Lilith Unfair

Lilith and Adam are in the garden, and Lilith gets upset because she wants to. And the text says, be on top. And some people try to interpret this figuratively as an authority question. I think it is far more likely that this is a reference to sexual positions, that Lilith wants to be on top. And Adam says, you are not fit to be on top. I am the only one who is fit to be on top. And this would align with the long notion that the only sexual position appropriate for a man is the dominant one, and the only sexual position appropriate for a woman is the submissive one. And so for a woman to be on top throws a wrench into the social hierarchy. And dogs and cats running wild. It’s pandemonium. I’m forgetting the Ghostbusters mass hysteria. Mass hysteria, yeah. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we try to increase the public’s access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation. About the same. How are you doing today, Dan?

I am doing fine. How are you doing?

I’m doing well. Although a tinge of regret. Someone told me that we really missed out on an opportunity to call our last episode, episode 12, “There’s Something About Mary,” so.

Well, that. That’s true. We could have done it. We missed it. You know, I did title it after something that Elizabeth Schrader said in the show. So I thought I was at least honoring her with that title. Yeah, but, you know, we… we miss opportunities all the time. That’s part of life. We win some, we lose some. Coming up on this week’s show, we’re going to be talking about a famous and infamous lady first, and then we’re delving later into some of your personal work, some work that you have a lot of experience with.

Yeah. I’m going to do a “What does that mean?” segment on the word stele, which I use every now and then, and I can count on getting a dozen references to Steely Dan. I was gonna say every time I say that word. And some people say stela, and then for plural, they say stelae. I say stele for the singular and stelae for the plural.

So S-T-E-L-E. Is that what we’re saying?

S-T-E-L-E. Yeah. Okay.

All right. Well, we’ll get to that later on in the show, but for now, let’s do our first segment. Who’s that? We’re gonna talk about someone, a name that appears, I think only once in the Bible. If it appears at all in your version, it might not appear in your version whatsoever, but it’s a person-thing, slash, who knows what. Well, hopefully, Dan, you know what it has been; it has become an icon of modern feminism. This person… well, people of a certain age, you and I included, Dan, will recall that back in the 90s, singer Sarah McLachlan named an entire festival after… a music festival after this person.

So who is or what is Lilith?

Yeah, let’s get into it. And speaking of Sarah McLachlan, huge fan by the way. If I had, if I had the money or the time or the know-how back in the 90s when I was in high school, I would have loved to have gone to…

If you’re listening Sarah McLachlan, call us.

She’s not. She’s got much better things to do.McClellan: But yeah, Lilith. So. Well, we only have one passage in all the Bible that has anything at all to say about Lilith. And that passage is in Isaiah 34 in verse 14. And here we’re talking about a threat of destruction to Edom. And part of this threat is to say, basically, I’m going to turn you into a deserted land, a land that’s going to be inhabited by a bunch of creatures that are associated with the wilderness, associated with a lack of habitation, a lack of civilization. So in the NRSV it says wildcats shall meet with hyenas. Goat demons shall call to each other, and there too Lilith shall repose. And the word in Hebrew there is lilit. And most scholars will tell you that this comes from a term in Akkadian, so from Mesopotamia that ultimately derives from a Sumerian word.

So it’s probably a borrowing into Akkadian from the Sumerian, which is a very different language from Akkadian. And I think the KJV renders screech owl, doesn’t it?

Yeah, the KJV says, let’s see. Yes, it’s so different. The wild beast of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island. And the satyr shall cry to his fellow. The screech owl also shall rest there and find for herself a place of rest.

Yeah, so they, it doesn’t sound like they had a great idea what to do with lilit. The only, the only time it occurs there.

But it seems the NIV, by the way, the New International Version.

Yeah. What does that say?

Renders it as the night creatures will also lie down and find for themselves. Places to rest.

Night creatures. Night creatures. Oh, I just realized we. I probably shouldn’t sing stuff because.

No, no.

Because we might run into copyright.

Nobody report us. Yeah, that was. That was for satirical purposes only.

Yeah. And obviously I changed the lyric. The. The New English Translation, the NET has nocturnal animals.

Whoa. So I think I saw that movie. That’s a really interesting.

With Neve Campbell from… something like that. Something like that. So when we go into Akkadian, we find these. These terms that seem to refer to an entire class of some kind of demon or entity that is associated with stormy winds and with the nighttime and with kind of predatory behavior as well as deviant sexuality. So there’s a feminine dimension of what’s going on here.

But I kind of like all those things. Everything you just mentioned, this is like. I’m kind of a fan.

