Israelite Religion—from

Levites to Prophets and Messianic Kings

Karl W. Luckert

Preface

Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire: Theological and Philosophical Roots of Christendom in Evolutionary Perspective was a book published in 1991 by the State University of New York Press. It has since gone out of print. All the while, inquiries about its availability are on the increase. Inasmuch as no scholar likes to see his most significant piece of work die a premature or unnecessary death, I have begun to revise its five portions to be displayed as separate "booklets" (or "pages") on the Internet. I have no illusions that this fresh exposure will in some miraculous manner make the content much easier to read. But as it was, the original book had a serious flaw that hereby can be remedied. The 1991 edition roams enthusiastically across no less than five academic disciplines. Not all the readers have appreciated this scope and complexity—and among potential reviewers only a courageous few have accepted the challenge. Inasmuch as the Internet presents itself as a perfect medium for virtual illusions I shall pretend here, for a while, that the book's five sections are separate booklets that can stand by themselves. So, for the time being my 1991 publication has become again a manuscript in progress. This means, what you read here today may not be exactly what you will find here tomorrow. 

This booklet sketches the rivulet of Hebrew religio-political thought and fervor as formerly it flowed through a stretch of historical time. It is written from the point of view of someone who, guided still by positive affections, continues to labor to better understand his Christian heritage. It now appears that the Christian religion was “conceived” by the seed of kingdom of heaven enthusiasm that issued from Judaism during the first century C.E. It was engendered when that enthusiasm for a new world order was kindled first by John the Baptizer and then enhanced by Jesus of Nazareth. It became anchored in the general flow of world history by the messianic teachings, by the living and dying, of the latter.

The notion of God's heavenly kingdom evolved from a longstanding Hebrew skepticism toward all forms of grand domestication. For definitions see the earlier booklet in this series, titled What is Religion? In Hebrew tradition that distrust can be traced, by way of examining ancient prophetic judgments on imperialistic ambitions. That same antimonarchic sentiment, together with the very instability of attempted Hebrew monarchies, may be traced all the way back to pre-monarchic priests like Samuel and thence to the Exodus epic told by Levitic priests. The kingdom of heaven idea proclaimed by Jesus, of a kingdom that is not really of this world where other types of kingdoms do abound, belongs to a very long sequence of historical events. And this stream of events originated with Hebrews who in one fashion or other knew themselves to be enslaved by Egyptian imperialism.

The ontology that underlies Greek philosophy is another such Egypt-inspired rivulet. It poured from Egypt half a millennium after the formative Hebrew reaction scored in history. It will be discussed separately in Booklet Four.

Most historians who labor within the larger Judeo-Christian tradition generally write about this subject matter defensively, in smaller-than-life installments. If and when historical overviews are attempted at all, many scholars are prepared to accommodate the expectations of audiences within the larger Judeo-Christian stream. Historical data in this field therefore often are presented and interpreted at the level of the lowest common denominator. All the while, general historians of religions, who labor to understand all religions in the world together, in accordance with the same rules of fairness, rarely dare step into the minefield of Judeo-Christian specialties.

Even the attempt of writing for a more limited audience of historians of religions can be perilous. Most historians of religions themselves are fugitives from the Judeo-Christian stream, even as they still work alongside its banks and in its institutions. Some among them have escaped their parental traditions and moved away a little farther than others. Their historical evaluations of biblical texts tend to be either overly defensive or overly aggressive, depending on their personal distances. Of course, such defensiveness is never admitted publicly—and perhaps it should not have been mentioned here.

* * *

This historical sketch of Hebrew Fire represents a personal inventory throughout. During the years of my youth I was taught to read and believe Bible stories literally and, wherever that was impossible, devotionally. In Sunday school I learned about the universal divine law mostly from Exodus 20—during the years of World War II. The ethics pertaining to war and genocide I tried to understand, devoutly, from Joshua 7, Deuteronomy 7 and 20, and 1 Samuel 15. Neither I, nor my elders understood the absurdity we beheld in our hands, as we were unaware of the holocaust that elsewhere in our homeland actually applied these Bible lessons. I first heard about the Holocaust at age eleven, after the war. I noticed the fact of anti-Semitism after I had come to America when, also, I experienced some anti-German backlash. I became aware of the puzzle of Semitic anti-Semitism several years after that.

I served in America's armed forces, and in church I sang along, patriotically, intoning the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I honestly saw glimpses of “the glory of the coming of the Lord”—and thereby felt exhilarated. At the same time, quietly and increasingly so, I began to worry about some of those divine mandates that the Bible seemed to furnish, in great abundance, to a wide assortment of religious egotists—reflecting, of course, a bad habit of which I myself was not entirely free.

With such sacred scriptures in our hands, how can Jews and Christians ever hope to get along. Our monotheistic faiths supported by idolized holy books, alongside Muslims who brandish their own, we have all become walking contradictions—and ticking time bombs as well. With specialized divine covenants we have lent our fighting hands to a God whom our ancestors have pretended to understand. Monotheistic and atheistic reactionaries together, fully endowed with inspired truths and the most advanced weaponry, are able to justify on behalf of the world's salvation any amount of destruction. Together these monotheists and atheists have become our planet's most dangerous creatures.

Such are the questions and worries that led me to the worldwide study of the history of religions. These also are the questions that tempted me, at the outset, to omit this portion pertaining to the Hebrew heritage from my discussion. It is conceivable that my words will generate more strife. But then, for the sake of God's love for humankind, and for human rationality and decency toward one another, our sacred books that we have learned to brandish as weapons need some dulling. The truth shall make us free, perhaps. An honest historical study might contribute a few fresh glimpses to the much-needed global historical perspective. What other honest academic point of view is there left for me, other than the one that permits an open perspective on the entire history of religions? Is there something else out there for someone whose native language is identical with the language that facilitated the Holocaust!

Nor is such a study irrelevant in an age when democracy has become a universal beacon of hope. With the confidence that initially belonged to brothers of Christ the Son of God, with that same confidence secularized ever so gradually, our Western fathers of democratic revolutions have stood up to kings and emperors as their mortal equals. And thus they wrote their Magna Charta, their Declarations of Independence, their Manifestoes. And so they continued to re-write their methodologies for doing history of religions.

The Monotheism of Moses

The ancient nation of Israel commemorated its exodus from Egypt as the moment of its birth—and that exodus was inspired by and accomplished with visions of fire. First there was the fire of God's holy presence that Moses saw when he faced a bush aflame in the desert. Then, concerning Israel's exodus from Egypt itself, we are told that

The Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light. (Exodus 13:21)

The backdrop for Yahweh's covenant with Israel, and Israel's reception of divine law as it was mediated through Moses, was similarly draped by divine fire:

And Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire; and the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain quaked greatly. (Exodus 19:18)

Before they were written on sheepskin, biblical accounts about the man Moses were filtered through several centuries of oral tradition. They were trickled through creative minds of many generations of storytellers. The present shape of these stories may not have been finalized until seven or eight centuries after the supposed event. Like premium wines, so stories often get better with age and, needless to say, the God of Israel made plenty of time available for Torah stories to ferment and improve.

All the while, it is not the purpose of this book either to establish or to refute textual roots. Our goals are broader and far more humble and important. Presenting a few examples that might help illuminate Egyptian aggravations or influences on Levitic, Israelite, and Judaic religion will be a sufficient task for this booklet.

Here and there in this study political history will have to be blended with literary history, to the chagrin of purist historians. The condition of our sources does not permit a clean line of demarcation. But even though large portions of the landscape may remain shrouded in morning fog by this approach, it is hoped that the general nature and direction of the Hebrew ideological rivulet, which flowed from Egypt through Palestine into the Mediterranean realm, will emerge from this historical sketch clearly enough to be worth our while.

Moses an Egyptian Hebrew

Apart from partial Hebrew scriptures we have no evidence that Moses, the leader of Israel's "Exodus," ever lived. A self-serving cult document is not the best possible source for historical proof. It is necessary, therefore, to slide sideways from general history and substitute some history of Hebrew literature. The time of composition of literary works, in a roundabout manner, is still a historical datum that may be considered for understanding the people who wrote and used them.

The Exodus epic, as recorded in the book of Exodus, begins with a brief reference to a time when the “people of Israel” were not yet slaves in Egypt. Perhaps another hand has added the story of how a Levite baby boy was exposed in a reed basket, somewhere along the Nile. He was found and adopted by the pharaoh's daughter, who raised the child in her royal surroundings and, presumably, gave him his Egyptian name, Moses.

Inasmuch as a similar exposure of a baby in a reed basket has been ascribed to the first Mesopotamian imperialist, Sargon of Akkad, the literal historical weight of this Moses story will have to be adjusted downward. Was this story recited to establish the credentials of Moses as a great hero of Sargon's stature? And then, why would later Israelite scribes have wanted to gloss over the Egyptianness of this man before accepting him as a their savior hero? In any case, the story tells about the birth and the early months of Moses' life in Egypt. It leaves a large lacuna concerning the remainder of his life in that great land. This much is clear, the story explicitly tries to link the man's birth to his later life as a leader who was destined to govern a runaway group of Hebrew slaves.

We are told that at a mature age Moses observed, one day, how a Hebrew man was being beaten by an Egyptian supervisor. Moses sided with the underdog and killed the Egyptian tormentor. In fear of punishment he then fled to Midian, an oasis in the Sinai desert to the east. A priest named Jethro took the Egyptian fugitive into his home and gave him one of his daughters in marriage. In time she bore Moses two sons.

One day, so the narrative continues, while watching the animals of his father‑in‑law, Moses saw an apparition: an “angel of fire” burning from the middle of a bush. Miraculously, the fire did not consume its branches. Ever since his flight from Egypt the man Moses must have wondered about his obligations toward the Hebrews who still languished and suffered back in Egyptian labor camps. His thoughts apparently were fuelled by the nagging memory of his personal violent and “criminal” interference. To justify this deed, it seems, he was predestined eventually to act on this matter. He was challenged to upgrade his status from being a fugitive from Egyptian law to that of a minority representative in political exile.

But be that as it may, from the burning bush Moses heard the voice of God. And that voice of God announced the divine decision that the Hebrew slaves were to be delivered from the bondage of Egyptian grand domestication. Then and there God commissioned Moses to approach the elders of these subjugated Hebrews in Egypt with his saving proposition:

You and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, “The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; and now, we pray you, let us go a three days journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.” (Exodus 3:18)

The reason for which God enlisted here the services of a leader who was familiar with proceedings at the Egyptian royal court is rather transparent. The strategy of Moses was to hoodwink the pharaoh with a ruse of citing religious obligations. Moses and the elders of the Hebrew slaves were to request a furlough, on the pretext of having to perform religious rites to their God who even by Egyptian reckoning dwelt in the Sinai desert. The motif of a pilgrimage pretext is mentioned again, later in the story, after Moses was actually granted permission for a portion of the people to leave. But Moses rejected a partial exodus and insisted that all Hebrew slaves are required by their God to go on this holy pilgrimage together.

In Hebrew opinion the stated objective of performing religious services in the Sinai desert was amply fulfilled later on, as their Exodus story unfolds. The people's service to their God, who dwells outside Egypt, was intended to last for all time. With the hindsight of tradition it had to be that way, or else Moses could be accused of having paraded before the pharaoh while telling a lie.

Apparently Moses held some initial hope for a diplomatic settlement, to the effect that a measure of religious freedom could be negotiated with an Egyptian pharaoh. And truly, if ever on earth there was a man who could negotiate religious privileges for oppressed slaves in Egypt, it would have been someone like Moses who knew the ways of Egyptian government. Such a spokesman for minority rights would have had to be familiar with Egyptian theology, as well as with political theory, and know that both of these were the same thing. He would have had to be acquainted with the ways of Egyptian as well as of Hebrew religion. And he would have had to be someone who knew how to exploit the differences between these two.

