So, Let Me Try to Understand...

One of the books I'm reading right now is The Human Story: Our History, From the Stone Age to Today by James C. Davis. Davis taught History at the University of Pennsylvania for more than thirty years. I have no idea what his religion might be, if any. He certainly doesn't tip his hand in the early chapters of the book.

Last night, before I went to sleep, I read his chapter on the ancient Hebrews, who gave us the Old Testament and from whose number was born Jesus of Nazareth. Why bother devoting an entire early chapter of his book to this group of people? "Well, for reason one," Davis explains, "their story illustrates how other wandering peoples on the borders of the settled places such as Sumer, Egypt, ancient China, and the Indus valley settled down. The Hebrews' story illustrates this civilizing process. What is equally important (reason two), the religion of this group of seminomads, after they had settled down, later influenced the creeds of several billion people."

But what struck me especially was an observation Davis made after talking about God's call to a man named Abraham, then living in what is modern-day Iraq, to go to a land God would show him and to believe God's promise that Abraham and Sarah would have a son, becoming the ancestors of nations and a multitude of believers. Through Abraham and Sarah, a revolutionary new idea took hold, ultimately among billions of people. That idea, quite simply, is that there is but one God Who made the universe. Writes Davis:

That is how the Bible explains why the Hebrews became a people with one god. Nowhere else, so far as we can tell, were there any other monotheists. In Mesopotamia, from which Abraham had come, the Sumerians and Babylonians and Assyrians worshipped many gods. So did the Egyptians. Even Pharaoh Akhenaten, when he ordered the worship of the sun and scrapped the other gods, required that he be worshipped also, as a pharaoh-god.

Only Hebrews worshipped just one god...

And while initially the Hebrews believed that there might be other gods, their worship of just one God eventually gave way to the belief, contrary to the views of everybody else on the planet, that there really was only one God.

Now, I pose a simple question, Columbo-style: Where did this idea come from? If everybody around you superstitiously worshiped gods of fire, wind, rain, and fertility...or everyone bowed down to camels, beetles, donkeys, lions, tigers, and bears (0h, my!), then why would you suddenly start saying that, "No, there is one God Who made all these things and us"?

And why, pray tell, would you suddenly proclaim that this one God is interested in having a relationship with us--not mocking us as the numerous gods of the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians did, for example--and that that relationship is secured not by our acting a certain way or by doing certain things, but simply because we trust that God? (See here.)

The Bible insists that it's all because God revealed Himself to the world in this way. The Hebrews came to believe in just one God because that one God, for the sake of the whole world, revealed Himself to them.

It's a plausible explanation when you think about it, the only one that makes sense in understanding why a people so swam upstream against the settled superstitions of the ages. It has about it the whiff of truth.