Exclusivism and its discontents

This morning in church, the praise team played an old praise chorus by Waterdeep that includes the line "You ride upon the clouds." It got me to thinking about how interconnected religions are. My 21st century urban Methodist church gets this image of God riding upon a cloud from the Old Testament, which we read because our religion, Christianity, started out as an apocalyptic Jewish sect. Jews, in turn, inherited the Hebrew Bible from their ancient Israelite ancestors.

God is frequently depicted riding upon clouds in the Hebrew Bible. The image, however, does not originate in the Hebrew Bible. The earliest attestation of it that I know is from the Baal epic from Ugarit, a city in modern Syria that was destroyed in the 11th century BCE, at least a century before any but the oldest biblical texts. Moreover, the epithet "Cloud-rider" belongs not to the God of Israel but to Baal, whom most Jews and Christians now know because he is the divine arch-rival of the God of Israel.

This is common in the history of religions: the Israelites needed a vocabulary to describe their God, so they borrowed it from the gods of their neighbors, even while they were busy execrating their neighbors for worshipping these very same gods. This is what has always bothered me about religious exclusivism: how can religions that depend upon each other make claims that exclude one another?