I Kings 12: I Identify With Rehoboam’s Stupidity!

I’m getting hungry right now, so my write-up of I Kings 12 will be brief. 

Something I notice in I Kings 12 is that the people have power over the king.  V 1 illustrates this: Rehoboam went to Shechem, for all Israel were coming to Shechem to make him king.  The people don’t come to Rehoboam to make him king—in his own city of Jerusalem.  Rather, Rehoboam has to go to where the people have decided to have their coronation—in Shechem, which is located in the tribe of Ephraim.  The same goes with Jeroboam.  The people summon Jeroboam so they can crown him king of Northern Israel.

What’s puzzling is that Rehoboam doesn’t seem to recognize the people’s power.  Here he is, going to Shechem at their summon to be crowned king over Israel.  He should realize that, obviously, the people are the ones with the power, not him.  Yet, for some reason, he decides that now’s a good time to become a tyrant, to impose heavier taxes and to whip the people into submission.  Smart guy!

Yet, strangely, I can somewhat identify with Rehoboam and his young friends, the ones who advised him to lay down the law.  I can imagine myself heading to Shechem to become king, thinking that I’m just going through the normal coronation procedure, without even being aware of the power dynamics that going to Shechem entails.  My young friends are like, “Dude, you have all this power!  Use it!  You’re the boss!”  Meanwhile, the older advisers are talking to me about serving the people and earning their devotion, which doesn’t sound all that attractive to me.  And so I go with what appeals to my vanity and desire for power, as short-sighted and as stupid as my decision may be.

I thought a little about David, though.  David didn’t go to the people of Israel, to the city where they wanted to have the coronation; rather, the people of Israel came to where David was, in Hebron, and they crowned him there (II Samuel 5:1).  How did this happen? 

A big reason was probably that the Israelites wanted David to rule them, after they had lost their own leadership: Ish-bosheth and Abner.  There was a void, and there was no charismatic leader from their midst stepping into it.  And so they figured that David was good enough and strong enough, and they sought his leadership.  I think this was also how David managed to maintain or recover Israelite loyalty later in his reign.  Absalom led all of Israel against David, but once Absalom got killed, Israel didn’t have a charismatic leader, so she returned to David.  When David then snubbed Israel for Judah (Stopped in My Tracks, God in My Life), much of Israel revolted against David under the leadership of Sheba, a Benjaminite.  Once Sheba got killed, however, a void emerged once more, and the Israelites wanted a strong leader.  So they went back to David.

What comes to my mind from all this is that not everyone is charismatic.  The impression I’ve sometimes gotten in Christian community is that we all have charisma and God will exalt us to leadership, in his own time, as he did for Joseph.  But a charismatic person can arise who is not of God.  And there can be a void in charismatic leadership, indicating that not everyone’s cut out for the task.  So not all of us have to be chiefs.  Many of us can go our way, planting our crops and thanking God for the harvest. 

YHWH and His Asherah, Genesis 12 and 20 and the Reader, Samaritan Priest-Line

1.  In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read P. Kyle McCarter’s “Aspects of the Religion of the Israelite Monarchy: Biblical and Epigraphic Data.”

Kuntillet ‘Arjud is located in the Sinai region and was under the control of Judah during the eighth century B.C.E.  An inscription found there refers to “Yahweh and his Asherah,” and there is also a picture of a bull-man and a bull-woman.  Because the Hebrew Bible seems to acknowledge the existence of bull- imagery for YHWH (see Hosea 8:6), many scholars assert that the picture illustrates “Yahweh and his Asherah,” and that the Asherah is the female consort of YHWH.

McCarter wrestles with the definition of “his Asherah” in the inscription, for the biblical and the archaeological evidence say different things.  Asherah was a high-ranking goddess in the ancient Near East, and there are places where the Bible recognizes that (e.g., I Kings 11:5).  But the Hebrew Bible also portrays the Asherah as a cultic device that is built and can be destroyed (Judges 6:25; I Kings 16:33).  When the Kuntillet ‘Arjud inscription mentions “his Asherah,” some scholars believe that it’s referring to a cultic object, not the goddess, for the Hebrew didn’t make a proper name into an object of possession, as we sometimes do (i.e., “my Mary”).  Some argue that YHWH’s Asherah is his wife, while others say it’s a cultic object. 

