Yahweh

The Hebrews' 'discovery' of the god who became their maker (2nd of 7 essays on Judaism)

This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024).

Next week: And God created Man…

THE ‘DISCOVERY’ of one god by the ancient Hebrews reformed the consciousness of humankind and was ‘perhaps the greatest turning-point in history’, in the view of the historian Paul Johnson.

‘How great,’ he wrote, ‘can be seen by considering the Egyptian worldview which the Israelites rejected.’

Yahweh, the creator god of Jews, protects the Israelites in the wilderness (OpenAI).

The belief in a single creator and arbiter of divine justice changed the way people thought, lived, willed and dreamed.

The Hebrews called their god Yahweh, the pronounced form of ‘YHWH’, the Hebrew letters for ‘god’ that were revealed to Moses in the book of Exodus.

Yahweh was more than the God, the ancient Jews believed. He was an interventionist, personal god, a divine presence in their lives with whom they formed intimate personal relations.

To the devout Israelites, Yahweh’s authority was incontestable, and the thousands of pagan deities of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome seemed diminished and childish beside his omnipotent presence.

The Jews were possibly not the first monotheists. The Zoroastrians sacrificed to a single deity, Ahura Mazda, from at least two millennia ago. The religion of the rebel pharaoh Akhenaten was more a personality cult than a monotheism.

Not until the sixth century BCE do we find signs of Yahweh entering Jewish consciousness as a single god who made the world and humankind in his image. Around that time, the Jews were in the habit of condemning fellow Jews who turned to other gods (even when forced to) as a grave breach of the ‘mystical monogamous matrimony’ between their heavenly king and his chosen people.

Their heavenly king was in no doubt that he was the only god, and said so: ‘I am God and there is none like me,’ Second Isaiah quotes God as saying. And: ‘I am the First and the last and beside me there IS no other God.’

A personal relationship formed between Yahweh and the Hebrews based on trust, unwavering obedience and conditional love. That was not possible in religions with hundreds or even thousands of gods.

The sharpest polytheistic thinkers quickly saw the allure of this idea. Even their most ‘phobic anti-Jewish writing’, as the historian Simon Schama says, conceded the psychological and emotional appeal of a single god.

The Roman historian Tacitus, although he called Jews ‘wicked’ and their rites ‘sinister and revolting’, grumpily acknowledged the attraction of monotheism:

‘The Egyptians worship a variety of animals and half-human, half-bestial forms, whereas the Jewish religion is a purely spiritual monotheism. They hold it to be impious to make idols of perishable materials in the likeness of man: for them, the Most High and Eternal cannot be portrayed by human hands and will never pass away. For this reason they erect no images in their cities, still less in their temples.’

This tone of grudging admiration persisted for centuries. In his essay in praise of monotheism, the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume venerated monotheism as ‘our highest spiritual accomplishment’ without mentioning its Jewish foundations. The worship of one god, Hume wrote, lifted the ‘ignorant multitude’ from the vulgar contemplation of pagan deities to the conception of ‘that perfect Being who bestowed order on the whole frame of nature’.

The ‘oneness’ of Yahweh was astonishing enough, but his character surpassed any god or spirit or immanence the world had known. He was the living will of the people, a ‘Transcendent Person’, a ‘living, active Being’, writes the theologian Will Herberg. He was a deity ‘endowed with personality’ who created the world and ‘saw that it was good’.

—

If Yahweh loved his people, he could also be angry and jealous, given to incandescent rages and titanic sulks. He threatened to abandon the Israelites at any sign of disloyalty. He fumed against their idolatry; nothing upset him more than their worship of false gods.

Yahweh had a soul, an inner spirit, of his own. He could be hurt. This worked both ways. The ancient Jews were acutely sensitive to Yahweh’s presence and terrified when he seemed to abandon them. Like two possessive lovers, the Hebrews and Yahweh needed constant reassurance of the other’s fidelity.

If I were fleeing an Egyptian army, and my god parted the sea to save me and fed me in the wilderness and performed countless miracles on my behalf, I doubt I’d need further persuasion of God’s love for me, and I’d probably devote my life to serving him. Not so the children of Israel: they needed signs, more miracles, more evidence of Yahweh’s love.

Protected by God’s cloud, nourished by ‘water from the rock’ and ‘bread from heaven’, the Israelites were seldom grateful for the heaven-sent miracles that sustained them. They frequently disobeyed Moses and sometimes turned their backs on Yahweh.

When the Israelites ‘forsook the Lord’ and began serving a series of false gods (e.g. Baal, Ashtoreth and the gods of the Philistines), Yahweh was furious: ‘Yet you have forsaken Me and served other gods,’ he raged. ‘Therefore I will deliver you no more. Go and cry out to the gods which you have chosen; let them deliver you in your time of distress.’

