The Evolution of God
The Bible is usually read as a grand narrative from creation to apocalypse. This straight-forward reading presents some paradoxes. For example, the Biblical God commands wrathful genocides alongside loving forgiveness. At times He demands uncompromising nationalism and at other times He promotes generous universalism. For centuries, armies of apologists have been busy justifying these paradoxes, anxious to clear up doubts that could arise about the divine origins of Bible. Robert Wright’s monumental book The Evolution of God gives a much simpler explanation for God’s schizophrenic nature: the God of the Bible is actually an amalgamation of different Canaanite gods. According to Wright the Bible is a selectively edited compilation of sacred middle eastern texts and traditions forged together into a cohesive narrative by Jewish scholars during the Babylonian captivity (697 BC) and then added to by Christian fathers in the 3rd century AD. It was only during the Babylonian captivity that true monotheism emerged.
In Wright’s narrative, the Jews were actually much less genocidal than the Biblical narrative suggests they were. In the Old Testament, God is a wrathful champion of an ISIS-like nation cruising from victory to victory as long as they were loyal to Him. However Wright suggests that Israel was actually a loose coalition of polytheistic tribes fighting off gigantic empires surrounding them. Within this pressure cooker Israelites faced impossible decisions: whether to accept humiliating vassalage at the hands of oppressive empires or to stand bravely against them. Not everyone can relate to the genocidal Jews in the literal Biblical account. But everyone can relate to Wright’s narrative of a nation afflicted and beset by unresolvable dilemmas. Under these circumstances it’s easy to see how some of the more troubling views about God emerged. Israelis were always the “little guys,” but they were inspired by stories that made them and their God out to be just as great or greater than the ruthless empires they were forced to take on.
The above diagram is an attempt to illustrate Wright’s account of the evolution of the Judaeo-Christian God from ancient Canaanite polytheism. It is meant to be a kind of family tree with the ancestral gods depicted at the bottom and evolving over time to form the Holy Trinity at the top. Wright is quick to point out that this narrative is not universally accepted, especially among the religiously devout. Nevertheless it utilizes some of the more mainstream theories about the development of Judaeo-Christianity from the historical and archaeological perspective. And nothing in this account precludes belief in the divine origins of the Bible. In fact the emergence of monotheism from polytheism represents a kind of miracle in and of itself. The Jews were uniquely important in the history of the world and not because of dramatic miracles like the crossing of the Red Sea. They were, in a much more important sense, divinely inspired.
Canaan as a Syncretic Pressure Cooker
Wright argues that Judaeo-Christian monotheism evolved from Canaanite polytheism through a process called syncretism (wherein two or more gods combine to form a new god). Much of Wright’s book analyzes how and why this happened. My illustration attempts to show how the empires surrounding Canaan acted as a kind of imperial pressure cooker leading to new deity combinations not unlike the pressures inside a nuclear reactor which force individual particles to combine to form new ones.
The Ancient Canaanite Trinity: Ywh (the flame), Baal (the husband), El (the father)
There were many deities in ancient Canaan, but three of them are central to the evolution of monotheism: Ywh, Baal, and El. Ywh (also Yhwh or Yahweh) was originally a warrior god with transcendent attributes. He enters the archeological record as a deity of the Shasu people, a religious minority persecuted in Egypt who later settled in Southern Canaan (the possible origin of the Exodus story). I’ve illustrated Ywh as an upside down triangle in an attempt to show that he represents the transcendence of heaven coming down into the human heart as a “still small voice” or a “fire in the bones.” Elsewhere in the Bible he takes the form of a burning bush or fire from heaven. I’ve therefore given Ywh the subtitle “the flame.”
Baal was a popular storm god who brought rain to farmers and fertility to families. Like Ywh I’ve illustrated Baal as an upside down triangle because he is also a sky god who comes down from heaven. Baal is also the Hebrew name for “husband,” and in a sense the god Baal was the archetypal husband: protector, provider, and inseminator of the land. (See analysis of Psalm 29)
El was the head god in a large pantheon of sons, daughters and wives and a popular god in Northern Canaan. He was a nomadic deity who dwelt in a tent or tabernacle and displayed the kind of patriarchal leadership that was emulated by kings and chieftains. I’ve illustrated him as a right-side-up triangle to emphasize the fact that he acts within a hierarchy. (El is also the generic term for “god” in Hebrew, so it is sometimes confusing distinguishing between El Shaddai, the proper name for this god, Eloheim, the name for El’s pantheon, and el, the name used for god generically.)