Yahweh as Amun

After we are told by the primary narrator how the Hebrew God has introduced himself as “Yahweh” (Exodus 3:7-8), another hand informs those who might still be unfamiliar with the God's manner of referring to himself by means of the word symbol YHWH (Exodus 3:9–15). We are told that the designation Yahweh was ascribed to the God of the Hebrews precisely at the crucial point in Levitic history, in preparation for the Exodus. The question that a thoughtful Israelite might have wished to ask concerning this word symbol is conveniently put in the mouth of Moses, who asks God directly:

If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, “the God of your fathers has sent me to you,” and they ask me, "What is his name?" What shall I say to them? God said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am.” And he said, “Say to the people of Israel, `I AM has sent me to you.'” (Exodus 3:13–14)

Devout readers in later Judaism have avoided reading the letter configuration YHWH because to them it signified the unspeakable name of God. It seems as though, somehow, the followers of Moses remembered part of the original lesson of Egyptian theology, that the name of God is not to be pronounced, on penalty of death. According to what else their leader Moses must have known about such holy matters, however, his people need not have worried excessively about this particular theological technicality.

Really! In second booklet of this series we have already shown how, in the context of Egyptian Amun theology—which the Egyptian aristocrat Moses must have studied thoroughly—it was impossible to pronounce the real name of the supreme God. Not even the lesser gods, those manifestations of angelic rank who surrounded the hidden essence of Amun, knew their God's real name.

The chances of ordinary humankind ever getting to know and to be able to pronounce the real name of the Hebrew God were equally remote. The word symbol YHWH, or I AM WHO I AM, is not really a name. If anything, it added up to God gently telling off Moses—letting him know that the Holy Name is not for him to know.

The Exodus story tells about Moses as a leader of Hebrews who was born of Hebrew parents; yet, he lived the early decades of his life as an Egyptian aristocrat in royal surroundings. If the second half of the preceding summary sentence is accepted as a possibility, and I see no reason why it cannot be, it follows that this man Moses also must have been well versed in traditional Egyptian political theory. Throughout Egyptian history the disciplines of political theory and theology belonged together. Moses, the aristocrat, therefore must have known contemporary Amun theology very well.

Startled by a spectacular fire and an anonymous divine call, Moses demanded assurance that he would be able to finish the job that, long ago, he had begun with an act of violence. Even though he asked his question on behalf of the Hebrew elders who lived in Egypt, he obviously needed additional divine assurance for himself. He needed this assurance to shore up his own confidence.

Our Egyptian-educated potential leader, who still had to be convinced of the feasibility of his assigned (and chosen) task, found himself caught up in an interesting dilemma. Could he who obviously knew Amun theology very well convince himself to actually obey the call of a God of Hebrew wanderers? And, if he could obey, could his faith actually have withstood the challenges and disappointments of the daring Exodus stratagem he envisioned?

Furthermore, could he have accomplished all these things, trustingly, if this Hebrew God who commissioned him actually had told him his name? In Egypt it was the hidden-ness of the All-God's nature, and of his holy name, that rendered Amun the greatest imaginable power in the cosmos. Could Moses have faced Amun and the Egyptian pharaoh on behalf of any other God who was defined less great than Amun? Or, in the Egyptian fashion of doing theology—on behalf of any God who with his magnitude could not account for all that was known about Amun? Probably not.[1]

But then, I am is not a name, as Amun in Egypt was not a name either. To perceive some theological unity between two unnameable or undefinable configurations of reality is not overly difficult. Both have their very hidden-ness and mystery in common. The Egyptian root of Amun is imn, which denotes hidden-ness and invisibility. During the New Kingdom the god Amun also was referred to as “He who abides in all things” (Der in allen Dingen bleibt).[2] How great is the distance from this theology to that which concerns itself with an I AM, or with an I AM WHAT I AM, or with an I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE, or with a HE CAUSES TO BE?

Hans Bonnet rejects the idea that a close parallelism may exist in the case of these two theologies. For instance, concerning the Egyptologist Sethe he remarked that the latter “dares to suspect that Yahweh was shaped after the model of Amun” (Bonnet pp. 31f). Obviously, Bonnet's judgment is based on a very spiritualized interpretation of Yahweh that appears informed more by Hellenic philosophical dualism than the Moses religion itself. Is pure spiritual transcendence really the most important aspect of Mosaic monotheism? Is a God who disguises his presence in a burning bush, in a cloud, or in a pillar of fire really “transcendent” in the Hellenic sense of transcendental Platonic “ideas”? This writer has concluded otherwise.

Although an influence of Indo-European dualism on Yahweh theology during the period of the Judges and the early monarchy is being ruled out here, one nevertheless must assume a strong basis of Semitic-Canaanite religiosity for all those Hebrews who dwelled in Palestine. As we shall have occasion to delineate shortly, most of the Israelite tribes may never have been in Egypt—though, in that case all of them have become involved with the Egyptian-Philistine frontier. The actual exposure of the Levites to Egyptian culture and religion, of course, would have depended on the length of their sojourn there. It seems in any case useful to consider in some detail the impact that Egyptian Amun theology, via Moses and his fellow Levites, could have had on the larger Israelite confederation. After all, an Exodus event and a Torah tradition attributed to Moses, in the course of a few centuries, became the central features of Israelite unity. The Egyptian-Hebrew connection is explored here to call attention to a neglected dimension of inquiry.

* * *

And yes, there also were significant differences between Yahweh theology and Amun theology from the outset. After all, the respective cults of these supreme deities engaged in mythological wrangling over the outcome of the Exodus episode. Each sponsored a different unit of people. Amun theology emphasized more the freshness of divine breath and living water, in continuity with Shu's Heliopolitan function and with the fertile blessings of the Nile. This was a function that Yahweh may have assumed only later in Israelite history. It was in the Elijah cycle of stories, 1 Kings 18, that the Hebrew Yahweh of the desert finally established himself as the bona fide giver of rain for agriculture.

Yahweh theology, at least the Levitic strain that traced its origins to the Sinai area, emphasized much more the fire of God's sternness and wrath. By comparison, this degree of severity was accounted for in Egypt by the lowest Enneadean hypostasis of Seth. In realistic perception of greater‑than‑human configurations of reality, what else could one have expected? A people who dwell all their lives in the lush and fertile Nile valley, naturally, will experience more of the All-God's Shu aspect. And a people who roam in the desert and daily struggle to survive its fierce heat—such as was the life-style of the Midianites who harbored Moses—naturally will experience more of the fiery Seth aspect. Whoever Moses was, he surely was aware of this difference, he is said to have lived at both places long enough to learn about such things.

A new and far more significant difference between Yahweh and Amun theology emerges only subsequently, in the story pertaining to the Exodus struggle itself, especially on the Israelite side. YHWH became the scribal designation of the God of gods at a time when that deity made a special effort to liberate a chosen group of Hebrew slaves from bondage in Egypt. For the history and evolution of religion, this means that a new kind of “God of gods” awareness thereby was introduced into the world to stay. This new God of gods theology stood in direct conflict with the very imperial grand domesticators who originally had defined and traditionally had been ruling in the name of the God of gods.

The God who revealed himself to Moses, by his very act of revelation, showed himself to be greater than his imperialistic apparitions that preceded him. He no longer endorsed a human deified King of kings in return for his keep or for the maintenance of his state cult. He was a God who forbade sacred images that, back in Egypt, were prominently used in the state cult. He forbade these images, apparently, because in the hands of priestly grand domesticators such were used as levers for political control. In contrast to the Egyptian and Canaanite deities who blessed artists and sculptor-priests, apparently, the God of Moses entrusted the management of his cult to a class of scribes. So it appears, judged by the written legacy these scribes produced.

The God of Moses was Lord of the entire world and, at the same time, also savior of a people who previously had fallen victim to ambitious grand domesticators. During the millennia that followed, this God, together with the reactionary universal salvation movements his cult inspired, toppled many a grand domesticator and pretender to divine authority. He disallowed and reformed many an over-domestication system or “civilization.”

Yahweh as Amun-Seth

Before leaving the monotheism of Moses to itself, to watch how its gospel of slave liberation has infected Palestine and lands beyond, it still may be helpful to say a few things about the Egyptian “Seth” element as it pertains to the Yahweh‑Amun theology of Moses.

In its Heliopolitan orthodox setting the divine Ennead, which includes Seth, represents a series of hypostases that emanate from a single source, Atum. During the New Kingdom the Amun theology that Moses had learned was still the full heir of the orthodox manner of thinking about theogony, as a process of generation and emanation. Therefore, the theological mind of Moses can be expected to have been aware not only of the essential attributes of the hidden godhead of the New Kingdom, Amun, but also of the God's desert heat emanation—the portion of Seth. As a desert god, Seth was known among Egyptians also as the god of foreigners, of thunder, lightning, and earthquakes. Seth in his cosmic dimension, on a monthly cycle, also was deemed responsible for injuring the poor eye of Horus, the moon.

It has been told that Moses spoke to the pharaoh in the name of the God of the Hebrews (Exodus 5:3). To an Egyptian pharaoh that meant in the name of Seth. Of course, the Hebrew narrator happily proceeded to exaggerate the status of Moses another step, at the expense of a supposedly superstitious pharaoh. But then, this is understandable. The story was told to amuse Hebrews, not Egyptians:

…the Lord said to Moses, "See, I make you as God to the Pharaoh; and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet." (Exodus 7:1)

It is uncertain how much historical weight can be given to the ten plagues that, with the exception of the last, can be explained in terms of ordinary natural or environmental imbalances. All nine, it must be acknowledged, also proved ineffective for softening the pharaoh's “hardened heart.”

The initial ruse of having to make a three‑day journey into the Sinai desert, to fulfill religious obligations under the threat of divine punishment, may have been only a cover for a more subtle ruse. What halfway intelligent pharaoh would not have been able to see through the first one? And yes, the story tells how the pharaoh hardened his heart, as could reasonably be expected of him.

Perhaps the real goal or ruse, from the outset, was to nag and intimidate the pharaoh, and wear him down to a point where he no longer would pay attention. Repeated rumors, to the effect that these people were about to leave, could so have been neutralized by the persistent formal diplomatic requests of Moses. Repeated unsubstantiated rumors could have created an impression to the effect that Moses and these slaves would never try to leave without the pharaoh's official consent. Such a subtle strategy could have given the escapees much needed lead time before the ruler would seriously have taken note. Of course, these are mere speculations based on the style of subterfuge by which political problems are being resolved in Near Eastern lands still today.

But then, the tenth and special plague attracts our attention as the pivotal point in the Exodus story plot. All of Egypt's firstborn sons, we are told, have been slain by an executioner angel of Yahweh. It is high time to rethink this Hebrew story plot from the hypothetical point of view of a twofold Hebrew‑Egyptian mind, such as had been the mind of Moses. The God who killed the firstborn sons of the Egyptians would have been Seth to them, the very god of desert dwellers. Furthermore, on the Egyptian side, the color of appearance of Seth, and of all his evil deeds, was red.[3] On the Hebrew side, Mosaic tradition has accented the role of their God with all kinds of red “fire” kratophanies.

Egyptians always have experienced unease in the presence of Seth. Their perception of this lowest Enneadean hypostasis, in Egyptian tradition, clearly has constituted the weakest point in the politico-religious structure within which an Egyptian pharaoh was obliged to operate. Even if critical historiography refuses to accept the tenth Exodus plague as a historical event and even if the rite of Passover is to be understood only as an historicized ancient communal herder sacrifice, both of these motifs together nevertheless may contain a historical kernel of fact. They hint at an actual diplomatic leverage that Moses reasonably could have applied to the Egyptian royal court.

Traditionally, whenever in Egypt a pharaoh died the god Seth was known to have killed him, reduced him or transformed him into the condition of an Osiris corpse. From the Hebrew perspective, of course, Yahweh upstaged the Egyptian perception of Seth. Instead of waiting to kill an old Egyptian pharaoh, he killed his firstborn son. This means he killed the very person who, on his ceremonial rebirth as Horus during the next enthronement rite, was meant to become the ruling pharaoh.

Egyptian mythology knows the ruling pharaoh as Horus and the avenger of Osiris. The young king supposedly was the one who was to have mutilated Seth during a battle that then ensued.[4] According to Egyptian tradition, however, that victory of Horus over Seth was never a decisive one. Seth was mutilated, and while they struggled the avenger Horus lost his eye. Both divinities had to be healed by Thoth. This meant that after their struggle Seth was again in a position to strike another blow against the next Horus‑king of Egypt, whenever he chose to do so. And everyone knew that ruling pharaohs when they suffered death were dispatched by Seth, to be thereby transformed into Osiris. In this manner the god Seth repeatedly defeated a ruling Egyptian Horus. He transformed him back into the mode of his brother Osiris.

