4 - The Old Poetry

Summary

One thing about Mark Smith’s work on religion is that his analysis of any individual problem always represents just one part of an effort to understand the whole. He has written synthetic studies but no “history of Israelite religion” or book-length examination of El, or Yahweh, or all the gods of Israel. It is particularly interesting to me that Smith’s treatments of Yahweh have the feel of finishing a landscape rather than of isolating a portrait. He has written on Yahweh because he must, in order to address so many different views of biblical and (call it) Israelite religion. I wonder whether he has not made Yahweh his primary object because he has not been certain of having discovered something deeply new about the god, and he is always looking for a fresh line of sight on the material at hand. He tells me, reflecting on what I just wrote, that another factor is “how the biblical material seems to reflect lost knowledge about Yahweh,” or even that Yahweh could have been “an unknown god for Israel in some critical respects to which the biblical authors – and we – no longer have access.”