Title: The Great Angel – Israel’s Second God

Author: Margaret Barker

Bibliographic info: 272 pp

Cover: Soft

Publisher: Westminster John Knox (1992)

ISBN-10: 0664253954

ISBN-13: 9780664253950

Buy it from Amazon

With thanks to Westminster John Knox press for the free review copy!

This review is a condensed version of my series of five blog entries starting here.

The overall thesis of this book is that pre-exilic Judaism was not a strictly monotheistic religion as is commonly assumed. Instead, Barker sees pre-exilic Judaism as being polytheistic, or more precisely, henotheistic. Barker believes that at the time of the Babylonian exile there was a “ ” reform which altered some of the core beliefs of Judaism, namely, the belief in multiple deities to the belief in one deity.

Barker asserts that the writings of the Old Testament still exhibit traces of this henotheism. The primary way in which the Old Testament reveals this is through the usage of different words for God, more specifically, Yahweh and El/Elohim/Elyon. According to Barker’s vision of pre-exilic Judaism, Yahweh was worshipped by the Israelites as one of many sons of Elyon.

After reading the initial chapter, I thought that Barker may be a Latter Day Saint (Mormon) due to the affinity that this thesis has with Mormon theology about God, as well as the fact that I have seen this book referred to in LDS literature. However she is not a Mormon but is instead a Methodist pastor, albeit one of those liberal Methodist pastors that one hears about so often (just kidding)

In this book, Barker gives eleven different lines of evidence to back up her claim. The first is the way that the Old Testament distinguishes between the “sons of El” and the “sons of Yahweh.” Barker argues that the traditional way of viewing the title “son of God” as referring to either angels, the King of Israel, or the nation of Israel, fails to recognize a crucial factor – the distinction between the “sons of Elohim” and the “sons of Yahweh.” As she states:

This distinction is important for at least two reasons; Yahweh was one of the sons of El Elyon; and Jesusin the Gospels was described as a Son of El Elyon, God Most High. In other words he was described as a heavenly being. Thus the annunciation narrative has the term “Son of the Most High’ (Luke 1.32) and the demoniac recognized his exorcist as ‘Son of the Most High God’ (Mark 5.7). Jesus is not called the son of Yahweh nor the son of the Lord, but he is called Lord. We also know that whoever wrote the New Testament translated the name Yahweh by Kyrios, Lord. [pp 4-5]

A crucial Old Testament text that she brings up is the following:

When the Most High [Elyon] gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God [Elohim]. But the LORD’s [Yahweh] portion is his people, Jacob [Israel] his allotted heritage. (Deu 32:8-9)

Barker sees the this Old Testament passage as showing that:

“Elyon the High God had allocated the nations to the various sons of God; one of these sons was Yahweh to whom Israel had been allocated (Deut 32.9) [p 6]

Another important Old Testament text she touches upon is that in the opening verses of Job. On this passage she says:

The prologue describes how the sons of God (sons of the ‘elohim), one of whom was Satan, came to Yahweh and challenged him to test the loyalty of Job.  The usual English renderings of Job 1.6 imply that Yahweh was superior to the Sons of God: ‘the sons of God came to present themselves before Yahweh.’ This is not necessarily what the Hebrew implies since the same verb is used in Ps. 2.2, and there it means ‘set themselves against Yahweh.’ Thus the prologue to Job depicts a heaven where Yahweh  is one among many  and is challenged to test the loyalty of his servant. [p 6]

Barker also discusses other Old Testament texts which supposedly show traces of Judaism’s henotheism such as the “sons of God” passage in Genesis 6 and the usage of the term in the psalter. Barker then discusses the title “son of Yahweh”, after which she concludes that:

All the texts in the Hebrew Bible distinguish clearly between the divine sons of Elohim/Elyon and those human beings who are called sons of Yahweh. This must be significant. It must mean that the terms originated at a time when Yahweh was distinguished from whatever was meant by El/Elohim/Elyon. [p 10]

Barker then makes the case as to why we cannot be certain about what we know about Judaism from before the Babylonian captivity. Her reasoning behind this is essentially that a reformation of the Jewish religion occurred at this time, by the “Deuteronomists”, who dramatically altered the belief and practices of Judaism. Barker lays out two possibilities of what happened at the time of the Babylonian captivity: 1) the Deuteronomists reformed Judaism for the better by bringing it back from error; or 2) the Deuteronomists changed the original form of Judaism and replaced it with their own idea of what Judaism should be.

The next line of evidence used by Barker to back up her thesis is the usage of “Yahweh” and “the angel of Yahweh” in the Old Testament. This is done by examining various accounts where people encountered either Yahweh or the angel of Yahweh, such as David in 2 Samuel 24, Gideon in Judges 6, Zechariah in Zechariah 12, the Exodus account, etc.

Barker then attempts to show that pre-exilic Israel believed in the ancient goddess, although not as a separate deity from Yahweh (the son of El-Elyon) but simply as the female aspect of Yahweh. She lays out her case in passages and tradition regarding Wisdom, the Queen of heaven, and Asherah. Barker concludes this section with the following words which sums up what she believes the early church believed:

It is only by recognizing this double aspect of the ancient Yahweh that we can begin to understand the writings of the first Christian centuries with their trinity of El Elyon, Yahweh and Wisdom. [pg. 67]

Then Barker tries to examine the role that the Angels had in Judaism before and after the Deuteronomic reform. She also apparently believes that very late texts like 3 Enoch (circa. 5^th century) and Kabbalistic traditions have managed to retain some aspects of the real pre-exilic Judaism.

Another line of reasoning that Barker uses to support her thesis is the writings of Philo and early Jewish writings like the Targums. Naturally, she finds great affinities between Philo’s writings and her idea of pre-exilic Judaism. She rejects the idea that the Memra of the Targums was an impersonal “buffer” idea to make God less personal with men and the world, and instead believes that the Memra was a personal “second” god, essentially the same thing as the Logos of Philo.

The last few lines of evidence that Barker points to are the beliefs and writings of the Gnostics, the early Christians, and finally the writings of the New Testament itself. About the Gnostics, Barker writes:

The crucial information which the gnostic texts afford is that they identify the second God with the God of the Jews in a way that Philo does not; sometimes he is named with a version of the divine name and sometimes he is identified with Jesus. [p 189]

In regards to early Christian writings, Barker looks at the pseudo-Clementine writings which have Simon Magus and the Apostle Peter arguing about faith. Simon Magus claims that Yahweh was the chief son of God yet distinct from the Most High God. Barker then touches upon statements made by Origen, Eusebius, Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, and more. Finally, Barker provides a survey of the Christology that is presented in the New Testament, focusing upon texts which present Jesus as being identified as Yahweh.

Overall, I found this book to be a fascinating read. However, seeing as the Old Testament, Ancient Near East etc, are not fields of study that I am greatly knowledgeable about, I cannot give a detailed critique of Barker’s thesis. I found the first chapter to be fascinating, but after that it seemed to slip downhill. What I mean is that I found too much of her arguments relying on pure speculation and which ignore facts that don’t agree with her thesis. For example, in her attempt to show that the New Testament authors believed in this pre-deuteronomic view of God, she points out that the NT portrays Jesus as Yahweh, the Son of Elyon, but she seemingly ignores that the New Testament also refers to Jesus as the Son of Yahweh. There are quite a few other examples of this selective quoting of Scripture to prove her thesis.