How did Yahweh Become God ? The Origins of Monotheism

The emergence of Yahweh as one of the major deities of the ancient and modern world is a historical tale as surprising as it was accidental. Originally, a relatively minor regional storm and warrior god, Yahweh would become the state deity of the ancient Israelite and Judahite polity before undergoing significant mutations to simply become God for billions of people the world over. But in that process, something truly astounding occurs: Yahweh goes from simply being a god among many other gods to simply being God—the god of what we now know as monotheism. Just how did Yahweh become

God? Following up on my first video exploring the origins of Yahweh, in this episode, I want to trace out the origins of mystic monotheism, and as we'll see, the emergence of monism in any form was certainly not the inevitable theological destiny of Yahwism. But what are the origins of mystic monotheism, and to what degree was the religion of ancient Israel ever really monotheistic at all? If you're interested in magic, hermetic philosophy, alchemy, Kabbalah, or the history of the occult, or just the arcane dimensions of religiosity, make sure to subscribe here to Esoterica and check out

my other content on topics in religious esotericism. Also, if you want to support this work of providing accessible scholarly free content on topics in esotericism here on YouTube, I'd hope you consider supporting my work over at my Patreon. You can take a look at making a one-time donation via PayPal, you can use the "Super Thanks" option below the video, or you can pick up some of our cool black metal merch. I think I'm making some YHWH black metal merch; YHWH is pretty metal from time to time. But now, let's turn to how a minor regional

warrior storm god, a god among gods, became simply God—eventually the god of monotheism. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion. [Music] So, summarizing a bit from my first episode on Yahweh, which would probably be helpful to watch before this one (you can check it out in the card above), what the earliest Israelite and archaeological evidence suggests is that Yahweh was not an indigenous Canaanite god. That pantheon is, in fact, very well attested in Bronze Age Ugaritic myth cycles, with no sign of Yahweh—he's just not

there. Yet, the Israelites appear in history in the 13th century, and Yahweh is attested as their national god by the mid-9th century Misha stelae, although in that case, it's where Moab has been defeated and some stuff has been stolen. But anyway, Yah's there. The more archaic strata of Israelite literature preserved in the Hebrew Bible seem to stress Yahweh as a thunderstorm god—not a Mediterranean storm god—and a warrior god, a raiding god associated with the region around Mount Seir and what is now southern Jordan and northwestern Saudi Arabia. This deity was eventually imported into the cult

center at Shiloh, probably through caravan trade, based on the earliest data from the earliest Israelite poetry. With the power vacuum of the Bronze Age collapse and the relatively inaccessibility of the Judean Highlands to a large imperial army, arose state-like polities for whom Yahweh was an important, though not the only, deity. Over time, Yahweh was merged with the various Ugaritic fatherly god, specifically El, before being assimilated and conflicting with the Canaanite storm deity Baal. The northern Israelite and southern Judahite cults would develop with some independence from one another, and whether they were ever connected into a

united early monarchy is debatable. The Northerners were much more comfortable, even enthusiastically syncretistic and iconographical, with the Southerners, while perhaps comfortable with Yahweh along with a consort, Asherah, were seemingly a bit less syncretistic and less comfortable with representations of Yahweh—a position sometimes referred to as aniconism. That is to say, they don't like representations of their god. But again, the data is all over the place. The general theological disposition of the region was probably a form of mystic henotheism. That is to say, Yahweh is our god, even if other gods exist. "My dad can beat up

your dad," or even "Yahweh monitors," though that does seem to be a minority position until the Babylonian exile beginning in the 6th century. In short, Yahweh is imported into this region of ancient Israel, undergoes a process of integration with a local pantheon, before emerging as the national god worshiped to varying degrees among other deities—from the Canaanite gods, various astral deities, the Queen of Heaven, and other regional deities that come and go. How then, from this theological situation, does the trajectory towards monotheism take shape? And that's going to be a big deal of what we'll be

studying in this episode. But first, what do I mean by monotheism? Simply put, I take monotheism to be a theological or philosophical position that affirms the existence of one and only one god, thus denying ontological status to the other gods or significantly demoting them or demonizing them or something like that. That deity is typically responsible for the creation of the world, the natural and ethical laws that govern it, and the fate of that world. Of course, the contours of all of that, especially in a developing theological system couched largely in poetic language, are going to

lack any, I don’t know, analytic rigor for my philosophy people out there, and it’s going to remain relatively vague and obscure, especially in its earliest forms. If we find just such conditions in the primitive monotheism of the Hebrew Bible, we shouldn't at all be surprised. But should we expect to find monotheism of any form in the Hebrew Bible at all? Well, yeah, of course we think it’s there. One camp argues that monotheism goes back to Abraham and Moses, with the biblical... text being the inherent word of God, and it's been monotheistic from the beginning because

there's just one God. Objectively, another argues that no monotheism is to be found in the Hebrew Bible at all; at most, we find henotheism or Yahweh monolatry with monotheistic rhetoric—something found in clearly polytheistic cultures like ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt—allowing us, following philosophical and theological developments of centuries later, to interpolate such positions back into the theology of the Hebrew Bible. The position I take in this episode is one that tries to be most representative of the non-confessional, non-dogmatic field as I understand it—that is, the evidence-based studies that have revealed the social and historical forces of

