If there is only one God in Genesis, it has to be said that he has an awfully large number of names. If we don't notice the plurality of God's names it can only be because of two things, perhaps the use of a translation which partially conceals the fact, and the blinding effect of over-familiarity with a text which results in not noticing what is in front of our eyes. God is often called elohim but he is also often called YHWH. These seem to be used as synonyms, but in any case it can be elohim, it can be YHWH, it can be YHWH elohim or elohim YHWH. The tradition followed by most translations is to substitute "the Lord" for YHWH which has the effect of suggesting something rather different, because the Lord sounds like an epithet of God, like saying "the great God" or "our lord God", but YHWH isn't actually that at all, it is a name (or the name) of God, whereas if anything it is elohim (translated as God) which was the epithet: the God YHWH. This confusion of the precise sense of YHWH (really a proper name but sounding in translation like a description, an epithet) is to be traced back to the Jewish custom whereby Jews avoid pronouncing the actual name YHWH as taboo, and substituting another word such as adonay (my lord) or hashem (the name), except that in the Jewish practice these are merely readings for a word which is still indicated in writing as YHWH (or YY as a sort of abbreviation); whereas in an English or Spanish translation it says "the Lord" or "el Señor" in writing, it is so read, and the awareness that this is just a replacement for a taboo name is largely absent, so that it is much less obvious that God is sometimes referred to by a name and other times just called God (or Dios).
Now this constant alternation or combination of elohim and YHWH in Genesis is never done in such a way as to suggest, or even leave open the possibility, that they refer to different deities or entities. They clearly seem to be synonyms, just as we assume that they indeed are; there appears to be no dichotomy between the two. But this is by no means the end of the story of the names of God in Genesis; in fact, what we've seen so far is the easy part. When we look closer, other uncertainties arise.
Sometimes it is pointed out that elohim 'god, God' is a plural noun; does that mean that it really means 'gods' in the plural? It is true that in form the noun elohim is nearly always used in the plural, the singular elóah from which it is derived being rare. However, it is just as true that elohim nearly always has a singular reference and we can see that, apart from the context, from morphological agreement; for example, a verb which has elohim as its subject has the form that agrees with a masculine singular subject, e.g. wayyómer elohim 'God said'. We never find *wayyom'ru elohim which is what we should expect if elohim were really a plural noun (wayyom'ru haelohim does indeed mean 'the gods said'). This means that, whatever the diachronic explanation for the plural form of the noun elohim (the suffix -im in the absolute state and the suffix -e in the construct state, elohe), the authors of Genesis understood elohim to be singular.
Note that the term traditionally used to replace the taboo name YHWH, adonay, is also plural in form: it means literally 'my lords' (in the singular, 'my lord' is adoni). Whatever the historical explanation for that might be, when adonay is used as the spoken form replacing YHWH, i.e. in substitution for the name of God, it is invariably as singular from a syntactic point of view as YHWH itself, hence wayyómer YHWH read as wayyómer adonay, which the King James Bible renders in English as 'the LORD said'. Not wayyom'ru! Now of course, if adonay actually means 'my lords', that is, when not being used to avoid pronouncing the tetragrammaton, it is plural and it takes plural agreement as we would expect. A case in point is in the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah when the angels visit Sodom and Lot invites them into his home: hinne na adonay 'here, my sirs,' he says to them, súru na el bet 'avd'khem 'please turn to the house of your servant', and súru, the imperative verb form, is plural, quite naturally. Of course, here the written text in Hebrew says adonay, not YHWH.
Now just as in some contexts adonay will be plural, it is also possible for elohim (construct elohe) to be used in the plural to mean 'gods', when that is appropriate to the context. The form of the noun (elohim, elohe) does not differentiate plural from singular, since it's already formally plural, but any grammatical agreement, when present, does. Handily, there is an example of this in Genesis too: when Jacob is running back to Canaan and Laban overtakes him, he surprises Jacob by asking him (31:30): lámma ganávta et elohay? 'Why did you steal my gods?' (i.e. 'my idols'). Now elohay is the plural form 'my gods' (like adonay 'my sirs, my lords'), but it could also mean 'my God' given that elohim is generally plural in form. But we know that Laban means 'my gods', not 'my god', because after that the text explains (31:32): w'lo yada' ya'aqov ki raxel g'navtam 'for Jacob didn't know that Rachel had stolen them'. Had stolen them (g'navtam), not had stolen it (which would have been g'navto). But if the text didn't contain that clarification two verses later, we might really not have been sure whether elohay here meant 'my god' or 'my gods'.
