The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

by Mark S. Smith

According to the Bible, ancient Israel's neighbors worshipped a wide variety of gods. In recent years, scholars have sought a better understanding of this early polytheistic milieu and its relation to Yahweh, the God of Israel. Drawing on ancient Ugaritic texts and looking closely at Ugaritic deities, Mark Smith examines the meaning of "divinity" in the ancient near East and considers how this concept applies to Yahweh.

Genres: Religion, History, Nonfiction, Biblical Studies, Theology, Judaism, Mythology

352 pages, Paperback

First published July 13, 2001

About the author

Mark S. Smith is Skirball Professor of Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at New York University. He has served as visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. Smith was elected vice president of the Catholic Biblical Association in 2009.

Reviews

[فؤاد]

یهوه در ابتدا خدای تمام جهان نبود، بلکه تنها خدای حامی قوم اسرائیل بود. به باور کتاب مقدس هر قوم خدای حامی خود را داشت که باید از او اطاعت می‌کرد تا حمایتش را جلب کند. یهوه تنها یکی از این خدایان متعدد بود. کتاب مقدس وجود خدایان دیگر را انکار نمی‌کند، تنها دستور اکید می‌دهد که قوم اسرائیل باید به یهوه وفادار باشد و خدایان اقوام دیگر را نپرستد. به این دیدگاه «یک‌پرستی» می‌گویند. بخش‌هایی از کتاب مقدس که پیش از تبعید بابل نوشته شده‌اند، این دیدگاه را منعکس می‌کنند.

آن گاه که خدای برین اقوام را میراث بخشید، آنگاه که بنی‌آدم را منتشر ساخت، او مرز قوم‌ها را تعیین فرمود، به تعداد پسران خدا. پس نصیب یهوه [یکی از پسران خدا] قوم او شد، و اسرائیل میراث تعیین شده از بهر او. (تثنیه ۳۲: ۸-۹)

وقتی امپراتوری بابل به رهبری بخت‌نصر اورشلیم را فتح و معبد یهوه را نابود کرد، برخی اسرائیلیان پذیرفتند که یهوه خدایشان در برابر خدای بابل شکست خورده و نتوانسته از ایشان و معبد خود محافظت کند.

اما برخی از یهودیان به دیدگاه دیگری گرایش پیدا کردند و جایگاه یهوه را از خدایی قومی به خدایی کیهانی ارتقا دادند. خدایی واحد که کارش خلق جهان است و دیگر لازم نبود اثر ملموس حمایتش در سیاست دیده شود.

بدین ترتیب شکست و ناکامی سیاسی، به یکتاباوری کیهانی منجر شد. اگر یهوه در این جنگ از ما حمایتی نکرد، دلیل بر ناتوانی او به عنوان خدا نیست؛ چرا که خدایی او برتر از آن است که با یک جنگ زیر سؤال برود. او خدای تمام کیهان است. بخش‌هایی از کتاب مقدس که پس از تبعید بابل نوشته شده‌اند، این دیدگاه جدید را منعکس می‌کنند.

[Koen Crolla]

There's a structure here that goes along with the book's title, but Smith doesn't manage to fill it out. He does extract a number of data points from the Ugaritic texts (and occasionally from Enuma Elish, though he ends up misrepresenting it more than once), but he doesn't do anything meaningful of legitimate with any of them and mostly just ends up with extended typing exercises relevant to nothing, seemingly because he fundamentally doesn't understand what legitimate argument even looks like. This also manifests when he tries to utilise other fields to bolster his legitimacy: there's a whole chapter devoted to Frazer's dying-and-rising gods from The Golden Bough, and Jasper's notion of an "Axial Age" seems to be central to his understanding of the history of the Levant.

