49. Many books by competent, well-respected scholars treat Genesis 1–11 without making this connection. John Day, Creation to Babel; Gordon Wenham, Rethinking Genesis 1–11: Gateway to the Bible (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015); Joseph Blenkinsopp, Creation, Un-creation, Re-creation: A Discursive Commentary on Genesis 1–11 (Bloomsbury: T&T Clark, 2011).
50. Machinist, “How Gods Die,” p. 189.
51. Mark Smith, “The Death of ‘Dying and Rising Gods’ in the Biblical World: An Update, with Special Reference to Baal in the Baal Cycle,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 12/2 (1998): 257–313.
52. The development of Akhenaten’s monotheism includes a striking parallel. Donald Redford writes of an early speech “in which Akhenaten introduces his god to the court. Therein he describes his celestial deity in terms of uniqueness, transcendence, and permanence that were to become common throughout the reign, while at the same time accusing the gods of having ‘ceased one after the other’” (“Akhenaten,” ABD, vol. 1, p. 135); “A Royal Speech from the Blocks of the 10th Pylon,” Bulletin of the Egyptological Seminar 3 (1981): 87ff; Akhenaten the Heretic King (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 172.
53. As noted above, it is also called the tower of Babel. Babel and Babylon are the same word in Hebrew. It is only English translators who created a distinction between the two.
54. Some might ask here, but doesn’t God speak to angels as well? The complex answer is that angels in the Hebrew Bible are not independent beings. They are manifestations (the technical term is hypostases) of God. This is treated in my Disappearance of God (published in paperback under the title The Hidden Face of God [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996]), pp. 9–13. The simpler answer is that God does not in fact ever speak to an angel in any of these texts. God rather speaks through angels sometimes.
55. Jeremiah 7:18.
56. William Dever, Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005); Ze’ev Meshel, “Kuntillet ‘Ajrud: An Israelite Religious Center in Northern Sinai” (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1978), http://www.penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/pdfs/20-4/meshel.pdf.; Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel, p. 654.
57. Baruch Halpern, “The Baal (and the Asherah) in 7th-Century Judah: Yahweh’s Retainers Retired,” in Halpern, From Gods to God, pp. 57–97 (originally published in 1993). The term “Baal” is likewise a generic, normally preceded by the definite article, not the name of a particular male deity. John Day claims that the discovery of the Ugaritic texts, which have a divine consort named Athirat, lead us to understand Asherah to be a name, equivalent to Athirat (Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan [London: Sheffield Academic, 2000], pp. 42ff). He does not defend this connection, and he does not cite Halpern’s solid case establishing the opposite, that Asherah is not a goddess’s name, even though Halpern’s treatment had first appeared in 1993. Day insists that “the fact that Asherah frequently has the definite article in Hebrew does not matter, since we likewise find Baal referred to regularly as ‘the Baal’ in the Old Testament.” The definite article matters in the case of the Baal, and it definitely matters in the case of the Asherah. Even the cases where the word occurs in plural, “Asherot” (see Judges 3:7) do not dissuade Day, who says that the parallel with the plural of Baal there “makes it undeniable” that it refers to a divine name. The occurrences of the word Asherah with a definite article, in plurals, and with a pronominal suffix (“His Asherah”) rather make the opposite conclusion undeniable. Also supporting this conclusion is the absence of Asherah in personal names as opposed to other names of goddesses. André Lemaire makes all of these points and firmly establishes that Asherah is a common noun, not the name of a goddess, in The Birth of Monotheism: The Rise and Disappearance of Yahwism (2007), pp. 57–62. I would list the many scholars who have treated Asherah as the name of a particular goddess, but I would have to include myself. I later became persuaded otherwise by the works of Lemaire and Halpern.
58. 1 Kings 18:19.
59. David Noel Freedman, “Yahweh of Samaria and His Asherah,” Biblical Archaeologist (December 1987): 241–49; Ziony Zevit, The Religions of Ancient Israel, p. 652.
60. See, for example, the book of Hosea 2:21–22.
61. William Dever, Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel; Saul M. Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel, Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988); Judith M. Hadley, The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah: Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mark Smith, Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Susan Ackerman, “Goddesses,” in Suzanne Richard, ed., Near Eastern Archaeology: A Reader (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003), pp. 393–97.
62. 1 Kings 16:32–33; 2 Kings 13:6.
63. 1 Kings 15:13; 2 Chronicles 15:16.