the ancient Levant that came to produce, ultimately, something like Judean monotheism in the context of the sixth-century Babylonian exile, nearly solely represented by the prophet-theologian responsible for the authorship of Isaiah chapters 40-55. A great deal of the rest of the text, most scholars, and myself take it, are actually monotheistic-like pronouncements from those previous periods, like those in the Psalms, along with similar exclamations made by the Deuteronomist, which are likely either examples of rhetorically exaggerated statements of monolist theology or early period interpolations of actual monotheism made by later redactors into the text. That is to say,

the general attitude of non-dogmatic academic scholars is that monotheism of any form is a very, very, very late theological innovation, barely attested in the Hebrew Bible, if at all. And yet, Judean theology would certainly come to express a monotheism centered on Yahweh, and this episode explores the origin of that theological on-ramping and what, if any, primitive monotheism might be expressed in the Hebrew Bible. So let's go make a lot of people twice as angry as it should probably make them think twice—at least twice. Now, while it might sound odd, the first thing worth pointing out

is that the ancient Canaanites never really had a huge profusion of deities to begin with. Unlike other nearby regions, the Canaanite Pantheon was always rather small; it basically consisted of one regal divine family and a relatively small family at that. Thus, in so far as monotheism was going to be a historical whittling down of a Pantheon until one God was left standing—so to speak, as opposed to some philosophical deduction of there being one and only one God—which does seem to have occurred, although much, much later primarily in Greek speculation, that whittling down process was just

numerically going to be objectively easier in Canaan rather than in Egypt or Mesopotamia; there were just fewer gods to get rid of. I mean, monotheism is the closest possible position to just atheism: you're just one God away, in effect. The Canaanite theological system consisted of a four-tiered structure centered on, again, a relatively small divine family. At the top of that system was the fatherly God El and his consort Aat. At the second tier were unsurprisingly his children, such as Baal and Anat. Below them is a much less attested group of deities, such as the craftsman

deity God Karpasis, and finally, at the bottom of the system, were the various semi-divine servants and the warriors. In addition to these deities, there were primordial divine forces such as Sea and Death, who would eventually be tamed by the warrior God Baal in the Baal cycle. Of course, other deities are also attested, such as some astral deities or the war plague deity Reshef. But in general, the four-tiered Pantheon seems to capture what the Ugaritic texts denote as the assembly or council of the gods, in one complete but not totally coherent totality. What is interesting is

what happens when Yahweh is introduced into that system. An archaic section at Deuteronomy 32:9 seems to be an early memory of a period when Yahweh was part of this divine ecology but still regarded as a son of El, not the highest God—the son of the god, in fact. The Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scroll versions of this text probably preserve the more archaic polytheistic reading, with the Masoretic text undergoing a later kind of anti-polytheistic censorship, at least as argued by Manuel Tov. Who's to argue with Emmanuel Tov? Apparently, at this primitive period, Yahweh was a

second-tier deity, with El the highest God, doled out his portion of the world for Yahweh to rule over. However, Yahweh's second-rate status was not to last, with his assimilation to El—something that the Israelites appear to have been universally pretty comfortable with. Yahweh would rise to the top of the pantheon, but not without a fight: Mortal combat for the gods! It's clear in the Israelite literature that Yahweh had to contend in popularity with Baal; they were just that similar. They're both warrior storm gods, and frankly, Baal was the incumbent regional deity. The Elijah and Elisha cycles

represent these theological contestations between Yahweh and Baal, and the cult of Baal. Further theological victory for Yahweh seems to have come with an interesting feature or bug, depending on how you look at it. Recall that El had a wife and thus a wife-consort, Asherah. What appears to have happened is that Yahweh does eventually rise to the top of the pantheon, like Rocky style—at least for the Yahweh partisans—but there Yahweh is kind of immediately wed, in a sense, with a consort, the descendant of Aat, Asherah. They're even linguistically connected. Yahweh got a wife—something attested in both

archaeological inscriptions but also in the Hebrew Bible, with Asherah devotion occurring in open-air elevated shrines or beitot, but also within the Jerusalem Temple in the form of a tree or a tree symbol representing her, much to the constant complaining of the prophet Monol of Yahweh. These mutations in the divine household would, however, continue... The Divine council is definitely retained in "Let Us Create" in the first creation story. Psalm 82 likely has Yahweh standing among the various divine beings, condemning them to death for being unjust. The framing sections of Job feature the Ha-Satan, the Satan, as

a kind of prosecuting attorney in the divine assembly, and Yahweh sends a spirit of deception to trick a bunch of prophets to get Ahab killed, which is one of my favorite, if not my favorite, stories in the Hebrew Bible. Along with a retinue of messengers and warrior beings, the angels, and even the title Yahweh Sabaoth, "the Lord of the Hosts," this just means Yahweh of the soldiers. All revealed that while somewhat flattened out, the divine assembly descended from the older Canaanite divine royal family was still pretty intact by the period of some of the composition

