Episode 318: Mark S. Smith – The Many Gods of Israel

Pete: You’re listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I’m Pete Enns. 

Jared: And I’m Jared Byas

On today’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, we’re talking about the many Gods of Israel with Mark S. Smith. 

Pete: Mark is a professor of Old Testament and exegesis at Princeton Theological Seminary, and he has authored or co-authored more than 20 books and monographs on Ancient Israel and major themes of the Hebrew Bible and we’re gonna see some of those books today.

Jared: Very interesting. So let’s jump into the episode. 

Mark: We want our monotheism pristine, and from day one. For all the challenges or difficulties that are posed by, uh, all this kind of information. And it seems like we’re totally reconstructing everything, which in a way we are. Once you start to realize what’s there, it’s not as foreign to the Bible itself as one might think.

Pete: Mark, welcome to the podcast. It’s good to have you. 

Mark: Thank you. 

Jared: Absolutely. So, but we’re gonna jump right in. When you say Israel had a polytheistic background, that might be new for some people to hear. So what do you mean by that and what, what kind of concrete evidence would you point people to? 

Mark: So by Israel’s polytheistic background, I’m referring to early or older evidence in the Bible for multiple deities, multiple gods and goddesses.

And I find in some older texts references to these deities. And I compare the evidence in these older texts in combination with the names of the same deities as known in texts outside of the Bible. For example, in Hebrew inscriptions or inscriptions from Israel’s immediate neighbors, uh, as well as the larger background furnished by the Ugaritic texts, which are late Bronze age texts from, uh, the region.

So those, that’s my sort of sense of background. Background is kind of a catchall term for this body of evidence, which has been recognized in, you know, piecemeal fashion, but it strikes me that it all adds up to a bigger picture. 

Pete: You know, Mark, you, you just mentioned something interesting and just to bring some clarity for our listeners, you mentioned older texts.

Mark: Sure. 

Pete: And people might look, well, Genesis is the first one. And Exodus, you don’t mean that, you mean something very different, right? 

Mark: Yeah, I do. I do mean something, although I’m not, I’m not by any means tossing out the importance of some information in Genesis. So when biblical scholars try to put dates on biblical texts, they’re not, it’s not in the order in which the Bible appears.

It’s according to criteria within the text, uh, that suggests their relative antiquity, and biblical scholars who’ve worked on this now for, well, I would say actually a century, but it’s most prominently known from, from the work of, uh, people like William Foxwell Albright and his students, Frank Cross and David Noel Friedman and their students.

And what they observed was a group of poems which display older grammatical forms that are not part of standard biblical Hebrew. And they, that those features of grammar have been called archaic biblical Hebrew, as opposed to the more standard biblical Hebrew of what we see in most of the prose that say runs from Genesis through Kings.

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: So in those older poems, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna tell you what they are, or at least some of them. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: Uh, they have older grammatical features, but they also have older cultural features. So these old poems seem to fit a profile of pre monarchic times. And even if I can’t date each of these poems back to pre monarchic times, I think the, certainly the roots of their language, their imagery, their worldview is coming outta this older background.

So those poems are poems like Genesis 49, Exodus 15, this is the song at the Sea. Um, you also have, um, let’s see, Numbers 23, 24 have four poems about the, about the seer, the foreign seer named Balaam. And those are thought to be older poems. You have, some scholars would say Deuteronomy 32 and 33 are pretty old.

Those poems, uh, the Song of Hannah in 1 Samuel chapter, is it 2? Yeah. I think the Lament of David over Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1 verses I think 19 to 27. Then finally, uh, 2 Samuel 22. I would also mention that 2 Samuel 22 has a direct parallel, almost a verbatim parallel in Psalm 18.

And so I wanna, when I look at the background of deities, I look to these poems first. And I also will look at, I will look at other evidence within the Bible that may date it later, but it sort of shows that the tradition is there. I’m not just making it up. And I also look at inscription sources, and I, for further background, I look at the Ugaritic texts, which have a lot more information.

Jared: Mm-hmm. So to kind of maybe oversimplify and then let you, um, under simplify or make more complex if, if someone said, so are you telling me ancient Israelites believed other gods were real? What would you say if you weren’t allowed to say yes or no, but you had to kind of give us a complex answer to that?

What, what’s your, not that you wouldn’t anyway, ’cause you’re a scholar, that’s what you do, but go for it. 

Mark: So, um, the first thing is that the fact that the Bible criticizes so many people for worshiping other gods suggests that those people believed in other gods. And in fact, it’s so ubiquitous in the Bible that it almost suggests to some biblical scholars that in fact, most Israelites, through the history of ancient Israel for at least quite a while, did believe that there were multiple gods out there.

So that I think is the strongest or even loudest indication that many, if not most Israelites did believe other gods were real. It. I’m not saying that they all worship them all the time, that’s more complicated. But I think, I think, uh, these passages, which are, I mean, they’re all over the place. In the prophets, the Book of Deuteronomy, and so on various historical books.

It suggests that a lot of people did believe in these other guys. Why does Elijah have to go to Mount Carmel and have this dispute with the prophets of Baal and Asherah? Because people seem to have believed it. Mm-hmm. The second reason is that we have passages in the Bible, which actually at least raise the issue of credence in other gods.

My own favorite comes from the story, Jeptha is negotiating with, uh, the king seems to be the king of Amon. This is an interesting problem. And he says to the effect, uh, you know, my God gave our people what to inherit just as your, your God Kamosh gave you. So it suggests that, at least in his negotiations, that this is a grounds for communication where divinity is in a sense acknowledged in a cross-cultural manner.