Which brings us to a problem. When Genesis speaks of elohim it just says elohim, meaning 'God'. But quite a few times, it doesn't just speak of elohim but rather it says elohe X 'god-of X'), such as for example the rather common phrase elohe avraham 'the god of Abraham'. In Hebrew, nouns in the construct state, like elohe 'god(s)-of', never take the definite article ha, but are usually definite in meaning nonetheless, hence the translation of elohe avraham as 'the god of Abraham' (rather than 'God of Abraham'). As we have seen, the phrase elohe avraham could potentially also mean 'the gods of Abraham', if we thought that Abraham had more than one god. And how we do know that the intended meaning is singular? Strictly speaking, we don't! It's just an assumption that is made by those who read or translate it, given the more general assumption that Abraham was a monotheist. And we know that Abraham was a monotheist... how? Well, actually... that's a really good question. Does it say in Genesis that Abraham had only one god? I don't think it does. He may have only had one, in which case elohe avraham means, in context, 'the god of Abraham' or 'Abraham's god'. And then again...
Sometimes it also says elohe yitzxaq 'the god(s) of Isaac, Isaac's god(s)', or elohe ya'aqov 'the god(s) of Jacob, Jacob's god(s)' or of course elohe yisrael 'the god(s) of Israel, Israel's god(s)', since Israel was Jacob's new name, just as Abraham was Abram's new name. Of course we know that "all these gods" (so to speak) are different ways of referring to the same god, right? Or don't we know that either? Well I am not going to answer that but I am going to say this: Genesis doesn't answer that question either! In some places in Genesis, the God of Isaac is referred to (at least we assume it's the same one) as páxad yitzxaq rather than elohe yitzxaq. This is usually translated as 'the fear of Isaac' or 'the dread of Isaac', but it's a problematic translation actually because there are some doubts about what precisely this word páxad actually meant; what everyone seems to agree on is that this is a denomination of Isaac's god, the "God of Isaac", and it's a singular noun, by the way, so if this and elohe yitzxaq are really synonymous then that helps to suggest that this is a singular elohe, at least.
And then there are the places where it says elohe avraham welohe yitzxaq 'the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac', though it could also mean 'Abraham's god and Isaac's god' (is that one or two gods?), or indeed 'Abraham's gods and Isaac's gods' (how many are there now?). Move on a generation, and now we find elohe avraham welohe yitzxaq welohe ya'aqov which means 'the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob' or... you get the idea.
So either there were various gods, or the one God had various names. The traditional interpretation is that all this refers to one God, but that implies that, as we can see, there was a very persistent tendency to keep switching the name of God around, and often to list alternative names when speaking of him. There are actually three possibilities here: maybe elohe X always refers to one and the same God, or maybe it always refers to a particular god among other gods, or maybe sometimes it means the one and only God and sometimes it means a particular god. We've already seen an example where, because of a form in another sentence (g'navtam), we know that elohim in the context means gods, plural. Now we will look at another example where, from the context, it would seem that maybe, at least, elohe X doesn't always refer to one and the same god.
So after Laban comes running after Jacob's people (ch. 30-31) and there is a confrontation over Laban's stolen gods, in which Rachel comes close to getting caught but she manages to fool him, Laban pulls the mishpokhe card and says: listen, so why are we arguing? We're family! So let's shake hands.
