OLD GODS. NEW TOGAS.
OLD GODS. NEW TOGAS.
Old gods (Near Eastern) put on new togas (Greco-Roman characteristics...) after a kid named Alex conquered the world. That is, how ancient Near Eastern religions were pushed underground after the conquest of Alexander the Great in 333 BCE and reemerged in Greek philosophical categories after the world had been thoroughly Hellenized. As we will see, the God of the Bible, Yahweh, is going to move from being an ancient storm god to being Plato’s incorporeal (God is a spirit rather than in a body) and transcendent (God is above and outside of the created order). In keeping with this larger change in human conception of the divine, the Jewish and then Christian God is going to put on the toga of Greek thought. By the time of the New Testament, humans are simply going to give fresher and newer language to the reality of the divine.
OLD GODS IN NEW TOGAS
Hans Jonas wrote a book called The Gnostic Religion in the 1950s which had a profound impact on the study of antique religion. His starting point was that almost all religions in the first century contained a “gnostic seed,” whereby a redeemer comes from an outside world to “save” lost humans from an evil or fallen created order. For Jonas, all of the religions of the first century, from Christianity to Mithraism to Gnostic Sects of every stripe contain the “gnostic seed” and are “salvific” in nature. Salvific simply means the goal of the religion is salvation or escape from trouble with God.
However, Jonas was careful to point out that these are not new religions. Rather, these religions are what happens when ancient Near Eastern deities and religions collided and mixed with Greek philosophy. For Jonas, Near Eastern gods simply went underground after the coming of Alexander the Great and the massive spread of Greek gods and goddesses over the Mediterranean world. These gods remained hidden for two or three centuries, only to reemerge with different language, labels, and conceptions borrowed from Plato, Aristotle, and their successors.
Now, for those of you who have made the discontinuity in the character of God an anchor point for your skepticism—that is, the difference between God in the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, and the God of Jesus and his followers in the New Testament for you was just too vast for you to consider it to be an accurate portrayal of God… you are first of all not alone. One of the earliest stripes of Christianity found heretical by the Church Fathers, existed and flourished because a man named Marcion and his followers felt the same way. For them the God of the Old Testament had to be an inferior God whose defining character trait was justice, while the God who sent and was found in Jesus was a superior God of love. Marcion then threw out the Hebrew Bible and portions of the New Testament which valued its Jewish heritage.
Here is the rub though- for Marcion and for that sort of skepticism in general. First of all, the God of the Old Testament is very gracious, loving, and compassionate in some passages. He is ethnocentric and violent in others… it depends on the author. But what I think is a bigger issue, is that the human conception of the divine has moved forward several clicks by the time of Jesus and the writers of the New Testament. That is, we need to get comfortable with the idea that our naming of God changes over time in the Bible. Let me show how the broader human conception of God changes over time, and then we can talk about what to do with that as we read the Bible.
A great artifact to help us understand the ancient human conception of the divine in the ancient world and the Old Testament of the Bible is the Hammurabi Stele. The Hammurabi Stele contains the first and most famous law code of human history. It is where we get the phrase, “eye for an eye.” The stele is an oblong stone, which for full disclosure, absolutely is supposed to be a phallic symbol :D. Etched into the stone is the law code, but the top foot or so contains a depiction of Hammurabi receiving the law from Shamash the Sun God of the Old Babylonian Empire (think around 1754 B.C.E.—so really, really old!). So here we have the human conception of a divine being engraved in a rock nearly 2,000 years before Jesus. This is going to allow us to see the dramatic shift in how people thought about God over time.
Here are a few things to notice about gods in the Old World from the depiction on the Hammurabi stele:
HUMAN BUT WAY BIGGER.
Next to the Sun God Shamash, King Hammurabi is very small. This is an essential assumption that the ancients had about the gods—they were like us except big. This is true in almost every way. The gods are imagined to be like us with bigger and more powerful bodies. In Syria we have unearthed a temple with a giant footprint mold etched into the stone leading up to the front entrance. This artist was depicting the god, who is human but giant, walking into his abode. The gods made us with similar bodies, emotions, and sentience. Only our attributes are miniature versions of their own. Humans are made in the image, or “statue”, of the divine. This means the gods are human writ large.