To the extent that Moses spoke authoritatively to the pharaoh, in the name of a God who behaved as Amun and Seth combined—or as the Hebrew narrator would mockingly have it, to the extent that Moses himself impersonated that kind of a God—he indeed did have a plausible case as to why the Hebrew people should be let go. People who belonged to this dangerous God of the desert, in Egypt, could not be held captive indefinitely with impunity. Moreover, it also was reasonable to think that the people of Seth should want to appease this dangerous God in the desert places where, according to Egyptian perception, he actually lived.

It is quite possible therefore that a diplomatically astute Moses indeed assured the pharaoh that an appeased Yahweh-Amun-Seth would refrain from plaguing Egypt. The presence of a narrative with ten plagues, which now dominates the larger Exodus epic, suggests that at one point some threats of plagues indeed could have been made.

The clinching plot of the Exodus, which subsequently could have given credence to a series of diplomatic plague threats against Egypt, was Yahweh‑Seth's killing of the Egyptian Horus-to-be; that is, the ruling pharaoh's firstborn son. For good measure it is said as well that the Hebrew God has killed all the firstborn sons in all Egyptian houses not marked with Sethian "red" blood.

The initial diplomatic bait that Moses might have offered to the pharaoh is now coming into better focus. In exchange for letting the Hebrew slaves serve their God in his distant desert, the land of Egypt would be spared the typical calamities that a foreigner's god, like Seth, would be able to inflict. Positively stated, Moses had offered Egypt a conditional blessing.

But diplomatic positivism of the "deal" offered by Moses was overshadowed, in the narrative, when subsequent Hebrew storytellers got carried away celebrating their escape. For good measure they celebrated all the punishments their mighty God could possibly have brought down upon those hated Egyptians.

The death of the pharaoh's firstborn son may be pondered in terms of historical realism still a little further. If Moses actually had approached the Egyptian pharaoh so as to appear to him as a spokesman of a God like Amun‑Seth, and if we consider how at some point during these negotiations Moses must have become desperate, then a conditional curse laid by him on the Egyptian crown prince could have been a logical next step. The story has it that the king's firstborn son actually died and that, in a subsequent state of grief, the disparaged pharaoh finally ordered the Israelites to get out.

Was this story merely the product of Hebrew wishful thinking? Was it all generated by priestly Levites to anchor an ancient herder ritual in the bedrock of Palestine historical relevance, to commemorate liberation? Possibly, yes. But then, if such thinking was possible by Hebrew minds at all—and the existence of the story testifies to the fact that it was—then it also is conceivable that a desperate Moses could have unloaded on the pharaoh's son some conditional “curse” or “cause” of death. With his Sethian mission, an impatient Moses easily could have cursed the entire sacred Egyptian tradition of royal succession. A strong Amun‑Sethian curse laid on the crown prince, possibly even pronounced within hearing range of the lad, conceivably could have contributed to bringing a sensitive young royal heir to his deathbed.

The Hebrew storyteller seems to have remembered that Moses acted like a God! Inasmuch as the curse was conditional, only the pharaoh himself could have removed it by liberating his Hebrew slaves. Thus, in consideration of Egyptian religious beliefs current at the time, and in light of experiences that had accrued for Moses, the basic steps of the Exodus appear to have been undertaken in accordance with a well-reasoned strategy.

In all likelihood Yahweh's commissioning of Moses, at the site of the burning bush, was no more than the turning point from theory to practice. While he lived at Midian, Moses had many years to ponder Egyptian weaknesses and Hebrew points of leverage. He probably still knew personally some key Egyptians at the court, and he knew their religio-psychological strengths and weaknesses. He would have been able to exploit these.

Still another question may be asked concerning the Hebrew Exodus, about what exactly might have happened on the Egyptian side. Was a divine curse really sufficient to scare and to kill the crown prince? Was it enough to create confusion, by which Moses and his people could escape? Or, were other death‑dealing measures resorted to in the process, perhaps with some inside help at the court? Could Moses have lent a helping hand in the Passover plot by sending a human angel of death into the pharaoh's house? But then again, bodily inflictions may not have been necessary. Curses were taken seriously enough in those days. Could the original Exodus plot indeed have been that simple?

Maybe—and maybe not. The exact historical sequence of events eludes those of us who live over three millennia later. Nevertheless, the religio-political affinity that exists between the Egyptian-educated aristocrat Moses and the man who in Hebrew literature we have come to know as the lawgiver of Yahweh still can be surmised in broad outlines. With help from the history of religions it may be possible to excavate some fresh hypotheses, perhaps with improved historical clarity, beyond what hitherto has been imagined.

God and his Created World

Even though the Exodus religion historically and foremostly represents a reaction against Egyptian civilization and its program of over-domestication, its theological tenets nevertheless come into better view when they are seen as having emerged from that same civilization. The form and content of all “antitheses” in this world are determined by “theses” to which they respond. Rarely do religious reforms change everything as thoroughly as, in each instance, the inheritors of those reforms would have liked to believe. For learning more about ancient Israel's theological tenets we must turn to its cosmogony.

According to both Hebrew creation stories in Genesis, taken together, God created the world by divine word or command, and then gave life to Adam from his own breath. No essential element in either of these story plots could be classified exclusively as Hebrew or Semitic. The ancient Egyptians had expanded their divine seminal emission metaphor many centuries earlier, perhaps in a first round while educating inexperienced children or semi-experienced juveniles. Already the oldest stratum of Egyptian texts had explained the generative emanational process as Atum's “spitting.” It referred to the godhead as blowing forth his breath, or his Shu. Considerably later, but still some centuries before a Hebrew pen gave us Genesis 1, Memphite theologians interpreted that same creative emission, or spitting, in terms of spitting forth words or giving creative commands—thus in terms of logos theology.[5]

A word of caution, already given in Chapter 5 of this book, must be repeated here. From the late point in time from which we now must view these matters, this logos modification may seem like an immense improvement. But examined in a larger historical perspective, it seems as though this improvement or refinement could as well have been very superficial. Already in Memphite theology that same “refinement” added up to a badly balanced theological statement and, therefore, to a mixed societal blessing. Had the Memphite theology been adopted unilaterally, it would have given to Egyptian kings undue power without sufficient checks and balances. Kings were the ones who issued most of the so-called divine and creative commands that inferior Egyptians had to obey.

For the sake of human rights it therefore was necessary in Egypt to also retain, alongside, the older and more universalistic Heliopolitan Atum mythology, including the phallus and the hand metaphors. Every male and female, high and low, was able to participate to some degree in that dimension of divine creative emanation. A measure of elementary divine status, basic equal rights for all people, could thus be derived much more easily from the older stratum of Heliopolitan Atum mythology. This also means that basic human rights could be hoped for more easily on the basis of the old Heliopolitan theogony than on the "advanced" logos theory of Memphis.

On the other hand, Hebrew scribes, after their liberation from exile in Babylonia, recorded their account of creation in surprising harmony with the Egyptian Memphite mythos of “creation by logos” (approximately 500 B.C.E.). They included a full sequence of divine creative commands, but they did so without having to worry about political checks and balances. The Judaic scribe could afford to do so, because at that time he and his people no longer had a deified king to establish or a mortal Son of God to keep in check. On that account he and his readers could afford to celebrate the notion of creation of the world by genuine divine command.

All the while, the second Hebrew creation story, the creation of Adam by clay and divine breath, belongs to a much older literary stratum of Egyptian and Hebrew thought. Creation by divine breath is an old notion that certainly antedates the ancient Egyptian idea of creation by Shu. Inasmuch as breath is an essential life function for all higher forms of life, this notion of divine breath could have originated almost anywhere on the globe.

Most of our schoolbooks, today, overemphasize the dependency of ancient Israelite religion on Semitic Mesopotamia. We are told that Abraham and his ancestors roamed there, and that the Mesopotamian and the Hebrew flood stories are structurally similar. But these schoolbooks generally were written from a post-Exodus bias, that is, from an anti-Egyptian perspective in the shape of which much of the Torah has been cast.

Before this fresh historical assessment evokes unnecessary concerns, I might hurry to add that in light of slavery in Egypt, which preceded Exodus and Torah, this anti-Egyptian sentiment may well have been justified. It probably was justified as much as, earlier, the Egyptian anti-Semitic resentment against Hyksos invaders was justified. Indeed, all these tribalistic and nationalistic sentiments, at one time or other, may have been proper. But should historians of today still permit themselves to be blindfolded by hatreds three millennia old?

Is the polytheistic theological comedy in the Mesopotamian flood story, in the Gilgamesh Epic, really as significant for elucidating its Hebrew counterpart, as it is generally made out to be? Is it very important to know how capricious gods drowned Mesopotamians when we know that the All-God of Egypt inundated the Egyptians every year as well? Flood stories among flood plain civilizations, and in this world of manifest limestone strata and fossils, are numerous and widely spread. And, religiously speaking, most of them are of very little consequence.

Are not creation stories infinitely more important for understanding Near Eastern domesticator cultures and religions? After all, creation stories are what legitimized the ownership of land, of animals and seeds. They represent “primary” scriptures for orderly sedentary living, and they furnish “title” to all kinds of possessions that, first, have been created by an acknowledged divine Creator and that, second, have been given in trust to humankind.

In sharp contrast with the Egyptian “breath” and logos cosmogony, the Mesopotamian tradition informs us how the creator god Marduk did his creating in grotesque opposition to logos. He drew his sword and cut the goddess Tiamat into two halves. Her upper half became Heaven and her lower half became Earth. Marduk's words of creation that accompany this deed add up to a negative curse. Even the wind he sent represented a negative force against Tiamat. Marduk brandished forces of death, rather than the positive life essence of Shu. Thereafter human beings were created from the blood of a criminal deity, Kingu, to serve the gods.

All this adds up to a Mesopotamian cosmogony of the Hesiodic hunter-herder-warrior variety. This warrior theology will be discussed in greater detail later, in the fifth booklet. Creation by weapon, by sword or knife, is a very ancient theme in theological burlesque. It is a theme cultivated far and wide among the maladapted progeny of male scavengers and hunters. Some groups of that progeny remained part-time hunters; some became headhunters and cannibals; whereas others became herders and aristocratic pioneers of civilizations—their evolutionary mal-adaptation notwithstanding. And never mind Hesiod who puts into the hand of Cronos a sickle to blackmail farmers.[6] His tale was recited, nonetheless, by bards who entertained the Greek equivalent to our soldiers—in rowdy veterans clubs.

“Creation by weapon” was the mythological basis for people who scorned the Egyptian “generation by phallus” cosmogony. And, from the point in history where we now stand, it looks as though those horse-war-and-glory poets, of the Hesiodic variety, have told their epic tales of castration intentionally to mock the un-heroic and cowardly priests of the Egyptian variety; namely, those priests who were more disposed toward cultivating “farmer” minds. Hesiod's castration story was clearly intended to be a joke on civilized generative creation theology. A sick joke, yes, but quite “good” as far as the quality of a warrior joke can be ascertained by an audience composed of would-be or nostalgic war heroes.

It must be acknowledged of course that some violence does appear at the lowest Enneadean emanation in Helipolitan theology as well. Seth has killed the Osiris-to-be, and the next Horus avenged his father Osiris. That much violence was admitted by Egyptian priests for a number of reasons: (1) to maintain pharaonic dynasties, (2) to assert the divine ruler's power over life and death, and (3) to explain the king's own dying as divine transformation into Osiris and returning homeward in the direction of union with the godhead.

While the theme of “creation by weapon” is being mentioned in relation to Mesopotamian mythology, one ought to point to a similar blemish in the Hebrew canon. In the second creation story in Genesis an embarrassing fragment from a weapon-or-knife version of an origin story has survived. Raw materials obtained by God for the creation of Eve, in the form of one of Adam's ribs, implies some sort of surgical cutting from the first man's body.[7] This bit of Mesopotamian knife mythology has in the history of Hebrew theology been more of an embarrassment than a blessing, it seems.[8]

Against Grand Domestication

Civilization, if seen in the long-range context of human evolution and from the perspective of the history of religions, represents a state of cultural achievement wherein the art of domestication has been overdone. From the perspective of the history of religions—as opposed to history of cultures and civilizations—a civilization therefore may be regarded as a kind of grand domestication or over-domestication scheme (see definitions in Booklet One of this series).

