Reading the Bible is like an archaeological dig.
The text we have today isn’t one book but many, written by different people from different cultures at different times. There’s no reason to expect that they all had exactly the same religious beliefs. As you read through them, you can notice the inconsistencies, like buried artifacts frozen in time.
There’s persistent speculation that some of the older parts of the Bible were written by ancient Hebrews who had a polytheistic belief system. They imagined Yahweh as one god among many, powerful but not omnipotent. They worshipped him as their tribe’s patron deity, but they didn’t deny that other people had gods of their own. (The technical term for this is monolatry or henotheism.)
Modern-day Jews and Christians wouldn’t admit this, of course. They’d say that the Bible is one coherent text, inspired by divine revelation to different people across the ages, but always conveying the same message. They’d say that there’s only one god, omniscient and omnipotent, and he faces no competition. Any claims to the contrary are demonic deceptions.
Iron chariots: God’s kryptonite?
However, there are some biblical verses that don’t fit with this smoothed-over modern theology. Take the famous “iron chariots” verse:
“And the Lord was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.”
Judges 1:19
Was God not almighty enough to give his champion a victory in this battle? Were his divine powers nullified by iron chariots, the way Superman is helpless around kryptonite?
Modern apologists say that it was Judah, not God, who couldn’t defeat the valley people. But that only raises further questions. It implies that if you have a choice between having God on your side and having iron chariots, you should take the chariots.
That’s one of the better-known biblical verses implying that Yahweh isn’t omnipotent. But there’s another one that’s more obscure, yet more significant. This story strongly implies that gods other than Yahweh are real. Not only that, these other gods are sometimes more powerful than Yahweh, and they can cause outcomes that go against his will.
Yahweh vs. Chemosh: Choose your fighter
This comes from 2 Kings chapter 3. In this Old Testament tale, the vassal kingdom of Moab rebels against its overlord, King Jehoram of Israel. Jehoram allies with King Jehoshaphat of Judah, the other Israelite kingdom, and the king of a loyal vassal state, Edom.
Together, the three kings march to war with Moab. Their campaign begins inauspiciously, as they get lost in the desert and run out of water. They consult the prophet Elisha, who’s traveling with the army, and beg for his help.
Elisha criticizes the kings, saying that their behavior hasn’t been as righteous as it should have been. Nevertheless, he promises that God hasn’t forsaken them. As a sign, he orders them to dig ditches, which miraculously fill with water and save the army from dying of thirst.
Elisha tells them, unambiguously, that this sign shows God will give them victory over Moab:
“This is but a light thing in the sight of the Lord: he will deliver the Moabites also into your hand. And ye shall smite every fenced city, and every choice city, and shall fell every good tree, and stop all wells of water, and mar every good piece of land with stones.”
2 Kings 3:18-19
Inspired by this proof of divine favor, the Israelites meet the Moabites in battle. At first, they win in a rout:
“The Israelites rose up and smote the Moabites, so that they fled before them: but they went forward smiting the Moabites, even in their country.”
2 Kings 3:24
So far, this story looks set to end up the same way as the other holy genocides of the Old Testament. But then something unexpected happens.
The king of Moab is surrounded. He can’t break the siege, and his armies are losing. With his back to the wall, he resorts to a desperation move: he kills his own son as a human sacrifice to the Moabite deity, Chemosh.
And, bizarrely… it works.
“Then he took his eldest son that should have reigned in his stead, and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall. And there was great fury against Israel: and they departed from him, and returned to their own land.”
2 Kings 3:27
Strengthened by the magic of blood sacrifice, Chemosh seemingly overpowers Yahweh. The Moabites win the battle. Elisha’s prophecy of victory proves false. The Israelites are defeated and depart without conquering Moab.
A sense of embarrassment
Some commentaries say that the original Hebrew of this verse is cryptic and hard to understand. This may be deliberate. Even through the mists of time and translation, you may detect a certain reluctance. The text merely says that the Israelite armies departed, as if voluntarily. But why would you do that at the climax of a battle, unless you lost?