of the Hebrew Bible. Further, this period also saw Yahweh ruling with his consort, Asherah, though Anat, remember, the other daughter of El, although it's not clear who her mother was. Anat, the most meddlesome of all goddesses of the ancient world, seems to have functioned with Yahweh at the Elephantine shrine. There on Elephantine Island in Egypt, we have Yahweh and Anah mentioned, so she seems to have perhaps been kind of daughter consort, although exactly what that relationship was down there at the Yahweh shrine on Elephantine Island is not clear. For at least the Yahweh partisans, what

seems to have emerged is something of a compressed henotheism: there are other gods, but our God is the best—remember that, "My dad can beat up your dad." It is something like monolatry; we are only going to worship our group God, thus a kind of henotheism to monolatry spectrum, though with tension as to what to do with Asherah. It appears that her devotion was very strong and quite widespread. I mean, mother fertility goddesses are going to be extremely popular for obvious reasons, if for nothing else given the infant mortality rate of this time. It also appears

that the eventual demotion and eventual elimination of Asherah was quite a slow process. Perhaps the monolatrist factions, by focusing more on the exclusive worship of Yahweh, diminished her position, ultimately producing a kind of theological divorce. Of course, her devotion continued, but this theological divorce would then allow her to be targeted for official state suppression, such as at public shrines, especially the Yahweh shrine in Jerusalem. This tendency toward monolatry also compressed into fewer and fewer divine and semi-divine beings, a compression aiding, even if unconsciously, on the trajectory toward eventual monotheism centuries later. So, one motor here,

if you want to think about it that way, is an alternating force of mythological compression: the divine family is just getting smaller, and suppression elements of it are being attacked and picked off one by one. More on this kind of religious suppression, especially state-backed suppression, in a moment. However, another development in the theological landscape of the ancient world, especially in the 8th century, is also worth mentioning here. Most deities at this time were conceived of as regional, even literally dwelling in some sense in shrines specific to those regions; they were literally the houses of those

gods, and they were specific to that locale. This was their turf, so to speak. It's like the Crips and the Bloods, but it's Yahweh and Baal. While these various manifestations in various regions, deities were largely taken to be regional in character, even if specific to certain shrines in those cities. So Baal Hadad and Baal-El might be just manifestations of Baal in those areas. However, with the great empire-building of especially the Assyrians, an interesting theological shift begins to occur. While previous theologies, again, usually had regional deities fighting alongside or on behalf of their warring kings—these often

local skirmishes over lands contested as belonging to that king or god—it appears that the Assyrians, however, boasting one of the first truly professional armies in the history of the world and using it with great brutality to create a vast empire, understood themselves as creating a unified imperial system whose central state god, especially Ashur but to some degree Ashur assimilated with Babylonian Marduk, was increasingly conceived as a universal divine being ruling over all the lands conquered by the Assyrian army. This Assyrian royal theology of one universal imperial king and one universal imperial god thus not only

portrayed Asher fighting alongside the Assyrian kings but also ruling over vast lands never initially associated with Assyrian royalty or their divine geographical mandate. This shift in Assyrian royal theology seems to have made a huge impression on everyone around them, because the Assyrian boot was on their neck, and that makes an impression upon you. Of course, the Israelites are going to be among those for whom an impression is made. The first is that the northern Israelite kingdom would just be destroyed by the Assyrians by 722 B.C.E., ending stateism there, prompting a massive refugee crisis, with the

southern kingdom of Judah eventually itself becoming an Assyrian vassal. Israelite royal theology, as witnessed by numerous psalms, had long seen a special relationship between the king, typified by King David, and the Israelite national god, Yahweh, whose throne home was Mount Zion within the temple in Jerusalem. Now, a lot of this royal theology did draw on more archaic Canaanite mythology, but also on Yahweh's own history as a kind of warrior deity—Yahweh as an ish, a man of war. These psalms develop an elaborate cosmic-terrestrial parallelism, where the terrestrial ambitions of the earthly king are mirrored in the

cosmic combat led by Yahweh. It's typical of the ancient world: here kings set out against their enemies while Yahweh is enjoined by cosmic angelic armies or by semi-divine beings. Like the war and plague hypostases, de and RF and Habakuk, these are survivals, by the way, of the more archaic four-tier Divine Council period, with RF being part of that Divine Council way back in Laric times. This King-God parallelism even becomes mythologically confederal when the Divine will rise up the king to set his hand upon the sea and his right hand upon the river, the king literally

taking on a Titanic scale himself, battling with the primal forces of watery chaos: the Mediterranean and the Tigris and Euphrates. Indeed, these mythological exaggerations for the once and future Israelite king become the foundation for later Messianic hopes and aspirations. This is rhetorical strategy made into theology, evolving into theology. It's very similar to the mechanisms that are going to ultimately produce monotheism, but with the imperial theological innovations of the Assyrians, with their universalizing God Ashu, the Israelites could continue to expand the mythological power of their God. That path had been blazed by the Assyrians; the Assyrian

theologians perhaps first conceived of a universal God—still a God, again, among other gods, but a real badass God—free of regional or shrine parochialism. However, it wouldn't be a powerful empire that would make good on that universality; it would be a kingdom sitting in the ashes of exile that would effectuate monotheism. It seems it's difficult to overstate just how fearsome the Assyrian Empire was, and despite a northern coalition joined by the Kingdom of Israel, the entire region would fall under Assyrian domination by 722. For his part, the southern Judean King Ahaz, wishing to basically be rid

