Middle Eastern religion
Main
any of the religious beliefs, attitudes, and practices developed in the
ancient Middle East (extending geographically from Iran to Egypt and
from Anatolia and the Aegean Sea to the Arabian Peninsula and temporally
from about 3000 to 330 bc, when Alexander the Great conquered much of
the area). They have had an enduring influence on Western civilization.
While this article treats only those religions of Middle Eastern
antiquity that have not survived to modern times, special attention is
given in the introduction to their role as antecedents of the major
Western religions (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and Islām), all of which
originated in the region. For full treatment of these “inheritors” of
the Middle Eastern tradition, including also the surviving
Zoroastrianism and Parsiism, see under the names of the individual
religions.
General considerations
The ancient Middle East constituted an ecumene. The term ecumene comes
from the Greek word oikoumenē, which means the inhabited world and
designates a distinct cultural-historical community. The material
effects of the commercial and cultural interconnections that permeated
the component regions of the ancient Middle Eastern ecumene are richly
supplied by archaeological excavations, which provide evidence of the
spread of architectural, ceramic, metallurgical, and other products of
ancient Middle Eastern man’s industry. Manufacturing and services tended
to be monopolized by professional guilds, including religious personnel
specializing in sacrifices, oracles, divination, and other kinds of
priestcraft. The mobility of such guilds throughout the entire area
helps to explain the spread of specific religious ideas and techniques
over great distances. Just as guild potters spread ceramic forms and
methods, so also guild priests spread their religious concepts and
practices from the Indian Ocean to the Aegean Sea, and from the Nile
River to Central Asia. The Greek poet Homer, in the Odyssey, noted the
mobility of guildsmen, mentioning religious personnel as well as
architects, physicians, and minstrels. Guild priests called kohanim were
found at ancient Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria as
well as in Israel. Moreover, Mycenaean Greek (late Bronze Age) methods
of sacrifice are similar to the Hebraic methods, which are preserved in
many countries to this day in the traditional techniques of Jewish
ritual slaughter.
General considerations » The “archaeological revolution”
The decipherment of Mesopotamian and Egyptian literatures in the 19th
century opened new vistas of ancient Middle Eastern history. Hitherto,
scholarly knowledge had been limited to the contents of classical
Hebrew, Greek, and Latin literatures. Explorations and excavations in
the Middle East yielded not only texts but also an abundance of ancient
art objects, artifacts of daily life, and architecture and thus have
revolutionized scholarly knowledge of the ancient Middle East, including
its religions. A ziggurat excavated at Babylon illustrates the form of
the biblical Tower of Babel. The prototype of the biblical story of the
Deluge has turned up in the Gilgamesh epic. A fragment (dating from
about 1400 bc) of that Babylonian epic has been found at Megiddo in
Israel, showing that the Mesopotamian version was current in Palestine
before the Hebrews, under Joshua, conquered the land about 1200 bc. A
previously little-known people, the Hittites, are, because of
archaeological discoveries, now recognized as a major power of antiquity
with a rich legacy of religious texts, especially rituals.
The earliest and certainly the most fundamental ancient Middle
Eastern civilization—the Sumerian—had vanished without a reference in
the literatures of the world. Sumerology is now an important field of
investigation. Biblical studies have been revolutionized by the tablets
(1400–1200 bc) found from 1929 onward at Ugarit. It has become extremely
difficult to keep abreast of the continually growing body of material,
and very few scholars today feel secure enough to venture beyond limited
areas.
General considerations » Literary sources of knowledge of ancient Middle
Eastern religion
Classical literature remains an important source for ancient Middle
Eastern religion. The Roman historian Livy wrote many descriptions of
religious rites of the ancient Middle East. The Roman poet Virgil’s
Aeneid and Eclogues reflect Egyptian, Semitic, and Anatolian, as well as
Greek, antecedents. The Greek biographer Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride
(“Concerning Isis and Osiris”) is still the best description of the
Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris and of the cult of the dead. The Greek
satirist Lucian’s De Dea Syra (“Concerning the Syrian Goddess”) is of
enduring value for an understanding of Canaanite religion. The writings
of Herodotus, the 5th-century-bc Greek historian, remain an
indispensable source for the cultural history and religion of the
ancient Middle East. And owing to the discovery of texts from Ugarit,
the Homeric epic of the Greeks is now firmly linked to Middle Eastern
literature.