In my search on Bibleworks, I found references to an image to or of the Asherah (I Kings 15:13; II Kings 21:7; 23:5).  Could the Asherah cultic device be an image of the goddess Asherah? 

McCarter mentions this possibility.  But he goes on a slightly different track in his attempt to offer an explanation.  He refers to examples in Northwest Semitic religion in which a goddess is a hypostasis or manifestation of a god.  For McCarter, YHWH’s Asherah was his visible manifestation, which appeared in the cult.  And that manifestation was marked with a wooden pole, which is called an Asherah.  YHWH’s Asherah is somewhat like YHWH’s consort, but it’s also like YHWH’s Shekinah—his manifestation, which conveys the transcendent God to humans.  And the pole is a symbol of that visible presence.

2.  In Reading Between Texts, I read Ilona Rashow’s “Intertextuality, Transference, and the Reader in/of Genesis 12 and 20.”  On pages 61-62, Rashow discusses a question: Where do texts get their meaning?  Is it in the text itself?  Is it imposed by the reader?  Rashow says it’s a little of both.

In her interaction with Genesis 12 and 20, she tends to read the text in a certain way: Abraham was a scum-bag to say his wife was his sister to Pharaoh and Abimelech.  And, in a sense, she bases her interpretation on the text itself.  Abraham thought that Abimelech was godless, for example, when actually Abimelech turned out to be quite God-fearing.

But are there other ways to read the text?  I find it interesting that the biblical text doesn’t explicitly criticize Abraham for lying to protect his own skin.  Why didn’t God rebuke Abraham the first time that he did it?  Genesis 20:13 says Abraham did this “in every place,” meaning that, if he was supposed to learn not to do this practice, the lesson apparently didn’t take!

Is the lesson of these stories that Abraham was wrong, or rather than God will uphold his people before the mighty of the earth?  I guess that, in interpreting this text, we bring ourselves and our buttons that can be pushed, even as we’re guided by the text itself. 

3.  I found this item of information interesting in Theodore Mullen’s Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, on page 44:

With respect to the priesthood, the Samaritans constructed a priestly genealogy that was descended directly from Phinehas and Eleazar, descendants of Aaron, but that did not form a collateral line with the Zadokite line of Jerusalem.

Sheol

I blogged more than once this week about the Hebrew Bible’s conceptions of the afterlife: see Rephaim, Undeceptive Deception, Suffering and The Dead, and the Rising.  My assumption was that all of the dead went to the Underworld, known in the Hebrew Bible as Sheol.

I thought about that today.  First of all, it entered my mind when I read former fundamentalist Ken Pulliam’s post, The Movie–The Invention of Lying.  (Speaking of the dying and the rising, Ken has returned to his blog after a month-and-a-half hiatus!)  Ken states the following about a movie that he saw:

I think it illustrates why religion is so popular with people.

1. People desperately want to believe that there is something after death. They want to believe that they will be reunited with their loved ones.

2. People want to believe that there is some purpose in life.

3. People want to believe that there is someone in control of this universe and that this someone will eventually make all wrongs right.

For these reasons, religions are very popular and will probably never cease to exist.

I have to admire Ken’s humility.  Some atheists I read on the blogosphere act as if they can single-handedly overthrow religion with their clever arguments.  At least here, however, Ken Pulliam acknowledges that religion ministers to people’s concerns in some way and will probably remain with us for a very long time.

But a thought entered my mind about religion and the afterlife.  Actually, it’s been in my mind before, so it’s more the case that Ken Pulliam’s post drew it out of the inner recesses of my mind.  What about the ancient Israelite religion that entered the Hebrew Bible?  It didn’t have a rigorous conception of the afterlife.  People just went to Sheol and hung out!  How can one say that, in this case, religion emerged out of people’s fear of death and desire for an afterlife?  One purpose behind Levirate marriage was to prevent a dead person’s name from being cut off (Deuteronomy 25:6).  A man’s name was also preserved after death through the passing on of his property to his offspring (Numbers 27:4).  In my opinion, the ancient Israelites were concerned about keeping their name alive because that was the closest to immortality that they could get, since their afterlife in Sheol wasn’t much to brag about.

