ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #16A Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> I read somewhere that most of the religion of the Bible was just borrowed from the religions of Israel's neighbors. Is this really true? I don't believe it, of course. But I would sure like to know how to refute it. >> This idea has been around for a long time, David. I remember -- well, I don't remember personally. I remember that in Germany in the 19th century there was this ongoing debate called the Babel-Bibel Controversy. Babel being Babylon, of course, and Bibel being Bible. And the debate was about exactly this, how much of the faith of the Old Testament was borrowed from other ancient eastern sources, specifically from Babylon in the case of this debate. So it's not surprising to know that this is still out there. In fact, there is a movement called the History of Religions Movement in ancient near eastern studies that has sort of resurrected this idea that almost everything from the Bible is borrowed from some other nearby ancient near eastern culture. Now, we need to be aware of the fact that there are many similarities between the faith of the Old Testament and the other societies around Israel just as there are many similarities between Christianity today and other elements in our culture. But similarity doesn't mean that one is borrowed from the other. Or more importantly, often similarity is an external kind of thing and it doesn't affect the way that one understands how or interprets the theology that is associated with it. The most obvious example of that is that the temple and the tabernacle in the Old Testament in terms of their architecture and shape were almost identical to other temples in the ancient world. But the theology of worship, the theology of the presence of God, even the theology of the idea of the nature of God was very different in Israel than from its Old Testament neighbors. I think what I would like to do rather than try to run through a whole bunch of details to illustrate this, I think what I would like to do is to focus on two major concepts that illustrate the way that in a very fundamental way the faith of the Old Testament is radically different from that of Israel's pagan neighbors. And the two concepts that I would like to focus on are the relationship between the realm of the devine and the realm of nature and the concept of time. So first let's talk about how they understood nature and shall we say the nature of nature in the ancient world? Now, if you were to go out on the street today and ask the average westerner to describe for you their understanding of reality, well, their first reaction would probably be to look at you as if you were a little strange. But if you could get past that reaction, they would probably suggest that their understanding of reality is that there is some material world or nature or creation within which we live. And that out there somewhere there is a kind of spiritual reality, as well, that's separate from and distinct from this realm of nature. There's some people, of course, who wouldn't take that view. And we often refer to this as New Age Religion that kind of reverts to the idea that the spiritual world and the material world are blended together. And in some ways this New Age idea, as we call it, is a revival of the concept of nature that we encounter in the ancient world. Let's think about this. And we often call this the mythopoeic view of nature. Because it is the view of the world that leads to the making of myth, which is what mythopoeic means. If you were to go back to ancient Babylon or ancient Egypt and were to inquire about their understanding of reality, the description would end up being something like this. And of course, they wouldn't put it in these terms. But it would fit into this kind of scheme. They would describe a reality in which the realm of the gods and the realm that we call nature or matter are not two separate things. But rather, they are at best a kind of continuum where the realm of the gods is at one end and the realm of nature is at the other. Almost like we think of the light spectrum where there are certain wavelengths of light that are not visible. And there are other wavelengths that are visible. We think of the invisible spectrum and the visible spectrum of light. Or in terms of sound there are certain frequencies that we can't hear and certain frequencies that you can hear. Well, in the same way they saw reality as that kind of spectrum or continuum. And the part of reality that the gods inhabited was the same reality that we inhabit and call nature. It's just that you couldn't see their part and you couldn't touch it or obviously hear it, either. So there's a connection between the realm of the divine and the realm of nature. Now, an example I think will illustrate this for us. Let's consider a very common deity in the ancient world, the sun god. We look up into the sky and we see the sun. And the ancient Canaanite would have called the sun by the name Sah Shu in Canaan, Semish in Hebrew. And they would also understand that there is a god that is the god related to the sun. And the name of that god is also Sah Shu. Now, when they looked in the sky and they saw the sun in the sky, they didn't think of the sun in the sky as a symbol of the god Sah Shu. They thought of the sun in the sky as that part of the god Sah Shu or that aspect of the god Sah Shu that was visible to us within the realm of nature. So we tend to think of this the other way around. We tend to think of gods as persons who are out there. And that there's this thing within nature like the sun. And the sun is merely a symbol for the god. But that's not the way they thought about it at all. The sun was not a symbol of the god Sah Shu. The sun was the god Sah Shu as he appeared within our realm. Perhaps an analogy would help at this point. And one that I find helpful, although it has limitations, is the idea of an iceberg. You know, an iceberg floating in the sea, most people understand that the majority of the iceberg is under the water and it's not visible and only the top of the iceberg is visible. You can't see all of it. But you know it's there. It's just not visible to us. In the same way they would say that the sun in