Grand domestication is a human effort, put forth by ambitious folk who thereby progress beyond the mere domestication of plants and animals to also control fellow humans, groups of people, and their gods. Militarism, slavery, exploitation, castration, cannibalism and headhunting, and human sacrifice are examples of excesses and crowning activities that have resulted from purportedly glorious or “grand” domestication schemes. On that account, imperialistic grand domesticators who have become oppressive are more adequately referred to in this discussion as over-domesticators.

By contrast, movements of universal salvation are popular reactions to systems of grand domestication that have become abusive—they are normal human reactions against over-domestication. These reactionary movements are universalistic in the sense that their adherents pledge allegiance to more generous types of superior reality configurations. In the ancient Near East this meant allegiance to a deity that was kinder and greater than an emperor's “God of gods” who was worshiped to legitimize the emperor's violence.

Seen within an expanded historical horizon, it was no accident that several movements of universal salvation—including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—were born between the very fangs of the two oldest civilizations in the Near East, between Mesopotamia and Egypt. Of course, our expanded historical horizon must allow for the fact that by the time these universalisms were born, Egypt had been dwarfed by Rome and Mesopotamia by Persia. Nevertheless, this changing of the guards among grand domestication systems only drives home the point that, long after the aggressive body of a culture or civilization has been slain and left to decay, its feared ghosts and religious countermeasures may linger some centuries longer. As a case in point the Second Isaiah, eight centuries after the Exodus, still evoked the scarecrow of Egypt to persuade his people to leave Babylon. By the same token, the Hebrew Davidic messiah ideal, and its hope, lingered on a millennium beyond David, and into modern days.

Universalistic reform leaders naturally learned most of their theological methods and logical structures from the grand domestication systems against which they reacted. On that account they reacted against imperial monotheism, invariably, by way of transcending the establishment theology with belief in a God who could embrace more of reality than imperial orthodoxies habitually accounted for. As a rule, a grand domestication system under a God of gods could be challenged only with another and greater kind of "God of gods."

Concerning the culture and religion of ancient Israel it may be said that into its cradle were given the hopes and the frustrations of both ancient Near Eastern civilizations. From Mesopotamia the Israelites inherited a passion for the herders' individuality and freedom, whereas from Egypt came its dream of imperial stability and a better-than-human divine kingship. But as it was, in real life all Near Eastern city states were administered by ordinary mortal grand domesticators; and these, in turn, depended for their safety and survival not only on the grace of their own God, but also on the weaknesses of other people's gods. Although greater individual and political freedom was implied by Mesopotamian polytheism—where relationships with various competing gods could be cultivated and balanced to advantage—none of these gods on that account could be respected with unrelenting seriousness.

From among the Hebrew patriarchs Abraham had been in closest contact with Mesopotamia, and from thence his independent herder mind was enabled to listen to God afresh in matters concerning human sacrifice. Tradition has it that he used to roam as a successful domesticator over a wide territory, and that he insisted very much on his nomadic independence. His later domain has been the vicinity of Hebron. By contrast, Isaac stood in closer contact with the Egyptian frontier in the region presently known as Gaza.

The domain of the patriarch Jacob at the dawn of Israelite history was centered on Bethel; even though much of his life's story has been linked more with Egypt itself. Tradition has it that he and his family took refuge from famine in Egypt. A son of Jacob, named Joseph, is said to have risen there to the rank of a viceroy in the service of some Egyptian pharaoh. Centuries later the aristocrat who was destined to give Israel a more universalistic monotheism was reared in Egypt and trained there in imperial religion and political theory. As has sufficiently been shown in Booklet Two, political theory at the level of the royal house was monotheistic theology.

The stories that narrate the lives of Israelite patriarchs describe conditions that existed a half to a full millennium before the Israelite monarchy was founded. Therefore, in reading these ancient stories, one must take into consideration, with an eye turned to history, the apparent motivations of teachers and scribes who may have recorded them—perhaps as early as the tenth century B.C.E. Some of these scribes undoubtedly were obligated to priestly traditions or were on royal payrolls.

For instance, the brief encounter between Abraham and Melchizedek, narrated in Genesis 14, seems to have answered better than anything else a need on the part of King David to justify his ruling of Israelite tribes from the Jebusite or Canaanite city he had taken over. The story also could have been used to justify, on behalf of David and Solomon, the installation of the native Canaanite priestly family, the Zadokite, to henceforth administer the cult of Israel's Yahweh or El (Lord God) in that city.[9] Other episodes in patriarchal story cycles, which pertain to God's covenants with patriarchs and kings, serve similar goals of nation-building.

The Abolition of Human Sacrifice

One Abraham story, in particular, holds great significance for understanding the meaning of the Hebrew patriarchal contribution in what was to become the religion of ancient Israel (Genesis 22). Storytellers remembered their chief patriarch for having accomplished a radical turnabout in Near Eastern religious practice. Abraham considered for a while, then wavered, and by the grace of his God abolished the practice of human sacrifice. He had meant to sacrifice his firstborn son, but as an alternative he took a ram that his God had provided especially for that occasion. He gave it as a substitute payment to the God who had reminded him of this more ancient method of sacrificing animals.

But, of course, the scriptural record is a little more ambiguous than that. In all likelihood it was the original scribe who already made it a point, and subsequent Jewish and Christian commentators vied with him and among themselves, to rationalize Abraham's initial willingness to sacrifice the life of his son. Allegedly the God of Abraham wanted to “test the faith” of his devotee, which means his willingness and his readiness for mindless obedience.[10] In the absence of sufficient historical perspective, still, the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard has magnified this so‑called faith of Abraham into a full-fledged non-rational "leap of faith."[11]

It is difficult to see how, in historical perspective, any interpretation of the Abraham story could be farther from the mark than that offered by Kierkegaard. Abraham's decision was no leap of faith. He walked every mile of the way rationally and ethically aware, step after step. Over-domesticators everywhere and at all times have understood, rationally well, why they sacrificed humankind. Their motives had to be justified, religiously and with a posture of humble obedience, of course. It is a well-known fact that obeying orders, religiously, always has been an alibi of over-domesticators who, for the sake of personal justification, pose intermittently as servants of greater‑than-human reality.

In the context of an inter-religious dialogue one also ought to keep in mind that, according to Islam, the son who was about to be sacrificed was Ishmael, not Isaac. But, inasmuch as our present discussion focuses on the historical record of human sacrifice as an aspect of general grand domestication, the fact that Abraham avoided sacrificing either of these sons and the fact that he did not become another grand domesticator appears far more important than any other benefits that might have accrued for the estate of either survivor.

The good news here is that both second-generation patriarchs—the one favored by Judaism and the one of Islam—have survived the supposed “faith” of Abraham. The world is a better place for the fact that this old supposed “faith” of Abraham was abolished more emphatically, still, by later universalistic prophets and reformers. In this manner, the peoples who practice religion in the historical shadow of Abraham are thereby challenged to live—and to let live.

Anyone who stays a while in the vicinity of a potential grand domesticator, soon enough, will see him showing his hand and disclose what is really on his mind. All along a potential grand domesticator will have listened more carefully to such divine revelations that happen to improve his personal destiny and promise fulfillment of his desires. A grand domesticator, even one like Abraham who is only tempted to become one, sooner or later will demand his reward from the God whom he serves so very faithfully. The sacrifice of one's own love toward family and kin—and one's own precious rationality to boot—goes against the drift of life manifest in processes of nature or purposes of divine creation. Presumably life has been created, or has evolved, to be enjoyed and lived in the first place! Therefore both of these types of sacrifice, of rationality as well as of kindred, do call for a special reward from Almighty God himself. At the very least they procure some extraordinary status of righteousness and justification. And behold, Abraham heard the rewarding voice of God even swear an oath:

…I will indeed bless you, and I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore. As your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies, and by your descendants shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves… (Genesis 22:17-18)[12]

Indeed, multiplication and paternalistic blessings, as heard by Abraham or composed by a later Israelite scribe on a grand domesticator's payroll, are only the wrappings of this divine promise. Possessing the gate of competitive enemies, however, that is the pearl grand domesticators—and even good folk like Abraham who are tempted to become grand domesticators—treasure very much.

Yes, there is a temptation hidden in this story after all. But it is the temptation of over-domestication that ancient Israelite scribes in the comfort of later monarchic environs, six and more centuries after Abraham, were no longer able to discern.

But how has this story received its traditional “faith testing” motive? Any reflective schoolteacher will have had numerous occasions, in the course of work, to discover the answer to this simple question. First of all, it is unlikely that Israelite scribes, who recorded their favorite “faith” answer for posterity, actually wanted their pupils seriously to consider the recurrence of an obediently executed human sacrifice—living as they did, under their kind of God. But then, with regard to actual practice in surrounding cultures, “disobedience” is what the reform of Abraham's religion seems to have been all about.

If confronted with a difficult theological question, as to why God would have demanded such obedience of Abraham, Hebrew teachers could not very well have suggested that their story's supreme patriarch may have misunderstood God or, worse yet, that God himself is arbitrary. If these scribes really had wanted to dwell on the horrible notion of human sacrifice, or if in their sheltered scribal world they still knew much about how it was done formerly, they at least would have concocted some impressive proto‑Levitic description of such a rite.

As it was, however, old Israelite teachers simply took the shortest and easiest path to finish off that lesson. And they did so as a people that knew herself specially chosen by God and redeemed from grand domestication. They sidestepped the problem of God's right to arbitrariness, because this was too difficult to grasp by the average faithful. Instead, these teachers steered their discussion to schoolroom-level ethics; that is, to the grand domestication portion of theology that could be applied directly to student behavior in a lowly classroom.

Every teacher to a degree is caught up in the exercise of grand domestication. And if an available story happens to teach discipline along with its subject matter, and if it thereby promises to make teaching easier, not many teachers can resist its endorsement and its blessings provided in the form of sweet authority. As all people in a king's entourage had to do, and as most scribes did, so too later generations of students were expected to practice blind obedience.

Therefore, the basic plot of the story remains that Abraham became a different kind of sacrificer, one who did not sacrifice his son. All those who propagated this story about Abraham knew, with all their rational faculties intact, why they wanted to remember precisely the faith of this patriarch and, at the same time, disregard the similar and much stronger faiths of all those who as grand domesticators in the ancient world, in fact, have sacrificed their offspring.

In its historical context the Abraham story carries the full rational weight of a new universalistic theology. The saving message that made this story worth remembering and that made it worth retelling, especially among firstborn sons, was that Abraham did not sacrifice his son, that by his God's own generous waiver a ram was substituted. The implied futuristic theology points therefore to a new God of gods. It points to a new revelation of the God of gods—to the effect that his appetite no longer includes a grand domesticator's hunger for power over human life and flesh.[13] Whether the appetite of the real God actually ever included such craving for human flesh, beyond the possibility of human misunderstanding, is an entirely different faith question. And that question belongs outside the realm of this historical discourse.

Among the civilizations that thrived during Abraham's time it was still deemed possible that such an appetite for human flesh and blood was a genuine divine attribute.[14] But, be that as it may, in the concrete sense of preferring ordinary domesticator food the God of Abraham, in conformity with plain domesticator needs, at once was more archaic and more humane. He was less of a grand domesticator and therefore also less “civilized.”

From the perspective of a civilized ruler or a high priest at the time, the theological reform of Abraham meant a step backward. Abraham had recoiled from progressive grand domestication sacrifices and retreated to the simpler primitive animal sacrifices of herder folk. “Retreat behavior” is the primary characteristic of religious movement—retreat behavior in space as well as in time.

Of course, a complete turning away from complex civilization and from over-domesticator religion, and a return to simple domestication, was impossible even for Abraham. No human conscience and no religious repentance from aggressive behavior, not even penitent somersaults and spiritual "conversions," will ever completely turn back the clock of history and a people's cultural progress. Hands continue to grasp, teeth continue to bite and chew, and human minds continue to analyze. Time rushes irreversibly along a forward progressive path.

