How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (11 page)

There is nothing controversial in the claim that the king of Israel was thought of as standing in a uniquely close relationship to God and was in that sense considered the Son of God. This view is found scattered throughout the Hebrew Bible. A key passage occurs in 2 Samuel 7. At this point in the narrative, Israel has already had two kings: the first king, treated with considerable ambivalence in the narrative, Saul, and the great king of Israel’s golden age, David. Despite David’s many virtues, he had a number of vices as well, and for that reason, when he expressed his wish to build a temple for God, God refused to allow it. The backstory is that since the days of the exodus, more than two centuries earlier, Israel had worshiped God in a portable facility, a large tent, the tabernacle. Now that Israel is firmly ensconced in the land, David wants to build a permanent dwelling place, a house, for God. But God tells him no. Instead, he himself will build a (metaphorical) “house” for David. David will have a son (referring to Solomon) who will build God’s temple, and from this son God will raise a house—a dynasty—to David. Moreover, this son of David will be chosen by God himself, adopted as it were, to be his own son: “I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name; and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me” (2 Sam. 7:12–14).

This idea that God has adopted the king to be his son is consonant with other usages of the term “Son of God” in the Hebrew Bible. We have already seen that angelic beings, the members of God’s divine council, were called sons of God. These were divine beings who stood in a specially close relationship with God as his advisors, servants, and ministers—even if some of them did fall from grace on occasion, as in that little episode in Genesis 6. Moreover, the nation of Israel itself is sometimes called the “Son of God,” as in Hosea 11:1—“Out of Egypt I called my son.” Here again, Israel is God’s Son because it stands in a uniquely close relationship with God and as such is the object of his love and special favor; moreover, it is through Israel that God mediates his will on earth.

So too with the king, who stands at the head of Israel and so in an even more special sense is “the” Son of God. In Psalm 89, in which the psalmist indicates that David was anointed by God (that is, literally anointed with oil as a sign of God’s special favor; v. 20), he is said to be God’s “firstborn, the highest of the kings of earth” (v. 27). Even more remarkable is Psalm 2, in words spoken by God to the king, probably at his coronation ceremony (when he received the anointing with oil): “You are my son; today I have begotten you” (v. 7). In this case the king is not only adopted by God, he is actually
born
of God. God has brought him forth.

The son of a human is human, just as the son of a dog is a dog and the son of a cat is a cat. And so what is the son of God? As it turns out, to the surprise of many casual readers of the Bible, there are passages in which the king of Israel is referred to as divine, as God.

Hebrew Bible scholar John Collins points out that this notion ultimately appears to derive from Egyptian ways of thinking about their king, the Pharaoh, as a divine being.
¹⁷
Even in Egypt, where the king was a god, it did not mean that the king was on a par with the great gods, any more than the Roman emperor was thought to be on a par with Jupiter or Mars. But he was a god. As we have seen, in Egyptian and Roman circles, there were
levels
of divinity, and so too in Jewish circles. Thus we find highly exalted terms used of the king of Israel, terms that may surprise readers who think—on the basis of the kind of thinking that developed in the fourth Christian century—that there is an unbridgeable chasm between God and humans. Nonetheless, here it is, in the Bible itself, the king is called both Lord and God.

For example, Psalm 110:1: “The L
ORD
says to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’” The first term, L
ORD
—traditionally printed in capital letters in English—is the Hebrew name of God YHWH, often spelled Yahweh. The four Hebrew letters representing that name were considered so special that in traditional Judaism they were not (and are not) pronounced. They are sometimes called the
Tetragrammaton
(Greek for “four letters”). The second term, “Lord,” is a different word,
adn
(=
adonai
, or
adoni
), which is a common term for the Lord God but is also a term that could be used, for example, by a slave for his master. What is striking here is that YHWH is speaking to “my Lord” and telling him to “sit at my right hand.” Any being enthroned with God is sharing the glory, status, and honor due to God himself. There is not a question of identity or absolute parity here—the king, sitting at God’s right hand—is not God Almighty himself. That is clear from what is said next: God will conquer the king’s enemies for him and put them under his feet. But he is doing so for one whom he has exalted up to the level of his own throne. The king is being portrayed as a divine being who lives in the presence of God, above all other creatures.

Even more stark is Psalm 45:6–7, in which the king is addressed in the following remarkably exalted terms, as a God:

           
Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever.

                 
Your royal scepter is a scepter of equity;

                 
You love righteousness and hate wickedness.

           
Therefore God, your God, has anointed you

                 
With the oil of gladness beyond your companions.

It is clear that the person addressed as “O God” (Elohim) is not God Almighty but the king, because of what is said later: God Almighty is the king’s own God and has “anointed” him with oil—the standard act of the king’s coronation ceremony in ancient Israel. And so God has both anointed and exalted the king above all others, even to a level of deity. The king is in some sense God. Not equal with God Almighty, obviously (since the differentiation is made clearly, even here), but God nonetheless.

A yet more astonishing example comes in the prophet Isaiah, chapter 9, which celebrates a new king who has been given to the people. Anyone who knows Handel’s
Messiah
will recognize the words; but unlike in Handel, the passage in its original context in Isaiah appears to be referring not merely to the birth of the king, but to the birth of the king as the son of God—in other words, it is about his coronation. At this coronation, a “child” has been given to the people—that is, the king has been made the “son of God.” But what is said about the king is truly remarkable:

           
For a child has been born for us,

                 
A son given to us;

           
Authority rests upon his shoulders;

                 
And he is named

           
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God [El],

                 
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

           
His authority shall grow continually,

                 
And there shall be endless peace

           
For the throne of David and his kingdom. (Isa 9:6–7)

That this passage is referring to the king of Israel is obvious by the final line. This is a king from the line of David: most scholars think it is a reference to the king at the time of Isaiah’s prophecy, King Hezekiah. He is acclaimed as the “son” of God, one with great authority and one who will bring endless peace. Clearly, this person is not God Almighty himself, since his authority is said to “grow continually,” and one can hardly imagine God not having final, ultimate, and complete authority from the outset. Nonetheless, the epithets delivered for the king are astounding. He is called “Mighty God” and “Everlasting Father.” As the son of God, he is exalted to the level of God and so has God’s status, authority, and power—so much so that he can be called God.

