The Memoirs of God: History, Memory, and the Experience of the Divine in Ancient Israel

by Mark S. Smith

Fortress, Minneapolis, 2004. 187 pp. $21.00. ISBN 0-8006-3485-3.

Mark S. Smith, a leading authority on the ancient Ugaritic literature and the history of Israelite religion in its West Semitic context, has written two important studies of the emergence of biblical monotheism: The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (2nd ed., 2002), and The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israels Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (2001). The present volume makes his earlier discussion accessible to non-specialist readers and also breaks new ground by using recent theoretical work on collective memory to illumine the process by which ancient Hebrew religion moved toward monotheism by forgetting its polytheistic origins.

Since the discovery of the Ugaritic texts early in the twentieth century, scholars have intensely examined the relationship of the early Israelite cult to its antecedents in Syro-Palestine. Until recently, many followed the masterful synthesis of W. F. Albright, who held that Israelite religion, from the start, rejected the Canaanite deities and demanded exclusive loyalty to one God, Yahweh. The normative Israelite cult, in this view, struggled against Canaanite syncretistic influence in "popular" circles, and gradually the monolatry of early Yahwism developed into fully expressed monotheism by the exilic period.

A new critical consensus is emerging, however, in which Smiths work plays an important part. According to this view, early Israelite worship included Yahweh along with El, Asherah, Baal, and other divinities attested in extra-biblical sources, especially the Ugaritic texts. Through processes of "convergence and differentiation," in Smiths terms, some features of these pre-Israelite gods merged with the figure of Yahweh, others were rejected as Canaanite. Thus at Israels origins there was no Mosaic monotheism, as Albright famously conceived it. Moreover, in order to embrace the monotheism that took shape later in the biblical period, it was necessary for Israel to reinterpret or to suppress the memory of its own polytheistic beginnings.
Smith and his colleagues reach this view of early Israelite religion by means of conventional historical-critical methods, but Smith suggests that comparative work in collective memory studies will help to explain the conflicted quality of biblical Israels relationship to its past. Though collective memory studies have a long history in European scholarship, the field is just beginning to have an impact on biblical studies in the United States. New Testament scholar Elizabeth Castelli has used collective memory theory to explain the role of martyr traditions in early Christian communities (Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture in the Making, 2004), and the Society of Biblical Literature at its 2005 annual meetings introduced a new program unit on this area of study.

Collective memory theory describes how social groups form understandings of the past. It began with the work of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s, and continued with a group of historians including Philippe Ari?s, Jacques Le Goff, Pierre Nora, and Dani?le Hervieu-Lˇger. In these studies collective memory emerges as an organic cultural production entailing multiple and disputed versions of the past. It involves both recalling and forgetting, concealing and refashioning, as much of history as it preserves. Smiths central assertion is that despite the presence of much "historical looking" information in the Hebrew Bible, the biblical record is more collective memory than historiography.

Smith begins the book with a survey of the biblical account of Israels history in Genesis:2 Kings and Ezra:Nehemiah, taking a moderate position vis-ˆ-vis the "minimalist-maximalist" historical arguments about biblical Israel. This section gives the general reader a good overview of the current debate, but Smiths purpose is not to advance the argument over Israels historicity. Instead, he highlights the tendency of biblical accounts to combine historical information with later cultural memories and reinterpretations of the past. For example, the description of the Jerusalem Temple in 1 Kings 6:8, in Smiths judgment, likely contains some reliable data concerning the original tenth-century b.c.e. sanctuary; but the present text combines so many later perspectives on the Temples significance that it might be described as "an echo chamber of the past views of the Temple" (p. 18). Historiography, since its beginnings with Herodotus and Thucydides, has always entailed critical controls such as the comparison of multiple sources and criteria for the verification of historical evidence. The biblical authors have no interest in such procedures. They allow multiple versions of events to coexist side by side, and they repeatedly reframe earlier material with later interpretations.

Collective memory research shows that societal crises often occasion cultural shifts in views of the past. Smith continues his discussion by reviewing the various historical challenges to Israelite and Judean culture during the biblical period. These include shifts in the meaning of Israelite or Judean identity and threats to the very survival of Israel and Judah in the Assyrian and Babylonian onslaughts of the eighth and sixth centuries b.c.e. Smith observes that in the aftermath of these disasters, the emerging biblical claim that one God guided history, blessing and punishing Israel, became a central way of making sense of the past.

Smiths next chapter traces in more detail the emergence of the monotheistic idea. Following the scheme of his earlier work, he maintains that the earliest Israelite cult centered on a divine royal household ordered like the Ugaritic pantheon. At the head of this household was El and his consort Asherah. Baal, Yahweh, and other deities held secondary rank. By the monarchic period, the national divinity Yahweh (now Yahweh-El), became king of the gods, still accompanied by Asherah; the sun, moon, and astral deities held secondary rank. Eventually the perspective advanced by the Deuteronomists and others prevailed, in which Yahweh alone headed the cult and other figures were suppressed, with the exception of divine messengers and servants.

