A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, Volume I: From the Beginnings to the End of the Monarchy

By Rainer Albertz

This book, the first of two volumes, offers a comprehensive history of Israelite religion. It is a part of the Old Testament Library series.

The Old Testament Library provides fresh and authoritative treatments of important aspects of Old Testament study through commentaries and general surveys. The contributors are scholars of international standing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: May 1, 1994
• ISBN: 9781611645927

Rainer Albertz

Rainer Albertz is Professor of Old Testament at the University of Munster in Germany.

Book preview

1 Introduction

C.J.Bleeker, ‘Comparing the Religio-Historical Method and the Theological Method’, Numen 18, 1971, 9-29; A.Causse, Du groupe éthnique à la communauté religieuse. Le Problème sociologique de la religion d’Israël, 1937; B.S.Childs, Old Testament Theology in a Canonical Context, 1985; W.Eichrodt, ‘Hat die alttestamentliche Theologie noch selbständige Bedeutung innerhalb der alttestamentliche Wissenschaft?’, ZAW 47, 1929, 83-91; id., Theology of the Old Testament, ET 1961, 1967; O.Eissfeldt, ‘Israelitisch-jüdische Religionsgeschichte und alttestamentliche Theologie’(1926), in id., KS I, 1962, 105-14; id., ‘Werden, Wesen und Wert geschichtlicher Betrachtung der israelitisch-jüdischen Religion’ (1931), ibid., 247-65; G.Fohrer, History of Israelite Religion, ET 1972; id., ‘Zur Einwirkung der gesellschaftlichen Struktur Israels auf seine Religion’, in id., Studien zu alttestamentlichen Texten und Themen (1966-1972), BZAW 155, 1981, 117-31; G.F.Hasel, ‘Major Recent Issues in Old Testament Theology’, JSOT 31, 1985, 31-53; M.Hill, ‘Social Approach (1)’, see F.Whaling (ed.), Vol.II, 89-148; G.Kehrer and B.Harding, ‘Social Approach (2)’, see F.Whaling (ed.), Vol.II, 149-77; S.T.Kimbrough, ‘A Non-Weberian Sociological Approach to Israelite Religion’, JNES 31, 1972, 195-202; id., Israelite Religion in Sociological Perspective. The Work of Antonin Causse, Studies in Oriental Religions 4, 1978; H.G.Kippenberg, ‘Diskursive Religionswissenschaft. Gedanken über eine Religionswissenschaft, die weder auf einer allgemein gültigen Definition von Religion noch auf einer Überlegenheit von Wissenschaft basiert’, in B.Gladigow and id., Neue Ansätze in der Religionswissenschaft, Forum Religionswissenschaft 4, 1983, 9-28; H.-J.Kraus, ‘Die Anfänge der religionssoziologischen Forschungen in der alttestamentlichen Wissenschaft. Eine forschungsgeschichtliche Orientierung’ (1969), in id., Biblisch-theologische Aufsätze, 1972, 296-310; G.Lanczkowski, Begegnung und Wandel der Religionen, 1971; T.Luckmann, Das Problem der Religion in der modernen Gesellschaft. Intuition, Person, Weltanschauung, 1963; id., The Invisible Religion. The Problem of Religion in Modern Society, 1967; J.Matthes, Religion und Gesellschaft. Einführung in die Religionssoziologie I, 21969; G.Mensching, ‘Religion, I. Erscheinungs- und Ideenwelt’, RGG3 V, 1961, 961-4; P.D.Miller, ‘Israelite Religion’, in D.A.Knight and G.M.Tucker (eds.), The Hebrew Bible and Its Modern Interpreters, 1985, 201-37; H.Mol, Identity and the Sacred. A Sketch for a New Social-Scientific Theory of Religion, 1976; L.Perlitt, Vatke und Wellhausen, BZAW 94, 1965; H.D.Preuss, Theologie des Alten Testaments, I, 1991; O.Procksch, Theologie des Alten Testaments, 1950; G.von Rad, ‘Offene Fragen im Umkreis einer Theologie des Alten Testaemnts’ (1963), in id., Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament II, TB 48, 1973, 289-312; R.Rendtorff, ‘Alttestamentliche Theologie und israelitisch-jüdische Religionsgeschichte’ (1963), in id., Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament, TB 57, 1975, 137-51; id., ‘Theologie des Alten Testaments. Überlegungen zu einem Neuansatz’, in id., Kanon und Theologie, Vorarbeiten zu einer Theologie des Alten Testaments, 1991, 1-14; H.Ringgren, Israelite Religion, ET 1966; C.Schäfer-Lichtenberger, ’The Pariah: Some Thoughts on the Genesis and Presuppositions of Max Weber’s Ancient Judaism’, JSOT 51, 1991, 85-113; id., ‘Vom Nebensatz zum Idealtypus. Zur Vorgeschichte des Antiken Judentums von Max Weber’, in E.Blum, C.Macholz and E.W.Stegemann (eds.), Die Hebräische Bibel und ihre zweifache Nachgeschichte. FS R.Rendtorff, 1990, 419-33; W.Schluchter (ed.), Max Webers Sicht des antiken Christentums, 1985; W.H.Schmidt, The Faith of the Old Testament, ET 1983; R.Smend Sr, Lehrbuch der alttestamentlichen Religionsgeschichte, 21899; R.Smend Jr, ‘De Wette und das Verhältnis zwischen historischer Bibelkritik und philosophischem System im 19. Jahrhundert’, TZ 14, 1954, 107-98; id., ‘Johann Philipp Gablers Begründung der biblischen Theologie’, EvTh 22, 1962, 169-79; F.Stolz, ‘Probleme westsemitischer und israelitischer Religionsgeschichte’, TR 56, 1991, 1-26; G.E.Swanson, The Birth of the Gods. The Origin of Primitive Beliefs, 1974; W.Vatke, Die biblische Theologie wissenschaftlich dargestellt, I: Die Religion des Alten Testaments, 1835; T.C.Vriezen, An Outline of Old Testament Theology, ET 1958; M.Weber, Ancient Judaism (1921), ET 1952; J.Wellhausen, ‘Israelitisch-jüdische Religion’ (1905), in R.Smend (ed.), Grundrisse zum Alten Testament, TB 27, 1965, 65-109; C.Westermann, ‘Das Verhältnis des Jahweglaubens zu den ausserisraelitischen Religionen’ (1964), in Forschung am Alten Testament. Gesammelte Studien I, TB 24, 1964, 189-218; id, Elements of Old Testament Theology, ET 1982; W.M.L.de Wette, Lehrbuch der christlichen Dogmatik in historischer Entwickelung dargestellt, I: Biblische Dogmatik Alten und Neuen Testaments oder kritische Darstellung der Religionslehre des Hebraismus, des Judenthums und Urchristentums, 1813, 31831; F.Whaling (ed.), Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Religion (2 vols), in J.Waardenburg (ed.), Religion and Reason 27, 1983; 28, 1985; W.Zimmerli, ‘Biblische Theologie’, TRE VI, 1980, 426-55; id., Old Testament Theology in Outline, ET 1978.

