At the outset we should pause to get our bearings, and recall the exceedingly important role which the Canaanites have played in the history of civilization, quite apart from their influence on Isræl. Just as the roots of our Western culture lie in the civilization of the Greeks and the Romans, so the roots of the Græco-Roman culture lay in the Orient, the mediating influence having been the Canaanites (or Phœnicians—after 1200 B.C. the two are synonymous). It is from these remarkable people that the Greeks borrowed the alphabet and passed it on to us, and today nearly all literate people on the globe, with the exception of the Chinese and Japanese, use some modified form of the Phœnician alphabet. Innumerable architectural and mythological details, many of which still survive, can be traced through Greece to Canaan, and thence to other areas of the Near East.
During the third and second millennia B. C. the Canaanites were in control of practically the whole of Syria and Palestine. Their commercial and artistic enterprises were many, one of the chief of which was the manufacture of purple dye. This we know, not only from ancient texts,
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Apis the Egyptian bull god (see Jeremiah 46:15, R.S. V. or N.E.B.).
but also from the names of the country. It has recently been shown that the Greek name “Phœnicia” must refer to the purple industry, and “Canaan”, the name by which the inhabitants designated their own land, probably refers to the same thing. The color was derived from the shellfish or mollusc, Purpura, native to the eastern Mediterranean coast. Tyrian purple through many subsequent ages was the most celebrated of all colors for dyeing. Since it was very expensive, only the wealthy could purchase it, and robes in this color became a mark of high rank, whence the phrase “born to the purple.”
By the eleventh century B. C, however, a great disaster had overtaken the Canaanite peoples. Isrælites had deprived them of the most of Palestine; Aramæan invaders had taken most of eastern Syria; and the Sea Peoples (among them the Philistines) had swept over the Mediterranean area like a flood, devastating the Canaanite coastline of Syria and Palestine. In the centuries which followed, having lost nine-tenths of the territory previously occupied, the Phœnicians turned most of their attention seaward and became the greatest sea-trading people of history, founding commercial colonies on the shores and islands of the Mediterranean as far as Spain. A vivid description of this activity, the best one we have from antiquity, is to be found in Ezekiel 27, wherein the extensive trade, not only by sea but also by land, is described. Herodotus, the Greek historian of the fifth century B. C, even informs us that a Phœnician fleet had circumnavigated Africa. He says further: “On their return they
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(the sailors) declared—I for my part do not believe them, but perhaps others may—that in sailing round Libya they had the sun upon their right hand” (Bk. IV. 42). This interesting item, inserted in spite of the author’s skepticism, is, of course, just what would happen if one sailed north on the western side of Africa (instead of the hypothetical east-west, parallel to the Mediterreanean, of which Herodotus was apparently thinking, according to the geographical conceptions of his time), and is important witness to the authenticity of the tradition, though we have no other means of testing its validity.
Israel’s Debt To Canaan
It was inevitable that such an energetic people should have left its mark upon Isræl. The Hebrews entered Canaan as a semi-nomadic people and settled down to a new type of life; and it was the Canaanites who taught them how to do it. Basically, they were heirs of the Canaanite material culture, continuing to borrow from it throughout the period of the Old Testament. This can be illustrated in numerous ways, but the most striking was in the time of Solomon, when the services of trained Canaanites were secured to carry out his numerous architectural activities
Probably more important for civilization was the influence of Canaan upon Isræl’s literature. From the Canaanites the Isrælites learned how to write, and indeed borrowed from them the very alphabet with which the literature is written. Almost one half of the Old Testament is written in poetry, some of it in particular forms that are now known to have been borrowed from the Canaanites. For example, a typical device of Hebrew poetry is parallelism, whereby the two halves of a line stand parallel to one another. Thus,
“The voice of the Lord is powerful;
the voice of the Lord is full of majesty;
The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars;
yea, the Lord breaketh the cedars of Lebanon”
(Psa. 29:4–5).
