Judaism

These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel beyond the Jordan in the wilderness . . . “Behold, I have set the land before you; go in and take possession of the land which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them and to their descendants after them.”

The history of the Israelites as it is told in the Bible is known to every educated person of European heritage—how they roamed as herdsmen between Babylonia and the Syrian coast until, invited by the Pharaoh, they settled in Egypt, fell into subjugation, and then escaped under the leadership of Moses, how they spent long years in the desert and finally conquered Canaan, forming a kingdom under Saul and David, which split in two after Solomon and fell under Assyrian and Babylonian dominance, and how, after a fifty-year exile in Babylon, a remnant of the faithful returned to establish the temple anew in Jerusalem. This remnant, now fully identifiable as Jews, sired Christianity, and through Christianity the Jewish concept of a universal, transcendent, ethical God, demanding faith and righteousness, and revealed in scripture and the history of his chosen people, dominated Western thought for a millennium or more. This conception of God lies behind many problems characteristic of Western thought but largely alien to more naturalistic traditions such as the Chinese: problems concerning faith and reason and the status of sacred scripture, theodicy, our knowledge of God, the metaphysical status of God and his transcendence of the natural order, the will and its freedom, and the relation of will, abscinding from reason, to the ethical quality of an action. Hebrew thought, as revealed to us in the Bible, lies behind the thought of the Jews,

and an understanding of it is basic to any historical understanding of Western philosophy.

The Bible tells us that the Hebrews received their religion, fully formed, at the hands of Moses before they ever entered Canaan, and assumes a background of transcendent monotheism going back to their earliest ancestors. But the Bible as we have it, our only source for the development of Hebrew thought, was composed late in Jewish history, and projects later beliefs into the nation’s past. The belief in a single, transcendent God, and in the necessity of faithfulness to that one God, was present some time before the fall of Israel to Assyria in 722 bce, but as best we can tell, it was to be found only in a minority of the population, which adhered to the teachings of a possibly ancient, and certainly extremist group of prophets and priests of Yahweh. It was the reaction of the Hebrews in the next century to that event and the other national disasters that followed that brought these beliefs to the fore, and made them the foundation of Josiah’s reform of the Hebrew religion in Judah in 622 bce.

This is about the best we can say about the origins of the Judaic religion while making any claim to historical certainty, but it is interesting to consider some likely conjectures about the earlier strata of Hebrew thought. We must depend here on the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, which recounts the legendary past of the Hebrews through the sojourn in Egypt and up to the entry into Canaan. The earliest parts of the Pentateuch come from two sources written before the fall of Israel in 722 bce—the Yahwist source, named for its use of the name “Yahweh” for God and designated “J” by textual scholars, and the Elohist source, E, named for its habit of referring to God as “El,” “the Lord.” The ‘Deuteronomist’ patched these two earlier sources together and added some material of his own composition during the last years of independence of the Southern Kingdom, to produce JE. The first edition of JE surfaced in the temple library in Judah and was published in 622 bce as the basis for Josiah’s reform, and it received a number of expansions over the next century and a half. The Priestly source, P, was written during the Exile from its own point of view, using JE as a base, and adding a good deal of new material, and then a final redactor of the Priestly history, who in some ways takes his own point of view, put the Pentateuch into its present shape.

E and J are epic histories of Israel, containing material going back as far as 1000 bce, and should provide useful information about early events, but the Deuteronomist and his Priestly editors found the tale they tell theologically embarrassing, so our version of the Pentateuch omits a good deal of their testimony on more sensitive topics. For instance, we are left with mere fragments of JE’s account of the conquest of Canaan, for according to JE the conquest was not, as the Deuteronomist and P make it, utterly complete, the result of an effortless miracle of God leaving the land empty so that the Israelites could occupy it in a single body without a fight. Rather it was of limited extent, involving lost battles, treaties with the locals, and some plain failures, with each tribe acting independently and carving out its own domain. Moreover, the tale of Moses and the captivity in Egypt, no doubt part of the tradition of one of the tribes that entered into the original alliance constituting the Israelite nation, has been magnified so that the local origins of the nation in the Judean highlands are lost, and the whole event is depicted as an invasion from the outside. The final editor strikes a compromise between his sources, and has the whole people march in together under Joshua, winning a series of battles through Yahweh’s miracles and utterly destroying all the inhabitants of the land. Why did P and the Deuteronomist rewrite history? Their accounts reflect apocalyptic hopes, patterning the first occupation of Canaan after a hoped for reoccupation. They are the product of a discouraged people who can see no hope for the future if Yahweh does not directly and miraculously intervene, and who look to the past to confirm their hopes. J and E, written before the rise of Assyrian power doomed Israelite nationalism, optimistically expect Israel and Judah to remain prosperous and powerful through their own efforts, with Yahweh’s usual help in battle. They seek no desperate apocalyptic miracle. Neither account, moreover, is reliably informed of events before, perhaps, 1100 bce, and so they reconstruct the earliest events, including the first arrival of the Israelites on the scene in Canaan, rather than reporting them.

