From Yahweh to Zion Read online

  Finally, note that the monotheism of the Torah is untempered by dualism. There is no trace in the Torah of a cosmic struggle between two principles, as in the myth of Osiris or in Persian Zoroastrianism. The fundamental tension is not between good and evil, but between Yahweh and the other gods. The snake (Nachash) tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden disappears forever from the Bible after that: it has no ontological consistency. The “devil” (diabolos in Greek) will make his appearance in the Gospels, and “Lucifer” later still, based on a tendentious exegesis of Isaiah 14:12 in the Latin translation (Vulgate). As for “the satan,” it appears to be borrowed from a Sumerian legal word meaning the “accuser,” and it never occurs as a proper name in the Pentateuch (Torah). “Satan” is the prosecution lawyer in Zechariah 3:1 and in the book of Job.51 In the Old Testament, when he personifies a destructive principle, Satan is hard to distinguish from Yahweh himself. Thus, in 2 Samuel 24, Yahweh incites David to abuse his power, while in the same episode recounted by 1 Chronicles 21, the role is given to Satan. One reads in the latter narrative that “Satan took his stand against Israel” (21:1), that “God […] punished Israel” (21:7), that “the angel of Yahweh wreaks havoc throughout the territory of Israel” (21:12) and that “Yahweh unleashed an epidemic on Israel” (21:14). Ultimately, it is always God who strikes not only the enemies of Israel, but also Israel itself when it proves unworthy of him. It is he who triggers wars, epidemics, and plagues of every imaginable sort; he uses alternately Israel to destroy the nations (as a “mace,” Jeremiah 51:20), and the nations to destroy Israel. Yahweh is the source of both good and evil. (It follows logically, according to some kabbalistic schools, that one can serve him through evil as well as through good.)

  The relationship between man and the biblical god is purely contractual and legalistic. According to the Egyptologist Jan Assmann, the idea that God could dictate his laws to men is an innovation of the Bible. In Egypt and elsewhere in the ancient world, the law was not the responsibility of the gods, but of men. It stemmed from human consensus, and its application was based on human judgment. The law therefore had no divine or eternal character: “No ‘pagan’ religion made the law its chief concern.”

  The Mosaic law, for its part, fell from heaven already engraved in stone. “Monotheism’s achievement was not to have introduced law and justice, but to have transferred them from the earth and human experience, as the source of the law, to heaven and the divine will. By ‘theologizing’ justice, that is, by placing justice in god’s hands, monotheism elevates it to the status of religious truth.”52 From the Egyptian point of view, attributing the decrees of law to a divine revelation is a perversion of religion and a distortion of law, which normally draws its source and legitimacy from human experience. The Yahwist priests stripped man of this fundamental responsibility, in order to deify law and history. According to the great Jewish thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz, “The Torah does not recognize moral imperatives stemming from knowledge of natural reality or from awareness of man’s duty to his fellow man. All it recognizes are Mitzvot, divine imperatives.”53 The hundreds of mitzvot (“commandments”) are an end in themselves, not a way to a higher moral consciousness. In fact, according to Gilad Atzmon, Jewish legalism stifles genuine ethical judgment, for “ethical people don’t need ‘commandments’ to know that murder or theft are wrong.”54 Jesus expressed the same view when he accused the Pharisees of preventing people from entering the Kingdom of God with their Law (Matthew 13).

  It can be remarked that elevating the law, a human construction, to the level of a divine command, has contributed to making Jews unassimilable. This is what Zionist author Jakob Klatzkin, an admirer of Spinoza, once pointed out in the journal Der Jude, 1916: “Only the Jewish Code rules our life. Whenever other laws are forced upon us we regard them as dire oppression and constantly dodge them. We form in ourselves a closed juridical and business corporation. A strong wall built by us separates us from the people of the lands in which we live—and behind that wall is a Jewish State.”55 Jewish historian Bernard Lazare likewise remarked that all the peoples conquered by the Romans submitted without difficulty to the laws of their conquerors, because laws and religions were clearly separated in their cultures. Only the Jews resisted assimilation, because Mosaic laws are religious by nature, and suffer no compromise.56

