The Hellenistic Origin of the Torah — A Review of Russell Gmirkin’s Books, Part 4 of 4: Cosmic Monotheism and the Timaeus

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Yahweh the Son of El

The most ancient version of the Hebrew Bible that we have, the Masoretic Text, was edited between the 7th and the 10th centuries ad. The Greek version known as the Septuagint, made around 170 bc, shows internal evidence of having been translated from a different Hebrew original that is lost. Some parts of that Hebrew original are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in the middle of the twentieth century. For example, one fragment from the manuscript referenced as 4QDeuteronomy, dated to the 1st century bc, gives this reading for Deuteronomy 32:8–9:

When the Most High (Elyôn) gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated humanity, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God (bene Elohim). For Yahweh’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.

The Masoretic text has “sons of Israel” (bene Yisrael) instead of “sons of God”, which makes little sense. The Septuagint has “angels of God” (aggelon theou), which is a standard Greek translation for “sons of God.” Bible translators today agree that “sons of God” is the original reading, although they generally place it in a footnote.

The original Deuteronomy 32:8–9 casts Yahweh in the role of one of the sons of El, here called Elyôn. Each of El’s sons receives one nation, and Yahweh receives Israel. According to Old Testament scholar Mark S. Smith, author of The Early History of God (first published in 1990), this reflects an ancient conception that was not specific to Israel, but echoes an ancient theology of the Near East. Some of the Ugaritic texts written in northern Syria in the 13th and 12th centuries bc, and discovered in 1928, call the supreme god El, and the other gods “sons of El.”

Some of the oldest Psalms preserve that ancient conception of a cosmic god El assisted by his offspring for terrestrial matters, and of Yahweh as one of those “sons of El.” In Psalm 82 the supreme God presides over a great assembly: “in the midst of the gods (elohim) he holds judgement, telling them ‘you are gods [elohim], sons of the Most High [elyown], all of you.’” Other psalms present Yahweh as one of the sons of God (bene elim), albeit the best of them: “Give Yahweh his due, sons of God, give Yahweh his due of glory and strength” (Psalm 29:1);  “Who in the skies can compare with Yahweh? Who among the sons of God can rival him?” (Psalm 89:6).

According to Smith, the “el” in Israel “suggests that El was the original chief god of the group named Israel.”[1] Judah, on the other hand, is linguistically connected to Yahweh. Before being imported from Judea to Israel (Samaria), Yahweh probably originated from the land of Midian in northwestern Arabia, as remembered in the book of Exodus (read here): Moses met Yahweh in a “holy ground” (3:5) while herding the goats of his father-in-law, who was a Midianite priest (2:16 and 18:1), who “offered a burnt offering” to Yahweh (18:12), and who instructed Moses on how to organize the tribes (18:19–25). It was Moses’ Midianite wife Zipporah who performed circumcision on their newborn son, to appease Yahweh’s wrath (4:24–26).

How Israel was “converted” to the cult of Yahweh is told in 2Kings 10: in 842 bc a Judean general by the name of Jehu overthrew King Omri of Israel, and slaughtered “all his leading men, his close friends, his priests; he did not leave a single one alive” (10:11). His religious “reform” consisted in luring the priests of Baal for “a great sacrifice to Baal,” and slaughtering them (10,18–28).

The process of merging Yahweh with El, thus promoting Yahweh from national god to cosmic Creator, took much longer. In the 8th century bc, Yahweh is still described as just a national god in Micah 4:5: “For all peoples go forward, each in the name of its god (elohim), while we go forward in the name of Yahweh our God for ever and ever.” In Judges 11:24, the Israelites declare to the Moabites: “Will you not keep as your possession whatever Chemosh, your god, has given you? And, just the same, we shall keep as ours whatever Yahweh our god has given us, to inherit from those who were before us!”