Um, a third uh, indicator to my mind is that the name of El appears cross-culturally in a general sense for we translate always as God. But the sense is that El is a figure who’s known in both the Bible and in extrabiblical texts as a figure in other regions that are not part of the Bible or part of Ancient Israel.

Pete: And Mark, that’s E-L, right?

Mark: Yeah. 

Pete: People might think beer. It’s not A-L-E.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. Well, although I like beer, it’s true. This is not that kind of ale, um. So El, um, they seem to recognize in a, in a whole number of passages that that El is not only in Ugaritic, it’s also in the Bible, sometimes identified with the God of Israel and sometimes not.

Mm-hmm. But also in, uh, the inscription from the trans-Jordan, non-Israelite, um, and a number of other peoples around Israel. So El seems to be a common term or common deity name shared. And that seems to be to my mind, go ahead. 

Jared: Maybe to, to, for, for the common folk, like around Christmas you would sing Emmanuel.

Right? It is El with us. That’s the, the suffix there is referring, it’s, it’s those letters there. And what I hear you saying is sometimes that name is referring to the God of Israel. But it’s a little more complicated than that because sometimes it’s referring to maybe a different deity. 

Mark: Yeah. Well, or it refers just generically to God.

And or just used as a title for Yahweh. I think Emmanuel is really just a title for Yahweh at that point in time. But let me use a different example where I really do think it is Eland that’s the name of Israel. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: So proper names both of, of, uh, persons and others. Israel is also used as a proper name for Jacob, um, that the name, personal names contain divine elements commonly in biblical Hebrew.

So we have the name of Nathan, he gave, this is the prophet Nathan, but we also have Jonathan in English, which is the short form of the divine name of Yah. Yahweh has given. So these names, the show and attest to different deities. Now, Israel, normally when you have a name that has a deity element in it, a divine element in it, a God or goddess name in it, it is the subject of the sentence.

And it’s usually not a generic word, a generic El. Normally. so many scholars will argue that the original God of Israel is reflected in the name of Yisra-el. Not Yra, not Yra, Yahoo or Yra, Yahweh. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: So that’s, that’s even for me, uh, um, a good example. Um, it is, it is tricky with the name of or the word El, because sometimes it seems to be a generic for God.

With a small g, sometimes it seems to be capital G being used in reference to Yahweh, and sometimes it seems to be, um, that is to say Yahweh is taken over this name over the course of time. We’ll talk about that later. 

Jared: Yeah. 

Mark: But then sometimes it does seem to be El as the proper name of a deity who’s not necessarily identified with Yahweh.

And I could give more examples if you want, also from the old poetry? 

Pete: Yeah. Just, I mean, this, this is striking, uh, memory here. The, um, the antiquity of Israel goes to extra biblical sources, namely the Merneptah Stele, the Egyptian Stele. This is late 13th century.

You already have it there and that, I mean that’s, it’s, it’s, it’s sometimes that’s, it’s overblown the significance of that. But it’s-

Jared: Everything you just say, can you restate for normal people? 

Pete: Um, there, there is an, an inscription, a late 13th century inscription, an Egyptian one called the Merneptah Stele.

And Merneptah was a, a Pharaoh. And um, it recounts battles that he had. And Israel is mentioned as one of these people groups that’s defeated, um, which the Bible knows nothing of that has no memory of the Egyptians buddies anyway. But Israel is mentioned and the question is, well, what is that referring to exactly?

And, and, and that’s, that’s, that’s a scholarly question, but it’s interesting and it has that Israel, the name, it, it goes back maybe earlier. To these, to those oldest texts that you’re referring to before, whether it’s Exodus or Genesis 49, et cetera. 

Mark: And I have another data piece of information that goes with the reference to Israel in the Merneptah Steles. Most scholars don’t remember to add that Ugaritic actually attests to this name also. 

Pete: Really? Okay. That’s- 

Mark: Now what to make of it.], ’cause it’s simply a personal, somebody’s personal name. We don’t have any context for it, but it looks, it looks real.

Pete: Could you give us a tweet length explanation of Ugaritic?

Mark: Oh, sure. 

Pete: Yeah. 

Mark: Great. Great question because I keep talking about Ugaritic. Ugaritic texts, uh, were discovered first in 1920. Well, really gets started in 1929, the site of Ugar and this ancient kingdom was really first come across, uh, comes across, uh, in 1928.

It’s like the Dead Sea Scrolls, founding story of plow, of farmers out in his field. And he’s plowing and he turns up this stuff and it turns out to be an ancient site. It’s across the street, so to speak, from Ugarit, where they figured out that that big hill across the street might be worth looking at. So they start across the street and they discover there hundreds, and then later thousands of tablets in eight different languages.

Pete: So we’re in the 14th century. 

Mark: Well, we’re going down, we’re, we, we’re going down from the 14th century down to the beginning of the 12th century. It’s older than the 14th century, but our, our best attested material, most attested amounts of tablets and so on are really coming from the 13th and 12th centuries.

Pete: Well, it’s, it’s just helpful to know how far back that word El goes and, and- 

Mark: Well, it, it’s very old because we don’t have it just in eury sources. We seem to have it in earlier sources. Some are positing it, even for Ebal, for example. So we’re going back another, almost another millennium perhaps.

