Yahweh and Elohim: Understanding Yahweh’s Behavior

This is part 7 of a multi-part series.

In the past few essays, we’ve delved in deep and looked at a number of examples that tell us a lot about Yahweh’s character. In this essay and the next, I’d like to examine what this means to the people of Israel, whose history is so deeply entwined with his. It’s extremely important that we proceed with caution here: We must not blame the victim in this story. Yahweh treated his chosen people with utter ruthlessness, and living through this must have been extremely harrowing for the Jews. He constantly blamed all his military failures on the errors of his chosen people, which doubtless brought along with it deep feelings of inadequacy. These kinds of feelings and emotions are par for the course for someone in an abusive relationship that they feel like they can’t get out of.

Keeping this caution firmly in mind, it’s still worth looking at the other side of the coin. Even though Yahweh’s behavior is inexcusable, we can still try to understand the motivations behind his behavior, and see if that provides any insights.

The Brutality of the Gods

Let’s look first at his ruthless disregard for human life. How might Yahweh, perhaps, justify this behavior to himself? First and foremost, we have seen that the Elohim are very powerful entities. Much more powerful than a human being. Perhaps they felt that they were superior to human beings, and treated them with the same disregard that less enlightened humans than ourselves have treated other animals. This would not be the behavior that we would expect from the omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God that later Judaism and Christianity portray. But we have seen a number of examples that clearly show that the Yahweh of the Old Testament is not such a God. His level of emotional maturity is inferior to that of much of modern humanity. Without excusing his abusive behavior, we might recognize that Yahweh simply didn’t know any better than to treat the “inferior race” of human beings without a modicum of respect and dignity.

What about other Elohim? Did they have a similar disregard for human life as Yahweh? This is hard to judge based on the testimony of the Old Testament alone. While other Elohim do appear, not many of their interactions with human beings are described there. Mostly just the fact that people were worshiping the other gods instead of Yahweh. Remember when King Ahaziah wanted to send messengers to inquire of Baal-Zebub in 2 Kings chapter 1? The messengers never made it. Ahaziah sent 51 men twice, and Yahweh consumed them in fire. When Ahaziah sent 51 men a third time, the captain basically surrendered, and they all followed Elijah back to the King to hear him tell him off. This story almost feels like a tell to me: No talk about humans interacting with other gods in this book.

One Elohim mentioned in the Old Testament, Moloch, is definitively associated with the practice of child sacrifice, which we discussed in depth in an earlier essay. Moloch is a god of the Canaanites, who cohabited the promised land with the Israelites, and are traditionally understood as the descendants of Noah’s second son, Ham. (The Israelites are descendants of Noah’s oldest son, Shem.) Moloch is mentioned in 9 passages in the Old Testament. Five of these are commonplace examples of the people of Israel worshiping other gods. The other four make specific reference to child sacrifice, including 2 Kings 23:10, Jeremiah 32:35, and Leviticus 18:21. The longest discourse on Moloch is found in Leviticus 20:1-5 (as always, I am following the Robert Alter translation):

And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “And to the Israelites you shall say, ‘Every man of the Israelites and of the sojourners who sojourn in Israel who gives of his seed to Moloch is doomed to die. The people of the land shall stone him. And as for Me, I shall set My face against the man and cut him off from the midst of his people, for he has given of his seed to Moloch so as to defile My sanctuary and to profane My sacred name. And if the people of the land actually avert their eyes from that man when he gives of his seed to Moloch, not putting him to death, I Myself shall turn My face against that man and his clan, and I shall cut him off and all who go whoring after him to whore after Moloch, from the midst of their people.”

In this passage, we see one side of the ambivalence of Yahweh towards the practice of human sacrifice. He is clearly strongly opposed to it here, even in this relatively early book of the Bible, even though much later, in the story of Jephthah and his daughter, he is shown to condone it. But these passages demonstrate that at least some of the Elohim other than Yahweh supported these barbaric practices.

I am not able to come to any firm conclusions on how Yahweh compared to the other Elohim without doing a lot more research on the matter. For the time being, let me share my current, speculative understanding on the matter. I think that the Elohim are the same kind of creatures as the gods of many other mythologies around the world, including the Aesir of Norse mythology, the Annunaki of the Sumerians, the Greek theoi, the Netjer of the Egyptians, and the Bhagavan of India. These gods do interact with humans sometimes, but are often more interested in their own affairs. When they do interact with humans, they are often ruthless, with a familiar disregard for human life or dignity. I suspect that Yahweh represents a more extreme example than most of these gods. He is more warlike, less secure than many of them, and takes out his insecurities on the people of Israel.

