Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 20 August 2009

The Basis of Judaism

There was no Judaism before the so-called return from exile. Even the Oxford Dictionary of the Bible and the Lutterworth Dictionary of the Bible accept it. The defining belief of Judaism is that God gave them a law at Mount Sinai, an unknown mountain, and agreed with them via Moses, the spokesman of the Jews (then called Israelites), a covenant by which God would succour the Jews providing that they remained righteous, meaning that they obeyed the law He had given them. Thus the meeting of God and the Jews at Sinai is crucial to the Jewish religion. That being so, it has much to tell us about Jewish origins, but the occasion of the Sinai event is set, in the biblical chronology, at the beginning of the Iron Age. All of this history is actually legendary, and is not believed by anyone unless they are besotted by religion. In this case, obvious clues can be teased out that suggest the Sinai event was actually the reading of the law by Ezra, a Persian, 700 years later in the fifth century.

J Jeremias wrote an extended work on theophany, by which he understood a sudden and dramatic coming of God. In Exodus, the theophany occurs on a mountain which in some passages is sealed off as sacred, Yehouah descends on to it, and Moses ascends it to meet God. In other passages, God dwells on the mountain, the people are allowed to approach it, and Moses remains with them when they do. These are the so-called J and E passages of Exodus. Yet, in Exodus 19:9a, ascribed to J, Yehouah says the people will witness Him speaking with Moses even though that is only possible in the passages ascribed to E.

John Van Seters, a prominent biblical scholar, thinks the usual division of passages in this way is faulty. Though these books certainly have multiple authors and editors, it is no longer possible to separate them out on simple criteria like the use of the name of God (J for Jahweh ie Yehouah, and E for Elohim meaning “gods” but rendered as God). There might have been such a division in the early life of the bible, but effectively the E source has been largely incorporated into J, or overwritten by it and by subsequent editors who did not follow any particular rule about naming God. The joints in the text have to be decided on the logic of the connexions between sentences, and adjacent passages. Van Seters thinks these criteria show that the books Exodus and Numbers have been written and edited by a single author whom he identifies with the former J, and J has used E and Deuteronomy to form his plot. In other words, the author J, once thought to have been very early in the history of the composition of the scriptures, is actually almost at the end of it.

What Van Seters sees is not J and E but, a composition made up of cultic instructions given by Yehouah to Moses, who is charged then to give them to the people. This required all of the people to appear on the mountain which was consecrated as sacred, and so normally off limits to anyone unconsecrated. Therefore all the people had themselves to be consecrated so that they could ascend the mountain in the theophany and hear God speak. Despite this, there is mention of priests, and priests were consecrated people who could enter the sacred zone. This shows the fourth layer of accretion of the text, the redactions made by the priests when they had eventually established themselves as a distinct privileged caste.

So, Exodus-Numbers begins with the E text, but most of E is subsumed in J, and J uses Deuteronomy as the source of much of his material. Deuteronomic passages tend to be quite distinctive in their concerns, and Deuteronomy still exists as a separate book of the scriptures, so these concerns are known, and can be seen relatively clearly in Exodus-Numbers. Lastly, sacerdotal concerns are naturally taken to be the main interests of the priesthood, especially where they elaborate upon matters that could hardly have been of interest at the foundation of a cult, but would have appeared as it become more established and complicated in its ritual. Thus in broad terms, Van Seters accounts for E, J, D and P (the Document Hypothesis), but it requires D to be late, J to be later, and P to be later still. It matches the hypothesis explained on these pages that the Persians founded Judaism when they set up the satrapy of Abarnahara with Yehud as a temple state in the fifth century BC. But they were not content to let the Canaanite traditions—which Persians considered barbaric—to continue unchanged.

The Sinai Theophany—a Storm God

Wellhausen first developed the multiple authorship (document) hypothesis of biblical evolution, and, in his book Prolegomena, noticed also that the Sinai episode (Exodus 19 to Numbers 10) in the wilderness tradition was an independent section of the artificially divided book, Exodus-Numbers. In Exodus, it is not clear whether the Sinai theophany is meant to be a fierce storm or a mild volcanic eruption. In some places it sounds like a storm and in others like an eruption, and in yet others it sounds like both. One wonders where Israelites, until recently slaves in Egypt would ever have seen a volcanic eruption to be able to describe it. There are no volcanoes in the whole of north Africa. The fact is that the theophany is a description of a storm, not a volcanic eruption. The darkness, clouds and rain are plainly enough storm phenomena. Lightning causes fires, and is described as fire, and the quaking of the earth is the rumbling feel of thunder, not any actual quaking, though the local people could have experienced an earthquake, and likened the feel of the storm to it.

