Abraham's Gods: Discovering Their Human Identities

MANKIND QUARTERLY 2016 57:2 125-157

Abraham’s Gods: Discovering Their Human Identities Michele Ernandes* University of Palermo, Italy *Address for correspondence: [email protected]

“Theologians from Philo of Alexandria down to the present have attempted to obscure Yahweh’s frequent appearance in the Hebrew Bible as a theomorphic human.” In this way, Harold Bloom (2005: 130) has expressed scholars’ embarrassment about marked anthropomorphism of God in some biblical tales. In this article, the author examines the nature of “Abraham’s God”, finding it incompatible with the god of the later prophetic (Mosaic) tradition. The proposed explanation is that the patriarchal stories originated as a secular family history that was re-interpreted at a later time and incorporated into the canon of the emerging religion of the people of Israel. During the reworking of the original source, a succession of Egyptian kings whom the patriarchs served was transformed into a god, who was equated with the god of the new religion. Key Words: Abraham, Genesis, patriarchs, anthropomorphism, Mitanni, Egypt. Some readers may ask: “Why ‘Gods’ instead of ‘God’ in the title? Was not Abraham a monotheist and was he not worshipper of YHWH, as we can read in Genesis 12:8?” The answer begins with the observation that Abraham was not, at least literally, a “worshipper of YHWH,” because he did not know this name, according to Exodus 6:2-3: ELOHIM spoke to Moses, and said to him, “I am YHWH, and I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as ’Ēl Ŝaddaj ; but by my name YHWH I was not known to them.” (See References “Bible b”). The second observation is that in the tales regarding Abraham there is not only ’Ēl Ŝaddaj, but there are also ’Ēl ‘Eljôn (Gen 14:18 -20), ’Ēl Ro’î (Gen 16:13), and ’Ēl ‘Ôlām (Gen 21:33). Of course, these names might be interpreted as a one and only ’Ēl, addressed with different epithets or attributes. ’Ēl was the supreme 125

MANKIND QUARTERLY 2016 57:2

deity among the West Semitic peoples. We find him, for example, as the High God in the 13th century BC Syrian city state of Ugarit (Noll 2007), and ’Ēl ‘Eljôn (“God most High”) and ’Ēl Ŝaddaj (“God Almighty”) are known from ancient Canaan (Loretz 1980). Yet even in the extant text, ’Ēl ‘Eljôn and ’Ēl Ŝaddaj present some characteristics very much different from the “YHWH” with whom Moses interacts, as we will see in §5. But, let us proceed in an orderly way. 1. Common Ways of Reading Biblical Texts There are three main ways of reading the History of the Patriarchs (Genesis chapters 12-50), or biblical historical texts more broadly: 1) Theological reading believes the text is inspired by God (namely by YHWH). In this reading, the Patriarchs are human beings who truly existed even if they had some peculiarities such as very long lifespans and encounters with God or angels. 2) Negative criticism dates back to Roman times and particularly Porphyrius, but was reduced to silence by the triumph of Christianity. It returned with a vengeance in Spinoza’s work and became dominant in the Enlightenment period. It emphasizes contradictions among biblical passages and the fantastic nature of some facts (e.g. Sarah giving birth to her child at the age of 90). Adherents of Biblical minimalism propose that most or all stories about the United Monarchy (of David and Solomon, 10th century BC) and before have been freely invented by priests working mainly during or after the Babylonian Exile (597-538 BC) (Garfinkel, 2011). Therefore, attempts at reading them as historical accounts are futile. 3) Positive criticism assumes a historical core of stories going back to the Patriarchs and tries to link them to historic events, recognizing the need to separate the historic core from religiously or politically motivated distortions. Positive criticism recognizes two features suggesting that a historical narrative has been freely invented or severely distorted: (1) content of a fantastic, miraculous and supernatural nature; and (2) content of great theological or political importance for the text’s authors or editors. Where these two features are lacking, a historical core is considered plausible. 2. Origin of the Extant Text Historical and literary criticism of the Pentateuch has recognized in these five books the contribution of four traditions, labelled J, E, P and D, from capital letters 126

ERNANDES, M.

ABRAHAM’S GODS: DISCOVERING THEIR HUMAN IDENTITIES

of their German naming. A little review, mainly abstracted from the introduction of Friedman’s book Who Wrote the Bible? (1987), follows. The tradition, or the document, J is characterized by JHWH as the divine name (JHWH is the German spelling of the divine name; the English spelling is usually YHWH or Yahweh), assumed to be written in the 10th and 9th centuries BC in the kingdom of Judah from the rework of earlier tales or traditions. The E document, from ’Ēlōhîm (hereafter ELOHIM) as divine name, was written in the 9th and 8th centuries BC in the kingdom of Israel, obviously using earlier sources. The E document uses ELOHIM as the divine name for all tales about events that happened before the revelation of the name “YHWH” to Moses. For the following events, it can use the name “YHWH”. Exegetes and biblical critics must then use other indications in order to establish if a passage, following Exod 6:3 and containing the name “YHWH”, belongs to the J or the E tradition. For the Book of Genesis the problem, of course, does not exist, as it precedes Exod 6:3. This does not mean that all passages of Genesis containing the name ELOHIM belong to source E. For example the first tale of the creation (Gen 1:1-2:3) belongs to a tradition following both J and E. It has been called P (from the German word “Priesterkodex”, or sacerdotal code), and was composed in the 6th and/or 5th centuries BC. To an intermediate period between the two more ancient sources, J and E, and the most recent one, P, belongs the Deuteronomic tradition, D. It is represented mainly in Deuteronomy, written in part during the reign of Josiah (around 620 BC) and finalized in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. Julius Wellhausen (1883) gave a first clear description of the phases of Pentateuch’s compilation: In summary, Pentateuch is considered the combination of parts arising from various traditions, and operated by one or more final Redactors, which added here and there some verses in order to join and integrate the different traditions (R interpolations). About Genesis, and in particular Abram’s history, we may find passages attributable to J, E and to P sources with some verses of R. However, we can emphasize that J, E, and P traditions resulted from the rework of previous tales or traditions: let us indicate these previous tales as Original Sources and label them OSs. The important limitation of the documentary hypothesis is that it captures the work of those who brought the elements of the Pentateuch into their extant form. It does not reveal the original sources on which the Yahwist, Elohist and others drew. The likely existence of earlier sources, either written or oral, is recognized by most scholars. Bright (2000), refers to sources previous to J and E; Tov (2001: 127


17-18) uses the German word Urtext: “the Urtext aimed at by textual critics is the completed literary composition which had already passed through several written stages and which stood at the beginning of the process of textual transmission.” The appendix of Friedman’s book Who Wrote the Bible? reports a useful summary table of Pentateuch’s passages with the indication of the documentary source to which they belong. In 2003, Friedman published The Bible with Sources Revealed, in which different colors and type styles allow readers to identify each of the distinct traditions. In this work, we refer to Friedman’s and Testa’s (1981) books as major sources for the indication of traditions to which biblical passages belong. In the following, I will attempt a reconstruction of the original source(s) from which the extant version of the patriarchal story was developed over several centuries. 3. A First Look at the Book of Genesis The Book of Genesis is formed by two parts, the first from Chapter 1 to Chapter 11, and the second from Chapter 12 to Chapter 50. The first part includes the Creation, the Garden of Eden, the Flood, and the Tower of Babylon. The second part includes stories of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Stories of the first part are of a mythological or theological nature, whereas the stories of the patriarchs have a human look. The two parts seem to be independent. Stories of the first part are not recalled in the stories of the second part. It seems that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did not know anything about Creation, Garden of Eden, Flood and Tower of Babylon. Unlike Genesis 1-11, the setting of the patriarchal story is not in fairyland. The geographical landscape is explicit. Most of the important cities and countries mentioned in the story are identifiable, and those that are not may plausibly have been too unimportant to be recorded in extrabiblical sources. Miraculous appearances and improbable events are sporadic, in contrast to Genesis 1-11. The patriarchal story is the history of a family narrated over four generations. The themes include fertility problems of an aging couple (e.g., Gen. 16:1-3), tussles between the wife (who is also her husband’s half-sister) and the husband’s concubine (21:9-11), strained relations between co-wives (30:14-16), and the task of finding a wife for the son (chapter 24) and a husband for the daughter (29:16-28): a perfectly credible portrait of Bronze Age family life. Other themes include conflicts among herders over pasture for their flocks (13:5-12); arrangements between the local king and the nomads at the periphery of his realm (21:22-34); woman raped, perpetrator killed by her brothers (chapter 34); and, of course, war (chapter 14). Again, there is nothing fantastic about these episodes. 128

ERNANDES, M.


