Three Defining Elements of Ancient Hebrew Faith

This short excerpt, from “Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions” does a good job of summarizing the most defining elements of Old Testament faith – and what separated it from the religions of surrounding peoples.

(1) The Israelites worshipped a God who was the only God

Any worship offered to gods other than Yahweh was condemned, as in the first of the Ten Commandments (Ex 20:3; Dt. 5:7) and in Dt. 6:13: ‘Thou shalt fear Yahweh thy God, and shalt ‘serve’ none but Him.’ In particular, this faith precluded belief in any female deity as consort of Yahweh, and thereby excluded all those sensual rites which stemmed from belief in wedded deities. For Israel there was only one God, a holy God, before whom man became conscious of his uncleanness and his sins: hence one of the purposes of Israelite cult was purification and expiation…

(2) The Israelites worshipped a personal God who intervened in history

Yahweh was the God of the Covenant. Their cult* was not the re-enacting of myths about the origin of the world, as in Mesopotamia, nor of nature-myths, as in Canaan. It commemorated, strengthened or restored that Covenant which Yahweh had made with his people at a certain moment in history. Israel was the first nation to reject extra-temporal myths and to replace them by a history of salvation…It is important to stress that the Israelite cult was connected with history, not with myth.

(3) The Israelites had no images in their cult*

Both versions of the Decalogue contain the prohibition of images (Ex 20:4 and Dt 5:8)… This prohibition was a primitive and characteristic feature of Yahwism, and the reason for it was that Yahweh was a God who could not be seen, and who therefore could not be represented. Yahweh spoke from the height of heaven (Ex 20:22-23), and the Israelites saw nothing when Yahweh spoke to them out of the fire on Sinai (Dt 4:15-18): the two texts draw the same conclusion, that men must not fashion cultic images…In other words, the prohibition of images is an implicit recognition that God is transcendent…From the very beginning, the prohibition of images safeguarded the religion of Israel from copying foreign systems of worship, where gods were represented like men, with bodily and sensual needs demanding satisfaction. The consequences of this were important…there was never any image of Yahweh in the Ark. The was never any such image at Shiloh or in the Temple of Solomon…The Holy of Holies, where Yahweh made himself present, was not open to the faithful; and the altar of Yahweh, unlike other altars, had no statue or divine symbol connected with it. Rather, Israelite sacrifices rose in smoke to the heaven where Yahweh dwelt.

*By ‘cult’ we mean all those acts by which communities or individuals give outward expression to their religious life, by which they seek and achieve contact with God.