Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The name of the Jewish God, Yahweh, which was disclosed to Moses, appears to have originated in northern Mesopotamia. We have known this only since the 1930s, with the discovery of a set of clay texts at Nuzu, a site situated between modern Baghdad and Nimrud in Iraq. Dating from the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries BC, these texts do not identify any biblical individuals by name but they do outline a set of laws, and describe a society that is recognisably that to which Jacob, son of Isaac, fled (in Mesopotamia, according to the Bible) after tricking his father into blessing him, instead of his brother Esau. For example, in the Bible Jacob purchases from Esau his ‘birthright’, which means title to the position of firstborn. The Nuzu tablets make clear that inheritance prospects there are negotiable. Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, although he was born in Ur, later spent time in Haran, which is also in northern Mesopotamia. This general area was a meeting ground of various peoples, most importantly the Amorites, Arameans and the Hurrians. The divine name Yahweh appears not infrequently in Amorite personal names.⁵⁸

However, until a relatively late period of Jewish history the Israelites had a ‘considerable’ number of divinities. ‘According to the number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah,’ says the prophet Jeremiah, writing in the sixth century BC.⁵⁹ When Israelite religion first appears, in the Hebrew scriptures, we find no fewer than three main forms of worship. There is the worship of teraphim or family gods, the worship of sacred stones, and the worship of certain great gods, partly native, partly perhaps borrowed. Some of these gods take the form of animals, others of sky gods, the sun in particular. There are many biblical references to these gods. For example, when Jacob flees from Laban, we hear how Rachel stole her father’s teraphim: when the furious chieftain finally catches up with the fugitives, one of his first questions is to ask why they stole his domestic gods.⁶⁰ Hosea refers to teraphim as ‘stocks of wood’, while Zechariah dismisses them as ‘idols that speak lies to the people’.⁶¹ It is clear that the teraphim were preserved in each household with reverential care, that they were sacrificed to by the family at stated intervals, and that they were consulted on all occasions of doubt or difficulty by ‘a domestic priest “clad in an ephod”. In all this the Israelites were little different from the surrounding peoples.’⁶²

Stone-worship also played an important part in the primitive Semitic religion. For the early Hebrews a sacred stone was a ‘Beth-el’, a place where gods dwelt.⁶³ In the legend of Jacob’s dream we get an example where the sacred stone is anointed and a promise is made to it of a tenth of the speaker’s substance as an offering. In other places women pray to phallic-shaped stones so that they might be blessed with children.⁶⁴ Yahweh is referred to as a rock in Deuteronomy, and in the second book of Samuel. References to other great gods are equally numerous. The terms Baal and Molech are general terms in the Hebrew scriptures, referring mainly to local gods in the Semitic region, and sometimes to sacred stones. A god in the form of a young bull was worshipped at Dan and Bethel, when the Israelites made themselves a ‘golden calf’ in the wilderness at the time of the Exodus.⁶⁵ Grant Allen says explicitly that Yahweh was originally worshipped in the shape of a young bull. In other words, the Israelite religion was polytheistic for centuries, with the worship of Baal, Molech, the bull and the serpent going on side-by-side with worship of Yahweh ‘without conscious rivalry’.⁶⁶ But then it all began to change, with enormous consequences for humankind.

There are two aspects to that change. The first is that the early Yahweh was a god of increase, fruitfulness and fertility. In the Bible Yahweh promises to Abraham ‘I will multiply thee exceedingly’, ‘thou shalt be a father of many nations’, ‘I will make thee exceedingly fruitful’. He says the same thing to Isaac.⁶⁷ One of the best-known practices of Judaism, circumcision, is a fairly obvious fertility rite concerning the male principle and also confirms the dominance of male gods over female ones.