This is your jam, huh? You are vibing. Um, and so in this literature, which spans many, many centuries, there’s not a ton of consistency. So we can’t really nail it down to one specific thing. We can just speak in broad terms about the different ways that it pops up. And when we get to some of the feminine aspects of it, this is a. Some kind of creature or female entity that does not have a husband or seeks to ensnare men or husbands. And so it’s kind of a deviant, aberrant sexuality. And so these are creatures that you are worried about. And I think that’s what they’re trying to get across in Isaiah 34 . This is somebody that you really want to keep outside the walls of your city.

Yeah. Don’t let her take her rest there.ere. Are you kidding me? Very dangerous.

Yeah. And. Oh, it reminds me of a time when I was in Beersheba and I was walking through one of the little streets, quote, unquote, streets of the ruins of Beersheba, and a fox darted across the path right in front of me and into a little hole right under like the ruins of a. Of a little wall of a house or something like that. And it reminded me of somewhere else. What is it? No, it’s actually in the New Testament. Foxes have their holes, but the Son of Man has not where to lay his head. But. But I kind of thought of this area. These ruins were now places where foxes were making their. Their dens. Very similar idea that this is going to be a place where it’s uninhabitable by humans and it’s inhabited by these creatures that occupy the periphery of civilization. You have this kind of idea of center and periphery, that is very influential in the way they think about the world anciently, where the city inside the city wall, that is kind of the height of civilization.

That’s where the best people live. That’s where the temple is. That’s what’s considered the center of humanity, human civilization. And then the further away you get from the city and the city walls and human habitation, the closer you get to kind of the unknown and dangerous boundaries of what is out there. And so that’s where demons dwell.

And that’s where I’ve seen Mad Max. I know how.

And that’s where. That’s where all the kind of unknown, kind of fuzzy creatures that you don’t really want to be around hang out. And so that’s where they’re gonna put these demons. The. The satyr, as. As the KJV calls it, or the goat, I think goat demons, as the NRSV puts it.

And then you gotta love the goat demons, man.

And you put Lilith. And even in the Pentateuch, when it talks about the scapegoat, this is the goat for Azazel, who was another demonic figure. And where do you take the goat to send it off to Azazel? Out into the desert, because the uninhabited region, habitation kind of corresponds to proximity to deity. And then the further away you get, the more you get the other half of the divine world, the. The malevolent half. And once you get to the sea, then you also have a similar situation where the sea is chaotic. And that’s where, you know, that’s where ships get wrecked. That’s where people drown. That’s where things go wrong. So you have order and chaos, center, periphery, civilization, uninhabitable land.

So how do we get from a screech owl or. And. Or some sort of demon, you know, thing. I guess you’re gonna get us to feminist icon at some point, right?

I’m gonna get us there. But the next thing to note is that in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the Great Isaiah Scroll, it’s not Lilith, it’s Liliths, it’s plural. And so, yeah, the name is liliyyot. So that’s the. The plural of the name. And then the verb is in the plural, which suggests that kind of as a callback to how it originally worked in the Akkadian language, that this was more of a category of entity. Not a single entity, but a category.

Right.

Now, when we get into early Jewish exegesis of the text, one of the things that the early rabbis and the early. In the early exegetes or interpreters of the Hebrew Bible tried to do is find meaning. Dan McClellan: And so they needed to find out what these words meant. And they wanted to kind of associate it with something that would make it significant. With this, it’s kind of difficult, but there was a reading of Genesis in early Jewish interpretation that set the stage for Lilith to become relevant several centuries down the road. And that reading had to do with how the early rabbis reconciled the two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2 . And we, and we talked about this in our very first episode. But you’ve got two different creation accounts, and Christians today try to harmonize these in a lot of different ways. Oh, one was the, you know, the spiritual creation, the other was the physical creation.

One was a broad outline, one was more detailed, one was the 30,000-foot view. One was on the ground—a bunch of different ways to try to harmonize this. One way that some early Jewish interpreters tried to harmonize this was to suggest there were two creations. And in the first creation you had man and woman, or there are two references to creation. In the first one, you had man and woman created at the exact same time. But in the second one, the human is created first and the woman is created afterwards. And so one way to reconcile this is to say when they were first created, Adam had a wife who was created at the exact same time as him. And then we’ve got this other woman who’s created subsequently. And so this must be Eve; Eve is Adam’s second wife. And so Genesis 1 , as a friend

of mine once put it, that becomes the first rolling out of the McRib.

