From Many Gods to One: How Ancient Israel’s Faith Revolutionized Religion w/ Dr. Michael Hundley

Johnny Ova: Welcome back everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova with the Sound of Heaven Church. I'm excited to have my guest on, Dr. Michael Hundley. Dr. Hundley, thank you so much for taking some time out to join us today.

Dr. Michael Hundley: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited.

Johnny Ova: I'm looking forward very much to this conversation. I want to set the stage and talk about this concept of many gods in the ancient world. When we open the Hebrew Bible, we're stepping into a world that already had a deep history of gods and goddesses. So what did the religious landscape of the ancient Near East look like before Israel?

Dr. Michael Hundley: Right. Actually, I'm going to go even broader than that. In terms of world religions, pretty much everybody out there imagined multiple different gods. That was kind of the universal. We assume that this idea of one God is normal, but it's actually not, it is an aberration. It's something that develops in the three monotheistic traditions. Pretty much across the globe you have multiple gods. That's the normal. Usually you have a hierarchy. At the top there's a high god who's like the CEO or the president. He's often like a one-stop shop. He can do everything, which makes him better. Not always a he, and sometimes he has a spouse, but he's usually not a fighter. He's more of an administrator or a judge. He creates, and after that he's in charge.

Dr. Michael Hundley: Beneath that you usually have the major gods, who usually have one cool power. You get to Baal in the Bible later. He's the local storm god. They're in charge like the president's cabinet members, the department of education or whatever it is. They have their specialization. Beneath that you've got the minor gods, who are like servants. They're usually not that well known. They're kind of the support staff. Then, out on the periphery, you get the wild gods. Sometimes monsters are gods, sometimes rivers, sometimes the sun, diseases. The stuff that's a little bit wilder, for lack of a better word.

Johnny Ova: Sure. It's a hard question, but how do these ideas come into existence? Is it something that always was? Is it something they hoped for? Or is it just, hey, I see the sun, it must be a god, because I don't understand it?

Dr. Michael Hundley: That's a good question. With a lot of what we're talking about here, we don't really know. We weren't there. We have imperfect information, so we're conjecturing a bit. But I think something called the cognitive science of religion helps a little. One idea is called the hypersensitive agency detection device. Fancy term. Basically it means that when I don't know whether there's a person or a living thing or a force behind something, I assume there is. For example, I'm back in the Serengeti hunting, and the grass rustles. Is it a lion or is it the wind? Chances are it's the wind, or another animal that's not a predator, but I'm predisposed to assume it's a lion. Or you're at home, or in someone's house, and it's creaking, and you assume there's an intruder. So in the face of this, if we don't know whether there's an agent behind it, we tend to assume yes, even if it's less probable, as a survival mechanism. And the more unlikely something is, the more likely we are to assume there's an agent behind it.

Dr. Michael Hundley: The next theory related to that is called theory of mind. The basic idea is that we project our minds onto the world around us as a way of understanding things. One example I use in class: if there's a girl, how do you know whether she's interested in you? She doesn't tell you, unless it's fourth grade. There are various signals, and effectively you're reading her mind. You're reading her gestures, her actions, her words, and projecting that outward. We do the same thing with our animals. We assume they're little people. We even talk to our phones like they're human. So theory of mind is the idea that not only is there an agent out there, but there's an agent like me. It could be less complex than me or more complex, but I'm going to understand it in a human-like way, because I can't help myself. I'm at the top of the food chain, so if I'm imagining gods, they have to be better versions of me, because that's all there is.

Dr. Michael Hundley: There's a practical side to that too. If they're like me, then I can actually influence them. That gets to the question of why you would believe in a rain god in particular. Today you read the Bible and it presents God as a rain god a ton, but nobody's really praying to that aspect of God anymore, because we usually go to God for our particular felt needs, the things we can't meet for ourselves. In the ancient world, you had the option of believing the rain just happens, a natural phenomenon you have no control over whatsoever, or that there's a being in charge of it who is like you. The second is a lot more comforting. If they're not like me, I can't relate to them, so that doesn't help. But if they're like me, they want the same things I want. I can serve them and worship them. People like to be pampered. In return I get the rain and they get followers. And the more unlikely something is, like the universe, the more natural it is to think this way. We're not born thinking scientifically. We're born believing in imaginary beings, whether they're real or not. So the more unlikely something is, the more likely we are to assume there's an agent behind it, a creator who is like me. It seems to be built into our DNA.

