God Against the Gods (9 page)

“The Jews Agree with the Gentiles”

The awkward and ironic truth is that the rituals against which the biblical authors rant and rave bear a striking resemblance to some of the approved beliefs and practices of monotheism as they are depicted in the Bible. What pagans did, as it turns out, was not so very different from what the pious worshippers of the Only True God did.

The prophets and kings who are depicted in the Bible, for example, used the “information technology” of divination to communicate with the God of Israel. Moses, Saul and David are shown to resort to divination by the casting of lots—the mysterious Urim and Thummim that are mentioned (but not described) in the Book of Exodus, for example, appear to have been the paraphernalia for the casting of lots that yielded yes or no answers to the questions that were posed to the God of Israel. And the worshippers of Yahweh were no less convinced than the worshippers of Apollo that dreams were the likeliest way to receive a divine revelation: “If there be a prophet among you,” says Yahweh, “I the Lord do make myself known unto him in a vision, I do speak with him in a dream.”
³⁷

Even magic working is among the practices of otherwise pious worshippers of the God of Israel—Moses himself makes and uses a bronze serpent to cure snakebite, as we have seen, and the curious object is preserved as a cherished relic in the Holy of Holies at the Temple in Jerusalem. Among the otherwise humane and progressive laws that Moses is shown to bring down from Mt. Sinai is one that prescribes a weird ritual of sympathetic magic for determining whether a woman has committed adultery. The priest is to write out a series of curses, wash the ink into an earthen vessel with “holy water” and make the suspected adulteress drink the potion. If she is guilty of the crime, the Bible assures us, “her belly shall swell and her thigh shall rot.”
³⁸

Above all, the daily rituals of blood sacrifice to the God of Israel that are described in such exacting detail in the Torah were very nearly identical to the ones practiced in honor of the gods and goddesses of paganism. Monotheists, like polytheists, favored the offering of animals that were good to eat—oxen, sheep and goats—and the offerings were an important source of sustenance for the men who served in the priestly castes. And the sacrifices carried out by the priests of Yahweh were, if anything, even more frequent and far bloodier than the ones conducted by their pagan counterparts: “Then shalt thou kill the ram,” goes one of the passages in the Book of Exodus, describing the duties of the very first high priest of Yahweh, “and take of its blood, and put it upon the tip of the right ear of Aaron, and upon the tip of the right ear of his sons, and upon the thumb of their right hand, and upon the great toe of their right foot, and dash the blood against the altar round about.”
³⁹

The irony was not lost on Julian, the most civilized of pagans and one who delights in taunting the rigorists of monotheism in his own writings: “The Jews agree with the Gentiles except for the fact that they believe in one God,” Julian points out in a tract titled
Against the Galilean
. “We have all else in common—temples, sacred precincts, altars for sacrifice, and purifications, in all of which we differ not at all from one another.”
⁴⁰

Spiritual Overinsurance

The attitude that Julian displays here, so characteristic of the core value of polytheism, was quite as obnoxious and off-putting to the true believers of monotheism as the supposed sins of harlotry, sorcery, idolatry and human sacrifice. Paganism, as we have noted, was “a spongy mass of tolerance and tradition,”
⁴¹
according to historian Ramsay MacMullen, a phantasmagoric collection of gods and goddesses, rituals and beliefs, art and iconography, and nothing was alien to it except the very notion of apostasy: “Everyone was free to choose his own credo,” explains MacMullen. “[A]nyone who wished could consult a priest, or ignore a priest, about how best to appeal to the divine.”
⁴²

