In the beginning...

The Bible starts by taking us back to the time when the world was made. Well, the time that the Author thought the world was made. And then goes on to tell us about Noah and the Flood, about Abraham , Isaac and Jacob, before intoducing us to Moses and telling us the Thrilling tale of how the Children of Israel escaped during the Exodus. And all this information was either written down by Moses, or else he collated the earlier stuff and used it to introduce his own Biography.

Now, no less a renowned scholar that Spinoza stated " It is clearer than the sun at noon  that Moses never wrote the Pentateuch" - the Pentateuch being another name for the Torah. So what actually did happen , back in the Beginning?

It would appear that about 1,000 BC, or thereabouts, a small tribe of Canaanites , living on a small fortified hilltop in Palestine , began to write themselves a history - weaving possible real events that happened in days gone by into a grand and self - congratulatory epic in which they were the chief protagonists and  main beneficiaries of their God, Yahweh.

To be sure, the local people round about, Canaanites like themselves, worshipped a God called El, another called El Elyon, and a whole host of other major and minor deities who were all nature gods of one sort or other. But gradually, these people began taking these gods , with their own myths and stories attached and reworking the stories until they were all about Yahweh. Yahweh was even given their names as His other titles, and became known as El, El Shaddai, and other epithets in His own right.

In Exodus, he tells Moses " I appeared to Abraham as God Almighty , only my name Yahweh, did I not make known to him'. Well, that is interesting, because Yahweh became transliterated into ' Jehovah ' , in the KJV. And there we find that when Abraham went to offer up Isaac  upon Mount  Moriah, and found instead that a ram had been caught in a thicket and he offered up that instead, he renamed that place 'Jehovah-jirah ' - 'Jehovah provides'. Now, why would he do that if he did not know the Divine Name ? Someone has clearly lost the plot!

Indeed, we  find that  God makes Adam before the animals in one version of Genesis, and after the animals in another . That Noah took 2 of every kind of animal into the ark. or was it two of every unclean and seven of every clean animal? And so many stories have 2 different versions of the same event. Curious.

Until a German chap  named Julius Wellhausen pointed out that there were actually 4 different narratives that were woven together as one to make the Torah that we read today. And then another Redactor went to work. These 5 different sources for our  Torah in the Bible may have been lone individuals, or separate ' traditions', and the whole idea of the different narrators became known as the ' Documentary Hypotheses.

Ok, so maybe Moses didn't write the Torah after all - but surely, God made the world , and revealed Himself to the Jews as The One True God- and the Jews had a revealed religion, and not a made up mythology like the rest of the pagans, right from the start... didn't they? Or was it more the case that the Jews were actually Henotheists, and not Monotheists, originally ?

Did they start out thinking that their God was just one of many other gods, but slowly gave Him more and more prominence, until they started declaring that the other gods just didn't really exist at all? Let us be honest , when Yahweh first  meets Abraham , it is always under trees. In many ways, Yahweh is very much like the nature gods of Canaan that He later supplants. When Naomi turns to Ruth , her daughter in law, and points to Ruth's sister, she points out that 'she has returned to her gods and her own people', and urges Ruth to do likewise. No hint of evangelism here. No  'stick with me , kid, for our God is the only one who is real' pitching from Naomi. Oh no. God even sits down in the assembly of the Gods, in one of the Psalms . For the Local Gods met in council in Canaanite myth. And how strange it is that David, the King who wrote all those psalms to his God, should have an idol in his home that his wife could use to throw Saul's men off the scent when they came to kill David. I mean, what are teraphim doing in David's house ? You know what teraphim  are, right ?  The little idols similar to the Lares and Penates of the Romans - household gods  - So why does David own one ?

Clearly, a lot of work was done to paper over the cracks in Israel's past - yet somehow, the hints of the truth still show through. most mysteriously, when Moses is about to go down into Egypt to confront Pharaoh, God wants to kill him, and Zipporah, Moses wife , saves his life by circumcising their sone and touching the feet of the angel with the foreskin , saying ' you are a bridegroom of blood to me'. the fragment of this once great tale is simply found in a few verses that someone tacked into Exodus, where it makes little sense to the modern reader until s/he studies anthropology.

Now, what was all that about? One theory is that circumcision was really a substitute for child sacrifice. it enabled parents to placate the gods by offering up flesh and blood, but still keeping the child alive. It obviously caught on as a better way of doing busines than the full blown burnt offering. But how bizzare that Yahweh wants to go kill Moses on the eve of his entering Egypt to deliver Israel...

If we read carefully, we may even detect that the God Yahweh even had a female consort, who is carefully concealed and yet carelessly alluded to in the Hebrew Scriptures. But that is another story. Let us conclude for now by saying that the bible is not the whole story, but rather the story that an all male priesthood wanted to show the people, and us as well. More detail may be revealed by the translator of texts, the archaeologist , the folklorist and the historian. And we get, not a monotheistic faith revealed by Almighty God, but rather, a people creating monotheism out of the myths and legends  of the people who dwelt round about them, adapting and improving the stories until we get the Bible that we have today. Or at least the Old Testament that we have got now.