The Great Angel

Where I heard about it

• My own reading list — a bare Amazon link I saved sometime in 2024–2026.

Connections

• Religious Intellectualism — the portfolio idea this sits closest to.
• Bible · Old Testament — the textual ground the argument is built on.
• Christianity — the tradition whose early Christology Barker traces back to it.

Verbatim source notes — restored from Roam, 2026-09-21

• The veneration of El, then, could have been a part of Israelite religion as late as the time of the exile, and references to the El cult could have been written over by the Yahwist who, working in the shadow of the Deuteronomists, was gathering everything into the tradition of Yahweh. There was no conflict with El; his cult was simply absorbed, because it had always had a place in Israel’s religion. Such a hypothesis (and it is only a hypothesis as are all other attempts to reconstruct the history of Israel’s religion), makes sense of much of the evidence from later texts. It would mean that those who had not experienced or accepted the reformulations of the exilic prophet and the Deuteronomists would have retained the older belief in El and Yahweh as separate deities, perhaps as a Father figure anda Son figure, which is what the Ugaritic texts lead us to suppose and what Deut. 32.8 (in the Qumran version) actually says. Yahweh received Israel for his portion when El Elyon divided the nations among the sons of God.
• There was only one God; everything that had formerly been believed of El and Yahweh was to be believed of the one God, Yahweh. In addition to making these declarations of monotheism, the prophet took the older titles of El and altered them; they became titles of Yahweh. Gen. 14.9 gives us the ancient title of El Elyon: ‘Creator (qonēh) of heaven and earth’. This is known elsewhere in the ancient Near East as a title of El, and we can be fairly certain that the account in Genesis is accurate, even if we cannot account for how it came to be in its present place. The Second Isaiah took the ancient title and expanded it:

‘I am Yahwehmaker of all things, who stretched out the heavens alone, who spread out the earth.’ (Isa. 44.24)

… Yahweh your maker, who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth.’ (Isa. 51.13)6 Here there is clearevidence of the reuse and expansion of the ancient El title and its application to Yahweh. Even more significant for an enquiry into the sons of God is the fact that the prophet altered the verb used to express the creative act. In the El epithet the verb is traditionally a form of qnh, ‘procreate,’ whereas in Isaiah it is “śh, ‘make’. The prophet has removed the idea that the creator God was the procreator, the father of gods and men. In other words, the idea of a procreator God with sons seems to have fallen out of favour among those who equated Yahweh and El.(Those who retained a belief in the sons of God, e.g. the Christians, as we shall see, were those who continued to distinguish between El and Yahweh, Father and Son. This cannot be coincidence.)

• Introduction

Jesus was worshipped by his followers and hailed as Son of God, Messiah and Lord. For centuries the churches have used these titles, and they now mean something very important to millions of people. Scholars of the ancient texts, however, are less certain about them, and how it could have been possible for monotheistic Jews to have worshipped Jesus. Here lies the great problem. Did the first Christians worship Jesus and what did they mean when theyused these words to describe their beliefs about him? What would a man from firstcentury Galilee have understood when he heard ‘Son of God’, ‘Messiah’ and ‘Lord?

• A straightforward reading of the New Testament, however, does suggest that Jesus was seen from the beginning as more than simply human. Long before the first Gospel was written down, Paul could quote a Christian hymn, presumably one which his readers would recognize, and therefore one which was widely known. (Phil 2.6-11)

See also Romans 1.3-4

• The third set of son of God texts is in Job. The prologue describes how the sons of God (sons of the ‘elohim), one of whom was Satan, came to Yahweh and challenged him to test the loyalty of Job. The usual English renderings of Job 1.6 imply that Yahweh was superior to the sons of God: ‘the sons of God came to present themselves before Yahweh.’ This is not necessarily what the Hebrew implies since the same verb is used in Ps. 2.2, and there it means ‘setthemselves against Yahweh’. Thus the prologue to Job depicts a heaven where Yahwehis one among many and is challenged to test the loyalty of his servant.

This is a world of heavenly rivalries, where suffering is seen asa test of loyalty to one’s own God, not as a punishment for wrongdoing. It is almost a pre-moral polytheism, and Yahweh, one of the sons of God, a part of this world. The sons of God (sons of’elohim) also appear in Job 38.7. Yahweh asks Job: ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? (…) when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

Yahweh is the creator and the sons of God are there too, closely linked to the morning stars. It is interesting that thereis no mention of the sons of God in the Genesis account of creation but Jubilees has a longer account which does describe the creation of the angels: ‘For on the first day he created the heavens which are above and the earth and the waters and all the spirits which serve before him … the angels of the presence, and the angels of sanctification… And on the second day he created the firmament’ (Jub. 2.1, 4). The question we cannot answer is: How is it that Jubilees and Job have an account of the creation which includes the angels, which Genesis does not mention, even though it does have an evil serpent figure of whose origin we are told nothing? Later traditions knew thatan elaborate heavenly world had been created before the material world and this heaven was totally integrated with the earth.