of his northern enemies, including his northern enemies Israel and perhaps seeing the writing on the wall—there's no stopping the Assyrian army—Ahaz became a willing vassal of the Assyrian Tiglath-Pileser III, all despite theological arguments to do the contrary by his court prophet, you may know him as Isaiah. Now, his son, Hezekiah, seems to have followed a very different tract, perhaps based on both the political realities of the time on the ground, but also, I suspect, out of his own theological convictions. Or, to put it another way, his theological convictions might have been in a kind of

dialectical relationship with his political concerns, which was the defense of the Judean state. Again, theology and politics at that time were simply inseparable, if they're ever really separable. Regardless, it appears that Hezekiah's Judean state absorbed a massive amount of population from the northern refugees. He oversaw significant state-building projects, especially those anticipating an eventual siege, specifically the construction of what is called the Broad Wall and the Siloam Tunnel for providing water for the rocky city that is Jerusalem. That tunnel, by the way, is still accessible, still gets water in it, and you can splash around in

there if you like. We're also told of specific religious measures that Hezekiah took, perhaps at the behest of Yahweh partisans or Yahweh monolators, to destroy Yahweh shrines and to further centralize Yahweh worship in the Jerusalem temple. Such centralization had the dual effect of further unifying the political and theological registers of Judean society and also, again, providing a theological center in the eventuality of a siege—a siege that was coming; it was always in the cards. Now, biblical minimalists and maximalists debate about the exact nature and extent of these so-called reforms or inquisitions if you're a non-Yahwist,

and little extra-biblical archaeology is forthcoming on the matter, though some scholars do point to an increasing aniconism in the seals or bullae of the period. But this could just be part of a shift from Assyrian influence to Egyptian cultural influence as the rebellion brewed. Now, Hezekiah was correct, and the siege did eventually come, mostly because the western region of the Assyrian Empire revolted under Egyptian encouragement. Sargon II's early 8th-century campaign in the Levant would see city after city fall; he impaled everyone in his path. The battle and fall of Lish would prove to be made

into art in his palace, providing us our best glimpse into the siege warfare of the time. And I have to say, there's something chilling about taking a stroll up the still-existing siege ramp left by the Assyrians up to the walls of that city. Eventually, Sennacherib laid siege—or at least subjected Jerusalem to a kind of blockade of some kind—and records have it that Hezekiah sought purely theological relief from the situation, with the Assyrian forces being tossed back after an angelic slaughter and Hezekiah paying 300 talents of silver and 30 talents of gold to the Assyrians, stripping

even the temple of gold and silver to pay the price. The Assyrians, for their part, recorded that after having Hezekiah pinned up like a bird in a cage, a higher payment of tribute was due to the Assyrians, declaring that the terrifying splendor of the army brought the matter all to a swift conclusion. Now, I suspect that the truth probably splits the difference of these narratives. Hezekiah did pay hefty tribute to avoid a nightmare of a siege, and Sennacherib was probably happy to avoid an assault on a basically well-stocked, walled mountain fortress, which also now had

a semi-secret underground supply of water, especially with the Egyptians at his back. Judea remained a vassal, something that the biblical narratives just happily don't mention. They really like to preserve Hezekiah, but they remained a vassal. Jerusalem, however, was at least saved, and it's very difficult to imagine, again, given the unity of politics and religion at this time, such a miracle. I mean, it's literally described by the Judeans as an angelic army routing the terrestrial forces of the Assyrian army; that the religious measures that strengthened Yahweh worship at this time clearly came at the expense of

other deities. That all must have paid off; it must have been the case that the Yahweh monolatry is like "Told You So." Now this victory must have been a positive boom for the Yahweh partisans, and perhaps they enjoyed, throughout the reign of Hezekiah, increased state popularity. I don't think anyone can deny military victories—especially surprising military reverses—put wind in the sails of theological visions. However, while a theological siege mentality might have worked well for a siege, it wasn't really going to function for the general prosperity of the regime. In general, it appears that incorporating elements of

astral worship, in deference to their position as Assyrian vassals, while also having a more theologically ecumenical position with non-Yahweh worship in the Jerusalem Temple and beyond, was just much more likely to solicit wider popular support for the regime—supporting the booming olive oil trade in the region and appeasing their Assyrian overlords. The longest-reigning Judean monarch and son of Hezekiah, Manasseh, did just those things. It's best to consider that the Yahweh partisans, while still not monotheists as we would recognize them, were likely thought of as extremist iconoclasts by the general population, for whom other gods were very

popular. The Glee in smashing ancient popular cult sites might have inspired the same horror that we experience when the Taliban destroys those great Buddha statues, or ISIS destroys all kinds of sites in the ancient Near East that they deemed idolatrous. The literature that has come down to us in the biblical text only tells one story—edited from the position of those Yahweh partisans and later Yahweh partisans editing their ideas into the text—even yield with triumphalism. But there's still good reason to think that such positions weren't popular, much less representative of the religious sentiments of the general

