Ø The country was always open to immigration[2] the more so because, in the Bronze Age, it had no unified government or army and had, in the Late Bronze Age, large areas of hill country almost unoccupied. This was the case in spite of the fact that the technology, in the form of plastered cisterns and metal tools, necessary to clear and settle the land were available. In the event, Israel emerged in the form of settlers on this unoccupied hill country.

From the north, the country was open to Lebanon, Syria and via Syria to Mesopotamia and Anatolia. The south was open to infiltration by nomads and to military invasion by Egypt. The east was open to infiltration by nomads from the Syrian Desert and Arabia. The western border was the Mediterranean which was the greatest highway of all. In fact, during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages Egyptian armies frequently invaded from the south, Israelite tradition states that they tried, and failed to enter Canaan from the south and then entered successfully from the east and the Philistines and other Sea People successfully invaded from the sea and took over the coastal plain. Later, both Israelite kingdoms were destroyed by Mesopotamian powers coming from the north in response to rebellions supported by Egypt from the south.

Ø While, according to biblical tradition, there were many ethnic groups in Canaan (Amorites, Hittites, Hivites, Horites, Kenites, Perizites etc.), and even though some of these would appear to be non-Semitic in origin (e.g. Horites (= Hurrians?) and Hittites) they seem to have become assimilated into the Canaanite culture speaking Canaanite and having West Semitic names.

Ø There was, from the earliest times, strong Egyptian cultural influence along the coast and strong Mesopotamian influence in north Syria. Egyptian cultural influence was boosted by Egyptian rule in the centuries preceding the emergence of Ancient Israel.

1.2 Canaanite Religion

Our only real view into the world of Middle to Late Bronze Age Canaanite culture is via Ugaritic literature (see my Ugarit and the Bible: Ugaritic Literature as an Aid to Understanding the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament).

Ugaritic literature reflects a society of independent city-states sharing a common culture; a stratified aristocratic society based on agriculture.

Some of the characteristics of Canaanite Religion were (see Table 1 for more details):

Ø It was polytheistic and iconic (i.e. worshiped idols which served as focuses of the presence of cosmic /nature gods). Although there were, in principle, many gods, the pattern in Iron Age Phoenicia, and probably in the territories of Israel and Judah, “… was composed of a triad of deities: a protective god of the city, a goddess, often his wife or companion who symbolizes the fertile earth; and a young god somehow connected with the goddess (usually her son), whose resurrection expresses the annual cycle of vegetation”[3]

Ø It was tied to nature and the seasons; a religion of renewal of life and fertility. This sometimes led to what we would consider strongly sensual, orgiastic or cruel behaviour. A prominent example of cruel behaviour is child sacrifice (Molech in the Bible; massive child sacrifice, apparently to El, in Carthage). Not surprisingly, its predominant sense of time was cyclical not linear i.e. it did not provide a good cultural background for the writing of history which presumes real linear change[4].

2. Alternative Views on the Emergence of Israel and Israelite Religion[5]

2.1 The Fundamental Problem – the Nature of the Evidence

The reason for serious scholars coming up with very different ideas about Israelite history and religion is rooted in the paucity, illusive nature, ambiguity and of the ambivalence of the relevant data. Short of major discoveries of contemporaneous religious and historical texts of the kind we have for Pre-Hellenistic Mesopotamia, Egypt and Ugarit, this situation is not likely to change. This results in the field of Ancient Israelite History and Religion being extremely open to academic faddism.

In fact, we have almost no certain knowledge of anything in Israelite history before the time of King David[6] (c.1010-970 BCE) at the earliest and almost no reliable biblical evidence regarding what religious beliefs and behaviour were before that reflected in the Torah. Since the Torah was only finalized in the early Persian period (late 6^th- 5^th centuries BCE) the evidence of the Torah is most relevant to early Second Temple Judaism. The Judaism reflected in the Torah would seem to be generally similar to that later practiced by the Sadducees and Samaritans.

2.1.1 Sources for the Cultural History of Syria-Palestine (1200 BCE-600CE)

Since, at least, 1200 BCE, the peoples of Syria-Palestine – Canaanites, Phoenicians, Israelites, Aramaeans and Hellenistic Greeks wrote using alphabetic scripts on papyrus or wood etc[7]. For non-permanent records they used broken pieces of pottery (called ostraca) writing on them using water-soluble ink. These materials usually do not long survive in the climate of the region.

As N H. Niehr wrote[8] -

“With regard to the sources, the distinction between primary and secondary evidence is paramount for working out a religious history or aspects of this history of Judah and Israel. Due to the Judean censorship of the texts of the Hebrew Bible during the Second Temple period, the evidence contained in the texts for reconstructing the religious history of Judah and Israel is of secondary or tertiary value. This evidence has to be corroborated, corrected or refuted by primary evidence provided by inscriptions and archaeological findings.”

2.1.1.1 Primary Sources

· Rare fragments of writing that have survived against all the odds – e.g. Dead Sea Scrolls, Arad and Lachish ostraca;

· Equally rare inscriptions and graffiti; and,

· Other archaeological evidence.

2.1.1.2 Secondary Sources

These are documents prized by groups having direct cultural descendants (Jews, Christian cultural tradition etc.) Since it was very laborious to copy books, normally only a small selection could be copied and these would be the items that the community, at the time of copying, considered important. The community valuation of what is worth preserving varies with period. E.g. In Hellenistic times Sappho’s poetry was considered a classic and was produced in a standard collection in Alexandria. However, only one complete poem has come down to us.

· Copies of copies, often many times removed, of documents, originally contemporaneous with the events or situations described but may have been subject to editing during the history of transmission;

· Histories in the Greek or biblical traditions[9] (see)

Of course, the most important of the documents are those contained in the Hebrew bible. Though, it can be argued that we have a reasonable idea of the political history of Israel from, say the late 10^th century to 586 BCE[10], and we have, from Ugaritic literature, a fair idea of Canaanite religion, it is unclear how much we know of Israelite religion before the Babylonian exile. Odd remarks preserved in the stories, not the framework, of the books of Judges[11] and Samuel probably provide some information. However, the overt information provided in the Torah-Deuteronomic History is anachronistic and tendentious.

“In the Deuteronomistic History, from Joshua s, there was clear evidence of Israel’s polytheistic roots, but readers often viewed the material as evidence of backsliding from original monotheism, because they followed the intimations provided by the final editors of these books. The editors were trying to promulgate monotheism in their own exilic age by projecting their religious values in idealized fashion back into the past. Some scholars went beyond the idealized portrait of the Deuteronomistic and Priestly editors and envisioned a religion more ideal and ethical than even those biblical editors suggested; Yehezkiel Kaufmann’s work would be a good example.

“The Deuteronomistic Historians …. Viewed their past through a Yahwistic lens and saw their history not only as it was but very much as it should have been. The guidelines by which they measured their past included strict allegiance to Yahweh, rejection of other deities, rejection of native cultic activities (such as golden calves, asherim and the bronze serpent), centralized worship in the Temple, and a great deal of egalitarianism and social justice in society. Their criteria for evaluating the past are laid out in their great manifesto the book of Deuteronomy. They evaluated the past as though their spiritual ancestors, the prophetic minority, were the true leaders meant to define the religious life of Israelites from the time of Moses onward when in reality they were but a progressive minority within society. Therefore, beguiled by the rhetoric of the redactors of the biblical text, readers sometimes missed the truly dramatic story in the Deuteronomistic History; the great struggle of the progressive thinkers in the ‘Yahweh-alone’ movement who gave birth to a new value system over the years and helped an entire people evolve toward monotheism.

“The Deuteronomistic Historians were not liars; they did not deceive more than historians of any age. All historians seek to craft a narrative of the past by selecting those aspects which they consciously or unconsciously consider most valuable in order to communicate a meaningful message to the present so as to shape the direction of the future…. The Deuteronomistic Historians were theologians and preachers who wished to achieve significant religious goals with their interpretation of history; they were above all preachers, and the Deuteronomistic History is primarily a sermon.”[12]

“The task of reconstructing the cult of Yahweh includes biblical claims and sets them within a wider framework that accounts for the available information. The data in the attested sources indicate a pluralism of religious practice in ancient Israel that led sometimes to conflict about the nature of correct Yahwistic practice. It is precisely this conflict that produced the differentiation of Israelite religion from its Canaanite heritage during the second half of the monarchy.”[13]

The approach of the Deuteronomistic Historians is not at all dissimilar to the retrospective definition of Normative Judaism in the rabbinic tradition.

2.1.1.3 The Voiceless People

The only Middle-Late Bronze Age (1950-1250 BCE) group in Syria-Palestine to leave us an extensive literature was the ruling class of Ugarit. No group did so in the Iron Age (1250-587 BCE). The only Iron Age groups in the region to have survived to the present are the Jews and Samaritans. The Jews, and the Christian church, have preserved important documents relating to Israelite-Jewish history 1200 BCE-600 CE.

The many other groups of the region, together with the illiterate, women, slaves, children, minority groups etc. remain voiceless. Who knows what they might have told us had there been records and had they survived.

First Temple and Second Temple Jewish society was fairly literate[14]. However, due to the scarcity of stone inscriptions, and the use of perishable writing materials, all the written remains could be printed on a few pages.

This contrasts sharply with the situation in Egypt and Mesopotamia. In Egypt papyrus lasts for thousands of years and there were many inscriptions on stone. The papyri include personal letters, legal documents, tax receipts, literature of all kinds. In Mesopotamia the clay tablets, inscribed in cuneiform, last for ever.

Sumerian (third to early second millennium BCE), has left us copious records and a cultural heritage –

“The Sumerians were prolific writers, scratching their cuneiform script with a stylus on moist clay tablets…. They recorded stories and poems, songs and technical data, laws, receipts, medical prescriptions. They recorded, it seems, everything of interest in their world and to their imaginations, and much of what they recorded has survived, an enormous body of documentation that surpasses that of the Romans and Chinese. ‘We have more from the Sumerians than from any culture in history before the invention of the printing press,’ …. We know the names of their gods and the list of their kings; we know their epics – including the world’s first tales of creation and of the flood, and the oldest written tale of paradise – and … we know their legacy; the legal and religious tradition the Sumerians bequeathed to Israel, and of the magical, astronomical and mathematical lore bequeathed to Greece. We know it because it became part of our legacy too.”[15]

This plentitude of documentation continued in the post-Sumerian period when the Semitic Akkadian became the main written language of Mesopotamia.

“Akkadian is first attested to in proper names in Sumerian texts (ca. 2800 BCE). From ca. 2500 BCE one finds texts fully written in Akkadian. Hundreds of thousands of texts and text fragments have been excavated, covering many subjects, e.g.

-economy (business, administrative records, purchase and rentals),

-politics (treaties),

-law (witnessed and sealed contracts of marriage, divorce; codes of law),

-history (chronological text, census reports),

-letters (personal, business and state letters),

-religion (prayers, hymns, omens, divination reports),

-scholarly texts (language, word lists, history, technology, mathematics, astronomy) and

-literature (narrative poetry, recounting myths, epics).

The last texts date from the first century A.D. By then Akkadian was already an extinct language, replaced as a spoken language by Aramaic.”[16]

Many Mesopotamian tablets were private records recording contemporary issues and concerns meant only for the eyes of the recipient. Thus we have a better idea of what life was like and what people thought in Mesopotamia, under Ur III in 2100 BCE that we have for almost any period of pre-modern Jewish history!

2.2 The Origin of Ancient Israel

A good and extensive review of current and past theories of Israel’s origin is presented in Gnuse chapter 1 New Understandings of the Israelite Settlement Process (pp. 23-61).

