The Struggle to Define God - Robert A. Butterfield

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the protection of the Persian empire all seemed to confirm the understanding that the hardliners had of the way God operates in history. Moreover, in their view, the consistency with which God had followed this pattern of behavior—not only in their recent history but in the days all the way back to Noah—convinced them that this divine behavior was much more than a mere pattern; it was God’s very nature. Thus, for the hardliners, God was above all a just and dependable God, whose behavior was predictable because God always acted according to the principle of punishing sinners and rewarding those who do good works. In other words, the hardliners believed in a God who repays good for good and evil for evil.2 This was their definition of God. In this understanding of God, the rich are being rewarded by God for being good, and the poor are being punished for being sinners.

      It was one thing for the hardliners to adopt such a theology themselves but quite another for them to induce the rest of the Jews to accept it. The hardliners had considerable prestige and influence among Judah’s inhabitants, but these other Jews, amounting to about three-fourths of Judah’s population, had never been exiled—had never had such a transformational experience—and thus had remained polytheists just as before the Babylonian exile. For this reason, there were important differences in attitude and opinion between those who had gone into exile and those who had remained in Judah. For example, the hardliners were motivated by a zealous desire to make all Jews practice exclusive loyalty to the God of Israel, understood as the God of retribution, lest the Jews sin again and invite another divine punishment. But many Jews, including some who had converted to monotheism, were understandably less enthusiastic, or simply had other ideas, the most important of which are developed in the four texts studied and which form the crux of the struggle to define God.

      One fundamental idea came from polytheism. A polytheistic system provides gods for every problem or purpose and assumes that these gods can be propitiated by means of appropriate offerings and that all gods can be thus influenced. No god is thought to be so principle-bound and inflexible that he or she will not forgive and bless upon receipt of the right offering. To a polytheist, the notion of a god who is moralistic and judgmental, to the point of being impervious to propitiation and unfailingly committed to a policy of punishment, is very strange indeed. Thus, in postexilic Judah, whose history up until that time had been characterized by polytheism, the popular mind experienced a cognitive dissonance between already existing conceptions of gods and the predictably punitive God espoused by the hardliners. This was especially so since the idea of a gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, was not unknown among the Jews. Thus, even a Jew who had converted to monotheism might have cause to find fault with the theology of retribution, and many other Jews also had reason to dissent.

      A more important reason for Jews to reject such a theology was the simple fact that the history of Israel and Judah was replete with examples of evil people who got rich and of good people who remained poor. Such a state of affairs was a clear contradiction of the theology of retribution, according to which God feels obliged to reward the good and to punish the bad. Hence even a casual observer of society could readily recognize that the theology of retribution was far from being a satisfactory definition or explanation of God.

      For centuries before the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Babylonians, the temple had been royal property dedicated to making round-the-clock sacrifices to a whole pantheon of gods, who, so ran the reasoning, had to be appeased in order to insure national security. Thus, the temple performed a governmental function and was not intended to attract or engage the average citizen. After the Babylonian exile, when the elite re-built the temple, they made the important political decision to re-brand the temple as the organizing center of national unity, a place for all Jews to congregate and celebrate.

      But even with many government-sponsored activities designed to build solidarity and conformity, the elite in general found it difficult to make the Jews into a cohesive community that would be absolutely loyal to the God of Israel. The hardliners had even more trouble getting Jews to adopt the theology of retribution, especially because the hardliners felt that their theology required the banning of foreign wives. That policy seemed rather strange and harsh to most Jews, because they still thought of themselves mainly as what their name suggests—that is, as inhabitants of Judah—and for centuries the inhabitants of Judah had been free to marry whomever they pleased, including polytheists and women from any of the many and various ethnic groups that lived in or around Judah.

      Not surprisingly, then, social tensions and dissent arose when the hardliners announced their plan to ban foreign wives in order to create a religiously pure community. Thus, women deemed “foreign” became the object of the hardliners’ xenophobia. By “foreign,” the hardliners meant “polytheistic” or “coming from an ethnic group whom they especially disliked.” Labelling certain wives as foreign and banning them—even if those women had deep roots in Judah and had always been considered perfectly acceptable members of the community—was patently misogynist and xenophobic. Presumably, this policy of banning foreign wives was hugely unpopular. It sought to ban wives and mothers who, it can well be imagined, were much loved by their family and friends and had much to contribute to the community. Hence, the decision to ban wives whom the hardliners deemed “foreign” was sure to produce a backlash.

      Significantly, this policy singled out women as the cause of Israel’s disloyalty to God and thus reflected a strong misogynist bias. By contrast, no matching policy was aimed at banning men who had polytheistic tendencies, even though men were capable of being every bit as disloyal to God as could women. This ban suggests that the hardliners viewed women as by nature particularly threatening and dangerous—a view of women that is in fact predominant in the Hebrew Bible. But, given that the northern kingdom was polytheistic throughout its history and that Judah was also polytheistic until sometime after the Babylonian exile, there was no political or religious justification for such a misogynistic policy until after the exile, when the hardliners decided to turn the project for monotheism into a project for religious and racial purity, too. Only then—and not before—did misogyny serve any political purpose. Thus, by implication, misogynist attitudes were introduced into the biblical literature by the hardliners.

      Thus, despite the conformity and unification usually associated with the period 538–350 BCE, it is really not surprising that considerable dissent arose against the theology and policies of the hardliners.

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