But Ken’s post got me thinking: they still believed that they’d see their loved ones in Sheol.  Even in their belief about the afterlife, they’d never truly lose a person they care about.  So maybe Ken’s statement about why religion is popular would apply to the ancient Israelite religion that entered the Hebrew Bible.

But then another experience in the blogosphere screamed “Wait a minute!  Not so fast!”  I was reading Chris Smith’s post, My Parents’ Dissertations Are on ProQuest, in which he talks about his parents’ dissertations.  His mom wrote hers on Sheol in Psalm 49.  I expressed my interest, and Chris replied:

In addition to my mom’s dissertation, you might be interested in the book, Shades of Sheol. The author makes a [s]urprisingly convincing case that only bad people go to Sheol in most of the OT passages on the subject, whereas good people go to “rest with their fathers”.

I vaguely recall reading about this book on one of James McGrath’s links.  I’d be interested in reading Philip Johnston’s (the author of Shades of Sheol) case.  One the one hand, I’m not sure that good people were the only ones who slept with their fathers, for the Hebrew Bible uses such a phrase for such wicked characters as Jeroboam (I Kings 14:20), Omri (I Kings 16:28), and Ahab (I Kings 22:40).  I wonder how Johnston interacts with such passages. 

One the other hand, Sheol does seem to be a place for the wicked.  In Isaiah 14, the Rephaim are there.  Moreover, Sheol is often a threat for the wicked in the Hebrew Bible.  If both the righteous and the wicked went there after death, would that make sense, for everyone gets the same end?  Some would say “yes,” since the threat of death and Sheol entails that the wicked will enter Sheol prematurely, whereas the righteous will enjoy a long and happy life before going there.  But is there another way to see the issue?

I read some Amazon reviews of the book (see Shades of Sheol: Death and Afterlife in the Old Testament), and one of the reviewers wrote something that struck me: “Johnston criticizes studies by Pedersen and Barth that suggested that the Israelite sufferer actually experienced Sheol in this life.”  There are people who say that one can experience Sheol in this life?  That’s an interesting statement, and I wonder if it can harmonize apparent contradictions in what the Hebrew Bible says about Sheol.  Psalm 139:8 says that God is in Sheol.  Psalm 6:5, however, states that there’s no remembrance of God there.  Could God be present in Sheol in the sense that he’s with the sufferer in this life?  I’ve often heard that, in the Psalms, deliverance from Sheol is God saving a person from a near-death experience, not God resurrecting him.  In a sense, the person who almost died was in Sheol, even though his death was not a done deal!

But I could be off-base, since Psalm 139:8 contrasts Sheol with heaven; its argument seems to be that God is in the highest and the lowest realms of creation, not that Sheol is a state in this life.  And deliverance from a near-death experience may not mean that the person who almost died was literally in Sheol, but rather that Sheol was grasping her with its clutches, pulling her in its direction.  I don’t know.  In any case, Johnston’s book looks like an encyclopedia on the subject, so I’ll take a look at it!

The Conquest, Asserting and Denying the Bible with the Same Act, Pharisaic Hebrew Bible

1.  In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read William Dever’s “The Contribution of Archaeology to the Study of Canaanite and Early Israelite Religion.”  The following statement stood out to me (page 236):

It must be stressed that in light of archaeology today, it is the LB-Iron I continuity—not the discontinuity—that is striking, and the more so as research progresses.  In other words, of the two biblical accounts, Joshua and Judges, the latter is by far the more realistic and thus more historically reliable.

Dever believes that there is archaeological continuity between Late Bronze Age Canaan and ancient Israel, which emerged in the Iron I Period.  Both appear to have a similar culture.  For Dever, a huge part of ancient Israel came from the Canaanites, meaning that most of the Israelites weren’t foreigners who left Egypt and killed off the natives of Canaan.  On the contrary, Dever contends, most of the Israelites were Canaanites, and their settlement of Palestine “was a gradual, exceedingly complex process,” not a swift takeover, or Conquest.