The Hebrew Bible is still the most important single source for
knowledge of the ancient Middle East, reflecting life from Egypt to
Iran, and from the Bronze Age beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. There
is very little in the Old Testament that does not follow the types of
religious literatures in the older Middle East: psalms, hymns, laws,
rituals, prophecy, wisdom literature, and other types. Sometimes parts
of the Bible are related in detail to specific outside sources. The
Egyptian Wisdom of Amenemope, first published in modern times in 1923,
for example, parallels Proverbs 22:17–24:22 so closely that it
effectively opened up the field of the comparative study of ancient
Middle Eastern wisdom literature.
Middle Eastern worldviews and basic religious thought » The concept of
the sacred
All of the ancient Middle Eastern people saw the agency of the gods in
every aspect of life and nature. Everything on earth was regarded as a
reflex of its prototype in the divine or sacred sphere, such as in the
biblical description of the creation of man “in the image of God”; God
was viewed as the primary reality of the universe, and human beings were
seen as the reflection of that reality. In Egypt, Thoth was the scribe
in the pantheon. Mortal scribes were viewed as the human reflections of
Thoth, and “the beak of the Ibis (i.e., Thoth) is the finger of the
Scribe” (Wisdom of Amenemope, ch. XV, 17:7).
The ancient Middle Eastern people believed that the universe resulted
from the injecting of order (cosmos) into chaotic primordial beings or
matter, followed by divine acts of creation. Genesis 1:1–3 says that
when God began to create the heavens and the earth, the “earth was
without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and
the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said,
‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” Thus darkness (i.e., evil)
was preexistent. Moreover, the deep (tehom in Hebrew) is the same as the
primordial dragon called Tiamat (cognate to the Hebrew tehom) in the
Babylonian epic of creation. The first act of creation is God’s evoking
light (i.e., the forces of good) by fiat. Accordingly, God is not
responsible for the forces of evil, which were there before he embarked
on the creative process. Proceeding by fiat he separated the
water-containing earth from the water-containing heaven, confined the
earth’s waters to the bodies of water (leaving the rest as dry land),
created the various species of vegetation, the heavenly bodies, the
animal kingdom, and finally man, who is to rule over the earth. All this
takes six days, after which God rests on the seventh, so that the
Sabbath crowns the epic of creation and imposes the obligation to
observe the sabbath in keeping with the principle of imitatio Dei (the
imitation of God).
The Babylonian creation epic (Enuma elish, “When on High”) states
that at first there existed only the male (Apsu) and female (Tiamat)
gods of the deep. They raised a family of gods that were so unruly that
Apsu resolved to destroy them. Rebellion and chaos ensued. Among the
deities was Marduk, the god of Babylon. Since the main version of the
epic of creation is the Babylonian, Marduk occupies the role of Creator.
(In the Assyrian version, Ashur is important.) Tiamat, who had embarked
on a course of destruction, was slain by Marduk, who cut her in two and
used her carcass to create the universe. Out of half her body he
fashioned the sky containing the heavenly bodies to mark the periods of
time. The epic culminates in the glorification of Marduk and the
establishment of his order. The Enuma elish was read on the Akitu, or
New Year festival, at Babylon, to reestablish order, in accordance with
sympathetic transference principles, by reciting Marduk’s creation. The
function of the Akitu is thus to rejuvenate society for the new year.
Middle Eastern worldviews and basic religious thought » Views of man and
society
The lack of hard-and-fast barriers between gods and men left room for
hybridizing. The aristocracy, in particular, claimed some divine form of
ancestry. Gilgamesh, a mortal king who ruled Uruk in Mesopotamia, was,
according to the Gilgamesh epic, born of the goddess Ninsun, even as
among the Greeks Achilles was accepted as the son of the goddess Thetis.
