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| Religion in Human Evolution, part 7: Moses and monotheism | Religion in Human Evolution, part 7: Moses and monotheism |
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| Perhaps the most radical innovation of monotheism is the idea that there can be truth in religion. Ritual doesn't raise questions of truth: the act is the meaning and cannot be false, although it can be wrongly performed. In a similar way, myths in their early forms are like Groucho Marx's principles: if you don't like them, there are others. As Bellah puts it: | Perhaps the most radical innovation of monotheism is the idea that there can be truth in religion. Ritual doesn't raise questions of truth: the act is the meaning and cannot be false, although it can be wrongly performed. In a similar way, myths in their early forms are like Groucho Marx's principles: if you don't like them, there are others. As Bellah puts it: |
"The | "The way to change a mythic culture is to tell a different story, usually only a somewhat different story, which does not involve denying any previous story. The commonly remarked 'tolerance' of polytheism, as noted by David Hume, for example, is not the moral virtue of tolerance as we understand it today, but is part of the very structure of mythic culture. Some myths and the gods whose actions they recount may be more central than others, but the issue of truth and falsity doesn't arise. The very idea of myth as 'a story that is not true' is a product of the axial age: in tribal and archaic societies, believers in one myth have no need to find the myths of others false." |
| So it is not entirely surprising that Akhenaten's experiment in monotheism was completely forgotten within 50 years of his death, and would have remained unknown for ever if his tomb had not been excavated, more than 2,500 years later. He made an enormous wound in the structure of Egyptian thought, although it was quickly healed. In one sense, his move was totalitarian, for the one god he worshipped was still partially identified with the pharaoh. This form of monotheism represents a monstrous new concentration of power – in a mythical polytheism there are always other gods to whom you can flee, who are not identified with the king. | So it is not entirely surprising that Akhenaten's experiment in monotheism was completely forgotten within 50 years of his death, and would have remained unknown for ever if his tomb had not been excavated, more than 2,500 years later. He made an enormous wound in the structure of Egyptian thought, although it was quickly healed. In one sense, his move was totalitarian, for the one god he worshipped was still partially identified with the pharaoh. This form of monotheism represents a monstrous new concentration of power – in a mythical polytheism there are always other gods to whom you can flee, who are not identified with the king. |
| It would be a thousand years before the experiment was repeated. When it happened again, it was not in Egypt, at the summit of its power, but in the tribe of Israel, a miserable and battered people between great empires, sometimes entirely extinguished as a nation. | It would be a thousand years before the experiment was repeated. When it happened again, it was not in Egypt, at the summit of its power, but in the tribe of Israel, a miserable and battered people between great empires, sometimes entirely extinguished as a nation. |
| Archaic Israel was not monotheistic. The Old Testament is not a reliable historical record even of the development of Jewish thought. "The single most central figure in the Hebrew Bible, Moses, has no more historicity than Agamemnon or Aeneas" says Bellah, though the name is undeniably Egyptian, which gives some credence to the idea of an exodus. "If there were a people called Israel in the hill country of northern Palestine in the late 13th century, as the victory stele of Pharaoh Mereptah indicates, it was of marginal importance." | Archaic Israel was not monotheistic. The Old Testament is not a reliable historical record even of the development of Jewish thought. "The single most central figure in the Hebrew Bible, Moses, has no more historicity than Agamemnon or Aeneas" says Bellah, though the name is undeniably Egyptian, which gives some credence to the idea of an exodus. "If there were a people called Israel in the hill country of northern Palestine in the late 13th century, as the victory stele of Pharaoh Mereptah indicates, it was of marginal importance." |
| He goes on to discount almost all the foundational myths of Judeo-Christian history, even the claim that the Jews had a distinctive and coherent religious history: Yahweh was not the original God of Israel, but a latecomer arriving from Edom. The original God of Israel had been El – this is obvious even from the name: had it meant "Yahweh rules", it would have been "Isra-yahu". And it is possible that El was not even one God, but a generic name for numerous gods, spirits, or ancestors. Perhaps, Bellah says, the creature with whom Jacob wrestled at the ford of Jabbok was not God, nor even an angel, but a Powerful Being, as we have seen in primitive societies. | He goes on to discount almost all the foundational myths of Judeo-Christian history, even the claim that the Jews had a distinctive and coherent religious history: Yahweh was not the original God of Israel, but a latecomer arriving from Edom. The original God of Israel had been El – this is obvious even from the name: had it meant "Yahweh rules", it would have been "Isra-yahu". And it is possible that El was not even one God, but a generic name for numerous gods, spirits, or ancestors. Perhaps, Bellah says, the creature with whom Jacob wrestled at the ford of Jabbok was not God, nor even an angel, but a Powerful Being, as we have seen in primitive societies. |
| In some myths, El had fathered Yahweh by his wife, the goddess Asherah. So far as we can reconstruct, every myth about El had him as one or several tribal deities contending with many others. Originally this was true of Yahweh, too. | In some myths, El had fathered Yahweh by his wife, the goddess Asherah. So far as we can reconstruct, every myth about El had him as one or several tribal deities contending with many others. Originally this was true of Yahweh, too. |
| Only the faintest traces of this history are to be found in the Pentateuch. Although these first five books of the Bible deal with the most distant past, from the creation of the world to Moses, they are also the most recently composed of its historical books. Bellah takes them to be a collection arranged under the Babylonian captivity, at least 600 years after the events they purport to describe. They are a reframing of older myths to justify the monotheism that had come to define Israel in captivity. Within them, Moses becomes the one man who can speak to the One God – and he has the inestimable advantage, as the source and guarantor of the law, that he is dead. His words are immortal, but their interpreters must be living men. | Only the faintest traces of this history are to be found in the Pentateuch. Although these first five books of the Bible deal with the most distant past, from the creation of the world to Moses, they are also the most recently composed of its historical books. Bellah takes them to be a collection arranged under the Babylonian captivity, at least 600 years after the events they purport to describe. They are a reframing of older myths to justify the monotheism that had come to define Israel in captivity. Within them, Moses becomes the one man who can speak to the One God – and he has the inestimable advantage, as the source and guarantor of the law, that he is dead. His words are immortal, but their interpreters must be living men. |
| In a passage that displays his masterly knotting together of psychology and sociology, reason and emotion, Bellah sets out the importance of this transformation: /> | |
| If we understand the Moses narrative not as a historical account but as a charter for a new kind of people, a people under God, not under a king, an idea parallel to Athenian democracy though longer lasting, then we might see Moses as a kind of "transitional object," as a way for people who knew only monarchical regimes to give up the king and begin to understand what an alternative regime might be like. |