2. THE EARLIEST DOCUMENTS AND THE ORIGIN OF THE HEBREWS

The serpent was the most subtle of all the wild beasts that Yahweh God had made. It asked the woman, “Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?” The woman answered the serpent, “We may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden. But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said, “you must not eat it or touch it, under pain of death.”“ Then the serpent said to the woman, “No! You will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good an evil.” The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was desirable for the knowledge that it could give. so she took some of its fruit and ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realized that they were naked... Then Yahweh God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil. He must not be allowed to stretch out his hand and pick from the tree of life also, and eat some and live for ever.” So Yahweh God expelled him from the garden of Eden, to till the soil from which he had been taken.

Genesis 3: 1-6, 22-23

Most interesting for early Hebrew thought is the earliest strand in J, the S document, found together with Priestly material in the first 11 chapters of Genesis. J proper probably begins with the story of Abraham in Genesis 12. The author of S is a pessimist without much reverence for God (or the gods, as traces of polytheism remain in many of the stories). His God is a bit fearful of men, who might supplant him if care is not taken, but he wants their sacrifices, and is inclined to help them out as long as they stay in line. S recounts human technological and cultural progress since the creation, and although it observes that this progress leads inevitably to wickedness, it finds it better than continued ignorance. The author’s world view, in brief, is very much of a piece with that of the ancient Mesopotamians, with the world view expressed, for instance, in the Gilgamish epic, despite the fact that it reworks their old stories from a monotheist’s viewpoint.

S has God fashion a man from the dust so that he might till the soil, breathing his own breath soul into the clay servant to make it live. But after God makes a consort for the man, the two, against orders, eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and become conscious both of themselves and of what is right and wrong, good and bad. They do not immediately die, as Yahweh, to prevent them from eating of the tree, had said they would, but the gods bar the man and his wife from Eden out of fear they might also eat of the Tree of Life and become immortal. Still, Yahweh feels some responsibility to humanity, for they are his creation, and he continues to help human beings as long as they behave themselves.

The flood story, another Mesopotamian tale, occurs in two versions, one heavily edited in P, the other in S. Yahweh’s pleasure at the sacrifice and his decision to keep human beings, despite their disagreeable qualities, to sacrifice to him, is the most clearly archaic element in S’s version. The later Israelites did not conceive that God had any need for human beings.

With the tale of Cain and Abel we seem to move away from the Mesopotamian milieu. Yahweh favors the herdsman because of his animal sacrifice, and the story reflects the attitudes of herdsmen living in the barren lands between the Syrian coast and Mesopotamia. Cain, murdering Abel, is condemned to become a nomadic herdsman himself (perhaps originally to fill the role of his brother?), wandering over the face of the earth, but protected by the gods. His crime pollutes the earth so that it will not produce a yield for him, and that is why he must become a herdsman, and be banished from the company of civilized farmers. But since he is placed under the protection of God, who will avenge his death seven-fold, it seems this punishment may be intended to replace the customary vengeance of kinsmen, moving society away from the interminable blood feuds that could arise even from an accidental killing as long as it was thought that the kin of the murdered person had a responsibility of taking vengeance on the killer. It looks as if a killer can take refuge in a temple, and, if he promises to go into exile in the desert, he will receive the protection of God, rather in the way that a killer in Greece might seek purification from blood-guilt from Apollo. But in its present redaction the story also intends to warn us specifically against harming the desert herdsman, who is under the protection of God, however unpleasant he may be, and however much we may think his plight due to some ancestral pollution of once fertile lands. It may even reflect an early account how the Hebrews came to be chosen by God and placed under his protection (the Hebrews, in the biblical version, are descended from Seth, Cain’s younger brother, not Cain, but perhaps the whole family was polluted). Of special interest is the way in which it echoes the career of Moses, who killed a man and fled into the wilderness to escape punishment. Did Moses, seeking refuge with an exile’s God, claim such protection for the Hebrews in Egypt as well?