The story derives its human touch from the description of its characters with all their flaws as well as their virtues. For example, although Abraham is described as a successful field commander in a military campaign (chapter 14), he is not a hero. Entering King Abimelek’s realm he is afraid that he might be killed for his attractive wife’s sake, so he introduces his wife as his sister. She is promptly taken into Abilelek’s harem, until the affair is resolved amicably (Chapter 20, also 12:1020). The story does not record the wife’s view of this episode. Nor is “Abraham’s God” a pleasant character. In one of the most moving episodes of the patriarchal drama, narrated in 18:23-33, we find Abraham pleading with his genocidal master to spare the citizens of Sodom. Here it is not YHWH but Abraham who is the moral exemplar! As a religious text, the patriarchal story is disappointing. Abraham’s relationship with his god is a servant-master relationship (Gen 26:24). The main ethical principle extolled is the need for unquestioning obedience. This core lesson is embodied in the episode in which YHWH orders Abraham to sacrifice his son, and Abraham proceeds to do so (22:1-19). Despite the appearance of “Abraham’s God” in several episodes, the main characters are the patriarchs themselves. Let us therefore hypothesize that the patriarchal story has originally been what 90 percent of it still is in the extant text: a family history. Family histories, either oral or written, are not uncommon. The best known examples are the sagas of the Icelanders. They record events from the “heroic age” of Iceland in the 10th and 11th centuries AD. The sagas were transmitted orally among the descendants of the characters whose exploits are remembered in the stories, and were recorded in the 13 th century, when literacy arrived in Iceland in the form of monks to whom the stories could be dictated (Ross, 2010). The historical veracity of the sagas is not always verifiable. In many instances, however, such as the voyages of early Icelanders to North America, historicity has been proven beyond doubt. The Icelandic sagas show that oral transmission for two to three centuries can preserve the essence of historical events narrated in the stories. We cannot be certain that the campfires of shepherds in the Levant were as conducive as the Arctic winter night to the faithful retelling of ancient lore, but the example shows that oral transmission alone can preserve the memory of historic events on this time scale. 4. From Original Source to Extant Text Where there is a story, there must be an author. The following hypothesis can be proposed as the most plausible: 129


Because other people’s families are boring, as everyone who has watched someone else’s family photographs knows, the author of a family history has to be sought among the descendants of the principal characters. In the Icelandic sagas, the authors recorded stories about their distant ancestors. In other cases, a family history may lead all the way to the author, ending with autobiographic material. Thus we must look at the very end of the story to get clues about its author. The patriarchal story ends in Egypt, making Egypt the likely place of its origin. The story does not reveal the name of its author, but it comes close. The last third of it, chapters 37 to 50, deals primarily with one person: Jacob’s son Joseph. It tells how Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, where he became steward in the house of Potiphar, the Captain of the Guard. After an interlude in prison on a sexual harassment charge, he caught the pharaoh’s attention, who made him supervisor of the royal granaries. We get the impression of a highly talented young man (e.g., 39:22-23) who rose to high position by sheer competence, despite his lowly origin. Theologically, Joseph is the least interesting character in the patriarchal drama. He never encountered “Abraham’s God”, and except for a brief appearance in 46:1-4, chapters 37-50 are remarkably god-free. Importantly, chapters 37-50 are narrated from Joseph’s perspective. They contain much detail of a personal nature: the sleeved garment that Joseph receives as a gift from his father (37:3), and the wanderer who gives him directions on the fateful day when he gets sold by his brothers (37:15-17). His emotions on being reunited with his brothers are recorded (42:24; 43:30-31), and we glimpse a sense of humor (as well as cultural competence) when he advises his brothers to describe themselves as “keepers of livestock” rather than “shepherds” because of the low status of shepherds in Egyptian society (46:3334). In the description of his achievements, we notice what looks suspiciously like pride (47:14-26). We also note that the events of Jacob’s return from Nahor, which Joseph experienced as a child, are narrated in much more detail than anything in the wanderings of Abraham and Isaac: 157 verses for Jacob’s move from Nahor to southern Canaan (31:3-35:21), and 9 verses (12:1-9) for Abraham’s move from Haran. Whoever wrote the main body of the patriarchal story was far more familiar with the later than the earlier events. Joseph is said to have lived to a ripe old age. Some verses seem to compare the time of his youth to the time when the story was written: “Now Joseph was handsome and good-looking” (39:6); and “So Joseph made it a statute concerning the land of Egypt, and it stands to this day, that Pharaoh shall have the fifth” (47:26). The last generation whose adult lives are recorded are some of Joseph’s 130

ERNANDES, M.


nephews, such as Judah’s sons Er and Onan (38:7-10). Also the names of Esau’s sons and grandsons were known to the author and were recorded quite pedantically (Chapter 36, attributed to the priestly source). The author does not know the adults of generations beyond the grandchildren of Jacob and Esau, although the births of Joseph’s great-grandchildren are mentioned (50:23). In short, the last chapters suggest that the original author of the patriarchal story was a foreign-born Egyptian civil servant by the name of Zaphenath-Paneah (41:45), born as Joseph, who recorded his own adventures and those of his ancestors up to his great-grandfather Abraham. We can only speculate about the purpose of the story. The inclusion of little scandals and stories about crafty women and silly or devious men (e.g., 30:14-16; 31:19, 30-35; 38:15-26), told in a good-natured way, suggests that the story was written for entertainment as much as for edification. Did the author record the story in writing? There can be no doubt that our suspect was literate. Even if Joseph was a mere warehouse manager, he must have been proficient in accounting, and therefore in writing. Indeed, accounting was the purpose for which writing had been invented in the first place (Baines, 1983). Autobiographic texts were common in Egypt since at least the time of the Middle Kingdom (Lichtheim, 1988, 2006). It is therefore not implausible that a retired Egyptian civil servant would compose an account of his life, extending it with the history of his family. This hypothetical Urtext would have been written in the hieratic script, which was used in the Egyptian civil service. Unlike cuneiform, which was adapted to many different languages, hieratic was never used for any language other than Egyptian (Baines, 1983). Thus the hypothesized “original source” of the patriarchal story was a piece of secular Egyptian literature. The religion of the story’s likely author is uncertain. We are told that his wife was “Asenath daughter of Potiphera, priest of On.” (41:45) On is usually identified as Heliopolis, center of the Egyptian sun cult. We also learn, in the last sentence of the story (50:26, evidently not written by him) that after his death he was “embalmed and placed in a coffin in Egypt.” Neither of these clues proves that he was an adherent of the Egyptian religion, but nor do we find him involved with the “god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” So, how did the patriarchal story become a religious text? According to Exod 6:2-3, it became incorporated in the new religion of JHWH by Moses, who had either invented the religion or adopted it from other tribes such as the Midianites. In this form, the story was carried from Egypt to Canaan. Historical narrative and religion were closely intertwined in the ancient Levant, where every tribe, king and nation had its own “patron god” (Noll, 2007). The many inconsistencies and 131


doublets in the extant text show that written transmission cannot have been continuous. Plausibly, written records (and the ability to read them) were lost around the time of the exodus. According to what we may call the Humpty Dumpty hypothesis, the story had to be reconstituted from fragmented oral sources after literacy had re-emerged in Canaan around the time of the United Monarchy. The patriarchal story survived because the religion of YHWH took hold among the tribes of Canaan and ended up as the state religion of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. In this historical odyssey, it became part of the effort to unite the tribes of Israel into a nation, and to maintain a sense of national identity when first political unity and then independence were lost. Family bonds are stronger than bonds to the wider community, which is the reason why kinship terms are used frequently in patriotic speech (Salmon, 1998). The function of the patriarchal story was to foster a sense of nationhood by identifying the nation with the family. Later editors adapted the original story for this purpose. For example, the number and names of Jacob’s sons had to match the number and names of the tribes that united into the nation of Israel. Another function was to support the claim of the Israelites to the land. In the extant text, God himself gives the land to Abraham and his descendants. The theme reappears in many variations (e.g., 12:7; 15:18-21; 17:8) that were no doubt inserted by the uncoordinated activities of many editors working in different places and at different times. 5. On the Differences between Abram’s and Moses’ YHWH Thus the task is to isolate those religious elements that were present in the original source, assumed to pre-date the origin of Moses’ prophetic religion, from later additions and distortions. We must look for incompatibilities between “Abraham’s God” and the “God of the prophets.” Simply looking at the most common way in which God is mentioned in the patriarchal story is disappointing. An example is Gen 38:7-10, which tells the story of Judah’s sons: “Er, Judah’s firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death. Then Judah said to Onan: ‘Go in to your brother’s wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her; raise up offspring for your brother.’ But since he knew that the offspring would not be his, he spilled his semen on the ground whenever he went in to his brother’s wife, so that he would not give offspring to his brother. What he did was displeasing in the sight of the Lord, and he put him to death also.” What is happening here? A young man’s death is attributed to divine wrath. Then his brother disobeys his father, and when he dies, his death is also attributed to God. Elsewhere, female fertility and infertility (e.g., 132

ERNANDES, M.


