Ethical Monotheism

Author(s): V. Nikiprowetzky
Source: Daedalus , Spring, 1975, Vol. 104, No. 2, Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt:
Perspectives on the First Millennium B.C. (Spring, 1975), pp. 69-89
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024331

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V. NIKIPROWETZKY

Ethical Monotheism

As removed as our present civilization may be, or may be thought

traditional beliefs, it would still not be an exaggeration to say that its
mosphere is totally permeated with monotheism. Monotheism continues
one of the major elements in our mental universe. Even the efforts that co
as the Soviet Union make to free themselves from it, or to set themse
it?all the while professing many of the moral values that derive from
the extraordinary importance it continues to hold.
It is usually assumed that monotheism represents Israel's contribut
kind's intellectual store of ideas. There is a tendency to want to subscrib
expressed in the beginning of Adolphe Lod's masterpiece,1 which grant
unique place, equal in importance to that of Greece and of Rome, in th
mankind." Mankind owes its science to Greece; its law to Rome; its m
Israel. But when one examines this general assumption, one begins to r
ble. Various prejudices and errors stand in the way of a correct view of this
The Holy Scriptures, in which we are all steeped, and an insufficiently
tion of ethical monotheism, which is the proper term for Israel's mon
forces to encourage inaccuracies and misconceptions.
Those who wish to evaluate precisely the historical debt mankind ow
must start with what might appear to be a negative inquiry. It must be
ethical monotheism was not a "natural" and universal fait accompli, de
mankind from the very beginning, nor was it the lot strictly of the Se
nor can it be considered the remnant of a universal belief, even less th
manifestation of a particular ethnic nature. It simply represents the cul
historical process belonging to Israel and to Israel alone. Even if one fo
tion of the monotheistic "vocation" of the Semites, one still cannot ach
if one assumes that Israel had its concept of God from the beginning, eithe
it ready-made in the great civilizations of the ancient African or Asia
from whom it could have merely borrowed, or by taking advantage of
and gnostic revelations in the Patriarchs' dreams or the flames of Sin
the fervor and the moving depth of its piety, and the grandiose sub
theological concepts, neither the religion of Babylonia nor that of Egyp
thing that is truly comparable to Israel's monotheism. Neither the Pa
Moses were true monotheists. Ethical monotheism, in its complete exp
contestably appears only during the prophecy of the exile period.
69

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70 V. NIKIPROWETZKY

The conceptualization of the history of Israel and of its religion, prior to the im
petus given to it by modern Biblical scholarship, considered monotheism as
primitive and fundamental fact of the Israelite faith. Israel would never have know
any but one god, that one and only deity who had formed the first human couple, dis
persed the peoples to their respective lands, whom the Patriarchs venerated under the
name of Elohim, who revealed to Moses his name of Yahweh, appeared to the Twelv
Tribes on Sinai, and, finally, allowed his Chosen People to conquer Canaan, and to
prepare the way for all of its subsequent history.
This same view persists today, in a more or less attenuated form, among the many
of either liberal or orthodox persuasion who write about one or the other of the three
religions that derive from the Bible. Certain scholars, who have tried to preserve
orthodox doctrine, but who, at the same time, were informed ethnologists
archaeologists, or philologists, such as Father Werner Schmidt, Father M. J
Lagrange, and, in more recent years, W. F. Albright, have tried to give a scientifi
justification for the old fundamentalism. Rather more surprisingly, perhaps, th
orthodox view has also received endorsement by such men as Ernest Renan in th
nineteenth century and Sigmund Freud in our own.
The work of Father Schmidt2 constitutes a remarkable return to the thesis o
cyclical degeneracy, a doctrine that has had its supporters since antiquity, includi
such philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.3 According to this theory, the in
tellectual and moral golden age of mankind was to be discovered in the very begi
ning. Then men had benefited from a Primitive Revelation, from which the progr
of the world, as in Hesiod's myth of races, subsequently led them ever more astray
According to this view, monotheism precedes polytheism, which represents
degenerate form.4 This doctrine turns up at various times; and the rabbinical tradition
is also not without it. For example, according to the first chapters of Genesis, Ad
and Eve knew the Lord, but according to Genesis 4:26, which appears unintelligibl
at first glance, the name of the Lord was not invoked until Enosh, Adam's grandso
The eleventh-century Hebrew scholar Rashi interpreted this inconsistency as follow
"Thus the name of the Lord was profaned by attributing the title of 'God' to men
to idols." Maimonides also explains how, during Enosh's generation, the sight of
celestial bodies caused mankind to fall into the great polytheistic error.5
In the eighteenth century, Rousseau6 espoused the opposite view, maintainin
that man began by being animistic and, consequently, polytheistic:
The stars, the winds, the mountains, the rivers, the trees, the cities, the very houses, everythi
had a soul, its god, its life. The grotesque figures7 of Laban, the manitous of the savages, t
fetishes of the blacks, all the works of nature and of men were the first deities of mortal me
polytheism was the first religion, and it always will be for any weak and fearful man who do
not have a sufficiently sophisticated mind to unite the whole system of beings under one i
and to give meaning to the word substance, which, ultimately, is the greatest of all abstraction
Any child who believes in God is, therefore, of necessity idolatrous or at least anthropomorphis

Voltaire,8 on the other hand, revives the theory that man began with a primiti
monotheism, though one that was actually monolatry. "I dare think . . . ," he write

that people began by acknowledging a single God, and that later human weakness led to t
adoption of several; and here is how I see the matter.
There can be no doubt that there were villages before large towns were built, and that all m
were divided into small republics before they were united into great empires. It is quite natur

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 ETHICAL MONOTHEISM 71
that a village, frightened by thunder, afflicted by the loss of its harvests, mistreated by the
neighboring village, sensing an invisible power everywhere, should soon say: "There is some
being above us which works our good and ill."
It seems impossible to me that it said: "There are two powers." For why several? In all things
people begin with the simple, the complex comes later, and with superior enlightenment one
often comes back to the simple at last. This is the course of the human mind.
. . . each village felt its weakness and its need for a strong protector. It imagined this tutelary
and terrible being as living in the neighboring forest, or on a mountain, or in a cloud. It imag
ined only one, because the village had only one chief in war. It imagined him as corporeal,
because they could not possibly picture him to themselves in any other way. They could not
believe that the neighboring village didn't also have its god. . . .

At the beginning of this century, Voltaire's totally hypothetical theory received

apparent confirmation from scholarly research. Ethnologists such as S. H. Kellog,
Wilhelm Schneider, A. Le Roy,9 Werner Schmidt, and others, believed that they had
evidence for the existence of monotheism in various peoples who, until then, had
received no scholarly attention and had simply been regarded as "primitive." The
Pygmies, the Fuegians, the Samoans, the Kodaks, the Ainus, certain Eskimos, the
Italmes are, they found, only apparently polytheistic. In fact they all recognize the ex
istence, beyond the multiple supernatural beings they worship, of an "All-Father,"
supreme being and creator, different from all the others and true Only God, all
powerful, benevolent, and moral. The same characteristics were recognized in the
Chang-ti of the Chinese as far back as the eighteenth century.
The thesis that these beliefs constitute monotheism no longer has many sup
porters; it is generally recognized today that an infinite distance separates the
"All-Father" of the primitives from the deity of ethical monotheism. The theory
does still appear now and again, however. As recently as 1950, Herbert K?hn
presented a paper entitled Das Problem des Urmonotheismus to the Academy
of Mainz,10 in which he traces primitive monotheism through the various periods
of prehistory, and then says:
Der Mensch hatte urspr?nglich den Glauben an den Einen Gott. Er ist deutlich sichtbar schon
in der Warmzeit bei dem Neandertaler in der Epoche vor der letzten Eiszeit, und er ist deutlich
in der ?berlieferung der Bibel in Namen des Gottes Jahwe selbst.11
He concludes by stating that this "Only God" worshiped by primitive man is iden
tical to the one who, as recounted in Genesis, created Adam and Eve.
The theory of Semitic monotheism held dear by Renan constitutes a particular
variety of the doctrine of the Urmonotheismus to be found among the primitive
tribes. In his Histoire g?n?rale des langues s?mitiques, Renan attributed to the
Semites an intuitive and genuine monotheism from the very beginning. "It is the
glory of the Semitic race," he writes,
that they have achieved, from their first days, the notion of the deity that all other peoples were
to adopt by their example and on the faith of their preaching. This race never conceived of the
government of the universe as anything other than an absolute monarchy; its theodicy has not
taken one step since the Book of Job. The greatnesses and the aberrations of polytheism always
remained alien to the race. One does not invent monotheism. India, which thought with such
originality and depth, has still not reached that point today; all the strength of the Greek mind
would not have been sufficient to bring mankind back to it without the help of the Semites; we
can also say, however, that the latter would never have conceived the dogma of the divine unity
had they not found it instinctively and foremost in their minds and hearts. The Semites did not
view God in terms of variety, plurality, or sex; in Hebrew, the word 'goddess' would be the
most horrible barbarism. The words the Semites used to address the deitv, EL Eloh, Adon,

