Reflections on Israelite Monotheism in Erhard Gerstenberger’s Theologies in the Old Testament
It is well known that monotheism has been a central concern of recent biblical scholarship, in both Old and New Testaments. The perception of Israelite religion has been revolutionised by the de-bate that was initiated by the discoveries at Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom.1The Albrightian consensus (at least such it was in North America) with its polarisation of Canaanite and Israel-ite religion has been replaced by a picture of pre-exilic religious diversity with a ‘monotheistic breakthrough’ as the result of a long process climaxing in the exile. New Testament studies has had its own discussion about monotheism. What kind of divinity did the New Testament authors attribute to Jesus of Nazareth, at what point did this occur, and how could this be squared with first-century Jewish monotheism?2 As has been the case with the Old Testament, older ‘canons’ (I use the term broadly) have been treated with suspicion and a new hearing given to previously marginal voices. In the study of the New Testament also, this decentring has destroyed the monochromatic picture of earlier scholarship.
The changing shape of these debates has been documented in a number of places, and I do not wish to rehearse the state of the question.3Instead, I wish to allow light from an oft-neglected area to shine on the discussion: that of theological scholarship. For,
1For an accessible summary of the discoveries, see M. Dijkstra, ‘I Have Blessed You by Yhwh of Samaria and His Asherah: Texts with Religious Ele-ments From the Soil Archive of Ancient Israel’, in: B. Becking et al. (eds.), Only One God? Monotheism in Ancient Israel and the Veneration of the Goddess Asherah (BiSe, 77), London 2001, 17-44. Detailed analysis and bib-liography are found in J.M. Hadley, The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah: Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess (UCOP, 57), Cambridge 2000.
2Recent contributions to the New Testament debate may be found in C.C.
Newman et al. (eds.), The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism: Papers from the St Andrews Conference on the Historical Origins of the Worship of Jesus (JSJ.S, 63), Leiden 1999.
3The Old Testament debate has been traced, for example, by R.K. Gnuse, No Other Gods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel (JSOT.S, 241), Sheffield 1997, 62-128.
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monotheism has not been absent from discussion in Systemat-ics. Here the presumed significance and centrality of monotheism has been put into question. We may pass over those who favour a move towards polytheism, not because their questions are not urgent and cogent, but because this seems to me to short-cut the Judaeo-Christian complex of which the Bible is necessarily part (even if the Old Testament might appear to some degree to be a co-opted part).4 A very directed attack has come from J¨urgen Moltmann who favours abandoning monotheism with its unsa-voury political implications for trinitarianism.5 In more general terms it is clear that there are many Christian theologians who see the Trinity as something to be strongly affirmed and worthy of exploration, and for whom monotheism is wooden, even of du-bious value. This is, of course, almost exactly the reverse of the situation that existed twenty or thirty years ago.
I have no wish to follow Moltmann with a straightforward rejection of monotheism, though the political appropriation of the oneness of God, made by Eusebius if not before, is problem-atic. Instead I wish to note what seems to me a more suggestive approach to the question, based on observations made by both David Tracy and Nicholas Lash that monotheism is the coinage of the English Enlightenment, more specifically the Cambridge Pla-tonist Henry More, and its coinage is in no small measure associ-ated with a particular rationality and approach to religion. Tracy observes that ‘ “monotheism” is an Enlightenment invention that bears all the marks of Enlightenment rationalism. Monotheism, in this not so secretly evolutionary view, is a contrast word to
“polytheism”; that is, by Enlightenment standards, monotheism is a more rational understanding of the logic of the divine as implying a unicity of divine power, not a dispersal of the power into many gods and goddesses. Like the other famous “isms”
4Famously, O. Marquard, ‘Lob des Polytheismus: ¨Uber Monomythie und Polymythie’, in: Idem, Abschied vom Prinzipiellen: Philosophische Studien, Stuttgart 1981, 91-116. Note also the sharp criticisms of monotheism in R.
Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism, Chicago 1998.
5See J. Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, London 1981, 197. Critiques of Moltmann can be found in C. Schw¨obel, ‘Radical Mono-theism and the Trinity’, NZSTh 43 (2001), 54-74, and R. Otto, ‘Moltmann and the Anti-Monotheism Movement’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 3 (2001), 293-308.
of the Enlightenment (deism, pantheism, theism, panentheism), modern philosophical “monotheism” is, above all, “rational” and
“ethical” ’.6 The quote from Tracy outlines essential features of the term ‘monotheism’ as commonly used from the Enlighten-ment onwards. It takes its explanatory power from a bifurcation of ideas of the divine. On the one side are ranged monotheism, ra-tionality and morality, and on the other polytheism. Simply and effectively the opposite position is demonised (though, of course, there are no demons in this world view).
