Table Of ContentDivine Doppelgängers
Divine Doppelgängers
yhwh’s Ancient Look- Alikes
eDiteD by Collin Cornell
eisenbrauns | University Park, Pennsylvania
This book received two grants: the Judaic Book Fund Grant from the Tam Institute of
Jewish Studies at Emory University and a Competitive Research Award from the Pro-
fessional Development Support Funds program at Emory University’s Laney Graduate
School.
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Names: Cornell, Collin, 1988– editor.
Title: Divine doppelgängers : YHWH’s ancient look- alikes / edited by Collin Cornell.
Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : Eisenbrauns, [2020] | Includes biblio-
graphical references and index.
Summary: “A collection of essays by scholars of the Hebrew Bible providing rec-
ommendations for how Jews and Christians can think theologically about the
challenge of similarities between YHWH and other ancient gods”—Provided by
publisher.
Identifiers: lCCn 2019055837 | isbn 9781575067445 (hardback)
Subjects: lCsH: Chemosh (Moabite deity) | God—Comparative studies. | God
(Christianity)
Classification: lCC bl205.D575 2020 | DDC 202/ .11—dc23
lC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2019055837
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Contents
Editor’s Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xiii
List of Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
part 1. tHe problem at large
Chapter 1. God and the Gods: History of Religion as an Approach
and Context for Biblical Theology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
Patrick D. Miller Jr.
Chapter 2. Canaan—Israel—Christianity: The Case for a Vertical
Ecumenism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32
Othmar Keel, translated by Armin Siedlecki
Chapter 3. More Than One God? Three Models for Construing the
Relations Between yHwH and the Other Gods. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60
Bob Becking
Chapter 4. Who Is Like You Among the Gods? Some Observations
on Configuring yHwH in the Old Testament . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77
J. Andrew Dearman
Chapter 5. Why Should the Look-A likes Be a Problem? . . . . . . . . . . 88
Robert Goldenberg
part 2. CHemosH as a Case stuDy
Chapter 6. Theological Approaches to the Problem of God’s Ancient
Look- Alikes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .101
Collin Cornell
vi Contents
Chapter 7. Chemosh Looks Like yHwH, but That’s Okay . . . . . . . . .115
Josey Bridges Snyder
Chapter 8. yHwH and Chemosh: An Investigation of Look- Alike
Gods Using the Moral Foundations Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
M. Patrick Graham
Chapter 9. yHwH, Chemosh, and the Rule of Faith . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
Brent A. Strawn
Chapter 10. Is There a Counterpart in the Hebrew Bible to New
Testament Anti-S emitism? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Jon D. Levenson
part 3. otHer Case stuDies
Chapter 11. Miqreh and yHwH: Fate, Chance, Simultaneity, and
Providence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .181
Stephen B. Chapman
Chapter 12. “Can a Woman Forget Her Nursing Child?” Divine
Breastfeeding and the God of Israel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
Christopher B. Hays
Chapter 13. Bulls and Horses, Gods and Goddesses: The Religious
Iconography of Israel’s Neighbors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
P. M. Michèle Daviau
List of Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
Index of Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Index of Scripture. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .253
Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
eDitor’s prefaCe
Sooner or later, whether by a note in a study Bible, a religion class, or a seminary
course, students bump up against the fact that God—the biblical God—was one
among other, comparable gods. Indeed, the ancient world was full of gods: great
gods of conquering empires, dynastic gods of petty kingdoms, goddesses of
fertility, personal spirit guardians. And, in various ways, these gods looked like
the biblical God, and vice versa. Like the God of the Bible, they too controlled
the fates of nations, chose kings, gave fecundity and blessing, and cared for their
individual human charges. They spoke and acted. They experienced wrath and
delight. They inspired praise.
None of this, of course, is problematic in itself. Antiquity was well aware
of the biblical God as a single example within a larger class of divine beings.
Envoys from the Assyrian king Sennacherib had, for example, according to
2 Chr 32:19, “spoke[n] of the God of Jerusalem as if he were like the gods of
the peoples of the earth” (NRSV). Many papyri written in Greek list out magi-
cal spells invoking numerous gods; some of them set yHwH, the name of the
biblical God, indiscriminately alongside other deity names.1 Or again: some
Christian gnostics understood the god yHwH as one member in a cohort of
lesser emanations descending from the transcendent divine One.2 Plainly, the
biblical God could be thought of as belonging to a kind: as a god among gods.
The trouble is that these descriptions arise from outsiders: outsiders to the
biblical traditions. Those “on the inside,” the ancient and modern communities
who receive the Hebrew Bible as a religious norm, would never accept this
1. George H. van Kooten, “Moses/Musaeus/Mochos and His God Yahweh, Iao, and Sabaoth,
Seen from a Graeco-R oman Perspective,” in Revelation of the Name YHWH to Moses: Perspectives
from Judaism, the Pagan Graeco- Roman World, and Early Christianity, ed. George H. van Kooten,
Themes in Biblical Narrative (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 107–83.