I’ve often read his sentiment about Joshua and Judges in other scholarly writings.  On some level, I don’t understand it, if he’s saying that Judges presents the Israelites as Canaanites.  My impression is that the Book of Judges presumes some sort of Exodus and Conquest.  But Judges doesn’t present the Conquest as total, for there were still Canaanites who lived with the Israelites in Palestine, influencing them to accept their religion.  Moreover, as Baruch Halpern states in his article, “Settlement of Canaan,” in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, Judges 1 “recorded a series of triumphs by individual tribes rather than a united invasion, as in Joshua 10–12.” 

On page 232, Dever states: Despite the general breakup of Canaanite cultural hegemony at the close of the Late Bronze Age, with the destruction or disruption of many sites in Palestine, Canaanite influence continued, especially at sites that did not become “Israelite”[.]

Is this consistent with the biblical pictures of Conquest, since Dever is saying that Canaanite sites were destroyed or disrupted at the close of the Late Bronze Age, right before the Israelites set up their sites in the central hills?  Many have argued that others (e.g., Philistines, Sea People) could have destroyed the Canaanites sites.  And Israel Finkelstein has argued against the historicity of the Conquest, saying that the cities were destroyed over one hundred years, not in one fell swoop. 

I should know more about this issue than I do, but at least my post puts questions in my head that I should explore.

2.  In Reading Between Texts, I read Peter Miscall’s essay, “Isaiah: New Heavens, New Earth, New Book.”  The following quote was quite provocative:

…a commentator on a text—here Speiser on Gen 1:1-2:4a—accepts and supports the [biblical] text’s authority by asserting that it is worthy of commentary and by explicating its meanings and implications.  At the same time, the commentator modifies and even undermines the original text’s authority by declaring that it needs commentary (i.e., it is not clear enough on its own), and this commentary is what the original text really means (i.e., the original text does not mean what it says).

I’ll let this quote stand on its own, without my commentary!

3.  Here’s a provocative quote of M. Smith in Theodore Mullen’s Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations (page 39):

“…the Hebrew Bible, as we have it, is primarily evidence of the interests of the Pharisees and their successors, who not only selected and interpreted the books but also carefully determined and corrected their texts…”

Mullen dates this process to the second century B.C.E.

Smith’s book, Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament, may be worth reading.  What was the extent of the Pharisaic contribution to the development of the Hebrew Bible?  I don’t think that the Pharisees were the only ones who accepted the Hebrew Bible, for biblical books are found in Qumran, a priestly sect.  The New Testament states that the priestly Sadducees accepted the Law of Moses.  But did the Pharisees and their successors interpret and correct biblical texts?  Most likely so.  I talk about that in my post, Theological Correction, where I link to other posts I wrote on the subject.

Zelda Rubinstein, J.D. Salinger

Two people have passed away: Zelda Rubinstein and J.D. Salinger.

1.  Zelda Rubinstein played on the movie Poltergeist, though I knew her more as the mischievous secretary on Picket Fences.  My family didn’t watch Poltergeist, probably because we felt that it was flirting with evil, and some of the people who played on the movie died shortly thereafter (see Poltergeist (film)).  I’m not sure if that was a curse or just plain coincidence.  I mean, tragic things happen! 

But I watched Poltergeist at some point in my adult life.  It had Craig T. Nelson from Coach, so I figured it couldn’t be too bad!  It was okay.  Plus, many people still use the catchphrases “He’s baaaack!” or “They’re heeeere!”, and that movie is, what, twenty-eight years old?

2.  J.D. Salinger wrote Catcher in the Rye.  I didn’t read it in high school, but I just now read the plot of it here.  I first heard of the book when I was reading about the religious right taking on the public schools.  One of its favorite targets was Catcher in the Rye, a big reason being that it had a lot of cuss words.  And, sure enough, when I looked at the first page of the book, it did!  But, when I read the wikipedia summary, I saw other objections that the religious right had to it: it undermines family values, encourages promiscuity, etc.