• The great destruction wrought by the Babylonians atthe beginning of the sixth century followed hard upon the so-called Deuteronomic reform. What was destroyed was therefore in a state of flux, since we are by no means certain that the Deuteronomic reform was the wholesale success claimed for it. The two accounts of what happened in the reign of Josiah differ in detail and emphasis: the Chronicler (2 Chron. 34-5) described finding the lawbook, renewing the covenant and keeping a great Passover; the Deuteronomist (2 Kings 22-3) described in detail all the abominations that were swept away and wrote but briefly of the great Passover. We do not know, therefore.

what happened at the time. All we know is that the Deuteronomists wrote themselves into history at this point, since, in 2 Kings, they clearly identified the programme of reform with their own ideals. If this is accurate, then we have evidence for a sweeping away of everything thatdid not accord with one particular point of view; ifitis not accurate, i.e.if it is onlya retrospective improvement on fact, then we have evidence for a rewriting of history on a massive scale, to the point where it becomes extremely difficult for us to call it history in any modern sense of that word. We should call it propaganda. It is a common enough phenomenon in this century to see a radical change of government or ruling philosophy accompanied by a rewriting of the past. If the keynote of the Deuteronomists was an emphasis on the sacred history, the Exodus and the saving acts of Yahweh to the exclusion of all other gods, then it is easy to see that any traces of earlier religious practices in Jerusalem, had they been concerned with things other than the sacred history, the Exodus and the cult of Yahweh alone, would have had little chance of surviving. It is a fact that the writings of the First Isaiah, our best source of information on the pre-Deuteronomic religion of Jerusalem, haveno concern forjust these things which the reformers made so central. Here then is the first question: What did they reform, either in fact, or by creative history writing? Was there more, far more, in the religion of pre-exilic Jerusalem, than the later writers wished to perpetuate?!

• An extension of this view of the Pentateuch, and one whose implications are even more important, takes account of modern work on oralliterature and its transmission. These studies have called into question many of the cherished beliefs that Israel’s traditions were handed down by word of mouth for centuries before they were written down. Tellers of tales were more likely to have adapted the tale at each new telling than to have kept rigidly for centuries to an exact form. It was a fluid, not a fixed, tradition. Thus the material in the Pentateuch, which had been used to reconstruct the early and outgrown religious practices of Israel is now seen to be ‘a mass of material, most of which may have been of quite recent origin … [which] had not necessarily formed part of any ancient Israelite tradition.‘12 The complex patterns in the Pentateuch, both in small units and in the extended compositions, are now recognized as evidence of a literary artistry far beyond anything that can be called ‘compilation’.

The scissors and paste methods of the earlier hypotheses are now seen to be unrealistic. The Pentateuch as we now have it is probably the product of one mind, that of a genius. If we could be certain of the motive for his writing, we could begin to understand what he was doing, and perhaps to guess at how he used his sources. We might even discover whether he was reflecting an established point of view, or expounding something new which was later adopted by his fellow exiles. We think of the prophets as great innovators, bringing new insights into their troubled situations. Why should a historian not be similarly prophetic? The Pentateuch would then be evidence for one point of view subsequently adopted by some, but not all, of the heirs to Israel’s traditions.

• All the titles are there: Son of God, Lord and Messiah.

It has been the practice to treat the titles separately, as if each designated a different aspect of belief, and the separate strands were only brought together by the creative theologizing of the first Christians I should like to explore a different possibility, namely thatthese three titles, and several others, belonged together in the expectations and traditions of first-century Palestine, and that the first Christians fitted Jesus into an existing pattern of belief. The rapid development of early Christian teaching was due to the fact that so much of the scheme already existed; the life and death of Jesus was the means of reinterpreting the older hopes. This is not a new idea; from the beginning Christians have claimed that Jesus was the fulfilment of the hopes expressed in the Old Testament. Our problem is to know exactly what those hopes were, and how they were expressed in firstcentury Palestine. What did the key words mean?

• Preface

At first I hesitated to write The Great Angel. It ranges over an enormous amount of material from ancient Canaan to mediaeval Kabbalah and nobody can hope to be competent letalone expert over so great a field. Nothing but a broad sweep, however,could have done justice to the evidence. In addition, I feared the consequences of presenting these ideas. There are many who will be disturbed by them and even angered.

• Several pieces of evidence point in this direction. First, there is no polemic against El in the Old Testament. There is plenty of polemic against Ba’al and other deities, even though the references may sometimes be veiled, but there is none against the Canaanite High God El. Perhaps, as Eissfeldt suggested, this is because El was never viewed as a threat to Yahweh. Ugaritic material shows how the Canaanite deities were envisaged; each had its own characteristics and modes of manifestation. Yahweh corresponds in many ways to ore anCI Ba’al, and as such we can understand the rivalry between them. But Yahweh also has many of the characteristics of El; how were these assimilated if there was no conflict between the two deities? Second, there is the evidence of Genesis. The patriarchs set up rural altars and had sacred trees and pillars; all these practices were forbidden by the Deuteronomic reformers at the end of the seventh century, yet this prohibition is in itself proof that such pillars, trees and altars were still a part of popular piety at the time. It has been suggested that the stories in Genesis which associate the patriarchs with these altars and pillars were an alternative to the destructive methods of the Deuteronomic reformers. The writer of the Pentateuch advocated absorbing the local cults into the collective memory of the people, and treating the cult places as memorials to events in Israel’s past. It is widely agreed that the Canaanite harvest festivals became associated with the celebration of events in Israel’s history: barley harvest with the Exodus, wheat harvest with Sinai and the grape harvest with the enthronement of the king. Cult places were similarly absorbed and given a place in the history of the patriarchs.
• The fact that the authors of the pre-exilic literature of the Old Testament outside the Pentateuch appear to know virtually nothing of the patriarchal and Mosaic traditions of the Pentateuch raises serious doubts about the existence of an early J or E.”

