The One Name

Contrary to current research, which views the Bible as a kind of testimony to power struggles whose blurring was unsuccessful, in imitation of Foucauldian thought, we should extract historical insights from the Bible precisely through ars poetica thinking that gives immense credit to the writers and their aesthetic intentions. The question that should be asked is how the unique biblical aesthetics grew and why specifically in Judah and Israel. Then the answer becomes evident: This is the necessary aesthetic result of iconoclastic monotheism, where the physical worship of God and the popular religious sentiment surrounding it were replaced, for lack of choice, with textual work around the word of God, which created great literature, into which the best of popular religious sentiment was invested. Because behind great literature stands an immense cultural effort - not a conspiracy

Classical music was created from the immense religious sentiment channeled into it in German culture, which saw overwhelming emotion as the "high" (and later in Romanticism). Similarly, classical biblical literature and Greek classical art were created from religious sentiment, which by its nature creates complexity (Source)

Just as the Book of Kings is interpreted in research as intended to unite Judah and Israel and their traditions into one ideology, so the Book of Joshua was the primary unifier between Judah and Benjamin and their traditions. The Book of Judges, in its integral parts (without the additions at the beginning and end), is also a unification and collection of stories from all the tribes, where Judah is almost absent and sometimes negative, meaning it is basically a book of unification of the northern kingdom (Israel), while the Book of Joshua is basically a book of unification of the southern kingdom (Judah). In other words, according to this view, these books were created as welded national myths, and only this explains the variety of ideological tensions and contradictory trends they contain.

But of course, this is a mistake because in other nations there was no problem in editing an ideological story while erasing other traditions and lacking complexity. This is a stylistic matter of the Hebrew narrator, for whom the beautiful story is complex in terms of characters and identification, and not his failure to create a one-dimensional ideological story. The arrogance of researchers - that's the story. This complexity of the biblical narrator stems from the lack of complexity within the story of the gods (for example, like the Greek ones) as representing contradictory mental and natural contents - because there is one God, so from a literary perspective, the human hero and his relationship to God is complex and represents contradictory mental contents.

The basic question in the Deuteronomistic tradition is why the unity of God in monotheism entails the unity of worship in Jerusalem. After all, our instinct is the opposite - of rabbinic Judaism - because the opposite is more likely: precisely because there is one God, one can worship Him equally everywhere. For example, in every synagogue. But the order can also be reversed: the unity of worship preceded the unity of God, because its purpose was to unite different traditions and tribes, and the unity of God is a second stage and intensification of it, which was recruited as an argument for the unity of worship, so that the struggle against idolatry is a struggle for political unity. And then we must also understand the unity of worship as creating opposition to the many idols and many places and to idols in general (because of their tendency to multiply), and finding justification for all these in the unity of God and His abstractness. Because if the goal is an exclusive political-religious center whose power stems from its religious power (because it lacks political power), then it is forbidden to worship the one God in more than one place. That is, in biblical monotheism, the moment of unity is more important than the abstract one of "everywhere," which is the later philosophical moment that resulted from the destruction of the Temple.

This is an inverse explanation for the appearance of monotheism in Judah. The need for unity of originally nomadic tribes and traditions did not create the Bible and its style - but the appearance of monotheism itself. The need to bring about political unity created ideological cultic unity, as a substitute for governmental cultic unity, which is imposed by force from above - because when there is no political power, there is ideology.