Mark S. Smith > Quotes

“Though the reasons for Israelite “convergence” are not clear, the complex paths from convergence to monolatry and monotheism can be followed. The development of Israelite monolatry and monotheism involved both an “evolution” and a “revolution” in religious conceptualization, to use D. L. Petersen’s categories. It was an “evolution” in two respects. Monolatry grew out of an early, limited Israelite polytheism that was not strictly discontinuous with that of its Iron Age neighbors. Furthermore, adherence to one deity was a changing reality within the periods of the Judges and the monarchy in Israel. While evolutionary in character, Israelite monolatry was also “revolutionary” in a number of respects. The process of differentiation and the eventual displacement of Baal from Israel’s national cult distinguished Israel’s religion from the religions of its neighbors. Furthermore, as P. Machinist has observed, one feature clearly distinguishing Israel from its neighbors was its apologetic claim of religious difference. Israelite insistence on a single deity eventually distinguished Israel from the surrounding cultures, as far as textual data indicate.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel

“Some scholars have stressed early Israelite religion as the quintessential period of pure Yahwism.

Following in the footsteps of Albright, G. Mendenhall and J. Bright posit an early pure Yahwism that was polluted secondarily in the land by the cult of Baal and other idolatry. In their schemes, the monarchy was largely a negative influence.

There are three major problems with this characterization of Israelite religion.

First, some of the features that Mendenhall and Bright view as secondary idolatry belonged to Israel’s Canaanite heritage. The cult of Baal, the symbol of the asherah, the high places, and the cultic practices involving the dead all belonged to Israel’s ancient past, its Canaanite past.

Second, the “purest form of Yahwism” belonged not to an early stage of Israel’s history but to the late monarchy. Differentiation of the cult of Yahweh did not begin until the ninth century and appeared in full flower only in the eighth century and afterward. Even this stage of reform was marked by other religious developments considered idolatrous by later generations; the cults of the “Queen of Heaven” and “the Tammuz” undermine any idealization of the late monarchy. The temple idolatry denounced in Ezekiel 8-11 probably constituted the norm rather than the exception for the final decades of the monarchy. The religious programs of Hezekiah and Josiah have been claimed as moments of religious purity in Judah, although even these policies had their political reasons.743 The pure form of Yahwism that Mendenhall and Bright envision was perhaps an ideal achieved rarely, if ever, before the Exile — if even then.

Third, the monarchy was not the villain of Israelite religion that Mendenhall and Bright make it out to be. Indeed, the monarchy made several religious contributions crucial to the development of monolatry. In short, Mendenhall and Bright stand much of Israel’s religious development on its head.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel

“Our limited data force a sense of historical fragility: even as I nurture interpretation, I continually run the risk of creating it in my own image.122”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“the ways in which the other deities found their way into the profile and character of Israel’s god. So the place of the other deities is not simply alongside Israel’s deity but within the god Yahweh as well as in differentiation and, at times, conflict with him. The development of a typology of convergence and differentiation,”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series

“although largely Canaanite according to currently available cultural data, Israel expressed a distinct sense of origins and deity and possessed largely distinct geographical holdings in the hill country by the end of the Iron I period.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series

“Genesis 1 does not use conflict as the main element in its vision of the cosmos and the place
of humanity in it. Instead, the priestly holiness of time and space overshadows the component of
conflict.
This view made sense of a world in which monarchy no longer protected Israel. This
outlook would serve Israel well in exile and beyond when responsibility for community order
passed from the Davidic dynasty to the priesthood of Aaron. Indeed, Genesis 1 has often been
dated to the exilic or post-exilic period.
Genesis 1 reflects this change: to the royal model has
been added a priestly model. The politics of creation have changed. There is still a king in this
world, but it is the King of Kings, the One Will who rules heavens and earth alike, with no
serious competition, and this King in Heaven is to be followed by humanity ruling on earth.
There is no single royal agent on earth whose human foes mirror the cosmic foes of the divine
king. Moreover, this king is the Holy One enthroned over the cosmos”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“Baal was an accepted Israelite god, that criticism of his cult began in the ninth or eighth century, and that despite prophetic and Deuteronomistic criticism, this god remained popular through the end of the southern kingdom.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series

