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106 6 No God but God Exclusive Monotheism and the Language of Violence Cultura facit saltus: Introductory Remarks In chapter 1 I described the many roads that lead from polytheism to monotheism. Polytheism is not a random accumulation of deities, demons , and spirits but a coherent system that may be regarded either as a unified divine world or as an irreducible but structured plurality of deities. Both of these aspects are simultaneously possible. The former presents the divine world as a latent monotheism found, for example, in Egyptian wisdom literature or in the story of the Golden Chain at the beginning of book 8 of the Iliad. The latter presents the divine world as a manifest polytheism in its three-dimensionality of cult, cosmos, and sacred language. It is easily understandable why and how polytheism can turn into monotheism. This is just a process of latency turning into manifestation, which can be observed as gradually progressing in all of the great polytheistic religions of the ancient world. However, there is also a price to pay for this form of inclusive monotheism that sees God in all gods, namely, the loss of personality and closeness with respect to the idea of God. The more all-encompassing the idea of God, the more God tends to fade into the impersonal remoteness of a Supreme Being or even into the abyss of negative theology. Until fairly late in history, people were not willing to pay this price. The cosmic god of the Egyptians and the Alexandrian Greeks was revered simultaneously with the deus absconditus, the invisible, ineffable One-andAll , and the powerful, if not omnipotent, god of the magicians, who promised protection against and salvation from every evil. For example, Isis was worshiped both as the deity who incorporated the innumerable deities of all religions in the world and as the tutelary goddess of navigation and rescuer of the shipwrecked. In time, however, the idea of a divine One-and-All became more and more difficult to relate to in terms of cult and personal prayer, and inclusive monotheism evolved into a form of mysticism and esotericism. Only by means of such mystical techniques as deep meditation could individual adepts aspire to connect to the One-and-All at rare moments of illumination. During the same centuries of late antiquity, when the temples fell into neglect and official cult turned into private mysticism, another, totally different kind of monotheism spread from Judaea—or Palestine, as the region later came to be called—into all the provinces of the Roman Empire. It was not easy for the pagans of that time to tell the two forms of monotheism apart and to comprehend the unbridgeable gulf that separated Jove from Yahweh. Yet for apologetic or propagandistic reasons Jewish writers also indulged in likening their God to the god of the philosophers. Even today many historians of religion are unwilling to see in the rise of biblical monotheism anything but just a general evolution from polytheism to monotheism. However, a process of slow evolution is not the form in which the Bible itself tells the story and recalls the breakthrough toward true monotheism. Biblical monotheism is not the latent monotheism of polytheism finally become manifest under the motto “All gods are one” but rather a totally new form of monotheism that excludes rather than absorbs the other gods under the motto “No other gods!” or “No god but God!” This form of monotheism, which may be called “exclusive,” is a matter not of evolution but of revolution.1 To be sure, there is a third form of asserting the oneness of God. This is usually understood to be the proper hallmark of monotheism: “God is One!” meaning “the only one.” Privileging this form over and against the other two means blurring the decisive differences since this form occurs in all three contexts. First, in the context of polytheism it is frequently used to emphasize the uniqueness or sovereign power of a specific god, especially the creator. There are thus hundreds of assertions such as “Amun [Amun-Re, Re, Ptah, etc.] is one [unique]” in Egyptian texts, and the same applies to Mesopotamian, Anatolian, and Canaanite texts.2 Second, it occurs in the context of inclusive monotheism (see chapter 3). Lastly, in the context of biblical monotheism the motto YHWH æchad, “the  is One,” of course holds the central place. However, to take this assertion as the distinctive feature of No God but God 107 [18.220...

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