Jethro in rabbinic literature

Transcription

I'm Saul Olyan, and it's my pleasure to introduce our speaker tonight, Thomas C. Romer, professor at the College de France in Paris and the Universite de Lausanne. He is the Brown Judaic Studies Visiting Scholar for 2015. Professor Romer is one of the most distinguished scholars of the Hebrew Bible in the world today, and I don't overstate. A German citizen called to a professorship at the Francophone world's most prestigious institution of higher learning, Professor Romer is the author of many influential books and articles on the Hebrew Bible and the world out of which it emerged. His authored books include [GERMAN], roughly translated Israel's Fathers, Investigations of the Patriarchal Theme in Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic Tradition from 1990; [FRENCH], roughly translated Obscure God-- Sex, Cruelty, and Violence in the Old Testament, 1996, English edition 2013; The So-called Deutoronimistic History from 2007; and recently [FRENCH], The Invention of God, 2014. I believe that is being translated into English right now. He has been a professor at Montpelier, Neuchatel, [INAUDIBLE], Pretoria, and Managua, a Sackler Scholar at the University of Tel Aviv, among other honors. I understand that the University of Tel Aviv will award Professor Romer an honorary doctorate this coming spring. Professor Romer's presentation tonight is entitled, "Yhwh, a God of the Wilderness-- a Biblical and Extrabiblical Investigation." Please join me in welcoming Thomas Romer. [APPLAUSE] Thank you very much and good evening and thank you for coming despite very difficult weather conditions. So I experienced some Providence now yesterday and today. And I'm very happy to be with you and to have this little talk with you about Yahweh, god of the wilderness. In the religious landscape of humanity, Judaism figures as the most ancient so-called monotheistic religion. We have a whole debate about whether we should call it monotheistic or not. But I'll skip this discussion. Judaism proclaims there's only one god who is, at the same time, the particular god of the people of Israel and who is also the god of the whole world. And this ideal of a single, unique god was taken over and propagated throughout the world by Christianity and Islam, each of which inflects a little bit the original conception in its own way. When we read the Jewish and Christian bibles or the Koran, we have the impression that this god was always present and unique. After all, he is the creator of the heaven and the Earth, tells the first chapter of the Bible. Looking more closely through, though, we find Biblical text that does not fit well with this idea. First of all, there are an important number of texts that reflect the idea that Yahweh-- I will come back to the question of the name-- was not worshipped by Israel from the very beginning. When this god reveals himself to Moses in the Book of Exodus, Moses does not know the name of this god. And in another version of Moses's commission, God tells him that he has not yet himself revealed to Israel under his real name. This is a trace of historical fact that this god was not always the god of Israel. Why, after all, does he review himself in the wilderness between Egypt and the land of Canaan? Does this god have a special connection to the wilderness? And if so, what is this connection? In this presentation, I would like to invite you to an investigation, a little bit like in a crime novel, to determine the origin and successive transformation of the god of Israel. And you have to look on what kind of evidence you have. To be sure, the results cannot be more than hypothetical, because we have at our disposal only a handful of indirect pieces of evidence. Relying exclusively on this evidence of Biblical text can also, of course, constitute a trap, which we must be careful to avoid, because the authors of the various books of the Bible are obviously not interested in giving us a historical reality. They are rather keen to impose on their readers their vision of the history and of the god of Israel. The Bible, then, must be analyzed historically, without preconception, just like any document of the antiquity. Furthermore, the results of our analysis of Biblical text must be compared with archaeological, epigraphics, and iconographic facts. That is the only way to trace the career of a god who was originally located in the desert and eventually became the god with the unpronounceable name of the Hebrew Bible. This investigation will also break a taboo which has dominated recent Biblical studies. Since 1917, at least in Europe, the text of the Torah, of the Pentateuch, some of which had traditionally been thought to be extremely ancient and to date back to the beginning of the first millennium, have come to be assigned a much more recent time. For this reason, we have seen the advent of a perfectly understandable and healthy skepticism about the historical valuable of these texts. They have come to be seen as theological constructions rather than historical records. For this reason, many scholars would consider it illegitimate to use even those texts to trace the origin of Israel and its god. To take this tack, however, is to ignore the fact that the narratives contained in the Pentateuch are not inventions preceding simply on the minds of some intellectuals sitting around in their comfortable chairs. Biblical literature is a literature of tradition. Those who put these traditional accounts into writing receive them from others. And they were, of course, free to write them modifying older versions, sometimes in a very drastic way. In most cases, however, the process of revision operated in a manner that rested on certain archaic kernels that might perhaps have received the definite formulation only at the relative late stage, but which could still preserve traces of memory of events of the distant past. So let us start our investigation. But before doing that, I just want to present the outline-- what we are going to do. We will speak about text that speaks about this encounter in the wilderness, then of the name Israel and Yahweh-- Yahweh, god from the south and the wilderness, in Biblical and extrabiblical evidence-- how this Yahweh became the god of Israel, and then the god one and only, then the only god, and in conclusion, some remarks about the wilderness scene and the three monotheistic religions. So that's the menu for tonight. In the book attributed to the prophet Hosiah, we find the following divine speech. "Like grapes in the wilderness, I found Israel. Like the first fruit on a fig tree in its first season, I saw your fathers." According to this oracle, the relation between Yahweh and Israel's started in the wilderness. And a similar statement occurs in the second chapter of the Book of Jeremiah. Here, Israel is often in prophetic text compared to Yahweh's wife-- more precisely, to Yahweh's bride, who followed his husband in his domain. Also, this domain is described as an uncultivated land. The oracle insists on the idea that the time in the desert was a time of a harmonious relation between Yahweh and Israel. The problem arose in the land, when Israel was seduced by other gods. Or, as a biblical scholar Robert Carroll put it, the honeymoon was wonderful, but the marriage a complete failure. And a similar idea occurs again in the Book of Hosiah. Here, Yahweh announces that he will restore this relation with his wife, Israel, and this restoration will take place in the wilderness. Since the wilderness is a theater of the first encounter between Yahweh and Israel, a new start of the relation has to happen again in this wilderness. And in the Book of Exodus, Moses's first encounter with the god, who will commission him to liberate the Hebrews from the Egyptian covey, takes place at a divine mountain, which is located in the wilderness in proximity of the land of Midian. We'll come back to this strange land. So because of all these evidences, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, many scholars have emphasized the role of the wilderness