29:31; 30:22) and a man’s success in life (33:11) and his wisdom (41:38-39) are attributed to God. These are not encounters with God. Instead, the writer gratuitously attributes an unexplainable event to divine intervention. The use of God as explanation for the unexplainable comes close to being a cross-cultural universal. It is undiagnostic. There is no way of knowing whether these references to God were part of the original story or were inserted by a later editor. For lack of a better term, let’s call this god the “God of popular piety.” The ’Ēl ‘Eljôn , ‘Ēl Ŝaddaj, and “ YHWH” in the tales we are examining presents some characteristics very much different from the God of popular piety. He is also very different from the “God of the prophets” who reveals himself to Moses. Japanese scholar Yukiko Ueno entertained an epistolary discussion about Bible’s content with Italian scholar Mario Alighiero Manacorda in 1987-88. In the letter sent from Tokyo and dated July 3rd 1988, she exposed on YHWH the following two observations: “The first one regards the relationship between God and the patriarch, and the meaning of his orders and his promises. Well, El Shaddai … gave to Abram … orders like a master to a servant, even if favourite, and the servant had to execute them personally ... Instead Jahvè gives to Moses orders like to an own representative at a people: orders not to be executed personally by Moses but to be transmitted and executed by others, with whom he will have to behave like God with him.... The second observation regards theophanies’ ways. The God of Abram, be he El Shaddai or Jahvè, appears in dream or in vision without choreography, moreover in the appearance of a man or even two or three men. Instead with Moses all changes and superhuman and wonderful apparitions abound: the burning bush that does not burn, the smoking mountain, ... compose a choreography that, if I have well understood, is already a liturgy: that is to say a religion that is transcendental, confessional etc... etc., right to constitute a new and independent theocratic power.” Summarizing, Yukiko Ueno distinguished three different types of divine beings in Genesis and Exodus: (1) a cosmological god believed to be the true God [as the divine being of the first tale about the creation, Gen 1:1-2:3]; (2) some gods that are possible earthly kings [’Ēl ‘Eljôn, ’Ēl Ŝaddaj, “ YHWH” of the patriarchs’ tales]; (3) a God that, believed true or invented [by Moses], is the expression of the birth of an earthly power.... [“YHWH” of Exodus book]. 133


We can summarize the differences between YHWH of the patriarchs’ tales (“Abraham’s God”) and YHWH of Exodus (“God of the prophets”) as follows: a)

The first lets humans see him, speaks with Abram on various occasions (Gen 12:1; 17:1; 18:1-32), with Sarah (Gen 18:15), eats at Abram’s table (Gen 18:8), and often sends messages by angels (Gen 16:7-12; to Sodom, Gen 19:1-22). His appearances tend to be public events. For example, he walks with Abraham quite publicly to the hills overlooking the Jordan valley (Gen 18:16).

b)

The second does not show himself, not even to Moses, who only can see his back as is written in Exod 33:20-23. He communicates with the prophet in private, creating the perennial problem for the prophet of convincing his people of the veracity of the divine revelations. The following passage from Genesis gives a flavor of Abraham’s relationship with his god: 18: 1YHWH appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day. 2He lifted up his eyes and looked, and saw that three men stood opposite him. When he saw them, he ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself to the earth, 3and said, "My lord, if now I have found favor in your sight, please don't go away from your servant. 4Now let a little water be fetched, wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. 5I will get a morsel of bread so you can refresh your heart. After that you may go your way, now that you have come to your servant." They said, “Very well, do as you have said.” 6Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah, and said, “Quickly prepare three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes.”7Abraham ran to the herd, and fetched a tender and good calf, and gave it to the servant. He hurried to dress it. 8He took butter, milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them. He stood by them under the tree, and they ate. Who was that god who so often passed through the land of Canaan during the life of Abram, and was so affable and confidential, at least with Abram (but not with the inhabitants of Sodom), and so different from the YHWH of Moses’ time? Was he the ancient Canaanite high god ’Ēl, as suggested by his aliases ’Ēl ‘Eljôn and ’Ēl Ŝaddaj? ’Ēl is known to us in some detail from the tablets of Ras Shamra, the ancient Ugarit which was destroyed by the Sea Peoples around 1200 BC. These sources paint the picture of an elderly god who is both benign and quite detached and uninvolved in the affairs of gods and men alike. This is not a 134

ERNANDES, M.


god who would visit mortal men to command them about or who would destroy a city because he dislikes the sinful habits of its citizens. In order to find an answer, we must first try to situate Abram in space and time. 6. Abram’s Life in Space and Time Regarding space Genesis (11:27-31) tells us that Abram was born (or lived the first part of his life) in Ur-Kasdim, translated in the Septuagint as “Ur of the Chaldeans.” This locality has traditionally been identified with the city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia, founded and inhabited by the Sumerians. The Chaldeans dominated South-East Mesopotamia in the 8th century and from 626 to 539 B.C., long after Abraham’s time. An alternative and more likely location is an Ur in the vicinity of Haran, mentioned on one of the Tablets of Ebla. Yet another possibility is the city of Ura, mentioned on one of the tablets from Ras Shamra (Ugarit). This Ura was under Hittite rule in the 13th century BC, most likely in Northern Syria or Southeast Anatolia (Gordon, 1977). Yet another possibility is Urkesh, at Tell Mozan (that is in Southern Urartu), according to the archaeologists at first Hurrian and then Mitanni (Buccellati & Kelly, 1995, 1997). Their discovery has intrigued some biblical scholars, as Patricia Berlyn (2005, pp. 75-76) who cites the following clues: 1) When Abram sent a servant to take a wife for Isaac, he said to him: “...you shall go to my country, and to my relatives...”, and the servant went to Aram Naharaym, to the city of Nahor (Gen 24:4-10). Even if the city of Nahor has not been identified, it was near Haran. 2) Joshua, remembering the land of Abram’s origin (Josh 24:2), said that it was beyond the river (Euphrates), while Ur of the Sumerians as seen from Palestine is, and has always been, on this side of the Euphrates. Regarding time Most religious scholars have assumed early dates for the patriarchs, calculated in part from the extraordinary lifespans reported (by the priestly source) in the extant texts. These typically produced dates of 2000-1700 BC for the birth of Abraham. These need to be rejected because life spans such as 175 years for Abraham are biologically impossible. Many secular scholars have tended to assume long chronologies as well, with the inevitable conclusion that the stories are without meaningful historical core. Faithful oral transmission of complex stories like this over periods 135


approaching a millennium is considered impossible. An alternative short chronology is based on biblical genealogies, but assuming normal human lifespans. Let us use David’s genealogy, i.e. the sequence (1 Chronicles 1:34, 2:3-15): Abraham, Isaac, Israel, Judah, Perez, Hezron, Ram, Amminadab, Nahshon, Salma, Boaz, Obed, Jesse, David: fourteen generations. David was born towards 1020 BC, and was the last of eight sons of Jesse; Boaz was a mature land-owner when he married Ruth and so Obed was born; Judah became father of Perez, born by his daughter-in-law Tamar, when he must have been over fifty years old; Judah was the fourth son of Jacob, and Abraham must also have been from fifty to sixty years old when Isaac was born. Using genealogy, we can calculate a high chronology (using a value of 40 years per generation), a low chronology (30 years per generation) and a medium chronology (35 years per generation). If we calculate 40 years for thirteen generations, from Abraham to Jesse, we obtain 520 years from David’s birth to Abraham’s birth: from 1020 to 1540 BC. For 30 years for thirteen generations, we obtain 390 years, and 1410 BC as a date for Abraham’s birth. 1540 and 1410 are the extreme dates. For a medium value of 35 years, we obtain 455 years, and 1475 BC as a date for Abraham’s birth. Conclusions on space and time during Abram’s life The conclusion that we may reach, based on above exposed considerations about the places (the region of Haran and Nahor) and the times (1540-1410 BC, medium value 1475) in which Abram was born, is that he belonged to the Mitanni kingdom. Keller (1978) had in effect assumed such a conclusion, even though in dubitative shape. The texts found at Nuzi, a Hurrian city, and dated to circa 1500 BC, describe customs to which Abram and his descendants adhered. Keller noticed the extraordinary consonance between Hurrian and Patriarchal customs, as in the following three examples: 1. In Gen 15:2, Abram complains that he will die without sons and a certain Eliezer will be his heir. From the Tablets of Nuzi we know that a couple without sons used to adopt a man as a son. He had to take care of his adoptive parents and then he would be their heir. 2. At Nuzi, if a married couple was without sons, the wife could provide her husband with a woman. The sons of this woman would thereafter legally belong to the wife. So did Rachel, providing her husband Jacob with her slave 136

ERNANDES, M.