The story seems to come from some group among the earliest Hebrews who identified themselves as desert nomads, exiled originally from the fertile lands of Mesopotamia, and more recently refugees escaping from Egypt. They may have dwelt on the borders of Canaan to the south and west, a pastoral people wandering about at the edges of cultivation. Nonetheless, it now seems most improbable, given the archaeological evidence, that the Hebrews as a whole originated as nomads. They formed, it seems, as a confederation of tribes of differing origins in the Judean highlands, most of which were of local origin, with a dominantly agricultural, not pastoral, background.

The religion of Canaan before the Hebrews was a Mesopotamian polytheism. Each political unit enjoyed its own gods, most of them anthropomorphic and subject to human weaknesses. El, the mighty one, creator of the present world order, father and king of gods and men, led the pantheon. “El” means “God” in all Semitic tongues, so “El” was “the God” par excellence, just as Zeus was “the God” for the Greeks. He lived at the edge of the world, where the upper and lower waters meet, beyond the reach of evil. He was all wise, all powerful, beneficent and merciful, rewarding justice, charity and hospitality when he judged humankind. The king represented El on earth, and performed, among other rituals, a rite for obtaining El’s forgiveness when the nation had offended their god. Canaanitic prophets informed their people of the gods’ demands, learned through ecstatic visions as well as oracular dealings with specific deities, and certain priests divined the future by examining the entrails of animals, the flight of birds, and the stars. Sacrifice was practiced, the gods being supposed to live off the smell of the offerings. Human sacrifice, generally of infants, occurred in great emergencies, and at the foundation of cities and temples.

El looks very like the Yahweh of the Hebrews, but the existence of other powerful gods, as well as a multitude of individualized local cults of El, obscured his universal reign. Baal, a god of storms and El’s son, domesticated into a god of the vegetation his rain nurtured, was worshiped everywhere, and was just as important as El himself. El may have been the god of the king and the nobles, but Baal was the god of the farmer on whose back society rested. The Hebrews, however, came to reject the cult of Baal. Nor did they have a cult of Asherah, a tree goddess, the consort of El, represented by a sacred pole, or a cult of any other deity that was tied to the land. There seems to have been a different god for every clan, the Fear or Kinsman of Isaac, the Mighty One or the Bull of Jacob, the God of Abraham, the Shepherd of Israel. These gods were worshiped, it seems, within the family, at the hearth with the paterfamilias officiating, not at the temple of public cult. The temples and their priesthoods, and the cults that went with them, had been left behind in the lowlands.

From the archaeological evidence, the formation of the Hebrews around 1200 resulted from the gathering of rebellious elements from the surrounding lowlands into the hills of Judaea. There is, in the Biblical accounts, a hostility to the culture as well as the political institutions of the cities on the plain. In these accounts, the desire for a king, such as other peoples have, represents one of the first moves away from faithfulness to Yahweh. This is a religion suited to a successor culture to a disintegrated civilization, like the Mediterranean civilization leading into the Middle Ages in Europe. Before the establishment of the Kingdom, we observe a feudal society, based on personal loyalties, whose religion includes a radical reinterpretation of the usual polytheistic reading of the justice of the gods. Justice is not a matter of recognizing one’s place in an urbanized social order, but rather a matter of the King’s duty to provide for the common person’s welfare. There are, in Judges and Joshua, a number of stories of Hebrew victories over lowland Palestinian Kings after which the King’s lands are “dedicated” to Yahweh. The practical outcome of this move is redistribution of the lands to “the poor of the land,” who are the special concern of Yahweh’s justice. The ideological shift here is not unprecedented. Among the Chinese it came to be thought that an Emperor who made the lives of the people miserable would “lose the mandate of heaven,” and his throne, generally to frontier kingdoms more interested in the welfare of the poor. Among the Greeks a rationalistic justification for agrarian reform was developed without reference to the Gods, but we nonetheless see in Hesiod’s Works and Days, for instance, how the old tradition might be turned to account in support of the poor. In the prophetic tradition of the worshipers of Yahweh, it is the rich who are unjust, oppressive landowners (the land is Yahweh’s and should be distributed as needed for subsistence agriculture), and the King and his ministers, inflicting levies on the poor to execute his building program, as Yahweh had warned he would do, and robbing the widow and orphan of their goods in their venal courts. The Hebrews who gathered in the highlands were rebels and refugees from a collapsing urban society. They would no doubt have been viewed as bandits by the civilized plains dwellers, as David was before he was King. The bandits grew in strength in the disorder and chaos of the 12^th and 11^th centuries bce, and about 1050, they established a new urban society as order reemerged, but one within which the worship of Yahweh, with its radical social message, was well established as the unifying national religion. The new people that emerged did not come in from the desert. They settled the hill country as agriculturists, and must have had considerable experience with agriculture before they arrived there. They were, rather, Palestinians escaping from the rule of the lowland kings, settling an underpopulated frontier.