Johnny Ova: Right. So with the rain, if you pray for rain and it happens to rain, it reinforces the idea. See, this is what God wants.

Dr. Michael Hundley: Absolutely. And if it doesn't rain, then I must have done something wrong and the god is mad at me, so I've got to redouble my efforts, or maybe I'm praying to the wrong god. The stakes are high enough that I'm going to believe it no matter what. If it works, great, I did my job. If it doesn't work, I must have done something wrong. Because if the system doesn't work, then I'm in trouble. So the idea of a being above me who's in charge, whom I can relate to, is really hard to get rid of, whatever the evidence. Nope, I still believe it. It must have been ritual failure, or fill in the blank. I didn't do my dance nicely enough.

Johnny Ova: So Dr. Hundley is not going to do the rain dance for us today.

Dr. Michael Hundley: No dances.

Johnny Ova: Coming back to the ancient Israelites' view of their God compared to their neighbors, was it radically different, or more similar than people may think?

Dr. Michael Hundley: Again, we're conjecturing here, looking at the texts. We can't take a time machine and jump back and say, here it is. And if I did, I probably wouldn't understand them. But this is something a lot of people don't understand. People often assume the Bible just fell out of the sky in King James English. It was written in a context, by people who understood the world the way their neighbors did. The Bible itself mentions the word god multiple hundreds of times, and it almost never says other gods don't exist. What it's generally trying to say is, you don't need them, because I'm enough. Even in Genesis and Exodus, God says, I'm the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. If they believed he was the only god, they wouldn't need to specify. He's our God, and there are other gods out there.

Dr. Michael Hundley: In that particular area you tend to have a high god, El, who is the high god of Ugarit. If you look at Cyprus, the little finger pointing at the mainland, that's where Ugarit is. Those texts were written before the Bible was written. El was the high god, then there were major gods under him and minor gods below that. The biblical world is very much like that. And here we're talking about perceptions, not necessarily reality, because in religious studies I can't tell you whether God is real or not. I can tell you what people thought about God. Their thoughts generally seem to have been: this is our God, there's a high God, and there are a bunch of other gods beneath that. For example, people often interpret son of God in a different way, but a son of God just means a god, the same way Ezekiel is called son of man, which simply means he's a man. You have the host of heaven, the divine council, even cherubim and seraphim, so many different characters and angels we assume are not gods, usually because we assume there's only one God. We're kind of assuming our solution before we even look at it. But by the standards of the ancient world, a lot of these beings probably were gods.

Dr. Michael Hundley: This is a little tricky, because other languages, Akkadian, the language of ancient Mesopotamia, and Egyptian, have something called the determinative. That's a fancy way of saying that next to the word there's a sign telling you what kind of thing it is. You have a word, and it will say river, or mountain, or person, or animal. There's also a determinative for god. That's one of the main reasons we know what they thought gods were, because they explicitly labeled them gods. The Bible doesn't really have that. There's no determinative. When we read it, we read it through a modern lens, reading back onto it, and because it doesn't explicitly call them gods, we often assume they're not. But chances are, based on all the parallels we know, ancient people would have imagined the world, even the world they believed in, as full of multiple gods.

Johnny Ova: So would we define a god or deity as anything outside our natural realm, outside the flesh? I've wondered this before. You mentioned angels and cherubim, and I have a question on the divine council in a second. Especially in modern Christianity, and I'm a pastor, I hold the stance that there's one true God. So the thought is, we're not a polytheistic religion. Yet when I take this back and ask questions about the Old Testament, I think, when you believe in these different divine beings, anything outside our flesh, outside our realm, outside our world, wouldn't those be considered deities of some sort?

