He tries to do this with an old angle … claiming the “omnis”
all come from Greek philosophy, and they’re not supported by the Old Testament.
Simply not true that they all come from Plato et al, and
simply not true that they’re not biblical.
The second issue first.
“Second Isaiah” is probably the clearest Old Testament
example of the omnipotence of the biblical god. Isaiah 45:7 NIV:
I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.
Second Isaiah has numerous other passages like
this.
As for the provenance of omnipotency, etc., in
early Judaism, after the return from exile? That came from the Persians that
liberated the exiles, namely from their Zoroastrianism that gave us, as well,
cosmic dualism, heaven and hell, etc.
That’s why Second Isaiah has passages like
this. Ditto for Zechariah and some other late books.
Beyond that, Hazony is wrong in another way.
Daniel, of course WAS written long after Jews
had had extensive contact with Greek philosophical thought. Depending on where
you butter your bread on the date of this book, Ecclesiastes may reflect Greek
philosophical influence, too.
And, the rabbis by the time of Rome certainly
did.
A "more plausible" idea of god might
exist, but it's not in the Tanakh.
Second, what is this "more plausible"
idea? Is it a "god of the gaps"? Is it a magic-god of Arthur C.
Clarke's famous dictum, wielding advanced enough technology to seem divine to
at least a few?
Finally, the idea that the Hebrew imperfect is
best translated in this case as “I will be what I will be,” rather than “I am
what I am,” in god’s burning bush appearance to Moses, is a weak reed. In
English, both tenses can be seen, to some degree, as implying continuity, not a
one-time event, or as implying an ongoing status. In either case, the Yahwist
author of that portion of Exodus wrote about 450 years before Second Isaiah. If
Hazony is going to give us an ounce of exegesis, please give us the whole
pound.
And, he should also tell us that modern
scholarship thinks the name of Yahweh is yet another botched pun, whose roots
are actually in the verb HaWaH, to storm or blow. In short, Yahweh was a
Midianite Zeus, with Sinai, like Olympus, an old volcano.
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