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kyladenae94's review
4.0
4 stars because i’m very certain my reaction is mostly because of the tone—very much pop-history, polemical in all the wrong places—and because i would have liked more technical detail & also good faith assessments of others’ viewpoints.
dean_issov's review
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
📚 Description
This book is a work of detective nonfiction. But I am going to give away where it is headed. I believe we can get at what probably took place in Egypt over three millennia ago. That would be a lot. But we have much more. We have evidence that without the historical anchor of the exodus, we would not have had the rise of the idea of monotheism. And without the experience of that returning group from Egypt, we might not have had the ethic of caring for the stranger. Monotheism and loving others as ourselves—two radical developments, major developments, in human consciousness became embodied in the heart of Western religion.
Whether one is a monotheist, a polytheist, an atheist, an agnostic, or an observer from another planet, one can recognize the significance of monotheism as a stage in the human adventure here on earth. And whether one is an ethicist, a politician, a minister, a rabbi, or just any decent human being, one can estimate the value of humans’ arrival at the idea of loving others as ourselves. Without the exodus we might have arrived at these ideas much later, or in a much different form, or not at all. Those are the stakes here: a story, history, and immense consequences.
- Richard Elliott Friedman, Introduction
✔️ What I liked
1. It's unbiased, the author only wants to give you the truth.
2. It's accessible for laypeople while still being a good scholarly work.
3. You can sense how important and personal this topic is to the author.
4. It debunks a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings about the Exodus and Genesis.
❌ What I didn't like
1. N/A
📑 Notes/Highlights
1. People say that the Bible is the only book ever successfully written by a committee, but we also note that this is probably because the committee never held a meeting. And we cannot attribute all the Egyptian names to an editor (usually referred to as a redactor) who threw them in when he assembled the text. We know this because no single person edited all of these texts. The Pentateuch (Genesis to Deuteronomy), the Deuteronomistic history (Deuteronomy to 2 Kings), the Psalms, the prophets, and the Chronicler’s history (1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah) were all edited at different times by different people.
2. Israel had choices. They could have chosen to worship only El. They could have chosen to worship only Yahweh. They could have chosen to worship both. They could have said that El is Yahweh’s father, or his son. But they chose none of these. They said: El is Yahweh. He was always Yahweh, but the Israelites in the land had not known this name because He did not reveal it until the time that these Levites were to come from Egypt to Israel. He revealed it to His greatest prophet, their leader, Moses. The Levites’ sources E and P retained this story as a crucial development in the people’s history. But the author of the J source, living in this same period, long after the acceptance of Yahweh as the proper name of God, and who was not a Levite priest, could not have cared less about when it started, and so he or she just told the story without including that transition. And that would explain how we came to have the crucial name of God distinction that helped us to separate the Bible’s sources to this day. That story is important itself, but it reflects something vastly more important. Yahweh and El are one.
3. So the picture that is proposed here is that there was an exodus. There was not a conquest. There was an introduction and merger of Yahweh, the God of the exodus experience, with El, the God of the Israelite experience. That merger was—it had to have been—a crucial step in the formation of monotheism. Whether you think that the formation and ultimate victory of monotheism was in the twelfth century BCE or the eighth or the seventh, sixth, or fifth, it is hard to see how it would have happened if Yahweh and El had long been two distinct gods of Israel. If there was an exodus, it was necessarily small in numbers. Does it really ruin your day if the exodus was historical but not all of the Israelites were in it? It was more than an escape or even a liberation. It was, unknown to the people who experienced it, a necessary part—a foundational part—of religion, literature, and history ever after.
4. Texts from the neighboring lands refer to the people, to their kings, to their government, to their armies, and to their cities. The basic fact is: everybody knew that Israel was there: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Arameans, the Moabites, the Persians.
5. In the last chapter we spoke of Pharaoh Merneptah (1213–1203 BCE), who refers to the people of Israel in a stone stele. Pharaoh Shoshenk I, in the tenth century BCE, describes his campaign in which he refers to cities in Israel (including Ayalon, Beth-Shan, Megiddo, Rehob, and Taanach). Assyrian King Shalmaneser III, in the ninth century BCE, names King Ahab “the Israelite” among his opponents in his Kurkh monument and names and pictures King Jehu of Israel on his Black Obelisk, which is now in the British Museum. The Assyrian emperor Sennacherib, in the eighth century BCE, describes in detail his siege of Jerusalem and its king “Hezekiah the Judean,” also in the British Museum. Six other Assyrian emperors refer to Israel and Judah as well and name kings whose reigns are also recorded in the Bible.