64. 2 Kings 18:4.
65. 2 Kings 21:3, 7.
66. The Wadi Kidron. 2 Kings 23:6. Some of these reports sound similar to one another, and the matter of the Deuteronomistic historian’s sources is a complex one. But at the least, the account of Josiah is likely to have been written very close to his reign (probably during it) since it appears to be part of the Josianic edition of the Deuteronomistic history (Dtr1). See Chapter 5, note 15.
67. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007).
CHAPTER SIX
The Mystery of Judah
1. Leviticus 19:18.
2. We differ on authorship as well. I trace this to the Priestly law code (P). Many scholars separate the Priestly text into a Priestly code and a Holiness code (H). This goes back to the nineteenth century CE and Wellhausen, but most prominent among recent Holiness code (or even Holiness School) scholars are Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), and Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus, The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1991–2001), 3 vols. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I see no evidence for the division into two sources, H and P. Friedman, WWTB, p. 172; The Bible with Sources Revealed, pp. 218, 296–97.
3. Mark 12:31.
4. Recall that we saw in Chapter 2 that the word for a sanctuary, miqdash, happens to occur fifty-two times as well, but that was in the entire Hebrew Bible. The treatment of aliens occurs fifty-two times in the Five Books of Moses alone! See Chapter 2, note 22.
5. See above, pp. 63–64. William Propp, Exodus 1–18, p. 128.
6. The italics are mine. Review by Glen A. Taylor of Jack Lundbom, Deuteronomy: A Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), http://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/9357_10328.pdf.
7. See the citation of Halpern in Chapter 4, note 21.
8. Deuteronomy 20:10–15. Likewise, Israel is pictured as sending words of peace when asking to pass through King Sihon’s land (Deuteronomy 2:26–29).
9. Deuteronomy 12:31; 18:9–14.
10. I understand this story to be part of a history of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, a text that was used as a source by the Deuteronomistic historian in composing his history.
11. That is the explanation of Rashi on Genesis 12:3 and 25:4.
12. It occurs in both the Niphal and Hithpael. Some people are taught that the Hithpael is reflexive and the Niphal passive. But that is a simplification that is sometimes made when one is first learning Biblical Hebrew, but one finds after reading enough texts that this dichotomy does not hold up. The two conjugations have an overlapping range of meaning. See Thomas O. Lambdin, Introduction to Biblical Hebrew (New York: Scribner, 1971), pp. 176–77.
13. Leviticus 19:18, 33–34.
14. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, The Anchor Bible 3A (New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 1654; and see bibliography there.
15. Genesis 38:12, 20
.
16. Exodus 11:2.
17. Exodus 2:13.
18. 2 Samuel 11–12.
19. Harry Orlinsky, Essays in Biblical Culture and Bible Translation (New York: Ktav, 1974), p. 83.
20. Wright, The Evolution of God (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), pp. 235–36.
21. Hector Avalos, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2005), p. 140.
22. John Hartung, “Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In-Group Morality,” http://strugglesforexistence.com/?p=article_p&id=13. Likewise, most recently, Dan Barker makes this classic mistake in God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction (New York: Sterling, 2016), p. 300.
23. Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 253.
APPENDIX A
From Egypt to Midian
1. The explanation of how I distinguish these source texts and determine that they are E, J, or P may be found in WWTB; in The Bible with Sources Revealed, pp. 119–26; and with especially detailed analysis in William Propp, Exodus 1–18, pp. 125–94. The distinction of the J text from E and P is particularly explained in my Hidden Book in the Bible. The most recent delineation of the sources is in two books by Joel Baden. On the positive side, Baden defends the existence of the E source against those who have denied it. On the negative side, Baden reverses much of the source identification of J and E in the section treated here and in the entire plagues text that follows. The evidence of language collected in The Hidden Book in the Bible is contrary to Baden’s re-identification of E texts as J, but Baden does not cite or deal with this evidence. The E texts that he calls J are entirely lacking all fifty of the terms that are characteristic of the J source and its related texts (The Hidden Book in the Bible, pp. 379–87). The identification of those J texts is further confirmed by two studies that had come to the same conclusion about J and its related texts independently: Hannelis Schulte, Die Entstehung der Gerschichtsschreibung im alten Israel, published in Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 128 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1972); and Clarimond Mansfield, The Book of Yahweh (Boston: Cornhill, 1922). Both Friedman’s and Schulte’s work are discussed by John Barton, “Dating the ‘Succession Narrative,’” in John Day, ed., In Search of Pre-exilic Israel (London: T&T Clark, 2004), pp. 100–104. It is also affirmed, with additional evidence brought, by David Noel Freedman, in “Dinah and Shechem, Amnon and Tamar,” in Freedman, Divine Commitment and Human Obligation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), pp. 485–95.