population. I suspect that Manasseh's theological policies, given his long and successful reign—how many of these guys get assassinated?—are much more of an indicator of their being representative of the population and the nations around him. His success probably proved him right, despite what the Yahweh partisans would have liked to have believed in their backbiting bickering about him. After his long reign, his son Amon would be assassinated—perhaps by Yahweh's partisans—and his 8-year-old son Josiah, who was now at this point 8 years old and could be manipulated, would lead another Yahweh reform or Inquisition, again depending on where

you stand on this whole issue. This would further destroy non-Yahweh shrines and non-Jerusalem Yahweh shrines, just to the degree to which, again, isn't quite clear. I mean, his contemporary Jeremiah doesn't really even seem to mention these kinds of things, and that would have been the kind of thing Jeremiah would have been all about. Josiah is also not attested anywhere else outside the Bible; however, the biblical text tells us that he did oversee renovations of God's house, the temple, and during that work, a scroll of the law was discovered and eventually vetted by the Israelite prophetess

Huldah. Now, many scholars, including myself, are rightly skeptical of this account—you just happen to find a scroll in a wall? It's probably much more likely that a later Yahwist actually produced a document very much like the book of Deuteronomy or perhaps its core chapters 12 through 26, with the northern prophetess Huldah vetting the text and acting as a kind of unifying force between the northern refugees and southern religious life—thus making Josiah at least symbolically a king of a reunified Yahwist monarchy—or a unified Yahwist monarchy, assuming there ever really was one to begin with. Further, the

theology of this document is subtly subversive of the existing order of the day. By Josiah's rule, the Assyrian Empire was collapsing; the Neo-Babylonian Empire was not yet fully on its feet, but it was coming; and Egypt was not yet able to establish regional hegemony given its former conquest by the Assyrians. Thus, the Judean Highlands were able to operate with a high degree of de facto autonomy. This political autonomy was probably theologically enshrined in that Deuteronomic code written or discovered in the wall. That theology takes the form of a vassal contract—something the Judeans knew a lot

about at this point—in which Judea became a vassal of Yahweh, following the laws laid down by that code in return for protection. It's always a protection racket, this Yahweh stuff: land, agricultural success, and a large number of descendants. This is a fascinating document because it represents a kind of theological anarchism, frankly in Israelite literature, in which the Israelites or Judeans, in this case, would ultimately only answer to Yahweh and not some other earthly power. However, the priesthood and the king would act as intermediaries in this vassal contract. But what if that king and that priesthood

with its temple were destroyed by, say, I don't know, a rampaging Neo-Babylonian army? What happens if the vassal contract now is simply between Israel and Yahweh? But a bit more about that priesthood and their contributions to this discussion: among their ranks were the day-to-day servants and shock troops of the Yahweh partisans. Of course, they served at the behest of the kings, and so the degree of their monolatry wasn't entirely up to them, as attested by various prophetic condemnations. Of course, many priests were almost surely also only lukewarm Yahwists. Sure, many of them happily served in

the henotheistic environment of at least the Yahweh-Asherah couple in the temple; however, it appears that at least some priests began... To develop a highly sophisticated theory of something like sacred contagion, where strict control of the spread of what was ritually fit from what was not must be very carefully maintained, this was accomplished by maintaining and managing states of ritual fitness and fulfilling a sacrificial cycle by which Yahweh was nourished—physically nourished in some sense, but also by which contamination could be curtailed and repaired. All of which was meant to maintain a state of cosmic homeostasis. In

fact, when they envisioned the creation of the world, they relied upon very common ancient Near Eastern tropes in which the Divine rests the world from watery chaos. But rather than personalize those forces of chaos, these priests seem to have demythologized them, with the Divine creating the world not from nothing—that's a much, much later idea—but by separating out various cosmic forces and entities from one another, culminating in the ultimate separation of time itself into the week and the Sabbath. This separation creation structure would then be mirrored in the creation of the Tabernacle or the Mishkan, and

in turn, in the Jerusalem Temple, especially as it's spelled out in Exodus 35-40—the dwelling of the Israelite Divine upon the earth. Now, again, this isn't monotheism; the remains of the Divine Council can still be heard in the creation separation process, along with there being chaos monsters inhabiting primordial uncreated waters, meaning that this deity is by no means alone in this creation separation process. But what we do see here is yet another tendency during this period of some degree of demythologizing, where primeval chaos is no longer personified, as in the chaos combat typically in the form

of a snake or a serpent, and where a Divine Council is acting in a singular fashion, with that Creator Separator eventually coming to have a singular dwelling point upon the Earth. Though you can still see lots of examples of God having to fight sea monsters in the Hebrew Bible—you see it in Job, and you can see it in Psalm 74—but again, all in all, the interest of the Priestly obsession with creating and maintaining a harmonious balance of the sacred and the profane through the very careful management of the temple sacrificial system does reveal yet another

aspect of this ramping toward monotheism, in the form of a demythologizing system of describing how the world was created through separation. Again, not created from nothing; that is a much, much later, probably 600 years later, theological and philosophical innovation of really the Greek world and not the Israelite world. But to return to Yahweh, Yahweh's fate was not going to be sealed not only by men but by non-Israelites. Once enemies, the Assyrians and the Egyptians joined forces against their now ascendant common foe, the Neo-Babylonians. It appears that Josiah may have been killed in a battle with