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72 V. NIKIPROWETZKY

Baal, Elton, Shaddai, Jehova, Allah, all imply the idea of supreme and incommunicable power,
of a perfect unity, even when they have a plural form. Nature, on the other hand, has little im
portance in Semitic religions: the desert is monotheistic. Sublime in its immense uniformity,
the desert first revealed to man the idea of the infinite, but not the inspiration for an inces
santly creative life, which a more fruitful nature inspired in other races. This is why Arabia has
always been the foremost avenue for monotheism.12

Renan expressed this theory on a number of occasions, in several articles,13 and in

his inaugural lecture at the College de France.14 It can also be found at the beginning
of his Histoire du Peuple d Isra?l in a somewhat diluted form. If commercial contacts
or urban civilization removed such peoples as the Phoenicians or the Babylonians
from their first religious simplicity, the nomadic Semites still preserved their
monotheistic intuition, which was consistent with the primitive spirit of the race:

. . . the Semitic patriarch's tent is the point of departure for mankind's religious development.
. . Yes, even in the remote times that we are considering, the Semitic shepherd wears on his
forehead the seal of the absolute God upon which is written: this race shall abolish all supersti
tion from the face of the earth.15

Of course, Renan admits that the nomadic Semites, like other races, practiced a
kind of animism. But at the very heart of this animism, the simplicity and the austeri
ty of the desert and of the patriarchal life cause a sense of unity to prevail over the
feeling of plurality. The spirits that the Semite perceives constitute an amorphous
divinity, an aggregate of numenous entities deprived of personality and therefore not
conducive to the development of a mythology. Renan writes:
As with all ancient peoples, the nomadic Semite believes that he is living in the midst of the
supernatural. The world is surrounded, penetrated, governed by the Elohims, by a myriad of
active beings, much along the lines of the "spirits" of the savages, living, translucent, in
separable in some way from one another, having no differing, proper names as the Aryan gods
did, so that they are indistinguishable. It is not the plural dei that proves the polytheism of
Greek and Roman antiquity; it is rather names such as Zeus, Hermes, etc. . . . One Eloh has no
name to distinguish it from another Eloh, to the point that all the Elohs together act as a single
being and the name Elohim takes a singular verb.

For the Semitic tribes, the nomadic life represented a sort of golden age toward
which they were continually striving to return. This striving explains the persistence
of primitive monotheism among the Israelites, the Semitic tribe that most purely and
forcefully represented the spirit of the race.
Works like Reste arabischen Heidentums by Julius Wellhausen and The Religion
of the Semites by W. Robertson Smith, however, have already dealt summarily with
this theory. According to them, the desert never represented an obstacle to animism
or demonology of even the most elaborate sort; primitive simplicity simply does not
exist. But an illustrious Catholic scholar, Father M.-J. Lagrange, finally came to
Renan's aid in his ?tudes sur les religions s?mitiques,16 when he stated that animism
and demonology were only secondary in the primitive monotheism that all Semites
must have professed and a trace of which Lagrange seems to recognize in the name El
by which they designated a superior and strictly personal god, "the common primitive
and very probably Only God of the Semites." We recognize here a new expression of
the thesis of Degeneracy: "It would be very futile," writes Lagrange (p. 83), "to deny
the survival of polydemonism. Among the Semites not only did it survive, it was also
particularly flourishing, as we shall see. But we shall also see that, among the

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 ETHICAL monotheism 73
Semites, polydemonism did not preclude certain presentiments about divine un
only remains to determine which came first."
The Ugaritic texts teach us that the case of the Semitic deity El is basical
different from the Supreme God of the primitives. He represents not monotheism
monarchical polytheism. The same situation existed among the pre-Islamic A
whose recognition of Allah as the supreme god did not eliminate the local cults
tribal gods.
Today the idea of mankind's original monotheism has generally been discarded.
Nonetheless, even now, the effort to reclaim for Israel a monotheism of very ancient
origins has not been abandoned. Following the path set during the last century, in
vestigation has been directed toward the great ancient civilizations of the Near East
with which Israel was in contact from very early times and whose religious influences
it may therefore have felt. By now, of course, scholarship is far from the fantasies of
authors such as Gerald Massey,17 or Daniel V?lter,18 regarding the influence of Egypt,
or from the excesses of the Panbabylonian School regarding the influence of Babylon.
But the view that Israel acquired its monotheism from Egypt or from Babylon, or that
it participated with those two cultures and with Syria in a kind of "march toward
monotheism," which included all the civilizations of the Near East during the second
half of the second millennium, is still expressed now and again, as we shall see.
T. J. Meek19 has demonstrated that the Babylonian religion never progressed
beyond the stage of a monarchical polytheism. The foremost place that An, the god of
the sky, finally achieves, he owes to the effort of Sumerian theologians who tried to
put some kind of order into the proliferation of their innumerable deities. But the es
tablishment of a supreme god at the head of the pantheon in no way eliminates the
existence of the subordinate deities, who often are more real and more immediate to
the believer than is the supreme god?since he tends to become a kind of abstraction
by the very nature of his position. This transforms him, in one way or another, into a
deus otiosus for whom there appears to have been no special cult. Such a pantheon is
far removed from monotheism.
We come, perhaps, a little closer to a monotheistic concept in the exclusivism of
certain pious statements or prayers in which the believer declares that he entrusts
himself?or that men should entrust themselves?only to the one god whom he is
worshiping, Nabu or Marduk, and to no other. This is really an affective exaggera
tion for the sake of adulation; it does not actually suppress the existence of deities
that he professes to ignore, any more than the protestations of love of one man for
one woman suppress the existence of all other women. One should likewise
distinguish monotheism from henotheistic syncretism, which involves making a
pantheistic god out of a supreme god by transforming all the other deities into his
hypostases or into parts of his body.
The Egyptians of the high periods were not monotheistic either. Each one of their
city-states was under the patronage of a specific deity whose fortune was linked to that
of the land that he protected. Horus became the national god of Lower Egypt when
his nome came to prevail over all the others. Seth represented a comparable situation
in Upper Egypt and for similar reasons. With the unification of Egypt under the
leadership of Lower Egypt, Horus became the national god of the entire kingdom un
til he was superseded by Re, the god of Heliopolis, at the beginning of the Fifth
Dynasty. Finally, the role of Thebes in the expulsion of Hyksos and the national