The final chapter expands on the significance of collective memory theory for understanding the development of biblical monotheism. The central point here is that both cultural memory and amnesia are at work in the emergence of Israels monotheistic faith. The development of the Sinai tradition is a key illustration. Originally a minor element, the Sinai revelation is eventually enshrined in cultural memory (and Scripture) as the most important event. Sinai, "mountain above all others," looms over every religious site. Centuries of religious innovation from the monarchic, exilic, and postexilic periods are transposed back onto the foundational setting of Sinai, transforming it from a commemoration of sole worship of Yahweh (Exod 20:3) to the basis for denying the reality of other gods (Deut 4:35). In actuality there were other gods at the beginning of Israels religious history, but they fall to collective amnesia. The original distinction of Yahweh and El fades, Baal largely converges with Yahweh, and Asherah is excluded. The divine household diminishes, and elements of earlier Israelite cultic practice are projected onto the essential biblical Other, the Canaanite.

Many of the details of Smiths historical reconstruction will continue to be contested, but his work will surely be foundational for further study. He is to be commended for making this work accessible to a wider audience. Many questions likewise remain about the use of collective memory studies. How does cultural memory function in oral form as opposed to literate settings, and where does such a distinction apply to the biblical material? What are the differences between the settings of ancient Israel and modern Europe, where much of the pioneering collective memory research has been applied? Smiths book is only an initial sounding into this area, but it is an insightful and promising project.

For student use, the book contains a chronological table outlining Smiths historical reconstruction from the Late Bronze Age to the first century c.e., plus maps. This volume lacks the encyclopedic footnotes of Smiths earlier books, but good bibliographies help readers pursue Smiths references. The volume concludes with a thoughtful postscript on the theological implications of Smiths study, especially the problematic place of history in contemporary theology and biblical studies. This afterword, like the rest of the book, is highly recommended.

Harold C. Washington
Saint Paul School of Theology
Kansas city, Missouri

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The Social Roots of Biblical Yahwism

by Stephen L. Cook

Society of Biblical Literature, Atlanta, 2004. 310 pp. $39.95. ISBN 1-58983-098-9.

The central thesis of this book is that the dominant beliefs shaping the Hebrew Bible have early and deep roots in the village system of ancient Israel. These beliefs consist of certain basic tenets. Israel is God's elected vassal by means of covenant and the land is Israel's inheritance with God as sole landlord. Israel's tenancy on the land is conditional on keeping covenant, which necessitates tempered rule by state and village leaders who keep the covenant. These beliefs, dubbed biblical Yahwism, are widely recognized in biblical scholarship as enshrined in Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua through Kings), with pronounced affinities to the Pentateuchal E source and to the prophets Hosea, Jeremiah, and Malachi.

Cook attempts to situate this cluster of beliefs within the stream of Israelite social history by focusing on Hosea and Micah, whom he studies with a literary analysis informed by social-scientific methodology. His conclusion is that this biblical Yahwistic cult and theology is older than Deuteronomy (seventh century) since it appears in writings from the eighth century that draw on a village social and religious system (as opposed to a state system), ultimately deriving from premonarchic tribal Israel. He locates the origins of these dominant beliefs at a far earlier time than do most scholars. Using comparative anthropology and sociology, Cook proposes that the village-derived theology of Hosea and Micah is grounded in their village-based roles as levitical priest (Hosea) and village elder (Micah).

Without doubt, this comparative study of traditional tribal societies, and how they respond to pressure from centralized polities, significantly illuminates the biblical texts. His perceptive explication of the socioreligious roles of rural elders and priests, as a template for understanding the social and religious settings of Hosea and Micah, exhibits a judicious joining of literary and social criticisms. Since his argument depends heavily on an exegesis of these two prophetic books, it is important that he seriously engages the text even when he views it in novel, sometimes problematic, ways (e.g., Hos 12:2Ð6 and Mic 5:1Ð6). This makes the book an exegetical goldmine for preachers and church educators. A further contribution is calling on the Psalms of Asaph (Pss 50; 73Ð83) as witness to a spirited articulation of biblical Yahwism in northern Israel prior to the fall of Samaria in 722 b.c.e. and thus to include it as one of the witnesses to covenantal theology preceding Hosea and Micah. In his view, this commitment to exclusive Yahwism was not first introduced to the south after the northern kingdom fell, contrary to prevailing scholarly opinion. Rather, as Micah attests, it was a theology and cult common to north and south from earliest times.

