A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period: Volume I: From the Beginnings to the End of the Monarchy 0664227198, 0664218466, 9780664227197

Table of contents :
Contents
General bibliography
Introduction
2. The History of Israelite Religion In thePeriod before the State
3. The History of Israelite Religion duringthe Monarchy
Notes

Citation preview

ISBN 0-664-22719-8

,!7IA6G4-c hbjh!:t;K;k;K;k ,!7IA6G4-cchbjh!

6.00 x 9.00

.855

6.00 x 9.00

A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period

A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period Volume I: From the Beginnings to the End of the Monarchy

Rainer Albertz

Westminster/John Knox Press Louisville, Kentucky

Translated by John Bowden from Religionsgeschichte Israels in alttestamentlicher Zeit, Das Alte Testament Deutsch, published 1992 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Gottingen © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1992 Translation© John Bowden 1994 First published 1994 by SCM Press Ltd, 26-30 Tottenham Road, London N1 4BZ All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Hrst American Edition

Published in the U.S.A. by Westminster/John Knox Press, 100 Witherspoon Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40202-1396 This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39.48 standard. @) PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Albertz, Rainer, date. [Religionsgeschichte Israels in alttestamentlicher Zeit. English] A history of Israelite religion in the Old Testament/ Rainer Albertz. p. em. Includes bibliographic references. Contents: v. 1. From the beginnings to the end of the monarchy. ISBN 0-664-21846-6 I. Judaism-History-To 70 A.D. 2. Bible. O.T.-Theology. 3.Jews-History-To 70 A.D. I. Title. BM165.A4313 1994 296'.09'01-dc20 94-7424

FOR MY WIFE

Preface This book, which because of its length is being published in two volumes, goes back a long way. My post-doctoral study, 1 in which I had come across the interesting phenomenon of a socially-conditioned 'internal religious pluralism' in the religions of Israel and Mesopotamia, prompted me to plan a history of Israelite religion which also integrated a social history of Israel- as compared with the high cultures of the Near East- and describe the reciprocal relationship between the two. So the first series of lectures which I gave as a brand-new lecturer at Heidelberg in the winter semester of I977/8 was entitled 'Social Revolution and Religious Change in Israel', and in the summer semester of I 9 8 I for the first time I ventured a series of lectures on 'The History of Israelite Religion' conceived along these lines. However, because of the wealth of material they extended only as far as the early monarchy. The lively response of the students, who spontaneously formed a study group on the lectures, showed me that there was a clearly neglected need here, and led me to think that the lectures should be published as a book. I took up the plan with the Siegen Hochschule and went some way towards realizing it there with a large number of lectures on aspects of the project. A first provisional article- intended for a wider public- appeared in I987 under the title 'Religionsgeschichte Israels in vorexilischer Zeit'. 2 It then took me more than a decade to prepare the final published version, offered here, which extends as far as the Maccabaean period. This was not only because of the many other duties which college lecturers now have, but also because of the extent of the material that had to be dealt with in a plan of this kind. In fact I had to work thoroughly through all the books of the Hebrew canon, and review countless scholarly findings in almost every field of Old Testament study, not only in the history of religion and theology, but also in archaeology, history, social history and literary criticism over the whole extent of the canon and a period of more than a thousand years, fitting everything into a coherent overall picture. It is for the reader to decide how far I have succeeded in this task, which the present wealth of publications makes almost impossible for an individual scholar to perform. From the beginning I would ask professional scholars whose contributions are possibly important for the subject to review what I have done; I would be grateful for any information or suggestions. A further complicating factor was that this book has been written in a period of upheaval in Old Testament scholarship which, with T.S.Kuhn,

Vlll

Preface

one may call a 'paradigm shift'. Indeed one can ask whether, given the fact that there is now so much dispute over the literary place and date of many areas of the Old Testament, such a work of synthesis makes any sense at all today. I have attempted to steer a middle course in the controversies: at important points I have largely gone along with 'modern' solutions which have convinced me, for example E.Blum's traditio-historical model for the formation of the Pentateuch, 3 which fits so splendidly into my socio-historical reconstruction of the early post-exilic period. At other points, for example in connection with the literary evaluation and dating of Deuteronomy and DtrG, I have kept to 'conservative' positions (those of W.M.L.de Wette and M.Noth), as literary division of this material seems to me to be too uncertain and of little heuristic value. In the face of some over-critical assessment of texts or traditions as purely literary inventions of later times, I have kept to the principle that in most cases a tradition is unlikely to have formed without some occasion in reality. And in the face of the 'modern' tendency to shift more and more texts or parts of texts to an anonymous 'late period', in my detailed investigation of the controversies in the post-exilic period I have often had to note that such texts do not tend to fit in there and therefore must belong to earlier periods. To this degree the present overall view of the panorama of social and religious history may contribute to a better assessment of the probability of literary theories, serve as a stimulus to new detailed investigations, and limit the sometimes boundless formation of hypotheses to a degree which serves a better understanding. This book, which has arisen out of constant contact with students through teaching, has been deliberately written as a textbook for students, clergy, teachers and interested lay people. Given the increasing professional specialization and the methodological splintering of Old Testament scholarship, it is meant to give them an overall view of all aspects of the historical development, which will aid their understanding, help them to get their bearings and stimulate them to further work of their own. 4 I have thought it importantto describe this development as concretely and as vividly as possible, so that readers can re-experience the suffering and the joy, the struggle, the failure and the success of the Israelites down the generations. No one who knows the state of the sources will be surprised that in doing this I often get to the very edge of the possibilities of reconstruction. However, given my aim of achieving a deeper understanding which will make it possible for readers to share in the theological controversies of the time, this risk seemed to me to be justified. As far as possible I have given an account of the sources, their historical reliability, and the degree of probability in my evaluation, so that the reader is in a position to judge my reconstruction critically. I have explained controversies in scholarship over important questions to the point that readers have a rough orientation in them and will have no difficulty in

Preface

lX

working on them further themselves. I have tried not to leave readers alone with lofty questions- as sometimes happens to them today. This large book need not be read through as a whole; chapters and sections have been written in such a way as to be understandable on their own. An abundance of references backwards and forwards should rapidly lead readers to places where matters presupposed or merely touched on in a particular text are discussed in more detail. The index should also make it possible to trace particular themes. The most important literature is indicated at the head of the relevant section. To avoid many repetitions, sometimes the notes contain a reference in brackets after the short title (e.g. [5.3]), to the bibliography in another section. Standard literature which is quoted regularly has been listed in the bibliography at the front of the book. I hope that this will provide a high degree of clarity. In conclusion, I would like to thank all those who have helped towards the writing of this book: my academic assistants Dr Burkhard Engel and Dr Ingo Kottsieper, who built up the material for the bibliography, provided me incessantly with piles of titles and gave me many valuable scholarly suggestions; then my secretary Rosemarie Reimann, who produced the long text with the utmost care and along with my assistant Susanne Dusberg, worked on the proofs; and finally my colleague Walter Beyerlin and my publisher Dr Arndt Ruprecht, for accepting the work. If this book guides its readers through the thickets of Old Testament scholarship, opens up the very human side of this part of the religious biblical tradition and awakens respect for and solidarity with Israel, God's first people, to whom we owe this fascinating religion, then my toil over the last ten years will already have been worth while. Hilchenbach, Christmas I99I

Rainer Albertz

Contents Preface

vn

General Bibliography

xv

Introduction

I

I

2

I. I

3

I. 2

History of research Task, method and hermeneutical reflections 1.3 Dividing lines

I 2

I?

The History of Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

23

2.I

Religious elements of early small family groups ('patriarchal religion') 2. I I 2.I2 2.I3

2.2

Designations and ideas of God in the family Religious practices relating to the family Religious practices relating to a nomadic form of lifu

The religion of the liberated larger group (the Exodus group) 2.2I 2.22 2.23 2.24

The social organization of the Exodus group The key religious experience of political liberation Yahweh, the God of liberation Theophany and existence in the wilderness

2.3 The religion of the pre-state alliance of larger groups 2. 3 I

2.32

The organizational form of the Israelite tribal alliance, with its opposition to domination Eland Yahweh as symbols of opposition to domination

25 29 33

34

40 44

46 49

53 67 72 76

Xll

Contents 2. 3 3 Religious wars of Iibera tion 2.34 The formation of the main cult 2.3 5 The formation of the law

79 82 9I

2.4 Family piety in the later pre-state period

94

2.4I Internal religious pluralism 2.42 The subsidiary cult in the family

99

95

3 The History of Israelite Religion during the Monarchy I o 5 3·I The formation of a monarchical territorial state

I05

3·2 The dispute over the religious legitimation of kingship II4 3 .2I The kingship theology of the house of David 3.22 Rebel movements and counter-positions 3.23 Justifications of the monarchy and mediating positions 3·3 The main state cult in the South 3. 3 I The Jerusalem state cult 3. 3 2 The Jerusalem temple theology 3·4 The main state cult in the North 3·4I Jeroboam's revolt and its theological motivation 3 ·4 2 The state cult of Bethel 3·5 The dispute over official syncretism in the ninth century 3. 5 I The religious policy of the house of Omri 3. 52 The prophetic opposition groups and Jehu's revolution

II6 I22 I24 I26 I28 I32 I38 I40 I43

I46 I49 I 50

3.6 The theological controversies in the social and political crisis of the eighth century I 56 3.6 I Social and political developments 3.62 The total opposition of the prophets 3.621 Criticism of social abuses 3.622 Criticism of military policy and alliances

I 59 I63 I65 167

Contents

xm

Criticism of officialdom and the monarchy Criticism of the cult and 'syncretism' Prophetic reorientations of Yahwistic religion Personal piety in the circles of prophetic opposition 3.63 Hezekiah's reform

170 I7I I 76

3.623 3.624 3. 62 5 3.626

I

77

I8o

3·7 Family piety under the late monarchy

I86

3. 8 The Deuteronomic reform movement

r 95

3.8I The background and aims of 'Josiah's' reform 3.82 The fight against official syncretism and poly-

Yahwism

I98 206

3.83 The fight against private syncretism and internal

religious pluralism 3.84 The stemming of social abuses 3.8 5 The synthesis of pre-state and state religion

2IO 2I6 224

3 ·9 The political and theological controversies after the death ofJosiah

231

3 ·9 I The collapse of the Deuteronomic reform movement 2 32 3.92 The dispute over Judah's political option in the face of neo-Babylonian expansion 2 36 3·93 The failure of Gedaliah's reform attempt 24I

Notes

243

General bibliography R.Albertz, Personliche Frommigkeit und offizielle Religion. Religionsinterner Pluralismus in Israel und Babylon, CTM A 9, 1978 W.Beyerlin (ed. ), Ancient Near Eastern Texts relating to the Old Testament ( r 97 5 ), ET 1978 Biblical Archaeology Today. Proceedings of the International Congress on Biblical Archaeology. jerusalem, April 1984, 1985 F.M.Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic. Essays in the History ofthe Religion ofisrael, 1973 H.Donner, Geschichte des Volkes Israel und seiner Nachbarn in Grundzugen (2 vols), 1984, 1986 G.Fohrer, History of Israelite Religion (r968), ET 1972 E.S.Gerstenberger, Der bittende Mensch. Bittritual und Klagelied des Einzelnen im A/ten Testament, WMANT sr, r98o H.Gese, M.Hofner and K.Rudolph, Die Religion Altsyriens, Altarabiens und der Mandiier, RM ro.2, 1970 H. Gunkel and J.Begrich, Einleitung in die Psalmen, 19 3 3 = 2 1966 A.H.J.Gunneweg, Geschichte Israels his Bar Kochba, 6 r989 S.Herrmann, History of Israel in Old Testament Times (2r98o), ET 2 r98r M.Haran, Temples and Temple Service in Ancient Israel, 1978 S.T.Kimbrough, Israelite Religion in Sociological Perspective, Studies in Oriental Religions 4, 1978 D.Kinet, Ugarit-Geschichte und Kultur einer Stadt in der Umwelt des Alten Testamentes, SBS ro4, r98r O.Loretz, Ugarit und die Bibel. Kanaaniiische COtter und Religion im A/ten Testament, 1990 M.Noth, A History of Israel, ET 2 1959 M.Noth, A History ofPentateuchal Traditions (1948), ET 1972 G.Pettinato, Das altorientalische Menschenbild und die sumerischen und akkadischen Schopfungsmythen, AHAW phil.-hist. 1971, r, 1972 G. von Rad, Old Testament Theology (2 vols, 1957, r96o), ET 1962, 1965 H.Ringgren, Die Religionen des A/ten Orients, 1979 H.Ringgren, Israelite Religion (1963), ET 1966 W.H.Schmidt, The Faith of the Old Testament (4 1982), ET 1983 J.J.Stamm, Die akkadische Namengebung, MVAG 44, 1939 = 2 1968 K.L.Tallquist, Akkadische Gotterepitheta, StOr 7, 1938 = 1974 R.de Vaux, Ancient Israel, ET 1961 M.Weber, Ancient judaism (1929), ET 1952

XVl

General bibliography

H.Weippert, Paliistina in vorhellenistischer Zeit, Handbuch der Archaologie. Vorderasien 11/1, 1988 J.Wellhausen, Israelitische und judische Geschichte, 9 19 58 --,Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, reissued 19 57

I

Introduction

C.J.Bleeker, 'Comparing the Religio-Historical Method and the Theological Method', Numen I 8, I97I, 9-29; A.Causse, Du groupe ethnique ii Ia communaute religieuse. Le Probleme sociologique de Ia religion d'Israel, I937; B.S.Childs, Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context, I985; W.Eichrodt, 'Hat die alttestamentliche Theologie noch selbstandige Bedeutung innerhalb der alttestamentliche Wissenschaft?', ZAW 47, I929, 83-9I; id., Theology of the Old Testament, ET I96I, I967; O.Eissfeldt, 'Israelitisch-jiidische Religionsgeschichte und alttestamentliche Theologie'(I926), in id., KS I, I962, I05-I4; id., 'Werden, Wesen und Wert geschichtlicher Betrachtung der israelitisch-jiidischen Religion' (I931), ibid., 247-65; G.Fohrer, History of Israelite Religion, ET I972; id., 'Zur Einwirkung der gesellschaftlichen Struktur Israels auf seine Religion', in id., Studien zu alttestamentlichen Texten und Themen (r966-I972), BZAW I 55, I98I, II731; G.F.Hasel, 'Major Recent Issues in Old Testament Theology', ]SOT 3I, I985, 31-53; M.Hill, 'Social Approach (I)', see F.Whaling (ed.), Vol.II, 89-I48; G.Kehrer and B.Harding, 'Social Approach (2)', see F.Whaling (ed.), Vol.II, I49n; S.T.Kimbrough, 'A Non-Weberian Sociological Approach to Israelite Religion', ]NES 3 I, I972, I9 s-202; id., Israelite Religion in Sociological Perspective. The Work of Antonin Causse, Studies in Oriental Religions 4, I978; H.G.Kippenberg, 'Diskursive Religionswissenschaft. Gedanken tiber eine Religionswissenschaft, die weder auf einer allgemein giiltigen Definition von Religion noch auf einer Dberlegenheit von Wissenschaft basiert', in B.Gladigow and id., Neue Ansatze in der Religionswissenschaft, Forum Religionswissenschaft 4, I983, 9-28; H.J.Kraus, 'Die Anfange der religionssoziologischen Forschungen in der alttestamentlichen Wissenschaft. Eine forschungsgeschichtliche Orientierung' ( I969 ), in id., Biblisch-theologische Aufsatze, I972, 296-3 Io; G.Lanczkowski, Begegnung und Wandel der Religionen, I97I; T.Luckmann, Das Problem der Religion in der modernen Gesellschaft. Intuition, Person, Weltanschauung, I963; id., The Invisible Religion. The Problem ofReligion in Modern Society, I967;}.Matthes, Religion und Gesellschaft. Einfuhrung in die Religionssoziologie I, 2 I969; G.Mensching, 'Religion, I. Erscheinungs- und Ideenwelt', RGG 3 V, I96I, 96I-4; P.D.Miller, 'Israelite Religion', in D.A.Knight and G.M.Tucker (eds.), The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters, I98 5, 20I-37; H.Mol, Identity and the Sacred. A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion, I976; L.Perlitt, Vatke und Wellhausen, BZAW 94, I965; H.D.Preuss, Theologie des Alten Testaments, I, I99I; O.Procksch, Theologie des Alten Testaments, I9 so; G.von Rad, 'Offene Fragen im Umkreis einer Theologie des Alten Testaemnts' (I963), in id., Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament II, TB 48, I973, 289-3 I2; R.Rendtorff, 'Alttestamentliche Theologie und israelitisch-judische Religionsgeschichte' (I963 ), in id., Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, TB 57, 1975, 137-51; id., 'Theologie des Alten Testaments. Uberlegungen zu einem Neuansatz', in id., Kanan

2

Introduction

und Theologie, Vorarbeiten zu einer Theologie des A/ten Testaments, I99I, I-!4; H.Ringgren, Israelite Religion, ET I966; C.Schafer-Lichtenberger, 'The Pariah: Some Thoughts on the Genesis and Presuppositions of Max Weber's Ancient Judaism', ]SOT 51, I99I, 85-II3; id., 'Vom Nebensatz zum Idealtypus. Zur Vorgeschichte des "AntikenJudentums" von Max Weber', in E.Blum, C.Macholz and E.W.Stegemann (eds.), Die Hebraische Bibel und ihre zweifache Nachgeschichte. FS R.Rendtorff, I990, 4I9-33; W.Schluchter (ed.), Max Webers Sicht des antiken Christentums, I 9 8 5; W.H.Schmidt, The Faith of the Old Testament, ET I983; R.Smend Sr, Lehrbuch der alttestamentlichen Religionsgeschichte, 2 I899; R.Smend Jr, 'De Wette und das Verhaltnis zwischen historischer Bibelkritik und philosophischem System im I9. Jahrhundert', TZ 14, I954, I07-98; id., 'Johann Philipp Gablers Begrtindung der biblischen Theologie', EvTh 22, I962, I69-79; F.Stolz, 'Probleme westsemitischer und israelitischer Religionsgeschichte', TR 56, I99I, I-26; G.E.Swanson, The Birth of the Gods. The Origin of Primitive Beliefs, I 97 4; W.Vatke, Die biblische Theologie wissenschaftlich dargestellt, I: Die Religion des A/ten Testaments, I 8 3 5; T.C.Vriezen, An Outline of Old Testament Theology, ET I958; M.Weber, Ancient judaism (I92I), ET I952;J.Wellhausen, 'Israelitischjudische Religion' (I905), in R.Smend (ed.), Grundrisse zumAlten Testament, TB 27, I965, 65-I09; C.Westermann, 'Das Verhaltnis des Jahweglaubens zu den ausserisraelitischen Religionen' (I 964 ), in Forschung am A/ten Testament. Gesammelte Studien I, TB 24, I964, I89-2I8; id, Elements of Old Testament Theology, ET I982; W.M.L.de Wette, Lehrbuch der christlichen Dogmatik in historischer Entwickelung dargestel/t, I: Biblische Dogmatik A/ten und Neuen Testaments oder kritische Darstellung der Religionslehre des Hebraismus, des Judenthums und Urchristentums, I8I3, 3 I83 I; F. Whaling (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Religion (2 vols), inJ.Waardenburg (ed.), Religion and Reason 27, I983; 28, I985; W.Zimmerli, 'Biblische Theologie', TRE VI, I98o, 426-55; id., Old Testament Theology in Outline, ET I978.

Today the 'history of Israelite religion' is no longer a standard subject in most theological faculties, at any rate in Germany. In its function of bringing together the various aspects of Old Testament research, in many places it has either been completely replaced by lectures on the 'theology of the Old Testmaent' or pushed aside as a special subject. 1 A survey of publications since the end of the Second World War gives the same impression: whereas the 'Histories of Israelite Religion' written in this period of almost fifty years can be counted on the fingers of one hand/ new 'theologies of the Old Testament' are appearing in regular succession and now outnumber threefold the histories of Israelite religion. 3 This fact is a direct consequence of the upheaval in theology which took place in Germany after the First World War, the break with nineteenthcentury 'liberal theology' and the triumphant progress of 'dialectical theology' .4 Quite apart from the demands of the subject, that the new insights of detailed studies in the history of religion and comparative religion should be brought together, the fact that 'the history of Israelite religion' nowadays again seems to be a meaningful and theologically

History of research

3

necessary task is connected not least with the present situation in theology generally, in which the great systematic schemes of Bultmann, Barth and their successors have lost their all-prevailing fascination. We find ourselves thrown back- though at another level- on the problems of nineteenthcentury theology; this comprehensive new conception of a 'history of Israelite religion', the desire to re-evaluate this discipline within the canon of Old Testament scholarship, is one more example of the trend.

I. I

History of research

The way which led to the development of the history of Israelite religion as an Old Testament discipline is a complex one and has often been described from a great variety of perspectives. 5 So I can limit myself to some broad outlines. In I 9 3 r Eissfeldt mentioned five sources of the historical approach to the religion of Israel and Judah: r. the rationalism of the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth; 2. Herder; 3. the influence of Hegel's philosophy of history, above all on Vatke; 4· the results of research into neighbouring religions during the second half of the nineteenth century; and 5. the history-of-religions school from the end of the nineteenth century to the First World War. 6 The first starting point, rationalism, was common to both 'Old Testament theology' and 'the history of Israelite religion'. In it, the concern to regard the religion of the Old and New Testaments as an independent historical entity over against dogmatics was a clear systematic interest: in the effort to demonstrate that Christianity was the ideal of reasonable, natural religion, the aspects of biblical religion which did not fit this ideal were explained away either as accommodation of the great religious mediators to the limited notions of their people 7 or as influences from neighbouring religions which were at a lower level. 8 In his famous inaugural lecture at Altdorf, which today is often claimed as the starting point for 'Old Testament theology' ,9 Gabler classified 'biblical theology' as e genere historico, but here 'historical' means above all the history of concepts, i.e. of ideas, and the historical investigation of biblical statements (interpretatio) is only a preliminary stage to philosophical reflection on the biblical concepts (comparatio), which links them to the true basic ideas of biblical religion on which dogmatics works. 10 So Gabler's programme in no way led to a really historical account of biblical religion, or Old Testament religion, which began to become an independent area of study in the subsequent period. One example of this is the remarkable rigidity of de Wette's 'biblical dogmatics', 11 which, despite all the distinguished historical criticism in which its author had engaged over a variety of fields, divided up the biblical testimonies in a dogmatic way with a philosophical hermeneutic derived from J.F.Fries.

