The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (35 page)

What makes the faith of ancient Israel as depicted in the Bible so revolutionary—and so unique among the religions of the ancient Near East—is the insistence that Yahweh is hot merely the
supreme
god but the
only
god. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” goes the very first of the Ten Commandments, “for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God” (Exod. 20:3, 5). Although the commandment itself can be under-stood in more than one way, as we shall see, the conventional reading of the First Commandment is that all other deities—and the ancient Near East fairly teemed with gods and goddesses—are not merely an “abomination” but a delusion, too. The One God, we are intended to believe, is the One and Only God. And the rivals of the Almighty are not gods at all—“no-gods” is the term Jeremiah uses to describe the objects of pagan worship (Jer. 2:11, 5:7).

Of course, strange gods and goddesses abound in the Bible itself, and the biblical authors readily concede that the Israelites are fatally attracted to the pagan deities worshipped by the Canaanites and other pagans throughout the ancient Near East. In fact, the Book of Judges is one long and despairing cycle of sin and redemption: the Israelites have done “that which was evil in the sight of the Lord” (Judg. 2:11) by lapsing into the worship of pagan gods and goddesses; God is angered by their faithlessness and abandons them to their enemies; the Israelites confess their sin and beg for forgiveness; God relents in his anger and “raise[s] them up a saviour” (Judg. 3:15); the Israelites enjoy a short interval of peace and freedom before taking up the worship of pagan gods—and then the whole sorry cycle starts all over again.

The infidelities of the Chosen People provide a convenient excuse to explain why God does not keep his oft-repeated promise to grant them sovereignty in the land of Canaan. That is supposed to be God’s end of the deal in the covenant the Almighty makes with Abraham and renews with Moses: “For ye are to pass over the Jordan to go in to possess the land which the Lord your God giveth you” (Deut. 11:31). Long before they actually reach Canaan, however, the Israelites are warned that they will find a tantalizing array of gods and goddesses, and the Lord sternly orders the Israelites to obliterate all signs of pagan worship in the Promised Land:

But the awkward fact of biblical history is that the Israelites do
not
dispossess all of the native-dwelling nations of the land of Canaan, and they do
not
obliterate the shrines and altars where the Canaanites worship their gods and goddesses. So the author of Judges is forced to explain why God’s promise has not been fulfilled—and he points to the apostasy of the Israelites as the reason. The early passages of Judges are devoted to a curious sort of historical revisionism, a battle list that
specifies the defeats rather than the victories of the armies of Israel: “And the children of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites that inhabited Jerusalem…. And Ephraim drove not out the Canaanites

that dwelt in Gezer…. Zebulun drove not out the inhabitants of

Kitron, nor the inhabitants of Nahalol….” and so on (Judg. 1:21, 29, 30). God denies the Israelites complete possession of the Promised Land precisely because they succumb to the temptation of pagan worship: “And they forsook the Lord, and served Baal and the Ashtaroth” (Judg. 2:13), that is, the gods and goddesses venerated by the Canaanites.

“I will never break My covenant with you,” God allows, “but… I will not drive them out from before you; but they shall be unto you as snares, and their gods shall be a trap unto you” (Judg. 2:1–3).

The Bible itself, with its beguiling catalog of the places and paraphernalia of pagan worship, allows us to understand the powerful seduction that the gods and goddesses worked on the Israelites. As the Bible concedes, the Israelites turn to Baal, to Ashtaroth, to Asherah. Baal is a storm and fertility god, one of the principal deities in the pantheon of the Canaanites and a descendant of their supreme god, El; Ashtaroth is the Hebrew rendering of Astarte, the Canaanite fertility goddess who is one of Baal’s consorts; and Asherah is the consort of the supreme god El and thus the mother of all the lesser gods, although the biblical authors sometimes pair her up with Baal, too (Judg. 3:7).