the sky is sort of like the tip of the iceberg. It's that part of the thing that is -- that shows up within the part of the world within the part of nature or reality that we can see. And so the gods that exist in the part of nature that we can't see can appear in one way or more than one way within our realm. So let's see how this works within Egypt, for example. I have a slide with a picture on it here. This is a photograph that I took in the British museum a while back. And you can see a couple of little figurines of Egyptian deities in this photograph. Now, these are Egyptian deities in human form. And they would certainly from time to time depict their deities in the form of people. And Egyptians did think of them that way. They understood that their gods could appear as people. But they didn't always appear as people. Here in this next shot we have three little figurines of gods or goddesses, depending on who they are here. The one on the left, it sort of looks like a hippopotamus standing upright, is the god Taweret, an important goddess in Egyptian popular belief. Taweret was the goddess responsible for the process of pregnancy and childbirth. In the middle we have the little blue guy. I'm not sure what he's supposed to be. He's really a cute looking figure. This is the god Bes. And on the right the green figurine that looks like a baboon is god Thoth. Now, in this case we have three figurines of gods that appear in the form of animals. For the Egyptians there was no difference between the gods choosing to appear in the form of animals or choosing to appear in the form of humans. A god could appear in any form that suited them. And there were some gods -- some figures, some animals, that were more consistent with the god's nature than others. And so they tended to appear that way. In this next shot we see an Egyptian goddess by the name of Maat or truth. The name is a little misleading. This is one of the most important Egyptian goddesses because this goddess is responsible for the order of the cosmos. Truth in the Egyptian understanding doesn't mean the opposite of falsehood. It means maintaining things the way they ought to be. Truth is the way things ought to be here. Notice this picture of Maat. She is in human form. But her arms extended also have feathers sticking out of them so that she has wings like a bird. In this case, we have a goddess who appears in a form that is sort of half divine -- or half human, half animal. And the feather, notice there's a feather in her headband. The feather is sort of the symbol of the goddess Maat. Whenever you see Maat, she always has a feather, usually in her headband as here. And sometimes she's simply represented as a feather. The goddess is represented in the form of a feather. There's one other thing I should mention about these figurines. Since we're talking about Maat in this picture here, I mentioned the sun and the sky was understood by them to be not a symbol of the god but the actual presence of the god within the realm of nature. The same is true of the figurines. These statues were not thought of as symbols. These were the god as they were present in that place. And the same is also true of the picture on the wall. This picture of Maat that we still see here, this was not a symbol or even a reminder of Maat. It was the very presence of Maat in this tomb looking over in this case probably the deceased. In fact, of course, the gods could be in many places at one time under a scheme like this. And this, too, is -- well, it seems odd to us to think that the gods could be, you know, in many cities or temples at one time. And again, you can use the analogy of the water to help understand this. Let's say I was swimming under water and I were starting to come up from under water. And I put my hand up. There might be sort of five places where my five fingers emerged from the water. But that was all you could see of me above the water. And you would look at that and you would say, "Well, there's five things sticking up there." But you would know that those five things are not five independent things, they are the same being. You are just seeing them in technically five different places. And that's the way they understood the ability of the gods to be present in multiple places at the same time. Well, in this shot we have the goddess Hathor, also in the form of a human, a woman. Beside it here on the right we have another image of the goddess Hathor, this time in the form of a cow. Notice although it's probably a little hard to see on your screen, the cow has two long horns that stick up. And if you look on the left side, the goddess Hathor in human form has a crown which has those same two horns in it. Just like the goddess Maat is represented by the feather, Hathor is almost always pictured with these two horns no matter what form she's in. In this shot on the left we have the baboon god Thoth that we saw a few moments ago in the little green statue. Thoth is the guide of writing or of the scribes. And here in this picture. There's a scribe sitting at his feet. This represents, of course, Thoth looking over or protecting the scribe. In this little shot we have also Thoth. This is Thoth not appearing as a baboon but as an ibis, a bird here with a long curled beak. If you don't know what an ibis is, it's a water bird with a long beak as you see here. And in this next shot we have Thoth again. Thoth here appears in a human form with a human body but with the head of the ibis that we saw a moment ago. So here in Thoth we have three different ways which Thoth can appear: As a baboon, as an ibis or as an ibis-headed person. By the way, Thoth is not only the god of scribes but the god of writing. And in this last shot you can see Thoth is engaged in writing. He's holding a stylus in his hand. And he's recording something. Thoth was the secretary of the gods. And behind Thoth is the pharaoh. Apparently what we have in this picture is Pharaoh, who is telling his deeds or what he has done to the god Thoth. And Thoth is writing them down in the annals or records of the gods so that the deeds of the king would be recorded perpetually. Now, here is one last thing before we leave. This is the goddess Taweret again, the goddess that appears as a hippopotamus as we said before. The