If the great bodies of epic literature did not exist in the ninth and tenth centuries, what was Israel thinking about God at that time? And how was God addressed: as Yahweh only, or as El, or as two separate deities with these names? What period of Israel’s thought does the Pentateuch represent with its many names and manifestations of God all gathered into one tradition?

• The anointed high priest of the first temple cult was remembered as having been different from the high priest of the second temple cult since the latter was described simply as the priest who ‘wears many garments’, a reference to the eight garments worn by him on Yom Kippur: ‘And who is the anointed [high priest]? He that is anointed with the oil of unction, but not he that is dedicated with many garments.’ (m. Horayoth 3.4). It was also remembered that the roles of the anointed high priest and the high priest of many garments differed in some respects at Yom Kippur when the rituals of atonement were performed. The anointed high priest, they believed, would be restored to Israel at the end of time, in the last days.
• Other questions immediately present themselves. Why is Moses not a part of the religion of the pre-exilic prophets? It has even been suggested that Moses is not mentioned in any genuinely pre-exilic writing. How can we have any picture of Israel’s older ways when so much of the Old Testament has been edited and transmitted by the reforming Deuteronomists or those whom they had influenced? The preface to Deuteronomy shows what they set out to remove; we always read this as though these were pagan practices, but a careful scrutiny shows that this was not necessarily so.

First, they were to have the Law instead of Wisdom (Deut. 4.6). Israel had had wise men of her own, so how did their wisdom teachings relate to the reformed religion, and what was the Wisdom which the Law replaced? Second, they were to think only of the formless voice of God sounding from the fire and giving the Law (Deut. 19.12). Israel had long had a belief in the vision of God, when the glory had been visible on the throne in human form, surrounded by the heavenly hosts. What happened to the visions of God? And third, they were to leave the veneration of the host of heaven to peoples not chosen by Yahweh (Deut. 4.19-20). Israel had long regarded Yahweh as the Lord of the hosts of heaven, but the title Yahweh of Hosts was not used by the Deuteronomists. Whathappened to the hosts, the angels?

These three examples will suffice to make the point: the religious practices which the Deuteronomists opposed are known to have had a place in the earlier religion of Israel. If they removed these as a part of their reform, and removed most of the references to them, how can their writings be evidence for anything other than their own ideals?

There are dangers of circularity in this process: one can eitherassume that what they wrote about the early history of Israel was an account of what actually happened and that their reform was a return to the ancient ways; or one can be more sceptical, and see in their ancient histories a call to return to a golden age which had never existed in reality, but which served the reformers’ purposes. One can see the uniformity of so much of the Old Testament as a sign that Israel’s history was a living sermon on the ways of God, or one can see the uniformity as a sign that the hand of improvers has been at work.

• In the light of current uncertainty about the age of materials in the Pentateuch, it is interesting to look again at the Canaanite parallels to Old Testament motifs and themes. The classic study of these is Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic by F. M. Cross, which uses Ugaritic materials to set the Old Testament in its ancient context. We can see that El and Ba’al were separate and easily identifiable types of divinity; their mythologies and modes of manifestation were different.

The Yahweh of the Old Testament seems to be an amalgam of the two types. This is not to say that Israel’s religion was simply plagiarism from Canaan, but only that Israel expressed its experience of the divine in the imagery and poetry which were common to all the peoples of Canaan. Such similarities as do exist show that many Canaanite elements, such as the ribald revelries of the heavenly court and the birth of the gods, have not been used. But, when the terrifvino theophanies of Yahweh are described, they resemble the appearances of the Canaanite storm god Ba’al. When heaven is described it resembles the Canaanite court of El.

Yahweh was judge and warleader of the historical community. He revealed himself to the patriarch Moses, led Israel in the conquest;he was the god who brought Israel up from the land of Egypt, her saviour. There is also the second strain which entered Israel’s primitive religion, that of the high and eternal one, El the creator of heaven and earth, the father of all.”

• The titles have been explained in various ways, but often so as to show that their original meaning was other than that which the Christians eventually adopted. They were brought into Christian thought from a pagan background, it is said, and thus represented a later understanding of Jesus which became incorporated into the New Testament, or they were a paganized understanding of whathad originally been Palestinian titles. The worship of Jesus cannot possibly have begun among the first Jewish Christians since their monotheism would have made such a practice unthinkable. The problem is solved by explaining that ‘Son of God’ was adopted from Greek mythology or the claims of contemporary royal families; that ‘Messiah’ was no more than the usual designation of nationalist leaders who wanted to rebel against Rome; and Lord’ was a courtesy title which unfortunately was confused by the Greek Christians with the Old Testament’s version of the divine Name and thus Jesus became divine and was worshipped like one of the local Greek gods.

