Mesopotamian Religion

8. Excerpts

Giorgio Buccellati
2007 Yahweh

Marco De Pietri – November 2023

Giorgio Buccellati

Buccellati 2007 Yahweh
“Yahweh, the Trinity: The Old Testament Catechumenate”,
Communio. International Catholic Review 34, pp. 38-75, 292-327

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Excerpts from Buccellati 2007 Yahweh

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Abraham

Topic	Page	Excerpt
The call of Abraham	pp. 296-297	The first aspect to consider is the particularity of the call as attributed to Abraham. The singling out of a particular individual is marked with great significance through a number of relevant details. The call is late in time: Abraham is seen as arising out of a well-established civilization, which has run a long developmental course and which he is called to leave behind. The call is unexpected: there is no preparation for its reception, no cultural humus from which it might be expected to grow of its own accord. The call is asymmetrical: Abraham is low on any scale of greatness, precariously uprooted and on the move. The call is suffered: the profound contradiction inherent in the expected sacrifice of the first in a promised long line of descendents sheds a tragic light on the rapport between the caller and the called. In all respects, the call stands outside normal patterns. Abraham is not, by any means, a typical figure. Far from being a topos, he is the most specific representation of the particular. God relates to him as he would to no one else. God depends on Abraham’s answer. God waits for him [this necessarily implies that the absolute is, to a certain extent, "limited"; Note of Author]. This reciprocal waiting is closely linked with the notion of particularity. Abraham does not wait idly for something generic to happen. He faces a specific promise that he thinks he understands, but which nevertheless has to take shape in its progressive modalities. No sooner does he arrive at a promised destination than the destination itself is called into doubt, the potential loss of his firstborn being the most tragic. God is shown as waiting, too: “because now I know that you fear God” (Gn 22:12). It is not a question of a generic passing of time. Each waits for something very specific. The particularity of the call expects the particularity of the response. It is the very reciprocal confrontation that proclaims particularity, one that is wholly foreign to the polytheistic mindset where, ironically, the very multitude of “particular” deities betrays an undercurrent of pantheistic amorphousness. They are in fact but generic icons, without the dynamics of personal and truly particular interaction, one which entails waiting with all the attendant connotations of risk and faith.

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Articulation of the absolute

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Articulation of the absolute	pp. 312-314	The Old Testament perception of particularity within the divine sphere is intrinsically trinitarian, I submit, because it consistently and steadfastly faces a major paradox – the presence of articulation within an absolute who is, at the same time, wholly above any split within his deepest reality. In other words, the Old Testament never flinches from upholding the co-presence of a fully articulated particularity on the one hand and, on the other, of a oneness that can never be ripped apart. This is in the manner not of a theoretical statement, but of a coherently developing experiential awareness. The contrast with polytheism helps us to elucidate the significance of the monotheistic apprehension. On the surface, it would appear that the presence of many divine beings entails a real articulation within the divine sphere, and that by contrast the obsessive emphasis on a single deity does not. On the contrary. The gods and goddesses effectively limit each other. They are, in other words, neither singly nor collectively, proper embodiments of the absolute. There is articulation, indeed. But an articulation of relatives. The wonder of the monotheistic position is that articulation is inscribed within the very heart of the absolute, who is never relativized as a result of it. It should be noted that in this, as in many other respects, polytheism in no way differs from pantheism. In both, it is the sum total of the particulars, the bracketing or bridging of the articulation, that constitutes the essence of the absolute. In polytheism the accent is on the articulated fragments, while in pantheism it is on the very phenomenon of articulation. Both are true to their name – “poly-” referring to the segmented multitude of constituents, “pan-”referring to the re-composition of the same into an overall totality. But, in both, the articulated many are the starting, and ending, target of attention. In monotheism, on the other hand, the absolute is the starting, and ending, point. Transcending fragmentation, the absolute is nevertheless articulated. It is the sensitivity for this reality that is proposed and steadfastly maintained in the Old Testament, even as the sensitivity develops in its details over the centuries. I have used the term “particularity” to refer to such a wholly idiosyncratic trait: distinctiveness within an absolute who transcends definition, numeration (of one) where there is no numerability, articulation without fragmentation.

