Sargon Expands the Realm
Around 2350 BCE, Sargon of Akkade became Mesopotamia's first great conqueror. In trying to subjugate southern Mesopotamia from his base in the north, he was taking on a major challenge in multiculturalism. Southern Mesopotamia was ethnically and linguistically Sumerian, whereas Sargon was a foreigner who spoke Akkadian, a Semitic tongue. [..]Subsequent sections are "Toward Monotheism", "True Monotheism", and then begins "Part II: The Emergence of Abrahamic Monotheism." Here's another excerpt, p. 101:Fortunately Sargon was a theologically flexible man. Though Akkadian gods had helped him subdue the Sumerians, this didn't mean the Sumaerian gods were his enemies. In the city of Nippur, he got local priests to agree with him that his victory had been the will of the eminent Sumerian god Enlil (a judgement that may have been encouraged by the display of Nippur's deposed king in a neck-stock). There was also reassuring news for devotees of the Sumerian sky god An: Sargon, it turned out, was An's brother-in-law!
And then there was Sargon's elaborate courtship of the Sumerian goddess Inanna. Though she wasn't exactly known for resisting the entreaties of men, Sargon didn't take any chances. His eloquent daughter Enheduanna—whom he'd installed as a high priestess at Ur, a religious center of Sumeria—set about writing hymns in praise of Inanna. Enheduanna pulled out all the stops: "Great queen of queens, issued from the holy womb... omniscient sage... sustenance of the multitudes... senior queen of the heavenly foundations and zenith.... How supreme you are over the great gods."
But not so supreme that she got to keep her name. Ishtar was an Akkadian goddess of long standing, and Sargon, in affirming the divinely sanctioned unity of his Akkadian-Sumerian empire, asserted that Ishtar and Inanna were actually the same deity. So why use two names? Hereafter Inanna, while retaining her essential traits, would be known as Ishtar.
The melding of religious beliefs or concepts—"syncretism"—is a common way to forge cultural unity in the wake of conquest, and often, as here, what gets melded is the gods themselves. Of course, when two cultures fuse, some of their gods may not match up. Sumerian gods with no rough Akkadian counterpart entered Akkadian culture either under their Sumerian names (Enlil, for example) or some Akkadian variation thereon (An became Anu). But one way or antoher, most gods of the vanquished Sumerians survived, eigther with their identities wholly intact or via fusion with an Akkadian god. This divine durability was common amid ancient warfare. (The Aztecs, who routinized conquest, built a special temple for imported gods.) One scholar has said of the waves of invasion that swept the Middle Esast in the second millennium BCE, "Conquered gods rarely, if ever, were ousted."
So too in the first millenium. Alexander the Great, in bringing much of the known world under Greek control, would extol the gods whose land he grabbed. And Alexander's native gods would receive the same pragmatic courtesy when Greece found itself on the other side of conquest. That's why you can map the Greek pantheon onto the Roman pantheon by changing the names—Aphrodite to Venus, Zeus to Jupiter, and so on. In the polytheistic ancient world, a savvy conqueror was a theologically flexible conqueror. Once the fighting is over, and you've got an empire to run, there's no sense starting needless squabbles.
You can look at the convenient malleability of polytheism in two ways. On the one hand, it was a handy tool for ruthless imperialists—an opiate, as Marx might say, of newly subdued masses. On the other hand, it was an elixir of intercultural amity. However ruthless the conquerors, howerver selfish their ambitions, in the long run they drew more and more peoples, over larger and larger areas, into economic and cultural exchange.
Sawrgon had carried Mesopotamia closer than ever to universalism, extending the reach of Sumerian gods beyond their southern homeland and across a cultural divide. This was still nothing like the simple, streamlined, monotheistic universalism that would eventualy emerge in the Abrahamic lineage: one god that governs all of humankind. But even back in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BCE, when polytheism was demonstrating its geopolitical potential, there were forces moving theology closer to monotheism.
..If you read the Hebrew Bible carefully, it tells the story of a god in evolution, a god whose character changes radically from beginning to end.This is seeming like a fascinating read for anyone who wants to understand the history and moral progress of pre-secular societies—rather than dismissing their beliefs as necessarily harmful delusions, as the 'new atheists' would (Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al.)
There's a problem, however, if you want to watch this story unfold. You can't just start reading the first chapter of Genesis and plow forward, waiting for God to grow. The first chapter was almost certainly written later than the second chapter of Genesis, and by a different author. The Hebrew Bible took shape slowly, over many centuries, and the order in which it was written is not the order in which it now appears. Fortunately, biblical scholarship can in some cases give us a pretty good idea of which texts followed which. This knowledge of the order of composition is a kind of "decoder" that allows us to see a pattern in God's growth that would otherwise be hidden.
Meanwhile, archaeology has supplemented this decoder with potent interpretive tools. In the early twentieth century, a Syrian peasant plowed up remnants of an ancient Canannite city called Ugarit. Scholars set about deciphering the Ugaritic language and combing the earth for Ugaritic texts. These texts, along with other vestiges of Canaanite culture unearthed in recent decades, have allowed the assembly of something notably absent from the Hebrew scriptures: the story from the point of view of those Baal-worshipping Canaanites. And, over the past few decades, archaeology has brought another check on the story as told in the Bible. Excavations in the land of the Israelites have clarified their history, sometimes at the expense of the biblical story line.
When you put all this together—a reading of the Canaanite texts, a selective "decoding" of the biblical texts, and a new archaeological understanding of Israelite history—you get a whole new picture of the Abrahamic god. It's a picture that, on the one hand, absolves Abrahamic monotheism of some of the gravest charges against it, yet on the other hand, challenges the standard basis of monotheistic faith. It's a picture that renders the Abrahamic god in often unflattering terms, yet charts his maturation and offers hope for future growth. And certainly it's a picture very different from the one drawn in the average synagogue, church, or mosque.
I have a friend who gifted his fundamentalist father Dawkins' The God Delusion. I gave mine Andrew's The Conservative Soul, and my friend later agreed it was a better way to go. For directly addressing contemporary issues it's probably still among the best, but if you want to help a religious fundie understand the history behind their world view enough to better grapple with the world beyond it, I'm thinking The Evolution of God may be a great approach.
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