Today the ‘history of Israelite religion’ is no longer a standard subject in most theological faculties, at any rate in Germany. In its function of bringing together the various aspects of Old Testament research, in many places it has either been completely replaced by lectures on the ‘theology of the Old Testmaent’ or pushed aside as a special subject.1 A survey of publications since the end of the Second World War gives the same impression: whereas the ‘Histories of Israelite Religion’ written in this period of almost fifty years can be counted on the fingers of one hand,2 new ‘theologies of the Old Testament’ are appearing in regular succession and now outnumber threefold the histories of Israelite religion.3

This fact is a direct consequence of the upheaval in theology which took place in Germany after the First World War, the break with nineteenth-century ‘liberal theology’ and the triumphant progress of ‘dialectical theology’.4 Quite apart from the demands of the subject, that the new insights of detailed studies in the history of religion and comparative religion should be brought together, the fact that ‘the history of Israelite religion’ nowadays again seems to be a meaningful and theologically necessary task is connected not least with the present situation in theology generally, in which the great systematic schemes of Bultmann, Barth and their successors have lost their all-prevailing fascination. We find ourselves thrown back – though at another level – on the problems of nineteenth-century theology; this comprehensive new conception of a ‘history of Israelite religion’, the desire to re-evaluate this discipline within the canon of Old Testament scholarship, is one more example of the trend.

1.1 History of research

The way which led to the development of the history of Israelite religion as an Old Testament discipline is a complex one and has often been described from a great variety of perspectives.5 So I can limit myself to some broad outlines. In 1931 Eissfeldt mentioned five sources of the historical approach to the religion of Israel and Judah: 1. the rationalism of the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth; 2. Herder; 3. the influence of Hegel’s philosophy of history, above all on Vatke; 4. the results of research into neighbouring religions during the second half of the nineteenth century; and 5. the history-of-religions school from the end of the nineteenth century to the First World War.6

The first starting point, rationalism, was common to both ‘Old Testament theology’ and ‘the history of Israelite religion’. In it, the concern to regard the religion of the Old and New Testaments as an independent historical entity over against dogmatics was a clear systematic interest: in the effort to demonstrate that Christianity was the ideal of reasonable, natural religion, the aspects of biblical religion which did not fit this ideal were explained away either as accommodation of the great religious mediators to the limited notions of their people7 or as influences from neighbouring religions which were at a lower level.8 In his famous inaugural lecture at Altdorf, which today is often claimed as the starting point for ‘Old Testament theology’,9 Gabler classified ‘biblical theology’ as e genere historico, but here ‘historical’ means above all the history of concepts, i.e. of ideas, and the historical investigation of biblical statements (interpretatio) is only a preliminary stage to philosophical reflection on the biblical concepts (comparatio), which links them to the true basic ideas of biblical religion on which dogmatics works.10

So Gabler’s programme in no way led to a really historical account of biblical religion, or Old Testament religion, which began to become an independent area of study in the subsequent period. One example of this is the remarkable rigidity of de Wette’s ‘biblical dogmatics’,11 which, despite all the distinguished historical criticism in which its author had engaged over a variety of fields, divided up the biblical testimonies in a dogmatic way with a philosophical hermeneutic derived from J.F.Fries. For de Wette, the ‘idea of religion’ in the Old Testament could only be recognized ‘in its manifold and impure appearances in history’,12 and it was necessary to strip off the ‘particularism’ which had found expression in partially degenerate ‘symbols’, in order to rise to its timeless ‘universalism’.13 De Wette did not see a continuous historical development; there were some high points only with Moses, the prophets and in the Psalms. But Christian prejudices and the early romantic influences of Herder continued to be evident in his marked disparagement of the post-exilic period as ‘Judaism’ in comparison to the pre-exilic period, ‘Hebraism’: ‘Whereas Hebraism was a matter of life and enthusiasm, Judaism is a matter of the concept and literalism.’14

The first scholar to break through to a really historical account of the religion of Israel was Vatke, with his Religion des Alten Testaments of 1835.15 The widely accepted Hegelian philosophy of history offered him not only the possibility of overcoming the hiatus between the historical and the theological approach but also a hermeneutical framework for understanding the history of Israelite religion as a ‘spiritual process’ of the revelation of the absolute Spirit progressing dialectically, and the union and ultimate identity of the human spirit with it.16 ‘The whole history of Old Testament religion is . . . a constant battle and victory of thought over the natural.’17

Even if it seems doubtful from a present-day perspective whether this is an apt description of the driving force of Israelite religion, the heuristic value of this philosophical-historical approach is evident from the help it gave Vatke in destroying the peculiar presentation of the Old Testament which depicted the whole of Israelite religion as already developed in the early Mosaic period, and which had hitherto stood in the way of any genetic understanding – even before Graf and Wellhausen had demonstrated that the Priestly legal material came into being at a late date. In reality the beginnings had to look very much simpler if the divine wisdom was not to have ‘leaped over several necessary elements of development’.18 For Vatke, Moses is a prophetically gifted nomadic leader who in antithesis to the natural religion of the people introduced the worship of Jehovah as the ‘one national God’.19

According to Vatke, the dialectical process, which began on a small scale with Moses, reached its first climax in the eighth-century prophets; they had for the first time decisively shaped the universalistic view of God and the idea of theocracy in the face of the national and nature religion of the people. In this way, the dialectical Hegelian model of thesis, antithesis and synthesis also gave Vatke a broad principle for dividing the religion of Israel into a pre-prophetic, prophetic and post-prophetic period. Indeed it enabled him – in contrast to de Wette and many who followed him – to evaluate the post-exilic era positively as ‘synthesis’, as the attempt at a benevolent transposition of theocracy in a legalistic direction, universalizing it in wisdom and internalizing it in religious poetry (551-577). For Vatke it was the Hellenistic period which first led to a decline, from which Christianity then rose to a final climax (577-590).

