Open the Old Testament and you run into a problem nobody warns you about. Israel is supposed to worship one God. Yet the text keeps naming others. Baal. Asherah. The gods of the nations. So where did they all go, and when did Israel actually land on one God alone?
Old Testament scholar Dr. Matthew Lynch of Regent College joins the Dig In Podcast to take that question apart. The standard scholarly story says monotheism showed up late, forged in the wreckage of the Babylonian exile. Dr. Lynch says that timeline is wrong, and he found the evidence hiding in a rare Hebrew word the prophet Isaiah used to humiliate the gods of the nations. What follows is a conversation about how the Bible does the work of lifting one God above every rival power, both the seen and the unseen.
In this episode you will learn:
– The real difference between monotheism, monolatry, henotheism, and polytheism, and why those distinctions change how you read the Old Testament
– Why the Hebrew word Elohim is far wider than most readers realize, covering angels, the dead, and the God of Israel himself
– The standard scholarly account of how Israel slowly arrived at one God, and exactly where Dr. Lynch believes it falls apart
– The rare term in Isaiah used to strip the gods of their dignity, a word that appears almost nowhere else in the entire Old Testament
– How Genesis 1, the Psalms, and Ezekiel each silence rival gods in completely different ways
– Why the prophets aimed their fire not just at other gods, but at the empires of Assyria, Egypt, and Babylon
– What the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten reveals about whether Israel actually invented monotheism
– How the unrivaled uniqueness of Israel’s God sets the stage for everything the New Testament claims about Christ
Guest: Dr. Matthew Lynch
Associate Professor of Old Testament at Regent College, Vancouver, and co-founder and co-host of the OnScript podcast. His books include First Isaiah and the Disappearance of the Gods, Flood and Fury: Old Testament Violence and the Shalom of God, Portraying Violence in the Hebrew Bible, and Monotheism and Institutions in the Book of Chronicles, all available on Amazon.
Connect with Dr. Lynch: https://www.regent-college.edu/faculty/lynch-matthew
First Isaiah and the Disappearance of the Gods (Critical Studies in the Hebrew Bible Book 12)- https://a.co/d/0fZgv5hS
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