DID JESUS WORSHIP YAHWEH? | HOLY COVENANT OR ET CONQUEST? | PAUL WALLIS

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Questioning Yahweh’s Character

Does that sound anything like the character of God as Jesus portrays God? That’s not a trick question; it’s not a difficult question. The answer is no, it doesn’t. So how is it that for the best part of 2000 years, Christianity has run with the idea that the Yahweh character in the Hebrew scriptures is a portrayal of God, and that that is the God that Jesus worshiped?

Reading from 1 Samuel 15

Samuel said to Saul, “I am the man whom Yahweh has sent to anoint you as king of his people Israel. Now go and crush Amalek; put him under the curse of destruction along with everything he possesses. Don’t spare him, but kill man and woman, child and nursing baby, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”

So Saul crushed the Amalekites, beginning at Havilah in the direction of Shur, which is to the east of Egypt. He took Agag, king of the Amalekites, alive and, executing the curse of destruction, put all the people to the sword. But Saul and the army spared Agag and the best of the sheep and cattle, the fatlings and lambs, and all that was good. They did not want to consign these to the curse of destruction; they consigned only what was poor and worthless.

Then Yahweh sent a message to Samuel: “I regret having made Saul king, since he has fallen short of obedience to me and has not carried out my precise instructions.” Samuel was appalled and cried out to Yahweh all night long.

In the morning, Samuel set off to find Saul. When Samuel reached Saul, Saul said, “May you be blessed by Yahweh; I have carried out Yahweh’s orders.” Samuel replied, “Then what is this bleating of sheep in my ears and the lowing of cattle that I hear?”

Saul said, “They have been brought from Amalek, the people having spared the best of the sheep and cattle to sacrifice them to Yahweh your God; the rest we have consigned to the curse of destruction.”

Samuel then said to Saul, “Stop! Let me tell you what Yahweh said to me last night. Yahweh anointed you as king of Israel. When Yahweh sent you on a mission, he told you: ‘Go and put those sinners, the Amalekites, under the curse of destruction and make war on them until they are exterminated.’ Why then did you not obey Yahweh’s voice? Why did you fall on the booty and do what is wrong in Yahweh’s eyes?”

Saul replied to Samuel, “But I did obey Yahweh’s voice. I went on the mission which Yahweh gave me. I brought back Agag, king of the Amalekites. I put Amalek under the curse of destruction. And from the booty, the people have taken the best sheep and cattle and what was under the curse of destruction only to sacrifice them to Yahweh your God in Gilgal.”

To which Samuel said, “Is Yahweh pleased by burnt offerings and sacrifices or by obedience to Yahweh’s voice? Truly, I tell you, obedience is better than sacrifice, submissiveness than the fat of rams. Rebellion is a sin of sorcery, and presumption a crime of idolatry. Because you have failed Yahweh’s instruction, he has rejected you as king.”

Saul then said to Samuel, “I have sinned, having broken Yahweh’s order and your instructions. Please forgive my sin and return with me so that I can bow down and abase myself before Yahweh.”

Samuel said to Saul, “I will not come back with you, since you have failed Yahweh’s word, and Yahweh has rejected you as king of Israel.”

Samuel then said, “Bring me Agag, king of the Amalekites.” Agag came towards him unsteadily, saying, “Truly, death is bitter.” Samuel then butchered Agag in the presence of Yahweh at Gilgal.

Comparison to Jesus’ Portrayal of God

Now let’s be honest: does that sound anything like the character of God as Jesus describes God in the Gospels? It’s not a trick question; it’s not a difficult question. The answer is no. That is nothing like the qualities of God revealed by Jesus and those who wrote for him in the New Testament. When those writers describe the character of God, they speak about a god of love and forgiveness—love which is patient and kind, never jealous, not boastful or conceited, is never rude, never seeks its own advantage, doesn’t take offense or store up grievances. That is not the character of Yahweh in the Hebrew scriptures, what we call the Old Testament.