We also have, um, we have some information. Admittedly it’s sketchy, but there seems to be some indication of El in what, in proper names, in a language that is sometimes called amorite, uh, which is really, um, it’s like Ugaritic and like Hebrew belongs to this subgroup of the Semitic languages. But it’s written in the cuneiform that we know from Mesopotamia.

And it’s, and, and we have thousands of personal names. Um, I mean, a whole phone book of these names was published by a scholar named Ignace Gelb of the University of Chicago. Um, and El seems to be a fairly prominent name. I, some people debate the evidence. Sometimes they wanna say no, it just refers to god with a small g.

But this is difficult. I mean, scholars are dealing with difficult materials, but people do think that El is an old name, an old Semitic God, uh, just as they think Baal is an old Semitic God and is also attested at Ebla. So we’ve got, we’ve got sources. We really have a lot of sources already from the end of the third millennium, right down through the turn of the era in later Greco-Roman sources.

We have information about these gods in, uh, sources that were translated into Greek, for example.

Jared: We talked about El backwards, maybe we can go forwards and talk about this move toward monotheism and, and how, you know, we, we started with Israel, had a polytheistic background, but at some point we moved to monotheism. So can you describe that movement and are there certain points that we can look at and say, well, this seemed to be a shift?

This seemed to be a shift that we can kind of see throughout the biblical text. 

Mark: So the end point as, as people want to talk about this from the point of view of biblical scholars is where they see clear monotheistic statements. Where they are very explicit, where they use negatives such as there there is no such gods, or they say they refer to God alone, they also might refer to, um, um, I like Psalm 82, verse 7, and the outcome of a poly, it’s almost dramatizing the shift from polytheism to monotheism where they say at the end that these gods shall die.

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: And death of gods, at least in the Hebrew Bible world, really means they don’t really have reality. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: Um, so these clear monotheistic statements, they bundle up in Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, we get some in the Deuteronomistic history for Samuel 2:21, 2 Kings 19, 15 and 19. A handful of Psalms.

And also what’s called second Isaiah. And second Isaiah is, is the label that biblical scholars use for Isaiah’s chapters 40 to 55, which they date sometime after the reign of the King Cyrus of the Persians. And they date second Isaiah after Cyrus, because Cyrus is actually mentioned twice in second Isaiah in Isaiah 44:28, and 45:1, so this so-called second Isaiah has a number of these statements about that other, there really are no other gods or these gods are nothings in this, this sort of language.

And these seem to be clear statements. Now some people will sometimes tell me, oh no, already the 10 Commandments is monotheistic, right? 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: Well. It is a small problem. The text, the text doesn’t say you, there are no other gods. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: It doesn’t even say you shall have no other gods. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: And the expression there is Elohim acherim, but it says you shall have no other gods, al panai.

Now some people tried to make al panai into one of these negatives as if, um, it’s monotheistic. But al panai literally means at my face, and face commonly refers to the divine presence. And I think a lot of scholars would now say that that commandment means you shouldn’t worship other gods at, at my place, in my cultic presence.

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: And it does come later on, I think, to take on and, and later. Maybe in later biblical texts or in later early Jewish reception, the sense that it is a monotheistic statement. But I don’t think most biblical scholars would say it’s a monotheistic statement in itself. So let me back up to that, because that’s one of the points.

Uh, we use the word movement. I’m very nervous about teleological language for monotheism because people, they, they either view monotheism as the original view of the Bible, which I think is deeply problematic for various reasons. There aren’t old texts that have the negative formulations, that there are no other gods.

They all come from, I’d say probably from the sixth century or later, which is pretty late in the day. I mean, the fall of Jerusalem is in the sixth century in 586. So you’re talking about relatively late, Jeremiah, second Isaiah, Deuteronomy, chapter 4, um, et cetera. So if I’m backing up, I’d probably, I’d probably begin with, I, I mean, I actually think that in early Israel you had a situation of multiple deities and it, and we, if we look to the Bible to see how it’s starting to get sorted out, we see some points which people might want to connect, connect the dots, so to speak, toward a movement.

But these are markers and here’s a couple. First, I’d suggest that in early Israel, as in other places, you had one main God with other gods and goddesses around. And one place where you see this in an early poem is in Psalm 29, and Psalm 29 addresses, the other gods says, ascribe to Yahweh. Oh, divine sons, or sons of God, possibly even, oh, sons of El.

It’s not so clear the expression in Hebrews bene elim, it looks like it, it’s pointed. It’s spelled as a plural, but some scholars think it goes back to the same expression, sons of El that we also see in Ugaritic for the gods and goddesses. So we seem to then have, I, I think it’s possible in, in some places in, in early Israel, even before the monarchy, you had sites where Yahweh would’ve been the main deity, but not the only deity floating around.

And you see that also in personal names. Saul has a son who’s in Chronicles. He is actually called Eshbaal. But the writer of Samuel didn’t like that, so he calls him Ishbosheth. Changes the baal to bosheth. Bosheth means shame. It’s like saying shame on you for having a Baal name. Right. So already early on, we do have these signs that, you know, perhaps in some places Baal had had a shrine.

I mean, this is what you get in the Gideon story in the book of Judges. And, um, but other places where you may have Yahweh as the main God, again with other deities possibly around. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: Um, I, I suspect that one of the things that’s next important to mention is the rise of the monarchy. And with the rise of the monarchy comes what we might call, um, a group of deities.

