When the Gods Disappeared with Dr. Matthew Lynch

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today our guest is Dr. Matthew Lynch. Dr. Lynch, thank you for joining us today.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Johnny Ova: When most people open the Old Testament, they assume it teaches there's one God and always has been. We get in the mindset of this is the way it is, the way it was and the way it always will be. They have that mindset going in, but the text itself keeps mentioning other gods. What is actually going on here?

Dr. Matthew Lynch: You've hit the nail on the head in terms of the complexity of even asking that question. You have to distinguish between whether the writers of the Bible think there's one God, and whether they've always thought that. If you polled all the writers on how many deities there are, would they all say one? You have to distinguish that, on the one hand, from the obvious fact that Israel as a people worshiped multiple gods at different times and were not always worshiping or believing in one God, because for various reasons they were tempted to follow other gods. Think about the land of Israel. It's a land that depends on rain for survival. When the rain's not coming, Baal is a really attractive option, because Baal is the storm deity. Whether it's a fertility deity or a storm deity, those basic needs often bring out the desire for other deities. So Israel, as recorded in the Bible, certainly worshiped other gods. The debate among scholars and people who think about the Bible is usually whether the biblical writers thought there was only one God, and whether they always thought that.

Johnny Ova: It breaks down into a couple of questions I get asked a lot. Say it's pretty clear in the Old Testament that Israel believed in other gods, or at least thought other gods existed. Does their belief validate that other gods exist? Just because they believed these other gods were real, are they really real? Is there one God? When you trace the line through the rest of the Old Testament into the New, it seems there's this thought that there is only one God in the sense of deity, and you don't go to false gods. Is this monolatry? It's like a big tug of war, a big twisted-up web.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: Exactly. Some of the terminology might be helpful. You mentioned monolatry, which is the idea that Israel thought, we should only worship one God, but other gods might exist. There's the verse that says the nations each walk in the name of their own god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God. Taken in isolation, that verse might reflect the idea that the biblical writers and Israelites themselves were saying, other gods might exist, but we're supposed to be focused on Yahweh alone. That's monolatry. Henotheism is another way of saying much the same thing: the belief that you're to be committed to only one God. Then there's monotheism, which is not only that we should worship one God, but that only one God exists, metaphysically. That's a different thing. And there's polytheism, which is belief in multiple gods.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: There are even funny words like summodeism, which is the belief that you have a big pantheon, but all those other gods are really aspects or manifestations of the one god. Some people would argue that later on the Assyrians dabbled in something like summodeism. One funny thing is that even a term like atheism, which to us means you don't believe any god exists, had a different sense in the first century AD. The Romans accused Christians of atheism, because for them participating in the life of the gods was a civic responsibility. If you don't frequent the temples, you're not doing the civic, social thing a good Roman should do. You show a social disregard for the gods, so you're an atheist. So even what some of these terms meant historically has changed, and the terminology is important in this discussion.

Johnny Ova: It's fascinating how the words change and the mindset changes. When you break the bubble of what you've been taught your whole life and realize this whole other world exists, it adds so much depth to the Scriptures, the stories and what the words meant.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: Even the term that gets translated God in the Old Testament is Elohim, or sometimes El, the singular form. Both the plural and the singular get rendered God, because in most circumstances it's clear they refer to Israel's God. But the Hebrew term Elohim has a wider semantic range than we normally think. It can refer to angels as Elohim. It can refer to Yahweh, the God of Israel, as Elohim. And when Samuel is summoned up by the witch of Endor, Saul sees an Elohim coming up. So it's everything from your deceased ancestor to the one God, Yahweh.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: So when we ask whether Israel thought other gods existed, it gets confusing, because they had such a wide range of meaning for the term that gets translated God. Something closer might be asking, do you believe in a divine realm with divine beings? In that case most Christians would say, I believe in multiple divine beings: angels, and on the malevolent side, demons, and God. So those terms have a different value when we read them in the text, and when we just see the word God, we might bring certain connotations to it.