the Egyptian forces of Neco II at Megiddo on the way to Haran, around 609, but there's some doubt about whether that story is reliable. Scholars really aren't sure about the exact way that Josiah perished. Regardless, Judea briefly fell into Egyptian hegemony before the rampaging armies of the Neo-Babylonians, led by Nebuchadnezzar II, would lay siege to the entire region. While a small sample size, I have to admit the YSM of the Elish letters is actually pretty undeniable. Those letters are a fantastic recovery; that image of a deity not being visible and the fires going out from

the north is just horrifying. And with the destruction of Jerusalem and its Yahweh Temple, the theology of the Deuteronomist had come to its apocalyptic conclusion. Yahweh had allowed Nebuchadnezzar to destroy Judea because of their violation of the vassal contract. You still hear this horrifying theology being used today—that the Holocaust was because of Reform Jews. You still hear it in circles ironically. Catastrophic devastation being proof of YSM for the Yis partisans, this is a trait often shared by theological dead-enders. However, there was a theological wrinkle in this: Nebuchadnezzar II didn't have all the Judeans put to

the sword, the kind of total annihilation that one might have expected. Rather, around 7,000 Judeans or so, many members of the priesthood and the aristocracy, likely advanced craftspeople and even farmers, were all carted off to Babylonia to build their empire for them. Within that empire, one can imagine that if the annihilation would have been total, the last Deuteronomist monolith could have wagged their finger at the last syncretist as they both perished in the chaos. But that didn’t happen; they all kind of just went into exile together, all in one basket, thus maintaining the theological ambiguity.

What in the world does any of this mean? Perhaps forcing a solution to be forged in the exile for what had just happened. "I thought we were supposed to be destroyed, and here we are! What does any of this mean?" Now, I'm sure that many of the exiles adopted the religious practices of Babylonia, perhaps first through syncretism and then through full-blown assimilation—that's just the fate of many displaced persons throughout history, and we should never blame them for surviving. Adoption of the dominant culture is often just the best form of adaptation and survival for your family;

I don't blame those people in the least. However, it appears that the Judeans were not randomly dispersed into Babylonia; rather, they were clustered into discrete communities, with one even being referred to as Judean Town, or Yehud, Jew Town. Interestingly enough, dozens of uniform tablets from the Judean community in the Babylonian exile do survive down to us, and while none of them record anything like religious literature and there's no evidence of them building a temple there—though it could have been small—these documents are... All just records of financial and trade transactions, like most uniform tablets, they do

record a very important piece of data: they record names. Of course, people's names don't tell us about their religious lives, but they might inform us or give us at least a hint of some dimension of public religious affiliation. If a person named Pinas names their son Muhammad, well, one could make a pretty good guess that that Jewish person might very well have converted to Islam before their son was born. We get data like that, a bit like that, from these tablets. So, what does that data reveal in the Yudu Archive, the Jew Town Archive, dating

from around 572 to 477? Sixty-six percent of Judean fathers and eighty-two percent of their children had Yahwistic names. The Masu Archive, dating from 452 to 413, shows 46% and 67%, respectively. In the Yudo region, only 7% of fathers and only 5% of children had Akkadian names, and only 5% of fathers and only 2% of children had non-Yahweh theophoric names. But in Masu, 22% of Judean fathers had Akkadian names, and 17% had non-Yahweh theophoric names. However, in their children, that number had dropped to only 5% for both categories. Now, what this data means exactly is difficult

to pull out, and it's just one or two sets of data, but what they do show is that they all seem to indicate an increase in Yahweh theophoric names during the exilic period. One could conclude that, rather than assimilation into the first generation of the Exile, more Yahweh theophoric names might represent an increase in exilic Yahwistic partisanship. That outcome wouldn't be surprising in a community struggling to recreate itself in a foreign land. As a community, what do you do? You simply double down on what you think makes you, you, theologically and otherwise. However, we also

see Judeans using seals that make use of non-Yahwistic imagery. Furthermore, marriage documents between Judeans and Babylonians do summon Babylonian gods to punish those who violate those agreements, and no other gods are invoked in those documents, including Yahweh. Yahweh is just not mentioned in those marriage documents. Though I have to say, in the documents I consulted at least, it was always a Judean woman being wed to a Babylonian husband, and I'm not sure if inverse documents are known to exist where a Judean man married a Babylonian woman. One might expect to see Yahweh in those documents;

