God Against the Gods (5 page)

The Gift of the Egyptians

But Akhenaton and the religion he invented may have been preserved and passed down through history in intriguing if obscure ways. Indeed, the startling discoveries at el-Amarna have prompted some scholars to wonder whether monotheism was, in fact, a gift of the Egyptians. If so, an argument can be made that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all daughter religions of the failed experiment that took place in prebiblical antiquity.

One of the pious hymns that Akhenaton himself may have composed—“O Thou only God, there is no other God than Thou”
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—seems to prefigure the fundamental credo of Judaism: “Hear O Israel, the Lord thy God, the Lord is One.”
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And some scholars propose that the solar imagery that can be found in the Psalms—“You are clothed in glory and majesty, wrapped in a robe of light; You spread the heavens like a tent cloth”
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—was not merely inspired by the pharaoh’s praise-song to Aton but is a Hebrew translation of the original Egyptian text. “Were not the Egyptian ‘Aton’ and the Hebrew ‘Adonai’ the same name?” muses Jan Assmann,
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and Sigmund Freud takes the argument to its furthest reach in
Moses and Monotheism
by suggesting that Moses himself was a priest in the cult of Aton who converted the Israelites to the new faith after the Egyptians repudiated the dead pharaoh. “The man Moses, the liberator and lawgiver of the Jewish people, was not a Jew but an Egyptian,” proposes Freud. “Moses conceived the plan of finding a new people, to whom he could give the religion that Egypt disdained.”
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Such speculation is still capable of provoking anger and outrage among the pious in all three monotheisms. But the simple proposition that the faith of ancient Israel was not something wholly new is now beyond debate—many of the beliefs and practices that are written into the biblical text were borrowed from the peoples among whom the Israelites lived and against whom they fought, sometimes as the victors and more often as the vanquished. And the borrowings were not always based on a belief in the Only True God—the Bible itself is covered with the fingerprints of polytheism, and even the biblical authors find themselves forced to concede that the people of ancient Israel, no less than the people of ancient Egypt, were reluctant monotheists.

The original theology of the Israelites, for example, may have envisioned Yahweh as one god among many. One of the Hebrew words used in the Bible to describe the God of Israel is
Elohim
, a plural noun that means “gods.” God sometimes speaks of himself in the plural: “Let us make man in
our
image,” he muses out loud in the Book of Genesis, “after
our
likeness.”
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According to one odd and awkward passage in Genesis, described by Bible scholar Ephraim Speiser as “controversial in the extreme,”
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Elohim appears to have sired a whole brood of godlings—“the sons of the gods,” according to a literal translation of the biblical text.
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“The divine beings saw how beautiful the daughters of men were, and took wives from among those that pleased them,” reports the biblical storyteller in the Book of Genesis, using words that seem more appropriate to Greek myth than Jewish scripture. “The divine beings cohabited with the daughters of men, who bore them offspring.”
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Nor were the Israelites able to resist the undeniable charms and comforts of idolatry. The biblical authors readily concede that the worshippers of Yahweh commonly owned
teraphim
—that is, the household idols that were used for the veneration of various fertility goddesses of the ancient world. The matriarch Rachel, for example, so covets her father’s collection of
teraphim
that she purloins his whole cherished collection.
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Michal, daughter of Saul and wife of David—both men chosen by God to serve as kings of Israel—keeps an idol on hand in the royal household.
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Moses hands down the famous commandment against the making of graven images—“or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or the earth beneath, or the water”
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—and then appears to violate the commandment by fashioning a snake out of bronze and using it as a kind of magic wand for the cure of snakebite.
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Moses, in fact, is plainly shown to be something other than a strict monotheist at one unsettling moment in the Bible. After God assists the Israelites in defeating the army of the pharaoh at the Red Sea, Moses leads the worshippers of Yahweh in a praise-song in which he entertains the notion that Yahweh may be the
best
god, at least as far as the Israelites are concerned, but seems to concede that he is not the
only
god: “Who is like you, O Yahweh, among the gods?”
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The notion may be startling to those who regard the Bible as a manifesto of monotheism, but it was commonplace among the polytheists of the ancient world—including more than a few of the Israelite kings—who acknowledged the existence of many gods and goddesses even if they offered worship only to their own tutelary god.

God and His Asherah

Further evidence of polytheism among the ancient Israelites can be found outside the pages of the Bible. No remnant of the Temple of Solomon has been recovered from the soil of the Holy Land, no trace of the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed by the finger of God, but archaeologists have found literally hundreds of
teraphim
, artfully fashioned out of rare ivory or humble clay, depicting naked women, some touching their breasts or genitals. Until recently, such artifacts could be dismissed as pagan relics that had nothing to do with the monotheism of ancient Israel—but new archaeological discoveries, fully as startling as the ones at Tell el-Amarna, suggest that they were used by worshippers of the God of Israel, too.

Not long ago, at an archaeological site in the wilderness of Sinai called Kuntillat ’Ajrud, archaeologists discovered a large ceramic storage jar that has been dated to the late ninth century B.C.E. At that place and time, the strict and uncompromising code of monotheism as set forth in the Ten Commandments—“Thou shalt have no other gods before me”
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—had been in effect for four hundred years, or so the Torah suggests. But the jar is inscribed with a prayerful wish that is starkly at odds with the official theology of the Bible.