  No Goddess for Yahweh

  Neither is there is any trace in Yahwist metaphysics of gender complementarity. According to the Bible, Yahweh needed no female deity to create the world—in a curious manner, hanging the sun in the sky three days and three nights only after declaring “let there be light” (Genesis 1:3–19). Yahweh is a god without history, without genealogy, without wife or mother or children; and therefore without mythology. Yet archeologists have found in the ruins of Kuntillet Ajrud (the Sinai Peninsula) inscriptions dating from the eighth century BCE, asking the blessing of “Yahweh and his Asherah,” suggesting that the Hebrews of that time had not yet excluded the Great Goddess from their religion.

  The discovery of the cuneiform tablets of Ugarit (in modern Syria) have helped us understand the importance of the goddess Asherah in the Semitic cultures of the ancient Middle East. Asherah was the consort of El, the sky god and father of the gods, but she also appears as his mother, while her children Baal and Anath are also a couple. According to Raphael Patai, author of The Hebrew Goddess, “For about six centuries […], that is to say, down to the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE, the Hebrews worshiped Asherah (and next to her also other, originally Canaanite, gods and goddesses) in most places and times.”57 Only in the Yahwism of the Exile, which triumphed with the reform of Ezra, was Asherah removed successfully. Yahweh’s repulsion for Asherah is matched only by his hatred of Baal. We find the name of Asherah forty times in the Old Testament, either to designate and curse the goddess, or to designate her symbol in the form of “sacred poles” that the Yahwist kings strove to destroy.

  We are now so used to the idea of a Creator who is male, single, and alone, that we have trouble imagining the spiritual void this implies from the point of view of ancient polytheism. The Bible tells that Hebrews often rebelled against this misogynous theology of their priests, and worshiped Asherah as “Queen of Heaven,” to the dismay of the prophet Jeremiah (7:18). After the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon, the book of Jeremiah tells us, Judean refugees in Egypt wondered if it was not their neglect of the Great Goddess, rather than of Yahweh, that was responsible for their misfortune, and they turned toward her with fervor. Jeremiah called them back to order by threatening that Yahweh would exterminate them (chapter 44).

  The Great Goddess is known in the Middle East under multiple identities. Under the name of Ishtar, she is the “Queen of all the inhabited places, who keeps the people in order,” according to a Mesopotamian anthem.58 In the Hellenistic period, Asherah and Ishtar were still assimilated to the Egyptian Isis, while Isis was enriched in turn with attributes of Demeter, Artemis, and Aphrodite, to which the Romans added Diana and Venus. Isis became for the Greeks the “myrionyme” goddess (“of ten thousand names”). In the Hellenistic synthesis that combined ancient Egyptian religion with Greek philosophy, the worship of the goddess Isis took precedence over that of her husband-brother Osiris. It radiated from Alexandria across the eastern edge of the Mediterranean basin. Isis became the symbol of Hellenistic civilization and its ambition to encompass all cultures.59 “You are, by yourself, all other goddesses invoked by all peoples,” said Isidoros addressing Isis. “You, the unique, who are all,” said the dedication of a worshiper from Capua. And in Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass, the goddess Isis calls herself “Queen of Heaven” and says: “My name, my divinity is adored throughout all the world in diverse manners, in variable customs and in many names.”60

  How can Yahweh, a male god who tolerates no female counterpart, help men grasp the mystery of womanhood? Yahwism reduces the divine to the masculine, and ignores the most universal and mysteriou
s of all human experiences: the complementarity of genders. In the Garden of Eden, natural law itself is reversed when the woman is declared to have come out of the man, rather than the reverse. If the function of myths is to express in narrative form universal truths, are we not here dealing with an anti-myth? Historical exegesis has long understood that the biblical story of the transgression of the first couple was meant as a polemical attack on Eastern traditions that exalt sexuality as a holy experience and a divine encounter, through initiatory or marriage rites. These rites have long been misrepresented in Western traditions by the calumnious rumor of “sacred prostitution.” The lack of any “metaphysics of sex” in Judeo-Christian culture has led to a judgment of obscenity passed on the whole iconography of hieros gamos in Asian sacred art.61 In Genesis, the first sexual act of Adam and Eve (of which the consumption of the forbidden fruit is the obvious metaphor) is the source of all evil, the “original sin” in Augustinian terms. No transcendence, no positive value whatsoever is attached to it, since even the knowledge that it is supposed to grant is denied.

