From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  Exodus 22:18–19

  Jealousy and Narcissistic Hubris

  “Yahweh’s name is the Jealous One” (Exodus 34:14). The Torah emphasizes jealousy as his main personality trait, calling him “the Jealous One” repeatedly (Exodus 20:5, Deuteronomy 4:24, 5:9, and 6:15). What Yahweh demands from his people above anything else is exclusivity of worship. But that is not all. He also demands that all his neighbors’ shrines be utterly destroyed: “Tear down their altars, smash their standing-stones, cut down their sacred poles and burn their idols” (Deuteronomy 7:5). Thus spoke Yahweh, otherwise known as El Shaddai, “the destroyer god” (Exodus 6:3).

  After the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel by Assyria, Yahwist priests and prophets who had sought refuge in Jerusalem held the Israelites responsible for their country’s defeat: they “provoked Yahweh’s anger” by “sacrificing on all the high places like the nations which Yahweh had expelled for them,” and by “serving idols” (2 Kings 17:11–12). Israel’s divine election had now passed to the smaller kingdom of Judah, whose survival depended on respecting the exclusivity of Yahweh’s cult and of Jerusalem’s Temple, and on destroying any trace of rival cults and holy places.

  The second book of Kings judges David’s heirs on the unique criterion of obedience to that precept. Hezekiah is praised for having done “what Yahweh regards as right,” namely abolishing the “high places” (2 Kings 18:3–4). On the other hand, his son Manasseh is blamed for having done “what is displeasing to Yahweh, copying the disgusting practices of the nations whom Yahweh had dispossessed for the Israelites. He rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had destroyed, he set up altars to Baal and made a sacred pole [an Ashera], as Ahab king of Israel had done, he worshiped the whole array of heaven and served it. […] He built altars to the whole array of heaven in the two courts of the Temple of Yahweh” (2 Kings 21:2–5). Manasseh’s son Amon is no better. Josiah, however, proves worthy of his great-great-grandfather Hezekiah, removing from the temple “all the cult objects which had been made for Baal, Asherah and the whole array of heaven. […] He exterminated the spurious priests whom the kings of Judah had appointed and who offered sacrifice on the high places, in the towns of Judah and the neighborhood of Jerusalem; also those who offered sacrifice to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations and the whole array of heaven” (2 Kings 23:4–5). In Samaria, over which he regained partial control, Josiah ordered the sanctuary of Bethel destroyed, and “All the priests of the high places who were there he slaughtered on the altars, and on those altars burned human bones” (2 Kings 23:20). In other words, Josiah is zealously faithful to the Law of Moses.

  For the Egyptians, gods are social beings, who collaborate in the management of the cosmos. The harmony of this world, including human affairs, depends on good cooperation between the gods.43 Hebrew theology, on the other hand, promotes the war of one god against all others. Yahweh feels a deep aversion toward all other gods and goddesses. His obsession is to preserve his people from any influence from other divine beings, and to make it his “personal possession” and “a kingdom of priests” devoted to his cult (Exodus 19:5–6). The Jealous One is possessive: “I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26). It is for their arrogant contempt of their neighbors’ religious practices that the Jews were perceived everywhere as a “race hated by the gods” (Tacitus, Histories V.3).

  In the ancient world, respecting the variety of the gods was the basis of international relationships. From the third millennium BCE onward, nations built their mutual trust on their capacity to match their gods; in this way, they knew they were living under the same heaven. “Contracts with other states,” explains Egyptologist Jan Assmann, “had to be sealed by oath, and the gods to whom this oath was sworn had to be compatible. Tables of divine equivalences were thus drawn up that eventually correlated up to six different pantheons.” This translatability of the gods relied on a standardization of their cosmic functions: the sun god of one country, for example, was assumed to be the same as the sun god of another. Polytheism as a cultural system used a “translational technique,” says Assmann, and in this respect, it “represents a major cultural achievement.” By standardizing the cosmic function of each god, it made the divine world of one particular group compatible with the divine world of another group. “Religion functioned as a medium of communication, not elimination and exclusion. The principle of the translatability of divine names helped to overcome the primitive ethnocentrism of the tribal religions, to establish relations between cultures, and to make these cultures more transparent to each other.”44 This was how the Greek and Egyptian deities merged into a Greco-Egyptian syncretism: Osiris took on the traits of Hades, as well as Asclepius and Dionysus.

