The Origins of Biblical Monotheism Quotes

“Our limited data force a sense of historical fragility: even as I nurture interpretation, I continually run the risk of creating it in my own image.122”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“Genesis 1 does not use conflict as the main element in its vision of the cosmos and the place
of humanity in it. Instead, the priestly holiness of time and space overshadows the component of
conflict.
This view made sense of a world in which monarchy no longer protected Israel. This
outlook would serve Israel well in exile and beyond when responsibility for community order
passed from the Davidic dynasty to the priesthood of Aaron. Indeed, Genesis 1 has often been
dated to the exilic or post-exilic period.
Genesis 1 reflects this change: to the royal model has
been added a priestly model. The politics of creation have changed. There is still a king in this
world, but it is the King of Kings, the One Will who rules heavens and earth alike, with no
serious competition, and this King in Heaven is to be followed by humanity ruling on earth.
There is no single royal agent on earth whose human foes mirror the cosmic foes of the divine
king. Moreover, this king is the Holy One enthroned over the cosmos”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“Monotheistic statements do not herald a new age of religion but explain Yahwistic
monolatry in absolute terms. As rhetoric, monotheism reinforced Israel’s exclusive relationship
with its deity. Monotheism is a kind of inner community discourse establishing a distance from
outsiders; it uses the language of Yahweh’s exceptional divine status beyond and in all reality
(“there are no other deities but the Lord”) to absolutize Yahweh’s claim on Israel and to express
Israel’s ultimate fidelity to Yahweh. Monotheism is therefore not a new cultural step but
expresses Israel’s relationship with Yahweh”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“Guthrie stresses
that in Israel holiness attaches to the elite and the monarch; the point may apply as well to Ugarit.
He notes how the radiance of the deity became associated with the power of the king: “Holiness
here is ideology, and designed to serve a particular social system.”

In his discussion of sacred
order, W. E. Paden comments in a related vein: “Power and order are intertwined and mutually
conditioning elements of religious world-building. Each is a premise of the other. The gods
presuppose the very system which invests them with their status as gods, even though the worldorder
may itself be perceived as a creation of the gods.” Thus, the holiness of a place expressed
altogether this worldly relationship of power and status”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“One would be wrong, however, to suppose that the dichotomy between the material and
the spiritual world was as natural to them as it seems to us. Occasional doubts could not rob
them of the conviction that the gods dwelled in the same universe as they did and were to a
large extent subject to the same forces and moved by the same reasonings.
Our uneasiness stems partly from the opposition of the reality as directly perceived by
the senses and a spiritual reality only reached by faith or some sort of mystical experience.
This was not how the Mesopotamians conceived of their gods. To them they were the
personifications of various aspects of nature and culture, very much present in daily
experience”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“Monotheistic Yahwism resembled neither a Greek philosophical notion of Deity as
nonsexual Being nor some type of divine bisexuality. Instead, Israelite society perceived Yahweh
primarily as a god, embodying traits or values expressed by gendered metaphors yet transcending
such particular renderings. It is unnecessary and it is not supported by any biblical text to argue
that monotheistic Yahweh involved either androgyny or homoeroticism”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“We may therefore propose a working hypothesis for Judah:
a culture with a diminished lineage system, one less embedded in traditional family patrimonies
due to societal changes in the eighth through sixth centuries, might be more predisposed both to
hold to individual human accountability for behavior and to see an individual deity accountable
for the cosmos.

(This individual accountability at the human and divine levels may be viewed
as concomitant developments.) Accordingly, later Israelite monotheism was denuded of the
divine family, a development perhaps intelligible in light of Israel’s weakening family lineages
and patrimonies. This is only one dimension of Israelite monotheism, a complex matter that the
last chapter of this book addresses in detail.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“It is unclear from any modern critique of religion that anyone is in a position to disprove the reality of religious mystery expressed in the ancients’ texts, even if we probe that mystery. Modern affirmations of such faith as well as denials of it are acts of faith. Yet these critiques of religion bring us closer to understanding the human side of divine-human relations. And this is what believers and nonbelievers, believing and unbelieving theologians and historians of religion share: a desire to understand the human side of the equation in religious traditions.”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“For once I myself saw with my own eyes      the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage,          and when the boys said to her,              “Sibyl what do you want?”          she replied, “I want to die.” T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts

“(So T. S. Eliot’s helpful reminder from “Gerontion”: “History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, / Guides us by vanities.”)”
― Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts