Excerpt from Robert Wright's
The Evolution of God, also featured in this weeks Time.
Decoding God's Changing Moods
The ancient Israelites got straightforward guidance from Scripture on how to handle people who didn't worship Israel's god, Yahweh. "You shall annihilate them — the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites — just as the Lord your God has commanded."
The point of this exercise, explained the Book of Deuteronomy, was to make sure the "abhorrent" religions of nearby peoples didn't rub off on Israelites.
Yet sometimes the Israelites were happy to live in peace with neighbors who worshipped alien gods. In the Book of Judges, an Israelite military leader proposes a live-and-let-live arrangement with the Ammonites: "Should you not possess what your god Chemosh gives you to possess? And should we not be the ones to possess everything that our god Yahweh has conquered for our benefit?"
The Bible isn't the only Scripture with such vacillations between belligerence and tolerance. Muslims, who like Christians and Jews worship the God who revealed himself to Abraham, are counseled in one part of the Koran to "kill the polytheists wherever you find them." But another part prescribes a different stance toward unbelievers, "To you be your religion; to me my religion."
You'd think the Abrahamic God would make up his mind — Can he live with other gods or not? What's with the random mood fluctuations?
But the fluctuations aren't really random. If you juxtapose the Abrahamic Scriptures with what scholars have learned about the circumstances surrounding their creation, a pattern appears. Certain kinds of situations inspired tolerance, and other kinds inspired the opposite. You might even say this pattern is a kind of code, a code that is hidden in the Scriptures and that, once revealed, unlocks the secret of God's changing moods.
And maybe this code could unlock more than that. Maybe knowing what circumstances made the authors of Scripture open-minded can help make modern-day believers open-minded. Maybe the hidden code in the Bible and the Koran, the code that links Scriptural content to context, could even help mend the most dangerous of intra-Abrahamic fault lines, the one between Muslims and Jews.
The first step in seeing this code is to look to the world that gave us the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament) and the Koran — the world that embedded the code in them. There we'll see how consequential God's mood changes could be — how, indeed, a burst of vengeful intolerance helped give us monotheism itself; we'll see that the birth of monotheism left us with what you might call a bad God.
But we'll also see that this God then had bursts of moral growth — within both Judaism and Islam — and that the proven ingredients of that growth are around today, just when another such burst is needed.
In the beginning — or near the beginning — was King Solomon. Israel's third King, he reigned in the 10th century B.C.E. (before the common era). In addition to being famously wise, he was flagrantly polytheistic. The Bible handles this awkward fact by blaming it on his many wives of foreign extraction, who "turned away his heart after other gods."
The Bible has the logic backward. In ancient times, when a man of royal blood married a foreign woman of royal blood, it wasn't on a romantic whim. It was part of foreign policy, a way to cement relations with another nation. And that cement was strengthened by paying respect to the nation's gods. Solomon's many wives didn't lead to his many gods; his politics led to both the wives and the gods.
Solomon believed Israel could benefit — economically and otherwise — by staying on good terms with nearby nations. As game theorists say, he saw relations with other nations as non-zero-sum; the fortunes of Israel and other nations were positively correlated, so outcomes could be win-win or lose-lose. His warmth toward those religions was a way of making the win-win outcome more likely.
Again and again in the Bible, this perception of non-zero-sumness underlies religious tolerance. This doesn't mean religious tolerance is always consciously calculated. The human mind does lots of subterranean work to pave the way for social success. But whether the calculation is conscious or not, people are more open to the religious beliefs of other people if they sense a non-zero-sum dynamic.
The flip side is that perceptions of a zero-sum dynamic — of a game in which one side will win and one side lose — can foster intolerance of other religions and their gods. Indeed, a close look at the Bible shows how this worldview helped move Israel from the polytheism of Solomon's time toward monotheism — a monotheism that (contrary to the standard story of Christians and Jews) doesn't seem to have taken root until the middle of the first millennium B.C.E.
Paving the way for this eventual triumph of monotheism was a series of prophets who cried out for exclusive devotion to Yahweh, railing against the polytheistic ways of Israel. These prophets aren't necessarily monotheists; they don't deny the existence of gods other than Yahweh. They seem to be what scholars call monolatrists, insisting that Israelites worship only one God.
Among the earliest of these prophets is Hosea, who is thought to have written in the 8th century B.C.E. Rejecting a Solomonic view — that immersion in the larger world could make Israel richer — Hosea insists the game is zero-sum: when Israel "mixes himself with the peoples ... foreigners devour his strength." Hosea's suspicion of the foreign isn't surprising. Israel, a small nation in a tough neighborhood, often did get pushed around.
The monolatrous prophets gained a following, but they had trouble winning consistent support from Israel's leaders. So in the early part of the 7th century B.C.E., decades after Hosea issued his sermons, Israel was still awash in religious pluralism. The Jerusalem Temple itself, according to the Bible, was home not just to Yahweh but also to Asherah, a goddess who, scholars increasingly believe, was Yahweh's consort. And there were "vessels made for Baal," the Canaanite God.
Then, in 640 B.C.E. came an intense Israelite King named Josiah who would lend brutal support to the monolatrist cause and push Israel closer to monotheism. He took the figure of Asherah out of the Temple and "beat it to dust." The vessels for Baal didn't fare well either.
Was Josiah, too, driven by a zero-sum worldview in which the worshippers of gods other than Yahweh looked like enemies?