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A contrast

Topic	Page	Excerpt
A contrast: revealing face vs. hiding name	pp. 298-300	The contrast between revealing the face and hiding the name is significant. The stress is on the priority of confrontation over representation. The face can be seen only in real time, while the interlocutors are present to each other. It cannot be appropriated, except through memory. Its primary reality lives in the direct encounter. A name, on the other hand, is intrinsically a referential representation. It is based on a one-to-one correspondence. It is, in other words, a univocal signpost, wherein a segment of reality is grafted onto a segment of expression that retains its referential consistency whether or not the referent is physically in view [cf. Mes-Pol, 1.7; Note of Author]. (Hence the great importance of onomastics in both the biblical and the Syro-Mesopotamian world.) In the Peni’el episode [Gn 32:24-32], confrontation is privileged to the exclusion of referentiality. The significance is underscored by the fact that the unnamed presence not only clings to the mystery of his own unreferentiality, but also alters the referential dimension of Jacob — whose name is changed. An unexpected depth of insight can be seen in this stark contrast of the unnamed claiming to impose a new name. Far from being denied, the value of the name is heightened. It is rooted in the actual presence. In that it signals the primacy of presence, without devaluing referentiality, the episode signals the primacy of life — and of mystery. [...] The later attitude in Judaism vis-à-vis the divine name (it could no longer be uttered, and could only be written in its consonantal skeleton YHWH [...]), and the correlative development of the notion of *shekinah* (“dwelling” in the sense of “presence”) show a profound coherence with the earlier biblical situation I have briefly described. It could easily develop into a mannerism, where the skeleton (the “Tetragrammaton”), which was supposed to deflect attention from the referent (the name) and direct it to the referenced (the present and living God), becomes instead itself the referenced, the center of attention.

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The covenant

Topic	Page	Excerpt
The relationship established with the covenant	pp. 303-305	It seems rather contradictory that a most universal notion of the absolute, as it emerges from the Old Testament, should be tied to a social group of such a persistent and consistent marginal provincialism as ancient Israel. The unique religious flowering that characterizes it had absolutely no influence on the broader course of civilization, not until its prophetic period came to an end and Christianity claimed to pick up and bear the torch of that deeper prophetic dimension. It is important to stress that the self-perception of ancient Israel shows little evidence of any delusion of grandeur in the political or cultural sphere. Their epic memory clings to an inglorious nomadic past; their cultic reenactment eternalizes an early condition of slavery; their greatest political achievement is but a minor provincial kingdom; their art and architecture is essentially derivative; their social fabric is torn to shreds when they lose all measure of political integrity. But they proclaim unflinchingly that the God of all-that-they-are-not has chosen to be bound to the verylittle- that-they-are. There is never a sense of embarrassment at the curious logic that they embrace, namely that such a lofty deity should be bound by the constraints of so particular, and so particularly humbling, a relationship. If anything, the logic becomes more self-assured as the reasons for potential scandal increase. Thus the notion of remnant celebrates the poverty of the human base, as if it could drag the absolute into an ever greater situation of finitude. There is an inverted proportion between such poverty and the ever more elevated notion that the God of the small remnant is in fact the one and only universal God: the particularity of this God emerges as all the more stunning because of the insignificance of the human pole in the relationship. The perception grows that he is “faithful” just as his promise seems to wane. He had promised universality to Abraham, and now the death from which Abraham’s son had been spared hovers ominously upon his latter-day children. God is perceived to be attached to an ever slimmer portion of the universe he is supposed to rule. And yet, he is faithful, in the eyes of the remnant, to the covenant he had offered. True, God freely chooses these covenantal bonds, but they are bonds nevertheless. They proclaim a very particular aim in the choice of the terms of his relationship. These terms could not be more explicit, for they are embedded in a covenant that posits obligations. The seeming contradiction is precisely in the proclamation of limits placed on the absolute. Nor does the fact that these limits are seen as being selfimposed reduce their impact. The notion of covenant is as important for what it tells us about God as for what it tells us about the human recipients of its benefits. It tells us that particularity is built into the very essence of the divine absolute, because of the explicit choices made and the specific consequences that ensue from them. [...]. The absolute is not amorphous — the strictures of the covenantal interaction bring this out sharply. It is as if the reality of the personal dimension were perceived not statically, but as the point of origin of a web of ties, very explicit and well-defined as to their limits and conditions by virtue of the specificity of the originator of those very ties. To appreciate properly what this means, it is useful to consider how the notion of covenant reflects another strong contrast with Mesopotamia, all the more so as the two conflicting perceptions address one and the same fundamental human need, that of security. Mesopotamian polytheism seeks security in predictability as a form of control, while biblical monotheism seeks security in trust as a form of surrender. In the former, the divine sphere is discovered through the progressive accretion of knowledge, which is appropriated and remains as such at the disposal of human enterprise. In the latter, the divine person proclaims faithfulness to a commitment, a faithfulness that cannot be grasped and owned, and to which humans are called to adhere even and especially when (un-controllable) events and phenomena contradict, at all appearances, the reliability of the divine signatory. As in other respects, here, too, we can see an important parallel with the modern situation. When science aims to provide the ultimate answer, as if in contrast with religion, it relies on the predictability of laws that entail control. Faith by no means excludes the validity of such laws, but it sees them as applicable only within partial domains of reality. When it comes to the question of ultimate predictability, faith proposes trust in an absolute that is at the same time universal and particular, i.e., capable of affirming, for himself, limits set in a covenantal mold. It is on these limits that the predictability of trust is based. And it must be noted that, in the final analysis, a science as a “universal theory of the universe” relies just as much on trust, trust in the coherence of laws and of the conceptual construct within which such laws are articulated — ultimately, trust in the impersonal.