Although with this approach in terms of the philosophy of history Vatke was able to tackle the living dialogical structure of the history of Israelite religion much more appropriately than the approaches before him, which had been either didactic or expressed in terms of the history of concepts, as a result he remains far too imprisoned in the history of ideas and his account seems abstract, almost docetic. For example, he sees the prophets as the ‘main organs of the idea’ (480), not really human beings of flesh and blood; for him, events of political history like the rise of Assyria as a world power or the downfall of the Israelite states are ‘accidents’: they may support the dialectical spiritual process (universalization, separation from the world), but cannot produce and determine it.

Nevertheless, Vatke’s approach was a brilliant one. However, to begin with he found no successors. His philosophical diction, which was difficult to understand, was a deterrent, and his critical destruction of ‘Mosaism’ brought down on him not only the angry attacks of the conservatives but also the charge of a critical scholar like de Wette that he had ‘researched in an irreligious and untheological spirit’;20 this prevented him from being given an ordinarius professorship.21 The scene continued to be dominated by more or less didactic approaches or approaches in terms of salvation history.22

It was two generations after Vatke before the ‘history of Israelite religion’ came to be fully developed by Wellhausen and his school. Once Wellhausen – independently of Graf – had succeeded in separating out the ‘Priestly Codex’ by literary criticism and demonstrating its post-exilic origin, he enthusiastically went back to Vatke’s scheme, which fitted in with this literary-critical result, but stripped it of its philosophical superstructure. Wellhausen stood near to the line running from Herder, Humboldt and Ranke in his understanding of history and he steered clear of all speculation in the philosophy of history; he saw history as an organic process in which the history of religion had an integral part. On the basis of this approach it was possible for Wellhausen to describe the history of religion as an ongoing interplay between political history and religious views; in his view influence was often exerted by ‘great men’.23 So for example he can say: ‘Only in Moses’ time did Yahweh become the creator spiritus of the people of Israel and thus at the same time take on a new, national and historical content, while his old relation to nature receded into the background.’24

Wellhausen himself did not write an extended ‘history of religion’, but only treated this as an aspect of his account of the history of Israel;25 however, in 1905 he wrote a brief essay, still worth reading, entitled ‘The Religion of Israel and Judah’. This shows how in his hands Vatke’s somewhat ‘bloodless’ outline becomes a taut and changing course of history with many facets.

Instead, a whole series of ‘histories of religion’ appeared from his pupils, a typical and influential example of which is R.Smend (Sr)’s Lehrbuch der alttestamentlichen Religionsgeschichte (1893, 21899). This book was the first deliberately to dispense with the title ‘Biblical Theology’. Smend stated programmatically: ‘The account of Old Testament religion must not be a systematic one.’26

Smend, too, believed that the history of religion had to describe an interplay of political and religious history: ‘So in connection with the history of Israel, the history of Old Testament religion seeks to show how this religion came into being with the people of Israel, lived in it and underwent the strongest influence from all its fortunes, and how conversely it created and sustained the people of Israel, permeated and dominated its life, how furthermore it called for the downfall of Israel and then raised up the Jewish religious community from the ruins of the fallen people. Only from the historical life of Old Testament religion do we recognize its historical truth.’27

In outline, Smend followed the tripartite scheme of Vatke and distinguished between the religion of ancient Israel, that of the prophets and that of the Jews. But in making a sharp distinction between the religion of pre-prophetic Israel and post-prophetic Judaism, he reintroduced de Wette’s differentiation between ‘Hebraism’ and ‘Judaism’, which resulted in a devaluation of the post-exilic period.28 In his view Judaism represented ‘to a large degree a compromise between it (prophetic religion) and popular religion’ (268). By contrast, for Smend prophetic religion, which universalized and individualized the national religion of Israel, separated it from the world and led it to higher morality, clearly represented the climax and turning point of the history of Israelite religion; on the one hand it was the ‘founder of the Jewish community’ by prompting the development of the law; on the other hand he saw it in direct relationship to Christianity (174).

Doubtless Smend’s development of Wellhausen’s real-historical approach did more justice to many points of the historical course of the history of Israelite religion than Vatke’s philosophical scheme. Nevertheless, on the one hand some inappropriate Christian evaluation crept in, and on the other hand it proved that the three-stage approach derived from Hegelian philosophy could not be made to fit the historical periods of Israel: as the development of the law, which Smend rightly interpreted as an answer to the preaching of the eight-century prophets, already begins with the reforms of Hezekiah and Josiah, he was compelled to make ‘Judaism’ already begin with the downfall of the northern kingdom in 721. That, of course, is historical and sociological: the self-designation yehūd is only attested from the end of the sixth century, and of course down to 587 Judah was still a state. Moreover on the basis of his system Smend could not assess the seventh- and sixth-century prophets appropriately, but had to reinterpret them as teachers of the law and pastors.

A further defect lies in Smend’s failure to take note of social factors, or his misinterpretation of them. While he recognized that there is a reciprocal influence between ‘prophetic religion’, the downfall of Israel as a state and the social form of the post-exilic community, this latter was not – as he thought – an unpolitical ‘community’ in the Christian understanding of the term, nor was it in any way the consequence of an individualization of religion and a separation of it from the world. His use of the term nation, as popular in the nineteenth century as it was vague, for pre-prophetic Israel is also questionable: it prevents Smend from seeing what a revolution the formation of the state and the monarchy represented in the history of Israelite religion.

