Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  72. The narrative tradition can be seen in part as a qualification of the liturgical elevation of David to near-divinity. The David narrative (esp. 2 Samuel 9:1 to 20:26) is a literary masterpiece on a par, in the entire Hebrew Bible, only with the Joseph story in Genesis. It is a depiction of David as very human, experiencing great triumphs but also terrible loss, and suffering the decline of extreme old age. But the narrative text also contains the Lord’s promise that David’s house will stand forever-it comes to David through the words of the prophet Samuel, which echo the similar passage in Psalm 89. See 2 Samuel 7:12-16.

  73. Smith, Origins of Biblical Monotheism, 160, discusses the arguments about whether David is really addressed as “God” in this text. Many have attempted to read it otherwise.

  74. For commentary on these passages, see Albertz, History of Israelite Religion, 1:116-122. Note the New Testament resonance of these terms.

  75. Holloway, Assurls King!, 189.

  76. The dating of Psalm 89 and of various passages in it is not a matter on which I have any competence to speak, but verses 30 to 33 sound very much like Deuteronomy, a late monarchical text, and could well have been added later to qualify the extravagance of the early text.

  77. Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (Minneapolis: Seabury, 1985), 108-109.

  78. For a discussion of these issues, see Albertz, History of Israelite Religion, 1:122-138.

  79. Levenson, Sinai andZion, 94.

  80. Note that Clifford Geertz, in Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), describes a situation where each of several rulers, dividing between them the small island of Bali, claimed to be ruler of the universe.

  81. But we must remember that Israel has never abandoned Zion, has always held Sinai and Zion somehow together. For a superb analysis of how this was possible, see Levenson, Sinai andZion.

  82. For an extensive discussion of the Yahweh-alone movement, see Morton Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics That Shaped the Old Testament (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971). “Yahweh alone” is ambiguous from a theoretical point of view: it could mean the obligation to worship only Yahweh although other gods exist, or it could mean only Yahweh exists. Using Greek roots, the first option is called monolatry and the second monotheism. “Yahweh alone” translates Hebrew words and is preferable to language with built-in Greek preconceptions.

  83. Geller, Sacred Enigmas, 193.

  84. Albertz, History of Israelite Religion, 1:159-170.

  85. Compare van der Toorn, Family Religion.

  86. Robert R. Wilson, in his Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), gives a valuable summary of information about prophecy in comparative perspective, as well as in Israel.

  87. On Isaiah, see Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets: An Introduction (New York: Harper, 1969), 61-97; and Wilson, Prophecy and Society, 270-274. Wilson suggests that the account of the political situation involving Isaiah to be found in 2 Kings 18:17-19:9a, 36-37, describes him as a prophet in the northern tradition, though what he views as a later addition, 2 Kings 19:9b-35, shows him as a spokesman for the Jerusalemite royal theology (Prophecy and Society, 213-219).

  88. Zevit, Religions ofAncient Israel, 653.

  89. Geller, Sacred Enigmas, 176.

  90. See George Mendenhall, “Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East,” BiblicalArcbaeologist 17 (1954): 49-76.

  91. Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). Eckart Otto, in “Political Theology in Judah and Assyria: The Beginning of the Hebrew Bible as Literature,” Svensk exegetisk arsbok 65 (2000): 59-76, has extended the Assyrian model to Exodus and the Moses narrative.

  92. Geller, Sacred Enigmas, 182-183.

  93. Holloway has this to say, in Assur Is King!: “The vassal treaties of Esarhaddon yield important and explicit data on the manner in which vassals were expected to comport themselves in the presence of their overlords’ pantheon. The vassal is commanded to `fear (lipluhu)’ Assur, `your god (ilkunu)’; he is enjoined to guard the image (ialmu) of `Assur, king of the gods and the great gods, my lords,’ the images of the king, the crown prince, and the seals of Assur and the king which are presumably meant to refer to those on the vassal treaty tablets themselves” (61).