This is how they "shook hands":
Thereupon Jacob took a stone and set it up as a pillar. And Jacob said to his kinsmen, "Gather stones." So they took stones and made a mound; and they partook of a meal there by the mound. Laban named it Yegar-sahadutha, but Jacob named it Gal-ed. And Laban declared, "This mound is a witness between you and me this day." That is why it was named Gal-ed. (31:45-8, JPS)OK, now don't take your eyes off the screen (31:51-4, JPS; I have added italics and changed one capital G to lower case g):
And Laban said to Jacob, "Here is this mound and here the pillar which I have set up between you and me: this mound shall be witness and this pillar shall be witness that I am not to cross to you past this mound, and that you are not to cross to me past this mound and this pillar, with hostile intent. May the god of Abraham and the god of Nahor" — their ancestral deities — "judge between us." And Jacob swore by the Fear of his father Isaac. Jacob then offered up a sacrifice on the Height, and invited his kinsmen to partake of the meal. After the meal, they spent the night on the Height.How many gods?
Of course we all know that Jacob was Jewish, only he wasn't, not if we're thinking in historical (and hence, in chronological) terms, because it actually says, when we get to Exodus, that Moses was the one who introduced the Israelites to the religion of YHWH (remember Mount Sinai? oh yes). Which makes Abraham, Isaac and Jacob... what? So here's an interesting factoid: it never actually says anywhere in Genesis what religion the patriarch's were. Now that doesn't prove anything. But it says that Jacob set up a stone as a pillar. Then it says that they all gathered stones and made them into a mound. Then Jacob and Laban named the mound, in different languages because they spoke different languages: Laban spoke Aramaic and Jacob spoke Hebrew. They both seemed to agree about the function of the mound: it was to be a "witness". Did Laban and Jacob have the same religion? Now remember, Jacob's grandfather Abraham had gone to Canaan because God told him to. Did Laban have the same god? The same gods? The same God? And if they did, then since we already have seen that Laban had gods, doesn't that mean Abram's people did too?
So back to what it says: Laban says אֱלֹהֵי אַבְרָהָם וֵאלֹהֵי נָחוֹר יִשְׁפְּטוּ בֵינֵינוּ אֱלֹהֵי אֲבִיהֶם "May the God of Abraham and the god of Nahor" — their ancestral deities — "judge between us." Notice the interpolation elohe avihem 'their ancestral deities' (or more literally: the god(s) of their fathers): Genesis says that! It says in black and white that Jacob and Laban had ancestral deities. It goes on to name two ancestral deities: that of Jacob is called elohe avraham and that of Laban is called elohe naxor. As we know, elohe avihem could mean 'the god of their fathers' or 'the gods of their fathers', but since two are named, even the JPS translation uses the plural in English ('their ancestral deities').
In case it may seem that I have a theory to prove, I really don't, unless you count it as a "theory" that I may be trying to show that matters are not very clear. That there are "difficulties in the text". A great many people have written a great deal about the problems that are very briefly raised here. Very lively discussions have been taking place for a long time about it. As a faithful translator I consider that in this respect I have two obligations. One is to try to make myself aware of the discussions that have taken place in order not to overlook the arguments or miss the insights that have come to light. The other is not to take sides. Precisely because the matter has not been fully resolved and the original text has not yielded a clear answer, I really don't want to produce a translation which gives the false impression that the text does provide a clear answer by making it sound so coherent that a reader of the translation would be led to think that there is no room for uncertainty about what this means. It is my job to translate the text, not to delegate to myself the task of making such a difficult decision on behalf of the reader! Therefore, my purpose in explaining all these awkward issues surrounding the text is to draw attention to the fact that there are awkward issues surrounding the text, not to drive home a conclusion just because I personally might prefer it.
Did you notice that "Jacob's god" (so to speak) is not referred to in the Genesis text cited as "Jacob's god", but rather as (1) Abraham's god and (2) Isaac's fear? In both cases, the person's (Jacob's) god is referred to as the god of one of his ancestors (his grandfather or his father). This is the most usual pattern, it turns out. In connection with Isaac, it is elohe avraham; in connection with Jacob, it's elohe avraham or elohe yitzxaq or elohe avraham welohe yitzxaq, and so on (thus by Joseph's generation we can get the familiar litany of all three patriarchs), with certain variations such as elohe avraham ufáxad yitzxaq. Another variation is that sometimes it will say aviw 'his father' after the name of the father, e.g. elohe yitzxaq aviw 'the god of Isaac his father', which really does seem to be drumming home that this was how the "system" worked. Now notice that in the passage cited which bring's Laban into this, his god becomes predictably elohe naxor, since Nahor was Laban's grandfather! And finally the clincher: in that sentence there is the appositional phrase, elohe avihem 'the god(s) of their father'. It is true that we might have expected elohe avotehem 'the god(s) of their fathers' (i.e. Abraham and Nahor), and my best guess at a linguistically likely explanation for the singular avihem is that this is a fixed, standard expression: elohe avi 'my father's-god', elohe aviw 'his father's-god', so elohe avihem 'their father's-god'. All this points to the conjecture of an ancient form of religion in which people like Jacob and Laban (the descendants of Terah) worshipped a kind of deity called elohe av-, father's god(s), or god(s) of the fathers, or as JPS puts it, "ancestral deities".
It would seem, from the narrative referred to, that Laban's branch of the family still practised an archaic custom of having physical images which represented or symbolised the ancestor deities (and again, remember that we have seen that in his case they were more than one), i.e. idols, whereas Abraham's branch had rejected, or was in the process of rejecting, that practice (in a later episode, Jacob has his people bury any such images they might be carrying with them, which appears to carry certain implications with respect to this!). On the other hand, if they were branches of the same larger family it would not be terribly surprising if, despite such a divergence, their religions also conserved important common features, such as the worship of the same kind of god or gods.
A lot is known today about the religions of other cultures in the same region as the "Hebrews" both in Canaan where Abraham's people resided and in Mesopotamia whence they had come (as well as in Egypt whither they went), at different periods, going back to long before the time of the Hebrews. We know that these religions were generally polytheistic: whole pantheons were believed in, rather than a single god. These multiple gods were specialised: there might be a god of the earth and one of the underworld and one of the sky, as in Greek mythology; and there were also gods who were worshipped in a particular place, the god of the city or of the family. These are the usual characteristics of polytheistic religions, but if the "Hebrews" were a people who moved about a lot, as the patriarchs are depicted as doing in Genesis, it wouldn't be much use for them to worship a god of a particular city or region; they would be better off having a portable god who followed them wherever they went and so could always protect them throughout their journeys and adventures. This did not leave them rootless, provided the roots with which they associated were not mainly geographical ones, attached to a specific place, but genealogical roots linked to their family, that is, to their fathers. Thus the elohim they worshipped would have been elohe avoténu 'our fathers' god(s)', or to be more precise, elohe avraham aviw 'his father Abraham's god(s)', elohe avraham welohe yitzxaq welohe ya'aqov 'Abraham's, Isaac's and Jacob's god(s)', elohe yisrael 'Israel's god(s)' and so forth. Make sense? This might have been a religious viewpoint practised by the early Hebrews which set them apart from the local populations in the places in Canaan they passed through, who were more place-oriented and geographically rooted, less ancestor-focused.
On the whole Genesis doesn't tell us much by way of details about the religious practices and beliefs of the Canaanites; we know much more from archaeological finds in modern times which have brought to light some of their writings. We know that in Canaan there was a complex pantheon and a complicated narrative connecting the different deities they believed in, all of which seems to have been quite alien to the Hebrews if we set store by what is told of the patriarchs in Genesis.
One of the most widespread and most important gods of the Canaanites was called El. El is not exactly the singular of elohim (there is no suffix -ohim). Rather we have two different roots (el, plural elim, and [elóah, plural] elohim), and if they are related at all etymologically I don't know how. In any case, el seemingly can refer to a god (i.e. one of the many gods) and also to one specific main god called El. El can also be followed by a word or phrase to refer to a particular el, a particular god. And some of this seems to have rubbed off on Genesis, because there too we find references to God as El X. These are not the normal or most frequent ways of talking about God in Genesis, but they seem to pop up at special points in the story:
- In the "special" chapter 14, Abram's interview with Melchizedek (14:18-20), we are told that the latter was a priest of El Elyon, and he blessed Abram in the name of El Elyon. Then when Abram talks to the king of Sodom (14:21:24), he begins by saying to him: "I swear to the LORD El Elyon, creator of heaven and earth, I will not take so much as a thread or a sandal strap of what is yours...".