Why a storm, then? Because the Canaanite tradition of the coming of god was that of the coming of the storm god towards the end of the year, bringing the salvific rains to fertilize and revive the parched earth. The idea of God being associated with storm and mountain relates to the Canaanite idea of God living in a mountain—Baal in mount Zephon (Saphon, Sapan), Baal being identifiable with Yehouah. So Yehouah, from this tradition, has some of the characteristics of a storm and fertility god, and the authors of Exodus have made use of it.

L Perlitt realized that the elements referring to God and the covenant could not have been part of the tradition of the storm god. They were late in character and Deuteronomic in theme. All the passages to do with the covenant, legal material and the Ten Commandments were late, and so could not have been Canaanite, leaving only traces of the traditions of the native people of Judah and Samaria—Canaanite tradition. Scholars have been increasingly ready to accept Perlitt’s judgements, but he offered no certain views about the older material, much of which pertains to descriptions of the theophany.

The Jewish scriptures have several instances of theophanies with varying characteristics. If the Sinai event is, as the scriptures imply, from pre-Canaanite traditions as Noth thinks, it is baffling why it has not impinged with crystal clarity on to other texts in the scriptures that describe a theophany. The same complaint can be lodged in lots of other instances concerning Exodus-Numbers. A plain example is the absence of Moses as an historical Israelite and Jewish name. Moses supposedly lived in the second millennium BC, but the bible knows of no other Moses, and, even by the first century AD, Josephus can cite no Jew called Moses other than the Moses of the myth. It is another millennium almost before any prominent Jews are called Moses, 2000 years after he is supposed to have lived. The case of Jesus is quite different. Josephus has many Jesuses in his books of Jewish history, yet Jesus is the Greek for Joshua, and Joshua was supposedly Moses’s successor. Quite so, but the common Jewish name was that of the priest Joshua who “returned” with Zerubabel, and the mythical Joshua was named after him! Jewish history and Jewish religion begins with the colonization of Yehud during the Persian occupation. This genuine beginning is described more accurately in Ezra-Nehemiah

Sinai and Edom

The Persian satrapy of Abarnahara consisted of different nations besides the Jews, each with slightly different traditions. The Persians might at first have given different scriptures to the different peoples of their empire whom they considered acceptable, allowing them to retain parts of their native traditions, but they found it to be too cumbersome, and they then decided on one ethical religion for all their subjects. It seems they settled on Judaism, so Judaism began with a diaspora!—all subjects who were not Medes or Persians and were willing to accept it, and many no doubt did because it carried privileges with it. If the Persians did not run different versions of the earliest Persian scriptures together, then either the Greeks did, or confusion of the traditions occurred in the Jewish civil war, when the Hasmoneans emerged victorious, but not before the Library of Nehemiah, which probably housed different editions of the Jewish scriptures, had been scattered.

Not considering possibilities like these, but assuming the Jewish scriptures are preternaturally correct—being divine—scholars have taken the variations of Hebrew they have found in the bible, together with the scraps of it they have found on potsherds and ostraca, as indicating an evolution of the language over time, when it is most likely a synchronic sample of dialects that existed in Canaan at the time the books were collected. Consequently different local traditions around the fourth century BC have been considered as different traditions through history. Thus many experts, Jeremias among them, consider the Song of Deborah, a poem in Judges to be ancient, and the theophany it describes as being original to this ancient time:

Yehouah, when you went forth from Seir, when you marched from the region of Edom, the earth quaked and the heavens dropped, yea the clouds dropped water. The mountains shook before Yehouah, the one of Sinai, before Yehouah, the God of Israel.

Judges 5:4-5, Van Seters

God comes forth from Seir, or Edom, and so too in parallel texts (Dt 33:2; Hab 3:3; Ps 68:8, 18) to appear elsewhere. Here Israel appears to equate with Sinai or Edom—The one of Sinai = the God of Israel—and Yehouah emerges from Sinai, which is therefore his abode. Yet having come forth from Sinai, the God of Israel manifests Himself on Zion, the sacred mountain and holy place of the Jews, while Amos 1:2 and Psalms 50:2 imply God lives in Zion, shining from it. So Zion equates with Sinai. It all suggests that Israel and Edom were originally parallel nations, not Israel and Judah, but Zion was substituted for Sinai, and Judah for Edom. And who could have lowered Edom and raised up Judah? The Persians! This substitution led to an ageless hatred of the two nations. It seems that there once was a scriptural tradition honouring Edom. For some reason Edom offended the Persians who chose Yehud as the temple state and centred the scriptures on Jerusalem. Yet, probably in error and ignorance, the old tradition was partially incorporated into the Jewish scriptures.

