Undeception

Review: The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide It)
Author: Thom Stark
Wipf and Stock, 2010
Chapter 4: “Yahweh’s Ascendancy”

Stark describes this chapter as an overview of “how Israel’s theology mirrored the various theologies of their neighbors, and how it was adapted over time in order to accommodate the changing socio-political fortunes of Israel” (p. 86).

He brings out the best wine first with a part of the payoff promised in chapter 2, the tantalizing bit about Yahweh as “son of a mountain god”. Stark begins by describing indigenous Canaanite religion contemporary to early Israel, a system that will seem familiar to most of us acquainted with Greek or Roman mythologies: a pantheon of gods and goddesses, all of whom were under the authority of a kingly chief deity who was the father of most of them, and many of whom were claimed by inhabitants of certain regions. Inerrantists will say, “Yes, the Bible is quite clear that there were practitioners of those pagan cults in Israel. But they were condemned by followers of Yahweh.” That is true, but it’s not so simple as that: the question is, when were the indigenous Canaanite religious ideas and practices condemned by followers of Yahweh?

Stark’s answer: not nearly so early as inerrantist and other conservative Christians are taught to think. This chapter attempts to demonstrate that early Israelite Yahweh-worship shows itself to be an “orthodox” subset of Canaanite religion within our own Bible, even within those writings that formulate standardized Israelite religion par excellence, the Pentateuch/Torah: enter the Song of Moses.

We know from other ANE texts that in early Palestine the deity over their pantheon was the mountain god suitably named God Most High, or Elyon. Stark shows how the original of Deut 32.8-9 was literally glossed over in the surviving copies of the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text in two quite different ways so as to remove traces of this passage’s polytheistic pedigree; one or the other of these obscured readings is all too naturally what we find in our modern English translations. But in the earlier Dead Sea Scrolls, the original situation is transparent: El Elyon divvied up the earth and gave each of his sons a portion:

When Elyon divided the nations,
when he separated the sons of Adam
he established the borders of the nations
according to the number of the sons of the gods.
Yahweh’s portion was his people,
Jacob his alloted inheritance.

Stark provides details as to how this sort of polytheism is precisely what we find in other Canaanite religions of the time. To my mind, there is nowhere to hide from this analysis.

He takes some pains to answer typical objections, such as an appeal to the first commandment, or to the statement, “I am Yahweh; there is no other god besides me,” which he demonstrates to be a claim of superiority, not exclusivity of existence (cf. Babylon in Is 47.8, Nineveh in Zeph 2.15).

Here let me point out that this chapter has by far the healthiest – and most needed – set of footnotes in the book so far. Helpful explanation of many background concepts and terms are joined by references to sources and suggested further reading.

I found his section on the famously mysterious “Sons of God and the Daughters of Men” passage of Genesis 6 to be immensely satisfying. After briefly describing the weakness in three competing explanations of the identities of the sons of God (angels, the kings of the earth, and the sons of righteous Seth), Stark lays out an infinitely more plausible explanation. The key phrase, usually read as “sons of God”, is the same we saw in Deut. 32.8 and should here again be read as ‘sons of the gods’. Why? “The same phrase appears in Ugaritic, Phoenician, Akkadian, and Aramaic inscriptions, and in all these cases it means, unequivocally, ‘junior deities’ ” (p. 78). The nephilim, their offspring with human women, were ”heroes of old, men of renown”: in short, they were demigods, much as Hercules, Perseus, etc. Despite the discomfort such a reading will produce in inerrantists, there can be little doubt that this makes the most sense of the passage on its own terms, once we stop imposing upon it the interpretive constraints gained by our beliefs on topics such as monotheism or the Bible’s historical accuracy. This is not to say that this passage cannot be analyzed in ways that downplay anything controversial about it (in fact, the bizarre sons of Seth and daughters of Cain interpretation is championed because it happens to support another sparsely substantiated traditional Christian doctrine, which I won’t get into here), but can we truly say that we are treating the text with honor if we do so?

The Mesha Stele, the Moabite king's commemoration of his defeat of Israel's King Omri in a battle through the "wrath" of his god Kemosh. Although the timeline is off (Jehoram was actually Omri's grandson) the event celebrated in this stele is likely to have been the basis of the story in 2 Kings. (Image via Wikipedia)

Another example of a polytheistic mindset alive and well within our Scriptures is found in 2 Kings 3.4-27, a narrative that unsurprisingly doesn’t make it to many felt boards: the great prophet Elisha’s failed prophecy promising a victory over the Moabites. Israel, Judah, and Edom join forces to oppose King Mesha of Moab. Elisha assures Israel’s King Jehoram that Yahweh would fight for their side. And things were looking good, until Mesha in desperation sacrificed his firstborn son to Kemosh, causing “wrath” to come upon Mesha’s enemies and overpower Yahweh’s forces. This is troubling under a view that recognizes God as the supreme deity, let alone the only deity, but it makes perfect sense as an artefact of historical Canaanite religion and a stage in which Yahweh was the “god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”, the god to be favored and worshiped by his local devotees, but not the only existing God.

So how did we get from there to here? Stark highlights several waypoints on the erstwhile war god Yahweh’s march from tribal deity to only existing God, traced through differing snapshots in Psalms primarily, progressing past his merger with Elyon as God Most High, a promotion to chief deity of the pantheon. Eventually, “just a few decades before the Babylonian exile,” Yahweh emerges as the only God. ”Perhaps conveniently,” Stark suggests, this came about the same time as the reforms of Josiah, “in which the high places of worship (which were normative from at least the time of David on) are torn down, their priests are slaughtered en masse by Josiah and his military, and strict religious centralization (a novelty in Judean religion) is imposed” (pp. 82-83). Jeremiah 10.1-16′s satirical polemic against pagan gods and their idols reflected an early, if not the first, conception of Yahweh as so transcendent above all gods that they were denied the dignity of divinity — and even existence. With such conceptualizations, monotheism finally arrives, and it’s there to stay. Stark outlines several compelling historical reasons for this shift, which I won’t spoil for you here.

Readers like myself unaware of the underlying timeline of Old Testament writings would benefit the most from this chapter if a table roughly outlining different writings’ relative dates were provided. Indeed, even as someone more or less convinced by this sketch of the history of Israel’s theism, I found the passage hopping necessary to illustrate the posited stages of development to be bewildering at times. When was Deuteronomy 32 written relative to Exodus? to the rest of Deuteronomy? Where was the author of 2 Kings exactly in the process? If even I, a like-minded reader, struggled to put it together, I strongly suspect that the passage citations will look like cherry picking, clever proof-texting to those more predisposed to be skeptical. No, the whole of scholarship on the dating of OT authorship and redaction history would be neither possible nor necessary, but a table that at least charts out where modern critical scholarship is coming from in the passages cited strikes me as not only preferable, but perhaps nearly indispensable.

Dr. Enns has recently reminded us that the Ancient Near East conceptualized the beginning of creation as a battle between order and disorder, the gods vs. chaos. We see the chaos of the natural world represented as an antagonist in the Genesis cosmogony. The forces of chaos are never quite given the dignity of a name, but the functionless void upon which the curtain opens in Genesis 1.2 and God’s actions of appropriating already existing material in that chapter clearly demonstrate that He is not tasked with creating a world from scratch but with the more typically king-like duty of bringing order out of disorder, as John Walton has been arguing.