Finally, the almost complete lack of a comparative perspective is striking. Smend accepts influences from ‘ancient Semitic religion’, Arabic tribal religion and ‘Canaanite religion’, which he simply describes as ‘nature worship’, only for the early period; otherwise for him the history of Israelite religion is an organic development within Israel,29 which needs ‘Baal worship’ only as a constant negative foil.

But despite these defects, the ‘histories of religion’ which appeared in or around the Wellhausen school30 represented a considerable step forward. They were so influential that traditional biblical theologies were either supplemented with a section on the history of religion31 or were turned into histories of religion and given new titles.32 The step to a clearly historical summary of the results of Old Testament scholarship had been taken.

In addition, there was the stimulus of the history-of-religions school around Eichhorn, Gunkel, Bousset and others, which went beyond the narrow approach of the Wellhausen school and in its research into the history of Israelite religion and Christianity sought to make positive use of the material from Eastern cultures that had accumulated in the meantime. One example of this is Gunkel’s Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Creation and Chaos in Primal Time and End-Time, 1895), which traced the motive of the battle with chaos from the Babylonian creation myths through the Old Testament to apocalyptic. Unfortunately no one in the school wrote a comprehensive history of Israelite religion. However, before the First World War it looked as if the thoroughoing history-of-religions approach could lead to a volume which embraced both Old and New Testament research and could even – if one remembers the works of Troeltsch – lead to a unitary theology on a historical basis which also included dogmatics.

But that never happened: the First World War brought a quite radical collapse of research into the history of religion in Germany before a fully convincing ‘History of Israelite Religion’ could be written. Eissfeldt, himself a young supporter of the history-of-religions trend, described this collapse in retrospect in 1931, not without regret: ‘When the war came to an end, the first unrest of the years of revolution settled, and now science and theology again came more into their own, it was not the theology of the history of religions which continued a victory march interrupted only by war and revolution; rather, a quite different kind of theology came into being and went from success to success: dialectical theology, which was also called theology of crisis and theology of the Word.’33

In 1926 he had described the new situation like this: ‘Weary of the historicism and psychologism and relativism of the history-of-religions method, people are longing for revelation and calling for a scientific treatment of the Bible which does justice to its claim to be the revelation of absolute values, namely a theological approach. The representatives of dialectical theology have met this demand most obviously.’34 Whereas a number of Old Testament scholars were concerned to meet this demand by replacing the history of the religion of Israel and Judah with a new form of ‘theology of the Old Testament’, Eissfeldt sought to rescue history-of-religions research into the Old Testament by clearly separating the two and dividing them into two different methodological approaches: ‘history of religions’ is concerned with knowledge and ‘Old Testament theology’ with faith. Consequently both forms of overall view are necessary and can supplement each other: ‘The historical understanding of the Old Testament can never be more than relative and immanent, and on the other hand faith grasped by an Absolute and Transcendent is not the organ for understanding the religion of the Old Testament as a historical entity.’35

Along the lines of the compromise offered here, in the subsequent period some scholars wrote both a ‘history of religion’ and a ‘theology of the Old Testament’.36 Yet others added longer or shorter sketches of the history of religion to their systematic theological presentation of the material,37 thus indicating that they, too, did not see a genetic understanding of the overall course of Israelite religion as wholly superfluous.

However, this compromise cannot disguise the fact that academic interest in history-of-religions accounts had been paralysed. The innovations and hermeneutical-methodological discussions took place on the side of ‘Old Testament theology’ and established themselves in the period before and after the Second World War as a new Old Testament discipline. By contrast, the histories of Israelite religion or historical sketches which have continued to appear since the First World War are largely uninteresting résumés38 which in method and historical system hardly go beyond those of Wellhausen and the beginnings of the history-of-religions school. Indeed, it has to be said that the few ‘histories of Israelite religion’ which were written after the Second World War under the domination of Old Testament theology mark more of a step back in method and system, although in terms of content they integrated new results of research.

This is true, for example, of Ringgren’s 1963 Israelite Religion; it is no coincidence that this was written by an author from Sweden, where there was never the theological contempt for history-of-religions research that there was in Germany. In terms of the history of research Ringgren offers a thoroughly sympathetic synthesis between the Scandinavian branch of the ‘Myth and Ritual School’ and German Old Testament scholarship (Noth, etc.). What differentiates the content of this ‘modern’ history of religion from that of Smend is above all the dating of the texts: Ringgren ventures to say much more and with more confidence about the religion of the patriarchs, Moses and the period before the state than scholars did in the time of Wellhausen; here the influence of Alt and Noth is evident.39 The main interest lies in the period of the monarchy, and many texts are claimed for this period (especially Psalms) which were previously regarded as post-exilic. By contrast the exilic and post-exilic period takes up only sixteen per cent of the book – an indication of a theological lack of interest. Although historical developments are addressed throughout the book, the presentation of the religion of Israel in the main part (the period of the monarchy) is in a dogmatic order, and deals with God, the forms of God’s appearance, the angels and spirits, etc. It looks as if the schemes sometimes used in Old Testament theologies have found their way into the history of Israelite religion.40 The writing prophets are simply set alongside cult and king. Here the author remarks: ‘It is an astonishing fact that a large part of the Old Testament consists of writings that in many ways represent a point of view quite different from that of the official religion of their period.’41 However, the struggle and dispute which underlies this is not developed; all we are given is the religious and moral content of the prophetic proclamation. Little can be detected in Ringgren’s work of the dialogue structure of the history of religion or even of the interplay between historical and religious changes which still so fascinated Wellhausen. The genetic understanding is fossilized in an intellectual system which is historical only out of necessity.42

The same is true of W.H.Schmidt’s The Faith of the Old Testament (ET 1983 of German 41982), which from the second German edition of 1975 appeared under the title ‘Old Testament Faith in its History’. This useful book with its wealth of material ‘does not seek to depict the history of Israelite religion as a whole with all the forms of popular piety, but above all the nature and history of the Old Testament understanding of God’.43 The delineation of the change in the image of God from the nomadic prehistory of Israel to the monarchy occupies the greater part of the book. Schmidt evidently thinks that the essential of a religion has already been grasped when its understanding of God has been clarified. But this means that the interplay between social and religious development only half comes into view; the effect of religion on social developments, for example by the formation of the law, is completely absent. The exclusion of ‘popular piety’ limits the whole approach once again to a line conceived of in ideal terms,44 and hardly allows any dispute over the understanding of God. Even kingship and prophecy stand peacefully side by side (§§12, 14). From the exilic and post-exilic period, only what is of interest to Christians is briefly (just eleven per cent of the overall length) considered.