(Historical linguistics isn't particularly important to any argument Smith tries to make, but it comes up a couple of times and it's a mess every time. His discussion of whether Ugaritic (the language) should be considered Canaanite is unburdened by any idea of how Semiticists define the Canaanite language family (or West Semitic). Twice he suggests PS *ʔil- 'god, El' is derived from "*ʾy/wl, "to be strong"" [sic], which, apart from being obvious nonsense on several levels, clearly represents a half-remembered version of Marvin Pope's discussion of this in his 1955 (!) book El in the Ugaritic Texts—too bad he didn't remember Pope came to the opposite conclusion. In one ultimately completely irrelevant discussion of the meaning of ʕôlām in Qoheleth 3:11 he speculates that perhaps the author was playing with meanings to be connected to both *ʕlm 'knowledge' and *ǵlm 'that which is hidden' [sic], as *ʕ and *ǵ merged (sorry, "coalesced") in Hebrew, unaware that *ʕ and *ǵ remained separate phonemes in Hebrew until well after Qoheleth was written.
(He also uses asterisks to indicate roots rather than reconstructions, which gets annoying quickly.))

I don't think Smith set out to produce theologyslop, though, or wrote a bad book because he holds his audience in contempt—I feel like for the most part he is genuinely playing checkers to the best of his ability, and just blissfully unaware that everyone else is playing chess.
But yeah, there's not really anything here about the origins of biblical monotheism.

[Rachael]

This was a fascinating and rich exploration of Ugaritic myth compared to Israelite conceptions of the divine. Smith explores the literature found at Ras Shamra, describing in detail the divine family of El and Athirat, Baal's relationship to them (as well as other gods and their divine enemies, helpfully classified into levels). He then makes a case for understanding the Ugaritic myths as reflecting the importance of the family unit in the culture and the self understanding particularly of the royal family. He then makes a case for the development of monotheism in Israel based on the disintegration of royal power and loss of land. The difficulty with the category is also discussed in terms of Yahweh's uniqueness vis a vis the rich myths surrounding other gods and relative sparsity of myth for Yahweh.

Some parts of his argument seem a little stretched, such as his argument that the Baal cycle shouldn't be understood in the category of a dying and rising god since the texts available to us do not explicitly talk about ritual around Baal's return to life. Rather he argues they are more about royal funeral rites.

Overall a thought provoking book. This is not an introductory text.

[Scriptor Ignotus]

The biblical corpus is a strange beast; it is, as one would expect, the most comprehensive source on how the Israelites of the late Bronze and early Iron Age understood their own origins and history, yet it has come down to us through the hands of monotheistic (or at least strictly monolatrous) redactors who both declaimed the incomparable status of their God as the singular, all-powerful divine creator who alone was worthy of worship, and reworked earlier material to obscure the polytheistic or henotheistic background of the culture that produced it. As the biblical texts were being composed over many centuries, reflecting changes in both the religious outlook and the socio-political circumstances of their authors—the two were deeply intertwined, as Smith shows—earlier strata were also being revised, creating the appearance of cultic and devotional continuity amidst evolving empirical conditions. But the redactors didn’t do a very thorough job of it; they left behind plenty of material attesting to the divine plurality and shifting pantheon of earlier times, though the precise contours of these previous mythographies were largely erased.

How, then, might we peer around the editorial wall constructed by the priestly caste of the late monarchy and the exile to access the religious landscapes that actually pertained at the time of the putative people and events depicted in the biblical histories: the patriarchs, the exodus, the judges, and the kingdoms of Israel and Judah? The textual and iconographic evidence uncovered at the ancient Syrian port city of Ugarit provides a critical line of sight. A thriving commercial hub during the late Bronze Age before its destruction in the early twelfth century BCE, Ugarit was in close enough geographical proximity to the Israelites that the two shared a common West Semitic religious, linguistic, and literary culture—though of course there were numerous local variations on the regional theme—and many of the writings, cultic objects, and other artifacts discovered there are roughly contemporaneous with the formative period of Israelite identity between the patriarchs and the monarchy. It is therefore possible to use Ugaritic mythology, of which we have a fairly comprehensive picture, as a template to cross-reference with the surviving polytheistic contents of the Bible to reconstruct this ancient Israelitic religion and chart its transition from polytheism to henotheism to monolatry to something resembling monotheism as we would now understand the concept. That is the project of this classic study.