Sometimes kings claimed to have two divine parents. King Keret, whose
epic was found at Ugarit, claimed to be the son of El, the head of the
pantheon, and of Asherah, El’s wife. Every Egyptian pharaoh was hailed
as “the son of Re” (the sun god). This does not, however, imply the
absence of a human father. The concept was one of paternity at two
levels; qualitative superiority emanated from the notion of divine
paternity, but one’s position in society came from the human husband of
one’s mother. Odysseus “the Zeus-begotten son of Laertes” (Iliad 10:144)
was a hero because Zeus presumably impregnated his mother; but he was
also king of Ithaca because his mother’s husband was King Laertes of
Ithaca. In this regard the birth and station of Christ differ only in
that Mary was a virgin when she was divinely impregnated. Though the
divine component of Christ is due to his divine paternity, his position
as king of the Jews comes not from his heavenly Father but from Mary’s
husband, Joseph, who was descended from King David (Matthew 1).
In the ancient Middle Eastern worldview, gods could become mortal,
and men could become gods. Utnapishtim, the hero of the Babylonian Flood
story, was deified together with his wife by the fiat of the great god
Enlil: “Hitherto Utnapishtim has been but human; henceforth Utnapishtim
and his wife shall be like us gods” (Gilgamesh epic 11:193–194). In the
Hebrew Bible, God so loved Enoch (Genesis 5:24) and Elijah (2 Kings
2:11) that he carried them aloft to heaven as immortals. But these were
special cases, and in antiquity they set no precedent for common folk.
Kings enjoyed deification regularly in Egypt, though in some other
traditions only upon dying. The Hittite monarch Hattusilis III refers to
his father’s death as “when my father Mursilis became a god” (Apology of
Hattusilis, line 22).
From the ancient Middle Eastern point of view, man was created to
serve the gods, and he does so in the hope that the gods appreciate it
and will reward him for it. The gods need food and drink and depend on
men to supply them. After the Flood the biblical Noah won God’s
goodwill, for “the Lord smelled the pleasing odor” (Genesis 8:21) of the
tasty flesh and fowl offered up to him. Noah was following a long
tradition, for Utnapishtim (Gilgamesh epic 11:155–161) had, after the
Flood, offered sacrifices and libations to the gods who “crowded like
flies” as they “smelled the sweet savor.” Though gods depend on man, man
also depends on the gods, and therefore service to the deities must be
maintained for the welfare of the state, even as the family and the
individual must do what the gods expect of them for domestic and
personal welfare.
Everything on earth reflects a divine prototype, and all human
affairs are divinely ordered and scrutinized. Gods may even build the
cities destined to be their cultic centres and in which they are to
reside, at least part of the time. The Greek god Poseidon built the
walls of Troy, according to the Iliad (21:446–447). At Ugarit, Baal’s
temple was designed and built by Kothar-wa-Hasis, the god of arts and
crafts. The Israelite King David gave his son Solomon plans for the
Temple drawn up by Yahweh’s (the Lord’s) own hand (1 Chronicles 28:19).
National policy went hand in hand with theology. Ashur was the
national deity of Assyria; the kings of Assyria were in theory his chief
executive officers. Thus Sennacherib, king of Assyria, in undertaking a
military campaign, recorded that he did so not on his own initiative but
in conformity with Ashur’s will: “In my second campaign, Ashur my Lord
impelled me.” When the Hebrews and Ammonites had a border dispute,
Jephthah told the Ammonites: “Will you not possess what Chemosh your god
gives you to possess? And all that the Lord our God has dispossessed
before us, we will possess” (Judges 11:24). There was no such thing as
secular policy in the ancient Middle East.
Since the king was the human agent of the god, he was exalted above
other men. In Israel, the king was chosen by God to rule his people.
God’s representative was a priest or prophet who consecrated the king by
anointing his head with oil. But the king of Israel was not divine,
neither while on the throne nor after death.