With the help of exciting distractions, such as the Greek Muses were known to provide or religious rites could bestow, the fruits of aggression and progress at times could be de-emphasized and checked for a while. And in some societies such fine arts pass then as being “cultured” or “civilized.” But gruesome excesses cannot be removed from the actual flow of time. An over-domesticator's practice of sacrificing human victims has become a historical datum, for priestly executioners as well as for prophetic protestants and reformers. Moreover, the reputation of a God on whose tables hapless human victims were once served, by virtue of this God's acceptance of the same to the extent that acceptance has been attested to by scribes, is fixed ontologically in the minds of later devotees. As a God who has once shown such an appetite, of course, he can be accepted or resisted. But the historical fact of his cult, as such, can never be erased completely from the slate of time.[15]

Consequently, those who retreated with Abraham into a simpler cultic mode of behavior, and who have begun to offer again old-fashioned domesticators' animal sacrifices, discovered that their sacrificial animals no longer could be given in accordance with pure and old domesticator logic. Before grand domestication was practiced, firstborn sacrificial animals were given as share sacrifices in payment for domestic herds. This was done to legitimize human ownership of herds under a God who previously had owned them—or who had created and subsequently allotted them to humankind.

The “first offerings” or “share offerings”—of portions of felled animals that hunters gave to their divine tutelaries to shift the weight of their own guilt unto them—were amplified by domesticators into ceremonial butchering feasts. Domesticators sacrificed whole firstborn animals to pay for subsequent litters, or even for larger herds. And after that these ordinary animal sacrifices of domesticators were magnified still further, by grand domesticators, to pay still mightier divine sponsors with the more valuable currency of human victims—to justify ownership of human herds. This is why in grand domesticator surroundings the stubborn insistence to present animal victims of less value, by someone like Abraham, has necessarily acquired new meaning.

In the shadow of Abraham's temptation and in light of his new faith, sacrificial animals, inevitably, have become “substitutional" offerings. Animal victims had to be given, henceforth, as substitutes to redeem prospective human victims whom grand domesticator religion had doomed to premature mystic absorption or digestion within a divinity.

On account of this new substitutional dimension it therefore is not warranted anymore to classify Abraham's religiosity, nor the three faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that descended from it, as nostalgic returns to primitivistic domesticator religion. Rather, it is the case that the spirit of universal salvationism, having gotten quagmired in grand domesticator fascinations and ambitions, was forced to retreat temporarily to older ritualized primitivisms of animal slaughters and sacrifices. There it had to start anew to regain its momentum for reform.

And of course, all this retreat behavior happened by necessity. Greater‑than‑human configurations of reality have a way of dampening human ambitions all the time. Reasonable religious responses always are retreat behavior of the balancing kind.

Israel's Return to Grand Domestication

Linguistic research and recent archaeological discoveries have taught us to approach the history of Joshua's conquest of Palestine with some serious reservations. The language in Deuteronomy and Joshua comes from a few centuries later and the supposed pattern of “conquest” does not match the destruction dates of cities in the region.[16] Moreover, the motives in the Joshua epic correspond much better to the grand domestication scheme of a certain king Josiah (622 B.C.E.) who attempted a religio-political reform. Josiah dreamt of a restored and reunited Israel, and it appears that, to advance his ambitions, he and his priestly collaborators embellished Joshua's “conquest of Palestine” that, at the time, lay already six centuries in the past. During the time of Joshua, supposedly, all the Israelite tribes invaded Palestine as a united front and took the land that, perhaps again supposedly, their creator-God had given them.

It now appears that most of the people who belonged to the ancient tribes of Israel were already in the land when Levitic wanderer priests went there to propagate their Exodus tradition. The tribal territories already were claimed, and this might be the reason why the tribe of Levi had no territory allotted to it. Priests ordinarily do not refuse ownership of land, if they can help it. As it was, their Levitic cult of Yahweh was centered on a portable tabernacle tent, and within that tent was kept a chest in which a few sacred mementos from their "escape" from Egypt were kept. But more important for the Israelite confederation of tribes became the Levitic annual commemoration of the Exodus experience itself.

Three centuries or longer Levitic tribesmen, as priestly mediators between God and humankind, had been cultivating their tradition of escape from Egyptian rule—under a God of gods who preferred Hebrew slaves over citizens of the mighty Egyptian empire. They roamed as Hapiru when they settled at their first place of refuge, at the Midian oasis, on the Sinai peninsula. From there they moved into the hill country of Palestine to interact with Israelite tribes. Hapiru was the Egyptian and Mesopotamian designation of foreigners and nomads, rebels, and outlaws; it referred to people who lived or moved about between these two large systems of grand domestication and who, generally, managed to slip away from the control of both. The label Hapiru appears to have given rise, later, to the positive self-designation Hebrew. On their part, some Hebrews in Palestine (that is, in the “Philistine” country) referred to themselves as the tribes of Yisrahel—a name that seems to have meant fighters, strugglers, or partisans of El (of their Lord God).[17] These tribes later were united into a kingdom as the people of Israel, under David (ca. 1000 B.C.E.) and his son Solomon.

The Levites created and told the narratives of Israel's national epic. They became what might be described as the first “priestly cheerleaders” in the confederation of Israelite rebel tribes. Their Exodus epic and their annual Passover celebration, which remained anchored in memories associated with Sinai as their “Holy Land,” have become the foci of their Yahweh religion. Other tribes subscribed to their story and their rituals and, in time, they all learned to commemorate together a joint miraculous escape from Egypt as the always united tribes of Israel. What has been their common experience for this joint ceremonial commemoration?

Up to the time of King David, the Israelite tribes fought separately for survival along the Egyptian frontier, sometimes with and sometimes against the Philistine city-states in the Gaza area. And sometimes they fought among themselves (see Judges 12). Only gradually by means of their annual first offerings rite, which they adopted from the culture stratum of simple herders and which they historicized in opposition to Egyptian grand domestication, were these rebel tribes ideologically and religiously cemented together into a single nation—at least for the duration of a couple generations under David and Solomon.[18]

The historical books in the Bible, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, in conjunction with recent archaeology in the Gaza area, have given us fresh clues for the early history of Israel. During Israel's formative years, the Philistine kings in that region ruled city-states that had adopted a general pattern of Egyptian culture. Concerning the Israelites, the biblical source tells of a first leader, Saul, who was grudgingly anointed by the priest Samuel for the purpose of leading Israel's defense against the Philistine kings. His kingship was intended only for the duration of an emergency. The general anti-monarchism on the part of Yahweh's priests reflected what all along had been the way of life among tribal herdsmen who led semi-nomadic lives—a tradition of fierce independence.

Saul's Philistine opponents were well-organized city-states along the northern Egyptian cultural frontier, organized under a well-established aristocracy. During most of Israel's formative centuries these city-states failed to heed the weakened Egyptian pharaohs. Nevertheless, for the Israelite tribes to stand up against the organized might of Philistine city-kings required a more stable military policy than King Saul could deliver on the short leash that Samuel, the priest, was willing to authorize in the name of the antimonarchic Yahweh.

Saul, as a part-time king, succumbed to pressures from Samuel. His dynasty crumbled under the might of the Philistine kings. His rival and successor, David, joined the Philistine opposition for a while, though, in the eyes of the latter he probably was untrustworthy as an ally. King David's private army consisted of Hapiru rebels and refugees, many of whom had come directly from those same grand-domesticated city-states, and established Hapiru tribal bands in the hill country of Palestine. When back in that hill country David at last succeeded in organizing the rival Yisrahel tribes, and when he began deploying their military potential, the Philistine city-kingdoms fell before him.

In stark variance with the conquest narratives included in Joshua 1–11 one finds, in Judges 1:27–33, a list of seventeen Canaanite cities that the Israelites had been unable to take over. According to 2 Samuel 8 David finally defeated and subdued the remaining Philistine cities. But even the amount of credit given to King David appears to have been an overstatement in light of 1 Kings 9:16. There one learns that it had been the pharaoh of Egypt who defeated the Canaanite city of Gezer and gave it as a dowry to his daughter, King Solomon's wife. Solomon's monarchy was an Egyptian-style grand domestication scheme.

During the formative years of the Israelite monarchy the Levitic cult of Yahweh had become a rallying symbol for the young nation. During Israel's formative centuries of rebellion against the Egyptian-Philiistine frontier this revolutionary cult made it possible to orchestrate a semblance of intertribal cooperation.

But what could have been the common experience among the Israelite tribes that made the joint commemoration of Passover and Exodus a meaningful unifying symbol? In light of the freshly established historical context, a reconstruction now can be attempted in a rather straightforward manner. All the tribes held memories in common: about suffering under grand domesticators and resentment toward their Philistine-Egyptian overlords and enemies. They achieved a measure of unity on the basis of their Passover-Exodus cult, which symbolized an underdog's reaction to the presence of Egyptian grand domestication as their common enemy.

Whether someone actually escaped during an “exodus” from the Nile Delta in the company of Levitic leaders, such as Moses and Aaron, or whether someone escaped Philistine-Egyptian city states to join some Israelite rebel tribe in the hills, or whether one participated in the end only in David's victory over these city states, one in any of these situations was liberated from Egyptian bondage in general. The plot of the Exodus epic, that is, Yahweh's victory over Egyptian taskmasters, has described and given meaning to all subsequent experiences of liberation from over-domestication.[19]

It must be kept in mind that ritualized play acting is a powerful means to routinize human thought and collective behavior, especially among minds caught up religiously in celebrating victory. Homines sapientes (men who think) is a misnomer for creatures who, in actual fact, are homines ludentes (men who play). And for the coordination of the latter, the staging of civic-religious pageants is of paramount importance. Rituals are more vibrantly alive and effective than all the literary historical footnotes of scribes combined.

Compare, for example, the experience of a typical immigrant to America. Sooner or later he or she gets drawn into celebrating a version of American Thanksgiving—or as a minimum to watch Thanksgiving pageants on television. Like the Jewish Passover, so also this national holiday is celebrated in exchange for divine blessings, for security, and for title to land. Our American epic about pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower is remembered annually and nationwide with many interdenominational thanksgiving services. The covenant with Manifest Destiny thereby is sealed during a festive communal meal that includes sacrificial turkey as the native American sacrificial “lamb.”

This latter-day equivalent to the Jewish Passover is what has redeemed the wanderings of many timid immigrants who came to America. It translated their wanderings into divinely blessed pilgrimages. Rites and celebrations, everywhere, are the real means by which national epics become effective in people's lives. A wanderer who found himself in the company of Levites roaming Palestine, three millennia earlier, could subscribe to Israel's national epic of the Exodus as easily.

Samuel, the priest of Yahweh, resisted monarchy as long as he could. But in the end the first two Israelite kings, Saul and David, as they competed among themselves, both justified their return to grand domesticator ways with claims of having been anointed king by that same antimonarchic priest (1 Samuel 10 and 16). Then David conquered Jebus (Jerusalem) with his private troops and made it his royal city. He also fetched the sacred “ark of the covenant” that used to be in Samuel's shrine at Shiloh, and he brought it home to Jebus (2 Samuel 5 and 6). This sacred chest, which was a token of Levitic Yahwism, was placed there under a new tent within the city walls. Using this chest as the relic and legitimate title to the Exodus tradition, the shrewd David then installed the man Zadok as a second high priest to administer the Hebrew cult of Yahweh (2 Samuel 8:17 and 15:24). By the time Solomon became king, Zadok was left as the only high priest. His Levitic predecessor was banished from the land (1 Kings 1 and 2).[20]

Understandably, the politically and militarily successful David also wanted to build a lasting temple of stone and thereby advance his dream of social fortification and grand domestication an extra step. But the rebel ethos of the Israelite tribes, by the justification of which David had won and organized his kingdom, would not permit him to go that far. The prophet Nathan at one point gave King David permission to build his temple, but quickly he reconsidered and came forth with God's revised order to desist (2 Samuel 7). The God of the recently liberated Hebrews would not suffer incarceration in a massive stone structure built by a grand domesticator—at least not yet. He and his appointed priests had to make do for a while longer with a tabernacle tent.

Another one of David's grand domestication schemes concerned the organization of military might. He conducted a census of “valiant men” throughout Israel, that is, a registration for military conscription (2 Samuel 24). It is said that David himself was the one who first felt guilty about having ordered this census. Yahweh's verdict, along with the rationalization of an epidemic at hand, was enunciated by David's own court diviner.

Religiously inspired roadblocks of this sort were constantly put in the path of Israel's king by antimonarchic men of God who, first ceremonially and later prophetically, continued to live under the spell of their rebel Exodus tradition. Obstacles of this sort clearly defined the perimeters beyond which the divinely sanctioned Yisrahel rebel ethos would not permit the king's grand domestication ambitions to progress.