  Yahweh, however, could not be matched up with any other god, and his priests forbade doing so. “Whereas polytheism, or rather ‘cosmotheism,’ rendered different cultures mutually transparent and compatible, the new counter-religion [Yahwism] blocked intercultural translatability.”45 And when the Lord directs his people, “You will make no pact with them or with their gods” (Exodus 23:32), or “Do not utter the names of their gods, do not swear by them, do not serve them and do not bow down to them” (Joshua 23:7), he is in effect preventing any relationship of trust with the neighboring peoples.

  The polytheisms of the great civilizations, Assmann emphasizes, are cosmotheisms, insofar as the gods, among other functions, form the organic body of the world. Such a conception naturally leads to a form of inclusive or convergent monotheism, compatible with polytheism: all gods are one, as the cosmos is one. The notion of the unity of the divine realm naturally connects with the notion of a supreme god, creator of heaven and earth, enthroned atop a hierarchy of deities emanating from him—a concept familiar to Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, and most ancient philosophers. The Yahwist priests, in a competitive mood, would also develop their own monotheism; but it was an exclusive and revolutionary monotheism, the exact opposite of the inclusive and evolutionary monotheism of neighboring peoples, and it led to the same result only in appearance.

  To understand how this biblical monotheism came about, it is necessary to know that in the oldest strata of the Bible, Yahweh is a national, ethnic god, not the supreme God of the Universe. The Israelites revered Yahweh as the Assyrians worshiped their god Ashur and credited him with their military victories: “For all peoples go forward, each in the name of its god (elohim), while we go forward in the name of Yahweh our God for ever and ever” (Micah 4:5). “I am the god of your ancestors, the god of Abraham, the god of Isaac and the god of Jacob,” Yahweh says to Moses (Exodus 3:6). Then Yahweh mandates Moses to say to his people: “Yahweh, the god of your ancestors, has appeared to me,” and to urge them to talk to Pharaoh in the name of “Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews” (3:16–18). “This is what Yahweh, god [elohim] of Israel, says, Let my people go,” Moses and Aaron say to Pharaoh (5:1). The Hebrews chant after the miracle of the Red Sea engulfing Pharaoh and his army, “Yahweh, who is like you, majestic in sanctity, who like you among the gods [elim]?” (15:11).46 And in Canaan, a Hebrew chief declares to his defeated enemy: “Will you not keep as your possession whatever Chemosh, your god, has given you? And, just the same, we shall keep as ours whatever Yahweh our god has given us, to inherit from those who were before us!” (Judges 11:24).47 In all these verses, Yahweh is an ethnic or national god among others.

  Yahweh’s superiority over other gods presupposes the existence of these other gods. One story in particular deserves to be mentioned here: After the Philistines had captured the Ark of the defeated Israelites, they “put it in the temple of Dagon, setting it down beside Dagon” (1 Samuel 5:2). The next day, they found the broken statue of Dagon. Yahweh then afflicted the inhabitants of two Philistine cities, Ashdod and Gat, with a proliferation of rats and an epidemic of tumors. The Philistines then ordered their priests to return the Ark to the Israelites, along with a penitential offeri
ng of “five golden tumours and five golden rats.” “So make models of your tumours and models of your rats ravaging the territory, and pay honor to the god of Israel. Then perhaps he will stop oppressing you, your gods and your country” (6:4–5).

  We repeat: At this stage, Yahweh was not the creator of the universe, but an ethnic god among many, demonstrating his superiority over all other gods and demanding the exclusive worship of the Israelites. The term “monolatry” has been coined to describe this rare form of polytheism that presupposes the existence of a plurality of gods but prohibits the worship of all except one. This is the meaning of the first commandments given to Moses: “I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of Egypt, where you lived as slaves. You shall have no other gods to rival me” (Exodus 20:2–3). David’s understanding of Yahweh’s blessing in 2 Samuel 7:23–26, if read without monotheistic spectacles, also points to a covenant between a god and a people: “Is there another people on earth like your people, like Israel, whom a god proceeded to redeem, to make them his people and to make a name for himself by performing great and terrible things on their behalf, by driving out nations and their gods before his people? For you constituted your people Israel your own people for ever and you, Yahweh, became their god. Now, god Yahweh, may the promise which you have made for your servant and for his family stand firm forever as you have said, so that your name will be exalted for ever and people will say, ‘Israel’s god is Yahweh Sabaoth.’”

