BlackOxford's Reviews > Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan

Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (The Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies, 265)
by 

Andrew Mein (Series Editor), 

 

Claudia V. Camp (Series Editor), 

 

John Day

What’s In A Name?

My given name is Michael. Derived from Hebrew מיכאל, the name means “He who is like God.” Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other ‘el’ names (either as prefix or suffix) are scattered throughout the Hebrew Bible, all referring to the supreme deity. Israel itself is such a name, probably meaning “El will rule.” Our inheritance of these proper names largely goes unrecognised as the most immediate cultural link we have to the ancient religions of the Middle East - at least for those of us who carry around birth certificates entitled Elizabeth, Daniel, Raphael, Gabriel, or Ethel.

But here’s the thing: although these names are biblical, the god they refer to is not originally the Hebrew God. The discovery, almost a century ago, of texts in the Ugaritic language (a progenitor of Hebrew) clearly show that El was identified as a benign creator god by several cultures that are generally designated as Canaanite, including the Hebrew culture. This is further attested by other evidence, including a 13th century BCE Egyptian pharaonic stele. 

The numerous biblical references and allusions to El as identical to the god Yahweh indicate a comfortable assimilation of the two cults. As Professor Day notes: “Most scholars who have written on the subject during recent decades support the idea that Yahweh had his origins outside the land of Israel to the south,…” El and Yahweh complemented one another nicely in terms of desirable divine characteristics like age, wisdom, power and concern for humanity (with El being the likely favourite according to modern sensibilities). It also seems likely that the mutual assimilation was helped along by some positive politics in the region (unlike the extreme antipathy to another important local deity, Baal, who became a The Other for adherents to the cult of El/Yahweh).

Both El and Yahweh also have pre-histories. For example, El likely “involves a conflation of Elyon, lord of heaven, and El, lord of earth…” in earlier regional cultures but mentioned explicitly in the biblical books of Isaiah, Deuteronomy, and Psalms. The somewhat startling statement in the opening chapter of the book of Genesis to “Elohim,” that is to many unspecified gods involved in creation could be a reference to the “sons of god” or the “royal court of god,” as suggested in prior myths. The singular use of the name El Shaddai, probably meaning Lord of the Mountain and referring to an (assimilated) Amorite deity is also noteworthy. These suggest that at least some of the biblical authors weren’t at all sensitive about the origins or rigorous consistency of their thoughts about the divine; nor did they share the awe or fear in expression of the divine name with later commentators, editors, and other religious authorities.

Yahweh’s evolution before his conflation with El is similarly complex. Despite the cultic antipathy toward Baal, Yahweh clearly inherits much of Baal’s association with weather and its indifferently and capriciously directed power (cf. the Seven Thunders of Psalm 29 as an appropriation from Baal). The Ugaritic texts also affirm the assimilation of the mythology of conflict with monsters like the Leviathan and Behemoth to Yahweh from its Canaanite sources (19th century scholars had identified this as Babylonian in origin). 

Day systematically analyses most of the gods and goddesses relevant to the emerging form of Yahweh in a manner of interest primarily to the professional scholar. However it appears to me that the evolutionary trajectory of Yahweh is always in line with the general precept that we get the god we want. Put more positively: theology, especially in its mythological rather than its dogmatic form, is an attempt to formulate the fundamental principles of a society. These principles are necessarily poetic, and equally necessarily unstable as a society grapples with what has been hitherto unsaid, and perhaps unsayable, about what is important, just, lasting etc.

But there is also in the history of the development of the idea of Yahweh, an apparent meta-principle at play. Implicitly - perhaps driven by political exigency, some inherent drive toward cooperation, or intellectual satisfaction - the evolution of religious ideas through assimilation, conflation, combination and so forth is an attempt to find common ground. As in negotiating a peace treaty, this is essentially a literary exercise carried out to make otherwise mutually incoherent languages compatible. The result, while hardly to be called truth, is something nonetheless worthwhile. Could this be the primary historical lesson for not just religion but also science and politics, namely that all insistent dogmatisation is inevitably harmful to human well-being?

Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic by Simon Winchester
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Let’s Lighten Up

I don’t know what to make of this book. It seems to be a rambling journalistic account of something called ‘knowledge’ which it defines in a traditional way as “justified true belief.” Starting with Plato, it provides anecdotes and opinions from a vast array of philosophers, scientists, teachers and literary types about our state of knowledge without coming to any conclusion about either the efficacy of that state or it’s likely future. It therefore makes little if any contribution to either the perennial issues of epistemology or the more recent discussions of Artificial Intelligence. Perhaps the book’s primary function, intentional or not, is to provoke meditation. Here is mine:

Experience is mute. Knowledge has a voice. This voice sounds every time we speak about our experience, as well as in the archives, histories, manuscripts, diaries and algorithms that constitute our unique inheritance as Homo sapiens.

Knowledge is always in the form of language. It is consequently fundamentally communal. Even if some elements of knowledge are spoken, written, or merely thought by individuals, their linguistic character implies they have been shaped by a specific language and the culture in which that language is practiced.