They’re sometimes called national gods. That is, we, we even have it reflected in the Bible, a recognition that Kemosh was the national God of Moab. And, um, milk is the national God of the Ammonites, and Yahweh is considered the National God of Israel and Judah. So this, you could still have other gods around, but becoming the national God is like, becomes more explicitly the divine king and becoming the divine king, you know, is a model that is elevating one God above other gods and goddesses.

Pete: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: So I think that that’s an important piece of our puzzle. 

Pete: It’s, it’s movement toward monotheism you’re saying. Right. 

Mark: You could argue, you could view it this way, it’s, it, it certainly becomes part of the ingredients of who Yahweh is. I would, I would just, I would just sort of caution that this is accumulation.

Jared: Right.

Mark: It isn’t like we swap one out when we get the next thing. I, I’m very. Reluctant to think in terms of stages. 

Jared: Right. 

Mark: Um, I, I, I know I’ve used that language in the past though, probably not in the last two decades. 

Jared: And are you saying that the monarchy then impacted that, uh, evolution in some way?

Mark: Well, certainly, and certainly it reinforces the idea of one God, not only with other gods, but above them. 

Jared: Yeah. Right, right. Mm-hmm. 

Mark: And even the end of Psalm 29 uses the royal language, uh, may Yahweh be enthroned over the, over the flood and so on. The language of enthronement is royal language. So it’s already there in, in sort of, I mean, Psalm 29, I admit, maybe I would date to the 10th century.

It could be older. It’s hard to know exactly, but it would dovetail with the origins of the monarchy. Um, now the next data point is hard because there has to have been other stuff that happened in between the rise of the national gods in different places. And what I think is a super important impactful, uh, notion, which you’re getting closer to monotheism, um, and what I’m gonna call it is, so, so far I’ve talked about a main God with other gods floating around in sort of early Israel, maybe even down into the monarchy.

This seems to be what is being criticized and then movement toward the national God. But, but perhaps an important later moment comes with the idea of an empire God, and the empire God comes into the world of the Bible through the Assyrian invasions from Mesopotamia into, um, ancient Israel, it’s already in the eighth century, actually.

It’s moving toward the west already in the ninth century, but it’s coming more impactfully in the eighth century. Well, the, the biggest invasion, Sennacherib in 701, I always say, I always say that the exile begins in 701. 

Because according to Sennacherib’s inscriptions, he took over 200,000 people into exile, into captivity.

So if captivity is people, and even if half of that number is bloated, that’s a lot of people. It’s far more the numbers you get from Kings and Jeremiah for the, the, the so-called, um, uh, exiles taken by Babylonian Kings. This is on an order of magnitude of eight times more than what you see in Kings and Jeremiah.

Pete: Hmm. Yeah. 

Mark: So I think of exile in a sense as at least if it’s people already starting in 701, and part of what we see with Sennacherib and some of his other kings of Assyria is the notion not of national gods, but that have relative parody. Remember I, I mentioned that verse from Judges 11:24, Jeptha, that says, doesn’t your God Kemosh do for you what our God, Yahweh, does for us?

This basic idea, this seems to be supplanted in Mesopotamia, at least by the idea of an empire God where the other gods. In fact, the other gods are not very important. You just have one overall. So in, in, in Assyria, we could say that this is the God Ashur. Um, Ishtar, of course, herself plays a very important role later.

Under the Babylonians, this empire God is gonna be Marduk. And many scholars argue that the God of Israel in eighth, seventh, perhaps sixth century, is in a sense being reconceived as an empire God, not just that is a universal God, a God overall, um, as a way in the sense of resisting Assyrian and Babylonian empire.

Now, this is a hypothesis. 

I, I admit it. It’s a hypothesis that I find appealing, in part because we seem to have reflexes of Assyrian rhetoric in a number of biblical books from this period in the Book of Deuteronomy, in the book of Isaiah. And it seems to me that if there, and we also have Acadian loanwords in these texts at this time. 

So Acadian is making an impact. It isn’t just ideas which you say, well that’s kind of loosey goosey. How do you know you really have that impact? Acadian loanwords help to show up what that impact looks like. And some of the, some of the terms that are loaned are actually political terms for leaders.

So, um, there’s a lot of, uh, Assyrian Babylonian impact and I think that there’s an argument, at least a serious proposal to consider the impact of the empire god or goddess of the Neo-Assyrians. The Assyrians and Babylonians in this period where I see it popping up, um, are, so that’s like an external factor perhaps.

There’s a correlate, a, a corresponding internal factor I think, uh, that’s specific to Israelite culture that works in tandem with this external feature. That is we see in, again, this is all this, this is rather, this part is rather hypothetical, but one of the things we see is the notion in Deuteronomy, in Ezekiel, uh, the idea that individuals should be responsible for themselves.

That is that in older text we might say that Ezekiel will say that parents have eaten the sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge. That is, they bear, they bear the, the, as it were, the sins of the parents because social identity was as much, if not more before this time as shaped by ‘family is the notion of oneness.’

So this, this is little footnote department. I actually think that the Divine Family, El, Baal, Ashera, Anat , all these deities who are known at Ugarit. They’re called the family of the gods and goddesses, that family was the basis of their sense of oneness, of divinity. That is, I think Ugarit has a monotheism, but it’s not individual expressed, it’s multiplicity.

Jared: Hmm. 

Mark: And what happens, I think in the sixth century, Deuteronomy, Ezekiel, you’re seeing if, if we can look at this idea that humans, that people are responsible for their own sins, I think it correlates reasonably with the notion of a deity, an individual deity responsible for the state of the cosmos.