Dr. Michael Hundley: A lot of it is a matter of labeling. I think we'll probably get to this, but the move to this monotheistic idea wasn't really changing the way they thought, but changing the way they labeled the world in a lot of ways. At this point, deity and god are pretty much synonyms. They didn't have many words for it. So in their minds, saying this is a god was pretty normal, and they didn't define it exactly. More often than not, we don't define what a person is. We just label it: that's a person. These were things in their environment that they considered gods. They weren't sitting there philosophizing, saying this has the necessary qualities and that doesn't. I think that's a god. And there are a bunch of other beings that are sort of in between. In ancient Mesopotamia, for example, you have a river. Is it a god? It depends on the text. It's always a river, but sometimes it's a god and sometimes it's not, depending on the context.

Dr. Michael Hundley: More often than not, something becomes a god when I need it to be a god. When I need it to have agency, when that helps me understand or engage with my world, then I assume it's a god. I can make an instrument a god when I need that instrument to pacify an angry god who's going to kill me otherwise. So it's one of those fuzzy labels. My new book project is about gods and monsters, and it's similar with monster. There's no DNA test for a god or a monster. It's a label we put on things, and from all we know, it seems to be a label people would have used that way. In the context of ancient Israel, you have the idea that you need to put away your foreign gods if you're going to worship Yahweh. It's not saying they don't exist. It's saying you need to be exclusive.

Johnny Ova: God wants the commitment.

Dr. Michael Hundley: Right. And that's the idea of monolatry. It's not a perfect term. Some people use henotheism, from the Greek for one god, but that one's a little fuzzier for me. I like monolatry better. Again, we're using terms that only sort of apply. Mono means one, and latreia is Greek for worship, so singular worship. The way I explain it to my students, it's like a marriage. I recognize the existence of other women out there. I'm not saying they don't exist. What I am saying is that I have an exclusive commitment to my wife, so she's the only woman for me. That's pretty much the direction the Bible goes, and more than anything else, that's what sets Israel apart from everybody else. It's not denying the existence of other gods. In fact, even today, there isn't a single monotheistic tradition, so Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, they all believe in multiple supernatural beings. Why don't we call them gods? That's largely a question of how we've chosen to label things.

Johnny Ova: Fascinating. Like you said, we can't jump in a time machine and go back. We're having these conversations to try to put ourselves into the mindset of how these people saw things. The rivers are fascinating. It's a god today. But I have to pull back on the divine council for a second. Can you explain the concept of the divine council, what it was, and how it helps us understand early Israelite religion?

Dr. Michael Hundley: You have this concept pretty much across cultures, throughout the ancient Near East, in ancient Greece, and further afield. Like I said about the hierarchy, you have a high god, and just like humans when they're making a decision, they meet. The high god at the end of the day is the one who makes the decision, but they take counsel. That's the divine council. At minimum they seem to be a group that meets with God, a sounding board. They're subordinate to God in the sense that he's the high God, so they do what he says. It seems to be a group of other beings that we might call gods who serve him in some function. Just like the president, when he's going to make a big decision, gets the cabinet together and they hash it out. That's the divine council.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. I've heard many teachings on the divine council, and there are always some interesting spins on it, some pretty wild ones.

Dr. Michael Hundley: There's a lot of crazy stuff out there.

Johnny Ova: Let's go to the shift from the polytheistic idea to the monotheistic idea. Some scholars debate whether Israel was truly monotheistic from the beginning. I think you answered this partly with labels, but was Israel's faith always centered on one God, or did it evolve over time?

Dr. Michael Hundley: When we talk about Israel itself, it's hard to say, because what we have access to is their texts. Was Israel always this way? The archaeological evidence suggests not. Even the texts say the whole time, you're worshipping all the wrong gods. But according to the main narrative of the text, exclusive worship is the driving force. Even so, you could argue about it. The New Testament calls Satan the god of this world. What does that mean? Is he a god or not a god? In my mind, monotheism is a concept that was developed, the word around 1660, and then retrojected back. So here's how I see monotheism, or for me, the monolatry thing. There's one really famous Babylonian story called the Enuma Elish. We usually call it the creation story, but it's not really about creation. Basically you have Marduk, who was kind of the god of nowhere, because Babylon was a backwater. Then Hammurabi effectively conquers the world, so the king of nowhere becomes the king of the world, and you've got to rebrand the god. The god can't be a nobody.