I'm just not sure if any of those survive. Also, these documents include being stabbed with an iron dagger if you break the agreement. So, geez! Now, Smith has also pointed out a shift in the late pre-exilic period and obviously the exilic period, where the tightly controlled familial units and the land that they are attached to, as a central unit of social selection, have begun to break down under socio-economic and perhaps even theological collapse. In a region racked by constant social instability, often at an apocalyptic scope brought on by vast imperial armies, in this “every man

for himself” nightmare, the literal lands upon which those very familial bonds were set are now stripped out from underneath them by empires. The family is no longer the fundamental unit of society; that is no longer tenable. The elderly grandparents are no longer just fonts of wisdom worthy of respect. You rise for them as they enter into a room or the gates of a city. Those old people were just a liability in this period of social chaos. Independent men capable of immediate brutality may well have risen to the very top of the previous social system, where

other things like class origin mattered. Now, if you could cut your way to the top, you could be at the top. On the other side of the coin, texts written near and within the Exile often focus less on communal and familial guilt for transgressions but upon the individual for their guilt. You can note Ezekiel's break with centuries of communal and familial guilt, such that children can no longer inherit the sins of their fathers, something in direct contradiction to the Torah. What has emerged is a new focus on individuality. The weakening of the terrestrial family structure

may have been one of those more, maybe one of the final forms of the compression, again shrinking the size and scope of the archaic four-tier divine family, focusing now more than ever on individual divine beings being worthy of worship—an individual divine being like the individual tough dudes that survived all this. Again, is such a shift sufficient for monotheism? No, of course not. But like everything we've been discussing, it's just another social force lending in the direction of the theological overdetermination that will become accidental historical monotheism. Well, if the ancient Assyrians were the first among the

peoples to come to the idea of a universal God through the process of universal empire building, though again we do find monotheistic rhetoric and perhaps even monotheism in the 14th century Great Hymn to the Aton by Akhenaten—way back in the 14th century being another early contender—the Judeans came upon the notion of a universal God through dialectical negation: centuries of theological compression, cycles of theological suppression. The now Exile left Judean theologians precious few theological options; perhaps we can say that they were doomed to monotheism. A history of royal theology—now a kingship of ashes. Yahweh is forced

to employ foreign kings to do His bidding. What other option is there? But ironically, this greatly expands the power of Yahweh: no longer the god king of the Judeans, but the god king of perhaps all god kings. One God king to rule them all, with priest and king now powerless and eliminated; that royal theology shifted to a direct relationship of the people of Judea. Or, of Israel written large, Israel becomes the more direct servant of the Divine Law, with individual responsibility now the ethical compass, much more so than familial or communal guilt and punishment. From

these two negations arises a synthesis; through concrete negation, the elevation of Yahweh as king over the Persians or the Egyptians implies a local negation of the operative power of those gods that underwrite those monarchies. If Yahweh is to be king over them, indeed, over the entire Olam, the entire world cosmos, it is no longer enough that those gods are inferior to Yahweh in power—henotheism isn't going to do the lifting here. They must be utterly negated as gods and indeed as beings at all. The radical universality of Yahweh logically implies the negation of all other divinities,

and it appears that such a theology attains just such philosophical escape velocity from mere monotheistic rhetoric, or henotheism, or monolatry. In the exilic theologian-prophet, the writer of Isaiah 40-55, this section of Isaiah has been recognized as a separate composition since at least the 18th century, distinct from the previous book composed in the 8th century BCE, what we call First Isaiah. The author of this deutero-Isaiah is living in the exile, and scholars contend, and I frankly agree, that he is the best candidate for the development of primitive Judean monotheism. But how does this idea emerge? Precisely

through a polemic with the very theological situation of the exile vis-à-vis the powers of those foreign gods who apparently now rule over the Judeans in exile. The clearest statements of this primitive monotheism appear in that polemical context, roughly in Isaiah 40-48 and 49-55. Specifically, those sections seem to inaugurate some core theological themes: one, that Yahweh is the creator of the cosmos and is in control of the present state of affairs, specifically using Cyrus as his anointed or Messiah to direct worldly affairs; two, Yahweh has specifically chosen Israel rather than any king as his servant upon

the world; and three, Israel should choose Yahweh because there are simply no other gods to choose from, as opposed to the vassal relationship of the deistic theology. Though, of course, that choice does involve some degree of redemption. Here, it's a logical deduction; there are just no other gods but Yahweh. Pick Yahweh—not pick Yahweh because you get stuff. This positive theology, however, is built upon a larger religious polemic, a negation of what is around them. That polemic and the rhetorical and theological inversions that come along with it are aimed at a comparison of the aniconic Yahweh

with the created idols of Marduk and Nabu. Recall that the Assyrians had assimilated Marduk to Asher in their theological universalizing project. Now, however, with Babylonian Marduk as the ascendant deity in the regional world, and in some sense the best candidate for the greatest god of that time, well, you come at the king, you best not miss. But in this polemic, and through powerful rhetorical negation, Second Isaiah increasingly negates himself into a universal monotheism. As Smith points out so well, Yahweh is a God who creates the world and crafts human beings, while Marduk is the creation

of hands—the craftwork of human beings. Idol makers are afraid, while Israel is commanded not to fear. Israel is made the witness of Yahweh; the idols have eyes but cannot see anything. Israel is said to know that Yahweh is God alone, whereas the idol makers know only their own handiwork—like, you know you made that; that's not a god. Yahweh is glorified through Israel, while the idols are bedded in mere human conceptions of beauty. The forest praises Yahweh, but its dead wood is only fit for idols, the same wood discarded and burned. The craftsman declares that wood

and stone are gods, but declares that Israel is their servant. The idols are mute and cannot declare their choice of worldly servants. The immobile statues of Marduk and Nabu must be carried by beasts and humans, while Yahweh carries Israel and the world over, moving even King Cyrus by his command. In effect, the deeper the polemical attack upon the Babylonian gods, there is an inverse logical rejoinder for the very ontological status of Yahweh. The negation of the great gods of this time leaves little logical choice for the Judean theologian—the negation of their theological powerlessness and exile.

