Worldview Foundations of Old Testament Literature

By Prof. Sergey Averintsev

The literature of the Old Testament elaborates and develops a completely special type of ideology, fundamentally different from the mythological systems of other peoples of that era, and in some respects even opposite to them: this is an “anti-myth”, which builds itself in the external forms of myth. If every pagan god of Egypt or Mesopotamia, of Canaan or Greece has a colorfully colored by the folk imagination story of his origin, of his marriages, exploits and sufferings, then with the biblical God Yahweh there is nothing similar and by the very nature of this image there cannot be.

There is nothing to tell about Yahweh, except that He created the world and man – according to Albright’s hypothesis, the very name Yahweh is an abbreviation of an ancient formula meaning “He Who causes all that exists to be”, and then He entered with His creations into the dramatic vicissitudes of union and dispute. He does not have His own divine “biography”. This is a completely unique feature, connected with the uniqueness of the ancient Hebrew idea of ​​God. Only with the passage of time does Yahweh make sense in the teachings of the prophets and scribes as the unconditionally only true God of monotheism; but from the very beginning He is in any case unique, incomparable and incommensurable with other gods, and therefore lonely. He is no longer the head of a patriarchal family, entangled in complex kinship relations with those similar to Himself, as the Greek epic depicts Zeus. Yahweh has no equals to Himself, and it is this that personally motivates His intense and jealous attention to man.

Hence the special world-historical role of biblical ideology in the formation of human self-consciousness: face to face with such an image of God, man more acutely perceived his own features as features of a personality who, with his will, stands against the entire composition of the world whole.

The creators of the Old Testament “anti-myth” set themselves a fundamentally different task than, for example, the Greek poets, who plastically and in relief depicted their gods as models of an ideal bodily “posture.” Yahweh must be depicted as a subject of will, not as an object of contemplation; therefore, all extrapersonal, reifying features had to be removed.

One can enter into communion with Yahweh, into dialogue, but He cannot be seen: “Remember firmly in your souls that you saw no form on the day that Yahweh spoke to you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire” (see Deut. 4:15). “He is pleased to dwell in darkness” (1 Kings 8:12). If ancient poetry willingly speaks of the Olympians in the third person, describing them and telling about them, then the Bible is characterized not by speech about God, but speech to God and the speech of God. Yahweh is not so much a “He” as an authoritative “I” and an invocation of “You”. Therefore, there is not and cannot be the sculptural, clear and calm imagery of the Greek myth; on the other hand, even greater scope is opened up for the theme of personal will. Of course, the poetry of human self-consciousness and of “sacred history” was not created in a vacuum; genetically it was connected with the material of the primeval nature myth. In the features of the personal God Yahweh, something of the image of the element remains. Sometimes His anger can turn into a blaze of fire: “Yahweh was angry, and His anger was kindled, and the fire of Yahweh burned among them and consumed the outskirts of the camp” (see Num. 11:1). In fire Yahweh appears to the people of Sinai, and smoke rises from this mountain as from a furnace (Ex. 19:18). Another elemental metaphor of Yahweh is the wind. The organic mutual transition between the personal and the elemental in this system of images is characteristic of the phrase ruach Elohim – “the breath/spirit of God” that occurs in the biblical account of the creation of the world, and then in other texts. This all-encompassing “breath of God” that hovered over the original chaos is not always just “spirit” in the spiritual sense. After all, in the book of Numbers (Num. 11:31) we read that this “breath” picks up a flock of quails and carries them from the sea to the desert, so it is a gust of wind; and yet this is by no means “mere” wind, but is certainly also some manifestation of the “spirit” of Yahweh, His coming to people, which communicates to them the gift of prophecy – as happens a little earlier in the same chapter of the book of Numbers.

And so it is in everything: the anger of Yahweh and the blazing fire that comes from Him; the gusts of His will and the gusts of the whirlwind; the overwhelming power of His word and the roar of thunder described as the voice of Yahweh in Psalm 17 – all this is a single and inseparable image, in its own way extremely concrete, although this concreteness has nothing to do with the statuesque corporeality of the Greek Olympians.

It would be a gross anti-historical error to understand the elemental features of Yahweh’s phenomena as a rational allegory of a “pure” transcendental content; but it would be no less a methodological error to reduce the entire image to them and not to see the fundamental difference between this image and the figures of natural mythology. Ultimately, the connection of the image of Yahweh with the elements of fire and whirlwind, that is, with those elements that are the most dynamic and the least “material”, does not deny, but clearly confirms the personal, volitional essence of Yahweh.

On the contrary, the clumsy immobility of the earth is further from Him; therefore Yahweh has no place on earth with which He is essentially connected, unlike the West Semitic local gods, the “baals”, whose names included a designation of the locality to which they belonged: Baal Peor – “Lord of Peor”, Melqart – “King of the city”. And Yahweh also has His holy places, mainly mountains – Sinai, Hermon, Carmel, Zion; but the Bible persistently emphasizes that the true essence of its God is not attached to these local points.