Dr. Michael Hundley: So that story is designed to rebrand Marduk as king of the gods, and one of the main ways it does that is, I use the analogy of amazon.com. You don't deny the existence of other gods. You don't say you can't shop at those other stores. You basically say, I'm the one-stop-shop god. He doesn't invent any new powers. He's not saying other gods don't exist. He's not even saying worship me. What he's saying is, I can do in one place all the things the other gods can do together, and that makes me the best. And then he argues to be king of the gods. The Bible is interesting and different. For the most part, God is not arguing to be king of the gods. When he's talking to the nations, he says, I want them to know who I am. When he's talking to his people, he says, if you're going to have me as your God, it's got to be exclusive. Exclusivity is probably a harder sell. If I want to be king of the gods and I have no ability to control childbirth, I'm still good enough to be king of the gods. But if I want exclusive worship, I have to be able to do absolutely everything, because if I can't deal with childbirth, you're going to go to the goddess of childbirth when that comes up.

Dr. Michael Hundley: So from the very beginning, if you're defending exclusive worship, this God has to offer absolutely everything, and if there's anything he doesn't offer, you're going to shop elsewhere. That's one of the reasons Baal in particular is a threat. He's the local storm god, and you're coming into this land and you need rain. He's a local guy. Yes, we worship Yahweh, but why not go to him too? Exclusivity isn't natural. We assume religion is exclusive, that I'm either this or I'm that. But in most of the world, and most of the ancient world, why would I do that? If my favorite grocery store is Whole Foods and Whole Foods doesn't carry what I'm looking for, I'm not going to give up. I'm going to go to another store. That's typically how we do religion too. So on one hand, you've got to argue that this God can do absolutely everything. And the way the text presents him is also very interesting, because he doesn't really have a backstory. Whatever backstory there might have been is largely erased. As a result, he just is. He's unknown, which makes him pure potential. He can be whatever the text needs him to be.

Dr. Michael Hundley: The analogy I use is, if you grew up next to somebody, you know where they came from, so you have a good picture of who they are, and for them to change they have to rewrite the narrative. But when a new kid shows up, he's much more interesting, because you don't know anything about him yet. He could be anything. The Bible presents God in that light, where God can be anything the text needs him to be. So that's step one. This God has to be everything, because if he's not, no one's going to buy monolatry. Step two is, why be exclusive? That's where you put in a non-compete clause, if we use economic language. If you want me to be your God, it's got to be only me. You've got to pick me or the field. Imagine Amazon saying, if you want to shop at Amazon, you can't shop anywhere else. I might be tempted to do that. They're incredibly useful. That's what's going on here. God is saying, I've got everything. I'm better in one place than all these other gods combined, and if you want what I have, you need to come to me.

Dr. Michael Hundley: Step three is competition, where you push the other gods out of the market, like Baal. In the Israelite worldview there's no room for other major gods. They're competition, not in the sense that God is worried about who's supreme, but competition for worship. Biblically, unlike a lot of other religions, there's no conflict on the cosmic scale. God's in charge and God's always going to be in charge. The conflict is over us. So Baal is in competition not with God for supremacy, but for our exclusive commitment. You spend a ton of time pushing him out of the market, the whole scene at Mount Carmel making fun of him: he's nothing, he doesn't have any powers. But they never actually say he's not a god. They're basically saying he's nothing compared to me. So effectively you corner the market. You have a monopoly, and if you want in, you have to be exclusive.

Johnny Ova: I want to stay on Israel, but I'm thinking about the New Testament, where Caesar is asking, hey, just light some incense for Caesar, and they absolutely refuse. From the religious side, you're taking a moral stand, I understand that. But from the Roman perspective it must have been, you guys are so annoying, because if you just did this, it would alleviate the headache for me.

Dr. Michael Hundley: Right, and we'll probably get into that. Even today, with a lot of other religious traditions, it's like, well, I'll go to your church and do your thing, but you won't come to mine. What's wrong with you? Because it's normal to share, but exclusivity really sets you apart, and I think most people who aren't born into it don't understand it. In the context of Rome it was offensive. They called early Christians atheists, not because they didn't believe in God, but because they rejected the gods everyone else believed in. You guys think you're so special. Why won't you just bend the knee? Everyone else does. You can worship your god, but worship ours too. That's just how society works.

Johnny Ova: That adds a lot. Going back to ancient Israel, what role do you think wars, exile and political upheaval played in shaping their understanding of God?

