Yahweh to Abraham, the grandfather of Jacob. In exchange for untram-
meled fidelity and obedience, Abraham and his heretofore childless wife
were promised a multitude of descendants and possession of the Land of
Canaan. As a guarantee, Abraham and his male descendants and followers
bore the mark of the covenant – the basis of ritual circumcision. Alongside
this unconditional promissory covenant was a conditional arrangement
between Yahweh and the Israelites, delivered to Moses at Mount Sinai.
According to the terms of this covenant, the Israelites agreed to follow a
series of commandments (Mitzvot) for which they would be rewarded by
God with the basic elements of a felicitous life, and suffer divine retribution
if they violated these commandments.
Yet the covenant with Yahweh did not prevent the Israelites from fre-
quently worshiping other local deities, notably Ba’al, the Canaanite god of
rain. This was not surprising, given the absence of a reliable source of water in
this region. Unlike the Egyptians and the peoples of Mesopotamia, for whom
the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers overflowed annually and pro-
vided a more than adequate source of water, the peoples who lived in the Land
of Canaan depended heavily on rainfall. The chronic concern for water is an
underlying theme in the covenental relationship between God and Israel, par-
ticularly in the obligatory covenant in Deuteronomy. At the heart of the
litany of blessings and curses enumerated in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, an
abundance of seasonal rain to assure good crops is the ultimate reward;
drought and the ensuing crop failure is the ultimate punishment for violating
the terms of the covenant.
The worship of Ba’al and other local deities, reviled in biblical narrative, is
nonetheless as prevalent as the worship of the God of Israel, and was the fatal
flaw of the tribal confederation described in Judges and I Samuel. The solidar-
ity and kinship of a covenantal community sustained the tribal confederation
for nearly two centuries. In the end, however, the internal and external weak-
nesses of the confederation led to its collapse. The common belief in Yahweh
or the covenant was unable to forge more than a limited sense of unity
between the tribes. At times, when individual tribes were beset by a foreign
adversary, the other tribes remained neutral. The Song of Deborah in Judges
5 is a literary condemnation of this lack of tribal solidarity. There were even
instances when the tribes fought against one another. Only in exile is the
Israelites’ monolatrous relationship with Yahweh transformed into a
monotheistic relationship.
The monolatrous worship of Jahweh was, in retrospect, a symptom of the
presence of foreign elements in Israelite culture. God’s commanding tone in
Genesis and Exodus is reminiscent of an Egyptian style of rulership. Like an
Egyptian Pharaoh, God speaks in absolutes. Divine injunctions to Abraham
and Moses are not given conditionally, or even simply as commands, but rather
as statements of fact. And the Israelites accept these commands in equally
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