The cult of the Jerusalem temple celebrates the coming of the One of Sinai to his people in Zion—Jerusalem. These psalms affirm the identity of the God of Mount Sinai and the Law with the God of Zion.

R J Clifford

The sound of God coming forth is the sound of thunder, a sound of great destructive force. God is surrounded by cloud and darkness, and He emits lightning and fire, while the earth and mountains quake and apparently melt! This melting, however, is actually a reference to the mountain pouring, flowing or streaming—with rain! The description is of a storm, and the coming of a storm god. The traditions of other storm gods in the ANE, and even Mesopotamia match this one inferred from the bible. Similar motifs occur in Assyrian, Babylonian, Hittite and Ugaritic hymns to gods like Ishtar, Marduk, and Hadad (Ramman). In a hymn to Ramman, we read:

When the Lord is angered, the heavens tremble before him, the great mountains are shattered before him. At his raging, at his wrath, at his roaring, at his thunder, the gods of heaven ascend to heaven, the gods of earth enter the earth. Shamash on the eastern horizon of heaven is shrouded in darkness. Nannar passes into obscurity on the western horizon.

In the Ugaritic myths, Baal is the storm god, the “rider on the clouds”. He is Haddad, the same god as Ramman, but in Canaan. Jeremias concludes that the Old Testament theophanies derive from descriptions of the coming of the storm god in older ANE traditions. This is emphatically the view of F M Cross who believes the parallel is exact except for the beneficial transformation effected by the “true God”!

Pan-Babylonian Culture

Of course, the Canaanite religious pattern and the others in the ANE were all within the scope of the pan-Babylonian culture. All were actually related at source—the long time and spatially extensive Babylonian cultural hegemony. Thus T W Mann finds closer parallels with the myths and hymns of Mesopotamia than with Ugarit. In particular, he sees a vanguard motif, whereby the storm god goes before a nation’s armies and blinds the enemy with their splendour. No doubt gods had some such duty. The gods of the Persians led their armies in the form of special chariots decked out in the god’s special livery. But the exaltation of the god in neo-Babylonia was not particularly anything to do with the god being in the vanguard of an army, but had to do with gods coming in sacred procession to their sacred place, the temple. The blowing of the shofar, a consecration and a festal context suits the Sinai theophany better than military motifs.

The traditions behind the bible were pan-Babylonian, ie Canaanite, neo-Babylonian and propagandistic. Whatever Israelite traditions might have been before the coming of the Persians—presumably Canaanite—the Persian colonists imported additional ones from the Babylonian culture they had recently left behind, and others directly from the Persian chancellery, because they were required to do so—the covenant and the law. A direct influence of the Babylonian tradition can be illustrated from the texts used in the worship of the Mesopotamian god, Sin, an obsession of the Babylonian king, Nabonidus (555-539 BC). The theme of fear of God, which is common in the Jewish scriptures, and explicit in theophanies like that at Sinai, were in use already in the religion of Sin:

1. Establish from heaven the fear of Sin, the lord of gods, in the heart of his people. May they not commit any sin and may their foundations be firm.

   Van Seters, The Life of Moses

2. O Sin, establish the fear of your great godhead in the heart of your people, so they will not commit any sin against your great godhead. May their foundations be as firm as heaven.

   Van Seters, The Life of Moses

3. You place fear of your godhead in the heart of any country in which you wish to dwell, and its foundations remain steadfast forever.

   Harran Inscription, ANET 563, Van Seters, The Life of Moses

Van Seters thinks the correspondence between the worship of Sin promoted by Nabonidus, and the worship of Yehouah promoted by Moses is “remarkable”. Yet the texts pertaining to the worship of Sin in the time of Nabonidus are 400 years earlier than the earliest attested fragments of the bible, and even 300 years before history notes anything about the existence of Jewish scriptures.