for the religious experience of the Israelites. I don't know if you recognize him. Here, you have Ernest [INAUDIBLE]. He was teaching the College de France. So in his history of the people of Israel, he boldly asserted that the desert is monotheistic, thinking that the origins of the Biblical monotheism are to be found in the wilderness. A similar idea was then taken by the German scholar Karl [INAUDIBLE], and later in North America by J. W. Blight in a GBL article, "The Nomadic Idea and Ideal," arguing that the wilderness was the birthplace of the Yahwistic religion and that Christianity should return to the desert ideal. This was a very-- I don't know what this means exactly, but anyhow. So this very romantic view on the wilderness was rightly criticized by later scholars, whose interests shifted towards a more literary analysis of the wilderness narratives in the Pentateuch. They argued that the wilderness traditions do not belong to the oldest traditions of the Hebrew Bible. In the oldest tradition, the exodus out of Egypt was followed directly by the entrance into the land without any sojourning in the wilderness, as for instance, can be seen in liturgical summaries, as you have it here in Deuteronomy 26, where Yahweh liberates the Israelites from the Egyptian oppression and brings them then immediately to the land of Canaan. Nevertheless, the importance of the wilderness in the Biblical text is intriguing. And it is difficult to explain them all together as just a literary invention. It is also clear that the relation between Yahweh and Israel is not an original one. And this can be show by the quite simple observation-- and this has to do with the name of Israel. If you take the name of Israel, it contains the theophoric element "El," which is the proper of a god. One finds, for instance, [INAUDIBLE] as the head of the pantheon, the Canaan [INAUDIBLE], if you want. The name Israel is so composed of a verb and the name "El," like Yishmael, [INAUDIBLE] here. For the etymology of Israel, we have two different options. I think I can skip this a little bit. Isa-- [INAUDIBLE]. And this is based on the story about Jacob's fight with an unknown person in Genesis 32, or more probably, with the Hebrew meaning "to rule," "to govern," so may El govern, which corresponds, in fact, to El's rule in the Canaanite pantheon. Outside the Bible, the first clear mention of the name of Israel occurs in the Stele of Pharaoh Merneptah, which can be dated roughly around 1210 BCE. And these granite steles tells about the victory of the king of Egypt in a campaign in the Levant. And here, we have Israel. Israel is destroyed, and his seed is not anymore. First of all, the name Israel, which we have here in Egyptian transliteration, is given a determinative, consisting of a man and a woman, and then three vertical strokes that indicate that it's a plural. This indicates that Israel is the name of a group, rather than of a region or of a locality. And these groups seem to be located in the mountains of Ephraim, exactly there where Saul later will found his kingdom. Israel, at any rate, seems to have been a group that was known by name to the Egyptians and was considered by them to be an enemy sufficiently important for being mentioned on a victory stele. The mention of the name Israel here, however, does not allude in any way to the exodus or any kind of having left Egypt. It's a group that was always in this land. And as we have seen, the name Israel indicates that its members had worshipped the deity El. And this is a very logical thing. If Israel would have worshipped all the time Yahweh, Israel would not have been called Israel, but [INAUDIBLE], like [INAUDIBLE], which is the name for Jeremiah, as it were. So this raises a question of how Israel met Yahweh and where this encounter took place. Or to put the question differently, where does Yahweh come from? And this brings us to our next point-- Yahweh, god from the south and the wilderness-- and first, some Biblical evidence. In the so-called victory song of Deborah in chapter 5 from the Book of Judges-- this is often supposed to be one of the most ancient texts of the Hebrew Bible-- we have here a victory celebration of Yahwistic tribes against the Canaanites. And in this song, we can read, "Yahweh, when you went from Seir, when you marched from the region of Edom, the mountains quaked before Yahweh. He is Sinai, the god of Israel." According to this text, Yahweh's origin is to be found in the Seir, which is paralleled to Edom. In Psalm 68, which apparently depends on Judges 5, has the same idea, replacing the names by the word for wilderness. Both texts insist or share a quite strange expression which, literally translated, means "Yahweh, he is Sinai." [HEBREW]. Sinai would then be another name for Yahweh. Is it conceivable that Yahweh originally was a place name, the name of a mountain, and by extension, then, the name of the god who lives there? One may even speculate whether the Hebrew expression [HEBREW] was another name for Yahweh, similar to the name of a pre-Islamic deity Du-shara-- "He is Mount Shara," or "He is from Mount Shara," a mount next to Petra. Taking this parallel seriously, then the expression [INAUDIBLE], "he of Sinai," would be a fitted use for Yahweh. In any case, for Judges 5 and Psalm 68, the Sinai cannot be located in the Sinai peninsula, where we have it now. And this, as you all know, is a late Christian idea of the Mount Sinai from the fourth or fifth century. So the Sinai must be something over what is called here on this picture mount [INAUDIBLE]. The hymn in Judges 5 seems to imagine that the Sinai is located somewhere in Edom. And the same idea also exists in a poetic text of the book of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 33. "Yahweh came from Sinai and down from [INAUDIBLE]." And finally, you can also mention a passage from the prophetic Book of Habakkuk. In this prophetic vision, Yahweh comes from Teman, which seems to be close to Midian. The word Teman is attested in the Bible quite often, either as the name of a clan in the genealogy of Edom, or as a territory which may be next to Edom or even identified with Edom. Outside the Bible, we should mention briefly the inscription from [INAUDIBLE], which we have here, which is in Sinai peninsula which was taken by Israel when they occupied this territory. And in the numerous inscriptions that they've found there, we have several interesting inscriptions that speak of Yahweh of Samaria, but also, still in the eighth century of a Yahweh of Teman several times. The Hebrew word Teman simply means south in general, and then probably also south as a designation of a particular geographic area somewhere in the vicinity of Edom and Midian. The land of Midian also plays a major role in the Biblical exodus story as a place of divine revelation. According to the Biblical story, Moses, having murdered an Egyptian overseer, escapes the anger of the Egyptian king by flying to the land of Midian, where he becomes the son-in-law of a priest-- Jethro, or sometimes [INAUDIBLE]. Apparently, Midian is close to Edom, as is also showed by this text from the Book of Kings, where Midian is just south of Edom. When working as a shepherd for Jethro in Midian, Moses leads the flock to the far side of the wilderness and comes to a divine mountain where an unknown deity reveals itself to him in a burning bush. And Moses asks his name. We all know this story. This is the only passage in the whole Hebrew Bible that contains a speculation about the significance of the divine name Yahweh. One might wish to follow the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, who understands God's answer to Moses-- "I am who I am" or "I shall be who I shall be"-- as a refusal of revelation. The idea would be I am who I am. That's none of your business. This is, of course, quite tempting, but in the following verses, the explanation is explicitly put into relation to the name Yahweh. The expression [HEBREW], first of all, echoes the promise of verse 12, where Yahweh says, "I will be with you--" [HEBREW]. And so Yahweh is the god