Versions of these ideas have been popular with New Testament scholars for most of the twentieth century, their hidden agenda being to emphasize the humanness of Jesus and to show that his ‘divinity’ was a later development and an unfortunate one at that. Hengel has shown how there was an alliance between Jewish and Protestant scholars in this task; the former wished to reclaim Jesusfor Judaism, but obviously only on their terms, and the latterfelt unhappy with the more mysterious and supernatural aspects of the Gospel stories.

• There is no evidence for the ancient Hebrew epic cycle which they advocate. The Pentateuch resembles rather the work of Herodotus, and its compiler, the Yahwist, was collecting materials and constructing his histories in a similar way. The Pentateuch was a sixth-century composition, he says. Herodotus wrote in the fifth century; the period between them is not so vast.

Herodotus is also thought to have been influenced by the forms and ideas of the Near East. The earlier Greek historians had used a mixture of myths, legends and genealogies to demonstrate the origin of Athenian society, its customs and institutions. Herodotus compiled his histories from several sources; some were written, some were tales he had heard on his travels, and sometimes he used ‘to fabricate stories and anecdotes using little or no traditional material, only popular motifs or themes from other literary works’. The resulting anthology was written to give the Greeks a sense of self-identity and national pride. This emphasis on the needs of the audience is important; the story or history was told with a clearly defined purpose and recording fact was not the primary consideration. A Pentateuch written in the exile could have had an exactly similar purpose; the loss of their homeland would have necessitated some other means of bonding the people together, and this was done by appeal to a common heritage of tradition and history. (This is what the Deuteronomists did when they appealed to the commonexperience of the Exodus; the Second Isaiah appealed to Abraham as the common ancestor, and so on.) If this is how the Pentateuch was compiled, then we cannot expect to find in it evidence for anything but the concerns of the exiles, and one of these seems to have been to relate the El practices to those of Yahweh’s cult.

• Chapter two: The Evidence of the Exile

The exile in Babylon is a formidable barrier to anyone wanting to reconstruct the religious beliefs and practices of ancient Jerusalem 16 we are to discover any possible reason for the distinction between the sons of El/Elyon and the sons of Yahweh it is a barrier which hastobe acknowledged. Enormous developments took place in the wake of enormous destruction, and these two factors make certainty quite impossible. They make all certainty impossible, and this too must be acknowledged, for the customary descriptions of ancient Israel’s religion are themselves no more than supposition.

• A more likely explanation is that the storm imagery of Yahweh’s theophanies had never disappeared, and, in its latest appearances in the apocalypses, represents a link with the very oldest traditions. Similarly the name El did not enjoy a sudden revival which eventually eclipsed the name Yahweh. Both Yahweh and El survived as distinct deities, but not in the post-Deuteronomic tradition.

One would expect that, after the author of the Pentateuch had explicitly identified El and Yahweh, a certain amount of rewriting would have taken place. Cross suggested that this fusion of the El and Yahweh divinities led to just such a renaming process, although he put it in the tenth century because he used the older method of dating the Pentateuch. ‘The substitution of Yahweh for El …

would be natural when Yahweh became the principal cult name.16 The consequences of this for our reading and understanding of the Old Testament cannot be overestimated. This is not just a question of divine names; it is also a question of how many divinities were acknowledged. To say that there are places in the Old Testament where Yahweh seems to have El characteristics may in fact mean that we have a rewriting of an Eltradition, which had formerly been a part of Israel’s tradition in its El form. That may seem to be stating the obvious, but if we do not know the date at which this renaming took place, we cannot know for certain how much of Israel’s tradition was monotheistic.

• This comprehensive treatment does not, however, distinguish between the two different words for God and therefore ignores a crucial distinction. There are those called sons of El Elyon, sons of El or Elohim, all clearly heavenly beings, and there are those called sons of Yahweh or the Holy One who are human. This distinction is important for at least two reasons; Yahweh was one of the sons of El Elyon; and Jesus in the Gospels was described as a Son of El Elyon, God Most High. In other words he was described as a heavenly being. Thus the annunciation narrative has the term ‘Son of the Most High’ (Luke 1.32) and the demoniac recognized his exorcist as ‘Son of the Most High God’ (Mark 5.7). Jesus is not called the son of Yahweh nor the son of the Lord, but he is called Lord. We also know that whoever wrote the New Testament translated the name Yahweh by Kyrios, Lord. (See, for example, the quotation from Deuteronomy 6.5: “You shall love Yahweh your God…‘which is rendered in Luke 10.27’You shall love the Lord[Kyrios]your God.’) This suggests that the Gospel writers, in using the terms ‘Lord’ and ‘Son of God Most High’, saw Jesus as an angelfigure, and gave him their version of the sacred name Yahweh (see chapter 10).
• When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of men, he fixed the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.
• The heavenly sons of God appear in the Old Testament in several places, often by name but sometimes also by implication. Their first appearance is in Genesis 6.2, 4, where they are the sons of the ‘elohim.

