by Peter Watson
The final–and conceivably the most important–aspect of this constellation of core beliefs is the simple fact that, around the time of the rise of the first great civilisations, the main gods changed sex, as the Great Goddess, or a raft of smaller goddesses, were demoted and male gods took their place. Once again, it is not hard to see why this transformation occurred. Predominantly agricultural societies, grouped around the home, were at the very least egalitarian and very probably matriarchal societies, with the mother at the centre of most activities. City life, on the other hand, as was discussed in the previous chapter, was much more male-orientated. The greater need for standing armies favoured men, who could leave home. The greater career specialities–potters, smiths, soldiers, scribes, and not least priests–also favoured men, for women were left at home to look after the children. And with men fulfilling several occupations, they would have had a greater range of self-interest than housewives, and therefore felt a more urgent need to partake in politics. In such a background, it was only natural for the leaders to be males too, so that kings took precedence over queens. Male priests ran the temples and, in certain cases, conferred godlike status on their kings. The effect that this change has had on history has been incalculable. It was first pointed out in the nineteenth century by Johann Jakob Bachofen in The Law of the Mothers, or Mother Right.
Analysis of early religions can seem at times like numerology. There are so many of them, and they are so varied, that they can be made to fit any theory. Nevertheless, insofar as the world’s religions can be reduced to core elements, then those elements are: a belief in the Great Goddess, in the Bull, in the main sky gods (the sun and the moon), in sacred stones, in the efficacy of sacrifice, in an afterlife, and in a soul of some sort which survives death and inhabits a blessed spot. These elements describe many religions in some of the less developed parts of the world even today. Among the great civilisations, however, this picture is no longer true and the reason for that state of affairs is without question one of the greatest mysteries in the history of ideas. For during the period 750–350 BC, the world underwent a great intellectual sea-change. In that relatively short time, most of the world’s great faiths came into being.
The first man to point this out was the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, in 1949, in his book The Origin and Goal of History. He called this period the ‘Axial Age’ and he characterised it as a time when ‘we meet with the most deep cut dividing line in history. Man, as we know him today, came into being…The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Leh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to scepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers–Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato–of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others.’56
Jaspers saw man as somehow becoming ‘more human’ at this time. He says that reflection and philosophy appeared, that there was a ‘spiritual breakthrough’ and that the Chinese, Indians, Iranians, Jews and Greeks between them created modern psychology, in which man’s relation to God is as an individual seeking an ‘inner’ goal rather than having a relationship with a number of gods ‘out there’, in the skies, in the landscape around, or among our ancestors. Not all the faiths created were, strictly speaking, monotheisms, but they did all centre around one individual, whether that man (always a man) was a god, or the person through whom god spoke, or else someone who had a particular vision or approach to life which appealed to vast numbers of people. Arguably, this is the most momentous change in the history of ideas.
We start with the religion of Israel, not because it came first (it didn’t, as we shall see), but because, as Grant Allen says, ‘It is the peculiar glory of Israel to have evolved God.’57 In Israel’s case, this evolution is especially clear.
The name of the Jewish God, Yahweh, which was disclosed to Moses, appears to have originated in northern Mesopotamia. We have known this only since the 1930s, with the discovery of a set of clay texts at Nuzu, a site situated between modern Baghdad and Nimrud in Iraq. Dating from the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC, these texts do not identify any biblical individuals by name but they do outline a set of laws, and describe a society that is recognisably that to which Jacob, son of Isaac, fled (in Mesopotamia, according to the Bible) after tricking his father into blessing him, instead of his brother Esau. For example, in the Bible Jacob purchases from Esau his ‘birthright’, which means title to the position of firstborn. The Nuzu tablets make clear that inheritance prospects there are negotiable. Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, although he was born in Ur, later spent time in Haran, which is also in northern Mesopotamia. This general area was a meeting ground of various peoples, most importantly the Amorites, Arameans and the Hurrians. The divine name Yahweh appears not infrequently in Amorite personal names.58
However, until a relatively late period of Jewish history the Israelites had a ‘considerable’ number of divinities. ‘According to the number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah,’ says the prophet Jeremiah, writing in the sixth century BC.59 When Israelite religion first appears, in the Hebrew scriptures, we find no fewer than three main forms of worship. There is the worship of teraphim or family gods, the worship of sacred stones, and the worship of certain great gods, partly native, partly perhaps borrowed. Some of these gods take the form of animals, others of sky gods, the sun in particular. There are many biblical references to these gods. For example, when Jacob flees from Laban, we hear how Rachel stole her father’s teraphim: when the furious chieftain finally catches up with the fugitives, one of his first questions is to ask why they stole his domestic gods.60 Hosea refers to teraphim as ‘stocks of wood’, while Zechariah dismisses them as ‘idols that speak lies to the people’.61 It is clear that the teraphim were preserved in each household with reverential care, that they were sacrificed to by the family at stated intervals, and that they were consulted on all occasions of doubt or difficulty by ‘a domestic priest “clad in an ephod”. In all this the Israelites were little different from the surrounding peoples.’62
Stone-worship also played an important part in the primitive Semitic religion. For the early Hebrews a sacred stone was a ‘Beth-el’, a place where gods dwelt.63 In the legend of Jacob’s dream we get an example where the sacred stone is anointed and a promise is made to it of a tenth of the speaker’s substance as an offering. In other places women pray to phallic-shaped stones so that they might be blessed with children.64 Yahweh is referred to as a rock in Deuteronomy, and in the second book of Samuel. References to other great gods are equally numerous. The terms Baal and Molech are general terms in the Hebrew scriptures, referring mainly to local gods in the Semitic region, and sometimes to sacred stones. A god in the form of a young bull was worshipped at Dan and Bethel, when the Israelites made themselves a ‘golden calf’ in the wilderness at the time of the Exodus.65 Grant Allen says explicitly that Yahweh was originally worshipped in the shape of a young bull. In other words, the Israelite religion was polytheistic for centuries, with the worship of Baal, Molech, the bull and the serpent going on side-by-side with worship of Yahweh ‘without conscious rivalry’.66 But then it all began to change, with enormous consequences for humankind.