Although Wright doesn’t go into this, I want to highlight the archetypal connotations of this ancient Canaanite trinity. The archetypes Father, Husband, and Flame are remarkably similar to the Catholic trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. El the Father and God the Father both the crown the hierarchies of their respective theologies. The “Son” in Catholic theology is often described as a husband or bridegroom, an archetype similar to the “husband” Baal. The Holy Ghost also has remarkable similarities to the Biblical depictions of Ywh as a flame of fire or a still small voice. While there may not be a direct link between these ancient deities and the development of the Catholic trinity, monotheistic conceptions of God seem to reflect many of the ancient polytheistic archetypes.
Syncretic Alliances
There were two major syncretic events in ancient Canaan that were central to the formation of monotheism. One was a 9th century BC anti-Egyptian alliance between Ywh worshipers in the south and El worshipers in the north. This alliance may have been the origin of the covenant rites of Israelite worship wherein various tribes of Canaanites gathered together around important shrines to swear allegiance to El and appeal for his protection from their aggressive imperial neighbors. An anti-Egyptian alliance would make sense from the perspective of the Shasu, who had been persecuted by the Egyptians before. In this alliance El retains his position as the top god and Ywh becomes one of his sons (see Mark S. Smith analysis of Psalm 82 in Origins of Biblical Monotheism). El’s importance in Canaan was reduced after the Northern Kingdoms were carried away captive by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, the so called “lost ten tribes.”
The second major syncretic event occurred during a 7th century BC alliance between the Israelite nations and the Phoenician Empire. According to Wright this event influenced the merger of Baal and Ywh which happened not through cooperation but through competition. The Bible gives a dramatic account of this competition in 1 Kings which tells the story of a conflict between the Israelite King Ahab, his Queen Jezebel and the Prophet Elijah. Jezebel was a Phoenician princess loyal to Baal, and her marriage to the Israelite Ahab represented an important alliance with Phoenicia that would help fend off threats from the aggressive Assyrian Empire. This gave political clout to worshipers of Baal and marginalized those loyal to Ywh. The worshipers of Ywh refused to go down without a fight. Their prophets decried the alliance and attempted to demonstrate that not only was Ywh a better god than Baal, he could also best Baal at his own game: bring rain in times of drought and stave off an Assyrian onslaught without the help of the Phoenicians. This conflict is depicted in the famous contest between the priests of Baal and Elijah. While this story was written long after it had supposedly occurred, it is nevertheless a remarkable illustration of the political situation at the time. Ywh upped his game, taking on the attributes of Baal in addition to his own so that he could be touted as a legitimate substitute for those who were partial to Baal and his generative powers.
Josiah
If there is any figure that comes closest to embodying the ugly Biblical violence celebrated in the Book of Joshua and elsewhere it is the Jewish king Josiah (641–610 BCE), who slaughtered the priests of other gods and enforced the complete domination of the cult of Ywh. While his reforms didn’t survive his reign, his accomplishments were celebrated by later Jewish scholars during the Babylonian captivity who recast him as a reformer reinstating an ancient monotheism laid down by the legendary prophets Moses and Abraham.
The Babylonian Captivity and a New Monotheism
The Babylonian captivity is the most important event in the creation of Jewish monotheism. During the captivity Jewish scholars compiled and edited what would become today’s Old Testament. Traditions associated with each of the three gods (Ywh, Baal, and El) were combined into a cohesive narrative and the three gods became one: a new, all powerful deity who wasn’t just better than the gods of other nations but was in fact the only God in existence. Exactly how this happened is the subject of much controversy but the most well known theory is called the documentary hypothesis. While many of the details of the documentary hypothesis are disputed, historians generally agree that there were various factions among the exiled Jews, each loyal to different traditions and conceptions of God. Their contributions resulted in a Biblical God who is quite diverse, at times nationalistic and at times internationalist, both pro-ritual and anti-ritual, both interventionist and non-interventionist, etc.