Why did monotheism arise among them? The re-conceived King of the Gods was worshiped originally without a temple. Sacrifices to him were carried out in wild places in the open air. It was Solomon who, in an attempt to domesticate this wild religion, built a temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem. Yahweh might well have absorbed the characteristics of a nomad’s god, his only temple a tent, and one element of the Hebrew coalition was apparently, we have seen, nomadic. But the reason for Yahweh’s lack of a temple probably had just as much to do with the rejection of urban values. The Hebrews saw the cult and priests as part of the corrupt establishment, and so the Prophets proclaim that Yahweh despises the feasts and burnt offerings of the priests, seeking only justice for his poor. His cult was a cult that could be carried out by the people, without priestly elements from the upper classes. Possibly a priesthood was provided (the priesthood of Levi) by the nomadic group that identified its ancestor as Abraham, for their holy men would not be implicated in the oppression from which the Hebrews were fleeing. Yahweh, the desert god of one group in the alliance seems to have been identified with El, who, as God of the whole universe, might be considered independent of the cult devoted to him in the lowlands, and El–Yahweh was a god of justice above all. With the identification of the two gods, now merged, as the god of the Hebrew federation, the stories of the nomadic tribe became the official history of the federation. These stories were likely adapted to establish a solidarity with the agriculturalists the nomads settled among, and so they came to think that they too had fled urban oppression, and the materials were apparently at hand to suggest the story of Moses and the flight from Egypt, a story that was transferred by the priesthood of Yahweh to the entire nation of which Yahweh was now the God.

3. MOSES AND THE WORSHIP OF YAHWEH

And Yahweh said, “I have seen the miserable state of my people in Egypt. I have heard their appeal to be free of their slave drivers... I mean to deliver them out of the hands of the Egyptians and bring them up out of that land to a land rich and broad, a land where milk and honey flow, the Home of Canaanites, the Hittities, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites... so come, I send you to Pharaoh to bring the sons of Israel, my people, out of Egypt.”

Then Moses said to God, “I am to go, then, to the sons of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ But if they ask me what his name is, what shall I tell them?” And God said to Moses, “I Am who I Am. This,” he added, “is what you must say to the sons of Israel: ‘I Am has sent me to you.’” And God also said to Moses, “You are to say to the sons of Israel: ‘Yahweh, the god of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’ This is my name for all time; by this name I shall be invoked for all generations to come.”

Exodus 3:7-10, 13-15.

According to the tradition, it was because of Moses, under whose leadership Yahweh brought them out of bondage in the land of Egypt, that the Israelites came to worship Yahweh. The loyalty of the Israelites to their god rested ultimately on this display of concern and might, which at least a minority (by the 8^th century, any way) supposed had made it clear that Yahweh reasonably demanded exclusive worship from his people, whom he had saved for himself, and that He was more powerful than the gods of other peoples. To worship the gods of the land was not only faithless, but foolish, for only Yahweh could provide for his people.