“I bless thee by Yahweh,” goes the inscription, “and by his Asherah.”
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The goddess called Asherah is conjured up in the Bible, of course, but only as an alien and evil deity who is worshipped by the pagan tribes and nations whom the Israelites vow to exterminate or expel from the land of Canaan. She is symbolized in pagan ritual by a living tree or a carved wooden pole set upright in the ground, and these so-called
asherim
are found in “uncanny places” all over the land of Israel—“upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every leafy tree.”
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At every mention of Asherah in the Bible, she is condemned as something so vile and so detestable that the biblical author is reduced to sputtering rage—the worship of all gods and goddesses is condemned as “that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, after the abominations of the heathens, whom the Lord cast out before the children of Israel.”
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What is significant about the inscription at Kuntillat ’Ajrud, and others like it, is the confirmation that both the Israelites
and
the native-dwelling pagans of Canaan embraced the goddess Asherah. Putting aside such cracks in the theological wall of the Torah as the one found in the tale of “the sons of the gods,” the Hebrew Bible insists that God does not consort with goddesses and does not sire godlings. But the flesh-and-blood men and women of ancient Israel, like polytheists all over the world and in every age, seemed to imagine that deities, too, came in pairs, male and female, king and queen, husband and wife, Yahweh and his Asherah.

The God That Failed

So even the strictest and sternest of the biblical authors were forced to confront the undeniable fact that the Israelites under the rule of their anointed kings, no less than the Egyptians under the pharaoh Akhenaton, refused to put aside “that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.” Indeed, the kings of ancient Israel themselves are some of the worst offenders. Solomon, for example, is famously depicted in the Bible as so favored by God that “all the earth sought to hear his wisdom, which God had put in his heart”
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—and yet it is also frankly reported that King Solomon “loved many strange women,” including some seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, many of whom lured him into the worship of gods and goddesses other than Yahweh.

“When he grew old, his wives turned his heart to follow other gods,” the biblical author concedes, “and he did not remain wholly loyal to the Lord his God as his father David had been.”
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To the biblical authors, the explanation for these “abominations” is simple and straightforward—God offers to bestow his blessings on the Israelites as his chosen people in exchange for compliance with his sacred law, but the Israelites fail to live up to their end of the bargain. “Now then, if you will obey me faithfully and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all the peoples,” God instructs Moses to tell the Israelites.
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But they yield so readily to their appetites and curiosities that God loses patience with the Israelites and, more than once, threatens to carry out the mass murder of his own chosen people and start all over again with the children of Moses.

“Now let me be, that my anger may blaze forth against them, and that I may destroy them,” God tells Moses after the Israelites defy the commandment against the making of graven images and offer worship to an idol in the form of a golden calf, “and I will make of you a great nation.”
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Moses manages to talk Yahweh out of killing
all
the Israelites by boldly reminding the God of Israel of how an act of divine genocide would look to all those abominable pagans back in Egypt: “Let not the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he delivered them, only to kill them off in the mountains and annihilate them from the face of the earth.’ ”
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But the Bible confirms that God is grimly determined to punish the chosen people for their spiritual lapses—and Moses turns out to be his willing henchman. Not long after his stirring speech in defense of the Israelites, Moses organizes what can only be described as a death squad, and some 3000 men and women who joined in the worship of the golden calf are put to the sword for their sin.

“Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel,” cries Moses to the men whom he recruits to carry out the killings. “Each of you put sword on thigh, go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay brother, neighbor, and kin.”
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The unmentioned but unmistakable subtext of these and many other biblical passages is that Yahweh, no less than Aton, is a failure. The God of Israel is rejected by the majority of the Israelites, the very people whom he has chosen as his “treasured possession,” and not just at the moment when they worshipped the golden calf but repeatedly over the long and troubled history of ancient Israel. Indeed, the Bible can be read as a bitter song of despair as sung by the disappointed prophets of Yahweh who tried but failed to call their fellow Israelites to the worship of the True God. Fatefully and tragically, the prophets respond to rejection in exactly the same way that God is shown to react to the worship of the golden calf—they are roused to a fierce, relentless and punishing anger toward any man or woman whom they find to be insufficiently faithful.

The Core Value of Monotheism

Here we encounter the core value of monotheism at its most bloodthirsty. Starting with Akhenaton, monotheism has been characterized by what scholars call exclusivism, the belief that worship is to be offered to a single god to the exclusion of all other gods and goddesses. At its purest expression, monotheism insists that its deity is not only the best of all gods and goddesses, but the one and only god, and that all other deities are false—“no-gods,” as the prophet Jeremiah puts it.
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The most zealous monotheists have always sought to exclude from their ranks anyone who does not share their true belief. And, as we have just seen, some monotheists insist that anyone who dares to offer worship to a false god is worthy of not merely exclusion but death. Indeed, the most militant monotheists—Jews, Christians and Muslims alike—embrace the belief that God demands the blood of the nonbeliever.

The point is made again and again in the Bible. All of Israel is offered the opportunity to enter into the covenant that Yahweh made with Abraham, but only a precious few accept the offer and perform their duties with the fidelity that God desires of them. The rest are hopeless sinners, worthy of every kind of suffering that God inflicts on them, sometimes through drought and famine, sometimes plague and pestilence, sometimes through acts of violence by zealous men like Moses and his death squad. According to the worldview of the authors and editors who composed and compiled the biblical text, the whole of humankind can be divided into two categories—on one side, the elect, the blessed, “the holy seed,” as the prophet Ezra puts it,
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and on the other side, the fallen, the accursed, “the wicked and the sinner.”
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