There are basically three alternative hypotheses (see Table 1) about the origin of Ancient Israel. Only one of these, in my view, seems a reasonable enough hypothesis to merit serious consideration, i.e. that ancient Israel, and its constituent tribes, emerged after the settlement in the almost unoccupied hill country of central Palestine by diverse groups originating from outside and within Canaan[17]. Most reconstructions assume that the worship of Yahweh and the traditions of Aramean-Mesopotamian origin, Sinai Experience and Egyptian were brought in, not necessarily by the same groups, from outside Canaan at, or before, the end of the Late Bronze Age (approximately 1200 BCE). Yahweh may or may not have been a deity worshipped somewhere in the region.[18]

The best summary of the archaeological evidence is in Finkelstein. He outlines (pp. 12-14) a seven point hypothesis which he considers to best fit the evidence. Among other things, he points out the mixed background of the people who became historic Israel.

Table 1

Hypotheses Regarding the Origin of Ancient Israel[19]

Alternatives for Emergence of Israel	How Well Does it fit Known Archaeological, Environmental and Historic Facts
1. Pan-Israelite Exodus and Invasion[20] as per Book of Joshua. Israel exists as a people before entering Canaan.	Not supported by archaeology. Fits with descriptions in Torah and Book of Joshua. Extremely unlikely to be historically accurate.
2. Independent migrations & Settlement by separate extended family (Hebrew bet ‘av), Clan (Hebrew mishpaHa) etc.,[21] in unoccupied hill country as per Alt[22], Noth, Aharoni. Israel, and its constituent tribes, form after settlement in the hill country on the basis of geography.	Fits reasonably with archaeology record and with descriptions in Book of Judges.
3. “Conquest” as Internal Revolt[23] -Canaanite peasants moving into hills to escape oppressive conditions under city-state aristocracies where they join up with small groups from outside Canaan as per Mendenhall, Gottwald.”[24] Israel, and its constituent tribes, form after settlement in the hill country on the basis of geography.	Fits reasonably with archaeology record but contradicts what the Israelites themselves said about their past in Hebrew Bible.
4. Independent Migrations & Settlement by separate extended family (Hebrew bet ‘av), Clan (Hebrew mishpaHa) etc., in unoccupied hill country where they merged with Canaanites leaving the city-state ruled low lands as per Finkelstein[25] and many others. Israel, and its constituent tribes, form after settlement in the hill country on the basis of geography.	Fits well with archaeology record and with descriptions in Book of Judges. In my view most likely to be correct.

2.3 Origin and Nature of Ancient Israelite Religion

A good and extensive review of current and past theories of Israel’s religious development origin is presented in Gnuse chapter 2 Recent Scholarship on the Development of Monotheism in Ancient Israel (pp. 62-128).

There are basically three alternative hypotheses (see Table 2) about the origin of ancient Israelite religion of which two are worth serious consideration i.e.:

2.3.1 That Israelite monotheism came into being as a sui generis innovation unrelated to the Semitic polytheism which preceded it. In Table 2, I provide further details plus the reasons that I find this option unconvincing, for some variations, or, state that for others, given the evidence available, that it is almost impossible to prove or disprove though, to me, they seem to me improbable.

2.3.2 That Israelite monotheism developed progressively out of Canaanite religion.

2.3.2.1 Practical Monotheism?

Most scholars would argue that the earliest unambiguously monotheistic texts in the Bible date to the Exile[26].

However,

“The study of Israelite religion often involves studying practices more than creedal beliefs because the Bible more frequently stresses correct practices than correct beliefs or internal attitudes. Christian scholars, however, tend to focus more on beliefs or internal attitudes because Christian theology has often emphasized this aspect of religion. The study of Israelite monotheism is complicated by this factor, as monotheism has usually been defined as a matter of belief in one deity whereas monolatry has been understood as a matter of practice, specifically, the worship of only one deity, sometimes coupled with a tolerance for other peoples’ worship of their deities. However, if ancient Israelite religion is to be viewed primarily as a matter of practice, then the modern distinction between monotheism and monolatry is problematic[27].”

2.3.2.2 The Process - Convergence and Differentiation

I find Smith’s reconstruction to be convincing so I will quote him on this (the emphasis through bolding is my own) -

“Baal and Asherah were part of Israel’s Canaanite heritage, and the process of the emergence of Israelite monolatry was an issue of Israel’s breaking with its own Canaanite past and not simply one of avoiding Canaanite neighbours. Although the Bible witness accurately represented the existence of Israelite worship of Baal and perhaps of Asherah as well, this worship was not so much a case of Israelite syncretism with the religious practices of its Canaanite neighbours, as some biblical passages depict it, as it was an instance of old Israelite religion. If syncretism may be said to have been involved at all, it was a syncretism of various traditions and practices of Israelites. In short, any syncretism was largely a phenomenon within Israelite culture…. Israelite religion apparently included the worship of Yahweh, El, Asherah, and Baal. The shape of this religious spectrum in early Israel changed, due in large measure to two major developments; the first was convergence, and the second was differentiation. Convergence involved the coalescence of various deities and/or some of their features into the figure of Yahweh. This development began in the period of the Judges and continued during the first half of the monarchy. At this point, El and Yahweh were identified, and Asherah no longer continued as an identifiable separate deity. Features belonging to deities such as El, Asherah and Baal were absorbed into the Yahwistic religion of Israel…. In … poetic compositions, titles and characteristics originally belonging to various deities secondarily accrue to Yahweh…. Israelite monolatry developed through conflict and compromise between the cults of Yahweh and other deities. Israelite literature incorporated some of the characteristics of other deities into the divine personage of Yahweh. Polemic against deities other than Yahweh even contributed to this process. For although polemic rejected other deities, Yahwistic polemic assumed that Yahweh embodies the positive characteristics of the very deities it was condemning.

“The second major process involved differentiation of Israelite cult from its Canaanite heritage. Numerous features of early Israelite cult were later rejected as Canaanite and non-Yahwistic. This development began first with the rejection of Baal worship in the ninth century continued in the eighth to sixth centuries with legal and prophetic condemnations of Baal worship, the Asherah, solar worship, the high places, practices pertaining to the dead, and other religious features. The two major developments of convergence and differentiation shaped the contours of the distinct monotheism that Israel practiced and defined in the Exile (ca. 587-538) following the final days of the Judean monarchy.” …

“Though the reasons for Israelite ‘convergence’ are not clear, the complex paths from convergence to monolatry and monotheism can be followed…. (and) involved both an ‘evolution’ and a ‘revolution’[28] in religious conceptionalization…. While evolutionary in character, Israelite monolatry was also ‘revolutionary’ in a number of respects. The process of differentiation and the eventual displacement of Baal from Israel’s national cult distinguished Israel’s religion from the religions of its neighbours…. Israelite insistence on a single deity eventually distinguished Israel from the surrounding cultures….’”

Table 2

Hypotheses Regarding the Origin of Israelite Religion[29]

Alternatives for Emergence of Israelite Religion	How Well Does it fit Known Historic Facts
1. Israelite religion was originally a local variety of the pattern in Iron Age Phoenicia in which there was a triad of deities: a protective god of the city (often El), a goddess, often his wife or companion (in Ugarit and Israel Asherah) who symbolizes the fertile earth; and a young god (in Ugarit and Israel Baal) usually her or their son), whose resurrection expresses the annual cycle of vegetation.[30] Through the processes of convergence and differentiation this developed into Biblical Monotheism. At an early stage a new god Yahweh was brought in from outside urban Canaan, identified with the Canaanite High God El[31], and accepted as the main object of worship by the emerging Israelite confederacy i.e. association of clans and tribes.	Appears to fit very well
2. It developed from early Semitic religion which was a “practical monotheism” in which only El was worshiped.[32]	Unlikely since the biblical evidence is that Israelite religion was preceded by polytheism.
3. It came into being as a sui generis innovation unrelated to the Semitic polytheism which preceded it. This hypothesis is further divided into 3 subcategories:
3.1 Verbal Revelation i.e. the Pentateuch was Virtually Dictated by God[33] 3.1.1 Traditional Jewish Divine Revelation[34] – God gave Moses on Mt. Sinai the written Pentateuch that we have today together with the Oral Law i.e. the tools for developing the laws of the Pentateuch to meet all future needs. This Oral Law was later embodied in the Talmuds and other Rabbinic literature; 3.1.2 Traditional Karaite and Samaritan Divine Revelation – God gave Moses on Mt. Sinai the written Pentateuch that we have today as an immutable, all-encompassing, law.	The results of Higher Criticism of the Bible make this extremely unlikely. In fact, the only way to intellectually maintain these positions would be to reason[35]: 1) Higher Criticism of the Bible deduces that the Torah was written and edited by people, over a long period, by comparing the Torah to other documents, showing similar characteristics, that can be shown to have been written and edited by people, over a long period; 2) For this to be valid one must compare like to like; 3) The Torah is the only divinely written document that has ever existed so comparisons with other documents are fundamentally invalid.
3.2 Various Modern Jewish Thinkers e.g. non-Orthodox Jewish theologians [36] and, perhaps Kaufmann – God intervened, perhaps progressively, to reveal his totally new religious teaching*	Given the evidence available, it is almost impossible to prove or disprove these sorts of hypothesis though, by what is known, they seem to me improbable.
3.3 A teacher, say Moses or one of the Isaiahs, got a brilliant intellectual insight or revelation from God, depending on your beliefs, instantly grasping the concept of ethical monotheism which was totally alien to his, and the people’s, early polytheistic beliefs and practices.** Of course, the founder/prophet would need to express the ethical monotheism through the linguistic semantics, images and at least some of the accustomed religious practices, of the time (eg. Sacrifices) provided that these did not fundamentally contradict the ethical monotheism.[37]

* we could use the image of Beethoven’s sketch books where a rough idea, which may or may not have been crystal clear in Beethoven’s head from the beginning, is extensively changed until the composer recognized that it was perfect.

** we could use the image of Mozart’s manuscript which were perfect as initially written down.

2.3.2.2.1 The Fundamental and Pervasive Paradigm of Family and its Manifestation as the Covenant (Brit/Brith)

In Ancient Israel the paradigm of the family was pervasive[38]. Judging by the stories of the Ugaritic gods, the same was true of Canaanite society[39]. Both God (e.g. Exodus 4:22; Deut. 14:1) and the king were considered fathers of the people of Israel.

“In the past, the question of Israelite polytheism has been approached by looking for evidence of specific deities worshipped by Israelites in addition to Yahweh. These would include biblical criticisms of the worship of other deities, such as the goddess Asherah in 2 Kings 21 and 23, as well as apparent references to this goddess or at least her symbol in the inscriptions from Kuntillet 'Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom in the eighth century. In the Kuntillet 'Ajrud inscriptions, the symbol is treated respectfully as part of the worship of Yahweh. The gods Resheph and Deber appear in Habakkuk 3:5 as part of the military retinue of Yahweh. Other deities who gain some mention in the Bible include the "hosts of heaven" criticized in 2 Kings 21:5, but mentioned without such criticism in 1 Kings 22:19 and Zephaniah 1:5. Scholars have also noted that the god El is identified with Yahweh in the Bible, again with no criticism. The criticisms of Yahweh's archenemy, the storm god, Baal, also seem to reflect Israelite worship of this god. While many of these deities are not well known from the Bible, they are described sometimes at considerable length in the Ugaritic texts, discovered first in 1928 at the site of Ras Shamra (located on the coast of Syria about 100 miles north of Beirut). As a result of comparing biblical and inscriptional evidence with the Ugaritic texts, we can see how the worship of other deities lasted for quite a long time in Israel down to the Exile in ca. 586.

