Yahweh tells his people that they “shall have no other gods before me,” he’s speaking into a culture whose very fabric is made up of the worship of other gods.
“You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex. 20:3).
In modern Western culture, it might be odd to speak of having a god at all, but in the ancient world it was strange to think there was only one god. Either way, the first commandment is actually a really weird thing to say. Yet this command is the heart of all of God’s commands to his people. As Luther argues, the breaking of all the other commandments is the breaking of this one, and yet following this commandment would have required the Israelites to completely destroy the ancient worldview. [1] It would be like telling a modern American that they had to get rid of their smartphone. So much of our daily lives rely on a smartphone for communication, music, podcasts, directions, photography, and research, to name a few. Smartphones are considered essential to life in American culture, and the thought of going through life without one is totally unthinkable. In the same way, for the people of the ancient world, it was a given that there was a pantheon of deities governing the everyday workings of nature and human life. To say there was only one God required a total abandonment of the foundations of reality.
When an ancient person looked out over the world, they saw the hands of hundreds, or even thousands, of deities at work in the day-to-day workings of every part of nature. The ancient person knew that if he planted seeds in the ground, in a few weeks he’d have crops ready to harvest. If he milked a goat, he could turn the milk into cheese. If he slept with his wife, nine months later a baby would come forth. There was a cause-and-effect relationship perpetuated by human activity. But there was also so much outside the world of human control that it was assumed these things were controlled by bigger and more powerful beings. [2]
The ancients attributed these effects to a frame of reference they could understand. The forces of nature that dominated so much of their daily lives were attributed to beings who were remarkably like humans. There was a hierarchy of gods, with the father at the top and sons and daughters below him. Each god or goddess was flawed and behaved in all the ways humans do. The stories of the gods are filled with betrayal, fickleness, love, companionship, greed, war, infighting, and capriciousness. Surely the world was controlled by more powerful versions of humans who acted just as humans did. This gave explanations for why a child might die during childbirth, why the banks of the river overflowed and flooded the crop lands, or why a storm came up out of nowhere and wrecked the ships upon the waves. Such explanations were so ingrained, so obvious, and so much a part of the culture of the ancient world that everyone took them for granted. The idea of an “atheist” didn’t exist, because that would be to deny the existence of the world itself. [3]
Since the gods were central to every aspect of life, the question became “How can I placate the gods to get what I want?” So an Egyptian might wonder how to provide the sun god, Re, with what he needed to successfully fight the god of chaos, Apothis, and rise anew in the east each morning. A Mesopotamian might wonder how to care for Ishtar, the goddess of war and love, so that he could win on the field of battle. A Greek might wonder how to worship Poseidon so that he could cross the sea safely. In Mesopotamian myth, the gods created humans to do the hard work of farming so that the gods could sit back and relax. This meant that the Mesopotamians viewed their entire existence as servants to the gods, and resulted in Mesopotamian temples serving as the center of political power, economic activity, farming, and religious activities. Since the gods were part of everything, the temple was the center of everything. The divine and the mundane were so intertwined that no human action could be taken without invoking the gods in some way. [4]
This is the milieu in which the Old Testament was written, and therefore the Scriptures have a lot to say about the Canaanite gods and goddesses and their relationship to Yahweh. Perhaps the chief god of the Canaanites and chief idol for the Israelites was the god Baal. The most important written texts regarding Canaanite deities come from a Syrian city called Ugarit. [5] These texts give considerable background information about the gods of Canaan, and provide substantial information for understanding how the biblical characters interact with the Canaanites.
Baal is the storm god. [6] He is the one responsible for thunder, lightning, and rain. In Ugaritic literature, he’s considered the king of the gods, but he wasn’t always that way. At one point, he was a lesser deity who served the father of the gods El. But he did battle with Yam, the god of the sea. The sea represents chaos in multiple mythologies as the sea is wild and untamable. [7] So by defeating him, Baal brings order to the world. He then petitioned El to allow him to build his palace in the heavens. Once established, he sent forth the rains that fertilized the ground. It also allowed him to take over as the king of the gods. [8] In another story, the god of death, Mot, kills Baal. But then his sister, [9] Anat, kills Mot. When she does this, Baal comes back to life, and this begins the Baal cycle where he is slain and raised back to life over and over again. [10] These two stories give the basis of the beliefs regarding Baal. He was the god of the sky, storms, and rains. In the Levant region, crop yields depended on rainfall and not perennial rivers like the Nile or the Euphrates. Therefore, here, the god Baal was the most important deity. In addition, the Baal cycle of death and life corresponded with the seasonal change when crops would grow, be harvested, and then lie dormant. Worship of this deity consisted of animal sacrifice, libation offerings, and ritual sexual activity with the temple prostitutes. These things represented fertility and new life in a tangible, hands-on way. [11]
So when Yahweh tells his people that they “shall have no other gods before me,” he’s speaking into a culture whose very fabric is made up of the worship of other gods. To ignore the god of the sky is to invite drought, famine, and death. To refuse these other gods goes against the very nature of the ancient peoples. But here we see that Yahweh is reshaping the whole conversation. Over and over again, Scripture attributes all of creation to Yahweh, not to a pantheon of deities.
One especially robust example is Psalm 104:
"He set the earth on its foundations,
so that it should never be moved.
You covered it with the deep as with a garment;
the waters stood above the mountains.
At your rebuke they fled;
at the sound of your thunder they took to flight.
The mountains rose, the valleys sank down
to the place that you appointed for them.
You set a boundary that they may not pass,
so that they might not again cover the earth."
This Psalm goes on to describe Yahweh as the God of the sea, the mountains, the crops, the wind, the sky, and virtually every aspect of creation. There is not a whole pantheon that is responsible for the natural forces of the world, but instead one true, good, and perfect God, and Yahweh is his name.
No longer do the Israelites need to offer sacrifices to placate a collection of fickle and capricious gods that don't care about them. Yahweh God is offering his people a much different relationship. Yahweh is a God who cares about his people, is slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love (Ex. 34:6). In fact, a quick look at the ritual laws in the Torah demonstrates that Yahweh is interested in repairing the relationship between his sinful people and himself. The sacrifices in this ritual system are either to say “Thank you” or “I’m sorry.” “Thank you” indicates the Israelites already attribute all they have to God. They don’t need to manipulate him to get what they want. The atonement sacrifices are there to acknowledge that they have broken God’s law, and to come before him in repentance and confidence that he will indeed forgive them. The Israelites have a God who calls them into a better life free from the fear of angry gods; a God who promises life, community, love, mercy, grace, and belonging. This God is totally foreign to anything that the Canaanites were worshiping, and anything our culture worships today. We have a God who loves us and has given us everything – how could we do anything except worship him and him alone?