This is the account of the sons of God who fell from heaven and became the fathers of the giants. It is generally agreed that the account in Genesis is a fragment survival from an early myth.2 A longer version of the tale appears in 1 Enoch, and this may be an expansion of the biblical fragment, or it may be the fuller form of the story from which the Genesis account was taken. Whichever explanation is adopted, 1 Enoch shows how the story was understood in the period of the second temple when the Enoch literature was being preserved and developed. The sons of God brought wisdom, i.e. divine knowledge of the secrets of creation, but because this wisdom was brought to earth in rebellion against God Most High, it corrupted the creation. 1 Enoch lists the names of these angel figures in two places (1 Enoch 6.7; 59.2). Most of the names end in -el, meaning god: Kokabiel, star of God, Tamiel, perfection of God, Barakiel, the lightning of God and so on. Were these angels, then, envisaged as aspects of God, manifestations of God, rather than as separate divinities? Notice that they do not have names compounded with Yahweh except in the Apocalypse of Abraham where there is a great angel called Yahwehel.

• The psalter gives several glimpses of the sons of God. The sons of gods (sons of ‘elim) appear in Ps. 29.1, where they are told to acknowledge the glory and strength of Yahweh the creator who is enthroned as king. The setting of this psalm is probably the same as that of Pss. 58, 82 and 89 which depict the divine council. Ps. 58 describes the ‘elim who have acted unjustly and are to be judged forit.

It does not mention the sons of God, but its theme is identical with that of Ps. 82 which describes the judgement upon the sons of God, (sons of Elyon). The opening verse illustrates well the problem of names which is apparent throughout this investigation: ‘Elohim has taken his place on the council of El, in the midst of Elohim he gives judgement’ (Ps. 82.1) and then: ‘You are Elohim, sons of Elyon all of you…’(Ps. 82.6) The sons of ‘elimalso appear in Ps. 89.6; none among the sons of ‘elim is like Yahweh who is a god feared in the council of the Holy Ones.

Then we should note Dan. 3.25, where one like a son of the gods (a son of elahin) appears as the fourth figure in the fiery furnace; he has human form. In 2 Esd. 13.22-6 the deliverer of Israel is the one whom the Most High has kept hidden, his Son to be revealed as the Man coming from the sea; here the son of Elyon has human form, but a comparison with 2 Esd. 2.42-8 shows that this man is an angel figure, the Son of God who crowns the martyrs in heaven. Finally there is the Qumran fragment known as 4Q Son of God: ‘He shall be hailed asthe son of Eland they shall call him the son of Elyon.’ It is not known of whom this was said but he was to rule on earth and be a conqueror. The setting is apocalyptic, with comets in the sky and the triumph of the people of God. The figure is not named, but he is the waters a recognizable.

• The other texts describing royal sonship are all related to the tradition of the Davidic covenant. The Deuteronomic formulation of it in 2 Sam. 14has eclipsed all other ideas of the royalcovenant, and may well have distorted our picture of it. The king is described as a son of Yahweh: ‘I will be his father and he shall be my son.’ Such an expression completely excludes any literal meaning for the words.

The king’s heirs will be sons of Yahweh. The Chronicler is equally clear: ‘It is Solomon your son who shall build my house and my courts, for I have chosen him to be my son, and I will be his father’ (1 Chron. 28.6). What we cannot know is how accurately the Deuteronomic and post-exilic representations of the idea of kingship reflect actual belief during the time of the monarchy. They show what was believed in retrospect by those who produced these writings, but this was not necessarily the only point of view in the period of the second temple and therefore in the period of Christianity’s origins.

• There are several ways in which it is possible to glimpse behind the reform of the Deuteronomists. One is to examine the remaining references to El. If there was a distinction between El and Yahweh, such as appears to be reflected in the distinction between the sons of El and the sons of Yahweh, then any evidence for a distinction betwecn Eland Yahweh must be crucial. There are several texts where El is simply a designation of Yahweh; this could be a sign of later reworking (as it undoubtedly is in the Second Isaiah), or it could be due to the fact that Elis both the name of the High God of Canaan and also the noun meaning ‘god’. In Ps. 104,for example, which isa paean of praise to Yahweh, the young lions seek their food from El who must here be Yahweh. In Deut 7.9 Yahweh is describedas the faithful God (El). In instances like these there cannot be any suggestion that the Canaanite High God is to be understood; ‘el’ means simply God The exclamation in Josh. 22.22 is similar: the Mighty One, God the Lord is El Elohim Yahweh. But if ‘el’ means no more than God, what are we to understand by the assertions of the Second Isaiah, when he emphasizes that Yahweh is El? Surely he cannot have been proclaiming that Yahweh was a god?

The prophecies of the Second Isaiah are from the period of the exile, the period in which we have reason to believe that there wasa process of fusion. What he says makes most sense if we assume thathe was taking the title El and using it of Yahweh.

… you are my witnesses,’ says Yahweh.

‘I am El, and also henceforth I am He.’ (Isa. 43.12-13)

‘Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth!