I use these “-isms” for the sake of simplicity, but Ferris Bueller may have been right to say that -isms are not good. Smith notes that the monolatrous turn in Israelite religion occurred primarily in the domain of rhetoric rather than philosophy; it was the product of a rhetorical strategy that functioned to harden Israelite/Judahite group identity and cohesion at a time when their grip on political sovereignty, territorial rootedness, and kinship relations was being eroded; not of some abstract metaphysical speculation. As such, it was unconcerned with the question of the existence of any particular deity; it instead wanted to emphasize the power of Israel’s national god and the necessity of paying cult only to him, even in the precarious geopolitical environment of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, when the royal-cultic establishment in which Yahwism was anchored was a small fish in a pond dominated by supranational empires before finally being swallowed by the Babylonian whale.

The Ugaritic pantheon was a divine assembly, often construed as an extended family—though the precise family relations between the gods is not always made explicit in the extant texts—which provided an underlying principle of unity behind the multiplicity of divine beings. This divine order had four tiers. At the top was El, the father of gods and men, who with his consort Athirat presided over the family of the gods as its patriarch. The second tier was occupied by subordinate gods like Yamm (sea), Mot (death), Anat, and Baal, the outsider and warrior-champion who in the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, through his combat with Yamm, would ascend to a place of primacy within the pantheon. The tertiary craftsman-god Kothar wa-Hasis mediated between the first and second tiers, while the whole order was supported by the servants and messengers who constituted the lowest stratus of divine beings—the “commoners” of the heavens.

The early Israelite mythology was roughly analogous to this, except the place of Baal as divine warrior and champion was taken by Yahweh—another god of mysterious origins and character, seemingly unknown in Ugarit, whose cult likely entered the highlands of Canaan from Sinai or what is now northwestern Saudi Arabia sometime in the late second millennium—who would not only supersede El in status and prestige but replace him altogether, absorbing his powers and characteristics along with those of the rest of the pantheon; and into whom the entire divine order would ultimately be telescoped, transforming him from the head god into the Godhead—but this final religious revolution still lay far in the future. Yahweh’s consort was Asherah, whose cultic symbols, whether statues, trees, or “Asherah poles,” would appear in the Jerusalem temple, much to the later consternation of the Deuteronomist.

The prevailing kinship theology of this early period, which cast El as the patriarch of a divine family, was appropriate for a social landscape organized by extended clans and lineages. El is fittingly the primary god of the biblical patriarchs; a fact acknowledged by the Bible itself in Exodus 6:2-3, when Yahweh tells Moses that he appeared to his forefathers as El Shaddai without revealing his proper name. But the emergence of monarchy occurred in tandem with the development of a royal theology intimately connected with the combat myth and the ascent of the champion god; whether one speaks of Baal or Yahweh superseding El through the defeat of Yamm and Leviathan, respectively, or Marduk eclipsing Ea through the slaying of Tiamat. Just as a king was a clan chieftain who assumed primacy among his peers by taking on the defense of a nation rather than just his own family, so was the divine champion who defended the pantheon and the cosmos from its supernal enemies endowed with unique authority. The cosmos was ordered and sustained through the martial defeat and subjugation of the forces of chaos. The kings who embodied this role in the human realm were the image and likeness of their patron god, through whom the god vicariously established order in the terrestrial plane—an act which was itself integral to the pacification of the cosmos. The kings of Israel and Judah were “Yahweh’s anointed” and his “sons,” begotten of him upon their accession to the throne (Ps. 2:7).