The distinctions between E and J are difficult in these early chapters of Exodus, and there have been many different proposals over the years. Though I am confident of my identifications, which are bolstered by Propp’s, which are extremely similar though we arrived at them independently, I am obligated to inform the reader of this complex history.
At minimum, though, there is agreement on the crucial first verse of Exodus 3, in which the story of God’s first revelation to Moses in Midian begins. Baden, like Propp and me, recognizes that this initiation of Moses must be from the source E. So do Carpenter and Harford-Battersby, pp. 82–83; S. R. Driver, p. 27; Robert Coote, In Defense of Revolution: The Elohist History (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), p. 141; Alan Jenks, “Elohist,” ABD, vol. 2, p. 480; and Cross, From Epic to Canon, pp. 60–61. Of the standard scholarly works, only Martin Noth does not attribute this verse to E. Strangely, he recognizes the problem of the name Jethro, which is a well-known mark of E, in the verse (p. 183n.), and he attributes the last quarter of the verse to E (p. 203n.), but he still calls the verse part of “an addition in J” (p. 30n.).
INDEX
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Aaron, 69, 92, 107, 127, 130
Aaronid priests, 105, 107–108, 111, 112, 130
abecedaries, 92
Abraham, 46, 48, 55, 60, 68, 117, 118, 145, 181, 207, 208, 215, 261n6
and Midian, 124, 126, 130
and monotheism, 187
Ackerman, Susan, 270n61
Adam, 118, 187
Adams, R. B., 242n2
’adōnay, 139
agnosticism, 5, 215
Ahab, 95, 99, 192
Aharoni, Yohanan, 92
Ahaz, 89
Ahituv, Shmuel, 254n16, 257n42
Akhenaten, 137–141, 142, 145, 268n52. See also Aten
‘al pānāy, 162
Albright, William Foxwell, 12–13, 23, 35, 134, 254n9, 262nn31–32, 265n11
aliens, 62–64, 65, 78, 82, 200–203, 205, 206, 208–210, 215–216, 270n4
Alt, Albrecht, 249n81
Alter, Robert, 239n4
Amalekites, 204
Amarna Letters, 137, 138
Amenophis IV. See Akhenaten
‘Apiru, 28, 65, 132
Arad, 92
Aram, Aramean, 16, 71, 75, 95, 96
Ark of the Covenant, 54, 64, 82, 163, 200. See also barks
Artaxerxes I, 96
Asa, 192
Asherah, 190–193, 267n35, 269n57. See also goddesses; Queen of the Heavens
Ashkenazi, 108–110
Assman, Jan, 134, 136, 138, 263n35, 263n37
Assyria, Assyrians, 42, 95, 96, 116, 171, 199
Astruc, Jean, 48
Aten, 138–139, 142, 145, 263n36. See also Akhenaten
atheism, 194, 195, 213, 215
Avalos, Hector, 212, 271n21
Baal, 159–160, 185, 190–191, 206, 269n57
Babylon, Babylonians, 95, 96, 151–153, 155, 157, 161, 166, 171, 188. See also exile; tower of Babylon
Baden, Joel, 239n4, 249n81, 251n100, 261n12, 271–272n1
Barkay, Gabriel, 91, 94, 254n8
barks, 54, 64, 82
Barmash, Pamela, 252n114
Barton, John, 272n1
Bathsheba, 210
Batto, Bernard, 241n18
Beer Sheba, 92, 98, 163
Behar, Doron M., 259n52, 259n54
Ben-Ami, Haim, 258n48
Benjamin, Don C., 44, 256n23
Ben-Tor, Amnon, 252n116, 256n34
Ben-Yosef, Erez, 242n2
Benz, B. C., 252n106
Beth-El, 163
Bietak, Manfred, 241n24, 242n1, 248n65, 250n89
Bilhah, 117
