Karen Armstrong - A History of God--The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

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our sources are incomplete - Baal is brought back to life and restored to Anat. This apotheosis of wholeness and harmony,
symbolised by the union of the sexes, was celebrated by means of ritual sex in ancient Canaan. By imitating the gods in this
way, men and women would share their struggle against sterility and ensure the creativity and fertility of the world. The
death of a god, the quest of the goddess and the triumphant return to the divine sphere were constant religious themes in
many cultures and would recur in the very different religion of the One God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims.
This religion is attributed in the Bible to Abraham, who left Ur and eventually settled in Canaan some time between the
twentieth and nineteenth centuries BCE. We have no contemporary record of Abraham but scholars think that he may have
been one of the wandering chieftains who had led their people from Mesopotamia towards the Mediterranean at the end of
the third millennium BCE. These wanderers, some of whom are called Abiru, Apiru or Habiru in Mesopotamian and
Egyptian sources, spoke West Semitic languages, of which Hebrew is one. They were not regular desert nomads like the
Bedouin, who migrated with their flocks according to the cycle of the seasons, but were more difficult to classify and, as
such, were frequently in conflict with the conservative authorities. Their cultural status was usually superior to the desert folk.
Some served as mercenaries, others became government employees, others worked as merchants, servants or tinkers.
Some became rich and might then try to acquire land and settle down. The stories about Abraham in the book of Genesis
show him serving the King of Sodom as a mercenary and describe his frequent conflicts with the authorities of Canaan and
its environs. Eventually, when his wife Sarah died, Abraham bought land in Hebron, now on the West Bank.
The Genesis account of Abraham and his immediate descendants may indicate that there were three main waves of early
Hebrew settlement in Canaan, the modern Israel. One was associated with Abraham and Hebron and took place in about
1850 BCE. A second wave of immigration was linked with Abraham's grandson Jacob, who was renamed Israel ('May
God show his strength!'); he settled in Shechem, which is now the Arab town of Nablus on the West Bank. The Bible tells
us that Jacob's sons, who became the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel, emigrated to Egypt during a severe famine in
Canaan. The third wave of Hebrew settlement occurred in about 1200 BCE when tribes who claimed to be descendants of
Abraham, arrived in Canaan from Egypt. They said that they had been enslaved by the Egyptians but had been liberated by
a deity called Yahweh, who was the god of their leader Moses. After they had forced their way into Canaan, they allied
themselves with the Hebrews there and became known as the people of Israel. The Bible makes it clear that the people we
know as the ancient Israelites were a confederation of various ethnic groups, bound principally together by their loyalty to
Yahweh, the God of Moses. The biblical account was written down centuries later, however, in about the eighth century
BCE, though it certainly drew on earlier narrative sources. During the nineteenth century, some German biblical scholars
developed a critical method which discerned four different sources in the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
These were later collated into the final text of what we know as the Pentateuch during the fifth century BCE. This form
criticism has come in for a good deal of harsh treatment but nobody has yet come up with a more satisfactory theory, which
explains why there are two quite different accounts of key biblical events, such as the Creation or the Flood, and why the
Bible sometimes contradicts itself. The two earliest biblical authors, whose work is found in Genesis and Exodus, were
probably writing during the eighth century, though some would give them an earlier date. One is known as 'J' because he
calls his God 'Yahweh', the other 'E' since he prefers to use the more formal divine tide 'Elohim'. By the eighth century, the
Israelites had divided Canaan into two separate kingdoms. J was writing in the southern Kingdom of Judah, while E came
from the northern Kingdom of Israel. (See Map p.8). We will discuss the two other sources of the Pentateuch - the
Deuteronomist (D) and Priestly (P) accounts of the ancient history of Israel - in Chapter Two.
We shall see that in many respects both J and E shared the religious perspectives of their neighbours in the Middle East but
their accounts do show that by the eighth century BCE, the Israelites were beginning to develop a distinct vision of their
own. J, for example, starts his history of God with an account of the creation of the world which, compared with the Enuma
Elish, is startlingly perfunctory:
At the time when Yahweh God made earth and heaven, there was as yet no wild bush on the earth nor had
any wild plant yet sprung up, for Yahweh God had not sent rain on the earth nor was there any man to till
the soil. However, a flood was rising from the earth and watering all the surface of the soil. Yahweh God
fashioned man (adam) of dust from the soil (adamah). Then he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life
and thus man became a living being. {6}
This was an entirely new departure. Instead of concentrating on the creation of the world and on the prehistoric period like
his pagan contemporaries in Mesopotamia and Canaan, J is more interested in ordinary historical time. There would be no
real interest in creation in Israel until the sixth century BCE, when the author whom we call 'P' wrote his majestic account in