Royal theology both reflected and facilitated the solidification of a larger national identity rooted in a centralized theopolitical establishment. This is made most clear with the late-Judahite reforms of Josiah and the promulgation of Deuteronomy in the seventh century, which were evidently intended to shore up the internal cohesion of the vulnerable kingdom by centralizing the Yahwistic cult in Jerusalem. The supersession of family relations by monarchical power as the anchor and unifying principle of social order was the political counterpart to the singular authority of the national god. In both the divine and human realms, power flowed no longer from the family itself as a collective unit, but from the individual god or king who sat at the top of a hierarchy that was now much steeper than in the tribal past. Smith suggests that the diminishment of the kinship system in the late monarchic and exilic periods introduced a heightened moral emphasis on individual responsibility even among ordinary people. Biblical texts dating to the seventh and sixth centuries insist that the righteousness of parents cannot save their children (Ezekiel 14:12-23), but children will also not be punished for the sins of their fathers (Jeremiah 31:29-30; Ezekiel 18; Deuteronomy 24:16); this in contrast with earlier material from Exodus according to which God “[visits] the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation” (Exodus 34:6-7).

Yahweh’s new status as the supreme national god was of course an important stage in what we retrospectively think of as the development of biblical monotheism, but it’s important to keep in mind that at this point Yahweh was only considered supreme within his nation, among his own people—and even then, not by everyone. Deuteronomy 32:8-9 captures this outlook well: each nation has its tutelary deity from among the sons of Elyon, and while Yahweh (and by extension, his people) is surely the greatest among them, the other national gods may be afforded a basic tolerance and respect so long as they don’t challenge Yahweh in his own domain. While the prophets Elijah (9th c.), Amos, and Hosea (both 8th c.) might seem to us like monotheists, they are probably better thought of as monolatrous Yahwists for whom the worship of foreign gods in Israel and Judah represents an infiltration by these gods of Yahweh’s turf, and therefore a threat to the royal cult and ultimately to the entire social and even cosmic order. The fact that their polemics—and in Elijah’s case, their massacres—were directed against their compatriots serves as sufficient evidence that many of the latter did not share their views: they were not necessarily monolatrous, and they did not view other gods as foreign or subversive. Ahab and Jezebel don’t worship Yahweh at all in the Deuteronomist’s portrayal, and it is of course the diffuseness of the northern kingdom in its pantheon, its worship, and its political authority (all three go together) that is blamed for its instability and fall.

So how does Yahweh go from the figurehead of a national cult—the proto-image of its kings, who wars against the gods of other nations—to the universal god of all people, from whom all things in heaven and on earth come into being; to the God of post-biblical religion? The answer has to do with a kind of theological dialectic that developed between Judah and its far more powerful imperial rivals in the late monarchic period; a process that culminated with the Babylonian exile. The eighth through sixth centuries saw the emergence of the supranational neo-Assyrian and neo-Babylonian empires. With supranational empires came supranational gods; Assur and Marduk absorbed the local cults and gods of the peoples they conquered. This new paradigm problematized the earlier model of a god for each nation, and it emerged as Judahite sovereignty, territoriality, and kinship ties were weakening. The new dichotomy was no longer between the royal cult of one people and that of another, but rather between two kinds of theopolitical universalism: an imperial universalism with ambitions to dominate the world, which would show up in later Jewish and Christian imagination as the imperial beasts of Daniel and Revelation; and a universalism of the dispossessed, of a people and a god with no foothold on the earth.

