That there existed a strict hierarchy in the heavens was taken for granted by peoples everywhere. How otherwise would Marduk have been able to press his fellow gods to labour for him? Zeus too, enthroned on the summit of Olympus, presided over a court. Nevertheless, the radiance of his glory had its limits. The other gods on Olympus were not consumed by it. Zeus did not absorb various of their attributes into his own being, and then dismiss their phantasms as demons. How different was the God of Israel! From what did all the manifold complexities and contradictions of his character ultimately derive? Perhaps from a process that had been the precise opposite of that celebrated by the Jewish holy books: a process by which Yahweh, to a degree unparalleled by any other deity, had come to contain multitudes within himself. When, in the very first sentence of Genesis, he was described as creating the heavens and the earth, the Hebrew word for God – Elohim – was tellingly ambiguous. Used throughout Jewish scripture as a singular, the noun’s ending was plural. ‘God’ had once been ‘gods’.
That the Israelites, far from announcing their arrival in Canaan by toppling idols and smashing temples, might originally have shared in the customs of their neighbours, and indeed been virtually indistinguishable from them, was a possibility that Jewish scripture emphatically, and even violently, rejected.* But did it, perhaps, protest too much? Indeed, had there even been a conquest of Canaan at all? The account preserved by the Jews, which told of a succession of spectacular victories by the general Joshua, narrated the downfall of cities that had either been long abandoned by the time the Israelite invasion was supposed to have occurred, or else were yet to be founded.† The conviction of those who composed the Book of Joshua, that God had bestowed lands upon his Chosen People in return for their obedience, reflected the perils of their own age: for it was most likely written in the spreading shadow of Assyrian greatness. Nevertheless, it also reflected something more. The insistence in the Book of Joshua that the Israelites had come as conquerors to Canaan hinted at a nagging and persistent anxiety: that the worship of their god might originally have owed more to Canaanite practice than Jewish scholars cared to acknowledge. Customs they condemned as monstrous innovations – the worship of other gods, the feeding of the dead, the sacrifice of children – were perhaps the very opposite: venerable traditions, compared to which their own evolving cult constituted the novelty.
The revolutionary quality of this – the way in which, from the cocoon of Canaanite, and Syrian, and Edomite beliefs, a new and portentous conception of the divine had come to unfold its wings – was veiled by Jewish scripture. Not entirely, though. In the Book of Psalms, one poem in particular served to dramatise the confused and lengthy process by which elohim – ‘the gods’ – had become the one supreme Lord: Elohim.
God presides in the great assembly;
he gives judgement among the gods.35
Injustice; favouring the wicked; scorning the poor, the lowly and the wretched: such were the crimes of which the assembled gods stood guilty. Their offences had cast the world into darkness and made it totter. Their punishment: to be dethroned from the heavens for ever more. Elohim himself pronounced their sentence.
I said, ‘You are gods;
you are all sons of the Most High.
But you will die like mere men;
you will fall like every other ruler.36
In the council of the heavens, there would henceforward rule only the single God.
An insignificant people the Jews may have been, peripheral to the concerns of great powers; and yet the deity of their scriptures, who had toppled gods much as conquerors like Alexander or Pompey toppled kings, was one whose dominion spanned the whole of creation, and brooked no rival. ‘My name will be great among the nations, from the rising to the setting of the sun.’37 This, very consciously, was to echo the Persian king. The magnanimity shown by Cyrus towards the exiles from Jerusalem had not been forgotten. Unlike the rulers of Egypt, or Assyria, or Babylon, he had shown respect for the God of Israel. More than any other foreign monarch in the annals of the exiles’ history, Cyrus had provided them with a model of kingship. The heavens, in the wake of their return from Babylon, had taken on something of the appearance of the Persian court. ‘From where do you come?’ So asked God, in the Book of Job, of an official in his retinue titled the Adversary – the Satan. Back came the reply: ‘From roaming through the earth and going to and fro in it.’38 In Athens, dread of the Great King’s secret agents had inspired Aristophanes to portray one of them as a giant eye; but in Jewish scripture there was no laughing at the royal spies. They were far too potent, far too menacing, for that. When God points to Job as ‘blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil’,39 the Satan responds mockingly that it is easy for the prosperous to be good. ‘But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.’40 So God, accepting the wager, delivers Job into the Satan’s hands. Innocent of fault though he is, all his worldly goods are destroyed; his children slain; his skin covered with boils. ‘Then Job took a piece of broken pottery and scraped himself with it as he sat among the ashes.’41
A criminal sentenced to the scaphe had no free hands with which to scrape himself, of course; and yet the power to make flesh rot on the bones was, in the age of Persian greatness, a peculiarly terrifying marker of royal power. What, though, of the claim made by Darius and his heirs, that when they put their victims to torture they did so in the cause of truth, and justice, and light? Job, as he lay hunched among the ashes, was approached by three companions, and after sitting with him in silence for seven days and seven nights, they sought to make sense of the torments inflicted on him.
Would God pervert justice,
would Shaddai pervert what is right?
If your children offended Him,
He dispatched them because of their crime.42
Such was the assurance offered elsewhere in Jewish scripture: that God only ever punished wrong-doers, just as he only ever favoured the righteous. Job, however, dismisses this comforting notion. ‘Why do the wicked live, grow rich and gather wealth?’ Most startlingly of all, the story ends with God himself speaking to Job from a whirlwind, and flatly rejecting the proposition put forward by his companions. ‘You have not spoken rightly of Me,’ he informs them, ‘as did My servant Job.’43 Yet to the question of why – despite his innocence – Job had been punished so cruelly, no answer is given. God restores to him everything that he had lost, and doubles it, and blesses him with new sons and daughters. But those children he had lost are not redeemed from the dust to which they had been returned. The bereaved father does not get them back.