Lash provides a similar reflection but provides a more detailed analysis based on the work of Peter Harrison.7 In his ‘Religion’
and the Religions in the English Enlightenment Harrison shows that the initial steps towards a science of religion took place in seventeenth century England.8 This fell far short of the descript-ive ideal of the nineteenth century, for the growing knowledge about the world’s religions was frequently used as a foil for the religious controversies that convulsed Europe at the time. Henry More’s neologism, ‘monotheism’, belongs to an attempt to organ-ise religious knowledge along the lines of the species and genus model of the sciences. With an attenuated concept of religious experience, he quantified religions according to the number of deities. In this schema there were monotheism and atheism (of which polytheism was a disguised form). This was married to a particular conception of knowledge in which truth was purely cognitive and immediately accessible to the rational mind. The failure to perceive rightly the existence of only one self-sufficient and eternal Being could be blamed on the enemies of rational-ity: the priesthood, sacrifice and idolatry which benighted one’s faculties.9 More’s intellectualised account of religion and his na-ive taxonomising of the world’s religions is nicely summarised by Lash as ‘a simple strategy for a complex world’.10
6D. Tracy, ‘The Paradox of the Many Faces of God in Monotheism’, in:
H. Haring, J.B. Metz (eds.), The Many Faces of the Divine (Conc, 1995/2), London 1995, 30-8, here 30.
7N. Lash, ‘The Beginning and End of “Religion” ’, in: Idem, The Beginning and End of ‘Religion’, Cambridge 1996, 3-25.
8P. Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment, Cambridge 1990.
9For a detailed account of More’s coinage of ‘monotheism’ contextualised in the debates about reason and revelation in seventeenth century England see N. MacDonald, Deuteronomy and the Meaning of ‘Monotheism’ (FAT, II/1), T¨ubingen 2003.
10Lash, ‘Beginning’, 10.
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All this would be of little interest to those in the discipline of Old Testament had it not been for the persistent practice of reading large parts of this package back into the biblical text.
An analogous example, which may be instructive, is the Western perception of ancient Egyptian religion. The Egyptologist Jan Assmann has shown in his Moses the Egyptian the degree to which Egyptian religion became a self-projection of the radical Enlightenment. Distinguishing the educated priestly elite from the Egyptian hoi polloi, intellectuals of the eighteenth century managed to convince themselves that behind the crass polytheism of Egyptian religion lay an esoteric and enlightened monotheism.
The mysterious hieroglyphs were believed to preserve accounts of this primeval religion. This true religion of the one God was ethical, universal, mythological, rational, aniconic and non-superstitious.11
This intellectual tradition, with its strange picture of Egyp-tian religion, melted away with Champollion’s decipherment of the hieroglyphs in the early nineteenth century. The projection of Enlightenment ‘monotheism’ on to biblical texts has been a far more complex affair, less easily untangled. This is the case not only because both testaments contain statements about Yhwh’s uniqueness, but also because the Enlightenment belongs to the Bible’s enormous history of influence. Modern views of God, as numerous Old Testament scholars have sought to emphasise, trace their roots back to ancient Israel, albeit through a complex history also influenced by the New Testament, Greek philosophy, the rise of Islam, Renaissance and Reformation, and the scientific revolution, amongst other things. Further, the Bible has always been read, to a greater or lesser degree, through the lenses of the changing view of God.
In the rest of this paper I want to consider characterisations of ‘monotheism’ in Old Testament scholarship. The first example is a classic and exploits the monotheism-polytheism dichotomy.
Its roots lie clearly in the Enlightenment. The second example is more recent and nuanced, evidencing continuity with what pre-cedes, but clearly also a step away from Enlightenment ‘mono-theism’.
The first characterisation of ‘monotheism’ is Albright’s fam-ous and controversial definition of ‘monotheism’:
11J. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Cambridge 1997.