Bihlah (Gen 30:3). Sarai had done the same by giving Hagar to her husband Abram (16:1-3). 3. Rachel (Gen 31:19) stole her father’s teraphim (home idols) and Laban pursued her and Jacob in order to recover them. The Tablets of Nuzi explain the reasons: who entered in possession of these guardians of the house was entitled to the inheritance. Another example of Hurrian right in Genesis is supplied by Testa (1981: 265) in his comment on the episode in which Jacob made himself blessed by his father Isaac in the place of Esau: The conflict between Isaac and Esau reveals the monstrous cheat of Jacob and the drama of his deprived brother. The episode is founded on the Hurrian law that recognized the testament as irrevocable and the prophetical blessing of the testamentary as unchangeable. The correspondence between Genesis and the Tablets of Nuzi supports the conclusion that Abram was a Mitanni of the first half of the 15 th century BC. The Mitanni kingdom had a feudal structure, and was constituted by a federation of several semi-independent chiefdoms, inhabited by two peoples who each spoke its own language: the Hurrians, of Urartean language, not Semitic (Drower, 1988), and the Mitanni proper, of Indo-European language (Kupper, 1988). In the period we are examining, the Mitanni constituted the dominant warrior aristocracy, whose elite force were combatants on war chariots called mariyanna (Drower, 1988). The Mitanni were mainly breeders, particularly horse breeders. Concerning Abraham’s social class, Gen 15:2-3 describes his designated heir Eliezer as a slave born in Abraham’s house. This identifies Abraham as a member of the propertied classes. Even after his emigration to Canaan, Abraham is described as “very rich in livestock, in silver and in gold” (13:2). At that time, Abram had become a member of a social/ecological class that Egyptian texts call habiru, the likely source of the later ethnonym “Hebrew.” The habiru were not an ethnic group. It seems to have been a generic term applied to the mainly pastoral, semi-nomadic people living on the margins of the Canaanite city-states. 7. Genesis 12:1-7 in the Light of Yukiko Ueno – Manacorda Observations and in the Near East Historical Context of the Mid-XVth Century B.C. Let us examine the first verses of Genesis chapter 12. 1Now [YHWH] said to Abram, “Get out of your country, and from your relatives, and from your father's house, …6Abram passed through the land to the place of Shechem, to the oak of 137


Moreh. The Canaanite was then in the land. 7[YHWH] appeared to Abram and said, “I will give this land to your seed.” He built an altar there to [YHWH], who appeared to him. According to the observations of Yukiko Ueno reported above (§5), and strengthened by Manacorda (1989), the god [YHWH] of this Patriarchal tale was an earthly king. We can add, a king endowed with divine features, because Abram built an altar to him. We have to find a god-like king who, in the mid-15th century BC near Haran, said to Abram “Go out of your country”, and who near Shechem (in Central Canaan) said to Abram, “I’ll give this land to your seed.” Near Eastern or Mesopotamian kings, although considered chosen by gods, were not gods in land. The only king who claimed to be considered a god was the Egyptian king (Bright, 2000). We know that, in the mid-15th century, a god-like Egyptian king was near Haran, and that he in previous years had conquered the Land of Canaan. He was Thutmose III and was in war against the Mitanni kingdom over dominance in Canaan, Lebanon and coastal Syria. We have a good knowledge of his Asiatic campaigns because their “Annals” are carved on the walls of the Temple of Karnak; other sources are stelae or inscriptions in tombs. John A. Wilson (1969: 227-264) has collected most of these sources in the book edited by Pritchard (1969) and well known as ANET. Claire Lalouette (1997) and Richard A. Gabriel (2009) are among scholars who have utilized these sources for their biographies of Thutmose. Thutmose added a particular feature to Egyptian divine kingship: as reported by Lalouette (1997) he wanted to be worshipped by the peoples under his dominion assuming the name of a local god for each of them. The first name of a Near-eastern god that figures in patriarchal tales is ’Ēl ‘Eljôn (“God most high”). In §8 we will discuss if Thutmose III might have chosen to impersonate this god in Near-Eastern countries. From these sources and authors, we know that during his 8th campaign, in the 33rd year of his reign (1447 BC according to the “low” Egyptian chronology we adopt) Thutmose won a battle near Haran. He captured some Mitannians, and then returned to Egypt through the Land of Canaan (Gabriel, 2009, p. 177 for a map). According to Gabriel (p. 173): “The Gebel Barkal stela tells of a great battle between the Egyptians and the Mitanni that took place on the east bank of the Euphrates in which “the numerous army of the Mitanni was cast down in one hour. They have disappeared completely as those who never were, like an end of the Devourer, by act of the arms of the great good god, strong in battle, who 138

ERNANDES, M.


causes slaughter among everyone.” Ostensibly, the battle was with the Mitannian king, but the list of booty taken from the defeated army belies the claim that a great battle was fought. The booty consisted of 3 chiefs, 30 of their wives and children, 606 male and female servants and their children, and 80 men at arms. These are hardly the numbers and items we would expect if a major armed force had met defeat on the plain of the Euphrates. The texts do not mention any captured arms, armor, chariots, horses, prisoners, and, above all, enemy hands. At best, the Egyptians seem to have defeated only a local garrison of Mitannian troops and certainly not the king’s main army.” (Readers of Gabriel’s book may note that he dates the battle in 1471 BC (p.159): this because he adoptes the “high” Egyptian chronology. For the origin of these different chronologies, see Grimal 1994: 202). The Egyptian king did not commit the mistake of penetrating farther into enemy territory. He chose as sufficient to have forced the Mitanni to the defensive and to have captured those few prisoners. Thutmose III was not only a great warrior but, as biographers and historians emphasize, also a skilled diplomat. Since his first campaign, he replaced some of the defeated princes with men loyal to him, and left others to govern their cities carrying with himself to Egypt their young sons or brothers as hostages whom he introduced to the culture and customs of his court. Such hostages, being educated in Egyptian ways, would have been pro-Egyptian when they succeeded into the government of their birthlands. Now, if we read again Gen 12:1-7 starting from the hypothesis that the “YHWH” who spoke to Abram was actually Thutmose III, we can propose the following conjecture: Abram was taken prisoner in Thutmose’s 8th campaign. Abram entered into Thutmose’s service, whereupon Thutmose relocated Abram to Central Canaan, where he could serve him without having to fight his kinsmen in Syria. Gen 14 describes how Abram may have served the king. An enemy had attacked the cities of the Jordan valley, and Abram participated in the counterattack as commander of 318 locally recruited men. Abram pursued the enemy’s army through the eastern desert to the area of Damascus, and recovered the booty they had made from Sodom. The number of 318 men commanded by Abram appears odd, but the Egyptian army and its allies were organized with maniples of 50 men as the smallest unit. What Abram commanded were possibly 6 maniples with 50 soldiers and three officers each. 139


Table 1: The seventeen Asiatic campaigns of Thutmose III, and the events in Abram’s life.

140

ERNANDES, M.


