Canter Bridge

Biblical monotheism pivots on the concept of incomparability.

Its spokespersons seem uninterested in emptying the skies of other beings, indeed we are at points allowed a glimpse of quite populated skies. But none of whoever else may exist ‘out there’ is to be compared with YHWH. He is unique. He is incomparable. He is the only one of his kind.

The book of Isaiah grows quite fierce about the matter.

I am the LORD, and there is no other; besides me there is no god. I arm you, though you do not know me, so that they may know, from the rising of the sun and from the west, that there is no one besides me; I am the LORD, and there is no other.

 I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the LORD do all these things.

Isaiah 45.5-7 (NRSV, emphasis added)

YHWH is here addressing Cyrus, the pagan king whom he has taken by the arm as his closest ally. Cyrus is not allowed fully into YHWH’s counsel, indeed he appears largely ignorant of the Big Thing of which he has become a protagonist.

But the prophet is jealous that YHWH’s incomparability be acknowledged from one horizon to the other. This is biblical monotheism at its most assertive. It is common to Isaiah but rather consistent across the biblical text. YHWH’s uniqueness is not merely an abstract point that people who worry about such things might care to ponder. It is instead a reality that must be, will be, universally acknowledged.

I have included in the above quotation the words that are presented to us as the chapter’s seventh verse.

I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the LORD do all these things.

Isaiah 45.7

It would be easy to read this as a new thought that a piecemeal text has pushed up against an earlier idea with no necessary connection between the two. However, it would be unlike the book of Isaiah to engage in such arbitrariness.

It seems more likely that the kind of monotheism that is here claimed on behalf of reality itself relieves Israel of looking for other powers, the existence of whom might explain the bad stuff that the people have experienced. Or if not relieve, then oblige.

If YHWH in his sovereign mastery over creation and history is unique and incomparable, then one had better seek causality in him rather than in several. Such a totalistic monotheism quite frankly creates philosophical, even ethical dilemmas, that will not be evaded.

But from the prophet’s perspective, at leave one knows where one must go for answers.