4

Introduction

For de Wette, the 'idea of religion' in the Old Testament could only be recognized 'in its manifold and impure appearances in history', 12 and it was necessary to strip off the 'particularism' which had found expression in partially degenerate 'symbols', in order to rise to its timeless 'universalism' .13 De Wette did not see a continuous historical development; there were some high points only with Moses, the prophets and in the Psalms. But Christian prejudices and the early romantic influences of Herder continued to be evident in his marked disparagement of the post-exilic period as 'Judaism' in comparison to the pre-exilic period, 'Hebraism': 'Whereas Hebraism was a matter of life and enthusiasm, Judaism is a matter of the concept and literalism.' 14 The first scholar to break through to a really historical account of the religion of Israel was Vatke, with his Religion des A/ten Testaments of r 8 3 5. 15 The widely accepted Hegelian philosophy of history offered him not only the possibility of overcoming the hiatus between the historical and the theological approach but also a hermeneutical framework for understanding the history of Israelite religion as a 'spiritual process' of the revelation of the absolute Spirit progressing dialectically, and the union and ultimate identity of the human spirit with it. 16 'The whole history of Old Testament religion is ... a constant battle and victory of thought over the natural.' 17 Even if it seems doubtful from a present-day perspective whether this is an apt description of the driving force of Israelite religion, the heuristic value of this philosophical-historical approach is evident from the help it gave Vatke in destroying the peculiar presentation of the Old Testament which depicted the whole of Israelite religion as already developed in the early Mosaic period, and which had hitherto stood in the way of any genetic understanding- even before Graf and Wellhausen had demonstrated that the Priestly legal material came into being at a late date. In reality the beginnings had to look very much simpler if the divine wisdom was not to have 'leaped over several necessary elements of development' .18 For Vatke, Moses is a prophetically gifted nomadic leader who in antithesis to the natural religion of the people introduced the worship of Jehovah as the 'one national God'. 19 According to Vatke, the dialectical process, which began on a small scale with Moses, reached its first climax in the eighth-century prophets; they had for the first time decisively shaped the universalistic view of God and the idea of theocracy in the face of the national and nature religion of the people. In this way, the dialectical Hegelian model of thesis, antithesis and synthesis also gave Vatke a broad principle for dividing the religion of Israel into a pre-prophetic, prophetic and post-prophetic period. Indeed it enabled him - in contrast to de Wette and many who followed him - to evaluate the post-exilic era positively as 'synthesis', as the attempt at a benevolent transposition of theocracy in a legalistic direction, universaliz-

History of research

5

ing it in wisdom and internalizing it in religious poetry (5 51-5 77). For Vatke it was the Hellenistic period which first led to a decline, from which Christianity then rose to a final climax (577-590). Although with this approach in terms of the philosophy of history Vatke was able to tackle the living dialogical structure of the history of Israelite religion much more appropriately than the approaches before him, which had been either didactic or expressed in terms of the history of concepts, as a result he remains far too imprisoned in the history of ideas and his account seems abstract, almost docetic. For example, he sees the prophets as the 'main organs of the idea' (48o}, not really human beings of flesh and blood; for him, events of political history like the rise of Assyria as a world power or the downfall of the Israelite states are 'accidents': they may support the dialectical spiritual process (universalization, separation from the world), but cannot produce and determine it. Nevertheless, Vatke's approach was a brilliant one. However, to begin with he found no successors. His philosophical diction, which was difficult to understand, was a deterrent, and his critical destruction of 'Mosaism' brought down on him not only the angry attacks of the conservatives but also the charge of a critical scholar like de Wette that he had 'researched in an irreligious and untheological spirit';20 this prevented him from being given an ordinarius professorship. 21 The scene continued to be dominated by more or less didactic approaches or approaches in terms of salvation history. 22 Itwas two generations after Vatke before the 'history oflsraelite religion' came to be fully developed by Wellhausen and his school. Once Wellhausen - independently of Graf - had succeeded in separating out the 'Priestly Codex' by literary criticism and demonstrating its post-exilic origin, he enthusiastically went back to Vatke's scheme, which fitted in with this literary-critical result, but stripped it of its philosophical superstructure. Wellhausen stood near to the line running from Herder, Humboldt and Ranke in his understanding of history and he steered clear of all speculation in the philosophy of history; he saw history as an organic process in which the history of religion had an integral part. On the basis of this approach it was possible for Wellhausen to describe the history of religion as an ongoing interplay between political history and religious views; in his view influence was often exerted by 'great men'. 23 So for example he can say: 'Only in Moses' time did Yahweh become the creator spiritus of the people of Israel and thus at the same time take on a new, national and historical content, while his old relation to nature receded into the background. ' 24 Wellhausen himself did not write an extended 'history of religion', but only treated this as an aspect of his account of the history of Israel; 25 however, in 1905 he wrote a brief essay, still worth reading, entitled 'The Religion of Israel and Judah'. This shows how in his hands Vatke's

6

Introduction

somewhat 'bloodless' outline becomes a taut and changing course of history with many facets. Instead, a whole series of 'histories of religion' appeared from his pupils, a typical and influential example of which is R.Smend (Sr)'s Lehrbuch der alttestamentlichen Religionsgeschichte (1893, 2 1899). This book was the first deliberately to dispense with the title 'Biblical Theology'. Smend stated programmatically: 'The account of Old Testament religion must not be a systematic one.' 26 Smend, too, believed that the history of religion had to describe an interplay of political and religious history: 'So in connection with the history of Israel, the history of Old Testament religion seeks to show how this religion came into being with the people of Israel, lived in it and underwent the strongest influence from all its fortunes, and how conversely it created and sustained the people of Israel, permeated and dominated its life, how furthermore it called for the downfall of Israel and then raised up the Jewish religious community from the ruins of the fallen people. Only from the historical life of Old Testament religion do we recognize its historical truth.' 27 In outline, Smend followed the tripartite scheme of Vatke and distinguished between the religion of ancient Israel, that of the prophets and that of the Jews. But in making a sharp distinction between the religion of pre-prophetic Israel and post-prophetic Judaism, he reintroduced de Wette's differentiation between 'Hebraism' and 'Judaism', which resulted in a devaluation of the post-exilic period. 28 In his view Judaism represented 'to a large degree a compromise between it (prophetic religion) and popular religion' (268). By contrast, for Smend prophetic religion, which universalized and individualized the national religion of Israel, separated it from the world and led it to higher morality, clearly represented the climax and turning point of the history of Israelite religion; on the one hand it was the 'founder of the Jewish community' by prompting the development of the law; on the other hand he saw it in direct relationship to Christianity (174). Doubtless Smend's development of Wellhausen's real-historical approach did more justice to many points of the historical course of the history of Israelite religion than Vatke's philosophical scheme. Nevertheless, on the one hand some inappropriate Christian evaluation crept in, and on the other hand it proved that the three-stage approach derived from Hegelian philosophy could not be made to fit the historical periods of Israel: as the development of the law, which Smend rightly interpreted as an answer to the preaching of the eight-century prophets, already begins with the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah, he was compelled to make 'Judaism' already begin with the downfall of the northern kingdom in 721. That, of course, is historical and sociological: the self-designation yehad is only attested from the end of the sixth century, and of course down to 5 87

History of research

7

Judah was still a state. Moreover on the basis of his system Smend could not assess the seventh- and sixth-century prophets appropriately, but had to reinterpret them as teachers of the law and pastors. A further defect lies in Smend's failure to take note of social factors, or his misinterpretation of them. While he recognized that there is a reciprocal influence between 'prophetic religion', the downfall of Israel as a state and the social form of the post-exilic community, this latter was not - as he thought - an unpolitical 'community' in the Christian understanding of the term, nor was it in any way the consequence of an individualization of religion and a separation of it from the world. His use of the term nation, as popular in the nineteenth century as it was vague, for pre-prophetic Israel is also questionable: it prevents Smend from seeing what a revolution the formation of the state and the monarchy represented in the history of Israelite religion. Finally, the almost complete lack of a comparative perspective is striking. Smend accepts influences from 'ancient Semitic religion', Arabic tribal religion and 'Canaanite religion', which he simply describes as 'nature worship', only for the early period; otherwise for him the history oflsraelite religion is an organic development within Israel,29 which needs 'Baal worship' only as a constant negative foil. But despite these defects, the 'histories of religion' which appeared in or around the Wellhausen schooP0 represented a considerable step forward. They were so influential that traditional biblical theologies were either supplemented with a section on the history of religion 31 or were turned into histories of religion and given new titles. 32 The step to a clearly historical summary of the results of Old Testament scholarship had been taken. In addition, there was the stimulus of the history-of-religions school around Eichhorn, Gunkel, Bousset and others, which went beyond the narrow approach of the Wellhausen school and in its research into the history of Israelite religion and Christianity sought to make positive use of the material from Eastern cultures that had accumulated in the meantime. One example of this is Gunkel's Schopfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Creation and Chaos in Primal Time and End-Time, 1895), which traced the motive of the battle with chaos from the Babylonian creation myths through the Old Testament to apocalyptic. Unfortunately no one in the school wrote a comprehensive history of Israelite religion. However, before the First World War it looked as if the thoroughoing history-of-religions approach could lead to a volume which embraced both Old and New Testament research and could even- if one remembers the works of Troeltsch -lead to a unitary theology on a historical basis which also included dogmatics. But that never happened: the First World War brought a quite radical collapse of research into the history of religion in Germany before a fully

8

Introduction

convincing 'History of Israelite Religion' could be written. Eissfeldt, himself a young supporter of the history-of-religions trend, described this collapse in retrospect in 193 I, not without regret: 'When the war came to an end, the first unrest of the years of revolution settled, and now science and theology again came more into their own, it was not the theology of the history of religions which continued a victory march interrupted only by war and revolution; rather, a quite different kind of theology came into being and went from success to success: dialectical theology, which was also called theology of crisis and theology of the Word.' 33 In 1926 he had described the new situation like this: 'Weary of the historicism and psychologism and relativism of the history-of-religions method, people are longing for revelation and calling for a scientific treatment of the Bible which does justice to its claim to be the revelation of absolute values, namely a theological approach. The representatives of dialectical theology have met this demand most obviously.' 34 Whereas a number of Old Testament scholars were concerned to meet this demand by replacing the history of the religion of Israel and Judah with a new form of 'theology of the Old Testament', Eissfeldt sought to rescue history-ofreligions research into the Old Testament by clearly separating the two and dividing them into two different methodological approaches: 'history of religions' is concerned with knowledge and 'Old Testament theology' with faith. Consequently both forms of overall view are necessary and can supplement each other: 'The historical understanding of the Old Testament can never be more than relative and immanent, and on the other hand faith grasped by an Absolute and Transcendent is not the organ for understanding the religion of the Old Testament as a historical entity.' 35 Along the lines of the compromise offered here, in the subsequent period some scholars wrote both a 'history of religion' and a 'theology of the Old Testament'. 36 Yet others added longer or shorter sketches of the history of religion to their systematic theological presentation of the material, 37 thus indicating that they, too, did not see a genetic understanding of the overall course of Israelite religion as wholly superfluous. However, this compromise cannot disguise the fact that academic interest in history-of-religions accounts had been paralysed. The innovations and hermeneutical-methodological discussions took place on the side of 'Old Testament theology' and established themselves in the period before and after the Second World War as a new Old Testament discipline. By contrast, the histories oflsraelite religion or historical sketches which have continued to appear since the First World War are largely uninteresting resumes 38 which in method and historical system hardly go beyond those of Wellhausen and the beginnings of the history-of-religions school. Indeed, it has to be said that the few 'histories of Israelite religion' which were written after the Second World War under the domination of Old Testament

History of research

9

theology mark more of a step back in method and system, although in terms of content they integrated new results of research. This is true, for example, of Ringgren's I963 Israelite Religion; it is no coincidence that this was written by an author from Sweden, where there was never the theological contempt for history-of-religions research that there was in Germany. In terms of the history of research Ringgren offers a thoroughly sympathetic synthesis between the Scandinavian branch of the 'Myth and Ritual School' and German Old Testament scholarship (Noth, etc.). What differentiates the content of this 'modern' history of religion from that of Smend is above all the dating of the texts: Ringgren ventures to say much more and with more confidence about the religion of the patriarchs, Moses and the period before the state than scholars did in the time of Wellhausen; here the influence of Alt and Noth is evident. 39 The main interest lies in the period of the monarchy, and many texts are claimed for this period (especially Psalms) which were previously regarded as post-exilic. By contrast the exilic and post-exilic period takes up only sixteen per cent of the book- an indication of a theological lack of interest. Although historical developments are addressed throughout the book, the presentation of the religion of Israel in the main part (the period of the monarchy) is in a dogmatic order, and deals with God, the forms of God's appearance, the angels and spirits, etc. It looks as if the schemes sometimes used in Old Testament theologies have found their way into the history of Israelite religion. 40 The writing prophets are simply set alongside cult and king. Here the author remarks: 'It is an astonishing fact that a large part of the Old Testament consists of writings that in many ways represent a point of view quite different from that of the "official" religion of their period.' 41 However, the struggle and dispute which underlies this is not developed; all we are given is the religious and moral content of the prophetic proclamation. Little can be detected in Ringgren's work of the dialogue structure of the history of religion or even of the interplay between historical and religious changes which still so fascinated Wellhausen. The genetic understanding is fossilized in an intellectual system which is historical only out of necessity. 42 The same is true ofW.H.Schmidt's The Faith of the Old Testament (ET 1983 of German 4 1982), which from the second German edition of 1975 appeared under the title 'Old Testament Faith in its History'. This useful book with its wealth of material 'does not seek to depict "the history of Israelite religion" as a whole with all the forms of popular piety, but above all the nature and history of the Old Testament understanding of God'. 43 The delineation of the change in the image of God from the nomadic prehistory of Israel to the monarchy occupies the greater part of the book. Schmidt evidently thinks that the essential of a religion has already been grasped when its understanding of God has been clarified. But this means that the interplay between social and religious development only half comes into view; the effect of religion on social developments, for example by the

IO

Introduction

formation of the law, is completely absent. The exclusion of 'popular piety' limits the whole approach once again to a line conceived of in ideal terms, 44 and hardly allows any dispute over the understanding of God. Even kingship and prophecy stand peacefully side by side (§§12, 14). From the exilic and post-exilic period, only what is of interest to Christians is briefly (just eleven per cent of the overall length) considered. The appearance of the book marks progress in taking into account influences from the ancient Near Eastern environment, especially from Ugarit, completely excluded from von Rad's Old Testament Theology, which had appeared somewhat earlier. However, the history-of-religions comparison in Schmidt's approach, which aims to give an account of the 'unmistakable uniqueness of Israel among the religions of antiquity', 45 often has an apologetic function. So this outline, which puts itself 'between a history of religion and a theology of the Old Testament', shows very clearly that the use of systematic theology, and the criteria for selection and evaluations which derive from it, at least in part get in the way of a view of the real historical developments.

In his History of Israelite Religion (ET 1972, German 1969), Fohrer is clearly more interested in the historical development in correlation with the political and social history and in critical encounters with neighbouring religions. For example, he distinguishes between nomadic clan religion and the Canaanite religion of the settled population, and describes the historical consequences of their encounter (n-53). However, in his view the decisive influences which advanced the history of Israelite religion did not derive from this social and religious correlation but from particular impulses. He distinguishes four of them: the Mosaic religion of Yahweh, the kingship, prophecy and the Deuteronomistic theology. Here Fohrer evidently wants to denote the contingent religious impulses which cannot be derived from the social structures and to a degree run counter to them. However, although this is a clear advance on Wellhausen's view that men with religious inspiration make history, the question remains. The 'impulse' theory in fact makes it possible for Fohrer often to ignore the tradents of the great religious innovations and prevents him from enquiring further into their social conditioning. So the impulses run the risk of becoming a history of ideas which exists in detachment. The same is also true of the term 'existential attitude' which Fohrer introduces. He distinguishes six forms of this: the conservative, the magical, the cultic, the national-religious, the wisdom and the prophetic (1 51ff., 267ff.). This is in part a quite accurate account of the different 'streams of faith' within the religion of Israel. But as Fohrer- again orientated on the history of ideas - does not investigate the tradents of these 'existential attitudes', they become random options existing alongside each other,46 and the theological clashes between them are not described. Thus the sociological approaches to a view of the religion of Israel in interplay with

History of research

II

its social development, which are certainly present in Fohrer, 47 remain rudimentary. With twenty-two per cent of the book, the exilic and post-exilic period is given more coverage in Fohrer's account than in those of Ringgren and Schmidt, but this is far from an appropriate evaluation of its significance for a new conception of the history of Israelite religion. This survey of the history of scholarship produces the following demands for a new conception of the history of Israelite religion. I. A history of Israelite religion must have a consistent historical construction and may not secretly or openly reintroduce dogmatic principles of division and selection (Ringgren, Schmidt). 2. A 'history of Israelite religion' must be presented as an open process which leads both to later Judaism and also to later Christianity. Divisions which introduce evaluations from a later date, i.e. particuarly in the light of Christianity, like 'Hebraism' and 'Judaism' (de Wette) or 'IsraeliteJewish' (Wellhausen et al.), are to be rejected, and similar emphases or devaluations, e.g. 'prophetic religion' as compared to the 'religion of the law' (Smend, etc.), are to be avoided. 3. A 'history of Israelite religion' may not be described as a mere history of ideas or of the spirit (Vatke, to some degree Fohrer); it must be presented as a process which embraces all aspects of the historical development. It has to detect and describe the interplay between the political and social development on the one hand and the religious and cultic development on the other (thus in embryo already Wellhausen, Smend et al.). The formal concept of religion to be used here, which sees religion as a reciprocal event between God and human beings, 48 should do justice to this concern. However, it must also be added that for the historian of religion 'God' is tangible only in the linguistic statements of human beings, in religious experiences which they report, in worlds of religious symbols which they develop, and in words which they speak to God or in God's name. Methodologically, this means that the standpoint from which the historian of religion describes the interplay cannot lie with God or in the claim to some 'bird's-eye view' between God and human beings; it can lie only on the side of the Israelite man or woman. 4· So a 'history of Israelite religion' today must eventually also include the social history of Israel alongside the political history (Wellhausen). As far as is possible from the sources, it must investigate consistently the human vehicles of the various religious traditions, the way in which they were conditioned, economically and socially, and their social context. It cannot ignore the question whether religious statements or symbolic worlds are formed or develop in relation to individuals in their family circle, the local community, or in relation to the people or the state, and it will attempt to investigate the material of the tradition at different levels

Introduction

I2

in accordance with these social entities. 49 It cannot ignore the fact that in the course of its history the form of the social organization of the entity 'Israel' changed considerably, that 'its religion' had a considerable role in this, and that conversely social change markedly altered religious statements and schemes. 5. A 'history of Israelite religion' has not only to describe the manifold different religious statements and theological schemes in the Old Testament in their historical and social setting, but also to bring them once again into dialogue with one another. Its task is to restore the 'frozen dialogue' of the 0 ld Testament tradition to a living theological discussion between different groups and parties. The dialectical model which Vatke took over from Hegel was certainly a correct starting point, but it is still too rigid and still too little filled with real historical life. The history of Israelite religion is then an ongoing discussion between various Israelite groupings about the way in which particular historical developments are to be interpreted in the light of God and what is to be done, according to God's will, in the face of these challenges. 5° 6. A 'history of Israelite religion' must be orientated on comparative religion. Religious discussion in Israel did not take place in a closed context but in its more or less open ancient Near Eastern environment, in which religious patterns of interpretation and conduct already long formed were constantly taken up, changed and rejected. There is a wide consensus today that here the narrowness of the Wellhausen school and the theological restraints which led to a decline in history-of-religions research as a consequence of dialectical theology must be done away with. What is needed is for not only isolated religious statements but also similar social and religious complexes to be compared, and for this comparison to be done fairly, i.e. without any apologetic interest. The common features are as important as the differences. The history-of-religions comparison does not have the task of demonstrating the uniqueness of the religion of Israel (pace W.H.Schmidt) but of helping to understand it better. 7· A 'history of Israelite religion' must again evaluate the post-exilic period more appropriately. 5 1 It musttake seriously the view, often expressed today, that the exilic and early post-exilic period was the decisive period for the formation of the religion of Israel, and at least devote the same interest and the same space to it as to the pre-exilic period - as far as the sources allow. However, this means a revision of anti-Judaistic Christian prejudices.

1.2

Task, method and hermeneutical reflections

Following this account of the interweaving of the 'history of Israelite religion' and the 'theology of the Old Testament' and the opposition

Task, method and hermeneutical reflections between them, we must now define the task and method of the former in comparison with the latter. In I926, in a concern to secure a place for the 'history of Israelite religion' within Old Testament scholarship, Eissfeldt attempted to make a clear methodological and conceptual distinction between the two disciplines: The history of the religion of Israel and Judah is 'a historical discipline. It describes the religion of the Old Testament as an entity unfolding in a historical development and in so doing utilizes the instruments of philology and history, which are also useful elsewhere ... This includes the means of empathy, which indeed is particularly important in this unique sphere. Moreover that is enough for the accomplishment of the historical task; no other means are needed. The historian does not answer the question of the absolute value, of the "truth" of the subject. Historians must be content with the statement that they are dealing with an entity which claims to be the revelation and the word of God ... The theological consideration of the religion of the Old Testament is different! This is an account of what in the Old Testament has become revelation, the Word of God ... to those describing it and their religious communities. Although it is thoroughly scientific, it will therefore have the character of witness and its validity is limited to the circle of those whose piety is the same as or similar to that of the one describing it, i.e. it is conditioned by confession and church ... Because Old Testament theology is about the description of the revelation of God which has become faith in the Old Testament and is constantly renewed, it cannot have the form of a historical description ... Therefore here the systematic nature of the account is the given one.' 5 2 However, nowadays such a contrast between a historical and objective relativistic discipline on the one hand and a systematic-theological and normative church discipline on the other is no longer completely satisfying. From the side of the history of religion it must be noted that there is no such thing as presuppositionless historiography. Eissfeldt, too, was well aware of this; 5 3 however, his idea of a historian of religion 'who regardless of his personal faith and the confession of his church can pursue and assess the development of his religion in enlightened objectivity' 54 has become at the latest since Auschwitz- deeply questionable. The author of a 'history of Israelite religion', too, cannot ignore the fact that the religion being described is the forerunner of two existing world religions, Judaism and Christianity, and in any account is called on to make a contribution towards working out this pernicious Christian history of guilt. Qua theologians, historians cannot ignore the fact that they are members of a church which is involved in internal and external controversies over how to cope with oppressive human problems. To this degree the historian's account will have its own theological interests, and the conception of the

Introduction 'history of Israelite religion' in the wider sense is a task which relates to the church. If anything is to be learned from the resolute theological concern about the Old Testament initiated by dialectical theology for an account of the history of Israelite religion, it is that this has to be pursued not out of a voluntary 'empathy' but out of a passionate concern for the problems and theological controversies in which the people of ancient Israel were engaged. 55 That their struggle over the appropriate responses and decisions about God is significant for the present is the presupposition on which historians of religion work, to the degree that they are and want to remain theologians. Even if as at present understood a 'history of Israelite religion' can neither be objective nor relativistic, it is not subjective either, nor does it pursue any immediate normative interest. The theological interests which an author brings to it must be subject to a number of controls from the historical subject to be described. The selection of material, the emphases and the evaluations must be proved by the criterion of their capacity to lead to the reconstruction of a continuous history which as far as possible fits all the Old Testament texts and the archaeological and historical data into a plausible overall picture. Even if a 'history of Israelite religion' can prove neither the truth-claims of the Bible nor the superiority of 'the faith oflsrael' (as Eissfeldt sees quite rightly), historians of religion, too, cannot get by without criteria for assessment if their reconstructions are not to remain utterly diffuse and random. 56 However, they will not seek to derive these from present church dogmas or complexes of problems, but from the religious discussion which they have to describe. For all the understanding and critical sympathy with which they have to depict any position in a particular controversy and evaluate its concern, they will not want to share and excuse everything. Manifestly wrong decisions and wrong developments must be identified as such in a survey of the overall course of events. Only in this way can the drama and seriousness of the religious struggle of Israelite people of the time again be brought to life. Thus despite the consistent application of historical method, the task of a 'history of Israelite religion' today is clearly more theological than Eissfeldt thought. Granted, it is not concerned with 'absolute value' and 'the truth', but it is concerned with the correct evaluations and decisions in particular historical situations and with the historical truth which flashes out in the dispute over them. In the meantime, on the side of Old Testament theology it has become clear that the systematic theological methods and the normative task which Eissfeldt wanted to assign to the church cannot be maintained. As early as I929 Eichrodt warned against regarding 'Old Testament theology' as a 'discipline relating to the dogma of religion' and assigned it a 'place within empirical historical Old Testament scholarship'. 57 By contrast, Vriezen

