WHO IS GOD?

A secular approach to the literature of the Bible (Tanakh), to God and to the other literary heroes of the biblical works.

Professor Yaakov MALKIN (Ph.D.) of the University of Tel-Aviv teaches rhetoric and aesthetics and is the editor of Yahadout h’ofshit (“Free Judaism”), the review of the Israeli Secular Movement for a humanist Judaism. Among his books: “Art as Love — A Journey into Aesthetics,” “The Song of Songs and Yona Jones” — biblical plays, “The Art of Discourse,” “The Literature of Cinema,” “Chaplin and Brecht,” the novel Vankavan, etc.

What is the meaning of God and of the Bible for atheists? What function do they fulfill in their lives?

Is there, in the classical literature constituted by the biblical anthology, a contradiction between the beliefs of the atheist and the life of God? Do the positions and relations to God, on the part of the atheist or the agnostic, undermine his relation to God as a literary hero created and established by the biblical writers?

In the text that follows, one will find an attempt at a refutation of the thesis according to which there exists a contradiction between the principles of atheist conviction or of agnostic doubt, and the possibility, for the holders of these convictions, of taking pleasure in, and of living with, the literary characters of the novels, books of poems, and biblical scenes. Many atheists continue to refer to God in their everyday language, in their blessings and in their curses, in their poems or in their thoughts. Let us cite Buñuel’s saying: “Thank God I am an atheist.”

Atheists are people who think that God has no place in their vision of the world, in any case not as a supernatural being possessing a personality, a will, and a force capable of changing or fixing the laws of nature, of influencing or surveilling human behavior. This is why the atheist believes that he must follow the laws of morality that set forth the manner of rendering man human, in the process of socialization. Atheists think that their humanity and the society that gave it to them have need of being defended by a system of statements, by barriers and humanist moral laws, based on principles such as that of Hillel1: “that which fills you with horror, do not do to your neighbor,” or that of Kant: “You must never use man as a means but as an end in itself, for a moral principle has value only if it is general and valid for all human beings.”

There is no function for God in the principles of Hillel or of Kant; this is why the atheist believes that there is no link between belief in God and his belief in these moral principles and in the laws that flow from them. The humanist ethics of the atheist or of the agnostic is an ethics that obligates absolutely, but it is without link to belief in the existence of God.

In the chapters that follow, I seek to show the presence of God in the lives of Jewish atheists and in those of the atheists of Western culture. The Bible constitutes a part of their classical literature; their spiritual life is influenced by their attachment to the Bible, both as members of the Jewish national culture and as members of Western culture. The Bible constitutes a part of their classical literature, and for that reason is an integral part of their ethical and humanist education. A humanist education is not possible without a literary basis, not because classical literature proposes models of moral behavior (it shows the contrary), but because literature and art alone are capable of measuring themselves against the definition of the human and the process of the humanization of man, which are at the foundation of ethics.

The affective and spiritual life of those who have been nourished on classical literature, who have grown up with the biblical works and heroes, as well as with other works of Western literature, are influenced by the literary works of the Bible, by the literary genres that are presented there, and by the way in which these heroes have been set up as human literary heroes.

The Western literary genres in the Bible, in the eyes of a reader steeped in contemporary Western literature.

From the point of view of the majority of free and secular Jewish readers, and in particular from the point of view of those among them who speak Hebrew, the literary reading of the Tanakh (of the Bible) is vital to the education and culture of man. Such a reading renews the link between the readers and their classical literature, the only classical literature they can know intimately in their national language. Not only does the presence of God in the biblical literary work not hinder and not prevent their pleasure and their identification with the work, but the creation of God, before their eyes, by writers who fashion him in different literary genres, makes present one of the factors of the pleasure of the literary text, like the pleasure that is procured for us on every occasion when we are witnesses to the creation and the development of a specific literary hero.

Tanakh (the Bible) — these initials are those of Torah, Neviim, Ketuvim (Pentateuch, Prophets, Hagiographa), the names of three anthologies that are gathered into a single one. The Tanakh is not a book, it is literature. The biblical anthology presents a selection of works that represents the pluralism in the culture of the Jewish people during the first thousand years of its history. It presents differing ideologies and views on man and on God, and diverse literary forms and genres that flourished in a culture as rich as this one, the major part of which is lost to us.

