On Pagan Judaism, Part 2
A Bandit God
Monotheism comes late in the Biblical story, and somewhere in the middle of Jewish history. Since allegiance to one god over others was overshadowed by a metaphysics of one god instead of others, there has prevailed a tendency to reinterpret the early part of Jewish history in light of the later, seeing monotheism everywhere. But what if, instead, we reinterpreted the later part of the history in light of the earlier, remaining open to the possibility that paganism survives even within “the original monotheism”?
It is only by paying attention to this pagan context that we can fully appreciate the specificity of the god named YHWH, the novelty of the Israelite cult devoted to Him, and the key experience that transformed the Israelite cult of YHWH into the Jewish theology of redemption: the experience of living in exile, among cults of other gods. If there is only one possible god, he must be a god of all attributes, or at best a list of anodyne niceties, which is the same as saying he has no special attributes at all. If there are other gods, then his attributes become specific, interesting, and strange.
The Bible’s depiction of “Elohim” generally resembles the Canaanite depiction of El: He is a venerable, usually dispassionate judge, the overseer of a divine or angelic council, a figure who sits above the world. YHWH, by contrast, is passionately involved in human affairs. He has personality. He gets angry and argues. He is not just the god of all elements, but often he appears specifically as a storm god. At other times, he is a warrior god, “YHWH of Armies,” usually rendered in English as “Lord of Hosts.” But he is not depicted as the general of organized armies. It seems that he emerged as a bandit lord.
There are many theories of the origins of YHWH. Whereas most ancient Israelite culture was contiguous with the Canaanite culture around them, no god named YHWH is attested in non-Israelite Canaan. This suggests that the cult of YHWH came to the Israelites from elsewhere, a hypothesis which is supported by the Bible itself. When Moses first encounters YHWH, he is not in Canaan or among the other Israelites in Egyptian captivity, but has fled after coming to political consciousness and slaying an Egyptian overseer who was beating an Israelite slave. Moses comes to the land of Midian, east of Egypt and south of what would later be Judah, or Judea. It is there, after he marries the daughter of local priest, that YHWH calls out from a burning bush, revealing that He is Moses’s god. He tells Moses to bring this news back to his people, and to lead them out of Egypt, into Canaan. When he embarks on this task, the strange god meets the people as they wander the desert, still not in Canaan, and closer to Midian. Despite the story of Genesis, which places YHWH already in the creation, here we have the story of a foreign god coming to a people’s aid from abroad and only entering their land as he accompanies them on their return home.
The semantic layers thicken when we consider the peculiar fact that, almost everywhere else in the Hebrew Bible, the people who make a covenant with god are referred to in genealogical terms, as the children of Israel or as adherents to one of Israel’s twelve tribes, but the people aided by YHWH in Egypt are also called “Hebrews.” Here and in most of the scattered occurrences of the term elsewhere in the Bible, “Hebrew” is uttered by non-Israelites, often with disdain, often emphasizing the Hebrews’ role as outsiders, troublemakers, scoundrels, or disobedient slaves. This may be because, etymologically, the term evokes the meaning “wandering” or “being across” or “beyond.” So when the patriarch Abraham, uniquely among the patriarchs, is called a “Hebrew,” he is not being called a member of the Hebrew nation. He is introduced as “Abram ha-ivri” (Gen 14.13), which might have meant “Abram the wanderer” or “Abram the one who comes from beyond,” or perhaps “Abram who was one of the bandit folk.”
It is widely speculated that “Hebrew” did not originally refer to a nation or descent group, but to a category of people known elsewhere in the region as Habiru or ‘Apiru. In Mesopotamia, the ‘Apiru were nomads and outcasts. In Canaan, they also became famed as warriors—not the kind of warrior that marched with the imperial hosts of Egypt or Babylon, but untamed desert warriors, partisans who attached themselves to many and no causes. The ‘Apiru of Midian, perhaps, worshiped their own god, named YHWH, and in their struggles against their outcast condition, they joined the suffering tribes of Israel, offering themselves as shock troops against Egyptian oppressors and offering, too, their god.
The novelty of the Israelite cult of YHWH lay not only in the radical rejection of other gods, but also in the strangeness of this new god. The Canaanites already had gods of the sea (Yam) and of the mountains (both El and Baal). They had gods of hunting and war (Anat, Chemosh), of death and the underworld (Mot), of fertility and renewal (Astarte and Asherah). The Hebrews wander in with their god of insurgent wanderers. They made animal sacrifices to YHWH, as Canaanites do to other gods, but their initial cultic centers are in tents rather than in fixed high places. The Canaanite holidays that were originally associated with sacrificial and agricultural practice are overlaid with historical narratives about escape and wandering. Passover, which had been a festival of spring, when unleavened bread reminded people of the poverty of winter, becomes a story of escaping from the sufferings of Egypt. Shavuot, when the Israelites celebrated the harvest of grain, is recast as a celebration of the encounter with YHWH in Sinai. Sukkot, when the Israelites would spend time in outdoor booths to celebrate the fruit harvest, gains new meaning as a commemoration of life spent outdoors during the time of wandering.
But the greatest change to Israelite cultic practice comes still later—when the inheritors of the Hebrews become wanderers again.
Exile among Other Gods
The deportation of the Judahite elites to Babylonia both consummates Jewish monotheism and throws the tradition back into a polytheistic world, where the god that had been given special place by the state of Judah is no longer society’s dominant god. In Exile, two mutually contradictory tendencies develop, one that idealizes the lost kingdom of Judah and dreams of return and restoration, and a second that denounces all worldly kingdoms and turns the dream of return into a symbol of universal redemption. The first tendency praises the former kings who suppressed non-YHWH worship, blaming the tolerance and polytheism of other Judahite kings for the catastrophe of Exile. The second tendency defers the imagined return of the proper kingship to an indefinite future, questioning the legitimacy of all rulers until that time arrives.
