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39 Chapter 3 The “Most High” God and the Nature of Early Jewish Monotheism Richard Bauckham Larry Hurtado and Alan Segal have both made important contributions to the discussion of the nature of Jewish monotheism in the early Jewish period.1 That discussion continues.2 It can now make significant progress mainly, in my view, through careful study of the ways Jewish writers of the period talk about God. There is a huge amount of evidence, but little study of it. For example, to have complete listings of the use of various divine names and titles in early Jewish literature would be extrememly useful, because only then can we observe which were popular , which were not, and in which types or categories of literature. Then we shall be able to write the kind of close studies of such terms in early Jewish literature that Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament provides for the Hebrew Bible. The present chapter is a step in that direction. Table 3.1 at the end of the chapter lists all the occurrences, as far as I have tracked them, of the title “the Most High” in early Jewish literature. The chapter attempts to account for this title’s relatively high frequency, asks about its significance, and seeks, thereby, to shed some light on the nature of early Jewish monotheism. In order to situate the discussion, some preliminary comments on the distinction between exclusive and inclusive monotheism will be helpful . The terms are used by William Horbury in a recent study of “Jewish and Christian Monotheism in the Herodian Age.”3 He states the argument of his paper thus: It is argued overall that the interpretation of Judaism as a rigorous monotheism, “exclusive” in the sense that the existence of other divine 40 Richard Bauckham beings is denied, does less than justice to the importance of mystical and messianic tendencies in the Herodian age—for these were often bound up with an “inclusive” monotheism, whereby the supreme deity was envisaged above but in association with other spirits and powers.4 The problem here is the meaning of “other divine beings,” a term that Horbury apparently equates with “other spirits and powers.” If such a meaning supposed that “rigorous” or “exclusive” monotheism must deny the existence of any supernatural or heavenly beings besides God, then clearly such monotheism never existed until the modern period. Traditional monotheism in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions has always accepted the existence of vast numbers of supernatural beings: angels who serve and worship God, demons who oppose God within an overall sovereignty of God above all. But such beings have been considered creatures, created by and subject to God, no more a qualification of monotheism than the existence of earthly creatures is. With this view of their nature, we can properly and, in my view, still usefully speak of “rigorous ” or “exclusive” monotheism. Misunderstanding of this point has recurrently muddied the waters of recent discussion of early Jewish monotheism.5 The key question is how the uniqueness of the one God is understood. In inclusive monotheism , the one God is the highest member of a class of beings to which he6 belongs. He is unique only in the sense of the superlative: he is the most powerful of the gods (and can, therefore, subject them to his will), he is the wisest, he resides highest in the cosmos, and so forth. He is unique in the sense of being supreme. Something like this view of God and the gods developed in antiquity out of an older polytheism in which the gods acted independently and competitively. It developed over much of the Near Eastern and, later, the Hellenistic and Roman worlds in antiquity.7 This perspective takes a gradient view of reality that does not draw sharp ontological distinctions between the supreme God and other gods or between gods and humans.8 By contrast, exclusive monotheism understands the uniqueness of the one God in terms of an absolute difference in kind from all other reality. We could call it “transcendent uniqueness.” It means that God belongs to no class of beings of which he can be the supreme instance. Instead, it takes a binary view of reality.9 In my view, early Jewish literature (with few, if any, exceptions) is strongly committed to such a view in the way it constantly understands the uniqueness of the God of Israel as that of the one Creator of all things and the one sovereign...

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