And this is not a glitch. This behavior that we read about in 1 Samuel 15 is the same character revealed by Yahweh whenever he is an active character in the Hebrew scriptures, from start to finish. You could find a similar moment in the time of Moses. Just like Samuel, the spokesperson for Yahweh, executes this brutal slaughter, so Moses does the same.

Now note that when Yahweh rejects Saul, he is rejecting Saul because he isn’t brutal enough. Saul has won the war, but he hasn’t killed every woman, child, and baby. He wants scorched earth; he wants a genocide. So on what basis do we consider genocide the worst crime against humanity, and yet we excuse it if the Yahweh character does it? And how is it that Christianity, for the best part of 2000 years, has run with the idea that the Yahweh character of the Hebrew scriptures is a portrayal of God, and that that is the God that Jesus worshiped?

Origins of Yahweh and El Shaddai

The answer is in the Gospels themselves. What I argue in The Eden Conspiracy is that although Yahweh later became used as the holy name for God, originally Yahweh referenced an entity which colonized our Hebrew ancestors and governed over them with brutality. And that Yahweh was not a portrayal of God and was certainly not the God whom Jesus called Father.

The idea that Yahweh was in fact originally a violent colonizer is emphasized by another name that Yahweh identifies with himself, and that’s the name El Shaddai. And for some time, there’s been a discussion in academic circles as to what exactly El Shaddai means. It has been conceded by the New Jerusalem Bible and the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew Lexicon that “the Almighty” is in fact an invented translation. El Shaddai does not mean that, and they suggest it could mean either “God of the mountains” or “God of the plains.”

However, you go to the root meanings of those words, and what you reach is “the powerful one,” “the destroyer.” And Yahweh says in a later text that he introduced himself to Abraham as the powerful one, the destroyer. And within a couple of chapters, he has destroyed two cities: Sodom and Gomorrah.

And there’s a very interesting moment in which the tribes of Israel are at war with the Syrians, and the Syrians think: “If we can draw them into the plains, we’re going to win, because El Shaddai means the powerful one of the mountains, doesn’t it? And therefore he won’t be in his home territory if he’s in the plains; we can slaughter them there.”

And when Yahweh El Shaddai hears this, he becomes so furious, and he says, “I’ll show them.” And what he shows them the next day is a total extermination, proving that he’s not the powerful one of the mountains or the plains; he’s the powerful one, the destroyer. And it gives them evidence for that on that occasion and many others throughout the Hebrew scriptures.

Historical Identification of Yahweh with God

If Yahweh’s character is so abominable, why is it that for so long Christians have identified their concept of God—a transcendent, loving God—with the character of Yahweh in the Hebrew scriptures? By the time Jesus came on the scene, Yahweh was being used as the holy name for God; it was the name for the Jewish God. And yet, when you read the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels and referred to in the New Testament, Jesus never once uses the name Yahweh, and neither does anyone who writes for him.

In fact, Jesus distances himself from the Yahweh character. When he does refer to the Yahweh character, it is disparagingly. One example is in the Gospel of John, chapter 8. Here Jesus is addressing the leaders of the Jewish people. When he criticizes their theology, they reply: “We are not illegitimate children; the only father we have is God.”

Jesus answered: “If God were your father, you would love me, since I have my origin in God and have come from him. I did not come of my own accord, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? Because you cannot bear to listen to my words. You are from your father the devil, and you prefer to do what your father wants. He was a murderer from the start; he was never grounded in the truth. There is no truth in him at all. When he lies, he’s speaking true to his nature, because he is a liar and the father of lies.”

Your father was a murderer, a liar, and the father of lies. Could he really be saying that about Yahweh?