In the editorial activity that follows this historical moment, when Persia conquers Babylonia, allowing a faction of Judahite intellectuals to return home while other factions remain abroad, the contradictory tendencies of exilic thought leave their marks on the compilation of texts that would be gradually canonized as the Hebrew Bible. Some passages that enter the compilation are clearly aimed at justifying the authority of the semi-autonomous Judahite government in the new Persian province of Yehud.
Other passages condemn such worldly authority, cry out against the injustice of those in power, and look forward to a whole new world. While the Book of Kings praises the old monarchs and their forced centralization of worship in Jerusalem’s Temple, all the preceding books celebrate the rich spiritual life of Israelites dispersed across plains and hills, who had no need to place their god in a fixed home. While some Biblical passages emphasize the liturgical responsibilities of priests and the people’s responsibility to obey them, other passages declare the holiness of the whole people and celebrate the prophets who speak without priestly license or royal approval.
While at some moments the prophets exhort the people to return immediately to their homeland, at other moments they begin to understand the people as wanderers through an exile that began with the exit from Eden and will end only when earthly paradise is restored. While some stories condemn all foreign and unofficial cults, others merely celebrate the wondrous characteristics of YHWH. While the former tendency aligns with the efforts to eliminate the worship of all but the one authorized god, the latter tendency expresses itself in an underground spirit of paganism.
If we take up the antimonarchical tendency of Jewish tradition, Judaism becomes at least a little bit pagan again. The Hebrew Bible was canonized during the period when the Temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt and Judean cultic practice was recentralized. But as Judean autonomy was increasingly restricted under Greek and then Roman domination, and after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, Jewish tradition would reconstitute itself as a theology without a cultic center, as the tradition of a people among many peoples, and as the worship of a god who differs from other peoples’ gods. It was only then, when the high priests of Jerusalem were replaced by rabbis without a Temple, that what we now know as Judaism was formed.
Judaism became itself not by having its own god sanctioned by a state, but by having a different god, a god that differed from the gods of those who ruled. Jewish intellectuals in this period stopped obsessing with the pagan-ness of the unauthorized gods around them and instead devoted themselves to finding space for their own god, which had become unauthorized. Judaism became itself by having the wrong god, by becoming pagan to other gods. And when Christianity and Islam came to rule in most lands inhabited by Jews, Judaism became other to the monotheisms in power.
It is true that it became a slogan of Judaism to declare that “YHWH is one!” (recited in the prayer “Shema Yisroel”), but this utterance derived its power from the awareness that YHWH was also an other to the others’ gods. By the act of resisting other claims to universal divinity and insisting on a specifically Jewish understanding of the god that is “one,” Jewish tradition carried forth the pagan practice of connecting every god to a people and allowing each people to make its god in its own way. If the boundaries among peoples were “fixed… according to the sons of El” (as we saw in Deuteronomy 32.8), there could be one Baal in Ugarit and another in Samaria, one El in Phoenicia and another in Israel, one YHWH in Midian and another among the wanderers of Sinai. The Lord could be one among the Jews and another among the Christians and the Muslims. Even if he was also still a little bit the same. He was worshiped differently, narrated differently; he was a different character.
The Underground Tradition
By resituating the Jewish god, among the world’s many gods, we can place Jewish tradition back in the plural ontology from which it emerged at the cusp of Western classical history, when philosophy began to seek unitary laws of nature and universal human justice but still assumed that there may be many paths to fulfillment in the universe. When theology began to imagine universal salvation but still allowed the poetry of particularity to grow apart in every different land.
The Bible tells the story of a covenant that becomes the connecting point between the Israelites and their god. Thereafter, if the people fail their god, he has the right to punish them, but if he fails them, by all rights they too should be freed from the terms to which their ancestors agreed. If there is only one god with whom to make a covenant, and if He is the sole master of the universe, then the contract is signed under duress. A contract like this can only be legitimate and upheld in the court of popular opinion if it is signed freely. In order to sign freely, the signatories must have somewhere else to turn if they don’t like the deal. It is only an act of freedom, that is, if there are other gods. Other gods, or else no gods at all which would leave us free to make a covenant among ourselves.
Jewish tradition does not only tell of the foreclosure of this freedom—the command to associate with a single god and no other god—it tells also of the struggle to maintain this freedom, long suppressed by the later Biblical narrators, but long defended by the people of whom they write. This is the tradition of rebellion and refusal that was repeatedly condemned by Biblical writers, but which also captivated them enough to make them keep telling the rebels’ stories. They left an underground tradition in the Bible’s pages, denounced and yet available for us to revive. We can place ourselves among those who insisted on worshiping the female Asherah alongside male YHWH. We can join the sons of Korah who declared against Moses that all the people are holy, not only their priests and their god (Num. 16.3). We can join in the creative pleasures of engraving images and building golden calves.
We can consider that building idols is what any creative theology must do. However much the prophets might inveigh against the base material that supposedly composes inferior and false gods, consider that the decisive material is not stone or gold, but words and ideas. They can pass through hard matter and rise up to make stories, with characters that speak to us and help us think beyond dumb experience and presupposed truths. The underground, pagan current in Jewish tradition is what enables the tradition to reject the claims of absolute truth that are made for the gods of those with power. The building of idols reminds us that it is up to us to make or remake or unmake our gods.
Joe Grim Feinberg
Beloved author of A Demonology of Desires.
Joe Grim Feinberg is a writer and social theorist based in Prague. His academic work explores folklore, national narratives, and the cultural-historical formation of political subjectivity. His literary work reworks old folk traditions--like ghost stories. Feinberg's novel A Demonology of Desires was published in 2025 by Sul Books.