Water and Storm Polemics Against Baalism in the Deuteronomic History.

• Author: Greenspahn, Frederick E.

The worship of Baal was plainly problematic for biblical authors. This book, which originated as a dissertation at the University of Utah in 1991, seeks to examine how they sought to challenge and discredit that religious tradition, particularly in the Deuteronomistic History. It does this by focusing on depictions of Yahweh doing what the Canaanites have their deity do (e.g., p. 97) and by locating references to Baal among the criticisms of Israelite religious practice.

The author's thesis - that references to water in the Deuteronomistic History (examined in a series of chapters comprising the core of this book) constitute an implicit polemic against Baal - is reasonable and even likely. Unfortunately, it is more often asserted than proven. The fact that biblical authors ascribe to Yahweh characteristics elsewhere (primarily in the Ugaritic texts) associated with Baal is not sufficient to prove a polemic. The relationship could be accidental, or the motif could have been borrowed without polemical intent. Several words and phrases associated with the polemic (e.g., tohu and tehom; cf. pp. 86, 88, 107) also occur in the Genesis story of creation, suggesting that they might have come from an entirely different stream of Israelite theology.

Although Deuteronomistic references to water are carefully enumerated, the polemical theme, upon which the study supposedly focuses, is not fully explored. One is left to wonder, for example, what the significance of this polemic would have been during the late monarchic and exilic periods when the Deuteronomistic History was presumably compiled and how widespread it is outside the Deuteronomistic...