“This approach to the study of specific deities in ancient Israel was summarized in Smith's earlier book, The Early History of God … On the whole, Smith's book -- following a number of other scholars-- shows how Israelite polytheism was a feature of Israelite religion down through the end of the Iron Age and how monotheism emerged in the seventh and sixth centuries. It is in this period when the clearest monotheistic statements can be seen in the Bible, for example, in the apparently seventh-century works of Deuteronomy 4:35, 39, 1 Samuel 2:2 (earlier?), 2 Samuel 7:22, 2 Kings 19:15, 19 (= Isaiah 37:16, 20), and Jeremiah 16:19, 20 and the sixth-century portion of Isaiah 43:10-11, 44:6, 8, 45:5-7, 14, 18, 21, and 46:9. Because many of the passages involved appear in biblical works associated with either Deuteronomy, the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua through Kings) or in Jeremiah (with its similar language and ideas as these other works), most scholarly treatments until recently have suggested that a deuteronomistic movement of this period developed the idea of monotheism as a response to the religious issues of the time. The question has remained: why in the seventh and sixth centuries?

“In his newest book, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism, Smith tries to address this question, but from a different angle in regards to monotheism and polytheism. Beginning with the Ugaritic texts, Smith asks what is monistic about polytheism and how the answer to this question might help make the emergence of Israelite monotheism more intelligible. Ugaritic polytheism is expressed as a monism through the concepts of the divine council or assembly and in the divine family. The two structures are essentially understood as a single entity with four levels: the chief god and his wife (El and Asherah); the seventy divine children (including Baal, Astarte, Anat, probably Resheph as well as the sun-goddess Shapshu and the moon-god Yerak) evidently characterized as the stars of El; the head helper of the divine household, Kothar wa-Hasis; and the servants of the divine household, who include what the Bible understands to be "angels" (in other words, messenger-gods).

“This four-tiered model of the divine family and council apparently went through a number of changes in early Israel. In the earliest stage, it would appear that Yahweh was one of these seventy children, each of whom was the patron deity of the seventy nations. This idea appears behind the Dead Sea Scrolls reading and the Septuagint translation of Deuteronomy 32:8-9. In this passage, El is the head of the divine family, and each member of the divine family receives a nation of his own: Israel is the portion of Yahweh. The Masoretic Text, evidently uncomfortable with the polytheism expressed in the phrase "according to the number of the divine sons," altered the reading to "according to the number of the children of Israel" (also thought to be seventy). Psalm 82 also presents the god El presiding in a divine assembly at which Yahweh stands up and makes his accusation against the other gods. Here the text shows the older religious worldview which the passage is denouncing.

“By some point in the late monarchy, it is evident that the god El was identified with Yahweh, and as a result, Yahweh-El is the husband of the goddess, Asherah. This is the situation represented by biblical condemnations of her cult symbol in the Jerusalem temple (evidently) and in the inscriptions mentioned above. In this form, the religious devotion to Yahweh casts him in the role of the Divine King ruling over all the other deities. This religious outlook appears, for example, in Psalm 29:2, where the "sons of God" or really divine sons or children are called upon to worship Yahweh, the Divine King. The Temple, with its various expressions of polytheism, also assumed that this place was Yahweh's palace which was populated by those under his power. The tour given by Ezekiel 8-10 suggests such a picture.” [40]

The concept of covenant (brit in Hebrew) as a joining together of parties with mutual, not necessarily identical, responsibilities in a hierarchical relationship would seem to grow naturally out of the paradigm of the family[41].

Some time between the ninth and seventh centuries BCE some minority groups within Israel started advocating the exclusive worship of Yahweh (henotheism) within the context of a covenant (brit) between Yahweh and Israel. The originally understood brit would have gone something like this - Yahweh would give Israel the Land of Canaan, protect Israel and ensure prosperity and Israel would worship Yahweh and no other god and would keep Yahweh’s laws however that would have been understood at the time.

2.3.2.2.2 Henotheism to Monotheism and the Importance of External Factors

“This picture of royal power was further developed with the monotheism of the eighth to the sixth centuries. The other gods became mere expressions of Yahweh's power, and the divine messengers became understood as little more than minor divine beings expressive of Yahweh's power. In other words, the head god became the godhead. Why at this time?

“Two major sets of conditions can be suggested. The first involves the changes in Israel's social structure of the family. At Ugarit, social identity was strongest at the level of the family. Legal documents were often made between the sons of one family and the sons of another. The divine situation followed suit. The divine family was expressive of Ugarit's social structure. The same was true in ancient Israel through most of the monarchy. Hence, the story of Achan in Joshua 8 suggests a picture of the extended family as the major social unit. However, the family lineages went through traumatic changes beginning already in the eighth century with major social stratification, followed by Assyrian incursions. In the seventh and sixth centuries, we begin to see expressions of individual identity (Deuteronomy 26:16; Jeremiah 31:29-30; Ezekiel 18). A culture with a diminished lineage system (deteriorating over a long period from the ninth or eighth century onward), one less embedded in traditional family patrimonies, might be more predisposed both to hold to individual human accountability for behavior (as suggested by the passages just cited) and to see an individual deity accountable for the cosmos (as suggested by monotheistic statements in this period). In short, the rise of the individual as a social unit next to the traditional family unit provided intelligibility to the rise of a single god rather than a divine family.

“The second major set of conditions apparent in forming this change involved the rise of the neo-Assyrian and neo-Babylonian empires. As long as Israel was, from its own perspective, on par with the other nations, it made sense to have a religious outlook that saw Israel on par with the other nations, each one with its own patron god. (This is the basic picture described above with Deuteronomy 32:8-9.) The assumption behind this worldview was that each nation was as powerful as its patron god. However, the neo-Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom in ca. 722 altered this religious way of looking at the world, for, if the neo-Assyrian empire were so powerful, so must be its god; and conversely, if Israel could be conquered (and later Judah ca. 586), it would imply that its god in turn is hardly as powerful as Israel had traditionally taught. As a result, new thinking separated the correlation of heavenly power and earthly kingdoms. Even though Assyria and later Babylon were so powerful, the new monotheistic thinking in Israel reasoned that despite its own weakness, its god was not weak. Moreover, just as Israel's fortunes fell, those of Assyria and then Babylon rose; inversely, Israel's monotheists now reasoned that Yahweh stood at the top of divine power, and correspondingly, the gods of Mesopotamia were reckoned to be nothing. As a result, Assyria had not succeeded because of the power of its god; instead, it was Yahweh now directing all the nations. In short, the conditions of human empires provided the model for divine empire; the Assyrian and Babylonian empires pointed now not to their own power and the power of their divine patrons but to Yahweh’s guiding all the events of Israel's life. Their exile was not their shame from the power of other nations and their deities, but rather was seen now as Yahweh's plan to punish and purify the one nation which Yahweh had chosen. Accordingly, the notion arose that the new king who might help redeem Israel might not be a Judean as traditionally thought in older biblical literature (see Psalm 2). Now, even a foreigner such as Cyrus the Persian could serve as the Lord's anointed (Isaiah 44:28, 45:1). One god stood behind all these world-shaking events.[42]”

We should note that Yehezkel Kaufmann[43], a distinguished Israeli scholar of the first half of the 20^th century, is an exception to this consensus. Many of Kaufmann’s ideas are interesting but his overall thesis[44] does not seem to me, or to most modern scholars[45], to be supported by what is known.

2.3.3 The High Places (bamot/bamoth) [46]

· When the original Yahweh-worshiping group(s) entered Canaan either Yahweh, unlike the gods of the agricultural Canaanites, did not appear at fixed places but to particular men or Yahweh’s cult places were in their earlier home territory. The early Israelites identified Yahweh with the ancient Semitic high god El (see below). By taking over cult legends of the local bamot, the early Israelites could give a basis for their claims to a particular area in which the bamah was located.

· Every village, or group of villages, had its bamah where sacrifice could be offered and sacred meals take place (e.g. 1 Samuel 9:12 ff.) It seems likely that pre-Deuteronomic Israelite tradition seems to have required that all slaughter for food be in the form of a sacrifice.[47]

· Many bamot had priests (Hebrew kohen plural kohanim) who claimed Aaronic, Mosaic (at Dan see Judges 18:30), Levitical or other lineage. It is likely that traditions of Israel's relationship to God, Israelite origins, and the etiology of the bamah itself would have been maintained by the kohanim or singers of the bamah. During the Deuteronomic Reform (see below) the kohanim of the bamot of Judah were put on the staff of the Jerusalem temple. It is probably through this means that some of the traditions preserved at the bamot entered the Torah (mainly Genesis e.g.. the stories in Genesis associating Abraham with locations in the south of Judah such as Beer Sheba) and the Deuteronomic History (Joshua-2 Kings). Traditions from the former Kingdom of Israel (e.g. associating Jacob with Beth-El and Shechem in the territory of the Joseph tribes or with Mahanaim in Gilead) may well have entered the Torah via the E and D traditions which are considered to have originated there;

· Some bamot were of particular renown or of more than local significance. The Bible, in various contexts, mentions a number including the following:

Ø Arad

Ø Beersheba (associated with Abraham)

Ø Bethel (associated with Jacob)

Ø Dan (associated with Mica)

Ø Gibeon

Ø Gilgal – probably a different place from above (associated with Elisha and Elijah)

Ø Gilgal (associated with Joshua and Samuel)

Ø Hebron (associated with Abraham)

Ø Mahanaim (associated with Jacob)

Ø Mt. Tabor

Ø Ophra (associated with Gideon)

Ø Penuel (associated with Jacob)

Ø Shechem – later the Samaritan holy city (associated with Abraham and Jacob)

Ø Shiloh (associated with Joshua)

Ø Zorah

· There were tribal shrines as well as the royal shrines at Jerusalem, Bethel and Dan. These did not, and were not meant to, substitute for local shrines. This created difficulties for the Deuteronomic historian(s) who wrote or edited the Deuteronomic History (Deuteronomy-2 Kings) since a key part of his platform was, as we shall see, the destruction of the bamot. Thus the Deuteronomic historian was forced to give anachronistic “split decisions” to a number of kings who he wrote acted against idolatry but did not remove the bamot. (Of course, these kings had no way of knowing that there would be a demand to close down the bamot in the 8^th-7^th centuries BCE.) These included Asa, Jehoshefat, Jehoash, Amazia and Azariah. I’ll quote, as an example of this treatment, the report on Asa –

“In the twentieth year of Jeroboam king of Israel Asa began to reign over Judah, and he reigned forty-one years in Jerusalem. His mother's name was Maacah the daughter of Abishalom. And Asa did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, as David his father had done. He put away the male cult prostitutes out of the land, and removed all the idols that his fathers had made. He also removed Maacah his mother from being queen mother because she had an abominable image made for Asherah; and Asa cut down her image and burned it at the brook Kidron. But the high places were not taken away. Nevertheless the heart of Asa was wholly true to the LORD all his days. And he brought into the house of the LORD the votive gifts of his father and his own votive gifts, silver, and gold, and vessels.”

1 Kings, chapter 15:9-15

In contrast, the Deuteronomic historian says of Rehoboam’s reign -

“Now Rehoboam the son of Solomon reigned in Judah. … And Judah did what was evil in the sight of the LORD, and they provoked him to jealousy with their sins which they committed, more than all that their fathers had done. For they also built for themselves high places, and pillars, and Asherim on every high hill and under every green tree; and there were also male cult prostitutes in the land. They did according to all the abominations of the nations which the LORD drove out before the people of Israel.”

1 Kings, chapter 14:21-24

3. What Does Syncretism Mean in Context?

How we conceive of syncretism in Pre-Exilic Israel is highly dependant on how we conceive of the origin and development of Israel and its religion.