The negation of the negation must, I think, result in monotheism, not so much because of the theologian's fancy or because of their desire to be monotheists, but really because their options have simply all run out. Monotheism wasn't a theological choice born out of triumph or dramatic revelation, but a theological dead end born out of defeat, exile, and centuries of historical accidents. Indeed, I'd argue that Second Isaiah is driven in this logic further than most monotheisms are willing to go. The writer has Yahweh declare at 45:8, "I form the light and create darkness, I make peace

and create evil; I, Yahweh, do all these things." I suspect that few monotheisms have risen to this height, making God responsible for both good and evil, and indeed most so-called monotheisms recoil in theological horror that God has even the capacity to create evil, thus making evil the result of some other da-god, like the devil or Satan, or whatever human failure, some kind of great fall in the Garden of Eden, or philosophical negation incapable of being created as such. The idea of Augustine that evil is simply negation—even later rabbinical Judaism, the direct inheritors of the theological

tradition, were so uncomfortable with this verse that they altered it before putting it into the prayer book: "Yotzer or u-vo'reh hoshech, oseh shalom u-vo'reh et hakol," rather than just saying "I create evil" (ra'ah). In this sense, Isaiah 45:8 may well be the pinnacle of pure monotheism—a monotheism so pure that it terrified future theologians, who had to betray it for philosophical negation or eschatological B-theism, with an inverse God of evil ultimately destroyed at the end of the world as a means of monotheistic saving face. Regardless, the Persian Cyrus would prove to be the first and only

effective Mosiah or Messiah in Judean history. The Judeans were allowed to repatriate their homeland; masses of Temple artifacts were returned, and some sections of the population did opt to return to Judea to rebuild things there. Many did not, however, preferring an apparently comfortable life in the Persian Empire. I mean, those uniform documents show a flourishing world there. Perhaps it was the remnants of the older priestly conservative class desiring to inaugurate the Deuteronomistic temple theology that returned, or perhaps even syncretist, wanting to go back to the old ways. One could imagine the non-monotheists, if they existed

at this point, frankly being content to worship Yahweh anywhere, a central Temple being more of an accessory to religious piety than a necessity. Indeed, non-Jerusalem Yahweh shrines would continue to exist well into the Hellenistic period. However, intermarriage and likely theological syncretism seem to have persisted through this period, and it's not even clear that the population has a sense of how to be religiously Judean—whatever that meant. In fact, I think they are inventing Judaism during this period, with readings of the Law of Moses seeming a rather novel innovation at the time, rather than some time-honored tradition

among the population. I suspect that most things we think of as Judaism were pioneered during this period, not found in the Israelite period. And while there does seem to be a return to the Deuteronomistic theology in the priestly sacrificial cycle by the theological conservatives—though, like all conservatives, I'm sure they were just innovating the entire time, all the while pretending this is the way that it's always been done—another, more radical theology was also emerging at this time. Perhaps born out of the theological negation that flickered into existence as exilic Judean monotheism, perhaps under the influence of

the Zoroastrian religion, a whole new heap of social turmoil marked a new mode of Judean religion. This mode was characterized by an interest in cosmogony, events in the primordial past, what is called exegesis into prophecy couched in highly symbolic and poetic language, a deep expressed anxiety about oppression and tribulation, eschatological upheavals, the judgment and eventual fate of the righteous and the wicked, and maybe some otherworldly journeys. It also introduced a sense of dualism between good and evil, the intervention into history by a kind of Messiah savior figure, and then anti-Messiah characters—the structures of the heavens

and the hells that they had developed, the hidden role of angels and demons in world affairs—a profusion of angels and demons not found in Israelite religion, in a generally divinely deterministic outlook. Things might be bad, but God’s in control; all of which were pseudonymous and alleged ancient authorship. Most importantly, what gives this genre, this mode of religiosity, its name is the revealing—the apocalypsis, from the Greek, meaning to reveal or to uncover—all of this to a human agent, often through an angelic emissary. Jewish apocalypticism was beginning to roar into existence within the crucible of monotheism, out

of which the theological particularism of Yahweh himself would be negated as so much dross, leaving behind the universal God the world has inherited, for better and for worse. The next episode, in what has apparently become a series on Yahweh—not sure how that happened—is going to explore Yahweh as He is transformed in that period of apocalyptic transformation, the Yahweh of the Apocalypse. For more on this subject, if you're interested in Yahweh in the history and development of monotheism, I really recommend you check out my reading list, which are basically my sources for this episode, over in

the description for this video. So if you want to get into this literature from an academic and non-dogmatic point of view, I'll point you in the direction of some fantastic texts. And I hope you, as much as you might be outraged or curious, will channel that energy not into arguing with me on the internet—because you're not arguing with me; you're arguing with all the scholars that I read and report back on. I hope you engage with those scholars; I'm just some guy, reporting to you their scholarship and a little bit of my own ideas. Go

check out their scholarship and argue with them; send them angry emails, not me. But until next time, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion. [Music] [Music]