Monotheism
© ITCHS 2024
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DRAFT
[This essay is a draft second chapter for a book-length consideration of the character of the Silent Years, the years between the last canonical prophet of the Old Testament and the prophetic works of the New Testament. The first chapter considers The Seven Day Week as a Jewish conception progressively imported into the Roman Empire.]
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Probably the least controversial sense that during the 400 Silent Years Judaism influenced the Western Tradition is the general consensus that monotheistic thinking spread among upper classes of previously pagan populations. Since everyone is willing to agree that there was Judaic influence involved in this shifting religio-philosophic perspective in classical times, it is the obvious place to start to familiarize ourselves with the kind of thinking we are essentially accepting in coming to this conclusion.
We are here interested in the kind of thought as much as in the conclusion.
We might want to start by establishing the period we are willing to consider. Since we are looking at the Silent Years, our consideration should end somewhere in the first century A.D. Such thinking is obviously only approximate, not definitive, but we might want to take something like 70 A.D. and the destruction of Herod’s Temple as a symbolic end-date for our consideration. From a Christian perspective, the Silent Years end earlier with the coming of John the Baptist and thus have an end date in the mid-to-late 20’s, A.D. For the start of the period, technically Malachi is the last of the Old Testament Prophets, with a date of approximately 430 B.C. In the case of monotheism, such a date wouldn’t be very important in any case because the movement away from paganism and toward monotheism clearly has Greek antecedents that are well documented and centuries earlier.
All of which emphasizes that our thinking is not about realities exclusive to the silent period. Monotheism had been growing in the Mediterranean well before the Silent Years began. But in terms of what happened during the Silent Years, there is abundant evidence that the seeds of monotheistic thinking were developing apace throughout the period. We do not need specific proof that this or that direct contact with Judaism was decisive in such very major development to conclude that the presence of Jews, their synagogues, and their commercial and other interactions with those all around them were conducive to such thinking in a previously pagan world.
All of which said, how far back can we show monotheistic tendencies in Mediterranean thinking? The answer is probably much more controversial than the reality by the end of the Silent Years period.
Rather than answer the question directly and controversially, let us go the simpler route to establish when the Mediterranean world might have come to be influenced by Judaism.
The biblical account indicates profound Hebrew monotheistic influence on Egypt (which, after all was a Mediterranean country) between 1800 and 1400 B.C. There is even indication that Egypt or at least its Pharaoh (Akhenaton) flirted with monotheism in the period. But then the Hebrews disappeared from Egypt only to reappear away from the sea in the mountainous reaches of Canaan where they established a separatist way of life only occasionally broken by periods like the Davidic-Solomonic Empire that admittedly brought them more in contact with their neighbors.
These sporadic periods of intermingling notwithstanding, the existence of substantial Israelite intermixing with the outside world only occurs with the Assyrian Captivity in 722 B.C. Anytime after that, anytime after the 8th century B.C., we can expect to find some inter-personal or inter-community influence of Jews at some distance from the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. This is a conservative estimate. If even some of the realities of the book of Jonah are accepted, a substantial personal influence of Judaism is perceptible on Nineveh, the Assyrian capitol, as early as the 860’s B.C. That would be better than 100 years before the traditional date for the founding of Rome. Greek philosophic movement toward monotheism is perhaps perceptible before 600 B.C. Clearly, this is well within the timeframe we have established for possible direct inter-personal influence from Judaism.
We can see more of what we mean and do not mean by possible Judaic influence by considering the great Greek philosopher-mathematician, Pythagoras from the 6th century, flourishing a lifetime after the fall of Jerusalem. Pythagoras himself is often thought of as from Magna Graecia, the southern boot of Italy. However, he is actually originally from the isle of Samos in Ionia (the western shore of modern Turkey) as were evidently an already formed school or party. He left Samos perhaps under pressure from the local tyrant, and headed west where he and fellow intellectuals established a political program of moral education and purification and eventually took over the colonial government.
We know Pythagoras, however, mainly for his later work in mathematics and astronomy after the political program had shattered. Every high school now teaches the Pythagorean theorem that the sum of the squares of two sides of a right triangle equals the square of the hypotenuse. Things get sketchy that far back in Greece, and we don’t have a very clear sense of what Pythagoras himself discovered and what others of his school, the Pythagoreans, may have discovered. Aristotle in discussing them always refers to the school rather than to the individual.
One way or another, it’s clear that the Pythagoreans understood the theory of parallels in geometry. They had also figured out how to draw a perfect regular pentagon with normal tools of Euclidean geometry—try it for yourself and you should be impressed. And once they had the perfect pentagon, they could go on to create the pentagon star, seen prominently on U.S. fighter and bomber planes of WW II (substituting an outer circle for the original pentagon). The figure can be described mathematically as three interwoven triangles.
Even more interesting, once one has constructed the pentagon star, one finds within the five star points another pentagon, also perfect but inverted from the first and much smaller. The Pythagoreans used the pentagon star as a badge to recognize one another.
This, of course, is all mathematics and all Greek to many of us. But consider that the Star of David is two perfectly balanced and interwoven triangles. Here Greek mathematicians are using perfectly balanced and triple triangles. Coincidence perhaps.
Also consider that the pentagon within the star within the pentagon suggests that an even smaller (and perfect) pentagon can be formed by the same rules and procedures, and after that another, and another, ever smaller in a theoretically unending progression. The pentagon star, in other words, is a forceful demonstration of the idea of an infinite series and of the infinitely small. By imagination, we can also see that our original pentagon could be the diminutive of a larger pentagon star, and progressively could soon reach proportions beyond human imagination. In other words, the pentagon star is also a symbol for infinity itself.
Now none of this is very biblical or very Jewish in its interests. The Bible doesn’t treat God mathematically, whereas the Pythagoreans eventually felt that everything was a number and that The God was number itself.
Also, the ideas of infinity and the idea of the (monotheistic) God don’t come easily in paganism and animism generally. But they are natural contemplations for people familiar with biblical ideas.
Moral purity often requires a leap in pagan thought, and a moral-purity program makes the Pythagoreans virtually unique among pagans of their day. Moral purity is a routine issue in the Old Testament.
So, does all this prove that Pythagoreans were in personal or community contact with Jews as displaced persons after either the Assyrian or Babylonian Captivity? Clearly not. And as already said, we don’t have that much real direct evidence about the Pythagoreans to say almost anything for sure about them.
But what is demonstrated here is that the Pythagoreans may have had ideas related to what they had picked up directly or indirectly from Jewish refugees. And that is quite consistent with a commonplace understanding that monotheism became more prevalent among originally pagan peoples after Jews had become refugees from Israel.
So, in terms of thinking processes, we are examining the hypothesis that the Silent Years were really not that silent, that they were years when Judaism reached out into all the world. Particularly, non-Semitic peoples of Europe became more aware of the non-pagan ideas the Jews brought with them. Often disguised, often put into explicitly anti-Jewish forms like the planet-god names of the seven-day week, such ideas have moved the world.
Within the first century of the Silent Years, we have the advanced philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. They may have had more direct contact with Judaism than we can find any record for. Or perhaps not. But they are aware of earlier philosophers, including the Pythagoreans, and they are at ease considering monotheistic solutions.
No one evidently doubts a very accelerated acceptance of monotheistic ideas during the Silent Year period. No one doubts that Jews had been increasingly displaced from Israel among pagan populations around the Mediterranean before and during the period under discussion. Others may doubt, but this study finds no particular reason to resist the idea that personal and community interactions with Jews throughout the period were assisting these undoubted progressions in Mediterranean civilization.
Last chapter: The Seven Day Week
Next chapter: Slavery