Johnny Ova: I have some questions around that, because it seems to me the divine beings are sometimes renamed to make people feel a little better about what we're talking about. I don't want to define this as a god, so let's call it an angel, or a demon. There's a standard story most scholars tell about how Israel arrived at belief in one God, since, as we just said, it seems they believed in multiple divine beings. Can you walk us through the consensus version first, and then we'll talk about why your work pushes back on it?

Dr. Matthew Lynch: Sure. It's always dangerous to talk about a consensus, because you have to take a forty-thousand-foot view. But insofar as I've researched this and talked to people, I think the general consensus is something like this. Go back to the Late Bronze Age, around the time Israel is coming into the land of Canaan. The standard view is that the writers of the Bible and the ancient Israelites themselves believed in multiple deities. Maybe they thought Yahweh had a wife named Asherah, and that other deities existed and had their legitimacy. Israel might have revered multiple gods, and they might have believed other gods had domain over other nations, each nation with its own boundary-specific deity, the Ammonites in the land of Ammon, the Moabites in Moab and so on.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: Then at a later point you have a more strident Yahwism. That's the next phase people talk about, where biblical writers, prophets and teachers in Israel started teaching that it's not just that we think highly of Yahweh, but that Yahweh is the only one we should worship. That's the henotheistic stage we talked about. The standard moment for that would be Elijah's contest with the prophets of Baal: if Baal is your god, show it by lighting this altar on fire, but if not, Yahweh will show that he has power in the land. That stridency is accompanied by a violent outburst against the prophets of Baal and Asherah in that scene. So it comes with a kind of zeal, and once we get to monotheism it's often thought of as a zealous impulse and a rejection of all others. So there's strident Yahwism, but other gods might still exist.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: The moment when strident Yahwism morphs into monotheism is usually thought to be the exile. That's because in the exile you have texts from the middle part of Isaiah, Isaiah 40 to 55, where Yahweh says things like, I am, and there is no other. There is no other God besides me. That's the smoking gun that monotheism hunters are often looking for: an explicit statement that affirms Yahweh and denies all the other gods. The thinking is that in exile, Israel is out among the nations, scattered, outside their land and outside the confines of nationalistic, land-focused thinking. They see that God is the God of all the nations, in fact the only God, and all the other gods are just fraud idols made of wood and stone. So in the exilic period this takes shape as a theological belief, it wins the day, and by the time they come back from exile they're basically reformed monotheists. That holds firm through the history of Judaism and then Christianity. That's the standard scholarly line.

Johnny Ova: How does your work push back against that? Where do you feel the story gets it wrong?

Dr. Matthew Lynch: I think it gets it wrong at several points. First of all, in how it conceptualizes monotheism in the first place, and what it demands before people will say, there it is. If your only criterion for discerning monotheism is a denial clause like "there is no other God," then you're going to say there are a few texts in Deuteronomy, mostly Isaiah 40 to 55 and maybe a few others, and that's it. It's a thin layer on the Bible. I would say that fundamentally gets wrong the way the Bible monotheizes. If you think of it as a verb, doing the work of distinguishing Yahweh as categorically supreme and unique, there are a lot of ways that happens in the Bible. There's a whole range of types of monotheistic rhetoric and language in the Bible, and it doesn't all behave the same way.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: Take Genesis 1. To be fair, a lot of scholars put it in the exilic or post-exilic period, but I'll give it as an example of a different way. It's a creation story with things that are often divinized in other cultures. The heavenly lights are called the greater light and the lesser light, the sun and the moon. The deeps are often divinized. You have reference to the sea monsters. But all of these are simply things God created and delights in. The other divinities are not given a place at the table. They're rhetorically denied entrance into the worldview Genesis 1 creates.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: Another way the monotheizing happens, which is a little counterintuitive, is that sometimes a text brings references to the Elohim, the other gods, into the picture to show that they are, first, created by God, and second, summoned to worship and give honor and glory to God. Worship him, all you Elohim, all you heavenly hosts. The Psalms sometimes do that, and Nehemiah 9 references it as well. In those cases the other Elohim are utterly subordinate, revering, extolling and praising God. Those texts monotheize in a very different way, but the result is the same: they distinguish Yahweh as categorically supreme.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: Another interesting example is the book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel almost can't use the word Elohim for those other beings. He reserves it for Yahweh, and he uses all sorts of mocking terms for the other things. One term, gillulim, I don't even know how it's normally translated, but it's basically rolled-up dung balls, as a way of referring to other deities. Or he refers to them as just images or idols, but never other gods. John Kutsko, in a really interesting study, showed how Ezekiel takes terminology used elsewhere in the Bible to refer to other gods and replaces it with terms like fraud gods, or trash, or dung balls.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: My point in all this is that there's a pretty vast range of ways that the Bible monotheizes. And when we start thinking about the rhetorical effect of all those texts, they're all putting God in a category of his own. To me that's monotheism. If Yahweh belongs in a class of his own, defines that class in himself and is utterly supreme, that's what Jews and Christians believe. Christians and Jews also believe in other divine beings, but we don't see that as a compromise of monotheism, because Yahweh is incomparably other. That's part of my pushback. And when you see the range of texts that do this work of putting God in a categorically supreme category, you realize that plotting a developmental story, polytheism to henotheism to monotheism, in a nice neat trajectory just doesn't work.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: My perspective is that ancient Israel flirted many times with monotheism, and would sometimes fall back into idolatry or henotheism or polytheism. We can't plot the trajectory in nice neat terms. That's the thing about the scholarly view: the desire for a neat story where everything moves in one inevitable direction. History doesn't normally work that way, and I don't think it did in ancient Israel.