Ø If we picture Israelite monotheism developing out of Canaanite religion, syncretism becomes an internal, and largely retrospective issue as portrayed by Smith;

Ø If we accept Israelite monotheism as some sort of sui generis monotheism then we get a more traditional picture of Canaanite-Israelite syncretism as outlined in Annex 2.

4. The Transmutation of Israelite Religion into Judaism

4.1 The Deuteronomic Reform (c. 620-609 BCE)[48] see 2 Kings Chapters 22-23; 2 Chronicles chapters 34-35

The Deuteronomic reform was an official program of the Judean king Josiah (reigned 639-609 BCE) to reform the cult and effectively to profoundly reform the theological, and probably also fiscal, underpinnings of the Kingdom of Judah. It was based on a scroll said to have been found in the Jerusalem Temple which probably contained the core of the canonical Book of Deuteronomy. It is likely that this scroll was authored in Jerusalem, sometime in the 7th century BCE, drawing partly on materials originating in the former Kingdom of Israel. The newly found, and perhaps newly authored, scroll, like the canonical Book of Deuteronomy, had 3 notable characteristics which made it the bedrock of both Judaism and Samaritanism:

· It was theocentric, leaving no room for a concept of secularity;

· It was absolutely unbending in demanding justice and monotheism and promised that God, who is just, would reward or punish his people based on how they kept God's Torah; and,

· It demanded a single cultic site for sacrifices.

This last demand is found nowhere else in the Torah. The demand for a single cultic site, with concomitant need to destroy all other cultic sites in the land, was a feature of Hezekiah's (727-698 BCE) reform (2 Kings chap.18) a century before[49]. However: (a) Hezekiah's reforms were reversed probably after his death; and (b) no written Torah/Book of the Law was involved. In fact, there is no mention of any such Book of the Law anywhere in the Bible before Josiah's reforms at the end of the 7th century BCE.

As P. K. McCarter comments on these two Davidic kings (Hezekiah and Josiah), ‘their policies, by unifying the worship of Yahweh, had the effect of unifying the way in which he was conceived by his worshipers, thus eliminating the earlier theology of local manifestations.’”[50]

4.2 The Destruction of the Local Bamot Throughout Judah and the Neighboring Areas of the Former Kingdom of Israel.

During the years 734-732 BCE, the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser captured Galilee and Gilead, exiled the leading elements of their Israelite populations and organized the areas as Assyrian provinces. It was probably at that time that most Galilean and Gileadite Israelite cultic and historical traditions, oral and written were lost for ever. A much reduced Kingdom of Israel, consisting of the former tribal territories of northern Benjamin, Ephriam and Cisjordan Manasseh, continued to exist for a few years as an Assyrian client state. However the king of Israel rebelled and in 722 BCE the rump of the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed and many of its inhabitants were carried off into Mesopotamia. However, many Israelites fled south to escape the Assyrians. Excavations have revealed that at precisely this time Jerusalem expanded from about 32 acres (corresponding to a population of about 5,000) to about 125 acres (corresponding to a population of about 25,000) and that there was massive and intensive development of terraced agriculture around Jerusalem to feed the expanded population. It is likely at this time that many Northern traditions were carried south and that a northern levitical text, calling for the centralization of sacrifice, which was later expanded into the book of Deuteronomy, was carried to Jerusalem.

As noted above, the Judean king Hezekiah (727-698 BCE) had tried, but ultimately failed, to destroy the bamot where sacrifices were carried out by the local priesthood. A century later, it was tried again by his descendant king Josiah, as part of the Deuteronomic Reform. Given general developments in Judah, it seems possible that the bamot were reestablished after Josiah's death. in any case, the goal was accomplished finally, or rendered irreversible, by the Babylonian destruction of Judah and exile of the great majority of its inhabitants[51].

Of course, during the 20 to 30 years between Josiah's destruction of the bamot and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and the exile of the Judeans, the population outside Jerusalem people must have continued to experience the need to worship and to feel in contact with, and in favor with, the divine. However, poverty and distances would ensure that the vast majority would be unable to visit the temple in Jerusalem on more than a few occasions in a lifetime. Sacrifice, probably until that time a central element in the cultic life of the people[52], became marginal, a concern of the kohanim as it was to be in the Second Temple period. The removal of the local bamot included the removal of the local kohanim who may have been both the major source of religious teaching outside Jerusalem and a powerful force resisting religious innovation. The upshot would have been a situation highly conducive to prayer becoming the central act in the cultic life of the people. This form of worship was no longer tied to the local shrine; in fact, it could be as easily done in Babylonia as in Judah.

The depopulation of Judah both ensured that that bamot would not be rebuilt and destroyed local loyalties while strengthening national ones. The survivors from all over Judah, settled in Babylonia, felt themselves primarily to be Jews, and only secondarily, to be Ephratites, Benjaminites, Gezerites etc[53]. The way was fully open to the development of new national traditions divorced from the multifold ancient local ways. This would have encouraged the substitution of prayer for sacrifice.

4.3 The Finalization, Promulgation and Acceptance of the Torah[54] as THE word of God and Basis of Israel's Relationship with God

This occurred around 400 BCE[55], plus or minus a couple of decades; perhaps at the ceremony described in Nehemiah, chapter 8. It was the seminal event of Jewish history. The religion was transformed, over time, from an Israelite religion based on sacrifice and prophecy to a Jewish religion based on a written Torah with sacrifice playing an important, though isolated, role throughout the Second Temple period[56]. Before the change there was no written Torah[57], literacy was religiously irrelevant, and, to learn the will of God the community might cast lots (e.g.. 2 Samuel 10:20) or used the Urim and Thumim or the community or individual consulted a prophet who was effectively the intermediary between God and man. After the change knowledge of the Torah was all important[58]. This led to a number of developments:

· The Torah, and the prophetic literature, totally banned any sort of polytheism and established Judaism as clearly monotheistic.

· The key function was now performed by the scholar of the law. As the Jewish saying goes (Avot 5 mishnah 24) “study it (the Torah) again and again for everything is contained in it. Scrutinize it, grow old and grey in it, do not depart from it. There is no better portion of life than this.”

· The interpreters of the law could be kohanim (as in the Samaritans to this day) or non-priests like the majority of Jewish rabbis

· Prophecy becomes irrelevant and slowly withers and dies;

· The priestly sacrificial function continues. However, it becomes a sort of public service which must be done right, as a necessary but not sufficient condition to keep the people in God's favor, but does not otherwise impact on the people[59] or the development of religion and law; and,

· Literacy is a fundamental requirement to understanding the law.

Annexes

Annex 1

A Few Gods from the Ugaritic Pantheon with Special Relevance to the Hebrew Bible

El (‘ēl)

The New Catholic Encyclopedia[60] states, likely correctly,:

“…El, (was) the ancestral deity of the Semites. (“El” appears also (in Arabia) under the augmentative form “Ilah,” who’s plural of majesty is the Hebrew “Elohim”)…. The names ending in ‘ēl and in ‘ilah are more numerous in the various proto-Arabic dialects than those in honor of any other deity. Taken as a whole, they are to be considered as survivals, for it has been proved that they were preponderant in ancient Akkadian and in proto-Aramaic. Since the word ‘ēl corresponds to the word god, it has been rightly concluded that the proto-Semites invoked only El. In fact, if the word god had applied to various deities, the personal names in ‘ēl would have had an equivocal meaning. It is legitimate to translate El as god but this practical monotheism does not imply a clear awareness that the gods adored by neighbouring peoples did not exist.”

Cross wrote, in Canaanite myth and Hebrew epic p. 43 “In Akkadian and Amorite religion as also in Canaanite, El frequently plays the role of “god of the father,” the social deity who governs the tribe or league, often bound to the league with kinship or covenant ties.”

El seems to have been pushed into the background, in most areas, by other deities: thorough most of Canaan by Baal-Haddad the god of the weather, fertility and war; in northern Arabia by astral deities (e.g. Şalam (moon god) Ilat (feminine form of ‘ilah i.e. El the goddess Venus), Athar (Morning Star); and in Mesopotamia the Sumerian religion largely displaced earlier Semitic forms leading to a pantheon peopled by nature and astral deities with an increasing role being played by national gods such as Ashur and Marduk.

Twice, at least, El was lifted out of the dust of obscurity to be used as the name of the eternal, exclusive, unique, all-powerful God of monotheistic religions[61]. This required that El be shorn of his consorts, children, peers, sexuality and many unedifying characteristics. The first occasion, was when the Israelites identified him with their God YHWH, appropriating a number of Canaanite El’s titles or epithets, as part of the process of developing the monotheism of the Torah. Then, much later, under Jewish and Christian influence, Muhammad declared El, under his Arabic designation, Allah, to be the one true God thus founding Islam.

In the Bible El both means god and the Israelite God[62].

In the Ugaritic literature El:

Is the greatest of all the gods with full ultimate authority though he tends to sit back and let other gods, especially Baal, take the spotlight;
is the creator of all things;
Sexually fathered the other gods who participate, under El’s headship in the Divine Assembly;
El’s epithets or descriptions include: Bull, Father of Men, Holy, Ancient, Merciful, Supreme Judge, guardian of the cosmic order, Kindly One and Compassionate. Ugaritic El can be drunken and, though he copulates freely with numerous females, his consort is Asherah.
He is represented as an aged man. El wore bull's horns, the symbol of strength, and was usually depicted as seated.

In Carthage, a Phoenician-Canaanite colony near present-day Tunis, he and his consort were the main or only gods to which child sacrifices, which took place on a massive scale[63], were dedicated.

“The common identity shared by El and Yahweh is impressive…. In the various texts El and Yahweh were both portrayed as 1) father figures, 2) judges, 3) compassionate and merciful, 4) revealing themselves through dreams, 5) capable of healing those who are sick, 6) dwelling in a cosmic tent. 7) dwelling over the great cosmic waters or at the source of the primordial rivers, which is also on top of a mountain, 8) favourable to the widow 9) kings in the heavenly realm exercising authority over the other gods, who may be called ‘sons of gods’, 10) warrior deities who led the other gods in battle, 11) creator deities, 12) aged and venerable in appearance, and most significantly, 13) capable of guiding the destinies of people in the social arena.”[64]

Baal (ba`al)

Baal is a son of El. His name (meaning – lord, owner, husband) is the normal Ugaritic-Canaanite epithet for the Canaanite rain god Haddu or Haddad (probably meaning “thunderer”) and hence, is the god of rain and fertility as well as being a war god.
Baal is not a creator, like El, but is the preserver and giver of fertility;
Baal is almost El’s prime minister. He is the executive of the divine assembly. Baal is the champion of divine order against chaos. Lightening is his weapon, and he can be found in storms and thunder;
When Baal falls into the hands of Mot, the god of death, there is drought and sterility, growth ceases. With his rescue, by his consort, rains return and vegetation is returned to the earth;
In the beginning of all things, Baal-Haddad warred with and conquered Yamm (Sea), and so brought the unruly waters of Chaos under divine authority and control.
Baal was the main god worshiped at Ugarit and, apparently, in many areas of Canaan;
Baal is always paired with a female sister-wife whose name varied with place and time – Anat (at Ugarit), Ashtart (paired with the vowels of boshet=shame to make the artificial name Ashtoreth in the Bible) or Asherah (in the Bible the Asherah is either the consort of Baal or a cult pole which may stand for the goddess or fertility).
Baal’s consort, whatever her name, had 3 characteristics:

Sexual lust;
Fecundity; and,
Being a bloody goddess of war e.g. Anat, at Ugarit, wading up to her thighs in the blood of her enemies.