Thus, for example, a pagan might be a devotee of the stately old gods of Rome and Greece whom Homer calls “the Olympians”—Apollo and Zeus, Aphrodite and Athena—and, at the very same time, a worshipper of the Syrian goddess known as the Great Mother, the Persian god called Mithra or the newfangled cult that conjoined the Egyptian goddess Isis and a freshly minted god called Serapis, a conflation of two older Egyptian deities. One famous pagan called Praetextatus, a contemporary of both Constantine and Julian, is described on his epitaph as a proud collector of pagan priesthoods and initiations of all kinds: “high priest of Vesta, high priest of the sun, a priest of Hercules, an initiate of the mysteries of Dionysos and Eleusis, priest and temple guardian in the mystery of Cybele, and Father in the mystery of Mithras.”
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It says as much about paganism as about Praetextatus that he used to joke with the pope that “he might be tempted to become a Christian by the prospect of being Bishop of Rome.”
⁴⁴

So welcoming was polytheism that even the holiest figures of monotheism were recruited into Greco-Roman paganism. One emperor, who could readily hold in his mind the thought of a supreme god and a whole gang of lesser gods, all living in peaceful coexistence with one another, adorned his private chapel with “statues of Abraham, of Orpheus, of Apollonius, and of Christ,” writes Edward Gibbon of Alexander Severus (208-235), “as an honour justly due to those respectable sages who had instructed mankind in the various modes of addressing their homage to the supreme and universal deity.”
⁴⁵

Even Yahweh, regarded by the strict monotheists who wrote the Bible as the one and only god, was made over into the deity called Iao and given a place among the many gods and goddesses of paganism. The Romans who sought the blessings of the God of Israel meant only to pay their respects to yet another deity whom they had encountered among the colorful and diverse peoples they ruled. Isis of the Egyptians, the Great Mother of Syria, and Yahweh of the Jews were all regarded with both curiosity and a certain measure of awe and fear, and they wanted to make sure that they did not forfeit the blessing of the
right
god by making sure to worship to
all
gods—a practice that the historian Robin Lane Fox describes as “spiritual over-insurance.”
⁴⁶

An intriguing example of spiritual overinsurance at work in the pagan world can be teased out of a passage in the Christian Bible, where we are given an account of Paul’s mission to Athens, the seat of classical paganism. “As I passed by, and beheld your devotions,” Paul says of the pagan worship that he witnessed, “I found an altar with this inscription:
To the Unknown God
.” Paul believes that the poor benighted pagans are unwittingly offering worship to the Only True God, even though they are ignorant of his identity—and he proceeds to reveal it to them: “The unknown God is the one I proclaim to you,” declares Paul. “Since the God who made the world and everything in it is himself Lord of heaven and earth, he does not make his home in shrines made by human hands.”
⁴⁷

No pagan altar has been found with the inscription that Paul describes, but there is an abundance of archaeological evidence for an ever-so-slightly different inscription: “
To the Unknown Gods
.” The inscription that Paul saw in Athens probably referred to “gods” in the plural, thus attesting to the anxiety that prompted the pagans to offer worship not only to the hundreds of gods and goddesses whose names they knew but also to deities who were unknown to them. A sacrifice offered at an altar dedicated to the “unknown gods,” as historian Hans-Josef Klauck points out, is like a letter addressed “To whom it may concern.”
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“Whilst all nations and kingdoms honor their respective gods, the Romans respect the gods of all the others, just as their power and authority have reached the compass of the whole world,” boasts the pagan orator Caecilius. “They search out everywhere these foreign gods, and adopt them for their own; nay, they have even erected altars to the
unknown
gods.”
⁴⁹

But the open-mindedness of the pagan world was regarded by those who worshipped Yahweh as the True God as its very worst sin. It is exactly what Ezekiel means when he likens Israel to a promiscuous woman who “poured out your harlotries on everyone that passed by,” and it is what prompted the author of the Book of Revelation to characterize Babylon—a code word for Rome—as “the mother of harlots and the abominations of the earth.
⁵⁰
By a bitter irony, it was the open-minded and easygoing attitude of paganism that roused the rigorists in both Judaism and Christianity to their hottest and ugliest expressions of true belief.