  It was only during the Babylonian exile that Yahweh, deprived of the temple where he had previously sat between two cherubim, began to claim to have created the universe himself. After banning all trade with other gods and declaring Yahweh more powerful than they, the Yahwist priests and prophets would claim that these other gods simply did not exist. And if Yahweh was the only real god, then he must have been the creator and master of the universe. The exterminating fury of the deicide god thus reached its logical conclusion, since denying the existence of other gods condemns them to nothingness.

  This evolution from monolatry to monotheism was retro-projected to the time of King Hezekiah in the following curious story. Having destroyed the northern kingdom, the Assyrian king threatens Hezekiah in these words: “Do not let your god on whom you are relying deceive you with the promise: ‘Jerusalem will not fall into the king of Assyria’s clutches’ […] Did the gods of the nations whom my ancestors devastated save them?” Hezekiah then goes up to the Jerusalem Temple and offers the following prayer: “Yahweh Sabaoth, god of Israel, enthroned on the winged creatures, you alone are God of all the kingdoms of the world, you made heaven and earth. […] It is true, Yahweh, that the kings of Assyria have destroyed the nations, they have thrown their gods on the fire, for these were not gods but human artifacts—wood and stone—and hence they have destroyed them. But now, Yahweh our god, save us from his clutches, I beg you, and let all the kingdoms of the world know that you alone are God, Yahweh” (2 Kings 19:10–19). In response to this prayer, “the angel of Yahweh went out and struck down a hundred and eighty-five thousand men in the Assyrian camp,” then struck their king by the hand of his sons (19:35–37). Pure fiction: the Assyrian annals tell us that in reality, Hezekiah paid tribute to the Assyrian king. But the lesson of the story, for critical readers, is that a prayer sufficed to annihilate all other gods and promote Yahweh from the status of national god to that of universal God.

  Of course, the universal God, Father of all men, was known in Samaria and Judea much before Yahweh was introduced there. The Bible itself tells how Abraham was initiated by Melchizedek, king of Salem (Jerusalem’s former name), “a priest of God Most High […], Creator of heaven and earth” (Genesis 14:18-20). The High God was commonly called El, meaning “God” (from which derives the Arabic name Allah). So the trick was to merge Yahweh with El; in the post-exilic strata of the Torah, the two names become interchangeable. Historical-critical scholars have long noted that biblical passages referring to Yahweh belong to southern traditions (Judea), while the traditions of the North (Israel or Samaria) designated the creator simply as “El” or “Elohim.” This indicates that it was in Judah that Yahweh usurped the majesty of El, who was thus declared residing in the Jerusalem Temple, to be worshiped nowhere else. From this point of view, Yahwism is a conspiracy against the true God.

  In the biblical story, Baal is the most formidable rival of Yahweh. To justify the eradication of Baal worship in Canaan, Yahwist scribes present him as a foreign god imported by Jezebel, the Phoenician wife of Ahab (1 Kings 16:31–32). But he was actually the traditional god of the land. Baal was for the Canaanites what Osiris was for the Egyptians: both fertility god and lord of the dead. Baal is actually the equivalent for “Lord” in Aramaic (as well as for the Greek Kyrios and the Hebrew Adonai). The term is often used in the plural to designate the deities at large, including the deified dead. But in all of ancient Syria, Baal Shamem, the “Heavenly Lord,” refers to the supreme God, understood as including all the manifestations of the divine.48 It is ironic that Yahweh, originally a minor tribal god, should rival the great Baal for the status of supreme God.