who will be with Moses. In addition, "ehyeh" also refers probably to the pronunciation of the name Yahweh, since the verbal form sounds very similar to this word. In any case, this revelation of the divine name, which is presented as unknown to Moses, is closely related to his sojourn in Midian. And such a Midian connection of Moses can hardly be an invention, especially since later texts have a very, very critical view on the Midianites. The motif of Yahweh residing on a mountain in the wilderness also appears in other places of the exodus narrative. You know all the exodus narrative. According to the main narrative, Moses and Aaron also ascend to bring the Hebrews out of Egypt and to lead them into the promised land. But in some passages, however, one gets a very strange impression. One gets the impression that the negotiation with pharaoh aimed only to get some days off in order to worship the desert god Yahweh. For instance, in chapter 5, "let us take a three day journey into the wilderness to offer sacrifices to Yahweh, our god, or he might strike us with plague or with the sword." This passage and others presuppose that the god of the Hebrew is residing in the wilderness a three day journey away from the Egyptian delta, which may fit quite well to Midianite [INAUDIBLE] location. First, Yahweh is presented as a not very sympathetic god. He is a dangerous god controlling plague, as do desert deities. In chapter six of the exodus, after pharaoh's refusal to let the Hebrews go, Yahweh reveals again to Moses. Scholars often point out that this is the very end of the story of Exodus 3. And Yahweh, in this revelation, says to Moses that he has not revealed himself under his real name until now. "I am Yahweh, but I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai." Interestingly, here, Yahweh asserts that before his encounter with Moses, he appeared as an "El" deity. And this may be an attempt to explain why the name Israel does not contain the name Yahweh, but "El." Scholars often say that there is a difference between the two version of Yahweh's revelation. Whereas Exodus 3 is located in the desert in Midian, Exodus 6 is supposed to take place in Egypt. But is this really the case? At the end of chapter 5, after the failure of the negotiation with pharaoh, we have a very small verse that says simply, "Moses returned to Yahweh." Commentators often think that this just means that Moses prays to Yahweh. But if one takes his literally-- he returned to Yahweh-- then it means that this revelation does not happen in Egypt, but in the same place as the first encounter in Exodus 3. Finally, the divine mountain appears again after the Israelites' exodus out of Egypt. In Exodus 18, we are told that Moses and the Israelites were camping in the wilderness at the mountain of God, where he then received a visit of his Midianite father-in-law and priest. This story apparently preserves some memory of a Midianite contribution to the cult of Yahweh, which was impossible simply to endure. The reader must assume here that the mountain of god is located in the Midianite territory and that Jethro was there to greet Moses when he arrived. And this encounter ends with a sacrifice for Yahweh. And this is very interesting. Before even the mobile sanctuary at the end of Exodus is constructed, before the sacrifice rules are given in the Leviticus, they do already a sacrifice here. Also, the passage describing the sacrifice is a little bit complicated. Here seems no possible alternative to taking the Hebrew text to mean that it was Jethro, the Midianite priest who took the initiative in this sacrifice. So the next step would then be to assume that the priest of Midian was a priest of Yahweh. In any case, the story confirms the importance of a Midianite background for Yahweh's origins. Summing up so far, the Hebrew Bible contains several indications for the origin location of Yahweh on a mountain in the wilderness which is to be located in Midian or Edom, and there is possibly no clear frontier between these two regions. Let us have a look on the extrabiblical evidence. This location may be confirmed by Egyptians' inscriptions from the last century of the second millennium BCE that mention nomadic groups called Shasu, a word that may come from an Egyptian verb meaning "to wander" or "to go, pass by." In an inscription of Amenophis III, there is a list containing various mentions of these nomads, with the specification of their territory. Amongst the Shasu from Seir, Seir Edom, there is a group that is called Shashu Yahwah. In this text, [? Yahwah ?] seems to be a geographic term referring maybe to a mountain, and perhaps also a divine name. The explanation of this duality may be that the god of a certain place could come to be identified with that place and thus take the same name as that place. The link between the Shasu and Edom is attested in, first, an Egyptian inscription. I have here one. You can have a look. And you can even see what the Shashu looked like. Here, you have them in-- this is from the Temple of Amun at Karnak, which represents the Philistine campaigns of Seti. And you can recognize the Shasu by their goatees and their hair held back by a hairband. It's quite fashionable, again, these hairbands. So the archaeological, epigraphic, and iconographic evidence all place some Shasu in the territory of Edom and Midian at the time of the transition from the Late Bronze to the Iron Age. And amongst the Shasu, there might have been a group whose tutelary god was called Yhw. And this evidence, of course, fits quite well with the text we just saw representing Yahweh as a desert god, even the south. Interestingly, you can even go a little bit further. In some seals in form of scarabs found in the south of Judea, we have variants of iconographic motifs called the master of the animals. Dating, for the most part, from the 11th and 10th centuries, they depict a person, probably a deity, who is taming in some way, controlling, animals-- here, ostriches. The ostrich clearly points to the steppe and the regions of the Shasu. And so [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE] suggest that this might be even a first representation of Yahweh. I don't know if we can go so far. But anyhow, that would indicate, again, that Yahweh was worshipped as the god of the steppe and the arid regions. And let us just mention another point, which is the relation between Israel and Edom. The Biblical text gives the impression of a privileged connection between Israel and Edom compared with the relation with their other neighbors. Deuteronomy 2 even says that it is Yahweh who has given Seir to the sons of Esau, exactly as he has given Israel his land. The Bible repeatedly condemns the national gods of the Moabites and the Ammonites, Chemosh and Milkom, but it never mentions a god of Edom. This god of Edom was Quas, of course, but this name is not attested directly before the seventh or sixth century BCE. So again, let's speculate. Was Yahweh also worshipped in Edom and Quas only stepped in when Yahweh became the national god in Israel and in Judah? Or is it possible-- and this would be another option-- that Yahweh and Quas were two names for the same deity? In any case, as we have already observed, in the eighth century BCE, Yahweh still was worshipped according to the inscription of [INAUDIBLE] as a Yahweh from Teman, which means that the southern and wilderness connection were still popular at that time. So how Yahweh became the god of Israel-- it is as plausible that a Shasu group brought the veneration of Yahweh as a god who defeats the Egyptians to Israel. As Nadav Na'aman has observed, "the biblical the description of Egypt as a house of bondage reflects very well the Egyptian reality of Egypt"-- sorry. I'll start again. "The biblical description of Egypt as a house of bondage reflects very well the Egyptian reality of the new kingdom." It is therefore plausible speculation that a group that worshipped an Edomite or southern Yahweh introduced this Yahweh to Israel. And we have an interesting text again in Deuteronomy 33 2 through 5. "Yahwah