Review Essay: Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes

Divine Doppelgängers: YHWH’s Ancient Look-Alikes, edited by Collin Cornell (Eisenbrauns, 2020), 280 pp. Reviewed by Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein.

As Bible scholars, archeologists, and historians learn more about the Ancient Near East, they increasingly paint a picture wherein various ancient nations understood their own deity/deities as uniquely powerful and potent in ways similar to how the Bible describes God. The book under review deals with the theological consequences of this view of history, questioning if and how the Bible’s God differed from all the other gods of the Ancient Near East. It also addresses what the possible theological consequences of these scholarly findings might be for the contemporary religious community. It is an edited volume with contributions from thirteen different scholars, each of whom touches on these questions from a slightly different angle.

The Problem of Lookalikes

To better state the problem, the Bible presents God as different in kind from all the other so-called “gods” of the ancient world. Yet many of the same descriptions used in the Bible in reference to God — including claims of His uniqueness — have parallels in other texts from the Ancient Near East describing those other gods. For example, just as the Bible depicts God as aiding the Israelites in conquering the Holy Land, so does the Mesha Stele similarly depict Chemosh as aiding the Moabites in freeing Moabite lands from the Israelites. The attentive reader may even catch whiffs of these parallels in passages like Jephthah’s assertion that Chemosh gave the Ammonites/Moabites their land in the same way that God gave the Israelites their land (Jud. 11:24). Additionally, scholars have pointed to the struggles between Marduk and Tiamat in Babylonian mythology as reminiscent of the battle between God and the Leviathan in the Bible (Isa. 27:1, Ps. 74:14). In fact, there is even some evidence that the God of the Bible was recognized in ancient non-biblical sources as a legitimate entity — just not as the One God, but rather as one of a multitude of deities. So what makes Him different?

For secular non-believers who do not view the Bible as theologically binding, these parallels and lookalikes pose no problems, as it is simply a historical oddity that the writers of the Bible claimed the same things about their God that the writers of other ancient literatures claimed about their god(s). But religious Jews and Christians believe in the revelatory message presented by the Bible of a Single God who created the world, guides history, and gives laws. For us, these parallels in extra-biblical texts are not a mere oddity, but may pose a theological problem. How can God be described as unique and unlike all other gods, if in fact the Bible’s descriptions of Him are not all that different from the ways ancient pagans described their respective gods? All of the essays in this book try to address this question in one form or another.

The Comparative Approach

The first essay featured in this book is written by Patrick D. Miller Jr., who approaches the issue from the point of view of comparative religion. He, like many of the other contributors, focuses on how God as depicted in the Bible is both similar to and different from the gods of the neighboring peoples (“convergence and differentiation”). Miller follows Frank Moore Cross’ understanding that the Bible’s conception of the One God stems from Israel’s Canaanite milieu, seeing that One God as the merging of the ancestral God (often referred to with El epithets) and YHWH. These similarities to Canaanite divinities are tempered by the ways in which God in the Bible differs from other gods in the neighborhood (for example, in His lack of female consort, His aniconic worship, and the meaning of His name as a conjugation of the verb “to be”), which mark the Bible’s God as different from the rest.

Brent A. Strawn similarly finds it too simplistic to argue that the One God of the Bible is simply just another one of “the gang.” Yet he also finds it unsophisticatedly apologetic to argue that parallels between the Bible’s God and other ancient deities are actually the result of a biblical polemic that sought to clarify that whatever epithets or events idolaters attributed to other gods should actually be attributed to God — the approach championed by Samuel David Luzzatto (Shadal, 1800-1865). In rejecting this approach, Strawn chooses instead to affirm that there are similarities and dissimilarities between God and the other ancient gods, which he justifies by way of various arguments from Christian theology that this reviewer admits he did not quite follow.

Another contributor, J. Andrew Dearman, offers a similar discussion centered on the nomenclatures (names/epithets) used by the Bible to describe God, and how they compare and contrast with those applied to other deities.

The problem with this line of discourse is that talking about influence and/or differentiation implies a conception of the Divine that is wholly manmade. In other words, if Israelites’ conception of God was formed as a result of their interactions with other peoples like the Canaanites — whether to imitate them or obviate them — as opposed to pure direct Divine revelation, then those theological conceptions were created by people and do not necessarily reflect any actual ontological/metaphysical reality. While this approach might satisfy students interested in the “history of religion,” an approach that focuses too heavily on the comparative aspect cannot solve any theological problems for an orthodoxically religious person. Some of the contributions to this book raise this issue, but do not offer a compelling answer to the quandary.

