2025 Annual Symposium
Thursday 20 November 2025, 15:00-16:30
Salle de conférence, MISHA, Strasbourg (access)
The symposium is open to the general public, and the lecture will be given in French.
The speaker, Thomas Römer, is an honorary professor at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and a professor at the Collège de France (chair of "The Hebrew Bible and its contexts"), of which he is currently the Chairman (administrateur). He holds an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University (Israel), is an associate professor at the University of Pretoria (South Africa) and a member of the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres.
His research focuses on the formation of the biblical corpus and the integration of archaeology into research on the origins of the Bible and Judaism. He recently published The Invention of God (Harvard University Press, 2015, originally published in English as L’invention de Dieu (Seuil 2014, Points 2017) and L’Ancien Testament (Que sais-je, 2019).
Lecture - The invention of monotheism
The question of the birth of monotheism poses a twofold conundrum. The first relates to the term itself, which does not exist in biblical texts and was only invented in the 17th century, in the context of the Enlightenment. This raises a second problem, namely whether we should assume a single origin for the belief in one God.
Although a number of biblical texts profess belief in a single God, there are indications that the worship of Yhwh, the God of Israel, was not exclusive for many centuries. Biblical monotheism as we know it only came into being after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians (587 BCE), and after the dismantling of the state structures of the Kingdom of Judah. These events could only be interpreted as the abandonment of Judah by its god, or even as the weakness of Yhwh, who was unable to defend his people against the Babylonians and their gods.
It was in this context that Yhwh's confession as the one and only God began to take shape. Scribes rewrote the history of the monarchy up to the destruction of Jerusalem in order to show that Yhwh was responsible for this catastrophe, the purpose of which was to punish the kings and the people who had constantly opposed his commandments. If Yhwh could control the Babylonians, he was also more powerful than their gods. Thus, in the second part of the Book of Isaiah that was written at the beginning of the Persian period, we find texts that set out to provide a theoretical demonstration of monotheism. However, monotheism did not immediately prevail, as evidenced in the 5thcentury BC by the existence of a temple that was dedicated to Yhwh as well as two other deities in Elephantine, Egypt.
Image - The Flight of the Prisoners (Exode des prisonniers), James Tissot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