Ironically, a New York Times article on the controversy surrounding the book quoted someone who compared the religious right to Catcher‘s provocative protagonist, Holden Caufield.  Holden hoped as an older kid to protect the younger children and their innocence, to catch them in the rye as they fell.  And that’s what the religious right tried to do in banning Catcher in the Rye (see  “In a Small Town, a Battle Over a Book”). 

The book covers the sordid side of life, but it also speaks about alienation and the belief of the protagonist that others are “phony.”  I don’t think wrestling with those issues is wrong.  Personally, I don’t like being judged as phony, but there have been Christians (i.e., Francis Schaeffer) who’ve offered similar critiques of American culture.  I once had a conversation with a guy, and he asked me if I’d seen The Bridges of Madison County and Six Feet Under.  I replied “no,” for the former has an affair, and the latter depicts homosexual activity.  He then replied that I don’t have to approve of those things, but I should still listen to what the stories are trying to say. 

Maybe Catcher in the Rye is the same way.  There are people who prefer stories with heroes we can admire, and they may shy away from an anti-hero like Holden Caufield.  For them, stories should depict how things should be, not how they are.  And they can easily point out the negative effects of bad stories.  I once heard a sermon that said some women have affairs after seeing The Bridges of Madison County.  The wikipedia article on Catcher states that some have blamed the shootings of John Lennon and Ronald Reagan on the book. 

But life is a struggle, a hard path with a clearly sordid side.  And we ourselves, like Holden Caufield, are a mixture of good and bad.  I’m not sure if everything in Catcher is age-appropriate for certain levels of school, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with reading about a person who struggles with himself and others, while learning lessons along the way. 

Tim Tebow

I joined a Facebook group supporting Tim Tebow’s pro-life commercial, which may or may not appear during the Superbowl.  (Go Colts!)

I joined it because, on the commercial, Tebow talks about how he’s glad that his mom didn’t abort him when she was presented with the opportunity.  A friend of mine called this a political ad, and I then realized that I should probably see it if I’m going to be in a group defending it.  So I did a search.

I didn’t find the ad, but here’s a picture of Tim Tebow’s girlfriend: See full size image.  Man!  How’s a born-again Christian like him handle the no-sex-before-marriage rule?  It would be hard for me, if I had a girlfriend like her!

I know, I’m a pig.

But this should make up for it: Izgad’s posts on why sex outside of marriage is ethically wrong. 

The Ethical Case Against Sex Outside of Marriage (Part I)

The Ethical Case Against Sex Outside of Marriage (Part II)

Howard Zinn

The AP has a story, Howard Zinn, liberal author of ‘A People’s History,’ dies.

I don’t know much about him.  I heard of him on Good Will Hunting because Matt Daimon told Robin Williams’ that Zinn’s People’s History will “knock your socks off.”  I have a CD of some of Zinn’s speeches, for one of my relatives was a fan of his.  This relative of mine likes anyone who’s anti-establishment, whether it’s leftists such as Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, or rightists such as the John Birch Society.  That makes a degree of sense, for both Mother Jones and the Birchers criticize Rockefeller!  There’s a place where the radical left meets the far right, and vice versa.

The AP story characterizes Zinn’s history as follows:

At a time when few politicians dared even call themselves liberal, “A People’s History” told an openly left-wing story. Zinn charged Christopher Columbus and other explorers with genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters.

The story says that Zinn himself fought in World War II.  The book may be worth reading if it picks apart FDR, even from a liberal perspective!

Tigay and Khirbet Qieyafa?, Intertextuality and Judges, Is Mullen a Minimalist?

1.  In Ancient Israelite Religion, I read Jeffrey Tigay’s “Israelite Religion: The Onomastic and Epigraphic Evidence.”  Tigay’s conclusion after his survey is as follows (page 178): Since personal names, salutations, votives, prayers, and oaths express thanks for the gods’ beneficence, hope for their blessing and protection, and the expectation that they will punish deception, the low representation of pagan deities in the names and inscriptions indicates that deities other than YHWH were not widely regarded by Israelites as sources of beneficence, blessing, protection, and justice.  In short, for Tigay, eighth century B.C.E. evidence indicates that most of Israel worshipped only one god: YHWH. 