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74 V. NIKIPROWETZKY

restoration insured the first place to Amun, the god of that city. Amun acceded
without suppressing Re; they became associated and eventually formed a single god
designated by the binomial Amun-Re. This fusion, however, did not abolish the
separate identities of the two divine figures any more than it did the rivalry of their
respective clergies. These unification processes should be qualified before they are
viewed as progress toward monotheism. From the beginning, the Egyptians recog
nized a great god, separate from all the others, and Egyptian wisdom literature seems
to have come so close to the notion of one God that it is tempting at times to see it as
a true precedent of monotheism. In reality, the Egyptian great god is not an only
God, but rather a collection of all the gods?the divine, or an abstract divinity, along
the lines of the theos of the Greek philosophers.
The reaj/ problem that the Egyptian religion poses with regard to monotheism is
exemplified in the religion of Amarnia. Its religion of Aton, the solar disc, represents
the result of a process that began with the reign of Tuthmosis IV and reached its pin
nacle during the co-reign of Amenophis III and his son Akhenaten. This development
was not without its political aspects: it represented an attempt by the Pharaoh to free
himself from the tutelage of the all-powerful clergy of Thebes. On the religious level,
it resulted in an abrupt split with the past under the reign of Akhenaten.
The new religion was aniconic, just as Yahwism was to become in its maturity. It
did not allow any figurative portrayal of the deity other than his symbol?a solar disc
from which light radiates, each ray of light ending with a human hand that holds the
hieroglyph for 'life.'
The god Aton was different from the Mesopotamian supreme gods who had ab
sorbed the other deities through a henotheistic process. He was also not simply an an
cient national god?Seth, Horus, Amun, or Re?under another name. His power ex
tended to all nations and to the entire universe, and he would not tolerate any other
deity. This jealous exclusivism is reminiscent of the personality of Yahweh. It is not
certain that Akhenaten eliminated all the other gods of Egypt and in particular the
god Re, and this doubt alone prevents us from affirming that the religion of Amarnia
represents the first historical incarnation of monotheism.20 What is certain is that, of
all the ancient religions?except Yahwism?it comes closest to being so. Some
historians believe that it constitutes a true ancestor of the monotheism that they
believe is to be found in the religion of Moses.
If the majority of scholars, even the doctrinally committed, are in agreement to
day that neither the religion of the ancient Hebrews nor the religion of the Patriarchs
can be called monotheism, it is a different matter when it comes to the religion of
Moses, whom tradition regards as the "founder" of Israel and of its faith. The
strongest opposition is to the idea that this man of God par excellence could have been
anything but a follower of the Only God and a rigorous monotheist. According to
Yehezqel Kaufmann, Moses is the originator of a theological upheaval that implied
"the death of the gods." This view is so pervasive that a man as liberated in religious
matters as Sigmund Freud, in a small, fascinating book, Moses and Monotheism, also
maintains, as the title of his book suggests, the traditional point of view. Furthermore,
he does it with an ingeniousness that is completely remarkable. He supposes that
Moses, who lived in the entourage of Akhenaten and was familiar with the religion of
Amarnia, embraced that religion and then tried to communicate it to his people.21
The god of Moses was in fact Aton. But the doctrine of Akhenaten and Moses was so

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 ETHICAL MONOTHEISM 75
thoroughly buried in the consciousness of the people of Israel that its national god
was not at first distinguishable from the other gods. Nonetheless, the pure mono
theism that Moses taught did not disappear completely from the collective
Israelite psyche. It simply went through a latent period during which, before it resur
faced, it remained buried in the popular unconscious.
W. F. Albright dedicated a famous book22 to retracing "the historical evolution of
monotheism.'' He asked himself whether Moses was a "true monotheist," and reached
the conclusion that he was not, if, in order to merit the title, the belief in an Only
God had to have been founded on a theological apparatus comparable to that of a
Philo of Alexandria, Rabbi Aquiba, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Mohammed, Saint
Thomas, or Calvin. But, though he was not an abstract theologian, Moses neverthe
less professed a belief in one God, creator of all things, "source of justice, as powerful
in the desert as in Palestine, who had no sexuality or mythology, whose form was
human, but who could not be contemplated by human eyes or portrayed in any
visible form, . . . [and on these grounds], without any doubt, the founder of Yahwism
is a monotheist." On the impetus of W. F. Albright, theologians and historians such
as G. E. Wright, John Bright, P. van Imschoot, and Edmond Jacob,23 began to talk of
Moses' de facto monotheism. The idea of the uniqueness of God was a completely in
stinctive feeling that, although deprived of the speculative and theoretical armor of
the Hellenistic systems, was not prevented from occupying the whole of the con
sciousness very intensely. This concept is not entirely Albright's; one can find versions
of it as far back as 1913 in the book that Johannes Hehn devoted to Die biblische und
babylonische Gottesidee,24 in Geo Widengren's work, when he speaks about "affective
monotheism," and in the posthumous work of Ivan Engnell.25
This distinction between an instinctive monotheism and a theoretical, critical, or
philosophical monotheism seems to disturb Roland de Vaux, and, in our opinion, with
good reason. "Why preserve the title," he asks, "if it no longer means what it says?"26
Such a distinction does seem to be untenable a priori. Either Moses did not admit the
existence of other gods along with Yahweh, and therefore he did not need to specu
late like Philo of Alexandria in order not to be considered an "affective monotheist";
whatever his style of speculation, he was simply a monotheist. Or he did not believe
that the existence of Yahweh precluded the existence of other gods, in which case,
whatever the fervor of his worship for Yahweh, Moses did not deserve to be called a
monotheist. His attitude would then not be fundamentally different from that of a
praying man who deprecated all other deities to the exclusion of Marduk and who
therefore, in his own way, practiced an "affective monotheism." It seems to us
legitimate to consider that this equivocal concept of defacto monotheism or of "affec
tive monotheism" only boils down to a sophistry of language. It reflects a pattern of
thinking that, incapable of accommodating facts and desirous of saving appearances,
resigns itself to a semantic subterfuge.
Albright's thesis regarding the monotheism of Moses was soundly refuted by
Meek in the final essay of Hebrew Origins. Albright had maintained that the
fourteenth century B.C. was the only period in the history of the ancient Near East
when one finds monotheism simultaneously in Egypt and in Babylonia, and ap
proximations of it in Syria and Asia Minor. He suggested that such exceptional cir
cumstances made plausible the appearance of Israelite monotheism at the same time,
and that consequently there is nothing anachronistic in the idea that Moses could also

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76 V. NIKIPROWETZKY

have professed it. In fact, however, the fourteenth century was in no way marked by a
general movement toward monotheism. Syria and Asia Minor were just as complete
ly polytheistic during the fourteenth century as they had been at previous times.
Although the god El was still the supreme god of the inhabitants of Ugarit, he had
about him a numerous and very diversified pantheon of gods, some of whom were
barely beneath him in status. As for the Babylonians and the Assyrians, the movement
toward monotheism never went beyond the stage of monolatry and of henotheism,
and, the latter only very much later than the fourteenth century B.C.
The only religion to which one can legitimately apply the term monotheism is, as
we have seen, the Egyptian cult of Aton. But there we are dealing with a minority
religion which Akhenaten tried to impose by force, a premature step that provoked a
violent counter-reform by the clergy of Thebes, who subsequently re-established
themselves immediately after the death of the Pharaoh. Far from advancing the es
tablishment of monotheism, the religion of Amarnia, in the final analysis, discouraged
it. It contributed to the confirmation of the supremacy of Thebes and of its cult. It
would be unlikely that Akhenaten, who failed to convert Egypt, could have had, after
his death and during the strong reaction of Thebes, such a strong influence on a
foreigner like Moses.
All attempts that have so far been proposed to explain Israel's religion in terms of a
series of borrowings from the cults of Egypt have met with total failure. Historians of
religion have periodically been forced to confront?with renewed surprise?the
reality of how impermeable the Asiatic groups to which the Hebrews belonged were
to the Egyptian civilization, in spite of the close contacts they had maintained with it.
It is not from a hypothetical, general tendency toward monotheism, involving the
Near Eastern universe during the fourteenth century B.C., from which Israelite
monotheism is derived, imposing itself on one man and a small group of his followers.
Rather it was a separate evolution that ended with Judaism and was imposed on a
whole nation. Only constant reference to the history of this nation allows us to under
stand and to follow its genesis. However, it must be recognized that monotheism in no
way constituted a first given fact of this history, but rather that it represents a relative
ly late development.
Albright is absolutely right when he exhorts the historian to devote attention to
the Israelite tradition, but nothing in this tradition corroborates the thesis of a
monotheistic Moses, not even a de facto or affective monotheist, when these ex
pressions are used in their strictest sense, that is, as implying a belief, not reasoned,
but truly exclusive of all divinities, save the one to whom unique existence is at
tributed. Even if one agrees to Albright's reasoning that the First Commandment
accords with the Mosaic spirit, one is forced to admit that it does not require such a solu
tion. The "death of the gods" is only real for Israel when all other worship was for
bidden.
The verse from Deuteronomy 6:4, which is controversially attributed to Moses,
has often also been interpreted as a monotheistic affirmation: "Hear, O Israel,
Yahweh our god, Yahweh is one." Out of habit, this venerable text, which is quoted at
the beginning of the daily Judaic profession of monotheism, no longer appears
strange; its probable true meaning is: "Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is our god, Yahweh
alone."27 This formula does not exclude the existence of other gods; it merely
proscribes their worship. In this sense, it would also not supersede the First Com