Before Yahwistic monotheism, historians of Israel identify a stage of Yahwistic monolatry, meaning the exclusive worship of Yahweh while acknowledging the existence of other gods. This is when Yahweh became the “jealous god”—his jealousy implying the existence of other gods—and the cult of other gods assimilated to adultery or prostitution, as in Exodus 34: 11–16:

Observe what I command you this day. Behold, I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Take heed to yourself, lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you are going, lest it become a snare in the midst of you. You shall break down their altars, and break their pillars, and cut down their asherim (for you shall worship no other god, for Yahweh, whose name is jealous, is a jealous God), lest you make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and when they play the harlot after their gods and sacrifice to their gods and one invites you, you eat of his sacrifice, and you take of their daughters for your sons, and their daughters play the harlot after their gods and make your sons play the harlot after their gods.

“The passage asserts four points about Israel,” comments Mark Smith in The Early History of God. “First, Israel’s ethnic identity was originally separate from other peoples of the land. Second, Israel was not originally among the peoples in the land. Third, specific cultic objects were alien to Israel. Finally, Yahweh was the only deity of Israel.” Exodus is here warning the Israelites against syncretism. But, Smith argues, since we now know that the conquest of Canaan is a literary construction, the Exodus narrative must be read as an inversion of the historical process: “the process of the emergence of Israelite monolatry was an issue of Israel’s breaking with its own ‘Canaanite’ past and not simply one of avoiding ‘Canaanite’ neighbors.”[2]

The aggressive monolatry of the jealous god is hardly compatible with the ancient Near Eastern notion of a “council of the gods” (as I mentioned earlier, some Egyptians recognized the god of the Jews as Seth, the evil god banned from the council of the gods). The shift from monolatry to monotheism is easy to implement: when the people are only allowed to worship one god, they are easily persuaded that this god is the only real god, and therefore God. As Mark Smith remarks: “if ancient Israelite religion is to be viewed primarily as a matter of practice, then the modern distinction between monotheism and monolatry is problematic.”[3]

The explicit identification of Yahweh with the supreme God El, was conceptualized during the Hellenistic period, and probably even finalized in the Hasmonean kingdom: “I am Yahweh who created the heaven and the earth,” we read in the Book of Jubilees (32:18), a text of Hasmonean propaganda affirming the supranational destiny of Israel.

Russell Gmirkin quotes abundantly from Mark Smith in his third and last book, Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts: Cosmic Monotheism and Terrestrial Polytheism in the Primordial History (Routledge 2022): His main thesis is that “Jewish monotheism was first introduced at a relatively late date, in the early Hellenistic Era, under the influence of Plato’s Timaeus.”[4] He is not the first scholar to tread on this path,[5] but he has perfected the comparative analysis between the cosmogony of Genesis 1 and the cosmogony of Plato’s Timaeus. In my view, however, the most interesting part of his book is not the comparative arguments, but rather Gmirkin’s perspective on the development, from the Presocratics to Plato, of a Greek theology combining “Cosmic Monotheism and Terrestrial Polytheism.”

Because the Abrahamic religions define themselves as monotheism, they define the religions they supplanted as polytheism. This is a polemical perspective that historians are now challenging. Two collections of essays have recently been devoted to “pagan monotheism”, published respectively by Oxford UP and Cambridge UP.[6] John North writes in One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire: “throughout the classical period and far earlier in the Near East, monotheistic assumptions are quite commonly found, without apparently raising any fears of weakening polytheistic practice.”[7] Such a concept of the divine realm as a “family of gods” (a cosmic god and his terrestrial offspring), or as one God in multiple forms, may be called “inclusive monotheism”, and contrasted with the Jewish “exclusive monotheism” that rejects the existence of any god but the supreme God. As we saw above, that exclusive monotheism is the result of promoting “Yahweh the god of Israel” to the throne of the supreme creator of heaven and earth. The jealous god ends up negating the very existence of all his competitors, thereby affirming that he is the only real god, and is therefore God. Yahweh’s promotion is an usurpation, however, in the sense that the supreme God is now regarded an a personal and rather crude entity with an exclusive love for one particular people. Jewish exclusive monotheism, therefore, is in reality a pathological form of polytheism: the cult of the ethnic god who thinks he is God.