came from Sinai. He has risen out of the south of Seir. He became king in [INAUDIBLE] in Israel, and the chiefs of the people assembled together with the tribes of Israel." So this last verse seems to indicate a kind of union between the chiefs of a people Yahweh, maybe a Shasu group. And the tribes grouped together under the name Israel. The chiefs of the people of Yahweh meet here with the tribes of Israel, and Yahweh thus becomes the god of Israel. Of course, this encounter preceded the time of the monarchy, when Yahweh then was introduced into the Temple of Jerusalem, but also in norhter sanctuaries such as Bethel, Dan, and also Samaria. Yahweh then underwent a transformation from a desert god into a tutelary or national god. During the time of the monarchy, Yahweh was considered both tutelary god of Judah and Israel. In Israel, he was worshipped similarly to the Ugaritic Baal and represented by a bovine statue, as we can see, for instance, in the Book of Hosiah, which criticizes this is kind of Yahweh worship. Psalm 28, which probably also comes from the north, clearly describes Yahweh as a storm god, but also alludes to the wilderness. The voice of Yahweh is over the water, but also the makes the wilderness tremble. In Judah, and especially in Jerusalem, Yahweh was worshipped more apparently as an El type, sitting on a throne, as can be seen especially in the prophetic vision reported in chapter 6 of the Book of Isaiah. It is plausible, also, that there was a statue of Yahweh in the first temple of Jerusalem, but this is a highly debated issue which would need a long development. And I don't want to do this here. In any case, during the time of the two monarchies, Yahweh was considered to be Israel's and Judah's god, as Chemosh was the god of Moab Milkom was the god of the Ammonites. This idea is expressed in the original version of a verse in Deuteronomy 32, verse 8. The original text can be reconstructed on the basis of the Greek version and a fragment from Qumran. And here, we have when Elyon, which is a title of El-- apportioned the nations when he divided humankind, he fixed the territories of the people according to the numbers of the sons of El. And Yahweh's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted share. So according to this text, Yahweh is considered to be one of the sons of El. According to Ugarit, El has 70 sons, and each son receives a people from El. So El gave Israel to Yahweh in the same way he gave Moab to Chemosh and Amon to Milkom. Also a tutelary deity, Yahweh was not the only god worshipped in Israel and Judah. He was associated with a female deity called Asherah, or "Queen of Heaven." And I refer to a very good book of [INAUDIBLE] about Yahweh and Asherah. [INAUDIBLE] the oracle Jeremiah even accuses his audience of worshipping too many gods. There is clearly polytheism at that time. So Yahweh's transformation into the one and unique god only started in the seventh century BCE. After the Assyrians destroyed Samaria in 722 BCE and integrated the territory of the former kingdom of Israel into the Assyrian Empire, the kingdom of Judah became the only Yahwistic monarchy. From this period, Judah began to lay claim to the name of Israel and thus also to the heritage of the former kingdom of the north. The events of 722 had a significant impact on the demography of Jerusalem. In a few decades, the city grew in a spectacular way. Demographic change brought with it a reorganization of the political structures of the kingdom of Judah. The traditional system of a purely agricultural economy founded on the clan was increasingly challenged by a centralized power of a state. The Judean administration underwent significant development in the eighth century and was progressively professionalized, reflecting the city's growing sites. King Josiah's arrival on the throne corresponds to the decline of the Assyrian Empire. And this is probably the reason that the king and his councillor undertook a political and religious reform, trying to make Yahwah the only god worshipped in Judah, and Jerusalem the only legitimate sanctuary for this worship. And this ideology provoked the closing of Yahwistic sanctuary, and according to the narrative of 2 Kings 23, even the destruction of the Temple of Yahweh in Bethel. The original version of the Book of Deuteronomy, the first edition, was written in order to promote the ideas behind this reform. It opened with a text which you all know, which is the famous Shema Yisrael, which can be translated as follows. "Hear Israel, Yahweh is our god. Yahweh is [HEBREW]"-- one. These two assertions are easily understandable in the context of the reform of Josiah. Yahweh is the only god of Israel, and he is one. That is, he is only the Yahweh of Jerusalem. But there is no more Yahweh of Samaria, Yahweh of Teman, of Bethel, or elsewhere. The claims that Yahweh is one then corresponds to the fact that there is only one place where he has a [INAUDIBLE] cult-- Jerusalem. This ideology of centralization cannot yet be labeled monotheistic, because the Book of Deuteronomy constantly warns against the cults of other gods. "Do not follow the [HEBREW]," the other gods, is a sort of refrain of sort in this book. The existence of the other gods is not denied. The focus is to prevent the audience from worshipping them. The passage from the one god to the only god only happened several decades after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BCE and the deportation of the Judean upper class to Babylon. These events may have produced a major crisis in the collective identity of the Judeans. The traditional political and ideological pillars of monarchical states in the ancient Near East had collapsed. One way of explaining the deportations and voluntary immigrations, especially to Egypt, was to say that the gods of Babylon were stronger and had defeated the national god, Yahweh. Or Yahweh had simply abandoned his people. Different groups in the Judean aristocracy tried to deal with and overcome the crisis by producing ideologies that endowed the fall of Judah with a religious or theological meaning. A group of scribes that revised the books of Deuteronomy to 2 Kings wanted to demonstrate that the fall of Israel and the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem are not due to Yahweh's weakness, but result from Yahweh's anger towards his people and their leaders, who constantly disobeyed the divine order expressed in the Book of Deuteronomy. Therefore, the anger of Yahweh was the real agent who brought about the collapse of the kingdom. But if Yahweh deduced as his instruments the king of Babylon and his army, this means that he was in control of them. And this idea prepares a way of so-called monotheistic statements, especially in the second part of the Book of Isaiah, often called Deutero-Isaiah. Some of these passages are containing a theoretical demonstration that Yahweh is the only god. And the author, for instance, mocks the sale of the statues of the gods, the only use of which is to enrich the artisans who made them. This demonstration of the uniqueness of Yahweh, whom Deutero-Isaiah often identifies, interesting, with El-- that's very important-- is here presented as a kind of a theological revelation. As we have it in this very interesting text-- you may all know this-- don't remember the former things. I will make everything new. Interestingly here, the wilderness appears again as the place of the new encounter between Yahweh and Israel. Yahweh's origins as a wilderness god are transcended and presented-- [INAUDIBLE] as the theological place that Yahweh will reveal his power and love for his people, and can be also seen in the opening of this Second Isaiah-- "a voice cries in the wilderness. Prepare the way Yahweh." The rise of Judaism in the Persian and Hellenistic periods was materialized by the addition of the Torah, the Pentateuch, and by the refusal to pronounce the name of the god of Israel. Since he's the only god, why should this god have a proper name in order to distinguish him from other gods? On the religious level, the idea of the wilderness