8. Historical, Ethological and Rational Reasons of YHWH = Thutmose (and His Successors) Now, let us examine more deeply the conjecture that the original god name might be ’Ēl ‘Eljôn and that the author of the patriarchal tale applied this name not to the God of the Universe but to a human king such as Thutmose III. There are historical, ethological, and rational reasons supporting this assumption. Let us examine them. a) Historical reasons “According to Egyptian religious ideology, the Pharaoh was an incarnated god and all the verbal and ceremonial imagery by which local kings addressed him shows that this ideology was known and accepted. Local kings called him ‘Sun of all lands’ and ‘god’ (or rather ‘gods’, since they use the plural form, as in Hebrew ’ĕlōhîm), prostrated before him ‘seven times and seven times’, even specifying ‘seven times on the back and seven times on the belly’ (which was much harder…). They declared themselves ‘ground on which he walked’ and the ‘stool under his feet’, or ‘under his sandals’, in perfect coherence with the pharaonic iconography of the time ...” (Liverani 2005: 12). We may conjecture that in conformity with the conventions of divine kingship, the author of the patriarchal story used divine names/titles to refer to the Egyptian kings whom his ancestors had served while using the “modern” title Pharaoh for the living king. Several generations later, in Moses’ time, readers of the story and/or those who were transmitting it orally may have been genuinely confused whether these names/titles referred to a god or a human king. Evidently, later editors decided to interpret “Abraham’s God” as a spiritual being rather than a king, either in good faith or as a deliberate distortion. According to this view, the divine names ’Ēl ‘Eljôn and ’Ēl Ŝaddaj are Hebrew translations of the names/titles used in the original Egyptian text, and YHWH is a later god with whom Abraham’s god was equated either by Moses or by later writers. The hypothesis explains one of the most striking features of the patriarchal story: its inordinate emphasis on strict obedience. If the writer was indeed a servant of the Egyptian king, it is understandable that this was part of his magnum opus: the loyalty with which his family had served the royal house of Egypt for several generations. We may think that Thutmose’s successors to the throne of Egypt followed his example. In Genesis 17:1-3, we read: 141

MANKIND QUARTERLY 2016 57:2 1When

Abram was ninety-nine years old, YHWH appeared to Abram, and said to him, “I am ’Ēl Ŝaddaj. Walk before me ...” 3Abram fell on his face. ELOHIM talked with him, ... The scene is vivid and intriguing: Abram meets YHWH and stands: only after he has heard the name he falls on his face. Why not at once? Why does he hesitate? The possible answer is that ’Ēl Ŝaddaj (“God Almighty”) was bodily very different from ’Ēl ‘Eljôn. According to our hypothesis, the original source reported “the God-like King [of Egypt]”(or something similar) instead of YHWH. Abram stands face to face with the God-like King of Egypt, recognizes the emblems of power, but he does not recognize the person. ’Ēl ‘Eljôn (Thutmose) was a little man, and at the time old, ’Ēl Ŝaddaj young and tall, if he was Thutmose’s successor, Amenhotep II (who, as the YHWH of Genesis chapters 17-19, was very different also in cruelty in comparison with his father). Between ’Ēl ‘Eljôn and ’Ēl Ŝaddaj, there is the transient appearance of another ’Ēl, who spoke to Sarai’s maid, Hagar the Egyptian. She named him ’Ēl Ro’î (Gen 16:13), as “the God who sees.” In Egypt, the “God who sees” was Horus; but Horus was also the first title of the Egyptian king. Was he the king, crown prince, or some other member of the royal family? We need other studies on this issue. The last Egyptian god-king Abraham had to face was ’Ēl ‘Ôlām (the “EverLasting God”), Thutmose IV, the YHWH (or ELOHIM) of chapters 22-24. b) Ethological reasons Ernandes and Giammanco (1998) wrote that the “Immense Power Being” concept [i.e. the concept of God] results from rationalization and projection of the image of a group’s dominant individual [i.e. the alpha male, particularly of a single male primate group] into a superhuman world. Recently, Hector Garcia (2015) has set out similar views. Reconstructing the brain mechanism that led early Homo sapiens to conceive of God, it was easy to observe that when human ancestors attained the necessary brain capacity, there had for many millennia no longer been the figure of the absolutely dominant male in their groups. As a matter of fact, on the basis of the sexual dimorphism noticed in fossils, and inferring social behavior from it, most scholars think that in ancient groups of hominins endowed with low sexual dimorphism (as in genus Homo), there wasn’t any individual that could act as real-world example of a “Being with immense power” (i.e. their groups were lacking the figure of an absolutely dominant male). As exposed in that work (p. 187), “How did it happen, therefore, that among human 142

ERNANDES, M.


beings with a low male-male competition social system we can find a projection in the super-human world of a being with immense power that should have to be associated with a high male-male competition social system?” The answer was that the human brain preserved structures and hierarchy forming functions in its R-complex, and that these structures led to conceive of God (see p. 181 for the scheme, and pages 187-189 for the explanation). Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers lived in egalitarian societies, both before and after they conceived the “Immense Power Being” idea. In their societies, no human could claim to be endowed with absolute power. An absolute power being could be conceived only as superhuman. Superhuman beings, in turn, could lend some powers to shamans, healers and the like. When in the course of history, at least from the development of chiefdoms, human beings achieved absolute or complete power over other humans, they could not present their power as being human in nature, but as endowed with divine nature, or as invested by gods. For example, ancient Egypt’s kings, Inca, Chinese and Japanese emperors were gods or gods’ sons. In brief: The deified group chief returned among humans deifying in turn a human chief, so endowing him with theomorphic features. c) Rational reasons As noticed by Yukiko Ueno, and reported above, the God of Abram appears without choreography, in the appearance of a man who speaks, eats, and walks. Nothing extraordinary or supernatural happens in the tales regarding Abram. Also God’s angels are very different from the harp-playing cloud dwellers of later art history. The two angels who were sent to Sodom to get Lot out of the doomed city were sufficiently humanoid that the Sodomites wanted to sodomize them (Gen 19:4-8). It is highly unlikely that a story that was composed as a religious text would describe God in these anthropomorphic terms. Moreover, from a philosophic (and sometimes theological) point of view, the God of the Universe is perfect, unchangeable, omniscient, and so on. One of the gods who speak with Abram is hesitant (Gen 18:17), and subsequently merciless (Gen 19:24-25). Again it is unlikely that a religious author would describe the God of the Universe in these terms. Given that later editors failed to alter or remove these descriptions, later theologians had to expend enormous effort attempting to explain (or explain away) these features of their God. An example of this kind of theological effort is given in Römer (2013). It requires no effort if these deeds are ascribed to Amenhotep II, who recorded various actions testifying to his cruelty (see Wilson, 1969, p. 245, in particular: “His Majesty reached ShamashEdom. He hacked it up in a short moment ...”). 143


As Harold Bloom has noticed (2005: 130), “Theologians from Philo of Alexandria down to the present have attempted to obscure Yahweh’s frequent appearance in the Hebrew Bible as a theomorphic human.” Identifying YHWH as some Egyptian theomorphic king solves Philo’s problem at its roots, at least for patriarchal tales. In addition, it explains why only Abram met and spoke with “God”: because only Thutmose III and Amenhotep II passed through the land of Canaan. Later Egyptian kings of the 18th dynasty lost interest in Canaan and rarely or never went there in person. 9. Contextualization, Deconstruction, and Comparison If in the history of Abram, in place of the terms YHWH, ’Ēl ‘Eljôn , and ELOHIM, we must read “His Divine Majesty the God-like king of Egypt”, how should we understand the meaning of the word Pharaoh that appears in Gen 12:15-20? In this story the Yahwist relates how Abram went to Egypt during a famine, where he introduced his wife as his sister, with the result that she was taken into Pharaoh’s harem. The story is duplicated in Gen 20:1-18, now with the city of Gerar (near Gaza) and its king Abimelek instead of Egypt and Pharaoh. This chapter belongs to the E tradition, and many scholars think it is the E version of the J episode told in chapter 12. The term “Pharaoh” literally means “Great House.” In origin, it indicated the residence of the king, then the administrative center. According to Italian Egyptologist Sergio Pernigotti (2007: 29), only from Akhenaten (1352-1338), about a century after Thutmose III, did the term “Pharaoh” refer specifically to the king. Akhenaten wanted to make clear the distinction between the sacred feature of the king (as a god in land) and his mundane function as head of the public administration, i.e. the head of the Great House, or Pharaoh. At the time of Thutmose III, the term Pharaoh was analogous to our time’s “White House.” If we learned that the “White House” has communicated, decided or announced something, we do not have to think that the President of the USA has communicated, or decided, or announced it personally. Even a plenipotentiary sent by the President for a specific mission can be defined as “White House.” For a rational interpretation of Gen 12:15-20, we may apply the contextualization principle: at the time of Thutmose III, the term Pharaoh indicated a man who was a government official or representative of the king. When the original version of the text was composed, possibly around 1300 BC, Pharaoh referred to the king already, but the author may still have used an old-fashioned 144

ERNANDES, M.


