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PARTISAN REVIEW
But he defeats
his
purpose in trying to press the Pentateuch into a
"system," thereby necessarily overlooking the manifold strata that
run through the compilation of the various books. At this point the
historian of ritual himself falls victim to ritualism. The subject of
inquiry boomeranged on the method of inquiry.
Goldberg's major impetus was however not philological "arche–
ology" but the fundamental problem of a theodicy. His inquiry led
him to the somewhat startling discovery that even the Pentateuch had
nothing to do with the general "theological concepts" of divine omni–
potence and divine omnipresence.
If
J ahve, the Elohim of Israel,
is
waging war on other Elohim, such a statement is only meaningful if
the superiority of one of the parties is, at least for a while, in doubt.
Neither can the concept of ,divine omnipresence be upheld in the
view of divine revelations. God is not everywhere but only where
he "manifests" himself. The presence of god is limited to the place
where his name is known.
If
god is bound to his manifestation, then
he is also limited to a corporeality from which he can be freed, out–
side the Pentateuch, only by a theological
tour de force.
Only if the concepts of divine omnipotence and omnipresence
are set aside, can the question of divine justice be asked in a mean–
ingful way. Goldberg's answer implies that the just god is at this time
not present, and that his reality and power are eclipsed. Therefore
the question of divine justice does not arise at all. Justice is possible
in an ultimate sense only when the war waged between the gods
comes to an end and the premundane god becomes manifest in the
world. Only at the end of history do the
Milchamoth Jahue,
the
wars of J ahve, end. Only in eschatological terms can the prophet
Isaiah speak about the
jeschuat Jahue,
the victory of Jahve, in the
war with the "other gods," when the primordial "one god" will
manifest himself as the Elohim of Israel. Since the primordial god
is not present in the world, it is the task of the peoples to bring the
primordial god into power, thus enacting his liberation from the
bondage of being a mere potentiality.
This eschatological theogony reminds the historian of religion
strongly of the ideology of Jewish gnostics in the late eighteenth
century, when the radical wing of Sabbatian messianists developed a
strikingly similar theology distinguishing the premundane "one god"
from the "many gods" in history. Together with the gnostics, Oskar