Cook has shown that the village roots of covenantal theology run deep in ancient Israel. That they also run early depends on the assumption that the written accounts of premonarchic Israel provide us a reasonably authentic sketch of Israel's tribal religion. Many scholars persuaded by the trenchancy of his interpretation of Hosea and Micah may nonetheless insist that he has not shown the village-based roots of Hosea and Micah to be necessarily much earlier than the eighth century, given that the village system did not cease with the rise of monarchy but persisted in Israel as one part of a dual system. At most, some skeptics might concede a measure of plausibility to Cook's claim that the palace coup initiated by the Jerusalem priest Jehoiada (2 Kgs 11) indicates that covenantal theology can be traced back to at least the mid-ninth century.
The preceding scholarly work most nearly approximating Cook's study is Morton Smith's Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament (1971). Smith also locates the earliest direct reference to exclusivist Yahwism in the ninth century in the reforms of the Judahite king Asa. Smith differs sharply in that he conceives early Israelite Yahwism as deeply indebted to Canaanite religion. When Cook rejects any biblical Yahwistic dependence on Canaanite religion, he unaccountably overrules many studies that demonstrate definite continuity between features of Canaanite religion and Yahwism.

Cook seems to be securing a kind of pure covenantal cult and theology, isolated from and uncontaminated by the religious beliefs and practices in its environment. He goes on to conceive this unassailable biblical Yahwism as the true religion of ancient Israel, constituting the foundation of contemporary Jewish and Christian beliefs. I question whether the convincing aspects of Cook's thesis actually hinge on the precise temporal origins of a self-contained covenantal theology. Cook wants to argue that the monotheism evident in this theology runs in an unbroken line from earliest times to its apotheosis in the completed Hebrew Bible. His choice of the term biblical Yahwism is intended to show that covenantal theology, starting out on the margins of society and contesting other religious cults, eventually became the dominant theology expressed in the Hebrew Bible.

The danger in this way of conceptualizing covenantal theology is positing a theology that throughout the course of centuries exhibited the very same features and occupied the very same social space as the monotheistic orientation of the completed Hebrew Bible. Cook warns against just such a notion of biblical Yahwism as fixed and unchanging with this qualification: I do not mean to suggest that the Bible's religious claims emerged in old Israel fully formed and inert. . . . There is no doubt that the Bible's theological traditions grew over time and responded to changing events. There was imagination, ingenuity, and political activism along the way (p. 2). In spite of this pointed caution, Cook's reconstruction of the course of biblical Yahwism seems curiously static.

Cook does considerable disservice to his painstaking argument about the nuances of covenantal theology in Hosea and Micah when he collapses this innerbiblical plurality of perspectives (p. 2) into the leveling term biblical, as if the covenantal notions of the author of the Song of Deborah or of the eighth century prophets were the same as those of the authors of Isaiah 40Ð55 or Ezra and Nehemiah. Equally inappropriate is the term Sinai theology to encapsulate this covenantal religion, presumably because the covenantal texts make Moses the progenitor of the covenant. Absolutely none of his argument rests on the historicity of Moses or the events described in Exodus through Deuteronomy.

The erroneous impression made by biblical and Sinai to qualify the Yahwism in question is compounded by the boo words Cook identifies as mistakenly applied by interpreters to biblical monotheism. Evolution, development, innovation, revolution, ideology, egalitarianism, democracy, and liberation are uniformly derided as distortions of the covenant theology and its prophetic practitioners. In choosing this derisive vocabulary to rebut other interpretations of biblical religion, Cook overlooks that he already has admitted to the long slow growth of Sinai theology and its changing responses to new events, as well as its determined defense of social justice for all Israelites.

Similarly, by renouncing the social-scientific category of ideology, he flies in the face of his own careful delineation of the social, political, and religious perspectives and commitments of village folk by making use of a well-recognized social-scientific understanding of ideology. To call the prophets reactionary rather than revolutionary presents false and imprecise alternatives to their forceful advocacy of Yahweh's lordship, including the likelihood of their participation in plans to overthrow wayward kings and replace them with leaders sworn to uphold covenantal standards in cult and in administration of social justice. In addition to self-contradiction, the negative slant that he gives to these terms is seldom explained, with the exception of evolution. Here, Cook is rejecting nineteenth century Hegelian/Wellhausian versions of the process, largely straw men because few biblical scholars today advocate these somewhat simplistic unilinear views of religious evolution. Neither does he give clear definitions of preferred terms such as monotheism and repristination.

The specific claims that Cook makes about Hosea and Micah as tradents of covenantal theology are strikingly persuasive. He is to be commended for his original contribution to biblical scholarship on this precise point. In his reconstruction of Hosea's and Micah's role in village-oriented Yahwism, Cook provides a stellar example of how social-scientific methods can be fruitfully joined with historical-literary criticism. When he wanders into sweeping generalizations and grossly imprecise interpretations of the trajectory of covenantal theology from its origins to its incorporation in the Hebrew Bible, he is on ground not only tangential to his fundamental argument but subversive of its best features. With its manifest virtues and its regrettable lapses, this book is worthy of debate. It is through disputation about critical issues sharply articulated and carried on with a fair hearing for all parties that biblical studies advance~dare I say~evolve?
Norman K. Gottwald
Pacific School of Religion Berkeley, California

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