  94. William L. Moran has written the classic article on this point: “The Ancient Near Eastern Background to the Love of God in Deuteronomy,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 25 (1963): 77-87.

  95. See especially Weinfeld, Deuteronomy, pt. 1, chap. 2, 59-158.

  96. Ibid., 77-78.

  97. Ibid., 117-118, citing Deuteronomy 28.

  98. Baruch Halpern, “Jerusalem and the Lineages in the Seventh Century BCE: Kinship and the Rise of Individual Moral Liability,” in Law and Ideology in Monarchic Israel, ed. Baruch Halpern and Deborah W. Hobson (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), 11-107.

  99. Halpern argues that the shift from collective moral responsibility to individual responsibility to be found in the texts of Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel can be understood as reflecting these social conditions: “Traditional Judahite culture was gone for good, swept away in the scheme of Assyrian deportations,” which “loosened the ties between the fates of individuals and those of their ancestors and collaterals” (“Jerusalem,” 79).

  100. Otto, “Political Theology,” 73-74. Otto points out that the story was Neo-Assyrian in origin but attributed to Sargon of Akkad, who reigned in the third millennium BCE and was thus part of an archaizing movement with parallels in Egypt (where the late “Memphite Theology” was attributed to the Old Kingdom). Thus the elevation of the archaic figure of Moses to centrality was the Israelite parallel of tendencies general in the Near East at the time. Otto finds that other details of the Moses epic, however, were derived from contemporary Assyrian royal ideology.

  101. Ibid., 75. If the vassal treaty of Esarhaddon was the model for many of the stipulations in Deuteronomy, it is hard to see how they would still have been available to provide a model for writers in exilic or postexilic times.

  102. Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 66.

  103. David Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities (Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1951 [1898]), 57.

  104. Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, 66-68.

  105. Ibid., 126.

  106. Machiavelli, calling Moses a “prophet armed,” went on to say that “all armed prophets win, and unarmed ones fall” because people are variable and the prophet must be ready “to make them believe by force.” The Prince, chap. 6, in Niccolo Machiavelli, The Chief Works and Others, vol. 1, trans. Allan Gilbert (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1965), 26. (Machiavelli is silent about the ways in which unarmed prophets may also “win.”) In The Discourses, 3.30.4, Machiavelli discusses the passage from Exodus 32 cited above and writes, “He who reads the Bible with discernment will see that, before Moses set about making laws and institutions, he had to kill a very great number of men who, out of envy and nothing else, were opposed to his plans.” The Discourses of Niccolo Machiavelli, vol. 1, trans. Leslie J. Walker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 547. It is also of interest that Machiavelli insists that if a new commonwealth is to be formed or an old one thoroughly reformed, there must be one sole authority. He writes in The Discourses, 1.9.2, in a context where Moses is mentioned as an example, “One should take it as a general rule that rarely, if ever, does it happen that a state, whether a republic or a kingdom, is either well-ordered at the outset or radically transformed vis-a-vis its old institutions unless this be done by one person. It is likewise essential that there should be but one person upon whose mind and method depends any similar process of organization.” Discourses of Niccolo Machiavelli, trans. Walker, 1:234. This observation might be helpful in understanding the overwhelming emphasis on the single ruler in all the early states.

  107. Marc Zvi Brettler, in his God as King: Un
derstanding an Israelite Metaphor, JSOT Supplement Series 76 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989), holds that God as king “is the predominant relational metaphor used of God in the Bible, appearing much more frequently than metaphors such as `God as lover/husband’ or `God as a father”’ (160).

  108. Geller, Sacred Enigmas, 192.

  109. Ibid., 31.

  110. Ibid., 50.

  111. According to Otto, “Political Theology,” 65, “Even the Deuteronomic revision of the Covenant Code according to the aspect of cult-centralization in Deuteronomy was guided by an anti-Assyrian impulse. If YHWH was to compete with the Assyrian God Assur and Jerusalem with the capital of Assur, which housed the only Assur temple in the Assyrian empire, then YHWH’s worship was not to be dispersed to several sanctuaries in Judean villages and towns.”