A storm god obviously lives in the sky—in heaven—yet in myth dwells on a mountain. Similarly, the biblical God, in these theophanies, often descends from heaven to the sacred mountain, and eventually His Holy Place is in the temple on a mountain. The rationale of this apparent contradiction is that mountains seem to touch heaven, and temples in the ANE were built on a pyramidal plan in which the highest point was the Holy Place wherein God dwelt. The Babylonian ziggurats were built on flat plains as artificial mountains rising to successive levels. Canaanites traditionally worshipped in bamoth, high places, and the Jerusalem temple was a shallow pyramid itself set on top of a mountain. Heaven and earth touched at the top of the mountain so it was the obvious place for God’s dwelling to be—where he could easily move from His heavenly home to His earthly home! Deuteronomy says nothing along these lines at all probably because it was not primarily concerned with native tradition, but local tradition was used eventually to make the transition to the law and the new concept of god more palatable.

Moses?

God comes to His people with a demonstration of meteorological power to benefit them, not to lead them to war. Besides the neo-Babylonian examples, it only happens in prophetic and apocalyptic texts, all post Persian. In theophanies of the storm god, thunder was his terrifying voice, but here God’s voice speaks the Ten Commandments, but the same dread accompanies it. In Exodus, God’s voice is the ritual blowing of the shofar pronouncing a festal occasion. In Psalms 47:6, it also corresponds with the enthronement of the king, apparently when the ark was led in procession around Jerusalem before being replaced in its Holy Place. The post-Persian Jews had no king other than the shah of Persia, and he was effectively God. God was the king of the Jews, and the ceremony was a commemoration of the reading of the law and the signing of the covenant. The Hasmonaeans will have interpreted “king” literally to suit their own ambitions as kings of the Jews.

In Deuteronomy, Moses had no special role, doubtless because he is fictional. He had not been invented as a great leader of the ancestors of the Jews then. Indeed, it was the J author of Exodus who set down the myth. After the people had reacted to the theophany fearfully, they asked Moses to mediate with God (Ex 20:9). It was the point where Moses entered as Mazda brought down to earth, and Ahuramazda was replaced by Yehouah. The law had been read under the authority of Ahuramazda, the Persian god, but the Jewish tradition required God to be Yehouah.

And all the people gathered as one man into the plaza before the Water Gate. And they spoke to Ezra the scribe to bring the Book of the Law of Moses, which Yehouah had commanded to Israel.

Neh 8:1

So, the Jews had been hearing, in the reading of the law, “Mazda” in the name of the Persian god, and evidently to them it sounded like Moses. As Moses began as God (Ahuramazda), a long explanation was needed of how he seemed to be God but was not really. It was that Yehouah had appointed Moses to lead the people, giving him the power to work wonders and to utter God’s words. He was not God (Ahuramazda) but Yehouah’s spokesman. That was why the people had mistaken him for God. For the Persians, Ahuramazda was God and naturally uttered whatever God willed! So Moses had to be Yehouah’s mouthpiece, and the mythical hero was invented.

Moses was the device whereby the change was made from the Persian God to the Jewish God. Ahuramazda was not the god of the new land, and he could not be allowed to enter it, so neither was Moses who thus became a vicarious sufferer for the sins of the people. What the colonists had heard as Ahuramazda became Aaron and Moses, and what was heard as the law of Ahuramazda became the Torah of Moses. But this early Moses had to be simply a mouthpiece, a prophet of Yehouah, a revealer of divine law, but then one who interceded for the people when God was angry. Moses is represented as more than that by J. He is a divine leader, almost a king, but he had no court and had no priestly role. In the book of the covenant, he is described as a nasi, one who is lifted up.

Effectively, the whole of Exodus explains how Moses became the mediator between the Jews (Israelites) and God. The earlier traditions of Moses that had existed before the Ptolemies undertook to prepare the Jewish scriptures for publication were combined by the J author of Exodus-Numbers to establish a comprehensive mythology in which the Jews owed the immediate origins to Egypt, not Persia. If the original theophany was the arrival of the storm god, a functionary had no role until the god—the storm god—arrived and announced himself, with clouds, rain, lightning and thunder. So Moses was obviously tacked on to the earlier motif.

In Deuteronomy, Yehouah gives the Ten Commandments at Horeb—not Sinai—in the fearful theophany, then a covenant is inscribed in stone. According to Van Seters, “the original version of the stone tablets is certainly the one in Deuteronomy 5:22” where God had inscribed the two tablets with the Ten Commandments. The later covenant issued in Moab is the full set of laws that would be needed in the promised land. In Exodus, Moses mediates all the laws at Sinai, making a book of the covenant out of them, which is ratified in a ceremony, and the theophany is described in a continuous narrative. In the wilderness trials of Deuteronomy, the people generally trust God until the event of the Golden Calf. In the Yehouist account, the people are continually tested, and the author expands the Golden calf incident, adding other examples of disobedience. It is certainly, Deuteronomistic in theme but goes much further than Deuteronomy and uses parts of the Deuteronomic history connected with bull worship, such as the story of Jeroboam indicating it is later than both. Deuteronomy briefly shows Moses setting up a system of administration which is extended into two separate accounts in Exodus.

