My point is that the death of the gods is not a remote, hypothetical little phenomenon. It plays a crucial role in the works of several of the major authors of the Bible. Professor Machinist wrote about Psalm 82 that there is a “legion of scholarly studies of it.”48 And, as I said above, people have recited it regularly for centuries. These passages have been there for all to see for millennia. Yet most people, even fairly knowledgeable people with regard to the Bible, have not heard about this matter of the death of the gods. And now we can add how the passages all fit together: how exquisitely the connection between the death of the gods and the distribution of the nations coincides with the end of God’s use of the plural after that distribution of the nations at the story of the tower of Babylon in Genesis.49 All of these biblical authors knew it. Maybe everyone in ancient Israel who read these stories and sang these songs knew it. The gods had died.
How Do Gods Die?
Why did they come up with this concept? Gods dying. How did it get started? How did people come to accept it? In part the grounds were already set for it in the ancient Near East because in pagan religion there were known myths of gods dying. Professor Machinist at Harvard and Professor Mark Smith at Princeton have addressed this. Machinist, in an article titled “How Gods Die, Biblically and Otherwise,” summarized:
In Ugarit itself, to restrict ourselves to some examples from the ancient Near East, the Ba‘al cycle of texts depicts the death, the violent death, of three of its divine principals: Yamm/Nahar; then his killer, Ba‘al; who, in turn, is masticated by his killer, Mot; who himself is later dismembered. The Mesopotamian mythic text of Enuma Elish, likewise, treats the death and, at points, dismemberment of the deities Apsu, Tiamat, and Qingu. And in Mesopotamia as well, dead gods can be referred to as a category.50
Smith titled an article “The Death of ‘Dying and Rising Gods’ in the Biblical World,”51 which is just one treatment out of a collection of publications of Smith’s on the relationship of Israel’s religion and the pagan religion of the ancient Near East.
My point: the stage was set. When monotheism began to catch on in Israel, when the prophets no longer had to browbeat people to stop worshipping all those other gods, when the Israelite moms and dads and Sunday (or Saturday) school teachers were teaching their children that there is only one God—whenever things reached that point—they had to explain what had happened to the gods. The idea of the death of the gods was already a known concept in the ancient Near East. I think that the answer to the question of why they were drawn to that idea in Israel lies in the questions with which I began this chapter: What did people think of their parents and grandparents who had worshipped the gods? What did they think happened to the gods—and the goddesses? What did they tell their children? When the children were taught that there is only one God, and they asked, “But Grandma worshipped lots of gods. Was Grandma bad?” the parent could answer, “No, dear. Grandma wasn’t bad. There used to be those gods, but they were bad, and they died. And now there is only one God.” What I have simplified here as a little conversation between a parent and child must have existed as a real theological issue that needed an answer. And, actually, it may well have occurred in numerous family and school conversations like this as well. Religious changes require religious explanations. And the mythological background of gods dying in the ancient Near Eastern pagan religions made this religious explanation fit right in.52 It was not even necessarily a radical idea. Gods die. What was radical was getting the number down to one.
The Mystery of Babylon
The story of the tower of Babylon has been the missing piece of the puzzle all along.53 It is the culminating story of the Primeval History (Genesis 1–11, also known to scholars by its German name, the Urgeschichte). Why? Because, from the biblical author’s point of view, it is the end of the old world of the gods. What follows is not the beginning of monotheism in history. It is the beginning of the monotheistic story. It is the story of the relations between Yahweh and humankind. It will take up the entire rest of the Bible.
In Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, that story starts with Abraham. There is a traditional story (a midrash), not found in the Bible, that Abraham’s father was an idol maker, that Abraham arrived at monotheism on his own, and that Abraham smashed the idols in his father’s house. Why does the monotheism story start with Abraham and not with Adam, Eve, Cain, Lamech, Enosh, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, or anyone else? The instincts of the three religions were precisely right. Abraham comes after—immediately after—the story of the tower of Babylon. The tower of Babylon tale comes in Genesis 11, and the first words of Genesis 12 are: “And Yahweh [or: the LORD] said to Abraham . . .” From the time of Babylon, the gods are condemned to death. And, instead of the gods, the one highest God now makes humans His companions to whom He speaks.54
The logical progression between these two chapters is even stronger than that. In the tower of Babylon story in Genesis 11, separate languages and lands are formed. In the Abraham story in Genesis 12, God’s first words to Abraham are a direction to leave his land and go to a new land:
And Yahweh said to Abram, “Go from your land and from your birthplace and from your father’s house to the land that I’ll show you.”
Everything else in the story, all the adventures of this man, his family, and their descendants, will follow from this move. And, as we know well from our previous observations, the longest and largest of their adventures will be their stay in Egypt and their exodus from it and their return to the land. Languages, geography, and history are all intimately, intricately tied to theology. Choose the metaphor you prefer: a network, a tapestry, a lentil stew. But the bottom line is: arrival at belief in one God.
So, many scholars among my colleagues and my teachers attributed monotheism to the Babylonian exile. We can understand that. They naturally saw great revolutions in thought coming as a result of great, catastrophic events in human history. That is often the case. Of course big events have big consequences in a culture. But in this case, the exodus from Egypt and the uniting of the Levites with the rest of Israel was at least as monumental an event as the Babylonian defeat of Judah.
The scholarly attraction to Babylon is not exactly wrong. The biblical authors did connect the gods’ demise to Babylon, but to the ancient Babylon of mythology, not to the Babylonian empire of history that would conquer the Jews centuries later.
The Queen of the Heavens
We are not quite done. Until now we have spoken of either one god or many gods. But there is another possibility that rounds out this picture: two gods.
In the English-speaking culture in which I grew up, when we learned grammar—I mean in the good old days when they still taught grammar in school—we learned that the grammatical number of a word was either singular or plural. That is how we think: one or many. But not all languages work that way. In Hebrew—both Biblical and Modern—there are three forms to indicate number: singular, plural, and dual. The dual is used when there are two of something. It is formed by adding the syllables -ayim to the end of a word. It is especially useful for body parts that come in twos. Thus an arm in Hebrew is a yad. A person’s arms are yadayim. A leg in Hebrew is a regel. A person’s legs are raglayim. If you own two Cadillacs, I guess you have Cadillacayim. Now the point is not just about grammar. It is about a different concept of number. Two of something is as different from nine or ten as it is from one. Now I bring this just as an example, not to prove anything. I mean to convey that this conceptual difference of number can apply to grammar, but it can also apply to theology. In other words: to gods. We know from both text and archaeology that Israelites and Jews in the biblical period conceived of Yahweh as male, and they sometimes worshipped a goddess alongside Yahweh. She was apparently His consort, His wife. In the text, the prophet Jeremiah criticizes the people because they worship “the Queen of the Heavens.” The text is ironic. Jeremiah reprimands the people for worshipping her and predicts terrible things to come.55 Later,
when all the terrible things that Jeremiah prophesied have come true, the people declare the opposite: that they were fine as long as they worshipped the Queen of the Heavens but that things turned bad only when they listened to Jeremiah and stopped worshipping her:
The thing that you spoke to us in the name of Yahweh: we’re not listening to you. But we shall do everything that has proceeded from our mouth: to burn incense to the Queen of the Heavens and to pour libations to her, as we’ve done, we and our fathers, our kings, and our officials in Judah’s cities and in Jerusalem’s streets, so we had plenty of bread and were well and saw no bad. But since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring libations to her, we’ve been lacking everything, and we’ve been consumed by the sword and by the famine.