phrase such as “pharaoh Abimelek, king of Gerar”, giving rise to confusion among later readers. If they are two versions of the same episode, we can apply the deconstruction and comparison principles. In other words we must take these two passages (Gen 12:10-20 and Gen 20:1-16) and read them in parallel, placing Gen 20 side by side to Gen 12. It seems that the source utilized by the Yahwist writer was less detailed than the one utilized by the Elohist writer, and also for the place we may use the contextualization principle. In Thutmose’s time, Gerar was a Canaanean city belonging to the Egyptian Empire and Abimelek was “Pharaoh” because, even if he was a Canaanean rather than Egyptian, he was king thanks to a decision of Thutmose and he governed in the name of the God-like king of Egypt. At the Yahwist writer’s time, Gerar was a Philistean city, and the Egyptian kingdom was confined to Africa. Therefore, it is plausible that the Yahwist was in good faith asserting that Abram went to Egypt. 10. A Closer Look at Abraham’s God As outlined before, we can recognize three gods in the patriarchal story: 1. The “God of popular piety” is the one most often mentioned. This god remains vague, and is used in an often casual way to explain otherwise unexplainable events in the world. His universality makes it impossible to decide which of his many occurrences should be attributed to the original author as opposed to later narrators and editors. 2. The “God of Moses” was either invented by Moses or acquired from desert tribes when Abraham’s descendants left Egypt. He is invisible, communicates with the prophet in private, and leaves it to the prophet to get the message across to the people. His appearances in the patriarchal story indicate insertions or distortions introduced by later writers. 3. “Abraham’s God” appears publicly and in human form, and gives commands to the patriarchs. His personal servants are called angels. He is hypothesized to be part of the original story, not as a spiritual being but as a succession of Egyptian kings. Let us now look at those episodes in the patriarchal story that seem to feature “Abraham’s God,” indicating the presumed documentary sources for each (J = 145


Yahwist, E = Elohist, P = Priestly source, R = Redactor), and suggesting possible explanations. Gen 12:1-9 (J, P) Here, YHWH meets Abram near Haran, where he tells him: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” At Shechem, YHWH re-appears and says: “To your offspring I will give this land.” (12:7) No details are given about the circumstances under which Abram met YHWH at Haran. Our hypothesis is that it originally related how Abram entered into the Egyptian king’s service, possibly after being captured in war, and was assigned a fiefdom in Canaan – for himself, not his offspring. There are four possibilities for the vagueness of this episode: (1) Memory about the details of this earliest event in the patriarchal story had faded by the time the story was first recorded; (2) The author did not want to reveal that his ancestor had been fighting against the Egyptian king before becoming his servant; (3) Details got lost during later oral transmission; or (4) Later editors omitted information that too clearly revealed the human nature of Abraham’s God. The promise of giving the land (of Canaan) to Abraham’s offspring reappears many times in the patriarchal story (13:14-17; 15:18-21; 17:8; 26:3). Because of its political importance (even today!), this motif is certain to be a later insertion or distortion wherever it appears. Gen 13:14-17 (J) Here, YHWH promises the land to Abraham and his descendants, who will be numerous “like the dust of the earth.” No context is given, and the theme reveals these verses as a late interpolation. Gen 15:1-21 (J?) In this lengthy episode, “the word of YHWH came to Abram in a vision.” It contains the usual promise of ample descendants (15:4-5) and possession of the land (15:7,18-21), a strange sacrifice (15:9-11), an obvious contradiction suggesting at least two independent sources (15:5,12), and prophecies concerning Abraham and his offspring indicating late insertions (15:13-16). The sources of this chapter are uncertain, but are most likely extraneous to the main text. Gen 16:7-13 (J) Here God appears not to Abram, but to “Hagar the Egyptian,” a slave of his wife Sarai. Sarai gave her to Abram because she herself was barren and her slave’s child would be counted as hers, but got upset when she felt that Hagar, when pregnant, “looked with contempt on her mistress.” (16:4) Hagar ran away 146

ERNANDES, M.


into the wilderness, where an “angel of YHWH” found her (16:7). It turned out that the angel was none other than ’Ēl Ro’î: the god who sees. Hagar the Egyptian is one of the more enigmatic figures in the patriarchal drama. How could an Egyptian woman be the slave of a habiru sheik’s wife at a time when the Egyptian king was overlord of Canaan, and why did she seek out an angel-infested part of the chaparral? Things become less odd when we realize that Hagar was a slave. Her epithet does not necessarily indicate her ethnicity. It is just as likely to mean that she had served in an Egyptian household before becoming Sarai’s slave. The only Egyptian households in Canaan at the time, though temporary, were those of the king and his military staff members (“angels”). The best explanation is that Hagar was seeking refuge with her previous masters, and that the “angel” she met turned out to be a member of the royal family. This episode seems genuine because there is no obvious political or religious reason for its invention. However, it is clearly modified by later editors. Again a prophecy is involved (16:10-12), and we even find a motif that looms large in the exodus tradition but is incompatible with the anthropomorphic nature of God and his angels in the patriarchal story: “Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?” (16:13) Gen 17:1-22 (P) This is Abraham’s first encounter with ’Ēl Ŝaddaj, whom Abraham does not recognize (17:1,3). This chapter has three themes: 17:4-9 is a covenant in which ’Ēl Ŝaddaj gives the land of Canaan to Abraham and his offspring “for a perpetual holding” (17:8). The second theme is the demand that every male in Abraham’s household be circumcised (17:10-14). The third theme is the promise of a son through his wife Sarah (17:15-22). Of these three themes, the third is repetitive with other similar promises of offspring (e.g., 15:4). We can only speculate that in the original text, the only involvement of “Abraham’s God” in his reproductive life was to give Hagar to his wife Sarai, briefing her that in case of continued infertility she might give Hagar to her husband according to the custom of her country. The second theme is certainly a late interpolation. It assigns religious significance and divine origin to the custom of circumcision, which had become an “ethnic marker” distinguishing the Israelites from other nations, possibly as late as 500 BC (Glick, 2001). The first theme, the right to the land, may have been in the original text as a reaffirmation of Abraham’s status as vassal of the king, duly transformed into an “everlasting covenant” (17:7) by the priestly source, to which this episode has been assigned. Interestingly, name changes (Abram  Abraham, Sarai  Sarah) are part of the covenant (17:5,15). Elsewhere, the patriarchal story 147


mentions a name change when a man entered into Pharaoh’s service (Joseph  Zaphenath-Paneah, Gen 41:45, attributed to the Elohist). Gen 18:1-19:25 (J) This is the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. YHWH (presumed to be the ’Ēl Ŝaddaj of Gen 17:1-22) appears to Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre (near Hebron) accompanied by two angels. After they have eaten and refreshed themselves, Abraham accompanies them on their way to the hills overlooking the Jordan valley. YHWH reveals his plan to destroy Sodom and the other cities of the plain, and Abraham pleads with YHWH on behalf of the Sodomites. Abraham returns to his place while YHWH goes his way and sends his angels to Sodom. In Sodom the two angels, who are guests in the house of Abraham’s nephew Lot, are ill-treated by the townsfolk. Early the next morning, the angels urge Lot to leave the town with them, for “We are about to destroy this place, because… YHWH has sent us to destroy it.” (Gen 19:13) In this story, YHWH has all the attributes of a king who destroys a rebellious city. The angels look very much like military officers. They seem to have some leeway in conducting the campaign, for one of them promises Lot to spare the town to which he was fleeing (19:21-22). This is the most spectacular episode in the entire patriarchal drama. The extant text identifies the destroyer of Sodom with the God of Moses, but the episode is otherwise so sparsely edited that the human nature of YHWH is unmistakable. Why should this be so? Most likely, the editors working on the text through the centuries knew that this was the most dramatic and most popular episode in the entire patriarchal drama. Suppressing it would have compromised the popularity of the entire patriarchal story by diminishing its entertainment value. Even divesting the destroyer of his human attributes would have made the story bland and unpalatable, so the editors did the bare minimum that was necessary to identify him with their god. The historical and archaeological identity of Sodom remains speculative. Shamash-Edom, which according to Egyptian sources was destroyed during Amenhotep II’s first campaign (Aharoni, 1960), is one candidate, but the archaeological identity of Sodom and Gomorrah remains elusive. Gen 20:1-18 (E) This is the Elohist version of a story also told by the Yahwist in 12:10-20. Here, King Abimelek of Gerar takes Abraham’s wife Sarah into his harem after Abraham had presented her as his sister, but “God came to Abimelek in a dream by night” (20:3) ordering him to restore her to Abraham. While both Abraham and Abimelek were vassals of the Egyptian king, who may have had a role in the affair, 148

ERNANDES, M.