Task, method and hermeneutical reflections

15

wanted to give it the task of 'recognizing the element of revelation in Old Testament preaching', which has to take place on the basis of a specific 'Christian theological starting-point' .58 Childs wanted even more consistently to define the 'theology of the Old Testament' as a specifically 'Christian discipline'. 59 But recently Preuss has again returned to Eichrodt's view: 'All in all, however, a "theology of the Old Testament" remains an undertaking with a historical orientation, and thus a descriptive one.' 60 But in that case is it more thana phenomenology of Old Testament religion? If the normative Christian orientation of 'Old Testament theology' has already proved problematical, so too has the demand for a systematic structure in it. Eichrodt still saw it in relation to the 'history of Israelite religion', as follows: 'Whereas the history of Israelite and Jewish religion is concerned with the genetic understanding of Old Testament religion in the interplay of historical forces, Old Testament theology is concerned ... with the great systematic task of making a cross section through what has come into being by which the inner structure of the living content of religion is to be illuminated and its characteristics are to be recognized, in the context of the religious environment or of types of the history of religion generally.' 61 However, it has proved that there is no simple way of performing this 'systematic task' of describing the Israelite religion which has 'come into being' 'by its inner structure'. On the one hand the ongoing quest for an appropriate principle for structuring and dividing the 'theology of the Old Testament' shows how difficult it seems to be to find a system which is congenial to the religion of Israel. 62 The interminable discussion about whether the Old Testament has a 'theological centre' 63 around which its religious statements can be grouped in a stringent theoretical way or whether we have a number of complexes of notions 64 has compelled the concession that the Old Testament evidently successfully avoids the grasp of a theoretical system. On the other hand, history is so essential an element of wide areas of Israelite religion and its literary presentation that an exclusion of the historical dimension would rob it of a decisive feature. Von Rad recognized: 'If we cannot divorce Israel's world of thought from her world of history because the picture of the latter was itself a complicated work of her faith, this at the same time means that we must also submit ourselves to the sequence of events as the faith of Israel saw them.' Then comes his famous remark: 'Thus, re-telling remains the most legitimate form of theological discourse on the Old Testament.' 65 But is that not to abandon Eichrodt's question about the unitary 'inner structure' of the religion of Israel, which is to guide the 'theology of the Old Testament' as distinct from the history of religion? The most recent representative, H.D.Preuss, well aware of this dilemma, attempts to take a middle way. This is 'to uncover the basic structures of witness and faith'; the system must 'match the subject-matter to be grasped' and 'necessary historical differentiation may not be left

I6

Introduction

aside, but must be integrated into this systematically orientated account, for God's way with his people was a historical one, a piece of history'. 66 Thus today the task of the 'theology of the Old Testament' clearly has a more historical orientation than Eissfeldt thought. But ifthe two disciplines of the history of Israelite religion and the theology of the Old Testament have clearly come closer together than in their confrontation in the 1920s, the question nevertheless arises what still distinguishes them, and whether it is still meaningful to pursue them both further and continue to develop them with a not inconsiderable expenditure of research. As early as 1963 Rolf Rendtorff was already pleading for a large-scale integration of the two. As the revelation of God did not take place outside but within the history of Israel, following Vatke and Koberle he made the demand that 'the theological approach should be understood as a historical task and vice versa', 67 and 'thus that at the same time the history-ofreligions approach to the Old Testament should be acknowledged to be an integrating element of Old Testament theology'. 68 However, much as one may appreciate the concern to overcome the gulf between historical and theological method and thus to find a theologically legitimate home for the history of Israelite religion under the roof of 'Old Testament theology', the only extended example of a depiction of this line of 'Old Testament faith in its history', the work by his pupil W.H.Schmidt, shows that a mere mixing of the two disciplines is problematical, because too many uncontrolled prior decisions and evaluations go into such an account. 69 Now if such an integration of the two disciplines does not lead to any convincing result, they enter into direct competition not only in their function of bringing together the results of individual research into the 0 ld Testament but also in the method they use. Despite the conceptual problems in the midst of which the discipline of 'Old Testament theology' has found itself from the beginning, its swan song is not to be intoned here. Who knows how it will develop in the future??0 If the discipline of 'the history of Israelite religion' has a real chance to develop itself again in the theological faculties, the future will show which of the two competing disciplines is more appropriate to the subject of the Old Testament and will be better able to assist the transfer of Old Testament research to theology and the church. I cannot disguise the fact that in the present situation I regard the history of religion as the more meaningful comprehensive Old Testament discipline: - because it corresponds better to the historical structure of large parts of the Old Testament; - because it takes seriously the insight that religious statements cannot be

Dividing lines

-

-

-

-

I7

separated from the historical background from which they derive or against which they are reinterpreted; because it is not compelled to bring down its varying and sometimes contradictory religious statements to the level of intellectual abstraction; because it describes a dialogical process of struggle for theological clarification, demarcation and consensus-forming which clearly corresponds to the present-day synodical or conciliar ecumenical learning process of the churches and Christian-Jewish dialogue; because it sees its continuity not in any religious ideas which have to be appropriated by Christians but in the people oflsrael itself, to which the Christian churches stand in a brotherly and sisterly relationship through Jesus Christ; because in a consistently historical approach it openly dispenses with any claim- even a concealed one- to absoluteness and deliberately does theology under the eschatological proviso, which befits a minority church in a multi-religious and partially secularized world community; because its approach from a comparison of religions facilitates dialogue with the other religions.

However, I could well imagine that alongside such an overall view from the history of religions, an important place could come to be occupied by a theological view which took on the task, starting from the burning problems of the present and the controversies in theology and the church about how a Christian solution can be achieved, of making thematic crosssections through the history of the religion of Israel and early Christianity in order to describe what insights or patterns of behaviour found there in connection with analogous problems and controversies can be important, helpful and normative for the church today. However, this would be a different kind of 'Old Testament theology' from what has been customary so far.

r. 3 Dividing lines The history of Israelite religion as attested for us in the writings of the Old Testament extends over a span of around a thousand years, from the end of the second millennium BCE (c.I 2 5o) to the middle of the second century BCE. The far-reaching revolutions which Israel experienced during this long period in its eventful political history, the formation of the state under David (c.IOoo), the loss of state independence with the exile (587) and the formation of a temple community in Jerusalem first under Persian (from 5.38) and then under Greek (from 332) rule, are also landmarks in the history of its religion. A history which seeks to describe the formation of

18

Introduction

the religion of Israel will therefore first of all have to be divided into a history of the period before the state, the period of the state, the exile, the Persian period and the Hellenistic period. However, such a chronological division is not in itself enough. The multiplicity of ideas about faith attested by the Old Testament writings, which often compete in one and the same period, makes it impossible to develop a history of religion as a straight-line history of religious notions and conceptions. Rather, we come up inexorably against the question of the tradents of such different notions of faith: what groups were they which referred to particular religious experiences and developed particular theological conceptions? To what other notions did they react, and what interests were they pursuing? The history of Israelite religion is not a bloodless history of ideas but a living process of constant controversy, an ongoing dispute between different groups in Israelite society. 71 It was only in the course of this unending discourse that- after many errors and false moves and the repudiation and adaptation of possible alternatives in thought and action - a group of religious traditions developed which gained broad social acceptance. It is these that we can call 'the' religion of Israel in its unmistakable distinctiveness. A historical account which, like the one presented here, does not seek to limit itself to describing the development of the religion of Israel as a history of ideas, virtually from a bird's-eye view, but attempts as far as the sources allow to trace it at its real social basis as a social and theological clash between different groups, will therefore have to introduce further dividing lines, regional and above all sociological. Scholars widely accept that an account of the religion of Israel must involve regional differentiation: the differences between the religious traditions of the North and the South are too clear and the cultic and theological conceptions of particular sanctuaries, for example Jerusalem or Bethel, are too markedly different from each other. So for the pre-exilic period we shall have to take into account very different regional expressions of Yahweh religion by the priesthoods of the various sanctuaries, even if these differences have been largely levelled out in the texts as a result of the theological interest of exilic reform groups and have been polemically caricatured from the perspective of the South. For the exilic and post-exilic period we shall have to reflect on the differences between the homeland of Judah and the Diaspora, even if the sources from the latter are sparse. Less accepted is the introduction of criteria of sociological differentiation into the account of the history of Israelite religion. There are several reasons for this. First, research into the social history of Israel and thus our knowledge of groups and controversies within Israel is still in its beginnings, and secondly, sociological models have so far seldom appeared in historical research into the religion of ancient Israel (Weber, Causse). 72 Furthermore, it must be noted that in general those forming theories about the sociology

Dividing lines

19

of religion in the past were largely interested only in the functioning of religion in society as a whole; 73 such theories were therefore only to a limited degree suitable for providing a sociological key to the observed multiplicity of religious traditions in the Old Testament. Still, here too we have recently seen the beginnings of a differentiation of religion within society, for example when Luckmann distinguishes between an 'invisible religion' deeply rooted in the anthropological and the institutionalized religion which has grown up in history/4 or when Mol recognizes that a distinction must be made in the religious process of creating and safeguard·· ing identity through sacralization, a distinction between different 'foci of identity' - he mentions individual, group and society - which can come into tension with one another. 75 At least two 'foci of identity' can also be recognized in ancient Israel, the family (as yet there was no such thing as the individual detached from the family) and the people (society as a whole). As I have shown elsewhere/6 these 'foci' bring together two different strata of Israelite religion: the main stratum of 'official religion', functionally related to the wider group of the people, and the substratum of 'personal piety', related to the individual in the smaller group of the family. Both strata always stand in a historically changing relationship, but are distinct in terms of content, function and the degree of their institutionalization. This will be described in detail in what follows. Here I shall simply indicate quite generally that the religious symbolic world of personal piety is orientated on family experiences, especially the father/mother-child relationship, whereas for official Yahweh religion it is above all political experiences, e.g. the experience of political liberation, which lead to the formation of symbols. 77 Functionally, personal piety primarily stabilizes and integrates, whereas official Yahwistic religion always also has a markedly dynamic and dysfunctional elements. And official Yahweh religion is ritualized and institutionalized to a far greater degree than the living piety of families. So in a historical account we shall in principle have to take note of these two levels of Israelite religion. Alongside this we can in part also distinguish a third level, the local level, that of the village community, which is situated between the level of the family and that of the people or state/8 At this point regional and sociological characteristics come to be combined. Following G.Lanczkowski/9 I use the term 'internal religious pluralism' for this socially conditioned stratification within the religion of Israel. Now the main stratum of the 'official religion' relating to the people is not a monolithic unity either, any more than Israelite society was monolithic. Alongside the functionaries of the religious and political institutions, the priesthoods of the various sanctuaries, the elders and the royal house, who already developed very different conceptions of what was to be regarded as 'official religion', there were religious and political opposition and reform groups like the prophets or Deuteronomists, who denied the

20

Introduction

legitimacy of the existing forms of official Yahweh religion and developed completely new theological and cult-political conceptions. 80 That means that there was considerable dispute among the various social groups in Israel as to what form of tangible symbolic world was appropriate for safeguarding the identity and survival of the people as a whole. The social controversies are reflected in the conflict over the most appropriate 'official religion', and the establishment and implementation of new religious political and theological conceptions set social changes in motion. In the course of these controversies there could be considerable shifts within official religion: what was once the alternative conception of a few outsiders, like the proclamation of the prophets of judgment, could later, as after the exile, become one of the basic pillars of society as a whole, while an official tradition like kingship theology, which was earlier so dominant, could break off almost completely with the downfall of the monarchy. The history of Israelite religion has to discover such changes and shifts and correlate them with changes and shifts in Israelite society. Finally, in addition to the historical and sociological orientation of this outline history oflsraelite religion there is also the comparative perspective: Israel, which was a latecomer on the scene in the ancient Near East, did not enter a religious vacuum in which it had to create the religious world of symbols from scratch, but a sphere in which all fields of life had long been occupied by religious patterns of interpretation. Israel had a share in the religious heritage of the very much older cultures, peoples and states of the Near East: there are only a very few individual elements which are unique, and parallels to almost everything can be found in the environment, whether to prayers, sacrificial customs or kingship theology. It is not the individual elements but the structure as a whole which makes the religion of Israel distinctive. 81 That means that the process of the controversy between competing religious conceptions does not just run within Israel but also includes many of the religious conceptions of neighbouring peoples, so that the dividing line between internal and external cannot be drawn clearly. In the process of reception, adaptation and exclusion it happens, rather, that time and again elements which for centuries were regarded as part of Israel's own religion were suddenly denounced by a group as being non-Israelite, fought against and finally excluded. 82 It will emerge that the features shared with the Near Eastern environment are very much greater at the level of personal piety than at the level of official religion. A history of Israelite religion will attempt to discover these connections with and demarcations from the Near Eastern environment, but also to demonstrate where there are independent parallel developments or where alternative possibilities were realized in neighbouring religions. In so doing it will have to raise the question how far this process of adaptation and

Dividing lines

21

exclusion was purely fortuitous or how far a tendency can be recognized in it which is grounded in the particular history, social history and religious history of Israel. This question is connected with that of the 'centre' of the Old Testament, which has been raised in the discussion of the appropriate structure for an 'Old Testament theology'. 83 However, it will transpire that the quite recognizable basic tendency of the history of Israelite religion is not static, so that it can be established notionally and conceptually; rather, there is a dynamic power within the social controversies which emerges among quite different theological notions. So this cannot be a criterion, but only the goal of a historical account.

The religion of Israel

North

South

Official

-~ c.0

2:-

u

-~

____.. >

Local

I

I

:

~LL

I

+

I' Local

________________:J.Jf

t:

j:

Cult

Family

I>

:I - I

I

~------ J----- ___ j or Diaspora

Level

' I ~~

Personal piety

~I

~

I

: :

31 :

I' ~>I--"'

-

Level

or Judaea

Level

2.

The History of Israelite Religion In the Period before the State

No phase of the history of Israelite religion is burdened with as many uncertainties as the period before the state (from c.1250 to Iooo BCE}. That is not because there are no sources for this period; quite the contrary: the tradents of the Old Testament have accumulated a vaster mountain of traditional material for it than for any other period in the history of Israel. The question is what historical value these sources possess. The view which the monumental work, the Pentateuch (the five books of Moses}, seeks to convey about the beginnings of the religion of Israel is roughly this: the religion of Israel began with a promise of Yahweh to Moses to liberate Israel from forced labour in Egypt and lead them to Palestine. It was consolidated by a revelation of Yahweh on Sinai in which he gave Israel all the commandments and laws, installed the cult and concluded a covenant with Israel. And they arrived at their destination by Yahweh giving his people the promised land. For all their differences over details, the groups of theologians who shaped this large-scale compromise work, the Pentateuch, were agreed that all the essential elements of the religion of Israel had already been developed in the early period before the entry of Israel into Palestine. What are we to retain of this view? In the past it has often influenced historical accounts, for example when the religion of Israel has been described as the religion of a founder 1 - because of the prominent role which Moses has in the present tradition - or when, despite all critical detachment, the history of Israelite religion is represented as a three-stage process of Mosaic religion, Canaanite syncretism and purified prophetic religion. 2 However, new insights of Pentateuchal criticism make it clear that the conception of the early period of Israel propagated in the Pentateuch derives in its present form only from the early post-exilic period; 3 in other words, there is a period of a good 8oo years between it and the real historical course of events. It rests on the theological conception that the time of Israel's salvation was the wilderness period, and that with the settlement in Canaan apostasy from Yahweh began which finally led to the exile. But this conception is attested with relative certainty only after the time of the prophet Hosea, i.e. at the end of the eighth century, and is then broadly developed by the Deuteronomistic reform theologians of the

24

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

seventh century. 4 Their interest was clear: by constructing an ideal early period before the settlement and the formation of the state they wanted to deprive contemporary cultic, cultural and political features of their religious legitimation, demonstrate them to be a false development and create the basis for a new religious identity, separating Israel from its cultural and political environment. Only on the basis of this conception was everything that late pre-exilic, exilic and post-exilic reform groups regarded as indispensable to the religious identity of Israel anchored in the early period of Israel. This is the reason for the existing accumulation of traditional material in the Pentateuch, which in this form quite certainly does not offer an accurate picture of the historical development. Nevertheless, it is hardly possible to regard the view of the beginnings of the religion of Israel as a whole projected in the Pentateuch as a theological fiction of later utopians. When the prophet Hosea 5 alienates Yahweh from his contemporaries as their 'God from the time in Egypt' (Hos. I 2.9; I 3 ·4 ), brands their whole present cultic and cultural existence as apostasy from 'true' Yahweh religion and after 2 50 years of state history disowns the institution of kingship as being an expression of the wrath of God (I3.Iof.), propagating instead the anarchical existence in the wilderness as the ideal period of the history of Israelite religion to which his contemporaries must return in order to rediscover their identity (2. I 6f.; I I. 5), his provocative view cannot have been completely plucked out of thin air. It must have some support in the religious traditions of the people. Perhaps these traditions were not so significant before, but they must at least have been there under the surface. Above all the considerable potential of opposition to domination intrinsic to Yahweh religion which already proved a social influence in the social order of the period before the state and the opposition movements of the early monarchy calls for an explanation in terms of the course of the history of Israelite religion. This seems to me to lie in the distinctive way in which Israel, unlike all the other cultures of the Near East, developed an essential part of its religion not under the conditions of statehood and an agricultural culture but in the exceptional situation of a revolutionary process of liberation and the extreme conditions of the wilderness. The socially dysfunctional elements of Israelite religion which keep emerging have their foundation in the special developments of the period before the state.6 Connected with that is also the distinctive feature that the Old Testament generally sees the religion of Israel as having a beginning in history. Whereas according to Sumerian tradition the kingship descends directly from heaven after the creation of the human race and the cities of Mesopotamia were founded even before the flood and handed over to their city gods/ and according to Babylonian tradition the creation of the world takes place directly after the foundation of Esangila, the temple of Marduk, 8 , Israelite tradition did not attempt to project the beginning of its

Religious elements of early small family groups

25

own religion back into the primal period and provide a mythological anchorage for the political, cultural and cultic institutions. In this surprising historical fixation of the 'sacred foundation history' in the framework of the history of Near Eastern religion we can once again see the distance which from the beginning the later tradents put between their own religion and a firm state and cultural order. From the perspective of the history of religion the claim of such a beginning is a problem. Historically there are no absolute beginnings; none of the religions known to us found a religious clean sheet; all built on earlier strata of religion. That is true of Christianity, Buddhism and Islam, and is of course also true of Israelite religion. In due course we shall be discussing the preliminary stages to Yahweh worship which can still be recognized. Here we must first tackle the view held by the tradents of the Pentateuch that there was a prelude to the religion of Israel in the religion of the patriarchs.

2.1

Religious elements of early small family groups ('patriarchal religion')

Y.Aharoni, 'Nothing Early and Nothing Late. Re-writing Israel's Conquest', BA 39, I976, 5 5-76; R.Albertz, Personliche Prommigkeit und offizielle Religion. Religionsinterner Pluralismus in Israel und Babylon, CTM A9, I978; A.Alt, 'The God of the Fathers. A Contribution to the Prehistory of Israelite Religion' (I929), ET in Essays on Old Testament History and Religion, 1966, I-Ioo; E.Bloch-Smith, ]udahite Burial Practices and Beliefs about the Dead, JSOT.S I23, I992; E.Blum, Die Komposition der Viitergeschichte, WMANT 57, I984; id., Studienzur Komposition des Pentateuch, BZAW I89, I99o; K.H.Deller, 'Die Hausgotter der Familie Sukrija S.Huja', in M.A.Morrison and D.I.Owen (eds. ), Studies on the Civilization and Cultu;e ofNuzi and the Hurrians, PS R.Lachmann, I98I, 47-76; B.Diebner, 'Die Gotter des Vaters- Eine Kritik der "Vatergott"-Hypothese Albrecht Alts', DBAT 9, I975, 2I-p; M.Dietrich, O.Loretz and ].Sanmartin, 'Ugaritisch ILIB andhebraisch '(W)B "Totengeist"', UP6, I974,450-I;A.Draffkorn, 'Ilani/Elohim', ]BL 76, I9 57, 2I6-24; J.Ebach and U.Riitersworden, 'Unterweltsbeschworung im Alten Testament. Untersuchungen zur Begriffs- und Religionsgeschichte des 'ob', UP 9, I977, 57-70; UP 12, I98o, 20 5-20; M.Greenberg, 'Another Look at Rachel's Theft of the Teraphim', ]BL 8I, I962, 239-48; D.R.Hillers, 'pa~ad yi~~aq', ]BL 9 I, I 972, 90-2; H.A.Hoffne~; 'Teraphim- A New Proposal for its Etymology', VT r6, 1966, ns-r7; id., 'Second Millennium Antecedents to the Hebrew 'OB', ]BL 86, I967, 385-40I; T~Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness. A History of Mesopotamian Religion, I976; K.Koch, 'Saddaj. Zum Verhaltnis zwischen israelitischer Monolatrie und nordwestsemitischem Polytheismus', VT 26, I976, 299-3 32; id., 'pa~ad ji~~aq- eine Gottesbezeichnung?', in R.Albertz et a!. (ed.), Werden und Wirken des A/ten Testaments, PS C. Westermann, I98o, I07-I 5; M.Kockert, Viitergott und Viiterverheissungen, FRLANT I42, I988; I.Kottsieper, Die Sprache der Ahiqar-spruche, BZAW I94, I990; B.Lang, 'Life after Death in

