The Mission of God > > < < Golden Compass Trilogy Home

Israelite Religions, Richard Hess

Posted Monday, January 28, 2008 by Charlie Trimm
Categories: Old Testament; Archaeology
This is simply a massive work by Richard Hess, combining insights from a wide range of fields. The bibliography itself is fifty pages long! Hess sets out to examine what religion actually was for the ancient Israelites, using the Bible, extra-biblical literary sources, and archaeology. The reason this topic is highly debated is because there seems to be ideas of what Israelite religion was, depending on which source you examine. The Bible seems to be mostly a monotheistic document, focusing on YHWH and Jerusalem. But then there are also inscriptions like the Kuntillet 'Arjud texts which describe YHWH having a consort, and a temple at Arad which seems to serve two gods. How does all this fit together? Hess argues against a two position view, in which there is the official religion (as seen in the Bible) and then a popular religion which was actually followed by the people (as seen by archaeology and inscriptions), pointing out that this dichotomy is not as clean as it is presented to be. For example, the Lachish and Arad letters are thoroughly Yahwehistic. And the Bible itself mentions service of other gods by Israelites. Hess argues for a continuum, without strict lines between the positions. There were people who followed YHWH, and there were those who followed Baal, and there were those in between. The book is really more of a reference work that something you just sit down and read (note the subtitle: An Archaeological and Biblical Survey), so it is helpful to have on your shelf and turn to when you have a question about a specific text or idea. He also includes a very helpful section on why he rejects the Documentary Hypothesis, including a whole paragraph list of various ways people take the sources today differently than Wellhausen. When there are this many different ideas, then perhaps one should go back and reexamine why we even started down this path. Overall, this would be helpful both to scholars studying preexilic religion in Israel and for teachers of the Bible who are interested in what else is going on in Israel during the time of the Bible. One of my personal goals is to make the Hebrew inscriptions more known among evangelicals, and Hess discusses many of them in this book. I highly recommend this work!

Series: Book Reviews
The Gods of the Nations, by Daniel Block
Hebrew Poetry and Robert Alter
Creation According to Sailhamer
The Rise of Evangelicalism	Random book reviews from Charlie
Old Testament Theology Devotionals
The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and Moody
Rethinking Missions with Steve Saint
Neither Poverty nor Riches
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind II
Going Places with God
A God Entranced Vision of All Things
The Meaning of Jesus: Borg versus Wright
Military History and Christianity: Do they mix?
Wright and Borg, Part 3
The Mosaic of Christian Belief
Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology
The Problem of War in the Old Testament
God is a Warrior
Holy War in Ancient Israel, by Gerhard von Rad
Yahweh is a Warrior
Is There A Meaning in This Text
Faithful Intepretation: Reading the Bible in a Postmodern World
Engaging Scripture
Does the Bible Justify Violence?
Reading Scripture with the Church
A History of Christian Thought, Volume 1
The Darker Side of Samuel, Saul and David
War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence
Golden Compass Trilogy
Israelite Religions, Richard Hess
The Mission of God
Biblical Interpretation: Then and Now
Life in Biblical Israel
Biblical Theology
Reading and Preaching the Bible in the Worship of the Church 3
Theological Introduction to the Psalms
The Tree of Life: An Exploration of Biblical Wisdom Literature