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352 Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism 352 Book Reviews / Numen 60 (2013) 348–370 Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism. Edited by Beate Pongratz-Leisten. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011. 372 pp. ISBN 978- 1575061993 (hbk.) This volume collects articles based on presentations at a Princeton conference 2007 with the same title as the book. It opens with a thorough introduction by Beate Pongratz-Leisten, “A New Agenda for the Study of the Rise of Mono- theism,” that presents the conditions for an up-to-date discussion of poly- theism and monotheism in the cultural sphere of the ancient Near East, that is: Israel and its neighbor cultures, especially Egypt and Mesopotamia, and including Iran, all of which are represented with contributions in this book. Special discussions of Mediterranean cultures such as Greece or Rome are not included; some contributions do trace the development from Iron Age to Hel- lenistic times. Egypt is discussed in an instructive and informative chapter: John Baines, “Presenting and Discussing Deities in New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period Egypt” (41–89). Baines warns against assuming direct influences with respect to monotheism from Egypt to Israel and stresses the continuity in actual, practiced polytheism in the history of Egypt, including changes for instance in terms of formations of constellations of deities or, in the fijirst millennium B.C.E. a stronger representation of magic. Akhenaten’s short-lived revolution, which still raises many important questions as to its background and extent, may have been an expression of monolatry rather than monothe- ism (65). Gonzalo Rubio’s chapter, “Gods and Scholars: Mapping the Pantheon in Early Mesopotamia” (91–116), is more about “mapping” than about “pantheon.” There was no single pantheon in early Mesopotamia (in the third millennium B.C.E.), which is at the center of interest here, but a number of constellations, varying according to city, cult, scribal tradition, etc. The bulk of the chapter is a presentation of diffferent lists of deities, “literary texts” (narratives, hymns, riddles), and scribal products that do not give a full representation of deities relevant for personal religion or for offfijicial cults. The chapter is informative enough for anyone interested in Mesopotamian culture; less clear is its rele- vance for a discussion of “revolutionary” monotheism, at least for this reviewer. In the chapter “The Heavens and the Gods in Ancient Mesopotamia: The View from a Polytheistic Cosmology” (117–136), Francesca Rochberg argues that ancient Mesopotamia never had a unifying concept of the world as a divine cosmos and that monotheism therefore must be an irrelevant category for Mesopotamian religion. Concentrating on heavenly and astral aspects of the gods, what one fijinds is always plurality, never homogenous unity; heaven © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/15685276-12341269 Book Reviews / Numen 60 (2013) 348–370 353 is a place where deities may dwell, and where heaven is deifijied, it is relevant for specifijic contexts and specifijic entities. Many deities have connections to celestial bodies, but there is a bewildering variety in the ways in which the relationship is conceived: gods may be stars and stars may be gods; the rela- tionship may be of identity, of representation, and of causality. When Philo attributed to “Chaldeans” the notion of a divine cosmos, he illegitimately trans- ferred an alien, Hellenistic idea back to a culture for which reality was complex and diverse. The editor’s own article, “Divine Agency and Astralization of the Gods in Ancient Mesopotamia” (137–187), deals partly with the same problematic. From the outset, the purpose of the article is stated to be a discussion of the prohibition in the biblical book of Deuteronomy on worshipping heavenly bodies in relationship to Mesopotamian and other Near Eastern notions of the divine; the long and thorough article does not do that (the concluding remarks do not make up for an analysis), but offfers instead what is also given as its sub- ject, an examination of Mesopotamian conceptions of the divine. The author makes a laudable efffort in introducing concepts and ideas from academic fijields outside Ancient Near Eastern studies, especially from cognitive studies (145– 146), although whether they will have the enthusiastically predicted “revolu- tionary efffect” (146) on our understanding of historical and empirical matters such as those in this book may still be an open question. Also the author’s own defijinition of religion (147) as “a system of thought and action for interpreting and influencing the world, built on anthropomorphic and animistic premises” sounds surprisingly Frazerian, passing over as it does the emotional, social, and institutional dimensions that normally, from Emile Durkheim to Cliffford Geertz and Roy Rappaport, have been taken for granted in all reasonable defiji- nitions of religion; maybe the psychologistic tendencies of the cognitivist stud- ies referred to here have been a little too seductive? In spite of these critical remarks, there is much to be learned from Pongratz-Leisten’s rich and thor- ough article when it comes to Mesopotamian themes. The distinction between primary (deities) and secondary (statues, buildings, celestial bodies, etc.) divine agents makes sense. Astralization of deities is treated with many exam- ples and details and is explained by reference to imperialism and as an indica- tion of scholars’ growing influence with royal courts in the fijirst millennium B.C.E. We also get a historical explanation of changes of the motif “the winged disk” in Assyrian iconography and of the development in the conception of the Assyrian state deity Assur. The next two articles, Peter Machinist’s “How Gods Die, Biblically and Oth- erwise: A Problem of Cosmic Restructuring” (189–240) and Mark S. Smith’s, “God in Translation: Cross-Cultural Recognition of Divinity in Ancient Israel” .
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