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The Origins of Biblical Monotheism Amidst the Trauma of Assyrian Attack and Hegemony

Though the story of the Bible places the origins of Israelite monotheism with Moses, the earliest datable evidence for biblical monotheism is found over 500 years after Moses in the prophecy of Hosea. Hosea is a prophet whose work is placed during the attack, subjugation and eventual destruction of Northern Israel by the Assyrian empire. In diverse ways Hosea built a case for rejection of other deities that constitutes the most distinctive religio-historical component of what will come to be called monotheism (following the definition of monotheism advanced in particular by Jan Assmann, e.g. Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder der Preis des Monotheismus [Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003]).

This chronological correlation of proto-monotheism in Hosea and the Neo-Assyrian period in Israelite history has long been clear to biblical scholars. The contribution of this lecture is to explain this correlation through the category of collective trauma. The thesis to be advanced is that Hosea’s proto-monotheistic prophetic message represented a distinctive processing of the collective trauma of 8th century Israel. “Trauma” here is defined as “an overwhelming, haunting experience of disaster so explosive in its impact that it cannot be directly encountered and influences an individual/group’s behavior and memory in often indirect ways.”

Though studies of trauma only emerged in the 19th century and generally have focused on individuals in the West, people in all cultures have experienced different forms of trauma, both collective and individual, for millennia. The reasons behind such explosive experiences of disaster are chronologically and culturally specific, as are some symptoms. Nevertheless, the experience of catastrophic breakdown of an individual psyche or collective group has been experienced by humans long before the emergence of trauma studies.