RELIGION / JOHN DART : Jewish Scholar Explores Sources of the Ancient Israelites’ Beliefs

The ancient Israelites were flailed for centuries by biblical prophets as shameless, compulsive idolaters who scoffed at God’s laws. Now a Jewish scholar hopes to give them a much-belated fair hearing.

Ziony Zevit of the University of Judaism, who has been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship that begins next month, said he will use the time and money to go beyond the biblical polemics to determine the range of beliefs of the Israelites, the people whose religion eventually gave rise to modern Judaism and Christianity as well.

He expects to be helped by inscriptions and other material from ritual sites discovered by archeologists in recent years.

Most of the books of what became the Hebrew Bible, called the Old Testament by Christians, were written between 1100 B.C. and a period shortly after 586 B.C. when the temple of the Jewish King Solomon, called the First Temple, was destroyed by the Babylonians. The biblical texts represent the viewpoint of the priestly elites of Jerusalem, advocates of monotheism--one God instead of many--who ultimately prevailed over Israelite polytheists who believed in a number of gods, Zevit said. The Judaism of rabbis and synagogues developed several centuries later.

“What seems to be emerging” from his eight years of research, Zevit said in an interview, “is that the monotheists were a small and insignificant movement until after the destruction of the first Jerusalem Temple--not the mainstream religion from which everybody was falling away” when the biblical prophets excoriated them for backsliding.

That means, Zevit said, that the Bible is not representative of what most Israelites were thinking 25 centuries ago because the later victors in the ideological struggles obscured the beliefs of the polytheistic losers in Israel’s early history.

“They thought that polytheism can be nothing other than stupidity, so they couldn’t represent it fairly,” said Zevit in his office at the hillside campus in Sepulveda Pass. “It’s reasonable to think that people thought what they were doing was right because they were instructed that it was right.”

Zevit, professor of biblical literature and northwest Semitic languages at the university, which is aligned with the Conservative branch of Judaism, was the only one of the 147 scholars awarded a 1994 Guggenheim Fellowship nationally whose research focus is on religion.

Veteran archeologist William Dever of the University of Arizona, in a telephone interview, praised Zevit as eminently qualified both in historical-critical analysis of the Bible and in archeology--which Dever called a rarity among scholars specializing in that era.

“He is deeply committed to Judaism but is willing to look at new sources, no matter how disturbing,” Dever said. Zevit’s book on the history of Israelite religion resulting from the research “will be a landmark study,” Dever predicted.

Zevit and Dever are not alone in seeking a better understanding of those scorned by the prophets Hosea and Ezekiel as “whores” to idols and ridiculed by Isaiah for seeking advice from “ghosts and the familiar spirits that chirp and mutter.”

Dartmouth scholar Susan Ackerman wrote in last fall’s Journal of Biblical Literature that since the late 1970s many studies have tried to redefine the varieties of Israelite religion in light of new archeological discoveries and more nuanced study of biblical texts. “We have thus come to doubt the rather homogeneous picture presented by the biblical writers,” she wrote.

Zevit said important inscriptions have been found at three sites in lands once populated by the early Israelites that link Yahweh, the God of the Bible, and Asherah, “the name of the goddess we know very well from Canaanite mythology,” Zevit said. The Canaanites were Semitic neighbors of the ancient Israelites.

“The Bible only knows the Canaanite gods Baal and Asherah, but here we have sites where Yahweh and this goddess are clearly associated,” he said, indicating they were once worshiped together.

In the Bible itself, Zevit noted, there are prohibitions against holding religious sacrifices in high places, but in the book of Kings it is mentioned that none of the kings have moved to high places because the people are still worshiping there.

“The people are obviously doing things in specific violation of the Pentateuch (the law-giving five books of the Bible),” Zevit said.

“We know that Israel’s neighbors in that time seemed to have their own national gods,” he said. “The Israelites may have been hedging their bets or had divided loyalties--the God of Israel takes care of these things and these other gods take care of other things.”

Zevit compared the scenario to modern-day Japan, where Shinto beliefs and practices concerning death and ancestors find popular accommodation with Buddhist beliefs.

In another example, Zevit said that the Pentateuch prescribes that an altar have four horns, upon which the blood of the sacrificial animal was to be placed to atone for sins.

“What are you supposed to think when you find altars that don’t have horns at all?” he asked. “Archeological data are giving us a whole bunch of altars with horns, without horns and other variations.”

The Jerusalem Temple built during Solomon’s reign was supposed to be the only place of worship for the Israelites, but to the south in Arrad have been found the remains of a temple-fortress that functioned for almost 300 years during the Israelite period, he said. “Furthermore, at the temple at Arrad they find curved standing stones, which are specifically prohibited in the Pentateuch.”

“We also know of a temple that was excavated at Hazor,” active in the same era, he said.

The Bible has to be seen as a collection of partisan documents--sometimes preaching to the converted, but also written to convince others, Zevit said.

“In the historical books--Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings (but not including Chronicles, which is a later version of Kings)--from the moment that Joshua dies, Israel starts to go downhill, as the story is told,” Zevit said.

“God is always sending figures to redeem, to teach, to preach, to convince Israel to change,” he said. “Ultimately, nothing happens. At the end of the book of Kings, the people are in exile. All of the prophets held the threat over Israel’s head that the worst (punishment would be) the exile of the people from the land, because that’s the cancellation of the covenant that was made at Sinai between God and the people.”

Zevit said the final authors of Kings were advancing an answer to the question of why the Israelites were then in enforced exile: “Here is the history that proves that you have blown it consistently. Why? You haven’t obeyed these laws and these laws, and you can’t plead ignorance. Why? Because God sent the prophets.”

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But in contrast to the biblical picture that monotheism had reached the status of an orthodoxy which backsliders or pagans resisted, “Israelite religion was very heterogeneous in a lot of its practices--much more than the biblical literature would allow us to suspect,” he said.

“It’s not enough to say, ‘Oh, that’s not Israelite religion, that’s paganism.’ Paganism is the name we give to something we don’t like,” he said. “Many of these people were thinking they were good, pious and did what was expected of them.

“This wasn’t a matter of good people and bad people, but a lot of people with competing ideas,” he said. “The struggle that monotheism underwent to be accepted was long and immense.”

Zevit said he will spend a year working primarily in two Jerusalem museums during his fellowship and visit several archeological sites.

Dever, the archeologist, said Zevit’s comprehensive synthesis of biblical, inscriptional and archeological materials will be unparalleled.

“My work will be of interest to the professional scholars, a minor percentage of our population, but it will also be of interest to people who take the Bible seriously,” he said.

That is sometimes surprising, Zevit said. The professor said he was invited to speak a month ago to a group of people having only passing familiarity with the Bible. To the shock of a friend, he decided to talk on “The Theory of Sacrifice in Ancient Israel.”

But the response then and in later phone calls was enthusiastic, he said.

“A lot of people out there--Jews, Christians, believers, nonbelievers, affiliated, non-affiliated--still take the Bible seriously as an intellectual monument to the past,” he said.

“They are very curious about it,” he added. “The religious can be curious about what their spiritual forerunners believed. Atheists and agnostics can be interested in what their intellectual forerunners thought. ‘Ah,’ they say, ‘that’s the religion I don’t believe in but I didn’t know about it before.’ ”