How The Desert Metaphor Shaped Monotheism

God from the heat of the inhospitable desert

Monotheism arose in the Middle East, in ancient Egypt (under Akhenaten in the 14th century BCE), Iran (Zoroastrianism), Canaan (Judaism, which spread via Christianity), and Arabia (Islam).

Zoroastrianism and Christianity aren’t purely monotheistic: the former religion envisions a process by which a single God will reign after an apocalyptic triumph of good over evil, and Christianity is only nominally monotheistic, not substantially so since Christians divide God into three divine persons and Catholics add a pantheon of sanctified saints.

Monotheism arises as a reform of polytheism, which speaks to one major influence on this kind of religion: the projection of human preoccupations onto the environment. Polytheism projects social relationships onto the forces of nature, dividing up the powers of the universe into social classes as though nature were ruled by a kingdom of higher and lesser gods.

The Mesopotamian gods, for example, “had human or humanlike forms, were male or female, engaged in intercourse, and reacted to stimuli with both reason and emotion. Being similar to humans, they were considered to be unpredictable and oftentimes capricious. Their need for food and drink, housing, and care mirrored that of humans.” Moreover, “like kings and holy temples, they possessed a splendor called melammu. Melammu is a radiance or aura, a glamour that the god embodied. It could be fearsome or awe-inspiring.”

Atheism is what ultimately follows from the repudiation of that vanity, but monotheism was the first curtailment of the bias, an early opposition to the polytheistic belittlement of nature’s inhumanity. The one God of monotheism is still a personification but an alien one. For example, almighty God loses his consort, so there’s no myth of the universe’s creation by a sexual process to reassure us about the cosmic centrality of life’s stature.

As social mammals, we’re at home in a family and by extension a community, so the thought of an absolute creator ruling over everything alone, a sole alpha and omega is mindboggling. Even a king or a dictator needs his sycophants to carry out his commands or to keep him from descending into loneliness and insanity. And indeed, God has his angelic minions as in polytheism, as well as the creatures that dwell in his material creation. Yet the monotheist’s emphasis is on a single God’s absolute supremacy, which is an alienating view of what’s supposedly most real.

Again, this isn’t as alienating as pure atheism, but compared to the socialized gods of polytheism, the monotheist’s God is an inhuman figure, especially when you look past the incoherent attributes this deity inherits from the pantheon he absorbs as he’s historically confected.

What isn’t perhaps as familiar as it should be is another likely influence on this aspect of monotheism. This is the geographic or climatological one. It’s no coincidence that monotheism arose in desert regions or in areas encroached by deserts and thus by some of the harshest land environments. Desert climate likely provided an extended metaphor that countered the humanizing instinct, the urge to reduce the wilderness to familiar, comforting categories. If polytheism is a naïve mental projection, monotheism is the beginning of an alienating one that was brought out by the desert’s inhospitality.

The Desert’s Tyrannical Overlord

Deserts are defined by the rarity of water within them. Life is possible in a desert, but just barely. Plants and animals such as cacti and camels require highly specialized adaptations to survive with so little water, which make them vulnerable to foreign predators that are introduced or to changes in the environment. Moreover, the deserts in the Middle East present these threats to human life: “dangerous insects and snakes, low rainfall, intense sunlight and heat, wide and fast temperature range, sparse vegetation, high mineral content, sandstorms, mirages, need for water.”

Suppose, then, you’re thinking about the Creator’s character, but the image you have of the created world is limited to your familiarity with deserts or else deserts become central to your impression of what the world is like. That familiarity would begin to adjust the religious expectations that are based on your social instincts. You’d no longer think of God’s abode as a palace or as a paradise, or perhaps you’d assume that if God does live in a paradise, this would be an oasis which God managed to establish within a more universal desert, an island in a sea of chaos.

Indeed, you’d no longer think of God as just a superhuman. God would be a harsh, creative force, showing some signs of mercy (the rarity of life and of water in the desert), but leaning towards tyranny and a terrifying, unknowable purpose. The question the early monotheists had to grapple with wasn’t, “What created the whole world?” given our more encompassing, scientific understanding of the universe. Instead, they must have been preoccupied with the mystery of who created the hostile desert. Who would have deliberately done so? What kind of creator is reflected in that handiwork that seems only just tolerant of the emergence of organic life?

Here, the metaphor of the desert could have blended with that of the monstrous human ruler. In the ancient world, kings and emperors tended to be corrupted by their concentrated power or they had to be brutal and ruthless in the first place to have commanded the respect and loyalty of their soldiers. Kings would initially have risen through the ranks like a mafia boss in an organized criminal enterprise, by killing his rivals and proving to be the most amoral manager under such harsh circumstances as the lack of legal or moral standards.

Thus, the psychopathy of kings would have been as inhuman and antisocial as the desert wilderness. A king could have you killed just for looking at him the wrong way, let alone for threatening his power or his lineage. Likewise, the desert is full of ways to kill the higher life forms that dare to wander the sand dunes.