CHAPTER THREE

TERROR AND TRUE BELIEF

The Jewish King Who Reinvented the Faith of Ancient Israel

Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

—1 Samuel 15:3

At certain sublime moments in the Bible, the spirit of toleration that was the core value of paganism is celebrated by some of the kinder, gentler biblical authors. The Israelites are commanded by God not only to respect and protect the “stranger”—a word that refers to anyone who does not belong to the Chosen People—but to love him, too. “The stranger who settles with you in your land shall be treated as the native-born among you,” says Moses in the Book of Leviticus, uttering the very first biblical expression of the “golden rule” that was later embraced by Jesus of Nazareth. “You shall love him as a man like yourself because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
¹

Here we find the deeply empathetic teaching that prompts us to characterize Judaism, Christianity and Islam as “ethical monotheism.” Over the centuries and millennia that have passed since these words were first recorded in the Bible, all three of the great monotheisms have struggled to put them into practice. And the majority of Jews, Christians and Muslims in the modern world embrace the values of respect, toleration and compassion that can be found in their sacred texts. Rigorism and all that it implies—fundamentalism, fanaticism and religious terrorism—are found only on the ragged fringes of all three faiths.

Still, the worst excesses of monotheism are also plainly and sometimes even proudly recorded in the Bible. Some of the biblical authors adopt a punishing attitude toward the stranger, including all of the peoples of Canaan except the Israelites, and all gods and goddesses whom they worship. And some passages seem to pronounce a death sentence on any man, woman or child who dares to follow any deity other than Yahweh. The most heated and hateful passages of the prophetic writings can be explained away as rhetorical and metaphorical excess, of course, but the equally bloodthirsty accounts that we find in Exodus and Numbers and Deuteronomy, Joshua and Samuel and Kings, are presented as works of history.

If we read the Bible literally, as the rigorists ask us to do, some of the earliest accounts of monotheism depict what is today called genocide, and it is a genocide carried out in the name of the Only True God.

Fear and Dread

“By war, and by a mighty hand, and by an outstretched arm, and by great terrors” is how Yahweh promises to bring the Israelites out of Egypt and into the land of Canaan. “This day will I begin to put the dread of you and the fear of you upon the peoples that are under the whole heaven, who, when they hear report of you, shall tremble and be in anguish.”
²

The military operations of the army of Israel that crosses the frontier of Canaan, as described in the Bible, can be understood as a war of conquest. God is shown to charge the Israelites with the task of defeating the native-dwelling peoples and establishing their own sovereignty by force of arms, and he points out that he is bestowing upon the Israelites not an empty wilderness but “great and goodly cities, which you did not build, and houses full of good things, which you did not fill, and vineyards and olive-trees, which you did not plant.”
³

The war of conquest is also explicitly described as a war of extermination. “You shall save nothing alive,” God commands the Israelites, “but you shall utterly destroy them.”
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And the Israelites take of God at his word: “And we utterly destroyed every city, the men, and the women, and the little ones,” says Moses in the account of one campaign as recorded in the Book of Deuteronomy. “We left none remaining.”
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Above all, the war of conquest and extermination is justified as a war on paganism. “You shall tear down their altars, smash their images, and cut down their Asherim”—that is, the upright posts or living trees by which the Canaanite goddess Asherah was worshipped.
⁶
Crucially, all of the acts of violence carried out by the Israelites are attributed to the God himself. Among the many titles and honorifics used to describe the God of Israel is
Elohim Yahweh Sabaoth
, which is usually translated as “Lord of Hosts” but also means “Yahweh, the God of Armies.”
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Although the soldiers of Israel will actually wield the weapons of war, they are encouraged to regard themselves as the instrument of the divine will: “The Lord your God,” declares Moses, “it is he that fights for you.”
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Priests and prophets, kings and commoners, are shown to carry out the will of God with the same bloodthirsty zeal against both the pagans and the Israelites who find the pagan gods so alluring. On the long march from Egypt to Canaan, for example, a man called Phinehas discovers that an Israelite prince named Zimri has taken a Midianite woman as a lover—and he is inspired to kill both the prince and his lover with a single spear thrust, a feat that suggests they were engaging in an act of love, belly to belly, at the moment of their death.
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The Bible reports that God is well pleased by his act of zeal: “Phinehas turned my wrath away from the children of Israel,” God is made to say, “in that he was zealous for my sake, so that I consumed not the children of Israel in my jealousy.”
¹⁰