Ezra and Persian Colonists

The original tradition is that all of the people of Yehud—the Persian colonists, known as The Return—were priests of the temple state. This was a holy nation or a dominion of priests (Ex 19:6)—an idea which comes from Isa 61:6, an unquestionably Persian text—because it was a temple state—religiously serving the subject people of Abarnahara and the Juddin elsewhere in Persia, and fiscally serving the Persian chancellery—and the colonists were to be its priests. The special place among the nations is mentioned also in Exodus 19:3b-8 (cf Dt 4:20), following a recapitulation of what God had done to the Egyptians. It all places the original event at the consecration of the temple and the reading of the law by Ezra. After the fall of Persia, the high priesthood usurped the country, which in any case had non-priests in the native Am ha Eretz, and reduced the bulk of the priestly population to servants and cantors, as Levites, and added the priestly codes and sacerdotal laws that benefited them.

Exodus simply fills out the outline already in Deuteronomy 4 and 5, two older versions. The substance of God’s announcements to the people had been coming from the mouth of Moses, not because he was God’s mouthpiece, but because he was God. God had been speaking directly to the people in the earlier version (Dt 5:22). They had heard the Ten Commandments spoken “in a loud voice” but had seen no form (Dt 4:2). That absence of form was uniquely Persian at the time, and, from Persian religion, it transferred into Judaism. Yehouah was not to be depicted in human form, nor as any likeness in Nature (Dt 4:15f). It was the law, not any image that proved God. The theophany explained that the people should fear God still (as they had feared the storm) but now so that they would not sin—they would obey God, and therefore obey His law (Dt 5:29), and this reason is repeated in Deuteronomy 4:9-10, and then in Exodus 20:20.

In Exodus 20:19, it is God speaking that threatens the people’s lives, and so scares them. In Exodus 19:9, the very purpose of the theophany had been stated to the people by Moses uttering Yehouah’s words as “that the people may hear when I speak with you, and therefore believe in you forever”.

In whatever place you hear the sound of the ram’s horn, gather there to us. Our God will fight for us.

Neh 4:20

In Exodus, the divine speech was the sound of the shofar, and in the apparently historical reading of the law by Ezra, the people cried with dismay, as Exodus says. It altered their lives.

And Nehemiah the governor, and Ezra the priest, the scribe, and the Levites who taught the people, said to all the people, This day is holy to Jehovah your God. Do not mourn or weep, For all the people wept when they heard the Words of the Law.

Neh 8:9

Ezra was a Persian or Babylonian official of the shah, and pronounced in the name of the shah’s god. So Ezra’s reading of the law of Ahuramazda became Moses’s reciting of the law of Yehouah.

The original version of the episode of the stone tablets was that of Deuteronomy 5:22. Stone tablets were, of course, tablets of baked clay inscribed in cuneiform, Babylonian writing used also by the Persians. In Exodus 24:12 there are more than just the two tablets of stone, and we discover that all of God’s law had been thus written. Moses had written a book! Towards the end of Deuteronomy, Moses had written a book, so again Exodus was expanding on Deuteronomy. In practice, the baked clay tablets were small, and the cuneiform wedges on them almost minuscule. A book would consist of many such tablets stacked together. But Egyptians used a type of paper—papyrus—not baked clay, so the tradition of “stone” tablets shows a Babylonian not an Egyptian origin. The earlier accounts in Deuteronomy had been presented as historical reviews. The author of Exodus had altered the history into narrative carelessly, so it shows.

A similar change was made in the New Testament. Some of Jesus’s miracles are altered parables. What Jesus related as a cautionary tale was changed into an impossible reality, and therefore became a miracle. The cursing to death of a fig tree is an example.

There is no longer any basis for supposing the notion of a pre-exilic Sinai theology of law and covenant… Zion was not the heir of Sinai, as is commonly suggested, but Sinai the heir of Zion.

John Van Seters, The Life of Moses

Further Reading

• More on Ezra, and more, and more still on Ezra.
• More on Moses, and more, and more still.
• More on Persian religion and Judaism, and more Zoroastrianism.
• More on Canaanite religion, and more.

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