New Theologies

Robert Goldenberg — one of only two Jewish contributors to this edited volume — follows a self-styled “midrashic” approach that argues that biblical statements about God’s uniqueness reflect rhetorical exaggeration aimed at swaying Israelites away from worshipping other gods and remaining within the covenantal fold of worshipping only the God of Israel. While Goldenberg devotes much space to showing how the rabbis in the Midrash would sometimes interpret individual passages in the Bible against their prima facie reading, he fails to realize that his reading totally upends the Bible’s overall monotheistic message; he is not simply downplaying the impact of select passages.

In some ways, Goldenberg’s essay is similar to the point made by Jon D. Levenson, the other Jewish contributor to this volume. Levenson argues that the Bible purposely reduced its presentation of idolatry to a ridiculous sort of fetish with no coherent theology, in order to preclude its possibility as a viable alternative to the worship of God. He implies that the prophets of the Bible would readily admit that alternate, equally potent gods exist, but that they downplayed that reality as a way of rejecting Canaanite paganism out of a sort of racist anti-Canaanite ideology.

Othmar Keel’s essay is explicitly built on Levenson’s perspective. It deals with the parallels by emphasizing how Judaism and Christianity could learn from the pagan mindsets with which they broke, by renewing the pagan celebration of nature and eroticism that has been downplayed by Judeo-Christian thought. This reviewer is left unsatisfied with Keel’s approach, because instead of offering a descriptive resolution to normative theology, the essayist simply proposes a radically new theology that may or may not be compatible with the old.

Bob Becking reacts to the issue by noting three theological models broadly found in the Bible: “intolerant monotheism,” which views the worship or acknowledgement of other gods as abominable; “conditional acceptance,” which acknowledges the existence of other deities but calls for exclusive worship of God (monolatry); and “lending deities,” a pluralistic perspective whereby one’s theological affiliations can be more fluid and one can be loyal to multiple gods at the same time. The implication is that the problem at the heart of this book is only significant if one follows the first approach; but since the Bible overwhelmingly favors that first approach as its normative theology, Becking’s resolution, like Keel’s, essentially evades the issue by calling for the acceptance of an alternate theology.

Continuity and Survival

In his contribution, M. Patrick Graham offers a learned compare/contrast essay between God and the Moabite god Chemosh using Moral Foundations Theory as a framework. Ultimately, he deals with the question of Divine lookalikes by noting that only God continues to survive and be the center of worship for a living community, while other ancient deities — no matter how similar to God they might have been in ancient times — are outdated and barely remembered nowadays. This approach very much resonates with this reviewer, as the related phenomenon of Jewish continuity and survival has maintained a prominent place in Jewish thought.

Manmade Revelation

The book’s editor, Collin Cornell, contributes an essay that outlines and rejects two approaches before proposing a third. Firstly, he cites the idea that the deities of old appear to resemble God due to demonic trickery meant to entice man toward the sin of idolatry, which he rejects as unsupported within the text of the Bible itself. Secondly, he cites and dismisses the idea that God and the pagan deities of the ancient world reflect “rays of truth” that could all be subsumed within a greater deity above them all, since this essentially admits that God is but one of many similar gods, running counter to the Bible’s claims of His incomparability. The third approach, which Cornell seems to adopt, argues that all gods described by ancient texts, including the Bible, are simply made up by people — which is why they resemble each other in so many ways — but that by dint of His own Divine decision, the One Real God chose to reveal Himself precisely as depicted in the Bible.

The problem with this idea is that it aligns too closely with the secular or atheist perspective that God and religion are merely man-made phenomena, and could lead to a problematic relativism: if any human conception or language could be seen as a revelation of God, it becomes difficult to discern which religious texts or beliefs genuinely reflect Divine truth.

A Traditional Approach

As an Orthodox Jew, I assess the problem that this book attempts to address, and the various approaches taken therein, from a traditionalist perspective. Instead of looking for a new theology that obviates the problem, I would instead seek a resolution that respects the accepted contours of Jewish theology while still answering as much as possible. Some might consider this apologetics.

My favored approach draws on Jewish traditions about an Urmonotheismus (primeval monotheism) that existed before the advent of idolatry. In the time of Adam, it was abundantly clear to mankind that there is only One God, and that He alone is all-mighty and worthy of man’s worship. However, subsequent to Adam’s death — in the lifetime of his grandson Enosh — the worship of multiple deities was introduced, for various theological, political, sociological, and/or psychological reasons. Essentially, these early pagans balkanized the powers and purviews of the One God into independent deities, each limited to a specific role: some ruled elements of nature (war, fertility, weather, wisdom, death), while others functioned as guardians of specific nations, cities, or regions.