But this “cosmic battle” between order and chaos is by no means a peculiarly ANE leitmotif. Although separated by hundreds of years from the ANE, Germanic mythology as it shows up in the Scandinavian stories is characterized by the same dualism. As fitting for a people thriving in a harsh environment, the mythology of the Scandinavians as represented in Old Icelandic (“Old Norse”) literature shows this motif in the form of the continuous struggle between the gods and the ancient, formidable, grotesque giants, the frost giants in particular for obvious reasons. The world itself was born of chaos: from the gap between the realm of fire and the realm of ice a mountainous frost giant Ymir was formed, the father of all giants from whose body the earth was made after being slain by the gods (there is good evidence that many of these motifs go back to common Indo-European mythology). The delicate balance of power between the cruel and pitiless forces of nature and the order maintained by the gods is evident in Snorri’s highly entertaining rendition of “Thor and Utgard -Loki” (also called “Thor’s visit to Jotunheim”): while the two gods and accompanying human are clearly somewhat at the mercy of the giants in Jotunheim (“Giantland”), the prospect of encountering the wrath of Thor’s hammer keeps the giants from exploiting their better position.

As J.R.R. Tolkien pointed out long ago in his monumental lecture/essay, “Beowulf: the Monsters, and the Critics,” the Germanic outlook was thoroughly grim, for they anticipated that order as championed by the gods was fighting a losing battle against chaos and its monsters, and that valor was a matter of playing one’s part in a game that everyone knew could never be won.

“The Northern Gods”, Ker said [in The Dark Ages], “have an exultant extravagance in their warfare which makes them more like Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason” – mythologically, the monsters – “but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.” And in their war men are their chosen allies, able when heroic to share in this “absolute resistance, perfect because without hope.”

Tolkien notes that the eschatological conception of “the doom of the gods” indicates that the Germanic outlook was much bleaker than the Mediterranean mythologies in predicting that chaos would triumph. But surely in accepting this fate they were but extrapolating a macro view of world history from their most reliable source: each individual’s experience. Human life is born in travail, then thrives and pushes back against all odds; defying death in early years, maturing to fear and avoid it, growing more and more aware that an entire lifetime’s work of survival is but delaying the inexorable fate of all. Each of us must succumb to the destructive power of nature, so why shouldn’t the entire world work that way?

Polytheistic cultures generally envisage gods as beings of a different sort altogether from the Judeo-Christian conception of God: rather than ultimate beings supreme over the natural world, they are merely beings whose great power was essential for maintaining some control over the natural world — and not always successfully. Despite depicting YHWH in standard ANE terms as a king, Genesis 1 describes Him as in full command of all the chaotic forces of nature.

Acknowledging Genesis’ ANE pedigree does not by any means strip it of special meaning. Rather, studying commonalities among cross-cultural cosmologies highlights the sort of meaning the original audience of Genesis would have been wanting and allows us to appreciate the accounts for what they were intended to be.

The BioLogos Foundation hits another home run by soliciting and sharing this gem:

Bishop of Durham Tom Wright, while no fundie, is generally regarded among scholars and many evangelicals as fairly conservative in his theological outlook (e.g., he affirms an historical Fall of some kind), so this is good to hear from him. I found it interesting that Bishop Wright clearly affirmed Walton’s model of Genesis 1 as a statement of God’s authorship and control of the universe recounted in the form of an analogy to a temple dedication. He echoes Walton when he warns that taking a “flat” view of Genesis as simple history just because it’s what our culture expects is in a real sense a dishonor to the text itself.

If we want to be faithful to the text, we must take it on its own terms, regardless of what we think it should be saying. Those who insist on a simple historical account are in effect attempting to wrest the creation stories away from the original audiences and make it meet our interests. The ancients would have found little enough meaning in a newspaper account of the events that began world history, but so many Christians are insisting that God was under some obligation to leave them out in the cold in order to satiate our modern demands.

Commonly in Christian theology, the agreement between Adam and God (the Adamic covenant) and the agreement between the Israelites and God (the Old Covenant of Moses) are contrasted (the Noahide and Abrahamic covenants are given varying significance depending on who’s talking). Many, such as those holding firmly to the Westminster Confession, argue that the Adamic covenant was a “covenant of works”, the Mosaic covenant was “of grace” at heart but administered through works, and that the New Covenant is thoroughly a covenant of grace. It’s almost as though God kept trying different ways to maintain a relationship with humanity, and finally managed to get it right with Christianity.