The same zeal moves Moses to send an army of 12,000 soldiers to punish the Midianites
en masse
for a similar sin on an even greater scale—the women of Midian have lured the men of Israel into their shrines
and
their beds. When the army returns in victory, the commander reports to Moses that every man among the Midianites has been slain, and their women and children taken as prizes of war. Moses, however, is angered by the very sight of the captives: “Have ye saved all the women alive?” he demands. Then he orders that all of the women and male children be put to the sword, too, sparing only the virgin girls and condemning them to a lifetime of slavery.
¹¹

Not only does God sanction such acts of violence, according to the sternest biblical sources, but he is moved to wrath whenever his worshippers do not carry out his commands with sufficient promptness, precision and ruthlessness. King Saul, for example, is ordered by God to “go and smite Amalek,” an ancient tribal enemy of Israel, and the Book of Samuel confirms that he “utterly destroyed all of the people with the edge of the sword”—but Saul, in a moment of
noblesse oblige
, takes it upon himself to spare the enemy king. To punish him for his lack of zeal, God withdraws his favor from Saul and drives him to despair and even madness by refusing to grant him any further oracles. God orders the prophet Samuel to anoint a new ruler of Israel—David, the warrior-king, whom the Bible approvingly describes as both “a man after [God’s] own heart” and “a man of blood.”
¹²

“Defiance of God is as sinful as witchcraft, and stubbornness as evil as idolatry,” Samuel scolds Saul, characterizing his decision to spare a single human life as an act of apostasy because God had decreed the death of
all
the Amalekites, man, woman and child. “Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you.”
¹³

Thus does the Bible provides both the vocabulary and the theological rationale of a new kind of rigorism. Yahweh is a jealous and wrathful god—he is moved to a murderous rage when any other god or goddess is worshipped, whether in place of him or merely in addition to him. Of his own worshippers, he demands not merely faith but zeal—he is not satisfied with good intentions and an earnest effort. Anything less than abject submission to the divine will is as sinful as sorcery and idolatry. And what is God’s will? It is to punish “with the edge of the sword,” sometimes wielded by a single zealous man and sometimes by a whole army, anyone and everyone who refuses to worship him as the Only True God.

We have a phrase to describe the kind of war that is fought according to these rules of engagement: it is the blight on human history called holy war, and it begins here.

The Man Who Invented Biblical Israel

Whether the wars of conquest and extermination that are described in such gruesome detail in the Bible actually took place is a matter of debate. According to modern biblical scholarship, the Israelites may not have conquered the land of Canaan at all—rather, they may have migrated to Canaan gradually and peacefully, or they may have been there all along. If so, what we are invited to regard as the very first holy war in recorded history is wholly mythical, a work of imagination by one or more of the biblical authors who sought to inspire and motivate the worshippers of the True God.

Indeed, the whole point of such mythmaking would have been to strengthen the idea of “chosenness,” to physically separate the Yahweh worshippers from everyone else in the land of Canaan, and to discourage the Chosen People from indulging in the pagan rituals of their friends and neighbors. The most bloodthirsty passages of the Bible, according to the consensus of modern scholarship, can be seen as the handiwork of a faction of fundamentalists that emerged in the seventh century B.C.E. and carried out a bloody purge of Judaism as it was then practiced. If so, they can be understood to have picked up the flag of monotheism where Akhenaton dropped it and to have passed it along to the generations that followed them, all the way down to Roman emperors who achieved the final victory in the war of God against the gods.