(Jeremiah 44:16–18)
In archaeology, too, we have found direct evidence of a female consort along with Yahweh. At a location called Kuntillet ‘Ajrud along Judah’s border, the archaeologist Z. Meshel of Tel Aviv University found inscriptions in the 1970s that refer to “Yahweh of Samaria and His Asherah.”56 An Asherah is a goddess. Some have taken it to be the goddess’ name, Asherah, but actually it is simply the word for a goddess. It normally is preceded by the Hebrew definite article—the Asherah, like the Baal—indicating that it is the general term for a goddess, not any particular goddess’ name.57 The inscription “Yahweh of Samaria and His Asherah” on the side of a giant jar from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud is consistent with the picture in Jeremiah: the people worshipped Yahweh, but they also worshipped a queen goddess alongside Him.
Back to the text: One of the relevant Bible stories that we considered earlier was the account of the prophet Elijah and the prophets of the Baal at Mount Carmel. There Elijah challenges 450 prophets of the Baal to the duel. The prophets of the Baal pray fervently, but nothing happens. Elijah prays to Yahweh, and the fire falls and consumes the sacrifice. But I left out the next part of the story there. Elijah has the people slaughter the 450 prophets of the Baal. Now, an interesting thing is that people often leave out a significant detail when they retell this story. There are not just the 450 prophets of the Baal present. There are also 400 prophets of the Asherah.58 But the prophets of the Asherah do not have an altar or an offering and do not pray. And the prophets of the Baal all get killed, but nothing at all happens to the prophets of the Asherah. Why not? Because, as the great biblical scholar David Noel Freedman put it, “The winner gets the girl.” The duel was between the two male deities. The female deity was not challenged and was not, like the Baal, shown not to be a true deity. She was the spouse of the triumphant God. The story is set in the kingdom of Israel, and its capital at this time was the city of Samaria. Recall that the inscription at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud refers to “Yahweh of Samaria and His Asherah.”59
It appears that even when the struggle was going on between monotheism and polytheism, that revolution was going to take an extra step to get people to give up the goddess. Human males had wives. Why would they not expect their God to have a divine wife as well? Now you might say, “What about Psalm 82 and the whole matter of the death of the gods?” Did not all the goddesses die too? Why would this one queen goddess live? But in Psalm 82 the Highest God, Yahweh, condemns all the children of the Highest (the bĕnê ‘elyôn) to die like humans. But the Queen of the Heavens, the Asherah, is not one of His children. She is His wife. So, the fact is, we do not ever really find out what became of her. We have no mythic text that addresses it. What we can say is that people continued to feel a need for a female presence somewhere in their religious picture, even if it was not a goddess. Mariology developed in Catholicism. And Biblical Judaism at one point identified the nation itself as God’s wife.60 Later Judaism developed the idea of the shechinah, a term for the divine presence. The word shechinah never occurs in the Hebrew Bible, but in the Jewish mystical system known as Kabbalah it acquired a status of its own. The word is grammatically feminine, and perhaps because of this it is treated as a feminine aspect of the deity. These and other terms and persons are not the equivalent of a divine wife, but they reflect a perfectly understandable feeling among some that both masculine and feminine must exist in the divine world just as they do in the human world. In the pagan world, this was not a problem. There were both gods and goddesses. And in Israel the Asherah was the last one to go.61
The biblical accounts of the kings of Israel and Judah convey the struggle over her exit. They refer to Israel’s tenth-century BCE king Ahab, who ruled in Samaria, making an Asherah, which stood in Samaria through several kings’ reigns.62 That fits with the archaeological discovery of the “Yahweh of Samaria and His Asherah” inscription. They report that King Asa of Judah (c. 918–873 BCE), whose reign may have overlapped near its end with Ahab’s, removed his mother from her royal status because she had made a “monstrosity” (some sort of idol?) to the Asherah. He burned the Asherah.63 If that report is correct, the Asherah must have been reestablished, however, because around two hundred years later, King Hezekiah of Judah destroys it again.64 But that is not the end of the Asherah. The book of 2 Kings reports that Hezekiah’s son, King Manasseh, put a statue of the Asherah in the Temple!65 But then Manasseh’s grandson, King Josiah, took it out of the Temple and burned it at the same place where King Asa had burned one about three hundred years earlier.66 And still, as we saw above, the prophet Jeremiah continues to struggle against those who wanted to continue burning incense to her.
