Cynthia Schaefer Elliot, Professor of Hebrew Scriptures & Archaeology, joins Mark and Professor Libby Backfish to discuss how monotheism was understood in ancient Hebrew culture. Within the discussion it becomes apparent that our current English definition of monotheism misrepresents its usage in ancient Hebrew culture. Instead of stressing the existence of one God, ancient Hebrews were called to the worship of one God, a practice they greatly struggled with.

TRANSCRIPT

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Welcome to Jessup think I'm your host, Mark Moore. And today on the show, I'm delighted to be joined for the first time by Cynthia Schafer-Eliot, Associate Dean of Faculty of theology and Professor of archaeology and Hebrew Scripture. That's what they tell me. That's what yeah, that's on your business cards. Here. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's really great to have you I know you're, you know, kind of a professional podcaster. So I just, you know, it's, it's good to have you on one of our shows. Now, I'm delighted to be here. Hey, that's good. And back on the show, friend of the show, we'll be back. Also a professor of Hebrew Scripture, so welcome back. Thanks for having me again. And when you when you come back a second time, that's when you become friend of the show. Okay, so it's not a friend of the show friend of the show mean to you, you've come back, you answered my email. That time just worked out. Yeah, exactly. fits in your schedule. But I'm excited to have you both on the episode today, cuz I want to talk about what I think is an extremely interesting topic, that of monotheism and ancient Hebrew culture. So maybe some people hear that and that's not as exciting to them. But when I hear that I get excited. And I want to kind of know more, because I feel like this topic has been maybe intriguing scholars of late or I've just been hearing more about it lately. And there seems to be a disconnect between kind of maybe our current definition of monotheism and the experience of the ancient Israelites in terms of monotheism. And so I just think it's maybe really interesting. And I think it actually exposes some some theological issues that I think are really important. And dealing with language. We're going to do a little language today. So So get your Hebrew ready. I did actually take so I was an English and writing undergrad, full disclosure. And as an elective, I took Hebrew because Good for you. I knew what to tell our state. Yeah, exactly. I will, I'll start I'll start preaching that you can take these as electives. But, but I think, see, I couldn't so language wise, it's going to, I think it's going to really open some things up maybe in theology. So when we look at that, and we look at the maybe current definition, mostly it is and probably like, the person on the street, if you ask them to define monotheism, right now. It would be similar to the to the definitions and Webster, not this idea of belief in a single God, or maybe even more strongly a belief that only one God exists. I think you hear that a lot. How does that definition maybe jive with the ancient Israelites experience of monotheism? It's a good question, hey, you know, do you want to go first or Yeah, I

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think, Mark, you were getting at something. There's a disjunction between how we would define it, how they would define it. And also the questions we're asking and the questions they're asking. So we're asking how many gods exist? And I think they were asking, how many gods do we worship? So it's much more that's an issue really good to see. Yeah, much. Just borrow that. Free before you. So I think it's an issue more of praxis for the ancient Israelites, because they were concerned with who do we worship? And whereas now we think of it more theoretically. And I think we can learn a lot from the ancient Israelites, because I think sometimes we think that just thinking about God, theoretically is enough. Right? Really, we need to make good on those thoug