it is equally likely that God was introduced into the story by later narrators and editors. Gen 21:12-20 (E) This episode deals again with Hagar, whom Sarai evicts with her son Ishmael. Although heavily edited, the episode seems to tell that Hagar found refuge and was allowed to raise her son under the protection of God. It most likely was an Egyptian “god,” as Gen 21:21 says that “his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.” Gen 22:1-18 (E, also J or R) In this well-known episode, ELOHIM tests Abraham by ordering him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham obeys but an angel of YHWH interferes, keeping him from killing his son. This is another dramatic episode, but of uncertain origin. It follows on another one in which Abraham concludes a treaty with King Abimelek (21:22-32) that seems to have been ratified by ’Ēl ‘Ôlām (the “Everlasting God”, 21:33), hypothesized to be Thutmose IV. The following story of the sacrifice of Isaac may or may not relate to the same ’Ēl ‘Ôlām. Possibilities for the origin of this episode include: (1) it tells a true story in which one of the more devious Egyptian kings (either Amenhotep II or Thutmose IV) tested his servant’s loyalty; (2) it was invented by the author of the patriarchal story to epitomize the unconditional loyalty with which his family had served the royal house of Egypt; or (3) it is a late interpolation by an editor who wanted to make a theological point. Only for 22:15-18, which reiterates the promise of numerous descendants, can we be certain that we are dealing with the work of a later editor. Otherwise, there is no strong evidence favoring one of the three possibilities over the others. Gen 26:2-6 (J) In this brief episode YHWH appears to Isaac during a famine, telling him not to go to Egypt but to settle under his protection in the vicinity of Gerar (26:2-3a,56). This story implies that Isaac had asked for permission to settle in Egypt, apparently through Abimelek (26:1), but the request was denied by “YHWH.” Thus it most likely refers to a political decision of the Egyptian king, while 26:3b-4 (promise of land and offspring) is a late insertion. Gen 26:24-31 (J) This is the last appearance of Abraham’s God. It is preceded by conflict between Isaac and Abimelek, who pushed Isaac out of the area that had been given to his father Abraham (21:22-32) and later to himself (26:2). In 26:24, YHWH appears to Isaac. Shortly after (26:26-31) a contrite Abimelek visits Isaac, 149


accompanied by his adviser and the commander of his army, to renew the treaty between them. The content of this episode is entirely political: both Abimelek and Isaac owe their positions to “YHWH,” but Abimelek encroaches on Isaac’s traditional rights. When YHWH inspects the place he visits not only the king, but unexpectedly visits Isaac as well. Abimelek gets the message and repairs his relationship with Abraham’s son. Thus both of the episodes featuring “divine” intervention in chapter 26 place Isaac in the vicinity of Gerar, which was under Egyptian control throughout the 14th century BC, and both are best interpreted as political decisions – by the Egyptian king, not YHWH. 11. Who is Jacob’s God? The anthropomorphic god of Abraham and Isaac with his propensity for public rather than private appearances and his involvement in political decisions is missing from the last 60 percent of the patriarchal story. Why should this be so? The story implies that Abraham’s clan remained in Canaan for more than a century, until the generation of Jacob’s sons. The only Egyptian kings who passed through Canaan repeatedly during their military campaigns were Thutmose III (ruled approximately 1479-1426 BC, hypothesized to be ’Ēl ‘Eljôn) and Amenhotep II (approximately 1426-1401 BC, hypothesized to be ’Ēl Ŝaddaj), with only one Syrian campaign likely conducted by Thutmose IV (1401-1391 BC, possibly the ’Ēl ‘Ôlām of the patriarchs). Later kings rarely if ever visited Canaan although the Canaanite city states remained formally subject to Egypt as shown in the Amarna letters of the mid-14th century (Izre'el, 1995; Moran, 1992). Nevertheless, the patriarchal story relates several episodes in which God appears to Jacob. We need to examine whether Jacob’s God is the same as the God of Abraham and Isaac: Gen 28:12-15 (E, J) This describes a dream that Jacob has at Bethel, featuring a ladder to heaven on which angels are ascending and descending, and YHWH reiterating his promise of giving the land on which he was lying to his descendants. This is not a public appearance but a private revelation. Despite assertion to the contrary (28:13), this is clearly not the god who appeared to Abraham and Isaac to give orders to his servants. Also the angels, who appear to Abraham (and to Lot and Hagar) as ordinary humans, have been transformed into heavenly beings. Thus we must consider this episode an interpolation by later editors working in the Mosaic tradition. 150

ERNANDES, M.


Gen 31:3 (J) Here, YHWH says to Jacob: “Return to the land of your ancestors and to your kindred, and I will be with you.” This happened near Nahor and Haran in Syria, presumably at a time (about 1370 BC?) when no Egyptian pharaoh ever ventured so far north. It is almost certainly a later interpolation, moulded after Gen 12:1. Gen 31:11-13 (E) In this Elohist version of Gen 31:3, Jacob relates how the “angel of God” (31:11) appeared to him in a dream, later identifying himself as the “God of Bethel” (31:13). This is a private revelation rather than a public appearance, and thus is unrelated to Abraham’s God. Gen 32:1-2 (E) Here Jacob meets the “angels of God.” This may be a late insertion to explain a place name. Alternatively, in the original text it may have referred to Egyptian emissaries, sent by the king to collect tribute from the local princes or conduct negotiations. Gen 32:24-30 (E) This episode tells how Jacob wrestles all night with a man whom he identifies as God. God subsequently changes Jacob’s name to Israel. It also contains the motif, typical of Mosaic religion, that ordinary men have to die when they see God (32:30). The story is awkwardly inserted into the narrative of Jacob’s return to Canaan. Its function is to explain the origin of the name Israel. The etymology may be dead wrong, but the originator of this episode seems to have believed that Israel means “the one who has struggled with God.” (32:28) Gen 35:1-4 (E) In 35:1 God orders Jacob to build an altar at Bethel. Jacob does so, and orders his household members to do away with the foreign gods. This is the only place in the patriarchal story where polytheism is rejected. Elsewhere in the patriarchal story (especially 31:19,30), we find no dogmatic intolerance of other gods. Competition with “foreign gods” was intense in the Kingdom of Israel at the time of the Elohist writers (Walls, 2015). Therefore, Gen 35:1-4 almost certainly was inserted into the story at a later time. Gen 35:9-13 (P) This is the priestly writer’s version of how Jacob’s name was changed to Israel, followed by the usual promise of plentiful offspring and possession of the land. Again we have to consider this an interpolation that was inserted into the original story. 151


Gen 46:2-4 (E) This is the last appearance of Jacob’s God, who speaks to Jacob in “visions of the night,” telling him not to be afraid to go to Egypt. Again, it is a personal revelation rather than a public appearance, and most likely was inserted into the text at a later time. That later editors repeatedly inserted God’s promise of plentiful offspring and possession of the land is in keeping with the function that the text eventually acquired, but why did they insert encounters in which God changes Jacob’s name to Israel? There must have been a time in the text’s history when the name change was of great importance. The earliest source that mentions Israel as an ethnonym is the famous Merneptah stele, dating from Merneptah’s reign about 1213-1204 BC. In addition to a campaign in Libya, the inscription mentions an earlier campaign in Canaan in which the pharaoh had defeated, among others, Israel: “Israel is laid waste— its seed is no more.” The name appears to refer not to a city state, but to a nonurban tribe. Another inscription has been proposed to mention Israel even earlier (van der Veen, Theis & Görg, 2010). Thus a tribal group named Israel seems to have existed in Canaan since at least the 13th century BC. Biblical tradition suggests that the name was applied to a loose federation of habiru tribes in Canaan during the 12th and 11th centuries BC which united into a kingdom around 1020 BC. Does the Merneptah stele imply that the exodus must have occurred sometime before the 13th century? Not necessarily. The exodus cannot have been a major event. It is not mentioned in any surviving Egyptian inscription and there is no archaeological evidence that it ever happened. Therefore, if it has a historic core at all, it can only have involved a rather small group. We can postulate that these migrants merged into the existing tribal network of Canaan while spreading their new religion and providing the ideological framework for the eventual unification of the tribes into a nation-state. If these Canaanite tribes were called “Israel” already when the exodus group arrived, a founding father carrying that name was needed. In this situation, the patriarchal story was transformed from the origin myth of the exodus group to that of the wider network of Canaanite tribes. Thanks in part to this transformation, the new religion became a force in the eventual unification of the tribes. Thus Gen 32:2430 and Gen 35:9-13 were inserted in an effort to adapt the patriarchal story to a larger agglomeration of tribes.

152

ERNANDES, M.


Conclusions and Limitations This paper examines an old enigma in the study of the patriarchal story: the oddly anthropomorphic features that “Abraham’s God” displays in several of the episodes in which he appears. The proposed solution is that in the original version, or Urtext, of the story, these episodes do not relate the patriarch’s relationship with a spiritual being, but his relationship with his feudal overlord who, at the time in question, can only have been the Egyptian king. The theory has the following components: 1. There is an historical core to the patriarchal story. This necessitates the assumption that the story was first consolidated and recorded not long after the narrated events. Evidence for this conjecture is found in the observation that the later episodes are narrated with far more detail than the earlier ones. This would be difficult to explain if the story had been freely invented or, if based on a historic core, had first been recorded many centuries after the narrated events. 2. Most of the later writers in the Yahwist and Elohist traditions acted in good faith when attempting to reconstitute the text after it had been fragmented during a period of exclusively oral transmission. Their effort to preserve authenticity is evidenced by the frequent contradictions and doublets that they preserved in the extant text when different sources were combined. 3. The patriarchal story did not originate as a religious text, but as a secular piece of literature that was re-interpreted and edited as a religious and historical text by later writers. This is evident from the contents of many episodes in which God appears, which reflect the political contexts of a later time, when the story was part of the state religion of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel: the many variations of the “everlasting covenant” assigning the land to Abraham’s descendants, and prophecies about future historical events (e.g., Gen 15:13-15; 25:23). 4.