For I am El and there is no other.’ (Isa. 45.22)

• The sceptical viewpoint is corroborated by evidence in extra biblical texts. 1 Enoch, for example, remembers the period of the exile and restoration as a time of disastrous apostacy, a time when wisdom was despised and impurity installed in the Temple. It would be very hard not to read this as comment on the Deuteronomic reform which so altered the form of Israel’s religion. This text implies that the true religion of Israel, i.e. the pre-exilic religion of Jerusalem, was preserved only by those who wrote 1 Enoch and related works. They kept a role for Wisdom which the Deuteronomists had subsumed under the Law; they kept a tradition of the heavenly ascent and the vision of God, which the Deuteronomists denied; they were astronomers who had a complex theology of heavenly hosts and angels which the Deuteronomists had said were not for the chosen people. Whom do we believe? Do we work with the picture of a pagan religion which the Deuteronomists reformed and brought back to pristine purity, ordo we work with a picture of an ancient religion virtually stamped outby the Deuteronomists, who put in its place their own version of what Israel should believe? This question is not just academic, a fine point to be debated about the religions of the ancient Near East. Our whole view of the evolution of monotheism in Israel depends on the answer to this question, for the Deuteronomists are recognized as the source of the ‘monotheistic’ texts in the Old Testament and as the first to suppress anthropomorphism. If the Deuteronomists do not represent the mainstream of Israel’s religion (and increasingly they are belme recognized as a vocal minority), was the mainstream of that religion not monotheistic and did it have anthropomorphictheophanies atis centre?
• Chapter one: The Son of God

So much has been written on this subject that it seems presumptuous even to attempt to say more. I do not want to survey the evidence for the use of the term in other religions, or in the contemporary Hellenistic world.

Rather, I should like to concentrate on one aspect whichI have not found explored elsewhere, namely the distinction between the different words for God in the Old Testament and the effect that this must have upon our estimate of what it meant to be a son of God.

• We do not know when the king was thought to become divine; it is generally assumed that this is a coronation psalm, but there is no proof. The king has been set on the holy hill of Zion (Ps. 2.6) and he has received an oracle (Ps. 2.7); this is all we are told. Ps. 110 is similar; the Greek of Ps. 110.3 reads ‘I have begotten you’, implying divine sonship, instead of the customary form ‘your youth’. The Hebrew consonants can be readeither way;itis interesting that the Greek read them as of divine kingship, and the Hebrew as we have it today has pointed them to mean something else. We shall never know what the original was, but in view of the similar change away from ‘sons of God’ in the Massoretic text of Deut. 32.8, the Greek seems more likely to have kept the original meaning. Isa. 9.6-7 belongs in this setting, although exactly what the oracle means is still debated. The child was born ‘to us’ and named ‘Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’. Perhaps these were birth names given at the physical birth, or perhaps they were throne names, given at the kingmaking ceremony. Perhaps, as has been suggested,° these names were given by the heavenly host who were rejoicing at the birth of their son. The Greek of this text has not four titles but one, one actu beie was temp IsT be re callec refere the de believe 4.22)

(Jer 3 WOuld and 367)

The Angel of Great Counsel, and this angel was to be the ruler of Israel. Isaiah’s other oracle of a royal birth (Isa. 7.14-17) suggests that the child was a sign of God’s presence from his birth. How else are we to understand’… bear a son and call his name Immanuel, God with us’? Ps. 89 is another royal psalm which compares the power of Yahweh in the heavenly assembly to the power of his king on earth.

Just as Yahweh is acknowledged by the heavenly beings as supreme, so his son will be acknowledged as supreme onearth. The kingwill cry to Yahweh ‘You are my Father’ (Ps. 89.26) and he will be made the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth. This royal sonship is a statement of power; the king is the agent of Yahweh, his representative and therefore the channel of his power.

• These were the sons of God Most High, angel figures who were manifested in human form. In the coded language of the apocalypses they were described as ‘men’ or like men or even as son of man; thus Daniel saw ‘the man Gabriel’ (Dan. 9.21) and John saw the anesl measuring the heavenly city ‘by a man’s measure, that is, an angele (Rev. 21.17). Mortals were described as animals.

The sons of Yahweh on the other hand are never called this bu name; it is always by implication: ‘You are my son,’ says Yahweh The king was the first to be called a son of Yahweh. How this was understood we do not know, but it is quite beyond the evidence to say that Israel did not understand the term in the same way as did other ancient nations who believed their kings to be divine. We have only the texts of the Old Testament as evidence, and these suggest overwhelmingly that Yahweh was ‘present’ in the one called his son.

Ps. 2 shows that the king could deliver the words of Yahweh:

I will tell of the decree of Yahweh:

He said to me, “You are my son, today I have begotten you.’ (Ps. 2.7)

There are also the last words of David:

The spirit of Yahweh speaks by me, His word is on my tongue. (2 Sam. 23.2)

• The reform of Josiah/the Deuteronomists, then, reconstructed as best we can from both biblical and non-biblical sources, seems to have been a time when more than pagan accretions were removed from the Jerusalem cult. Wisdom was eliminated, even though her presence was never forgotten, the heavenly ascent and the vision of God were abandoned, the hosts of heaven, the angels, were declared to be unfit for the chosen people, the ark (and the presence of Yahweh which it represented) was removed, and the role of the high priest was altered in that he was no longer the anointed. All of these features of the older cult were to appear in Christianity.

One of the few certainties in this area is that the name Yahweh was linked to the Moses traditions, and in two places in Exodus the writer makes it clear that the El traditions of the pre-Mosaic period, i.e. the tradition that the patriarchs worshipped God by the name of El, are to be understood as the forerunners of the Yahweh traditions he is describing.

Yahweh, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaacand the God of Jacob has sent me to you; this is my name for ever, and thus Iam to be remembered throughout all generations. (Exod. 3.15)

I am Yahweh. Iappeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as El Shadda:

but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them. (Exod.