Plato’s Timaeus

According to Russell Gmirkin, “the Greek natural philosophers were the inventors of monotheism.”[8] The first of these “natural philosophers” were the physiologoi of Miletus represented by Thales and his intellectual successors. They came to their monotheism through trying to understand the kosmos (a Greek word originally meaning “order” or “harmony”). They rejected the mythical cosmogonies, such as Hesiod’s Theogony, which explained the creation the world through struggles of anthropomorphic gods, and they developed the first scientific cosmogonies. “Broadly speaking,” Gmirkin explains, “mythical cosmogonies described the origins of the existing cosmos within a narrative framework of complex and colorful stories about the gods. … Scientific cosmogonies, by contrast, sought to explain the origins of the cosmos as a result of ordinary physical processes.”[9] As they reflected on the unity and regularity of the cosmos, the “natural philosophers” formulated a principle that we may call “Intelligent Design.” Xenophanes of Colophon (ca. 570–478 bc) “criticized the traditional stories about the anthropomorphic gods, but posited the existence of a single, supreme god who ruled the universe by his omniscient, omnipresent intelligence.” Heraclitus of Ephesus (ca. 544–484 bc) “called the divine intelligence that ordered the kosmos and governed the present universe Logos, which he equated with the divine element of fire.” Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (ca. 500–427 bc), “inferred the existence of a cosmic intelligence present at the formation of the kosmos.” Anaxagoras articulated a form of monotheism, defining Nous as the creator and motor of all things, “unlimited, self-ruled and unmixed with anything” (Fragments of Anaxagoras, frag. 12).[10]

Plato was a student of these natural philosophers. “In agreement with many of the Presocratics, Plato held that the beautiful, orderly arrangement of matter in the observed world could only have come into existence through the agency of a singular supreme eternal divine intelligence. Like Xenophanes and Anaxagoras, he even gave that cosmic all-powerful presence the name Nous or Intellect.”[11] But Plato was also a political thinker who understood the social function of the city gods, and made his peace with them.

In the Timaeus, he distinguishes the cosmic God, the Demiurge (demiourgos) who created the universe, from his offspring, the lesser gods who watch over the forces of nature and human life. Mortal life was created by the lesser, terrestrial gods (Timaeus 40d–47e). Gmirkin writes:

Plato found it inconceivable that mortal life could have been fashioned by the eternal cosmic god of Creation (Timaeus 41b-c). Nor could that supremely good deity have created humans, with their capacity for both goodness and wickedness (Timaeus 30a, 42a–d, 71d–e; cf. 69d–e). By the Demiurge delegating the task of creating mortal life to his sons and daughters, the ordinary Greek gods of myth, Plato was thus able to exonerate the supreme eternal Creator from responsibility for mortality and wickedness in a neat philosophical solution to the problem of theodicy [i.e., the existence of evil and an all-powerful God]. [12]

In Timaeus 40e-41a, Plato endorsed the gods listed in Hesiod’s Theogony as the sons and daughters of the One God who was beyond representation and above civic cults. Thus, says Gmirkin, “Plato’s Timaeus was the first text to combine a cosmic monotheism based on philosophy with a terrestrial polytheism based on civic religion and popular myth.”[13] In this platonic way, “the philosophical ruling class, while dedicated to the esoteric study of the eternal cosmic god in a university setting, thus simultaneously posed as conservative defender of the traditional civic gods within the polis and its temples.”[14] This two-level theology, based on a compromise between philosophy and the cults, became central in the Hellenistic world, and would be fully embraced by the Romans, as abundantly documented by Cicero.