The older attempts to establish that the story of the Exodus from Egypt was historical must now be rejected. Egyptian sources report both the expulsion of trouble-making Semitic groups that had settled or were trying to settle within Egyptian lands, and the escape of Semitic groups they had pressed into forced labor, but this is all traced back to the expulsion of the Hyksos from Egypt, around 1600, and is now known to be much too early to account for the emergence of the Hebrews around 1200, and indeed, too early to be reflected in the Biblical record. The story of the Exodus must have been elaborated out of the folk material of some, presumably nomadic, group in the Hebrew confederation. It dwells on the formation of the priesthood and ritual of Yahweh, so presumably that priesthood was originally the priesthood of that group. The story was seized upon and improved later to support the attempts by Josiah and others to return to the purity of the earlier faith. It seems that the texts as we have them originated at the earliest in the 8^th century bce, in the later Monarchy, and so at least some 400-500 years after the events reported, and this is reason enough to regard the story as largely constructed to meet the needs of the time, rather than rooted in any sort of reliable tradition. What was needed in this later period of crisis was some assurance that Yahweh could and would save the Hebrew state from absorption into the larger empires bordering it, and so a story emphasizing God’s power to save his people, and his faithfulness, was required. The Priestly orthodoxy has difficulties even with earlier sources represented in the Torah itself. The biblical story of the Exodus contains elements outside the Priestly source that suggest an expulsion rather than a flight, and that only a part of the Hebrew nation was involved. Some tribes (Gad and Reuben) seem never to have been in Egypt at all, even according to the Priestly account. Moses, if he existed, might have been the leader of a group of Hebrews who established themselves at Kadesh, accrued new runaways over time, and only later moved into the southern hills of Canaan, perhaps under pressure from Egypt or from some other nomadic group. But the place names in the account, including ‘Kadesh,’appear to have been places familiar to those who put together the documents, and those that can be identified, including Kadesh, seem not to have left any archaeological trace from the 12^th century. In brief, the itinerary was reconstructed by the editors from what they knew of the Sinai Peninsula. So even this minimalist account is open to doubt.

If our narratives contain any truth about him, Moses was perhaps an Egyptian who had killed another Egyptian, in defense, as we are told, of a Hebrew who was being treated unjustly. He fled into the desert to escape punishment, and settled down with a priest of Midian, a pastoral tribe of Sinai, marrying into his family. In its earlier forms, the story may have provided a precedent for the adoption of Yahweh’s worship from a pastoral tribe by the Hebrew confederacy, fleeing like Moses’s people from urban oppression. Probably the Midianite worshiped Yahweh, whose original cult center may have been at Sinai. In any case, Moses came to believe that he had a mission from Yahweh to rescue his people from Egyptian bondage. All the sources tell a story of plagues inflicted on Egypt to persuade the Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. Perhaps some set of disasters created enough disorder to make an escape of rebellious peasants possible, and was attributed to Yahweh by Moses.

P and E hold that God first revealed his name to Moses, which suggests that Yahweh was a new God to the Egyptian refugees. In P and J they refuse to believe Moses, though not in E. Perhaps there is an old tradition here which suited the Priestly author’s concern with Israel’s faithlessness, but made no sense to the Elohist. P recounts the drowning of the Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, where JE reports a battle in which the Egyptian chariots bog down in the mud. The stories about the visit to Mount Sinai and the subsequent journey to Canaan are probably late. If the group settled at Kadesh, relations with rebellious groups in Canaan could have been established there, while the location, only three days from the Egyptian border, might have provided a place of refuge for rebel groups fleeing Egypt.

Did Moses introduce a religious innovation? It might be argued that if he did not it is very hard to explain what was said of him, though our sources are so late that it is not hard to imagine the doctrine of the monotheistic transcendental Yahweh attributed to Moses arising in some other way, and becoming attached to a legendary prophetic figure. If we assume that Moses did originate the teaching, what was it exactly that he taught? For a start, Moses would have introduced a new name for his God, YHWH, probably to be read as “Yahweh.” The revelation of God’s name here should be taken as equivalent to a revelation of his real nature. According to the Elohist, just before giving Moses his name, Yahweh declared (depending on how one chooses to translate it) “I am who I am,” or “I am he who is,” or “I am, that is who I am.” The intention seems to be that no mythological history of Yahweh, no anthropomorphic career, is needed. He simply is, and no account of who he is need be given. Indeed, “Yahweh” may come from the same root as ehyeh, “to be” in northern Semitic speech. The utterance is an assertion of a certain transcendence and ineffability on the part of Yahweh. He is not an earthly being with an earthly career, and cannot be understood as such a being is understood. He is the God who lies behind all things, whose power extends to all things, not a particular God with particular purposes or powers. He is the creator god, who does not possess a people, since he is associated with no particular place, but is now adopting the Israelites in his concern that they should receive justice.