This device was undoubtedly learned from the Canaanites, and is a major reason for the majesty and rhythmic cadence of much Isrælite poetry. The Canaanites are now known to have been famous musicians in their time, and Isræl undoubtedly borrowed the instruments and learned the art of playing them from Canaan.
Official Religion Of Early Israel Not Polytheistic
The Canaanites were polytheists, believing in numerous gods. Primitive man, conscious of so many forces in this world which he could not control, sought desparately to find an explanation for them in order that he might find some means of alleviating the insecurity of his own position. Naturally he came to the conclusion that nature was alive, full of power, and not to be tampered with. Gradually he identified the various elements
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Canaanite deity, probably Baal, made of bronze and covered with gold and silver.
of mystery. To him they were persons, and he gave them names. The sun, moon, planets, and stars were personified and named. There were thought to be gods who controlled or were the source of rain, thunder, lightning, vegetation, death, illness, wisdom, life and health, destiny or fate, love and fertility, the arts and inventions, etc.
The first remarkable fact about early Isrælite religion to be mentioned, therefore, is that there was no personification of the various elements of the universe. All things were believed to have been created by Jehovah (or Yahweh, as the name was probably pronounced). There were no special gods of rain, vegetation, death, disease, invention, or fertility. All these were merely part of Yahweh’s beneficent ordering and ruling of the world. To be sure Yahweh was often conceived as the leader of his people in war, a God of War, who brought triumph to his people over their enemies (Deut. 33:27ff., for example). He was also particularly associated with Mt. Sinai, so that he has been called a mountain God. He certainly controlled the weather and the seasons (e.g., Judges 5:4). He is the God who controls fertility in people, animals, and plants, so that he might be called a God of fertility (e.g., Gen. 16:2, 49:25, Deut. 33:13ff.). Yet this sort of specialization which is so common in polytheistic religion is quite foreign to the Old Testament. Yahweh, and he alone, is the creator and controller of all things in the world, and no one aspect of nature can be singled out as more characteristic of him than any other. Even the conception of Satan as the source of evil does not appear in clear form until the close of the period covered by the Old Testament. In early Isræl
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so great was the theologians’ concern for Yahweh as the only source of all things, that evil was occasionally ascribed to him as well as good (I Sam. 16:14, II Sam. 17:14. Compare also II Sam. 24:1 with I Chron. 21:1, where the Chronicler has inserted Satan for Yahweh).
No Mythology About God In The Old Testament
One of the most interesting facts about polytheism is the peculiar nature of most of its religious literature. The subject matter of this literature is largely concerned with the gods and goddesses and their loves and wars, though an occasional human or semi-human hero is introduced. The elaborate stories apparently had as their primary object the explanation of how the world came to be and how it functions. In Canaan one of the primary questions was about the climatic cycle. Why is it that the rain and vegetation cease during the summer months? Why does the rain begin again at the end of October? Why does the whole countryside spring forth in verdure in the spring? Canaanite religion gave the answer in a mythological story. In the spring the God of Weather and Vegetation (Baal) was killed in a great battle with the forces of Death. This is the reason why the rain ceases to fall and the vegetation ceases to grow. In the fall the rains return because Baal is brought back again to life. In the spring the country is covered with green because of the marriage of Baal with the Goddess of Fertility.
In the Old Testament this type of polytheistic mythology is not to be found. There are hints occasionally which may be taken to mean that some people believed in a conflict between Yahweh and the Dragon of chaos in the creation of the world. Yet such a belief was not shared by the the religious leaders who obviously felt it to be a heresy and unworthy of God as he had revealed himself to them, and it was wholly omitted in the early chapters of Genesis.
The activity of the God of Isræl, then, was not to be seen in an abstract, unreal mythology, but rather as the direct cause of events in nature and in history. To Isræl history was the scene both of God’s blessing and of his judgment. He was to be known, not through artificial and unreal stories, but in the actual events of life. For this reason Isrælite religious leaders told and retold the stories of their people’s past with much care. What greater lessons for the present and the future are to be found, than those to be seen in the Divine activity of the past? Thus in the Hebrew nation history became sacred and important, and was viewed as the scene of moral judgment in almost complete contrast to the preoccupation of the surrounding peoples with polytheistic mythology. This point of view is the basis of the Judeo-Christian interpretation of history today, and is one of the great contributions of Isræl to civilization.