Baal’s epithets include Mighty and Rider of the Clouds.
'Baal's land', that is to say, land where cultivation depends on the activity of the god manifests in the autumn and winter rains. The term Baal-land as distinct from irrigated land was used in Mishnaic Hebrew (2^nd century CE) and has survived down to the present day in Muslim.

Anat (`anat)

Goddess of love and war. Sister/wife of Baal. Anat often aids Baal in his battles and takes his part in defeat.

Mot (Death)(mwt)

Baal is killed by Mot (in the autumn) and he remains dead until the spring. His victory over death was celebrated as his enthronement over the other gods. It depicts the prevailing order of things as the result of struggles among the gods--successive bids for power in which Yamm and Mot are confined to their present bounds and Baal and Anat (associated with fertility and military prowess, respectively) prevail. Having descended into the underworld and survived Death, Baal embodies the assertiveness and continuity of life.

Yam(m) (Sea)

Yam was the god of primordial chaos and Baal’s enemy. Before the great combat with Baal Yam sent emissaries to the Assembly of the Gods demanding tribute to include his receiving Baal as a slave. Baal drove the emissaries from the assembly hall thus opening the war.

Annex 2

What Syncretism Might Mean in the Context of the Theory of Early Israelite Sui Generis Monotheism

1 What Would Have Attracted Israel to Canaanite Religion[65]?

Ø Territoriality – i.e. they now felt themselves to be in Baal’s territory

Ø Fertility – they were now farmers with a life-and-death dependence on rain[66]. Baal was the god of the weather who could provide or withhold rain whereas, YHWH was looked on as a war god more suitable for nomads than farmers. The competition between Elijah and the priests of Baal on Mt. Carmel is quite instructive in this regard.

Ø As settlement proceeded the Israelites took over many Canaanite shrines which Israelites and Canaanites would have continued to use together. Over time, the Israelites would have appropriated many cultic laws, traditions and practices.

2 Synthesis and Syncretism – Israel’s Response to Canaanite Culture

Since the Israelites had little experience in governing and lacked a higher culture, in a literary and artistic sense, they borrowed.

The united Israelite kingdom under Solomon borrowed its administrative system[67] and the Wisdom tradition of education administrators from the Egyptians. A “smoking gun” is found in the biblical Book of Proverbs which probably started out as a Wisdom textbook for trainee scribes and young Judean gentlemen. Proverbs 22:17-24:22 “…is modeled on an Egyptian work, The Instructions of Amen-em-ope. This may have been composed as early as the thirteenth century B.C., but was still being copied centuries later and may well have been studied during his training by an Israelite scribe of the prophetic period.”[68]

The Israelites appropriated their literary and artistic higher culture from the Canaanites (see below). The channel was either the scribes, architects and artists of local cities such as Jerusalem, whose Jebusite-Canaanite population remained in the city after it became the Israelite capital, or from the Phoenician cities of present-day Lebanon whose Canaanite culture flourished unbroken from the Middle Bronze age until Hellenistic times.

The adoption of the Egyptian administrative system, and its cultural values, may have led to greater stratification in Israelite society, a deliberate distancing of the rulers from the ruled, the splitting of the kingdom after the death of Solomon and exacerbated the social problems denounced by some of the prophets. However, some of these processes were simply intrinsic to the institutionalization of a state.

The cultural interaction with the Canaanites was even more problematic. For one thing, the Israelites lived cheek-by-jowl with the Canaanites for centuries. They spoke the same language and, indeed, much of the Israelite population may have been Canaanite by origin. Overall, there were two broad approaches to the absorption of elements of Canaanite religion-related culture:

2.1 Harmless Borrowing - Synthesis

I am defining synthesis as being an attempted union or reconciliation of diverse, but ultimately reconcilable tenets, institutions or practices producing a religion or culture that is viable.

Ø Canaanite language i.e. Hebrew would have replaced their earlier West Semitic language;

Ø Accepting Canaanite cultic nomenclature – e.g. words for priest, the sacrifices;

Ø Acceptance of agricultural festivals e.g. hag hamatsot, shavuot, sukkot. These were later historicized i.e. became edot i.e. memorials to important historic experiences of Israel.

2.2 More Substantial Borrowing Eventually Absorbed into Israelite Normative Tradition – Synthesis

Ø Literary Tradition – The psalms and other biblical poetry are clearly in the fully developed literary tradition of Bronze Age Canaan as we know it from Ugaritic literature. These ancient techniques include chiasmus, alternating tense forms, fixed word pairs in parallel constructions, imagery etc.

The Israelites borrowed literary images from the Canaanite tradition. Two examples are:

v The Canaanites, at times, referred to Baal, the weather god, as Rider of Clouds. This term was used in Psalm 68:5 as a poetic image for God. However, this did not imply attributing to God the nature of Baal. To the Canaanite Baal was a timeless weather god annually fighting with the forces of chaos and death (the god Mot) which threaten him and the world. However, for the Israelites, YHWH, totally and effortlessly, controlled the weather and everything else without rival or opposition. God transcends natural phenomena; is above and outside of nature. The Israelite God acts in linear time rather than being in an endless succession of seasons.

v The use in Hebrew poetry of the assembly of God is clearly descended from the assembly of the gods in Ugaritic literature. A clear example is:

“God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment” Psalm 82:1

The accepting of the Canaanite literary tradition and poetic images paved the way for Israelites to accept El rituals, places of worship and hymns.

2.3 Border Line Between Synthesis and Syncretism

I am defining syncretism as being an attempted union or reconciliation of diverse, ultimately irreconcilable tenets, institutions or practices producing a religion or culture that is "artificial", "synthetic" or derivative rather than one which is sui generis. Such religions are usually doomed by the ultimate irreconcilability of their constituents.

Ø Identifying YHWH with El the Canaanite High God El. El was formally, though not actively, head of the Canaanite pantheon. In the story of Abram and Melchizedek (Gen. 14:18-20), the approval of the biblical author or editor, makes it quite clear that Melchizedek’s El Elyon is to be equated with Abram’s God. Some of the El titles in the Torah are known to have been used by the Canaanites, while many of the rest probably were though we do not have the records to prove it. El titles include – 'El Bet' el (Gen. 31:13; 35:7); 'El 'Olam (Gen. 21:33); and 'El Ro'i (Gen. 16:13); 'El 'Elyon (Gen. 14:18); and 'El Saddai (Gen. 17:1) -- as titles for YHWH. The identification of El with YHWH enabled the early Israelites to take over High Places (Hebrew bamah; plural bamot) dedicated to El=YHWH probably together with their traditional etiological legends and myths, cultic personnel and aspects of their ritual. Obviously, in the end, these elements were successfully accepted into the Torah. However, this could, and probably often did, lead to syncretism (see below)

Ø Adopting Canaanite Bamot. This could, and probably often did, lead to syncretism (see below). However, in the transition from seeing YHWH as a tribal god for a wandering people, to a god for a settled peasant population, occupying the land that God had given them as part of the brit, it would have been necessary to establish fixed shrines. Undoubtedly, Jerusalem started out as a Jebusite bama.

2.4 True Syncretism

Ø Worship in every type of shrine, including the royal shrines at Jerusalem, Beth-El and Dan (see for Jerusalem - 2 Kings 23:4-7; Bethel and Dan - 1 Kings 12:26-33; Beth-El - Hosea 10:15, Amos 7:12-13), of Canaanite fertility gods, especially Baal (e.g. Judges, chapter 6:25 ff.), with or without worship of his consort Asherah (1 Kings 15:13; 2 Kings 21:7, 23:4) supplementary to the worship of YHWH. This could be a division of labor with YHWH continuing to be worshiped as the national god and god of war, Baal as the giver of fertility to the crops and Asherah-Ashtart as the giver of fertility to women. This is similar to the Canaanite pantheon where El was the creator god, Baal the bringer of fertility to the land and Baal's consort (variously Anat, Asherah or Ashtart) was Virgin, yet Progenitor of People[69].

Ø Worship of the national god YHWH but attributing to him sexuality and pairing him with a consort (Asherah who was El’s consort at Ugarit). This may have been widespread, including in the Jerusalem temple (2 Kings 23:4-7). We have interesting knowledge of this type of syncretism from the inscriptions of Kuntilet Ajrud [70];and the letters found in Elephantine (525-400 BCE)[71];

Ø Worship, probably child sacrifice to Molech –

“And he (king Josiah) defiled To'pheth, which is in the valley of the sons of Hinnom, that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Molech.” 2 Kings 23:10

“This city has aroused my anger and wrath, from the day it was built to this day, so that I will remove it from my sight … They built the high places of Baal in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them, nor did it enter into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin.” Jeremiah 32:31, 35

Ø Of popular beliefs and private worship we have very little knowledge. However, the numerous figurines of pregnant women found in every pre-Exilic Israelite site probably represent Ashtart (Ashtoreth in the Hebrew Bible) or Asherah[72] In addition, the Bible makes repeated reference to terephim which were statues or figurines representing household gods (Genesis 31:19; Judges 17:5, 18:4-20; 1 Samuel 15:23, 19:13-16; 2 Kings 23:23; Ezekiel 21:21; Zechariah 10:2). A recent, brief, but good treatment of this subject is found in What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?: What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel by William G. Dever 2001 pp. 173-174, 180, 194-198, 270.

Table 3

Canaanite Religion Compared to Israelite Religion (as reflected in the Torah)

Syncretism would be the Bridging of the Distinctions Between the two Columns

Canaanite Religion	Israelite Religion as Reflected in the Torah
Many gods but the pattern in Iron Age Phoenicia, and probably in the territories of Israel and Judah, “… was composed of a triad of deities: a protective god of the city, a goddess, often his wife or companion who symbolizes the fertile earth; and a young god somehow connected with the goddess (usually her son), whose resurrection expresses the annual cycle of vegetation”[73]	Only YHWH may be worshiped by Israel and he is unique and without rival. Other gods may exist but they cannot be compared with YHWH.
Images	No images, massavahs (pillars) or asheras (sacred poles)
Many local shrines, ritual, organized priesthood, nature festivals	Before settlement earthen alters at encampments.
Priesthood probably hereditary[74]	Priesthood hereditary by time of the Torah but earlier sacrificial functions carried out by family or clan heads.
Ugarit - El creates and procreates sexually. For Iron Age Phoenicia see	YHWH is creator of everything and has complete control. He is the god of war.
Ugarit - Baal controls the weather and hence fertility of land. Baal and consort are deities of fertility, sex and war. For Iron Age Phoenicia see
Pattern is cycle of nature[75].	God acts and the people live in meaningful history with direction. Covenant is part of this
Destruction on earth is due to conflict between the gods i.e. Baal and consort vs. gods of death, chaos and the sea.	Destruction due to human sin.
Child sacrifices and cult prostitution.	Forbidden

Select Bibliography

1. Ugaritic Canaanite Religion

Aharoni, Y and Avi-Yonah, M, The Macmillan Bible Atlas, third edition revised by A F Rainey and Z Safrai, MacMillan 1993

Athanassiadi, Polymnia and Frede, Michael editors, Pagan monotheism in late antiquity, Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1999.

Cassuto, U.,The goddess Anath; Canaanite epics of the patriarchal age. Texts, Hebrew translation, commentary and introd. by . Translated from the Hebrew by Israel Abrahams. Jerusalem : Magnes Press, Hebrew University, [1971]

Herrick, Greg, Baalism in Canaanite Religion and Its Relation to Selected Old Testament Texts
Oldenburg, Ulf, The conflict between El and Ba'al in Canaanite religion, Leiden : E. J. Brill, 1969.