“For once I myself saw with my own eyes      the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage,          and when the boys said to her,              “Sibyl what do you want?”          she replied, “I want to die.” T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“Despite the shock this fact may deal to modern Western religious sensibilities, it is
commonplace within the history of religions that immortality is not a prime characteristic of
divinity: gods die. Nor is the concomitant of omnipresence a widespread requisite; gods
disappear. The putative category of dying and rising deities thus takes its place within the
larger category of dying gods and the even larger category of disappearing deities. Some of
these divine figures simply disappear; some disappear only to return in the near or distant
future; some disappear and reappear with monotonous frequency”
― Mark S. Smith

“While the death knell for source theory was sounded often over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, it has not been supplanted by a more persuasive model.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series

“(So T. S. Eliot’s helpful reminder from “Gerontion”: “History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, / Guides us by vanities.”)”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“Separate religious traditions of Yahweh, separate traditions of origins in Egypt for at least some component of Israel, and separate geographical holdings in the hill country contributed to the Israelites’ sense of difference from their Canaanite neighbors inhabiting the coast and the valleys. Nonetheless, Israelite and Canaanite cultures shared a great deal in common, and religion was no exception.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series

“Genesis 49:25-26 possibly point to an early stage when Israel knew three deities, El, Asherah, and Yahweh. In addition, Baal constituted a fourth deity in Israel’s early religious history. This situation changed by the period of the early monarchy. Yahweh and El were identified, and at some point, devotion to the goddess Asherah did not continue as an identifiably separate cult.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series

“the ascendant position of Yahweh as the national god under the monarchy would make convergence of divine imagery a powerful ideology political tool. Yet, given the lack of information, the premonarchic period cannot be ruled out entirely as the older context for convergence, at least to some degree.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series

“The only passage perhaps suggesting that necromancy was viewed negatively before 750 is 1 Samuel 28, the story of the Necromancer of Endor.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel

“Interpreters have imposed on Genesis 3 ideas about sin and disobedience, divine anger, or divine punishment found elsewhere in the Bible.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Genesis of Good and Evil: The Fall(out) and Original Sin in the Bible

“We may therefore propose a working hypothesis for Judah:
a culture with a diminished lineage system, one less embedded in traditional family patrimonies
due to societal changes in the eighth through sixth centuries, might be more predisposed both to
hold to individual human accountability for behavior and to see an individual deity accountable
for the cosmos.

(This individual accountability at the human and divine levels may be viewed
as concomitant developments.) Accordingly, later Israelite monotheism was denuded of the
divine family, a development perhaps intelligible in light of Israel’s weakening family lineages
and patrimonies. This is only one dimension of Israelite monotheism, a complex matter that the
last chapter of this book addresses in detail.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“Monotheistic Yahwism resembled neither a Greek philosophical notion of Deity as
nonsexual Being nor some type of divine bisexuality. Instead, Israelite society perceived Yahweh
primarily as a god, embodying traits or values expressed by gendered metaphors yet transcending
such particular renderings. It is unnecessary and it is not supported by any biblical text to argue
that monotheistic Yahweh involved either androgyny or homoeroticism”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“It is unclear from any modern critique of religion that anyone is in a position to disprove the reality of religious mystery expressed in the ancients’ texts, even if we probe that mystery. Modern affirmations of such faith as well as denials of it are acts of faith. Yet these critiques of religion bring us closer to understanding the human side of divine-human relations. And this is what believers and nonbelievers, believing and unbelieving theologians and historians of religion share: a desire to understand the human side of the equation in religious traditions.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“the perspectives offered in the texts may not represent the cultures as wholes (as presupposed by the long-used constructs “Israelite” and/or/versus “Canaanite”). Instead, texts have been taken as representations of the overlapping perspectives of various social factions, strata, and segments: so-called official versus popular; domestic versus public; elite versus peasant; male versus female.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series

“The cult of Yahweh and the symbol, the asherah, appear from later data to be general features of both northern and southern religion. The northern evidence for El seems clear from his cult in Shechem. Jerusalem probably represents another cultic site where the royal cult of Yahweh assumed the indigenous traditions of El. The monarchic solar imagery for Yahweh seems to be strictly a southern development, a special feature of the royal Judean cult.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series