It was precisely when it lost the last vestiges of terrestrial power that this heretofore marginal West Semitic people and its tutelary deity made a profound contribution to the religious and moral consciousness of much of the world: a God whose weakness and homelessness were the paradoxical indicators of his utter transcendence and infinitude; a God who had no cosmic or earthly rivals—even the most powerful enemies of his worshippers were merely tools he used for their chastisement—because he was the source of all things; a God who had no temple or vicar-king because he was the uncontainable God of all people and the earth was his footstool. Genesis 1, likely written during the Babylonian period by a priesthood that had become the guardian of community order with the disappearance of the monarchy, reflects this new reality devoid of boundaries and intermediate institutions. In sharp contrast with the earlier combat narrative—traces of which can be seen in texts like Psalm 74:12-17, wherein the establishment of dry land and the fixture of the sun and stars in the firmament is connected with the slaying of Leviathan—this new priestly creation account depicts a peaceful, dialogical ordering of the cosmos characterized by harmony, repetition, and an inherent goodness and purposiveness to things. The human being as such, rather than a particular king or dynasty, is now the image-bearer and viceregent of God, tasked with ruling the earth on his behalf.

One might use this connection between monotheism, universalism, and the erasure of political boundaries to interpret the theopolitics of the late Second Temple period. One thing the Maccabees, the Hasmoneans, the Herodians, the Jesus movement (at least as interpreted by its earliest followers during Jesus’s life “in the flesh,” as Paul would put it), the Jewish rebels of 67-73 CE, and Bar Kokhba had in common is that they all represented, with varying degrees of success, attempts to reestablish territoriality and the national cult; to push back against the Seleucid and Roman imperia with a rival imperium of their own.

In the case of the Jesus movement, it seems that while Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet foretelling the imminent arrival of the Age to Come, the overturning of the present celestial and political order, and the establishment of God’s reign on earth (understood by this time to be occluded by intermediate forces, angelic and human), many of his followers (and perhaps the man himself) viewed him as a new David who would at the “palingenesis” (Mt. 19:28) rule a neo-Davidic kingdom that would in some sense be instantiated in time and space, with the Twelve (1 Cor. 15:5) acting as his lieutenants over the reconstituted Israelite tribes.

After the “defeat” of this messianic claimant, his movement shifted from a rival-imperial stance to a counter-imperial one akin to that taken during the Babylonian dispersion. The raised and glorified Jesus was no longer the would-be ruler of a bounded territorial kingdom, but the enthroned monarch of the entire cosmos. He became a counter-emperor, his worship a counter-imperial cult, and his following a counter-empire within the empire. As the Christ he remained a singular figure, the pre-eternal Son and champion of God, but his filiality with the Father was also accessible to all; he was the “firstborn of many brethren” (Rom. 8:29), and everyone could be (literally) incorporated into his celestial body politic. The ekklesia was far more than just a “religious” institution in our sense; it was a universal polity with its own kind of citizenship, popular assemblies, organs of authority, ambassadors (apostles), soldiers (martyrs), and systems of material distribution. It was an inverted form of the empire it inhabited.

[Eric]

The information in here is excellent in its quality, and extensive in its grasp. However, it is at times also inaccessible. The main points are usually easy to comprehend, but some of the supporting arguments get bogged down in technicalities, too many references to others work without a summery of their arguments, and for those unfamiliar with the language and lore of the western Middle East, it may be difficult. This work attempts to stand on its own, however it is best as a solid complement for other works on this topic.

[Joel Camaya]

Smith discusses lengthily West Semitic religion, providing it with the backdrop of the Ugaritic texts that present a whole panorama of its polytheistic system, and dwells on the Israelite polytheism in its incipient stages. He also asks questions about the ancient circumstances of biblical monotheism: “Why did biblical monotheism make sense at the time of its emergence with the context of Israelite polytheism and against the larger backdrop of West Semitic polytheism from which Israelite polytheism emerged…?”14 Smith deals with the subject intensively (a detailed discussion of the deities of Ugarit—structures, relations, and nature), inserting biblical references throughout. Then he proceeds to put forward the seeds of monotheism that were found in the cult of El. These seeds developed through time into the biblical monotheism that found its developed form in Isaiah 40-55.

[Kirk Lowery]

Smith is marvelous when he sticks to his specialty: Ugaritic studies. He is completely unconvincing in his comparison to the Hebrew Bible -- and he knows it.