Dr. Michael Hundley: A lot. But can I go back? I wanted to add one more thing first. So you have no room for major gods, but you do have minor gods. You do have sons of God, and in my mind you can argue that angels would probably qualify: gods plural, the divine council, the host of heaven, the holy ones, cherubim, seraphim. More than likely you'd put them in the god category. One interesting thing the text does is keep them around as an entourage. They don't really have much of a function. Sometimes the ones that had a function become cheerleaders, basically as a way of hyping up the big guy. Sometimes, like with Sodom and Gomorrah, you have an angel go rather than God himself, as a way of having some critical distance. The text also makes sure they're not a threat. Until the very end of the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, angels don't get names. These beings don't have any names. They basically wear the yahweh.com name tag. I work for yahweh.com, and angel literally means messenger. There's nothing about them we can grab hold of. They're basically just a conduit to their employer. And I think I'm getting to your question in a roundabout way.

Johnny Ova: Take your time. This is great.

Dr. Michael Hundley: The next step is that they name this category, and it's unclear exactly when this happens. In Daniel 3, I think verses 24 and 28, when Daniel's friends Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are in the lions' den…

Johnny Ova: In the furnace, right.

Dr. Michael Hundley: In the furnace. They say there are four men in there, these three guys and one who looks like a son of God, and then later it says God sent his angel, or messenger. That seems to be the first instance of people calling this bottom group angels. So effectively you give the minor god category a name, and the name is angel. We're still talking about the market here. In the Israelite market you have the God you're allowed to worship. You can't worship the little guys, but you acknowledge them. So in the acceptable system you have God and angels, which effectively means you have only one God. Redefining the bottom category and pushing out the middle category is, in my mind, where the whole monotheism thing was built. And if we want, we can talk about where the foreign gods come in a bit later.

Johnny Ova: Real quick on this: is there a difference for the angels that are named, like Michael and Gabriel? Do you think there's a special reason they're named?

Dr. Michael Hundley: Absolutely. The bottom category is called messenger, and most of them aren't messengers anymore, but they get classified that way, and then we read back into the text that anything that happened that isn't God must be an angel. So why do angels get names and identities? You see it in the Bible itself, and then in early Christian literature there are all kinds of wild stories about angels. They're not competition anymore. They're not gods anymore. Now we've established that in the system there's only one God, and as a result you can have some critical distance. You can give them names and identities. You can relate to them. They're no longer competition. Once you've redefined the category, you don't have to be careful.

Dr. Michael Hundley: So, back to the wars. This is also really interesting about the Bible, because usually you hear that history is written by the winners, but this was written by the losers. Throughout their history, except for a very brief period, they lost over and over and over again. When they're competing against local powers like Moab or Edom, it's on a small scale. But when they come face to face with empire, it's much different. You have early encounters with Egypt, but things especially change with Assyria and Babylon, the two Mesopotamian powers. Assyria knocks out the northern kingdom and turns Jerusalem into pretty much one little surviving hill. The Babylonians send them into exile. So Israel gets weaker and weaker and can't do much, and as a result, to justify exclusive worship, God has to be stronger and stronger. The weaker Israel gets, the stronger God has to be. Especially in the face of universal gods like Marduk, or the Egyptian Amun, or the Assyrian Ashur. These are the gods of empires, the one-stop-shop gods. To justify exclusive worship, you have to convince people Yahweh is still worth worshipping exclusively, so he takes on this universal role where he's bigger and better than they are.

Dr. Michael Hundley: A lot of stories about gods are about saying, my god is better than your god. And a lot of the biblical story is written to justify why this God is supreme even though it doesn't seem like it. What Babylon and Assyria basically say is, your God's weaker than mine. How do I know? I beat you. So why would you still worship that God? In history, most of the time, once you're conquered, at least after a while, you assimilate. From the ancient world, this is really the only living religion left. They didn't assimilate. So why not? Of course you have the spiritual, church answer, which may or may not be true, but as a scholar I can't really go with that. What I find interesting is that the arguments they make are incredibly compelling. They explain why they lost. Actually, can I backtrack and finish the system first? It makes more sense if I explain it that way and then come back around.

Johnny Ova: Absolutely. Go ahead.