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 ETHICAL MONOTHEISM 77
mandment of the Decalog. They both indicate not monotheism, but monolatry.
Monolatry again appears in the famous verse of Deuteronomy 4:19 where we read:
"Nor must you raise your eyes to the heavens and look up to the sun, the moon and
the stars, all the host of heaven, and be led on to bow down to them and worship
them; the Lord your God assigned these for the worship of the various peoples under
heaven."28
In this text, Yahweh is nothing more than the supreme god who assigns to the
different nations the deities that they will respectively worship?this is very far
removed from the concept of monotheism. The belief in an only God, creator of the
universe, omnipotent and omnipresent, of a God who has no sexuality, mythology, or
concrete representations, does not imply monotheism, contrary to what Albright
maintains. In fact, none of the traits that he attributes to the god of Moses would be
sufficient to establish the existence of a monotheistic belief. The quality of cosmic and
creative deity that Moses attributed to Yahweh makes him a divine entity no different
from the supreme god, from the "All-Father" of the primitives described by
ethnologists. As Albright himself points out, this type of deity is found in the religions
of all the polytheistic peoples of the ancient Near East. This cosmic creator surely had
a human form, but he lived so far removed from the universe that was his creation
that the human eye could never see him. The lack of sexuality and of a mythology
perhaps does not represent original attributes of Yahwism, contrary to the opinions of
Albright and Renan, for whom "the word 'goddess' in Hebrew would be the most
horrible barbarism."29 The various Scandinavian schools more or less legitimately
believed that they could conjecture about representations, which originally would
have implied that Yahweh had sexuality and a mythology, from the traces that
Israelite theologians of later eras were not able completely to erase from the Old
Testament.
The Yahwism of the military colony of Elephantine?as reflected during the fifth
century B.C. in the Aramaean papyri discovered at Jeb?undoubtedly represents a
bastardized, syncretic, or popular stage of the religion. Nonetheless, it is extremely in
teresting because it shows that the idea of associating a female assistant divinity,
"Anath-Yaho," with the national god of Israel still did not appear strange to the mind
of Israelites who were contemporaries of the great reformers.
But even if the absence of sexuality and of mythology really constituted char
acteristic traits of Moses' god, it would be quite impossible to make them criteria for
monotheism; they can equally be observed in the ancient gods of China. It is also in
no way proved that "Mosaism" was an aniconic religion; numerous exegetes think
that the Ark of the Covenant originally contained vulgar, figurative representations of
Moses' god, and that, generally, only statues of cast gold and silver were forbidden.
There are frequent discussions about the nature and function of objects such as the
ephod, the teraphim, the Nehustan, which are sometimes represented as the
accessories of idolatry and sometimes linked to the worship of Yahweh or to the Moses
legend. No convincing and definitive explanation has yet been proposed relating the
Golden Calf of the desert or the calves of Jeroboam at the sanctuary of Bethel to the
person or the religion of Yahweh. It is striking, in any case, to observe that in the ninth
century B.C., the champions of Yahwism, such as Elijah or Elisha, do not utter a
word of denunciation against the "calves of Bethel." The first protests come a century
later from Amos and Hosea. But even if Moses had taught that Yahweh did not per

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 78 V. NIKIPROWETZKY

mit figurative representations of himself, he would have been no different from the
Chinese before Buddhism, the ancient Aryans of India, or the Assyrians, all of whom
seem not to have made representations of their supreme god.
Hence, the assertion that Moses taught the existence of an only god is entirely
deprived of any historical justification. If we lack authentic evidence to determine ex
actly what Moses' teachings might have been, it is not completely impossible for us,
by considering the history of Israel and through an analysis of the texts, to retrace the
genesis and the evolution of its religion, culminating in the seventh or sixth century
in an ethical monotheism, which truly represents a unique historical phenomenon.
It is probably fruitless to search for the true origin of the god Yahweh, and the
meaning of his tetragrammaton. The innumerable hypotheses and comparisons to
which these two problems have given rise are noteworthy especially for their ingenui
ty. Neither has received a convincing solution, nor one that goes appreciably beyond
the mere appearance of truth. With regard to the meaning of the tetragrammaton, of
which even the proper pronunciation is not certainly known, etymological research is
trying to solve a false problem. According to some authors, far from expressing a
theological doctrine, the name 'Yahweh' was originally a toponym.
It is widely accepted that Moses lived at the end of the second millennium B.C.,
somewhere in Negeb. He united a number of nomadic clans to form the core of a con
federation, which, though the ties were very loose at times, was to constitute the basis
for the Israelite nation and its religion. But the teachings of Moses were limited to the
boundaries of this confederation, or if we prefer, to the borders of Israel, a detail
which in itself prevents them from constituting a true monotheism. Ignoring, on a
religious level other ethnic groups, Moses' religion cannot be considered as anything
other than monolatry, or the cult of a national god. But it was a monolatry that was
remarkable in certain ways, for Yahweh was not a narrow, tribal god in the fashion of
the god of the Patriarchs.
In a work published in 1948 called Revelation and Response in the Old Testa
ment, C. A. Simpson places at the origins of Yahwism a "momentary" intuition of
monotheism; "a drive towards monotheism" (pp. 20, 59); "implicit drive towards
monotheism" (p. 54); "a strange drive towards monotheism" (p. 56) animates from
the outset the "Israelite Yahwism." This "strange virtue" of Yahwism is, according to
Simpson, the result of a collective, psychic experience which led Israel to perceive the
relationship that linked it to Yahweh and made it abandon itself to a joyous accep
tance of the Reality as it appeared in the volcano and in the storm. This same virtue
permitted Yahwism to absorb the religion of Qades and to assimilate its priests and its
rites, while at the same time the terrifying Yahweh ceased to be mainly a destructive
power and assumed the qualities of a just god. The "drive towards monotheism" is
again manifested at the time of the settlement in Hebron in the ability of the clergy of
Hebron to organize the tradition of the desert. Actually, the unification of the tribes
had proceeded from this very tradition several centuries earlier.
One might reproach such a presentation as being tainted by metaphysics. It
presupposes that, as the result of a shock or of a memorable revelation, monotheism
became an integral part of the "nature of Israel,"30 representing its essential reality,
beyond its empirical and contingent being. With "explicit monotheism," Israel in
effect only became what it already was. To such a theological view, one may prefer ex
planations borrowed from the realm of history.

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 ETHICAL MONOTHEISM
79
Can we consider that, because Yahweh presided over a confederation of clans of
diverse origins, Yahwism constituted the beginning of universalism? T. J. Meek
denies it. He points out that in effect Yahweh's status was no different from that of the
g?d Re who became the national god of all the nomes of Egypt. This much is certain,
except that unlike the god Re, Yahweh was an exclusive and jealous god. The struggle
against all other gods and their ultimate elimination were implicit in this character
istic of the Hebraic god. However, it is necessary to modify Kaufman's theory, which
places this struggle at the very beginning. In fact, during the course of his historical
evolution, Yahweh encountered in various ways several types of deities and several
different gods.
When the Patriarchal traditions had undergone a more complete unification and
had been arranged within the perspective of the holy history of the Israelite nation,
Yahweh came into contact with the god of the Patriarchs, who had also resulted from
a syncretism.
Whatever the pertinence of the criticisms raised by Albrecht Alt's famous study on
Der Gott der V?ter, the notion itself of the "god of the clan" must be preserved. The
Patriarchs, as witnessed by the texts, adored the tutelary god of the ancestors of the
clan: to them he had appeared and for them he had not ceased to be a guide in their
pilgrimages, promising them the possession of the arable fields that bordered their
grazing land.
The occupation of the land of Canaan by the Israelite tribes was considered to be
the fulfillment of the promises that the "gods of the father," who were joined in an
only deity, had made successively to all the Patriarchal lineage. Yahwism proclaimed
passionately that Yahweh was only the "god of the father" under a new name. Here
was, then, a peaceful fusion to the profit of the Israelite god. But in the process of
assimilating into his own personality the "god of the fathers," Yahweh also usurped
the personality of another god with whom the "gods of the father" of the semi
nomadic Hebrew clans had been in contact during their sojourns in Canaan. The
Patriarchs, who frequented the sanctuaries of the non-migratory peoples, found es
tablished there the cult of El, the great god of Canaan. They rendered him homage as
the master of the land, although without renouncing their veneration for their family
god. The progress toward a non-migratory way of life brought about syncretism
between the "god of the father" and the god El. The "god of the father," who did not
have a proper name but was described only as the "god of [the individual in
question]," received from them specific names, borrowed from the cult of the god El.
From the great god of Canaan, which the literature of Ugarit has made familiar to us,
the "god of the father" borrowed certain traits, in particular his attributes of power
and his characteristic of cosmic deity. This promotion, which extended the sphere of
the god from the horizon of the clan to the limits of the world, constituted an impor
tant stage in the process that would culminate in the assimilation of the god of the
Patriarchs and the god of Israel.
Finally, we can say that Yahweh assimilated the god El. The assimilation
occurred peacefully.31 In addition to his cosmic characteristics, Yahweh seems to have
borrowed from the religion of El the characteristics of royalty and the idea of a
celestial court, traits belonging to a religion of a non-migratory people and which the
Patriarchs had not claimed for their "god of the father."
It has been pointed out that Baal is totally absent from the Patriarchal tales, being