became very important for Judaism, and then for Christianity and Islam. And this brings me to some short concluding remarks. Most of the parts of the Torah, of the Pentateuch, are located somewhere in the wilderness. And this location introduces a sort of theological revolution. In the ancient Near East, it was the kings who received from their tutelary divinities laws that they were to teach to the people living in the land they ruled. But in the Hebrew Bible, no king ever gets a law from his god. Everything, or this function, has been transferred to Moses in the Pentateuch. Judaism, then, will be a religion which has no need of royal or political legislation. It is the Pentateuch which puts itself in the place of political institution, but also in the place of the land. Thus, the wilderness setting of the Pentateuch is inventing the separation of political power and religious practice, and also the distinction between religious practice and a specific territory, allowing Judaism to function as a diaspora religion. In the last century before the Christian era, the theme of the wilderness played a major role in the community of Qumran. For instance, the image of the Teacher of Righteousness in the sectarian documents was patterned upon the image of Moses. And the Qumran community understood its life in the desert as a return to the Torah. The desert becomes here, for the people of Qumran, a place of purification and preparation for becoming the new Israel. Some of these ideas also appear in the New Testament. The oldest gospel, the Gospel of Mark, opens with a quotation from the Second Isaiah-- "the voice of one crying out in the wilderness." John the Baptist, who announces the venue of the Messiah, is living in the wilderness so that the wilderness appears again as a starting point of a new divine revelation. And a similar idea can be found in the Gospel of Luke, where the wilderness appears as a time of preparation. "The child Jesus grew and became strong in spirit. And he was in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel." Again, Jesus, according to the Gospel of Matthew, spends 40 days and 40 nights in the wilderness, echoing the 40 years of the Israelites journey in the wilderness. The wilderness is also the place where Jesus goes to pray to his god. And later, as you all know, in Christianity, the wilderness becomes a privileged place for the Amorites, who were seeking an immediate relation with their god. Finally, in Islam, the wilderness appears again as a place of the original revelation, since it is a place where the angel Gabriel reveals himself to Mohammad and begins to describe the [INAUDIBLE], the recitations in his heart. In the Qu'ran, however, one may observe a paucity of references to the wilderness. In most instances, the wilderness appears as a place of judgment or a place where God takes care of the [INAUDIBLE]. Historically, Islam is therefore not a religion of wilderness. This idea started in Islamic thinking around the ninth, 10th centuries, and was built on the figure of Ishmael, who already in the Hebrew Bible is described as dwelling in the wilderness. And this idea, then, was taken up in the Occident in a very romantic way. I gave you already some examples. This started, perhaps, with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "West-Eastern Divan" and becomes, then, commonplace in Western thinking. Nevertheless, it is striking that in the Hebrew and Christian Bible and in the Qu'ran, the wilderness remains a place of an initial encounter with the divine. And this idea may have a historical foundation in the fact that Yahweh, who becomes Adonai, the Lord, Allah, or whatever, was at the beginning of his career a god of the wilderness. Thank you very much for your attention. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Thomas. Do we have-- I should stand there. Do we have questions, comments, reactions for our speaker? You compared to Martin Buber's book on Moses. Moses, yes. And no one of his, quote, historical explanations for the use of [INAUDIBLE] was to draw a distinction between Egyptians' gods, which could be conjured by various incantations and saying, [INAUDIBLE], and therefore, you can't conjure me. And then you also alluded to Psalm 29, which, again, it's a god of the weather-- sort of like this last couple of weeks, bringing in storm after storm coming in from the sea. [INAUDIBLE] was not known as an historian of religion. Do you see any validity this his historical speculation there? Yeah. The two texts are quite different, I think. I think for the first text, Exodus 3, in a way, I think Buber was very well aware about the discussion going on on this historical critical interpretation of the Bible. And I think, in a way, what he wanted to say-- maybe he wouldn't have said it like this-- but this chapter maybe is already a reflection why the name, the tetragram, should pronounce anymore. This depends, of course, how you will date this text. If you put it on a quite late level, as some of my German colleagues would do, then I think you can quite well go with the Buber idea in saying you cannot just have me pronouncing my name. This name should not be pronounced anyhow. But of course, then, there is in the following verses an explanation-- [INAUDIBLE] is the god of the tetragram. For Psalm 29, that's very interesting, because I don't think that Buber was commenting on that. Psalm 29 has really very, very strong parallels with hymns about Baal in Ugarit. What is interesting in the Hebrew version of this psalm is that next to the waters that Yahweh is dominating, like Baal is dominating [INAUDIBLE], it's also said that he is controlling the wilderness. And this is something-- you have no parallels in the Ugaratic [INAUDIBLE]. So it's interesting that they put in this northern Canaanite Ugaritic context this idea of the wilderness. So your talk focused mostly on Exodus. And I think that in Genesis, it says it appears [INAUDIBLE]. Right. So I'm wondering why [INAUDIBLE] people would leave such an obvious repetition on the name of the Lord. And one may be, why the stakes would be written for Abraham when there's all this discussion? Yeah. You're alluding to Genesis 15, which where God is presenting himself with the same thing that he's doing in the [INAUDIBLE], but saying, I brought you out, not of Egypt, but of Ur, [INAUDIBLE]. Of course, it all depends how you put these texts together on geochronic level. I think here, in this text, it's clearly the idea that Abraham, in a way, is a foreigner of Yahweh. And this, of course, does not fit very well with Exodus 6, where Yahweh's saying, I did not reveal myself under my real name. So here, it's a little bit competition. Did he or not reveal himself under his real name to Abraham? The other interesting thing in the Book of Genesis is that there are many texts where the patriarchs are building altars or founding sanctuaries, and where Yahweh is called El Elohim Israel, for instance. So there is also this idea that the patriarchal time is a time which was not really the time of the revelation of the divine name. For instance, in Genesis 17, when Yahweh is revealing himself to Abraham, then he is saying, I am El Shaddai. And this fits with Exodus 6. Whereas in Genesis 15, he is saying, I am the Lord. So this is, of course a tension, or maybe even an attempt to say Abraham also knew already the real name of God. Thank you for your talk. I have a question. You talked about the roots and the development for Midian of [INAUDIBLE]. Yeah. Are there any other circumstances of special relationships or status given to Edomites or Midianites? Because it would seem that that would be absent. The Midiantes-- it's very complicated to grasp on a historical level. What is quite clear, at least from the Egyptian documents, that in this territory, which is called Edom or Midian, there are these Shasu groups. They are used apparently, also, by the Egyptians, sometimes, in these copper mines, which are in this region next to modern El'ad. And this would bring, in a way, some parallels also to the Biblical stories, in a way. So there is