There are layers to that. And so there arose this tradition—not a majority tradition, but a tradition—that Adam was created simultaneously with a first wife. And then there was a second wife that was made. And that second wife was Eve. And so that then leads to the question for later exegetes: who on earth was this first wife? Yeah, and we get it in a text called the Alphabet of Ben Sira, which was written sometime between around 700 CE and around 1000 CE. We get a text that links Lilith with Adam’s first wife and suggests that, according to this interpretation that has Eve as Adam’s second wife, the first wife was Lilith.

I take it that this Alphabet of Ben Sira was not a children’s book.

No, no, it was. It was not a picture book. It was a chapter book. It was all words. And now in medieval Judaism, Lilith had become somewhat of a succubus, one of these demons that kind of afflicts particularly men, particularly their sexuality—causes problems for them—but can also cause problems for newborn babies. And in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, we have a bit of an etiology for this character as a succubus. In the story, Lilith and Adam are in the garden and Lilith gets upset because she wants to— and the text says—be on top. And some people try to interpret this figuratively as an authority question. I think it is far more likely that this is a reference to sex, sexual positions, that Lilith wants to be on top.

And Adam says, “You are not fit to be on top. I am the only one who is fit to be on top.” And this would align with the long-standing notion that the only sexual position appropriate for a man is the dominant one and the only sexual position appropriate for a woman is the submissive one. And so for a woman to be on top throws a wrench into the social hierarchy. And dogs and cats running wild, it’s pandemonium. I’m forgetting the Ghostbusters.

Mass hysteria.

Mass hysteria, yeah.0:16:51.340] Dan McClellan: So, and we can go all the way back to ancient Mesopotamian texts from a thousand BCE that talk about how if a man is on the bottom, that it robs him of his masculinity and his vitality. And we can go to. There’s an early Jewish text, I’m blanking on what it is at the moment, but it talks about how if a man takes the bottom position in sex with his own wife, it will give him diarrhea. And there’s a notion that it renders one effeminate. Yeah. It renders one ritually impure. Yeah. And so this is. This is an ideology that exists for thousands of years. And it’s reflected in this idea that Lilith is like, no, I want to be on top. And Adam’s like, we can’t. Can’t do this. That’s absurd. Yeah. What kind of household am I running here?

And it’s amazing. It is amazing that the alpha male, the original, the only male at the time, had alpha male ideals about sexual positions.

But, yeah, well, and it kind of shows you that these are characters that are used to tell stories about ourselves. Right. And so she gets upset and she storms out of the Garden of Eden and she just takes off. And God is told about this, is not happy with this, and so sends three angels after Lilith to convince her to return to the Garden of Eden. And they catch up with her and they say, hey, what’s going on? You need to come back to the Garden of Eden. And she’s not having it. And these three angels are Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof. And yes, those are great names. Yeah. And what Lilith tells them is I’m not coming back. I am going to go be a succubus. I’m going to go afflict men, I’m going to go afflict newborn babies.

I’m going to cause illness, I’m going to cause death among newborns. And the only way you can stop me is if a newborn baby is wearing an amulet that has your three names on it. And if I see that amulet, I will have no power over that newborn. That infant.

Weird that she put her own strictures on herself. Yeah, that seems, that seems like an odd thing to do if you’re going to just. If you’re in an afflicting mood, don’t, you know, don’t make rules that you have to follow that just.

Yeah, just don’t just arbitrarily limit yourself.

So.

Most likely this story is an etiology for why people were using amulets with maybe these three angels’ names on them. Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof. Maybe they didn’t have their names.

Which by the way, beautiful names. If you’re considering naming your baby. I think if you’re not going to name them Dan, which obviously you should, that’s the easiest. Go with Semangelof or whatever you just said.

Semangelof. Yeah. And so this was likely a practice that was going on at the time. The use of apotropaic amulets to ward off evil, and specifically the evil that is the succubus Lilith, who would cause illness and death in newborns. And there was, which by the way.

Was so common in the era like, you know, newborn death and, and, and miscarriage was fully like a third of children, wasn’t it? Pregnancy, something. Something along those lines.

Yeah. I’m sure it’s changed over time, but certainly it’s not until the modern era that infant mortality has dropped significantly, which is one of the main contributors to our huge populations these days.yeah, you live to an age of 40. It’s like no infant mortality drags that average down. But even in the ancient world, if someone survived to adulthood, most likely they were going to live to be 60 or 70 or something like that. So the life expectancy has not changed.

I think you mean 969.

Oh, please don’t get me started on.

Well, we’ll do that on another show. Yeah.

Oh gosh, I get, I get asked about that all the time. People like, were they. Did they mean months?