The crucial figure in the making of Jewish monotheism, according to the revisionists in Bible scholarship, is the king called Josiah (c. 648-609 B.C.E.), a sixteenth-generation descendant of David, the greatest of all the biblical kings. No less than Akhenaton, Josiah was a visionary and a revolutionary who resolved to repudiate the oldest traditions of the land that he ruled and impose a new set of rituals and beliefs on his subjects. And Josiah was remarkably successful in doing so. According to the latest theories of biblical authorship, the Bible as we know it and the faith of ancient Israel as it is described there were the result of the crusade of religious reform that King Josiah carried out.

Before the reign of Josiah, we are invited to imagine, the majority of ancient Israelites mixed and matched their religious beliefs and practices, just like the pagans among whom they lived, and strict monotheists represented only a tiny minority of the Chosen People. But Josiah rejected the easygoing ways of his fellow Israelites and devoted himself to the worship of Yahweh as the Only True God. He allied himself with the most rigorous of the priests who served at the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, and he granted them a measure of power and privilege that they had never before enjoyed.

The tale is told in the Bible itself. Josiah is only eight years old when his father is assassinated, the victim of a conspiracy among his own courtiers, and he ascends the throne as king.
¹⁴
Presumably, the boy king rules under the regency of his mother, Jedidah, but the spark of true belief is already burning within him by the age of sixteen, when he wakes up to the spiritual failings of his fellow Israelites and “began to seek after the God of David.” At the age of twenty, he commences the first of a series of purges: “He began to purge Judah and Jerusalem from the high places, and the Asherim, and the graven images, and the molten images.”
¹⁵
Later, at twenty-six, he piously resolves to refurbish the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, and he sends carpenters and stonemasons into the ancient shrine to make repairs. At that moment, according to the Bible, Josiah is granted a revelation from on high.

“A Pious Fraud”

The high priest reports to the young king that something remarkable has been discovered in the Temple—a long lost scroll of the Torah. When Josiah opens the scroll, he is so alarmed at what he finds there that he rips his own garments in a gesture of grief and terror. The scroll, as it turns out, includes a set of laws that do not appear in the other four books of the Torah, the only ones known to the Israelites until the discovery of the lost scroll. If the missing fifth book of the Torah is authentic, Josiah realizes, the Israelites have been unwittingly breaking the sacred law of Yahweh for several hundred years.

What are the laws that came as such a shock to Josiah? Most of the text of the lost scroll simply restates the laws that appear in the earlier books of the Torah, including all of the commandments against “that which is evil in the sight of the Lord”—that is, the practices that the Israelites have borrowed from their pagan neighbors. But one point of law is wholly new—the scroll declares that God will accept sacrifice from only a single site in all of ancient Israel, the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Elsewhere in the Bible, of course, it is reported without comment or criticism that altars have been erected and sacrifices have been offered to Yahweh at sites all over the land, ever since the God of Israel first revealed himself to Abraham. But now the Israelites discover that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses and Joshua, Saul and David, among many others, were defying the sacred law of God when they did so.

Josiah sends the scroll to a prophetess called Huldah for authentification—one of the few instances in the Bible in which a woman is afforded a decisive role in the spiritual life of ancient Israel. The prophetess declares the scroll to be genuine, and so the young king resolves to strictly enforce the new set of laws by, among other things, suppressing the offering of sacrifices to Yahweh at any site except Jerusalem, which happens to be the capital city of his kingdom. Indeed, as it turns out, the newly discovered scroll is perfectly consistent with Josiah’s own understanding of what God wants of the Israelites. It is precisely this coincidence that prompted one nineteenth-century Bible scholar to call the lost scroll—which scholars believe to have been most or all of what we know today as the Book of Deuteronomy—“a pious fraud.”
¹⁶
Fraud or not, however, the scroll allows Josiah to claim that he is acting on specific instructions from God in escalating and expanding the purge that he has been carrying out with such zeal.