6. The Babylonian sources, too, refer to the Jews and their monarchy in the years after the Babylonians replaced the Assyrian empire. And the record continues when the Persians replace the Babylonians, as documented in the Cylinder of Cyrus, the Persian emperor. Cyrus’ decree in 538 BCE let the exiled Jews return to their land. It was followed by an influx of Jewish population. There was population growth from the reign of Darius I to Artaxerxes I. The country that the Babylonians had conquered was reestablished as a state of Judah (yehud medintha) within the Persian umbrella. You want irony? Persia, today called Iran, the country that reestablished the Jews’ country in biblical times, had a president who said that Israel has no roots there.
7. The Levite community that left Egypt may have been led by an Egyptian man, Moses, who was attracted to that one-God idea, and when they arrived at Midian he married a priest’s daughter and learned of the God Yahweh, whom he identified as the one God. Or the Levites may have left Egypt and then met a Midianite man, Moses, and were attracted to identify his God Yahweh as the one God. Or maybe Moses and/or the Levites found the idea of one God on their own, and they were then influenced either by the Egyptian monotheism in the air or by the Midianite faith of Yahweh. We can arrange these puzzle pieces in a number of possible ways. The bottom line, though, one way or another, is that the Levites had spent time in both Egypt and Midian, their God was Yahweh, and then they came to Israel.
8. In the study of the sources of the Bible, we attribute the creation story in Genesis 1 to the Priestly source (P). This story is where God says “Let us make a human, in our image.” And we attribute the stories of the Garden of Eden and the tower of Babylon to the source called J. These stories are where God says “The human has become like one of us” and “Let us go down and babble their language.” The point is that two different authors, two of the major authors of the Bible’s first books, both had this idea that God speaks in the plural only at the beginning of their story and then never again. In the past, when people read those authors’ divine plurals, they concluded that these authors were not monotheistic. And when they read the story of the male gods having sex with human women, this seemed to confirm that these authors were not monotheistic. But all of those things end after the tower of Babylon story. The author of J and the author of P and the poets of Psalm 82 and the Song of Moses all reflect this idea that there used to be gods, but no more. That is why that Song of Moses could say that God apportioned the nations to the gods in verse 8, but the very same song could say “I, I am He, and there are no gods with me” in verse 39. The theology is consistent: Once there were gods. Now there are not.
9. When monotheism began to catch on in Israel, when the prophets no longer had to browbeat people to stop worshipping all those other gods, when the Israelite moms and dads and Sunday (or Saturday) school teachers were teaching their children that there is only one God—whenever things reached that point—they had to explain what had happened to the gods. The idea of the death of the gods was already a known concept in the ancient Near East. I think that the answer to the question of why they were drawn to that idea in Israel lies in the questions with which I began this chapter: What did people think of their parents and grandparents who had worshipped the gods? What did they think happened to the gods—and the goddesses? What did they tell their children? When the children were taught that there is only one God, and they asked, “But Grandma worshipped lots of gods. Was Grandma bad?” the parent could answer, “No, dear. Grandma wasn’t bad. There used to be those gods, but they were bad, and they died. And now there is only one God.” What I have simplified here as a little conversation between a parent and child must have existed as a real theological issue that needed an answer. And, actually, it may well have occurred in numerous family and school conversations like this as well. Religious changes require religious explanations. And the mythological background of gods dying in the ancient Near Eastern pagan religions made this religious explanation fit right in. It was not even necessarily a radical idea. Gods die. What was radical was getting the number down to one.
10. Indeed, there is context and there is *context*. As we saw, in the full context of the first books of the Bible, starting with creation and with caring for all the families of the earth, we would not imagine the verse about loving your neighbor to apply only to one’s own people. And in the full context of the occurrences of the word rē‘a, too, we would never take the verse about loving your neighbor to mean: now that is just if your neighbor has the same religion as you. These people who have been reading the verse as meaning just-your-own-kind were both misreading the immediate context of the passage and completely missing its total context in the Bible.
❓ Would I recommend this book?