The cosmic God, according to Plato, created the Cosmos on the basis of the supreme Form or Idea, from which all other Forms or Ideas proceed: the Form of the Good. “The Form of the Good was to the rest of the Forms as the sun was to the visible world (Republic 6.508a–509c) and was the ultimate cause of existence, both in the world of Forms and in the lower realms.”[15]

Having established that God’s most essential quality was his goodness (Timaeus 29e; Phaedrus 247a; Republic 2.381b–382e), and that God desired the universe to partake in that divine goodness, Plato claimed that humanity’s aim, on both an individual and a societal level, should be to become like God: intelligent, orderly, just and good. Since philosophers, not poets, and not cultic officials, were the true experts on the nature of God and ethics, it followed that the philosophers should take a leading role as an active social force in guiding humanity to fulfill its divine purpose.[16]

According to Gmirkin, “the essential goodness of the cosmic god of the universe was … a profound advance over Plato’s philosophical predecessors, who failed to single out the intrinsically ethical nature of the supreme god as a divine characteristic.”[17]

Two Kinds of Cosmogonies

Gmirkin’s theory of Plato’s influence on Genesis 1 is based on the distinction between two kinds of cosmogonies: traditional cosmogonies, such as Hesiod’s, are mythical, while the cosmogonies of the natural philosophers are scientific. Mythical cosmogonies described the origins of the cosmos in a narrative framework of stories about the gods. Scientific cosmogonies sought to explain the origins of the cosmos as a result of physical processes. Such cosmogonies were often accompanied by theories on physics and natural phenomena. These were introduced by the first school of philosophy at Miletus on the Western coast of Asia Minor (perhaps in part due to interaction with Persians). They consciously rejected the mythological approach of Hesiod and sought to deductively reconstruct the origins of the cosmos without recourse to divine or mythical explanations.

There were hybrid forms of cosmogonies, combining Greek science with elements of myth. In Plato’s works, and especially in Timeaus, we find what Gmirkin calls “scientific-theological-mythical cosmogonies,” a genre that “synthesized science, theology and mythology into a narrative that chronicled the origin of the kosmos, the gods, mortal life and the first political institutions of the mythological past.”[18] Plato’s Timaeus was the first and foremost example of such a hybrid cosmogony in Greek literature.

The cosmogony of the First Creation Account (Genesis 1 up until Genesis 2:3) is more scientific than mythological. “Instead of possessing elements of mythical cosmogony, the First Creation Account displays a systematic concern with the origin of natural features of the cosmos: day and night, earth and sky, sea and dry land, the celestial bodies and life in its various manifestations.”[19] Although God has humanlike characteristics, the cosmos is described mainly as the result of a series of physical separations (of light from darkness, of earth from sky, and of sea from dry land). The emergence of life forms is described as a process of spontaneous generation, in conformity to accepted scientific theories, even though it is willed by God (Genesis 1:20–24). Gmirkin therefore classifies Genesis 1 as a scientific-theological-mythical cosmogony.

This, to Gmirkin, proves a Greek influence. The idea that Genesis 1 is unlike Ancient Near Eastern cosmological myths and resembles Greek scientific cosmogony, is not new.[20] But until recent times this resemblance was taken as accidental; direct influence from Greek literature on the Bible was only conceivable for the Septuagint translation. Martin Rösel argued in 1994 that the authors of the Septuagint use Timaeus in the choice of some terms—for example the translation of tohu wabohu (“without form and void”) in Genesis 1:2, which echoes precisely Timaeus 51a–b.[21]

But Gmirkin argues that the Hebrew text of Genesis 1, used by the Septuagint translators, was already written with Timaeus in mind. Gmirkin examines “various lines of evidence that indicate that Genesis 1 did in fact draw on the Timaeus, including: a similar sequence of creational events; many strikingly similar details in the two accounts; a closely comparable theological presentation of the role of the Creator in fashioning the present universe; several uniquely Platonic philosophical concepts and themes that appear prominently in Genesis 1.”[22] In view of those parallels, “It is reasonable to propose that the authors of the cosmogony of Genesis 1 were educated elites with a strong background in science, philosophy and theology.”[23]

The First Creation Account in Genesis 1 names the deity El or Elohim. The Second Creation Account in Genesis 2–3 names it Yahweh. The difference goes deeper than the name, Gmirkin argues. While in Genesis 1, El is the cosmic god who creates the universe, in Genesis 2–3, Yahweh is a terrestrial god who resides on earth and interacts with humans.