According to the Bible, the altars and shrines of these pagan gods and goddess were sited on hilltops and mountaintops, the “high places” that figure so importantly in the biblical accounts of where and how the Israelites and their neighbors worshipped. Rituals were apparently conducted under the boughs of sacred oaks and around stone columns placed upright in the ground, a faintly druidical practice that was never completely eradicated by the priests and prophets of early Israel. The Canaanite goddess known as Asherah was depicted and venerated in the form of living trees or carved wooden poles, the so-called Asherim of biblical usage. Pagan gods and goddesses were depicted in statues and figurines crafted of precious metals as well as wood, clay, and stone, including the
teraphim
or household idols that figure in the stories of the patriarchs—these are the “graven images” that are specifically condemned in the Ten Commandments and yet have been found in remarkable profusion by archaeologists in the Holy Land.

The worship of idols, by the way, was probably
not
the crude and
almost childlike practice that the Bible and earlier Bible scholarship suggest. According to pious tradition, the ancients were gullible and deluded souls who regarded idols as living embodiments of their gods, caring for and even feeding the statues and figurines as if they were alive. The Bible itself attributes these notions to idol-worshippers—and scoffs at them. “[T]he work of men’s hands, wood and stone,” is how the Deuteronomist describes the objects of pagan worship, “which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell” (Deut. 4:28). But according to recent archaeological evidence, the ancient pagans understood that idols were man-made artifacts rather than living gods, and they regarded an idol as a source of inspiration and comfort rather than a Pinocchio that might come to life if they prayed hard enough. Thus the graven images of antiquity may have been similar in function to the icons and other ritual objects that can be found in places of worship in our own day.
⁴²

If we believe the testimony of the prophets as recorded in the Bible, the worship of pagan gods and goddesses is the occasion for displays of sexual depravity, whether in the form of bacchanalian orgies or of more discreet visits to the sacred prostitutes, male and female, who supposedly ply their trade at the temples of pagan gods and goddesses. (See chapter seven.) Although contemporary scholars question whether sacred prostitution was ever as common as the Bible suggests, the prophets are plainly obsessed with the interplay between sex and the worship of pagan deities, and something more than a metaphor is found in the words of Jeremiah: “Upon every high hill, and under every leafy tree, thou didst recline, playing the harlot” (Jer. 2:20).

Even the greatest kings of Israel were apparently susceptible to the temptation of goddess worship. King Solomon, who built the first temple at Jerusalem and whom the Bible regards as both mighty and wise, is plainly described as an apostate, too. “God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding exceeding much, and largeness of heart,” we are told at first (1 Kings 5:9). But the love-smitten old king is seduced into idol worship by his several hundred foreign wives: Solomon “turned away his heart after other gods,” “went after Ashtoreth,” and raised up a “high place” where he conducted pagan rituals. “I will surely rend the kingdom from thee,” God vows, although the Almighty defers the punishment to a later generation out of solicitude for David, whose many sins of the flesh did not include paganism (1 Kings 11:5–11).

Now the priestly editors who collected the sacred texts and rendered them into the book we now know as the Bible insist on drawing bright lines between the worship of Yahweh, which is presented as the only acceptable act of faith in ancient Israel, and the worship of pagan gods and goddesses, which is routinely condemned in the Bible as an “abomination.” Although the Bible confirms that the Israelites repeatedly and obsessively turned to the forbidden deities, the biblical authors always insist that the Israelites are committing apostasy—and suffer grievous punishment from on high—whenever they indulge in the forbidden pleasures of pagan worship.

The worship of pagan goddesses is made out to be the sin that finally turns God against the Chosen People once and for all Even though God stayed his hand against Solomon, the Bible is full of outrage toward a long-reigning king of Judah named Manasseh who first took the throne at the age of twelve and proceeded to do “that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, after the abominations of the nations.” The biblical author condemns Manasseh for offering his own son as a human sacrifice, practicing the black arts of soothsaying, and divination by ghosts and spirits. But his worst offense by far is held to be the erection of a graven image of the goddess Asherah in the Temple at Jerusalem. Although Manasseh himself is damned for the shedding of “innocent blood,” the crime of idolatry brings divine punishment on the guilty and innocent alike.

“Behold, I will bring such evil upon Jerusalem and Judah,” God vows, “that whosoever heareth of it, both his ears shall tingle” (2 Kings 21:12, 16).