The divinity of kings evoked certain fictions. By sucking the breasts
of goddesses, crown princes imbibed a source of divinity. The baby
pharaoh sucking the breasts of Isis (who was perhaps in real life
represented by her high priestess) is a common motif in Egyptian art. In
Mesopotamia, it was not the usual practice for kings to claim divinity,
but now and then it cropped up. Naram-Sin (23rd century bc) prefixed the
sign for divinity before his name and was officially a god. The same
usage is attested among kings of the 3rd dynasty of Ur (c. 2112 bc–2004
bc).
Middle Eastern worldviews and basic religious thought » Views of basic
values and ends of human life
The good life was one lived in accord with the regulations of one’s god.
In the realm of ethics and morals there was more international
uniformity than there was in taboo and ritual. Honesty and kindness were
universally recognized as good, theft and murder as bad. Wisdom
literature tended to stress the same virtues and to condemn the same
vices, regardless of the region and cult. It remained for the prophets
of Israel to single out uncompromising virtue as the overriding
consideration in the good life required by God. The most important
factor in that system was “social justice,” whereby the weak was always
protected in conflicts of interest with the strong. This had an
important place in what may be called “international religion”—i.e.,
that governing relations between men from different areas belonging to
different cults. That level of religion, called “fear of the gods,” is
tested when the strong man confronts the weak. The strong man who
injures the weak lacks the fear of the gods; the strong man who helps
the weak has the fear of the gods. This was religion transcending all
the regional cults, and it came into play when strangers abroad were at
the mercy of the local inhabitants. Odysseus in a foreign land wanted to
know if the people there feared the gods or were lawless so that no
stranger was safe (Odyssey 9:176). Abraham, too, was concerned in
Philistia lest the inhabitants might kill him because there was no “fear
of God(s)” (Genesis 20:11). Men of all nations and all cults knew that
only among god-fearing men was there decency or safety.
There was another common trend in international religion. No matter
how polytheistic a cult may have been, it left a place for the god
shared by all peoples. Theos, “God” (not merely “a god”), is in Homer;
pa netjer, “the God,” occurs in Egyptian exactly like Elohim, “(the)
God,” in Hebrew. Nebuchadrezzar II, the 7th–6th-century-bc Babylonian
king, made Zedekiah, the Judaean king, swear by Elohim (2 Chronicles
36:13), the God of the universe for Babylonians and Hebrews alike.
Similarly, when the Hebrews spoke of truth uttered by Pharaoh Necho,
which fell on the deaf ears of the Judaean King Josiah, the text (2
Chronicles 35:21) states that Elohim, “God,” had spoken through the
mouth of the pharaoh.
In Egyptian religion (followed by Judaism, Christianity, and Islām),
the concept of a happy afterlife depending on one’s ethical and moral
record in this world was developed. Vignettes in the various Egyptian
books of the dead show the deceased’s heart being weighed against the
feather of truth in the balances before the scribe god Thoth, who
records the text. When the Bible speaks of God as “who tests the heart
and the kidneys” (Psalms 7:9; Jeremiah 11:20 and 20:12) it refers to the
same concept.
Middle Eastern worldviews and basic religious thought » Myths as the
basic mode of religious thought
Myths were developed to account for the cosmos. How did the gods bring
heavens, earth, plants, beasts, and human beings into existence? What is
the divine origin of human institutions and of the ecumene? What divine
process is responsible for prosperity or failure? To explain such basic
questions, etiological (origin or causal) myths were developed. For
example, the attraction between man and woman (and the consequent
institution of marriage) is explained by the myth that primeval man was
one creature, subsequently divided into two parts, male and female,
which are attracted to one another to regain their pristine unity.
Aristophanes expresses this theory of sexual attraction in Plato’s
Symposium. Genesis relates the same theory in the familiar myth that a
rib, taken out of Adam, was fashioned into Eve; and precisely because
woman was taken out of man, man forsakes his father and mother to cleave
unto his wife so that they become one flesh.
