Episode 35: Isaiah and the Messiah 2: Idolatry in Ancient Israel and During the Exile

This is all incredibly important foundational information for discussing the disputations and idol polemics that we find throughout Isaiah 40-55 and without this knowledge, it is very easy to make some wrong assumptions based on the faulty modern views of paganism put forth by the new age/Wiccan movement.

Transcript below, not really very edited so please forgive grammar and spelling mistakes

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As I was writing my lessons on Isaiah chapters 41 and 42, it occurred to me that I needed to lay some serious foundations as to what the faith of ancient Israel actually was during the monarchy and exile—what their mindset was and their view of reality. It can be very difficult to relate to the ancient Israelites at times because we were born into a largely monotheistic world. We look at what happened at Sinai with the golden calf, and during the time of the Judges, and the downward spiral of I and II Kings and we wonder how on earth they could not understand that they were breaking the first commandment to have no other gods before YHVH. Why didn’t they see a problem with worshiping Yahweh and other gods on the side?

But the ancients didn’t think the way we do – and the word monotheism (the exclusive worship and recognition of the existence of only one ultimate God) didn’t exist. The closest approximation to monotheism in the ancient world was actually atheism – because a belief in and worship of only one god just didn’t make any sense to the people of the ancient world.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on youtube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com.

In Isaiah 40-55 we see this common theme, as we will cover more in the upcoming weeks, of Yahweh having to challenge the belief of His people that He was unable to save them because He had been (1) defeated by the Babylonian gods and (2) He had no authority outside of Israel anyway. And this was a very reasonable assumption in the ancient world, this was how they looked at things. Monotheism was crazy and weird. But what were the Israelites? If they weren’t monotheists then what is the alternative? Polytheists? Monolaters? Henotheists? Let’s go through each and use the Biblical account to see where they lined up.

So, what was the norm? Why so many gods? And how did the ancients view their gods?

Gods and goddesses were all about function and dominion. Someone had to be responsible for the rain and it certainly couldn’t be the same one responsible for the sunshine because the functions of sun and rain were entirely different. Therefore, in their minds, there just had to be more than one god and in the case of the Hittites, thousands of them. This is the basis of polytheism, which is the recognition and worship of many gods – gods who are not jealous in nature and who do not demand exclusive allegiance. In other words, Marduk doesn’t care if you are seeing Ishtar on the side and she doesn’t care if you are seeing Enki. In fact, they expected you to. Marduk was the national god, supporting kingship, and Ishtar was the goddess of prostitution and war, and Enki was the god of wisdom. You can’t just neglect one, all of them had to be honored of society would fall apart.

The polytheistic gods were entirely different from the God of A, I & J. One – they were not moral in nature. They had no set standards of conduct that you had to live up to, no knowable expectations – and so the people who worshiped them had no idea whatsoever how to please or displease them. In the polytheistic world, if you made a god angry, then bad things started happening to you. The problem was – which god did you make angry and how did you do it? There was absolutely no way to know for sure, and so in the ancient cuneiform tablets, we see an account of a woman desperately seeking forgiveness but who has no idea what she has done.

If you were being cursed by an unknown god, it was serious business. You had to start repenting of everything you can think of, to every god imaginable. You had to start making the “sacrificial tour” – trying to appease these gods whom you have supposedly done something to offend. Your friends avoid you because they don’t want the gods angry at them by association.

Now – I want you to maybe consider the book of Job in a new light because Job is worded in a really interesting way. With the exception of the very beginning and the very end when the actual actions of YHVH are being discussed, the actual name of God is only mentioned twice in Job 12:9 and 28:28 – both times by Job:

Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this?

And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.