Why, then, does the Hebrew Bible assert the contrary?  For Tigay, its authors were trying to find a reason that Israel fell, a sin for which God punished their nation.  Tigay acknowledges that there were a few idolaters in ancient Israel.  Because God often punished the entire group for the sins of a few individuals (e.g., Achan in Joshua 7), God held all of Israel responsible for the idolatry of a few, in the minds of certain biblical authors.

Some of the evidence that Tigay considers contains the names of a foreign god—some, but not the vast majority.  Tigay accounts for this in a variety of ways: the names with foreign deities belonged to foreigners dwelling in Israel, it took a while for some Israelites to shed their pagan names, or some of the non-Yahwistic names refer to demons or spirits, not full-fledged gods.  Here, I want to interact with another of his explanations. 

Tell Qasile is located on the western coast of Israel.  An ostracon found there refers “to a shipment of Ophir gold to, or belonging to, the town of Beth-horon” (175).  The ostracon is in Hebrew script but has a Phoenician numeral, perhaps because Phoenician influence existed in the harbor town of Tell Qasile.  Is the ostracon referring to a temple of the deity, Horon?

What intrigued me was this statement by Tigay (page 176): One may even wonder whether the Hebrew script necessarily implies that the inscription was written by an Israelite.  The Moabites used Hebrew script (witness the Mesha inscription), and perhaps it was used in Philistia too.    Tigay then refers to a “fragmentary inscription in Hebrew letters” found on “a fragment of an eighth century jar at Ashdod,” which indicates to scholar M. Dothan that “by the eighth century B.C.E., if not earlier, the Ashdodites shared a common script and language with their neighbors, the Phoenicians, and with the people of Israel and Judah.”

Of course, Tigay’s whole point in all of this is that the Tell Qasile finding doesn’t show that the Israelites worshipped another god besides YHWH.  Even if the ostracon is in Hebrew script, Tigay contends, it could’ve belonged to the Philistines rather than the Israelites. 

I wonder if this information is relevant to the discussion about the Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription, which was found on the Judahite-Philistine border and dates to the tenth century B.C.E. (see here and here).  Because it’s in Hebrew and contains biblical-like language, many have argued that it demonstrates that much of the Hebrew Bible was written early and that King David’s kingdom actually existed.  But could it belong to the Philistines rather than the Israelites, even if it’s in Hebrew?  The name YHWH does not explicitly occur in the inscription, though scholars have put it in brackets.  Perhaps it’s a Philistine inscription, urging the Philistine king to do justice. 

I don’t want to be dogmatic in this case, though, because there’s plenty that I don’t know.  The Khirbet Qieyafa inscription doesn’t just use the Hebrew script: it’s in Hebrew.  But a document can use Hebrew script without being in Hebrew.  Was the Mesha inscription in a language other than Hebrew, even though it used a Hebrew script?  Is the Tell Qasile ostracon in Hebrew in terms of its language, not just its script?  Still, M. Dothan affirms that the Ashdodites shared a common script AND language with the people of Israel and Judah.  Does that indicate that a Hebrew inscription found near Philistia could be Philistine rather than Israelite?

2.  In Reading Between the Texts, I read Timothy Beal’s essay, “Ideology and Intertextuality: Surplus of Meaning and Controlling the Means of Production.”  Beale discusses Mieke Bal’s feminist interaction with the Book of Judges.  To be honest, I’m not sure if I thoroughly understand her point.  She says that biblical scholars tend to focus on the nationalistic wars in the Book of Judges, rather than the women, who have a voice in the book.  I get that.  But does she believe that the Book of Judges itself subordinates the women to the nationalistic battles?  That’s where I was unclear.

Intertextuality is relevant here because we’re juxtaposing two texts: the Book of Judges, and the scholarly approaches to it.  Feminists look at the scholarly approaches and compare them with the Book of Judges itself, and they see things in the Book that are not really on the radar of the scholars.  Beale even went so far as to suggest that the scholarly focus on nationalistic battles may have been culturally-conditioned, for “theologically driven nationalism” was big in nineteenth-twentieth century Germany.