- An angel tells Hagar that she will give birth to a son and call him Ishmael. Hagar "called the Lord who spoke to her, 'You are El Roi'" (16:13).
- When God appears to Abram to make his new covenant (the "circumcision covenant") with him, he announces himself by saying: "I am El Shaddai" (17:1).
- When Abraham and Abimelech make a pact about a well at Beersheba, after which Abraham plants a tree and "invoked there the name of the LORD, El Olam" (21:33).
- When Jacob tells his wives about the dream in which God told him to go back to Canaan, he says that God presented himself as El Bet-El, the God who had previously appeared to him at Bet-El (31:13).
The traditional translations tend to obscure the nature of these names by translating the second element as an attribute and so treating it as a description of El, which is translated as 'God' (just as if the text had said elohim, which is used in other context and likewise translated as 'God'). This tradition goes back as far as the Septuagint. Here is a comparative table:
- Hebrew el 'elyon = Greek ὁ θεὸς ὁ ὕψιστος = Latin Deus excelsus = Spanish Dios Altísimo = English (KJV) the most high God
- H el roi = G ὁ θεὸς ὁ ἐπιδών με = L Deus qui vidisti me = S Dios de la vista, un Dios que ve = E Thou God seest me
- H el shadday = G ὁ θεός σου = L Deus omnipotens = S Dios Todopoderoso = E Almighty God
- H el 'olam = G θεὸς αἰώνιος = L Deus aeternus = S Dios eterno = E everlasting God
- H el bet-el = G ὁ θεὸς ὁ ὀφθείς σοι ἐν τόπῳ θεοῦ = L Deus Bethel = S el Dios de Betel = the God of Bethel
- elohim was the Hebrews' generic word for god (anyone's, of any kind),
- the patriarchs' old religion had the ancestral deities (called elohey Avraham etc. etc.),
- the El-names were local gods that were "picked up" from the neighbouring Canaanites (the patriarch's willingness to adopt such "gods" even sporadically raises questions about their attitude to religion and god(s) which I cannot enter into and have little to say anyway),
- so what about YHWH?
However, knowing what we already know about the "habits" of the text before us, this still allows for two different kinds of possible relationship: (1) the tetragrammaton could actually come from the ehye asher ehye story, or (2) the tetragrammatron could really have a completely independent origin from this story but have been connected to it as one more typical name game (pun) of which we have seen that there are tons in Genesis. But this is a bit off on a tangent, the important point that concerns us is that it seems, from the text, that the name and worship of YHWH is associated with Moses, but Moses came many generations later than anything that happens in Genesis, so what is the tetragrammaton doing in Genesis from as early as chapter 2, the story of the garden of Eden, which was planted by YHWH?
Well of course, the answer to that question is obvious after a moment's reflection. The author of Genesis 2 was not somebody who was present at the creation of Eden and "saw that it was YHWH who created it". The story was simply written, or else at the very least given its final form, by someone whose God was YHWH, according to whom YHWH was the creator of everything. So it is not an anachronism after all for the Eden story to speak of YHWH.
Now, who wrote Genesis? Not Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of course. It is a perfectly reasonable idea that the same writers who incorporated the God YHWH into the account they wrote of the earliest Genesis stories also brought YHWH into the stories of the patriarchs, and for the same reason. This does not prove that the patriarchs worshipped YHWH and knew him by that name (although they do have God announce to Abram in 15:7 ani YHWH asher hotzetikha etc. etc.). Nevertheless, the other names of God could represent some aspects of the patriarchs' religion. That would explain why there are so many names of God in Genesis (the "new" name has been added but the older ones have not been removed) and would also solve the "mystery" of how Moses could have introduced the Israelites to YHWH and yet the patriarchal saga, which in any case nobody has suggested was written before Moses' time, can be chock-full of references to YHWH as the name of the God (of a people who now have a monotheistic religion).