Every other reference is to the generic term God or Elohim and most folks assume that the God of AI &J was being referred to but in re-reading it, I see two different pictures of God being presented – one from the ANE polytheistic mindset of a god whose standards are unknown and must be appeased and the other in line with YHVH, whose standards can be known and which Job knows he has not transgressed.  Like the account of the woman who doesn’t know who the heck she offended or how, Job’s friends are desperately trying to get him to repent for whatever he has done – after all, in the ANE, community was everything, and Job was placing them all in jeopardy by refusing to just admit to a whole bunch of things that he hasn’t even done. So as the chapters wear on and Job keeps protesting his innocence, his friends get more and more determined that he has done something to deserve all this trouble, and Job gets more and more belligerent until their accusations finally lead Job into a place where he makes the mistake of saying that he, and not God, is in the right. But it all comes down to clashing world views and different ideas about God and gods. This was the ANE world.

Another reason that we struggle with understanding Israel’s continual fall into idolatry is because we do not understand faith in the ancient world. Nowadays we have these nice little boxes where we compartmentalize our lives – making a differentiation between sacred and secular, but in the ancient world, there was no such division. That division is very modern. There was no such thing as religion in the ancient world because every aspect of life was religious. There was the ever-present ancestral worship that we see in the story of Laban and Rachel – the teraphim she took would have been the representation of Laban’s ancestors and the caring for those idols was a very grave responsibility that Laban would have taken very seriously. Losing these idols would have been beyond traumatic for the entire family.

This next part is vital to understanding the hyperbole (exaggeration) and idol polemics in Isaiah. We often think that the ancients viewed their idols as gods, but nothing could be further from the truth – the idols were simply representations of the god, which the people could care for and in so doing, care for the god. These idols were oftentimes dressed in the morning, fed, given drink, bathed, oiled, and put to bed. In this way, they thought that they were caring for the god – freeing up the god to do their cosmic jobs and contributing to the general order and well-being of the world. A happy god, after all, is a non-interfering god and they didn’t really want the gods interfering in their lives because they were too unpredictable and amoral (as opposed to immoral—at least immoral gods would always do something bad, amoral gods are unpredictable) to be trusted. This caring for idols would have been normal and unquestioned by the mixed multitude that came out of Egypt and probably to the Israelites as well. Aaron, somehow, knew how to make an idol and did not seem to protest that the making of that idol would be breaking the covenant. That right there is our first clue as to what was going on in the minds of the Israelites and why they seemed unable to really grasp what was being demanded of them.

You see, polytheism is more than simply the worship of many gods – it is to have gods who don’t even remotely care if you are seeing other gods on the side. The worship of the main city god in the ancient world was the job of the priests and kings, the common people worshiped the household gods – they had pantry gods (snakes to keep the mice away), ancestral teraphim, the god of the hearth and a number of other minor deities. It may very well be that the rank and file Israelites, despite the commandment to only worship One God, felt that paying attention to the minor deities didn’t really count as a transgression. Maybe they only considered it super bad when something happened like when King Ahaz actually replaced the altar of Yahweh in the Temple with a replica of the altar he saw and made sacrifices on when he was in Damascus.

Now, I am not excusing them, but I am trying to explain how the ancients saw the world of the divine and what they had to overcome – and why, once they were in the Land, they were commanded not to associate with the Canaanites at all, ever.  The Canaanites had gods of the hills and gods of the valleys, gods of the harvest and gods for this and for that and the temptation would be very great to bow down and worship those gods and serve them if one was concerned that the harvest wasn’t going to come in, or if enemies attacked and you wanted the favor of the regional deities in battle. This is why the commandment was given in Deut 12 not to learn the ways of the peoples of the Land – because this was their approach to life and it was very tempting to follow them into it during times of testing and trial.

And the temptation has always been there to describe the religion of the Israelites as having always been monotheistic but truthfully until after the exile it never was. Israel was always worshiping other gods on the side – even King David had an idol in his home.

I Sam 19:13 And Michal took an image, and laid it in the bed, and put a pillow of goats’ hair for his bolster, and covered it with a cloth.

