Jeff Reads Genesis! Part 4: The Old Testament God

The character of the Hebrew God as reveled in Genesis and Exodus is pretty interesting. I am not familiar with other sources of evidence on how the Hebrews saw their deity while the Old Testament was being written, particularly with respect to those of other religions. However, the early books of the Old Testament portray him as a deeply insecure and ambitious deity with some important limitations on his powers, and it is even implied that the Hebrews may have recognized the existence of other gods. So, even though the existence of a single, all powerful and omnipotent God is a theme of modern Islam and Christianity, it was apparently not have been the case for writers of the Old Testament (except in the creation and flood stories), who saw the Lord as a much more human God, more in line with the fallible and often petty deities of polytheistic religions (it is for this reason that I refer to him as “the Lord” rather than simply as “God,” as the latter name implies he is the only one).

The Lord is not omnipotent; he has to go find things out just like everyone else. In Gen 3 for example, God is wandering around in the Garden of Eden after man and woman have eaten the fruit of knowledge, and does not know where man is immediately. He has to call for him. He also has to ask why man is hiding, and then has to intuit from his answer that he had eaten the fruit. In Gen 4:10, the Lord also does not know that Cain has murdered Abel until he hears that Abel’s “blood cries out from the ground.” After eating lunch with Abraham, the Lord tells him that “I have heard a great outcry from Sodom and Gomorrah…I am going down to see if their actions are as wicked as I have heard. If not, I want to know” (Gen 18:20-21).

God is pretty insecure about his position as top dog, and a great deal of what he does in Genesis and Exodus is geared toward not only preventing mankind from becoming as powerful and knowledgeable as he is, but to increase his prestige and reputation. He gives his justification for guarding the Tree of Life in Gen 3:22 “Look, the human beings have become like us, knowing both good and evil. What if they reach out, take fruit from the tree of life, and eat it? Then they will live forever.” When Noah’s descendants are building the Tower of Babel, the Lord expresses the concern that if they succeed “nothing they set out to do will be impossible for them!” (Gen 11:6) and proceeds to interfere.

One of my favorite passages in is Gen 18. The Lord, accompanied by two angels, comes to visit Abraham in the form of three men, but Abraham recognizes him and feeds him lunch. During this visit, the Lord tells Abraham, who is by that point about 100 years old, that he will successfully impregnate his wife Sarah with a son. Sarah overhears this conversation, and, knowing that she is past childbearing age and not believing her husband can even get it up anymore, much less get her pregnant, laughs (Gen 11-12). The following exchange ensues (Gen 13-15):

Then the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh? Why did she say, ‘Can an old woman like me have a baby?’ Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return at this time next year, and Sarah will have a son.”


Sarah was afraid, so she denied it, saying, “I didn’t laugh.”


But the Lord said, “No, you did laugh.”

I wonder if he went home crying and kicking things.

However, the best example of the Lord needing to be respected is in Exodus. The Lord has a relatively simple task (for a powerful deity): “persuade” the Pharaoh to release Moses and his people. However, he proceeds to make it more complicated. The Lord releases a whole series of awful plagues upon the people of Egypt, and after several, the Pharaoh agrees to release Moses…but then changes his mind, because the Lord deliberately “hardens his heart” (Exod 7:3, 9:12, 10:20, 27, 11:10). This gives the Lord an excuse to keep releasing plagues. Why? Because “I can multiply my miraculous signs and wonders in the land of Egypt…When I raise my powerful hand and bring out the Israelites, the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord.” (Gen 7:3, 5).

In addition to having limitations, the Lord usually presents himself as “the God of Abraham” or “the God of the Israelites,” suggesting that he is their personal god, not everyone’s god, and this suggests to me that the Hebrews acknowledged that other cultures had their own deities. Another reason I think this is the story of Moses. When Moses and his brother Aaron are initially going before the Pharaoh to perform various magic tricks the Lord has empowered them to perform (turning a stick into a snake, turning water to blood, making frogs), the Pharaoh calls out his own sorcerers and wise men to duplicate them…and they can, at least at first (Gen 7:11-12; 7:22, 8:7). Exodus does not say these Egyptian sorcerers and wise men are charlatans…they really do have magical powers, and if Moses and Aaron are getting their powers from the Israelite god, the Egyptians may be drawing their powers from their own deities. Exodus does stress that the Israelite god is stronger; during the stick-into-snake trick, the snake that Aaron creates eats those made by the Egyptians (Gen 7:12), and from the plague of gnats onward, the Egyptian magicians can no longer keep up (Gen 8:19).

The Lord is also not a vegetarian. In Gen 18, Abraham feeds his guests bread, roast veal, milk and yogurt. The Lord also seems to like the smell of burning meat (Gen 8:20-21), which apparently how he gets off on animal sacrifice. Matt Brown has suggested to me that this is “why he invented hell.”

LNJ