Under Solomon

It remained for Solomon, who rose to the throne with the prophet Nathan's helpful plotting, to build a temple of stone and to bring the Yahweh cult under full royal control (1 Kings 6). In his magnificent court temple, the presence of God was meticulously maintained by priests who were on the royal payroll. The structure of the temple itself was built after a Phoenician-Egyptian model; it accommodated a “holy of holies” enclosure inside, the same arrangement as generally could be found in Egyptian Amun temples.[21]

The trouble with all this magnificent temple religiosity was the fact that a God, who accepted the maintenance of his cult from the hand of a king, himself came to depend on the generosity of that king. As a result, the divine-human relationship of dependence was reversed. This was the typical outcome whenever the religious behavior of common folk fell under the control of a grand domesticator. Tribes of humankind as a rule became over-domesticated together with their tribal gods.

During the reign of Solomon the Israelite kingdom rivaled in superficial splendor the glories of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and for a while his state even surpassed theirs. His royal scribes collected wisdom literature and recorded it in their king's name, boasting wisdom all the while on behalf of their king. Solomon's wisdom is said to have been greater than the wisdom of all the sages of Egypt (1 Kings 5, 10). The fact that his scribes resorted to such boasting in competition with Egypt testifies indirectly to the Hebrew religio-cultural indebtedness to that civilization. Along with all that, the Israelite king in fact was married to a daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh (1 Kings 3:1).

But Israel's political and religious awareness was sustained, all the while, by its Exodus memory and its religious fervor of partisanship—thus by their combined early Mesopotamian and subsequent Hapiru herder tradition. The Davidic dynasty was not supported by a time‑tested and balanced grand domestication organization. Schools of loyal scribes and officials, guilds of artisans, and other groups of citizens on which both Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations relied during their centuries of stability and good fortune—all these traditions were in their infancy even during the apex of Solomon's reign. The king seems to have had only his military safely organized. And for a grand domestication system to endure humanely, such a onesided exploitational “law and order” emphasis is never sufficient.

When Solomon died, in 922 B.C.E., the northern tribes of Israel broke away from Judah. They refused to serve Solomon's son, Rehoboam, who stoutly promised to continue the police state tactics of his ambitious father. The northern tribes refused to provide forced labor any longer or pay the king's excessive taxes. They seceded to form their own Israelite kingdom under Jeroboam I (1 Kings 12). The two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, existed alongside each other until Sargon II, of Assyria, defeated Samaria in 721 B.C.E.

Josiah's ruthless conquest of the northern Israelite realm, and the “reform” (622 B.C.E) during which he slew all northern priests at their sanctuaries, was duly legitimized with the celebration of a Passover commemoration. A detailed account of this event is narrated in 2 Kings 23. Under Nebuchadnezzar's sweep, which enforced the Babylonian policy of integrating the Near East, Josiah's dynasty disappeared soon afterward. The southern monarchy of Judah held on a little longer, into the sixth century, when most of its population was deported to Babylonia, in 597 and 587.

Remnants of the southern kingdom, of Benjamin and Judah, eventually returned from exile in Babylon. Another group, which had moved in the direction of Egypt accompanied by Jeremiah, left no written records. But traces of their descendants have been found near the first cataract of the Nile. Throughout their dispersion, the exiles in Babylonia celebrated the freedom from over-domestication that their ancestors had achieved by way of escaping the power of Egypt.

When in 539 Babylonia fell to Cyrus the Great, Palestine came under Persian hegemony as well. With permission from Cyrus, and from later Persian emperors, small remnants of Judaic exiles from Babylonia returned to Jerusalem with a charter to reestablish the semblance of a Judaic state.

Alexander the Great (336–323 B.C.E.) displaced the Persian overlords. He and his successors justified their rule as cultural colonizers. In rebellion against their Greek overlords the small Judaic state for a while became independent under the Maccabees, in 168. But after having become radicalized through revolution against the Greeks, these Hasmonaean priest‑kings themselves quickly lapsed into methods of tyranny and over-domestication.

Beginning at 63 B.C.E. the period of Roman domination was punctuated repeatedly by brush fires of Judaic rebellion. Their hope of another independent Judaic state was smashed to embers by Roman might, during the first century C.E., and the dispersion that followed lasted almost two millennia.

Only during the twentieth century, after persecution and holocaust, have Jews of the Jamnian tradition returned in large numbers to Palestine. Although America and the Western world, under the influence of Christendom, watch these new Jewish pioneers by and large supportively, their present effort at running a modern democratic state, a new Israel, is perceived by most of their Near Eastern neighbors again as a return to grand domestication or over-domestication.

Universalistic Monotheism and Messianism

An early trace of universal salvationism that survived from the Israelite past already was noted in the story about Abraham. This patriarch may be credited with having resisted the “temptation of civilization,” that is, of sacrificing a human victim—thus implicitly also with having rejected an ancient theology of grand domestication.

Hapiru or Hebrew reactionary universalism has become politically significant when, centuries later, under Moses—or with the composition of Exodus stories—the status of the Egyptian “God of gods” was directly challenged and undercut. During that challenge the God of the Hebrew slaves revealed himself, to those freed slaves at least, as the world's mightiest and victorious God of gods. Thus the typical Near Eastern “God of gods” theology, which here and there has legitimized an imperial grand domesticator “King of kings,” was replaced by radical Hebrew liberation theology.

Nevertheless, the theology of Moses cannot yet be classified as complete “universalism.” The Mosaic reform was only the beginning of an important movement in that direction. The limitations to the universalism of Moses were, as such limitations always are, conditioned by historical circumstances. In their struggle for liberation and survival, the Hebrew slaves acquired fresh ways and means for defending themselves. They needed arms, training, and courage, as well as divine protection when these things proved insufficient. All the while, the God who in his mercy liberated them from slavery continued to support them during the aftermath. It therefore goes without saying that the mundane existential concerns of a fledgling nation, in the end, turned the theological universalism of Moses back onto a return path of defensive exclusiveness. By hindsight it seems as though such defensive retrenchment scarcely could have been avoided.

It is a fact in the history of cultures and religions that any God who has been called upon to serve as a war deity, to lead a people as their “Lord of hosts,” of necessity has ceased to function as universal Lord of the world. To insist that a Lord of war in his partiality is nevertheless a universal God, in the past, has led to fanatic warfare. It has led to the extermination of the enemy side in order to prove the truth of one's own arrogant theological fixation. Campaigns which are organized to establish the universality of a war deity can lead either to calamity for the believers or to imperialistic victory. Thus they lead to calamity on at least one side of the confrontation. In either case the universalistic outlook is eclipsed. This predicament constitutes the downside of monotheistic religion wherever such is being cultivated by advanced humanoid predator minds.

Under David and Solomon

Two or three centuries after Moses, the Hebrew “Lord of hosts” cult ripened into its next phase. “Yahweh Sabaoth” as foremost deity of war was invoked to sponsor a new grand domestication system. During the reigns of David and Solomon such a system came into bloom and reached its zenith quickly. While living under these two kings, the heirs of the Israelite rebel tradition gloried for a while in their united monarchy, as in something that was divinely established. But then, the abrupt division of the kingdom into northern and southern portions severely dampened that euphoria.

The Mosaic tradition remained an internal contradiction within both kingdoms. With an anti-overdomestication religious cult at their centers, both kingdoms also remained riddles and aggravations unto themselves. In reading the biblical sources, one should keep in mind that only the perspective of the southerners has survived in writing. Thus, at best, our understanding of ancient Israelite history is one-sided; at its worst, and most probably, the cultic depravity of the northerners has been exaggerated.

To illustrate their confrontationalism, we need only point to their most conspicuous bone of contention—the Canaanite cult of the bovine. Mythologically and symbolically considered, the famous calf sculpture that the first Levitic high priest, Aaron, has set up for worship (Exodus 32), and the ones Jeroboam is said to have set up at sanctuaries in Bethel and at Dan (1 Kings 12:28), have served similar Canaanite nuances as the twelve calves that supported the bronze basin documented for the Jerusalem temple (1 Kings 7:23–26 and 2 Chronicles 4:2–5). All the complaints about the apostasy of northerners, on the part of southern kings and their prophetic supporters, must be evaluated in light of the fact that, ordinarily in this world, a loss of hegemony breeds resentment and bad blood.

Modern rationalists often dismiss ancient conflicts about cultic behavior as proceeding essentially from irrational thinking, and they include in this judgment all religious behavior to boot. But such evaluations usually fail to see the “rational” or political significance of unified religious behavior. In our introductory chapter we defined religion in general as retreat behavior. Thus, politically and socially, the predictability of religious behavior implies that whosoever bows to, or retreats from, the same greater-than-human configuration of reality as one's own, together with others, such a person can be relied on in emergencies or battles. In post-theistic and secular political ideologies, swearing an oath to a national emblem or a flag, serves a similar function.

Back in the early literature of the Israelite monarchy, one finds the kind of flattery that was customary at grand domesticator courts elsewhere: May the king have a long life! May his dynasty last forever! And in a complete relapse into the Egyptian style of grand domestication, the zealous prophets of Yahweh themselves participated in that idolatrous trend. The prophet Nathan, who personally had been scheming to have Solomon installed as David's successor, is said to have gone so far as to attribute divine sonship to his chosen prince. His words resound as if spoken by God himself:

“I will be his father, and he shall be my son… I will not take my steadfast love from him… and your house and kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever.” (2 Samuel 7:14–16)

The priestly poet who composed the second Psalm has recited this same message even more daringly—as unabashed grand domesticators' breaking and dashing, poetically sublimated of course. This poet, too, has impersonated the voice of God:

“I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.” I will tell of the decree of the Lord: He said to me, “You are my son, today have I begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.” (Psalms 2:6–9)

Born ever so gradually of court flattery and carried on the wings of poetry, a gradual transformation could be observed in Israelite grand domestication etiquette and liturgy. The internal politico-religious contradiction began to stir, stretch, and squirm out from its narrow confines.

A reader of the psalm just quoted, invariably, will be impressed by how a poetic metaphor, an exaggeration, is able to blaze a trail beyond itself and beyond present political realities—“aesthetically,” if you like. For contemplating the possibilities of this process of artistic exaggeration, by way of considering still another step in the aesthetic sublimation of this psalm, one need only re-experience it under the wonderful musical umbrella that George Friedrich Händel constructed for it in his inspired oratorio The Messiah. There the terrible smashing and the dashing sounds rather wonderful.

Isaiah and Micah

In the poetic prophesies of Isaiah (eighth century B.C.E.) court flattery was elevated unambiguously above the raw desire for dynasty and throne. So, for instance, Isaiah 9:2–7 still echoes many polite phrases of Near Eastern court etiquette. Some scholars have suggested that this particular “messianic passage” originally may have been recited while celebrating the accession of King Hezekiah to the throne of Judah:

For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David, and over his kingdom…. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this. (Isaiah 9:6-7)

Even after making allowances for a generous amount of flattery, this passage in its extant form no longer fits very well the coronation of an ordinary human king. These words of poetry soar high, so as to leave any kind of human Hezekiah far behind in the dust of this world. As a result of having transcended their mortal subject matter, these words actually have ceased to be mere dishonest court flattery. Carried on wings of superlatives and metaphors, such magnificent words were in homo sapiens minds miraculously transformed. Resounding as direct echoes from the mouth of God, in the eternal presence of which they were recited, these words suddenly had to be rationalized as honest and serious "prophesy"—or else risk the human mind getting caught jesting dishonestly in the presence of the holy God.

Isaiah has abandoned the hope of expecting very much from a mortal contemporary king. Prophetically he therefore proceeded to describe an ideal king instead, one whose arrival realistically could be hoped for only in the future. Looking away from the present king who sat on the throne of Judah, the prophet has even permitted his train of thoughts to start afresh with a newly born baby boy who, in a manner of speaking, is at the moment still “out of this world.”

If we accept the suggestion of some scholars, that this text represents enthronement liturgy from the days of King Hezekiah, then it is possible that the passage quoted could have been written after disappointment had set in over the king's defeat under Sennacherib of Assyria. In any case, the prophet no longer had an ordinary human king in mind, one that would disappoint again. He anticipated a king who was no less than “Mighty God” himself. Thus, beginning with Isaiah, pro-monarchic prophets gradually developed their political enthusiasm toward a new kind of antimonarchic trans-monarchism.

