Author of Creation, according to the teaching of Scripture. Yet the world remains imperfect. Reality as we encounter it, filled with seeming arbitrariness and random suffering, cannot possibly represent life as a perfect God intended it. Western religions have invested great intellectual efforts in solving this problem of theodicy (tsaddik ve-ra’ lo in Hebrew, “the righteous one whose lot is bad”), not a few of them directed toward either blaming the victims, as do Job's “comforters,” or promising vindication in the World to Come. Christianity, it may be said, conquered Rome by conquering death with its promise of life eternal. Rabbinic teaching too, while avoiding the most extreme otherworldly focus of much Christian rhetoric, used the afterlife as its chief solution to the woes of theodicy. But some of the most profound and deeply felt responses to human suffering, perhaps feeling the inadequacy of this answer, turn back to the images of premundane forces that elude the control of God. Gnosticism, on the edge of early Christianity, and Kabbalah, arising in the heart of medieval Judaism, both have recourse to this myth of an incomplete conquest of the chaos that underlies creation. The opposing forces were not destroyed, only set aside by the imposition of creation's order. They retain their character as “forces of darkness,” rejecting the goodness of God, producing demons that both tempt and punish humans, and representing an alternative, “evil” and yet sometimes surprisingly profound and attractive, vision of existence.6 Monotheism in a moralizing context can thus never quite escape its own dualistic shadow. Insofar as the enemy of God and rectitude is real and powerful, it will be expressed by some demonic manifestation that is more or less a version of the ancient tale of God's inability or unwillingness to fully vanquish the forces of chaos or darkness.7 The emerging monotheistic orthodoxies of both Judaism and Christianity both struggled mightily with this dualistic urge. The church rejected Gnosticism in its early centuries, but the presence of “the devil” in the imagination of so many Christians over the centuries shows that its influence never receded entirely. In Judaism it was the Kabbalists who opted for a limited dualism, seeing the demonic's origin within the inner divine process. While that view was dismissed in much of modern Judaism, it is now enjoying a certain comeback, along with much else in the mystical tradition.
The complexity of the divine personality as reflected in our sources also belongs to the legacy of the biblical struggle to both combat and subsume the polytheistic universe that preceded it. In a world of many gods, specialization of function can be rather clearly delineated and the conduct of a particular deity can be more or less predicted. It is no surprise that the god of war will act in an aggressive and warlike manner, that love gods seductively supply us with potions that lead us into love, or that gods and goddesses of the crops overflow with bounty. Rain gods have to be appeased in their proper season, and gods of fertility must be given their due, both in sacrificial offerings and in sexual rites, so that both human and animal wombs might be opened. You may have your tribal gods and I mine, but travelers venturing beyond their own people's territory are well advised to make some offering to the power ruling the land or city they are about to enter. Monotheism means that all these deities, along with their many functions and personae, are absorbed into a single Being, one God who has to represent them all. Y-H-W-H comes to be seen as the God who rules Assyria and Babylonia as well as Israel. He is the One who brings the rain and blesses the flocks; He is at once master of birth and death, of war and peace, of compassion and punishment, affliction and healing. How can one God manage so many emotions and act in so many different ways? God is a King with ten garments, according to an early Hebrew poem embedded in the New Year liturgy. “Which one shall I wear today?” he is constantly