Yahweh and Elohim: Other Gods

Yahweh and Elohim Part 2

This is part 2 of a multipart series.

In part 1 of this series, we discussed how the monotheism of the Old Testament was a concept that post-dated the original texts that went into making the Bible, and how the authors of the earlier texts were probably living in a thoroughly polytheistic world. The term “Elohim”, which originally meant “gods”, was changed by later redactors to mean “God”. This thesis is championed by researchers such as Mario Biglino and Paul Wallis.

Let’s take a look at who some of these other gods were, and how Yahweh fit into the larger story.

Of course, there are many stories in the Old Testament that refer to other gods. In most of these stories, the Israelites, or sometimes other peoples, are worshiping other gods, incurring Yahweh’s wrath. These gods include Astarte, Baal, Dagon, and Marduk. All other factors aside, any such stories would fit both narratives equally well. To the monotheist, the people were simply worshiping false gods. To the polytheist, they were worshiping gods other than Yahweh. Either way, Yahweh doesn’t like it. These stories are not terribly helpful, then, in constructing an argument for a polytheistic narrative. Other stories in the Old Testament, however, present a different picture.

Quotes from the Old Testament follow the Robert Alter translation.

Baal-Zebub

Let’s start by taking a look at the story of the Ahaziah, the eighth king of the Kingdom of Israel. As narrated in 2 Kings 1:2, when he took ill, he went to a god other than Yahweh for advice:

And Ahaziah fell through the lattice in his upper chamber and became ill, and he sent messengers and said, “Go, inquire of Baal-Zebub god of Ekron whether I shall survive this illness.”

Baal-Zebub is a Philistine god, and Ekron is a Philistine city. The Hebrew word for “god” here in “god of Ekron” is Elohim. In the next verse, Yahweh reacts, and he is not happy:

But the LORD had spoken to Elijah the Tishbite: “Rise, go up to meet the messengers of the king of Samaria and speak to them: ‘Is it for lack of a god in Israel that you go to inquire of Baal-Zebub god of Ekron?’”

Here, “LORD” is a translation of Yahweh, and both instances of “god” are translations of Elohim. Yahweh finds quite an ironic way to ask why Ahaziah did not come to him for advice. He seems to be jealous here, an epithet he gives to himself many times over. Yahweh is not behaving like Ahaziah is a fool for seeking advice from a false god, but rather like Ahaziah has spurned Yahweh in favor of another.

Yahweh continues by providing an answer to the question Ahaziah wishes to ask of Baal-Zebub:

“And therefore, thus said the LORD: ‘From the bed you mounted you shall not come down, for you are doomed to die.’”

And that was indeed his fate.

Chemosh

Or consider Jephthah, in chapter 11 of Judges. Leading up to this story, the Israelites had taken to serving other gods, and this pissed off Yahweh, so he let them be conquered by the surrounding people. It’s worth quoting because it is such a representative interaction between Yahweh and the people of Israel. From Judges 10:6-7:

And the Israelites once again did evil in the eyes of the LORD and served the Baalim and the Ashtaroth and the gods of Aram and the gods of Sidon and the gods of Moab and the gods of the Ammonites and the gods of the Philistines. And they forsook the LORD and did not serve Him. And the LORD’s wrath flared against Israel, and He handed them over to the Philistines and to the Ammonites.

In chapter 11, the Israelites turn to Jephthah as their captain for protection against the Ammonites, who were aggressing them. Jephthah attempts to parley, asking in Judges 11:12, “What is between you and me that you have come to do battle in my land?” The king of the Ammonites claimed that the land was originally theirs, and orders Jephthah to leave: “For Israel took my land when it came up from Egypt, from the Arnon to the Jabbok and to the Jordan. And now, give them back in peace.”