That is where deities reign, we might say, or they live, et cetera. And I could also correlate this with the idea that you seem to have it, one expression in the book of Deuteronomy. We might say that the core idea in forming the book of Deuteronomy is the idea of one god, one people, one city, one divine teaching.

Jared: Mm-hmm. Right? 

Mark: And it’s a kind of package of oneness. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: And so my sense is that the sixth century is a pretty, well, eighth to sixth century is a pretty critical moment, and it’s out of that context that the language takes what we might think of as the logical conclusion from that, which is explicit statements that finally say there is no other gods.

Pete: Yeah. Okay. Mark. Um, I, I have to ask you this because I mean, I happen to be teaching, uh, Torah now at, at Eastern, and every time I teach it, this comes up, we read through Genesis chapter 1, let us make humankind our own image, chapter 1. And in chapter 3, it happens again at the end. You know, like he’s become, uh, they’ve become like us, right?

Yeah. So how, how, how do you explain that in this whole matrix of, uh, polytheism or monotheism, what is the ‘us’ referring to? And I’m assuming you don’t think it’s the Trinity because John Calvin didn’t even think that was the Trinity. ‘Cause it would’ve made no sense to people back then, unless you do, but I, I’m pretty sure you don’t.

Mark: Gosh, Pete. Don’t put words in my mouth, man. Um, well first of all, I came into biblical studies through John Calvin, and that’s another, that’s another story. So I have great respect for Calvin, uh, and he had a discerning eye, and I don’t think it’s the trinity. I think we have to remember that what you get at the end of 3 is also not necessarily what you get in chapter 1.

Okay. So most biblical scholars, they like to say that the first creation story, Genesis 1:1 to 2:3, is a priestly text. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: And they’re gonna say that Genesis 2:4 to the end of chapter 3, they often will say either they’re, they’ll assign it an old source criticism to the so-called J Source standing for Ywe because you spell Ywe and German with a J and not a Y.

Or if you’re not a source critic, you’ll still say, you’ll say, well, it’s not priestly. They’ll use the term non priestly narrative or literature in the Pentateuch. Either way, whatever, whatever you think about those discussions. Scholars seem to agree that these texts are not coming, Genesis 1 and Genesis 3 are not coming from the same hand or source. 

Pete: So they might mean different things that, that reference.

Mark: Well, so I think, I think what we have to, we’re dealing with, we have to be careful, we have to parse this out a little bit more carefully. Now, at the end of Genesis, when it says like us, he will become like us if he gets to eat from the tree of life and so on.

Um, I have to admit, I do think of that as kind of low level polytheism. 

Pete: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: Because the ‘us’ is a, because the ‘us’ refers to having superior, uh, having immortality. 

Pete: Yes. 

Mark: Now, immortality is one of, if you’re gonna be a deity, a God, or a goddess in the ancient world, you have to have four or five basic qualifications.

One of them is eternity. Deities are eternal. We, we use the word immortal, but they don’t use the word immortal or cognate to be translate literal, but they use the language of eternity. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: And so when it’s said that, yeah, I guess I do think that this is a, uh, a reflex. It could be a, it could be coming out of this older divine family or divine counsel language ‘like us.’

They use, they use, and that language continues. Um, you know, not only in, at the end of Genesis, even in the Isaiah call story, Isaiah gets his vocation or commission from the deities in the temple. It’s Isaiah chapter 6, and God says, God says, who will go for us? Right? So this language does seem to be, at least at a minimum, it’s a relic of this older polytheistic language or reflex of it.

But they’re not really worrying about how deeply polytheistic it is. 

Pete: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: Now back in chapter 1. 

Pete: Yeah. 

Mark: Made in our image after our likeness. That’s trickier. You’re in the priestly material. 

Pete: Yeah, 

Mark: And I’m, I’m just gonna say it, I think that the priestly material is thoroughly monotheistic. Uh, I also think it also could date to the sixth century, but that’s a different problem.

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: We’re not gonna worry about that today. But the reason, but what I think is going on there is I think it’s possible that the older language of we and us, or our, that may have come out of this sort of polytheistic sort of sensibility, uh, oh, kind of low grade, not necessarily like all the major deities, just general.

I think Genesis 1, is it could be more like the use of the plural of majesty or excellence. 

Pete: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: And it could have been understood by the priestly writer in this term. In this way. 

Pete: Okay. 

Mark: And that way strikes me. 

Pete: Yeah. I mean it just as good that accounts for the relative lateness of the priestly source, where maybe they’re not living with that same complete memory of polytheism that goes back to the 12th century and, and early.

Mark: Right. 

Pete: Alright. 

Mark: Okay. Right. Uh, so I, I, I think that that’s right. 

Pete: Yeah. Okay. 

Mark: I mean, that’s my, remember a lot of what is being said tonight, you know, people say, well, do you have proof of this? Well, biblical scholars hardly ever have proof of things that they’re trying to figure out. What they have is, they have bits of data.

And especially the older you go back, the thinner that data gets and you’re just doing the best to provide really what is a model that is good at explaining and fitting into an explanation that accounts for all these different data points. So one has to be careful. I mean, there’s a huge difference between saying, I’ve got 300 examples of this.

That’s evidence. But a lot of our religion questions are disparate data points that seem to have something to do with each other. How do you explain El-shaddai? What does that mean? You know, we have titles, El titles. Why does God say I am the God of,  I am Yahweh. Um, I’m the God of your father, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but by my name Yahweh didn’t reveal myself.