Solomon, who started out so well, was influenced by his wives to build temples to all of their gods – temples which remained until the days of Josiah and the great Covenant Renewal during his reign. We see good kings forever having to tear down idols and high places, and bad kings building them back up again. At one point, there was even idolatry going on in the very temple of God as we see in Ezekiel 8, the chapter that got me started studying all this in the first place back in 2015.

¹⁰ So I went in and saw; and behold every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed upon the wall round about.

¹¹ And there stood before them seventy men of the ancients of the house of Israel, and in the midst of them stood Jaazaniah the son of Shaphan, with every man his censer in his hand; and a thick cloud of incense went up.

¹⁴ Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord’s house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.

¹⁶ And he brought me into the inner court of the Lord’s house, and, behold, at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east.

Now in verses 3 and 5 it refers to images of jealousy – which of course is absolutely unique to YHVH. No other god would have been jealous as long as they themselves were also worshiped. But Yahweh is exclusive and brooks no competition.

And yet the overwhelming majority of people really seemed to have no problem with this whatsoever. The reason for that is something called “henotheism” – the primary worship of one of a group of gods, while not denying the others, or necessarily ignoring them. Because of this mindset – idolatry was tolerated and even flourished. After all, this system put YHVH at the top of the pyramid, but while recognizing the other “gods” as minor deities and so Israel saw herself as faithful even though she was committing spiritual adultery. In the henotheistic mindset, it is okay to also acknowledge Ba’al or Ashtoreth as regional gods with local control as long as the main focus of your worship is YHVH. Obviously, to us at least, this was not acceptable to the one true God.

Monolatry is very similar to henotheism and it is what we see in Mormonism – the belief that there are many gods but it is only acceptable to worship one. The other gods have no jurisdiction and therefore they are not to be worshiped. Monolatry is exclusive polytheism – you can only worship one god but there are a great many.

So, Henotheism, and not monotheism, is what we see going on in Ancient Israel. Whereas other nations only worshiped their own gods and were therefore polytheistic, Israel worshiped YHVH AND the gods of all the other nations around them to varying degrees of severity over the years. In this way, they were far more unfaithful than the nations around them and this was why they were repeatedly called on the table for whoredom. The Moabites weren’t worshiping the Egyptian gods and the Egyptians weren’t worshiping the Phoenician gods – everyone but Israel worshiped their own gods. Now, the Egyptians recognized the Phoenician gods and the Moabite gods as being absolutely real, but they weren’t the gods of the Egyptians – they were centered in other countries and therefore weren’t really a concern.

So, idolatry in Israel didn’t start with Solomon, he simply made an existing situation far worse. In fact, it would seem that as soon as Joshua, Caleb and those who conquered the land died – Israel immediately started doing things according to the ways of the Canaanites that they had failed to drive out.

And so, I want to talk about the differences between YHVH and the gods of the Nations, because there is talk out in the secular scholarly world that monotheism was the natural evolution of religion. Quite the contrary, there was no evolution at all – it was commanded and resisted until exile drove the Jews to the realization that YHVH meant business and would not tolerate it anymore. And even during the exile, as we will see in our Isaiah studies, they still had to be convinced.

The gods of the nations were like us – they had beginnings and endings. They were born and they reproduced and sometimes they were even conquered by other gods and died. So, when you hear someone say, “Where did God come from” that is very much an ANE mindset. Like the people of the ANE world, they did not operate according to any wrong vs right code of conduct. Not that the people didn’t have laws for ordered living, mind you, but their gods weren’t scolding them for immorality. They were functional gods – each god having a jurisdiction and unable to go outside of it. The gods operated within a large community of gods, and they fought and debated and made decisions. Their job was to run their own particular cosmic functions – keeping everything in order. Nothing was more important to the ANE mind than order, because the opposite of that was chaos in the form of famine, drought, pestilence, barrenness, and death. The only reason that the people of the ancient world believed they were created was to do all the work for the gods, who were bored after having created the world and wanted to be cared for. Therefore, as I mentioned before, the priests and kings were responsible for taking care of the major city deities. The common people never bothered with them, but instead took care of their own household gods. As long as Ba’al was taken care of by the priests – given food and drink – he was free to manage the agricultural fertility of the land. If he was not taken care of, he might get distracted and everyone could die of hunger.