Biran, Avraham, 239n2, 256n30
Black Obelisk, 95
Blenkinsopp, Joseph, 262n27, 264n6, 268n49
Blessing of Jacob, 72, 105, 107, 258n45
Blessing of Moses, 41, 73–74, 105, 132, 258n45
Bloch-Smith, Elizabeth, 100, 256n24, 257n41
Bockmuehl, Markus, 255n16
Bradman, Neil, 258n48
Brettler, Marc, 244n30
Bright, John, 111–112, 259n55
Bronze Age, 59
Brueggemann, Walter, 264n6
bulla, 89, 90
Cain, 118, 187
Calloway, Joseph, 253n117
Campbell, Antony, 245n35
Canaan, 15, 38, 40, 50, 58, 66, 71, 131, 174
Egyptian rule in, 77–78, 252n114
See also conquest, of Canaan
Canaanites, 50, 204, 205, 206, 210
in Egypt, 28–30, 58
worship El, 51–52
Caphtor, 71
Carmel, 159, 190, 206, 266n17
Carmy, Shalom, 244n30
Carpenter, J. E., 245n35, 249n81, 261n12, 272n1
Carr, David, 260n62
centralization, 163–166
Christians, 158, 165, 187, 193, 195, 203, 215
Cinderella, 11
circumcision, 54–57, 64, 72, 80, 82, 200, 247n61
City of David, 3, 90, 97. See also Jerusalem
Clements, Ronald E., 249n81
Clifford, Richard, 264n6
Cline, Eric, 20, 241n19
Cogan, Mordecai, 256n23
Cohen gene, 108–109. See also kohen; Levite gene
Colenso, John, 27
Collins, John, 241n1
conquest, of Canaan, 14, 79–81, 104, 117, 203–206
Coote, Robert, 272n1
covenant, 9, 55
Covenant Code, 151
Cross, Frank Moore, 3, 35–37, 41, 52, 69, 126, 149, 155–156, 243nn15–18, 244n23, 246n39, 246n46, 247n50, 249n81, 254n16, 258n45, 261n1, 261n12, 265nn10–11, 265nn14–15, 267n34, 272n1
Cyprus, 71
Cyrus Cylinder, 96
Cyrus the Great, 96
D source, 46, 61, 70, 105, 116, 131, 200, 245n38, 248n72, 260n63
plagues, 59–60
Dan, 98, 163
Daniel, book of, 184, 193
Dan’il, 184
Darius I, 96
David, 3, 42, 96, 98, 158, 210, 239nn2–4
Davies, Graham, 131, 248n65, 255n16, 262n25
Dawkins, Richard, 194, 212, 213, 270n67, 271n23
Day, John, 268n40, 268n49, 269n57
Day, Peggy, 267n35
Dayagi-Mendels, Michal, 253n4
De Lacey, Douglas, 255n16
Dead Sea Scrolls, 35, 49, 101, 170, 171
Deborah, 36, 40, 80
Decalogue. See Ten Commandments
Demsky, Aaron, 255n16, 255nn18–19
Deutero-Isaiah. See Second Isaiah
Deuteronomic Law Code, 70, 163, 164, 260n63
Deuteronomistic History, 33, 158, 159, 160, 265n12, 265n14, 270n66, 271n10
Dever, William, 15, 50, 81, 240n10, 248n65, 253nn117–119, 255n19, 258n44, 269n56, 270n61
Dinah, 56, 72, 247n61
Dobbs-Allsopp, F. W., 254n16
documentary hypothesis, 41–47, 150, 245n32. See also D source; E source; J source; P source
Dolansky, Shawna, 243n19, 247n59
Driver, S. R., 261n12, 272n1
Dtn. See Deuteronomic Law Code
Dtr. See Deuteronomistic History
E source, 46, 47–48, 51, 53, 61, 70, 74, 75, 79, 105, 116, 200, 245n38, 246nn42–43, 247n48, 248n70, 248–249n72, 261n12, 263n43, 271–272n1
Midian in E, 123–127, 128, 130
parallels with Egyptian tradition, 57–59
plagues, 59–60
Eden, 178, 179, 183
Edom, Edomites, 38, 205, 254n15
and Midian, 131–133, 140, 144
and Shasu, 123, 242n2
See also Seir
Egypt, 4–5, 10, 19, 21, 23, 40–41, 50, 51, 52, 60, 61, 66–69, 71, 72, 75–78, 79, 87, 104–105, 107, 112, 117–118, 121–122, 145–146, 149, 169, 170, 188, 210, 251n100, 258n44