I revealed myself by the, I appeared as El-Shaddai. So we got all these data points. What do we do with all this stuff? And what you’re really hearing tonight is, you know, my effort to, to build on the best work I’ve seen done by other biblical scholars and historians and, and students of extra biblical literature to put together a, a, a story that fits these, all these disparate data points together.

So I, I immediately concede we need to be, we need to be a little modest and recognize the limits of what we don’t have. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. Right. 

Mark: And I totally, I totally buy that. And, uh, so I don’t want people to think that, you know, I’ve got, I’ve got so much proof for everything I’m saying. Most biblical scholars don’t use the language of proof.

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: Or if they do, they, they use it as an invective, a polemic against other biblical scholars and say they don’t have real proof for that. Well, not too many, not so many things in biblical studies that has to do with the reconstruction of ancient religion have proof.

Jared: Well, within that, I, I wonder, there’s a couple of other things if we can try to maybe quickly cover just because your model for this movement, you used the term convergence and differentiation. Yeah. And you talk about Yahweh absorbing, Yahweh excluding, can you just say what you mean? ’cause I think when you talk about that passage of I’m Yahweh, I didn’t reveal myself, that may be tying in here a little bit.

So can you say more about that? 

Mark: Yeah, I can. So that passage, that’s Exodus, uh, chapter 2, verses 2-3 seems to show on the part of God’s own speech that up to a certain point, nobody knew me by my name, Yahweh, they knew me by the name of El. Kind of interesting. So you see that juxtaposition, which is given a kind of theological explanation in terms of, we might say, and that’s also another priestly passage.

It gives a kind of stages, it’s like the priesthood’s theory of stages of the development in the revelation of Yahweh. That starts early on with El-Shaddai, which is a common title in priestly literature and genesis. Then you get the revelation of the name to Moses in chapter 6 of Exodus, and then you get a fuller revelation of who God is at Mount Sinai.

So they have this idea of stages unfolding, revelation we might say, which Christians should be pretty comfortable with because, uh, Christians think of a pretty significant unfolding of revelation in something they call the New Testament. So this is already something that’s already built into the priestly understanding, their own reconstruction we might say, of Israelite religion.

So what we’re doing is a modern, scholarly version of something that’s already been undertaken within the Bible itself to some extent. And the fact is, is that we know that the priestly writers’ presentation is their interpretation of this history. Because in fact, in non-priestly material, in the Pentateuch, specifically in Genesis, in the last verse of chapter 4, in the non priestly material, they say at that time they used to call on the name, they began to call on the name of Yahweh.

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: So you’ve got two different stories about when the name of Yahweh seems to be around. 

Jared: Yeah. 

Mark: Which I find fascinating. Now, let me go first to convergence and I got the idea of convergence from a footnote of, of Frank Cross. Famous biblical scholar wrote a fantastic book in religion, probably the most influential book in biblical studies in the 1970s called Canaanite Myth in Hebrew Epic on pages, uh, 53, 54.

I explicitly cite this footnote because Cross observed that in Deuteronomy 33, verses 26 to 27, it combines in its description of God, God who, who rides in the heavens, which is the word for riding like a chariot. It’s a title for Yahweh in Psalm 68, I think verse 4, that he rides on the aravot, which is either, it’s ambiguous. It could be over the desert regions or on the clouds. And in etic, the same titles used for Baal as Rider of the Clouds. 

Jared: Mm. 

Mark: So you gotta think of him as riding, that the clouds are like his chariot that he is riding across the sky. Now, Deuteronomy 33 verses 26 to 27, combine in the heavens with the title Elohe Qedem, and Cross took Elohe Qedem, which literally means God of antiquity for old primordial God, ancient God.

And cross thought that this was an El reflex. So within the same passage, you have the combination of a Baal type reflex, the chariot writer, the storm God, he’s the warrior. And then you get, you get the ancient God he thought as an El reflex, El is not a chariot writer. He doesn’t fight in battles in Ugaritic.

Um, he’s an old God. He has got a nice beard. And he’s, he’s the old God in the Pantheon. And he cross took this as a combination of their features. And this was my first thought about the idea of convergence going on between Elfeatures, Baal features with Yahweh in literature that predates the whole monotheistic kind of situation.

And I found other examples, at least what I thought were other examples. And my other main one that I super love is language that I think you have a, you have El in parallelism to Shadi. This is in Genesis. This is the blessing section in Genesis 49, verse 25. So you have El, the word El, God. Parallel to Shaddai, which we have as El-Shaddai is a title and it’s followed. 

And this is of the blessings of El and Shaddai and El is a blessing God in Ugaritic by the way also, but followed by that are the blessings of an unnamed figure. But it’s clearly a her. It’s the blessings of breast and womb. And many scholars will suggest that this is not just, some will say, oh, it’s generic fertility.

I think breasts and womb are pretty particular. And after El-Shaddai, I think it’s another deity. And if I had to guess, I think it’s Asherah. And we know all about Asherah from later passages in the Bible. She’s the blessing goddess. Well, or the reflex of her blessing, we find in Kuntillet Ajrud inscriptions. I bless you, by Yahweh and by his Asherah.

So Asherah is the blessing goddess seems to be already, and the combination then of El and Asherah in Genesis 49:25, which it’s in the context that people just assumed in Ancient Israel, was actually referring somehow to Yahweh’s great blessing economy, but they didn’t worry about this being separate or different names or different deities.