The Documentary Hypothesis that has prevailed for most of the twentieth century recognized that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2–3 represent two different traditions that have been stitched together after the Assyrian conquest of Israel. It was thought that Genesis 1 represented a Northern tradition, while Genesis 2–3 was a Judaean tradition. Gmirkin accepts the notion of two traditions combined but dates the process in the Hellenistic era, and speculates on two competing groups within the 70 elders who wrote the Pentateuch. I find this particular part of Gmirkin’s theory plausible, but insufficiently established to justify his confidence.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Gmirkin’s third book is a most interesting read, but not his greatest contribution to the argument of the Hellenistic date of the Pentateuch. I find the influence of Plato’s Timaeus on Genesis 1 plausible, but not as convincing as the influence of Plato’s Laws on Deuteronomy, theorized by Gmirkin in his second book. What is missing is also a discussion of how this new theory dovetails with the theory of Berossus’s influence on Genesis 1–11 that Gmirkin defended in his first book.

Gmirkin’s bold claim that “the origin of Jewish monotheism is to be traced to Plato’s Timaeus” seems somewhat excessive. I also believe his claim that “The Greek natural philosophers were the inventors of monotheism” to be excessive.[24] Gmirkin attributes to Plato the invention of the theology combining the Cosmic god and his offspring. And it may be true that Plato was the first to introduce that hybrid theology to the Greeks. But, relying on Mark Smith, Gmirkin himself acknowledges that this model was known in Syria long before Plato and even the Presocratic “natural philosophers.” That considerably weakens the case of Plato’s role in the invention of Jewish monotheism.

There are different stages and different ways leading to pure monotheism. Some scholars refer to the notion of a hierarchy of gods with one god on top as “superlative monotheism.” Arguably this is not yet monotheism, but it is getting close. In the ancient world, national gods were like kings. When one kingdom conquered another and forced it to pay tribute, the god of the conqueror was assumed to be more powerful, and therefore above in the hierarchy of the gods. Assur, for example was the national god of the Assyrians, as well as the name of their capital city. But as the Neo-Assyrians conquered the totality of the Fertile Crescent, that is, when the Assyrian king became of king of kings, Assur became a king of gods or a god of gods. In the national liturgy, Assur became elevated to the highest divine status and was sometimes credited with creating heaven, humanity, and the other gods.

When the Assyrians conquered Israel beginning in 740 bc (as also attested in Assyrian chronicles), a vengeful nationalism seethed in Jerusalem, where thousands of Israelis, including priests, took refuge. In the prophecies of Isaiah (Isaiah 1–39), this took the form of a mimetic rivalry, in which Yahweh declared himself the most powerful god, called for a showdown with Assur, and foresaw a future when people from surrounding nations will say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the god of Jacob that he may teach us his ways so that we may walk in his paths” (Isaiah 2:3).

Yahweh Sabaoth has sworn it, “Yes, what I have planned will take place, what I have decided will be so: I shall break Assur in my country, I shall trample on him on my mountains.” … This is the decision taken in defiance of the whole world; this, the hand outstretched in defiance of all nations. Once Yahweh Sabaoth has decided, who will stop him? Once he stretches out his hand, who can withdraw it?” (Isaiah 14:24–27).

Come near and listen, you nations, pay attention, you peoples. Let the earth and its contents listen, the world and its entire population. For Yahweh is angry with all the nations, enraged with all their hordes. He has vowed them to destruction, handed them over to slaughter. Their dead will be thrown away, the stench will rise from their corpses, the mountains will run with their blood. The entire array of heaven will fall apart. The heavens will be rolled up like a scroll and all their array will fade away, as fade the leaves falling from the vine, as fade those falling from the fig tree. For my sword has drunk deep in the heavens: see how it now falls on Edom, on the people vowed to destruction, to punish them. (Isaiah 34:1–5)

Although there is no affirmation that Yahweh is the creator of Heaven and Earth, the last verses present him as mastering cosmic phenomena. It is a small step from there to pure monotheism.

