1. I’ll be reading one essay of Ancient Israelite Religion every day (except Saturday), until I decide to read more. Today, the essay I read was William W. Hallo’s “The Origins of the Sacrificial Cult: New Evidence from Mesopotamia and Israel.” Hallo refers to a Sumerian story about the crown prince Lugalbanda, of Uruk (see Lugalbanda in the Cave).
On one of his campaigns, Lugalbanda is left for dead in a cave, with little food. The plants aren’t fit to eat, so Lugalbanda becomes carnivorous by necessity. He lures an auroch (a kind of cattle) and two goats through cakes, and he binds them. He’s hesitant to wield his cutting-tools against his prey, but a dream from Za(n)qara (the god of dreams) instructs him on how to slaughter them. He follows the instructions to the letter, and (in Hallo’s words) “goes them one better—significantly better” (9). He shares his meat with the four greatest deities of the Sumerian pantheon. The sweet savor rises to the gods like incense, as they consume the best part of the meat. And Lugalbanda recovers from his illness.
Hallo compares this story with Genesis: humans were made vegetarian, but God allowed them to eat meat after the flood. Hallo’s view (if I understand it correctly) seems to be that the sacrificial system served to legitimize the consumption of meat. Israelites wanted or needed to eat it, but they were leery about shedding blood, so sharing their meat with the gods allowed them to eat it without qualms.
But the commonality between Lugalbanda and the Bible is that both present humans as initially vegetarian, until they were allowed to eat meat (which gods/God did anyway).
2. I started Matitiahu Tsevat’s The Meaning of the Book of Job and Other Biblical Studies. Today, I read “The Meaning of the Book of Job.”
Essentially, Tsevat argues that the Book of Job says God doesn’t consistently reward the righteous and punish the wicked, so people should be righteous because it’s good, not to receive a reward. I already knew that Job complained about this in his speeches, but Tsevat’s essay was helpful because he referred to places in God’s speech from the whirlwind touching on reward and punishment. For Tsevat, God addressed Job’s complaint head-on.
Here are some examples, and the translation is whatever Tsevat is using:
40:11-14: “Give free scope to your raging anger. Seeing anyone haughty, bring him low; seeing anyone haughty, abase him and tread down the wicked in their tracks. Conceal them alike in the earth, wrap their faces in concealment. Then I, too, will acknowledge that your right-hand is all-prevailing.”
38:12-13, 15: “Have you ever in your life commanded the morning, have you directed the dawn to its place to take hold of the skirts of the earth so that the wicked are shaken out of it, so that light is withheld from the wicked, and their uplifted arm is broken.”
Tsevat interprets these passages to mean that Job can’t punish the wicked, and it’s not God’s general policy to do so, either. For Tsevat, 38:12-13, 15 doesn’t describe what God does, for the morning doesn’t hurt the wicked; rather, the sun shines on the just and unjust alike.
38:25-27 is also pretty telling: “Who has cleft a channel for the rain flood or a way for the thunder cloud to cause rain on land where no man is, on a desert where no people live to satiate waste and desolate terrain and to sprout fresh grass?” As Tsevat points out, the Hebrew Bible often treats rain or the withholding of it as a tool God uses for reward and punishment (see Deuteronomy 28:24, or the Elijah story). But God tells Job in 38:25-27 that God sends rain where there are no people. It’s almost as if God or nature is blind to what humans do, or maybe the lesson here is that God doesn’t consider humans to be the center of the universe!
I checked the MacArthur Study Bible and the Nelson Study Bible, and they have an interesting take on Job 38:12-13, 15, the passage about morning. Nelson says that God here is responding to Job’s complaint in 24:13-17 that God allows the wicked to do their evil deeds at night. For MacArthur and Nelson, God’s response is that he sends the morning to interrupt and expose the wicked, to shine the light on their activities. That’s tempting to accept, but 38:15 says that light is withheld from the wicked.
I’m not sure what to do with Tsevat’s proposal. I always understood God to be saying to Job that Job can’t do all the things God does, for God is superior. That would imply that passages such as 38:12-15 and 40:11-14 affirm the existence of a moral order in the universe. That would be consistent with Job 1, in which God places a hedge around Job for his protection, presumably because of Job’s righteousness. But God can make exceptions to his moral order, as when he tests people, so Job’s friends were wrong to assume that Job was suffering on account of his sin.
At the same time, I like Tsevat’s proposal because it takes seriously Job’s speeches about the existence of injustice in the world, as when Job observes that there are wicked people who die in a state of peace, prosperity, and contentment (Job 21). Can we interpret God to say that he’s just in his whirlwind speeches, thereby sweeping Job’s observations under the rug, as if they’re invalid? But if God is saying that he doesn’t rule the world according to a moral order, that allows Job’s observations to stand. We don’t have to be like Job’s friends, who try to subordinate reality to their belief that God is just.