YHVH, on the other hand, did all the work of Creation not for Himself but for the people He was creating. Instead of creating a race of slaves to take care of Him, He took care of the needs of the people and created for them a day of rest. He had absolute standards of right and wrong, so his people knew whether or not they had transgressed – he cared for the least of these and not just the heroes and kings. So, from Gen 1 we see a God diametrically opposed to the ANE gods. As I mentioned before, He is jealous, unlike ANE gods. He doesn’t break His own rules, unlike ANE gods. He has no beginning and no end; He doesn’t need to be fed or dressed; He doesn’t need other gods to help him with the functioning of the universe. He refuses to allow His creation to create an idol to represent Him. However, that doesn’t mean that He can’t create a human being to represent Him and place His spirit in.

YHVH is the absolute antithesis of everything that was being worshiped in the ancient world and so, although the accounts of ancient myths might have literary similarities to the scriptures, and follow the patterns of the time, the information the bible conveys is generally the exact opposite. YHVH used the literary conventions of the day to say things like, “Okay, I want you to see me being enthroned in Genesis 1 and I want you to see the blueprint of who I am relationally to my people and so I am using this recognized literary style, but in the midst of it, I am going to show you how entirely different I am than every false god.”

And in Isaiah, we come across a number of paradigms that the Israelites had been living with for over a thousand years. Yahweh spends chapters and chapters addressing this mindset—not that there were chapters when He did it, but you know what I mean.

First up, in the ancient world, when one country defeated another country it was actually a case of one country’s gods defeating the other country’s gods. So, in the eyes of the people, the Babylonian gods were mightier than Yahweh and they proved it not only when they conquered Jerusalem and led away His people into exile, but even moreso when they destroyed His Temple. In their minds, they weren’t seeing and hearing what the prophets had been saying (well, some were but not most) about how Yahweh was going to hand them over for destruction, and the city, and His temple because they had made everything so disgusting that He couldn’t stand it anymore and He was literally going to use the Babylonian Empire as a janitorial service. Break down the walls, deport the people so they can’t defile the Land anymore, and burn Solomon’s Temple and the palace he built right beside it up on the Temple Mount, to the ground. But we will see in chapter 42 or 43, can’t remember right now, that they still don’t get the picture that this exile wasn’t Yahweh being conquered, but their punishment! It’s wild!

And we will see that they weren’t publicly worshiping Him in exile either! They were treating Him like an absentee, defeated god. Yahweh repeatedly reassures them that He is going to do what no gods has ever done before—restore a defeated nation from exile. He tells them that the upcoming deliverance will be more glorious than the Exodus out of Egypt. He makes a ton of stunning predictions which brings us to the next point about the gods of the nations—they didn’t make prophetic predictions. Oh sure, there are legends of the Oracle at Delphi delivering vague predictions that could go either way, and stories about pronouncements in literature, but we have zero religious literature referring to any pagan gods predicting what would happen in the future and having it come to pass. So we need to learn about the “law of continuity” in order to explain this.

The law of continuity, in a nutshell, says that nothing ever changes. Life goes on as it always has. And in the ancient world, it was pretty much true. The concept of a “new thing” was just foreign in the extreme. No nation had ever been delivered and restored from exile, therefore no country can ever be delivered and restored from exile. It is why Pharaoh wasn’t scared of Yahweh’s threats. It’s why Israel in exile had lost hope and had to be not only encouraged but also re-educated. Yahweh had lost. He was gone, off in Israel far away and powerless, shamed. They had no protector, they had no nation and no hope. Life was pretty good in Babylon and they were prospering even though they were a conquered people. Better to just give up and learn to like it. And so, starting next week in Isaiah 41, Yahweh is going to start making some startling predictions and He will literally be challenging the gods of the nations to a prediction duel—here’s what I say will happen, what do you say will happen? Hello? Hey, say something, do something! Anything! No? Didn’t think so!

