical story.
− Argument 2.4: Only in the time of Hosea, in the second half of the 8th
century, did YHWH take over the part of a weather and fertility god
from Baal. In Hosea 2:8 YHWH complains: “She (Israel as a
woman) did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine
and the oil.”
− Argument 2.5: Not only in the story of the Deluge YHWH inherits
the part of a female deity. The ʿaštěrōt haṣṣōʾn are as the name says
originally a blessing granted by Astarte (cf. the Latin veneres gregis).
In Deut 7:13; 28:4, 18, 51 they are mentioned as a blessing of
YHWH.
− Argument 2.6: In the 7th century BC under Assyro-Aramean
influence the cult of the moon god of Harran became very important
in the Levant. In the vision of Zechariah 4 the lampstand between
two trees, one of the symbols of the moon god of Harran, is used in
its new context to make visible YHWH’s promise of a new
beginning with his people.
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OTHMAR KEEL
MOTIF/REASON 3: Besides the foreign and alien origin of YHWH and the
somehow enigmatic and long lasting process of YHWH taking over the
parts of more and more deities, there seems to be as a third motif/reason a
single event and its interpretation, actually its misinterpretation which is at
the origin of sentences in the Hebrew Bible which can definitively
considered as monotheistic in a strict sense.
− Argument 3.1: This event was the attack and the siege of Jerusalem
by the Assyrians under Sennacherib which failed to conquer the city.
Different biblical and Assyrian texts agree in that fact. Normally the
Assyrians pushed to the end and didn’t stop their attacks before they
had punished “the rebel.” The fact that Sennacherib did not follow
this policy in the case of Hezekiah and Jerusalem can be explained
by different historical circumstances. For the prophet Isaiah the
destruction of all Judean cities except Jerusalem was a catastrophe.
One hundred years later a completely different view was
predominant. A cluster of stories transmitted twice in the Hebrew
Bible (2 Kgs 18:17-19:37 and Isa 36:1-37:38) ascertains that the
event was a great victory and that it was a miracle and exclusively
the consequence of an intervention of YHWH or his angel. Many
other and more important cities were not saved by their protectordeities, because according to the story, they were not real deities at
all. YHWH alone is god and has demonstrated it by this event that
contains most probably the oldest strictly monotheistic formulae (Isa
37:16; 2 Kgs 19:19). The stories were told at the time when the
Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar threatened the city. There was a
lively debate between two factions. The one argued for military
opposition advocating the Sennacherib and the David and Goliath
stories to support their view.
The main representatives of the other party were the prophets
Jeremiah and Ezekiel who pushed to submit. The political leaders
followed the advice of prophets who as Hananiah (Jeremiah 28)
recommended military action. They were convinced of YHWH’s
intervention in favor of Jerusalem as at the time of Sennacherib and
Hezekiah. After the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple of
YHWH by Nebuchadnezzar, Hananiah and his colleagues were
considered pseudo-prophets and Jeremiah and Ezekiel as true and
reliable prophets. The monotheistic Credo, however, of the “pseudoprophets” survived, although their argument was no more valuable.
Usually the so-called Deutero-Isaiah is considered the first
representative of a clearly articulated not just a latent monotheism.
Deutero-Isaiah takes up the monotheistic formulation of the
Sennacherib stories, but without the unambiguous argument the latter
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had to present. After the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple
their argument was no longer valuable.
− Argument 3.2: Deutero-Isaiah combines the monotheistic formula of
the Sennacherib/Hezekiah stories with latent but fully developed
monotheism. According to this view the one God is in charge of all
peoples and nations not just of Israel or Judah respectively. This
view may have been favored by the topographical / geographical
situation of Jerusalem, which rendered possible the encounter with
many cultures and nations, being however less vulnerable than Gaza,
which had the disadvantage to be right on the main road between
Egypt and the Levant and Mesopotamia and so exposed to the
devastating attacks of different armies. An observation point a
certain distance away in the mountains, such as Jerusalem, favored
the view that one single deity governed the movements of the
different peoples and nations. Already for Isaiah Assyria is an
instrument in the hands of YHWH (Isa 7:20; 10:5). For Jeremiah
Nebuchadnezzar is a servant of YHWH (Jer 27:6; 43:10) and for
Deutero-Isaiah the Persian king Cyrus is even his anointed (Messiah;
Isa 45:1), a view absolutely unthinkable for Deuteronomic/Deuteronomistic theologians with their one God only in charge of Israel.
Despite the different reasons, motifs, and arguments which can be listed in
favor of a certain historical development as, for example, the fact that the
history of European philosophy starts in the Ionian cities of Asia Minor,
there always remains in history an element of arbitrariness due to the
multiplicity of influences and their multiple possibilities of interactions.