6.2-3)

A traditional study of the Pentateuch would assign these two passages to the Elohist and Priestly sources respectively, and explain the fusion as a memory of Israel’s remoter past. Recent scholarship has offereda different explanation. The passages represent a fusion, but a fusion of the several strands of Israel’s religion practised in the period immediately before the exile. One of these was the veneration of El in addition to Yahweh. The pressures of the exile and the zeal of the Deuteronomic reformers combined to produce a fusion ofall Israel’s traditions. Everything that could possibly have been subsumed under the religion of strictest Yahweh worship, the religion of Moses and the Law, was absorbed and reformulated. The rest was dismissed as Canaanite and condemned.

• The problem lies in the difference between the Hebrewand the Greek versions. The MT does not mention sons of God, but has sons of Israel instead. The Qumran Hebrew has sons of God (sons of ‘el) and the Greek has angels of God. This text shows two things: that there was some reason for altering sons of God to sons of Israel, or vice versa (the Qumran reading suggests that the earlier Hebrew had read ‘sons of God’); and that the sons of God were the patron deities of the various nations. Elyon the High God had allocated the nations to the various sons of God; one of these sons was Yahweh to whom Israel had been allocated (Deut. 32.9). This fossil incorporated into Deuteronomy is thought to be one of its oldest components; how such a ‘polytheistic’ piece came to be included in Deuteronomy, with its emphasis on monotheism, is a question we cannot answer, although it is possible to guess why ‘polytheism’ was removed from the later Hebrew text, as we shall see. The angels of the nations are probably the same as the ‘messengers’ (it is the same word in Hebrew) of the nations who appear in Isa. 14.32 and who are warned that Yahweh’s people are protected by Zion which he has founded. The angels of the nations appear in a later form in Daniel, where they are the princes of Persia and Greece, attacking the unnamed angel who fights for Israel with the help of the archangel Michael (Dan. 10.13-14).
• All the texts in the Hebrew Bible distinguish clearly between the divine sons of Elohim/Elyonand those human beingswho are called sons of Yahweh. This must be significant. It must mean that the terms originated at a time when Yahweh was distinguished from whatever was meant by El/Elohim/Elyon. A large number of texts continued to distinguish between El Elyon and Yahweh, Fatherand Son, and to express this distinction in similar ways with the symbolism of the temple and the royal cult. By tracing these patterns through a great variety of material and over several centuries, Israel’s second God can be recovered.
• The question we have to answer is: when did the two fuse, and why?

Yahweh and Ba’al were seen as rivals in the traditions associated lan esch with the prophet Elijah. These, recorded in good Deuteronomic style, made it quite clear that Israel could have only one Lord, Yahweh. The presence of Ba’al characteristics in Yahweh show that he must at some stage have been perceived as a similar deity. There is no record of conflict with El; all we have is the cryptic declaration of the Second Isaiah.

The proposed date of the fusion of Eland Yahweh characteristics is based on the assumed date of the materials in the Pentateuch, the reviv tenth- and ninth-century epics which, in the older theories of Pentateuchal origins, were combined by editors in the early period of the monarchy. (Remember that this was only a theory; there was no actual evidence for the existence of these epics, nor for their having been combined at the suggested time.) Yahweh is recognized as having ‘El’ characteristics as ‘early’ as the epic texts, ‘except in the Sinai pericope and in the archaic hymns cited in the epic sources’.”

But if these epic texts were not early, and if much of the oral material was no older than the tale as it was told, we have no certain basis for saying that the combination of the two divine types took place in the early period.

• If the Deuteronomists had emphasized above all else that it was Yahweh who brought Israel out of Egypt and that this was the beginning of the nation, whatever this represents in terms of theology must be recognized as crucial for our reading of the Old Testament.

Yahweh and history became fundamental; what happened to everything else? Even the least sophisticated study of the seaming of Pentateuchal traditions at Exod. 3.15 and Exod. 6.2-3 shows that it was Yahweh which became the dominant name for God. It was acknowledged that this had not always been the only name for God, but this was the name by which God was in future to be known.

Presumably this means that any non-Yahweh traditions were either dropped, or rewritten of Yahweh. There are, as we shall see, examples of this in the Second Isaiah. The unanswerable question must be: How many traditions were rewritten in the wake of the great reform and did everyone go along with the new ways?

• One or two observations will illustrate this. Cross quotes a piece of Ugaritic poetry where El and Ba’al are in parallel, butstill, we assume, di E.

separate deities:

sLift up your hands to heaven%3B Sacrifice to Bull, your father El.

Minister to Ba’l with your sacrifice, The son of Dagan with your provision.”

Could this affect the way we read some of the psalms, where we have always assumed thattwo divine names in parallel were no more thana poetic repetition of the names of God? ‘Yahweh thundered in the heavens, and Elyon uttered his voice (Ps. 18.13) might refer to twe deities. The relationship between El and Ba’al in the Ugaritic texts is also significant; Elsits on the throne in his council, with Ba’l Hadduat his right hand. Ba’l had the titles king and judge, but he was still subordinate to EI. 18 This is exactly the picture assumed in the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt 25.31-46) where the king sits in judgement but acknowledges a Father. The king in the Gospel is called Son of Man, and it has long been recognized that the son of man vision of Dan. 7 has similarities to the pictures of Ba’l and El in the Ugaritic texts.9 How, it must be asked, could a second-century text such as Daniel have had a living knowledge of the Ba’l traditions of Ugarit? How could a text written at a time when the religion of Jerusalem was threatened by the paganism of a foreign ruler, how could such a text employ pagan ideas? And what are they doing in the Gospel? The answer must surely be that these ideas were not pagan, but deeply rooted in the most conservative of Israel’s traditions. The picture of Ba’l ascending to El had not only been a picture of Ba’land El; it had also been a picture of Israel’s God and another, El and Yahweh.