Another thing you need to realize as we are going through the idol polemics is that they do not paint an accurate picture of idolatry in the ancient world—and they weren’t supposed to. Isaiah wasn’t going for historical accuracy here, this was a polemic designed to portray the polytheists as ridiculous. It is mocking the mindset and the practices of the ancient world by twisting what they were doing out of context but in a way that highlights the fact that idols cannot compete with Yahweh in any way, shape, or form. Isaiah knew what real idolatry looked like. He knew how it worked and He knew what the priests were thinking and doing—everyone did. Writing a boring treatise on that wouldn’t have convinced anyone how silly it is. As it was, it made sense to them and so he had to create a sort of Frankenstein’s monster out of it, real and yet grotesque—a caricature of the real thing. Because the real thing looked pretty reasonable to them. Remember, these were the children and grandchildren of idolaters, not of monotheists.

It is so important to understand literature types and especially when reading the prophets. Isaiah is largely lyrical poetry, peppered with polemics and disputations and historical accounts. When people take a verse out of context and fail to explain the literary genre of the passage, it is very easy to make that verse mean something entirely different than it was intended to mean and nowhere do we see that more than with the idol polemics. I have seen them used in order to discount Yeshua/Jesus as the Messiah, when, in context, they have nothing to do with the existence of a divine Messiah at all and are only applicable to the idols that the Israelites are fearing and crediting with more power than Yahweh. But it takes a lot of time and effort to learn to read the different literary styles of Isaiah and either the people who are misrepresenting it honestly haven’t studied it in this sort of literary and historical context, or they are just blinded by agenda—because nowhere in Isaiah does it disqualify a Messiah being born to embody the Spirit of Yahweh and deliver His people and the nations as His strong right arm, and quite the opposite. This is why I am taking the time to teach it all line by line and making sure that everyone understands the context, and when to and not to take verb tenses literally (in poetic works it can be tricky) and to understand why the Gospel writers, and the Qumran community, and David Kimhi and Abarbanel and others saw the Messiah in Isaiah. It is worth taking the time to do this. And when people tell you that Isaiah is so easy to understand that even a child could understand it, that’s nonsense. If that was true then we wouldn’t see so many commentaries from all sides over the last 2500 years saying so many different things about it. Those are the words of people who want to tell you exactly how a child reads it in order to shame you into thinking that if you don’t agree, then children are more clever than you are. No, it isn’t easy and it isn’t self-evident. It’s an ancient document that needs to be treated with the utmost respect and studied in-depth and not just read over at a shallow level and then presumed to be understood. None of us are that smart. We no longer know what the author knew. We are not familiar with how ancient authors expressed things. And most of all, Yahweh is smarter than we are, and cleverer, and He did not give His word to us in a form that everything is a no-brainer.

Truth is, most everyone reads Isaiah with an agenda, and not to see what actually is and is not there—which is why we see exactly what we expect to see. That’s called confirmation bias. You know, if you are led to believe that Yeshua is found in every page of the Bible, you will find Him there and even when the connections are dubious in the extreme. So, if you don’t want Yeshua to be the Messiah, you will find stuff out of context that clearly says He is not the Messiah. If you know He is, then you will see Him fulfilling everything. So, you know, we have to know what we believe and not read Isaiah in order to prove ourselves right. I mean, I know that Yeshua is the Messiah experientially—I KNOW Him. I am not looking in Isaiah to prove it or disprove it because I have already experienced the new creation miracle in my life and it is ongoing. What more proof do I need He is the real deal?