Alongside the books of chronicles, the books of laws, the architectonic descriptions, the vocabulary, the lists of dynastic filiations of the ancestors of the peoples of the Near East, there appear in the Tanakh poetic works in prose and in verse. As though by a deliberate will, at the beginning, there were gathered into the Tanakhic anthology creations that display almost all the genres known in Western literature.

From the point of view of the modern reader, who reads these works as someone bathed in the Western culture of the twentieth century, the literary works contained in the Tanakh reveal themselves as belonging to known literary genres, although the classical works that are in the Tanakh are singular in their form and do not resemble in their characteristics other works of the genre to which they belong. (In the genre “drama” are included, for example, works that differ from one another, such as the Hindu or Chinese drama, the Greek or Shakespearean drama, the drama of Racine or of Molière, of Brecht, of Beckett or of Ionesco, or again the philosophical drama Job.)

In this acceptation, the literary works of the Tanakh appear to the reader as belonging to clear literary genres.

Among these works, many are those that had an influence on other works that developed in European literature of the same genre. This is why Harold Bloom can, in his book “The Book of J,” study the literary value of the biblical creation in relation to the works of Tolstoy or those of Shakespeare; this is why critics and researchers in literature can treat the biblical works with the same instruments as those they use for a contemporary literary text. This is what Frank Kermode does (in the preface) in the essay “The Bible as Anthology,” which he edited in collaboration with Robert Alter, author of “The Art of Biblical Poetry” and of “The Art of Biblical Narrative.”

For the contemporary reader, we distinguish in the Tanakhic (biblical) literature songs, which were sung in the Temple with the accompaniment of an instrumental ensemble (as is the case in the Psalms), and which became, in time, archetypes for Piyyutim (religious songs) and religious lyric poems; novel-series, like the narratives of the ancestors; short stories with astonishing twists, like “Tamar, wife of Er,” “Jephthah,” “Jonah”; short realist narratives in which there is no place for God, like “Esther” or “Ruth”; epic songs, like the song of Deborah or the song of Miriam; nature poems, like the first version of the creation narrative and many poems of the Psalms; sayings, like the “Proverbs of Solomon”; erotic poems and love poems, in “The Song of Songs” and in David’s love poem to Jonathan; poetic-rhetorical works, like Judah’s speech to Joseph in Genesis, or like the discourses of morality and politics in the books of the prophets; historical novels on the life of Moses, Samuel, and Saul, David and Solomon; philosophical poetic essays, like “Ecclesiastes”; a philosophical drama, like “Job”; mystical poetry, in “Daniel” and in “Ezekiel.”

In almost all the works cited above (in which God plays a role in the plot), the character of God is developed as that of a literary hero. When the reader, free of the interpretive constraint and of the halakhic obligations, discovers the characters of human heroes, including that of the multifaceted character of God, he finds himself in the presence of a hero’s personality within the work, and feels that he is participating in the elaboration of the reality created around it.

Such a reading opens to the free, secular, and/or atheist readers many doors in the literature of the Tanakh, doors that had been slammed shut by the mountains of commentary of the religious explanatory system, the religious approaches having sought to attribute a moral teaching to each verse and to each chapter of the Tanakh. They identify the literary reality that is created in the Tanakh with a physical and historical reality that their theology represents as a real and exclusive image of what happens in the world. They arbitrarily deform the meaning of isolated works or verses that are found there, and they sacralize and perpetuate these deformations, as in the explanation that tries to transform the “Song of Songs” — from the collection of love songs to a betrothed that it is (or a love play, as Max Brod and Father Puget called it) — into a song of love between God and the Catholic Church or the community of Israel.