Myths are often invoked in magic (which, unlike religion, aims at
compelling, instead of imploring, the gods). To banish evil from the
life of a client, the magician may invoke the cosmic myth whereby the
forces of good triumph over the forces of evil. Evil is depicted on a
seal of the Akkad period (late 3rd millennium bc) in Mesopotamia as a
seven-headed monster whose heads are being successively killed by good
anthropomorphic (human-form) beings. At Ugarit, in mythological poems of
the late Bronze Age, the good gods Baal and Anath slay the wicked
Leviathan of the Seven Heads, providing the precedent for the victory of
good over evil. The Hebrews also nurtured this myth whereby God slays
the many-headed Leviathan (Psalms 74:14) and will do so again at the end
of days, to quell evil and establish good for all eternity (Isaiah
27:1).
Middle Eastern worldviews and basic religious thought » Association of
religion with the arts and sciences
Religion in the ancient Middle East was associated with both the arts
and the sciences, though in the literature of the area it is difficult
to disentangle the secular from the sacred. Hymns, at one level, and
omen or ritual texts, at another level, are clearly religious. Yet it
would be difficult to categorize the Gilgamesh epic of Mesopotamia or
the Homeric epics of Greece as definitely either secular or religious.
They deal with human events or worldly problems, but the gods are
constantly on hand. The same may be said for two Ugaritic epics, the
epic of Keret and the epic of Daniel and Aqhat, which date from the late
Bronze Age. This also holds for the patriarchal narratives in the
biblical book of Genesis about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in which God
and his messengers play the same kind of role in human affairs as do the
gods in the Homeric or Ugaritic epics.
Religion had close ties with science as well as with literature and
art. Astronomy, mathematics, and time reckoning are sciences in which
the ancient Middle East made great strides at an early date, long before
3000 bc. Heavenly bodies were at the same time both deities and
personified numbers. The planet Venus was the “star” that the Assyrians
and Babylonians called Ishtar, which was at the same time both the
goddess Ishtar and the deified number 15. The Moon was not only Earth’s
satellite but also the lunar deity Sin and the deified number 30. The
most perfect number was one, for by advancing from zero to one men
believed they proceeded from nonexistence to existence. Moreover, all
other whole numbers were regarded as multiples of one, representative of
the Creator, the Prime Mover, of the universe. The Egyptians called Re
“the one One”; the Babylonians identified the divine “One” with Anu, the
god of heaven. When the Hebrew prophet Zechariah (14:9) proclaimed “on
that day the Lord will be one and his name One,” he indicated that the
Hebrews, like their neighbours, reckoned with sacred numbers and saw in
the number one a symbol of the Creator. Biblical monotheism, therefore,
has more than one dimension, including not only the monotheistic
principle that there is one God and none beside him but also the
mathematical principle of the primacy of “one” and its deification as
the Prime Mover.
Middle Eastern worldviews and basic religious thought » The role of
magic
The loftier trends of ancient Middle Eastern religion did not as a rule
threaten to eliminate magic. White, or protective, magic was never
seriously discouraged. Black, or destructive, magic was frowned on by
organized society, regardless of whether the official religion was
monotheistic or polytheistic, because black magic makes its victims
unfit for functioning productively in society. Section II of the
Babylonian king Hammurabi’s (Hammurapi’s) code punishes witchcraft (as
well as false accusations of witchcraft) with the death penalty.
Moreover, all organized religion tended to oppose magic that
circumvented the official clergy. King Saul of Israel had
characteristically banned sorcery, driving it underground. Yet when he
wanted guidance from the dead prophet Samuel, Saul consulted the Witch
of Endor, who was practicing her art illegally (1 Samuel 28:6–25). She
was able to call up the spirit of the prophet from the underworld,
which, incidentally, illustrates one of the reasons why society opposes
spiritualism. The witch, by claiming to bring the greatest authorities
of the past onto the current scene, threatens the authority of the
establishment.
The Letters to the Dead of pharaonic Egypt were written by living
persons to the dead in order to achieve practical results, in keeping
with the pragmatic, down-to-earth nature of the ancient Egyptians. It
was unquestioningly assumed that the dead continued to exert influence
on the living. Difficulties experienced by widows, widowers, and other
survivors were attributed to the malevolence or negligence of the
ungrateful dead who failed to defend their dear ones in the land of the
living.