26

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

the Prophetic Promise', VTS 40, I 98 8, 144-5 6; N.P.Lemche, Ancient Israel. A New History of Israelite Society, I988; T.].Lewis, Cults of the Dead in Ancient Israel and Ugarit, HSM 39, I989; J.Lewy, 'Les textes paleo-assyriens et !'ancien Testament', RHR IIO, I934, 29-65; O.Loretz, 'Der kanaanaische Ursprung des biblischen Gottesnames El Saddaj', UF 12, I98o, 40-I; id., 'Ugaritisch-biblisch mrz~, "Kultmahl, Kultverein" inJer I 6,5 undAm 6, 7. Bemerkungen zur Geschichte des Totenkults in Israel', in FS ].Schreiner, I982, 87-94; id., 'Vom kanaanaischen Totenkult zur jiidischen Patriarchen- und Eltemehrung',Jahrbuch fur Anthropologie und Religionsgeschichte III, I978, 149-204; V.Maag, 'Der Hirte Israels. Eine Skizze von Wesen und Bedeutung der Vaterreligion' (I98o), in id., Kultur, Kulturkontakt und Religion, Gesammelte Studien zur allgemeinen und alttestamentlichen Religionsgeschichte, I98o, III-q; id., 'Jahwas Begegnung mit der kanaanaischen Kosmologie' (I965), ibid., 203-20; id., 'Malkut JHWH' (I96o), ibid., 145-69; M.Malul, 'More on "pa~ad yi~~aq" (Genesis XXX 42.53) and the Oath by the Thigh', VT 35, I985, I92-20o; H.-P.Miiller, 'Gott und die Getter in den Anfangen der biblischen Religion. Zur Vorgeschichte des Monotheismus', in O.Keel (ed.), Monotheismus im a/ten Israel und in seiner Umwelt, Biblische Beitrage I4, I98o, 99-I42; E.Otto, 'Erwagungen zum iiberlieferungsgeschichtlichen Ursprung und "Sitz im Leben" des jahwistischen Plagenzyklus', VT 26, I976, 3-26; id., 'pasa~', TWATVI, I989, 659-82; G.Pettinato, 'Culto ufficiale ad Ebla durante il regno dilbbi-Sipis', OrAn I8, I979, 85-2I5; F.Pomponio, 'I nomi divini nei testidiEbla', UFI5, I983, I4I-56;M.Rose,' "EntmilitarisierungdesKrieges?"', BZ 2o, I976, I97-2I I; L.Rost, Weidewechsel und alttestamentlicher Festkalendar (I943), in id., Das Kleine Credo und andere Studien zum A/ten Testament, I969, IIo-!2; H.Rouillard and J.Tropper, 'TRPYM, Rituels de guerisons et culte des ancetres d'apres I Samuel XIX I I-I? et les textes paralleles d'Assur et du Nuzi', VT 37, I987, 34o-6I; id., 'Vom kanaanaischen Ahnenkult zur Zauberei. Eine Auslegungsgeschichte zu den hebraischen Begriffen 'WB und YD'NY', UF I9, I 9 87' 23 5- 54; E. Ruprecht, 'Die Religion der Vater. Hauptlinien der Forschungsgeschichte', DBAT II, I976, 2-29; S.Schroer, In Israel gab es Bilder. Nachrichten von derdarstellenden Kunst im A/ten Testament, OBO 74, I987; S.Schwally, Das Lebennach dem Tode, I892;].Van Seters, 'The Religion of the Patriarchs', Bib 6I, I98o, 220-33; K.Spronk, Beatific Afterlife in Ancient Israel and the Ancient Near East, AOAT 2I9, I986; A.Tsukimoto, Untersuchungen zur Totenpflege im a/ten Mesopotamien, AOAT 2I6, I985; H.Vorlander, Mein Gott. Die Vorstellungen vom personlichen Gott im A/ten Orient und im A/ten Testament, AOAT 2 3, I 97 5; H.Weidmann, Die Patriarchen und ihre Religion im Lichte der Forschung seit Julius Wellhausen,FRLANT94, I968;M.Weippert, 'Saddaj (Gottesname)', THAT II, I976, 873-8I; J.Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums, 2 I897; C.Westermann, 'Die Verheissungen an die Vater', in id., Die Verheissungen an die Vater, FRLANT II6, I976, 92-I5o; id., Genesis I2-IJ, EF 48, I975; id., Genesis I2-36 (I98I), ET I986.

In the narrative of the call of Moses in Ex.3f. it is emphasized that the God YHWH who reveals himself to Moses in the thorn bush was none other than the God whom the patriarchs Isaac and Jacob had already worshipped (3.6, 13, 15). According to this version Yahwistic religion is simply

Religious elements of early small family groups

27

extended forward: Yahweh is the God of the patriarchs, as is also largely presupposed by the texts in Gen.12-50. Thus the religion of Israel really already begins with Yahweh's command to Abraham to leave his home in Mesopotamia. Joshua 24.2 adds that his ancestors served other gods in Mesopotamia. The stratum of Priestly editing in Ex.6 depicts things rather differently. Here the revelation of the name of Yahweh first takes place to Moses: Yahweh revealed himself to the patriarchs under another name, El-Shaddai (Ex.6.2; Gen.IJ.I) which only subsequently is identified with Yahweh. Here the religion of the patriarchs appears as a kind of prelude to the 'full' Yahweh religion of Israel. Prompted by these theological conceptions in the Old Testament itself, over the last sixty years Old Testament scholars have attempted to reconstruct a preliminary historical stage to the religion of Yahweh from the texts of Genesis; this led to the appearance of sections on a preYahwistic 'patriarchal religion' in the more recent histories of Israelite religion. 1 The starting point for these historical reconstructions was a generally influential work by Alt, 'The God of the Fathers' (I929). 2 Whereas Wellhausen, on the basis of his literary-critical model of the formation of the Pentateuch, had denied the patriarchal sagas any historical worth, seeing them as an idealizing 'mirage'/ and had defined the religious practices which appear in them as projections back of later Yahweh religion, 4 thinking that he could reconstruct their preliminary stages from relics of pre-Islamic Arabian religon as belief in ancestors and demons/ Alt thought that he could gain access through form criticism to the oral prehistory of the individual sagas which were incorporated into the Pentateuchal sources opened up by Gunkel and thus construct a historically reliable bridge over which he could advance to authentic elements of a pre-Yahwistic stage of religion in the material of the Genesis tradition. Starting from the designations 'God of Abraham' or 'Fear of Isaac' or 'God of my/your/his father' 6 which occur in Genesis, with their characteristic reference to a group, he conjectured that unlike the Canaanite 'local numina' ('elim)/ the gods of the fathers were not originally bound to particular localities. He reconstructed patriarchal religion- supported by a comparison with similar designations of God in Nabataean inscriptions, though these are much later -as a specifically nomadic type of religion. He saw the characteristics of the gods ofthe fathers as being their lack of any local association, their close tie to a particular group, and their 'concern for the fortunes of their groups of worshippers', 8 e.g. in the promise of descendants and later also of the land. In this 'trend towards the social and historical'/ Alt thought that patriarchal religion had points of contact with later Yahweh religion and could have been its predecessor. 10

Alt's hypothesis, which has only been sketched out in outline here, has in part been considerably developed and in part also considerably modified by others. There is no need to give an account of the history of research at this point, since there are a number of good surveys. 11 The hypothesis

28

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

exerted an almost unbroken fascination up to the end of the I96os, after which for the first time it was subjected to vigorous criticism by Diebner in I975; 12 a detailed refutation was offered by Kockert in I988Y The background to this was criticism of the source theory, which, with the denial of a source J from the early or middle monarchy, 14 also made large holes in the kind of historical investigations back into the period before the state which still provided a secure basis for Alt. Nevertheless, in my view it still remains an open question whether we must now accept that the patriarchal traditions have no historical value whatsoever. At any rate according to more recent traditio-historical insights the first narrative compositions go back to the early monarchy; 15 indeed, some elements of the tradition even go back to the period before the state. 16 Certainly we can no longer expect the few religious features of the earliest traditions to provide a complete picture of the religion of early small Israelite groups, and we must probably take into account that some things have been filtered or even suppressed as a result of the interests of the tradents; nevertheless, we need an explanation for the fact, not denied even by Blum and Kockert, 17 that what has been handed down about the religious notions of the patriarchs differs markedly at a series of points from Yahwistic religion. The attempt at a sociological explanation presented here takes up some justified critical questions raised about statements I have made earlier. 18 The most important arguments levelled against Alt's theory are as follows. The designation 'God of the fathers' does not indicate a nomadic type of religion, but is also attested in sedentary cultures. 19 Granted, the patriarchs are presented to us in Genesis - though not consistently - as nomads rearing sheep and goats, but specifically nomadic religious practices can hardly be recognized from the texts. 20 Finally, it can now be said with some certainty on the basis of our archaeological knowledge that the cultural milieu of Palestine presupposed by the patriarchal narratives of Gen.I2-50 does not go back beyond the conditions of Iron Age I (from I2oo BCE), i.e. that at the earliest it points to a time when the Israelite tribes were also settling in the land. 21 The location of the patriarchs at a 'time' before the exodus is the consequence of a subsequent systematization of a variety of foundation traditions. We can also say on the basis of comparative ethnological material that the conception of deriving one's own group genealogically from ancestors stems from tribal societies;22 the already relatively developed genealogical system of the patriarchal stories here already presupposes the tribal conditions of Israel in the late pre-state period or the early monarchy. However, precisely when one recognizes that even the early patriarchal narratives already come from a period in which there was a developed Yahweh religion in Israel, the fact that the religious world which the tradents of Genesis outlined for their ancestors is clearly distinct from

Religious elements of early small family groups

29

the world of the symbols of Yahweh religion calls for a scientific explanation. As I have explained at another point/3 this difference is connected with a sociological difference: from the start Yahweh religion is functionally related to the wider group of the tribe, the tribal alliance and then the people, whereas in accordance with the genealogical fiction that the people grew out of the families of its ancestors, the tradents of Genesis seek to describe the small group of the family and the religion associated with it. The patriarchal stories in Gen.12-50 relate the beginnings of the people of Israel from the aspect of family history, so here we have an accumulation of that religious pattern of experience and interpretative schemes which were customary and native to the family. Thus 'patriarchal religion' can largely be understood as a form of personal piety, as a typical family piety of the kind that can also be demonstrated from other texts. Here we may conjecture that in what they narrated of religious practices and beliefs in the families of their ancestors, the tradents first of all went by what they knew of and thought important in the family piety of their time; however, we may assume that they also had relevant knowledge of what was typical of families in the period before the state. So 'patriarchal religion' is to be defined not as a preliminary stage but as a substratum of Yahweh religion. This stratum of family religion is a preliminary stage only to the degree that it shows an amazing similarity to other Near Eastern religions,2 4 going as far back as Sumero-Babylonian religion at the beginning of the second millennium.H This religious stratum of the family is very much older than the specific history of Israelite religion; it is the basis on which Israel's Yahweh religion was built up. 2.1 I

Designations and ideas of God in the family

The ancestors of Israel are described in Gen.12-50 as associations of families (bet 'ab, 'father's house') with a patriarchal organization. In part they reared sheep and goats as nomads in the hill-country of Palestine and its arid southern marginal zones (Gen.26.19ff.; 37.12ff.), and in part they also engaged in sedentary agriculture (Gen.26.12f.). They largely had an independent economy and were only loosely incorporated into an overarching system of affinity (mispaf?a, 'clan'). Though the 'splendid isolation' in which the patriarchal families move through Palestine may derive to some degree from the fictional genealogical conception oflsraelite origins, it provides a quite accurate picture of the social reality of this period, to the degree that political structures extending beyond families had been developed weakly at least in the early period of the time before the state. 26 In this early period even more than in later times the family was the basic economic and social unit among the shepherd and farmer population of the hill-country.

30

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

So it may similarly seem appropriate to depict the family in the early pre-state period as the key vehicle of religion: the father is still a priest (Gen.13.18; 35.7), 27 the cult is still largely a family cult, and religious experiences and notions are primarily governed by the horizon and the needs of family life. This is also already evident from the idea of God: the God worshipped in the family is regarded as a God of the father or forefather. Three different type of designations of God relating to this are accumulated in the earlier Genesis tradition: 'God ofmy/yourfather' (Gen.3 1.5;42,29;49.25; 50.17), 'God of Abraham/Nahor' (Gen.31.42,53), and the antique-sounding 'paiJad of his father' or 'paiJad of Isaac' (Gen.3 1.53, 42), where paiJad cannot be interpreted with certainty and perhaps denotes God as 'numinous terror'. 28 In addition there are examples from later redactional strata (Gen.26.24; 28.13; 32.10; 46.1,3). Even if this notion of God occurs later in Israel (Ex.15.2; 18.4) and seems to have played a role especially in the Davidic royal family (II Kings 20.5; I Chron.28.9; II Chron.J7.4; 32.17; 34.3), it is so firmly rooted in the earlier tradition coming from the early or middle monarchy at the latest that it can be regarded as a typical expression of family religion from the period before the state. The best attested and most original type is the personal designation 'God of my father', etc., whereas the impersonal type 'God ofNN' is used in the earlier tradition only where the god of one family is distinguished from that of another. 29 Thus the father god belongs to the type of the personal god ('my God', etc.) who is later characteristic of the piety of Israelite families. 30 Only the personal reference in the 'God of my father' runs explicitly through the father or forefather of the family; it was taken over from the generation of the father living at the present or the generations of forefathers, along with many insights and skills; his or their religious experience with him also established the relationship of trust in him for descendants. Thus the relationship to God itself is part of the process of tradition within the family. It emerges from a historical comparison of texts that the term 'God of the father' is an appellative, and that the family gods all had names.Jl In the present Genesis texts Yahweh is seen as the god. But there are some indications that this was not the case in the early period before the state; the ancestors are connected with a series of El deities, e.g. with El-'Elyon in Jerusalem (Gen.J4.19,22); El-Bethel in Bethel (Gen.31.13; 35.7; cf. 28.IIff.); El, the God of Israel, in Shechem (Gen.33.2o); El-'Olam in Beersheba (Gen.21.33); and an El-Ro'e in the Negeb (Gen.16.13), at least some of whom (El-'Elyon, El-Bethel, El-'Olam) can be understood as a local manifestation of the great god of heaven, El, who in Ugarit stands at the head of the pantheon. In the Priestly writing's conception, the patriarchs worshipped Yahweh under the name El-Shaddai (Gen.17.1; 28.3; 35.11; 48.3; Ex.6.3), and no proper names containing Yahweh appear in the

Religious elements of early small family groups

3r

patriarchal narratives- all the proper names are compounded with El (e.g. Yishma'el). The individual evidence is to be assessed very differently. Thus e.g. El-Bethel and El the God of Israel very probably, and El-'Elyon certainly, point to later historical developments. 32 Nevertheless, they- and especially the view of the Priestly writing, which is hardly sheer invention - suggest that among the early Israelite families before the state various regional forms of the god El were worshipped as family gods. 33 This is also indicated by the way in which the god of the father and El Shaddai are made parallel in Gen.49.25; Shaddai, which also occurs as a theophorous element in three ancient proper names, 34 could have been a name of these early family gods. However, its etymology and origin have yet to be explained satisfactorily, cf. M.Weippert, 'Saddaj', 875-81; Vorlander, 215-24; Loretz, 'Ursprung', 420f.; Knauf, 'El Saddai', 2off.; Kockert, Viitergott, 79-81. The derivation fromsaddayim, 'breasts', which comes nearest to the Massoretic pointing, is probably to be ruled out, since 'el sadday is a male deity. Thus the duplication of the dalet is usually taken to be false and other derivations are considered. Vorlander wanted to derive the divine name from the Akkadian sedu, 'guardian spirit', which would certainly fit personal piety well, but it does not explain the long vowel and probably comes to grief on the fact that while Hebrew knows a loan word sed (Deut.32.17; Ps.ro6.37), this has taken on a clearly negative significance (alien gods, evil demons) here. The derivation from the primal semitic word sd 'field, mountain', which appears in Ugaritic as sd, in Akkadian (with a long vowel) as sadu and in Hebrew- assimilating to Aramaic phonetic development- as sade, has more to be said for it. M.Weippert, 'Saddaj', 879, had already reconstructed the divine name as 'el sade', in analogy to the Ugaritic '!. trt sd, and interpreted it as 'El of the meadow'; Loretz now seems to have contributed a similar example from Ugarit, 'il sd y~d, 'El of the "field", who hunts' (KTU r.ro8.12; UF 12.421), but the context is broken and the interpretation is not wholly certain. The evidence from an ancient North Arabian inscription ('!Sdy) which Knauf has contributed could be added here. In that case, as with 'el 'olam we could have a further regional form of El the god of heaven. However, as ~~d ~~du appears in a variety of ancient Near Eastern onomastica as a theophorous element, 35 since we are at the level of family piety we should perhaps consider whether sad(d)ay should not be seen as a fossilized appellative meaning '(my) mountain', i.e. ('my) protection'. The view of Koch, 'Saddaj', 3 r 6, that Shaddai in the Job poem can still be seen as an 'aspect of God which is connected with the human being as an individual, coming physically close to him and making him happy or deeply wounding him... remotely comparable to the personal guardian angel of later centuries' very much suggests that this god belonged to family religion before he was taken up into Yahweh.

However, quite apart from this point of detail, it is more important to note that in Israel people did have and could have their own gods at the family level. And this not only is the case, say, in the early period before the state, when Yahweh worship had not yet established itself at the tribal

32

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

level, but also remains possible throughout the whole period of the state (Jer.2.27). It is still in no way customary in the early monarchical period to give one's children names containing Yahweh; this only changes in the late period of the monarchy. 36 Already at this point it becomes clear that the family as an independent economic unit and sphere of life had its own world of religious symbols which in no way needed to be identical with that of society as a whole. However, regardless of the names of the gods whom the families chose to be their gods, at the level of family piety they lost any specific characterization. Whether the early Israelite familes worshipped El-Shaddai or El-'Olam or another El, as a family god this god had little more in common with the great god of heaven in the Ugaritic pantheon than the name. The cultic, local, historical and functional differentiations within the world of the gods, which are a reflection of political and social differentiations, hardly play any role at the level of the family with its relatively simply social structure: whatever the family god may be called, in the family he is related functionally to the central needs of the small group, and to a large degree these remain constant. The phenomenon can be seen most clearly in the personal family nomenclature: the theophorous elements can change in the names- here the family adapts to the changing religious situation in its environment - but the predicates which express what is experienced from the god remain largely constant. 37 This emerges in another way from a peculiarity of the patriarchal narratives. There is almost no religious separation and polemic. Only in the late Deuteronomistic text Gen.35.2ff. does Jacob call on his family to put away the strange gods they had brought with them from Mesopotamia. However, in view of this tendency towards intolerance which is elsewhere so typical of later Yahweh religion, it is almost even more striking that those who handed down the patriarchal narratives leave the various divine designations which have come down to them as they are without any polemic and otherwise limit themselves to identifying these designations with Yahweh. Here there is further awareness that religious demarcation plays hardly any role on the level of family piety, because what is expected and experienced from various gods is in any case more or less identical. The markedly functional concept of the god at this level stands in the way of a far-reaching religious differentiation. As far as we can recognize, in the early Israelite families the worship of a family god was more or less monolatrous, but this practical worship of one god still completely lacked the exclusiveness and intolerance which was later to be so characteristic of Yahweh religion. 38

Religious elements of early small family groups 2.r2

33

Religious practices relating to the family

Although we cannot assume that the later tradents have handed down a complete picture of early Israelite family religion, we do know a whole series of religious practices and ideas which relate to the central questions of survival for the families of the time. A typical religious event was quite obviously the promise of a son, which is attested several times in the Abraham stories. 39 It was of decisive significance for the family as an economic unit that children- and in the legal patriarchal form of the family above all sons - should be born. These were necessary not only as a workforce to keep the family occupation going, but also to safeguard the survival of the group, to take on the care of parents in old age and give them an orderly burial, and to continue the occupation into the next generation. So if a woman had no children, the identity of the family was seriously threatened. Marriage law in the ancient Near East attempted to cope with this desperate situation by allowing various forms of polygamy and vicarious birth, but this evidently often led to serious family conflicts among the wives (Gen.I6.I-6; 2r.8ff; 29.3Iff.; I Sam.r.2-8). This typical family emergency was certainly not limited to the period before the state; in later periods too we still have evidence of the lament of the childless woman (I Sam.I; Isa.s4.I-6) and the promise of a son (Judg.I3; I Sam.I; II Kings 4.8-n), but at this time it was particularly prevalent, because here the social structures transcending the family had not been strongly developed. So it is no surprise that in early Israelite families the saving intervention of their God was expected and experienced particularly at this vulnerable point. The event of the 'promise of a son' immediately suggests a whole series of distinctive features of family piety: the promise is often bound up with a specific form of theophany and takes place through a divine messenger (mal'ak yhwh, cf. Gen.I6.7,n; Judg.I3.3); this denotes people, often strangers, who only subsequently become significant for what they have said, who prove to be divine emissaries. This is a theophany outside the cult, which is clearly distinct from the exceptional cultic theophanies (Gen.28 .I off.; Ex. I 9). The view that one can meet God in everyday human encounters is typical of family piety. This is because the promise of a son is not tied up with an institutionalized mediator. Unlike the promises addressed to the people, the time-span involved in the promise of a son is very short; it extends over precisely a year and is thus directly related to a life-cycle in the family, the period of the wife's pregnancy. 40 The wife is also the original recipient of the promise (Gen.I6.n; I8.9f.; Judg.I3.3f.; II Kings 4.I6); in other words, the promise of the son is a typical female religious experience. When one remembers that women in Israel were largely excluded from the official

34

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

cult, the central role assigned to their world of religious experience in family religion is amazing. Finally, the promise of a son stands out for being given unconditionally. The only important thing is that a descendant will be born; by comparison the moral quality of the woman is a matter of complete indifference (cf. Gen. I 6. 7ff. ). At this point a special feature of family piety becomes evident which also emerges elsewhere. The family god sees to the survival of the family quite independently of the moral behaviour of its members (cf.Gen.I2.I0-2o). The unconditional character of the divine action is matched by the high degree of danger to which the families were exposed -above all in the early period. Alongside the important complex of the promise of a son we find the unconditional care which the family god extends to his group expressed less clearly in some other passages. He rescues small children from various threats: from the threat of dying of thirst (Gen.21. I 6ff.) or the threat posed by child sacrifice (Gen.22); he stands by them in the dangers of infant mortality (Gen.21.2o). He rescues the wife from the sexual advances of alien rulers (Gen.I2.1o-2o). Even if it is not clear in each case how far we have here typical situations in which the early Israelite families were in danger, it becomes clear how strongly in this form of religion the divine action was related to the distresses and needs of the family. 2.I3

Religious practices relating to a nomadic form of life

In the past the 'religion of the patriarchs' has always been defined as a nomadic type of religion (Alt), and as a result a series of scholars even thought that they could find a basic structural pattern for Israelite religion in the conflict between the religion of the nomads and the religion of the sedentary population. 41 However, neither view is tenable. More recent research into nomads with sheep and goats, ancient and modern, have shown that these live, and lived, in close symbiosis with the farming population and that numerous toings and froings are possible between the two forms of life and economy. 42 For example, there is evidence from the texts of ancient Mari (c.I8oo BCE) that one and the same clan engaged sometimes in agriculture and sometimes in the nomadic rearing of sheep and goats. 43 Thus on ethnological and sociological grounds alone a cultural and religious opposition between nomads and the sedentary population is quite improbable. For Israel before the state it is possible to demonstrate an opposition between the farming and shepherd population in the hill-country on the one hand and the city states of the plains on the other, but not one between farmers and nomads. Correspondingly, while the tradents of the patriarchal narratives depict the patriarchs of Israel predominantly as nomads with flocks of sheep and goats, they by no means do so unanimously or consistently: in their view the patriarchs also had

