Thank you for your comments. You obviously did some digging. I’d like to honour your study with a reasonable response.
First I should point out that the books of the Torah (Pentateuch) are not written in chronological order, though their contents may seem to flow this way. One cannot assume, therefore, that the first mention of God’s name in the Torah is the earliest. For example, “Yahweh” is used as a name of God in Genesis 2, and yet we’re told in Exodus 6 that God was not known as Yahweh until the time of Moses. This is further evidence that the books of the Torah were written at a later date than the events narrated in them. It also provides evidence of alterations to the narrative: since God wasn’t known as Yahweh until the time of Moses, the identification of the two has been enacted retroactively. All this is further supported by the archaeological record. I’ve tried to keep my comments within the scope of the Biblical literature in order to provide a text that is easily accessible, but at some point a stubborn refusal to examine all the evidence reduces one’s position to a circular argument (at that point I would argue it’s no longer a reasonable approach, but superstitious, and has little to do with truth).
El is the singular form of Elohim. Elohim is a variant of the name usually used in the Ancient Near East (ANR) for one god among many. Among the Hittites and in the Ugaritic texts it was “El”. Among the Assyrians and Babylonians it was “Ilu”. The Southern Arabians referred to “Il or Ilum”. One of the texts found at Ugarit makes a similar connection between El and Yahweh as Deut. 32 (see my first post):
Fragment KTU 1.1 IV 14: "The name of the son of god, Yahweh."
At Ugarit Yahweh was viewed as one of El’s sons. El was the head of a pantheon of gods and was usually represented as a bull. In the Ugaritic poems for example, El is referred to as “Bull El”. As you recall, Israel set up a golden calf at Sinai (Ex. 32). This wasn’t some random representation or idolatrous whimsy. The Hebrew text is clear that this was a male (bull) calf:
He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf [‛êgel], fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods [elohim], Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”
Note the text says: “these are your gods, Israel...” The translators (NIV) note that the translation can be either singular or plural. The point is clear: this wasn’t a random usage of the term “elohim” as some Biblical commentators have tried to suggest, as if in this instance “elohim” refers to a generic “gods”. The connection between the bull-calf and the Bull god El is quite clear, and would have been clear to Israel. This was the reason for constructing the calf in the first place.
Please see the comment section of my previous post for the response to the rest of your questions.
While I sincerely find your thoughts and study fascinating (most do not have the motivation, time, or mental energy to pursue things at the level you do) I suppose some questions that remain for me are: what function does your assimilation theory serve? What makes it a valuable conclusion for you? Does it serve to reinforce your notion that the God of Israel is pure myth, the result of culture and time?
ReplyDeleteThank you for continuing to thoughtfully consider these posts. I should say that the evidence for cultural and theological assimilation in the ANR has reached the point where it is no longer in question. This has been the case for some time. The real challenge is to trace these cultural/theological threads back to their earliest sources. This is a continuing task for the archaeologists.
ReplyDeleteThe fundamental value of the evidence, for me, is its truth content, or I should say, its encyclopaedic content (truth is another matter). It has explanatory power and makes sense of the Biblical inconsistencies I’ve already mentioned. I am not interested in what people wish the past to have been, I am interested in what it was. I understand a certain amount of reconstruction takes place when “doing” history, but I am not such a relativist or subjectivist to believe that we can therefore know nothing about a people’s experience other than our own. This quest isn’t completely for myself (as much as I am driven by a need to know), but for others as well. What I share here is a reflection of this desire for others to at least have the opportunity to hear the scholarship, to consider the implications, and to dialogue.
The evidence is certainly interesting. It reveals a process of thought concerning the gods that I find fascinating. I haven’t had time to go into further details concerning Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten), the Egyptian pharaoh who broke with all tradition, who set up the god Aten as Creator and worshipped him only.
To quote Yale scholar John Collins, who succinctly expresses the results of the historical data and sums up this section of my postings:
“The context of the discussion has changed significantly in recent years with the recognition that the biblical texts are not historically reliable accounts of early Israelite history but ideological fictions from a much later time. The texts are not naïve reflections of primitive practice but programmatic ideological statements from the late seventh century B.C.E. or later. We can no longer accept them as simply presenting what happened. Whether we see these texts as reflecting expansionistic policies of King Josiah or as mere fantasies of powerless Judeans after the exile, they project a model of the ways in which Israel should relate to its neighbors.”
Hence the cultural/sociological importance of the myths themselves. To slightly modify a phrase by James Barr, “of concern now is not whether the narratives are fact or fiction, the concern is now, how does this ideology function?”
A most excellent consummation. Thanks for all this. You have as you say, "given the opportunity for others to hear the scholarship."
ReplyDeleteAs for the paraphrase of James Barr, here's another paraphrase, from Thomas Mann: If i am not living the ideology, the ideology is living me.