I expect that many, many other people in the world from this time period were brutalized and traumatized by the gods to a similar extent as the Israelites. We have to keep in mind that the world of three and four thousand years ago was a barbaric place by modern standards. Life was short, and slavery were commonplace. So was war, and the losers of a war, if not enslaved, were usually exterminated. While these brutalities may have been, to some extent, the nature of human beings at the time, this kind of behavior was, in the least, reinforced by the influence of the gods. And none of this in any way lessens the importance of the fact that our ancestors suffered deep trauma on a regular basis. This trauma was perhaps experienced more strongly by the Israelites than most others.

Straying from the Law

We have seen that Yahweh regularly employs extreme forms of punishment against his people when they behave in ways that he doesn’t approve of. Without condoning this behavior, how can we put it in the best possible light, to attempt to understand his perspective and motivations?

Having codified, written rules governing human behavior was an important step in the development of human civilization. In agrarian or hunter-gatherer societies, modifying human behavior for the good of the group could be done on a more informal basis. As cities and nations began to grow in size, we no longer lived in communities where everybody knew everybody else, and decision-making patterns such as consensus, or disagreements settled by a group of elders, became unwieldy. Early examples of a written, codified law, such as the ten commandments, or the Torah as a whole, become extremely important tools for helping these early civilizations to survive and flourish.

The first half of the ten commandments are about worshiping Yahweh to the exclusion of other gods. So far, I have interpreted this as insecurity on Yahweh’s part; that he genuinely fearful of the people of Israel abandoning him for some other god. A kinder interpretation would be that an entire people worshiping the same god, exclusively, mutually reinforces the societal commitment to obeying the codified law. This strengthens the positive effects that the rules have.

In any such codification of law, some of the rules laid down will seem to be arbitrary or unfair. Many of them, however, will embody basic moral principles of how human beings should treat one another. The second half of the ten commandments do just this. Bad things happen to us – and not just punishments for breaking the law – when we fail to behave based on moral principles. Take for example the commandment, “You shall not bear false witness against your fellow man.” Someone we dislike is accused of a crime, and we lie and say we saw it take place, because we want to see them punished. What are some of the repercussions of this? First of all, our conscience bothers us. We regret our actions, and experience remorse. Our self-image – our opinion of ourselves – is damaged. This negatively affects our behavior going forwards. Some people are bound to know we were lying, and even if they also begrudged the accused, our reputation suffers. We cause injury to the social cohesion that a common set of laws provides, and our nation suffers for it.

So far in this series of essays, I interpret Yahweh’s extreme punishments for the people of Israel disobeying his laws as a gaslighting technique. When bad things happen, Yahweh avoids taking any responsibility, and at the same time, tightens his psychological grip on his people by blaming the problems on them. An alternative explanation that certainly has some truth to it is that the nation suffers as a consequence of their disobeying the law. It suffers both because the cohesion of society as a whole suffers, and because the individual members of society are on unproductive paths.

Depending on the level of development of the individual, some sort of threat of punishment is useful for getting people to go along with a system of codified law. If the laws were entirely fair and just, and the individual in question was good-hearted and enlightened, the threat of punishment would not be necessary. But there has probably never been a body of codified law that was entirely just, and societies composed of enlightened people are, to date, so rare as to probably be nonexistent.

The pattern here fits the pattern of development of a child growing into adulthood. When the child is very young, the parents have lots of rules governing their behavior. They find it appropriate to mete out punishments for failing to obey, and do not always feel obliged to explain why the rules make sense. As the child grows, the parents explain the reasoning behind more and more of the rules, so as to teach the child to fit in socially, and cultivate their sense of moral compass. Harsh punishments are replaced by open displays of disappointment, which can be quite effective at modifying behavior towards healthier patterns. Eventually, the child grows up, and the parents largely cede their role of enforcing rules, relying instead on the moral compass of the child, as well as their societal fit.

Of course, some parents are better than others, and all of them make mistakes. One common mistake is to punish too harshly, which causes hurt, fear, and emotional distress. A child who is dependent on an abusive parent might repress his feelings of anger and unfairness, redirecting it onto themselves. If the parent is at a low level of development – perhaps holding on to deep feelings of fear, anger and resentment that they don’t know how to manage – they are vulnerable to mistreating their children in this way. Yahweh seems to be one of these misguided parents when it comes to his treatment of the people of Israel.

Looking at Yahweh’s behavior in the best possible light does help us better understand the dynamics between him and the people of Israel. But it in no way excuses his behavior, or diminishes the pain and trauma he inflicted upon the Jews. In the next essay, we’ll take a look at the ways the Jewish people reacted to the traumatic experience of living under this brutal god. What techniques and strategies did they use to deal with their situation? How well have they processed the experience?