On another occasion, Jesus completely mocks the idea that Yahweh could be considered any kind of father. Now, “father” was the language that Jesus used to address God. Now, the Gospels and New Testament are written in Greek, and so the word “God” is “Theos,” and the concept was fairly established that this referred to the God and source of the cosmos and everything in it—that in which we all live and move and have our being, of which we are all offspring. That’s the Apostle Paul’s summation of what “Theos” means. And Jesus addresses Theos as “Abba,” as Father.

But he mocks the idea that Yahweh was any kind of father, and you can find it in Luke 11 and Matthew 7. Here Jesus is describing a scenario that was very familiar to his Jewish hearers. He says: “Now which of you fathers, if your children were hungry or thirsty, would give them a stone if they asked you for food or drink? Would give them a snake?”

And it would sound like a completely perverse scenario to us today if we were unfamiliar with the Hebrew scriptures. This is a scenario well known to anyone who knows the Yahweh stories, because there did come moments when the people of Israel were starving and thirsty in the desert. And when they cried out for water, Yahweh provided them with a stone and said: “You can get water from there; I’ll show you how you can find water from the stone.”

And then he provides them with emergency rations. They don’t have access to proper food, so they have an emergency ration of manna—a word that means we don’t even know what it is—and it was just enough to sustain them from day to day, but they couldn’t have more than enough because it wouldn’t last for more than a day.

Well, after a while, the tribes of Israel become tired of that provision: “We can’t go on living like this; we’re hungry, we’re thirsty; we want to go home.” And they put their complaint to Moses, Yahweh’s deputy. Yahweh is furious that these people are complaining about his provision, and so he sends snakes or serpents to attack them and kill them, and many die and many are made ill.

So there’s the scenario: hungry and thirsty children crying out for food and drink, and they’re given a stone and a snake. And Jesus in Matthew 7 and Luke 11 says: “What kind of father would treat his children like that?” He makes a mockery of the Yahweh stories as if they were depictions of the God whom he called Father.

Jesus in the Tradition of Ancient Judaism

Now, when Jesus spoke disparagingly of Yahweh, he was speaking in the tradition of ancient Judaism. He wasn’t attacking Judaism; he was speaking in the same way that his ancestors did. And this is recorded for us in the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Second Kings. It tells us this: 2 Kings 17.

The Israelites worshiped other powerful ones. They spoke slightingly of Yahweh their powerful one, and they built themselves high places wherever they lived, from every watchtower to every fortified town. They set up pillars and sacred poles on every high hill and under every green tree. They sacrificed on all the high places. They were following the pattern of their ancestors. They rejected the commandments of Yahweh their powerful one. They despised his laws and the covenant he had made with their ancestors, making sacred poles and commemorating the whole seba’ hashamayim, the sky armies.

In The Eden Conspiracy, I show that the author’s intent may be slightly different from the narrator’s intent, because the narrator wants us to be horrified that the Jews of the ancient past commemorated contact with other powerful beings whom they remembered with affection. They remembered Asherah with affection because she had helped their ancestors make their great leap forward into agronomy and city building and development into a civilization.

But they remembered being colonized by Yahweh as a very negative thing, and they had rejected Yahwism as their religion and as their law. So that was the memory that has now been written into the text. The author has guaranteed we will never forget that that is what Judaism used to be. But the narrator wants us to be horrified that that was persisting.

And when we get into the stories of Kings, Hezekiah and King Josiah, we’re into the story of reform, where Jewish ritual practice was pared down to become monotheism. And the panoply of the seba’ hashamayim—this great array of advanced beings who came to our planet in the deep past—all that would be forgotten. The statues knocked down, the altars broken, the temples demolished. The carvings of the seba’ hashamayim in the Jerusalem Temple would be defaced and destroyed. The entire temple to Asherah, which Solomon had had built in a town next to Jerusalem dedicated to Asherah, that would be demolished.