Johnny Ova: So to recap your main point: one supreme being in its own separate category can still be called monotheism.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: Yes. Michael Heiser, who you may be familiar with, used the term "species unique." There's a way of talking about uniqueness where we're all unique from each other. You're different from me, I'm different from my wife. But we're not categorically unique from each other. We're all creatures, all created, all human. More broadly, you could extend that to the entire created realm, which is all created and derivative of God. Talking about categorical supremacy captures an impulse biblical writers have to find language for this deep conviction and experience that this God is utterly unlike any other. They're not sitting there with a theology book open in front of them, being careful to be studiously monotheistic in what they say. It's more of a worship impulse. It's more of an impulse to praise God, by celebrating through story, song and otherwise how this God is different.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. Your book starts with a single strange clue, a rare Hebrew word that shows up far more in Isaiah than anywhere else. What was that word, and what did you notice about it?

Dr. Matthew Lynch: It's a similar phenomenon to what I described in Ezekiel. First Isaiah, Isaiah 1 to 39, is usually dated by scholars to the pre-exilic period, before Israel went into exile in the Babylonian period. There's a term there used for non-Israelite deities, which is elilim. I think it's a deliberate play on the word Elohim, but it's related to a term meaning something ephemeral and insubstantial. The technical term is a dysphemism. A euphemism is saying one thing cryptically by another. A dysphemism is a deliberately mocking term for something, where you don't use the term itself. So instead of calling them Elohim, Isaiah calls them elilim. I think it's a mocking term to deny them the dignity of the title Elohim.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: That term, by the way, shows up, I forget offhand, about twelve times in Isaiah 1 to 39, out of a total of about fifteen or sixteen times in the whole Old Testament. So it's possibly a First Isaiah innovation, a made-up term to get this point across. There are other impulses in First Isaiah that suggest to me that this section is no less strident in its effort to show the utter supremacy of Yahweh. It just doesn't do it with the same language as Second Isaiah, so it didn't set off the alarm bells for monotheism hunters, because they want the denial clauses: I am, and there is no other.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: But if you deny the gods the dignity of the term Elohim, and at the same time keep up a nonstop emphasis on Yahweh being high, lifted up, supreme and exalted while all else is brought low to the dust before him, what are you doing? When you exalt Yahweh spatially with every term you can think of and deny the other gods the title Elohim, what do we call that? To my ears, that's monotheizing. And it happens before the exile. I don't think it's new to First Isaiah either. I think the same impulse goes back even earlier, and it's present in almost all forms of the Exodus tradition.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: It's almost as if, right away, in their experience of this God, Israel wanted to find ways to say he is utterly unlike any other. Maybe sometimes they still believed other gods might exist, but were as good as nonexistent, or by comparison more like a human than a god next to Yahweh. Maybe that was the case early on. It's hard to get inside their minds. But I think the impulse emerges quite early, in varied forms, because they're not philosophizing or theologizing in a detached way. They're not worried about the term monotheism. That's what makes it hard for us to put language to it.