The Significance Of Anthropomorphism
In the early strata of Old Testament narrative, especially, God is described in very human terms. He walks, talks, makes things, is pleased,
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A bronze figurine, covered with gold leaf, found in a Canaanite temple at Megiddo. Idols such as this and the one shown on page 101 were the “graven and molten images” of the Old Testament.
gets angry, repents. He is believed to have a body with face, back, arms hands, and feet. In other words, God is thought of as a great Man, the greatest and finest Man who could be conceived.
Now it has been customary to explain this as a fairly low conception of God from which Isræl gradually emerged. While it is true that later literature is not so outspokenly anthropomorphic, we should attempt to do justice to the importance of the early conception. Ancient polytheists in and around Isræl did not conceive of their gods as abstract principles. They were beings with definite form. But apparently people had not yet made up their minds about the primacy of man among the created beings. There was no clear or fixed conception of what deity was like. Gods were pictured as human beings, animals, birds, snakes, or hybrid forms made up of almost any combination of elements. There was thus little stability in the conceptions of the nature of the gods, primarily because there was no unified view regarding the relative importance of the various levels of created beings. Perhaps, after all, the bull or the serpent were more important in the sight of the gods than were men.
In the Old Testament, however, there is no doubt about the matter. Man and God have a fundamental similarity, both physical and mental, which exists between God and no other of his creatures. Man is the highest and greatest created being, and more nearly like God than anything in the animal world. Accordingly, there is a special relationship existing
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between God and man, a relationship which can exist between God and no other creature, because of the very nature of God’s creative acts. The old uncertainty in the polytheistic world is cleared away, therefore, with one stroke, and the subsequent development of the Jewish-Christian religion made possible.
It should also be pointed out that the God of early Isræl, as an idealized Man, was no abstract idea which cannot be made concrete and real. He was a God who was living, active, powerful. This so-called “anthropomorphism” of conception was indeed a primary source for the dynamic, virile, and ethical character of Isrælite religion, and it may be argued that such a view is actually more valid than some modern definitions of God as the principle of integration or concretion, or the sum of human ideals, or the vital energy regulating and ordering matter. From the Isrælite point of view such conceptions run into the same danger as does polytheism: that of abstracting certain forces of nature and making them into independent Gods.
The God Of Israel Stood Alone
A most remarkable fact about the early Isrælite conception of God is that he was believed to stand alone, with no other being on or near his level. His power was to be seen even in Egypt, where it was recognized by Israel as superior to that of the gods in whom the Egyptians believed. He had no wife or family. In fact, biblical Hebrew possesses no word for “goddess”. Enlightened religious circles, at least, apparently did not believe in the female aspect as necessary to explain the working of the world, though to be sure many tolerant Isrælites compromised their heritage in worshipping the gods and goddesses of Canaan. (We must be careful to distinguish, however, between the beliefs of the religious leaders and those of the unenlightened masses.) The leaders did believe that there were a number of divine beings associated with God in his rule of the world. Thus we hear of “angels” (literally “messengers”) of God who come to earth (Gen. 16:7, 18:2, 19:1). Joab and Meribaal (Mephibosheth) honor David by comparing him to an “angel of God” (II Sam. 14:17, 19:27). Such “angels” were probably thought to be members of a general “host of heaven” (I Kings 22:19) with whom God took counsel (cf. Job 1:6. Gen. 3:22 and 11:7 may possibly be interpreted in this light).