  On this ground, Yahwism is an anti-Osirism, since the myth of Osiris and Isis magnifies the power of love over death. The Egyptian myth has parallels in countless myths and tales foreign to Judaism and Christianity, in which a lost soul, a victim of a bad death (Osiris) is saved in the afterlife by the sacrificial love of his soul mate (Isis).62 This type of mythical imagination is totally foreign to the Bible. No biblical narrative encourages Jews to conceive of sexuality as anything other than a natural function. The paucity of Jewish reflection on the supernatural power of human love can be contrasted with the rich traditions of India, where the erotic and the sacred go together. See for example how the Creator Brahma creates Dawn, radiant of youth and vitality, and himself succumbs to her charms, according to the Kalika Purana. One of the lessons of these myths of Hieros Gamos, according to Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, is that a man may find his own soul by adoring a woman, and vice versa.63

  Yahwism, for its part, only values marriage from the perspective of creating lineages and communities. The only major exception is the Song of Songs—which only found a place in the Hebrew corpus in the first century CE due to an allegorical interpretation of Rabbi Akiva unrelated to its original inspiration. In reality, the Song of Songs is merely a poetic evocation of youthful love, probably of non-Jewish origin, whose carnal eroticism does not rise beyond comparison with drunkenness. The divine is never mentioned.64

  From Deicide to Genocide

  The ancient peoples readily admitted that they all worshiped the same Great Goddess under different names. The cult of the Mother Goddess is undoubtedly the most international and the most likely to bring different peoples together; all men can recognize themselves as the son of one universal Mother. Motherhood is pacifying. It is also, perhaps, less discriminating than fatherhood, and it seems that the concept of chosen people would make less sense in a world embraced by the Queen of Heaven than in a world controlled by the one Yahweh. But the exclusively male character of Yahweh and his refusal to share power with a goddess are not the only factors involved. It is the chronic jealousy of Yahweh, not just his misogyny, on which the xenophobia of biblical Israel is founded. We have seen that the ancient peoples always ensured that their gods were compatible or on good terms, making cultural and economic relations possible.

  The authors of Deuteronomy were aware of the widespread idea that national gods were all under the authority of the Supreme Creator. But they altered it in typical fashion: “When the Most High (Elyown) gave the nations each their heritage, when he partitioned out the human race, he assigned the boundaries of nations according to the number of the children of God, but Yahweh’s portion was his people, Jacob was to be the measure of his inheritance” (32:8–9). In other words, among all nations, the very Father of humankind has picked one for himself, leaving the others under the care of lesser gods (angelic powers, for such is here the accepted meaning of “children of God”). That is the ultimate source of Jewish pride: “Of all the peoples on earth, you have been chosen by Yahweh your God to be his own people” (7:6). And this people of his, Yahweh naturally wants to “raise higher than every other nation in the world” (28:1). Although he implicitly admits being the Father of all other national gods, he feels for them only a murderous hatred.

  The essence of monotheistic Yahwism, which is a secondary development of tribalistic Yahwism, is the exclusive alliance between the universal Creator and a peculiar people, in order to make it “a people that dwells on its own, not to be reckoned among other nations” (Numbers 23:9). Its specificity is less in the affirmation of a unique God than in the affirmation of a unique people. The one God is the side of the coin shown to the goy to remind him his eternal debt to the “inventors of monotheism”; but the other side, the concept of chosen people, is what binds the Jewish community together, so that one can give up God without abandoning the exceptionality of the Jewish people.

