Roth Note: This post is for those who study Scripture deeply, not for the average church goer who will likely find it distasteful. After reading this I asked myself, what if Yahweh really is one of the sons of the Supreme God – Creator of All and only just the god of Israel, not the god of all nations? For me, that would explain a lot …
I’ve heard about Russell Gmirkin’s work for a few years, but it is only very recently that I decided to give it a try. What I had heard of his theories sounded so extravagant that I had assumed it couldn’t possibly be serious scholarship. Well, I can report that it is serious scholarship. Cutting edge, and groundbreaking. I became so absorbed that I read his three books in a row, took notes, and will now try my very best to give you an overview. The material is so rich and the implications so vast that I will need two parts for his first book, and two parts for his other two books. Gmirkin’s work turns the spotlight on what has been, for two thousand years and some, the most successful of all Jewish adaptative strategies, and the mother of all others.
The original Deuteronomy 32:8–9 casts Yahweh in the role of one of the sons of El, here called Elyôn. Each of El’s sons receives one nation, and Yahweh receives Israel. According to Old Testament scholar Mark S. Smith, author of The Early History of God (first published in 1990), this reflects an ancient conception that was not specific to Israel, but echoes an ancient theology of the Near East. Some of the Ugaritic texts written in northern Syria in the 13th and 12th centuries bc, and discovered in 1928, call the supreme god El, and the other gods “sons of El.”
Because the Abrahamic religions define themselves as monotheism, they define the religions they supplanted as polytheism. This is a polemical perspective that historians are now challenging. Two collections of essays have recently been devoted to “pagan monotheism”, published respectively by Oxford UP and Cambridge UP.[6] John North writes in One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire: “throughout the classical period and far earlier in the Near East, monotheistic assumptions are quite commonly found, without apparently raising any fears of weakening polytheistic practice.”[7] Such a concept of the divine realm as a “family of gods” (a cosmic god and his terrestrial offspring), or as one God in multiple forms, may be called “inclusive monotheism”, and contrasted with the Jewish “exclusive monotheism” that rejects the existence of any god but the supreme God. As we saw above, that exclusive monotheism is the result of promoting “Yahweh the god of Israel” to the throne of the supreme creator of heaven and earth. The jealous god ends up negating the very existence of all his competitors, thereby affirming that he is the only real god, and is therefore God. Yahweh’s promotion is an usurpation, however, in the sense that the supreme God is now regarded an a personal and rather crude entity with an exclusive love for one particular people. Jewish exclusive monotheism, therefore, is in reality a pathological form of polytheism: the cult of the ethnic god who thinks he is God.
My French Catholic Bible (published by the Dominicans of the École Biblique de Jérusalem) adds a footnote to that passage, saying that Rahab’s “profession of faith to the God of Israel … made Rahab, in the eyes of more than one Church Father, a figure of the Gentile Church, saved by her faith.” I find this footnote, likening the Gentile Church to the whore of Jericho, emblematic of the true role of Christianity. For it is indeed the Church that, by acknowledging the god of Israel as the universal God, introduced the Jews into the heart of the Gentile city and, over the centuries, allowed them to seize power.
Read the entire Part 4 of the essay …
Go to Part 1.
Go to Part 2.
Go to Part 3.
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