This interpretation of the “Song of Songs” leads rabbis like Joel Teitelbaum of the Satmar Hasidim to maintain that Zionism is guilty of the Shoah, for it would have pushed back the end (of time) and would have transgressed the three oaths that God had [the Jewish people] swear in the “Song of Songs,” when he told them: “do not awaken, do not arouse love before it wills.”2

The collection of the works made by the redactors of the Tanakh serves as a basis for all the Judaisms that are found within Judaism, and shows a many-faceted image of reality, differing from and opposed to any exclusive theological vision concerning God, his world, and his relations to man. The multiplicity of genres and ideologies that are shown in the biblical literature help the reader to see ancient Judaism as naturally pluralist, traversing numerous religious and cultural currents, in which are expressed varied modes of artistic and literary creation.

A variety of ideologies, opinions, and models of God characterizes the pluralism of the Tanakh and of Judaism.

From an ideological point of view, the Tanakhic (biblical) anthology constitutes a meeting point of diverse positions, ideas, and visions of the world, opposed to one another.

The position of the prophets, who see in each historical event a divine action whose aim is to punish the wicked and reward the just, scarcely resembles the position of the other narratives, which see in God a personality that is unstable, in most cases, and that causes, supports, and permits injustice. Abraham shows God that He is not just in inflicting destruction and collective punishment. This, even upon a sinful city like Sodom, in which collective and public homosexual rape is habitual, and in which even the host of God’s envoys, Lot, offers his virgin daughters to collective rape, on the condition that they (the inhabitants) not infringe the laws of hospitality.

The creator of the second creation narrative in Genesis sees in God the master of Eve in the garden of Eden. A master who fails in his attempt to prevent the workers and the guards of his garden from knowing the difference between good and evil, so that they may remain forever inferior, and under his dependency. This vision in no way resembles the vision that Moses has of Yahweh.

Yahweh, such as he appears to Moses, is an abstract divinity whose voice an individual hears in his solitude. A God who is such that the covenant he proposes, in order to create the people and the nation of Israel, is composed of general human principles. These are found in the Commandments, and served to ground Jewish ethics in the general terms of Hillel.

But the God of Moses quickly grows angry, like Moses himself. The revolt of the golden calf, Moses reduces it by having three thousand of his religious opponents executed in the course of the first war of religion that abstract monotheism ever conducted. God, as Moses hears him, is ready to destroy his people in the desert for any expression of protest and of hesitation as to the wisdom of the departure from exile and the liberation from slavery. This, even as they entail endless wanderings in the desert, in conditions of hunger and thirst.

The nihilist attitude of Kohelet is practically indifferent to these beliefs in a God who is like man, a God like a present being, as well as to the most popular belief among the people of Israel of that time: God as a golden calf issued from a cow and a goat. The belief of Kohelet sees no meaning in life in a world of a God in which evil triumphs over good, death triumphs over life, and the feeling of vanity of vanities triumphs over and surpasses the feelings of the meaning we accord to our life, to our struggle to accomplish things, or to our aspirations to happiness, to the work and the toil we invest in them, or even to the aspirations to success.

The God of the author of Job in no way resembles all his other models in the Bible. Contrary to the models of the prophets and of Job’s friends, the author of Job shows God, surrounded by the sons of God and choosing to plot a conspiracy against man precisely with Satan. The a-morality of God seems to this author to form part of the nature of God who is not man, who is not the source of morality, but the force that creates and maintains the universe, that combats archaic forces issuing from their dwelling places out of all the myths of the culture within which it was created. There is no occasion, then, to attribute to him qualities of justice or considerations of grace, or even any responsibility whatsoever as to the fate of man, as to his sufferings or as to the evil that is done to him.

From the diversity of the philosophical tendencies that are expressed in the diverse works of the Bible, there emerges a diversity of the physical aspects of God.

God appears to the author of Genesis when he walks in his garden on the side from which the day comes — and he is male and female, probably naked like Adam and Eve, after their likeness and in their image. At the visit that God made to Abraham in his tent, his host washes his feet for him, and serves him a meal of delicacies, of meat and milk, as befits the table of an ancestor of the people of Israel, beside whom are settled God and his envoys, who are all free not to practice the mitzvot of the Halakhah. The meal is spent making prophecies about the future, not omitting the satisfied laughter of Abraham and Sarah on the subject of the chances of seeing God’s promises realized. At the end of the meal, Abraham adjures God (“Far be it from You!”) to renounce all collective punishment, which is the contrary of justice and of judgment.