Johnny Ova: I guess that's why you also argue Isaiah refuses to even call these rival deities gods. Isaiah seems a little snarky, a little sharp with his tongue as he writes. He won't call them gods. He demotes them to idols. And this goes back to what I said at the beginning. There are Jews and Christians who are uncomfortable with the fact that Israel worshiped multiple gods. So it seems like Isaiah takes these things, Baal and the rest, and recategorizes them to make himself feel better about what he's trying to teach.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: Absolutely. There are a lot of ways to diss the gods, and that's the one Isaiah chose. But it's confusing for us as readers sometimes, because Isaiah doesn't even want to use the term, and then over in the Psalms you have "worship him, all you gods." To reconcile that, people sometimes think the Psalms must reflect a different phase of their religious life, when they weren't monotheistic yet. I'd say no. As one New Testament scholar put it, in those texts it's like being really famous. You walk around with your whole posse, and the bigger your posse and the paparazzi around you, the more social status you have. If I say I'm famous but I walk around and no one notices me, and I don't have a bodyguard or anything, then I'm probably not that important. And I'm sure at your church you always have a bodyguard.

Johnny Ova: At least three at all times.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: At least three. So when you go out to be in touch with the common person at the grocery store, you've got your posse around you, your bodyguards, to highlight your significance. I think when we see the heavenly hosts, the angelic beings and the gods worshiping Yahweh, it's a way of saying, look how big and how significant Yahweh is. It's not, oh my goodness, there are other gods, so they're not monotheistic yet. He still belongs in a class of his own.

Johnny Ova: Is there anything else you want to add on the rhetoric of exaltation, lifting Yahweh above everything that exalts itself, and what that looks like in the text?

Dr. Matthew Lynch: I hope listeners' eyes don't glaze over, if that's the right metaphor. I did a study of all the terminology for high and low, the spatial language in Isaiah, and noticed it's highly concentrated in Isaiah 1 to 39. It doesn't drop off completely, but it drops off significantly in Isaiah 40 to 55. So I asked, what is First Isaiah doing with that language? I think if you imagine exaltation as the language you'll use to talk about Yahweh's supremacy, you're going to use up-and-down language. How can you convince someone that Yahweh is the best, and not only the best but utterly unlike any other? Being up high means that there's no room for anyone else up there. So all other reality, when it's judged and confronted with Yahweh, is brought low. Low language also prevails in First Isaiah.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: In Second Isaiah I noticed a shift in the language used to talk about Yahweh's uniqueness. I've already mentioned "I am, and there is no other." I called it a rhetoric of negation, because it constantly relegates not just other gods but all other powers to nothing before Yahweh. That made me realize that the result of both the spatial exaltation language and the rhetoric of negation falls not just on other gods. In fact, other gods are less prominent than other nations. By paying attention to this language, we see that one of the things Isaiah wants to nullify is any power we might give to a nation, an empire, a military, something like that. All the nations are dust, a drop in the bucket, nothing.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: Isaiah 40 to 55 consistently uses the Hebrew term efes, which means nothing, or dust, and similar terms for all other reality. So a lot of texts we bring into our discussion about monotheism are not just about gods and how many there were, but about any power. Those texts are often far more interested in getting Israel out of the mentality that the Assyrians or the Egyptians or the Babylonians had any real, impressive power. They constantly cut them down to size.

Johnny Ova: Here's the question most believers wrestle with. Are you describing Israel inventing monotheism over time, or describing how the texts make their case that there was only ever one God to begin with?