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God as an “I”-speaker

Topic	Page	Excerpt
God as an I-speaker	pp. 308-310	God speaks in the first person when addressing, singly, specific individuals in a variety of different situations [...]. This is one of the sharpest contrasts with the polytheistic religious reality, such as the Mesopotamian, where such a first-person address on the part of any of the gods is hardly ever documented. It is also in contrast, one might note, with the wisdom tradition within the Bible itself: there God is predicated essentially in the third person, through a reflection that speaks more about him rather than qua himself. The second aspect is that the poignancy of the personal involvement is all the more striking because the first person is used not only as a form of address but also to externalize divine feelings. It is in fact a strong lyrical component of the biblical text that it should be giving voice to the divine urge to share emotions. These come to the fore with special intensity when they relate to love, and to the hurt of love unrequited. [...] The emphatic, emotional participation of the divine “I” is without parallel in the ancient Near East. However less anthropomorphic Yahweh may seem on the superficial level of figurative imaging, the more “human” he emerges as to the deeper reaches of the psychological realm.

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God’s features

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Features of the God of Israel	pp. 45-46	But then, what are the aspects of the trinitarian absolute that we find already present in the Israelite perception of Yahweh? I will refer briefly to three, and then examine one in particular. *Innumerability* — God is at the same time the whole and the only. Divine oneness becomes progressively clearer, but what remains constant is the uniqueness and singularity of the innumerable God. What matters about oneness is not the numeric property (which would yield, through a reductionist approach, but a polytheism of one), but the irrepeatability. Wherever else we see a trend away from multiplicity (the most famous being the Aton episode in fourteenth-century Egypt [on this specific topic, cf. ]), it presents itself as the reductionist need for simplification, not as the essential realization of an altogether different, a truly absolute, simplicity. But in the Old Testament, God remains unnumbered at the very moment that numeration (oneness) is predicated of him. The Old Testament trains our sensitivity to predicate number without ascribing numerability. *Particularity* — An essential aspect of the Old Testament perception is that God, for being the absolute “whole and only,” is emphatically not the “amorphous.” There is no implosive indefiniteness: rather, God is seen to explode in creation, through the seesaw relationship with ancient Israel in her historical development, through the anguished mysticism of the patriarchs, the psalmists, the prophets. There is no anonymity, there is no generic projection of abstract divinity. Consider for instance the notion of choice and vocation. God calls individuals and the whole nation by name. The very notion of a “chosen people” acquires a psychological dimension that contrasts sharply with that of the Syro-Mesopotamian sphere — where the reverse is true: a successful people (say, the Assyrians) have a chosen god (Assur), who is but the projected emblem of their socio-political congruence. The profound insight in the Old Testament is that human particularities do not limit or circumscribe divine particularity. God calls by name Adam, Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Israel herself — but is not reduced to the finitude of those he calls. *Relatability* — Perhaps the most far-reaching trinitarian anticipation of the Old Testament lies in the recognition that God, while wholly above relativity, does nevertheless relate. Such is not the quality of fate in a polytheistic system, fate remaining the broadly underlying, wholly amorphous, and statically inert matrix of reality. Fate does not relate. But the monotheistic God does. He expects a response that is the more acceptable the more confrontational it becomes (from Jacob’s wrestling to Jeremiah’s anguished acceptance of the call). Thus we may say that the great Old Testament intuition (or revelation) is that the absolute is not so implosive as to exclude the relative. God’s absoluteness is not tainted by virtue of his openness. The Old Testament presents us with the notion of a polarity that is no less real for being wholly asymmetrical. God is not tainted by love.