The letters were most often inscribed on ceramic vessels but were
sometimes written on papyrus, linen, or even on a stela. They were
deposited in tombs, not necessarily those of the persons addressed. It
was believed that all burials were part of one interconnected system and
that the mail would be delivered to the deceased addressee as long as it
was posted anywhere in this network.
The writers sometimes remind the deceased addressee of the water and
offerings they have brought to the tomb. Occasionally they threaten to
discontinue such services if the deceased persists in refusing to help
them. A frequent grievance is that malevolent persons (often relatives)
are defrauding the rightful heirs of the deceased person’s estate. The
writer may even vow to take legal action against the dead in the divine
court of the West (i.e., of the realm of the dead).
One of the letters, known as the Leiden Papyrus, is particularly
interesting because of the light it sheds on Egyptian life as well as on
the relations between the living and the dead. The author is a widower
who has been in a bad state since his wife’s death. He is convinced that
his misfortunes are due to his late wife’s ill will. In the letter he
reminds her that he was a model husband and threatens to testify against
her in the court of the West. He goes on to say that he was a young and
busy officer in the pharaoh’s service at the time he married her. In
spite of the pressures of his important duties, he writes, he stood by
his wife and did not abandon her. He even made the soldiers under his
command defer to her and render service to her. Moreover, he refrained
from having affairs with other women. Before his wife’s death he was
assigned a mission to the wild south, on which he could not take her.
Nevertheless, he provided for all her needs and gave nothing to other
women. When she fell ill he engaged a skillful physician who gave her
the best possible care. While death was overcoming her, he virtually
abstained from eating and drinking for eight months. When he finally
returned home to Memphis, he gave her a first-class funeral, complete
with a shroud of the finest Upper-Egyptian linen. At the time of the
letter, three years have passed since the wife’s death. During this time
he has lived alone and remained faithful to his departed wife. Yet in
spite of this flawless record, she has been afflicting him and behaving
like one who does not know the difference between right and wrong. He
has therefore decided to prosecute her. In closing the letter he
reaffirms his fidelity, declaring that he has not touched any of the
female members of the household.
Religious practices and institutions » Nature: the framework of ideas
and practices
Fertility of agriculture, of edible animals, and of the human population
was a paramount factor in the life and religion of the ancient Middle
East. The forms that the fertility rites assumed varied from region to
region, depending on climate and geography. Rain and dew were
all-important in Canaan but of little significance in Egypt. In both
areas water was crucial, but the source of the life-giving water was
entirely different. The agricultural year varied in the two regions. In
Egypt the year was divided into three seasons: inundation, sowing, and
harvest. In Canaan there were two seasons: the winter, characterized by
rainfall, and the summer, characterized by dew. The year was punctuated
by different agricultural activities, as is indicated in the Gezer
Calendar, in which all 12 months are accounted for as times of
profitable agricultural activity, with harvests in the rainless summer
as well as in the green winter. Anxiety was caused by the uncertainty of
rain in the rainy season and of dew in its season. All of the regions of
the ancient Middle East schematized the blessing of good years and the
threat of bad years in terms of seven-year cycles. A Mesopotamian text
illustrating this is the Gilgamesh epic (8:101–113), in which the
slaying of the hero Gilgamesh would initiate seven lean years. At Ugarit
the slaying of the hero Aqhat evokes a curse depriving the land of rain
and dew for seven (or, climactically, eight) years. The seven lean and
seven fat years in the biblical story of Joseph in Egypt reflect the
same system. In Egypt, of course, rain and dew are out of the picture;
instead, generous Nile risings mean prosperity; inadequate risings in
the season of inundation spells misery. A text of the Ptolemaic period
(4th–1st century bc), purporting to record events of the Pyramid age,
tells of seven lean years in the reign of Djoser (3rd dynasty; i.e., c.
2650–c. 2575 bc). The pharaoh appealed to the gods, who responded by
restoring an abundant flow of the Nile.