Instead, these old traditional divine names and features and so on are being assumed to be belonging to Yahweh. A third passage, I’m just gonna throw it out, is in Psalm 18, verses 14 to 16, Elyon, perhaps because Elyon is an El title elsewhere, it, this literally means most high. It’s a little debated, it’s a little tricky, but it is combined with Baal type battle.

And it’s all assumed to be imagery, both as imagery for Yahweh. So you see in these three passages, and notice I’m taking examples. Genesis 49 is an old poem. Uh, Psalm 18 is thought to be an old poem. This section, especially Deuteronomy 33, verses 26 is 27, might not be as old, but at least you see the afterburn of this kind of convergence.

And so I think convergence is in fact a bit, it’s sort of, I hate to use the kind of teleological language, but it seems to be attested in older sources. Compared to what’s called differentiation. By which I mean the recognition that Yahweh isn’t like other gods, right. God. And you shouldn’t worship them.

They have nothing to do with Yahweh. So what monotheism does in effect with this later differentiation is sort of saying, well, we’re gonna take the characteristics of other deities with one hand and we’re gonna push away the actual deity names or identities with the other hand. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: And Israelite religion over time, this cumulative process is doing these things together.

Jared: Yeah. It seems, I mean, I don’t, I don’t know, just, I don’t mean to speculate on the reasons for this, but, well, let me just summarize what I hear you saying so I can make sure that, that our listeners are, are tracking. This idea of convergence is ascribing to Yahweh, these characteristics and these traits in these things that would’ve actually normally been associated with other deities. 

And, and there’s this convergence of that where, you know, the Baal, the cloud writer is being, that that language that we would usually see with Baal is being ascribed to Yahweh. And so there’s this kind of convergence language, and then later, well not later, but in different passages, we see the um, kind of not, you know, the other side of that, of that, where we’re differentiating and saying, this is clearly Baal and that is not Yahweh and you need to distance is there.

So I wanna make sure I’m getting that summary correct, but the-

Mark: That’s basically it. I mean, when you’ve got the passage in 1 Kings 19, Elijah against the prophets of Baal and Asherah, there, there, this is a differentiation kind of passage. Let me just, let me, if you don’t mind, I’d like to just mention one thing, which is you, we haven’t asked about, well, what does Mark Smith think is the original profile then of Yahweh?

Pete: Yeah, yeah, what does Mark Smith think?

Mark: What does he think? Does he think? Anyway, so I, so I think that, uh, the oldest passages, according to Biblical scholars about the origins of Yahweh, they typically, and there are a lot of biblical scholars who think this, this is not just my view, is a poetic, I, uh, a poetic piece that’s set.

It’s actually got a duplicate. It’s in Judges 5, verses 4-5, and it’s paralleled very directly by Psalm 68, verses 8-9, and those verses, and you can track the lines. You can, you can see the poetic variance between just little words, like two different words for ‘also.’

They’re in the same slot, in the same line, but they’re variants. So these leads look like poetic variants. And there are other variants within the lines, but they track really close. And one also has an extra couple of lines compared to the other. So I don’t, I, I don’t, I’m not arguing that one is dependent on the other or expanded on the other.

I think that there were just two old or, uh, variants, oral variance, and they both were there in the tradition. 

Pete: Yeah. Yeah. 

Mark: And now what does it say about who Yahweh is? It says when you march and, and it’s Judges 5 that gives these specific places, when you march from Edom, when you went out from Edom, when you marched from Seir.

Now Edom, we know a lot about Edom from the Bible. This is not Israel. So one of the very interesting things is, I mean I think this is religiously really interesting and even challenging, is that the idea if is Yisrael, Eh is the God who’s at home in Israel, but Yahweh, if this is true, what scholars suggest about Judges 5:4-5 is Yahweh’s not originally from Israel.

And that for me is super interesting. That’s gonna get narrativized as the Sinai legislation. You think you’re in the Sinai Peninsula and so on, but Sinai may not originally have been in the Sinai Peninsula. That seems to be a later interpretation. Even the Apostle Paul refers to Sinai as being in Arabia.

In the letter to the Galatians, I think I’m not a New Testament scholar. I hope I got that right and, and that would be, most scholars are putting it down in the region of Edom, which is south of the Dead Sea and East of the Dead Sea. You’re getting down into Southern Georgia. And some people even speculate that it’s further down, even in what is now northwest, the northwest corner of Saudi Arabia.

Which by the way, you can see from the hilltops in Israel today, from, if you go up on a mountain at the seaside port of Eilat, you can see Saudi Arabia. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: Which I did a couple of years ago with a guide. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: You can also see Egypt from up there. And Jordan, and of course Israel.

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: Um, so in this poem then it, we, we have a geography that’s distinctive, but we also know that when God marched, we’re told, we’re told the Earth shook and, and the heavens dripped, that is with rain and or they say with water. So we seem to have a storm. God, the storm produces the sinking of the earth, ra-ash in Hebrew.

And it is thought then that he has a profile that although it has a different tradition of language, not really called the writer on the clouds there or anything like that, but could have a profile that’s, that is like Baal. And the reason that’s super interesting is it means that they’re natural rivals.

So all the polemics in the Bible when it comes to other deities, when they wanna name someone, Baal is the bad boy. They don’t polemicize against El. They just sort of assume El is God. They don’t, they do polemicize later about Asherah, but early on, Asherah seems to be okay in the Kutillet Ajrud inscriptions and you know, bless you by Yahweh and his Asherah.

However, one exactly construes that but the polemics are, are largely devoted against Baal. And I think it’s like, it’s, it’s like pretty similar profiles it makes for natural competition. 

