From monolatry to monotheism

Josiah was killed by the Egyptians in 609 BCE. Following this were decades of Israeli submission to Egypt and later to Babylon. Yahweh's temple was burned, and the exile of the rich and privileged class to Babylon began. This exile was to last a couple of generations. The Babylonians saw this as the defeat of Yahweh at the hands of their god, Marduk. Most of the influential Israeli theologians of the time had been forcibly relocated to Babylon. They were hard pressed to make sense of the total and devastating defeat of their nation and their god. They were presented with the classic "problem of evil" (theodicy) - how could Yahweh permit this awful outcome? They had two options to reconcile this experience with their beliefs - abandon hope and admit that Yahweh was an inferior god, or devise an explanation that allowed them to claim, "Our god is omnipotent - he allowed this to happen to us to punish us for not being as faithful as we should have been". Using this tortured logic, Yahweh allowed Marduk to only appear to prevail in order to teach the faithless Jews a lesson. Jeremiah, who had relocated to Egypt, not Babylon, wrote that God was punishing the Israelites for worshipping other gods. The reasoning was that any god who could muster the greatest power on earth (Babylon) to punish wrong-worshipping Israelites, must be orders of magnitude more powerful than any other claimant to godhood. In this way Yahweh began to migrate (in the eyes of the Israelites) from one of many gods, to the super powerful, omnipotent god we recognize today. As psychologists have demonstrated countless times (see Leon Festinger), cognitive dissonance can cause us to cling even more fiercely to the beliefs that are threatened. It all happened (according to Wright) because of the rationalization that was required by the "exilic theologians" to make sense of an otherwise unexplainable disaster.

For example, a century earlier, Isaiah has god saying, "Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger", which clearly illustrates the point Wright makes. This is no ordinary god - he has to have the Assyrian god, Assur, in the palm of his hand to orchestrate such an apparent "defeat" just to make a point. Beginning about this time, Isaiah (frequently referred to as the second Isaiah, since most biblical scholars think the book of Isaiah was written by two authors) has god saying things along this theme, "I am the LORD and there is no other. Beside me there is no god".