All right, so we’ve got Lilith.

We.

She, she has, she is going to afflict all of the children. She has made a, she has made a deal with the angels that their names can protect them. I guess I, you know, it makes sense to me that this woman who, you know, was meant to be brought in, at least in this story, which is non-biblical again, but this story where she is Adam’s first wife and she’s, she refuses to subject herself to this sort of patriarchal notion that she is not equal to this man in some way and that he has to dominate her. Yeah, I’m starting to see Sarah McLachlan’s point.

Yeah, yeah. You can see how someone like this would become an icon for femininity. Now there are pieces of misinformation in circulation out there. Some people will argue that the original version of Genesis talked about Adam’s first wife as Lilith or something like that. And there are no data that support that. This is a much later tradition that’s building on not just earlier accounts of Genesis, but medieval interpretive traditions regarding the accounts of the creation and is kind of extrapolating and elaborating on those traditions to create this story of Adam having a first wife named Lilith. So that’s something that, that idea is created somewhere in that window between around 700 CE and 1000 CE, so only a little over a thousand years old.

And the reason that it became. Sorry, I’m just, I’m trying to piece this together. This, this Alphabet of, of whoever, sorry, Ben Sira. Ben Sira is taking, you know, is, is taking the exegesis of the difference between the two creation stories and inserting this already existing concept of, but vague and not quote, not well understood idea of a evil night spirit, a succubus or whatever, and saying let’s create an origin story for both, basically.

Yeah.

Does that sound like a fair representation of what you’re saying?

Yeah, I think so. It’s. It’s taking the, the blocks that are around them and just building something new out of them.

Yeah.

Which is what is so often the case with the texts that are in the Bible and the texts that are next to the Bible and that inform the Bible. And it makes sense because these texts that become authoritative or these traditions that become authoritative, they’re not going to gain any traction. Any purchase if they’re just totally out of left field and they have no relationship whatsoever to what’s already going on in the discourse. And so that’s why you pluck from the existing discourse to create. To find the building blocks for these ideas that you want to put forward. And that way, once that new idea is out there, it’s new in some sense, but in another sense, it’s appealing to things that people already understand and have accepted and are already in widespread circulation. And that’s how you build a tradition that’s going to become popular and is going to last. If you come out of, you know, again, of left field with something that has no relationship to what people are talking about, it’s only going to have the novelty, and that’s going to wear off pretty quickly.g to wear off pretty quickly. And so you’ll find a lot of these extra-biblical traditions, and even a lot of biblical traditions are just incremental elaborations on stuff that is already out there.

And sometimes it takes on a life of its own and. And people confuse it for the original idea.

Well, I mean, if you want to. To wrangle Jewel and Lisa Loeb and. And get them to rally around a cause. Sounds like. Sounds like Adam’s first wife is a. Is a good. Is as good a one as any man.

You’re. I’m. I have. I feel all these restrictions on me now because I want. I want to quote a bunch of song lyrics. Suddenly I’m like, I probably shouldn’t do that.

So don’t get us into any more trouble than we’re already. All right, well, there you go, Lilith as the screech owl, which I’m sure that, you know, some people. Some people might say that about some of those. Some of those singers that I just mentioned.

But.

What. I think that’s a really cool little tradition there.

Yeah, it is interesting. I think it’s. It’s important to know the origins of that since that tradition kind of has some traction on social media. And I think it’s interesting to know why it has informed this kind of feminist approach to the creation account in Genesis and the origins of Adam’s wife. But, yeah, it’s definitely something that comes much later down the line and originates in this ancient Mesopotamian tradition about some kind of rather amorphous demonic spirit of some kind associated with the nighttime, with the winds, and with a deviant kind of sexuality.

And if you would like an amulet for your child, please go to our web page where it’s in a merch section. We don’t have a merch section yet. We’ll come up with one soon anyway. That’s great. Let’s move on to our next segment.

All right, let’s do it.

Well, Steely Dan, talk to us. What’s that mean?

What’s that mean?

We’re looking into. We’re looking into the stelae. You’ve. You. You teased it before.

Yep.

Talk to us. What, what do we got here?

So I use this word a lot, stele, in. mainly in my writing, but also in some of the. Some of the social media content that I put out there. And it, it’s basically a standing stone. The Hebrew word here is matzeva, and the plural is matzevot. And when you see in your translation of the Bible a reference to a pillar, sometimes it will be standing stone, sometimes it will be pillar. I can’t imagine anybody is translating stele, but this is a stele. This is an upright stone. It is sometimes carved, sometimes as it is found naturally, but it is something that is taller than it is wide frequently. And in the periods of the composition of the Hebrew Bible, almost all the time, it had a flat front, and then the back was usually rounded or angled or something like that. And the, and that flat front would be the face of this stele.

