Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism

Acknowledgments

ix  I am grateful to the Mosse Foundation—in particular Steven Aschheim, its scientific advisor, and John Tortorice, its director—for having been given the chance to rethink various issues in the right place and in the right format: in Jerusalem and in a series of lectures. I could not have wished for a better context to present and discuss my thoughts on monotheism , in a place where over the course of fifteen years so many discussions and related activities have helped them to take shape. Chapters 1, 3, and 6 were originally delivered as lectures in early December 2004 at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem. Chapters 2, 4, 5, and 7 were substantially rewritten for this study in order to place the revolutionary character of biblical monotheism within a broader context . Chapters 2 and 4 derive from lectures given in Solymite contexts. Chapter 2 deals with the question of religious violence in the context of Egyptian polytheism and is based on an unpublished lecture presented in June 2000 in Jerusalem in the context of the conference entitled “Good and Evil” organized by Moshe Idel. Chapter 4—which situates the monotheistic revolution within the broader context of the “Axial Age” and looks for antecedents of this Great Transformation in ancient Egypt—is based on a lecture originally entitled “The Axial Age in World History,” presented at a 2001 conference organized by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Johann Arnason (published as “Axial ‘Breakthroughs’ and Semantic ‘Relocations’ in Ancient Egypt and Israel”); I am grateful to these colleagues and friends for their critical and stimulating input. Chapter 5, which traces the various steps that eventually led to the formation of the Hebrew canon, is based on a paper I contributed to a conference entitled “Forms of Transmission,” organized by Ulrich Raulff and Gary Smith at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam (published as “Fünf Wege zum Kanon”). Maria S. Rost polished my English and spared the reader more than mere linguistic slips. I dedicate this book to my friend Othmar Keel, a true cultural scholar among theologians, who has devoted his life to the rediscovery of those cultural dimensions that tend to be excluded and suppressed by an all too narrow and schematic application of the Mosaic Distinction. x Acknowledgments     ...