The Biblical Gods

[maklelan]

I tried this thread out on another board and not a single person was able to respond to the evidence. I'm curious to see how people here respond.

The thread is designed to provide some evidence concerning the nature of ancient Israelite belief in God, just so everyone is aware that their criticisms of Mormon henotheism are greatly misplaced. If you have questions or concerns, I am happy to answer them, but please refrain from drive-bys. I am not appealing to the theological authority of the Bible. I am appealing to the Bible as an historical record that can reveal early Israelite belief, and I will show that accusations that Mormon henotheism (recognizing that God and Yahweh are two separate beings, and that many divine beings inhabit the heavens) is unbiblical or is incompatible with the belief of the ancients is unfounded.

The first thing of which one must be aware is that there is no consistent theology in the Bible. One part of the Bible will preach one doctrine, and another another doctrine. It was written by hundreds of people from several cultures and subcultures over the course of about a thousand years. Literarily speaking, it is a mixed bag of theological speculation, assertion, and denial. The following statements comes from Shaye Cohen, professor of Hebrew literature and philosophy as Harvard University (from From The Maccabees to the Mishna, 52–53):

In the eyes of the ancients, the essence of religion was neither faith nor dogma, but action.

Defining Judaism this way [through theological creeds] is completely foreign to antiquity. Ancient Judaism has no creeds.

What we can tell from the Bible, from archaeology, and from other extra-biblical literature, however, is that the earliest manifestations of Israelite theology don’t view God as alone. Again from Cohen (76):

At first the Israelites believed that their God was merely the God of their nation, mightier than the other gods but not materially different from them.

Through detailed study of the Bible and through cognate literature, like the Ugaritic texts and other inscriptions from the time period, we know that the pantheon of Israel was four-tiered and based on a familial organization. The head God was the father with his wife. The second tier was made up of the main deities. The third tier was messengers of various kinds, and the fourth tier was for divine beings of menial servitude (See Lowell K. Handy, “The Appearance of Pantheon in Judah,” in The Triumph of Elohim, 33–36).

In the biblical version of this pantheon El is the father God, and Asherah the mother. Yahweh is one of the sons of El. A variety of angels (messengers) and other divine creatures inhabited the lower two tiers. Deuteronomy 32:8–9 preserve this ideology. The Masoretic text emends verse 8 to avoid talking about El’s children, but the original text, as evidenced by the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, referred to when God divided to the nations their inheritance and “set the boundaries of the people according to the number of the children of El.” Who were these children, and what allotment did they receive? See verse 9: “For Yahweh’s portion is his people: Jacob [Israel] is the portion of his allotment.” Thus Yahweh is clearly portrayed as a national deity, given his stewardship by his father, El Elyon.

How then do we explain Yahweh Elohim as a title for a single deity? Before the eighth century, as the prophets began a propaganda campaign against the surrounding nations they had to exalt their national deity above the rest. They introduced a new ideology that conflated El and Yahweh, got rid of the other national deities, and promoted El/Yahweh to ruler of the whole universe. This promotion is portrayed in Psalm 82. It states that Elohim stands among the assembly of El (v. 1). He asks how long the other judges will be wicked (v. 2). He states that they are all gods, children of Elyon (v. 6; remember Deut 32:8), but that they will die. He calls out to another god to arise, judge the nations, and inherit them all for his portion (v. 7). Here Yahweh is called upon to destroy the remaining gods of the second tier and take over their stewardships. Thus Yahweh becomes the ruler of all the nations, and the prophets can point to their God as ruler over the countries and cultures around Israel. From Mark Smith’s The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (49):

Psalm 82, like Deuteronomy 32:8–9, preserves the outlines of the older theology it is rejecting. From the perspective of this older theology, Yahweh did not belong to the top tier of the pantheon. Instead, in early Israel the god of Israel apparently belonged to the second tier of the pantheon; he was not the preside god, but one of his sons. Accordingly, what is at work is not a loss of the second tier of a pantheon headed by Yahweh. Instead, the collapse of the first and second tiers in the early Israelite pantheon likely was caused by an identification of El, the head of this pantheon, with Yahweh, a member of its second tier.

Isaiah’s appeals to monotheism, occuring in deutero-Isaiah, written around the time of the exile, are not manifestations of an established theology, nor do they demand a reading of strict monotheism, which is precluded by the mention of angels, seraphim, cherubim, and other divine beings. Isaiah’s primary goal in much of his preaching is iconoclasm, and when he says that there is no God created he means that none of their idols are actually gods, not that there are no other deities in the universe, which, again, is precluded by angels, and demons, and seraphim, and Satan, etc.

The point of this is to show that strict monotheism is unbiblical, and so belligerent criticisms of Mormonism for being henotheistic are quite counterproductive. Yahweh and El were originally conceived as separate deities, and they were not conflated until it served a propagandist purpose.

I also want to show that the Bible is not univocal and not inerrant. One scripture’s restriction does not apply to other scriptures. In Exod 33 God says no man may see him in live, but in Exod 24 Moses and his seventy see God, and verse 11 tells us they lived. One scripture says one thing and others say another. Saul’s son is called Eshbaal (man of Baal) in Chronicles, but Ishbosheth (man of shame) in Samuel. Clearly the scribes have freedom to alter the texts to suit their ideologies. In Exodus 34:24 it references a commandment to go up three times a year to appear before God, but the phrase we translate “appear before God” doesn’t actually say “appear before God.” It says “to see the face of God,” but the Masoretes wanted to avoid claiming God was seen in the temple, so they changed the vowels around to make the verb “to see” passive (“appear”). Unfortunately for them, the verb is missing a letter and can’t be passive. The same thing happened in Isaiah 1:12, where the verb is made passive, but it doesn’t even have the necessary preposition to make “my face” an object of appearance, so what originally said “to see my face” was changed to say “to appear my face.” They also have the freedom to make mistakes. In 1 Samuel 13:1 it says Saul was one year old when he began to rule. He clearly wasn’t, but the original text was corrupted and the number of years was lost. The resulting phrase just happens to be identical to the phrase used to designate a living being as a year old.

Mormonism is not ignorant or corrupt for allowing doctrines that conflict with normative Christianity. As it turns out, our perspective is much closer to that of the people who originally penned the Bible than that of mainstream Christianity. All the bickering, belittling, and self-righteous indignation that goes on here betrays, for the most part, the ignorance of the antagonist rather than the heresy of Mormonism. If you are a cynic, I would think twice before berating Mormonism because it conflicts with your assumptions about what the Bible does and does not teach. There are people around who know much more about it than you.