Today there is a debate among scholars as to how we should label the religion of early Isræl. W. F. Albright in From the Old Stone Age to Christianity (The Johns Hopkins Press, 1940) maintains that it is monotheism, and that even Moses was a monotheist: “If. .. the term ‘monotheist’ means one who teaches the existence of only one God, the creator of everything, the source of justice, who is equally powerful in Egypt, in the desert, and in Palestine, who has no sexuality and no mythology, who
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Amon, chief of the Egyptian gods (see Jeremiah 46:25, R.S. V. or N.E.B.).
is human in form but cannot be seen by human eye and cannot be represented in any form—then the founder of Yahwism was certainly a monotheist” (p. 207).
Other scholars, however, do not accept this view and believe that the terms “henotheism” or “monolatry” are more adequate designations of the real character of the religion. Henotheism is defined by Webster as “the belief in one god, not to the exclusion of belief in other gods”; and monolatry is “the worship of one god, although more than one may be recognized as existing”.
A solution of the problem acceptable to all is difficult. Early Christianity, Judaism, Mohammedanism, and Platonism are usually given as classic examples of monotheism; and if so, we cannot deny the term to early Isræl solely on the ground of a belief in angels or subsidiary beings under God’s control. The problem really revolves around the answer to this question: did the leading religious thinkers of early Isræl believe that the gods of the people about them really existed, and were comparable in power to the God of Isræl? The first commandment has been translated: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:3). This certainly sounds as though there was a belief in other gods, since the commandment merely says that they shall not be put before Yahweh. The Hebrew is to be translated literally, however, as follows: “There shall not be to you other gods upon (or over) my face.” Since there is no agreement on just what that last expression means it is better to turn to other passages, the meaning of which is quite clear.
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The question is: how did orthodox Isrælites interpret the meaning of such expressions? Are they really evidence of henotheism in early Isræl or are they accommodations to the customs and phraseology of the time? There can be no doubt that good Jews from the fifth century B.C. read this verse and others like it monotheistically, and “the gods” mentioned had no more real existence to them than do the gods of Burma to us. The monotheistic Chronicler puts these words in the mouth of Solomon: “for great is our God above all gods” (II Chron. 2:5). A recent commentator has been able to find very few definitely monotheistic Psalms, and yet all scholars are agreed that most of the composers of the Psalms and the worshippers who used them in the Second Temple were certainly monotheistic. When did this type of wording lose its implied belief in other gods to orthodox Isrælite leaders? Was it in the sixth century, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth, or in the time of Moses?
This question is not easily answered, and there is little room for dogmatism. The attempt to impose clear-cut distinctions upon Isræl is a very difficult thing to do. The period of early Isræl is a transitional one, when the battle between monotheism and polytheism was in full sway, and when among groups of people there were certain to be all shades of opinion, from outright polytheism among the masses to the loftier conceptions of the leaders. Modern distinctions of analytical logic were entirely foreign to Isræl, and it is always difficult to impose such distinctions on people who have no idea of formal logic. To this writer the following seems to be a fair summary of the present state of our knowledge:
Whether between the thirteenth and ninth centuries there were a few men in Isræl who actually believed that no other gods existed but Yahweh, is something we do not surely know. It is certain, however, that there were those who held that Isræl must not worship anyone or anything but Yahweh and him alone, and that this God of Isræl was all-powerful on earth, even in Egypt with all its might, splendor, and great gods of hoary antiquity. It is also certain, from what has been said already and from what is to follow, that the nature of Israel’s religion as we know it from the literature written between the eleventh and eighth centuries was remarkable and different, a radical mutation among the religions of the earth. These are the important points to be kept in mind as the discussion of the exact, descriptive, anthropological term which is to be applied to the religion continues.
The Prohibition Against Images
A fifth remarkable fact about early Isrælite religion is the commandment: “Thou shalt make thee no molten gods” (Exod. 34:17; cf.20:4).The plethora of idols among Isræl’s neighbors is eloquent testimony to the distinctiveness of this prohibition.
