Paul Clark

Reviewed by Paul Clark. Originally posted April 2023.

One thing Römer stresses is the mutability of the early texts that were later incorporated into the Hebrew Bible. Under most circumstances, papyrus and vellum scrolls don’t remain legible for long and must be copied out again every few decades. This offers ample opportunity to edit, add and delete, and scholars have learned how to spot the tell-tale signs of interpolation.

Römer begins his survey by looking at the god’s name. He opts for Yhwh rather than the more common Yahweh, since we cannot actually be sure about the vowels, which were not written in early Hebrew. He then examines the evidence concerning Yhwh’s geographical origins, concluding that the area around the Negev desert, Sanai and northern Arabia is his most likely source.

How the Ancient Israelites came to adopt Yhwh is uncertain. Römer speculates that a nomadic tribe or clan may have taken him north with them around 1000 BCE. However, the religion of the Israelites and Judahites wasn’t very different from that of their neighbours. Yhwh was just one of the many gods they worshipped, and for a long time, he probably wasn’t their main god. He was also worshipped as a minor god by many of Israel and Judah’s near neighbours.

Römer sets out evidence that suggests Yhwh originally shared Solomon’s temple with other gods – it is likely that the temple’s most important god was in fact a sun god. He shows that the temple probably contained a statue of Yhwh, whilst the golden calves at Bethel and Dan were not seats of Yhwh, as many scholars suggest, but statues of him.

Over time, Yhwh was promoted to the status of the national god of Israel and Judah and began to take on features of other gods. There was nothing unusual about this: something similar happened to national gods in other countries in the region. What was unusual was the emergence in the eighth century BCE of a Yhwh-only party, prophets and priests who insisted that Israelites and Judahites should only worship Yhwh, to the exclusion of all other gods. This was not monotheism: merely a conviction that a covenant with Yhwh forbade the worship of other gods, even Yhwh’s wife Asherah.

In the decades after the fall of the Kingdom of Israel in 720 BCE, the Yhwh-only party came to power in Judah, first (perhaps) under King Hezekiah and later under the boy-King Josiah. Once in power, they tried and largely failed to suppress the worship of other gods. Römer shows that many Judahites would later blame the catastrophic Babylonian invasion of 586 BCE on their failure to give Asherah the devotion due to her.

For those Yhwh-worshipping notables carted off to exile in Babylon, two explanations were possible. Either the Babylonian god Marduk was stronger than Yhwh, or Yhwh himself had used the Babylonians to punish the Judahites for their failure to worship only him. If the latter is the case, then Yhwh becomes a far more powerful god, not merely a national god but one who can use other nations to execute his will. This was an important step on the way to monotheism.

However, Römer says that true monotheism didn’t develop until after the Persians had conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews (as the remnants of the Judahites were now known) to return home and restore their temple. He accepts the thesis that Zoroastrianism influenced both the development of monotheism and the emergence of Satan as God’s adversary, but he says that since we don’t actually know very much about Zoroastrianism in that period, it is difficult to say how this influence manifested itself or how important it was.

Römer briefly takes us through the Persian and Hellenistic eras and discusses the importance of the Jewish diaspora in Egypt and Mesopotamia. He notes the attraction of Jewish monotheism for many gentiles and the emergence of the apocalyptic ideas that would later give birth to Christianity.

This book is very readable, though occasionally I found myself wondering whether the translator should have gone for something like of “place name” rather than a word like “toponym”. Römer guides us through his argument step by step, always laying out his evidence clearly. Since he is aiming at an academic audience, he does assume greater familiarity with history and the Biblical text than many general readers may possess, but in the age of quick searches using Google and Wikipedia, this isn’t much of a problem. If you have some knowledge of the topic and want a cutting-edge understanding of what modern scholarship tells us about the origins of Jewish monotheism, this book is for you.

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