The Invention of God by Thomas Römer

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Invention of God by Thomas Römer Pieter W. van der Horst The Invention of God By Thomas Römer. Translated by Raymond Geuss. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. xii + 303 pp. Ever since 1990, when my colleagues and I at Utrecht University started working on the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (1999), I have had a great interest in the origins of monotheism and of Israel’s belief in the one and only God. The book reviewed here is concerned with precisely that topic. [End Page 106] Originally published in French as L’invention de Dieu (2014), the French origin of the book still betrays itself in the unusually high number of references to French publications as compared to other books in this field of study. The book itself considers how the original storm and warrior god of a nomadic desert tribe to the south of ancient Palestine became Israel’s one and only God, the creator of Heaven and Earth. This fascinating theme has certainly delivered a fascinating book. At every page Römer displays his mastery of a wide range of ancient sources and scholarly literature. In what follows I give a succinct overview of the book’s contents, but I am afraid I will be unable to do justice to its richness. In a lengthy introduction, problems that the ancient evidence poses to the scholar are described as Römer argues that the way the final editors of the Bible presented matters often look different than historians’ perspectives. Römer steers a middle course between maximalist and minimalist positions, and though he is occasionally inclined to follow a more minimalist approach, he never shows sympathy for the extreme historical skepticism of the so-called Copenhagen School. Chapter 1 deals with God’s name, YHWH, its origin and meaning, and the avoidance of its pronunciation. Here Römer could have benefited from the recent study by F. Shaw, The Earliest Non-Mystical Jewish Use of Iaô (2015), but that book was published too late to be taken into account in this work. Chapter 2 offers a discussion of the geographic origin of YHWH and argues that there can be little doubt that originally he was a tribal god of one of the nomadic groups in the south (Teiman, Edom, Seir, Midian), such as the Sashu and Hapiru/’apiru, who worshipped him as a war god and a storm god. In fact, many traces of these functions are still visible in the Hebrew Bible. In chapter 3 Römer unravels the biblical stories of Moses and the identity of the Midianites and the role the latter may have played in the spread of the cult of YHWH: “Moses was perhaps the leader of a group ‘apiru’ who, when they had left Egypt, encountered YHWH in Midian and passed on the knowledge of him to other tribes in the south.” Chapter 4 raises the question of how YHWH became the God of Israel. Again, the possibly pivotal role of the southern nomadic Sashu and Hapiru is highlighted. The much-debated meaning of the name Israel and the various names of God in the Bible are discussed (El Olam, El-Roï, El Shadday, El Elyon, etc.). As the tutelary deity of Saul and David, who introduced him into Jerusalem, YHWH rose to a high position at the beginning of the first millennium. YHWH’s complicated move to Jerusalem is the subject of chapter [End Page 107] 5, where Römer argues that “the older sanctuary there was first of all that of a sun god and that YHWH was added as an associate god,” so YHWH was not immediately the principal god there. The cult of YHWH in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, the subject of chapter 6, was of quite a different nature than that in Judah. He was worshipped in the Northern Kingdom of Israel in several temples and at several “high places,” often in the form of a bull (or, identified with the Canaanite god Ba’al [Lord]), but nevertheless to his worshippers he was no one other than YHWH, quite contrary to the opinion of the...