Now there’s only the Jerusalem Temple honoring Yahweh. There’s the king and his God Yahweh; all the others will be forgotten. The other priesthoods disbanded. The narrative has been changed; control centralized. And so we now have an ordered theocracy with one God, one king, one high priest, one temple in Jerusalem—all the tithes coming there, and only the one high priest telling us what’s what, what’s true, what’s false, what’s news, what’s fake news. And yet the author has guaranteed that we remember what Judaism was in the beginning.

So when Jesus speaks slightingly of Yahweh and rejects his laws, he is speaking in the tradition of primitive Judaism.

Early Church Confusion on Yahweh’s Laws

Yet in the early church, it was unclear whether Jesus really had repudiated the laws of Yahweh. It took a while for the idea to bed down that Jesus really had rejected Yahwism and repudiated Yahweh’s laws. And one of the reasons for this confusion can be found in a passage in the Gospel of Matthew: Matthew 5:17.

Jesus said: “Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the law of the prophets. I’ve come not to abolish them but to complete them or fulfill them. I tell you the truth: until heaven and earth disappear, not one dot, not one little stroke, is to disappear from the law until everything is fulfilled.”

So there is an ambiguity there, because there are two time frames for the ending of the law. Now make clear first of all: he is talking about the ending of the period of Yahwistic law. One time frame is “until heaven and earth disappear.” He says nothing’s going to change about the law, and he uses this phrase “until heaven and earth disappear,” which could be a time frame or it could be an emphatic phrase saying the law is not going to change ever.

But then there’s another time frame: “until everything has been fulfilled.” And the apostolic writers are very clear that Jesus came to fulfill the law—that means to complete it, and that means completed action. They put an end date on the laws of Yahweh.

But you can see why there was a little bit of ambiguity there and why it took a while for the apostolic leaders and the early church fathers to work out that Jesus really had repudiated the law. Now there are many occasions when this seemed to be the implication, because Jesus was saying: “Moses said this, but I say this. You’ve heard it said”—and he’s referring to Yahwistic law—“but I say this.” And the hearers of the time understood what a shocking claim that really was.

Could Jesus really be saying that the moment was coming when we can completely forget about Yahweh and all his laws and move on to something better? Well, this was the debate that the apostolic church had to have, because what it boiled down to as Christianity got going was: to become a Christian, do you have to obey the laws of Yahweh? Do you have to believe in the Yahweh stories to be a Christian? Because many people from outside of Judaism, outside of the Jewish faith, were following Jesus, and the apostles had to get their heads around what this meant.

The Jerusalem Council in Acts 15

And so they called a council in Jerusalem, and it is recorded for us in Acts 15. And they address this question: what do we do with the stories and the laws of Yahweh? Do we maintain them in Christianity moving forward? And they came to a decision at the end of this council, chaired by Jesus’s brother James. And the answer is a resounding no; we don’t. Yahweh’s law is at an end.

They could only have reached that conclusion if they’d been absolutely clear that Jesus had put clear blue water between what he was on about and what Yahwism was all about. If they had any doubt, they would have fudged it. But they were clear: Jesus had fulfilled—put an end to—the era of Yahweh. Now something better was going to happen.

And the only little rule they came up with was: only we should ensure that believers remain sexually pure, and they don’t eat meat sacrificed to idols. Now what does that mean? Were they keeping one of the 650 commandments of Yahwism, or were they saying something else?

When they say “don’t eat meat sacrificed to idols,” they’re not talking about buying meat from the market and you don’t know what was done to it previously. No: eating meat sacrificed to idols means sacrificing to idols. And what they are saying is: we should be sure that Christians moving forward don’t worship anything that is less than God. Don’t eat meat sacrificed to idols; our worship is of God, the source of the cosmos and everything in it—that in which we all live and move and have our being, of which we are all offspring. That’s how the Apostle Paul defines God in Acts 17. And Christians mustn’t worship anything less.