  In the cycles of Elijah and Elisha, Elijah challenges 450 prophets of Baal to conjure lightning upon the burnt offering of a bull: “You must call on the name of your god, and I shall call on the name of Yahweh; the god who answers with fire, is God indeed.” The prophets of Baal exhaust themselves by shouting to their god, performing “their hobbling dance,” and gashing themselves with swords and spears, with no result, while Yahweh sets fire to Elijah’s bull after Elijah has drenched it with twelve jars of water to raise the challenge. People then fall on their faces and scream “Yahweh is God!” Then, on Elijah’s order, they seize all the prophets of Baal, and Elijah slaughters them (1 Kings 18). Let us appreciate the significance of this battle of the gods, which is still awaiting its Hollywood adaptation. It perfectly illustrates how, to arrive at monotheism, Yahwism takes the diametrically opposite path from other cultures of the same period: Rather than reaching philosophically the notion of the unity of all gods under a universal Godhead, the Yahwists pursued the outright negation of other gods and the extermination of their priests. In this process, theology and anthropology are inseparable. It is insofar as the national god of the Jews managed to establish himself as the “one God” of humanity that the Jewish people would be able to style themselves as the “chosen people.”

  For a Greek, writes historian Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, “monotheism can only be the subject of philosophical speculation and not of religious practice, polytheistic by definition.” Therefore, when the Greeks discovered the Jews in Egypt after Alexander’s conquest, a misunderstanding took place, nurtured by Jewish intellectuals themselves. Because they worshiped only one god and claimed for him the title of universal creator, the Jews gained for themselves a reputation as a “people of philosophers”—while the Egyptians, for their part, accused them of “atheism.” Around 315 BCE, Theophrastus of Eresus, disciple of Aristotle, called the Jews “philosophers by birth,” while mentioning that they “now sacrifice live victims according to their old mode of sacrifice,” that is, by burning completely their animal offerings (the original meaning of “holocaust”).49

  The misunderstanding became a public scandal in 167, when Antiochos IV dedicated the temple in Jerusalem to Zeus Olympios (the supreme god). He was expressing the idea that Yahweh was another name of Zeus. But the revolt led by the Jewish Maccabees proved that in their eyes, Yahweh remained primarily the god of the Jews, and only incidentally the supreme God. In other words, Jewish monotheism is really a supremacism and not a universalism.

  More than a misunderstanding, it is an ambiguity inherent to Judaism and its relationship to Gentiles. That is apparent in the Edict of Persian king Cyrus according to the book of Ezra: “Yahweh, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has appointed me to build him a Temple in Jerusalem, in Judah. Whoever among you belongs to the full tally of his people, may his Go
d be with him! Let him go up to Jerusalem, in Judah, and build the Temple of Yahweh, the god of Israel, who is the god in Jerusalem” (1:2–3). So, Cyrus speaks in the name of “the God of heaven” while authorizing the Judean exiles to build a temple to “Yahweh, the god of Israel […] the god in Jerusalem.”

  We understand that both phrases refer to the same God, but the duality is significant. We find it again in the edict authorizing the second wave of return. It is now Artaxerxes, “king of kings,” addressing “the priest Ezra, Secretary of the Law of the God of heaven,” to ask him to offer a gigantic holocaust “to the god of Israel who resides in Jerusalem” (7:12–15). We later find twice the expression “God of heaven” interspersed with seven references to “your God,” that is to say, the God of Ezra and Israel (and keep in mind that capitalization here is a convention of modern translators). The phrase “God of heaven” appears one more time in the book of Ezra, and it is, again, in an edict of a Persian king: Darius confirms the edict of Cyrus and recommends that the Israelites “may offer sacrifices acceptable to the God of heaven and pray for the life of the king and his sons” (6:10). Elsewhere the book of Ezra only refers to the “God of Israel” (four times), “Yahweh, the God of your fathers” (once), and “our God” (ten times). In other words, according to the author of the book of Ezra, only the kings of Persia imagine that Yahweh is “the God of heaven”—a common designation of the universal god Ahura Mazda among the Persians—while for the Jews, Yahweh is merely their god, the “god of Israel,” the god of their fathers, in short, a tribal god.

  The same principle can be observed in the book of Daniel, when Nebuchadnezzar, impressed by the gifts of Daniel’s oracle, prostrates himself and exclaims: “Your god is indeed the God of gods, the Master of kings” (Daniel 2:47). These passages (in which the god of the Jews becomes, in the eyes of the goyim, the God of the Universe) reveal the real secret of Judaism, the key to its relationship to universalism and Gentiles: for the Jews, Yahweh is the god of the Jews, while Gentiles are led to believe that he is the supreme and only God. “In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew,” confirms Maurice Samuel in You Gentiles (1924).50