Complicating the picture is the fact that Babylon was overtaken by the Persian Empire during the period of the captivity. The Persians allowed the Jews return to their homeland, but not without pressing the Jews to adopt a more globalist outlook. The Persians granted their people local control throughout the empire but wouldn’t tolerate belligerence. The so called “priestly source” of the documentary hypothesis was likely a pro-Persian faction among the Jews, one that emphasized the international, universal aspects of God as opposed to the nationalist Ywh. The priestly source uses El, not Ywh as God’s name and narrates stories from Elohist tradition like the story of Abraham. In my chart I attempt to illustrate the Elohist emphasis during the captivity by enlarging the right-side-up triangle of El and merging it with Ywh’s upside-down triangle to create a new “star of David.”
The Evolution of Christianity
Jesus was a messianic Jew crucified by the Romans. However it wasn’t obvious to his followers what his death and resurrection was supposed to mean. There were many early versions of Christianity and they had widely divergent views. Wright examines three main branches: Ebionite Christianity, Marcionism, and Pauline Christianity.
The Ebionites denied that Jesus was divine in any way. He was a messiah for the Jewish people and Christians were to continue to obey the Jewish laws of the Old Testament. Thus for Ebionite Christians, Jewish conceptions of God stayed intact. Marcionism on the other hand held that Jesus had been sent by the true God and that he had defeated the evil god of the Old Testament. Therefore, the entire Jewish conception of God was to be done away with.
Somewhere in between the extremes of Marcionism and Ebionite Christianity is Pauline Christianity. A Jew himself, Paul believed that Jesus was the fulfillment of old Jewish law but that he did not overthrow the Jewish God. Rather Jesus was in some sense the God of both the Old and New Testament. This was a conception that would later evolve into the Catholic Trinity. Wright gives an extensive analysis as to why Pauline Christianity succeeded where other versions failed. Here is a brief summary: Christian missionaries relied initially on converts from the Jewish diaspora (which had occurred due to the collapse of the Alexandrian empire.) Jews scattered around the Hellenistic world were well regarded by the Greeks (who had also been scattered around the Mediterranean by the collapse of the Alexandrian empire). In fact many Greeks wanted to become Jews themselves although they balked at all the formal rules involved, particularly circumcision. Christianity was an attractive alternative. However Ebionite Christianity was too harsh and demanding, too much like existing Judaism. And Marcionism treated the Jews with contempt. In the end, Pauline Christianity represented a more ideal balance between Greek and Jewish culture. The newly baptized Greeks proclaimed that Jesus was “Socrates for the masses” and celebrated the God of both Old and New Testament as a single, universal Logos (stoicism) or One (neo-platonism).
Wright’s thesis is informed by game theory and its notions of zero-sum and non-zero sum thinking. Both Marcionism and Ebionite Christianity were zero-sum religions. They either excluded the Jews or excluded the Gentiles. Pauline Christianity on the other hand was a non-zero sum phenomenon that allowed Greeks and Jews to come together in a way that enhanced the cultures and prospects of both groups.
Wright’s book goes on to discuss the development of Islam and skips over the development of the Catholic Trinity. At the top of my illustration however I’ve added a ven diagram with stocism and neo-platonism intersecting with Pauline Christianity. In my view, the Holy Trinity emerges from the combination of these three philosophical and religious traditions. This emergence was formalized by the great 4th and 5th century theologian St. Augustine. It’s a complicated topic I intend to cover more deeply in future posts. For this analysis I’ll only note that the Catholic conception of God was perhaps the greatest non-zero sum accomplishment of the human race up to that point. As Philosopher John Vervaeke points out, St. Augustine took the best philosophy (neoplatonic), the best theology (Christian), and the best psychology (stoic) of his day and melded it into a cohesive worldview so powerful that it would endure for over a thousand years, eventually giving birth to the modern world.