Acts 15 is a very clear repudiation of Yahweh’s law, because the apostles understood: Jesus never spoke in Yahweh’s name; he never used the name Yahweh. Whenever he referred to Yahweh, it was always to repudiate his laws or disparage his stories or mock the idea that Yahweh was any kind of father.

And towards the end of John’s Gospel, he makes clear to his Jewish followers that his God and Father was something unknown to them. Now they knew Yahweh very well; they were Yahwists. But Jesus is now saying: my God and Father—what I’m talking about—is something new to you.

John 14:8: Philip said to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and then we should be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and still you do not know me? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”

Of course, this echoes what Jesus had told the Jewish leaders in John 8, where he said: “You don’t know me and you don’t know my Father.” So there is a dis-equation of Yahweh and the Father of Jesus.

Early Church Fathers and Philosophical Preparation

So how did this confusion arise? Early church fathers regarded Stoicism and Plato in particular as a useful preparation for Jesus. Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen—all wrote in these terms. Justin Martyr put it very clearly: he said that the Yahwist laws and the prophetic tradition of Judaism was the preparation for the Jewish people for what Jesus was on about. And that he had been prepared for Jesus through Stoicism and through being a student of Plato.

Now he’s only repeating in effect what the Apostle Paul writes in the Book of Galatians. So what does that mean mathematically for this new faith, Christianity? Judaism was the preparation for the Jews; the Vedas were a preparation for the Hindus, so on and so forth. Plato was his personal preparation.

And as Christianity decided it was going to be an international faith and was not going to be tethered to Judaism—was not going to be a Jewish sect—mathematically that made international thought, crystallized by Plato, the more useful preparation. And I think if the early church had followed the logic of Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Marcion, we would have had an Old Testament of Plato and a New Testament of Jesus in the apostolic writings.

But instead, what happened was the Jewish scriptures were glued onto the apostolic writings to make a Bible of Old Testament and New Testament. And the Hebrew canon that was glued on—well, that was the 6th century BCE redaction of the Hebrew scriptures.

Now you remember I mentioned those kings Hezekiah and Josiah; they initiated this ritual reform of Judaism. So they pared it down to get rid of the paleo-contact aspect, so that people would forget about the seba’ hashamayim, the sky armies, and the elohim, the council of powers, and remember only Yahweh. And so they demolished the temple that Solomon had erected to go alongside the Jerusalem Temple—one dedicated to Asherah and the beings who came and helped our ancestors discover agriculture. Ordered that the other temples be demolished, the other priesthoods disbanded. The standing stones marking the places of ancient contact knocked down; the altars where the commemorations were made broken.

All that is the ritual reform which begins in the 8th century BCE. This reform continues into the 6th century BCE. So by the time we have the reconstruction of the temple and Ezra the senior priest overseeing that, we now have a set of scriptures teaching Yahwism: there’s only one God, and his name is Yahweh. And it’s that edit of those stories that got glued onto the apostolic writings.

Consequences of Confusing Yahweh with God

The problem with gluing them together is that it sends the signal that this God whom we call Yahweh is the same God whom Jesus worshiped and taught about. And it’s simply not the case. Though Yahweh came to be used as the holy name for God, originally it referred to this colonizing entity—this experience of colonization and brutalization by other non-human powers.

And the problem is, if you confuse those things—if you confuse God with a dragon, if you confuse God with a colonizer, if you confuse God with a violent, genocidal, jealous ET entity that has no empathy towards its humans—you end up with a very distorted vision not only of God but of yourself.

If you worship a God who divides the human race into “my people” and “not my people,” you will have to think in that same racist kind of way. You worship a xenophobe; you will become a xenophobe. You worship violence; you will justify violence. And indeed we have through the ages: we’ve justified invasions, colonizations, enslavements, misogyny, all kinds of violence and injustice in the name of a violent God.

