Antiquitopia

In the Life of Adam and Eve , Michael commands all the host of heaven to bow down before the newly created Adam--the very spitting image of God--and yet only Satan abstains, claiming one should only bow before God (Satan, then, becomes the first strict monotheist, or monolatrist). This text may seem to challenge the concepts of monotheism or monolatry, although it may only challenge our MODERN concepts of monotheism rather than ancient standards. At the same time, the Rabbis, in a bit of a later time, clearly found the notion of the angels or the hosts of heaven bowing before Adam troubling. R. Hoshaya said: When the Holy One, blessed be He, created Adam, the ministering angels mistook him and wished to exclaim "Holy" before him. What does this resemble? A king and a governor who sat in a chariot, and his subjects wished to say to the king, "Domine! (Sovereign)!" but they did not know which it was. What did the king do? He pushed the governor out of the chari...

Amazingly, I am going to be able to fit all of my comments on chapter 3 of Bauckham's Jesus and the God of Israel in one post! Follow the labels back to see the earlier posts. Chapter 3 is about “The ‘Most High’ God and the Nature of Early Jewish Monotheism” Of all the chapters I have read, I have found this one to be the most informative. In it B calls for listings and tables of divine names and titles in early Jewish literature to see which are popular and which are not in particular genres and in particular provenances. I think such an extensive study would be most useful indeed! This chapter takes a small step towards this with a study of the term “Most High.” He tries to account for its high frequency, its significance, and how it sheds light on early Jewish monotheism. Of course, to do this he must rehearse defining “monotheism” and “inclusive” versus “exclusive” monotheism. Again, inclusive monotheism, in B’s definition, is when the highest God is...

I just received in the mail a copy of James McGrath's new book, The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context , sent to me from the University of Illinois Press. Given that I have been reading and reviewing Bauckham's book on a very similar subject, I probably should give some time to this work as well. I would like to thank James for keeping this book short! Something I am not very good about in my own writing. Text, notes, bibliography, and index are all only 155 pp. Only 104 pages of text! So, it looks like a much quicker read that Bauckham. I'm sure most of you read McGrath's blog already and are quite up-to-date about this book. But I will just point out its general layout and leave reading and reviewing to a future time when I have more time. His first chapter focuses on the issue of method and scholarly study of ancient Jewish and Christian perspectives on the divine. It seems at first glancing that he lays out a typology of monothe...

I am continuing my review of Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the God of Israel . I am dividing the rather lengthy first chapter into three posts (and they themselves are a bit long). You can see my introductory remarks here . Chapter 1 consists of a barely revised version of his booklet from ten years ago, also from Eerdmans (and even with the same cover design), entitled, God Crucified . In the first third of this chapter, he discusses ancient Jewish "monotheism," something that will be elaborated in chapters 2 and 3. He argues that the key issue for understanding New Testament Christology is Second Temple monotheism. He gives two views of monotheism among modern scholars: “strict” and “revisionist.” In the former, Jesus cannot be divine in a Jewish context—Jesus’ divinity threatens monotheism. In the latter, there is a denial of any strictness to monotheism: categories of being between human, angelic, and divine are all blurry (blurred by principle angels, exalted...

I became interested in this question in my research into the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice , which consistently refers to heavenly beings as "Gods," rather than merely "Angels." It does refer to "Angels," but they seem to be among the lower rungs of the "Gods"--the "Angels" are "Messengers," the errand-runners. Often this terminology is mistranslated as "Angels" or "Strong Ones" (which is correct in an etymological sense, but then we would have to translate "God" as "Strong One" as well). So, if ancient Jews were comfortable referring to a multitude of divine beings as "Gods," then I guess modern scholars should just face the facts and, when a particular text calls for it, do so as well. I have written far more about this here . Since then, I discovered that it is a title of Jupiter in Virgil's Aeneid (I'll quote this at a later time); it seems to be the title of t...

מי־כמוכה באלים יהוה (Exodus 15:11) The question comes from an issue raised regarding whether the enthronement of Enoch in the Similitudes of Enoch and Moses in Ezekiel's "Exagoge" actually "threaten" monotheism. I have been discussing it with Ken Schenck, professor of religion and philosophy at Indiana Wesleyan University and the blogger of Quadrilateral Thoughts . They have been side comments on a broader discussion, and so I thought I would make them the forefront of the discussion here. He also has a nice discussion of the spectrum of scholarly positions...so I would recommend reading that for helpful background. But, now, I would like everyone else to weigh in. Traditionally, scholars and people in general have assumed that ancient Judaism was monotheistic. Second Isaiah clearly thinks so--so we have one ancient Jew (or Judahite) who was monotheistic (with perhaps a school). And in a particular interpretation of the Sh'ma, one seems to be saying...