Yahweh and Elohim: Jewish Strategies for Dealing with Yahweh

This is part 8 of a multi-part series.

As we have seen, the Jewish people certainly went through a harrowing experience in their relationship with Yahweh over the course of many centuries. To their credit, they managed to survive and thrive through many millennia despite this. They developed powerful kingdoms, and endured multiple defeats, forced migrations, captivities, and attempted genocides. They have held strong as a people right up to the present day. Just what sorts of strategies did the people of Israel use to deal with the cruel and heavy-handed approach that Yahweh took towards them over the centuries?

The most obvious reaction of the Jews to the abuses of Yahweh is, they survived. They coped. They got by. Coming back once again to the story of Abraham and the aborted sacrifice of his son Isaac, we are struck by the fact that Abraham does not once complain. Not once does he even question Yahweh’s order. When I was a child in Sunday school, I was told that Abraham here was showing exemplary devotion and obedience to God. It never seemed very exemplary to me. It is the moral duty of every one of us to question authority, especially when the authority figure is so clearly in the wrong. Perhaps an exception can be made when one is under duress. Refusing Yahweh’s command in this situation could easily mean Abraham’s demise, as well as the demise of his only son. With no good options open to him, Abraham chose to suffer and survive.

Another example of the Jews surviving this abusive relationship is their becoming ruthless in war. Many times over, after defeating a neighboring army, the people of Israel slaughtered every survivor, man, woman, and child. In some instances, every last donkey and cow was slaughtered as well. All on Yahweh’s orders. I’m sure there were many Jewish soldiers who felt terrible about killing helpless women and children after these battles. But what could they do? They would not only be risking their own lives if they disobeyed, but the well-being of the entire people of Israel.

One brilliant thing that the Jewish people did was to thoroughly document their interactions with Yahweh over the generations. The Old Testament is perhaps the most detailed and thorough account we have of the relationships between human beings and these gods, the Elohim. Aside from being an amazing piece of literature, this documented record gave future generations the opportunity to remember and reflect on what they went through. As we have seen, having a written, codified law helps tremendously in the development of a nation. In this case at least, the Old Testament also helps strengthen the identity of the Jews as a people. Israel did very well for themselves. Many smaller nations from that time and place disappeared while hardly leaving a mark on history. The Jews multiplied in great numbers, were proficient at war, defeating and destroying many of their competitors. They also maintained their identity, and resisted being absorbed by conquering nations, through multiple periods of exile and subjugation.

Ironically enough, Yahweh’s prohibitions against worshiping other gods, motivated by his jealousy and insecurities, in some sense ended up being his downfall. Over time, polytheism gradually gave way to henotheism, where many gods are acknowledged but only one is worshiped, and from there into monotheism. Under Jewish monotheism, Yahweh was gradually transformed from the brutal, capricious figure we have seen in these essays, into the benevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God that we know from modern Jewish and Christian theology. He was changed into an entirely different creature. It’s possible that Yahweh himself grew and matured, transforming himself nearly completely in this way. More likely, the Jewish people, and the Christians in turn after them, forgot about the abusive overlord of their past, and replaced him with a more comforting figure. Who wouldn’t want to forget such a harrowing history? Getting some distance is a critical, early step in dealing with surviving an abusive relationship like this. There is a certain amount of escapism in this approach, but given the circumstances, it is a valuable and important coping mechanism.

Of course, this development of Yahweh into a benevolent God presents a problem. The stories of Yahweh’s treatment of the Jews are now not just preserved in writing, but preserved in a book that was revered by, and sacred to, the people of Israel. The stories of Yahweh’s mistreatment of the humans will never go away. This means that, from time to time, people will have to find a way to square Yahweh’s difficult behavior with their conception of a benevolent God. One approach to bridging this cognitive dissonance gap is through sophistry and apologetics, where we find ways to explain away Yahweh’s documented misbehavior.

To examine this kind of sophistry a little more closely, let’s return to the story of Abraham’s aborted sacrifice of his son Isaac. It’s a powerful example, because it seems nearly impossible to pass off a command to sacrifice your only son as the command of a benevolent God. And yet, many Jewish teachers attempt to make such a case. I’ve culled a few such attempts from an excellent essay by Professor Isaac Kalimi, entitled Mitigating the Akedah. It’s worth a read if you find this topic interesting.