And this could be used for a number. Well, not a number, a few different purposes. Now we begin to find these in the area of the Levant or ancient Southwest Asia or Israel-Palestine, way back in the Neolithic period. And they’re kind of scattered around the deserts. And archaeologists identify two different uses for stelae, which is the way I refer to the plural of stele. plural of stele. One use is as a commemorative marker for a burial. So it’s very similar, and in fact, in many ways looks almost exactly the same as a contemporary headstone that you might see in a cemetery. You also find them in the Neolithic period in groups, in arrangements that indicate to many archaeologists that they are there to represent or presence, give presence, to manifest the presence of deities.

Now, I’ve argued in my book that there’s actually some overlap between these two different uses, that the concepts of, or the concept of deities is very closely related to concepts of deceased ancestors. These are unseen, imagined agents. And when I say imagined agents, I’m referring to agents that we cannot see but can only engage with, with our minds. And so this is not to say fake, made up, fairy tale agents. It’s to say it’s the exact same thing as talking about the United States of America. It’s something that you cannot see or touch or smell or taste. It’s something that you conjure up in your mind. And so these imagined agents, they are able to interact with people. And one of the main ways people try to interact with them is by offering things like food and water and light and shelter in exchange for maybe not hurting them, maybe protection, maybe information about what’s happening in the future.

Now, these kinds of interactions take place with regard to deceased ancestors as well as with regards to deities. And when you find these standing stones, sometimes they’re set up in mortuary chapels, the little rooms that are designed for people to go and engage with their deceased kin. So they might go there annually and have a feast with the person. They might go there to recite their names so that their memory continues on, so that their. Their afterlife is extended. They might go there to petition them for help, leave what are known as little votive offerings, little objects intended to remind the deceased ancestor of them or something like that. And we see the exact same kinds of behaviors in temples where you go to have a feast, where you go to appeal to them for protection or for aid, and where you go to recite their name.

And so the difference between ancestors and deities is not a very clear one anciently. So there are a lot of similarities between the way these things functioned in relation to deities as well as in relation to ancestors. And there was an interesting discovery from 2008 that shines a lot more light on the overlap and the way these things worked. There was a stele that was discovered that had a drawing and an inscription on it. And the drawing was of a deceased person who was holding up some stuff. And they’re in front of a table with some pita bread and some duck and things like that on it, and they’re holding a pine cone in a bowl. But the inscription is the really cool part. It identifies. It says, I am Kuttamuwa, who made this stele. And it is basically a prescription for what kinds of offerings should be given to the stele in their mortuary chapel on a regular basis.

And it refers to giving these things to my nephesh, which can be somewhat uncomfortably translated as my soul, which is in this stele.

Oh, wow. That. So, okay. Somehow these. The stele has become the receptacle for the eternal nature of this person.

Yeah. And. And we see very similar ideas at work in most of the mortuary practices around this area. We see it in Mesopotamia, we see it in Anatolia. We see it in Egypt, where somehow the deceased’s something. Spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it, it’s conceptualized in a variety of different ways, but somehow this thing is hanging around and you engage with it by creating some kind of material media to house it.ind of material media to house it. And that becomes the index and the medium for engaging with it. So, and this, this Katumuwa stele is kind of making explicit this idea that my soul is going to reside in this stele. And so put the food right in front of it.

Put me in front of pine cones.

Yeah, pine cones and bowls and ducks with the head still on.

And I need a duck and a pine cone or I’m going to be mad. Get in here.

Take the cannoli and. But, and this stele is very much shaped like a contemporary headstone.

Can you give me the size? How tall are we talking?

They’re different sizes. Some of them might only be like a foot high. So the, the earlier in time you get, the smaller they. They tended to be. But the, the Katumuwa one is probably, I think, if I recall correctly, about a meter high. It might be shorter than that. But when you. I have spoken about the Judahite temple at Arad, and if you go there, you can see a stele set up and you can actually enter the Holy of Holies. It’s a reconstruction. And the stele and the two incense altars are replicas. They’re not the originals, which are on display in the Israel Museum. And so like, there’s not a rope you can walk up into it. You can stand on the incense altars, you can, you can give it a duck, you can touch the standing stone. Yeah. If you want to. You know, I’m, I’m sure no one would notice if you went up and poured some oil on it or something like that.

And bring a pine cone. Who knows?