The appearance of the book marks progress in taking into account influences from the ancient Near Eastern environment, especially from Ugarit, completely excluded from von Rad’s Old Testament Theology, which had appeared somewhat earlier. However, the history-of-religions comparison in Schmidt’s approach, which aims to give an account of the ‘unmistakable uniqueness of Israel among the religions of antiquity’,45 often has an apologetic function. So this outline, which puts itself ‘between a history of religion and a theology of the Old Testament’, shows very clearly that the use of systematic theology, and the criteria for selection and evaluations which derive from it, at least in part get in the way of a view of the real historical developments.

In his History of Israelite Religion (ET 1972, German 1969), Fohrer is clearly more interested in the historical development in correlation with the political and social history and in critical encounters with neighbouring religions. For example, he distinguishes between nomadic clan religion and the Canaanite religion of the settled population, and describes the historical consequences of their encounter (11-53). However, in his view the decisive influences which advanced the history of Israelite religion did not derive from this social and religious correlation but from particular impulses. He distinguishes four of them: the Mosaic religion of Yahweh, the kingship, prophecy and the Deuteronomistic theology. Here Fohrer evidently wants to denote the contingent religious impulses which cannot be derived from the social structures and to a degree run counter to them. However, although this is a clear advance on Wellhausen’s view that men with religious inspiration make history, the question remains. The ‘impulse’ theory in fact makes it possible for Fohrer often to ignore the tradents of the great religious innovations and prevents him from enquiring further into their social conditioning. So the impulses run the risk of becoming a history of ideas which exists in detachment.

The same is also true of the term ‘existential attitude’ which Fohrer introduces. He distinguishes six forms of this: the conservative, the magical, the cultic, the national-religious, the wisdom and the prophetic (151ff., 267ff.). This is in part a quite accurate account of the different ‘streams of faith’ within the religion of Israel. But as Fohrer – again orientated on the history of ideas – does not investigate the tradents of these ‘existential attitudes’, they become random options existing alongside each other,46 and the theological clashes between them are not described. Thus the sociological approaches to a view of the religion of Israel in interplay with its social development, which are certainly present in Fohrer,47 remain rudimentary.

With twenty-two per cent of the book, the exilic and post-exilic period is given more coverage in Fohrer’s account than in those of Ringgren and Schmidt, but this is far from an appropriate evaluation of its significance for a new conception of the history of Israelite religion.

This survey of the history of scholarship produces the following demands for a new conception of the history of Israelite religion.

1. A history of Israelite religion must have a consistent historical construction and may not secretly or openly reintroduce dogmatic principles of division and selection (Ringgren, Schmidt).

2. A ‘history of Israelite religion’ must be presented as an open process which leads both to later Judaism and also to later Christianity. Divisions which introduce evaluations from a later date, i.e. particuarly in the light of Christianity, like ‘Hebraism’ and ‘Judaism’ (de Wette) or ‘Israelite-Jewish’ (Wellhausen et al.), are to be rejected, and similar emphases or devaluations, e.g. ‘prophetic religion’ as compared to the ‘religion of the law’ (Smend, etc.), are to be avoided.

3. A ‘history of Israelite religion’ may not be described as a mere history of ideas or of the spirit (Vatke, to some degree Fohrer); it must be presented as a process which embraces all aspects of the historical development. It has to detect and describe the interplay between the political and social development on the one hand and the religious and cultic development on the other (thus in embryo already Wellhausen, Smend et al.). The formal concept of religion to be used here, which sees religion as a reciprocal event between God and human beings,48 should do justice to this concern. However, it must also be added that for the historian of religion ‘God’ is tangible only in the linguistic statements of human beings, in religious experiences which they report, in worlds of religious symbols which they develop, and in words which they speak to God or in God’s name. Methodologically, this means that the standpoint from which the historian of religion describes the interplay cannot lie with God or in the claim to some ‘bird’s-eye view’ between God and human beings; it can lie only on the side of the Israelite man or woman.

4. So a ‘history of Israelite religion’ today must eventually also include the social history of Israel alongside the political history (Wellhausen). As far as is possible from the sources, it must investigate consistently the human vehicles of the various religious traditions, the way in which they were conditioned, economically and socially, and their social context. It cannot ignore the question whether religious statements or symbolic worlds are formed or develop in relation to individuals in their family circle, the local community, or in relation to the people or the state, and it will attempt to investigate the material of the tradition at different levels in accordance with these social entities.49 It cannot ignore the fact that in the course of its history the form of the social organization of the entity ‘Israel’ changed considerably, that ‘its religion’ had a considerable role in this, and that conversely social change markedly altered religious statements and schemes.

5. A ‘history of Israelite religion’ has not only to describe the manifold different religious statements and theological schemes in the Old Testament in their historical and social setting, but also to bring them once again into dialogue with one another. Its task is to restore the ‘frozen dialogue’ of the Old Testament tradition to a living theological discussion between different groups and parties. The dialectical model which Vatke took over from Hegel was certainly a correct starting point, but it is still too rigid and still too little filled with real historical life. The history of Israelite religion is then an ongoing discussion between various Israelite groupings about the way in which particular historical developments are to be interpreted in the light of God and what is to be done, according to God’s will, in the face of these challenges.50

6. A ‘history of Israelite religion’ must be orientated on comparative religion. Religious discussion in Israel did not take place in a closed context but in its more or less open ancient Near Eastern environment, in which religious patterns of interpretation and conduct already long formed were constantly taken up, changed and rejected. There is a wide consensus today that here the narrowness of the Wellhausen school and the theological restraints which led to a decline in history-of-religions research as a consequence of dialectical theology must be done away with. What is needed is for not only isolated religious statements but also similar social and religious complexes to be compared, and for this comparison to be done fairly, i.e. without any apologetic interest. The common features are as important as the differences. The history-of-religions comparison does not have the task of demonstrating the uniqueness of the religion of Israel (pace W.H.Schmidt) but of helping to understand it better.

