History
- Evolution of Judaism - National Monotheism
According to Hebrew history
narrated in Exodus , the second book of the Torah, the Hebrews became a
nation and adopted a national god on the slopes of Mount Sinai in
southern Arabia. While we know nothing whatsoever of Hebrew life in
Egypt, the flight from Egypt is described in Hebrew history with immense
and powerful detail. The migration itself creates a new entity in
history: the Israelites; Exodus is the first place in the Torah which
refers to the Hebrews as a single national group, the "bene yisrael," or
"children of Israel."
The flight from Egypt itself stands as the single greatest sign from
Yahweh that the Israelites were the chosen people of Yahweh; it is the
event to be always remembered as demonstrating Yahweh's purpose for the
Hebrew people. It is the point in history that the scattered tribes
descended from Abraham become a single unit, a single nation. It is also
the crucial point in history that the Hebrews adopt Yahweh as their
national god.
Hebrew history is absolutely silent about Hebrew worship during the
sojourn in Egypt. A single religious observance, the observation of
Passover, originates in Egypt immediately before the migration. This
observance commemorates how Yahweh spared the Hebrews when he destroyed
all the first born sons in the land of Egypt. The Yahweh religion
itself, however, is learned when the mass of Hebrews collect at Mount
Sinai in Midian, which is located in the southern regions of the Arabian
peninsula. During this period, called the Sinai pericope, Moses teaches
the Hebrews the name of their god and brings to them the laws that the
Hebrews, as the chosen people, must observe. The Sinai pericope is a
time of legislation and of cultural formation in the Hebrew view of
history. In the main, the Hebrews learn all the cultic practices and
observances that they are to perform for Yahweh.
Scholars are in bitter disagreement over the origin of the the Yahweh
religion and the identity of its founder, Moses. While Moses is an
Egyptian name, the religion itself comes from Midian. In the account,
Moses lives for a time with a Midianite priest, Jethro, at the foot of
Mount Sinai. The Midianites seem to have a Yahweh religion already in
place; they worship the god of Mount Sinai as a kind of powerful nature
deity. So it's possible that the Hebrews picked up the Yahweh religion
from another group of Semites and that this Yahweh religion slowly
developed into the central religion of the Hebrews. All scholars are
agreed, however, that the process was slow and painful. In the Hebrew
history, all during the migration and for two centuries afterwards, the
Hebrews follow many various religions unevenly.
The Mosaic religion was initially a monolatrous religion; while the
Hebrews are enjoined to worship no deity but Yahweh, there is no
evidence that the earliest Mosaic religion denied the existence of other
gods. In fact, the account of the migration contains numerous references
by the historical characters to other gods, and the first law of the
Decalogue is, after all, that no gods be put before Yahweh, not that no
other gods exist. While controversial among many people, most scholars
have concluded that the initial Mosaic religion for about two hundred
years was a monolatrous religion. For there is ample evidence in the
Hebrew account of the settlement of Palestine, that the Hebrews
frequently changed religions, often several times in a single lifetime.
The name of god introduced in the Mosaic religion is a mysterious term.
In Hebrew, the word is YHWH (there are no vowels in biblical Hebrew); we
have no clue how this word is pronounced. Linguists believe that the
word is related to the Semitic root of the verb, "to be," and may mean
something like, "he causes to be." In English, the word is translated "I
AM": "I AM THAT I AM. You will say to the children of Israel, I AM has
sent you."
For a few centuries, Yahweh was largely an anthropomorphic god, that is,
he had human qualities and physical characteristics. The Yahweh of the
Torah is frequently angry and often capricious; the entire series of
plagues on Egypt, for instance, seem unreasonably cruel. In an account
from the monarchical period, Yahweh strikes someone dead for touching
the Ark of the Covenant; that individual, Uzza, was only touching the
ark to keep it from falling over (I Chronicles 13.10).
But there are some striking innovations in this new god. First, this
god, anthropomorphic or not, is conceived as operating above and outside
nature and the human world. The Mosaic god is conceived as the ruler of
the Hebrews, so the Mosaic laws also have the status of a ruler. The
laws themselves in the Torah were probably written much later, in the
eighth or seventh centuries. It is not unreasonable, however, to
conclude that the early Mosaic religion was a law-based religion that
imagined Yahweh as the author and enforcer of these laws. In fact, the
early Hebrews seemed to have conceived of Yahweh as a kind of monarch.
In addition, Yahweh is more abstract than any previous gods; one
injunction to the Hebrews is that no images of Yahweh be made or
worshipped. Finally, there was no afterlife in the Mosaic religion. All
human and religious concerns were oriented around this world and
Yahweh's purposes in this world.
As the Hebrews struggled with this new religion, lapsing frequently into
other religions, they were slowly sliding towards their first major
religious and ethical crisis: the monarchy. The Yahweh religion would be
shaken to its roots by this crisis and would be irrevocably changed.
From:
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/HEBREWS/HEBREWS.HTM
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Evolution
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