Knowledge is, and always has been, infinite since the possibilities for the expression of experience are limitless. This is so even if our experiences themselves are limited by sensory abilities or technology. That knowledge is expanding at an increasing rate - from primitive signs, to language, to writing, to print, to electronic media - is a truism.

Experience is not knowledge. The connections between the world of experience and the world of knowledge have always been problematic, and have become obviously so as knowledge-technology itself becomes our dominant experience.

Nevertheless this dominance of knowledge over experience, long before the Internet or AI, has prevailed among the human species. Knowledge may not determine what we experience but it does most often set the bounds of what we can see. Knowledge has the advantage of the immense weight of a society to impose itself on individual experience.

Knowledge resists all attempts at verification through rational processes and calls experience which has not been captured/described/categorised in language as illusory. Conversely all experience that is so ‘encoded’ in language becomes part of recognised reality - most frequently with its own scientific, religious, superstitious, conspiratorial or other justification.

Knowledge only gives way to knowledge, and even then only when new knowledge is considered more useful in terms defined by/through/in the new knowledge. This usually occurs when adherents of the old knowledge die not because they accept the new knowledge as justified.

In short, knowledge is not something that we have or possess, either as individuals or as societies. If any thing, knowledge as the epitome of language possesses/controls/directs its participants. Education is, in the most general terms, the process of increasing knowledge, that is to say, one’s facility with language. But this means that education inevitably results in the mastery by language as much as the mastery of language.

Breaking the chains of knowledge may therefore be the challenge of knowledge itself. Knowledge is always misleading no matter how logical, sensible, or useful it may seem. Liberating knowledge, in other words, is doubt. Perhaps this is the authentic meaning of the myth of the tree in the garden of paradise - a kind of warning to not take anything too seriously.

View all my reviews

Thoth, the Hermes of Egypt by Patrick Boylan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Outstanding Religious Poetry

Thoth is the ibis-headed (sometimes monkey-headed) god of the ancient Egyptians, made famous by the costumes of medieval plague-doctors (among other things Thoth was a kind of Lord of the Dead). His mythical status and character probably originates independently as some sort of weather deity (as did the Hebrew YHWH). But like all divine beings, Thoth evolves and his myth is combined with others, particularly those of the perhaps more renowned figures of Osiris, Isis, and Horus.

Unlike later dogmatic religions, even Christianity which likely incorporated much of Thoth-like conceptions, the Egyptians didn’t feel the need to systematise or rationalise their divine thinking. Nevertheless certain themes, which can credibly called insights about reality, remain reasonably constant.

For example, in the mature stages of his myth, Thoth becomes the god of writing and speech, that is to say, language. Thoth is the scribe of Re-Atum, the supreme sun god and is responsible for maintenance of The Book, that is to say, the complete record of reality. The myth suggests that even the supreme god requires the mediation of language to comprehend the universe. Thoth’s association with the moon, and therefore the calculation of the seasons, implies even his control over the recognition of time.

Although Thoth is technically inferior to the sun god, he is nevertheless self-generated quite independently and unlike any of the other gods, who all have progenitors. It may not be too far-fetched to suggest that Thoth is in fact a precondition for the recognition, if not the very existence, of Re-Atum not to mention all other deities. The ancient historian Plutarch therefore identified Thoth with the Logos of Greek philosophy, the ordering principle of the universe. Thoth also comes to he thought of as the expressive ‘organ’ of Re-Atum. This same idea is, of course, expressed in the Christian gospel of John referring to Jesus as just this necessary condition for creation as well as the divine ‘voice’ to the world.*

Thoth’s incorporation into the myth of Horus, the son of Osiris and Isis, amplifies his participation in making the world perceptible. When Horus loses an eye in the fight with his brother/uncle Set, it is Thoth who not only finds the damaged organ but also heals and re-implants it into Horus. Hence it seems appropriate that Thoth is also the god of magic, in the very specific sense that he brings the unseen and the invisible literally to light. And since the Eye of Horus is also the symbol of the Pharoah, Thoth is the one who carries the soul of the Pharoah over the seas of heaven upon his death, as it were holding eternity in his hands.

Like all theology, the mythology of Thoth is a kind of poetry. And like all good poetry, that of Thoth seeks to both identify and undermine its dependency on language. Nothing, certainly nothing that could be considered human, can exist outside of language. This seems to me a central message of this part of Egyptian Mythology.

* In some legends, Thoth is considered as “the first begotten of Re.” To protect himself from danger or sickness, a man need only “invoke the name of Thoth” to become one with him and therefore invulnerable. Thoth is the saviour who comes when he is called upon. One cannot but suspect that the Trinitarian thinking of the early Christian church, consciously or otherwise, borrowed from this source.

Postscript: this is the first book I’ve read and the first review I’ve posted in about 18 months. I have been more or less blind as far as print media of any length due to cataracts. But now after my second op two weeks ago, the world has opened up. I haven’t seen this distinctly or colourfully for half a century. A miracle perhaps, except I know it was rather the skill of several very talented doctors.

View all my reviews