Yes. I highly recommend this and also Friedman's other book "Who Wrote The Bible?" Both of these books are, in my opinion, his best works for laypeople.
This book is a work of detective nonfiction. But I am going to give away where it is headed. I believe we can get at what probably took place in Egypt over three millennia ago. That would be a lot. But we have much more. We have evidence that without the historical anchor of the exodus, we would not have had the rise of the idea of monotheism. And without the experience of that returning group from Egypt, we might not have had the ethic of caring for the stranger. Monotheism and loving others as ourselves—two radical developments, major developments, in human consciousness became embodied in the heart of Western religion.
Whether one is a monotheist, a polytheist, an atheist, an agnostic, or an observer from another planet, one can recognize the significance of monotheism as a stage in the human adventure here on earth. And whether one is an ethicist, a politician, a minister, a rabbi, or just any decent human being, one can estimate the value of humans’ arrival at the idea of loving others as ourselves. Without the exodus we might have arrived at these ideas much later, or in a much different form, or not at all. Those are the stakes here: a story, history, and immense consequences.
- Richard Elliott Friedman, Introduction
✔️ What I liked
1. It's unbiased, the author only wants to give you the truth.
2. It's accessible for laypeople while still being a good scholarly work.
3. You can sense how important and personal this topic is to the author.
4. It debunks a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings about the Exodus and Genesis.
❌ What I didn't like
1. N/A
📑 Notes/Highlights
1. People say that the Bible is the only book ever successfully written by a committee, but we also note that this is probably because the committee never held a meeting. And we cannot attribute all the Egyptian names to an editor (usually referred to as a redactor) who threw them in when he assembled the text. We know this because no single person edited all of these texts. The Pentateuch (Genesis to Deuteronomy), the Deuteronomistic history (Deuteronomy to 2 Kings), the Psalms, the prophets, and the Chronicler’s history (1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah) were all edited at different times by different people.
2. Israel had choices. They could have chosen to worship only El. They could have chosen to worship only Yahweh. They could have chosen to worship both. They could have said that El is Yahweh’s father, or his son. But they chose none of these. They said: El is Yahweh. He was always Yahweh, but the Israelites in the land had not known this name because He did not reveal it until the time that these Levites were to come from Egypt to Israel. He revealed it to His greatest prophet, their leader, Moses. The Levites’ sources E and P retained this story as a crucial development in the people’s history. But the author of the J source, living in this same period, long after the acceptance of Yahweh as the proper name of God, and who was not a Levite priest, could not have cared less about when it started, and so he or she just told the story without including that transition. And that would explain how we came to have the crucial name of God distinction that helped us to separate the Bible’s sources to this day. That story is important itself, but it reflects something vastly more important. Yahweh and El are one.
3. So the picture that is proposed here is that there was an exodus. There was not a conquest. There was an introduction and merger of Yahweh, the God of the exodus experience, with El, the God of the Israelite experience. That merger was—it had to have been—a crucial step in the formation of monotheism. Whether you think that the formation and ultimate victory of monotheism was in the twelfth century BCE or the eighth or the seventh, sixth, or fifth, it is hard to see how it would have happened if Yahweh and El had long been two distinct gods of Israel. If there was an exodus, it was necessarily small in numbers. Does it really ruin your day if the exodus was historical but not all of the Israelites were in it? It was more than an escape or even a liberation. It was, unknown to the people who experienced it, a necessary part—a foundational part—of religion, literature, and history ever after.
4. Texts from the neighboring lands refer to the people, to their kings, to their government, to their armies, and to their cities. The basic fact is: everybody knew that Israel was there: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Arameans, the Moabites, the Persians.
5. In the last chapter we spoke of Pharaoh Merneptah (1213–1203 BCE), who refers to the people of Israel in a stone stele. Pharaoh Shoshenk I, in the tenth century BCE, describes his campaign in which he refers to cities in Israel (including Ayalon, Beth-Shan, Megiddo, Rehob, and Taanach). Assyrian King Shalmaneser III, in the ninth century BCE, names King Ahab “the Israelite” among his opponents in his Kurkh monument and names and pictures King Jehu of Israel on his Black Obelisk, which is now in the British Museum. The Assyrian emperor Sennacherib, in the eighth century BCE, describes in detail his siege of Jerusalem and its king “Hezekiah the Judean,” also in the British Museum. Six other Assyrian emperors refer to Israel and Judah as well and name kings whose reigns are also recorded in the Bible.