Pfeiffer, Charles F, Ras Shamra and the Bible, Baker Studies in Biblical Archaeology, Baker Book House, 1962

Smith, Mark S. ed. The Ugaritic Baal cycle, Leiden ; New York : E.J. Brill, 1994-

http://www.bible.org/docs/ot/topics/baal.htm

Canaanite/Ugaritic Mythology FAQ, ver. 1.2

http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze33gpz/canaanite-faq.html

Canaanite/Ugaritic Mythology FAQ, ver. 1.1

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/mythology/canaanite-faq/

Phoenician Religion -- Pagan

http://phoenicia.org/pagan.html#anchor87202

2. Ugaritic Literature in Relation to the Hebrew Bible

Albright, William Foxwell, Yahweh and the gods of Canaan; a historical analysis of two contrasting faiths. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1968.

Avishur, Yitzhak, Studies in Hebrew and Ugaritic psalms; [translated from the Hebrew] Magnes Press, Hebrew University, c1994.

Bronner, Leah, The stories of Elijah and Elisha as polemics against baal worship, Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1968.

Craigie, Peter C., Ugarit and the Old Testament, Grand Rapids : Eerdmans, c1983.

Cross, Frank Moore, Canaanite myth and Hebrew epic; essays in the history of the religion of Israel, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1973.

Cross, Frank Moore, From epic to canon : history and literature in ancient Israel, Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University press, c1998.

Day, John, Yahweh and the gods and goddesses of Canaan, Sheffield Academic Press, 2000.

Fisher, Loren R. Fisher, editor, Ras Shamra parallels : The texts from Ugarit and the Hebrew Bible. Pontificium institutum biblicum, 1972-

Lewis, Theodore J, Cults of the dead in ancient Israel and Ugarit, Scholars Press, c1989.

Smith, Mark S, Untold stories: the Bible and Ugaritic studies in the twentieth century ,Hendrickson Publishers, 2001.

3. Early Israelite Religion

HEBREW HENOTHEISM

http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/henotheism.htm

Albertz, Rainer, A history of Israelite religion in the Old Testament period [translated by John Bowden], Louisville, Ky. : Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994-

Assmann, Jan, Moses the Egyptian : the memory of Egypt in western monotheism, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1997.

Bright, J, A History of Israel, 2^nd edition, Westminster, 1972

Cohen and Troeltsch : ethical monotheistic religion and theory of culture / by Wendell S. Dietrich, Scholars Press, c1986.

Cornfeld, Gaaiyah. Archaeology of the Bible: Book by Book, Adam & Charles Black, 1977

Dever, William G., What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?: What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel, Eerdmans, 2001

Edelman, Diana Vikander (ed.), The triumph of Elohim : from Yahwisms to Judaisms, Kampen : Pharos, 1995

Finkelstein, I. and Na’aman, N., From nomadism to monarchy : archaeological and historical aspects of early Israel, Jerusalem : Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi : Israel Exploration Society ; Washington : Biblical Archaeology Society, c1994.

Friedman, Richard Elliott, Who Wrote the Bible, Harper & Row, 1987

Fohrer, Georg, History of Israelite religion, translated by David E. Green, Nashville, Abingdon Press [1972]

Gnuse, Robert Karl, No other gods : emergent monotheism in Israel, Sheffield, Eng. : Sheffield Academic Press, c1997.

Gnuse, Robert Karl review of Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

Hadley, J. M., The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah, Cambridge University Press 2000

Hayes, J H and Miller, J M, Israelite and Judaean History, Westminster 1977

Hess, Richard S., Early Israel in Canaan: A Survey of Recent Evidence and Interpretations, originally published in Palestinian Exploration Quarterly 125 (1993) 125-42.

Kaufmann, Yehezkel, Uniform title Toldot ha-emunah ha-Yisre'elit. English Title The religion of Israel, from its beginnings to the Babylonian exile. Translated and abridged by Moshe Greenberg, [Chicago] University of Chicago Press [1960]

King, P. J. and Stager, L. E., Life in Biblical Israel, Westminster 2001

Nakhai B. A., Archaeology and the Religions of Canaan and Israel, ASOR 2001

Noth, M, The History of Israel, 2^nd edition, A&C Black, 1960

Schmidt, Werner H, The faith of the Old Testament : a history, translated by John Sturdy, Philadelphia : Westminster Press, c1983

Shanks, H, The Biblical Minimalists: Expurging Ancient Israel’s Past in Bible Review vol. XIII no. 3 June 1997.

Smith, Mark S, and Miller, Patrick D, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel , San Francisco : Harper & Row, 1990.

Smith, Mark S., The origins of biblical monotheism : Israel's polytheistic background and the Ugaritic texts, New York : Oxford University Press, 2001

Stern, E., Archaeology of the Land of the Bible Volume II: The Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian Periods 732-332 BCE, Doubleday 2001

Soggin, J A, A History of Ancient Israel, Westminster, 1984

Vaux, R de, The History of Early Israel, Westminster, 1978

Vogel, M. H., article on Monotheis http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/henotheism.htm m in cols. 260-263, vol. 12, Encyclopedia Judaica, Keter 1972.

Weber, Max, Ancient Judaism; translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale, Free Press ; London : Collier-Macmillan, [1967]

Vriezen, Theodorus Christiaan, The religion of ancient Israel, Lutterworth Press [1969, c1967]

Zevit, Ziony, The religions of ancient Israel : a synthesis of parallactic approaches, London ; New York : Continuum, 2001.

[1] Torah refers to Genesis-Deuteronomy also called the Five Books of Moses and, in Hebrew Humash/Chumash. For the history of the development of the Torah and the Deuteronomic Reform see Friedman, Richard Elliott, Who Wrote the Bible, Harper & Row, 1987

[2] See de Vaux p 132 ff.

[3] Stern, E., Archaeology of the Land of the Bible Volume II: The Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian Periods 732-332 BCE, Doubleday 2001 p. 75

[4] This sort of generalization must be used with caution see Gnuse, Robert Karl, No other gods : emergent monotheism in Israel, Sheffield, Eng. : Sheffield Academic Press, c1997. p. 229

[5] See The Biblical Minimalists: Expurging Ancient Israel’s Past by H. Shanks in Bible Review vol. XIII no. 3 June 1997; Mattanyah Zohar’s letter to the editor of the Biblical Archaeological Review, entitled The Real Basis for the Exodus that appeared in vol. XIV no. 2 March/April 1988 pp. 13 and 58.

[6] See: What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?: What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel by William G. Dever 2001; The Biblical Minimalists: Expurging Ancient Israel’s Past by H. Shanks in Bible Review vol. XIII no. 3 June 1997; Mattanyah Zohar’s letter to the editor of the Biblical Archaeological Review, entitled The Real Basis for the Exodus that appeared in vol. XIV no. 2 March/april 1988 pp. 13 and 58.

[7] King 304-310.

[8] In Edelman, Diana Vikander (ed.), The triumph of Elohim : from Yahwisms to Judaisms, Kampen : Pharos, 1995

[9] The best example of the biblical historical tradition is the Deuteronomic History (Deuteronomy- 2 Kings). This is not history, as we would understand it, and was not meant to be. Rather it was salvation-history designed to illustrate a paradigm (when Israel obeyed the Torah it prospered and visa versa). What did not fit was dropped or changed to fit the paradigm. It is very instructive to examine, in 1 and 2 Chronicles how Samuel and Kings are adapted to a modified paradigm in the late fifth or early fourth centuries BCE.

[10] See What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?: What Archaeology Can Tell Us about the Reality of Ancient Israel by William G. Dever 2001; The Biblical Minimalists: Expurging Ancient Israel’s Past by H. Shanks in Bible Review vol. XIII no. 3 June 1997.

[11] “The structure of the Book of Judges is primitive by modern literary standards; blocks of successive editorial remodeling are piled around the edges of the nuclear stories. The result is that old Israel’s narrative art survives in its purest form in the Book of Judges, where theological updating across the centuries was confined almost exclusively to the connectives between the units; rarely did it invade their essential contents.” P. 29 Anchor Bible Judges by R. Boling, Doubleday 1975

[12] Gnuse p. 177-178

[13] Smith 1990 p. xxxi

[14] King pp. 310-317

[15] From the article The New Sumerian Dictionary by William McPherson in the Biblical Archaeology Review Sept./Oct. 1984 (vol. X no. 5) which was reprinted from the Washington Post.

[16] http://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/

[17] We find scattered recognition in the Hebrew Bible of the Canaanite origin of Israel – most notable in Ezekiel, chapter 16:3 “ and say, Thus says the Lord GOD to Jerusalem: Your origin and your birth are of the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite, and your mother a Hittite.”

[18] Fohrer suggests Midian p. 71; “The only conclusion to which we can come, then, is that it is possible, and even probable that the divine name YHWH existed outside Israel before Moses… but we have no certain evidence of this. Vaux, R de, The History of Early Israel, Westminster, 1978 p. 343; “…, from the beginning of her history in that land Israel worshiped Yahweh. On the other hand, before that time there is no trace of Yahwism either in Palestine or anywhere else, nor has the divine name “Yahweh” demonstrably been discovered in texts of an earlier period.” Bright, J, A History of Israel, 2^nd edition, Westminster, 1972 p 123

[19] A good and extensive review of current and past theories of Israel’s origin is presented in Gnuse, Robert Karl, No other gods : emergent monotheism in Israel, Sheffield, Eng. : Sheffield Academic Press, c1997 chapter 1 New Understandings of the Israelite Settlement Process (pp. 23-61).

[20] See Hayes and Miller p. 264 ff.

[21] See Hayes and Miller p. 266 ff

[22] “Earlier in this century Alt (1989) proposed a new interpretation of the evidence. He suggested that Israel’s origin is to be found in wandering semi-nomadic clans who peacefully entered the [[127]] land and settled in the hilly country which was unoccupied. Brought together into a loosely knit association by a group of Yahweh worshippers from the desert, and perhaps ultimately from Egypt, this group populated the hill country and eventually grew strong enough to band together and to gain dominance in the rest of the land, during the period of the Monarchy” from Early Israel in Canaan:A Survey of Recent Evidence and Interpretations by RICHARD S. HESS

[23] See Hayes and Miller p. 277 ff. and Early Israel in Canaan A Survey of Recent Evidence and interpretations by Richard S. Hess “Various theories of the social sciences have attempted to come to terms with the archaeological, biblical, and historical data. A significant representative of these theories is that which posits a peasant revolt which took place against the oppressive Canaanite aristocracy which maintained its cities at the cost of sizeable expenditures for defense in the forms of city walls, large buildings, and weapons, and for paying tribute to Pharaoh, who was maintaining an empire in this land. Such expenditures would come from the labor of the lower classes who may have been gradually dispossessed and turned into serfs and then into virtual slaves.

Whether the revolt was a more dramatic assault on the upper classes (Gottwald 1979), or whether it simply involved the gradual movement of individuals and groups of dissatisfied people into the hills (Mendenhall 1983, who emphatically denies the peasant revolt hypothesis), there was a change and it brought about a change in living. In the hill country, where the chariots and other weapons of the city-state armies could not reach (Josh 17:14-18), it was possible to have simpler defenses and to live in smaller communities without costly walls, palaces, and other large buildings. The impression created in the excavation of these villages is one of an egalitarian society, certainly more so than one finds in the socially stratified larger towns located in the lowlands…. However, the reasons for the evidence of the society as egalitarian may be due as much to the scarcity of food and natural resources as to any ideology.

[24] “For Gottwald…this will be a conversion in the more or less modern sense of the term: the rebel rural masses will have accepted belief in YHWH, the liberator God brought to them by groups coming out of the eastern desert” Soggin, J A, A History of Ancient Israel, Westminster, 1984 p. 105

[25] see Searching for Israelite Origins by I. Finkelstein, Biblical Archaeology Review vol. XIV no. 5 Sept./Oct. 1988 p. 34 ff. and the review article of Finkelstein’s book The Archaeology of Israelite Settlement on p. 6. ff. of the same issue.