Dr. Michael Hundley: So in the system you've got the high God, nothing in the middle, and the minor gods turned into angels, so only one God. And you still have the foreign gods out to the side. What do you do with them? This is where it finally does become monotheism. In the system you've got to identify them. Where do they fall? They get called demons. Pretty much any being who's not on Team God is a demon. So today, any god who isn't the God is either a demon, not real, or a distortion of the one true God. That's how people often present it. But then where do the demons come from? Are they independent of God? The Christians say no. God is in charge. God created everything, so God must have created them. Then did God make them evil, or did they choose to rebel? The answer is they chose to rebel. And what category are they in? The only category left is angels. So they become fallen angels. That's how we explain it. And the demons, and Satan, aren't fighting God for supremacy. They're fighting the good angels over us. By the way, this whole idea of other supernatural evil isn't really in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible very much, at least not explicitly. That comes after.

Johnny Ova: You're talking about Satan, the devil.

Dr. Michael Hundley: Right. Satan still effectively seems to work for God in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, which is a whole other topic. All the characters who are a little sketchy are still working for God. So effectively, in this system there's only one supernatural power, and that means everything that happens is his responsibility. Either he allows it or he causes it. That changes religion, because before, the problem of evil isn't really a problem. You've got one god doing one thing and another god doing another. Here you have to explain how the one God of the universe allows all this to happen. So they spend a ton of time morally justifying God: it's not his fault. In the Old Testament, where you don't have these other evil supernatural forces, the blame falls on us. What went wrong is that we were not true to the covenant. We didn't keep our end of it, and God is punishing us for that. So you've got to convince people this happened not because our God is weaker, but because our God is punishing us.

Dr. Michael Hundley: Then step two, you've got to convince people that punishment isn't the end, that there's some sort of redemption, that the suffering is going to be worth it. In the Jewish tradition you have the idea of redemptive suffering, the suffering of the people. If we as a people suffer enough, it will bring about something like the messianic age. Christianity interprets it as the suffering of an individual, of God, for the group. When you have no hope in the present, when you're under the thumb of a bigger empire, you tend to project your hope into the future, and God makes bigger and bigger promises to keep the worship going. The question then is how those promises will be realized, and that's really where Judaism and Christianity differ, and Islam too. They all agree that God is making these great promises, that we're weak and not seeing them realized, and that what went wrong is that we messed up. The question is where redemption comes from, and that's where the three of them split.

Johnny Ova: You made a statement a little earlier about getting followers. What's the benefit? Is it really a genuine search for truth, or something to hang on to because the present day is so bad, something to give light and hope in what they're going through? If we say, we've got to get more followers, so we've got to come up with reasons why things happen, we prayed for rain, it rained, look everybody, my God answered, come join me. Is the benefit selfish? Is it hopefulness? Before we talk about the split between Christianity, Judaism and Islam, is it a genuine search for truth, or self-benefit?

Dr. Michael Hundley: Generally, as humans, we're more interested in coherence than in truth. If I argue with you, chances are you're more likely to defend your own position than think about my arguments. One thing religion does is bring coherence to our world. The world's big and the world's scary, and religion helps explain it. For the most part it's not a numbers game, and it really hasn't been. In the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament there's not really any evangelism going on. Even with Jesus, the parables were spoken in coded language, almost as a weeding-out device. The drama is that you've got a God who wants to be with people, but the people suck. How does that work? That's the point. It's not, we want to get as many people in as possible with a really cool sales pitch. It's that we want the people who are there to understand what's going on and to be transformed. The goal is depth, quality over quantity. That's true in most of these cases. Getting as many people to worship as possible really wasn't the goal. Most world religions don't actually evangelize. I think the numbers game really starts once you get into empire, and it's also a very modern phenomenon. You don't see much of it at all in either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament.

Johnny Ova: So the start of evangelism, go into all the world and preach the gospel to all nations, was a very foreign concept. Most people in the first century really didn't care what anybody else believed.