Was Moses a true monotheist? If by ‘monotheist’ is meant a thinker with views specifically like those of Philo Judaeus or Rabbi Aqiba, of St. Paul or St. Augustine, of Moham-med or Maimonides, of St. Thomas or Calvin, of Mordecai Kaplan or H.N. Wieman, Moses was not one. If, on the other hand, the term ‘monotheist’ means one who teaches the existence of only one God, the creator of everything, the source of justice, who is equally powerful in Egypt, in the desert, and in Palestine, who has no sexuality and no mythology, who is human in form but cannot be seen by human eye and cannot be represented in any form - then the founder of Yahwism was certainly a monotheist.12
Albright maintains the appearance of historical differentiation, noting the distance between Mosaic monotheism and that of Philo and onwards. Nevertheless, by introducing a critical and basic division between polytheism and monotheism, the location of Mosaic religion is predetermined. Note also that there is some shifting of definitions: ‘equally powerful in Egypt, the desert, and in Palestine’ takes the place of universalism. This represents, on the one hand, a careful attendance to the particularities of the biblical text, but, on the other hand, the shape of Mosaic belief is brought into conformity with a particular conception of ‘mono-theism’ which is not easy to justify as a descriptive account of Israelite religion according to the Pentateuch.
To echo Lash: Albright provides a ‘simple strategy to a com-plex world’. Or, better, a simple strategy to comcom-plex worlds, for Albright’s argument ranges across religious thinkers of enormous diversity. The recent restatement of the same strategy in Robert Gnuse’s No Other Gods strikes me as being as questionable as it was in Albright’s work. Gnuse argues for the restoration, in nu-anced form, of the theories of the ‘Heilsgeschichte theologians’.
The contrast between ancient Near Eastern religion and early Judaism is that between post-cyclical and pre-linear thought. The latter entails a more developed portrayal of God’s action in his-tory, a deity free from nature, an emphasis on ethics rather than purity, a stress on human freedom with disappearance of magic and superstition, centrality of social justice and egalitarianism, and a universality from below. The modernistic assumptions un-derlying Gnuse’s approach are revealed in numerous ways: his
12W.F. Albright From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historic Process, Garden City 219-57, 271-2.
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description of early Jewish thought (note the intellectualism im-plicit in the decision to analyse in terms of thought) as pre-linear and of post-renaissance thought as linear, his strong contrast of ethics and cult, his talk of human rights and social justice.
Strong evidence of continuity with the English Enlightenment is also found in the conceptualisation of sin. As Margalit and Halbertal note, ‘different concepts of God create, when reversed, different concepts of idolatry’.13 For Henry More, polytheism or atheism was an intellectual error, easily corrected by an attent-ive reading of his apology for the Christian religion. According to Albright, after the Mosaic revolution only the ‘ignorant and moronic’ failed to be monotheists; and I have already noted the significance of Gnuse’s use of ‘thought’. All of this is far removed from the centrality of idolatry in the Old Testament – a sin fre-quently portrayed as adultery, an act of betrayal.
The second example I wish to examine is derived from Er-hard Gerstenberger’s Theologies in the Old Testament, a work that is a substantive and challenging contribution to the dis-cipline of Old Testament theology.14 I will not review the work (which I have done elsewhere),15but will, rather, examine a num-ber of quotations indicative of the sort of problem with which I am concerned. First of all, I should note a number of moves by Gerstenberger that strike me as promising. He notes that ‘the dispute over the one God takes place first at the level of practical life and the lived worship of God, not in theory’.16 The contrast implied by the ‘not’ is, I think, overstated, but justifiable in the face of the intellectualism demonstrated in many discussions of
‘monotheism’. In the same section he argues that ‘fundament-ally the whole monotheism of the early Jewish community is a great, impressively presented monolatry which arose in a situ-ation of confession and at a few points is theoretically supported by statements of uniqueness verging on an ontology’.17This cap-tures nicely a recent reluctance amongst some scholars to claim a heavy ontological significance for Deutero-Isaiah’s rhetoric.18
13M. Halbertal, A. Margalit, Idolatry, Cambridge 1992, 1.
14E.S. Gerstenberger, Theologies in the Old Testament, Minneapolis 2002 (ET of Theologies im AT: Pluralit¨at und Synkretismus alttestamentlichen Gottesglaubens, Stuttgart 2001).
15‘Review of E.S. Gerstenberger, Theologies in the Old Testament’, in:
Biblical Interpretation (forthcoming).
16Gerstenberger, Theologies, 274.
17Gerstenberger, Theologies, 275.
18M. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic
Elsewhere, however, the idea of ‘monotheism’ that Gerstenber-ger delineates justifies us in asking, ‘Whose monotheism? Which rationality?’ In a discussion of Torah and the ethic of the post-exilic community Gerstenberger makes the following observations.