  112. See Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and, especially, Douglas, Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  113. See Geller’s valuable interpretation of the Priestly work in chap. 4 of Sacred Enigmas, 62-86. For the later influence of this tradition, see esp. 85-86. Geller also interestingly notes that P offers a New Cult, by no means identical with the old royal cult, for P “amputated the role of the king completely” (82).

  114. Stephen A. Geller, “The God of the Covenant,” in One God or Many? Concepts of Divinity in the Ancient World, ed. Barbara Nevling Porter, Transactions of the Casco Bay Assyriological Institute 1 (2000): 286.

  115. Jurgen Habermas, who finds the very germ of reason in the first commandment, has this to say: “From a philosophical point of view, the first commandment expresses that `leap forward’ on the cognitive level which granted man freedom of reflection, the strength to detach himself from vacillating immediacy, to emancipate himself from his generational shackles and the whims of mythical powers.” Quoted in Sandro Magister, “The Church Is under Siege, but Habermas, the Atheist, Is Coming to Its Defense,” www.chiesa.repub blica.it.

  116. Geller, “God of the Covenant,” 293, but see the whole discussion, 290-296. I have added the rest of verse 5, which Geller doesn’t quote here, together with the Hebrew for the key terms, which he does discuss. In the same essay Geller discusses the relation between God’s transcendence and his availability to humans in relation to the question of his name. When Moses asks God for his name, God replies, “I am what I am” (or “shall be what I shall be”) (Exodus 3:13-14, Geller’s translation). Given the ancient Near Eastern idea that one’s name is one’s power, God is reticent in answering Moses’s question. In two other passages God (or an angel) refuses to give his name: Genesis 32, judges 13. Yet God tells Moses that Yahweh, “he is,” the form the name “I am” naturally takes in the third person (Exodus 15, Geller’s translation), is “my name forever.” Geller comments: “In such an ancient, and biblical, context it is clear that God has refused to reveal his true name to Moses, and to Israel. He replies, `I am whatever I am,’ and that will suffice. It is, in fact, a mild rebuke. But in terms of the immediate context of rescue, and the future one of covenant, `I am/ shall be’ is a totally meaningful name, because it takes up the promise earlier in the story that `I shall be with you.’ In other words, on a cosmic level God remains unknown and unknowable, but in relation to Israel, he is to be forever accessible.” Geller, “God of the Covenant,” 307.

  117. Ibid., 295-296.

  118. Timothy Polk, The Prophetic Persona: Jeremiah and the Language of the Self, JSOT Supplement Series 32 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1984). Polk makes it clear that he is analyzing the Jeremiah of the text as we have it, and is not trying to discover the “real” Jeremiah of history, a quest that may not be hopeless but is not essential for his purpose.

  119. Polk, The Prophetic Persona, 44.

  120. Ibid., 149-150.

  121. Ibid., 148.

  122. See the remarkable essay by Jochanan Muffs, “Who Will Stand in the Breach? A Study of Prophetic Intercession,” in Love and joy: Law, Language and Religion in Ancient Israel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 9-48.

  123. Smith, Origins of Biblical Monotheism, 179. Smith’s analysis of “Second Isaiah,” which I have found most helpful, says that the use of quotation marks reminds us that we do not know if the author or authors of this text ever intended it to be read as a separate work.

  124. Ibid., 179. The criticism of idolatry, though understandable in terms of the emphasis on Yahweh as the one God, was quite unfair. The Babylonians, for example, had great affection for Marduk’s temple and his image contained therein, but they did not believe his image “was” Marduk, only that he was on occasion present there. Marduk was a great cosmic God of storm and empire and could never be wholly identified with any image. See Jon Levenson, “Is There a Counterpart in the Hebrew Bible to New Testament Antisemitism?” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 22 (1985): 242-260.

  125. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). Honneth has worked out his three phases of recognition in the context of modern history and believes that they are not so clearly distinguished in premodern times. I will argue that recognition as love and recognition as justice are explicit in the Hebrew scriptures, but recognition as creator of value remains largely implicit.