Of course, the Bible itself already frames the sacrificial command as a test. The story starts, in Genesis 22:1: “And it happened after these things that God tested Abraham.” This test narrative may well have been added to the story at a later point, to soften the blatant cruelty of the order of human sacrifice. As we discussed earlier, even if we accept the test narrative, it is still a cruelty to put Abraham and Isaac through this ordeal. The test narrative is reinforced in the Babylonian Talmud, Taanit 4a, which cites Jeremiah 19:5 for support. From Taanit 4a:

“Nor did it come into my heart,” this is referring to Isaac, son of Abraham. Although God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, there was no intent in God’s heart that he should actually do so; it was merely a test.

For context, here is Jeremiah 19:5, Robert Alter translation:

And they have built high places to Baal to burn their sons in the fire of burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not charge and of which I did not speak and which never came to My mind, therefore, look, days are coming, said the LORD, when this place shall not be called Topheth and the Valley of Ben-Hinnon but the Valley of the Killing.

The Hebrew word לִבִּֽי׃ (lib·bî), translated as “heart” in the first passage, is commonly translated as “mind” in the passage from Jeremiah. Both translations are reasonable, and “never entered my mind” works well as colloquial English. The connection between this passage and the story of Abraham and Isaac is not clear to me, but the verse from Jeremiah is used here to reinforce the test narrative.

It’s pretty clear that even the test narrative represents a cruelty, and other Rabbis attempt to soften this even further. In this Talmudic passage, Sanhedrin 89b, we not only have Satan goading Yahweh on, but fault is found in Abraham for not preparing an animal sacrifice:

Rabbi Yoḥanan said in the name of Rabbi Yosei ben Zimra: This means after the statement of Satan, as it is written: “And the child grew, and was weaned, and Abraham prepared a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned.” Satan said before the Holy One, Blessed be He: Master of the Universe, this old man, you favored him with a product of the womb, i.e., a child, at one hundred years of age. From the entire feast that he prepared, did he not have even one dove or one pigeon to sacrifice before You as a thanks-offering? God said to Satan: Did Abraham prepare the feast for any reason but for his son? If I say to him: Sacrifice your son before Me, he would immediately slaughter him. Immediately, after these matters, the verse states: “And God tried Abraham.”

If Satan goaded Yahweh on in this manner, it may make him an accomplice in that act, but it in no way lessens Yahweh’s responsibility for his own actions.

One final example: In the book of Hebrews – a chapter in the New Testament written by an eloquent and pious Jew – we find the claim that Abraham was willing to carry out the sacrifice because he believed that afterwards, Yahweh would raise Isaac from the dead. Hebrews 11:17-19, David Bentley Hart translation:

In faith Abraham, being tested, offered up Isaac; he who had in fact received the promises was offering up an only son, he to whom it had been said, “In Isaac seed shall be reckoned to you,” having reasoned that God was able to raise him up even from the dead – from which he did indeed, figuratively, receive him.

If Abraham had this expectation in mind when he went about following Yahweh’s order, I have to wonder, did Yahweh know that he knew? If Yahweh was indeed omniscient, then of course he would have known. This would certainly make the whole incident a lot less cruel, but it makes for strange theater. Abraham would be going through the motions of killing his own son, all the while both he and Yahweh fully aware that Isaac would afterwards be raised from the dead. What could possibly be the point of such a strange ritual?

We’ve seen a few examples now of Jewish scholars, fully aware of the dissonance between the idea of a benevolent God and the cruelty exhibited by Yahweh in the Old Testament, attempting to relieve this dissonance by various apologetic explanations. This seems to be the general pattern: Obvious displays of cruelty on the part of Yahweh are explained away as best as possible as not actually cruel.

There is a second approach we can take to reconcile our conception of a benevolent God with the documented misbehavior of Yahweh. We can acknowledge that Yahweh was not benevolent, and not at all the same as the God worshiped in Christianity and modern Judaism. At some point in time, Yahweh and the other Elohim left the scene, and they no longer interact with us in any direct, physically manifested way. After having been given the distance necessary to allow ourselves to begin a healing process, eventually we can come back and revisit the abuse and subjugation in a more honest manner. Acknowledging our actual lived experiences is a later stage of healing for survivors of abuse such as ourselves. It’s high time we embark on this next stage of healing. It is a difficult task to undertake, because it can shake the foundations of our religion and faith. But the presence of evil – even evil that is intimately close to us, and forcefully imposed upon us – does not in any measure negate the divine, natural beauty of our world. Even though Yahweh was this way, God is still with us.