It is interesting to note that not only the king of Israel, human as he was, is lauded with divine status and even the term “God,” but so too in ancient Jewish texts was that great savior and lawgiver of the people, Moses. The root of this tradition is in the Torah itself, from an intriguing passage in Exodus 4. God is commissioning Moses to go to the Egyptian Pharaoh and demand that he set free the enslaved people of Israel. Moses resists God’s demands and says that he is not an eloquent speaker but is “slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exod. 4:10). God does not accept the excuse: he himself is the one who gives speech to humans. Moses continues to resist, and God finally strikes a compromise: Moses’s brother Aaron will accompany him, and Aaron will do all the talking, based on what Moses instructs him. And then God makes this remarkable statement: “[Aaron] indeed shall speak for you to the people; he shall serve as a mouth for you, and you shall serve as God for him” (Exod. 4:16). Here, Moses is not said actually to
be
God, but he will
function
as God. He will be the one who tells Aaron God’s message to be delivered to Pharaoh, and in that sense he will “serve as God.”

Some later Jews took this message a step further and claimed that Moses was, in fact, divine. The clearest expression of this view comes in the works of the aforementioned Philo of Alexandria. Philo was deeply imbued in Greek philosophical thought, as we have seen, and was particularly invested in showing how the Jewish scripture, if properly understood by means of allegorical, or figurative, modes of interpretation, presents and supports the teachings of the great Greek philosophers (or rather, how the teachings of the Greek philosophers are already found in the Hebrew Bible). Judaism, for Philo, presented the best of what the greatest philosophers of the world had ever taught.

Philo was highly prolific, and we still have a number of his writings, including a biography of Moses that praises the great lawgiver of the Jews as a highly learned and insightful man. In these and other writings Philo celebrates both Moses and the deeply philosophical law that he proclaimed. For Philo, Moses was “the greatest and most perfect man that ever lived” (
Life of Moses
1.1). In interpreting the passage laid out above, Exodus 4:16, Philo indicates that Moses appeared to others as a god—but he was not really God in essence (
The Worse Attacks the Better
161–62). Here, Philo is playing with the idea that there are levels of divinity. In fact, he thought that through his life, Moses “was gradually becoming divine” (
Sacrifices of Abel and Cain
9–10). Since Moses was a prophet and friend of God, “then it follows that he would naturally partake of God himself and of all his possessions as far as he had need” (
Life of Moses
1.156). That is why some people had wondered whether Moses did not have a merely human mind but rather “a divine intellect” (
Life of Moses
1.27).

In the Hebrew Bible, Moses receives the law directly from the hand of God, as he alone ascends Mount Sinai to commune with God (Exod. 19–20). Philo maintained that because of Moses’s contemplation of God, “he also enjoyed an even greater communion with the Father and Creator of the universe” (
Life of Moses
1.158). As a result, Moses was to be God’s heir: he would have as his inheritance “the whole world” (
Life of Moses
1.157). Moreover, even though he was not God Almighty himself, Moses, according to Philo, “was called the god and king of the whole nation” (
Life of Moses
1.158). Here then we see Moses called what the king of Israel is called—and what, in a different context, the emperor of the Romans was called: god.

Like other specially favored humans who had a particularly close relationship with God—so close that Moses himself could be considered in some sense divine—at the end of his life Moses was highly exalted by God and made immortal: “When he was about to depart from hence to heaven, to take up his abode there, and leaving this mortal life to become immortal, having been summoned by the Father, who now changed him, having previously been a double being composed of soul and body, into the nature of a single body, transforming him wholly and entirely into a most sun-like mind” (
Life of Moses
2.228).

Or as Philo states even more forcefully elsewhere: “Having given up and left behind all mortal kinds, he is changed into the divine, so that such men become kin to God and truly divine” (
Questions on Exodus
3.29). Here, then, is a close Jewish analogy to what we have found in pagan sources: a powerful, wise, and great man rewarded after his life by being made divine. At times, Philo goes even further and imagines Moses as a kind of preexistent divine being sent to earth for a time: “And even when [God] sent him as a loan to the earthly sphere and caused him to dwell there, he fitted him with no ordinary excellence, such as that which kings and rulers have, . . . but he appointed him as god, placing all the bodily region and the mind which rules it in subjection and slavery to him” (
Sacrifices
8–10).

I
T MAY NOT HAVE
come as a huge surprise to learn that pagans who held to a range of polytheistic religions sometimes imagined that humans could be divine in some sense. It is more surprising, for most people, to learn that the same is true within Judaism. It is absolutely the case that by the time of Jesus and his followers most Jews were almost certainly monotheists. But even as they believed that there was only one God Almighty, it was widely held that there were other divine beings—angels, cherubim, seraphim, principalities, powers, hypostases. Moreover, there was some sense of continuity—not only discontinuity—between the divine and human realms. And there was a kind of spectrum of divinity: the Angel of the Lord, already in scripture, could be both an angel and God. Angels were divine, and could be worshiped, but they could also come in human guise. Humans could become angels. Humans could be called the Son of God or even God. This did not mean that they were the One God who created heaven and earth; but it did mean that they could share some of the authority, status, and power of that One God.