Jack the Bodiless

Isn't Deuteronomy considered post-exilic? I was under the impression that the transition to monotheism was pretty much completed during the exile, possibly due to Zoroastrian influence, but here's a late survival of henotheism (worship of one god but belief that others exist). Furthermore, though YHWH is clearly identified as the God of Israel, he's also clearly the lesser deity here: indicating that the authors had no difficulty in worshipping an inferior deity.

I appreciate the difficulties in assembling a timescale of the transition, with older documents being retrospectively edited by the YHWHists and (probably) different authors having differing views anyhow. But does an approximate timescale exist?

John Kesler

Not all of Deuteronomy was written after the exile. Here is Mark S. Smith's comment on Deuteronomy 32:8-9, from The Origins of Biblical Monotheism:

Here is Smith's commentary regarding Psalm 82:

Jedi Mind Trick

Does this mean that the Hebrew religion was simply a reworking of the traditional Canaanite religion? Could it be that the Sh'ma reflects a change where all the gods, including El, were combined into one god, Yahweh? A cultural evolution similar to and perhaps inspired by Akhenaton’s “reformation.�

John Kesler

I don't think it was a matter of combining "all the gods" to get Yahweh. Rather, attributes of some gods, like El and Baal, were appropriated for Yahweh, a deity that some scholars believe originated in the southern Levant.

Also, although the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4 ff) may seem like an endorsement of monotheism, it actually is a proclamation that Yahweh alone was Israel's god and does not speak to the existence of other gods. True monotheism is expressed in passages like Isaiah 45:5a: "I am Yahweh, and there is no other; besides me there is no god."

spin

Deut. 32:8-9
John Kesler cites Mark Smith, who has written a lot on the subject of early Jewish beliefs. Smith was working on a slightly different translation from the one cited above (the OP), for instead of "sons of Israel", which is a much later smoothing hand at work, the text read "sons of god" (ie El), a translation based on LXX and DSS readings. The event we are dealing with is the distribution of the peoples among the sons of El, one of these sons being Yahweh. The model is that found in the writings from Ugarit, where the divine father was the same El.

Smith points out an interesting development, noting the fact that Asherah, who was the wife of El at Ugarit, had by the 8th c. BCE become the wife of Yahweh, according to inscriptions in Judah (Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom). He says that Asherah becoming the wife of Yahweh would have happened "only if these two gods [El and Yahweh] were identified [as one] by this time."

The next step in the process is the transformation of Asherah into her symbol, the tree. (The prophets often talk about naughty things happening "under every green tree".) The symbol was also a carved representation of a tree and this may have led to the form of the menorah.

Most other gods would probably have already disappeared into the void by the time Yahweh had been identified enough with El. The writings still preserve the importance of El through his name. Baal who we know through Ugarit can be compared with Yahweh and we find that some imagery of Baal is borne by Yahweh: both are dwellers on the high mountain; both fight with the unruly sea; the opening of Isaiah 27 is word for word with a Ugaritic passage, except it mentions Yahweh not Baal; etc. But like Asherah, Baal is already being repudiated in the biblical literature.

We can therefore see an "evolution" from much earlier times (partially represented by the state of affairs in Ugarit) to the henotheism (worship of only one god among many: "you shall have no other gods beside me") of the bible, but the bible only represents the latter part of the process, when apparently monotheistic ideas are starting to appear. Yet it does preserve remnants of earlier states in that process.

I see all the bible as we have it written coming from the post-exilic period, but some of the traditions it holds go back many hundreds of years.


spin

Loomis

Lloyd Barre argues that for the most part, El was always the god of Israel. He says Yahweh was only worshipped by a minority of northerners.

http://www.biblicalheritage.org/God/el-def.htm

Barre’s slant is that the “transition to monotheism� you mention never really took place.

I guess we can argue that the final nail was hammered into the polytheistic coffin when the Masoretes tweaked Deuteronomy 32. Maybe that was around 900 C.E. ???



Btw, do you think that if TV Police Lieutenant Columbo were living in 721 B.C.E. Israel, he would have typed ‘Baal’ with underscores or minus signs?

For example:

B__l

Or maybe …

B—l

:rolling:

Loomis

Regarding Psalm 82-

I think a lot of folks (like Mark S. Smith and Karen Armstrong) are jumping to conclusions when they claim/ assume that the god who does the judging is Yahweh. Like it or not Psalm 82 doesn’t say a goddamned thing about Yahweh.

Nothing.

I see three possibilities:

1) Yahweh is the judge-god. (This is the popular/ lazy view)

2) Yahweh is one of the ‘bad gods’ who is condemned to die like a mortal. This would also include Yahweh’s brothers Milcom and Chemosh. (Agrees with Deut 32)

3) The author of Psalm 82 never heard of a god named Yahweh. (I personally think this possibility deserves more attention.)

It’s fascinating that even atheist bible scholars can carry little mental artifacts that prevent them from examining all the possibilities.

rob117

Deuteronomy probably began with the law code that was "discovered" (read: planted) in the temple by the high priests in the 18th year of Josiah (622 BC). This probably consisted only of Deuteronomy 12-26. This was incorporated into an early version of the Deuteronomistic History (Deuteronomy-II Kings) near the end of the reign of Josiah, before he died (609 BC). This history was re-edited during the exile, probably during the reign of Amel-Marduk (562-560 BC), since his accession is the last event mentioned.

So Deuteronomy would be an immediately pre-exilic core, with an exilic final form.

spin

When was the Kings passage about the book find you are relying on written??


spin

rob117

We have a medallion that quotes Dtr1 dating from about 600 BCE.

See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblica...Biblical_texts