And my books—The Eden Conspiracy, Escaping from Eden, The Scars of Eden, Echoes of Eden—argue that the time is more than due for us to unravel this connection: to be sure that when we use the word “God,” we’re speaking only of the source of the cosmos and everything in it—that in which we all live and move and have our being, of which we are all offspring—which is a beautiful, inclusive vision in the words of the Apostle Paul in Acts 17. And that we do not consider the Yahweh figure of the Hebrew stories as God. It is something else. And in The Eden Conspiracy, I go into the root meanings of key words to show that Yahweh is just one of a number of non-human demographics with whom our ancestors had to deal in the deep past. We have Yahweh, El Shaddai, Elyon, all the Elohim, the elohim adah—they are stories of paleo-contact, not of “Almighty God,” which turns out to be an invented translation altogether.

Contrasts Between Yahweh and Jesus’ Teachings

When I go to the teachings of Jesus, I see a great difference. Yahweh was all about: “You worship me and nobody else because I’m a jealous God.” And Jesus said: “I didn’t come to be served; I came to help you.”

Yahweh believes that he can micromanage us to the point of telling us what we can eat and not eat, whereas in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus declares all foods clean.

Yahweh is unforgiving and will not be reasoned with, and Jesus says: “Your sins are forgiven.”

Yahweh is all about: “You follow my orders to the letter even if they don’t make sense to you.” And there comes a moment when his king, King David, is nearing the point where he might question Yahweh’s orders. What he does is he counts his armies because he’s now old enough that he only wants to fight winnable wars. So he counts his troops—a very sensible thing to do. But for Yahweh, that’s just too close to weighing up his instructions. You do not think for yourself; you do not use your own mind; you do not trust in your own judgment; you trust in Yahweh with all your heart. And as a punishment for thinking for himself, Yahweh slaughters 70,000 of David’s troops.

Now contrast that with what Jesus says, because in his first message that he toured with for a year—according to the Gospel of Matthew—Jesus not only encourages us to use our own minds, but he says: “Go beyond the mind”—the root meaning says this: “go beyond the mind because the whole cosmic realm is available to you.” That’s the Kingdom of Heaven: the whole cosmic realm is available to you.

Elsewhere in the Gospel of Matthew—and you can find it in the Gospel of Thomas as well, the earliest Christian source according to many scholars—he says: “The whole of the cosmic realm is within you.” Now can you imagine a more profound invitation to explore what’s possible than that?

So on the one hand, you have Yahwism, where your role and my role is only to obey and worship and do what we’re told. And Jesus here is saying: “Explore what’s possible. The things you’ve seen me do—these and even greater things will you do—because the whole of the cosmic realm is available to you.” One is demeaning, diminishing, disempowering; and the other is empowering, invitational, and inspiring.

In my book The Eden Conspiracy, I show how Yahwism and what Jesus was on about are two completely different things. Jesus didn’t teach Yahwism; he didn’t talk about Yahweh; and he certainly didn’t worship him.

Ancestral Memory and Freedom

Our ancestors wanted us to know about what happened under Yahweh. They wanted us to know about colonization; they wanted us to know about covert government; they wanted us to know about previous civilizations; they wanted us to know about ancient technology. All those stories are there in the Hebrew canon, and the authors of the Hebrew canon have guaranteed that we never forget it.

I believe the Bible is in fact one of the most detailed and important curations of ancestral memory of paleo-contact that we have in the world. It stands alongside the Vedas of Hinduism; it stands alongside the Popol Vuh of the Mayan tradition; it stands alongside traditions we have from the Epic people in Nigeria, the Yoruba people, Edo people of Nigeria, the Dogon people of Mali, West Africa. In fact, all around the world are narratives of ancient contact. So our ancestors wanted us to know about that.

And Jesus wanted us to know what it is to be free from that kind of tyrannical leadership, free from that kind of colonization, enjoying our own power and our own ability to explore the cosmos and what that might mean for you and me.

Yahweh came for slaves; Jesus came to set the prisoners free, so that you and I could have a better human experience. Thank you.