Rubbed his head for luck. Yeah, but. And that’s about a meter high as well, and about a foot and a half wide.

Interesting.

And one thing I pointed out in my book is this is not unrelated to the way we engage with headstones today, because you see it in movies, you see it in TV shows. Maybe some people who are listening have had the experience of talking to a headstone visiting a cemetery. And because the headstone is kind of the only thing you have to focus your attention on. And maybe the name on the headstone, that kind of becomes the medium for communication, that becomes the object that represents the presence or the agency of the deceased loved one.

Even if it’s just metaphorical, it’s just a stand in for that person so that you can process whatever you need to. As you, I have been. I spoke to a headstone of my grandparents headstone at one point. I didn’t anticipate that I was going to do that, but it was there and I was having thoughts and I just thought, you know, I’ll just speak them to this, to this headstone.

And it’s cognitively natural because we want to have some kind of material media to represent these imagined agents that are, that are, you know, in the world around us according to our perception. You know, sometimes people will just look up and just talk to the sky. But if you’ve got something that has the person’s name on it, maybe even a picture of them, excuse me, it’s just. It just feels kind of natural to do that. And so we treat headstones in many ways just like they treated stelae anciently, and not just for deceased kin, but it’s the exact same thing for deities. They conceptualized the deity as inhabiting this stele the exact same way that Katumuwa conceptualized his headstone as his eternal inhabitation. And so in my book Adonai’s Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach, I make the argument that the cognitive motivations are the same and that the concept of divine images, and particularly stelae, builds on the exact same cognitive foundation as our engagement with headstones today and as ancient engagement with headstones as kind of the habitation, the home of the deity.bitation, the home of the deity.

And even in the Hebrew Bible we have a reference to Jacob refers to this place as Bethel, which means house of God. And in the Greek transliteration we have baetyl. And baetyl in ancient Greek became a noun that meant a stele. And so Jacob, when he talks about this will be the house of God, is not saying this region, he’s saying this object that I have set up and that I have anointed will be where God will dwell. And so this is. It’s all interrelated.

Yeah. That’s kind of crazy that this, I mean, yeah, you think of house of God and you think of a building or you think of a structure or something, but you don’t think of it as being like a thing inhabited by an object that is literally inhabited by God. That’s fascinating.

I think so too. And there are other ways that we see this kind of bubbling to the surface in places in the Bible. And one of my favorites is the fact that standing stones seem to be a perfectly legitimate divine image. In very, very early literary layers in the Hebrew Bible, we have standing stones set up. We have a standing stone that we discovered in a Judahite temple. Divine images were in use in the first temple period. They represented Adonai. They represented the God of Israel. And then in the exilic period, we have a transition where we have some stories about Moses and Joshua being commanded to write the words of the law on standing stones. And then they. And then they offer worship and burn offerings before Adonai. In other words, they’re kind of combining the words of the law with the standing stone that reifies the presence of, or manifests the presence of, the God of Israel.

And so this is kind of overlaying the law on the standing stone. And the law has God’s name repeated on it a number of times. In fact, the very first words of the Decalogue are, I am the Lord your God. And so, just like Katumuwa says, I am Katumuwa, here’s my stone. The Decalogue, the Ten Commandments say, I am Adonai, here are my laws. And what are they written on? According to the tradition of Moses and Sinai, tablets, which are mini standing stones. So we go from Moses and Joshua writing the law on the big full-size standing stones that allow us to worship God to this commandment: Hey, Moses, write the words of the law on itty bitty standing stones. Travel, travel size.

Precisely. Because what does that do? That allows you to put them in the Ark of the Covenant and then carry them around. So they’re not limited to a building that can’t move. We can now mobilize the divine image. And we have numerous examples of what are called model shrines from the ancient world and from ancient Israel and from Israelite locations. And a model shrine is a miniaturized temple where you put a mini divine image inside. And that miniaturizes, mobilizes, and personalizes the divine space and the divine image. And so I argue that the Ark of the Covenant, which is treated precisely as a divine image in several places in the Bible, is exactly a model shrine or a shrine model. And the miniature tablets, the miniature standing stones, are miniature divine images.

So it becomes almost a little temple unto itself.

Yeah. And if you’re on the move, you can take it with you. If your army is going out to battle, you can trot your divine image, your God, out before you. So in 1 Samuel 4 , when the Israelites are going to battle against the Philistines, they trot out the Ark of the Covenant and the Philistines say, God is in their camp, and you have Moses in the Book of Numbers , it talks about, in the morning, Adonai would come out with the ark, and in the evening they would put Adonai back in the temple.hey would put Adonai back in the tent. And it’s basically treating the presence and the movement of the Ark of the Covenant as isometric with God’s own presence and movement. And so it’s, it’s doing the exact same thing that divine images prior to the exile and divine images in the nations around Israel did.