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80 V. NIKIPROWETZKY

a more recent arrival in the pantheon of Canaan. Originally from the mid-Euphrates
region, it seems, he was able practically to supplant El by the middle of the second
millennium. While El still maintained nominal royalty, he was in fact a deus otiosus
who did not interfere with the affairs of men; Baal, god of the storm and of fertility,
with a remarkable and engaging personality, and attributes necessarily linking him to
human vicissitudes, usurped the foremost place. Yahweh clashed with him at the
gates of Canaan (Num. 25) and the conflict, which continually put the two deities in
opposition, was unresolved for a long time. Yahweh finally triumphed over his adver
sary and, assuming certain functions he had stripped from Baal, became in part a god
of agriculture.
It cannot be doubted that, in the words of Roland de Vaux:

It is starting with the First Commandment that the religious experience and the theological
reflection of Israel arrived at the expression of monotheism in the proper sense: Israel realized
that these gods, which meant nothing to it, were impotent also for their own followers and went
from there to denying their existence completely.32

If, then, monotheism required centuries to reach maturity, we may state with some
confidence that the Mosaic religion had sown its seeds. But we cannot stress too much
how slowly this process evolved in practice. For a long time, Yahweh was venerated as
the supreme god, without, however, eliminating the worship of gods more closely
associated with daily life.
When Yahwism became the State religion under the monarchy, the domains
proper to Yahweh were affairs of state and foreign policy. For the needs of daily life
and, more particularly, those of agriculture, the Israelites could voluntarily turn to the
deities they found around them who were considered the dispensers of fertility. The
champions of Yahwism had to devote prolonged and not always successful efforts to
extirpate the worship of these lesser Baals, the first possessors of the soil, who seemed
to have been local incarnations of the great god of Canaan. To put an end to Baal,
Yahweh came to assume his attribute as god of fertility.
Yahweh became for Israel what Kemos or Milcom were for Moab or Ammon. His
role in agriculture made of him, in the same manner as these deities, a local god.
Yahweh was conceived as the god of the land of Israel, where he resided and where
alone his powers were accessible. When Naaman, a general of the King of Aram, was
cured of leprosy by Elisha and wanted to adore Yahweh in his own country, he had
two mules bring earth from Israel (II Kings 5:17) to Aram, and thus a substitute for
Yahweh's land was transported to his own. Similarly, David complained to Saul that,
by forcing him into exile, his enemies were making him serve other gods (I Sam.
26:19-20). No more than Moses does David even for an instant have the idea that
Yahweh can be the god of any people other than the Israelites.
The religious evolution of Israel is inseparable from the vicissitudes of its national
history. The origin of the development that ends in the establishment of ethical
monotheism is marked by the appearance of inspired people, the nabis, who replace
the ancient seers, the rti ?h or h?z?h. As intolerant and as fanatic champions of
Yahweh, the Prophets started the religious war in reaction to the Philistine oppression
of the Hebrews, and the mortal danger presented to them by the Philistine expan
sionism that led to the conquest of the high lands. The preaching of the prophets
represented, on a religious level, calls to battle against the Philistines and to form an
Israelite state. Monolatry became symbolic of an imperative duty to Yahweh and to

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 ETHICAL MONOTHEISM 81
the Hebrew nation. The opposition to the agricultural cults and what is called, for
lack of a better term, the "nomadic ideals" gave rise to the fanatic intolerance of such
prophets as Elijah and Elisha.
The prophets, or certain orders associated with them?such as the Nazarenes and
the Rechabites?believed they were sanctioning a return, beyond the corruption of
the agricultural and urban civilization, to an original Mosaism, which they un
consciously idealized. In fact, this supposed return to an original state led to a new
development. The prophets projected into the past their own personal experience and
the ideas that the spectacle of their contemporary history inspired in them.
The violence and the radicalism of certain episodes in the religious battle should
not mislead us; neither implies monotheism. The episodes of Elijah's sudden turn of
fortune on Mount Carmel or Jehu's bloodthirsty "jealousy" for Yahweh are nothing
more than the manifestations of a monolatrous fervor which would not tolerate shar
ing the land of Israel with any god other than the national god.
But the notion of Yahweh's unique power inside his territorial domain was accom
panied by an idea that is already evident in Elijah's irony when he speaks of the
prophets of Baal: "At midday," we read in I Kings 18:27, "Elijah mocked them: 'Call
louder for he is a god; it may be he is deep in thought, or engaged, or on a journey; or
he may have gone to sleep and must be woken up.' " Elijah does not deny outright
the existence of Baal; he only offers proof of Baal's impotence both in comparison
with Yahweh and absolutely. This feeling is at the root of the monolatrous attitude,
but here seems to go beyond it.
Monotheism made further progress after the Jeroboam Schism. The political split
and the enmity that had built up between the two kingdoms did not prevent either of
them from worshiping Yahweh. Yahweh was no longer the divine patron of ethnic
groups or united territories; in spite of the memory of and the regret over the loss of
former unity, he was the god of two opposing political entities. This was the first prac
tical recognition of his universal character. A further stage was attained when the
Assyrians were seen as the instrument of god's anger, and Cyrus as Yahweh's
anointed.
Around 750 B.C. we find Amos emphatically stressing the grandeur of Yahweh,
and the universality of his field of action and jurisdiction. The prophet of Teqoa sees
Yahweh as the creator of the world and Lord of the celestial legions. He sees him as
the Judge, not only of Israel and of Judah, but also of the Aramaeans, of the Philis
tines, of the Phoenicians, of Edom, of Ammon, and of Moab. The Israelites are in fact
no more than the Coushites are for him. If Yahweh helped Israel to rise out of Egypt,
did he not also help the Philistines out of Caphtor and the Aramaeans out of Qir?33
Subsequent to Amos, in a famous vision in the temple of Jerusalem, Isaiah has the
Seraphim proclaim that the glory of Yahweh fills the entire world.34 This constant ex
altation of the image of Israel's god left less and less room for others. Religious
thought evolved from the idea of the incomparability of Yahweh to that of his
uniqueness. The feeling the prophet Elijah expressed by proclaiming that Yahweh is
God (haelohim) meant, as we mentioned earlier, that Baal cannot be compared in
power and in the capacity to do and to save to Yahweh, to whom no other god can be
likened. Next to the living God, the gods of the nations are only idols (literally,
'nothings' elil?m),35 'breaths of wind' (hebel),36 'non-gods' (lo-elohim),37 lies,38 or
abominations.39