The model of God who fights Jacob in a physical and obstinate combat follows the model that the author of Genesis attributed to him, that is to say a god walking, eating, disputing, and bargaining with his host, like a man. When God is vanquished in the combat by Jacob’s embrace, God recognizes that his adversary has vanquished him, that he has fought him and dominated him; this is why he calls him “Israel.” And Jacob calls the place of this combat Peniel (face of God), for there Jacob saw God “face to face,” one to one at the Jabbok, on the threshold of the promised land, without the presence of a winged angel — which the Jewish and Christian draughtsmen and commentators planted in the narrative, without any basis or sign in the original text, thus diverting the action and its meaning to the point of occulting it.

The God of Moses does not possess a form that one could sculpt or represent by a mask, as for the other models of the Gods of that epoch. His God is represented by a voice in the desert, accompanied by symbols of presence such as a pillar of smoke, or a fire that does not consume itself, or a cloud. As the God of Moses is a being who will be and who will make be what will be, he has no present, just as the engine that moves without a source of energy is the energy of the future. This is why Moses called him “YHWH,” following an active mode — the one who makes being be.

The God of Aaron, by contrast, has a form, and a mask, and a body of gold. It is possible to serve him, to dance around him, to offer him sacrifices and to imagine how he eats and is satisfied by these sacrifices. In the competition between the two gods, it is the God of Aaron who won in the ancient epoch. The God of Moses remained the exclusive God of a small minority, according to the testimony of the prophets, while the majority of the people served the calf in the sanctuaries that they raised to it at Bethel and at Dan, alongside other Gods, whom the Israelites also served at the same time as the Canaanites.

Opposing moral attitudes: humanist and pacific against racist and mass-murder-oriented attitudes.

The lack of ideological unity that characterizes the Tanakh expresses itself as much in the numerous forms of God as in the diversity of opinions on nature, on its exclusivity, or on the moral conduct that befits it. This is why one cannot say: “the Bible says,” any more than: “Judaism says.” All that one can say is: “it is said in Judaism,” or else: “it is said in the Bible.”

In the Bible there exists a polarization between humanist demands and racist, murderous demands. Set against the extreme humanist attitudes that are attributed to God by the commandments of Moses, the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah, Joshua and Samuel represent racist demands, no less extreme, likewise formulated in the name of the same God, who, according to their words, wills the mass murder, including the murder of the women, the children, the cattle, and the sheep of the vanquished enemy. Set against the religious patience of Abraham, who also serves the God of Jerusalem, the Jebusite, who also sacrifices on the altar of Melchizedek, priest of the supreme God, one of the greatest Gods among the Canaanite divinities, there is expressed also in the Bible a bloodthirsty religious fanaticism like that of Elijah, who slits the throats of hundreds of prophets who are in the service of the king of Israel, solely because they believe in and serve Baal and Astarte, like most of the children of Israel.

The contradiction between the partisans of peace and those of war expresses itself, for example, in the polemic of Micaiah with the king, at the meeting between the kings of Israel and of Judah who wish to attack Aram. It also expresses itself in the struggle of Jeremiah, who is condemned to death because he believed in an immediate peace, at any price, even at that of a complete submission to the Babylonians (who were threatening Jerusalem), and in cooperation with its conquerors and its destroyers, like the Jewish representative of Babylon, Gedaliah, whom Jewish terrorists come from the other side of the Jordan assassinate, and to whom the people of Israel consecrate an annual day of fasting (the “fast of Gedaliah,” which many people still observe today). Hundreds of Israelite court prophets praise and rejoice in the battles, in order to please the kings of Israel and of Judah who launch into wars of unhappy conquest because of a minor border dispute.