a link between this nomadic group, Shasu, or maybe also the so-called [INAUDIBLE], and Egyptian control of this territory. And also, of course, there's evidence of conflicts of these groups and the Egyptians from time to time, which also can be one of the current [INAUDIBLE] of the [INAUDIBLE]. And what is striking in the Bible is that Edom is treated quite different than Moab and Amon. Edom is really the most close to Israel. So this text in Deuteronomy 2:5 is very strange. It parallels the idea that Yahweh gives Israel its land. But he also gives Edom its land. And this is never said for Moab or for Amon. So there is some indication of this idea. And of course, then, the Yahweh of Teman, which still in the eighth century, appears several times in this text from [INAUDIBLE]. So there's a Yahweh from Samaria from the north, but there's also a Yahweh from Teman, even in a time when Yahweh was already a national tutelary deity in Israel and Judah. So if I understand right what you're suggesting, then I'm still wondering why the editors or the writers who wrote the story of Exodus-- they would bring in the story of Yahweh from the wilderness as a literary allusion to something that they know from the more recent past. So they would know around the seventh century that they had received Yahweh from the Edomites a century or two earlier. And they would just edit over this story about Moses going to the Midianites as sort of like, OK, this is similar to the experience that we had 200 years ago. It seems a bit weird. It's not clear what is the interest. I also feel that your story-- that this description really falls through even if you put aside the exodus aspect of things. It seems to me that it's a very-- at the seventh century, that would have been a distant history back then. I'm not sure that I understand you exactly. So you think this Midianite connection in the exodus would-- So I'm trying to think from the point of view of editor of the seventh century. Yeah. Why would they use the same motif of the people of Israel or Moses or the patriarch meeting God at the wilderness? Why would they use this-- Why wouldn't they censor it? That's the idea? Or-- Yeah. Why do they need it? It seems that-- Yeah. This is-- yeah. OK. Now, I think I got your point. I think that is a little bit what I tried to say in the beginning. I think we should not consider the Biblical authors or redactors as modern sources in our way that want to make up a coherent story. I think they deal with traditions, which they try, in a way, to combine with their new ideas, or with revisions. But I think there's also a kind of this idea of transmission, not only just we change the whole thing. One can change a lot, and you see it also in other ancient Near Eastern documents. But still, I think this is what [INAUDIBLE], the Egyptologist, is calling these traces of memory, which does not always well fit to the new story that you will set up. For instance, take Exodus 18. It would have been much better to leave the whole thing out. Already, the rabbis were very puzzled by that. Why does this story be told before the people arrive on Sinai? They are already in the mountain of God. And this does not, of course, fit. But I think there was some idea in order also to keep with tradition and to bring it, one way or another, with what becomes more and more the official view. But I think this is the way how the Bible is set up. It's not one author who's deciding, at the end, I'll take this story, and all what does not fit to the story, I'll just put it away. I think they put away some stuff, but also, they kept different thing-- also, what you are alluding to, to Genesis 15 and to Exodus 6, which does not fit so well. I think their idea was not to have a coherent story, but to transmit traditions-- to revise them, but also to offer to their audience different views, I would say. I think it's important to underscore just how powerful the [INAUDIBLE], the wilderness, is. [INAUDIBLE] Sinai or to the [INAUDIBLE], or over Jordan. It is extremely inspiring to be in that-- one could understand why writers who might have wandered into the wilderness, it's not that-- you could just go downhill from Jerusalem into the Jordan Valley. And sometimes, we overliteralize or make it-- the sources are not only literary, but physical. It is a very physical place to be. Yeah. Yeah, this is also part of this idea that the wilderness is giving you some ideas about encounters with the divine. It may be. It may be also. But I think also it's our way we look on the Biblical text. I think it's not just the idea of coherence. It's really also the idea of transmitting things, and even of keeping different things together. You have this also in other stuff. So the Gilgamesh epic-- we have the old version. We have the new versions. But even in the so-called standard version, you still have contradictions, because sometimes, when they tell the flood story, they forgot-- or they maybe even did not forget-- that it was not at [INAUDIBLE], but with [INAUDIBLE]. So they left it in. It's a little bit the same idea. I think we should still a little bit think of the scribes who transmitted the Torah as both. They were very free in regard to the traditions they had. But on the other hand, I think they were also willing to keep different traditions and to write them down, even if it does not fit all the time. And I think they could also have left out this Exodus thing. Why this idea we just want to go three days and then we come back? So also, the commentators were puzzled by that. Oh, maybe, it's just a strategy. But what kind of strategy is it? Because in other texts, it's very obvious. So I think the Bible is more a kind of a collection of traces. That's what I was saying in the beginning. We have to account that, even in very recent texts, you can have memories of quite old traditions. You have the same outside the Bible. If you take Manetho, which we know only by later sources, this Egyptian priest, he knows a lot about the Akhenaten story, which was, in the way, in Egyptian memory, darkened and kept away-- maybe more than a thousand years. He has still this memory and he's using it in his own way-- in order to construct even an anti-Judaic story out of it. But it's interesting-- you can see how old memories can survive, especially in learned milieus, where it transmitted by the generation of scribes, orally or also literarily. [INAUDIBLE] Wilderness can have a local meaning as well as an absolute geographic meaning. And what I'm getting at with that is that in many tribal societies, and particularly in Africa and North America, wilderness was that place that was just outside of the village. It was just outside the settlement. And it's there that the specific rituals were practiced. Yeah. And in Africa, it's quite common that the rituals that are practiced in that wilderness, which is just next door, was circumcision. And I'm wondering-- and it was the place that was associated with god, the gods, in particular, [INAUDIBLE]. Yeah. And I was just curious as to whether there was any association between circumcision and wilderness. In the Bible, there is no-- specifically to this question, in the Bible, there's no hint that-- no. There's maybe even a different way in the Bible, because you have this very interesting text in the Book of Joshua, in Joshua 5. When the Israelites arrived in the land, then Joshua is circumcising the second generation, saying that the first generation in the wilderness did not circumcise their sons. So this is a little bit the other way around. It's sort of the opposite. You could say maybe it's a critique of other practices. This I don't know. But the only text who's a little bit speaking about the location of circumcision is this text in the Book of Joshua. But you're totally right that if you have a word in Hebrew like [HEBREW], wilderness, it can be very, very close. The text I was speaking about-- the difference is that they always have some location with Seir, Edom, or Midian, which brings them a little bit far away [INAUDIBLE]. I have just two questions of clarification. I