7. A ‘history of Israelite religion’ must again evaluate the post-exilic period more appropriately.51 It must take seriously the view, often expressed today, that the exilic and early post-exilic period was the decisive period for the formation of the religion of Israel, and at least devote the same interest and the same space to it as to the pre-exilic period – as far as the sources allow. However, this means a revision of anti-Judaistic Christian prejudices.

1.2 Task, method and hermeneutical reflections

Following this account of the interweaving of the ‘history of Israelite religion’ and the ‘theology of the Old Testament’ and the opposition between them, we must now define the task and method of the former in comparison with the latter.

In 1926, in a concern to secure a place for the ‘history of Israelite religion’ within Old Testament scholarship, Eissfeldt attempted to make a clear methodological and conceptual distinction between the two disciplines:

The history of the religion of Israel and Judah is ‘a historical discipline. It describes the religion of the Old Testament as an entity unfolding in a historical development and in so doing utilizes the instruments of philology and history, which are also useful elsewhere . . . This includes the means of empathy, which indeed is particularly important in this unique sphere. Moreover that is enough for the accomplishment of the historical task; no other means are needed. The historian does not answer the question of the absolute value, of the truth of the subject. Historians must be content with the statement that they are dealing with an entity which claims to be the revelation and the word of God . . .

The theological consideration of the religion of the Old Testament is different! This is an account of what in the Old Testament has become revelation, the Word of God . . . to those describing it and their religious communities. Although it is thoroughly scientific, it will therefore have the character of witness and its validity is limited to the circle of those whose piety is the same as or similar to that of the one describing it, i.e. it is conditioned by confession and church . . . Because Old Testament theology is about the description of the revelation of God which has become faith in the Old Testament and is constantly renewed, it cannot have the form of a historical description . . . Therefore here the systematic nature of the account is the given one.’52

However, nowadays such a contrast between a historical and objective relativistic discipline on the one hand and a systematic-theological and normative church discipline on the other is no longer completely satisfying.

From the side of the history of religion it must be noted that there is no such thing as presuppositionless historiography. Eissfeldt, too, was well aware of this;53 however, his idea of a historian of religion ‘who regardless of his personal faith and the confession of his church can pursue and assess the development of his religion in enlightened objectivity’54 has become – at the latest since Auschwitz – deeply questionable. The author of a ‘history of Israelite religion’, too, cannot ignore the fact that the religion being described is the forerunner of two existing world religions, Judaism and Christianity, and in any account is called on to make a contribution towards working out this pernicious Christian history of guilt. Qua theologians, historians cannot ignore the fact that they are members of a church which is involved in internal and external controversies over how to cope with oppressive human problems. To this degree the historian’s account will have its own theological interests, and the conception of the ‘history of Israelite religion’ in the wider sense is a task which relates to the church. If anything is to be learned from the resolute theological concern about the Old Testament initiated by dialectical theology for an account of the history of Israelite religion, it is that this has to be pursued not out of a voluntary ‘empathy’ but out of a passionate concern for the problems and theological controversies in which the people of ancient Israel were engaged.55 That their struggle over the appropriate responses and decisions about God is significant for the present is the presupposition on which historians of religion work, to the degree that they are and want to remain theologians.

Even if as at present understood a ‘history of Israelite religion’ can neither be objective nor relativistic, it is not subjective either, nor does it pursue any immediate normative interest. The theological interests which an author brings to it must be subject to a number of controls from the historical subject to be described. The selection of material, the emphases and the evaluations must be proved by the criterion of their capacity to lead to the reconstruction of a continuous history which as far as possible fits all the Old Testament texts and the archaeological and historical data into a plausible overall picture.

Even if a ‘history of Israelite religion’ can prove neither the truth-claims of the Bible nor the superiority of ‘the faith of Israel’ (as Eissfeldt sees quite rightly), historians of religion, too, cannot get by without criteria for assessment if their reconstructions are not to remain utterly diffuse and random.56 However, they will not seek to derive these from present church dogmas or complexes of problems, but from the religious discussion which they have to describe. For all the understanding and critical sympathy with which they have to depict any position in a particular controversy and evaluate its concern, they will not want to share and excuse everything. Manifestly wrong decisions and wrong developments must be identified as such in a survey of the overall course of events. Only in this way can the drama and seriousness of the religious struggle of Israelite people of the time again be brought to life.

Thus despite the consistent application of historical method, the task of a ‘history of Israelite religion’ today is clearly more theological than Eissfeldt thought. Granted, it is not concerned with ‘absolute value’ and ‘the truth’, but it is concerned with the correct evaluations and decisions in particular historical situations and with the historical truth which flashes out in the dispute over them.

In the meantime, on the side of Old Testament theology it has become clear that the systematic theological methods and the normative task which Eissfeldt wanted to assign to the church cannot be maintained. As early as 1929 Eichrodt warned against regarding ‘Old Testament theology’ as a ‘discipline relating to the dogma of religion’ and assigned it a ‘place within empirical historical Old Testament scholarship’.57 By contrast, Vriezen wanted to give it the task of ‘recognizing the element of revelation in Old Testament preaching’, which has to take place on the basis of a specific ‘Christian theological starting-point’.58 Childs wanted even more consistently to define the ‘theology of the Old Testament’ as a specifically ‘Christian discipline’.59 But recently Preuss has again returned to Eichrodt’s view: ‘All in all, however, a theology of the Old Testament remains an undertaking with a historical orientation, and thus a descriptive one.’60 But in that case is it more than a phenomenology of Old Testament religion?