Now there were creator gods among other peoples, but they were often regarded as unimportant in everyday affairs, and although they were given to demanding justice, it was usually their sons, gods of thunder and the storm, like Baal the son of El, who did the necessary business. In fact, there was often some tale how the creator god had been deposed or supplanted, or even killed, by his or her more vigorous offspring, or at the very least kicked upstairs into the position of the wise old advisor to the vigorous young ruler. Young Baal is a creator inasmuch as he brings order out of chaos, and he plays his role in a duplication of the stories of the older, supplanted god (often the god of a conquered people). But even if Baal can be taken as a universal creator god, still he represents a natural process through which the world arises, and Moses’s Yahweh does not represent any such process. Yahweh was identified with the highest God in the Canaanite pantheon, El, and with other craftsman-creator gods in the stories of the S Document, but these stories had later to be reinterpreted so as not to make God anthropomorphic, or a mere part of nature.

The transcendent nature of Moses’s God is revealed in the prohibition against images of Him. The second of the ten commandments was unprecedented. In part the bar on images was an attempt to prevent Yahweh’s worship from becoming attached to a particular shrine, but the real point was that nothing in nature could be compared to Him. He was more powerful, greater, and holier than anything that a human being could represent. The transcendence of Moses’s god is also revealed in the Priestly story of creation in Genesis 1. There God simply brings the world into existence by demanding that it come into existence. There is no technique or power in the ordinary sense. He simply says “let it be” and it is. His very word, like the word of a ruler, has a power to actualize itself. The notion that the word of a ruler has a power to realize itself is not new here, and we see the words of the Egyptian Ptah, a craftsman god like so many creator gods, assigned a similar power in Egyptian mythology. Hence a human power that makes sense in the human realm becomes the creative power of God. It becomes God’s transcendent power precisely because a naturalistic account of the power of command is not available. A king’s subjects obey him for various good reasons, but why is it that nature should obey the commands of God, a nature that surely cannot understand or respond to authority? And yet, we are told, so great and incomprehensible is God’s power. This is about as close as one can get in a concrete image to the notion of an absolute power, unlimited by any other power, and unconstrained by any natural law. The God of Moses is, first of all, a God of absolute power. Stories with interesting plots, in which a god meets and overcomes difficulties, sees through deception, overcomes other gods through heroic effort—all of this is nonsense if applied to the God of Moses. Yahweh is a God without myths. Indeed, part of the drive of the creation story in the opening chapter of Genesis is to identify the Sun and Moon and the waters above and below the earth not as gods, which they are for the Mesopotamians, but as mere objects brought into being by Yahweh. If this part of the priestly approach to Yahweh goes back to Moses, then Moses’s concept of his god ruled out other gods from the beginning, simply because it rendered nature a machine constructed by the one god, not a community of spirits expressing themselves in natural events. If we do not attribute this level of sophistication to Moses, we still need to attribute enough to him so that his teachings could take this direction by the time of the prophet Amos. No doubt some development in thought can be attributed to the prophetic-priestly tradition that intervenes between Moses and Deuteronomy, but any such development must be provided with a base to start from.

It must be noted, though, that there is a limit to Yahweh’s power, and this limit creates the possibility of a story for him, of difficulties met and overcome. Yahweh can be thwarted through the free will of his creatures, who can impudently refuse to reward his love with due obedience and reverence. What is originally the only thing that can be conceived as obeying anyone, an intelligent being, now becomes the only thing that can disobey God. (This is precisely because we can understand how obedience occurs with such a creature, and so can also understand how it might fail to occur. We understand neither how it does occur, nor how it can fail, when nature itself obeys God.) So God becomes the all powerful parent dealing with a willful child. Stories like that of the flood, and the Garden of Eden, can be retained, though with a new twist, and told of Yahweh.

These doctrines, of course, fit well with the God of the agrarian revolt of the early Hebrews living in the hills of Judaea. It may be that a religious innovator belonging to a group driven out of Egypt (not nomads, be it noted, but agriculturalists temporarily without land) gave rise to them, an