Dr. Michael Hundley: You can believe whatever you want. It's very much like today in a sense. You can believe your eyebrows are god. Well, almost everybody believed in gods, but the idea was, I've got my gods, you've got your gods, so what do I need your gods for? And gods were often cultural. The God of Israel is the God of Israel. I'm not an Israelite, so he's not my God. This is where monotheism in particular changes the game. With monotheism you have a claim of the absolute. This is the God, and this one God has all the answers. When that happens, you have to spread it. The initial Jewish understanding, in Genesis 12, is that we're going to be a blessing to the nations. We're going to be this great people who show off our great God, and people are going to come to us. The New Testament changes that and says, no, we're going to go to them. Most other world religions have no interest in that. The three that really do evangelize are Islam, Christianity and Buddhism, and all three believe they have the answer, exclusive truth. That's why they feel they need to grow. It's not, hey, we're trying to build an evil empire while we twist our mustache. It's the little old lady who wants to save you, so you can join her team and get the benefits and not the punishment.

Johnny Ova: No doubt. Do you think the move toward monotheism was more about theology, or about survival and cultural identity in the face of oppression? Was it, this seems like the absolute truth, I'm in? Or, I hope this is the truth, I need to survive?

Dr. Michael Hundley: I think to them this made sense. They didn't want to give up their religion, and this is what allowed it to cohere for them. It's not just survival, like, I'm going to come up with something dirty and underhanded as a way of tricking people into believing this silly thing. We believe all kinds of things. Whether it's true is a different question. But I think what makes it so powerful is that they pitched it in a way people wanted to hear. It hit them where they needed it. That's why it still resonates. The Psalms aren't written to us, but they still resonate with us, because they deal with the same human struggles and offer us the same solutions. Exactly where it comes from is a question I can't really answer. But what makes it so effective is that it really speaks to the human condition in a way that crosses ages and times. It resonated with them enough that they survived, and it resonates with us, because we're still talking about it.

Johnny Ova: Right. So, and I'm not banging the drum here, but if we went back to the first century and talked to the Pharisees or the high priests in the temple, the Jews, not the Christians, was their thought process that these other gods exist but my God is the greater God? Or was it, ours is the only real God?

Dr. Michael Hundley: We don't really have any early literature that says it was the only God. There's later literature that does, but around the time of Jesus we have very little, and a lot of it comes from Qumran, so how much do we trust that? It's hard to say, because we're arguing from silence a bit. But if I had to guess, I'd say they probably acknowledged the existence of other gods but assumed theirs was superior and worth worshipping exclusively. That didn't necessarily mean other people should worship our God. It's just that we're the chosen people and we've got the best God. Generally the way it worked, and this is also different from New Testament Christianity, is that if you want to worship my God, you've got to become one of my people. You become a Jew first. That's one of the arguments between Peter and Paul. Do you have to follow the Jewish law? Do you have to become Jewish to become a Christian, or can you just jump the line? In their minds, we've got the best God. Is he the only one? It doesn't spell it out, but whatever else is out there is inferior and not really worth talking about. My God's great, and I'll show him off, and people can come to me and have what I have, but I'm not going to go out and advertise.

Johnny Ova: It almost seems it was offensive to the Jews for the Gentiles, the non-Jews, to be worshipping the same God. Wait a second, we're his chosen people. You have to become a Jew. You can't jump ahead of me.

Dr. Michael Hundley: Right, and Paul talks about this a lot. They didn't have a big problem with Gentiles becoming Jews. They could adopt the tradition. Even today you can convert to Judaism and become part of the people. That wasn't the problem. The problem was the idea that you could get rid of the law and everything else that makes us Jewish and makes us special, and these guys could just get in with nothing. That's kind of crazy. It is offensive. How does that work? We've been surviving as this people. We've been as faithful as we can. We're still here. And these other guys who don't know anything don't have to understand our suffering or follow our culture, and they can just jump the line and get Jesus to give them all these great things. Not fair.

Johnny Ova: I have two more questions, and if there's something I missed that you think we need to talk about, feel free. I want to be respectful of your time. How has this transformation, going to what we're defining as monotheism, under your definition, shaped the way the world thinks about faith, morality and identity today?