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82 V. NIKIPROWETZKY

Although constant progress in theological thought will lead from the doctrine of
the incomparability of Yahweh to the affirmation of his sole existence, it is still clearly
not certain that the formulas which glorify Yahweh authorize us to believe that such
prophets as Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, or Zepheniah deserve to be qualified strictly
as monotheists. When Jeremiah proclaims with impressive force40 that only Yahweh
is God, it is not entirely evident that we have gone beyond the doctrine of Yahweh's
incomparability. Reasons for hesitation are even more apparent in Deuteronomy,
which was for the most part composed shortly before the exile. Passages such as
4:35 and 39 resemble professions of a monotheistic faith: "You have had sure
proof that the Lord is God; there is no other. . . . This day, then, be sure and
take to heart that the Lord is God in heaven above a'nd on earth below; there
is no other." But in Deuteronomy 10:17 we read: ". . . for the Lord your God is
God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, mighty, and terrible God." The italicized su
perlatives bring to mind phrases found in ancient poems, such as Exodus 15:11:
"Who is like thee, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like thee, majestic in holiness,
worthy of awe and praise, who workest wonders?" They also imply that the existence
of other gods was actually admitted.
Radical monotheism is unambiguously present, however, in the doctrine of the
Second Isaiah, which represents a crystallization of the entire previous process. Isaiah
of Babylon still uses formulas of incomparability but now gives them a definite
monotheistic meaning: "Before me there was no god fashioned nor ever shall be after
me. I am the Lord, I myself, and none but I can deliver. I myself have made it known
in full, and declared it, I and no alien god amongst you" (Isa. 43:10-12). "I am the
first and I am the last, and there is no god but me" (Isa. 44:6).41 "... so that men from
the rising and the setting sun may know that there is none but I: / am the Lord, there
is no other; I make the light, I create darkness, author alike of prosperity and trouble.
I, the Lord, do all these things" (Isa. 45:6-7).
Hebraic and Jewish literature will never again cease to affirm belief in an only God
and the non-existence of all the others, so that ethical monotheism, in Palestine and in
the Diaspora, will become the characteristic of Jewish uniqueness and so that a text
from the Talmud will be able to proclaim the following definition: "Anyone who
denies the existence of other gods is called Jewish."42
What follows is an attempt to present this spiritual revolution, which was ethical
monotheism in its complete form, in a systematic summary:
Yahweh is neither a deified natural force nor a metaphysical entity. He is a con
crete personality, conceived, in his relationship to man, as capable of all the psychic,
intellective, and affective operations of an intelligent living being. Living God, that is,
both existent and personal, Yahweh is also a spiritual God, whose appearance and es
sence escape the perception of the senses and the grasp of intelligence. No natural
reality can be compared to him; any figured representation would debase him. Aton,
on the other hand, although also conceived as the creator of all that exists is none
theless as the solar disk somehow still immanent in the world. Unlike Aton, Yahweh
is an absolutely transcendent God. Certainly he is the Universal Creator beyond
which there is no other force, no other divine entity. It is he and he alone whose life
giving virtue is behind each natural phenomenon?no exceptions could exist. The
Hebraic poets encounter his presence in every corner of the universe. If their thoughts
rise to the highest heavens, they find him there. If they descend to the center of the

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 ETHICAL MONOTHEISM 83
abyss, or to the abode of the dead, they find him again. But Yahweh, who fills
everything, is nowhere. Far from being contained in the world, he contains it, in a
way man cannot conceive. The feeling of infinite distance separating Yahweh from all
creatures and all virtues, which had been contained in the idea of divine holiness
since ancient times, will become more and more profound among the theologians
and the prophets of Israel as time goes on. Yahweh's essence will be relegated more
and more to an ontological abyss completely separated from the world, and his very
name will be increasingly supplanted by the personal pronoun hu, i.e., "Him," the
"absolute Being," until it becomes totally unutterable, probably under the influence
of Greek custom. But such a process did not make Yahweh either a deus otiosus or a
pure intellectual abstraction. By a sort of paradoxical dialectic, which we encounter
constantly in the doctrine of the monotheism of Israel, this transcendent God did not
cease to be passionately concerned with this world and with its history. Yahweh also
never ceased to be a Holy God.
The historians of Israel rightly stress the factors that at the beginning separated
the metaphysical holiness of Yahweh from the idea of ethical holiness that is much
more familiar to us. God's holiness means that divinity is above all logically situated
in a domain that is entirely different from the domain of creatures. To use Rudolf
Otto's formulation again, he is the "All Other," the mysterious and terrible God be
fore whom all the tangible universe is nothing but ashes and dust. Divine holiness is
conceived as a sort of explosive fluid whose touch is mortal for the profane, whether
innocent or guilty. In a striking formulation, Lods compared Yahweh's holiness to
Yahweh's wrath. Holiness is, above all, a designation of divinity itself whose inexplic
able sympathies and hatreds color the worshiper's fervor with fear. But, since the time
of ancient Yahwism, it seems, fear is the reverential side of love, and the seeds of the
moral ideas, which the prophets' piety will develop unforgettably, are found in meta
physical holiness as it is conceived. Yahweh is considered not only the All Powerful,
but also a wise, just, good, and truthful God by whom man is to be guided.
Amos, Micah, Isaiah celebrate the justice of Yahweh, who hates the oppression of
his humble people by the rich and the proud. Yahweh's love of Israel is often pre
sented as a manifestation or aspect of divine justice. But this love of Israel is never in
collusion with its sins. On the contrary, it is a domineering requirement, often cou
pled with the most devastating threats, that Israelite justice correspond to divine
justice. Yahweh's jealousy is another designation of this complex feeling. God requires
of Israel an exclusive cultual and moral fidelity; he will not put up with any deviation
or lapse. On the other side is Yahweh's truth and fidelity; his acts and his word are in
absolute harmony, as are his past and present actions, and his compassion is never
sought in vain. Yahweh is the elohim who saves; the supreme model of all purity so
that holiness becomes a human ideal, ritualistic and moral: "You shall keep yourselves
holy, because I am holy" (Lev. 11:45); "... you shall regard him as holy because I the
Lord, I who hallow you, am holy" (Lev. 21:8).
The doctrine of Yahweh's holiness carries within it implications of major impor
tance. First of all, it makes Yahweh a God who cannot bear to remain confined within
his firmament. He reveals himself spontaneously and constantly to men and, in par
ticular, to the Israelites to the point where historical progress will be conceived as a
moral process culminating in the attainment of Yahweh's justice on earth and the es
tablishment of the Kingdom of God.

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84 V. NIKIPROWETZKY

Yahweh intervenes in this world through the mediation of his Angel who seems to
be separate from Yahweh at times, yet identical with him. In fact, the "Angel o
Yahweh" is not exactly a supernatural creature, nor, despite his name, a simp
messenger of God; he is a phenomenon by which men experience the presence of G
and receive a specific divine revelation. When it is Yahweh's sovereign energy that
working in the world, the authors of the Scriptures use the expression the "Spirit o
God" to designate it. The Spirit of God is presented as personal, because it is the
reflection of a personal God, although it is not separate from God as a hypostasis. The
same can be said of the Word or of the Wisdom, concepts that express the absolut
reign of God in the world or that specify his rule.
Earlier we said the doctrine of the monotheism of Israel was born out of Israel
history, and we noted that Jeroboam's schism had been the first step by which
Yahweh had overcome his status as a national god. A series of Israelite misfortunes
also contributed enormously to the development of the figure of the God of Israel
The major steps in this evolution can be retraced as follows: The rise of the Assyria
empire and of the neo-Babylonian empire, which in the eighth century caused the
destruction of the kingdom of Israel, and in the sixth century caused the destructio
of the kingdom of Judah, confronted Israelite theological thinking with the most soul
searching problems. The temporal prosperity and success of these pagan empires co
trasted vividly with the decline, the internal disorder, and the external powerlessness
of the kingdoms of Israel and of Judah, for whom Yahweh was the divine patron. The
prophets could never admit that this state of affairs was due to the fact that the gods o
Assur and of Babel had greater power than Yahweh, or, to borrow old Scriptural
phraseology, that they were the elohim. On the contrary, they were bent on justifying
Yahweh by attributing the responsibility for Israel's disastrous situation to Israel's
own infidelity and sin. They did this with memorable passion, but also with
radicalism and violence in their self-accusation that remained unprecedented; it w
to mark post-exile Jewish piety with an intense sense of guilt and furnish the ant
Semitism of modern times with some of its most pernicious arguments. But the power,
the justice, and the honor of Yahweh were maintained.
This theodicy also opened the religion of Yahweh to the outside world. Sargon
conqueror of Samaria in 722 B.C., Sennacherib, who almost took Jerusalem in 702,
Nebuchadnezzar, who took it in 597 and sacked it in 587, were not thought to be a
ing independently of Yahweh. They were merely the instruments of his justice. It was
Yahweh himself who had "hissed unto them" from the north to punish his sinning
people in his fury. In the same way, after the edict of 539, the Deutero-Isaiah cele
brated Cyrus as the shepherd of Yahweh, his Messiah whom Yahweh seized by th
right hand to submit all nations before him.
The succession of great empires with universal pretensions, which was to dazzle
the whole of Oriental and classical antiquity and give rise to so many philosophica
speculations, extended the doctrine of the Rod of Divine Wrath in Israel's theology
all the world. In chapters 40 to 48, the Deutero-Isaiah recognized that the successio
of empires was due not to the struggle and the subsequent triumph of a plurality o
universal gods, but was rather the work of Yahweh alone, directing the progress of the
universe according to a pre-established plan. At the same time as the world and th
contrast between Yahweh and the world were discovered, the concept of the universal
Providence of Israel's Saint was set forth.