Religious elements of early small family groups

35

cattle (baqar), which clearly go with an agricultural economy (Gen.12.16; 13.5; 18.7; 26.14), and in their view the patriarch Isaac engaged in agriculture, indeed with great success (Gen.26.12f.), before again being forced into a nomadic form of life. That means that for the tradents both forms of economy were closely connected, and there is no reason to doubt this as an anachronism. Indeed it must even be said that the tradents were evidently already relatively distanced from nomadic conditions of life. If we look more closely, real nomadic conditions are depicted only relatively rarely in Gen.12-50 (Gen.I3.5ff.; 26.19££.; 37.12ff.). And the same also applies to religion. Hardly any specific religious practices relating to a nomadic lifestyle and economy among early Israelite families have been preserved in Gen.12-50. Above all, there are no certain instances in Gen.12-50 of the change of pasture (transhumance) which so determined the nomadic rhythm of life and the religious practices which were quite certainly associated with it. Texts which so far have partially been claimed for this (Gen.I2.1ff.; 26.2f.; 31.3; 46.2f.) 44 are redactional constructions and have nothing to do with transhumance. 45 Rost put forward the theory that the Passover festival which has now been handed down to us within the Exodus tradition (Ex.12) was originally such a religious accompaniment to the change from winter to summer pastures. 46 Various features of the Passover rite- the date in the spring, eating in haste, the prohibition against leaving anything of the slaughtered lamb and the blood rite to ward off the destroyer- could in fact point in this direction. 47 It also fits that despite its later connection with the agricultural festival of the harvesting of the grain (ma~~ot) and the reference to the religious traditions of the liberation of the people (Ex.12), and despite temporary reorganization as a pilgrimage festival in the Deuteronomistic reform (Deut. I 6), Passover remained a family festival. Its function was originally the warding off of demonic powers which could endanger man and beast at the time of transhumance. Texts like Gen. 3 2.2 33 3 and Ex-4-24-26 indicate that people in fact felt exposed to the attack of demons, especially when moving about. In the patriarchal story the notion of the god who is with people is also related to the dangers of the way; this is attested both in the earlier narrative tradition (Gen.28.2o; 26.3,28; 31.5,42) and in later revisions (Gen.26.24; 28.15; 31.3; 48.21). Here, while we do not have a specifically nomadic religious experience- the same idea is attested in Gen.21.20 with reference to the danger of infant mortality and also appears in later texts with reference to illness and other dangers - we do have one which played a special role for itinerant groups which were often in solitary regions or foreign lands. 48 According to this view the god is experienced as one who is very near to a person, accompanies him on his way, stands by him in danger and makes his enterprises prosper. The god is regarded as a

36

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

protective covering which wards off all danger and under which the life entrusted to him flourishes. Again it is typical of this primeval expression of personal piety that this proximity of the god is always a positive and unconditional experience. It is simply there or promised unconditionally (26.3; 28.15; 31.3). And the numinous danger of the cultic nearness of God is absent (Gen.28.16f.). Here again we can see the massive stabilizing function which religion has for the individual at the level of family piety; it is a reflection of the high degree of danger to which people- particularly in nomadic families- found themselves exposed at that time. One typical experience of nomadic families, particularly in the period before the state, seems to have been that their god protected them from the attacks of other superior groups. That applies first in connection with other nomads (Gen.3of.), but above all in connection with the inhabitants of the cultivated land, who were organized as states and into whose sphere of power it became necessary to move in times of drought (Gen.12.10-20; Gen.26). But just as nomadic families are too small to defend themselves by force of arms, so too the intervention of their god was completely unwarlike. The picture painted in Gen.26.19ff. seems typical here: the Isaac family constantly has to yield in the dispute with the shepherds of the city-king of Gerar over rights to wells. Their god does not intervene in this dispute, but simply safeguards the life of his group by helping it to discover new wells (26.22). The divine support finally results in a treaty with the city king (26.28). In the dispute between the nomadic groups of Jacob and Laban their family gods have only the function of protecting the treaty between the two (Gen. 31.5 3 ). That means that just as the family nomadic groups are far too vulnerable militarily to be able to engage in any warlike clashes, so too the action of their god is not experienced in warlike actions, as is the case with the tribal god Yahweh. The family piety of this time is strikingly unwarlike, in clear contrast to the Yahwistic religion of the Israelite tribes before the time of the state. 49 Finally, a series of cultic institutions is associated with the migrations of the patriarchs: there is often a report that they build altars once they have settled in a new place (Gen.13.18; 33.20; cf. 12.8; 13.4; 26.24f.), and in addition they erect cultic stones (ma~~eba, Gen.28.18; 33.20 [cj]; 31·45) and plant sacred trees (Gen.21.33). Sometimes the description suggests that they discover holy places and thus found later cults (Gen.28.10-22; 32.2f.), sometimes that they visit already existing cult places (12.6; 21.3 3). Because of the aetiological interest of the tradents, which at this point comes markedly to the fore, it is difficult to estimate how real this information is. In principle we must probably reckon with two possibilities: both that the farming and the nomadic families of early Israel performed various sacrificial actions in their houses or in their tents, and that they sought out holy places in their region and offered their family sacrifices there (cf. the sacrifice vowed in Gen.28.2off.). We have no information

Religious elements of early small family groups

37

about the occasion and nature of these family cultic festivals for the early period before the state- apart from the passover rite; very probably we should presuppose animal sacrifice, and perhaps in extreme emergencies also child sacrifices (Gen. 22). Probably divine images play a not inconsiderable role here. Possibly too we should presuppose veneration of ancestors - partly connected with them. The teraphim which Rachel steals from her father Laban and can hide in a camel saddlebag (Gen.3 I.I9, 34f.) are probably envisaged as small figurines of deities in the possession of the family, as they are called 'my' or 'your gods' '•lohayleka, vv.30,32) by the persons concerned. They recall the DINGIR(MES) = ilani in family legal documents from Nuzi,s 0 evidently a reference to figures of household gods, which are mentioned here as part of the ancestral heritage. In Nuzi, claim to inheritance did not depend on possession of the figures of the gods, 51 and we should probably not presuppose this in Gen.3 I either; rather, they served to secure the continuity of the family and the solidarity between one generation and the next. In Nuzi the disinherited were denied access not only to the houses and fields of the family but also to their household gods. 5 2 Along these lines, Rachel's theft, too, may be seen as a resolute attempt to salvage the continuity of her family from the break and separation between the families because of the refusal of an appropriate legacy (cf. vv.I6, I9). Even if the narrator of the Jacob composition distances himself with slight irony from such figures of family gods by the vividness of his account, he still indicates that in the early period- as inN uzi- the teraphim had a high value (if not unconditionally material, at least emotional), which could lead to a life and death struggle (v.32). Unfortunately nothing is told us in Gen. 3 I about the religious and cultic significance of the tera phim. Nor do the other twelve instances in the 0 ld Testament give us a clear picture: in I Sam I9.I3, I6 the reference is again to the figure of a family god,S 3 though probably rather larger, which Michal put in David's bed to give the impression that David was ill. Injudg.I7.5; I8.I4,I7f., 20, the teraphim are part ofthe basic equipment of a regular household cult and are here distinguished clearly from a cultic image of god proper (maH•ka, pesel); they are in the same class as the ephod, so that some exegetes wanted to define them as a cult mask in analogy with the latter. 54 However, it is more probable that these were incidental and subordinate figurines around the precious cultic image. We come even more strongly into the sphere of the official cult in Hos.3.4, where teraphim appear alongside the meal offering (zeba~), massebas and ephod: judg.I8.14 probably and Ezek.2r.26; Zech.Io.2 clearly indicate a mantic significance: questions could be put (sa'al b•, Ezek.26.26) to teraphim as to ephod and oracle by lot, and like a soothsayer (qosem) it could communicate information about the future (Zech.Io.2). A healing function possibly underlies I Sam.I9.I3,I6. 55 If the same cultic objects are denoted by all these instances of tera phim, which is not completely beyond doubt, then we would have to assume that figures of gods originally used within families were also accepted in the official cult until they fell victim to the Deuteronomistic polemics against alien gods (I Sam.r5.23; II Kings 23.24). The original family significance of the teraphim can perhaps be clarified to some degree by further inferences. From Gen.3 I we can conclude that Laban's teraphim

38

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

which Rachel steals are not identical with the personal guardian deities of the Laban or Jacob family: the loss of the divine figures does not jeopardize the possibility of his calling on the God ofNahor to conclude a treaty (v.5 3 ). The situation in Micah's household cult (]udg.17f.) suggests rather more lowly deities who are represented by the teraphim figures. And the instances from Nuzi could give a further pointer: here there is mention of efemmu ('spirits of the dead') in partial parallel to the ilani (household gods). 56 The ilani thus seem to represent the deified ancestors of the familyP Since the teraphim are also mentioned, once, in the Old Testament along with the 'obot andyidd•'onfm (II Kings 23.4), probably a reference to the spirits of the dead, though in a late, generalizing Deuteronomistic context,S8 Schwally's old theory, 5 9 which has recently been put forward again with better arguments by Rouillard and Tropper, 60 that the teraphim are meant to be images of deified ancestors, has something to be said for it. This could be supported by the fact that in I Sam.28.13 the spirit of the dead Samuel can be called '•lohim ('God'), like the teraphim in Gen.3 1.30,32, and that the spirits of the dead ('obot) even more clearly than the teraphim had a mantic function (Lev.19.3 1; 20.6; Deut.I8.II; Isa.18.19f.; 19.3par on 'itim = etemmu; cf. the constant epithet yidd•'onfm ='knowing'; cf. I Sam.28.3). So was there an ancestor cult in early Israelite families? Loretz answered this question with a resounding affirmative; 61 in his view the early Israelites participated fully in the 'Canaanite cult of the dead', as it can still be reconstructed from the Ugaritic texts; he thought that this cult was only repressed by the Yahweh monotheism of the exilic and post-exilic period and replaced by the veneration of the patriarchs. The cult of the dead and ancestor worship 'as an important sphere of family piety were in this way corrected by Yahwism and incorporated into official religion'. 62 Fascinating though this hypothesis seems, its wide-ranging argument has too many gaps to be fully convincing. Beyond doubt, in the light of the material from Ugarit the great significance of ancestor worship in North Syria, 63 embedded as it was in the chthonic aspects of the god Baal,64 can help to illuminate the etymology of Hebrew conceptuality, 65 but the question remains how all this can also be presupposed as a contemporary reality for ancient Israel. 66 In Israel, probably right down to the early post-exilic period, 67 the custom of enquiring of the spirits of the dead (necromancy) was probably widespread, but in the only detailed instance which we have, I Sam.28, it is no longer related to the ancestors of the enquirer's own family: Saul goes to enquire about his future from the ghost of Samuel (v.15) and not his own ancestors- perhaps this should be seen as a prominent exception. And while the significance attached to the tombs of paternal and maternal ancestors in the patriarchal narratives 68 and formulas like 'be gathered to his fathers' (Gen.25 .Sf., 17; 3 5.29; 49.29, 3 3, etc.) 69 still indicate that there was emotional solidarity between the living members of the family and their dead ancestors, there are no references whatsoever in the patriarchal narratives to a regular cult of the dead of the kind evident, for example, in the kispu ritual of Mesopotamia, and elsewhere they are scanty (Deut.26.q). 70 Given the rigid restraint which later official Yahweh religion exercised on the whole complex of the world of the dead and the underworld, it can hardly be disputed that this largely negative evidence is at least in part the result of later dogmatic correction. However, reservations about the veneration of ancestors clearly begin much earlier than Loretz suggests, as is shown by the distanced and

Religious elements of early small family groups

39

ironic treatment of the teraphim already to be found in narratives from the early to middle monarchy (Gen.3r; I Sam.r9). If the image of early family piety in Gen.12-50 is not fully distorted, then the personal relationship to the God of the fathers had reduced the significance of the divinized ancestors to remnants, for example to the sphere of safeguarding family continuity, oracles and perhaps also healing functions. 71 The 'ancestor religion' which can be detected even more directly in the conservative personal nomenclature 72 is evidently only a religious sub-stratum right at the beginning of the history of personal piety in Israel.73

At any rate it is clear that this family cult is still firmly related to the rhythm of the life of the group and that it has not come to lead an independent existence as a distinctive permanent event removed from everyday life. It still has no specialized cult personnel; the father himself still exercised priestly functions (cf. also the address 'father' used to the priest, ]udg.I7.10). In general the religion of the early Israelite family was still not bound to holy places, holy times and an institutional mediator of the holy. 74 So we should suppose that by no means all the practices and notions which governed the religion of the early Israelite families have been handed down to us; nevertheless, the few that we can recognize point to a distinctive symbolic world which is consistent in itself and which at many points clearly differs from the rising Yahweh religion of the Israelite tribes. Its content is determined by the central problems of survival experienced by the farming and nomadic family and its group structures. The close personal relations in the family are also normative for its relationship to its god. One characteristic feature is the great directness and unconditional nature of the relationship with the personal god of the family, who like a father protects the group entrusted to him from all dangers. By contrast, essential elements which were to become so important for the Yahweh religion of the Israelite tribes are absent: the warlike exclusiveness of the relationship to the god, the high degree to which it is permeated by ethics, the incorporation of the sphere of political action, the differentiated cultic institutions and any kind of theological reflection. The piety which was alive in the early Israelite families was, if one likes to describe it that way, a pre-cultic, pre-political and pre-moral religion. For the further course of the history of Israelite religion it is important to keep remembering that not all the religious relationships in Israel first came into being and were shaped by Yahweh religion. Rather, there was in it a sphere of family religion which had already existed before it, on which it built and which was integrated more firmly into it only in the course of history.

40 2.2

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State The religion of the liberated larger group (the Exodus group)

G.W.Ahlstrom, 'An Israelite God Figurine from Hazor', OrSuec 19-20, 1970/ 71, 54-62; id., Aspects of Syncretism in Israelite Religion, HSoed V, 1963; B.Albrektson, History and the Gods. An Essay on the Idea of Historical Events as Divine Manifestations in the Ancient Near East and in Israel, ConB.OT r, 1967; E.Anati, Har Karkom, Montagna Sacra nel deserto del'esodo, 1984; E.Aurelius, Der Furbitter Israels, Eine Studie zum Mosebild im A/ten Testament, ConB.OT 27, 1988; U.Avner, 'Ancient Cult Sites in the Negev and Sinai Deserts', TA II, 1984, II5-131; B.Balscheit, Alter und Aufkommen des Monotheismus in der israelitischen Religion, BZAW 69, 1938; W.Beyerlin, The Origin and History of the Oldest Sinaitic Traditions ( r 96 r ), ET r 966; T.Booij, 'Mountain and Theophany in Sinai Narrative', Bib/65, 1984, r-26; J.Bottero, 'Habiru', RLA Iv, 1972-5, 1426; A.Brelich, 'Der Polytheismus', Numen 7, r96o, 123-36; ].Buchholz, Die Altesten Israels im Deuteronomium, Gottinger Theologische Arbeiten 36, 1988; G.W.Coats, 'Moses in Midian', ]BL 92, 1973, 3-ro; R.Cohen, 'The Mysterious MB I People. Does the Exodus Tradition in the Bible Preserve the Memory of Their Entry into Canaan?', BAR 9, 1983, r6-29; F.M.Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic. Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel, 1973; id., 'Reuben. First-Born of Jacob', ZAW.S roo, 1988, 46-55; F.Criisemann, Bewahrung der Freiheit. Das Thema des Dekalogs in sozialgeschichtlicher Perspektive, Kaiser Traktate 78, 1983; D.N.Friedman and P.O'Connor, 'JHWH', TWAT III, 1982, 533-54; V.Fritz, Israel in der Wuste, MTS 7, 1970; id., Tempel und Zeit. Studien zum Tempelbau in Israel und zum Zeltheiligtum der Priesterschrift, WMANT 4 7, 1977; W.Fuss, Die deuteronomistische Pentateuchredaktion in Ex 3-q, BZAW 126, 1972; M.Gorg, 'Ausweisung oder Befreiung? Neue Perspektiven zum sogenanntenExodus', Kairos 20, 1978, 272-8o;A.H.].Gunneweg, Leviten undPriester. Hauptlinien der Traditions hi/dung und Geschichte des israelitisch-judisch Kultpersonals, FRLANT 89, 1965; id., 'Mose in Midian', ZTK 6o, 1964, 1-9; J.Halbe, Das Privilegienrecht jahwes Ex 34,10-26. Gestalt und Wesen, Herkunft und Wirken in vordeuteronomischer Zeit, FRLANT 114, 1975; W.Helck, 'Die Bedrohung Palastinas durch einwandernde Gruppen amEnde der r8. und am Anfang der 19.Dynastie', VT r8, 1968, 472-80; id., Die Beziehungen Agyptens zu Vorderasien im 3. und z.]ahrtausend v. Chr., AA 5, 2 r 9 7 r; id., review of S.Herrmann, Israels Aufenthalt in Agypten, TLZ 97, 1972, 178-82; R.S.Hendel, 'The Social Origins of Early Aniconic Tradition', CBQ 50, 1988, 365-82; S.Herrmann, Israel in Egypt (1970), ET 1973; F.-L.Hossfeld, Der Dekalog. Seine spaten Fassungen, die originate Komposition und seine Vorstufen, OBO 45, 1982; id., 'Du sollst dir kein Bildnis machen! Funktion des alttestamentlichen Bilderverbots', TTZ 98, r 98 9, 8 r -94; id., 'Einheit und Einzigkeit des friihen] ahwismus', in M.Bohnke and H.Heinz (eds.), Im Gesprach mit dem dreieinigen Gott, FS W.Benning, 1985, 5774; M.Hutter, 'Das Werden des Monotheismus im alten Israel', in N.Brox (ed.), Anfange der Theologie, FS B.Bauer, 1987, 25-39; E.Jenni, 'Jahwe', THAT I, 1971, 701-7; O.Keel,jahwe-Visionen und Siegelkunst, SBS 84/86, 1975; D.Kellermann, 'l•wi', TWAT Iv, 1984, 499-521; E.A.Knauf, 'Eine nabataische Parallele zum hebraischen Gottesnamen', BN 23, 1984, 2r-8; id., 'Jahwe', VT 34, 1984, 46771; R.Knierim, 'Das erste Gebot', ZAW 77, 1965, 20-39; B.Lang, 'Die Jahwe-

The religion of the liberated larger group allein-Begegnung', in id. (ed.), Der einzige Gott: Die Geburt des biblischen Monotheismus, I98I, 47-83; N.P.Lemche, '"Hebrew" as a National Name of Israel', StTh 33, I979, I-23; N.Lohfink, 'Zur Geschichte der Diskussion tiber den Monotheismus im alten Israel', in E.Haag (ed.), Gott, der einzige. Zur Enstehung des Monotheismus im Israel, Quaestiones disputatae I04, I98 s; O.Loretz, HabiruHebriier. Eine sozio-linguistiche Studie iiber die Herkunft des Gentiliziums 'ibri von Appellativum gabiru, BZAW I6o, I984; D.J.McCarthy, Treaty and Covenant. A Study in Form in the Ancient Oriental Documents and in the Old Testament, AnBib 2Ia, 2 I98I; }.Maier, Das altisraelitische Ladeheiligtum, BZAW 93, I965; A.Mazor, 'The "Bull-Site"- An Iron Age I Open Cult Place', BASOR 247, I982, 27-42; T.N.D.Mettinger, 'The Elusive Essence. YHWH, El and Baal and the Distinctiveness of Israelite Faith', in E.Blum, C.Macholz and E.W.Stegemann (eds. ), Die hebraische Bibel und ihre zweifache Nachgeschichte, FS R.Rendtorff, I990, 393-417; J.S.Moor, Uw God is mijn God. Over de oorsprong van het gelooof in de ene God, I983; H.P.Muller, 'Der Jahwename und seine Deutung Ex 3,14 im Licht der Textpublikationen a us Ebla', Bib/62, I 98 2, 3o 5-2 7; H.M.Niemann, Die Daniten. Studien zur Geschichte eines altisraelitischen Stammes, FRLANT I 3 5, I985; E.von Nordheim, 'Der Gott der Hebriier. Dberlegungen zum Aufenthalt lsraels in Agypten', SAK 4, 1976, 2 5 5-7I; M.Noth, 'Der Wallfahrtsweg zum Sinai' (I940), in id., Aufsatze zur biblischen Landes- und Altertumskunde I, I97I, 3374; S.Nystrom, Beduinentum und Jahwismus, I946; L.Perlitt, 'Sinai und Horeb', in H.Donner, R.Haushart and R.Smend (ed.), Alttestamentliche Beitrage zur Theologie, FS W.Zimmerli, I977, 302-22; G.von Rad, 'Beobachtungen an der Moseerzahlung Exodus I-!4' (I97I), in id., Gesammelte Studien zu A/ten Testament II, TB 48, I973, I89-98; A.Reichert, Der Jehowist und die sogenannten deuteronomistischen Erweiterungen im Buch Exodus, Diss.theol. Tubingen I972 (typescript); R.Rendtorff, 'Mose als Religionsstifter? Ein Beitrag zur Diskussion tiber die Anfange der israelitischen Religion' (unpublished I968), in id., Gesammelte Studien zum A/ten Testament, TB 57, I975, I52-7I; M.Rose, Der Ausschliesslichkeitsanspruch Jahwehs. Deuteronomische Schultheologie und die Volksfrommigkeit in der spiiten Konigszeit, BWANT Io6, I975; id.,]ahwe. Zum Streitum denalttestamentlichen Gottesnamen, TS I22, I978; E.Ruprecht, 'Exodus 24,9-I I als Beispiel lebendiger Erziihltradition a us der Zeit des babylonischen Exils', in R.Albertz et al. (ed.), Werden und Wirken des Alten Testaments, FS C. Westermann, I98o, I38-73; H.Schmid, Die Gestalt des Mose. Probleme alttestamentliche Forschung unter Beriicksichtigung der Pentateuchkrise, EdF 237, I986; H.H.Schmid, Der sogenannte ]ahwist. Beobachtungen und Fragen zur Pentateuchforschung, I976; W.H.Schmidt, Das erste Gebot. Seine Bedeutung fur das Alte Testament, ThEx I65, I969; id., Exodus, Sinai, Wiiste, EdF I8I, I983; id., Exodus r,r-6,3o, BK II/I, I988; id., 'Jahweh in Agypten. Unabgeschlossene historische Spekulationen tiber Moses' Bedeutung ftir Israels Glauben', Kairos r 8, I 976, 4 3-5 4; id., ' "Jahwe und ... " Anmerkungen zur sogenannten Monotheismusdebatte', FS Rendtorff (see T.N.D.Mettinger), 43 5-47; G.Schmitt, 'Der Ursprung des Levitentums', ZAW 94, I982, 575-99; R.Schmitt, Zeit und Lade als Thema alttestamentlicher Wissenschaft. Eine kritische forschungsgeschichtliche Darstellung, I 972; H.Schult, 'Eine einheitliche Erklarung ftir den Ausdruck "Hebriier" in der israelitischen Literatur', DBAT Io, I975, 22·-40; H.Schulz, Leviten im vorstaatlichen Israel und im Mittleren Osten, I987; J. Van Seters, 'The Plagues of