enjoyed it very much. So the first one-- that if I heard you right, you had the Yahweh from the desert is surly and that wilderness gets incorporated in. But then, the wilderness serves this other function during the Babylonian exile. Right. And is that just a happy coincidence in a way? I guess there's a missing piece of that in your story. [INAUDIBLE] I missed that. I don't know if that's a missing piece. I think it's, in a way, showing that old tradition can get to a very new life in different contexts. I think it's not just that we have these old texts and then we jump directly to a text like Isaiah 43. You have, of course, already the taking over of these wilderness traditions in other texts-- for instance, in the Exodus story, which is certainly older, also, in these prophetic texts, which are from the eighth or seventh century. So it's not just a missing point. I think for the prophets, they are not interested to know where Yahweh's coming from. They present the wilderness, of course, also in a more religious or theological way. Maybe also in opposition to what's going on in the time of [INAUDIBLE] the second, when the differences in the cities became more and more important and to say that the wilderness is idealized, in a way. But still, I think you can see that there may be-- and some of my German colleagues would say, oh, no, that's impossible to say. But I think we have these old texts. And I don't understand-- one of my colleagues in Germany says, all this text-- I was quoting Judges 5, Deuteronomy 33-- they were all invented in the Persian period, when Jerusalem was destroyed in order to show that Yahweh doesn't need to be in Jerusalem, that he can be also in the wilderness. But if this was just an invention at the time, then why the texts are a little bit odd? Why they're not all in the same direction? Because there are differences between these texts. So I think these texts can reflect older traditions and we can use them historically. But this does not mean that this is the only way that wilderness was taken over in the Biblical or what will become the Biblical books. I think already in the prophets, wilderness is a religious or a theological place of the encounter. But this can be based on older memories. And what Second Isaiah is then doing is taking over this prophetic and maybe also the Exodus discourse in order to make the wilderness something which will prelude a new creation [INAUDIBLE]. And the other question was simply that the evidence from the scriptures-- [INAUDIBLE]-- you mentioned that it's Yahweh of Samaria in the eighth century? Yeah, eighth century. Right. [INAUDIBLE] if you just talked for a minute about Yahweh getting to Samaria. What exactly? And how would that fit into this? I think-- yeah. This is a question when Yahweh becomes a tutelary god. And I would say this is linked, at least, to the Amorites, or maybe even earlier. I think the thing-- of course, a lot of people would say there was never a united kingdom. This is all mythical invention. My colleague Israel Finkelstein would say that. But still, you have to explain why-- and this, I think, is the only case-- why Yahweh was worshipped as a tutelary deity in Israel and in Judah, and it was not just one deity among others. Even the Biblical authors who write from Judean perspective, they have to acknowledge that Yahweh is also the god of the north. So I think it's related to the beginning of Israelite monarchy, which apparently-- desert tribes that then became the north in one day and the south on the other, even if there was no united kingdom under [INAUDIBLE]. But there is still this tribal identity or whatever you want to call it, which will be continued in the north and in the south. And there is also much evidence that the exodus story probably was first transmitted in the north before it came to the south. So I think if you look at what we have in the Merneptah Stele, Israel in the mountain of Ephraim, this is a little bit the kernel where the monarchy starts, if we take the Bible and we take the locations that are mentioned in relation to the Saul narrative. So I would say Yahweh became a national god with the beginning of the monarchy, I would say. 10th century? Yeah, 10th or ninth century. Yahweh was taken out of the desert. He was taken out. At the one place-- and this is, of course, very difficult. So this is, I think, what a text like Deuteronomy 33 is alluding to. So I can guess or speculate that at once, there was an encounter between these Shassu groups, because the Shassu, they weren't around quite long. We have Shassu also in the north. So they apparently came also to the north. So there was an encounter with a nomadic group and this group called Israel in the mountains of Israel. And so they were apparently impressed by this god that the Shassu had to offer. But of course, this is more fiction than-- If I understand you correctly, you mentioned in the Ugaritic text El as this major [INAUDIBLE] deity and Yahweh being more of a local god. Yeah. Is there any sort of reading of the Bible-- because you mentioned El as the name, as mentioned in the Bible, pre-Moses, pre the story of exodus, as Judaism evolving as this more monotheistic, El-worshipping religion, and then developing a greater pantheon with the worship of Yahweh. Isn't that sort of almost like monotheism in reverse? We don't know what exactly was the El religion, I think. Israel is the name with El. That does not mean that they just worshipped El. It's like in Ugarit. El is the chief of the pantheon, but he's not the most popular got. Baal is much more popular. And there are other gods around. So what is interesting in regard to Yahweh and El. If you take this text from Deuteronomy 32, and if you accept that the Greek and the Qumran fragment that present the older version, then you have still this idea that at one point, even when Yahweh was already kind of a tutelary deity, he was still considered to be part of the son of El , and that only successively he took over the function of El. Some people would even argue-- Otto [INAUDIBLE] would even argue-- when Yahweh was introduced in the temple of Jerusalem, he was not the only god who was worshipped there. But this is a more complicated issue. But I would say that there is at least attempts to show that Yahweh equals El. And why do they have to show it so strongly? Probably because this was something that was not accepted or acceptable so clearly. So they had to try to show it. It's also interesting if you have the story about Ishmael in Genesis 16. So the name is given Ishmael, and the explanation is because Yahweh has listened to the voice of [INAUDIBLE]. So it's a kind of almost an equation. [? Yishmael ?] equals [? Yishbah ?] Yahweh [INAUDIBLE]. So I think this is something that went on during one or two centuries ago. So there's another whole hypothesis that you didn't mention, that's very popular here still, about the origin of Yahweh-- that Yahweh and El are not separate gods, but Yahweh is a manifestation of El, a local manifestation. Thomas mentioned earlier that Yahweh the one of Teman, Yahweh the one of Samaria. We also have Yahweh [INAUDIBLE] in the Bible-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] So we know about from all over ancient West Asia that you have these local, distinct manifestations of all kinds of gods and goddesses. So this is the argument of Frank Moore Cross, who is no longer with us, but was a very influential American scholar of the previous generation-- that Yahweh is a manifestation of El, and that he bears all of El's epithets. When the text says El Elohim [INAUDIBLE] that that's Yahweh, but known by his more well known name, El, so that this is this alternative hypothesis-- not popular in Europe, but still [INAUDIBLE] here. Oh, it was also received in Europe. It has to do much also with the etymology of the name of Yahweh. Well, that's the next part of my comment. How do we explain the name Yahweh? Yeah. And cross argued that if you go back again to Exodus 3 where you have the author punning and playing on [INAUDIBLE], the verb "to be," "I will be"-- so