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 ETHICAL MONOTHEISM 85
In the speculations of post-exile Judaism, this concept will take on an ever greater
importance. It can be found at the heart of apocalyptic literature, where it reaches a
height and a rigidity that, to some degree, make it comparable to the heimarmene of
Greek mythology. The idea of Yahweh's ethical holiness seemed to imply a radical
break with any feeling of nationality. What is moral is not limited by any ethnic or
national contingency, and we have seen that the prophets describe Yahweh as a just
judge of nations other than Israel.
Added to the idea of Yahweh's Providence, would the idea of his moral holiness be
able to make the God of Israel, God pure and simple, a universal deity totally devoid
of all national coloration? Meek is inclined to think so.43 He believes that the traits of
Israelite nationalism that are found in the Deutero-Isaiah are vestiges or scoria. He
points out that the two World Wars demonstrated that in practice Christianity is
also more partial to a national than to a universal God, and that it thinks of Him as a
German, French, or British God, indeed as a Protestant or Catholic God, before
seeing Him as the God of all Christians.
In the final analysis, however, Israelite religious nationalism is not a comparable
phenomenon. Christian nationalism is a contingent phenomenon and a factual rather
than a legal one; it is a negative deviation in that it contradicts Christian doctrine, and
simply reflects a certain human weakness. On the other hand, Jewish nationalism is a
fundamental element in the religion of Israel. It is a goal that none of the prophets,
not even the severest and the most pessimistic, has ever abandoned. Only God and
creator, Father of all men, Master of the Empires, sole source of good and evil,
Yahweh is the God of one nation. Israel alone has received his promises; it alone is the
depository of his Law, the permanent expression of his word and divine will. It
alone remains bound to be intermediary between the deity and the rest of mankind.
From this comes the sort of religious imperialism that is expressed so strongly in es
chatological concepts before they break out in the apocalypses. From these come that
indivisible conglomeration of particularism and universalism that is the major trait of
the religion of Israel?so baffling in its logic and so powerful a generator of hostility.
Thus, Israel's monotheism is a universalist religion enclosed within the categories of a
transcendental nationalism, or Zionism.
The main characteristic of the relationship with Israel, which Yahweh or the Lord
will continue to preserve, is clearly reflected in the three concepts that constitute the
fundamental substructures of the religion and that further evolution only deepened
rather than erasing: election, alliance, and theocracy. God chose Israel from the
beginning: it is bound to him through a sort of political pact by which the deity
becomes the only legitimate master. He governs his people through the medium of
Law, to the exclusion of every other political power except, at the end of time,
through the intermediary of the ideal Davidide, the King Messiah. The legitimate
comparison is not between Israel and Germany, France, or England, but between
Israel and the Christian Church in general, where the management of the religion of
Israel is transposed, and which, very significantly, has usurped Israel's name. In fact,
the Jewish theologians see the movement of history as a march of all nations toward
conversion to the religion of Yahweh and as their more or less complete acceptance of
the spiritual statute of Israel, a concept which places empirical Israel midway between
an ethnic group and a religious community, a nation, and, indeed, a church.
We have now reached the end of our study, which has led us to note that, despite

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86 V. NIKIPROWETZKY

some definitely specious analogies, the monotheism of Israel?wherein lie the seeds of
the religions of a large part of mankind?constitutes a particular phenomenon. We
would not know how better to end our analysis than to stress once again the necessity
for differentiating between ethical monotheism and something that insufficient
scholarly endeavor might lead the historian to confuse with it. It cannot be summed
up as a simple belief in an "All-Father," either a supreme divine king or a panthe
istic god; it should also be distinguished from philosophical monotheism in both the
varieties that have been hinted at in this paper: the first regards God as the immanent
order in the universe or the power that maintains such order just as a general would
maintain the cohesion of his army; the second denies the world its reality and places
the deity in absolute ontological solitude. The ethical monotheism peculiar to Israel
is certainly less elaborate and more na?ve than philosophical monotheism.
Nonetheless it does represent a true spiritual revolution and it continues to deserve
being considered as one of the moral and intellectual bases of modern society. It has
also been a much more accidental evolution than philosophical monotheism or the
pseudo-Urmonotheismus; it is inconceivable without this evolution. Being the
product of an entire history, which belonged to a people whose spiritual universe
revolved around the holy Scriptures in the same way as the history of other nations of
the ancient Near East revolved around mythology, ethical monotheism was only at
tained by Israel through a progressive revelation. It acceded to this by means of the
doubts and the wisdom inspired by its experience during the first millennium before
Christ, and no earlier.

References

1 Adolphe Lods, Isra?l, des origines au milieu du VIIIe si?cle avant notre ?re (Paris, 1930 and 1969).

2 See, for example, Werner Schmidt, Die Urojfenbarung als Anfang der Offenbarungen Gottes (Munich,
1913); Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (2nd ed., M?nster, 1926).

3 According to Plato, Cratylus 397 c-d, at the beginning of their history, the Greeks had participated in
the worship of the astral gods, common to all humanity. This cult of the astral deities was according to him
much closer to the theological truth than the unworthy mythological fables, and was still reflected in the
very name of the gods, theoi, derived from theein, "to soar up," which preserves the recollection of the
sidereal movements.
According to Aristotle (see, for example, Metaphysics xii.8.18 ff), the religious truth known by the
Hellenistic ancestors and by the first men remains alive in the fables though they conceal this through dis
tortion. In reality, humanity has lost and discovered this truth several times in the course of its history;
Aristotle refuses to consider human history in the perspective of an indefinite progress.
Seneca, in his famous letter XC to Lucilius, maintains that the spiritual faculties of the first men, "more
recently issued from the hand of the gods," were superior to those of their descendants.

4 For some, the thesis of primitive monotheism, far from running counter to historical probability, is in
perfect agreement with it. According to this view the transition from monotheism to polytheism
represented intellectual progress, and the fact that Israel remained faithful to primitive monotheism there
fore implied not a profound and unique intuition, but merely a state of intellectual backwardness in which
this people persisted. Cf. H. Steinthal in Ign?c Goldziher, Mythology Among the Hebrews in Its
Historical Development (London, 1877), p. 421.

5Madda,\V, 1.
6 Emile, Book IV, in Oeuvres, VII (Paris, 1823), pp. 116 f.

7 This is what Rousseau calls the teraphim that Rachel takes from her father (Genesis 31:19).

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 ETHICAL MONOTHEISM 87

8 Dictionnaire philosophique, article on Religion, section III, question 2; English translation from
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, trans. Peter Gay, II (1962), pp. 438-40.

9 S. H. Kellog, The Genesis and Growth of Religion (London, 1892); Wilhelm Schneider, Die
Naturv?lker:Missverst?ndnisse, Missdeutungen, Misshandlungen (Paderborn, 1885-1886), 2 vols.; A. Le
Roy, La Religion des primitifs (Paris, 1909). For a recent synthesis of the problem of monotheism among
primitive peoples, see in Mircea Eliade, Trait? de l'histoire des religions (Paris, 1964), chap. II: "The sky.
Ouranian gods. Celestial rites and symbols," pp. 46-144; bibliography, pp! 101 ff. Also see Angelo Brelich,
"Prol?gom?nes ? une histoire des religions," in H. C. Puech, Histoire des Religions, I (Encyclop?die de la
Pl?iade [Paris, 1970]).