Still, the line between piety and apostasy—the boundary between the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the worship of the gods and goddesses of the Canaanites—cannot be drawn with such clarity or certainty. The Bible itself seems to suggest that the faith of ancient Israel appears to owe much to the pagan beliefs and practices of its neighbors. In fact, some of the holiest moments in the lives of the patriarchs and matriarchs bear a curious and telling resemblance to the very practices that are so heatedly condemned by the biblical authors.

For example, God chooses a tree—not unlike the trees that are regarded as sacred by pagan cults—as the place where he will appear to Abraham, first at Shechem (Gen. 12:6) and later at those famous
“terebinths of Mamre” (Gen. 18:1). Rachel steals her father’s household idols when she returns with her sister, Leah, and their husband, Jacob, to Canaan
*
—and such “detestable things” are not wholly banned in Israel until the reign of the reformer-king, Josiah (2 Kings 23:24). When Jacob struggles with (and defeats) an angel of God—or perhaps it is God himself—he commemorates his victory by taking the stone he had used as a pillow, setting it upright in the ground, and anointing it with oil. “And this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house,” declares the patriarch (Gen. 28:22). According to some scholarly speculation, both Tamar, Judah’s seductive daughter-in-law, and Rahab, the good-hearted harlot who shelters the Israelite spies, may have been priestesses of Canaanite fertility cults whose allure proved to be irresistible to Israelite men.
⁴³
(See chapter seven.)

Until the Book of Deuteronomy was belatedly and rather mysteriously discovered during the reign of King Josiah in 622
B.C.E
.—and the worship of Yahweh was restricted to the Temple at Jerusalem by King Josiah in hasty compliance with the newly discovered laws of Deuteronomy (2 Kings 23:1–3)—the Israelites felt free to offer sacrifices at a number of “legitimate” altars and sanctuaries that had been erected throughout the land of Judah and Samaria. “The sanctity here was linked with the site itself and its natural features, such as a sacred tree, a sacred spring or the like,” wrote the venerable Bible scholar Martin Noth, who pointed out that “a natural rock formation” might be used as “an altar for the presentation or burning of offerings.”
⁴⁴

So, despite the best efforts of the priests and scribes who were its censors and guardians, the Bible betrays the fingerprints of deities that may have preceded or coexisted with Yahweh. The Bible refers to God as Elohim, a plural form of the Hebrew word for “god,” and the Almighty uses the plural when announcing the creation of humankind in Genesis: “Let
us
make man in
our
image, after
our
likeness” (Gen. 1:26). Biblical scholarship holds that these are grammatical rather than theological eccentricities, as Ephraim Speiser insisted,
⁴⁵
but we are left to wonder whether even the ancient Israelites regarded Yahweh as
merely one god among many until the priestly redactors cleaned up the sacred texts and imposed the strict theology that we find in the Bible.

Certainly the Israelites saw some relationship between the god (et) called Yahweh and the supreme god whom the Canaanites called El—and perhaps, at some early moment in their history, the Israelites saw the two gods as one and the same. Abraham, for example, encounters a Canaanite king and high priest who blesses him in the name of El Elyon—“God Most High, Maker of heaven and earth”—and Abraham seems to identify and embrace the deity as his own (Gen. 14:19). Later, when God discloses to Moses that his personal name is actually Yahweh, the Almighty explains: “I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac and unto Jacob, as El Shaddai”—a phrase that is conventionally translated as “God Almighty” but one that also harkens back to the all-mighty god of Canaan (Exod. 6:3).

Modern scholarship has detected in the Bible certain distinct influences of the pagan civilizations that surrounded ancient Israel. Genesis echoes the creation myth recorded in a Mesopotamian text called the
Enuma Elish
. A tale very like the story of Noah and the Ark is told in a still more ancient Sumero-Babylonian saga, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Certain passages found in the Book of Proverbs—“Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye….” (Prov. 23:6)—appear to have been copies almost verbatim from ancient Egyptian texts.
⁴⁶
Even the famous curses and blessings that are found in the Book of Deuteronomy, a relatively late addition to the biblical canon, resemble the legal boilerplate that can be found in contracts and treaties throughout the ancient world. The notion that the faith of ancient Israel was something entirely new and unique is betrayed by the hard evidence in the Bible that many of the laws, rituals, and beliefs were borrowed from other cultures and civilizations.