The Bible: Commentary and Controversy

Whatever we take from a casual reading of the Old Testament, the truth is the Jews weren’t monotheistic; many gods abounded. Want proof? How about Yaweh commanding the Israelites to “have no other god before me.” Obviously not necessary if there were no other gods. (A man named Colin Wells, by the way, in an article published by Boston University in their Journal of Humanities and the Classics, delved into this subject with style and substance.)

But beyond the Jews, gods were of course ubiquitous and timeless. As I said in another piece, “From the cave men who might have worshiped the moon, or a polar bear, to the Egyptians, Romans, and up to present day. All had some sort of physical representation of their god or gods, mostly human. With all the human characteristics inherent in themselves, their tribe, their society. Good and bad. Like the God in the bible.”

So how did all those gods get boiled down into one? Where did that phenomenon originate? Fascinatingly enough, Wells tells us it was an inevitable byproduct of the Age of Reason, beginning around 800 BC, when the Greeks upgraded the alphabet to include vowels, making it, as Wells says, “a much more flexible and precise instrument.”

He continues, “For writing and thinking go together, and the dawn of this new literary age was simultaneously the dawn of reason.”

I’m stating it much too simplistically, but this new age of intro- and extrospection gave rise a couple of hundred years or so later to an early naturalism, in which the Greek philosopher Thales decided to explain the world in secular terms, thus inventing science. Thales proposed that nature could be explained by a single unitary principle – water, which he saw as an inherently divine material substance. Later Air, Fire, and the Infinite were added by his followers.  In other words, all of nature could be explained by the existence of these four divine – but not Divine – agents. No supreme overarching, originating authority needed – nature could do and has done quite well all by itself; no “gods” or “spirits” needed. If you think about it a moment, I think you’ll understand, as I do now, what a momentous hypothesis this was – in the face of thousands of years of gods of all sorts that could somehow overrule and manipulate nature.

As Wells says in his essay, “Thales forever split this world, creating two separate conceptual realms, the natural and the supernatural—or in the common synecdoche, the seen and the unseen—that didn’t exist before. Rather, they existed, but the hard-and-fast conceptual boundary between them didn’t. Putting up that boundary was the most significant act in the history of human thought.”

Because his thoughts could be described and explained coherently – thanks to the new alphabet – Thales was able to publish them, which inspired new areas of thought as well as criticism among those who read them.

After countless centuries of “gods,” this postulation was difficult for most of the world to accept. A couple of centuries later, along came Plato and his hybrid philosophy of the Demiurge, “a divine craftsman who shapes the material world after ideal forms that exist on a perfect immaterial plane,” which Aristotle later called an “Unmoved Mover.” Something like the “Great Watchmaker,” I guess. Not a god per se, but a prime mover who sets the events in motion.

So we creep along. Centuries later the Jews assimilate this “Unmoved Mover,” analogous to one responsible entity above nature,  but move him from a prime mover to one who is still interested in what happens in his creation, and begin the transition to one god. One small problem – how to make this idea palatable to, well, all the “pagans” out there. So along comes Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, who writes: “God is One, but he has around him numberless potencies.”  Again according to Wells, “Philo’s ‘potencies’ would soon become the angels and demons (including Satan) whom early Christians would equate with the traditional gods of Greek polytheism as Christianity split off from this evolving Jewish tradition.”

Basically what I hear Wells saying is until the thought appeared that there was no god, that nature was everything, with no extranatural authority, then and only then could there be any dispute about the existence or non-existence of God. Not “a” god, but God with a capital G.

The Jews, and much of the rest of the world, reluctant to believe they were here by themselves, at the mercy of nature, with no recourse, took to this idea and expanded it. As Voltaire opined: “if god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.” Needless to say, there was widespread belief in “gods” of some kind, and always had been.

One important change here was the transition to a new kind of “belief.” In fact, until this point it was not really necessary to believe in the god you were petitioning; petitioning the gods was more the act of saying the right words and hoping there would be a response. Faced with the possibility that gods might not be or have been required at all to create and regulate the world, the Jews and others felt compelled to sew up that problematic possibility with the invention of a God who not only created the earth, but also inserted Himself into the lives of His creations.

This had to be done not in the manner of the Greek and Roman gods, who were for the most part very much like the humans who created them, and who were each responsible for some geologic formation or human emotion. This required the creation of a new kind of god – an all powerful god who, to quote my old Catechism, “was then, is now, and forever shall be.” As Wells says, “In Darwinian terms, rational inquiry changed the religious environment, and  exclusive monotheism was the new class of religion that evolved as a result.”

Obviously we couldn’t have a plethora of gods squabbling with each other. Someone needed to be in charge, which presented another problem: which of the contemporary gods to choose as The God among all those out there: El Elion (“God Most High”)? El Olam (“God Eternal”)? El Shaddai (“God the Mountain”)? El Ro’i (“God All-Seeing”)? Hadad/Ba’al (the Storm God)? Dagon (God of the Harvest)?

The Jews solved this problem by simply entering into a kind of “my god can beat your god” competition. Consider the confrontation in 1 Kings 18, in which Elijah tells Ahab to gather all the people of Israel, and 450 prophets of Ba’al, and meet him on Mount Carmel.

Then Ba’al’s followers cut a bull into pieces and set it on a wooden altar, as did Elijah by himself, for he was the only one left of the Lord’s prophets, due to Jezebel’s purge. Long story short, the test was to see which god could ignite his bull and his altar. Ba’al couldn’t strike the match, and Elijah’s Lord could, settling the matter.

So then Elijah called to the Israelites and told them to gather the 450 prophets of Ba’al together and take them to the Kishon valley, where every last one was slaughtered. Which set the stage for countless acts in the bible in which the Lord’s (Yaweh’s) followers – or Yaweh Himself – slaughters everyone they can find who do not accept Yaweh as the one true god.

Not that the Jews are undefeatable. But their belief is so set that even when they lose a battle they assume it’s not evidence of their god being weaker, but of Him causing their defeat as punishment for some sin they have committed (which also sounds pretty Catholic.)

Eventually the Jews evolve from knowledge of, but not necessarily belief in, other gods, to belief in one and only one God, made clear by the author in Isaiah 44:6: “This is what the Lord says— Israel’s King and Redeemer, the Lord Almighty: I am the first and I am the last; apart from me there is no God.”

All this, of course, is the result of detailed research about the times, the people, and the social structure, and appears to be in contradiction with the old testament, in which God creates heaven, earth, and all its inhabitants, including man and woman.

However, God does use the plural in Genesis, when he says “Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness.” Was he inferring there were other gods inhabiting the chaos with Him, or was He just using the royal “we”?

Is a puzzlement.

It does raise a pretty serious question, though. If I choose to believe in a god rather than whatever science offers, what god – or kind of god – should it be?

First, it should obviously be one capable of at least getting things started on Earth, then either walking away or staying to watch (and possibly measure) the result.

Second, if my god is going to involve himself with the affairs of his creation, he should be the kind of god Jehovah Himself claimed to be – and obviously was not: “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth; keeping loving kindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.” Wow. He was so not that.