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God’s names

Topic	Page	Excerpt
God's names	p. 40	One may consider, by way of contrast, how words like Elohim “gods,” Ba'al “lord,” or Allah “the god” became, respectively, proper names in ancient Hebrew, in various Canaanite dialects, and in Arabic, from the common nouns they originally were. This is not insignificant, particularly in view of the emphasis that is otherwise placed on naming, as in the well-known cases of Yahweh himself in the Old Testament [...]. A personal name evinces the directness and uniqueness of a “personal” knowledge that starts from the presupposition of an established polarity — the polarity wherein a person expects a person. Modern terms like “(mother) nature,” “(father) time” or “(lady) luck” show how generic concepts that are felt to be linked to some aspect of a superhuman, if not divine, realm evoke the need for personification, however fictitious one may perceive it to be.

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God’s word

Topic	Page	Excerpt
God's word	pp. 306-307	God expresses himself. What he has to say is embodied in articulate human speech. His “word” emerges more and more sharply, through all the definiteness of human language, as something circumscribed, hence very particular. [...] The “word of God” is not just an anonymous “Word” (however much with a capital W) seen as a generic and inarticulate creative force. It is in fact articulate speech, a discourse where specific “words” bring out the full particularity of the speaker and of his will. Herein, once more, lies the great difference vis-à-vis polytheism as in Mesopotamia — where the “word” of a given god (such as Marduk in the Enuma Elish, 4:15-27; cf. also Excerpts) refers not so much to a communicative linguistic utterance, as to a nod that results in a given effect. The built-in antinomy between the absolute and the particular is the dimension that matters to us here. Yahweh’s word is reductive because it communicates at a level that is truly human. It is reductive in the specific sense that it encapsulates the divine within a frame of reference that is culturally bound and definable. The Word is made word, the universal translates to the particular, the absolute to the relative. This unique property, which allows the functional bracketing of two dimensions that cannot be bracketed as to their substance, is the genius of ancient Israel.

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Living God

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Living God	pp. 310-311	Perhaps the most poignant emergence of a trinitarian dimension is the notion of the “living God” that punctuates different strands of the Old Testament. For it goes to the epicenter of divine self-awareness in ways that the polytheistic conception never could fathom. The predication of God’s life is not so much in contrast with a state of death to be predicated of the “other” gods as it is in contrast with their effective immobility. God is felt to be alive because in him we face divine self-consciousness: whatever mystery may shade the absolute from our awareness, we stand reassured that the absolute is not a mystery for himself. God is awake to his own mystery. The theme of wakefulness is a telling one because of the contrast it proposes with the Mesopotamian perception. When Psalm 121 describes the watchfulness of Yahweh (“your guardian will not fall asleep, indeed, the guardian of Israel will not grow drowsy to the point of falling asleep,” 3–4), the obvious echo for any listener familiar with Mesopotamian religious lore is from Atram-hasis or Anzu: there, the supreme god, Enlil, does grow drowsy to the point of falling asleep, and the whole order of things is subverted in the process. Sleep is as much a counterpart of self-consciousness as death is. God’s sleep, his tumbling into unawareness, causes the collapse of, we might say, all metaphysical regularity. By contrast, the living God is a god awake, awake in the first place to himself as the foundation of all being. In this Old Testament perception we witness the Absolute bending over onto himself, as it were. To the outside, God being awake, God being alive matters because humans can rest assured that he will not neglect them, that (more broadly) the cosmic order will not be undermined. But the notion of the living God prefigures, at the same time, the ad intra dynamics of God’s very life. It is an explicit denial of genericity in the divine absolute, and a proclamation instead of the supreme particularity of the person as a fulcrum of self-awareness.

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Messianism

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Waiting and Messianism in Israel	pp. 292-294	Waiting is a fundamental religious attitude that sets the ancient Israelite perception quite apart from that of Mesopotamia and of polytheism in general. Waiting for a faithful God is indeed one of the attitudes most strikingly wanting in Mesopotamian and polytheistic spirituality. It is, by contrast, an essential dimension of monotheistic spirituality, where one is called to let God’s operation unfold through time, [...] through the long wait of the Old Testament [...]. In this perspective, Messianism emerges as a spiritual attitude. The monotheistic perspective, from the Old Testament to us, proclaims a wait that is an intrinsic component of the earthly relationship to God. [...] In other words, waiting is the form taken by the perception of a dynamics within the absolute — and it is a non-vectorial perception of what appears at first to be an exclusively vectorial dimension. Waiting in time implies a direction from one finite point to another. When waiting, we look to a point in time, a finite moment when an event might happen. Waiting for God means that we, as the subjects of the action, wait for a finite moment, while knowing that he, as the object of the desire, never will be such a finite moment. In some ways we expect God to share in our deferring while remaining beyond it. We perceive God to be involved in our directional, vectorial being because of a real, if nonvectorial, dynamism in his inner life — because of the trinitarian essence of the divine absolute. Messianism is, in this light, the other face of creation. The creation ethos of the Old Testament underscores the involvement of the absolute with the relative, as the latter is posited by the former: a vectorial movement is set in motion that tends toward a target from a given starting point, while neither the start nor the end are, properly speaking, “points” at all.