Gmirkin’s point that cosmic monotheism was known to Plato long before the Pentateuch was written remains valid. So does his argument that the cosmogony of Genesis 1 was influenced by the proto-scientific monotheism of the Greek natural philosophers. But then, it must also be said that Greek monotheism did not appear ex nihilo. The Greeks themselves recognized the priority of the Egyptians and even the Persians in many aspects of their culture. It is certain that the Babylonian exiles had come in contact with the monotheism promoted by the Achaemenids in the 5th century bc. The expression “God of Heaven” in the books of Daniel, Jonah, Ezra and Nehemiah (and well as in Genesis 24:7), was a common designation of the universal god Ahura Mazda for the Persians.

Although the books of Ezra and Nehemiah (originally one book) were certainly composed after the Persian period, they shed some light on the emergence and the nature of Jewish monotheism. The book of Ezra contains extracts from several edicts attributed to succeeding Persian kings to allow the Judean (Jewish) exiles to return to Palestine and rebuild the Jerusalem Temple. They are certainly not genuine documents, but their content reveals the politico-religious strategy deployed by those who forged them (my Catholic “Jerusalem Bible” calls them “proto-Zionists”). In the first edict, Cyrus the Great calls Yahweh both “the God of Heaven” and “the god of Israel, who is the god in Jerusalem” (Ezra 1:2–3). We find the same duality in the next edict by King Artaxerxes who allows “the priest Ezra, Secretary of the Law of the God of Heaven,” to offer a gigantic holocaust to “the god of Israel who resides in Jerusalem” (7:12–15). We later find twice the same expression “God of Heaven” (Elah Shemaiya) interspersed with seven references to “your god,” that is, “the god of Israel.” “God of Heaven” appears once more in an edict signed by the Persian king Darius to confirm Cyrus’s prior edict and recommend that the Israelites “offer sacrifices acceptable to the God of Heaven and pray for the life of the king and his sons” (6:10). The expression appears one more time, when the Judeans tell the local Persian governor who disputes their right to build the temple: “We are the servants of the God of Heaven and Earth” (5:11). When no Persian is involved, the book of Ezra only refers to the “god of Israel” (four times), “Yahweh, the god of your fathers” (once), and “our god” (ten times). In other words, according to the biblical author, only the Persians are supposed to believe that Yahweh is “the God of Heaven.” In the book of Nehemiah, when Nehemiah wants to convince the Persian king to let him go to Judea to oversee the rebuilding of Jerusalem, he offers a prayer “to the God of Heaven” (Nehemiah 2:4); but once in Jerusalem, he asks his fellow Jews to swear allegiance to “Yahweh our god” (10:30).

This unmistakable pattern unlocks the deepest secret of Judaism, and exposes the real nature of “Jewish universalism”: for the Jews, Yahweh is the god of the Jews,[25] whereas Gentiles should be told that he is the supreme and universal God—who happens to prefer Jews.

This strategic dialectical relationship between Jewish monolatry and Mesopotamian monotheism also appears in the book of Daniel, written in the same Hellenistic period. The eponymous hero is selected from the Judean exiles in Babylon to be educated by the chief eunuch of King Nebuchadnezzar. Because he proves capable of interpreting the dreams of the king, Nebuchadnezzar falls at his feet and says: “Your god is indeed the god of gods, the Master of kings” (2:47). The expression “the god of gods” echoes the expression “king of kings” by which the Persian emperor designated himself. The parallel between the two expressions perfectly represents the way the Jews relate to the various empires that conquered them: the Babylonians, the Persians, the Lagids, the Seleucids, and later the Romans may have the king of kings, but they, the Jews, have the god of gods, whom they ultimately imposed on those empires.