DIVINE COUNCIL.
Gods in the ancient world are part of a council, or group of gods that discuss and make decisions together. The most common arrangement of a divine council is like a family. Texts found at a dig site to the north of Israel called Ras Shamra, contain Canaanite mythological texts in a language and culture due north of ancient Israel, called Ugaritic. These Ugaritic texts suggest Yahweh may have been part of El’s divine council alongside Baal and Asherah at one time. In the Bible, God is called El, Elohim, and Yahweh interchangeably, and Israel’s god competes with Baal. This is probably because Baal is a rival storm God in an early Canaanite pantheon.
DECKED OUT IN HORNS.
At least in iconography, divine beings are marked early on with horns. You can tell Shamash is the god here because he is decked out with horns signifying power.
THE OLD GODS SHINE.
Ancient gods are luminous. They shine like stars in the sky. If we look closely at Shamash we notice his shoulders have lines coming from them. These are rays of light and are extremely common in depictions of gods and goddesses in and ancient Near East.
Turning to the Bible, consider the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai in the Hebrew Bible. The conception of the divine is largely the same. Like Hammurabi, Moses is the go-between for a people and a god. That god is taking on a vassal people, or a covenant people. He will be their special god and they will be his special people. But this is how it may be said that God met with Moses on a mountain, or talked to him face to face. This particular biblical writer holds an ancient conception of divinity—that God is human writ large, decked in horns, and shiny. We even have this fabulous legend about Yahweh being so shiny that it “rubs off” on Moses:
Exodus 34.19-24
When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands, he was not aware that his face was shining because he had spoken with the Lord. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, his face was radiant and they were afraid to come near him. But Moses called to them; so Aaron and all the leaders of the community came back to him, and he spoke to them. Afterward all of the Israelites came near him, and he gave them all the commands the Lord had given him on Mount Sinai. When Moses finished speaking to them, he put a veil over his face. But whenever he entered the Lord’s presence to speak with him, he removed the veil until he came out.
This tale about Moses reflecting God’s luminosity is written by an author with an ancient Near Eastern conception of God. In fact, if we tick through our list of the human concept of gods in the ancient world, Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible lines up pretty well. God is described as having a body, stretches out his arm, etc… In the opening chapters of the Bible God makes mankind and then says to someone else, “Let us make man in our image.” This is not some ancient reference to the Christian trinity (an idea solidified by a Church council of the 4th century C.E.), but rather, Yahweh is speaking to his divine council. Numerous texts speak of Yahweh shining, and even being clothed or enshrouded in brilliant light. And I’ll give a free podcast to anyone who finds a text about Yahweh’s horns (just kidding they are all free!) Now, not all texts are the same, that is to say, later texts like parts of Isaiah are moving towards what we would call monotheism. However the vast majority of the Hebrew Bible envisages God in this way, and this is something we simply have to be honest about. This is simply how the ancients thought about the gods. For Israel, Yahweh is how they named the most high God, and over time the other gods faded away.
GOD GOES GREEK
After Alexander moved through Palestine in 331 B.C.E., however, a story about the giant, shiny God seen by Moses would never have been written. Large, horny, shiny gods were slowly going the way of the buffalo. Hans Jonas was astute in his observation, that gods like Shamash, or Marduk, or Ishtar, or even Yahweh of the Old Testament either disappeared with the coming of the Greeks, or how they were conceived of by people morphed to keep up with a shift in human culture. The Olympian Gods consolidated and Zeus move into the far heavens as the Plato’s One transcendent being while the others became intermediate daemons, or lesser gods. Yahweh is going to lay down his sword and become a spiritual deity who is all-powerful and present everywhere. He is going to become Plato’s ideal, transcendent God for Jews and Christians.