The polarization between those who seek social justice and the partisans of the establishment, who saw in the practice of the mitzvot, of sacrifices, and of prayers, the discharge of their debt toward God — this polarization is at the center of the rhetorical and poetic works of prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos, who affirm that there is no greater sin than social injustice, and that there is no meaning to sacrifices and prayers if one does not conduct oneself with justice, equity, and rectitude, for ethics in the relations between men is the foundation of the covenant between God and man, between God and the people.

Only the belief in the uniqueness of this world here and in the impossibility of life after death is common to the majority of the works of the Bible. The greater part of the works is animated by the belief that all things happen in this world here only; life begins and ends with death in the sensible world. Despite all the cultures speaking of life after death that surrounded them, the authors of the Bible believed that man is made of the chemical elements deriving from the earth constitutive of the terrestrial globe, and that he will decompose at his death into these elements, without being able to continue to live beyond death, the resurrection of the dead being impossible in any case, and the myths about life in the world to come having no reality. This position was the most revolutionary contribution of Jewish culture to the ancient world: while others saw life in this world as an entrance passage toward the salon of death in which true life would begin in the company of the Gods, biblical literature proposed a realist, logical (consistent) position, which rejected any illusion that would have constructed worlds other than ours. In time, this position became a line of separation, not only between the Sadducees and the Pharisees, but between the Jewish culture that is based on the Bible and on the belief in this world here, and the Jewish culture that is based on “the oral law” (Torah Ba’al Peh), which expresses one single one of the currents of Judaism within Hellenism and its belief in a world to come.

There were of course also exceptions to this rule, but the authors of the Bible took care to gather dozens of chapters of works in accord with this point developed by the poet of Genesis: man is dust and to dust he shall return, the garden of Eden has already existed and is no more. The soul of man is like his breath, it disappears with his death.

The redactors of the biblical anthology placed the garden of Eden at the beginning of the road, before human history, so that it might be clear that there is no longer any road leading there; this is why the prophets believed that one had to amend (repair) the world through social reforms, such as the pursuit of the exploiters, the profiteers, the slaveholders, and those who are greedy for gain, and not through prayers, sacrifices, fasts, mortifications, and magic intended to make the Messiah come. The “Messiah” in their language was simply someone who had been anointed to be king, and not someone who will come by miracle and will roll the dead from their tombs through underground galleries to Jerusalem. The Jewish pluralism that expresses itself in the Bible (Tanakh) and in our present culture, which is based on it, evolved and evolves on the basis of this belief.

The opposition between God as a “realist” character in literature, and his idealist portrait in prophetic literature.

In Genesis are described literary heroes in the reality of their daily life. There one sees showing through the tension between the aspiration to realize promises and ideal, and the reality of work and of the search for substance, the confrontation with the problems of life in the polygamous family, as well as the difficulties of relations with neighbors, nomads often suspected of hostile intentions.

It is the specificity of realist literature not to concentrate on the heroic or mythic actions, but to attach itself to the great variety of stakes and obstacles in which the humanity of man is revealed, beyond the limits of the historical task that he seeks to fulfill. This choice presents the components of a human reality that includes the tension between the aspiration to ideals and the attempt to realize them in a confrontation with hunger, love, jealousy, and the instincts of honor. This tension expresses itself in the actions of the life of Abraham, of Jacob, and of Joseph, and in that of God, all of whose plans are altered. All the promises he made to others and to himself not having been realized as he first imagined them.

In Abraham, one perceives this tension clearly. It reads in his belief, in his struggles, in the fact that he lends his wife to Pharaoh, in his life as a shepherd, as the husband of several women, and as a father. Abraham was destined to become the ancestor of numerous peoples and the heir of the promised land. Yet he is not only the first immigrant into Eretz-Israel, but also the first emigrant outside its borders. In the distress of the famine because of which Sarah and Abraham went down into Egypt, they accept that Sarah be lent to Pharaoh. And the king will make of this couple of famished nomads, masters of slaves, of servants, of donkeys, and of camels, all things rare in the second millennium before the Christian era. Of course, Abraham and his acts cannot serve as a moral model, but the unique humanity of the patriarch reveals itself to us precisely in his moral failures, as for every literary hero in the classical works of the West. The moral failures of Abraham in the episode of Hagar and Ishmael, and, more than in any other, in the “sacrifice” (the binding) of Isaac — make him one of the most complex characters of the narrative, in no way resembling the gentle portrait that the Midrash and the Haggadot make of him. There he is represented as a child prodigy and monotheist, who smashes the statues of the divinities in his father’s shop.