It is interesting to note that archaeology offers support for the antiquity
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of this commandment in Isræl. No where can we place our hands on a figure of Yahweh among the excavated ruins in Palestine. Of course, one would immediately ask: how do we know what god a small male idol represents? But the interesting fact is that Canaanite cities possess a large series of copper and bronze figurines of gods, most of which are identified with Baal. Yet when we turn to Isrælite towns, the series gives out. Isrælites were certainly familiar with them as we know from the denunciations (cf. Hab. 2:19, Isa. 40:19, Jer 10:14). Yet in the city of Megiddo, for example, a tremendous amount of debris was moved from the first five town levels (all probably Isrælite), and not a single example of a male figurine of this sort has been found. As far as the writer has been able to learn front the published reports, the same is true in other Isrælite towns.
At the same time, however, large numbers of figurines representing the Canaanite mother-goddess or fertility-goddess are found in every excavation into Isrælite houses, indicating that among the common people almost every home must have had one or more of them. They are indisputable evidence of the widespread syncretism, verging on polytheism, among the masses. It is most surprising that we do not find an occasional male image among such unenlightened and tolerant circles, and very likely examples will some day turn up. The fact remains, however, that most of the people of Israel apparently thought that Yahweh was simply not honored in that way. A few superstitions might be borrowed from Canaan, but this was not one of them. The antiquity of the second commandment thus receives support, and by implication also the first commandment; and these two prohibitions are certainly among the distinguishing features of early Isrælite religious belief, lifting it high above the practice of surrounding people.
The Union Of Religion And Morality
In a typical polytheistic setting religion and morality rarely go together, a fact scarcely surprising when we recall that the deities are personifications of natural forces and phenomena. The lives of the gods appear to have no standard of morality whatever governing their actions. In fact, they are on an ethical level below that of the average of society as a whole, if we may judge from the ancient codes of law. In Isræl, however, the opposite was true. To be religious there meant that one must also be moral, for God was a righteous God who demanded of men obedience to his laws. Of course, the exact content and interpretation of the laws varies with the century and point of view, but the basic moral requirement remained. And as early as the tenth century, we find that this moral requirement was high, even if we judge only from Nathan’s parable, upholding the rights of the poor man against the selfishness of the rich, and from David’s consciousness of sin in the Bathsheba incident (II Sam. 12). The worship of Yahweh required the best of man, and this is surely a most distinctive element in the early religion of Isræl.
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Israel A Covenanted Group
One of the fundamental conceptions of Isrælite theology was that of the covenant, a conception originating as the legal basis of society and used to describe the special relationship believed to exist between Yahweh and his people. Isræl even in the early period of her national life was apparently keenly conscious of having been chosen by Yahweh and in turn of having chosen him of her own free will. In patriarchal and nomadic society covenants or agreements between men and groups were the legal arrangements which made peaceful community relations possible. In such agreements the deities of the respective groups were made parties to the covenant and would see to it that it was kept (cf. the Mizpah Benediction, Gen. 31:49). The deity, therefore, made the covenant absolutely binding, and religion was the very basis of the stability of a society which had no strong central government.
In the period of the Wandering, Conquest, and Settlement that which held the various groups together was a religious bond or covenant made directly between God and the people (cf. Exod. 24, Deut. 33:8ff., Josh. 24). This conception formed the basis of the whole Isrælite conception of society, It is a covenanted society, and for it there is no direct Near Eastern parallel. The Old Testament conception of righteousness and justice is to be explained in this background. Righteousness was no abstract principle, but primarily the maintenance of the covenant, while sin was transgression, a breach of the covenanted obligations. God was the ground and source of righteousness, and violating his law meant the breaking up of the covenant community, though the positive, personal and intimate quality involved in the relationship created the possibility of reconstructing the broken bond.
Here the listing of differences must conclude, though there are still other things to which one could point. We have seen that though the manner of Canaan did exert great influence upon Israel, yet there was among the Hebrews in the tenth-ninth centuries, before the period of the classical prophets, a distinct cultural and religious pattern which was new, different, and dynamic. It was so strong and resistant that altered living conditions, and changes in political and social structure in Canaan, failed to compromise it seriously, though it was in constant danger of such compromise.
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. Ephesians 2:8, 9
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