Yahweh is a wanderer, freely moving through all spaces and by His very nature homeless, like the element of the wind that symbolizes Him:

“Behold, He will pass by me, and I will not see Him;

He will fly by, and I will not perceive Him,” as the hero of the book of Job says (Job 9:11).

Of course, the everyday basis of such ideas was the nomadic way of life, once inherent in the ancestors of the ancient Jews. But in order for the image of the God-stranger, who does not fit either in heaven or on earth, to be experienced with such expressiveness, it was necessary for human self-consciousness to feel its own separation from natural space and its opposition to it.

It is characteristic that Yahweh constantly demands from His chosen ones, once they enter into communion with Him, first of all to “come out” somewhere into the unknown from that place where they have been rooted until now: this is what He does with Abraham, and then with the entire Jewish people, whom He “leads out” from Egypt. This state of “exit” clearly has the weight of a symbol in the literature of the Old Testament: the person or the people must “come out” from the inertia of their existence in order to stand in history before Yahweh – as will against will.

Paradoxically, Yahweh, with all His terrible otherness and transcendence, is much closer to man than the so-human gods of Greek myth. Zeus and Apollo do not care at all about the inner world of their worshipers; they live in cosmic existence and “in their own circle,” accepting from people only a tribute of loyalty. On the contrary, Yahweh jealously and insistently demands love from man: to love Yahweh your God, to walk in all His ways, to keep His commandments, to cleave to Him, and to serve Him with all your heart and with all your soul (see Num. 22:5). Ultimately, the Old Testament God has only one concern, unique as Himself: to find man submissive and devoted to Himself. For the sovereign possession of the whole world is not enough to satisfy Yahweh’s will; it can be satisfied only through the free recognition of another will—the human will. Only in people can Yahweh be glorified (see 2 Sam. 7, etc.).

Here many can clarify two places of interpretation – the Midrash, on Psalm 123; it is a late but legitimate offspring of the same ancient Hebrew tradition: “You are My witnesses, says Yahweh, and I am God” (see Isa. 43:12), that is: if you are My witnesses, I am God, and if you are not My witnesses, I am as if not God. And again: “To You I lift up my eyes, O You who sit in the heavens” (see Ps. 122:1). This means that if I did not lift up my eyes, You would not sit in the heavens.

In order to have “witnesses,” Yahweh chooses for Himself individual elect and the entire “chosen people”—chooses, which is very important, of his own free will, appealing to the also free will of people and offering them a “contract.” From the point of view of pagan mythology, such relations between a deity and a people simply cannot be understood. Of course, Marduk treats the Babylonians better, Amun the Thebans and the Egyptians in general, Pallas Athena the Athenians and the Greeks in general, than foreigners; but not at all because they “chosen” their people, but simply by virtue of their natural belonging to one country or another. The sanctuary of Athena is connected to the hill of the Acropolis as a tree is to its soil. But Yahweh does choose His people for Himself, and in such a way that His choice is not conditioned by anything; because they love “without reason.” “Yahweh your God has chosen you to be his own people, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that Yahweh chose you and chose you—because you were the fewest of all the peoples, but because Yahweh loves you,” Moses explains to Israel (see Deut. 7:6–8).

A love that demands, and with jealous severity, reciprocal love; an “I” that seeks recognition from another “I”—this is the essence of the relationship between God and man in the ancient Hebrew understanding. Man is intrinsically necessary to God and feels this necessity. Hence comes the formal “union,” or “contract,” or “covenant”—berith, between the two parties, when at Mount Sinai Yahweh and Israel bind themselves to mutual obligations.

From this sense of freedom and the cosmic importance of human choice flow the mystical historicism and optimism of the Old Testament. Old Testament literature lives with the idea of ​​a progressive purposeful movement, possible only for the conscious will, be it divine or human.

Thus, in the narrative of the Book of Genesis, the blessings and promises that Yahweh gives to Abraham and his descendants are repeatedly repeated. As a result, a natural effect of accumulation arises – a sense of a steadily increasing amount of divine guarantees of future good. This idea of ​​progressive movement unites the scattered narratives of the various books of the biblical canon into a single religious-historical epic, the like of which, precisely in its unity, no other people of the Mediterranean and the Near East knows. Each of Homer’s poems depicts only a closed episode of the legendary tradition of the Hellenes, and their entire aesthetic specificity is based precisely on this closure.

In the Bible, the continuous rhythm of history dominates a movement that cannot be closed, and each separate fragment of which has its true and final meaning only in relation to all the others. With the development of Old Testament literature, this mystical historicism becomes more and more distinct and conscious; it reaches its culmination in the prophetic and apocalyptic texts.

Source in Russian: Old Testament Literature, “Alpha and Omega”, 41, 2004.