Speculations on the Withdrawal of Yahweh

I’ve mentioned once or twice in passing in my Yahweh and Elohim series that I believed that at some point, Yahweh passed away, or otherwise left us. I am quite interested in trying to figure out when, and how, he left us. I am currently reading through Kings, and my impression is that he has already departed by the time of Solomon, the first king of Israel documented in Kings. I’d like to discuss, rather informally, how I’ve come to that conclusion. Before I get into it, a little background on Kings will be helpful.

Background on Kings

A quick explanatory note: Like Samuel, we traditionally have two books of Kings. That is, we have 1 Kings and 2 Kings, just as we have 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel. In both cases, these were originally single books, but at a certain point in their transcription, they were both too long to fit on a single scroll, so they were split in two. (This occurred when they were first translated into Greek in the third century B.C.E.) So the breaking up of Samuel and Kings into two books each is not an indication of a semantic break in content, but rather a technical artifact of the writing process of the times.

The main thrust of the book of Kings seems to be a retelling of the history of the kings of Israel and Judea originally found in the annals of these kingdoms. This can be seen by the presence, at the end of the story of each individual king, a closing statement along the lines of 1 Kings 11:41 (Alter translation throughout):

And the rest of the acts of Solomon and all that he did, and his wisdom, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of Solomon?

Perhaps Solomon, whose reign receives a full 9 chapters, is a bit of a special case, so let me provide one more example from 1 Kings 14:19:

And the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, wherein he did battle and whereby he reigned, why they are written in the Book of the Acts of the Kings of Israel.

The annals referenced in these kinds of statements are lost. It seems that the Deuteronomic author of Kings has taken a rather clerical account of the reigns of these kings from the annals, and added in some dramatic elements and character development. They also tend to interpret every setback as caused by the failure of the king (or the previous king) to uphold Yahweh’s law, and every positive development as due to their righteous devotion to the law.

In the final essay in the Yahweh and Elohim series, I said that “Most of the rest of it – from Genesis chapter 12 where Abram is introduced, through the end of Samuel – reads to me like an historical account of Abraham and his descendants.” I still hold by this, although I do feel like I need to revisit Judges and Samuel in this regard. But it seems to me that the narrative has taken a new direction in Kings. The most obvious difference is the introduction of blatantly folkloric material, of which I have given a small handful of examples here. In general, it feels like the author or authors are retelling bland historical accounts drawn from the annals of the two kingdoms, and embellishing them with folk tales and dramatizing narrative that perhaps is drawn from oral tradition.

Folklore

As the book of Kings progresses, we begin to see more instances of folklore, and tales of folk magic, insert themselves into the story. For instance, in 2 Kings 4:1-7, we find a tale that is mildly reminiscent of the story of Jesus turning water into wine:

And a certain woman from the wives of the acolyte prophets had cried out to Elisha, saying, “Your servant, my husband, died. And you know that your servant was a LORD fearer. And the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves.” And Elisha said to her, “What shall I do for you? Tell me, what do you have in the house?” And she said, “Your servant has nothing at all in the house except a cruse of oil.” And he said, “Go, borrow vessels for yourself from outside, from all your neighbors - empty vessels, and not just a few. And you shall come and close the door behind you and behind your sons, and you shall pour into these vessels, and the full ones you shall set aside.” And she went from him and closed the door behind her and she was pouring. And it happened when the vessels were full that she said to her son, “Bring me another vessel,” and he said to her, “There are no more vessels.” And the oil stopped. And she came and told the man of God, and he said, “Go, sell the oil and pay your debt, and you and your sons will live off what is left.”

In the final chapter of the Yahweh series, I mentioned a folktale about a talking ass inserted into the narrative in Numbers chapter 22. My memory is not great, but as far as I recall, the talking ass story is the only significant bit of folklore between Genesis chapter 12, and 2 Kings chapter 4.

There are a number of reasons why I feel that Yahweh is no longer present by the time we get to Kings in the Old Testament narrative. The main reason is, Yahweh no longer plays any active role in these stories. In the past, he is shown helping the Israelites in battle. He also made direct interventions for the people, such as in Numbers 21:4-9, when he instructs Moses to make a copper snake and put it on a pole, so that anyone bitten by a poisonous snake could look up at the pole, and not die. The folk stories in Kings do not involve these kinds of direct interventions. To be honest, I suspect that this less-than-active involvement of Yahweh in the affairs of the Israelites starts before the book of Kings, but this is the moment when it first became clear to me. Yahweh is obviously present in parts of Joshua, so I have a tentative window for his departure that includes Joshua, Judges and Samuel.

Speaking in Dreams

Another potential tell that Yahweh has departed is the lack of stories of Yahweh speaking directly to the Israelites. Rather, he speaks to them in dreams, such as in 1 Kings chapter 3, verse 5:

In Gibeon did the LORD appear to Solomon in a night-dream, and God said, “Ask. What shall I give you?”

Solomon asks (verse 9) for “an understanding heart, to discern between good and evil.” Interestingly enough, this is quite similar to what Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden for! In this case, Yahweh grants Solomon his wish, because he has not asked for self-serving ends such as (verse 11) “long life for yourself and did not ask for wealth for yourself and did not ask for the life of your enemies.” This dream sequence is immediately followed by the first instance of folklore in Kings, a demonstration of his newfound wisdom, where two women claim to be the mother of the same child, and Solomon suggests cutting the baby in half.