Yahweh has something to do with the verb "to be." If you look at the vowels and consonants, yeah, it looks like it does have to do with the verb "to be." But what form of the verb "to be?" The causative. Yeah. And this is never attested in the Hebrew, the causative. And this is also a problem. And some people would say, this is already very-- there were also some other people who were going in this direction. [INAUDIBLE] was also going and saying, Yahweh is just the one who is or who is creating life or whatever. Yeah, the causative of the verb "to be" would mean he causes to be, which in plain English would mean he creates. The alternative explanation is coming from scholars as [INAUDIBLE]. And they would say this is already a theological attempt to explain a word or name which maybe was not so evident anyhow. And they would say maybe it's related to a root, which is to-- how do you say in English-- "to blow," "to bring the wind." And that would be something-- Yahweh, the one who brings the wind, who is blowing, so like more storm gods, like the Baal in Ugarit. It's a very tricky question, this etymology. And also my colleague, Jean-Marie Durand, he also always says, do the people really care so much about etymology? Or does etymology give us so much [INAUDIBLE] really essence of somebody or a name? I think in Exodus 3 it's quite clear. It's playing on the root [HEBREW]. But can you be sure that this is really the origin of the meaning of Yahweh? And we have all these-- Of course we can't, because we can't be sure about [INAUDIBLE]. We can't. And I think the other problem of this cross theory is a little bit-- he does not speak so much-- of course, it depends always which theory you have and which text that you take. He does not use very much the text I was using now. He is more using the text in Genesis, where Yahweh is often identified with El. So he said, this is because this is a historic reality. I would say this is an attempt to identify two different gods. And then, of course, it depends how we interpret the age of the text, but also how you organize your argument. I think an interesting argument is also to see that in all place names that we have in, let's say, Judah and Israel, there is no place names with Yahweh. There are names with El. There are names with Baal, with Anat. And this is an indication also probably for me that Yahweh was not an autochtonous god in this region-- that he was, in a way, imported, because otherwise, why do we have [INAUDIBLE] and not [INAUDIBLE] and something like that? So we have all these names and yeah, Yahweh never shows up in these names. Yeah, the association wtih Edom, Seir, Paran, is very, very strong, as you pointed out. Yeah, and I think you cannot just claim that-- Everyone would agree on that. Yeah, not everyone. So a lot of people would say it's just set up in the exile or after the exile. Oh, OK. I have to deal with that in Europe. [INAUDIBLE] Oh, you know, I gave a similar paper, and I was very much aggressed by some scholars. I don't give you the names, because they said, how can you say? This is a very late text. And I say, OK, even if they are late texts, we still have to explain the texts. We cannot just say it's late. So I don't take it into account. And they can [INAUDIBLE] inscriptions. And this also is important. Absolutely, you have to explain this also. [INTERPOSING VOICES] Yeah. And this is also intriguing. We have a Yahweh which is worshipped in Judah and in Israel, but also still in Teman. In Teman. And this is very interesting, yeah. It's very interesting. And another interesting point-- and this is the last thing I'm going to say-- you were talking about early traditions, and I was wondering whether you can make a case for some of these associations being earlier by pointing out that Edom becomes really, really negatively construed after 587 and the destruction of Jerusalem. They're accused of helping the Babylonians destroy Jerusalem. And from that point on, Edom has, in many, many texts, very negative associations. And [INAUDIBLE]. Right. Exactly. But in the text you're talking about, that's where Yahweh comes from. Yeah. And also still, this text in Deuteronomy-- this idea that they have the same right given by Yahweh to be in their land as the Judeans have the right to be in their land. I think this is-- and the same happens with Midian. If you look to the more recent texts about the Midianites, in Numbers 25, for instance, they are seducing Israel to worship other gods, to adultery, to all kinds of sexual organs, whatever you can imagine. So how can you explain this if you just say, OK, it's invented in the same time? No, I think we have some older traditions around here. And you can see, yeah, Edom and Midian become very negative, also. In prophetic oracles already from the sixth century, you have this very negative view on Edom. So perhaps all of this positive stuff is actually early. It may be. But again, what is interesting is that they keep it, even at the time when Edom maybe was not so much appreciated by the final editor of the Pentateuch. This means [INAUDIBLE] some respect in regard to the tradition that they transmit. They review. They change. But also, in a way, they think it's important-- and this is maybe something a little bit strange for us, but this is the way they think [? chronologically ?], I think. They have this idea that you can transmit traditions that do not fit, that are odd sometimes. And I think that's why that keeps us busy, happily. But it is the same thing in the New Testament, also-- why you have the four Gospels, not just one Gospel. [INAUDIBLE]. Do we have other comments, questions? It's sort of slightly peripheral. The question is in later rabbinic traditions, I guess the tetragram [INAUDIBLE] would be taken [INAUDIBLE] with mercy, and Elohim more with that anger or something like that. So I guess my question is-- [INAUDIBLE]-- but how do we go from a storm god, which denotes the anger originally to more of the-- how does the name swap its association? I think the first thing is that this decision not to pronounce anymore the tetragram, because Elohim, you can use it for the god of Israel. You can use it for all kinds of gods. But it is true that in the thinking already in the Pentateuch, Elohim becomes more general. It's not by accident that in the first chapter, you have Elohim who is creating Heaven and Earth. And also this can be a plural that can integrate all kinds of deities, divinities. It becomes a more open concept, I would say, at least in the Torah. And then this idea which, of course, is a little bit strange-- if this is the only god, why does he have a name? A name you need in order to distinguish somebody from somebody else. Though, I think this is one of the reasons that at one time they decide not to pronounce the name anymore and to find all kinds of substitutions. But then, of course, there's speculation why this name cannot be pronounced anymore. And then there's, of course, all the speculation about the meaning of the name. And I think it starts, maybe-- but this is, of course, also a matter of debate, how you understand the text-- it starts maybe already in this text of Exodus 3, where god is really presented [INAUDIBLE]. You cannot [INAUDIBLE]. So I think what you were alluding to-- that the tetragram is more related to mercy and Elohim is more related to the more judging function of the gods, et cetera-- is probably also this idea that Elohim is it's not just something specific for Israel. It is used for all the nations, whereas the tetragram, even if you don't pronounce it, this is the god who is, of course, the same as Elohim. But [INAUDIBLE] also is a god who has a special relation to Israel. And this is another problem, of course-- why this god, who's the only god, the god of all the nations, why does this god have a special relation to Israel. And this starts in, of course, with all the theories we have in Deuteronomy already about election and all this stuff. OK. Very good. Well, I think we've worked you hard enough. Thank you so much. [INAUDIBLE] Thank you for coming. [APPLAUSE]