10 Herbert K?hn, Das Problem des Urmonotheismus (Akademie der Wissenschaften und der
Literatur in Mainz. Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, 1950), pp. 1639-1670.

11 Ibid., p. 1670.

12 Histoire g?n?rale des langues s?mitiques (1857), pp. 5-6.

13 E.g., ?tudes d'histoire religieuse (7th ed., Paris, 1856), pp. 173-182; Journal Asiatique, Feb.-April,
1859.

14 De la part des peuples s?mitiques dans l'histoire de la civilisation (1862).

15 Histoire du Peuple d'Isra?l (4th ed., Paris, 1887), chap. Ill and IV.

16 ?tudes sur les Religions s?mitiques (2nd ed., Paris, 1905), pp. 70-83.

17 Gerald Massey, A Rook of the Reginnings (London, 1881-1885), 4 vols.; Ancient Egypt (London,
1907), 2 vols.

18 Daniel V?lter, Aegypt und die Ribel (4th ed., Leiden, 1909).

19 T. J. Meek, Hebrew Origins (2nd ed., New York, 1950).

20 According to Jan Assmann, "Palast oder Tempel? ?berlegungen zur Architektur und Topographie
von Amarna," Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 31 (1972), 143-155, Akhenaton, his wife, and the god Aton
would have constituted a divine triad analogous to the triads that the ancient Near Eastern religions have
made familiar to us. The large structure cleared at tell el-Amarna could not have been a temple dedicated
exclusively to Aton, but a sort of palace-temple where the theophany of the Amarnian triad took place.

21 In fact, according to Freud's theory, the Hebrews were not originally the people of Moses. Moses was
an Egyptian, a priest, a high official of the Amarnian administration, perhaps even the governor of the land
of Goshen, where Jacob's children had been allowed to settle. A devout follower of the religion of Aton, and
desperate over the Theban reaction to this strict form of monotheism, Moses could expect nothing more
from Egypt Of energetic temperament, he conceived the idea of founding a new empire with the Hebrew
tribes he had come to know through his official status. He led them from Egypt and, as Akhenaton before
him, he vigorously imposed the religion of Aton upon them. Since the Israelites were as unprepared as the
Egyptians of the eighteenth dynasty had been to receive such a totally spiritualized theological concept,
they did away with their tyrant by assassinating him. This murder of the Father entailed all the conse
quences any psychoanalyst would have expected. In time the people repented for Moses' murder and tried
to forget the crime. The religion that the Israelites had abandoned after the Prophet's violent death con
tinued to live in their subconscious in the form of a latent tradition before it surfaced again and became the
superego of the Jewish psyche. Then, through a form of compensation or repenting, the Israelites confused
Moses the Egyptian with another religious founder to whom they merely transferred his name. Jethro the
Midianite's son-in-law was the true promulgator of the cult of Yahweh, which Moses had not known at all.
Yahweh was sufficiently similar to the gods revered by the neighboring peoples that when the Israelites
gathered at Qades and accepted him as their national god, the monotheistic idea became obscured for a
long time. The religious history of Israel can be defined as a struggle between Aton, the god of Moses the
Egyptian, and Yahweh, the god of Moses the Midianite. Contrary to what the literal meaning of the Scrip
tures may lead us to believe, the prophets, filled with the ancient Egyptian Mosaic ideals, are the enemies
of Yahweh, though believing themselves his champions. Originally, Yahweh had nothing in common with
Aton, the god of Moses; but, as the centuries passed, he ended by losing his own attributes and, through the

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 88 V. NIKIPROWETZKY
influence of the collective subconscious, began more and more to resemble his rival.
As one can see, this psychoanalytic Midrash unfolds around a basically sound intuition, namely, that
Israelite monotheism had a dynamic character. But, by a strange inversion of reality, Freud placed at the
beginning of the evolution the situation that Israel in fact only achieved at its conclusion.

22 From the Stone Age to Christianity (3rd ed., Baltimore, 1964). It has to be stated that this work,
whose tone is curiously reminiscent of the Reader s Digest, is, on a scholarly level, more harmful than
useful. The posthumous work of Roland de Vaux is also disappointing, although far superior to Albright's
book. His Histoire Ancienne d'Isra?l, particularly the first volume published in 1971, proposes a synthesis,
the poor quality and even hazardous nature of which contrast strikingly with its rich and up-to-date
scholarship.

23 G. E. Wright, The Old Testament Against Its Environment (London, 1950), p. 39; John Bright, A
History of Israel (Philadelphia, 1959 and 1972), p. 139; P. van Imschoot, Th?ologie de l'Ancien Testament,
I (Tournai, 1954), 37; Edmond Jacob, Th?ologie de l'Ancien Testament (Neuch?tel-Paris, 1955), p. 51.

24 Johannes Hehn, Die biblische und babylonische Gottesidee (Leipzig, 1913).

25 Ivan Engneil, A Rigid Scrutiny: Critical Essays on the Old Testament (Vanderbilt University Press,
1969), tr. by John T. Willis; G. Widengren, The Accadian and Hebrew Psalms of Lamentation (Uppsala,
1937), p. 72.
26 Roland de Vaux, Histoire d'Isra?l, p. 431, note 32.

27 For a very clear instance in Biblical Hebrew of 'One' for 'Alone,' see Isaiah 51:2. According
to one interpretation, for example, that of W. F. Bade, the formula of Deuteronomy 6:4 would be mono
Yahwism. On the theological level, it would reflect the doctrine of the cult extolled by Deuteronomy
and established by King Josiah. By proclaiming that there was only one Yahweh, Deuteronomy con
trasted the God of Israel with a deity like Baal, whose person in Canaan had been dissociated and was
divided among the local sanctuary gods. Thus, mono-Yahwism would represent a specific and original
facet of Israelite monolatry and would constitute a step along the road leading to monotheism.

28 This and all other passages are taken from the New English Rible (Oxford University Press, 1971).

29 See above, pp. 71-72 and note 12.

30 In short, this conception marks a return to a view that is analogous to Renan's concerning the
"mysterious innate faculty" of the Semites, the true "instinct" that pushed them toward monotheism.

31 As has been shown by Otto Eissfeldt in "El and Yahweh," Journal of Semitic Studies, I (1956), 25-27
and "El und Jahwe," Kleine Schriften, III (T?bingen, 1966), pp. 386-397.
32 Histoire Ancienne d'Isra?l, pp. 442 ff.

33 Amos 5:8; 9:6; 4:13; 5:27; 1-2; 9:7.

34 Isa. 6:1-3; compare Jer. 32:27.

35 Isa. 2:8, 18, 20; 10:10-11; 19:1, 3; 31:7; Hab. 2:18; Ezek. 30:13.

36 Jer. 2:5; 8:19; 10:15; 16:19.

37 Jer. 2:11; 5:7. The opposition elohim/lo-elohim recalls the phraseology of Elijah on Carmel.

38 Amos 2:4; Hab. 2:18.

39 Hos. 9:10; Jer. 4:1; 7:30; 13:27; 32:34; Ezek. 5:11; 7:20; 20:7-8, 30.

40 In any case, Jeremiah's formulas are very close to those that the Second Isaiah used, and it is
commonly admitted that Jeremiah practiced monotheism. However, this is not at all certain, since there is
no clearly expressed denial of the existence of the gods that can be found in the Prophet from Anatoth.
As Meek recalls in Hebrew Origins, p. 226, note 107, this is why a conservative Jewish scholar like Jacob
Hoschander viewed the Second Isaiah as the first monotheist that history had ever known.

41 Cf. 48:12.

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 ETHICAL MONOTHEISM 89

42 Rabylonian Talmud Megillah 13a. This refusal to recognize the existence of other gods led the Greek
anti-Semites of antiquity to accuse the Jews of atheism.

43 Hebrew Origins, op. cit., p. 218, note 112 sub fine.

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