Evolution of God

The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright

About 100 pages into a fas­ci­nat­ing new book, detail­ing the rise and fall of gods, god­desses, the reli­gious impulse and its reper­cus­sions. The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright, is a gen­eral his­tory, start­ing from the ear­li­est hunter-​​gatherer soci­eties, mov­ing into chief­doms after the dis­cov­ery of agri­cul­ture, onto city-​​states in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and through the advent of Levantine mono­la­try and monothe­ism. I’ve reach the foot of Mount Monolatry and fierce storms are tak­ing shape.

Wright reminds us how much reli­gion per­me­ated every cul­ture, from the dawn of human time to the present. All things were tied to the gods, espe­cially early on in our evo­lu­tion. The fate of your hunts, your har­vests, your health, your per­sonal for­tunes and the for­tunes of your tribe, chief­dom and city-​​state were inex­tri­ca­bly linked to them. He shows how impor­tant facts on the ground — polit­i­cal, eco­nomic, gen­eral wel­fare — were when it came to the ascen­dancy of this god or that god. The quid pro quo nature of that. As in, if a per­son was seen to have access to a par­tic­u­lar god, and good things were asso­ci­ated with that god, like strong har­vests and vic­to­ries in wars, then both the gate­keeper and the god could gain in stature.  Multiply that by many fac­tors when we reach city-​​states, and whole his­to­ries might be revised, destroyed, overcome.

So far, Wright is blaz­ing the trail from poly­the­ism to monothe­ism, but does not say that it’s a straight line. More like a zig zag. In Egypt, for exam­ple, monothe­ism lived for a brief time in the late 2nd mil­le­nium under Akhenaton, as he ele­vated Aten above all other gods. Mesopotamia came close with the god Marduk.

Wright fre­quently talks about the moral and eth­i­cal dimen­sion in reli­gions from around the world, and reminds us that it existed long before monothe­ism. Even in the very ear­li­est soci­eties, it was believed that the gods pun­ished bad behav­ior, that if you did X, Y or Z, they might inflict ter­ri­ble things on you, your fam­ily, your clan. Religious rites were pri­mar­ily designed to pre­vent that, to push the gods into allow­ing good things to hap­pen and pre­vent bad things. We have not changed much in that regard, even after thou­sands of years of reli­gious evolution.

Back to the foot of the moun­tain. In a sec­tion of the book that might well stir up a lot of con­tro­versy, although it’s not con­tro­ver­sial amongst schol­ars, Wright talks about new dis­cov­er­ies regard­ing Canaan and the ori­gin of the Israelites:

.… If you read the Hebrew Bible care­fully, it tells the story of a god in evo­lu­tion, a god whose char­ac­ter changes rad­i­cally from begin­ning to end.

There’s a prob­lem, how­ever, if you want to watch this story unfold. You can’t just start read­ing the first chap­ter of Genesis and plow for­ward, wait­ing for God to grow. The first chap­ter of Genesis was almost cer­tainly writ­ten later than the sec­ond chap­ter of Genesis, by a dif­fer­ent author. The Hebrew Bible took shape slowly, over many cen­turies, and the order in which it was writ­ten is not the order in which it now appears. Fortunately, bib­li­cal schol­ar­ship can in some cases give us a pretty good idea of which texts fol­lowed which. This knowl­edge of the order of com­po­si­tion is a kind of “decoder” that allows us to see a pat­tern in God’s growth that would oth­er­wise be hidden.

Meanwhile, archae­ol­ogy has sup­ple­mented this decoder with potent inter­pre­tive tools. In the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury, a Syrian peas­ant plowed up rem­nants of an ancient Canaanite city called Ugarit. Scholars set about deci­pher­ing the Ugaritic lan­guage and comb­ing the earth for Ugaritic texts. These texts, along with other ves­tiges of Canaanite cul­ture unearthed in recent decades, have allowed the assem­bly of some­thing notably absent from the Hebrew scrip­tures: the story from the point of view of those Baal-​​worshipping Canaanites. And, over the past few decades, archae­ol­ogy has brought another check on the story as told in the Bible. Excavations in the land of the Israelites have clar­i­fied their his­tory, some­times at the expense of the bib­li­cal story line.

When you put all this together — a read­ing of the Canaanite texts, a selec­tive “decod­ing” of the bib­li­cal texts, and a new archae­o­log­i­cal under­stand­ing of Israelite his­tory — you get a whole new pic­ture of the Abrahamic god. It’s a pic­ture that, on the one hand, absolves Abrahamic monothe­ism of some of the gravest charges against it, yet on the other hand, chal­lenges the stan­dard basis of monothe­is­tic faith. It’s a pic­ture that ren­ders the Abrahamic god in often unflat­ter­ing terms, yet charts his mat­u­ra­tion and offers hope for future growth. And cer­tainly it’s a pic­ture very dif­fer­ent from the one drawn in the aver­age syn­a­gogue, church, or mosque.…

 

Wright’s book is heav­ily foot­noted, comes with sev­eral appen­dices, and the deep research shows. I’m look­ing for­ward to dis­cov­er­ing more of it and fol­low­ing the evo­lu­tion­ary road deeper into the desert, to the sea, and into the sun.

 

 

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