You see, friends, Plato had argued in the 5th C BCE that a perfect God must be entirely transcendent. He meant that whatever the One, God, or singular divine reality really was, it had to be perfect. This perfection meant complete removal from an imperfect created order. The upshot of such thinking, is that the human conception of God had to grow up. People in the Classical World began to imagine God as way bigger, as the sole basis for the created realms of the heavens and earth, and as a spiritual being. God was simply way more powerful, beautiful, and majestic than humans had previously imagined. This God had a plan which he carried out carefully, and any of the so-called gods on Mount Olympus must be merely intermediate beings (another episode).
THE CONCEPT OF GOD IS A MOVING TARGET.
So here is the important bit:
In Greek thinking, the rational exploration of the world and the internal moral dialogue of philosophy slowly won the day over more primitive ways of thinking about natural phenomena. Ideas about God followed suite, and then were carried worldwide by Alexander’s army and maintained in the Hellenistic Dynasties of his generals up until the time of Jesus. The upshot is that by first century, in religions from Christianity to Gnosticism to the various forms of Judaism, we will find this updated conception of a transcendent God removed from creation by the nature of Perfection and Holiness. With respect to Judaism and Christianity, the perfect holiness of God will create the need for Messianic expectation and make sense of an outside being coming to the world to save us.
A comparative example from a Jewish man, Philo, will demonstrate the vast difference in how people conceived of Yahweh at the time of Jesus. Philo lived in Alexandria, the most philosophical city of its time, and he is perhaps the first and most important figure in history to combine Greek Philosophy and Jewish thought. He lived at the same time as Jesus. A prolific writer, Philo published vast and numerous treatises explaining how Greek thought and the sacred Scriptures of the Hebrews were not at odds, but were actually discrete expressions of the same truths. In his Allegorical Interpretation, Philo writes this about God:
“For not even the whole world would be a place fit for God to make His abode, since God is His own place, and He is filled by Himself, and sufficient for Himself, filling and containing all other things in their destitution and barrenness and emptiness, but Himself contained by nothing else, seeing that He is Himself One and the Whole.”
For Philo and his zeitgeist God is not regional, but rather the whole world is His domain. “God is His own place” means that God is completely transcendent from creation and He relies on himself for existence and sustenance. Ancient gods, by comparison, literally needed feeding by humans in sacrifice to sustain the natural order. God is also in and through everything for Philo. He fills everything else with his animating spirit and all created beings would be lifeless without divine animation. The final phrase, “He is Himself One and the Whole” is drawing directly from Plato and his successors in terminology. God is the One, high God, dependent on nothing and over all creation. And this God, is the one encountered in the Greek New Testament. When you read in the gospels, or Paul’s letters, or letters of the apostles—this is their conception of the Yahweh of the Old Testament. God has moved from being thought of like Marduk to being much more like Plato’s One, or Aristotle’s prime mover.
Now we can farther locate what is happening in Second Temple Judaism and the rise of Christianity. For today though, let this big idea sink in: the human conception of God evolves like everything else. It is a moving target. All religions appear static or unchanging and timeless, but in reality they are always updating and morphing to be relevant and to meet the needs of human worshipers. In the evolution of human spirituality or internal thought, we might think of Greek philosophy as the mutation that helped our spirituality reach new heights in the way we think about and name the One, True Master of the Universe.
THE TAKEAWAY FOR MODERNS
OLD TESTAMENT GOD | NEW TESTAMENT GOD
The fundamental presuppositions behind the word “God” have changed significantly between the times when the Hebrew Bible was compiled and the New Testament was put together. This means when we pass from the majority of the texts in the Old Testament into the New Testament, we encounter a vastly different conception of God. That is okay. Learn to recognize that the Bible has many voices spanning a lot of time. Even the language of the texts has moved from a Hebrew, Semitic, script, to the Koine, or “common” Greek that was used throughout the Mediterranean world. Commensurately, the Eastern conception of God has moved West. And that’s okay. Actually, my friends, it is better. Because think about it:
First, your intuition is correct when passages of the Bible that rightfully seem barbaric and unbecoming of a complex and wonderfully creative Creator. You can see passages in the Bible each in their discrete settings in antiquity. If a Hebrew Bible text seems to use language for God with violent motifs or even to lean towards holy war in his name… you now know it is from a time when gods were humans writ large. You now know that that god actually was the warrior god in his divine council. That God is extremely violent and some authors of the Bible really do conceive of him as a God who commands violence.