There are two aspects to that change. The first is that the early Yahweh was a god of increase, fruitfulness and fertility. In the Bible Yahweh promises to Abraham ‘I will multiply thee exceedingly’, ‘thou shalt be a father of many nations’, ‘I will ma
ke thee exceedingly fruitful’. He says the same thing to Isaac.67 One of the best-known practices of Judaism, circumcision, is a fairly obvious fertility rite concerning the male principle and also confirms the dominance of male gods over female ones.
The early Yahweh was also a god of light and fire. The story of the burning bush is well known but in addition Zechariah says ‘Yahweh will make lightnings’, while Isaiah describes him this way: ‘The light of Israel shall be for a fire, And his holy one for a flame…His lips are full of indignation, And his tongue is as a devouring fire.’68 It is not so very far from here to Yahweh being ‘a consuming fire, a jealous god’.69 Several aspects of lunar worship were also incorporated into early Judaism. For example, the Sabbath (shabbatum, the ‘full-moon day’ in Babylon) was originally the unlucky day dedicated to the malign god Kewan or Saturn, when it was undesirable to do any kind of work. The division of the lunar month into four weeks of seven days, dedicated in turn to the gods of the seven planets, is self-evident in its references.
When you look for them, the biblical verses linking early Judaism to even earlier pagan religions, showing all the core beliefs we have identified, are clear-cut. Far from being an ethereal, omnipotent and omniscient presence, the God of the early Hebrew scriptures lived in an ark. Otherwise, why was it sacrosanct, why the despair when the Philistines captured it? What now needs to be explained is two things: why Yahweh emerged as one god; and why he was such a jealous god, intolerant of other deities.
First, there are the particular circumstances of the Israelites in Palestine.70 They were a small tribe, surrounded by powerful enemies. They were continually fighting, their numbers always threatened. The ark of Yahweh (the portable altar), in its house at Shiloh, seems to have formed the general meeting-place for Hebrew patriotism. Containing the golden calf (i.e., the bull), the ark was always carried before the Hebrew army. There was thus just one god in the ark, and although Solomon (tenth century BC) built temples dedicated to other Hebrew gods, which remained in existence for some centuries, Yahweh became in this way the main deity.71 For generations the two tiny Israelite kingdoms maintained a precarious independence between the great empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Beginning in the eighth century BC, however, this balancing act broke down and they were defeated in battle, first by the Assyrians, then by the Babylonians. The very existence of Israel was at stake and, in response, ‘there broke out an ecstasy of enthusiasm’ for Yahweh. In this way was generated the ‘Age of the Prophets’, which produced the earliest masterpieces of Hebrew literature, designed to shock the sinful Israelites into compliance with the wishes of their god, Yahweh who, by the end of this period, had become supreme. ‘Prophet’ is a Greek word, meaning one who speaks before the sacred cave of an oracle.72
There are two issues here, one of which will be considered now, the other in a later chapter. These are, first, the message and impact of the prophets and, second, the compilation of the Hebrew scriptures which, far from being the divinely-inspired word of God, are, like all holy writings, clearly a set of documents produced by human hands with a specific aim.73
The Hebrew prophets fulfilled a role that has been called unique in the history of humanity, but if so it was not so much prophecy in itself that marked them out as their loud and repeated denunciations of an evil and hypocritical people, and their bitter predictions of the doom that must follow this continued estrangement from God. To a man, the prophets were opposed to sacrifice, idolatry and to the traditional priesthood, not so much on principle as for the fact that ‘men were going through the motions of formally honouring God while their everyday action proved they had none of the love of God that alone gives sacrifice a meaning’.74 The prophets’ main concern was Israel’s internal spirituality. Their aim was to turn Yahweh-worship away from idolatry (the idol in the ark), so that the faithful would reflect instead on their own behaviour, their feelings and failings. This concentration on the inner life suggests that the prophets were concerned with an urban religion, that they were faced with the problem of living together in close proximity. This may explain why, in their efforts to shock the Israelites into improving their morality, the prophets built up the idea of revelation.75