[26] Smith 1990 P. 152

[27] Smith 1990 P. xxx

[28] “Albert Lang… and others propose a model of successive revolutions in an evolutionary process, and this is an excellent paradigm in which to discuss the biblical tradition.” Gnuse, Robert Karl, No other gods : emergent monotheism in Israel, Sheffield, Eng. : Sheffield Academic Press, c1997. p. 142

[29] A good and extensive review of current and past theories of Israel’s religious development origin is presented in Gnuse, Robert Karl, No other gods : emergent monotheism in Israel, Sheffield, Eng. : Sheffield Academic Press, c1997chapter 2 Recent Scholarship on the Development of Monotheism in Ancient Israel (pp. 62-128).

[30] Stern, E., Archaeology of the Land of the Bible Volume II: The Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian Periods 732-332 BCE, Doubleday 2001 p. 75

[31] See Cross, Canaanite myth and Hebrew epic p. 43 “In Akkadian and Amorite religion as also in Canaanite, El frequently plays the role of “god of the father,” the social deity who governs the tribe or league, often bound to the league with kinship or covenant ties.”

[32] “…El, (was) the ancestral deity of the Semites. (“El” appears also (in Arabia) under the augmentative form “Ilah,” who’s plural of majesty is the Hebrew “Elohim”)…. The names ending in ‘ēl and in ‘ilah are more numerous in the various proto-Arabic dialects than those in honor of any other deity. Taken as a whole, they are to be considered as survivals, for it has been proved that they were preponderant in ancient Akkadian and in proto-Aramaic. Since the word ‘ēl corresponds to the word god, it has been rightly concluded that the proto-Semites invoked only El. In fact, if the word god had applied to various deities, the personal names in ‘ēl would have had an equivocal meaning. It is legitimate to translate El as god but this practical monotheism does not imply a clear awareness that the gods adored by neighbouring peoples did not exist.” New Catholic Encyclopedia 2^nd edition, Detroit: Thomson/Gale in association with the Catholic University of America, c2003. volume 1 pp. 613-620

[33] see Maimonides’ 13 Principles of Faith “… we believe that the entire Torah which is found in our hands today is the Torah which was given through Moses, and that it is all of divine origin. This means that it all reached him from God in a manner that we metaphorically call “speech”. The exact quality of that communication is only known to Moses … to whom it came, and that he acted as a scribe to whom one dictates….” Maimonides’ Commentary on the Mishnah Tractate Sanhedrin trans. Fred Rosner 1981, p. 155. The Muslim view of the Koran is very similar.

[34] From Rabbi Norman Lamm in The Condition of Jewish Belief

“I believe the Torah is divine revelation in two ways: in that it is God-given and in that it is godly. By "God-given," I mean that He willed that man abide by his commandments and that will was communicated in discrete words and letters. Man apprehends in many ways: by intuition, inspiration, experience, deduction and by direct instruction. The divine will, if it is to be made known, is sufficiently important for it to be revealed in as direct, unequivocal, and unambiguous a manner as possible, so that it will be understood by the largest number of the people to whom this will is addressed. Language, though so faulty an instrument, is still the best means of communication to most human beings.

“Hence, I accept unapologetically the idea of the verbal revelation of the Torah. I do not take seriously the caricature of this idea which reduces Moses to a secretary taking dictation. Any competing notion of revelation, such as the various "inspiration" theories, can similarly be made to sound absurd by anthropomorphic parallels. Exactly how this communication took place no one can say; it is no less mysterious than the nature of the One who spoke. The divine-human encounter is not a meeting of equals, and the herygma that ensures from this event must therefore be articulated in human terms without reflecting on the mode and form of the divine logos. How God spoke is a mystery; how Moses received this message is an irrelevancy. That God spoke is of the utmost significance, and what he said must therefore be intelligible to humans in a human context, even if one insists upon an endlessly profound mystical overplus of meaning in the text. To deny that God can make his will clearly known is to impose upon Him a limitation of dumbness that would insult the least of His human creatures.

“Literary criticism of the Bible is a problem, but not a crucial one. Judaism has successfully met greater challenges in the past. Higher Criticism is far indeed from an exact science. The startling lack of agreement among scholars on any one critical view; the radical changes in general orientation in more recent years; the many revisions that archaeology has forced upon literary critics; and the unfortunate neglect even by Bible scholars of much first-rate scholarship in modern Hebrew supporting the traditional claim of Mosaic authorship — all these reduce the question of Higher Criticism from the massive proportions it has often assumed to a relatively minor and manageable problem that is chiefly a nuisance but not a threat to the enlightened believer.

“Torah is not only God-given; it is also godly. The divine word is not only uttered by God, it is also an aspect of God Himself. All of the Torah — its ideas, its laws, its narratives, its inspirations for the human community — lives and breathes godliness. Hillel Zeitlin described the Hasidic interpretation of revelation (actually it was even more true of their opponents, the Misnagdim, and ultimately derived from a common Kabbalistic source) as not only Torah min ha- shameyim (Torah from Heaven) but Torah she-hi shemayim (Torah that is Heaven). It is in Torah that God is most immediately immanent and accessible, and the study of Torah is therefore not only a religious commandment per se, but the most exquisite and the most characteristically Jewish form of religious experience and communion. For the same reason, Torah is not only legislation, halakha, but in its broadest meaning, Torah — teaching, a term that includes the full spectrum of spiritual edification: theological and ethical, mystical and rhapsodic.

“Given the above, it is clear that I regard all of the Torah as binding on the Jew. To submit the mitzvot to any extraneous test — whether rational or ethical or nationalistic — is to reject the supremacy of God, and hence in effect to deny Him as God.

The classification of the mitzvot into rational and revelational, or ethical and ritual, has descriptive-methodological but not substantive religious significance. Saadia Gaon, who a thousand years ago proposed the dichotomy between rational and

nonrational commandments as the cornerstone of his philosophy of law, maintained that even the apparently pure revelational laws were fundamentally rational, although man might not, now or ever, be able to grasp their inner rationality. At the same time, far greater and more genuine spirituality inheres in the acceptance of those laws that apparently lack ethical, rational, or doctrinal content. It is only these performances, according to R. Hai Gaon, that are prefaced by the blessing, "Blessed art Thou... who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to ..." Holiness, the supreme religious category, contains an essential nonrational core; and this state of the "numinous" can be attained only when man bows his head and submits the totality of his existence to the will of God by performing His mitzvah for no reason other than that this is the will of the Creator. R. Nachman of Bratzlav recommended to his followers that they observe the "ethical" laws as thought they were "ritual" commandments. In this manner, the ethical performance is transformed from a pale humanistic act into a profound spiritual gesture. I do not, therefore, by any means accord to ceremonial laws any lesser status than the others. On the contrary, while confident that these mitzvot shimiyot are more than divine whim in that they are ultimately of benefit to man and society, I prefer to accept even the sikhliyot, the rational and ethical, as "ritual" in an effort to attain holiness, the ultimate desideratum of religious life.”

[35] In his autobiography Helping With Inquiries, Louis Jacobs recounts “He (Dayan Grunfeld) tried to convince us that the problems raided by Biblical Criticism could be solved on the basis of the Kantian distinction between the phenomena and the noumena, i.e. that Biblical Criticism operated on the level of that which is perceived and could not therefore, be applied to the torah which was not a human production but a divine communication. I pointed out that if this distinction makes any sense when applied to the Torah, it would follow that no one has ever understood or can understand the torah, hardly a position a devout Jew can hold.

[36] see Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew by Neil Gillman

[37] Maimonides recognized this “For a sudden transition from one opposite to another is impossible…. And as at that time the way of life generally accepted and customary in the whole world… consisted in offering various species of living things in the temples in which images were set up, in worshiping the latter, and in burning incense before them …His wisdom … did not require that He give us a Law prescribing the rejection, abandonment, and abolition of all these kinds of worship. Therefore He … suffered the above-mentioned kinds of worship to remain, but transferred them from created or imaginary and unreal things to His own name… He (thus) commanded us to build a temple for Him …. Through this divine ruse it came about that the memory of idolatry was effaced and that the grandest and true foundation of our belief – namely, the existence and oneness of the deity - was firmly established, while at the same time the souls had no feeling of repugnance … because of the abolition of modes of worship to which they were accustomed….” Moses Maimonides The Guide of the Perplexed trans. S. Pines 1963 vol. 2 Pp. 526-527

[38] See King pp. 4-5 and 36-38. Although many stories in the Bible (e.g. Samson, Levite's Concubine) show that the nuclear family was important, there curiously is no word for the concept in Biblical Hebrew. The family hierarchy was -

1. individual

2. nuclear family - father has main authority

3. extended family bet av in Hebrew

4. clan mishpaHa in Hebrew

5. tribe

6. in pre-monarchal times `am Yahweh translated as the 'kindred of Yahwe' (see below) i.e. Israel as a whole. Later this role was taken by the king.

7. God

From the Bible it is difficult to determine:

· how the bet av functioned. However, we can assume that it did so and was probably the most important unit in Israelite society; and,

· whether the tribe and/or clan were really effective decision making and action taking units and, if so, how decisions were made. Perhaps it varied by situation, time and place. In particular, the tribe might have disappeared, or lost its effectiveness, under the monarchies.

[39] see Cross, Canaanite myth and Hebrew epic pp. 39-43.

[40] http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/MSmith_BiblicalMonotheism.htm

[41] In God as Divine Kinsman: What Covenant Meant in Ancient Israel, (In Biblical Archaeology Review vol. 25 no. 4 July/August 1999). Frank Moore Cross is quoted as writing -

"The social organization of West Semitic tribal groups was grounded in kinship..(which) defined the rights and obligations, the duties, status, and privileges of tribal members.... In the religious sphere, the intimate relationship with the family god, the 'God of the Fathers,' was expressed in the only language available to members of a tribal society. Their god was the Divine Kinsman...

"The Divine Kinsman fulfills the mutual obligations and receives the privileges of kinship. He leads in battle, redeems from slavery, loves his family, shares the land of his heritage (naHalah) provides and protects. He blesses those who bless his kindred and curses those who curse his kindred [see Genesis 12:3]. The family of the deity rallies to his call to holy war, 'the wars of Yahweh,' keeps his cultus, obeys his patriarchal commands, maintains family loyalty (Hesed), loves him with all their soul, calls on his name…

"Early Israel was a somewhat fragile tribal league, or confederation. This league, says Cross was 'a kinship organizations, a covenant of families and tribes organized by the creation or identification of a common ancestor and related by segmented genealogies.' it was also a religious organization. The league was called the `am Yahweh (see Judges 5:11; 1 Samuel 2:24; 2 Samuel 1:12 et al.). This phrase is usually translated 'people of Yahwe,' but it would be more accurately translated 'kindred of Yahwe.' According to Cross, 'Yahwe is the god of Israel, the divine Kinsman, the god of the covenant.' Each has obligations to the other"

[42] http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/MSmith_BiblicalMonotheism.htm

[43] quote from A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE JEWS Tzvi Howard Adelman, Jerusalem

at http://www.jajz-ed.org.il/juice/history1/week1.html “Kaufmann is important because almost every study of the Bible which originated in Israel refers back in some way to his views. For similar reasons Wellhausen continues to live not only in Kaufmann's critique,

but in reactions to Kaufmann. Kaufmann's views of the Bible are constructed around two basic assumptions: 1) Rather than being late, the P source was early, perhaps from the eighth century BCE. This means that the nationalistic and cultic elements that Wellhausen saw as signs of degeneracy Kaufmann saw as original aspects of the religion of Israel. Thus the religion of the Torah rather than being a product of late post-exilic events after

the first Temple was destroyed in the year 586 BCE reflects the original quality of Hebrew monotheism. 2) Monotheism, therefore, was not a gradual development for the Hebrews but an entirely new innovation. He took this view to the extreme by asserting that nowhere in the Bible is there a trace of mythological elements, of battles between primordial forces, or the birth and death of competing Gods. Among the Hebrews this battle was waged and won before the compilation of the Bible. Israelite monotheism began with Moses and the conquest of the Land of Israel was done for religious-to eliminate backsliding to the ways of the other nations-- and not national purposes. While at times Kaufmann criticized biblical criticism for atomizing the grandeur of the texts, he, nevertheless, accepts it with his own modifications.”