If the normative Christian orientation of ‘Old Testament theology’ has already proved problematical, so too has the demand for a systematic structure in it. Eichrodt still saw it in relation to the ‘history of Israelite religion’, as follows: ‘Whereas the history of Israelite and Jewish religion is concerned with the genetic understanding of Old Testament religion in the interplay of historical forces, Old Testament theology is concerned . . . with the great systematic task of making a cross section through what has come into being by which the inner structure of the living content of religion is to be illuminated and its characteristics are to be recognized, in the context of the religious environment or of types of the history of religion generally.’61 However, it has proved that there is no simple way of performing this ‘systematic task’ of describing the Israelite religion which has ‘come into being’ ‘by its inner structure’.

On the one hand the ongoing quest for an appropriate principle for structuring and dividing the ‘theology of the Old Testament’ shows how difficult it seems to be to find a system which is congenial to the religion of Israel.62 The interminable discussion about whether the Old Testament has a ‘theological centre’63 around which its religious statements can be grouped in a stringent theoretical way or whether we have a number of complexes of notions64 has compelled the concession that the Old Testament evidently successfully avoids the grasp of a theoretical system.

On the other hand, history is so essential an element of wide areas of Israelite religion and its literary presentation that an exclusion of the historical dimension would rob it of a decisive feature. Von Rad recognized: ‘If we cannot divorce Israel’s world of thought from her world of history because the picture of the latter was itself a complicated work of her faith, this at the same time means that we must also submit ourselves to the sequence of events as the faith of Israel saw them.’ Then comes his famous remark: ‘Thus, re-telling remains the most legitimate form of theological discourse on the Old Testament.’65 But is that not to abandon Eichrodt’s question about the unitary ‘inner structure’ of the religion of Israel, which is to guide the ‘theology of the Old Testament’ as distinct from the history of religion? The most recent representative, H.D.Preuss, well aware of this dilemma, attempts to take a middle way. This is ‘to uncover the basic structures of witness and faith’; the system must ‘match the subject-matter to be grasped’ and ‘necessary historical differentiation may not be left aside, but must be integrated into this systematically orientated account, for God’s way with his people was a historical one, a piece of history’.66

Thus today the task of the ‘theology of the Old Testament’ clearly has a more historical orientation than Eissfeldt thought. But if the two disciplines of the history of Israelite religion and the theology of the Old Testament have clearly come closer together than in their confrontation in the 1920s, the question nevertheless arises what still distinguishes them, and whether it is still meaningful to pursue them both further and continue to develop them with a not inconsiderable expenditure of research.

As early as 1963 Rolf Rendtorff was already pleading for a large-scale integration of the two. As the revelation of God did not take place outside but within the history of Israel, following Vatke and Köberle he made the demand that ‘the theological approach should be understood as a historical task and vice versa’,67 and ‘thus that at the same time the history-of-religions approach to the Old Testament should be acknowledged to be an integrating element of Old Testament theology’.68 However, much as one may appreciate the concern to overcome the gulf between historical and theological method and thus to find a theologically legitimate home for the history of Israelite religion under the roof of ‘Old Testament theology’, the only extended example of a depiction of this line of ‘Old Testament faith in its history’, the work by his pupil W.H.Schmidt, shows that a mere mixing of the two disciplines is problematical, because too many uncontrolled prior decisions and evaluations go into such an account.69

Now if such an integration of the two disciplines does not lead to any convincing result, they enter into direct competition not only in their function of bringing together the results of individual research into the Old Testament but also in the method they use. Despite the conceptual problems in the midst of which the discipline of ‘Old Testament theology’ has found itself from the beginning, its swan song is not to be intoned here. Who knows how it will develop in the future?70 If the discipline of ‘the history of Israelite religion’ has a real chance to develop itself again in the theological faculties, the future will show which of the two competing disciplines is more appropriate to the subject of the Old Testament and will be better able to assist the transfer of Old Testament research to theology and the church.

I cannot disguise the fact that in the present situation I regard the history of religion as the more meaningful comprehensive Old Testament discipline:

– because it corresponds better to the historical structure of large parts of the Old Testament;

– because it takes seriously the insight that religious statements cannot be separated from the historical background from which they derive or against which they are reinterpreted;

– because it is not compelled to bring down its varying and sometimes contradictory religious statements to the level of intellectual abstraction;

– because it describes a dialogical process of struggle for theological clarification, demarcation and consensus-forming which clearly corresponds to the present-day synodical or conciliar ecumenical learning process of the churches and Christian-Jewish dialogue;

– because it sees its continuity not in any religious ideas which have to be appropriated by Christians but in the people of Israel itself, to which the Christian churches stand in a brotherly and sisterly relationship through Jesus Christ;

– because in a consistently historical approach it openly dispenses with any claim – even a concealed one – to absoluteness and deliberately does theology under the eschatological proviso, which befits a minority church in a multi-religious and partially secularized world community;

– because its approach from a comparison of religions facilitates dialogue with the other religions.

However, I could well imagine that alongside such an overall view from the history of religions, an important place could come to be occupied by a theological view which took on the task, starting from the burning problems of the present and the controversies in theology and the church about how a Christian solution can be achieved, of making thematic cross-sections through the history of the religion of Israel and early Christianity in order to describe what insights or patterns of behaviour found there in connection with analogous problems and controversies can be important, helpful and normative for the church today. However, this would be a different kind of ‘Old Testament theology’ from what has been customary so far.

1.3 Dividing lines

The history of Israelite religion as attested for us in the writings of the Old Testament extends over a span of around a thousand years, from the end of the second millennium BCE (c.1250) to the middle of the second century BCE. The far-reaching revolutions which Israel experienced during this long period in its eventful political history, the formation of the state under David (c.1000), the loss of state independence with the exile (587) and the formation of a temple community in Jerusalem first under Persian (from 538) and then under Greek (from 332) rule, are also landmarks in the history of its religion. A history which seeks to describe the formation of the religion of Israel will therefore first of all have to be divided into a history of the period before the state, the period of the state, the exile, the Persian period and the Hellenistic period.