Were then the patriarchs not monotheists? Weren't they Jewish? Well now, as I warned, I have not really set out to properly answer these questions, these are merely reflections (based on readings on the subject, generally), but let us see. To begin with, were the patriarchs real people who lived in history? There is debate about that, and if they were not, then the question becomes meaningless or its meaning changes at least. If the patriarchs didn't live as people, as described in the Genesis narrative, this means they must have been projected onto their imagined past by people at a later time; in that case, it is those people who, ideally, we ought to ask what religion they projected the patriarchs as having! Other scholars argue that it is quite possible that, in some sense, people represented by the patriarchs of the Genesis story did exist; if so, we can go on to the next level.
On the next level, where we assume that the patriarchs existed historically, let us again ask realistic questions. We know the Israelites developed or acquired somehow a monotheistic religion. We don't know for sure how that happened althought there are some suggestions in Exodus which, if historically factual (once again) rather than part of the hypothetically backwards-projected story, could provide clues about the process, but nothing is certain. But what is certain is that, just as surely as we know that Judaism ultimately emerged and is monotheistic, there was a time before which Judaism had not yet emerged and so the ancestors of monotheistic Israelites could only have been something else. If, then, the partriarchs did exist, it is perfectly reasonable to think that, as ancestors of the Israelites, since they presumably did not yet have the same religion as is said to have begun to exist with Moses, they could have had a different kind of religion and had different gods from the post-Mosaic Israelite God. Isn't that sensible?
However, once again we must consider, in any event, who composed the stories of Genesis (and Exodus), because whenever it was that the prototypical literary portrayal of Abraham the patriarch was first sketched out, I very much doubt that the writer was able to obtain an interview with Abraham to ask him about his religion. Where did the hypothetical writer's information come from? The sketch must have emerged out of one of two processes or (most likely) a combination of both: tradition and projection. Either there were older traditions already available which provided some sort of information which were later woven into a narrative, and the process perhaps repeated countless times, until the narrative gradually came closer and closer to the version we now possess; or the new narrators took their own context and knowledge and beliefs, in their time, as a basis to project backwards onto an earlier era, real or imagined, what they thought things would have been like. It follows that even if Abraham et al. lived, and were polytheists (or in any case practised a kind of religion nobody today would recognise as anything they can identify), the story of them that has become a tradition and been preserved in Genesis need not portray them as they were, but rather as they were perceived and understood at the time when the narrative was developed and fixed.
In addition to generic elohim, a variety of other appellations are applied to God, including el and compounds with el as already mentioned, and then or course there is the tetragrammaton, YHWH, which I discussed in Between documentary hypothesis and textual fact. A lot of ink has flowed regarding this circumstance. One can hardly blame some writers for having taken this as evidence that the text had a polytheistic origin; furthermore, the neighbouring peoples who surrounded the Israelites on all sides and who had already been around for millennia when they appeared on the stage of history were all polytheists and these do sound something like the kinds of names their multiple deities might have (one of the gods in the Ugaritic pantheon was El, for example). Of course, this idea clashes with most of what is actually said in the Torah and other Jewish writings, often with insistence (witness the first commandment). Perhaps there is an archaic element that shows itself in these various names. But there is also another possibility, which I don't think is simply a sophistic cop-out, which is that while God could have many names (preference for which most probably correlated with geographic location), perhaps the authors understood, in their own time, that these were simply different names for the same entity: you can call your god A and I will call mine B but they are the same God. Notice, for example, that there is never the slightest hint of "different gods" interacting with each other, whether to cooperate, fight or even just converse. This is very much in contrast to the temporally or geographically adjacent polythesitic mythologies, or those of Greece and Rome, for example. God may indeed have different names yet there is no pantheon in Genesis. None whatsoever! It is therefore absolutely true, after all, that when all is said and done, in Genesis there is only one God. Which of course we knew all along.
No comments:
Post a Comment