42

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

Egypt: Ancient Tradition or Literary Invention?', ZAW 98, 1986, 31-9; W.von Soden, 'Jahwe "ER ist, Er erweist sich"', WO 3, 1966, 177-87; F.Stolz, 'Monotheismus in Israel', in O.Keel (ed.), Monotheismus im A/ten Israel und seiner Umwelt, BiBe 14, 1980, 143-89; H.Vorlander, 'Der Monotheismus als Antwort auf die Krise des Exils', see B.Lang (ed.), Der einzige Gott, 84-113; P.Weimar and E.Zenger, Exodus. Geschichten und Geschichte der Befreiung Israels, SBS 75, 1975; M.Weippert, 'Jahweh', RLA 5, 1980, 246-53; id., 'Synkretismus und Monotheismus. Religionsinterne Konfliktbewiiltigung im alten Israel', in J.Assmann and D.Harth (eds.), Kultur und Konflikt, 1990, 143-79; M.Weinfeld, 'Kuntillet 'Ajrud Inscriptions and their Significance', SEL 1, 1984, 121-30; id., 'The Tribal League of Sinai', in P.D.Miller, P.D.Hanson and S.D.McBride (ed.), Ancient Israelite Religion, FS EM. Cross, 1987, 303-14; E.Zenger, Israel am Sinai. Analysen und Interpretationen zu Ex 17-34, 1982; H.J.Zobel, "•ron', TWAT I, 1973, 391-404·

Now the piety of early Israelite families projected on to the patriarchs is not yet the real beginning of the history of Israelite religion. Rather, those who handed it down are agreed that the decisive impetus which set the history of Israelite religion in motion arose from quite specific religious experiences which Israel had in Egypt and in the desert of southern Palestine, when it was still far from the area where it later settled. Oppressed by Egypt and conscripted for forced labour, Israel had been led out of Egypt by Yahweh under the guidance of Moses, had experienced the saving power of this God over a unit of Egyptian chariots at the Sea of Reeds, and had witnessed a powerful theophany of Yahweh at Sinai, which was the foundation of the special relationship between Israel and this God and which determined its cultic and ethical form for all time. I have already pointed out that this conception of the beginnings of Israelite religion arises from the view of very much later groups of theologians, 1 and that it quite certainly does not correspond in all details to what really happened. The numerous breaks and discrepancies in the texts of the books of Exodus to Deuteronomy make it probable that here various religious traditions of the early period have been compiled and shaped on the basis of the very different interests of rival groups. The literary evidence of Exodus-Deuteronomy is far more complicated than in Gen.12-50, so that scholars have still to explain it satisfactorily. The literarycritical model of the three-source theory gets into difficulties at the latest from Ex.19ff. on, and has recently been undermined by its advocates as they have found themselves compelled to assume more or less extensive 'Jehovistic' and 'Deuteronomistic' redactions alongside the traditional sources J, E and P. 2 Here too the model of tradition history put forward by E. Blum seems to me to take us further. 3 For the books of Exodus to Numbers Blum has worked out the outlines of a pre-Priestly, late Deuteronomistic (KD) and a Priestly (KP) composition, both of which come from the early post-exilic period. 4 The advantage of this new traditio-historical approach is that Blum can regard the modus operandi of the

The religion of the liberated larger group

43

authors as varying between a redaction of existing traditions which merely provides links and comments and a complete reshaping of earlier traditional material depending on the particular complex of texts. Thus in his view relatively little has been done to shape Ex.I-14 (I 5 ), but the interventions increase considerably from Ex.I9ff. on. However, simply because of the often blurred transitions, Blum hesitates to pursue diachronically the texts available to Kn. In view of the current flux in scholarly discussion, here too it is impossible to offer a generally accepted traditio-historical model. For Ex.I-14 (; I5) I assume the following stages of tradition in my reconstruction of the history of Israel's religion. ][.Post-Priestly revisions: the introduction of Aaron in Ex.4.I3-I6, 2?-30; 5.I, 4, 20; and 4.2I-22. 2. Priestly revision or new conception (KP); Ex.r.I-5, 7, I3f.; 2.23 a~-25; 6.II?; the well-known Priestly share of Ex.7-14; I 5.I9. 3· Pre-Priestly revision (KD): Ex.r.6, 8; 3.I-4, 12, I?f.S; 4.29-3I*; 5.22-6.I; Moses' staff in 7·I5, I?, 20; II.I-3; I2. (2I-23), 24-27; I3.3-I6; I4.I3f., 3of. For the reasons for this see Blum, Studien, I7-43, 232-62. Before that, we can tentatively recognize the following stages: 4· A narrative of the plagues and Exodus which is no longer completely extant: (Ex.I.9-12, I5-2.23aa; 4·I9-20a, 24-26 [?];) 5.I-2, (3-I9,) 20-2I 6 ; 7·I4-I2.39* (excluding KD and KP); l3.I?-I9, 2I-22; 14*; I5.Iaa (Iab~-I8), 20-2!. In my view it comes from the exilic period. 7 5.The remains of a Moses narrative: Ex.r.9-I2, I6-2.23aa; 4·I9-1.oa, 24-26 (?) ... ,8 which perhaps also included the narrative 5. 3-I 9. 9 The version preserved in I4. 5a only as a narrative variant, that the people had fled from Egypt, could belong to the same stage of the tradition. 10 The sequence of events in Ex.2.IIff. displays striking parallels to the revolt of Jeroboam and probably comes from the northern kingdom of this period. 11 Such an approach to tradition history of course has considerable effects on the dating of the texts. Only a small amount (no.5) goes back to the early periods of the monarchy- after taking away the 'J source'. The main mass of the text is of exilic or early post-exilic origin, i.e. separated from the events by between 700 and 8oo years, though some parts, like the important 'call of Moses' (Ex. 3 .I-4.I 8 *) of KD, are in part based on earlier tradition. 12

Some external observations suggest that the beginnings of the religion of Israel as conceived in the Pentateuch only took the central role now assigned to them with the Deuteronomic reform movement in the seventh century. 13 Thus for example in his theological argument the prophet Isaiah in the eighth century seems to manage completely without the exodus tradition which is so prominent in the Pentateuch, and not a single pre-exilic prophet mentions the Sinai theophany which is developed so powerfully there. 14 In the centuries before that, the Exodus- Sinai tradition probably played a leading role only among the tribes of central Palestine and in the northern kingdom. 15 So we will have to qualify quite considerably the conception of the

44

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

beginnings of Israel presented by the Pentateuch. In principle, however, this conception is not to be doubted, since a whole series of special features which Yahweh religion displays can be explained only from the extraordinary social conditions in which it came into being, as indicated here. 2.21

The social organization of the Exodus group

The view of the tradition is that the Jacob family went into Egypt with seventy people, and improbably increased there to become the people ('am) of Israel, which left Egypt with 6oo,ooo men (I 2. 3 7). This account quite certainly does not accord with historical circumstances, but derives from a later theological conception according to which the Exodus events took on such central significance for Israel that all Israel must have been in Egypt. According to the present view, there is much to suggest that there was only one group of what was later to become Israel in Egypt and this contributed its religious experiences to the tribal alliance. 16 Nevertheless the tradition is correct to the degree that it notes a clear jump in the size of the group from the families of the patriarchs to the Exodus group. The Exodus group no longer has the social form of organization of the family, but is a larger group, in whatever way it is to be described. This insight has quite considerable consequences for the sociology of religion: contrary to the tendency which is constantly to be found in research to put 'patriarchal religion' and 'Yahweh religion' in parallel, 17 it must be stated here that the social entity Yahweh religion is quite different from the religion that we found attested in the patriarchal narratives. From its origins on, Yahweh religion is the religion of a larger group and thus has deep-seated differences in both structure and content from the religion of a small family group. Because the needs of a larger group are political, a priori Yahweh religion also has a markedly political orientation. Unfortunately we have too few authentic reports in the tradition about the structure, composition and living conditions ofthe Exodus group. In the light of later stages of the social history of Israel we should most probably think of a form of tribal organization. But tribal structures are barely recognizable here, and the occasional mention of elders (Ex. 3. I 6, I 8; 4.29; I 2.2I) looks schematic. 18 The tradition does not even presuppose an ethnic coherence (Ex.I2.38: Num.Ir.4)Y However, one report is credible, namely that the Egyptians set the group to build the 'store cities Pithom and Ramses' (Ex.r.n), which probably went with the new residence in the eastern Delta constructed by the Ramessids in the middle of the thirteenth century. 20 The view dominant in the earlier Exodus tradition in particular, that this was a group of workers conscripted to forced labour by the state (Ex.I.II-q; 5·3-I9), is

The religion of the liberated larger group

45

indisputable, even if the detailed descriptions of the social conflicts this involved are more stereotyped and probably arise from experiences of forced labour by Israelite groups under SolomonY It has been conjectured that the Exodus group consisted of former nomads who had sought refuge with their herds in the Nile Delta in an emergency, as is attested by contemporary Egyptian sourcesY But quite apart from the fact that there is no Egyptian evidence for the involvement in state forced labour of nomads, who were in fact admitted only for a limited time, 23 even the Old Testament tradition itself shows no knowledge of nomadic customs in the Exodus group; on the contrary, it supposes that the group is settled in the Nile Delta (Ex.9.26) and after the Exodus is so unfamiliar with nomadic strategies for survival in the wilderness that it constantly gets into difficulties and is dependent on the help of nomads (Num.10.29-32). The fact that Moses has an Egyptian name (msy, 'give birth', cf. Thutmose, Ramses) and is regarded by the Midianites as an Egyptian (Ex.2.19) suggests rather that even if the group probably consisted of Semitic elements in the population, economically it had largely adapted itself to an Egyptian way of living. In other words, from the start Yahweh religion is not a nomadic religion, as is constantly asserted. 24 So there is more to be said for the theory of W.Helck, that the Exodus group was a detachment of prisoners-of-war, of ethnically differing origin; there is evidence of the conscription of such groups in state buildingwork.25 In this connection one might consider whether the Exodus group is not to be classified with the outlaws who are called lzaplbfru in cuneiform sources and 'pr.w in Egyptian sources, and who sometimes disrupted the Near East as marauding bands. 26 The involvement of such elements of the population in state building enterprises is mentioned in contemporary Egyptian sources. Thus in a letter of Ramses II we find: 'Give grain supplies ... to the 'pr who are bringing stones for the great pylon of ... Ramses Miamum'.' 27 And if it is striking that in Ex.1-12 the Israelites are often called Hebrews ('ibrf, cf. Ex.1.15f., 19; 2.6f.,II,13) and Yahweh is explicitly called 'God of the Hebrews' in the Old Testament (Ex.3.18; 5 .3; 7.16; 9.1,13; 10.3), this may be a recollection that the Exodus group originally belonged with this class. The various reports of a lack of solidarity in the Exodus group (Ex.2.111 5; cf. 5 .2of.; 6.9) are not to be regarded as historical accounts in the strict sense, but as sociologically typical, as is the way in which the disruption of solidarity is described as an instrument of domination deliberately introduced by the Egyptians (Ex.5 .14££.). So the origins of Yahweh religion are connected with an economically assimilated but socially declassed group of foreign conscripts to forced labour in Egyptian society under the Ramessids, whose solidarity had been undermined by state measures.

46 2.22

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State The key religious experience of political liberation

The origin of Yahweh religion is indissolubly connected with the process of the political liberation of the Exodus group. It is the spark which helps to ignite a long-drawn-out, tumultuous social conflict. The book of Exodus reports in different ways how this assimilated group of foreign forced labourers, with no solidarity, incapable of political action and oppressed, by the initative of the god Yahweh secured a political leader and a new political hope for the future which made it possible for them to achieve internal solidarity, and externally to detach themselves from their social bonds and thus be capable of a common political act of liberation. In the earliest stratum of the tradition, the rudiments of which we can still recognize, 28 a first attempt at rebellion undertaken by Moses comes to grief: he strikes one of the hated Egyptian overseers to settle a dispute in the group. But instead of showing solidarity with him and turning their aggression on their oppressors, the Hebrews fail to recognize his claim to leadership and threaten to denounce him (Ex.2.II-I4; cf. I Kings II.27; I2.I8; Acts 7.24f.). Moses has to flee abroad and is given hospitality by a Midianite priest (Ex.2.I 5-22). Here, outside the Egyptian sphere of power, he gets to know the god Yahweh. On the basis of an oracle of Yahweh, he returns to his people at a favourable moment (2.23aa + 4·I9,20a) and can mobilize those subjected to forced labour to a shared escape (14.5). An Egyptian troop of chariots pursuing the fugitives gets stuck in the morass of the 'Sea of Reeds'. The event is celebrated by the group as a victory of Yahweh over the Egyptians (I5.2I). According to this earliest stratum of the tradition (which has been reconstructed), Yahweh is experienced by the group of forced labourers as a god who at the decisive moment finds it a political leader to motivate it for its liberation and enables it to succeed. Moreover he is the god who intervenes when the act of liberation faces failure, and saves it despite the military supremacy of its oppressors. In the narrative of the plagues and the Exodus (Ex. If.*; 5-I2 *29 ), which is probably exilic, the experience of political liberation is portrayed as a dramatic struggle between Moses and the Pharaoh. Here Moses appears less as a political leader (also 2. I If.; 5) than as a magical religious emissary of the God of Israel who with the help of his overwhelming miraculous power compels the liberation of his people despite the magnitude of the political resistance and enforces its recognition by the politically powerful. 30 In the early post-exilic tradition of K0 and KP, these religious experiences are shaped by earlier material and given a theological accent: Moses is thought worthy of an explicit theophany in Ex.3f. and 6. Yahweh sets political liberation in motion by an explicit promise that he will take pity on the plaintive serfs, lead them out of the Egyptian sphere of power and

The religion of the liberated larger group

47

settle them in new territory (3.7f.). Moses is given a formal commission to set in motion the work of liberation (3.I0-17), which sometimes is understood more along the lines of the later charismatics as a commission to carry on negotiations with the Pharaoh (3. I o, I 8 b) and sometimes more in the sense of the later prophets as a commission to extend to the people the message of liberation (3.I6-I8a). In the K0 conception, the decisive contribution of the group is that it believes the divine word of promise (4.I, [5,] 8,9, 29-31, i.e. anticipates the religious utopia and accords with it). The broad perspective on the future which is intrinsic to the act of political liberation set in motion by Yahweh is worked out particularly clearly in this account. The exilic elaboration of the Reed Sea tradition (Ex. 14f.) further stresses the aspect of divine power over the hostile military forces threatening the group in connection with the experience of deliverance which has its home here: not only does Yahweh 'scatter the Egyptians in the midst of the sea' (14.27), but he is also regularly celebrated as a 'man of war' ('fs milqamah, Ex. I 5.3; cf.I4.I4, 25). In the view of the later tradents, the experience of Yahweh in the war of liberation31 which is so typical in the later pre-state period is already present before this initial experience of liberation. Even if the texts which have been handed down to us represent the key religious experience of the Exodus group as understood through later patterns of interpretation, at least some important structural characteristics of the Yahweh religion of Israel which was coming into being can already be recognized from them. Israel's Yahweh religion arises in the liberation process of an oppressed outsider group of Egyptian society; its world of religious symbols is therefore directly related to the process of historical and political liberation. From the start that gives it a historical and political orientation and a clear leaning towards the social, which was to remain a characteristic of the religion of Israel. In contrast to the state religions of the ancient Near East, which derive themselves from earliest mythical times, Yahweh religion has a historical foundation and did not from the beginning have the function of legitimating rule and stabilizing the existing social order. Rather, as the symbolic world of a social outsider group fighting for its right to life, it serves to provide internal solidarity for this group and to detach it from a social order which was felt to be unjust, in the direction of a future social integration which makes possible a freer and more equitable social lfe. This starting point explains the bias against domination, transcending present social circumstances, which was to become established time and again in the history of Israelite religion. The details of the structural elements of this emergent Yahweh religion can be clarified on the basis of this fundamental sociological characterization if we compare them once again with the family religion of the patriarchal narratives. 32

48

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

Here, first of all, we have a serious of analogies: like the action of the gods of the fathers, Yahweh's action too is related to the central situation of the group in an emergency; like the family god, Yahweh too attaches himself directly to a group, reveals a new future for it by his word, and sees to its survival. The saving action of God and the personal tie to him thus play an essential role at both levels of Israelite religion. But that is also where the common features already end. Since the group to which Yahweh's action is related is a wider group and its need is a political need, the saving action of God which it experiences is also more complex. God's saving intervention here is not at a specific point, but sets in motion a process of liberation which consists in a whole chain of individual actions: giving solidarity to the group, delivering it from the sphere of Egyptian power, saving it from a military threat, finding it a new place to live, and so on. Consequently the time-span between the divine word of promise that opens up a new future to the group of conscript labourers and its realization is extended enormously. Whereas at the level of the religion of the smaller group the promise of a son took only a year to be fulfilled, on the level of the religion of the larger group it embraces a long-drawn out political and historical process which according to later tradition transcends even the life-span of a generation (forty years). In contrast to the action of the gods of the fathers in the families, the action of Yahweh is experienced by the Exodus group in the broad span of history. And there is yet a further difference: the promise of Yahweh is no longer given directly to those concerned, as it is in the case of family gods, but through an intermediary. It is Moses who is given the oracle of Yahweh that sets the process of liberation in motion, and he has to organize the Exodus group. Here we can see a fundamental structural characteristic in the religious motivation of the larger group, which is probably connected with the highly complicated processes of communication in such groups. Just as here it is impossible to arrive at a decision unless the individual can formulate a view over which the group can find a consensus, so in the Old Testament the revelation of the word is always limited to individuals or small groups who have to hand on and interpret the relevant divine oracle to the wider group. Religious representation is decisive for the divine relationship to the larger group; for this group there is not the immediacy of the relationship to God which is typical of individuals and small groups. These considerations also indicate the necessity for the role of Moses in the beginnings of Israelite religion, despite the way it has constantly been put in question in the more recent pastY He is certainly not a founder of Israelite religion, 34 as Zarathustra or Muhammad were founders of religions, but he is the indispensable mediator of the oracle of Yahweh, without whom the religion of Israel would not have been set in motion. Finally, a last difference must be mentioned. Yahweh's initial approach to the Exodus group probably had as elemental and unconditional a

The religion of the liberated larger group

49

character as that of the gods of the fathers to their families; nevertheless, unlike these, it was bound up to a much greater degree with the initiative and decision of those concerned. In addition to the word of promise, Moses is also given the political task of implementing the work of liberation. He must manage to persuade the group, bring it solidarity and mobilize it, and carry through the action against resistance. The group of conscript labourers must also make their own contribution to their liberation: they must decide whether they will commit themselves to the uncertain word of God and take the risky way to their liberation, thus abandoning all the social security that they still have. From the later perspective of Ex+ 3 I this decision is described by the key word 'faith'; in this context it does not just mean a religious but also an active political option. Without this 'faith', which is stressed very strongly by the pre-Priestly composition (Ex.4.Iff.; I4.I Iff., 3 I), the whole enterprise of liberation continually threatens to collapse. That means that the substance of the historical foundation of the relationship to God among the Exodus group is very much more strongly affected by human decision and participation than the original relationship of trust in God in the small family group. From the start Yahweh religion is more closely focussed on a correspondence between divine and human conduct. Given the particular situation in which it arose, it is characterized internally by a demand for loyalty within the group and externally by a tendency to separate itself off.

2.23

Yahweh, the God of liberation

The tradition still indicates that the Exodus group first got to know the god Yahweh in connection with its liberation by Moses (Ex.3.I3f., IS; 6.2). 35 That certainly does not mean that before that the group had no religion; even if we know nothing a bout the pre-Yahwistic religion of this group, we can begin from the assumption that it too had its family gods 36 and shared in the worship of Egyptian or Semitic gods in the region. 37 What came about through the liberation from Egypt was not the relationship to God as such but the special tie to the god Yahweh. Who was this god Yahweh and where did he come from? Attempts have been made time and again to learn something about the nature of Yahweh from the explanation of his name. 38 The divine name appears in different forms, in the Old Testament mostly in the long form (tetragrammaton) YHWH (6,828 times); because of the reluctance to utter the divine name which began in the Hellenistic period, its pronounciation is not completely certain. When the Massoretes laid down the pronunciation of the Hebrew consonantal text in the early Middle Ages, they vocalized the tetragrammaton by the words which were read in its place, '•donay ('Lord') or '•lohrm (God); this gave rise to the false

50

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

reading 'Jehovah'. Yahweh is the most probable pronunciation, on the basis of the transcriptions Iabe/ai or Iaoue from late antiquity. Various short forms are also attested: YHW or YHH (probably to be read 'Yaho') was the current form of the name among the Jews of the Egyptian military colony in Elephantine (fifth century). YHW is now also attested for the ninth century on a stone fragment from Kuntillet 'Ajrud. In addition, the form 'Yah' appears in poetic, especially liturgical, texts in the Old Testament (cf. Ex.r5.2 and 'Halleluyah') and the forms y•ho-/Yo (e.g. Joshua) and -yaha/-yah (e.g.Adonijah) in personal names. Inscriptions cast doubt on the conjecture, continually put forward, that the long form only developed later from the short form; 39 the tetragrammaton is already attested as the regular written form of the Israelite divine name in the ninth century by the stele of the Moabite king Mesha (KAI r8r, 17f.) and by the inscriptions fromKuntillet 'Ajrud, a Jewish outpost in the Sinai region, not to mention eighth- and seventh-century instances (Hirbet e/-Qom, Arad, Lachish, Hirbet Beit Lei). 40 "Morphologically the name Yah~eh is most simply explained as a substantivized verb-form of the third person imperfect, with the long and short forms being related like a 'long imperfect' to a 'short imperfect'. Isolated formal parallels for such a formation of a divine name can be adduced from Mesopotamia and more frequently from pre-Islamic ArabiaY The etymological explanation must start from a verbal root HWI. At an earlier time scholars were fond of referring back to Arabic roots, e.g. hawa, 'fell', or hawa, 'blow'. According to the first derivation Yahweh 'felling (with his lightning)' (Stade) would have been a storm god, and according to the second, one who hovers and goes through the air (Wellhausen), 42 i.e. a storm god. Today reference is usually made to the Hebrew/Aramaic root HYII HWI, 'be, become', on which the scribal word-play in Ex.J.J4 is based. Here, when Moses asks the name of the god who appears to him, he is given the mysterious answer 'ehye '•ser 'ehye, 'I am who I am' (first person because the god is speaking). If this paranomastic relative clause really amounts to more than dismissive tautology, 43 then a possible meaning is most probably to be looked for in the direction of the promise 'I will be with you' in v.r2: Yahweh is the god who is with his people and works for them. 44 The scholarly explanations start either from the causative root (Yahweh is the one who calls into being, creates) 45 or the basic root (Yahweh is the one who is, who makes himself present as god and shows his power and aid). 46 It is not possible to distinguish between the two explanations with certainty. In support of the latter one can point to personal names from Amurru of the type Yawi-GN, 'GN proves (helpful)', which are attested in Mari and now probably also in Ebla47 (cf. Akkadian Ibassi-GN). A verbal form corresponding to the name Yahweh appears here as a predicate of the praise of God. It is quite possible that such a predicate has become independent in the name Yahweh.