[44] In his magisterial work The religion of Israel, from its beginnings to the Babylonian exile he wrote –

“Biblical scholars, and the historians of antiquity in general, tend to interpret Israelite religion as an organic outgrowth of the ancient Orient. Some scholars discover the origin of biblical faith in monotheistic tendencies of the religion of the ancient Near East, others point our pagan elements in the religion of Israel. All assume that an organic connection exists, that even the unique elements of Israelite faith must be understood in the light of the surrounding religions…. Israel’s monotheism was, in this view, not a popular creation, but the doctrine of a priestly or prophetic elite…. On the popular level, then, there was no essential difference between the pre-exilic Israelite and the pagan; both were children of the same culture

“This view is here rejected in toto. We shall see that Israelite religion was an original creation of the people of Israel…. Its monotheistic world view had no antecedents in paganism. Nor was its theological doctrine conceived and nurtured in limited circles…. It was the fundamental idea of a national culture, and informed every aspect of that culture from the very beginning. It received, of course, a legacy from the pagan age which preceded it, but the birth of Israelite religion was the death of paganism in Israel. Despite appearances, Israel was not a polytheistic people…. Israel’s world was its own creation, notwithstanding its utilization of ancient pagan materials.”

In Kaufmann’s opinion the way of thinking of Israelites, at all levels of the society, was so different from paganism that they could not understand the meaning, and interior life, of paganism. “… (the Bible’s) sole polemical argument that idolatry is the senseless deification of wood and stone images. We may, perhaps, say that the bible sees in paganism only its lowest level, the level of mana-beliefs…. The prophets ignore what we know to be authentic paganism. Their whole condemnation revolves around the taunt of ism.”

[45] See e.g. Cross p. 241.

[46] for the appearance and layout of bamot see King pp. 319-348; Nakhai pp. 161-200

[47] See Bamberger’s comments on Leviticus 17 in The Torah: A Modern Commentary, W G Plaut Union of American Hebrew Congregations 1981 pp 872-74

[48] See Hayes, J H and Miller, J M, Israelite and Judaean History, Westminster 1977 pp. 458-469; Albertz, Rainer, A history of Israelite religion in the Old Testament period [translated by John Bowden], Louisville, Ky. : Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994 p. 195 ff.

[49] See Hayes, J H and Miller, J M, Israelite and Judaean History, Westminster 1977 pp. 442-444

[50] Smith 1990 P. 148

[51] See The Babylonian Gap by E. Stern in the November/December 2000 issue of the Biblical Archaeology Review and the following two articles in the May/June 2002 issue: There Was No Gap by J. Blenkinsopp; Yes There Was by E. Stern.

[52] Fohrer p. 115 “At cultic sites sacrifices were offered, which from this time (after the “conquest” but before the monarchy) steadily increased in importance, the more so because, until the centralization of the cult at Jerusalem introduced by the Deuteronomic reform, all animal slaughter was sacrificial.”

[53] Local loyalties did continue for a few generation. This is evident from the insistence of returnees from Babylon on settling in their ancestral home.

[54] Torah refers to Genesis-Deuteronomy also called the Five Books of Moses and, in Hebrew Humash/Chumash. For the history of the development of the Torah and the Deuteronomic Reform see Friedman, Richard Elliott, Who Wrote the Bible, Harper & Row, 1987

[55] This is considered far too early by the “Sheffield school” see Davies in Edelman p. 51-52 whereas Albertz places it about 500 BCE p. 466 ff.

[56] This case can be overstated. See see Davies in Edelman p. 154-156

[57] This is clear from the fact that no one is ever recorded, in the historical books of the Hebrew Bible, as looking in a book for divine guidance before the Deuteronomic Reform (c. 620-609 BCE).

[58] See Encyclopaedia Judaica vol. 3 col. 908 under heading Authority in deciding the halakhah for this in a Jewish context.

[59] Compare this to Greece and Rome where the priests conducted sacrificial auguries to determine practical military and political questions

[60] See volume 1 pp. 613-620 New Catholic Encyclopedia 2^nd edition, Detroit: Thomson/Gale in association with the Catholic University of America, c2003.

[61] The following is taken from the New Encyclopedia Britannica (1995), vol. 26 pp. 560-562

“God in monotheism is conceived of as the creator of the world and man; he has not abandoned his creation but continues to lead it through his power and wisdom; hence, viewed in this aspect, history is a manifestation of the divine will. God has not only created the natural world and the order existing therein but also the ethical order to which man ought to conform and, implicit in the ethical order, the social order. Everything is in the hands of God. God is holy ---- supreme and unique in being and worth, essentially other than man…. The god of monotheism, as exemplified by the great monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam --- is a personal god. In this respect the one god of monotheism is contrasted with the conception of the divine in pantheism (e.g. philosophical Hinduism) which may also affirm one god or a divine unity. The god of pantheism, however, is impersonal, rather like a divine fluid that permeates the whole world including man himself….In monotheistic religions the belief system, the value system, and the action system are all three determined…by the conception of God as one unique and personal being. Negatively considered, the monotheistic conviction results in the rejection of all other belief systems as false religions, and this rejection partly explains the exceptionally aggressive or intolerant stance of the monotheistic religions in the history of the world. The conception of all other religions as “idolatry” (i.e. as rendering absolute devotion or trust to what is less than divine) has often served to justify the destructive and fanatical action of the religion that is considered the only true one…. For exclusive monotheism only one god exists; other gods either simply do not exist at all, or, at most, they are false gods or demons; i.e., beings that are acknowledged to exist but that cannot be compared in power or in any other way with the one and only true god. This position is in the main that of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. While in the Old Testament the other gods, in most cases, were still characterized as false gods, in later Judaism and in Christianity…the conception emerged of God as the one and only, and other gods were considered not to exist at all…. Inclusive monotheism accepts the existence of a great number of gods but holds that all gods are essentially one and the same, so that it makes little or no difference under which name or according to which right a god or goddess is invoked. Such conceptions characterized the ancient Hellenistic religions…. Henotheism …(is) a belief in worship of one god though the existence of other gods is taken for granted…. (In) pluriform monotheism… the various gods of the pantheon, without losing their independence, are at the same time considered to be manifestations of one and the same substance…. There may be some reason to speak of the Old Testament conception of God as monolatry rather than monotheism, because the existence of other gods is seldom explicitly denied and many times even acknowledged…. In Israel the ethical aspects was as important as the exclusiveness of their one God; the prophets stressed the ethical elements of an essentially exclusive God. The God of Israel was a jealous god who forbade his believers to worship other gods. In this respect he differed from other gods in the ancient Near Eastern religions who, as a rule, did not put such exclusive obligation on their adherents.”

[62] for El in Ancient Israel see pp. 252-253 of Harper’s Bible Dictionary, P. J Achtemeir (ed.) Harper & Row 1985

[63] See Child Sacrifice at Carthage – Religious Rite or Population Control? By L. E. Stager, S. R. Wolff Biblical Archaeological Review X:1, Jan./Feb. 1984

[64] Gnuse, Robert Karl, No other gods : emergent monotheism in Israel, Sheffield, Eng. : Sheffield Academic Press, c1997. p. 193

[65] Of course, the Sheffield school”, seeing Israelite religion as a slowly differentiating variety of Canaanite religion would see the issue differently.

[66] Some in Israel accepted that agriculture was not the way of God but then rejected agriculture not God (see Jer. 35 re. the Rechabites)

[67] See Solomonic State Officials by Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, Gleerup 1971; Solomon’s New Men by E. W. Heaton, Pica Press 1974; and, p xxxiii Anchor Bible Proverbs and Ecclesiastes by R. B. Y. Scott, Doubleday 1965.

[68] p xxxv Anchor Bible Proverbs and Ecclesiastes by R. B. Y. Scott, Doubleday 1965.

[69] “The Phoenicians worshipped a triad of deities, each having different names and attributes depending upon the city in which they were worshipped, although their basic nature remained the same. The primary god was El, protector of the universe, but often called Baal. The son, Baal or Melqart, symbolized the annual cycle of vegetation and was associated with the female deity Astarte in her role as the maternal goddess. She was called Asherar-yam, our lady of the sea, and in Byblos she was Baalat, our dear lady. Astarte was linked with mother goddesses of neighboring cultures, in her role as combined heavenly mother and earth mother. Cult statues of Astarte in many different forms were left as votive offerings in shrines and sanctuaries as prayers for good harvest, for children, and for protection and tranquillity in the home. The Phoenician triad was incorporated in varying degrees by their neighbors and Baal and Astarte eventually took on the look of Greek deities.” http://phoenicia.org/pagan.html

[70] From (from Ha'aretz Magazine, Friday, October 29, 1999)

YHWH and his Consort

How many

gods, exactly, did Israel have? Together with the historical and political aspects, there are also doubts as to the credibility of the information about belief and worship. The question about the date at which monotheism was adopted by the kingdoms of Israel and Judea arose with the discovery of inscriptions in ancient Hebrew that mention a pair of gods: YHWH and his Asherath. At two sites, Kuntilet Ajrud in the southwestern part of the Negev hill region, and Khirbet el-Kom in the Judea piedmont, Hebrew inscriptions have been found that mention 'YHWH and his Asherah', 'YHWH Shomron and his Asherah', 'YHWH Teman and his Asherah'. The authors were familiar with a pair of gods, YHWH and his consort Asherah, and send blessings in the couple's name. These inscriptions, from the 8th century BCE, raise the possibility that monotheism, as a state religion, is actually an innovation of the period of the Kingdom of Judea, following the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel. Ze'ev Herzog.

[71] See Encyclopedia Judaica vol. 6 col. 608. In their worship the main god was Yahu (=YHWH) with Ashambethel and Anathbethel as accompanying goddesses. There were no remins of scriptures found at the site which almost proves that these were “pre-Deuteronomic” Israelites without a Torah.

[72] See pp. 188-205 in Hadley, J. M., The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah, Cambridge University Press 2000; p. 52 in Cornfeld, Gaaiyah. Archaeology of the Bible: Book by Book, Adam & Charles Black, 1977; Understanding Asherah - Exploring Semitic Iconography by Ruth Hestrin in Biblical Archaeology Review vol. XVII no. 5 September-October 1991; King 348-352.

[73] Stern, E., Archaeology of the Land of the Bible Volume II: The Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian Periods 732-332 BCE, Doubleday 2001 p. 75

[74] “Phoenician priesthoods were hereditary, like the Jerusalem priesthood, and they also habitually wore white, as the Jerusalem priesthood did except for special occasions when a celestially decorated garment was worn.” http://essenes.crosswinds.net/m91.htm

[75] This sort of generalization must be used with caution see Gnuse, Robert Karl, No other gods : emergent monotheism in Israel, Sheffield, Eng. : Sheffield Academic Press, c1997. p. 229