Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The early Yahweh was also a god of light and fire. The story of the burning bush is well known but in addition Zechariah says ‘Yahweh will make lightnings’, while Isaiah describes him this way: ‘The light of Israel shall be for a fire, And his holy one for a flame . . . His lips are full of indignation, And his tongue is as a devouring fire.’⁶⁸ It is not so very far from here to Yahweh being ‘a consuming fire, a jealous god’.⁶⁹ Several aspects of lunar worship were also incorporated into early Judaism. For example, the Sabbath (shabbatum, the ‘full-moon day’ in Babylon) was originally the unlucky day dedicated to the malign god Kewan or Saturn, when it was undesirable to do any kind of work. The division of the lunar month into four weeks of seven days, dedicated in turn to the gods of the seven planets, is self-evident in its references.

When you look for them, the biblical verses linking early Judaism to even earlier pagan religions, showing all the core beliefs we have identified, are clear-cut. Far from being an ethereal, omnipotent and omniscient presence, the God of the early Hebrew scriptures lived in an ark. Otherwise, why was it sacrosanct, why the despair when the Philistines captured it? What now needs to be explained is two things: why Yahweh emerged as one God; and why he was such a jealous God, intolerant of other deities.

First, there are the particular circumstances of the Israelites in Palestine.⁷⁰ They were a small tribe, surrounded by powerful enemies. They were continually fighting, their numbers always threatened. The ark of Yahweh (the portable altar), in its house at Shiloh, seems to have formed the general meeting-place for Hebrew patriotism. Containing the golden calf (i.e., the bull), the ark was always carried before the Hebrew army. There was thus just one god in the ark, and although Solomon (tenth century BC) built temples dedicated to other Hebrew gods, which remained in existence for some centuries, Yahweh became in this way the main deity.⁷¹ For generations the two tiny Israelite kingdoms maintained a precarious independence between the great empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Beginning in the eighth century BC, however, this balancing act broke down and they were defeated in battle, first by the Assyrians, then by the Babylonians. The very existence of Israel was at stake and, in response, ‘there broke out an ecstasy of enthusiasm’ for Yahweh. In this way was generated the ‘Age of the Prophets’, which produced the earliest masterpieces of Hebrew literature, designed to shock the sinful Israelites into compliance with the wishes of their god, Yahweh, who, by the end of this period, had become supreme. ‘Prophet’ is a Greek word, meaning one who speaks before the sacred cave of an oracle.⁷²

There are two issues here, one of which will be considered now, the other in a later chapter. These are, first, the message and impact of the prophets and, second, the compilation of the Hebrew scriptures which, far from being the divinely inspired word of God, are, like all holy writings, clearly a set of documents produced by human hands with a specific aim.⁷³

The Hebrew prophets fulfilled a role that has been called unique in the history of humanity, but if so it was not so much prophecy in itself that marked them out as their loud and repeated denunciations of an evil and hypocritical people, and their bitter predictions of the doom that must follow this continued estrangement from God. To a man, the prophets were opposed to sacrifice, idolatry and to the traditional priesthood, not so much on principle as for the fact that ‘men were going through the motions of formally honouring God while their everyday action proved they had none of the love of God that alone gives sacrifice a meaning’.⁷⁴ The prophets’ main concern was Israel’s internal spirituality. Their aim was to turn Yahweh-worship away from idolatry (the idol in the ark), so that the faithful would reflect instead on their own behaviour, their feelings and failings. This concentration on the inner life suggests that the prophets were concerned with an urban religion, that they were faced with the problem of living together in close proximity. This may explain why, in their efforts to shock the Israelites into improving their morality, the prophets built up the idea of revelation.⁷⁵