  126. Peter Machinist has surveyed the biblical passages that insist on Israel’s distinctiveness from other peoples and has found that they concentrate on two issues: the uniqueness of Israel’s God and the uniqueness of Israel as a people. Machinist, “The Question of Distinctiveness in Ancient Israel: An Essay,” in Ah, Assyria …: Studies in Assyrian History and Ancient Near Eastern Historiography Presented to Hayim Tadmor, ed. Mordechai Cogan and Israel Eph’al (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1991), 196-212.

  127. Geller, Sacred Enigmas, 181.

  128. Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997).

  129. An insight that Hegel came to see in his late lectures on the philosophy of religion, after having initially thought of the Jews as living in bondage to the law. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987 [1827]), 679.

  130. See Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence ofEvil: The Jewish Drama ofDivine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

  131. Ibid., 86.

  7. The Axial Age II

  1. Louis Gernet (1882-1962) was the student of Durkheim who specialized in ancient Greece; he was one year ahead of Marcel Granet, the Durkheimian who specialized in ancient China. Gernet spent thirty years, from 1918 until 1948, teaching Greek composition at the University of Algiers. Although he continued to publish, he worked in comparative isolation during these years when the Durkheim school was in disarray. But in 1948, at the age of 66, he returned to Paris to teach at the Ecole Pratique des Flames Etudes, and it was only then that he built up a following among younger classicists. On his career, see S. C. Humphreys, “The Work of Louis Gernet,” in her Anthropology and the Greeks (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 76-106. Paul Cartledge makes note of the remarkable revival of work influenced by Durkheim in postwar France when he writes: “In terms of intellectual vitality and influence there is only one possible rival within the domain of the `Sciences Humaines’ in France to the so-called Annales School’ of sociologically minded historians inspired by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, and that is the `Paris School’ of cul rural historians of ancient Greece and especially ancient Greek religion and mythology dominated for the past three decades by J.-P. Vernant. It is no accident (as they say) that both `Schools’ were crucially influenced in their origins by the work of the sociohistorical psychologist Emile Durkheim.” Translator’s introduction in Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, Religion in the Ancient Greek City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xv-xvi.


  2. Louis Gernet, “Ancient Feasts” (1955), in The Anthropology of Ancient Greece (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981 [1968]), 35. The agapai with which this passage closes were “love feasts” in which gods and men participated together.

  3. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice ofZeus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 3, citing Iliad 2:462f. and 17:446-447.

  4. Ibid., 3-4.

  5. Although there is no evidence that the Greeks ever considered themselves chosen as such, it is possible, as we will see below, that the Athenians felt chosen by Athena.

  6. To a Greek audience it may be that Hector did not seem as admirable, particularly in comparison to Achilles, as he does to us.

  7. E. R. Dodds in The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 35, 54, citing Aristotle’s Magna Moralia 1208B.30 and Nicomacbean Ethics 1159A.5. But Dodds also points out that “we can hardly doubt that the Athenians loved their goddess” (54).

  8. The term anax was also used for Priam and a few other leaders.

  9. Eric Havelock has a useful discussion of the terminology of anax and basileus in Homer in The Greek Concept of Justice: From the Shadow in Homer to the Substance in Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 94-99.

  10. In Chapter 6 we saw that the opposite is true in the Hebrew scriptures, where Yahweh is more often referred to as king than as father, even though, on the whole, Yahweh is more “fatherly” to the Israelites than Zeus is to the Greeks.

  11. My research assistant, Timothy Doran, did a comprehensive search for me of all the uses of anax and basileus in Homer, Hesiod, and the Homeric hymns. Also, his findings on Zeus as pater were most helpful.

  12. See Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), for a discussion of the reasons for doubting that though Dorian is indeed a dialect of Greek, “the Dorians” can be viewed as a cultural or military group in Mycenaean or archaic times. See also Hall’s Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002).