Reading the Eden story as an historical account gives us the impression that there was a covenant with humanity that got broken. Successive attempts at reconciling God and man were necessary, each in the form of a new epochal covenant that had to hold up at least temporarily until Jesus came and brokered the final version. But we get a slightly different picture if we understand the early Genesis accounts as etiology, an origins story, offered by later Israelite theologians to replace the errant myths they were familiar with, some lingering from their ancient past and others absorbed from surrounding cultures.

Did you see the Indiana Jones movies? Everyone knows him as the swashbuckling archaeologist who displayed his uncommon daring, epic bravado, and quick thinking to rescue relics and precious artifacts from those who sought to exploit them for nefarious purposes. We learned all that about him in the first movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and saw his awe-inspiring knowledge, skill, and good luck in action once again in The Temple of Doom. We intuited that these were not two isolated occasions. We could tell that he’d been at this for quite awhile, and was an “old hand” at it.

At the beginning of the third movie, the filmmakers included something commonly appreciated by fans of such recurring tales: an origin story. Now this is interesting: those who see him as a young man might have expected to see some decisive moment that transformed him from a typical kid into the legend as we know him. Whereas a young, carefree, and well-adjusted Bruce Wayne experienced something that sharply reversed his course and sent him hurtling toward the brooding, dark, and psychologically scarred Batman he became, Lucas and Spielberg took a tack that’s in many ways much more interesting — and ancient.

To our surprise (and satisfaction), when we first see him as a teenager, despite the absences of his only known phobia, the scar beneath his chin, and his iconic fedora, he’s already Indiana Jones. By my count, four separate etiologies are presented in this short story prefacing The Last Crusade, but what’s remarkable is what remains the same: here at our first glimpse, what do we see but the same idealistic adventurer that we’ve known all along, who believes that precious artifacts “belong in a museum”, knows his archeology, is bravely tenacious, and stands his ground even when cornered. We find that what makes Indiana Jones Indiana Jones is…well, he’s Indiana Jones.

I think that’s one of the primary things the Genesis story of the Fall was meant to convey: God initiates relationships with men, and their pride and self-interest routinely cause the severing of those relationships. Now, I’m not sure how “Moses” arrived at this conclusion; God certainly may have revealed it, but since He didn’t reveal how it happened (via the evolutionary processes that created us), I tend to think it was acquired by more proximate causes. For one thing, as seen in etiologies across the ancient world, uniformitarianism seems to have been generally taken for granted; they formed their etiologies based upon assumed continuity between what is observed in the present and what happened in the past.

No matter, one of the most profound revelations to us in the Genesis story, one we can take to the bank, was that humanity was human all along. The unfaithfulness the religious leaders of Israel were warning against the Israelites repeating is seen as part and parcel of the warp and woof of what people have always been. “You’re just like your muleheaded Grandpa Adam.”

An interesting result of this interpretation is that it redirects one view of the Fall popular among Christians who understandably want to make sure that accepting evolution and a non-historical view of Genesis doesn’t throw out any more than necessary. These take up an allegorical or parabolic interpretation in which Adam and Eve aren’t necessarily two historical people, but whose Fall as depicted actually did take place in history among a certain population of humans. This view has been championed by theologians from C. S. Lewis to Keith Ward. The idea is that there was a period of time, probably in the thousands of years, in which humans were doing just fine, walking in the Garden with God in the cool of the evening, until by the influence of some catalyst they rose up and rebelled. I think this misses the point of the story, which was that humans have been humans as long as they’ve been human. In fact, what the story seems to be saying is that humanity is in a sense defined in contradistinction to other creatures by our simultaneous knowledge of God and the moral law and our inability to acknowledge God and live up to that moral law.

I tend to see a bit more continuity throughout human history in what God expects from those with whom He is in covenant: He expects love and faithfulness. The fantastic aspect of the New Covenant is the demonstration in Jesus’ self-sacrifice that God’s love covers our unfaithfulness and inadequacy to love. And as we consciously submit to Him and subjugate ourselves to His order, an ability to live and love Him faithfully and adequately are given back to us by His grace.