On the other hand, before we just chuck the god of the Old Testament, even within a timeframe of history when humans conceived of the gods as much more violent and whimsical… the God the Israelites conceived of is uncommonly good. He is on the side of humans. He creates because he is an artist, not because of a violent accident. He forms humans carefully like the clay pot of an artisan and intimately breaths his animating breath into our frames. And he sides with slaves. This is the God who does not attach himself to the most victorious people, but instead defends a slave people. This is the God who adopted a people no one thought was worth anything.
So the shocking thing about the God of much of the Old Testament is not that he was a warrior God in antiquity—that should actually be expected in the age it is written— no, what is shocking is that for some reason he is good, trustworthy, reliable, committed to people, loving, and cares about the marginalized and oppressed. So even the barbaric and ethnocentric passages of the Hebrew Bible may be a click forward in the time they were written.
Second, you can lean into a more evolved way of speaking about God. In some ways many sublime human ideas found a seminal point in the Classical World, and the ideas about God in Late Antiquity really are more evolved, more beautiful, and dare we say, better. The apex of divine language is that God is ultimately love and that to love God means to love people well. But it takes the human spirit a while to get to this point. This is true in Christianity and every other faith tradition. The great gift of human religion is uncommon love and compassion for even our enemies. The great detriment of human religion is taking a frozen description of God from early on in humanity’s evolving consciousness of God and taking it as currently literal. When conceptions of God which no longer serve humanity’s spiritual growth towards love, compassion, and justice, but actually drag us back to dangerous categories of “us and them”—when these conceptions gain a head of steam and fuel an ideology, this is when religious is not helpful. This is when religion hurts humanity.
Perhaps we ought to make this the measuring stick of human religion in the modern world: does it make the world better? Does it help humans thrive together? I would argue the better articulations of God in the Bible can change the very fabric of the world and our daily lives when we live them out. I would argue living out the ethical teachings of Jesus is the best way to an anxiety free life which is grounded in the noblest virtues.
Third and finally, a more mature and nuanced understanding of how the Bible formed and can be interpreted is this: HUMAN HOLY LANGUAGE IS EVOLVING… AND THAT IS OKAY.
When you hang human religion on the hook of not only changing through time, but specifically taking on Greek philosophical ideas in the Classical Era (333 B.C.E. forward) that reshaped older conceptions, you can appreciate that this phenomenon is ALWAYS taking place in human religion. Even religious traditions that look static and fixed to theological outlooks are still gradually changing. 100 years ago it was acceptable in the United States to interpret the Bible in such a way as to prop up the institution of slavery. 100 years from now, it may shock us that the Bible once was used to specifically condemn same sex partners.
Human thought, imagination, and dare we say salvation is a moving target and our job is to make it better and better, more inclusive, and more embracing of diversity because of love and charity… taken from a more evolved and nuanced generosity understood in the divine. Remember, God is what God is. When an old god gets a new toga, it is simply our limited perspective catching up a step.
So may you be filled again with wonder that while human perspectives and language can be small and slow in its growth, the reality of God is everything wondrous in the world. God is the undercurrent of animation, energy, and generosity present in the world. God is the magic, the spark, the fire, that somewhere inside you, you are grateful for.
May you lean into the most helpful images of God in the Bible and be set free from the ones that your more evolved conscience suspects are from a more primitive past. May you move towards what helps, and let go of what may have hurt you.
And may you start to enjoy the stories of the Bible again. When we are set free from believing that the Bible is one, unified theological statement, we are actually liberated to find humor in stories that are backwards in the modern world. It is actually funny to read the story of Samson in the Book of Judges when we are free to realize that he is a complete musclebound idiot. But also, we can be awed by how relevant and helpful some stories and pieces of wisdom are today. The Psalms can still give language to our deepest fears and longings, we can have the same identity crisis of Jacob before us.
May you be free to let go with one hand of what has hurt you and weighed you down with pictures of the divine that no longer work. And with the other hand, may you sift and find treasure in some of the greatest stories ever told.