“Schloen comments: “Tempting as it may be to avoid explicit theorizing, the fact remains that contestable choices are embedded in even the most ‘obvious’ and innocent-looking of ‘common sense’ interpretations in archaeology and socio-economic history.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series

“New reflections developed out of Israel’s new social circumstances as well as its new political situation on the international stage from the seventh century on. The loss of family patrimonies due to economic stress and foreign incursions contribute to the demise of the model of the family for understanding divinity. With the rise of the individual along with the family as significant units of social identity (Deut. 24:16; Jer. 31:29-30; Ezekiel 18; cf. 33:12-20) came the corresponding notion on the divine level, namely of a single god responsible for the cosmos. Judah’s reduced status on the world scene also required new thinking about divinity. Like Marduk, Yahweh became an “empire-god,” the god of all the nations but in a way that no longer closely tied the political fortunes of Judah to the status of this god. With the old order of divine king and his human, royal representation on earth reversed, Yahweh stands alone in the divine realm, with all the other gods as nothing. In short, the old head-god of monarchic Israel became the Godhead of the universe.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel

“Rather than a story of sin, Genesis 2–3 explicitly relates a transferal of the knowledge of good and evil from the deity to the humans.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Genesis of Good and Evil: The Fall(out) and Original Sin in the Bible

“Despite many gains, the basic task remains largely a matter of interpreting and integrating small pieces of evidence drawn from rather disparate sources. In studying biblical texts in particular, scholars are often dealing with literary vestiges of religious practices and worldviews. The larger works in which these older vestiges appear have so refracted the earlier religious history that their recovery requires disembedding them from their literary contexts. This may seem counterintuitive to many readers of the Bible because such an operation often runs against the grain of the Bible’s claims. In my opinion, what vestiges we have provide barely enough material to write a proper history of religion for ancient Israel.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series

“The notion of Baal riding on a winged war chariot is implicit in mdl, one element in Baal’s meteorological entourage in KTU 1.5 V 6-11.342 Psalm 77:19 refers to the wheels in Yahweh’s storm theophany, which presumes a divine war chariot. Psalm 18 (2 Sam. 22):11 presents Yahweh riding on the wind surrounded by storm clouds. This image forms the basis for the description of the divine chariot in Ezekiel 1 and 10.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel

“literary study with little or no interest in diachronic development (coupled with a de-emphasis on ancient langages apart from Hebrew) has tended to minimize the significance of ancient Near Eastern contexts of Israelite culture, not to mention Israelite history in general and the history of Israelite religion specifically. To name only a handful of subdisciplines applied to the Hebrew Bible, structuralism, reader-response theory, ideological criticism, and postmodern readings have contributed to a devaluation of diachronic research, including the history of the religion of Israel.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series

“One would be wrong, however, to suppose that the dichotomy between the material and
the spiritual world was as natural to them as it seems to us. Occasional doubts could not rob
them of the conviction that the gods dwelled in the same universe as they did and were to a
large extent subject to the same forces and moved by the same reasonings.
Our uneasiness stems partly from the opposition of the reality as directly perceived by
the senses and a spiritual reality only reached by faith or some sort of mystical experience.
This was not how the Mesopotamians conceived of their gods. To them they were the
personifications of various aspects of nature and culture, very much present in daily
experience”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“Guthrie stresses
that in Israel holiness attaches to the elite and the monarch; the point may apply as well to Ugarit.
He notes how the radiance of the deity became associated with the power of the king: “Holiness
here is ideology, and designed to serve a particular social system.”

In his discussion of sacred
order, W. E. Paden comments in a related vein: “Power and order are intertwined and mutually
conditioning elements of religious world-building. Each is a premise of the other. The gods
presuppose the very system which invests them with their status as gods, even though the worldorder
may itself be perceived as a creation of the gods.” Thus, the holiness of a place expressed
altogether this worldly relationship of power and status”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“Because mythic images (and little mythic narrative) have been incorporated and refracted through the textual lens of the various genres, these genres offer only a glimpse of the larger understanding.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (The Biblical Resource Series