The anthropomorphism of Abraham’s God is incompatible with the transcendental, secretive God of Moses, who is imported into the patriarchal story as the God of Jacob or the God of Bethel. Later editors were aware of these incompatibilities (e.g., Gen 16:13; 32:30), but failed to remove them completely.

5. The contents of many of those episodes that feature God in anthropomorphic terms are of a public or political nature or, in the case of Sodom, suggest military action. The proposed explanation is that in the original text, these 153


episodes described the patriarchs’ dealings with their feudal overlord, the Egyptian king, rather than their relationship with a spiritual being. 6. Comparison of the biblical record with inscriptions from Egypt suggests that the patriarchs served a succession of Egyptian kings, and that some events in the patriarchal story can tentatively be identified with events known from the Egyptian records. These include especially Abraham’s first encounter with ’Ēl ‘Eljôn (Thutmose III) near Haran, and the destruction of Sodom (possibly Shamash-Edom) by ’Ēl Ŝaddaj (Amenhotep II). At this point, the outlined theory offers the most plausible explanation for the anthropomorphic features of Abraham’s God. However, there is no definitive proof for any of the elements of the theory. Conclusive evidence related to it is unlikely to appear from new discoveries of extra-biblical textual sources, or from ancient written documents featuring elements of the story itself. More likely is that archaeology will identify candidate sites for the biblical Sodom, with dates that either support or contradict the proposed chronology. However, even this evidence can by its nature only speak to the theory’s plausibility. It cannot provide definitive proof or refutation. Acknowledgement: I am greatly indebted to Gerhard Meisenberg for his support and contributions to the elaboration and presentation of the theory that is presented in this paper.

References Bible: a) Jewish text of Genesis: 2006 Genesi. Ebraico, Greco, Latino, Italiano. Testo della Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Traduzione interlineare italiana. Testo greco dei Settanta, ed. Alfred Rahlfs. Testo latino della Vulgata Clementina. Testo italiano della Nuovissima Versione della Bibbia. A cura di P. Beretta (i. e., P. Beretta ed. Genesis. Jewish, Greek, Latin, Italian. Jewish text: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Italian interlinear translation. Greek: Septuaginta, ed. A. Rahlfs. Latin: Vulgata Clementina. Italian: Nuovissima Versione della Bibbia). Cinisello Balsamo: San Paolo. b) English text: World English Bible (2001), but using YHWH instead Yahweh, and maintaining the divine names used in Jewish text (above sub a). 154

ERNANDES, M. ABRAHAM’S GODS: DISCOVERING THEIR HUMAN IDENTITIES c) Vulgata: Bibliorum Sacrorum iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam nova editio. Curavit Aloisius Gramatica. Roma: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, MCMLI. Others: Aharoni, Y. (1960). Some geographical remarks concerning the campaigns of Amenhotep II. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 19: 177-183. Baines, J. (1983). Literacy in ancient Egyptian society. Man 18: 572-599. Berlyn, P. (2005). The journey of Terah: To Ur-Kasdim or Urkesh? Jewish Bible Quarterly 33(2): 73-80. Bloom, H. (2005). Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. New York: Riverhead Books. Bright, J. (2000). A History of Israel, 4th ed. Westminster John Knox Press of the Presbyterian Publishers Corporation. Buccellati, G. & Kelly-Buccellati, M. (1995). The identification of Urkesh with Tell Mozan (Syria). Orient-Express 3: 67-70. Buccellati, G. & Kelly, M. (1997). Urkesh. The first Hurrian capital. Biblical Archaeologist 60: 77-96. Drower, M. (1988). Syria, in: Edwards et al., reprint 1988. Edwards, I.E.S., Gadd, C.J., Hammond, N.G.L. & Sollberger, E. (1973). The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. II: The Middle East and the Aegean Region (c. 1800 - 1380 B.C.). London: Cambridge University Press (reprint: 1988). Ernandes, M. & Giammanco, S. (1998). MacLean’s triune brain and the origin of the “Immense Power Being” idea. Mankind Quarterly 39: 173-201. Friedman, R.E. (1987). Who wrote the Bible? New York: Summit Books. Friedman, R.E. (2003). The Bible with Sources Revealed. A New View into the Five Books of Moses. N. Y.: Harper. Gabriel, R.A. (2009). Thutmose III. The Military Biography of Egypt’s Greatest Warrior King. Washington: Potomac Books.

155

MANKIND QUARTERLY 2016 57:2 Garcia, H.A. (2015). Alpha God: The Psychology of Religious Violence and Oppression. Amherst (N. Y.): Prometheus Books. Garfinkel, Y. (2011). The birth and death of biblical minimalism. Biblical Archaeology Review 37: 46-53 Glick, L.B. (2001). Jewish circumcision. In: Denniston et al. (eds.), Understanding Circumcision, pp. 19-54. Springer US. Gordon, C.H. (1977). Where is Abraham’s Ur? Biblical Archaeology Review 3: 20-21.) Grimal, N. (1994). A History of Ancient Egypt (paperback; hardcover, 1992). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. (French orig.: Histoire de l’Egypte ancienne. Libraire Arthème Fayard, 1988). Izre'el, S. (1995). The Amarna letters from Canaan. Civilizations of the Ancient Near East 4: 2411-2419. Keller, W. (1978). Und die Bibel hat doch recht. (1st ed. 1955). Vienna: Econ Verlag GmbH. Eng. Transl.: Bible As History. (2nd revised edition), Bantam Books, 1983. Kupper (1988). Northern Mesopotamia and Syria, in: Edwards et al, 1988. Lalouette, C. (1997). Mémoires de Thoutmosis III. Calman-Lévy. Lichtheim, M. (1988). Ancient Egyptian Autobiographies Chiefly of the Middle Kingdom: A Study and an Anthology (Vol. 84). Universitätsverlag. Lichtheim, M. (2006). Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. III: The Late Period. Univ. of California Press. Liverani, Mario (2005). Israel’s History, and the History of Israel. London-Oakville: Equinox. (Italian original: Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2003). Loretz, O. (1980). Der kanaanäische Ursprung des biblischen Gottesnamens El Saddaj. Ugarit-Forschungen. Internationales Jahrbuch für die Altertumskunde Syrien-Palästinas Neukirchen-Vluyn 12: 420-421. Manacorda, M.A. (1989). Lettura laica della Bibbia. Roma: Editori Riuniti. Moran, W.L. (1992). The Amarna Letters. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 156

ERNANDES, M. ABRAHAM’S GODS: DISCOVERING THEIR HUMAN IDENTITIES Noll, K.L. (2007). Canaanite religion. Religion Compass 1(1): 61-92. Pernigotti, Sergio (2007). Non solo Faraoni. Pharaon (Italian quarterly magazine) 2: 2229. Pritchard, James B. (ed.) (1969). Ancient Near Eastern Texts [ANET] Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd edition with supplement. Princeton: Princeton University Press Römer, Thomas (2013). Dark God. Cruelty, Sex, and Violence in the Old Testament. Paulist Press. Ross, M.C. (2010). The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salmon, C.A. (1998). The evocative nature of kin terminology in political rhetoric. Politics and the Life Sciences 17: 51-57. Testa, Emmanuele (1981). Versione, introduzione e note alla Genesi. Nuovissima Versione della Bibbia dai testi originali, vol. 1 (4a ed; 1a: 1972). Roma: Edizioni Paoline. Tov, Emanuel (2001). Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2nd revised edition. Minneapolis and Assen: Fortress Press and Van Gorcum. van der Veen, P., Theis, C. & Görg, M. (2010). Israel in Canaan (long) before pharaoh Merenptah? A fresh look at Berlin statue pedestal relief 21687. Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 2(4): 15-25. Walls, N. (2015). The gods of Israel in comparative ancient Near Eastern context. In: S. Niditch (ed.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Ancient Israel, pp. 261-277. Wiley. Wellhausen, J. (1883). Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels. Berlin: Reimer. Among English Translations, Prolegomena, Hard Press, 2006. Wilson, J.A. (1969). Egyptian Historical Texts, in: J. B. Pritchard (ed.), pp 227-264.

157