Jephthah responds, in Judges 11:14-27, with an impassioned and eloquent speech that accomplishes many things. First, it establishes the Israelites as peaceful and innocent, and the Ammonites and others as culpable, by reviewing recent history where the Israelites simply asked to “pass through” their land, and they were refused. He then establishes Amorites as the aggressors when he recounts how Israel defeated the Amorites and took their land. (Take note, the Amorites are a different people than the Ammonites.) The Amorites had previously taken the disputed land from the Ammonites, and the Israelites took it from them. Jephthah continues by asking, wouldn’t the Ammonites do the same, and take possession of any lands that their god gave them to possess? He continues by asking, why did the Ammonites not retake the land when the Israelites were dwelling elsewhere? It’s a fascinating speech that I will quote here in full, but feel free to skip over it if you want:

And Jephthah again sent messengers to the king of the Ammonites, and he said to him, “Thus says Jephthah: Israel did not take the land of Moab and the land of the Ammonites, but when it came up from Egypt, Israel went in the wilderness as far as the Sea of Reeds and came to Kadesh. And Israel sent messengers to the king of Edom, saying, ‘Let me pass, pray, through your land,’ and the king of Edom did not listen. And to the king of Moab, too, they sent and he would not agree. And Israel stayed in Kadesh. And they went through the wilderness and swung round the land of Edom and the land of Moab and came from the east of the land of Moab and camped across the Arnon and did not come into the territory of Moab because the Arnon is the border of Moab. And Israel sent messengers to Sihon king of the Amorites, king of Heshbon, and said to him, ‘Let us pass, pray, through your land to our place.’ And Sihon did not trust Israel to pass through his territory, and Sihon gathered all his troops, and they camped at Jahaz and did battle with Israel. And the LORD God of Israel gave Sihon and all his troops into the hand of Israel, and they struck them down, and Israel took hold of all the territory of the Amorites from the Arnon to the Jabbok and from the wilderness to the Jordan. And so, the LORD God of Israel dispossessed the Amorites before His people Israel, and you would possess it? Do you not take possession of what Chemosh your god gives you to possess? And all that the LORD our God has given us to possess, of that we shall take possession. And now, are you really better than Balak son of Zippor king of Moab? Did he strive with Israel, did he do battle with them? When Israel dwelled in Heshbon and in its hamlets and in Aroer and in its hamlets and in all the towns that are along the Arnon three hundred years, why did you not recover them in all that time? I on my part have committed no offense against you, yet you are doing evil to battle with me. Let the LORD, who is judge, judge today between the Israelites and the Moabites.”

It’s a very interesting picture being painted here, with various peoples, led by their gods, going into war with the surrounding peoples. On the one hand, Jephthah is alluding to a moral sense of the injustice of this kind of warring activity when he says, “I on my part have committed no offense against you, yet you are doing evil to battle with me.” On the other hand, he also alludes to a “might makes right” principle when he says, “Do you not take possession of what Chemosh your god [Elohim] gives you to possess? And all that the LORD [Yahweh] our God [Elohim] has given us to possess, of that we shall take possession.”

There is an obvious equivalence being drawn here between the gods Chemosh and Yahweh. There is no sense whatsoever that one god is true, and the other false. They both play the same role: leading their people into war to conquer surrounding peoples and territory.

Elyon

The term “Elyon”, which occurs 53 times in the Old Testament, means “highest”. It is sometimes used to refer to a being, and is traditionally understood as an epithet for the One God. But how was this understood by the original authors of these texts? Was this yet another name for Yahweh, or did it refer to some other figure?

Psalm 82 may shed some light. The first verse states: “God takes His stand in the divine assembly, in the midst of the gods He renders judgement.” Both instances of the word “god” here are translated from Elohim, so no specific gods have been named yet. However, we have a clear image of an assembly of many gods, with one of them standing up to address the group. A common translation here is “God presides over the assembly,” but this is not justified, as the Hebrew word נִצָּ֥ב (niṣ·ṣāḇ) simply means to stand, or to take one’s stand.