The fundamental objection to all these attempts at explanation is that only in the rarest instances is etymology appropriate for making statements about the actual significance of a god. Divine names are often very much older than the religions which use them, and ideas about a god change under the covering of the same name. It is relatively improbable that Israel

The religion of the liberated larger group was still aware of the meaning of the name Yahweh; the speculative allusion in Ex.3.I4 stands in almost complete isolation. 48 By comparison, the question of the origin of Yahweh takes us further. While there are no certain instances of him from the surrounding world, 49 the Old Testament tradition itself attests that Moses had his decisive encounter with this god outside Israel, and also outside the area of later Israelite settlement in the hilly wilderness in the south of Palestine (Ex. 3. I6). Furthermore, a series of partially old poetic texts indicates an original local link between Yahweh and this region, which here is called Sinai, Se'it; the fields of Edom, Ternan, or the mountains of Paran. Yahweh sets out from there to come to the aid of his people in Palestine (Judg. 5.4f.; Ps.68.8f.; Deut.33.2; Hab-3-3). 50 In an early epithet Yahweh can even be termed 'the one from Sinai' (]udg.5.5; Ps.68.8f.). The tradition that Elijah undertook a pilgrimage to Yahweh on Horeb (I Kings I9), which is supposed to be forty days' journey south of Beersheba, suggests that the god Yahweh was connected with a mountain in the desert region of southern Palestine, even if there are only vague ideas in the Old Testament about its precise location. The god whom the Exodus group got to know through Moses thus comes from an area which was not part of the territory of later Israel. So this local tie can hardly be explained from Israelite worship of Yahweh either; rather, there is some evidence to suggest that Yahweh already had his home in the mountain region south of Palestine and was worshipped there before he became the god of Israel. First there are the Egyptian lists from the time of Amenophis III (first half of the fourteenth century) and Ramses II (thirteenth century) which attest Y-h-w3 as a geographical and or ethnic designation in SJW land, i.e. the same region of southern Palestine. 51 We cannot rule out the possibility that this could have something to do with the worship of a god of the same name in this region. Secondly, there are the reports from the Old Testament about the links between Moses and the Midianites (Ex.2.I5ff.; 3.I; I8), whose area of settlement is to be sought east of the Gulf of Akaba and who thus belong within the region mentioned above. After his flight from Egypt Moses is said to have married a Midianite woman whose father had been a Midianite priest (Ex.2.I 6; 3 .I; I 8.I). Certainly the tradition fluctuates a little; at one point the father-in-law is called Reuel (2.I8) 52 and at others Jethro (3.1; I8.Iff.),Jether (4.I8) and Hobab (Judg.I.I6; 4.II; compare Num.Io.29); the last-named is described as a Kenite, but this could be regarded as a subgroup of the Midianites. 53 However, in view of the markedly hostile relations with the Midianites at a later date, this account cannot have been invented and may therefore be regarded as historical. 54 Granted, it is nowhere said in so many words that Jethro was a priest of Yahweh, but if according to Ex. I 8. I 2 he is the one who invites the Israelites to a sacrificial

52

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

meal for Yahweh on the mountain of God, then we may suppose that the Midianites or Kenites were already worshippers of Yahweh before the Exodus group joined them. 55 A further indication of this is that the Kenites were also regarded as notable worshippers of Yahweh later (Gen.4.15;Judg.4·17ff.) and that Israel felt akin to them (I Sam.15.6f.) so that the Kenites were accorded an area of settlement within Judah (judg.1.16). Granted, the tradition of the mountain of God on which Yahweh is worshipped is geographically remote from the Midianites (Ex.3.1; 18.Iff., 27), so that we cannot say with certainty that Yahweh had specifically been a Midianite god. But it does indicate that the god Yahweh who had his home in the wild, craggy mountains of southern Palestine was also worshipped, among others, by the nomadic Midianites or Kenites. It is quite probable that Moses first got to know this god through the mediation of his Midianite father-in-law before receiving from him the oracle that sent him back to Egypt and made him the liberator of his group. So the god Yahweh is older than Israel; he was a southern Palestinian mountain god before he became the god of liberation for the Moses group. It was important here that he was a god who came from outside, an alien god who had not yet been incorporated into the structure of the Egyptian pantheon and was thus in a position to break up this religious system which gave political stability to society. As the mountain god of a wild and lonely religion which was barely organized politically, and worshipped only by freedom-loving nomadic tribes, he had become so little the symbol of state domination that for Moses and then for his people he could become the symbol of liberation. It is no coincidence that on several occasions in Ex.1-12 Yahweh is termed 'God of the Hebrews' (Ex.3.18; 5.3; 7.16; 9.1,13; 10.3), i.e. a god who one-sidedly takes the side of the social outsiders in the social conflict that breaks out. We hardly know what characteristics were attributed to Yahweh before he became god of the Moses group. We may best conclude from the descriptions of the epiphanies (judg.5.4f.; Ps.68.8f.; Deut.33.2; Hab-3-3), in which Yahweh breaks out from the southern hill-country with violent storms, that he is to be reckoned a Hadad type (storm and thunder god). 56 And some properties which Yahweh shares here, say, with the Ugaritic Baal ('rider on the clouds', cf. Ps.68.5; Isa.19.1, etc.) can derive from a correspondence with this preIsraelite type. The special feature of the Israelite history of Yahweh is that the dynamic properties of this former storm god are twisted round into the political and historical sphere. The god of Sinai who sets nature in an uproar comes to the help of the Israelite tribes in a battle of liberation (judg.5); the god who appears to Moses in the wild mountainous country of southern Palestine mobilizes a whole column of conscript labourers to dare to seek their liberation.

The religion of the liberated larger group 2.24

53

Theophany and existence in the wilderness

In addition to the Exodus events the tradition mentions a second key experience which lay at the foundation of the religion of Israel: the encounter with God on Sinai. Scholars still argue about how the two traditions are related, but the great traditional formulation of the Sinai pericope (Ex.19 - Num.IO) does look like an alien body within the Pentateuchal tradition of Exodus and settlement, and the events of Sinai are usually passed over in the other summaries of the early history oflsrael (cf. Deut.26.5-10; ]osh.24; Judg.II.I 6-26, etc.; it is first mentioned in the post-exilic prayer Neh.9). 57 So the historical background of the Sinai tradition has generally been put in question, and attempts have been made to understand it as a historicized cult legend,S 8 or there has been a concern to attribute it to another group from the earliest period of Israel. 5 9 However, such differentiations create more problems than they can solve. Why should a cult legend have been projected into a region in which Yahweh was demonstrably no longer worshipped? How would the assumption of different groups explain the fact that the events of Exodus and Sinai are connected through Yahweh and Moses? 60 Moreover, there are indications throughout the text that both were once more closely connected than they now seem to be. The Mountain of God on which Moses was given the liberating promise by Yahweh (3.1ff.) is said in Ex. 3. I 2 to be the mountain on which those who were liberated from Egypt will worship Yahweh; and one stereotyped motive which appears in the negotiations with Pharaoh is that of a worshipping of the 'God of the Hebrews' outside Egyptian territory (3.18; 5.3, c£.4.23; 7.1 6,26; 8.16; 9.I,13). That these motives are only partially kept up in the present version of the Sinai texts 61 and that in Ex.19ff. it looks as if Moses arrives with his group at a hitherto completely unknown place is because the later tradition was scrupulously concerned to disguise the connection of the Mountain of God with the Midianites and thus with any pre-Israelite worship of Yahweh. 62 The isolation of the events on Sinai is thus at least in part the consequence of later dogmatic correction. One could ask whether the vague ideas about the location of the mountain in the Old Testament might not similarly be explained largely by a concern to transfer this place, so important for the constitution of the Israelite relationship with God, to a 'historical no man's land' which was as indeterminate as possible. According to old hymnic traditions Yahweh's abode lay in the Edomite sphere (the fields of Edom, Se'ir: judg.5.4; Deut.3.2) to the east and- because of Paran (Hab.3.3; Deut.3 3.2)- perhaps also to the west ofthe 'Arabah, i.e. right next to the Midianite area of settlement (Hab.3.7) east of the Gulf of Akaba (I Kings rr.r8). In these accounts of epiphanies and probably also in the old epithet of Yahweh 'from Sinai' (Judg.5.5; Ps.68.9), Sinai does not denote a particular mountain but a whole region.

54

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

Alongside this there was the tradition of a mountain of God (har ha'•lohim, Ex.3.1; 4.27; 18.5; 24.13; cf. har yhwh, 'mount of Yahweh', Num.10.33), which in Ex.3.1 ('behind the wilderness') and 18.5 (Jethro encounters Moses at the Mountain of God) is separate from the abode of the Midianites but nevertheless must have been a sanctuary at which the Midianites worshipped Yahweh (18.12). Since because of its word-play with 'thornbush - Sinai' (Hebrew s•ne-sinay) the fragment about the disclosure of the cult which has been transferred to Moses in Ex.3.1-6 must end up in the application of the name Sinai to the mountain of God (d. har sinay, Ex.19.18; 34.2,4), the tradition of the Mountain of God cannot be separated from the tradition of the epiphany, 63 even if in Ex.19ff. any reference to Edomite or Midianite localities is studiously avoided. Rather, we have to reckon with the possibility that Sinai is not only a region but also can denote one or more mountain sanctuaries in this region. 64 That some texts put Sinai near the oasis of Kadesh-Barnea ('En qdes and 'En quderiit) in the northern Sinai peninsula (Ex.17.6; Deut.33.2, etc.), where Israel is said to have spent a considerable period (Ex.17; Num.13.26; 2o; Deut.1.19, 46; Josh. 14.7), can be interpreted as an attempt to remove Sinai from the Edomite sphere. Such an intent is probable, given the remarkable note about distance in Deut. 1.2, 'it is eleven days journey from Horeb in the direction of Mount Se'ir to Kadesh Barnea', with which the Deuteronomists once again distance the Mountain of God from its old Edomite location and transfer it to the solitude of the southern Sinai peninsula. Perlitt has demonstrated the probability that the designation Horeb, which is used in the Deuteronomistic literature for Sinai, is to be understood as a cryptic cipher (meaning 'desolate land') to avoid any association with the Edomites, so hated after 587, who had advanced their area of settlement into the Negeb and southernJudah. 65 The archaeological investigations in the southern Negeb and on the Sinai peninsula have indeed disclosed a large number66 of fragmentary settlements for the Chalcolithic period (sixth to fourth millennia) and some for the early Bronze Age (third millennium) 67 which can be interpreted as mountain sanctuaries, but hardly any settlement can be made out for the relevant period of the late Bronze Age- apart from the Egyptian sanctuary at Timnah. Excavations at Kadesh have similarly brought to light a surprising gap in settlement between the end of the third millennium and the tenth century. 68 So today there is more to suggest that the Old Testament Sinai is not to be sought on the present Sinai peninsula 69 but east of the 'Arabah or the Gulf of Akaba. 70

If we take into account this tendency deliberately to obscure existing historical connections, there is much to suggest that historical experiences also underlie the Sinai tradition. After a successful flight from Egypt, the people under the leadership of Moses sought out the mountain sanctuary of Yahweh who had so miraculously proved to be the god of their liberation. Moses thus returned to the place where he had received the decisive oracle of Yahweh (3.Iff.), and just as Moses had come to know the god Yahweh through the mediation of his Midianite father-in-law, so in turn it was the Midianites who introduced the Exodus group to the cult of Yahweh at the Mountain of God (Ex.I8.I2). It is quite probable that 'Sinai' was once

The religion of the liberated larger group

55

a mountain sanctuary in the frontier area between Edam and Midian which was visited by a number of nomadic tribes in the region, especially the Midianites; now the Exodus group, too, took part in its cult. In the view of the later tradition the following events took place at Sinai: a theophany, the foundation of the cult, a proclamation of the commandments and the making of a covenant. Probably not a single text which various groups of theologians have contributed to this in the course of a long history of tradition can with any degree of probability be directly associated with the experiences ofthe Exodus group. Nevertheless, essential elements of emergent Yahweh religion seem to be described here with fundamental accuracy. We cannot enter here into an extended discussion of the complicated literary stratification of the Sinai pericope. I follow Blum, Studien, 4 5-99, in starting from the following stages of the tradition: r. Post-Priestly elaborations: I9.rrb(?), 20-25; 24.Ib-2 (?). 2. Mal'ak revision: 23.20-33; (32.34a~;)33·2,3b*,4; 34·II-I7. 3· Priestly composition (KP): I9.I, 2 *; 24.I 5b-I8a; 25-3 I; 34·29ff. *; 3 5ff. 4· Pre-Priestly composition (KD): Ex.I9.3 b-8,9; 20.22f. *; 24.(I), 3,8, (9-rr,) I2Isa, I8b; 32.7-I4; 33.I,3a, 5-34.IO, 28, 29ff. * 5. Exilic texts: the Decalogue in an exilic version: 20. I- I 7 (probably first inserted by KD), also 24.I*, 9-rr 71 and Ex.32.I-6, I5-34*, (35) ... (continuation chs.33f. newly shaped by KD). 72 6. Pre-Deuteronomic composition: Ex.I9.2b*, 3a, IO,IIa, I3b-I7a, I8-I9; 20.I8-2I leading to the Book of the Covenant, 20.22f.*-23.29; 24.3-8*. 73 The theophany narrative has been once again thoroughly worked over in I9.I2-I3a, I7b (also 24.1b, 2?) to the effect that the people may not go on Sinai. However, there are no grounds for a division of the description of the theophany ( I6f.E; I8f. J) if we take into account the stereotyped topics of such descriptions and escape the pressure of having to reconstruct continuous sources.

The element of the theophany is most firmly anchored; five different theophany stories are connected with the Sinai event (Ex.19f.''; 24.1*, 911; 24.1 sb-I8a; 33; 34). While they differ in the way in which they describe the divine appearance, they agree that on Sinai Israel is confronted with the majesty of Yahweh. So our starting point can be that the Exodus group experienced on the Mountain of God the compelling numinous power of their god Yahweh- probably in connection with their worship there (cf. Ex.18.12). But that introduced a new element into their relationship with their god; in their liberation from forced labour in Egypt they had experienced Yahweh in a historical process. Atthe Mountain of God they are confronted with the intervention in their reality of his divine sphere of power, which bursts open the course of history. On his mountain, which communicates the experience of power and transcendence simply by its massiveness

56

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

and height, Yahweh encounters in his compelling power and immediate presence the group of fugitives, made open to him by their dramatic experiences of liberation and made sensitive by the tribulations of the wandering and the solitude of the wilderness. Thus to the historical experience of God is added the experience of the cultic nearness of God. Only thus did the group's historical experience of God, which despite all the signs and wonders that it had experienced essentially remained obscure and in danger, find its confirmation and clarity. Only thus did the encounter with God grounded in history issue in a steadfast relationship to God. Through the experience of the theophany, Yahweh, the God of a historical liberation, becomes an all-embracing symbol of sacral integration for the wider group. The way in which historical and cultic experience of God are brought together here is another specific feature of Israelite religion. In principle there are both types of experience of God in all religions. But whereas in the other religions of the ancient Near East the cultic experience of God dominates, and historical experiences fade into the background in comparison with the presence of the gods in cultic theophanies/4 Israelite religion, for all the emphasis on the cult to be found in it too, maintained the priority of the historical experience of God. The Israelite relationship to God was not grounded in the Sinai theophany but in the Exodus. The theophany simply confirmed, endorsed and perpetuated what had previously already been given a basis in history. According to one strand of the tradition the theophany culminates in the establishment of worship. Unfortunately only fragments have survived of what was probably the earliest conception in the pre-Priestly texts: the earliest that we can detect by literary criticism is the narrative fragment Ex.24.1 *, 9-n, dealing with a sacrificial meal of Moses and the seventy elders on the Mountain of God in the divine presence, and in this form it probably comes from the exilic period. 75 The account of Jethro's sacrificial meal with the representatives oflsrael in Ex.I8.I-I2 is even later, but goes back to a very old tradition. 76 However, here the theophany element is absent. The conception is carried through most clearly in the Priestly composition (KP) from the early post-exilic period: from the appearance of the glory of God (k•bod yhwh) is communicated to Moses the command to build the sanctuary, which is imagined by KP as a portable copy of the Jerusalem temple (Ex.24.15b-I8; 25.8ff.). After the sanctuary has been built (Ex.3 sff.), the sacrificial laws decreed and the priests appointed (Lev.I-8), in Lev.9 the first sacrificial worship is performed. This is sanctioned by a further appearance of the glory of Yahweh: Yahweh is present in worship, and the primal encounter with Yahweh in his glory is continued in his cultic presence for all times.77 This view clearly presupposes later stages in the history of the cult, which were projected back on to the early period. Nevertheless the

The religion of the liberated larger group

57

connection between theophany and cult is so widely confirmed in the history of religion that we may assume that if the Yahweh theophany which the Exodus group experienced on the Mountain of God was not the foundation of the Yahweh cult in this place, it was the foundation for the regular worship of Yahweh by the group. As far as we can see, its characteristics, too, are not very specific, but typical of the cult of larger groups in antiquity generally: it is performed at a holy place, which in this case is still a natural sanctuary, a mountain, with very few cultic installations. All through the history of religion, natural holy places (mountains, hedges, springs) precede constructed sanctuaries. The cult is bound to a holy time which separates its events from the flow of everyday history (Ex.24.16; cf.19.1of.,15) and for which the participants must prepare themselves by special rites (cf. 19.10,14f.: washing of clothes, sexual continence). And it calls for a cultic representation, one or more mediators of the holy one, who alone are allowed to enter the holy place and perform the sacred actions for the wider group. Even already in the early period these will have consisted above all of sacrificial acts (18.12; cf.24·5,II), though later theologians dispute that (Amos 5.23; ]er.7.22). Certainly we must imagine that the early cult of Yahweh in the wilderness was still relatively simple,78 but it probably already had all the beginnings of the later institutionalized cultic practice. Here Yahweh worship as the cult of a larger group is fundamentally different from the small cult of the family. How far sacred equipment already had a role in the wilderness is not so certain: there is mention of a 'tent of meeting' ('ohel mo'ed, cf. Ex.33·7n; Num.11.16f.,24; 12.4££.; Deut.31.14f. andinKP), which could go back into the wilderness period. It recalls the qubbe of the pre-Islamic Arabs, a small tent made of red leather in which the tribal images of God were carried about. 79 The view of the tradition is that it did not stand at the centre of the regular cult but served only to provide occasional oracles; however, at any rate there is evidence of a portable sanctuary at which Moses, the leader of the group, and Yahweh would meet. 80 By contrast the 'ark' ('aron) is probably not originally a cultic object but a kind of standard which guaranteed the presence of God in battle (Num.10.35f.; 14.44; cf. I Sam-4-3ff.; II Sam.11.II; 15.24££.).81 It first became a cultic object in the sanctuary of Shiloh where it was preserved, and then later in the Jerusalem temple, where it was seen as part of God's throne in the Holy of Holies (II Sam.6; I Kings 8.6££.; Pss.99·5; 132.7), until the Deuteronomistic theologians gave it a new function as a container for the covenant document, the Decalogue (hence 'ark of the covenant' in Deut.1o.1-5). It is equally uncertain whether there was already a special priesthood in the early period of the cult of Yahweh. The Levites seem to be the most likely candidates for this, even if an isolated late Deuteronomistic passage

58

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

(I Sam.2.2 7) traces the priestly privilege of the sons of Eli in Shiloh back to the time in Egypt. Scholars are still unclear about the pre-exilic history of the Levites. The problem which concerned earlier scholarship, that of the relationship between a 'secular' (Gen.34; 49.5-7; tribal lists) tribe of Levi (which perished) and a 'religious' (Deut.3 3.8-n; cf. Ex.32.25-29; Judg. r7f.; r9f.) tribe 82 can be regarded as solved on the basis of the investigations of Gunneweg and Schulz: according to the old 'Ievitical rule' which can be detected behind Ex.32.29 and Deut.33.9a, 'lives with no tie to clan or tribe', 83 or 'separates himself from his kinship groups (and is grouped into leviticallines)' 84 in order to enter into a special bond with Yahweh. 85 Nevertheless, the function and role of the Levites in early Israelite society still remain deeply controversial, even in more recent scholarship. Whereas Gunneweg saw the Levites as a social opposition group which- though not originally priests - took over central tasks in the amphictyony, 86 and Schmitt described them as a 'warlike order' which was committed to following Moses unconditionally, 87 Schulz wants to see them as an influential leadership elite with a tribal organization who as a result of the client relationship to Yahweh, which is stressed, took on a broad spectrum of tasks: religious and cultic (manticism, priestly service, giving the blessing), and legal (settling blood feuds, asylum, instruction in the law). 88 But despite the ethnological material that Schulz offers to support his sometimes rather 'airy' exegetical combinations, 89 the question remains whether this does not exaggerate the role of the Levites; the few pre-Deuteronomistic texts about the Levites tell against such a central and comprehensive function. Moreover it will transpire that contrary to widespread opinon the Deuteronomic-Deuteronomistic movement which was influential later has nothing to do with the old Levites. 90 The Deuteronomic conception that all priests are Levites (Deut. r 8. r etc.) is an artificial archaism. Judges 17-18 offers a quite credible picture of the Levites in the period before the state: 91 a Levite from Bethlehem with the status of a landless ger ('sojourner') seeks an income on his travels and finds a position as priest, first in the house cult of Micah on Mount Ephraim (r7·7-12) and later in the service of the Danites in their state sanctuary of Dan (r8.r8ff.). Levites did not need to be priests, but were felt to have a particularly predisposition towards priesthood (cf. 17.13; Deuq 3. rob). Here it is quite probable that J udg. r 7f. does not depict an individual instance but that in a similar way Levites were engaged as priests in the lesser sanctuaries which were scattered all over the country. Once installed they could even found a priestly dynasty at individual sanctuaries- as in Dan (r8.3ob), 92 but in principle in the early period we should probably think in terms of limited appointments (simply because of the limited need and restricted resources of the patrons or village communities), so that the Levites were constantly compelled to look for new places. The Levites purchased their right to priestly service by a readiness to sever their ancestral kinship relationships/ 3 take upon themselves the legally uncertain status of ager (cf.Judg.r7.7; 19.rff.), and thus become mobile. For this they entered into a special relationship of loyalty to Yahweh (Deut.33.8; ~iisfd) and entrusted themselves solely to his protection (Deut.33.II; cf.]udg.20). The Levites of_the

The religion of the liberated larger group

59

early pre-exilic period can thus be defined as a mobile, religious association with a quasi-tribal organization which lived dispersed through the land. 94 Some of them were engaged in priestly service, predominantly at the small sanctuaries of the country ('the high places'); 95 those who could not find a fixed position probably earned their living by casual religious services, for example as experts in omens (d. the manipulation of the Urim and Thummim in Deut.33.Ioa; cf. Judg.I7.5f.); perhaps they were also active as helpers and teachers in the law (Deut.33.Ioa). Here of course their significance would naturally have faded when with increasing institutionalization of the cult firmly-installed priestly families (the sons of Eli, Aaron and Zadok) increasingly became dominant. 96

The question is how far this still largely uninstitutionalized form of the priesthood goes back in time. The saying of Levi in Deut.33.8-n connects it with an event in Massah-Meribah (Kadesh) which has not been handed down to us and therefore is difficult to explain (v.8b); according to the narrative scene in Ex.32.25-29 it is Moses himself who already accords the Levites the priestly privilege on the Mountain of God because of their martial intervention on behalf of Yahweh, and according to the note in judg.r8.3ob the Levites of Dan traced themselves genealogically from Gershom the son of Moses97 (cf. Ex.2.22; 18.3 ). Moreover Moses (despite his Egyptian name) was regarded as a child of levi tical parents, at the latest in the early monarchy, and has been incorporated into the genealogy of the Levites in various ways. 98 These passages indicate that the Levites probably already legitimated themselves with reference to Moses in the period before the state and traced themselves back to the Exodus group. But how far does this accord with historical reality? On the one hand the only report which speaks of the Levites in connection with Sinai (Ex.32.25-29) certainly does not go back to an old tradition. 99 In its monolatrous rigorism it not only presupposes the Deuteronomistic theology of separation (cf. Deut. 13.7u; 17.2-7) but also reflects an exilic controversy between the Zadokides/ Aaronides and the Levites (=country priests) over who was to blame for the apostasy of Israel. 100 Had there been historically even the beginnings of such Levites who fought against syncretism and the cult of images in the way depicted by this legend, the history of Israelite religion would necessarily have taken a very different course. 101 On the other hand, the links between the Levites and the time of Moses are so close that it is quite possible that at least the basic pattern of a mobile religious association with a tribal organization, which can be demonstrated in the period before the state, goes back to the time of Moses and the beginning of the main cult of the Exodus group. That would explain why such a mobile priestly guild arose at all alongside the local priesthoods and would also explain how the Deuteronomic theory of the Ievitical origin of all priests could come into being.