The components of the personality and of the humanity of God reveal themselves too in the actions in tension between the promise and its realization. Like most other creators, God is satisfied with the work of his hands, but only when he is alone in the world, and only at the moment when he has just created it. A short time afterward, he regrets having created humanity; he tries then to drown it in the Flood, then regrets having, in his haste, destroyed almost everything that lives on the earth, and he makes a vow beautiful as the rainbow in a cloudy sky.

The opposition between the ideal character and the real character expresses itself in two genres of biblical literature: the rhetoric of the prophets, and the works of fiction and action: narration (the narrative) and the philosophical drama.

The poetic rhetorical works of the discourses of the prophets present God as the incarnation of an ideal portrait that synthesizes absolute force and justice. The works of the realist literature of the Bible, like Genesis, show God as an existing character, as a “real” hero, who lives the gap and the opposition between the promise and the realization, as every human being feels it.

While prophetic literature represents an ideal God, a just judge, who does harm to the wicked and good to the just and to those who are faithful exclusively, the biblical (narrative) literature of stories describes God to us as a capricious character, creating and then destroying, the just and the guilty, a being calling to sin and to avenge at the same time, hoping and regretting, punishing the just, and pardoning the wicked, inconsistent in his judgment, fighting his creatures, and bringing about a disaster without justification, in the course of which children disappear because of a wager between God and Satan. Among the famous great sinners, let us cite Solomon, who will succeed and have a long and good life, although he built temples for his numerous wives in Jerusalem, although he beat the people with whips (as his son testifies), although he made it a slave to build for himself and for God luxurious palaces with imported materials and craftsmen. Solomon, precisely, who “did evil in the eyes of God,” with regard to all that we have just enumerated, nonetheless enjoys the benefits of God and his blessing, while Job suffers precisely because he is just and because he is right. The sons of Jacob, those who perpetrated the great massacres of Shechem, who destroy the march toward peace and integration into the surrounding milieu that Jacob had projected, are entitled to blessings and to the promise of becoming one day the ancestors of all the tribes of Israel.

Not all literary works, or works of mimetic art, succeed in transmitting life to the heroes they create. From time to time, the heroes are one-dimensional, like the character applied to a task that he fulfills in a plot. Thus, the character of James Bond in his films, or the metaphorical character (who has no life of his own), of the Wolf or of the grandmother in Little Red Riding Hood. When a man or a woman appears in literature, and lives for himself — he seems to us to have an independent personality and existence. Even if we do not know how his being was composed, and by what means he convinces of his existence, we develop an attachment to the literary hero who lives as if we had known him with an intimate knowledge, as if he existed in the full sense of the word. So it is with Hamlet or with Père Goriot, with Anna Karenina or with Madame Bovary.

In the love of Professor Kugelmass of New York for Madame Bovary, Allen [Woody Allen] certainly gives concrete form to the attachment of the receiver of the work for its heroes. Kugelmass does not content himself with the spiritual attachment to his heroine; he asks the magician Persky, who is in Brooklyn, to make them meet, and, thanks to a time machine, Kugelmass finds himself in the house of Madame Bovary, who is surprised… She is flattered, bewitched, and consents to the desires of the Jewish professor from America who has leaped over time and space, into the domain of life, in order to meet her. Their frequent meetings arouse the astonishment of the community of literature teachers in the world. None of them can understand how the New York Jewish teacher was able to introduce himself into Flaubert’s work, nor above all how he succeeded in convincing the magician to accede to the desire of his beloved, which allows him to find Madame Bovary again during a visit to the Plaza Hotel, beside Central Park.

It is here that the charm stops.

