My thoughts from Sunday School: Did Elijah defeat Ba'al or disprove Ba'al?

[Pyreaux]

Are all High Places bad?

Sunday School started 1 Kings. My thoughts on Kings has evolved over time to the point that they are no longer appropriate for Sunday School. It's simply not the time to dig into an overly long counter narrative. So, I heard the Sunday School throw the classic tropes around that condemn the construction of other shrines, high places and groves, as if they only exist to worship foreign deities.

1 Samuel 9 explicitly shows the prophet Samuel blessing a sacrifice at the high place in Ramah. Saul is told he will meet a group of prophets coming down from a high place playing harps, tambourines, and flutes (1 Samuel 10:5). 1 Kings 3:3–4 says Solomon loved the Lord, but "he sacrificed and burned incense at the high places." But Gibeon was "the chief high place," and it was precisely there that Yahweh appeared to Solomon in a dream and granted him his wisdom. The scribes explain why this was okay at the time. 1 Kings 3:2 "The people, however, were still sacrificing at the high places, because a temple had not yet been built for the Name of the Lord."

The condemnation of the high places in the later monarchy was about protecting the divine boundaries. Because high places were so deeply contaminated by the rebellious elohim, keeping them open was a constant invitation for infiltration and footholds into Israel.

Margaret Barker takes a sharp, historical-critical view here. She argues that the "high places" actually preserved elements of the ancient, original First Temple theology, including the veneration of Yahweh’s heavenly host and the divine mother figure (represented by the Asherah). For Barker, when later reforming kings like Hezekiah and Josiah violently tore down the high places, wasn't just a cleanup of paganism, it was an aggressive political purge by a specific Jerusalem faction determined to centralize all power, money, and theology into their capital city, effectively rewriting Israel's older, decentralized religious history.

Did Elijah defeat Ba'al or disprove Ba'al?

The perspectives of scholars like Michael Heiser and Margaret Barker, Elijah’s showdown at Mount Carmel is understood as a defeat of a real territorial deity, rather than the modern "disproof" of an imaginary being. Look at the Old Testament through the lens of ancient Near Eastern context, rather than modern Western categories of monotheism. Elijah did not go to Mount Carmel to argue that Baal was a psychological fiction. He staged a geographical turf war near the Israel border.

Baal was a real demonic and/or rebel entity. When Elijah mocks Baal in 1 Kings 18:27, "Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling... or sleeping", modern readers assume Elijah is saying, "He's fake." Elijah is actually mocking actual beliefs about Baal, who routinely went to the underworld, traveled, or slept. Elijah is essentially saying, "Your god is a limited entity who can't hear you right now"  

Barker places a heavy emphasis on 1 Kings 18:30, where Elijah "repaired the altar of the Lord that had been torn down." For her, this isn't an abstract debate about whether the gods exist, it is a physical and spiritual reclamation of the First Temple cultus against a real, rival priesthood that had successfully hijacked the nation. The notion of disproving a god's existence is a modern, post-Enlightenment way of thinking. Elijah might say rather, he defeated Baal. He proved Baal had no authority over the land of Israel, Yahweh alone is King over the council of the gods.

Edited July 6 by Pyreaux

[Analytics]

I've been listening to a fascinating Great Courses series, The Pagan World: Ancient Religions before Christianity, by Hans-Friedrich Mueller, and it's changed how I think about the Old Testament.

My impression is that early Israelite religion wasn't originally categorically different from the surrounding Canaanite/Semitic religions. Instead, the Israelites seem to have gradually become a people defined by an exclusive covenant with Jehovah, and only later did that develop into the explicit monotheism we associate with Judaism.

Through that lens, stories like Elijah's don't read to me as arguments over whether only one God existed. They read more like arguments over whether Israel would remain faithful to its covenant with Jehovah or seek the blessings of the other gods that everyone around them also believed in.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying, but I find that way of looking at it makes the Old Testament feel much more like it's taking place in a real ancient Near Eastern world instead of in a religious vacuum.

[The Nehor]

Baal and Jehovah/Adonai had similar portfolios. Both were localized storm deities. It is probably inevitable that one would eventually supplant the other.

Some parts of the Old Testament retain the idea of Israel’s god being a localized one. When King Mesha of Moab was attacked and besieged he went and sacrificed his son to the god Chemosh and divine power came down and drove out the attackers. Localized deities were believed to have a kind of “home court” advantage so it fits well. Of course once Israel’s god became a more universal deity this account looks very weird and a bunch of (mostly silly) rationalizations were concocted to obscure the plain meaning of the text so Israel’s deity didn’t actually lose.

[The Nehor]

One of my favorite historians did a four-part blog series on how polytheism works in very general terms.

https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/

The problem a lot of people have when looking back on polytheist religion is that they often import the idea that it is like Abrahamic monotheism except there are more gods which isn’t really how it works. Abrahamic monotheists are expected to be devoted to God and to love God and to obey God and the like. Polytheism has a more moderated view. The gods don’t much care if you like them or not. They expect to be respected and for mortals to placate them and to “keep square” with them in terms of debts owed. Piety is respecting the gods. They don’t expect a kind of lifelong devotion that our form of monotheism does. I suspect many polytheists would find modern Christians and Muslims and Jews to be fanatical and dangerous. They certainly thought that of the Christians when they appeared originally.