Dr. Matthew Lynch: There's a synergy between the two. One way of asking it is: how representative of the average Israelite is the perspective we read in the Bible? It's hard to tell, because sometimes the biblical writers are prophetic, in the sense that they speak against the consensus and against the people. Other times they capture the common worship songs and wisdom sayings of the people, and in that sense they're representative.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: I have to back up for a second to get to this point. There's a way of talking about biblical writers among scholars that I think is really unhelpful. It goes something like this: you have elite biblical writers who held certain orthodox convictions, and on the other hand you have the consensus of the people, which was heterodox, more plural and more diverse. You pit the biblical writer against the average Israelite. I think that's really mistaken, because it assumes a modern way that books come about. I think the feedback loop between text and people was much more intimate. The text represents the convictions and traditions of the people, passed on through time. That's not to say there weren't Israelites who believed in other gods. The Bible tells us that. That's no scandal.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: Did the Israelites invent monotheism? I don't know. There's an example from ancient Egypt, Pharaoh Akhenaten, in the fourteenth century, the 1300s BCE. He did a demolition job on all the other gods except the Aten, the high sun god. So for a brief moment Egypt kind of had monotheism. There's debate about whether he considered the royal family part of the pantheon, but let's assume Akhenaten was monotheistic. If so, Israel didn't invent it. But they are the ones who gave the most studied attention to one deity's supreme uniqueness for the longest period of time, and in that sense they're the ones where it stuck, whether they invented it or not. "Invented" is probably the wrong word, but you get the point.

Johnny Ova: I've just got a few more questions, and again, Dr. Lynch, thank you so much for your time today. Israel's whole story builds toward the claim that this one God finally makes himself fully known through Christ. How does the disappearance of the gods set up what comes next in the biblical story?

Dr. Matthew Lynch: I think all this monotheistic language prepares the way not just for beliefs about how many gods there were, but for beliefs about the character and nature of this God. Because Yahweh is species unique, utterly unique, the idea that this God would do utterly unique things in history follows logically from his uniqueness. It's not that this directly prepares the way for the incarnation. But combined with the conviction throughout the Old Testament that God desires to be present with his people and has gone to great lengths to make that happen, those two together prepare the way for it. I wouldn't say monotheism is a direct preparation for the incarnation, but the uniqueness of Yahweh is the enduring factor here, and that uniqueness takes utterly unique form in the incarnation. In that way it prepares for it.

Johnny Ova: Lastly, for the pastor or the skeptic listening right now, why does it matter that we get this question right?

Dr. Matthew Lynch: I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that it's a good discipline, when you're presented with an overly simple historical scheme for Israel, like polytheistic, then monolatrous, then monotheistic, never deviating one way or the other, to be skeptical, because history is complex. The emergence of beliefs is complex and has many factors. I'd encourage people not to just say the scholars are all wrong. There's some truth in the scholarly story, but it's way too simple. So keep a little niggling thought when you hear things. It could be any story, like the claim that the church tried to suppress heterodox beliefs in the early church and there are all these other stories about Jesus that just aren't told. It's more complicated than that. Having that impulse is healthy, not to be skeptical of everything all the time, but to question things in a healthy way.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: I also think the story of monotheism matters for the reasons I mentioned earlier. It's really about a worship and adoration impulse in Israel that opens up for us when we pay attention to the many colorful ways Israel kept coming back to the belief that this is a God unlike any other. That uniqueness takes shape not just in terms of power, that he can create or destroy nations, but also in terms of character. If anything, it's the utterly unique character of God that Israel cannot stop singing about and praying about and worshiping, that his loving kindness endures forever, and they just can't get over that. Attending to the qualitative difference of Yahweh, in power yes, but also in his character, is why it matters.

Johnny Ova: Awesome. Dr. Matthew Lynch, thank you so much for your time today. I enjoyed our conversation, and I know our audience will as well. I'm going to link your book. Is there any other way people can get hold of you?

Dr. Matthew Lynch: My Regent College website page has my profile, so you can probably connect with me that way.

Johnny Ova: I'll put that on there as well. Dr. Lynch, thanks again. I appreciate it.

Dr. Matthew Lynch: Thank you.