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Polytheism vs. monotheism

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Contrast, polarity between polytheism and monotheism	pp. 44-45	In order to better understand the continuity with the Old Testament, it is good to reflect for a moment on the contrast between polytheism and monotheism, which is much deeper than generally acknowledged. It is a radical contrast between two irreducible modes of thought, so that monotheism can in no way be regarded as a mere rarefaction of polytheism. They are, in effect, two opposing polarities. In the polytheistic polarity, the absolute is accepted as cumulation, as the sum total of numerable fragments. The relative is thereby inserted in the very heart of the absolute and, as it were, sublimated by it. The very juxtaposition of relative elements, of all possible relative elements, is viewed as constituting the absolute. The concept of totality is the defining criterion for absoluteness. The polarity is resolved, we might say, in terms of inclusion. In the monotheistic polarity, the absolute is accepted as the beyond, as a different mode of reality that does not admit numeration. The relative is thereby opposed to the absolute. No matter how complete, totality is never seen as meeting the standards of absoluteness, for it remains a congeries of numerable fragments. Here the polarity is resolved, as it were, in terms of exclusion.

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Torah

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Torah as Logos	pp. 300-301	What we normally translate as “law” can be seen in a more properly metaphysical light if we consider the profound unity between being and goodness and between being and knowledge. Outwardly, the law is a conglomerate of ordinances. But, by virtue of being anchored in the creative will of God, it is at the same time the matrix of reality. The profound difference from the Mesopotamian notion of fate helps to understand its nature. There is no Torah in Mesopotamia because fate does not will it — in fact, fate does not will anything, but is rather itself the sum total of what happens and can ever happen. Interestingly, the basic moral precepts outlined in the Bible are found almost verbatim in Mesopotamia, and even in the New Testament there are important, almost literal, echoes. The real difference is in their foundational origin. In the Bible they derive from, and are founded on, the explicit will of a creator God who posits the rules not to coerce a pre-existing reality, but to establish reality itself with its particular teleological nature. In other words, the rule is the same as both the creation and the goal. For our current argument, it is the particularity of the systemic order of reality that is of interest. God is so enmeshed in creation that he establishes the very last detail of finality, for which the Torah serves as though it were a blueprint. But it is a living blueprint, as it were, for there is a constant correlation between it and the “living God” who has posited it — or, rather, constantly posits it, through a mysterious match between the eternal and the temporal present. The Torah is not a fossil, but a living organism, identical with the personal will from which it issues forth and which nurtures those for whom it is meant [...]. The live interaction between God as the constitutive order and humans as the constituted order of reality presents us with the utmost degree of particularity: the most minute element of order is willed because it is so established. The Torah is the logos because it is both the rationale of being and the rationale of its adherence to its foundational point of origin, in every single manifestation of its nature. Hence it is that the Torah is a presentiment of the Logos. What would otherwise be a mere set of rules is transcended into a living principle, one that articulates the totality of details in their most minute particularity.

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Trinity and nature of God

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Trinity: OT anticipations	pp. 43-44	Where, then, can we find trinitarian anticipations in the Old Testament perception of divine reality? We will seek them, in this article, in the impossible conflating of universality and particularity in the perception of God. On the one hand, God is absolute in terms of his control on all reaches of human perception, from the physical to the spiritual dimension. On the other hand, God is hopelessly enmeshed in the details of a human group, ancient Israel, which was, by all objective standards and by its own self-perception, a marginal and insignificant participant in the political and cultural scene of its day.

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Unpronunciability

Topic	Page	Excerpt
Unpronunciability of God's name in Israel	p. 63	The “Power” is one of the euphemistic terms used in lieu of the unpronounceable name of God, Yahweh, which in writing was rendered by the four, unpronounced, consonants (YHWH) known as the Tetragrammaton.