Dr. Michael Hundley: In terms of faith, it's interesting, because again there's this idea of exclusivity. If you go to China today, people are kind of all of them. Why would I differentiate, that I'm either a Christian or I'm something else? With morality too, you have this concept, which you get in Buddhism somewhat and in Islam, that there's a universal morality. Instead of you having your cultural customs and me having mine and some philosophical greater good, there's a divinely given set of rules that applies to everybody. That's a game changer. And in our culture, the Western world, the US, whether you're Christian or not, you grew up in a world imbued with these Western Christian ideas. Even if you're anti-God, you're usually anti-God because he's not like what people say the Christian God should be. So we tend to define everything through that lens. In the Western world, a lot of scientific advances came because people believed there was a God in charge and an ordered world. So this gives definitive answers other traditions don't. And as a result, it often doesn't always play well with others.

Johnny Ova: Last question. Speaking to my audience, and I love this conversation because it really opens up the box: if you could clear up one modern misconception about ancient Israel's faith, what would it be?

Dr. Michael Hundley: It's what we've been talking about. For me, it's not monotheism, it's monolatry, exclusive worship. If you're looking for what sets Israel apart from everybody else, it's exclusive worship. You do have other cultures where people make a covenant, a contract between people and other people, and the gods are sort of included in it. But the idea of this God making a contract with his people for exclusivity, that's the game changer. In my mind, monotheism wasn't the goal, but was sort of an effect of having to promote monolatry. And related to that, the question I think people often shy away from is, why does it matter what we call it? What's the difference between one high God and a bunch of minor gods, and one God and a bunch of angels, other than definition? We're much more comfortable with the second, but is it fundamentally different, or is it just about our labels?

Johnny Ova: From my perspective it's the labels for sure. It's very difficult for somebody to say there are many gods mentioned in the Bible, or that they believed in many gods. It's more comfortable to say, they're angels.

Dr. Michael Hundley: Much more, because again, that's about coherence. We want a system that makes sense, and we explain it in a way that makes sense to us. Everybody wants to believe their tradition is the right one, and this is the logical conclusion of the argument. Our angels are better than yours. Their gods are demons, who are fallen angels. So our system encompasses the entire world, and we're right. Is that true? I don't know, but it is comforting.

Johnny Ova: Well, Dr. Hundley, this has been fun. I appreciate your time journeying into their mindset, trying to see what they saw and believe what they believed. If you have anything you're working on or want to talk about your books, I'm going to link some of your books in the descriptions on YouTube and everywhere else.

Dr. Michael Hundley: Sure. I just did a four-part series with Ancient Near East Today, I don't know if you're familiar with it, that's more public facing. What is a god in the ancient Near East? Then two parts on what is a god in the Hebrew Bible, and the fourth one is From Monolatry to Monotheism, pretty much what we've been talking about. It's written for people who aren't academics and scholars, so I think it's a good entry point into what I'm arguing. And as scholars, we take the data we have and make the best case we're able to. We're not really proving things. People often assume, and scholars do this too, that we present ourselves as the answer. But really we're doing guesswork like everybody else. We're taking the data we have and making the best case we can. So it's an ongoing process. It's a dialogue. I'm not here to tell you the way things are. I've studied it more, which means I might have some more answers, but it doesn't mean I'm right.

Dr. Michael Hundley: What I'm trying to finish right now, and I just have the introduction and conclusion to write, is a book called Ancient Gods and Monsters. I think it's a really interesting one, because virtually every culture throughout history has had them, gods and monsters, heroes and villains, and the line between them is often really fuzzy. If you compare gods and monsters objectively, they're almost identical. They have a lot of the same characteristics, and more often than not it's a matter of our perspective and how we use the terms. It looks at how the ancient world constructed its worldviews: who were the gods, who were the monsters, and what does that say about them? And it really does land in today's world, where we're always constructing heroes and monsters based on our own social locations. Those guys out there are bad and monstrous, and the guy on my side is a hero or a god. It's a natural way for us to construct our world, and we've done it since the very beginning. So I'm looking at the stories and the ways they did that, hoping to see how it's relevant today.

Johnny Ova: Awesome. I'm going to have those links. When does that book come out?

Dr. Michael Hundley: I don't know. The editing process takes a while. I'm almost done writing it, so I'd guess probably another year or so. We'll see.

Johnny Ova: We'll keep a lookout for it. I'll link your other materials in the YouTube description and on Apple Podcasts. This has been great. Dr. Hundley, thank you so much for your time and for sharing some of it with us.

Dr. Michael Hundley: I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.