Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [19]
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EVOLUTION CONTINUES: A JEWISH HISTORY OF “GOD”
Ancient Legacy Preserved and Transformed
Our Western religious history begins in the ancient Near East, among peoples who worshipped sky gods, deities who dwelt first within and later beyond the heavens and who were manifest in lofty mountains and mighty storms. Our ancestors celebrated the ancient memory of these gods, including their defeat of the netherworld gods, dwellers in the darkness and the deep. The reframing of the Creation story was part of a much larger evolution toward what was to become Israelite monotheism as it emerged in the later prophetic period. But the pre-Israelite polytheistic legacy, hidden as it was behind the harmonizing face of Genesis, could not be entirely set aside. Transformations of culture are never sudden or complete; aspects of old beliefs and fears are retained as the “shadow” side of seemingly new and different ways of thinking. I want to point out certain elements of that ancient Near Eastern legacy that have abided with us over the several millennia since what was once considered the “monotheistic revolution,” probably better to be understood as the slow, long-term, and by no means consistent “monotheistic evolution.”
First among these elements is the vertical metaphor: the sense that God stands (or sits, in fact) above us. The old sky gods did not disappear but conceptually morphed into the God of Hebrew Scripture. In the biblical period God was seen to dwell in a palace located on the far side of the upper waters that lay beyond the sky. “The heavens are the heavens of Y-H-W-H; the earth has He given to the children of Adam” (Ps. 115:16), wrote the Psalmist. Christianity inherited this belief from the Scripture it called the Old Testament; the risen Christ was depicted as dwelling “in heaven,” at the right hand of the Father. Christian art depicted this two-tiered universe in infinitely more graphic detail than had previously been imagined. The rabbis and the earliest Jewish mystics, restricted to verbal descriptions, spoke also of God residing in the “seventh heaven,” and of arduous heavenly journeys to reach the divine throne room. The early visionary or Merkavah tradition may be characterized as one of extreme, sometimes perhaps even self-mocking, verticality. Rabbinic teachings closely related to the Merkavah sources depicted Moses, as well as his latter-day successor Rabbi Akiva, rising through the clouds and holding onto God's Throne of Glory so as not to be pushed back to earth by those fire-breathing angels who opposed human ascent to a realm beyond our natural place.1
Far as we think we have traveled from those ancient beliefs, a certain attachment to the vertical metaphor in theology has never quite left us. As children we still think of God being “up there,” of heaven as somewhere beyond the sky. Even if we as adults see ourselves as having outgrown such childish conceptions, verticality is hard to shake. We will still turn our thought to heaven or think of ourselves as seeking to reach a “higher spiritual level.” In more casual moments, we might talk about “getting high” by exulting in God. Even the “superior” morality of the post-Kantian God rests on this ancient model of thought; it is, after all, a more “elevated” way of living. All of these are part of the legacy of the vertical metaphor. Of course, that metaphor is reinforced throughout the pages of Scripture, and anyone raised in Judeo-Christian-Islamic culture has great difficulty escaping it.
In fact there has been some competition over the course of two thousand five hundred years between this vertical language