The book of Joshua, written in the Persian or Hellenistic periods according to the “minimalists”, reflects the same conscious ambiguity. It never refers to Yahweh simply as “God,” but always as “Yahweh the god of Israel”,[26] “Yahweh my god” or “our god” when Israelites are talking,[27] or “Yahweh your god” when the Israelites are talked to.[28] The only explicit profession of faith that Yahweh is the supreme God, in the whole Book of Joshua, is from the mouth of Rahab, a prostitute who hides two Israeli spies for the night inside Jericho’s walls, and later lets the Israelites into the city in exchange for being spared, together with her family. As justification for betraying her own people, she tells the Israelites that “Yahweh your god is God both in Heaven above and on Earth beneath” (2:11), something that neither the narrator, nor Yahweh, nor any Israelite in the book ever claims. This story, which likens the prostitute of Jericho to the Trojan Horse, illustrates that the Israelites are satisfied with the belief that Yahweh is their god, while Gentiles will be conquered by the belief that Yahweh is the God of Heaven and Earth—who happens to love Israel and hate all Israel’s enemies.

My French Catholic Bible (published by the Dominicans of the École Biblique de Jérusalem) adds a footnote to that passage, saying that Rahab’s “profession of faith to the God of Israel … made Rahab, in the eyes of more than one Church Father, a figure of the Gentile Church, saved by her faith.” I find this footnote, likening the Gentile Church to the whore of Jericho, emblematic of the true role of Christianity. For it is indeed the Church that, by acknowledging the god of Israel as the universal God, introduced the Jews into the heart of the Gentile city and, over the centuries, allowed them to seize power.

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[1] Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, William B. Eerdmans, 2002, p. 102.

[2] Ibid., p. 71.

[3] Ibid., p. 82.

[4] Russell E. Gmirkin, Plato’s Timaeus and the Biblical Creation Accounts: Cosmic Monotheism and Terrestrial Polytheism in the Primordial History, Routledge, 2022, p. 501.

[5] See for example Lukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò, Origin Myths and Holy Places in the Old Testament: A Study of Aetiological Narratives, Copenhagen International Seminar, Equinox, 2011, quoted in Thomas Thompson and Philippe Wajdenbaum, The Bible and Hellenism: Greek Influence on Jewish and Early Christian Literature, Routledge, 2014, p. 9.

[6] Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede, Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Oxford UP, 1999; Peter Van Nuffelen and Stephen Mitchell, eds., One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (1-4th cent. A.D.), Cambridge UP, 2010.

[7] John North, “Pagan ritual and monotheism”, in Peter Van Nuffelen and Stephen Mitchell, eds., One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (1-4th cent. A.D.), Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. *

[8] Gmirkin, Plato’s Timaeus, op. cit., p. 518

[9] Ibid., pp. 86-87.

[10] Ibid., pp. 518-520.

[11] Ibid., p. 526

[12] Ibid., p. 140:

[13] Ibid., p. 524

[14] Ibid., p. 544.

[15] Ibid., p. 546, quoting Timaeus 46d; Republic 6.508e–509b; Phaedrus 249c, 250d.

[16] Ibid., p. 528.

[17] Ibid., p. 527.

[18] Ibid., p. 137.

[19] Ibid., p. 101.

[20] Gmirkin mentions William F. Brown, Structure, role and Ideology in the Hebrew and Greek Texts of Genesis 1:1 – 2:3, Scholars Press, 1993.

[21] Martin Rösel, Übersetzung als Vollendung der Auslegung: Studien zur Genesis Septuaginta, Walter de Gruyter, 1994.

[22] Gmirkin, Plato’s Timaeus, op. cit., p. 191.

[23] Ibid., p. 169.

[24] Ibid., p. 518.

[25] “In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew,” writes Maurice Samuel in You Gentiles (1924), pp. 74-75.

[26] Joshua 7:13, 9:18, 13:14, 13:33, 14:14, 22:16.

[27] Joshua 9:23, 14:8, 22:19.

[28] Joshua 1:11, 1:12, 1:15, 3:3, 3:9, 4:5, 4:23-24, 8:7, 9:9, 22:3-4, 22:5, 23:3,5,8,11, 24:2.