• Israel as a people was also described as the son of God. They were to be restored as ‘Sons of the living God’ (Hos. 1.10), and had been called from Egypt as a son of the Holy One (Hos. 11.1,9). All the other references come from writings compiled during the exile, and reflect the democratization of the royal covenant. What had formerly been believed of the kings was then interpreted to apply to the whole people. Thus Israel, instead of the king, was the firstborn son (Exod. 4.22). Yahweh was the father of Israel, and Ephraim was his firstborn (Jer. 31.9). The family of Yahweh the Holy One, sons and daughters, would be gathered in (Isa. 43.6), and the sons of Yahweh would be distinguished from all other people by their observance of ritual laws: they could not disfigure themselves nor eat unclean foods (Deut. 14.1 and 3ff). Some called on Yahweh as their Father and Redeemer even when the rest of Israel did not acknowledge them (Isa. 63.16). The family imagery continued in the later literature. ‘Solomon’ ruled over the sons and daughters of his God (Wisd. 9.7), and warned his Egyptian contemporaries that Israel had been acknowledged as God’s son in the earlier encounters with Pharaoh (Wisd. 18.13). The pattern was further developed to describe the ultimate triumph of the upright man in the face of his enemies. The child/servant of the Lord had knowledge of God and lived an upright life. He was persecuted by those who mocked his claim to be God’s son (Wisd. 2.12-20). Later the persecutors were amazed to find that he had been ‘numbered among the sons of God’ (Wisd. 5.5).

These passages are based on the Servant poems of Isaiah, especially Isa. 52-3)’ and the suffering of Yahweh’s servant has been used to explain the sufferings of the righteous man. This later text associates the triumph of the persecuted one with his recognition as a son of God, thus increasing the possibility that the poems originally described the Davidic kings in their relationship to Yahweh. The Psalms of Solomon compare the suffering of the righteous to the disciplining of a firstborn son (Ps. Solomon 13.8; 18.4), and the expected Davidic king would reign over the sons of God (Ps. Solomon 17.30). Sirach offers three very different examples of the usage: in Sir. 4.10 the righteous man is exhorted to be like a son of Elyon, the Most High;in Sir. 23.1 he prays to the Lord, Father and Ruler of his life; and in Sir. 51.10 he prays to the Lord, the father of his Lord, using kyrios each time. The ‘two Lords’ will prove to be a very important piece of evidence.

• Jeremiah (or rather, his Deuteronomic editor) also linked the two:

Lord Yahweh it is you who have made the heavens and the earth by your great you brought your people Israel out of power and your outstretched arm the land of Egypt with signs and wonders, with a strong hand and with outstretched arm and with great terror. (Jer. 32.17, 21)

• The second sons of God text is Deuteronomy 32.8, one on which a great deal has been written:
• The Pentateuch tells us that El was the more ancient name for God and that Yahweh, the name revealed to Moses and connected with the Exodus tradition, replaced it. Namessuch as El Shaddai appearin the ‘early’ stories of Genesis and Exodus, and in ancient poetry such as the Balaam oracles (Num. 24). If we assume that the Pentateuch is an account of the events in Israel’s remotest past, then we should expect the name El to have disappeared from use long before the time of the exile. But it did not disappear; on the contrary, the writings from the exilic period and later use El more frequently than the earlier texts.

This gives rise to some extraordinary explanations in order to keep the traditional view of Israel’s history intact. The Second Isaiah and Job, both exilic texts, use El. This is explained as a ‘revitalisation of old liturgical forms’. In the later Psalms, Daniel and the apocalyptic writings ‘El returns to popularity’. In Hellenistic Jewish literature it finally takes over from Yahweh,‘perhaps due to the influence of Zeus Hypsistos. Is this special pleading really necessary? Is it possible that El never fell out of use? The evidence for so much of the earlier period of Israel’s history has come from the Deuteronomists, who are known to have reformed and unified Israel’s traditions. Could the later texts’ use of El be a sign of their freedom from the reformers’ influences, rather than a sign of conscious archaizing?

• The restructuring of Israel’s traditions and writings during the exile and the years which followed must always be borne in mind when reading the Old Testament. So too must the fact that many traces of the older ways survived, as can be seen in Dan. 7, and were still being removed at the beginning of the Christian era, as can be seen from the significant differences between the Qumran versions of certain Hebrew texts and those we now use. Such traces of the older ways as escaped the ancient scribes are often removed by modern readers as they read, since we have all been steeped in one particular view of the Old Testament and its monotheism. The first Christians did not read it as we do; they still knew that Yahweh was the son of Elyon. To read the Old Testament without our customary presuppositions is an iliuminating experience, and it is to this that we now turn.