THE NABATAEAN “GOD OF THE FATHERS”

John F. Healey

In 1929 Albrecht Alt, in his ground-shifting essay on “Der Gott der Väter”,1 invoked the epigraphic evidence provided by the Nabataean inscriptions to support his argument that the Hebrew patriarchal narratives showed traces of earlier nomadic religious tradition. This approach combined the nineteenth/early twentieth-century interest in casting light from Arabia on the patriarchal narratives with the early twentieth-century form-critical effort to get back to the earliest forms and elements of the texts. Subsequent scholarship has thrown doubt on many of the basic theses and conclusions of Alt and his followers, such as the assumption that the family unit formed the basis of the origins of Israelite religion2 and even his minimal confidence over the recovery of history from the texts.3 The Ugaritic texts were published soon after Alt wrote his essay and patriarchal religion could then be seen in the new light of El-worship.4 In the context of these develop- ments the Nabataean evidence was marginalized on the grounds that it is very late in date. It receives scant attention in later discussions. I cannot contribute usefully to the discussion of the nomadic or other origins of Israelite religion or the traditions of the Book of Genesis, but it is noteworthy that the patriarchs are presented in the Pentateuch as settling nomads, whether this is historically authentic information or not. This concept certainly became part of the Israelite self-under- standing: “A wandering Aramaean was my father” (Deut. 26:5). Several of Alt’s fundamental points remain valid: in the narratives available

1 A. Alt, Der Gott der Vater (BWANT 3/12; Stuttgart, 1929), ET “The God of the Fathers”, in Essays on Old Testament History and Religion (Oxford, 1966), pp. 1–77. I first read the Alt essay in 1970, soon after I met John Emerton and was attending his lectures in Cambridge. It is a pleasure to dedicate this short paper to him in recogni- tion of all the help and encouragement he has given me over so many years. 2 M. Köckert, Vätergott und Väterverheißungen: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Albrecht Alt und seinen Erben (FRLANT 142; Göttingen, 1988), pp. 137–41. 3 See the review in C. Westermann, Genesis 12–36: A Commentary (translated by J. J. Scullion from Genesis 12–36 [BKAT; Neukirchen, 1981]; London, 1986), pp. 105–13. 4 Westermann, Genesis, p. 106. 46 john f. healey to us patriarchal religion includes the habit of referring to the divin- ity as “the God of my/your father”, patriarchal religion is presented as different from later Yahwism and the tradition claimed that the self-revelation of God as Yahweh took place at a particular point after the patriarchal age (Exod. 3 and 6): in theory his name was unknown earlier. The undermining of Alt’s wider conclusions does not neces- sarily render the Nabataean material irrelevant to the understanding of what the biblical authors had in mind (even if that was only an imagined tale of origins). What I propose to do here is to look again at the Nabataean evidence, without implying anything about the real nomadic or other origins of Israelite religion. The phenomenon which drew Alt’s attention was the habit, in the Pentateuchal texts, of referring to the god of the patriarchs as the god of a named individual. It is summed up by the phrase “the god of the fathers”, though it mainly occurs in the form “the god of my/your father” (cf. Gen. 31:5, 29, 42; 49:25; 50:17) and in the separate titles “the god of Abraham”, “the god of Isaac”, and “the god of Jacob” (Gen. 31:5, 29, 42; Exod. 3:6), as well as a number of associated epithets, such as “the Fear of Isaac” and “the Mighty One of Jacob” (Gen. 31:42, 53). We may note also Gen. 26:24; 28:13; 32:10; 46:1, 3. There are two elements to this kind of usage. Firstly, the god being referred to remains, at the moment the phrase in question is used, anonymous. This anonymity need not in itself have any particular significance. The title “Emeritus Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cam- bridge” is anonymous in itself, but in a particular context, as in this volume, there is nothing mysterious about who is being referred to! The title “the god of Abraham” is not of itself a circumlocution or euphemism in which the divinity’s true name is being avoided. Clearly, in the biblical context, there is nothing taboo or secret about which god is being referred to in the narratives in question and Alt discussed the specific cases where the phrase is immediately explained by the use of the tetragrammaton (Gen. 28:13) or by reference to El Shadday (Gen. 49:25). Historiographically, on the JEDP analysis the setting aside of the name Yahweh by the Elohist tradition until it was revealed at Horeb/Sinai is a separate issue: it is a literary device, since the reader knew all along which god was involved. The J author (if he existed) had no inhibition about using the name Yahweh from the start and does not hold the reader in imaginative suspense. It would certainly be very speculative, and played no part in Alt’s argument, to