Those references in Jeremiah are the last ones to the Asherah or the Queen of the Heavens. There are none in the books that tell the later destiny of the Jews: the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Daniel, and the prophets Haggai and Zechariah. So at some point after Jeremiah, the acceptance of monotheism also came to include the demise of the last goddess. When, where, and why: we just do not know. The text does not say. What the people believed to have come of her is a mystery.
When Monotheism Won
By the end of the biblical period, monotheism had won.
Monotheism had won so much so that on the whole we have forgotten what pagan religion was about. Most people could not tell you what the word “pagan” means.
Monotheism had won so much so that even educated people think that pagan religion involved idol worship.
Monotheism had won so much so that college Departments of Religion today usually do not offer a course on pagan religion. Departments and programs of religious studies commonly offer Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Hinduism. Only Hinduism might come close insofar as it involves multiple gods, but a course on it would not aim to shed light on pagan religion as such. If you want a course on Greek or Roman pagan religion, go to the Classics Department. If you want a course on ancient Near Eastern pagan religion, go to the Near Eastern Studies Department or the Oriental Institute. But to find this in a Religion Department would be rare, even though pagan religion is the longest-lasting religion on earth.
Monotheism had won so much so that rabbis in antiquity turned to a new sort of explanation for why the Second Jerusalem Temple was destroyed. When the first Jerusalem Temple had been destroyed in the wake of the Babylonian conquest in 587 BCE, the biblical interpretation of that catastrophe was that the people had worshipped other gods. But when the second Jerusalem Temple fell to the Romans in 70 CE, the rabbis’ interpretation of the catastrophe was moral rather than worship of other gods. The people had accepted monotheism enough by that time that one could not trace the disaster to apostasy. So the rabbis taught that it was because of “pointless hatred” (Hebrew śin’āt ḥinām). Monotheism was no longer the issue.
The triumph of monotheism has changed everything, probably even the nature of atheism. Today more people than ever believe in God. And more people than ever don’t. How different would this be if the difference were not between atheists and those who believe in God, but instead were between atheists and those who believe in the gods and goddesses? Would books like those of Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hi
tchens (God Is Not Great), for example, look different if they had had to frame the argument this way?67 Would the evidence on both sides be different? We shall never know. Monotheism won.
The Exodus and Monotheism
We have seen a movement from many deities to two to one. Whether you take that movement to be fact, mythology, or theology, it is the story of how we got to where most (Western) religions are now. And, as I said, it even defines where atheism is at. Have you heard the old joke about the Jewish man who was left on a desert island for years? When a ship found him, they saw two large huts that he had built on a hill. They asked him what they were. He said, “That one’s my synagogue. I go there and pray and celebrate holidays.” And they asked him what the other hut was. He said, “That’s the synagogue I don’t go to!” (You can change this to churches or any house of worship you like when you tell the joke.) So we hear people say, “Do you believe in God?” But we do not generally hear people say, “Do you believe in the gods?” The religion that atheists don’t go to is monotheism—by default. Or, better: by history. Is the idea of one God higher than the idea of many? Is it more logical? More attractive? The idea of many gods—polytheism—served humankind for about three or four millennia before monotheism came along. Pagan religion was the most successful religion of all time (in terms of how long it lasted; Christianity is the most successful in the number of adherents). I have read and heard it said many times that monotheism has done more harm than polytheism. The claim is that monotheism is exclusive—“If my belief is right, then everybody else’s beliefs must be wrong”—so monotheists are more likely than polytheists or atheists to exclude, persecute, and purge others. We can admit that there is some logic to that claim, but still the evidence of history goes both ways. Polytheist and atheist nations and empires have done their share of atrocities. I would not want to take a side in a depressing debate over which has done more horrible things. My task here has not been to argue that monotheism is higher or lower than other ideas. It has just been to track how it came about and to recognize that it succeeded. Monotheism won. One won.
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