Only in this transition, we move away from standing stones. We have the full size standing stones, then we have the law, and we have miniature standing stones with the law, and then we have no standing stones, and we just have the law. But the law still has the divine name on it. And so if you go to a synagogue today and you look at the very front, they’re probably going to have a cabinet of some kind that’s been richly decorated. And they open up that cabinet and you have the scrolls of the Law. And you know what they call that cabinet? They call it the Ark.

Oh, interesting, because.

Yeah, this holds the text of the law. Go ahead.

Sorry, I just. The. So I know that in Jewish tradition, the writing of the name of God or the speaking of the name of God is a sacred thing, is a very, like, you’re not supposed to, you don’t do it under, under most circumstances. Yeah, so I’m taking that to. I, you know, you’re. You’re emphasizing that. That the name of Adonai is written on these things. That, that is, that is of great import in this tradition.

Yeah, the. The name. Materializing the name, whether materializing it vocally, anciently, and, and kind of intuitively, speech is a type of materialization, brings something into being. And literally as well, we’re moving particles, well, waves. And so if you are writing or are speaking the name of God, there is a sense in which you are invoking God’s presence or manifesting God’s presence. Because on the standing stone, there were ceremonies that you would go through to enliven the standing stone. So in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, you had the washing of the mouth ceremony, and you had the opening of the mouth ceremony. And it was basically like this divine image’s mouth is now open, it can breathe, it is alive. The agency, however, that is conceptualized of the deity has now entered into the divine image, and the divine image is enlivened.

And so there were ceremonies that did that. And inscribing the name was an integral part of the ceremony because the name was considered one of the main vehicles for agency and so to speak. The name, to write the name, was to materialize it, and in a sense, was to invoke that presence and was to manifest that presence. And this is why one of the cool things that we saw in the Israel Museum were two little silver scrolls. One of them is about. Almost 4 inches long. The other one’s only a little over an inch long and about half an inch wide, and the other one’s about an inch wide. They’re called the Ketef Hinnom silver scrolls, and they have a version of the priestly blessing on them. But the divine name is written a handful of times on there. And these scrolls were, excuse me, found rolled up tight and buried with somebody. And they probably would have been an amulet that that person wore in their lifetime and they were buried with. And the amulet probably had apotropaic functions or it functioned to ward off evil.

Much like the amulets of Sensenoy and Semangelof, the names allowed the amulet to be activated, to have that power. And so the divine name allowed those little amulets to ward off evil.

Wow.

And so the speaking, the writing, the name, in some sense, was like creating a little mini divine image, was creating something that could manifest God’s presence.:54.970] Dan McClellan: And so outside the temple, you weren’t supposed to do that. And the destruction, once the temple’s destroyed, there is no place where it’s appropriate to do that. And so there are a lot of ways that the Torah scrolls and Torah manuscripts are treated like divine images. You have to go through certain procedures in order to create it. Once it has been created, you have to go through certain procedures if you have to dispose of it. And the divine name is treated particularly carefully in the creation and the disposal of these texts. And so one of the things I conclude in the book is that in many ways, they didn’t outlaw all divine images. They just renegotiated what a divine image was. And it went from a big stone that you had in your Holy of Holies in the temple to the text of the Torah.

And this is why even Christians today, many of them will treat their Bible as somehow metaphysically special. Like, this brings God’s presence, and when I read it, I can feel the spirit of God, the presence of God. That’s exactly how a divine image functioned. A divine image wasn’t necessarily for worship. It could be for worship, but the primary function, the overarching function, was to facilitate God’s presence. And so if you are looking at your Bible, if you’re reading your Bible to facilitate God’s presence, You’re doing the exact same thing with your Bible that they did anciently with divine images.

Now, I’m gonna. I’m gonna keep our conversation in the. Since. Since we already have been playing around with feminism in this episode. You know, when I was doing some research before our interview with Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who who talked to us about Asherah, there was a whole thing about Asherah poles. Now, would these be similar in in to to to to this idea of a standing stone, of a stele, of a whatever, you know, is is it the same kind of concept?