Despite the spread of polytheism and paganism, there always remained a few stalwart monotheists who recognized the uniqueness of the One God — figures like Noah, Melchizedek, and Abraham, who preserved that early tradition and became the earliest heroes of Judaism. Perhaps the most famous Jewish source formulating this view of history is Maimonides’ Laws of Avodah Zarah (ch. 1) in his Mishneh Torah.

In the pagan conception of divinity, “the gods” are always limited by something the Greeks called Fate and the Romans called Fortune — limitations that may be tacit admissions that there really is One God under whom all the other gods reign. Indeed, the Talmud (BT Menahot 110a) claims that even idolaters recognized God as “the God of gods,” which might allude to this paradigm. Yehezkel Kaufmann dubs this pagan conception the “primordial realm,” wherein the ancient deities were said not to have final say, and their plans are ultimately thwarted by a power above them. Stephen B. Chapman’s essay in this volume makes a related point: that the God of the Bible differs in kind from all the other deities of the ancient world in that He was not understood to be subservient to fate, but instead controlled it.

In light of this understanding, parallels to biblical depictions of the One God in extra-biblical pagan literature may be rooted in earlier descriptions and conceptions of the One God that predated the advent of idolatry. Idolaters used those expressions and ideas for their own purposes, mythologizing various aspects of God in the tales they told about the trials of their deities. Yet the Bible preserves that verbiage as reflecting its original monotheistic intent. Indeed, although rabbinic tradition ascribes the Book of Psalms to King David, it also states that he included in the book psalms written by pre-Mosaic monotheists Adam, Melchizedek, and Abraham (BT Bava Batra 14b). Thus, even if some of the verbiage used in Psalms resembles notions that contemporary pagans were saying about their gods, Psalms could be argued not simply to be mimicking them but rather harkening back to a tradition that predated them, restoring their original intent. The same could be said about other parts of the Bible — for example, why Isaiah depicts the One God as riding on a light cloud (Isa. 19:1), which very much resembles Ugaritic descriptions of Baal doing the same.

Moreover, there is ample room in Jewish theology to view the ancient pagan deities as real entities in ways that do not detract from God’s potency and uniqueness — functioning much like Satan, angels, demons, or astrological forces, as cogs in a sort of neo-Platonic system that God uses to administer the world, differentiated from God by their lack of free will.

Fake News

Perhaps the simplest approach to the questions at the heart of this book is to revive a controversial idea proposed by Jan Assmann, known as the “Mosaic Distinction.” He argued that the Bible introduced a new way of assessing the deities of the ancient world, one totally inconsistent with the more liberal polytheistic milieu around it: the Bible differentiates between the One God and all other gods by simply labeling the latter as false. All the literary or poetic parallels between Him and other deities cannot sidestep the simple assertion that those deities are merely false non-entities, while only the God of the Bible actually exists. Assertions along the lines that Chemosh gave the Moabites their land are simply “fake news,” because there is no such thing as Chemosh outside of the imaginations of its worshippers — who nonetheless had a vested interest in making their claims sound believable, hence the similarities between the fake gods and the Real God.

Ultimately — as Josey Bridges Snyder writes in the conclusion to her essay — no data unearthed from the ancient world could prove or disprove the existence of God. That is why belief in Him is called “faith.” Yet God gave us brains, and He fully expects us to use them. The fact that ancient lookalikes existed does not detract from our belief and devotion to God; it is simply an interesting historical tidbit that can potentially help us better understand the religio-cultural milieu in which our ancestors lived and the outside temptations the Ancient Israelites had to contend with.

Conclusion

Many of the contributions to this fascinating volume touch on my concerns but do not fully flesh them out. This book is addressed to believing Jews and Christians who are bothered by the above-described questions from a theological perspective and who seek to square the findings of biblical studies and archeology with their own religious beliefs. Because of that, I — as an observant Jew — am within the book’s target audience, and I therefore felt that my responses were fully warranted.

Essentially, this book presents a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between the God of the Bible and the deities of the Ancient Near East — a topic that is both challenging and essential for those of us who take our faith seriously but also interact with the scholarly world. While some essays may not have fully addressed my concerns, the diversity of perspectives offered here is invaluable. All in all, I found most of the essays to be quite scholarly and erudite, and even those which only tangentially touched on the issues at the core of this book contributed to the discussion. As an Orthodox Jew, I appreciate the respectful and scholarly manner in which these thorny issues are handled, even if the answers are not always clear-cut or even acceptable to me.