[Jena]

Luego de leer "La historia de los Judíos" de Paul Johnson, Goodreads me recomendó este libro "Los orígenes del Monoteísmo Bíblico" para complementar el anterior.
El libro de Mark S. Smith, es lento, farragoso por sus tecnicismos de hebreo y otros idiomas y repetitivo en su redacción. Da la idea que el autor quiere entender lo que ha dicho, así que requiere una lectura cuidadosa y paciente para enterarse de las teorías sobre un monoteísmo surgido del politeísmo propio de Cananea. En esta región, Abraham celebró su alianza personal con su dios y la donación de tierra. ¿Pero de cuál dios se trataba?
El autor hace una comparación de la Biblia con los textos de Ugarit, hoy la población costera mediterránea de Ras Shamra, en Siria, que coincide con el antiguo Israel en tiempo y lugar.
La propia Biblia dice que Yavé era un dios desconocido para los patriarcas Abraham, Isaac, y Jacob, y los presenta como adoradores del dios cananeo "El". Las fuentes más extensas de la Edad del Bronce sobre este dios, provienen de Ugarit. "El" aparece como el patriarca divino por excelencia, su paternidad se aplica a todo el pantheon divino que incluye a Athirat su esposa, y sus setenta hijos.
El culto del dios "El", subsistió aún en la Edad del Hierro. Se cree que con el transcurso del tiempo, Yavé, que era un dios de segundo nivel y quizás extranjero, se fue incorporando a la vieja figura de "El". Esto se puede confirmar en el Exodo 6:2-3, que identifica a el viejo dios "El Shadday" con Yavé:
"Y Dios le dijo a Moisés: "Yo soy Yavé. Me aparecí a Abraham, a Isaac y a Jacob como Al Shadday, pero nunca me conocieron por mi verdadero nombre Yavé".
Como el dios "El" de los textos de Ugarit, así es descrito Yavé, un dios viejo y patriarcal, esto puede verse en el libro de los Salmos, en Job, en Isaías, Abakuk, etc.
Por lo que hace al monoteísmo, fue meramente retórico desde la salida de Abraham de la ciudad-estado Ur, hasta la época del Exilio forzado de Israel por la invasión Asiria. Luego, viene la derrota de Judá ante Babilonia,que fue más benévola que la anterior.
Todos los judíos que quedaron en Cananea se asimilaron a otros pueblos vecinos y, nuevamente, cayeron en el politeísmo. Otras tribus huyeron a Egipto o a distintas regiones de Medio Oriente y desde entonces vivirían fuera de la tierra prometida.
Durante el exilio babilonio fue que, al verse dispersos, sin jefes o estado, sin ninguna otra estructura de apoyo para un gobierno, se impuso la práctica regular de su religión para conservar su identidad y afianzar el verdadero monoteísmo que los caracteriza.

[Kenneth Clark]

This book is packed with information and can be overwhelming at times. It was well worth the time to read and reread every word. This is a book that I will have to revisit again in the future.

This book examines the myths of the Persian, Mesopotamian, and especially Canaanite people before and during the creation of the Hebrew Bible. Mark S. Smith is the leading authority on the Ugaritic texts and the Divine Council mentioned in the tablets found in Ugarit as well as in the Hebrew Bible. The author traces the early polytheism of Canaan and Israel through the rise of the Yahwistic cult that would merge gods from the region into a single patriarchal deity. I highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in the consensus view amongst scholars of religion and the Bible.

[Rob Duxbury]

I was excited to read this book. It was a bit dry but full of good information. His work on the Ugaritic texts was very helpful. The reason why I give this book a two star was for the awful lack of understanding and misunderstanding of the Bible and the verse he uses.

[Jonathon Bernard]

Informative and effective overall, but too dry, cautious, and even repetitive at times to be engaging.

[Peter Bradley]

My Amazon Review -

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3EL5FWO...