3.  I found a key quote in Theodore Mullen’s Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations, which may explain where he’s coming from.    It’s on page 25:

…it may have been during the Persian period, and not earlier, that the Torah was created as the basis of the community and that the mode of this creation and its transmission was through the scribal schools associated with the Jerusalem priesthood as functionaries of the Persian government.

Does Mullen believe that the national history of Israel was written during the Persian period?  I’ll see.  There are indications that he leans in a minimalist direction.  He doesn’t really accept the historicity of Josiah’s reform, for example.  He may acknowledge that it existed on some small level, but (for him) it wasn’t big, and it wasn’t in response to a book of the law.

Intertextuality, Beginning Mullen

1.  I started Reading Between Texts: Intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible, a collection of essays on (well) intertextuality and the Hebrew Bible.  My hope is to comment on an essay a day (except Saturday), as I’ve been doing with Ancient Israelite Religion. 

So far, intertextuality appears to be reading two texts side-by-side.  When this happens, we compare and contrast.  We approach one text with the other in mind, and new questions emerge, for one text leads us to notice things in the other text.  For example, God dramatically intervenes in the Exodus, but he doesn’t in Esther.  Rather, Esther has to use her wits and beauty.  What’s that say about the Book of Esther’s view concerning the roles of God and humanity in the well-being of Israel?

Daniel is bolder with the king than Esther is.  She has to crawl on egg-shells to get an audience with him.  And, although she is clearly intelligent, she’s not valued for that by the king, who focuses instead on her beauty.  What’s that say about the treatment of women in Israel’s exile?

I’m going to enjoy this book because intertextuality allows one to play a little bit with the text.  I’m not saying that we can abuse the text or make it mean anything we want, but rather that we can compare, contrast, juxtapose, and arrive at interesting insights in the process.  I’m especially looking forward to reading the essay that reads the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 in light of Samson.  I doubt the essay is saying that the author of Isaiah 53 had Samson in mind.  Rather, it’s seeing what happens when we read the two texts together.

It should be fun!

2.  In the meantime, I’ll be reading Theodore Mullen’s Ethnic Myths and Pentateuchal Foundations: A New Approach to the Formation of the Pentateuch.  I’ve not gotten enough into the book to see what his perspective is, but I have impressions, which could be right or wrong.  Mullen doesn’t seem to care for the Documentary Hypothesis, which divides the Pentateuch into four sources: J, E, P, and D.  He recommends R.N. Whybray’s The Making of the Pentateuch, which (if I’m not mistaken) argues that contradictions in the Pentateuch don’t mean that it had to come from different hands.    Mullen appears to speak glowingly of synchronic approaches to the text (i.e., the literary approach), which treat it as one piece, rather than dividing it into sources.  And he points out on page 2 that one can create national traditions from whole cloth.  So will his point be that, at some point in Israel’s history, someone wrote the Pentateuch to be Israel’s national history?  We will see!

The Dead, and the Rising

I’m going to do something slightly out of character today.  Ordinarily, I do all of my readings and then write one post about all of them.  Today, however, I’ll be writing one post on an Ancient Israelite Religion article, then I’ll write one on my other readings.  Aren’t I a rebel?

The reason I’m doing it this way is that the article I read in Ancient Israelite Religion covered issues that are important to me as well as revealed gaps in my knowledge.  This post is my attempt to correct that. 

The article is Brian Peckham’s “Phoenicia and the Religion of Israel: The Epigraphic Evidence.”  Here are the two topics:

1.  Peckham talks about Sidonian royal inscriptions warning people not to disturb the sleep of the dead by opening their coffins.  On page 82, Peckham states the following, and I’ve omitted the transliterations that he places in parentheses: For a Sidonian king, the tranquillity of death is sleep with the Rephaim that can be disturbed either by opening the coffin to search for treasure, by taking it out of the tomb, or by removing it from its resting place.

I wondered about ancient Near Eastern notions about the afterlife.  If they held that the dead go to the Underworld, why did people offer food to the dead?  Did the dead come up from their sleep every now and then to eat?