At times Moses himself despaired of the Israelites as a thoroughly ungrateful lot. After they complained about a lack of water, he appealed to the Lord, ‘What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me!’

In one famous case, the children of Israel, bored or impatient for Moses to return – he happened to be receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai at the time – devoted themselves to a golden calf that Aaron, Moses’ elder brother, had fashioned out of their gold jewellery.

When Yahweh saw what the children of Israel had done, he threatened to destroy them, and only Moses’ pleading stayed his hand. It wouldn’t be their first act of disobedience:

‘We have sinned!’ they pleaded with Yahweh after he later found them worshipping multiple ‘false’ gods. ‘Do to us whatever seems best to You; only deliver us this day, we pray.’ And they pledged to abandon the foreign gods who had seduced them and serve the Lord whose ‘soul could no longer endure the misery of Israel’.

—

Yahweh gazed down on his children with a blend of parental delight and deep dismay. The Lord’s moods were perplexing. In one breath he would issue unctuous reassurances of his feelings of love and mercy for the Israelites; in the next he’d command them to sack a city or cut them off if they infringed his rules.

The Hebrews’ belief in Yahweh’s personal involvement in their lives distinguished the Hebrew god from the remote, aristocratic gods of Greek and Roman antiquity, and the sprawling, ethereal ‘life force’ of the Hindu and Buddhist faiths.

Think of it this way: the polytheistic deities formed the substance of nature – they were inside natural phenomena, the Sun, the rivers, the mountains and so on – whereas the Hebrew god stood outside nature: indeed, the Jews (and the coming Christians) believed Yahweh was nature’s creator.

‘The absolute transcendence of [the Hebrew] God,’ observed the archeologist Henri Frankfort, ‘is the foundation of Hebrew religious thought . . . God is not in sun and stars, rain and wind; they are his creatures and serve him.’

To serve and love Yahweh and do his bidding: that was the duty of the Jews, whatever the cost in pain and blood. In return, God would fulfil the covenant to his chosen people.

The Jews’ god imposed an exceptionally bloody will on the world. Listen to Shalom Auslander, a former Orthodox Jew turned author, who portrays Yahweh as a mass murderer who would be condemned as a war criminal if he dared set foot on Earth.

Recalling a theology class he took as a boy, Auslander remembered the shock he felt on hearing the rabbi say that God struck down all Egyptians, not just the soldiers: the young and the old, the innocent and the guilty: ‘Mothers nursing their babies found their breast milk had turned to blood.’

When God hardens Pharaoh’s heart against the Jews – Yahweh was always testing his children – and refuses to release them from captivity, the punishment was swift: ‘God, in his mercy, started killing babies’: every firstborn son in the land of Egypt must die, God tells Moses.

‘If he were mortal,’ Auslander concluded, ‘the God of Jews, Christians and Muslims would be dragged to The Hague. And yet we praise him. We emulate him. We implore our children to be like him.’

That perspective overlooks the compassionate side of Yahweh. ‘The Lord is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works,’ the Psalms tell us. He rebukes the prophets when they are cruel or insensitive. When Jonah wants to destroy Nineveh to ‘save face’, God intervenes: ‘Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who know not their right hands from their left and also many cattle?’

—

On one hand, then, Yahweh demanded the love and obedience of the Jews. As Moses instructed the Israelites, ‘Hear, O Israel. The Lord our God . . . is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.’

On the other, Yahweh seemed reluctant to return their love, or at least not without stern conditions attached.

So the Jewish people both loved and dreaded the god of their creation, and the jarring quality of their devotion, at once adoring and fearful, would characterise the minds of the faithful in the two great monotheisms to come, Christianity and Islam.

Next Thursday, 16th January 2025: And God created Man… (3rd of 7 essays on Judaism)

Selected sources and further reading:

Auslander, S. (15 April 2022) ‘In This Time of War, I Propose We Give Up God’, The New York Times.

Frankfort, H. et al (1946) The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Herberg, W. (1951) Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Young.

Hume, D. (2016) Complete Works of David Hume, Hastings UK: Delphi Classics.

Johnson, P. (1988) A History of the Jews, New York: Harper Perennial.

Rippin, A. (2006) The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’ān, Hoboken NJ: Blackwell Publishing.

Schama, S. (2013) The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words (1000 BCE – 1492), London: The Bodley Head.

Tacitus and Wellesley, K. (transl.) (2020) ‘Tacitus on the Jews’, Livius Articles on Ancient History, livius.org.

The Bible (New King James Version), Exodus 17:4, 11:5; Deuteronomy 6:4–5; Judges 10:13–14; Jonah 4:11; Psalms 145:8–9.

Vermes, G. (2013) Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea, AD 30–325, London: Penguin.