Yahweh, the God of Alienation

Monotheism, God’s hiddenness, and Jewish resentment

One argument that’s common in atheistic circles is that the rise of science pushed God out of nature. Whereas animists used to identify gods or spirits with natural processes, and polytheists took their gods to reside in statues, temples, and city layouts that reflected the starry skies, scientific study of nature showed that the apparent universe is effectively godless.

Thus, religious folks had no choice but to define God as “transcendent” or “supernatural.” There was nowhere else to put deities but in some realm that’s forever beyond empirical disconfirmation.

Yet while it’s true that science pressured theistic religion in that respect, this argument overlooks Judaism’s rather existential impact on this conception of a transcendent God.

The Jewish prophets progressively carved out a monotheistic conception of an almighty creator God that was hidden throughout the universe except in that God’s displays of favouritism towards his chosen people and thus in the preservation of the Jewish lineage.

Amos broadened the Jewish conception to include a moralistic sense which distanced God from actual inequalities between the rich and the poor and repudiated the cynical suspicion that might makes right. God was more like a moral ideal that could hold regardless of the actual state of the world because the ideal is about what should happen even if it rarely does.

Hosea explained how even the Jews’ God could be apart from his special people, when Jews failed to fulfill God’s expectations. In that case, the relationship between the two would be like that between Hosea and his unfaithful wife Gomer.

Yet Jonah showed how even when you’re not living in harmony with God, you can repent and find God again, as Jonah did in the belly of a big fish.

Jeremiah shows how prophets who spoke for God could be persecuted, which alienated them from profane society.

Ezekiel described God in paradoxical, alien terms, which discredited intuitive theological conceptions.

Isaiah and Second Isaiah solidified that evolving Jewish monotheistic tradition in which God came to be present only in the miraculous defense of the Jews against their many conquerors and in the promise of a future state of messianic perfection and ritual purity.

Jewish monotheism developed in the Axial Age in which the polytheism that had long been politicized became moralized with uncompromising ideals and mystical monism. Polytheism typically provided an implicit religious justification of the societal norm in which a rich minority ruled over a poor majority, as some elite gods ruled over and toyed with humanity.

Yahweh, however, was a righteous exception to that polytheistic rule. It wasn’t just that God was now envisioned as a singular entity. The Jewish point of monotheism is that morality trumps politics. God would spare the Jews because of their faithfulness to his code of purity and he would ruin empires regardless of their transitory power over his chosen people.

As Karen Armstrong says in A History of God, Judaism’s emerging prophetic theology

succeeded not because it could be demonstrated rationally but because it was effective in preventing despair and inspiring hope. Dislocated and displaced as they were [under the Assyrians and the Babylonians in the crucial prophetic period], the Jews no longer found the discontinuity of the cult of Yahweh alien and disturbing. It spoke profoundly to their condition.

In other words, as she says, “At a time when the cult of Yahweh might reasonably have been expected to perish, he became the means that enabled his people to find hope in impossible circumstances.”

Of course, in the following centuries, Jews would turn repeatedly to their hidden, righteous savior God, when they were ruled by the Greeks and Romans, persecuted by Christians, and nearly extinguished by the Nazis.

But what this means is that Yahweh is effectively the god of alienation. Yahweh’s hiddenness reflects the founding Jews’ ostracization from the goyim and from the foreign conquering empires and secular regimes. Just as Jews segregate themselves from “impure” society, Yahweh is distanced from all of nature, the latter being impure in a platonic sense.

At least in the Western tradition, then, monotheism is based on Jewish alienation (or in Nietzschean terms, on the literary creativity of “resentment”). The one, true God was a psychological and social mechanism that mitigated Jewish dread that the world was apparently absurd and grossly unfair since wicked empires routinely stomped on moral and visionary people like the Jews.

Originally, at least, God was pushed out of nature to symbolize how Jews were pushed out of larger societies. God became ethereal just as Jews became outcasts or lowly slaves to the larger realities of foreign empires. God was alienated from his creation in just the way that Jews were alienated from profane, impure societies because Yahweh came to resemble the Jews as they saw themselves.

The key to Jewish theology is that God deliberately hides from nature not just to spare us from his inhuman appearance, which would supposedly kill us on the spot as the Jewish scriptures maintain (that being a convenient excuse for God’s apparent nonexistence). Instead, the point is that nature disgusts God just as Jews resented their conquerors who acted all-too naturally.