Jared: I wanna just summarize what you just said ’cause I think that might be a very new idea. 

Pete: Yeah. I think all this is new idea 

Jared: That in, in Judges 5 and, and I think you said, uh, Psalm 68, we have this, this parallel where Yahweh seems to have come from somewhere.

And has come into the land of Israel. El seems to be the native God. Yahweh seems to have come from somewhere else and come into place. So the, these are two different deities. Yahweh has come into the land and over time there’s this co-mingling, this, uh, yeah, convergence with, with Yahweh and, and El.

Mark: Yeah. And um, and the thing that’s super interesting to me is I think all this kind of stuff bothers us a lot more than I think it bothered early Israelites. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: And getting used to that is not easy. And, um, I had a teacher named Marvin Pope, whom I adored. He used to say, I don’t write ’em, I just read ’em.

Um, and you know, we have, all we have are the remains of the day. We don’t have Greek style treatises of the Greco-Roman period that say, this is how it all happened. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. Right. 

Mark: It’s difficult. I think it’s a challenge as a historian or a historian of religion, I think it can be challenging as a religious person, not only because it’s a lot of different ideas, not stuff we’re used to.

We want our monotheist, monotheism pristine and from day one. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: And I suppose my one solace in all of this, at least on the religious side, is I don’t really have a problem with, um, seeing a kind of unfolding revelation. I think the priestly writer or tradition in the, I already mentioned this, I think they had a theory of unfolding revelation about Yahweh.

So I don’t think, I don’t think that what scholars are doing is actually, the content of what they’re doing is new because they have, they have different or additional data. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: Mm-hmm. And they kind of reconstruct the past with the data they have. We have. And I think that’s what the priestly tradition and Genesis and Exodus is doing.

And, um, I think that that is, um, helpful for us to bear in mind that for all the challenges or difficulties that are posed by, uh, all this kind of information and it seems like we’re totally reconstructing everything, which in a way we are. In fact, it has a biblical warrant, an antecedent within the Bible itself in the Pentateuch.

And, and I think I could probably find more basis for it than that, but I, I do think, um, it’s not, once you start to realize what’s there, it’s not as foreign to the Bible itself as one might think. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. Well, with that, as we, as we wrap up our time, rather than kind of ending people with this, uh, or ending the, the episode for people with this kind of cliffhanger, could you, if people wanted to take the next step and say, what, what, you know, they do the double take and say, ‘what did he just say,’ and they want to follow up.

Do you have some resources maybe that you can send people to? 

Mark: Okay, so I, this is, this is the absolutely, uh, uh, selfish approach to this, which is I’m gonna show you some things that I’ve worked on. I could show other things, but- 

Pete: Well, do you just carry those around with you? Yeah. How, how does that work? 

Mark: No, I just brought them, well, actually I use one of them to teach with because it’s so accessible.

Yeah. And that’s the first one. This is called Stories from Ancient Canaan, and it’s in a second edition. The first author is Michael Coogan, who was one of my teachers at Harvard a long time ago, and he did a beautiful book, that same title, first edition, and after about I don’t know how many years, 20, 30 years, I suggested that we do a, um, we do a revision of this.

So this came out in 2012 and it contains, it contains all these stories that I talked about earlier on. 

Pete: Okay. 

Mark: So that’s like a good first place for background information, for getting that, get your, get your footing in this stuff. This is a good book for that. Um, the first book that I ever worked on that I tried to sort of figure all this out is, uh, a book called The Early History of God.

This is also a second edition. Don’t use the first edition because there’s a lot more good information here. First edition came out in the early nineties, I think this is 2002, and. It’s gonna line up, it’s gonna tell you about the Ugaritic text, but it’s really gonna tell you about, sort of a ca It’s got a case study of Yahweh and El, Yahweh and Baal, Yahweh and Asherah, Yahweh and Anat and it, and it sort of says, what’s the data set look like?

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Mark: So it’s got a lot of the stuff I said today, but it’s got more information. The book that is really, in some ways, the most me in all of this is a book called God in Translation. And it, it surveys this idea of translatability, of God’s goddesses of divinity from the late Bronze Age, right down through the New Testament.

Heaven forbid, Mark Smith writes a chapter on the New Testament, but there it is, one biblical scholar, fantastic biblical scholar who unfortunately passed away. Dean McBride, we’re at a meeting and he says, why do you have to keep writing all these books about God? Why couldn’t you get it right the first time?

So there you have it. And my answer was, God’s infinite. So four or five books is not so terrible. 

Jared: That’s right. You’re actually being really efficient. Yeah, so far. Excellent. Well, Mark, thank you so much. I mean, I think this is a great, uh, to have you as a guide into a topic that I think can be challenging, as you mentioned.

So appreciate that and, and the way that you were able to, to bring us through that. So thanks for jumping on and talking about it with us. 

Mark: Sure. Happy to do it. Good to see you both. 

Jared: Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you wanna support what we do, there are three ways you can do it.

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Outro: You’ve just made it through another episode of The Bible for Normal People. Don’t forget, you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by The Bible for Normal People team.

Pete: and, uh, his areas on Ancient Israel. And 

Jared: no, that’s not gonna work. 

Pete: No, it’s, 

Jared: and he’s on areas of ancient Israel?

Pete: Okay, I’ll start again. Does that, I’m still gonna riff. I’m still gonna riff. 

Jared: Fine. 

Pete: Takes riff in coherence. Takes an hour 

Jared: riff in coherence. Pete: Ready?