6o

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

The early cult of Yahweh probably had a twofold function: it strengthened the bond between Yahweh and this special group of people who had grown up in history, and it reinforced the social composition of the group itself. We may assume that it was the factor which first turned the heterogeneous bunch of fugitives into a firmly organized tribe. Even if our knowledge of the detail of the early Yahweh cult is sparse, it is of fundamental significance that its essential beginnings are to be put in the southern regions of the wilderness, before the Exodus group entered the cultivated land of Palestine. This cult was originally not bound to one of the famous sanctuaries in the cultivated land; at its centre was a tie, not between Yahweh and a particular place, but with a particular group of people. The recollection of this origin not only enabled later opposition groups continually to distance themselves from the existing cult with astonishing radicalism, but also made possible the continuation of Yahweh worship in the exilic period after the collapse of the state cult in 587. According to a second strand of the tradition, the theophany culminates in the giving of commandments and laws. For this reason a whole series of collections of commandments and laws from different periods have been inserted into the Sinai pericope: the Decalogue (Ex.2o.I-I7), the 'Book of the Covenant' (Ex.20.22-23.29 ), the so-called 'cultic Decalogue' (Ex.34.II-26), the 'Holiness Code' (Lev.I7-26) and various priestly laws. This conception can be detected for the first time by literary criticism - at an earlier period than the cultic one - at any rate already in the seventh century, 102 in a theophany narrative which ended with the divine proclamation of the Book of the Covenant and the imposition of an obligation on Israel. After that it found classical expression in the Deuteronomistic theologians, who connected the Decalogue and the Deuteronomic law (Deut.s; 6.1ff.; 12ff.) with the theophany on Horeb; this model was made the determining structure of Ex.19ff. by K0 , who was also followed by KP -though with a different emphasis (Lev.nff.). Still, for all the prominence that this conception has in the tradition, it hardly goes back into the early period. The explicit authorization of the commandments and laws by the God who reveals himself in all his majesty presupposes a thoroughgoing theologizing of the law which only took place after the end of the eighth century. Certainly we may also presuppose basic legal norms and simple forms of legislation in the Exodus group, for settling conflicts within the group. However, it is more than questionable whether these already had religious derivation and support; we do better to think of old clan law (cf. Lev.18) and customary law. The insight that none of the bodies of commandments and laws associated with the events on Sinai goes back to the time of Moses is of considerable consequence for the reconstruction of the history of Israelite religion. The Decalogue (Ex.20.I-I?), for which time and again a Mosaic origin has been assumed, was clearly inserted into the theophany narrative

The religion of the liberated larger group

6I

Ex.I9.2f. *, 10-19; 20.18-21 at a secondary, literary stage/ 03 and on close inspection proves to be an ingredient of the Deuteronomic/Deuteronomistic reform conception. 104 According to the most recent view, the Book of the Covenant, Ex.2o.22-23.19, which was incorporated earliest, does not come from the period before the state but from the reform of Hezekiah at the end of the eighth century. 105 And the so-called 'cultic Decalogue' in Ex.34.11-26 is by no means, as was assumed, 'privilege law' from before the state; it is a late composition which combines the commandments from Ex.13 with the Book of the Covenant. 106 In any case it has not seriously been supposed that the Priestly legal material is of Mosaic origin. However, the dating of individual commandments and thus the problem of the origin of the fundamental norms of Yahweh worship, which is important for the history of religion, is a separate issue. Yahweh worship as expressed, for example, in the first two commandments of the Decalogue, was exclusive and aniconic. Here the peculiarities of the later religion of Israel as compared with that found anywhere else in the ancient Near East are so striking that many scholars want to anchor at least the prohibition of alien gods and images in the early period of Yahweh religion. 107 However, the forms of the two commandments as they have been handed down prove to be relatively late. The prohibition against alien gods in the Decalogue, which is formulated in comprehensive terms ('You shall have no other gods but me', Ex.2o.3; Deut.5.7), is hardly much earlier than the Deuteronomistic reform (622 BCE); Ex.22.19 and 34.14, 108 which specifically prohibit the cultic worship of other gods, give the impression of being older. They too already presuppose the competitive situation of agricultural life. So it is more than questionable whether we can assume that the prohibition against alien gods was already formulated explicitly in the early period. The question of the origin and age of biblical monotheism has again been vigorously discussed in recent times. 109 Whereas earlier scholars generally saw the exclusiveness of Israel's worship of Yahweh as an old legacy of the early period, which in the crises of the settlement and formation of the state was gradually developed into the express requirement of monolatry (sole worship) in the face of the threat of 'Canaanite' infiltration, and finally, during the exile, into theoretical monotheism (the assertion of a sole God and the denial of all others), 110 in more recent scholarship the exact opposite has been maintained, that throughout its preexilic phase the religion of Israel had been a 'polytheistic religion which was no different from the religions of the surrounding world'.11 1 The propagation of the sole worship of Yahweh is said to have begun only at a late stage, at the earliest with Elijah in the ninth century, but really only with Hosea in the eighth century, and to have been the concern of only small opposition groups (the 'Yahweh alone movement'). 112 According to this view, this movement was only able to influence society for a short period under Josiah, but then finally helped monotheism to victory in the exilic and early post-exilic period. 113

62

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

This is not the place to discuss the controversy in detail; we shall be doing that later. 114 Here we are only concerned with the principle. Where the new critical view, some details of which I accept, is right is in pointing out that the development to monotheism was by no means 'pre-programmed' from the beginning, so that to some degree it took place 'automatically', but had to be fought out in an open process which at first involved many social conflicts. The only question is whether with such a model one can still demonstrate plausibly why such opposition movements could arise at all in Israel- in contrast to all the other societies of the Near East. What drove men like Elijah, Elisha and Jehu to be discontent with the official diplomatic syncretism of Ahab, if this was customary throughout the polytheistic world of the Near East? 115 What led the prophet Hosea to denounce the Yahweh cult of his time as a cult of Baal, if Yahweh was really identical with Baal? 116 It is not enough to refer to social and political crises 117 as an explanation of such abrupt and sometimes bloody battles over religious demarcation in later Israel. For people could equally well have taken the typical polytheistic way of overcoming crises and have sought the backing of other gods (cf. Jer.44.r 5-19 ). 118 No, there must have been a potential for difference within Yahweh religion which distinguished it from the usual polytheistic religions, a potential to which opposition groups which saw the exclusive worship of Yahweh as the only possibility of overcoming crises could appeal. 119 To this degree the approach of earlier scholars, who started from an inherent tendency to monolatry within Yahweh religion from the start, still has a lot to be said for it.

So there must have been something in Yahweh religion which led to the formulation of the later prohibitions of alien gods. As will become clear, we certainly cannot speak of monotheism or even only of monolatry in the strict sense, at least in the pre-exilic period, but the claim to the sole worship of Yahweh which was made at the latest from the middle period of the monarchy onwards cannot be explained fully from the opposition to state syncretism and polytheism in this relatively late period (Elijah; Hosea): it must have had some support in the structures of Yahweh religion, which are older. 120 The prophet Hosea found its basis in the key religious experience of the early period: But I am Yahweh, your God from Egypt, You know no God but me, there is no helper but me ( r 3 ·4 ).

We must agree with him that the reasons for the distinctive tendency to exclusiveness intrinsic to the religion of Israel are to be sought in the extraordinary combination of social and religious factors out of which it emerged: under the extreme conditions of political liberation and a lengthy existence in the wilderness a close personal relationship developed between the Exodus group and Yahweh. 121 The other religions of the Near East know such a personal relation to a

The religion of the liberated larger group god only in the case of small groups and individuals ('personal god', 'guardian deity'). 122 The personal bond between a god and a larger group is a peculiarity of Israelite religion. By contrast, the Babylonian gods, for example, are related to particular cities or to the land of Sumer and Akkad. There is no word in Akkadian for 'people'; rather, nisa means the 'population of the land', which could change in the course of history without any far-reaching change in the divine world. The Babylonian population relates to the gods only through the land, the city with its temples, and the political institution of the monarchy. At the political level, only the relationship between the gods and the king has a personal dimension; the divine relationship with the gods is an objective one. The gods are the owners of the land and keep this possession in order by delegating rule over it to a king, and implementing their decisions by a divine and royal set of authorities. 123 In the light of the special initial conditions of Israelite religion, Yahweh is not primarily the owner of the land but the god of a larger group ('God of the Hebrews', later 'God of Israel') which owes him its freedom, indeed its existence in all dangers. This gives the bond with him a degree of exclusiveness- at any rate at the level of the larger group. The sole position of Yahweh as the god of the larger group is matched by the relatively simple social structure of the Exodus group. In this group of fugitives in the extreme conditions of the wilderness there is as yet no far-reaching social differentiation, division of work, or institutional division of society. But the polytheism of the other Near Eastern religions is related to a social order with this kind of rich division. The multiplicity of the world of the gods reflects the manifold competing interests and the complicated social conditions of the high cultures of the Near East. 124 And just as these find a balance in the monarchical hierarchy, so too the pantheon finds a unity in tension only in the monarch at its head ('king of the gods'). As long as the Exodus group was fighting for its survival, i.e. as long as its social structure was undifferentiated and its interests were clear, the bond with a single god was the given; a single religious symbol was enough. Under these extreme conditions Yahweh had only one task: that of securing the survival of the group in the freedom it had gained. For this, no complicated set of authorities within a pantheon was needed. Yahweh acted directly and indirectly with the group, not like a king of the land but like a ruler of a tribe. I have already pointed out that the distance of Yahweh from the polytheistic system of Egyptian religion was what first made it possible to see in him the guarantor of its liberation from Egyptian society. Thus the disposition towards the sole worship of Yahweh in Israelite religion can be explained quite plausibly from the social conditions of the Exodus group. However, that does not automatically point the way to monolatry or even to monotheism. It will prove that under changed social

64

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

conditions, especially once the establishment of the monarchy led to a differentiated and complex Israelite society, in Israel too the signs were wholly set for syncretism and polytheism. 125 That means that what the sole worship of Yahweh that had been 'normal' under the extreme conditions of the early period could mean in changed social and political conditions was in no way a priori clear, but had to be discovered. For most people it had simply been overtaken by social developments. There were only some opposition groups which, even in the changed social conditions, harked back to the exclusive relationship to God of the early period and took the the worship of Yahweh alone as their slogan (Elijah, Hosea). 126 This prophetic fight for the exclusiveness of Israel's relationship to God was at the same time a fight against the social and political developments of the middle and late monarchy, against a disintegration of Israel society into competing classes and its political alliances and the foreign infiltration into it. 127 It was only in the course of this controversy that the prohibitions against alien gods were formulated. And it took another long controversy before all the implications of these prohibitions were accepted by all social groups. It is certainly no coincidence that the monotheistic tendency of Yahweh religion could only be realized fully in the exile, after the collapse of society and beyond the level of a political national religion. 128 The historical development of the prohibition of images seems to have run parallel to the prohibition of alien gods. Here too the explicit formulations of commandments (Ex.20.4-6; Deut. 5 .8-10;Ex.20-23; 34·17;Lev.I9.4; 26.1;cf. Deut.27.1 5) are relatively late; 129 in his battle against the cult of images the prophet Hosea (around 73 o) does not seem to have known any, otherwise he would certainly have referred to them.B 0 Nevertheless, even in the earlier period the Yahweh cult had a certain innate aniconic tendency: e.g. the throne of God in the Jerusalem temple was empty. The best explanation of this is that the Yahweh cult of the Exodus group did not have a divine image. 131 In the extreme conditions of the wilderness there was probably neither the material for such an image nor a cult in which it could be used; furthermore there was probably no need for it as long as Yahweh was regarded as the symbol of a distancing from Egyptian culture with its explicit theology of the divine image. Traces of aniconic cults can also be demonstrated elsewhere in peripheral cultures of the Near East (e.g. among the Nabataeans). 132 But that does not exclude the possibility that once the people were established in the cultivated land of Palestine Yahweh could be worshipped with the use of symbols and divine images which were customary there. 133 Cultic stones (massebas) are often mentioned in the earlier texts- without any criticism- as tangible symbols of divine presence (e.g. Gen.28.18), and are not excluded even by the earliest formulation of the prohibition against strange gods (Ex.20.23 b). In the meantime archaeological evidence for them has also emerged in clearly Israelite sanctuaries: for example, there

The religion of the liberated larger group were masse bas in the holy of holies of the temple of Yahweh in Arad. The ephod which, according to judg.8.22-28, Gideon erected was a precious symbol of Yahweh. Images of gods in the form of hman beings and animals are attested in the Yahweh cult of Dan (Judg.nf.) and Jerusalem (II Kings I8.4; Nehushtan, a serpent-like god of healing?). The bull image of Bethel may originally have been meant only as a pedestal on which Yahweh was envisaged as standing invisibly, but in the popular view it was directly identified with Yahweh (cf. Ex.32.I-6; Hos.8.6). A statuette which might possibly be meant to depict Yahweh was found in Hazor, 134 and the bronze figure of a bull in the hill-country of northern Samaria. 135 Thus until well into the time of the monarchy Yahweh could also have been worshipped with cultic symbols and divine images without any criticism being incurred. The battle against divine images only began with the prophet Hosea; for him they were the clearest expression of a 'Canaanite' takeover of Yahweh religion (Hos.4.I7; 8.4f., 6; Io.s; II.2; I3.2; I4.4,9). As a consequence of this controversy, probably at the end of the eighth century, first of all the manufacture of valuable statues of gods made of precious metal was forbidden (Ex.20.2 3b); in the seventh century the making of any divine images (2o.4a); and finally also the use of the traditional cult symbols (massebas and asheras, Deut.I6.2If.). In the exilic period the prohibition of images was even extended to the house cults (Deut.27.I5) and any form of pictorial representation in the context of worship (Ex.2o.4b-6; Deut.4.I5-I7). In any case, for the Deuteronomists the veneration of any cultic image, even if it was meant to represent Yahweh, was idolatry. In this process of clarification, which only began relatively late, opposition groups first recognized again that static material representation in an image of the kind customary throughout the ancient Near East robs Yahweh of a vital characteristic which he had had since the early period of Israelite religion: his transcendence and distance from the established world with its apparently firm structures of being and domination and its historical dynamic. Yahweh is not originally a god who could be drawn into the world through an image as a guarantor of the existing social order, but a god who with his promise of liberation transcends the existing world in the direction of a new world and better order. Israel cannot understand its god through the static representation of an image but only by following him on the way pointed out by his word (Deut-4-I2ff.). 136 Finally, the events on Sinai were regarded by the tradition as a fundamen·· tal covenant between Yahweh and Israel. But whereas scholars formerly often tended to regard the 'covenant on Sinai' as the bedrock of the tradition and make it the 'Mosaic' starting point for further historical development, 137 recently it has become increasingly clear that this is a later interpretation which is only loosely included in the Sinai pericope and only goes back to the Deuteronomic/Deuteronomistic theologians. 138 In the Sinai pericope the pre-Deuteronomic narrative probably first spoke of an

66

Israelite Religion in the Period before the State

obligation oflsrael to the law (Ex.24.3ff. *),and the events on Sinai were elaborated to become a formal, ritual covenant on the model of the Deuteronomic/Deuteronomistic conception (Deut.5 .2ff., etc.) by K0 only in the early post-exilic period (Ex.19.3 b-8; 24.3-8; Ex.34 *). 139 So it is quite certain that we cannot yet speak of a covenant in the full theological and legal sense in the early period, though we can speak of a special personal relationship between Yahweh and the Exodus group which had grown out of the experince of liberation and was consolidated by theophany and worship. Even without a formal covenant, this relationship with God already furthered the social integration of the group, and even without an explicit proclamation of commandments it embodied elementary norms of conduct within the group, above all those which, despite all difficulties over completing the act of liberation, were not to be given up but were to continue with the God of liberation. However, these norms were not yet differentiated in detail. The tradition of the wandering in the wilderness reports numerous dangers to which the group of fugitives from Egypt were exposed in the conditions of the wilderness region of southern Palestine. It speaks of the problems of hunger (Ex.16; Num.11.4-35) and thirst (Ex.15.22-27; 17.1-7; Num.2o.I-13), of the threat from enemies (Ex.I7.8-16) and wild beasts (Num.21.4b-9), and of serious failures to gain a foothold in cultivated land (Num.13f.). Such descriptions are hardly to be regarded as historical in the strict sense, 140 but rather as typical and realistic illustrations of the risks involved in the venture on which the Moses group had embarked. The action of liberation was continually threatened with failure; in its struggle for survival the group was constantly dependent on its god Yahweh. That in this connection the tradition speaks not only of Yahweh's leadership (he goes ahead of the group like a commander, halak lipne, Ex.I3.2I; 32.1,23; Num.I4.I4, cf. Num.I0.33 and Akkadian alik pani = commander) and saviour (Ex.Is-n) but also of his anger (Num.II; 13f.; 2of.) is certainly not completely without a basis, despite all the later theological projection: the experience of the wrath of God is a necessary part of a relationship to God, grounded in history and politics, of a larger group, the process of whose liberation is constantly endangered. 141 But however one may assess the wilderness tradition in detail, it is a good indication that the Exodus group did not succeed all at once in moving from disintegration in Egyptian society to integration in the cultivated land of Palestine. Historically, it is particularly significant that the beginnings of Yahweh religion are to be found in the extreme conditions outside cultivated land, even before the successful integration of the group. From there it developed a critical potential which could constantly be activated by later opposition groups against social structures of domination.

The religion of the pre-state alliance of larger groups 2. 3

67

The religion of the pre-state alliance of larger groups

Y.Aharoni, 'Arad: Its Inscriptions and Temple', BA 31, 1968, 2-32; id., The Land of the Bible. A Historical Geography, 1979; G.W.Ahlstrom, An Archaeological Picture of Iron Age Religion in Ancient Palestine, StOr 55 .3, 1984; R.Albertz, 'Hintergrund und Bedeutung des Elterngebots im Dekalog', ZAW 90, 1978, 34874; id., 'Israel I. Altes Testament', TRE XVI, 1987, 369-79; id., 'Schalom und Versohnung. Alttestamentliche Kriegs- und Friedenstraditionen', ThPr r8, 1983, r6-298; id., 'Tater und Opfer im Alten Testament', ZEE 28, 1984, q6-66; A.Alt, 'The Settlement of the Israelites in Palestine' (1925 ), in Essays on Old Testament History and Religion, ET r 9 66, r 73 -222; id., 'The Origins oflsraelite Law' ( r 9 34 ), in ibid., ror-72; id., 'Erwagungen iiber die Landnahme der Israeliten in Palastina' (1939), in Kleine Schriften I, 1959, 126-75; A.Angerstorfer, 'Aserah als "consort ofJahwe" oder Asirtah', BN 17, 1982, 7-r6; W.B.Barrik, 'What do we really know about "High Places"?', SEA 45, 1980, 6o-7; H.M.Bastard, The Religious Polemics of Amos, VTS 34, 1984; Biblical Archaeology Today, Proceedings of International Congress on Biblical Archaeology, Jerusalem, April 1984, 1985; ].Callaway, 'A Visit with Ahilud. A Revealing Look at Village Life when Israel first settled the Promised Land', BAR 9, 1983, 42-53; F.Criisemann, Widerstand gegen das Konigtum, WMANT 49, 1978;j.Day, 'Ashera in the Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitic Literature',JBL 105, 1986, 385-408; W.Dietrich, Israel und Kanaan. Vom Ringen zweier Gesellschaftssysteme, SBS 94, 1979; H.Donner, '"Hier sind deine Gotter, Israel!"', Wort und Geschichte, FS K.Elliger, 1973, AOAT 18, 45-50; O.Eissfeldt, 'Der geschichtliche Hintergrund der Erzahlung von Gibeas Schandtat' (1935), Kleine Schriften II, 1963, 64-80; id., 'El andJahweh', JSS 1, 1956, 25-37; H.Engel, 'Abschied von der friihisraelitischen Nomaden und der Jahweamphikytonie', BiKi 3 8, r 9 8 3, 4 3-6; id., 'Die Siegesstele des Merenptah. Kritischer Dberblick iiber die verschiedenen Versuche historischer Auswertung des Schlussabschnitts', Bib 6o, 1979, 373-99; id., 'Grundlinien meiner Hypothesen iiber die Entstehung und Gestalt der vorstaatlichen Stammegesellschaft', BiKi 38, 1983, 6o3; !.Finkelstein, 'Excavations at Shiloh 1981-1984. Preliminary Report', TA 12, 1983, so3; id., The Archaeology of the Israelite Settlement, 1988; E.J.Fisher, 'Cultic Prostitution in the Ancient Near East? A Reassessment', BTB 6, 1976, 225-36; F.S.Frick, The Formation ofthe State in Ancient Israel, The Social World of Biblical Antiquity Series 4, 1985; V.Fritz, 'Conquest or Settlement. The Early Iron Age Palestine', BA 50, 1987, 84-101; £.Gerstenberger, Wesen und Herkunft des 'Apodiktischen Rechts', WMANT 20, 196 s; C.H.J.de Geus, 'Agrarian Communities in Biblical Times: 12th to roth Centuries BCE', in Les Communautes Rurales II: Antiquite, 1984, 207-3 7; id., The Tribes ofIsrael, SSN 18, 1976; N.K.Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh. A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel 126o-roso BCE, 2 1981; C.F.Graesser, 'Standing Stones in Ancient Palestine', in E.F.Campbell (ed.), The Biblical Archaeologist Reader IV, 1983, 293-321; M.L.Gruber, 'Hebrew Q