From the moment when the literary heroine leaves the book where she was created, and where she was granted life, she disappears as a personality. Her force of attraction disappears with her, and Kugelmass then does everything to put her back in her (original) place. The life-force of the literary heroes resides in their existence as beings created and living in our mind. God, like the other literary heroes, lives as long as we have not tried to take him out of the world in which we created him.

God died, having been cut off from the literary reality in which his life was formed.

God disappears from our consciousness when we seek to make the literary hero who personifies him leave the literary work, and to plant him within the borders of physical existence; as soon as we put him back into the pages of the book and into the plot of the work of fiction, then God and the other literary heroes of the Tanakh return to life.

There are no laws, nor prescriptions, for the creation of the literary miracle by which words succeed in making a character live before us. It is a phenomenon unique in its realization, to see a literary hero accede to his own life. There is no genre or formula that can guarantee the advent of this poetic miracle.

The narratives of the Fathers (Ancestors) belong to the novelistic genre, even if they differ in many respects from “the saga of the Forsyte family,” just as that saga may differ from “In Search of Lost Time.” Despite the difference of level, of form, and of literary means, the literary miracle is produced with them: the literary character is born into life, like Venus emerging from the waves, and as God is born from words.

The atheist believes in God as a creation of art and literature, in which he lives, even in the secular age.

For an atheist who lives in the classical literature of humanity and of the Bible in particular, the existence of God does not have to be proved. The atheist has no need to transform the narratives recounting the actions of God, his words, and his feelings, into allegories. Religious Jewish philosophers, like Maimonides, who wished to reconcile the rationalist attitude that sees in God an abstract concept such as Moses had conceived it, or else the first cause of movement as Aristotle saw it, with the narratives implying a concrete and human God, explained these narratives by the need to furnish the people with an allegory that would satisfy their ears. As the atheist has no need of a concept of God in his vision of the world, since it does not answer the questions, in any case unanswerable, with which he is confronted, there is for him no contradiction between the concept and the narratives that create it.

In the eyes of atheists, the narratives centered on the actions of God seem to unveil poetic truths. The atheist precisely has no doubt about them, because they are narratives of fiction, which, outside their domain, lose all reality. All the heroes of these events were created by human beings, as part of the reality of the literature of fiction. God, like the Little Prince of Saint-Exupéry, exists, not because the narratives concerning him would have been transformed into allegory, but thanks to the “reality” that was attributed to him by the writers who created him.

We cast doubt on, and we lend little credit to, the accounts of the newspapers that relate a meeting with celestial creatures, and a fortiori with God. Witnesses who, in court, explain and justify their actions by instructions they supposedly received during meetings with God, are suspected by us of being false witnesses, or, at the very least, of being victims of hallucinations and therefore liable to (psychiatric) treatment.

But we do not doubt that Jacob fought with God (and not with an angel) at the moment when he wished to cross the threshold of the promised land, for God tried to prevent him from entering it, despite the promises he had made to his father and to the father of his father, in their dreams, in their visions, and during the face-to-face meetings with him. The book of “Genesis” is a literary work capable of persuading us of the human reality that it creates before us. This reality includes God.

Thus is revealed one of the paradoxes of the belief of atheists and agnostics, but also that of the other believers in doubt:

They see historiography as imaginary, and literature as recounting what “really” happened. Historical truth seems to them relative and changing, whereas poetic truth is, in their eyes, absolute and definitive.

The agnostic and the atheist do not accept the existence of God as a historical, physical, or metaphysical truth, but recognize the poetic truth of the literary works that created God as one hero among others, and “planted” him in the spiritual culture of humanity.

Until two hundred years ago, the greater part of this culture was religious and based on the belief in the existence of God even outside of literature.

For two hundred years, the process of secularization has been advancing and developing within culture, within Western society, and within all their ramifications. With this process, there appears, in the reader, a change of point of view on the heroes of the literature created in the religious age, and particularly on one of its principal heroes: God. □

(Translated from Hebrew by Izio Rosenman)

Books on the Bible as literature:

  1. Sage of the Talmud↩︎

  2. For the French translation we use La Bible du Rabbinat français, Éditions Colbo, Paris, 1989.↩︎

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