I found these items in Charles Kennedy’s Anchor Bible Dictionary article, “Dead, Cult of the”: 

At Ugarit and elsewhere tombs were equipped with libation tubes or jars without bottoms to conduct fluids into the grave.

The dead especially needed liquid refreshment, since the realm of Death (Mot) was widely regarded as an arid place, a desert devoid of life-giving rain. Liquids—water, wine, and blood—were particularly welcome. This need on the part of the dead raised a problem for the living. The libations poured on graves could be matched by cups of wine drunk by the living.

Somehow, the nourishment reached the dead in the Underworld, where it was eagerly accepted.

Why’s the Bible dislike the cult of the dead?  Did the biblical authors (of the Hebrew Bible) not believe that the dead needed subsistence?  According to Kennedy, they apparently did not:

The dead were declared outside the sphere of God’s cult (Ps 88:3–12) and therefore divorced from him. They no longer required food and drink, much less sex, since they are in a state of rest. In the Apocrypha the pragmatic argument is made that drink poured on a mouth closed in death was as much a waste as food left on a grave. Equally useless is offering fruit to an image of the deceased, “for it can neither eat nor smell.”

For the biblical authors, the dead were in a state of rest.  The Sidonians conceptualized death as that as well, but they probably believed that the dead could wake up and have a snack every now and then. 

In my post, Rephaim, Undeceptive Deception, Suffering, I quoted Patrick Miller, who said that Ugaritic people provided their dead king with services to “secure the blessing of his successor.”  Could the dead have an impact on the living?  How could they do that from the Underworld?  A statement Peckham makes on page 86 may offer insight (again, I omitted the transliterations in parentheses): The earliest king of Byblos [in Phoenicia] prays that whoever disturbs his grave will both lose his throne and the legal authority that gave the city authority.  He “prays.”  Maybe this means that the dead king couldn’t do much on his own, but he could ask the gods to bless or to curse.  Or perhaps the blessing or the curse itself had a certain power. 

2.  Peckham talks about the death and resurrection of the Phoenician god Eshmun, whom the Greeks called “Adonis.”  I thought of the Star Trek episode, “Who Mourns for Adonis?”, and I realized that I didn’t know much about him. 

Still, I’ve written about dying and rising gods in my posts, God’s Size, Differences, Three Stages, Moving to the City, Dying and Rising Gods, the King as God, Renegade Priest in Eden and YHWH in the Underworld.  The god’s death meant winter or the absence of stability; his resurrection entailed spring and prosperity, or the restraint of the forces of chaos.  This, I glean from Richard Baukham’s informative article in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, “Descent to the Underworld.” 

One point in Bauckham’s article that impressed me was that people in the ancient Near East believed that those who went to the Underworld never came back.  When Baal returned from the dead, therefore, it was because he had help from other gods.  I’d often heard that people in the ancient Near East during the time of the Hebrew Bible lacked a rigorous conception of the afterlife, but I wondered how dying and rising gods fit into this.  Apparently, it’s because of the former that the latter is so remarkable!  Death is pretty powerful, so when one manages to defeat it, it’s something to talk about!

As Peckham points out, the Hebrew Bible condemns the celebration of the dying and rising god.  Ezekiel 8:14 criticizes women who weep for Tammuz, and Jeremiah 7 and 44 lambaste the worship of the Queen of Heaven.  The Queen of Heaven fits into this in the sense that she was the love of the dying and rising god: once the god arose, he went to be with her. 

I wonder if these pagan customs can teach Christians to associate Christ’s resurrection with spring—God’s plan to renew or recreate us and the world around us.  Some of my readers may take offense at this, for did not the biblical authors condemn such customs?  And yet, according to Peckham, they may have also appropriated them at times!  Peckham refers to the Book of Hosea, in which Israel is God’s spouse and rises from the dead on the third day (see Hosea 6:2).  In Hosea’s mind, was Israel like a dying and rising god?  Was Hosea drawing from pagan imagery to express a concept: that Israel, like the dying and rising god, would rise from the dead and meet her beloved?