The population desired the normal pattern of times and seasons, so
that “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and
night, shall not cease” (Genesis 8:22). But since the seasonal pattern
is not dependable, the need for order evoked a system of cycles, notably
the sabbatical, or seven-year, cycle. The sabbatical year was the
seventh year, and the jubilee year followed seven sabbatical cycles.
This was a pervasive system in the ancient Middle East. A Ugaritic
liturgical text specially designed for this phenomenon aims at
terminating a sabbatical cycle of privation and ushering in one of
fertility by celebrating the birth and triumphal entrance of the deities
Shahar (“Dawn”) and Shalim (“Dusk”), whose advent brings an abundance of
food and wine.
It was only natural that fertility rites should include sexual myths
that were acted out dramatically. The Ugaritic text just alluded to
describes El, the head of the pantheon, copulating with two human women.
This has echoes in Hosea and Ezekiel where God, as in the Canaanite
literary tradition, is referred to as having a love affair with two
women, symbolizing Judah and Israel. The Hebrews, however, eventually
eliminated sex from their official theology as well as from their
religious practices. Up to the time of King Josiah’s reform (621 bc)
there was a women’s cult of Asherah (under qedeshim auspices
[consecrated for fertility practices], according to 2 Kings 23:7) in the
Jerusalem Temple, alongside the male cult of Yahweh. Asherah’s devotees
considered her the chief wife of Yahweh, even as she was the wife of El,
head of the Canaanite pantheon, for in the Bible El is identified with
Yahweh. But Josiah eliminated the cult of Asherah, and official Judaism
has since then left no place for other gods, which meant the elimination
of every goddess. Popular religion, to be sure, persisted in the female
fertility principle until the destruction of the Temple in 586 bc. In
Judaean excavations Astarte figurines were found in private homes down
to that time. Further purification of the Hebrew religion, which was
intensified by the catastrophe of 586, put an end to the practice of
pagan fertility rites, including the use of goddess figurines. Without
goddesses there could be no sexual activity in the pantheon, and thus
Judaism has developed without a divine mother figure.
The ancient Middle East made a place for homosexuality and bestiality
in its myths and rites. In the Asherah cult the qedeshim priests had a
reputation for homosexual practices, even as the qedeshot priestesses
for prostitution. Israel eventually banned both the qedeshim and
qedeshot, while in Ugarit the qedeshim and kohanim were priestly guilds
in equally good standing. Baal is portrayed in Ugaritic mythology as
impregnating a heifer to sire the young bull god. The biblical book of
Leviticus (18:22–27) bans homosexuality and bestiality expressly because
the Canaanite population had been practicing those rites, which the
Hebrews rejected as abominations.
Phoenician/Punic sites include an area called the tophet that
contains large numbers of infant burials (see photograph). One
explanation of the tophet is that it reflects a major aspect of a
fertility cult in which the first-born child belonged to the deity. The
deity rewarded the parents who had sacrificed their child with future
fertility. In the Hebrew Bible, just as the firstfruits of the harvest
belong to God, so do the first-born of the people and their domestic
animals (Exodus 13:1, 12–13, 15).
The actual cases in the literature do not always specify infant
sacrifice. The Bible describes how King Mesha of Moab sacrificed his
crown prince to avert a military disaster (2 Kings 3:27). King Ahaz of
Judah sacrificed his son in pagan fashion (2 Kings 16:3). King Manasseh
of Judah sacrificed his sons by fire (2 Chronicles 33:6), filling
Jerusalem with innocent blood.
The Jewish practice of redeeming a first-born son at the age of one
month (Numbers 18:16–17) appears to be a milder substitute for the
practice of child sacrifice. Another alternative to sacrificing a child
was to dedicate it to the service of God. Hannah, by fulfilling her vow
to dedicate her first-born, Samuel, to God’s service (1 Samuel 1:27–28)
was rewarded by the birth of five other children whom she and her
husband could keep for themselves (1 Samuel 2:20–21).
According to ancient views, the myth came first, and the rite
imitated or reenacted it. This sequence, however, is not necessarily the
order in which religion develops. Rites can be very tenacious, and when
the origin of a rite has been forgotten, a myth has often been invented
to explain it.