So it’s it’s a related concept. In some of the earlier periods and some of the larger empires, they had a lot more flexibility and they had a larger market, and they had a lot more resources to be able to create divine images of all different shapes and sizes. So some of them were anthropomorphic statues, some of them were crowns, some of them were thrones. You had a lot of different ways to create divine images. Bronze bulls that we found in Israel from the Bronze Age are examples as well. And so an Asherah would have been a kind of stylized tree. And we have some, a handful of drawings of these. The Taanach cult stand is an example of a cult stand that stands about three feet high. That is, there’s an argument to make that this is a species of shrine model, and on it it shows stylized date palm, so a trunk and then some kind of branches that curl off of it, and on either side are feeding ibexes.

And this is also drawn on a large pot, a pithos from Kuntillet Ajrud that is largely understood by scholars to be a symbol that represents Asherah. So one of the interesting things, there’s a scholar named Raanan Eichler, I think he’s an Israeli scholar, but he published a paper a little bit ago that said, isn’t it interesting that in the Ark of the Covenant we have perhaps too many standing stones, two divine images? Do you recall, Dan? Maybe you don’t. This is kind of a trivia question. What else was put into the Ark of the Covenant at different periods?

I’m trying to remember my Raiders of the Lost Ark.

So there were two other things that were said to go in the Ark of the Covenant.30] Dan McClellan: Some of the manna, the manna, which is not important here. But the other thing was Aaron’s budding staff.

Oh, that’s right.

Yes, I do remember that staff that had flowers growing out of the top of it, which Eichler argues sounds suspiciously like an Asherah pole.

Yeah.

And was put in the shrine model with the other mini divine images. And his argument is that the whole story of, oh look, the staff magically budded, and that’s how we could tell who was in charge, was a secondary creation as kind of a— What is that doing in there? Like an etiology for the presence of… An Asherah pole in the Ark of the Covenant. And so, yeah, it is very much a related concept that this—that this pole could have been a piece of material media that helped facilitate access to the presence of the goddess.

And there’s something very interesting about the idea of laying an Asherah pole next to these tablets that end up being an image of Adonai. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that’s—that’s a very interesting idea.

Well, that’s why—so we’ve got the—I mentioned the—the pithos that has the drawing of the stylized date palm and the ibexes, very similar to Asherah. The other side of the pithos has the two anthropomorphic figures with the inscription above it that refers to Adonai and Asherah. And so the association of Adonai and Asherah there is pretty clear. One other thing that I find interesting is we’ve got another very early iconographic depiction of two ibexes feeding on either side of a tree. However, rather than that stylized date palm, that tree is the menorah. Oh, it is a trunk. And then three branches that kind of swoop down, and then up on the other side, seven-branched menorah.

And so—and that’s called the Lachish Ewer, that piece of art. It has an inscription, its dedication to the goddess. It says… But I haven’t seen much. I haven’t seen an argument before that this looks suspiciously like a menorah. I’m sure that somebody has to have made that association before. I’d like to track that down. I think that’s worth some more looking at, because that would be another thing that would be interesting to find if maybe the menorah is actually a conflation of the source of light that was used in the temple with another way to kind of get rid of the Asherah pole would be to conflate it with whatever is offering the lampstand, whatever is offering light in the temple. But that’s not—I haven’t formalized that argument. That’s just a curiosity that I’ve noted. So don’t…

Spread that around.

Yeah, those who are saying I made that claim. I’m just thinking, I think there, that would be interesting to look at if—

Yeah, it—it makes sense. It makes—I mean, it—it’s tree-like, certainly in its—in its visual nature.

Yeah. And so to return to the origin of the segment, the stele. We think of divine images as something that has been rejected by the Bible and that is aberrant and that is, you know, that’s for those weirdos. But we do it today with cemeteries that have stelae in them. And, you know, if there’s a deceased loved one there, it feels natural to us to go talk to it as kind of a medium or a representation of their agency, their presence, or their person. And so we’re not so far removed from what was going on anciently. And I would argue that in the Bible they did not so much reject the use of idols or divine images, so much as they just renegotiated them and decided instead of doing it this way, we’re going to do it this other way, a way that many people still do without knowing that that’s exactly what they’re doing.g. So there’s an argument to make that treating your Bible like something that brings God’s presence is a derivation of ancient stelae, ancient standing stones used as divine images.

I love it. That is fascinating. Well, we’ll leave it at that. I love this conversation. You and I are going to go and have a little bit more conversation on some of these topics for our patrons. So this is now a thing that we are doing every week. So anyone who wants to hear more from us in a less formal way, please think about becoming a patron of the show. You can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and for, at this point, any amount of donation. We will give you access to the patrons-only content. For those of you who aren’t coming over to Patreon, that’s fine. We love you anyway. Thank you so much for listening. If you have anything you’d like to say to us, you can write into us. The email address is contact@dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

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