However, such a chronological division is not in itself enough. The multiplicity of ideas about faith attested by the Old Testament writings, which often compete in one and the same period, makes it impossible to develop a history of religion as a straight-line history of religious notions and conceptions. Rather, we come up inexorably against the question of the tradents of such different notions of faith: what groups were they which referred to particular religious experiences and developed particular theological conceptions? To what other notions did they react, and what interests were they pursuing? The history of Israelite religion is not a bloodless history of ideas but a living process of constant controversy, an ongoing dispute between different groups in Israelite society.71 It was only in the course of this unending discourse that – after many errors and false moves and the repudiation and adaptation of possible alternatives in thought and action – a group of religious traditions developed which gained broad social acceptance. It is these that we can call ‘the’ religion of Israel in its unmistakable distinctiveness.

A historical account which, like the one presented here, does not seek to limit itself to describing the development of the religion of Israel as a history of ideas, virtually from a bird’s-eye view, but attempts as far as the sources allow to trace it at its real social basis as a social and theological clash between different groups, will therefore have to introduce further dividing lines, regional and above all sociological.

Scholars widely accept that an account of the religion of Israel must involve regional differentiation: the differences between the religious traditions of the North and the South are too clear and the cultic and theological conceptions of particular sanctuaries, for example Jerusalem or Bethel, are too markedly different from each other. So for the pre-exilic period we shall have to take into account very different regional expressions of Yahweh religion by the priesthoods of the various sanctuaries, even if these differences have been largely levelled out in the texts as a result of the theological interest of exilic reform groups and have been polemically caricatured from the perspective of the South. For the exilic and post-exilic period we shall have to reflect on the differences between the homeland of Judah and the Diaspora, even if the sources from the latter are sparse.

Less accepted is the introduction of criteria of sociological differentiation into the account of the history of Israelite religion. There are several reasons for this. First, research into the social history of Israel and thus our knowledge of groups and controversies within Israel is still in its beginnings, and secondly, sociological models have so far seldom appeared in historical research into the religion of ancient Israel (Weber, Causse).72 Furthermore, it must be noted that in general those forming theories about the sociology of religion in the past were largely interested only in the functioning of religion in society as a whole;73 such theories were therefore only to a limited degree suitable for providing a sociological key to the observed multiplicity of religious traditions in the Old Testament. Still, here too we have recently seen the beginnings of a differentiation of religion within society, for example when Luckmann distinguishes between an ‘invisible religion’ deeply rooted in the anthropological and the institutionalized religion which has grown up in history,74 or when Mol recognizes that a distinction must be made in the religious process of creating and safeguarding identity through sacralization, a distinction between different ‘foci of identity’ – he mentions individual, group and society – which can come into tension with one another.75

At least two ‘foci of identity’ can also be recognized in ancient Israel, the family (as yet there was no such thing as the individual detached from the family) and the people (society as a whole). As I have shown elsewhere,76 these ‘foci’ bring together two different strata of Israelite religion: the main stratum of ‘official religion’, functionally related to the wider group of the people, and the substratum of ‘personal piety’, related to the individual in the smaller group of the family. Both strata always stand in a historically changing relationship, but are distinct in terms of content, function and the degree of their institutionalization. This will be described in detail in what follows. Here I shall simply indicate quite generally that the religious symbolic world of personal piety is orientated on family experiences, especially the father/mother-child relationship, whereas for official Yahweh religion it is above all political experiences, e.g. the experience of political liberation, which lead to the formation of symbols.77 Functionally, personal piety primarily stabilizes and integrates, whereas official Yahwistic religion always also has a markedly dynamic and dysfunctional elements. And official Yahweh religion is ritualized and institutionalized to a far greater degree than the living piety of families.

So in a historical account we shall in principle have to take note of these two levels of Israelite religion. Alongside this we can in part also distinguish a third level, the local level, that of the village community, which is situated between the level of the family and that of the people or state.78 At this point regional and sociological characteristics come to be combined. Following G.Lanczkowski,79 I use the term ‘internal religious pluralism’ for this socially conditioned stratification within the religion of Israel.

Now the main stratum of the ‘official religion’ relating to the people is not a monolithic unity either, any more than Israelite society was monolithic. Alongside the functionaries of the religious and political institutions, the priesthoods of the various sanctuaries, the elders and the royal house, who already developed very different conceptions of what was to be regarded as ‘official religion’, there were religious and political opposition and reform groups like the prophets or Deuteronomists, who denied the legitimacy of the existing forms of official Yahweh religion and developed completely new theological and cult-political conceptions.80 That means that there was considerable dispute among the various social groups in Israel as to what form of tangible symbolic world was appropriate for safeguarding the identity and survival of the people as a whole. The social controversies are reflected in the conflict over the most appropriate ‘official religion’, and the establishment and implementation of new religious political and theological conceptions set social changes in motion. In the course of these controversies there could be considerable shifts within official religion: what was once the alternative conception of a few outsiders, like the proclamation of the prophets of judgment, could later, as after the exile, become one of the basic pillars of society as a whole, while an official tradition like kingship theology, which was earlier so dominant, could break off almost completely with the downfall of the monarchy.

The history of Israelite religion has to discover such changes and shifts and correlate them with changes and shifts in Israelite society.

Finally, in addition to the historical and sociological orientation of this outline history of Israelite religion there is also the comparative perspective: Israel, which was a latecomer on the scene in the ancient Near East, did not enter a religious vacuum in which it had to create the religious world of symbols from scratch, but a sphere in which all fields of life had long been occupied by religious patterns of interpretation. Israel had a share in the religious heritage of the very much older cultures, peoples and states of the Near East: there are only a very few individual elements which are unique, and parallels to almost everything can be found in the environment, whether to prayers, sacrificial customs or kingship theology. It is not the individual elements but the structure as a whole which makes the religion of Israel distinctive.81 That means that the process of the controversy between competing religious conceptions does not just run within Israel but also includes many of the religious conceptions of neighbouring peoples, so that the dividing line between internal and external cannot be drawn clearly. In the process of reception,