I’m sure that the thought has crossed my mind before, and I’m sure that books I read about the Hebrew Bible mentioned this, but having been reading lately about ancient creation stories, perhaps my mind has been processing this familiar data from a different angle lately.
What struck me this morning is the absence of any account in the Hebrew Bible of the origin of the gods. Their existence is denied by some late authors (e.g. Deutero-Isaiah) and assumed by most others (e.g. the Deuteronomic Historian, and many of the Psalms). But their origin, whether they are designated “gods” or “angels” or something else, is never addressed, much less described.
The thought struck me as I was thinking about the plurals in Genesis 1-3, where God is speaking but we are never told whom he is addressing. It seems to me surprising that we are never given an account of the creation or of the begetting of intermediary beings, “gods” or “angels”. Given the controversies surrounding the topic, we might have expected at least a polemical account that sought to combat assumptions others had about them and their origins, much as the author of some of the Genesis material polemicizes against the idea that the sun, moon and stars are deities. Why do we instead get nothing? Is it because that issue had already been settled in some sense at the time of writing, or is it perhaps more likely to be because the author had no alternative story to tell that could successfully counter the prevailing one, and thus chose to say nothing?
Perhaps another solution can be found, namely that none of the so-called “other gods” worshipped by Israelites were thought of as “other”. It is noteworthy that the key instances all seem to be titular in nature rather than names: Ba’al means “husband”, Moloch is just a particular way of adding vowels to the Hebrew letters that mean “king”. And even Asherah, who seems to have been understood as the female consort of the male deity Yahweh, is somewhat more complicated, since the term seems to denote a cultic object in the Bible, and in the famous drawing from Kuntillet`Ajrud in Samaria there is a reference to “Yahweh and his asherah”, and the use of a possessive pronoun on a personal name would be all but unprecedented, if I’m not mistaken. Could it be that ancient Israel’s monotheism and/or polytheism were both of an inclusive sort, with individual deities assumed to be manifestations of a single underlying divine reality? It is difficult to answer these questions, precisely because our most ancient sources seem to have chosen the route of omission and silence rather than overt polemic or explanation.
I know some readers of this blog specialize in Hebrew Bible, and so I’d appreciate input – whether in the form of your own views or recommendations for reading on this topic. What, if anything, do you think may have been believed by ancient Israelites about the origins of the “gods”, but not recorded on the pages of the Hebrew Bible?
On a not entirely unrelated topic, here’s a link to a video I came across about “scientific Adam and Eve” which some of you may find interesting.
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