NELC0311 - Divinity, Polytheism and Monotheism in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel - Judah

This course treats monotheism as a particular historical development of the texts in the Hebrew Bible (that is, the Jewish Tanakh/Christian Old Testament), and thus analyzes the idea of “one God only” as the product of a complex set of historical conditions. It will take extensive time to examine the early history of the Hebrew Bible’s familiar God, Yhwh, in inscriptional, biblical, and archaeological evidence, showing that he was once at home in the polytheistic environment of the ancient Near East (Southwest Asia). By embracing these longstanding entanglements, this course will explore the means by which Hebrew scribes came to define this deity not only as the most important god among many, but as the only all-powerful deity to exist in the entire cosmos. A variety of topics will be covered, addressing a number of questions raised by the evidence at hand: what is the evidence for Yhwh outside of the Bible? How do historians define his emergence in history? Did he really have a wife named Asherah? What did he look like and where did he live?
What circumstances caused Judean writers to consider him the only all-powerful deity the universe? And finally, how did the subsequent Jewish imagination re-inscribe the older polytheistic world in light of monotheizing changes? While knowledge of the Bible, its languages, and its history may seem like a desired feature for the prospective student, there are no prerequisites. This course will be able to introduce the material to those at a beginner’s level.