The abrupt ending and vague language hint that the biblical authors were embarrassed to relate this. The chapter ends here, and the next chapter moves on to a completely unrelated story. It offers no explanation for how or why Elisha’s prophecy failed to come true.
The interesting thing is that we have commentary from Moab’s side about the battle. It’s an artifact called the Mesha Stele, dated to around 840 BCE. Here’s a translation, with missing text inferred in brackets.
I am Mesha, son of Chemosh[ît], king of Moab, the Dibonite. My father ruled over Moab thirty years, and I ruled after my father. I made this high-place for Chemosh in Qerihoh, high-pl[ace of sal-]vation, for he saved me from all the kings and made me enjoy the sight of my enemies. Omri, king of Israel, oppressed Moab for a long time because Chemosh was angry with his country. His son succeeded him, and he also declared: “I will oppress Moab.” In my days, he declared thus, but I enjoyed his view and that of his house: Israel was destroyed forever. Omri had taken possession of the land of Madaba, and he dwelt in it (during) his days and, (during) half of my days, his sons, forty years, but Chemosh restored it during my days.
Although this has the usual embellishments that all ancient kings put in their inscriptions, it confirms the essential details of the biblical story. The Mesha Stele says that Chemosh was angry with the Moabites for disobedience and allowed Israel to subjugate them. When they repented, Chemosh vanquished the Israelite occupiers and restored their land to them. It’s very much like the Bible’s rationalizations that God allowed foreign powers to defeat the Israelites as punishment for their sins.
How do modern apologists explain this?
Modern apologists who study this passage find themselves plunged into confusion and disarray. They obviously don’t believe that Chemosh overpowered Yahweh, but there’s no consensus as to what they think did happen.
One commentary by David Guzik suggests that “[t]he radical determination of the king of Moab convinced the kings of Israel, Judah, and Edom that they could not completely defeat Moab” and they left “content with their near-complete victory”.
Even if it were true that Moab’s human sacrifice convinced the Israelites to withdraw, it doesn’t account for the failure of Elisha’s prophecy. They failed to conquer every Moabite city as he said they would (note that the king sacrificed his son “upon the wall”). It also doesn’t explain the “great fury” mentioned in the text.
Another commentary says that the Israelites withdrew because they felt bad that they’d driven their enemy to such a horrible act:
“The meaning seems to be that the ghastly act produced a universal horror, which turned into indignation against Israel as the original authors of the expedition which had so dreadful an end… The Israelites themselves so far sympathized with the emotion of horror which brought upon them the indignation of the Moabites, of neighboring tribes, perhaps also of the Edomites and others among their own allies, that they gave up the thought of proceeding further.”
To anyone familiar with the history of Old Testament warfare, this is obviously ridiculous. The Israelites routinely slaughtered their enemies to the last man, woman and child. Would they really pull back, at the brink of victory, because they suddenly developed a conscience and felt sorry for what they’d made the Moabite king do?
There’s one other scholarly paper by Drew Holland, which notes that this has been “a puzzling text for interpreters from rabbinic Judaism to the present”. He suggests, with creativity but no textual evidence, that the Israelites participated in the sacrifice, which outraged Yahweh and caused him to withdraw his aid.
The real question, to my mind, is why the biblical authors included this story at all. They could have left it out. At the very least, they could have come up with a more theologically satisfying rationale, like blaming the Israelites’ loss on some last-minute sin, rather than an ending which implies that God himself fell down on the job.
If the biblical authors thought of God as omnipotent, this is extremely difficult to explain. That’s why the mere fact of this story’s inclusion supports the polytheistic/henotheistic hypothesis. It’s possible that the writers of this passage didn’t consider Yahweh’s loss of face troubling or unexpected, the same way an ancient Greek might not have had qualms about a story where Zeus is outwitted by Apollo. However, for modern monotheists, it lingers as a stubborn anomaly that defies explanation.