Some scholars and translators try to pan this off as God presiding over an assembly of human judges, but this seems quite a tortured reading to me. Robert Alter agrees in the footnotes:

The efforts of traditional commentators to understand ‘elohim here as “judges” are unconvincing. God speaks out in the assembly of lesser gods and rebukes them for doing a wretched job in the administration of justice on earth.

Alter is clearly a monotheist, and while he insists on proper scholarly interpretation, up to the point where he accepts that this Psalm is speaking of multiple gods, he is still inclined to put his One God, Yahweh, at the head of the assembly. However, Yahweh is not mentioned a single time in this Psalm.

The speaker at the assembly implores the other gods to treat the humans fairly:

“How long will you judge dishonestly,

      and show favor to the wicked?

Do justice to the poor and the orphan.

      Vindicate the lowly and the wretched.

Free the poor and the needy,

      from the hand of the wicked save them.

They do not know and do not grasp,

      in darkness they walk about.

            All the earth’s foundations totter.”

Then he turns his attention back to the other gods in verse 6: “As for Me, I had thought: you were gods [Elohim], and the sons of the Most High [Elyon] were you all.” So Elyon is the father of the gods of this assembly? That is what the speaker seems to assert.

The speaker closes his speech with a striking claim: “Yet indeed like humans you shall die, and like one of the princes, fall.” Are these gods mortal, like us? Some believe that the Elohim were very long-lived, but in fact mortal. Alter’s interpretation is that these “lesser gods” are put into their place here, and “rudely demoted from their divine status.” I can understand how he might reach that conclusion, but there is nothing in the text that supports this. The speaker, for all we know, is just a regular member of the assembly. He might be the leader of the assembly, but that is not clear. And the claim that “like humans you shall die” reads like a statement of fact, and not a curse. As in, “I used to think we all were so great, but then I remembered how we are all going to die just like these humans we rule over.”

So we are presented with a group of gods, and a god named Elyon presiding over them. This image is confirmed in Deuteronomy 32:8: “When Elyon gave estates to nations, when He split up the sons of man, He set out the boundaries of peoples, by the number of the sundry gods.”

Of course, monotheists will want to conflate Elyon with Yahweh, because of course Yahweh, the One God, would be the chief of the gods, if there were many gods and they had a chief. And there are many verses in the Old Testament that use the two names to refer to the same being. See for instance 2 Samuel 22:14, Psalm 97:9 and Psalm 47:2. But these are all cases of Israelites calling Yahweh “most high”, and this could easily be interpreted as a form of flattery or appeasement. You really did not want to piss this Yahweh guy off! (More on this later.) And it must be remembered that the sentiment that Yahweh is “most high” could have been added at any point along the path of the development of these texts. Conversely, it would probably be a lot more difficult to change the meaning of a song that is as blatantly polytheistic as Psalm 82.

I would argue that Elyon and Yahweh are two separate gods. It seems highly implausible to me that Yahweh was the “chief of the gods”, when he is so often presented on equivalent terms as the other gods in these stories. For instance, when Ahazia wanted advice from Baal-zebub, Yahweh did not ask, “Why go to that god, when the boss of all the gods is right here?” Instead he asked, “Why go to that god, when you have a god of your own right here?” And Jephthah did not say to the king of the Ammonites, “Your god Chemosh is a servant of our god Yahweh, so even if you could take this land in war, it is still rightfully ours.” Instead, he said, “Wouldn’t you keep the land if your god won it for you? In the same way, we will keep the land that our god won for us.”

Of course, it is incredibly important that we learn and understand just who these Elohim actually were. But I’m going to stay focused on Yahweh for the time being. In the upcoming installments, we will look more deeply into his character, and see that he is not the omniscient, omnipotent, or benevolent god that modern day Christians want him to be. This does not mean that there is not such a god! But it does mean that it is not Yahweh, unless Yahweh has matured an awful lot from his earlier days.