238 Job Y. Jindo
Kaufmann, that ancient Israelites themselves understood the religion of
this deity, YHWH, to be universalistic from the outset — from the begin-
ning of human history. On the other hand, he notes, empirical investiga-
tion cannot determine the historicity of this tradition prior to the Exodus,
and he rather thinks of historical monotheism as founded during the time
of Moses, as the Bible itself also attests indirectly. According to him, every
level of biblical literature, even the earliest, is pervaded by the universalistic
notion of the monotheistic deity. If so, the religion of ancient Israel that
produced biblical literature was universalistic even before the formation of
this literature. Th is means that the religion of ancient Israel, as a historical
religion, was monotheistic from the outset — from the Mosaic age.
Kaufmann points out that biblical literature nowhere articulates, ex-
plicitly or systematically, the monotheistic worldview, which he deems to
have permeated the entire cultural system of ancient Israel. Th is means, for
him, that the monotheistic belief in YHWH was a cultural given in ancient
Israel. In the Bible, furthermore, the idea of monotheism is expressed in
symbols and popular forms, such as in the anthropomorphic depictions of
the absolute deity. It is these observations that lead him to conceive of bib-
lical religion and literature as a popular phenomenon, a product of the col-
lective ruah. of ancient Israel — ruah., of course, as always with Kaufmann,
in the empirical sense — and not of some individual thinkers or limited
circles of religious elites thereof.
At the same time, Kaufmann regards the Israelite, popular aspect of
biblical monotheism as essentially arbitrary. Because biblical monothe-
ism is fundamentally universalistic, it could have been conceived in any
other place or age, and it is a matter of coincidence that ancient Israel in-
tuited the idea of biblical monotheism. Only the medium — or the ruah. —
through which biblical monotheism was intuited and objectifi ed, but not
its conceptual content, is Israelite and popular. Herein lies what Kaufmann
reckons as the secret of Jewish survival: the accidental union of the Jewish
people with the universalistic idea of biblical monotheism that transcends
both land and peoplehood is what has enabled Jews to survive as a people
in the Diaspora for centuries.30
Kaufmann, in stressing the notion that monotheism was deeply en-
grained in the collective consciousness and culture of ancient Israel, makes
an argument that to this day appears to be too radical to be accepted in
scholarship: that biblical authors did not understand true polytheism and
instead regarded it as a fetishism — as a deifi cation of material objects such
as wood and stone. Because biblical authors’ monotheistic perception of