‘There are duties to God and duties to fellow human beings in one’s own community. No more than this is to be found in the Torah. There are no state laws and (in contrast to the wisdom literature) there are no international laws or human rights. In a community which claims to be confessing the one and universal God, that of course is a defect.’19 That the same idea is also found in Gnuse is worth noting. He writes: ‘concomitant with the belief in one universal deity is a stress on human rights and dignity in some egalitarian world view’.20Now it is certainly the case that human rights may be seen to derive, by a convoluted and extended historical process, from the Bible (though, interest-ingly enough, the American Declaration of Independence appeals to Nature’s God and self-evident truth), but I question whether they are useful, in a straightforward sense, as categories for de-scribing the beliefs of early Judaism, still less for judging them defective.
A more subtle example is found in Gerstenberger’s discussion of popular beliefs in early Judaism. ‘We might remember the sometimes incredibly archaic theological notions in the Priestly Writing: “That is a burnt offering, a gift offering, a fragrant sa-vour for Yahweh” (Lev 1.9). The direct feeding of the image of God . . . is not presupposed. But by being burnt, this same food offering for the invisible God goes up in smoke and he can accept it with his sense of smell. The age-old taboo regulations about eating meat, sexual practices, striking skin diseases or mould on buildings or textiles, and the fear of deformed human beings and animals, which are certainly pre-Israelite, are quite incompat-ible with the strict belief in Yahweh inculcated by Deuteronomy or Deutero-Isaiah.’21 How very strange that this incompatibility went unnoticed for nearly two thousand years! For I do not count
Background and the Ugaritic Texts, Oxford 2001. Cf. C.R. Seitz, ‘The Di-vine Name in Christian Scripture’, in: Idem, Word without End: The Old Testament as Abiding Theological Witness, Grand Rapids 1998, 251-63.
19Gerstenberger, Theologies, 264.
20R.K. Gnuse, ‘The Emergence of Monotheism in Ancient Israel: A Survey of Recent Scholarship’, Religion 29 (1999), 315-36, here 315.
21Gerstenberger, Theologies, 261.
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the reconfigurations of these practices that took place in Chris-tianity and Rabbinic Judaism as evidence of intellectual unease, but as arising from a sense of a new state of affairs resulting from the death and resurrection of Jesus and the destruction of the Temple. On this logic are we to judge that the Priestly writer had a less strict belief than that found in Deuteronomy or Isaiah, or are we to judge that the author of Deuteronomy somehow fell short of his basic convictions when he decided to include chapter 14 (to choose the most obvious example) with its ‘age-old ta-boo regulations’ ? The case against the so-called secularisation in Deuteronomy and the idea that the book prohibits all ‘supersti-tions’ (another modern idea) has been made by others and does not demand repeating.22
A further example is Gerstenberger’s discussion of partic-ularism and universalism. In this dichotomy it is clear where monotheism lines up: ‘Alongside nationalist encapsulation there is sometimes an amazing openness to the outside world, which corresponds completely to the monotheistic universalism of Deu-tero-Isaiah. God’s power may no longer be commandeered by one group . . . Anyone who lives in the power of the one God and creator must learn to renounce the exercise of imperial or spiritual power on others. There is one and the same undivided peace for all.’23The extent to which universalism – a term rarely given any definition, as Jon Levenson rightly notes24– is found in the Old Testament is disputed, and Deutero-Isaiah is, of course, at the centre of such discussions. Specific exegesis of passages aside, to what degree is the well-established logic of ‘one God, one world’, so frequently appealed to by Gerstenberger, evid-enced in the Bible? It is well-known that in Deuteronomy and other parts of the Bible, one God entailed not one world, but one chosen people from that world. In Deutero-Isaiah this election re-volves around the mysterious servant-figure. Whatever role either
22For these two issues see respectively, N. Lohfink, ‘Opfer und S¨ akulari-sierung im Deuteronomium’, in: A. Schenker (ed.), Studien zu Opfer und Kult im Alten Testament mit einer Bibliographie 1969–91 zum Opfer in der Bibel (FAT, 3), T¨ubingen 1992, 15-43 and F.H. Cryer, Divination in Ancient Israel and its Near Eastern Environment: A Socio-Historical Investigation
22For these two issues see respectively, N. Lohfink, ‘Opfer und S¨ akulari-sierung im Deuteronomium’, in: A. Schenker (ed.), Studien zu Opfer und Kult im Alten Testament mit einer Bibliographie 1969–91 zum Opfer in der Bibel (FAT, 3), T¨ubingen 1992, 15-43 and F.H. Cryer, Divination in Ancient Israel and its Near Eastern Environment: A Socio-Historical Investigation