2. See, e.g., the second- century Apocryphon of John; on its pantheon, see A. J. Welburn,
“The Identity of the Archons in the ‘Apocryphon Johannis,’ ” Vigiliae Christianae 32 (1978): 241–54.
vii
viii Editor’s Preface
classification. For them, the biblical God is sui generis: without parallel; one of
a kind. One standard of faith, though particular to the Reformed branch of the
Christian churches, expresses a belief shared by all the inheritors of the Bible:
“There is but one only living and true God.”3 The origins of this confession
are complex and debated, but they certainly include influence from biblical
texts like Isa 45:5a: “I am yHwH, and there is no other; besides me there is
no god.”4 Likewise, in the New Testament, the apostle Paul congratulates his
gentile addressees for “turn[ing] to God from idols, to serve the living and true
God” (1 Thess 1:9b). On this line of thinking, it may be true at a linguistic level
that the word used for God (“God”) can be applied to other beings (“gods”),
but theologically, God alone is God. Assyrian officials, Greek magicians, and
Christian gnostics are mistaken in their perception, or so it would seem.
And yet this judgment has changed and grown more difficult in the era since
colonizing European powers began to seize artifacts and texts from the ancient
Near East and to subject them to serious study. Beginning in the 1700s and
continuing into the 1900s, archaeologists, cuneiformists, expert Semitists, and
biblical scholars produced a much higher definition picture of the similarities
between God and the gods than had theretofore been available. They deciphered
hymns of praise to powerful imperial gods, analyzed prayers calling on personal
divine guardians, and discovered female figurines designed to catalyze blessing.
The biblical hymns and prayers and stories and blessings of yHwH, his affect,
his anger and pleasure, all came to be seen within this comparative context.
Claims about the uniqueness of the biblical God appeared to suffer erosion.
How then did the heirs, the insiders to the biblical traditions, respond? What
did the scholars say who belonged to religious communities centered on the
worship of one God? Was there an answer to this problem of God’s ancient
look- alikes?
In fact, not very much was written that addressed these questions directly.
This was due in part to disciplinary specialization. As excavations and expro-
priations from the Middle East brought troves of artifacts into academic dis-
cussion, philologists and historians had their hands full just trying to reach a
basic understanding of these new data. Decrypting the ancient materials and
making preliminary comparisons with biblical literature occupied the energy
of generations. Even if such scholars had received the training to zoom out
from the details and to talk more theologically about the significance of God
among the gods, there was little professional quarter for doing so. On the other
hand, theologians and other intellectuals operating from within the biblical
3. The Westminster Confession of Faith 2.1.
4. This is an example of the so-c alled “exclusivity formulae,” as in Isa 43:10; 44:6; 45:5–6; 46:9.
Here and elsewhere in this preface, quotations are drawn from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
Editor’s Preface ix
traditions mostly lacked the interest and preparation to reflect on what it meant
that other gods recovered from the archaeological record mirrored the biblical
God. Of necessity, they spoke in generalities about the relationship of the living
God to God’s creation in its manifold forms. The result was and remains a dearth
of resources that consider the problem of confessing one God while recognizing
this god’s profound similarity to many others.
The present volume intends to help fill that gap. The idea for it emerged from
my experience as a student in seminary. As I recount in my own chapter contri-
bution, I had to read and translate the Mesha Inscription for a class—an artifact
from the Iron Age Levant brought to European attention in 1868.5 The focus
of our class discussion was linguistic and historical; my classmates and I were
immersed in the peculiarities of Moabite morphology and the usefulness of the
inscription as a historical source. But for me, a theological reality loomed large:
here in this text was a god, the Moabite god named Chemosh, who was a divine
doppelgänger of the biblical God. Like yHwH, he was angry with his land and
handed his people over to oppression by foreigners. Like yHwH, he spoke and
issued orders for battle. He loved his chosen king.6
There could be no going back from seeing these (and other) theological
parallels, and no ducking out of the seeming conflict they pose with the core
affirmation of Judaism and Christianity that God is unique. But since I found
scant resources at hand to think this dilemma carefully through, the question
lay dormant. What I did not know, as I enrolled in Emory University’s gradu-
ate program in Hebrew Bible, was that I was entering an unusually rich vec-
tor of Chemosh- related research, one that would afford me opportunities to
study this god, and numerous others, in several dimensions—and also to reflect
theologically on their significance vis-à - vis the god yHwH. Unwittingly, I had
subscribed to the “Emory Chemosh School.”7
Insofar as such an entity is identifiable, its obvious first entry is the 1989
edited volume Studies in the Mesha Inscription and Moab. This book traces back
5. See Collin Cornell, “Theological Approaches to the Problem of God’s Ancient Look-A likes,”
101–14. For more on the discovery of this inscription, see especially M. Patrick Graham, “The
Discovery and Reconstruction of the Mesha‘ Inscription,” in Studies in the Mesha Inscription and
Moab, ed. J. Andrew Dearman, ABS 2 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 41–92.
6. For a sustained comparison of yHwH and Chemosh, see M. Patrick Graham, “yHwH and
Chemosh: An Investigation of Look- Alike Gods Using the Moral Foundations Theory,” 126–37.
7. Not to be confused with the “Emory annex to the Fribourg school,” on which, see Brent A.
Strawn, “The Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Iconography: Past and Present Research,
Present and Future Trajectories (A Committed Outsider’s Perspective),” a lecture given at the Uni-
versity of Zurich on January 20, 2017. A revision, though without reference to the Emory annex,
appears in Strawn, “Introduction: Othmar Keel, Iconography, and the Old Testament,” in Othmar
Keel, Jerusalem and the One God: A Religious History, ed. Brent A. Strawn (Minneapolis: Fortress,
2017), xxv–xlii.