goddess responsible for pregnancy and childbirth in ancient Egypt. And here on the right we have a statue of the wife of queen -- I'm sorry; the wife of Pharaoh Amenhotep III. Her name was Tee. And so this is Queen Tee. And if you look at this statue of Queen Tee carefully, you'll see that Queen Tee is depicted as if she were the goddess Taweret with the exception of the face and hair. And even the hair is sort of like the goddess statue. Everything else in this is the goddess Taweret. She has the same crown. She has the same general body shape. She's holding her arms at the same angle and has her hands sort of doubled up as fists just like the goddess Taweret does. She has the same bulging belly as the hippopotamus god Taweret does, as well. So this raises an interesting question for interpreters. What's meant by this statue? Is this statue telling us that Queen Tee was thought to be the incarnation of the goddess Taweret? Or perhaps that she's hoping that the goddess Taweret will look over her and protect her in her pregnancy and childbirth? We just really don't know. But it's a fascinating kind of thing to see in this case the queen pictured as a goddess. And frankly, not all that attractive one, either. This is not done for the sake of flattery in this case. So that's how the gods in Egypt were depicted in a variety of ways. But let's return to our basic point about the understanding of the relationship between the gods and nature. We said before that it was a continuity between the realm of the gods and the realm of nature. One of the major implications of that continuity is that what happens in the realm of the divine affects what happens in the realm of nature, as well. The events that happen in your life and mine happen that way because of things that happened in the divine realm. We can see this in the traditional story associated with the destruction of the city of Troy in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. You may remember how the Trojan War got started. There was to be a beauty contest between three of the leading goddesses. And the gods had more sense than to get involved in that debate. So they drafted a handsome young man by the name of Paris, a prince of the city of Troy. And he was going to judge this beauty contest. And to make a long story short, he did. And of course, the goddess who won was pleased and happy with him. And the goddesses -- the two goddesses who didn't were unhappy. And as a result of this, in the end they introduce Paris to the wife of a Greek king. He ran off with her. And this led to war between the city of Troy and various Greek cities. So what happened in the realm of the divine, the judging of this beauty contest and the rivalry between the various queens led to rivalry and in the end warfare between the two nations who were associated with those goddesses. So in the ancient world, if one city fights another city, it's because the gods associated with those two cities were in a struggle between themselves, as well. And which city won depended upon which god was the more powerful. If my god was more powerful than your god, then my city would defeat your city in war. At least that was the theological theory behind their understanding of reality. Now, this kind of reminds us of a fact when we think about it. There are many gods and goddesses. And there was no single god or goddess who controlled every aspect of reality in the ancient world as they understood it. So not even the high god controlled all of reality. There's a wonderful account from Babylon which includes the flood story that illustrates this. The flood according to the Babylonian legend came about because the high god was frustrated. He couldn't get a good night's sleep. What had happened was the gods had created mankind because they were lazy and they didn't want to work. They wanted someone else who would produce food and clothes for them. And so they created humans to perform these mundane tasks for them. And then humans increased in number. And they increased in number so much that they made so much racket and so much noise that the god, the high god, couldn't get a good night sleep. And he got grumpy because he was tired. And he decided he was just going to wipe out all of these humans so that he could sleep better. Well, the other gods learned of his plan. And they rather liked not having to produce their own food and clothes and just be able to spend all their time relaxing and doing whatever it was that they did. And so they oppose the will of the high god. And they were able to -- and here we won't go into all of the details of the story. But they were able to shield and protect some of the humans and protect them from being destroyed in the flood. So in the end all the humans were not wiped out as the high god had intended. So even the high god, the most powerful and important of the gods, was not able to accomplish his will all the time in these matters. Because no one single god controlled everything that happened. What happens within the realm of the gods happens because of the struggle between the gods. And that struggle between the gods to accomplish their will leads to struggle in the human realm between persons and between nations. One of the effects of their understanding of the way the gods existed was that no one could ever be sure that their god would be able to deliver on his promises to them. Let's say that I wanted something bad to happen to you, that we had been in some conflict and I was angry with you and so I wanted something bad to happen to you. I might go to my local priest and get a little figurine or perhaps if I couldn't afford a figurine, I might even get a little piece of pottery shard. And I might write a curse on there. I might write "May the gods curse X." And I might take it to the priest and give my offering. And the priest would take it and say some magical formula over it. He would take the figurine or piece of pottery and he would break it. And this was understood to encourage the gods to go and do likewise, the gods to inflict harm upon you. Now, you might be as angry with me as I am with you. And you might be doing the same thing, performing the ritual and attempting to curse me so that something bad would happen to me. And we couldn't both get