The conventional wisdom, at least since the European enlightenment in the eighteenth century C.E., is that the phenomenon of monotheism is an idea which emerged from a preceding general inclination to polytheism among the human race. It is also conventional wisdom that we know of no instance of a monotheistic religion before the instances which are regularly cited to support this narrative. This emergence is short on evidence, and the evidence we have is less than clear in terms of context and implications, but is nevertheless a key assumption for historians of thought, and for theologians. It is assumed that the appearance of monotheism represents a negative and critical reaction to aspects of polytheism, and marks a great leap forward in human thought.
The evidence comes entirely from religious contexts, but
this does not seem to matter. It is a great leap forward whether or not you are
religiously minded, a professional theologian, a historian of cultural ideas, or
even an outright atheist, because it marks the arrival of the ability to think
in abstract rather than concrete terms. After this, it was possible for human
beings to think in terms of universals rather than in assemblages of
essentially unconnected particulars. It does not matter how the change is dressed:
the human race was emancipated from an irrational concern for personification
of natural forces, and the other ways in which a religious pantheon, or a
sequence of genealogies, might have been built.
The two instances which are taken to show the emergence of
monotheistic patterns of thought are:
1): the Hebrew insistence that Yahweh stands
alone, and that ‘there is no other god beside me’. This insistence dates – in
textual terms - back to the middle of the 1st millennium B.C.E., since we
know, largely from internal evidence, that the text of the Old Testament was heavily
redacted in the fifth century B.C.E., and reflects the views of what appears to be
the victorious ‘Yahweh only’ faction in a long-running theological and
political struggle concerning the nature of the Hebrew religion.
And:
2): The religious revolution which is supposed to have been
wrought by the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten in the 14th century B.C.E.,
in which the plethora of divinities and the religious cults attached to them
were replaced with the worship of the god ‘Aten’ alone.
I wrote extensively about Hebrew monotheism in the chapter
‘The Idea of Being in Israel’, in The
Sacred History of Being (2015), and the influence of Mesopotamian ideas of
divinity (principally Babylonian) on Hebrew thought. There are many clear
references to Babylonian concepts in the Old Testament, often in the form of
parodies. The Hebrews certainly encountered Babylonian religious thought and
practice during their exile in Babylon. The extent to which this was a
significant influence on their thought and practice before the period of exile
is hard to determine however, since there is very little evidence to illustrate
the nature of Hebrew religious thought before that time, both in terms of
datable textual references, and archaeological remains. We do not know whether
polytheism was a Hebrew practice in the first half of the 1st
millennium BCE, because there is no unequivocal evidence remaining for that
period. Other individuated Hebrew gods are
unknown to us in the textual and archaeological records, though there are
references in Hebrew texts to the worship of both foreign and Canaanite gods
(Baal being one of the most conspicuous). Yahweh is however sometimes referred
to as ‘El’, and occasionally with the plural form ‘Elohim’. Which might be
taken to imply a multiplicity of gods.
There is a great deal of evidence however which shows that
argument about the nature of the divine took place, and some of that may have
been prompted by the importation of foreign deities and foreign cult practices.
These arguments, and their potential implications for the nature of Hebrew
thought about the divine, were also discussed in ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’.
This argument about the nature of the divine is rarely read
by scholars in terms of a philosophical debate. There is no connected
discussion available to us relating to these conjectural debates, if that is what
they were, and scholars are disinclined to address the detail which does exist
in terms of a philosophical understanding of the divine.
As for Akhenaten’s religious revolution, some biblical scholars
have argued (over many years) that Moses brought monotheism to the Levant at
the time of the Exodus from Egypt, and that there is a lineal connection (of
some sort) between the supposed monotheism of Akhenaten, and the Hebrew
conception of Yahweh. We are told in the Pentateuch that Yahweh is the one true
god, but, as already mentioned, these are texts which were redacted in the middle of the
1st millennium B.C.E. These texts reflect the interests and beliefs of
the victors – the ‘Yahweh only’ group. The truth may be quite different. Since we
have no reliable evidence for Hebrew conceptions of the divine in the first
half of the 1st millennium, what can be said of their conceptions of
the divine in the second half of the second millennium B.C.E.?
In any case, are we clear about the difference between
monotheism and polytheism? To adherents of the idea that the passage from
polytheism to monotheism represents a cultural evolution, the answer is obvious: monotheism is a move away from local and tribal gods, and a move towards a
grander and more abstract conception of the divine. However imperfectly
understood. This eventually led to the development of articulate discussion of
the philosophical nature of the divine among the Greeks.
But this narrative is
entirely based on the two examples discussed above, and our understanding
of what was going on in both cases is very thin. It is possible to impose the
narrative of a cultural evolution on these examples, and this is what is done.
But there is no conclusive evidence that this narrative represents the actual cultural
dynamics at play in the second and first millennia B.C.E.
I’ve already shown in
my essay ‘Polytheism, Monotheism, and
The Cult of the Aten’ *1 that Akhenaten did not set out to obliterate the cults of
the traditional gods of Egypt, and that there is no evidence that Akhenaten’s
worship of the Aten attracted early hostility from the traditional cults. This
does not mean that there was no tension between the new cult and the other priestly
establishments. We do know that in the end, both Akhenaten’s supporters, and
the priests of Amun, were enthusiastically hacking out references to their
respective divinities from the monuments. But we have very little unambiguous information
about how this situation came to pass.
In fact there is
another narrative available concerning Akhenaten’s religion of the Aten which
has not so far received much attention. Why is this? The existing narrative
supports the simple idea of the development of monotheism as a form of reaction
to what had become unacceptable aspects of polytheistic belief. This narrative has a great hold on scholars,
even if not all the available evidence provides clear support for it. The other
narrative about Akhenaten’s religious revolution suggests something quite
different – that the worship of the Aten was not just a newly minted preoccupation
of Akhenaten, and to lesser extent his father, but that his revolution was an
attempt to restore a very old body of thought in Egypt.*2
If that is the case,
then the modern narrative we have constructed, on the basis of a very partial
understanding of the evidence, will necessarily collapse. For one thing, monotheism
will have been shown to be very old, and indeed be an Egyptian way of thinking
about reality which stretches back to the earliest dynasties. For another, the
idea of a cultural evolution from polytheism to monotheism will no longer be
tenable, if monotheism is an idea which is thousands of years old. And in
addition, if monotheism has an extensive history in Egypt, alongside an equally
extensive history of polytheism, we would need to ask, ‘how could this be?’
2 Discussed in 'The Horizon of the Aten' (forthcoming).
['Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia (III)' will follow shortly].
['Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia (III)' will follow shortly].
Thomas Yaeger,
December 26, 2018.
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