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?