Yahweh speaks to Solomon again in a dream in 1 Kings chapter 9, but the author here seem to attempts to gloss over the dreamlike nature of the conversation by not directly mentioning it, but instead, referring back to the earlier incident, (verse 2), “that the LORD appeared to Solomon a second time as He had appeared to him in Gideon.”

Obviously, appearing to someone in a dream is a lot less authoritative than speaking to them directly, as, for instance, Yahweh did with Moses. If someone were to be making up an encounter with Yahweh, it would seem a lot safer and more believable to couch it in terms of a dream. And if they were making it all up, then they would have extra incentive to find ways to make the story more believable.

The only instance of Yahweh potentially speaking directly to humans that I’ve found so far in Kings is when he speaks to Elijah in 1 Kings chapter 9. But even here, it seems to be a dream sequence that is glossed over. First, he speaks to an angel twice, in two consecutive dreams in 1 Kings 9:4-7:

And he had gone a day’s journey into the wilderness, and he came and sat under a certain broom-tree, and he wanted to die, and he said, “Enough now, LORD. Take my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” And he lay down and slept under a certain broom-tree, and look, a divine messenger was touching him, and he said to him, “Arise, eat.” And he looked, and there at his head was a loaf baked on hot coals and a cruse of water. And he ate and he drank and he lay down once more. And the LORD’s messenger came back again and touched him and said, “Arise, eat, for your way is long.”

A short time after this, Yahweh speaks to him. The text does not directly indicate that this is a dream, but this is implied by the position of the phrase, “spent the night.” 1 Kings 9:9:

And he came into a cave and spent the night there, and, look, the word of the LORD came to him and said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

Continuing on in this conversation, Yahweh repeats the question, and then gives Elijah his orders. To me, the vague allusion to spending the night reads as if the original story indicated a dream sequence more clearly, but a later author, who would have preferred that Elijah and Yahweh spoke directly, introduced as much imprecision as they felt comfortable doing.

In any event, Elijah is a zealot for Yahweh, and if anyone in this part of the story was bold enough to claim to speak directly to Yahweh, it was him.

The Ark of the Covenant

One other incident that occurs in Kings gives me cause to doubt that Yahweh is still with us by this time. After spending a good bit of attention to the construction of the Temple and Solomon’s palace (1 Kings chapters 5-7), we are treated to a detailed description of a lavish ceremony for bringing the Ark of the Covenant to the newly constructed Temple (1 Kings chapter 8). Solomon gives an extended speech, and 22,000 each of oxen and sheep were sacrificed. The Temple of Jerusalem becomes the final resting place of the Ark before it disappears for good, probably at the time of the Babylonian conquest. Solomon’s ceremony is all very splendid and reverent, but there is a bit of cognitive dissonance here: The Ark is supposed to go forth in front of the armies of Israel as they went into battle. It was supposed to help them defeat their enemies. The original temple for the Ark was the Tabernacle, which was designed to be mobile for this reason. The ceremony of placing the Ark in the Temple of Jerusalem is like a funeral, and the Temple itself like a tomb.

Of course, it had already been a long time since the Israelites had born the Ark with them to battle. The last battle it saw was in 1 Samuel 4:3–11, when the Israelites were defeated by the Philistines, and the Ark was captured. It was later returned to the Israelites, because it was afflicting the Philistines with tumors. Many more Israelites died before it found a resting place in Zion, under King David.

There are a couple of details that I would like to mention regarding Solomon’s ceremony of bringing the Ark to the Temple. I’m pulling two short quotes out of a much longer narrative, and it’s probably worth reading the whole chapter to put them in proper context. That said, 1 Kings 8:27 caused me to raise my eyebrow:

But can God really dwell on earth? Look, the heavens and the heavens beyond the heavens cannot contain You. How much less this house that I have built.

Solomon’s impassioned speech belies a more modern view of Yahweh: That omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent single God that we find in most variations on the Abrahamic religions today. But if we look at the line, “But can God really dwell on earth,” from the viewpoint of the ceremony being a funeral, it perhaps takes on a different meaning. The last place, as I recall, that we saw Yahweh walking the surface of the earth was in the Garden of Eden. But he has had a lot of direct involvement with the goings on at the surface of the earth, and this is quite a far cry from “the heavens beyond the heavens” not being able to contain him. It seems to fit the evidence that Yahweh can no longer “really dwell on earth.” Does this have something to do with the Ark becoming non-functional?

The following passage also struck me as strange. 1 Kings 8:9:

There was nothing in the Ark except the two stone tablets that Moses had put there on Horeb, which the LORD had sealed as a covenant with the Israelites when they came out of the land of Egypt.

This phrasing suggests that we might have expected to find something else within the Ark. Had something gone missing? Maybe something that once made it a powerful weapon of war? Maybe something that ended up killing - more or less throughout its existence - a whole lot of people who mishandled it, or who simply looked at it wrong (1 Samuel 6:19)? Perhaps the Philistines made the thing more dangerous while they were tinkering with it when it was in their possession. Perhaps something dangerous was removed by Obed-edom, to whom David brought the Ark after it killed yet another (2 Samuel chapter 6). David went from being afraid of the Ark, to dancing and rejoicing, while it was in Obed-edom’s possession.

Closing

My suspicion at this point is that the battle where the Philistines defeated the Israelites and captured the Ark was a crucial moment. I am going to need to go back and look at this more carefully. After this event, the Ark seems to have become dangerous to human health, and no longer serviceable as a weapon of war. How did Yahweh himself fare at this defeat? It is highly unlikely, given what we know about the power of an El, that the Philistines themselves could have killed Yahweh, or even harmed him. But perhaps Dagon, the Philistines’ god, was also present at the battle?