Religious practices and institutions » Types of religious organization
and authority
Religion occurs at different levels of society: personal, familial,
local, national, and international. At the personal and international
extremes there is need for but little organization. And yet in religion,
as the people of the ancient Middle East saw it, there was a progression
from one stage to the next. In the early myths of Genesis, God and Noah
have direct personal relations. This leads to a covenant between God and
all who went out of the ark: birds and beasts as well as mankind
(Genesis 9:9–10). Through the sons of Noah and their descendants, who
form the nations of the world (Genesis 10), there is a theoretical
progress to international religion. This scheme of the relations between
God and mankind, from the personal to the universal level, mirrors the
historical record of religion. Judaism (followed later by Christianity
and Islām) traces “the Religion” back to Abraham, who had personal and
direct relations with God, as was customary in the ancient Middle
Eastern milieu. Abraham’s intimacy with God is similar to the intimacy
between Odysseus and the Greek goddess Athena. The next step is a
covenant between a particular deity and a particular person, binding the
two together in a contractual relationship for all eternity from
generation to generation. Such covenants were not rare; the Hittite King
Hattusilis III made such a covenant with Ishtar. Abraham’s covenant is
unique simply because it was the only one destined to last in history.
The descendants of able men who established a dynasty or tradition
would worship the God of their father, or fathers, and adhere to the
original covenant. Genesis 31 portrays Jacob and Laban swearing by their
respective ancestral gods: Jacob by the god(s) of Abraham and Laban by
the god(s) of Nahor. Once a group expanded into a federation of clans or
tribes, religious organization became necessary. A central shrine (such
as the one at Shiloh in Israel) for amphictyonic (religious
confederational) pilgrimage festivals required a professional priesthood
and other religious personnel to take care of sacrifices, give oracular
guidance, interpret dreams and omens, as well as to provide instruction.
In an amphictyony of 12 tribes, each tribe could render federal service
for religious and secular purposes, one month each year. A special tribe
(such as the Levites in Israel, or the Magians in Iran) could be
dedicated full-time to cultic duties.
A greater degree of centralization and organization of the cult would
generally follow from the establishment of a powerful state. The cult of
Marduk of Babylon spread in importance and influence because Babylon
became the capital of a powerful kingdom in the time of Hammurabi (18th
century bc) and of a mighty empire during the reign of Nebuchadrezzar
(604–562 bc). The Egyptian cult of Amon-Re not only became powerful but
took on the form of a universal religion as a result of the military and
political triumphs of the rulers of Thebes, particularly during the
reign of Thutmose III (1479–26 bc). Under Solomon, Jerusalem became the
centre of a great commercial empire. The Temple of Solomon and its God,
the God of Israel, were catapulted into an international prominence that
was quite different from the national status that marked the extent of
Hebraic religion previously. The new internationalism of Israel’s
involvements paved the way for the universality of the views of the
prophets. The God of Israel was subsequently concerned with all mankind
and not merely with one people in one small land. This ultimately meant
the transformation of biblical religion from the cult of a single people
to a more subtle, spiritual movement that required different
organization and different personnel. The priesthood became defunct with
the destruction of Herod’s Temple and the cessation of sacrifices in ad
70. The new religious leaders (rabbis) were rather teachers and
spiritual guides who were united by dedication to the same scripture.
The spread of the devotees over the face of the earth meant that they
were now divided into regional groups, serving under different
sovereigns, and the individual Jewish communities were organized
independently, each with its own house of worship.
There were various devices for holding an ethnic-religious group
together even though it might be fragmentized into scattered
communities. Laws of purity, especially those pertaining to diet, kept
different groups apart. Each normally respected the other’s rules, but
the fact that each group had different taboos kept them from breaking
bread together and mingling socially. They could do business with each
other in the marketplace, but they could not fraternize in each other’s
homes. Above all, laws of purity were deterrents to intermarriage, the
major factor that breaks up religious communities and encourages
homogenization.
Cyrus H. Gordon