Micah was a younger contemporary of Isaiah, he too projected the focal point of his hope forward into the future. But he also looked back into the past to the potentiality of a royal childhood. With a fresh start he humbly and ambitiously began to re-envision Davidic history from scratch, beginning at Bethlehem, in the town which had been the birth place of the boy‑child that became King David.

But you, O Bethlehem Eph'rathah, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel. (Micah 5:2)

Hananiah and Jeremiah

The Israelite experiment with grand domestication began disintegrating after the death of Solomon. It came to an end early during the sixth century B.C.E. when King Zedekiah of Judah put in his lot with an Egyptian coalition against Babylonia's rising King Nebuchadnezzar. Here, at this important turning point in the history of Judah, one finds two prophets speaking opposing revelations on behalf of their God.

Hananiah prophesied in support of joining the Egyptian coalition: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon” (Jeremiah 28:2). The prophet Jeremiah, who regarded revolt against Babylon to be folly, replied first with ridicule and some time later with a serious counter-prophesy: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I have put upon the neck of all these nations an iron yoke of servitude to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon.” To strengthen his statement further, Jeremiah accused Hananiah of telling a lie and put a curse of death on him.

Such had been, beyond the realm of court flattery, the style of royal advisement in those days. Unfortunately, King Zedekiah heeded the wrong divine promise, or the wrong curse. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, wasted the land, and deported most Judeans to Babylonia. There they were given some fifty years to get weaned away from their dream vestiges of the Davidic monarchy.

When Jeremiah's attempt at influencing his king's foreign policy failed, he declared old religious covenants abnegated, including the one that was believed to have existed between God and the dynasty of David. And while contemplating Israel's present situation he hurried back in time to also declare void the covenant that Moses had mediated between God and Israel. Jeremiah saw the old covenants to be replaced by the dawning of a new era of personalized salvation—salvation on a universalistic scope. His new covenant insisted on a complete change of human nature—a new creation, indeed.

Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke… But… I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and his brother, saying, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:31–33)[22]

The Second Isaiah

The end of captivity for the Jews in Babylonia came with poetic fanfare. An admirer of the eighth century B.C.E. prophet Isaiah, an anonymous poet now known only as Second Isaiah, tagged an appendix to the old scroll—Isaiah 40–56. The fact that he got away with this deed suggests that he was a scribe rather high up in the rabbinic hierarchy. His long poem exploded with fervor about the wonderful saving event that had just occurred and that he himself had been able to decode.

The person who wrote Second Isaiah can be introduced as a poet, that much is quite obvious from his style of writing. But he also must be regarded as a prophet. Poetry spoken in the presence of God, impersonating at times the voice of God or of his angels, is poetry that might better be named prophecy.

The prophesy of Second Isaiah opens with a song, a song of comfort, which was recited as though it was chanted by the council of heaven itself. It was addressed to the Judaic survivors of the nearly fifty years of exile, sixty years for victims of an earlier deportation. The concrete proof for this freshly announced divine comfort is given at several spots throughout the poem: God has sent his messiah (his anointed one) to conquer Babylon and set his chosen people free. And never mind if that messiah of Yahweh happened to be a Persian conqueror that really did not seem to know much about the God of the Judeans!

Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, who formed you from the womb: "I am the Lord, who made all things" …who says of Cyrus, "He is my shepherd, and he shall fulfill all my purpose"; saying of Jerusalem, "She shall be built," and of the temple, "Your foundation shall be laid." Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and ungird the loins of kings, to open doors before him. (Isaiah 44: 24-45:1)

The phrase whose right hand I have grasped in Second Isaiah corresponds to a similar phrase on the Cyrus Cylinder, a cuneiform record inscribed by Babylonian priests of Marduk.[23] It shows the priests of the Babylonian high god equally enthused, welcoming this Persian imperialist as their savior. Indeed, it seems as though Cyrus had saved the Babylonian cult of Marduk as well. Indeed, he had saved all cults in the land from the hands of a Babylonian revisionist king, Nabonidus. This invading Persian imperialist, in addition, has been given credit for having liberated numerous divine statues, belonging to various city cults in the greater Mesopotamian realm, also for rebuilding their regional sanctuaries.

All this does not necessarily mean that our poet from Judea got his phrase directly from the priests of Marduk; rather, it means that both priestly sources probably obtained similar messages from Cyrus' own generous edicts. All the while, it is obvious that Persian propaganda in Babylonia was informed and advised by the priests of Marduk who, unabashedly, collaborated with Cyrus in the government of the city-state. They probably had collaborated already during Cyrus's takeover of the city.

Some portions in Second Isaiah, for example chapters 44 and 46, contain explicit ridicule of Mesopotamian polytheism. This hostile Jewish posture, superficially, has kept many scholars from considering the poet's actual indebtedness to Babylonian religion. However, a historian who wishes to attain a realistic perspective must assume that a reasonable Jewish poet, of necessity, would have done some serious reflecting on Babylonian Marduk religion during his fifty years of forced exposure to it. A Judaic rabbi could not have helped but see, and wonder, what the Babylonian Akitu rites (the New Year rites) were all about. These Akitu rites were as central to Babylonian religion and statecraft as Passover had all along been for Israelite and Samaritan traditions. Many Akitu rites were performed in public and therefore could be observed easily.

The disappearance and the return of the Babylonian god Marduk were an integral part in these ceremonial proceedings. Moreover, the behavior of the Babylonian chief deity was closely linked with the fortunes of the king who knew himself to be commissioned by the God. Throughout Mesopotamian history, the king played a key role in this divine-human drama of suffering and redemption. The king was dethroned and deprived of his insignia. He was humiliated to the point where the high priest of Marduk would pull him by the ears, strike his cheeks, and extract a confession to the effect that he had not sinned against the Lord of the countries, had not been negligent in serving the God, and had not destroyed Babylon.[24] Later the face of the king was struck once more, to draw tears from his royal eyes as a good omen for water and fresh growth on the land. All this had to be duly enacted in order to renew the land and the year, thus space and time, for another round of Mesopotamian balance and prosperity.

Jonathan Z. Smith has commented on the negative confession of this Babylonian rite as an incongruity—allegedly for the purpose of stimulating discussion and gaining an entry into this archaic text. He reasoned that, if anyone, it was foreigners who would have destroyed Babylon when given a chance. Disbelievingly he asks, “What native king of Babylonia ever contemplated or was guilty of destroying or overthrowing Babylon, smashing its walls or neglecting/destroying Esagila?”[25]

The Nabonidus Chronicle and the Cyrus Cylinder suggest otherwise.[26] Priests of Marduk and collaborators with Cyrus have accused the last king of the Babylonian dynasty of having attempted just that. In an empire where the central seat of power frequently was moved from one convenient capital city to another, the clause not destroyed Babylon and Esagila seems to have included the meaning of “neglect” or “abandonment.”

In light of a wider religio-historical perspective, the priestly inquest during a Babylonian Akitu rite therefore need not be written off as a “situational incongruity.” Any high priest of Marduk, who felt responsible for the God's cult and for the balancing of Babylonian culture and empire, not only would have regarded both ritualized slappings of the king as proper but also reasonable and very necessary. Indeed, often in the past cities and states have been corrupted and ruined from within by follies committed by their own leaders. Human government always represents a two-edged sword: one that cuts inward as well as outward.

One may see in the Babylonian Akitu tradition an archaic system of “checks and balances” that the priestly cult has been able to impose upon the king's secular ambitions, as a means of delimiting a God's generous legitimization of royal ambitions. We all know that royal powers everywhere have tended to become absolute when left unchecked.

Millennia were required to fine tune this blessed “incongruity” and, judging from such religio‑political arrangements elsewhere in human history and society, all these balancing measures probably never really worked or endured as well as expected. Every generation of humanists and masters of ceremonies has had to labor and to scheme anew, as homines ludentes, to harmonize and safeguard their culture's “cult versus state” balance. Every generation anew has had to invoke greater‑than‑human reality configurations to safeguard sanctions that prevented leaders from turning privileges into absolute rights. They had to invent rituals that kept benevolent dictators from taking the lead in too many activities.

Citizens of Judea, in 586 B.C.E., went into exile with the Deuteronomic knowledge that their God rewards good behavior and punishes bad behavior. They had been taught how to interpret divine punishments as evidence of guilt and sin. Throughout their exile in Babylonia they were haunted by the very same question Job asked of God: What is my sin? They wondered whether collectively they were guilty of something other than those peoples were who were not exiled. And so, at the end of their sojourn in Babylonia, their Second Isaiah answered these questions by insisting that suffering, although at some point it may have been God's punishment, nevertheless has been a prelude and necessity to redemption.

The poetry of Isaiah 53 celebrates the notion of divinely sanctioned and redemptive suffering. The questions that the poet has raised are all typically Judaic, and they have been generated by the Second Isaiah's own experience of deportation and exile. His answers, however, dared to draw heavily from the very core of Babylonian religion itself. During the cultic rites of that religion the God Marduk disappeared temporarily from the land of the living.[27]

The debate still continues about whether in Babylonia the God Marduk actually was thought of as a “dying and rising god,” as such deities have been categorized by Sir James Frazer.[28] Indeed, reconstructions of the full Akitu sequence rely on bringing together Mesopotamian documents of several culture strata. But in addition, I suspect, the debate thus far has relied far too heavily on a difference between latter-day Christian and Jewish views. According to the Christian tradition, dying and rising taken together are reasonable divine attributes, whereas historians of Jewish provenance tend to regard such notions as being unnecessary in a context of respectable Semitic religion.

But be that as it may, even if Marduk's temporary disappearance during the New Year's rite is not called death, the king's suffering before his national deity by itself demands some kind of theological-imperial parallelism or justification for the priest's assertive actions. The simplest motive of why a high priest should have struck the king appears to have been the imposition of Marduk's authority over that king. Beyond that, for a king to be struck during his annual reinstatement rite could best be justified, and can still now be best explained, by referencing such practices directly to the very nature and habits of the sponsoring deity.

But again, be that as it may, we must not allow ourselves to be distracted by the emotive meanings that death or resurrection carry here or there among scholarly traditions. What in the realm of the gods, or at the level of a God of gods, could dying possibly mean? Certainly, it meant not death in the finite human sense.

And together with these considerations, the existence of the text of Second Isaiah 53 is itself a Judaic-Babylonian datum that needs to be reckoned with. And such historical data definitely do transcend their Christian as well as their Jewish significance.

Thus, the question whether Marduk should be classified as a “dying and rising” deity really is beside the point. The central meaning of the Akitu drama was that divine roles and royal roles were synchronized and harmonized. Then for the duration of a safe ritualized interval of renewal the risk was taken for this arrangement to be interrupted, interrupted only to be reassembled again more solidly. God and king together have “suffered” and have put forth an effort, as it were, for the redemption and the renewal of Babylon. After Marduk had reemerged, the king of Babylon once again could be enthroned.

In full accord with Babylonian soteriology the “Servant Israel” in Second Isaiah suffered and was “cut off from the land of the living.” The poet considered him dead and proceeded, accordingly, to dwell on what could still be salvaged from this sad situation. Thus, with an application of Babylonian soteriology and logic, the poetry of Second Isaiah progressed from death to reemergence and new life. The poet knows that his gospel may indeed sound incredible to fellow Judaic ears:

Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows and grief....Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed. (Isaiah 53:1–5)

It is obvious that Second Isaiah actually believed that to him the purposes of God have been revealed. He proceeded to tell exactly how God has stepped into Judean history once again. He has led his chosen Persian messiah, Cyrus, by his own hand. On the basis of the “Babylonian Chronicles” students of history can reasonably infer that Cyrus participated in the Babylonian cult festival: that during the Akitu rites he thus was humiliated, that he suffered and subsequently was re-enthroned.[29] As far as the motives of Cyrus himself were concerned, no doubt, he suffered all these indignities pragmatically, to legitimize his rule over Babylonia.

But then, the Second Isaiah communicated the will of his God not as it pertained to Persian interests in Babylonia, but as it affected him as one of God's specially chosen people. His immediate goal was to persuade his fellow deportees to return home. He either did not see, or he chose to overlook, the pragmatism that motivated Cyrus in his ritualistic participation, his divine suffering.