6. The Babylonian sources, too, refer to the Jews and their monarchy in the years after the Babylonians replaced the Assyrian empire. And the record continues when the Persians replace the Babylonians, as documented in the Cylinder of Cyrus, the Persian emperor. Cyrus’ decree in 538 BCE let the exiled Jews return to their land. It was followed by an influx of Jewish population. There was population growth from the reign of Darius I to Artaxerxes I. The country that the Babylonians had conquered was reestablished as a state of Judah (yehud medintha) within the Persian umbrella. You want irony? Persia, today called Iran, the country that reestablished the Jews’ country in biblical times, had a president who said that Israel has no roots there.
7. The Levite community that left Egypt may have been led by an Egyptian man, Moses, who was attracted to that one-God idea, and when they arrived at Midian he married a priest’s daughter and learned of the God Yahweh, whom he identified as the one God. Or the Levites may have left Egypt and then met a Midianite man, Moses, and were attracted to identify his God Yahweh as the one God. Or maybe Moses and/or the Levites found the idea of one God on their own, and they were then influenced either by the Egyptian monotheism in the air or by the Midianite faith of Yahweh. We can arrange these puzzle pieces in a number of possible ways. The bottom line, though, one way or another, is that the Levites had spent time in both Egypt and Midian, their God was Yahweh, and then they came to Israel.
8. In the study of the sources of the Bible, we attribute the creation story in Genesis 1 to the Priestly source (P). This story is where God says “Let us make a human, in our image.” And we attribute the stories of the Garden of Eden and the tower of Babylon to the source called J. These stories are where God says “The human has become like one of us” and “Let us go down and babble their language.” The point is that two different authors, two of the major authors of the Bible’s first books, both had this idea that God speaks in the plural only at the beginning of their story and then never again. In the past, when people read those authors’ divine plurals, they concluded that these authors were not monotheistic. And when they read the story of the male gods having sex with human women, this seemed to confirm that these authors were not monotheistic. But all of those things end after the tower of Babylon story. The author of J and the author of P and the poets of Psalm 82 and the Song of Moses all reflect this idea that there used to be gods, but no more. That is why that Song of Moses could say that God apportioned the nations to the gods in verse 8, but the very same song could say “I, I am He, and there are no gods with me” in verse 39. The theology is consistent: Once there were gods. Now there are not.
9. When monotheism began to catch on in Israel, when the prophets no longer had to browbeat people to stop worshipping all those other gods, when the Israelite moms and dads and Sunday (or Saturday) school teachers were teaching their children that there is only one God—whenever things reached that point—they had to explain what had happened to the gods. The idea of the death of the gods was already a known concept in the ancient Near East. I think that the answer to the question of why they were drawn to that idea in Israel lies in the questions with which I began this chapter: What did people think of their parents and grandparents who had worshipped the gods? What did they think happened to the gods—and the goddesses? What did they tell their children? When the children were taught that there is only one God, and they asked, “But Grandma worshipped lots of gods. Was Grandma bad?” the parent could answer, “No, dear. Grandma wasn’t bad. There used to be those gods, but they were bad, and they died. And now there is only one God.” What I have simplified here as a little conversation between a parent and child must have existed as a real theological issue that needed an answer. And, actually, it may well have occurred in numerous family and school conversations like this as well. Religious changes require religious explanations. And the mythological background of gods dying in the ancient Near Eastern pagan religions made this religious explanation fit right in. It was not even necessarily a radical idea. Gods die. What was radical was getting the number down to one.
10. Indeed, there is context and there is *context*. As we saw, in the full context of the first books of the Bible, starting with creation and with caring for all the families of the earth, we would not imagine the verse about loving your neighbor to apply only to one’s own people. And in the full context of the occurrences of the word rē‘a, too, we would never take the verse about loving your neighbor to mean: now that is just if your neighbor has the same religion as you. These people who have been reading the verse as meaning just-your-own-kind were both misreading the immediate context of the passage and completely missing its total context in the Bible.
❓ Would I recommend this book?
Yes. I highly recommend this and also Friedman's other book "Who Wrote The Bible?" Both of these books are, in my opinion, his best works for laypeople.
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