our way, of course. And it may be that I've been perfectly righteous and perfectly moral. I do everything my god expects. And you are the same way. You are perfectly righteous, perfectly good. You do everything that your god expects of you. And let's say in this case that your god prevails and something bad happens to me. In the ancient world they understood that bad things happen to good people because the gods are deciding what's going to happen. And the god of the good person just may not be powerful enough to protect him from the harm that others want to do to him. So it doesn't matter how righteous you are. It doesn't matter how pious you are. It doesn't matter how faithful you are in making your offerings and so forth. Bad things might happen to you just because your god isn't powerful enough or maybe because the other gods all gang up on him. And so you can never be sure that your god is going to be able to deliver even on the good will that he may have for you. And this is a very important concept for the book of Exodus. Because Yahweh proves through the plague narratives and being able to bring his people out of Egypt. The demonstration of who Yahweh is in the book of Exodus underscores that the God of Israel is more powerful than all of the gods of Egypt combined. He is able to defeat them, to overcome them and to bring his people out. The point is that the God of Israel is able to deliver on the promises that he gives. So in this sense, the omnipotence of God, God's all powerful nature, is the key to our confidence in God's salvation. If the ancient near eastern view of reality is the true one, then we couldn't be sure that God could save us, even if he wanted to. But because the God of the Bible demonstrates that he is the only true God, that he is all powerful, we can be confident and certain that he not only will accomplish our salvation but that he can accomplish our salvation. Well, let's mention just a couple of other things about ancient near eastern religion before we wrap up. Let's talk for a moment about worship. I mentioned the ritual a moment ago in which we would try to curse one another. That also illustrates the role of magic in ancient near eastern religion. Magic is a very important part of the worship of the ancient world because they believe that since what happens in the realm of the divine affects what happens here because of the continuity between the two of them, that the opposite is also true. That what happens here can have an affect on the world of the divine. And so magic ritual is intended to influence the gods and cause the gods to do something that would affect things within the realm of nature. And so that's a very important part of religion in the ancient world. Along with that we need to recognize one last thing. Namely, that ancient near eastern religion did not function with the idea that the gods loved mankind. Nor did it function with the idea that humans should love the gods. Rather, the gods are thought to be all powerful beings who created mankind to serve them, to serve as slaves and provide for their needs. The gods cared for humans because they needed humans to work for them. And humans acted out their duty toward gods because they needed these powerful gods to try to protect them. But in the ancient world, there is not a sense that I should expect the gods to love me or that I need to love them in return. That idea is simply completely foreign to the ancient world. And so the biblical idea that the God of Israel loves Israel and that the people of God love God is a radically different idea than we encounter in the ancient world. Well, we've talked for a few minutes now about the ancient near eastern idea of the relationship between the gods and nature. How they exist or how nature is not a separate thing, the realm of nature and the realm of the divine. But rather, how there's this continuity. And that what happens in one part affects the other and vice versa. We ought also to mention just in closing that there was in Mesopotamia in particular not much of a concept of the afterlife. That Egyptian religion did hold the view of an afterlife. And so Egyptian religion is much more optimistic than Mesopotamian religion was about whether people survived after death. In Mesopotamian religion it was certainly possible for individuals to live after death often by becoming gods. The line or the gray area between human and divine was such that it was possible to be promoted, as it were, to move across that line and no longer be human but be god. And the same is true in Egyptian religion so that the pharaoh as he lives here on earth is the earthly presence of the gods in the realm of the divine. And when he dies, he ceases to be here but moves into the realm of the divine. So the membrane, the wall of separation between the realm of the divine and realm of nature, is such that it's possible to move back and forth from one to the other. And while Egyptian religion held that others could live after death, as well, in Mesopotamian religion, it seems at least that it's rare for the average person to conceive of the ability to live after death. So Mesopotamian religion is much more pessimistic about these matters and Egyptian religion much more positive about life after death. So as you can see, there is a considerable difference between the faith of the Bible and the faith of the ancient near east. Yahweh is not one of the gods who appears within the realm of nature. But rather he is outside of nature. He created it. And he is able to manipulate it. But he is not within it. And one of the most important things about Yahweh is that he cannot be manipulated from within nature. The Old Testament prohibits acts of magic because they imply a different understanding of who God is. And they are prohibited because Israel is not able to manipulate God through magical acts. And for them to attempt to do so would be to worship God in a way that's contrary to God's very nature. So while there are certainly some elements in the Old Testament that are similar to ancient near eastern religion, there are also many important concepts and ideas in the Bible that are radically different from the religions of the ancient near east, as well. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***