  And so, even while claiming to be the Creator of the universe and humanity, Yahweh remains a national, chauvinist god; that is the basis for the dissonance between tribalism and universalism that has brought up the “Jewish question” throughout the ages. In fact, the Jewish conception of Yahweh parallels the historical process, for in the development of Yahwism, it is not the Creator of the Universe who became the god of Israel, but rather the god of Israel who became the Creator of the Universe. And so for the Jews, Yahweh is primarily the god of Jews, and secondarily the Creator of the Universe; whereas Christians, deceived by the biblical narrative, see things the other way around.

  Having chosen for himself a single tribe among all the peoples, using unknown criteria, Yahweh plans on making of them not a guide, but a bane for the rest of humanity: “Today and henceforth, I shall fill the peoples under all heavens with fear and terror of you; whoever hears word of your approach will tremble and writhe in anguish because of you” (Deuteronomy 2:25). The biblical stories are there to dramatize the message. Let us mention a few, taken from the cycles of Jacob, Moses, and David, all carrying the same trademark.

  Shechem, the son of Hamor, king of the Canaanite town of Shechem, “fell in love with [Jacob’s daughter Dinah] and tried to win her heart,” then “seized her and forced her to sleep with him.” Jacob’s sons “were outraged and infuriated that Shechem had insulted Israel by sleeping with Jacob’s daughter—a thing totally unacceptable. Hamor reasoned with them as follows, ‘My son Shechem’s heart is set on your daughter. Please allow her to marry him. Intermarry with us; give us your daughters and take our daughters for yourselves. We can live together, and the country will be open to you, for you to live in, and move about in, and acquire holdings.’ Then Shechem addressed the girl’s father and brothers, ‘Grant me this favour, and I will give you whatever you ask. Demand as high a bride-price from me as you please, and I will pay as much as you ask. Only let me marry the girl.’” Jacob’s sons then “gave Shechem and his father Hamor a crafty answer,” demanding that “you become like us by circumcising all your males. Then we will give you our daughters, taking yours for ourselves; and we will stay with you to make one nation.” Hamor, trusting the good intentions of Jacob’s tribe, convinced all his male subjects to be circumcised. “Now on the third day, when the men were still in pain, Jacob’s two sons Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, each took his sword and advanced unopposed against the town and slaughtered all the males. They killed Hamor and his son Shechem with the sword, removed Dinah from Shechem’s house and came away. When Jacob’s other sons came on the slain, they pillaged the town in reprisal for the dishonoring of their sister. They seized their flocks, cattle, donkeys, everything else in the town and in the countryside, and all their possessions. They took all their children and wives captive and looted everything to be found in the houses” (Genesis 34:1–29).

  Second example: In Moses’s time, when the kings of Heshbon and Bashan wanted to prevent the Hebrews from entering their territory, the H
ebrews “captured all his towns and laid all these towns under the curse of destruction: men, women and children, we left no survivors except the livestock which we took as our booty, and the spoils of the captured towns” (Deuteronomy 2:34–35).

  That is nothing compared to what King David did to the people of Rabba, after having sacked their town and “carried off great quantities of booty”: “And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brickkiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon. And David and all the people returned unto Jerusalem” (2 Samuel 12:31). The episode is repeated in 1 Chronicles 20:3: “And he brought forth the people that were therein, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes. Even so dealt David with all the cities of the children of Ammon.”

  I have quoted here from the King James Revised Version. Significantly, this episode has been fraudulently retranslated after 1946. We now read in the Revised Standard Version: “And he brought forth the people who were in it, and set them to labor with saws and iron picks and iron axes, and made them toil at the brickkilns.” And in the Catholic New Jerusalem Bible: “And he expelled its inhabitants, setting them to work with saws, iron picks and iron axes, employing them at brickmaking.” This new rendering makes the story politically correct, but highly improbable, since iron tools were never needed to make bricks—certainly not axes, picks and saws—but made deadly weapons that no victor in his right mind would distribute to the men he had just vanquished.