People have various beliefs about God. Some don’t even believe in God. Being exposed to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and their religion, we were likely taught that the Bible was giving us a unified description of what the “one true God” was thinking, feeling, and desiring. The Bible was a singular product, at least in their teaching, so we might still feel there is a simple, singular answer.
If you are looking for what the Hebrew God of the Bible is thinking, if God’s mind changes, you might be surprised to find that at least in context from the standpoint of Jewish thinkers, there is no “mind” to consider.
Of course it looks like the Jews are describing a Bronze Age deity when they talk about YHWH in the narratives (especially in Genesis through 2 Chronicles), but it was designed to do that. The writers were living in the Iron Age, from the period of the Persian Empire.
If you were one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, then you were taught to read the text as historical and at face value. That was due to both a lack of education from its leaders and perhaps duplicity. The Jews, on the other hand, were “wrestling” with the concept of God, not settled with it, as if it were static, as the Watchtower was trying to teach it.
This is why there is no “mind” for “God” to change in Jewish theology. It is taught that one cannot use prayer and ask for God to change things as Christians do in their prayers. That is not what prayer is for in Judaism, which is why prayers are written down, settled in the Siddur, composed of the Psalms and several other ancient texts handed down from the centuries. One learns to accept God’s will or to accept reality as settled, unchangeable, by repeating the words of psalms and holy texts daily to edify the mind.
In other words, Jews learn to change their mind via prayer, not change God’s “mind.”
The clues have always been there in the Biblical Hebrew text via anachronisms, written by Hebrews who were not from the Bronze Age but merely guessing what life might have been like for their ancestors. They had some legends, some folklore, and borrowed some mythology from around them that came from the foreigners among whom they dwelled. This mixture provided the following Iron Age boo-boos, for starters:
- The Garden of Eden being a Babylonian King’s Garden
- Eden guarded by a cherubim with a sword
- A flood legend that imitates Babylon’s
- Babylon’s Tower disaster reported as history/mythos
- Abraham having camels
- Abraham coming from Ur of the Chaldeans
- Arameans constantly referenced throughout Genesis
- The existence of Edom (which only popped up after the Assyrian’s invaded)
And the list can go on and on (and we haven’t even left the book of Genesis yet). Since Jehovah’s Witnesses do not dare question the validity of the Biblical text, all of this is reality.
Thematically, the Biblical writers in the Mosaic Law narrative and beyond, state that the Jews are called “Israel” and not “Abraham.” The name “Israel” means to “wrestle with God,” not to blindly accept via faith. The folklore about Jacob is that at the point that he is about to make peace with his brother and his past and to inherit the land with his family and his children, he wrestles all night with God and never stops. The wrestling match leaves a permanent identifying mark on him too, not just a new name.
The idea is that God is not a static, one time concept that gets written down in Scripture and that is that. If one reads the Psalms, the concept of God is different from the narratives in Genesis through 2 Chronicles. If you read Esther, there is no God. If you read the Prophets, God is entirely different, far more complex, almost denying what you learned before.
God changes or better yet, what the Jews learned about God changes. They “wrestle” with God. Sometimes God is this, sometimes they learn that God is that.
The idea behind God today is that Jews cannot say what “God” is. Unlike Christianity that defines God, i.e., God “is” love, God “is” omnipresent, omniscient, etc. Judaism sees God as Ineffable and thus undefinable.
This does not mean that Judaism is the owner and main definer of “God.” But if one is talking about the God of Abraham, the ideas of what they are talking about in this context might help.
I suggest that anyone can make up their own minds on what they wish to believe, however, and that no religion or religious authority has the final say on what God is or isn’t. However, again, in this context, and in this context only, here is where many in Judaism have come to over the centuries in comparison to the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
- God has no body.
- God is not a spirit.
- God has no mind.
- God is greater than an entity.
- God is greater than a “God.”
- The concept of “God” was invented by humans and therefore God is greater than a “God.”
Some go so far as to add that God is not personal or not a “person,” so to speak, meaning God is beyond personhood. The concept is that there is no supernatural God, i.e., God is not the creator as much as creation is godly or evolution is an act of what we understand as divine, if that makes sense. The spark of “divinity” is in everything and everyone, but God is not omnipresent in the Christian sense, such as a supernatural presence is everywhere controlling everything, knowing everything, and responsible for everything that happens.
The various and different stories in the Scriptures are ancient concepts, elementary in the Jewish evolution of wrestling with the God concept. Not everyone believes in God, feels a need for God, or will come to the same conclusions. Hopefully some of this may have been of some help wherever you are on your personal journey.