Just when ecstatic prophecy began in Israel is uncertain. Moses not only talked to God and performed miracles, but he carried out magic–rods were turned into snakes, for example. The earliest prophets wore magicians’ clothes–we read of ‘charismatic mantles’ worn by Elijah (‘the greatest wonder-worker since Moses’) and inherited by Elisha.76 According to the book of Kings (1 Kings 18:19ff), prophecy was a practice common among the Canaanites, so the Israelites probably borrowed the idea from them.77 The central–the dominating–role in Israelite prophecy was an insistence on the ‘interior spirit’ of religion. ‘What gives Israelite prophetism its distinctly moral tone almost if not quite from the very beginning, is the distinctly moral character of Israelitic religion. The prophets stand out in history because Israel stands out in history…Religion is by nature moral only if the gods are deemed moral, and this was hardly the rule among the ancients. The difference was made in Israel by the moral nature of the God who had revealed himself.’78 The prophets also introduced a degree of rationalism into religion. As Paul Johnson has pointed out, if there is a supernatural power, why should it be confined only to certain sacred rocks, or rivers, or planets, or animals? Why should this power be expressed only in an arbitrary array of gods? Isn’t the idea of a god of limited power a contradiction in terms? ‘God is not just bigger, but infinitely bigger and therefore the idea of representing him is absurd, and to try to make an image of him is insulting.’79
Although the prophets differed greatly in character and background, they were united in their condemnation of what they saw as the moral corruption of Israel, its turning away from Yahweh, its over-zealous love of empty sacrifice, especially on the part of the priesthood. They were agreed that a time of punishment was coming, due to the widespread corruption, but that Israel would eventually be saved by a ‘remnant’ which would survive. Almost certainly, this reflected a period of great social and political change, when Israel was transformed from a tribal society to a state with a powerful king and court, where the priests were salaried and therefore dependent on the royal house, and where a new breed of wealthy merchant was emerging, keen and able to buy privileges for itself and its offspring and for whom, in all probability, religion took second place. All this at a time when the threat from outside was especially difficult.
The first prophets, Elijah and Elisha, introduced the idea of the individual conscience. Elijah was critical of the royal household because some of its members were corrupt and worshipped Baal.80 God spoke to him, he famously said, in ‘a still, small voice’. Amos was appalled at the bribery he saw around him, and at temple prostitution, a relic of ancient fertility rites.81 It was he who developed the concept of ‘election’, that Israel had been selected by Yahweh, to be his chosen people, that he would protect them provided they abided by their covenant with him, to worship him and only him (but see below, page113). For Amos, if Israel failed in this sacred marriage with Yahweh, Yahweh would intervene in history and ‘settle accounts’.82 Hosea refined the covenant still further. He believed in a Yahweh who was master of all history, who had ‘irresistible designs’ for all the world. He too opposed corrupt kingship and the cult of the temple, expressly branding as idolatry the worship of the golden bulls which had been instituted in the royal sanctuaries (1 Kings 12:25–30); he also conceived the idea of a messiah who would redeem Israel.83 It was Hosea who first introduced a religion of the heart, divorced from place. This was reinforced when Jerusalem survived a siege by the Assyrian King Sennacherib, in 701 BC. The Israelites triumphed thanks to bubonic plague, transmitted by mice, but to them this only confirmed that their fate was linked to Yahweh and their own moral behaviour.84
Isaiah, without question the most skilful wordsmith and the most moving writer among the prophets (and indeed of the entire Hebre
w canon), began his mission, according to his own account, in the year that King Uzziah died–around 740 BC. By tradition he was the nephew of King Amaziah of Judah and was well-connected to the politicians of his day.85 But he got out among the people and had a sizeable following–a popularity that endured, as may be gauged from the fact that, among the texts found at Qumran after the Second World War was a leather scroll, twenty-three feet long, giving the whole of Isaiah in fifty columns of Hebrew. As a result of his pressure on Hezekiah, the king at the time, the Temple in Jerusalem turned back to Yahweh-worship and the sanctuaries in the provinces were closed and public worship centralised in the capital.86 Isaiah condemned Judah as a land of unbridled, irresponsible luxury, a sensual society without concern for the spirit, divine or human.87 He explicitly singled out for condemnation the monopoly in land that had ‘borne such evil fruit in Judah’.88 Isaiah was pushing the Israelite religion to a new spirituality and a new interiority, still more divorced from time and place than Hosea had imagined, more and more a religion of conscience, when men are thrown back on themselves as the only way to achieve social justice. Men and women, he was saying, must turn away from the pursuit of wealth as the chief aim in life. ‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place.’89