As far as Second Isaiah was concerned, this Persian messiah of God invaded Babylonia for the primary purpose of liberating God's special people. As poet he himself experienced this saving event as if it were new light and a first insight sent by God. Then, while he was already at it, he proceeded to decode God's riddle that had been put to Judaism by way of their Deuteronomic theory of suffering.

The identity of the suffering Servant in Second Isaiah is dual and triple. One may identify in this text two Servant figures. A first "Servant Israel" signifies the people of Judea going into exile. This Servant died by the very fact of having been exiled. But then, after the exilic “burial” of this Servant, alongside “the wicked and the rich” of Babylonia, there followed the rebirth of a liberated and freshly prospering Servant Israel. This second Servant was redeemed by the sufferings of the first, of that same designation. The first Servant died at the very moment when freedom was lost to Nebuchadnezzar, and the second was born when freedom was decreed by Cyrus.

Thus, the role of Cyrus vis-à-vis Israel corresponded, in Babylonian terms, to the role of Nebu when he liberated Marduk from the confines of his netherworld mountain. All the while, however, from the point of view of Israel's sovereign God, the prophet saw neither Marduk nor Cyrus emerging from netherworld and captivity; instead, he saw the new Israel. From the point of view of Israel's God, the larger scenario looked like this:

For a brief moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you, says the Lord, your Redeemer. (Isaiah 54:7–8)

The incorporation of a Persian messiah introduced into the theology of Second Isaiah a third Servant figure, Cyrus, his mission closely fused with the fortunes of the second. This figure was introduced on the strength of Judaic messianism and Babylonian theology, together with the implicit gospel of redemptive suffering. Its introduction into the scriptures of Judaism had far-reaching consequences for the distant future.

The Second Isaiah called for a reenactment of the Exodus, but the immediate result could be counted only in small numbers of people who were willing to return to their Judean homeland. Beyond these meager results Judaism produced later, under Ezra and Nehemiah, much the opposite of what this universalistic Second Isaiah had hoped for. For its survival the new Judea retreated to narrow and defensive provincialism.

The universalistic motives expressed by biblical writers of the postexilic period, such as are reflected in books like Ruth and Jonah, reveal the posture afforded only by a liberal minority. But the fact that these books, too, were collected and recopied is sufficient proof that some scribes and teachers persisted in laboring for a more universalistic outlook.

It must be said that the universalism of Second Isaiah itself, with all its international openness and awareness, still contained some nationalistic blemishes. Here and there the poet-prophet appears to be still unduly patronizing toward other nations. It seems so at least in these passages:

For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left, and your descendants will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities (54:3). Behold, you shall call nations that you know not, and nations that knew you not shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, and of the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you. (55:5)

Standing, as it were, suddenly under the protection of Cyrus, a strong messiah of Yahweh who was made to startle nations, miraculously appearing as if from nowhere, the prophet's occasional relapses into nationalistic vainglory do seem understandable. Concerning Israel's special status in relation to fellow humankind he still dreamed the dream of Joseph (compare Genesis 37) and he postulated favoritism on the part of his God. Thus, by way of such defensive and nationalistic overstatements the wonderful book of Second Isaiah has to the Judaic tradition not only helped contribute a distorted view of other nations but also reinforced a latent martyr complex. From Judaism that same tendency to sanctimonious martyrdom was passed on to Christianity and hence to some if its secular offshoots.

* * *

Claims to supraegalitarian chosenness, or to divinely sanctioned superiority, among peoples destined to live together in a world also blessed with democratic ideals and awareness of a Golden Rule, in the end always aggravate and invite retributive leveling or persecution. The Christian exploitation of Second Isaiah, of preempting the sufferings of the Servant to signify specifically the sufferings of Christ—claiming the promised salvation for followers of Christ alone—has aggravated deadly competition between two “almost” universalistic religious faiths. It has heightened both the irritability and vulnerability of Christian and Jewish egos alike. It has isolated Judaism to persist in its diaspora of sanctified uniqueness, while, at the same time, it has saddled vast stretches of Christendom with an idolatrous scriptural fixation on that same divinely ordained uniqueness. A deadly combination, indeed! Democratically considered, the Christian scriptural idol of an ethnic “apple of God's eye,” piously garnered from Zechariah 2:8, necessarily invites vultures from near and far to peck at that eye.

And so, during the holocaust under German National Socialism, in post-Versaillesian anger, two nationalisms—one seeing itself as having been “elected by God” and the other, more recently informed about having been “selected by Nature”—in moments of worldwide economic desperation, saw the younger grab the throat of the older. All humanoid cultures thrive on robbing from among the possessions of the gods.

Judaism and Christianity, two ancient universalisms that are more provincial than either side likes to think of itself, persisting in half ignorance about their own histories and full ignorance about each other's, will predispose themselves repeatedly to new opportunities for conflict. Islam meanwhile has entered that same field, and it participates in that same scuffle with similar zeal.

* * *

Still, a historian must try to remain fair. By sixth century B.C.E. Jewish standards, the universalism of Second Isaiah was remarkable and radical. Salvation had come to his people through a God‑anointed Persian grand domesticator. And that gospel of salvation, in its Babylonian historical setting, came nicely wrapped in Babylonian logic and soteriology. One wonders what could have happened had this Judaic poet acknowledged the worldly presence of “Persia” as such, or had he spoken a clear word of appreciation to Cyrus's relatives. Some facts of life and relationships best acknowledged here on earth; they need not be eclipsed, necessarily, by the personal privileges and relationships that individuals achieve with their gods. But such historical realism apparently was not yet meant to be.

Instead, something else has transpired. The very introduction and presence of such a book as Second Isaiah into the thought stream of Judaism was destined, after a period of incubation, eventually to break forth with a new and a different kind of religious rhythm, with a different religious style. A renewed awareness of redemptive divine-human suffering has ushered in a new era in the history of Judaism. And, for the rest of the world, it changed B.C.E. to C.E.

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[1]This line of reasoning, of Yahweh theology confronting the Egyptian background of. Amun theology, is relevant even in the extreme case of denying the historicity of Moses and his exodus from Egypt. If the Exodus tradition took shape in Palestine in confrontation with Philistine-Canaanite traditions along the Egyptian cultural frontier, then the pressures of the Egyptian imperialistic theology were present just the same.

[2]Sethe, par. 217–230, in Hans Bonnet, Reallexikon der Ägyptischen Religionsgeschichte (Berlin, 1952), pp. 31–34.

[3]See Adolf Erman, Die Religion der Ägypter, pp. 37–39.

[4]See ibid., p. 74.

[5]The Shabaka Stone of about 800 B.C.E. alleges to be a copy of an earlier text. But, even if its date of copying is postulated, it still precedes the Hebrew source, which generally is dated at 550 B.C.E. or later.

[6]See the extensive presentation of this mythology later, in Booklet Five.

[7]The Sumerian words for “living” and “rib” are homonymous; they are both spelled ti. Thus the Babylonian goddess Ninhursag was referred to as Nin-ti. Accordingly, the Life-giving Goddess was nicknamed The Rib Lady. In Genesis 2:21–22 Eve is that Rib Lady, and in Genesis 3:20 she is Mother of the Living. See Don C. Benjamin, “The Adam and Eve Story,” (1990), and the S. N. Kramer translation of “Enki and Ninhursag: A Paradise Myth” in James P. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton, N,J., 1969), pp. 37–41.

[8]See, for instance, the rabbinic tale that intentionally makes light of this story plot by way of explaining why women must wear perfume: Eve's basic substance was a rib, an organic substance that spoils easily whereas clay, the substance of which Adam was made, keeps indefinitely. See Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, pp. 34ff.

[9]It probably is an oversimplification to reconstruct the ancient history of Israel's religion in terms of only two priestly houses, Levites and Zadokites. A more thorough reconstruction would have to consider also Libnites, Hebronites, Mahlites, Mosesites, Korahites, and possibly even the Aaronites as separate priestly lineages. See J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 112f. Among relevant passages concerning Levites and Zadokites may be mentioned in 2 Samuel 5:8–10; 8:17; 15:24ff; and 1 Kings 2:35.

[10]For the original moralized story itself, see Genesis 22. The New Testament epistle to the Hebrews shows the Christian continuation on that same theme.

[11]Søren Kierkegaard has argued that Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac “for God's sake, because God required this proof of faith.” He rationalized this faith posture of Abraham as the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” see “Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de Silentio” (1843), trans. Walter Lowrie, in Robert Bretall, ed., A Kierkegaard Anthology (Princeton, N.J., 1946), pp. 116–134.

[12] Compare here also Jacob's self-interest and bargaining, in Genesis 28:20-22, as a prelude to his subsequent prosperity.

[13]The theological breakthrough reflected in the Abraham story does not mean that human sacrifice in particular, or over-domestication religion in general, were eliminated as a practice in Israel, or for that matter in Judah. For flagrant exceptions, see Judges 11:31ff, 2 Kings 16:3, and Jeremiah 7:31.

[14]Consider, for example, the sacrifice of a young man, excavated in 1979 seven kilometers south of the great palace of Knossos. The proceedings of the sacrificial rite were interrupted by an earthquake and by subsequent fire, some 3,700 years ago. See Yannis Sakellarakis and Efi Sapouna‑Sakellarakis, in National Geographic Magazine (February 1981), pp. 204–222.

[15]Consider for instance the "Ransom Theory" in the history of Christian theology. It still implies a more archaic and cruel deity than seems to be implied by a God who is the "father" of Jesus Christ.

[16]See J. Maxwell Miller and John H. Hayes, A History of Ancient Israel and Judah (Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 60f and 71f, concerning thirteenth century B.C.E. city destructions. “Conquest cities” like Arad, Heshbon, Jericho, Ai, and Gibeon yielded no archaeological evidence of Late Bronze Age occupation, much less of destruction.

[17]The author gratefully acknowledges this probable etymology as a suggestion of David Wucher.

[18]“Historicized” in the sense that the Exodus was made the central guiding theme of the cult, as an acknowledged historical event. The Passover rite, as celebrated by Hebrew-Canaanite refugees from Philistine city-states, also may be understood as a ritual of “romantic herder nostalgia.” Yisrahel rebels and refugees retreated to simpler living in the hill country and, making virtue of necessity, imitated and idealized the pastoral life-styles of ancient patriarchs.

[19]Although arguments over exact motives, means, and ways of Israel's Yawistic revolution still have not been completely settled and the historical synthesis still is incomplete, a general consensus appears to have evolved concerning Egypt's over-lordship over the Philistines. For the beginning of this debate. see Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh (Maryknoll, N.Y., 1979), pp. 410ff. It should be kept in mind that, still during the reign of Solomon, it was within the power of the Egyptian pharaoh to take and give the city of Gezer as a dowry.

[20]Zadok was apparently a man of the local Jebusite, that is, Canaanite, family of priests who traced their ancestry back to Melchizedek. A later source, 1 Chronicles 24:3 and 12:27–28 rationalizes Zadok into having been a Levite. See also Genesis 14:18–20 and footnote 9, above.

[21]Commentaries ordinarily cite the affinity of Solomon's temple with Phoenician prototypes. But similar floor plans were customary also in Egyptian temples of “Amun,” the contemporary name for Egypt's One God. See, for instance, the Middle Kingdom core of the Temple of Amun-Ra, at Karnak. Lionel Casson, Ancient Egypt (New York, 1965), pp. 120ff.

[22]See also Jeremiah 32:38–40 and Ezekiel 11:19. A similar new relationship between God and people was anticipated in Hosea 2:20.

[23]See James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3d ed. (Princeton, N.J., 1969), pp. 315f.

[24]Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago, 1948), pp. 313ff.

[25]Jonathan Z. Smith. “A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams: A Study in Situational Incongruity,” History of Religions, 16:1 (1976): 1–11.

[26]Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, pp. 305ff, 315ff.

[27]See Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, pp. 321ff.

[28]See, for instance, Smith, “A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams.”

[29]The evidence is somewhat indirect and contextual. Upon taking over Babylon, Cyrus slaughtered sacrificial sheep, offered incense, and “constantly prayed to the gods, prostrated on his face” (Verse Account of Nabonidus). The priests of Marduk further wrote concerning their god, that “he scanned and looked through all the countries, searching for a righteous ruler willing to lead him (i.e., Marduk, in the annual procession).” See the Cyrus Cylinder. Both documents are published in Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, pp. 312–316.