The Desert Sun’s Omnipotence

The overriding power in a desert is the heat which makes water scarce; everything in a desert bows to that unifying, clarifying force. The heat is almost inescapable: nomads like the Bedouins wore special clothes to protect their eyes and used mud to make brick shelters with insulation and to circulate air. But the predominant factor would have been the unbearable heat which made work during the day dangerous or impossible.

Similarly, the God of the desert would have been as unapproachable and irresistible as the sun that lorded it over the beleaguered creatures that watched their every step in that arid climate. You’d exit your rude shelter, and the heat would bear down on you like the weight of God’s superiority and overpowering agenda. The pantheon was simplified and merged into a single divine sovereign that was as infinite, eternal, and immovable as the sun that was obviously omnipotent in the desert.

When trying to eke out a living in a desert, you’re forced to think in stark, black-and-white terms. You need to drink water on a regular basis, which means you planned your movements around the wells or your water reserves. The unbearable heat frazzles your brain, making complex thought onerous. Rather than deigning to reinvent the wheel or to indulge in the luxury of skepticism, you’d be more inclined to follow a code that had been developed long ago. You’d follow established rules to the letter out of a prudent sense of necessity.

In this respect, desert culture facilitated not just a consolidation and dehumanization of the image of the gods, but the later Arabic developments of algebra. The idea of an algorithm, of a stepwise process that guarantees a certain result might have seemed natural to people who survived in desert conditions by realizing that only death lay outside a tried-and-tested plan of action. You had to ride the camel from waterhole to waterhole, veering not at all from the caravan route. Likewise, with an algorithm you could reach your desired result, but only by hewing to the precise steps laid out by the mathematical plan.

The Hope that God would Save Us from Himself

Think of how the psalms picture God in two ways to express these desert expectations. First, there’s the raw fear of God, the candid description of God as an alien tyrant who kills indiscriminately. See, for example, this part of Psalm 8:

Yet you sweep people away in the sleep of death — they are like the new grass of the morning: In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered.

We are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your presence. All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan. Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away. If only we knew the power of your anger! Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due.

Now doesn’t that sound above all like the god of a desert? Historians say this image of Yahweh is drawn from his taking on the attributes of the storm and war gods from the Canaanite pantheon, but that doesn’t address the Jewish scriptures’ preoccupation with these harsh attributes. There were over 234 gods and goddesses of Canaan, and they represented the ways of life of all the people who lived in that time and place. Yet Jews were fixated on this characterization, which suggests the desert got the better of their humanizing impulses.

The second characterization is apparent from many psalms such as 91:

I will say of the Lord, “He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”

Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.

Here, God is portrayed as Jews’ saviour who protects them from various dangers but note the implication that God would be saving the Jews from himself. The pestilence, plagues, and terrors of the night are parts of the world God would have made which are unmistakable in the desert. Thus, to pray to God as a merciful savior would have been like hoping you wouldn’t succumb to the desert’s hazards, that you’d find water over the next dune.

That is, the desert has the dual nature reflected in these two characterizations of God. God and the desert are fearful in their alienness and lethality, but there’s hope for shelter from either: even in a desert, life finds a way to survive if not exactly to flourish.

The Desert: A More Realistic Religious Metaphor

What this suggests is that monotheists sharpened their religious metaphors to incorporate the overwhelming features of their landscape, which happened to be the desert. God couldn’t be like any old king, not even a tyrannical one. God’s character had to be reflected in his created world, and that meant God had to incorporate not just inhumanity but sublime remoteness and indifference. The one supreme God must have been beyond parochial notions of right and wrong, because the desert’s harshness demonstrates that God doesn’t need living things. If God plays favourites, his will must be as inscrutable as the luck that determines who will succumb to heat stroke or who will get bit by a venomous snake.

If God is preoccupied by what we call “morality,” this morality must be relentless and unwavering. Just as moral questions cut through self-serving excuses and political compromises, the desert heat is a clarifying force in that it compels you to dispense with trivial matters to stay alive. The desert and an almighty God cut through illusions and cleanse the land of all that’s unfit to occupy it.

According to the monotheistic myths, whoever is judged unworthy will be heaved into the fires of Hell; again, excruciating heat is the overriding metaphor for the wrath of God. In some monotheistic theologies, Hell will have a cleansing effect, purifying the soul to enable it to endure God’s presence without tormenting itself with vain misconceptions. Likewise, the desert concentrates the mind, assimilating life to its lifeless vistas.

All of which suggests that the desert’s seeming singlemindedness was a driving metaphor for monotheists. Fear of God was paramount, and God’s intentions were as mysterious and stark as the desert heat and blinding glare. If God created the land, sea, and sky, why were some regions so inhospitable? What else could have been on God’s mind besides life when he created the universe?

And if God’s not so consumed with thoughts of our welfare, why should we be so fixated on worshiping God? Wouldn’t that be like lusting after someone who’s out of our league? This doubt emerges in the books of Job and Ecclesiastes, and it leads to atheism and to secular humanism or to a more pessimistic philosophy. In the meantime, monotheists wrestle with the existential issues raised by their peculiar faith.