Archive for the ‘YHWH’ Category
the treatment of women in the bible – a bemused exploration: Jezebel
Jezebel – drawn from life
This’ll be the first of an occasional series, I reckon.
I’ve written elsewhere about the Church (Catholic) and its obsession with Mary – supposedly an eternal virgin, passive, obedient, modest, quiescent, deferential – the archetypal perfect woman. Of course the whole Judeo/Christian/Islamic religious combo is a product of the – very long – patriarchal period of its genesis, a period that it has helped to perpetuate, and there’s no doubt in my mind that the waning of that religious hegemony in the WEIRD world has helped the empowerment of women – though it must be said that many regions that have been far less affected by that combo, such as China and Japan, remain disappointingly patriarchal.
Of course there were other women who played more or less important roles in the Bible, from Eve (spare rib, temptress, but also name-giver and mother-of-all-humans) to Esther (Jewish wife of Xerxes of Persia, saviour of the Jews), and including Deborah (prophet, judge, military leader), Miriam (sister of Moses, who helped to hide him in the bullrushes), Lydia (businesswoman, hostess, friend of Paul), Phoebe (benefactor, associate of Paul), and Priscilla (businesswoman, missionary, another friend of Paul). This collection of women doesn’t attest to my intimate knowledge of the Bible, it comes from a Christian theologian and musician, Tendai Kashiri. I admire and value her attempt to find women of action, power and positivity among the Biblical stories, but it hardly needs to be said that they are few and far between in an overwhelmingly male-dominated world.
In a fascinating lecture, available on YouTube, entitled ‘Who was Baal?, the historian and theologian John Hamer incidentally mentions, in reference to Jezebel (originally Jeyzebaal), that she was portrayed as a foreign, Baal-worshipping enemy of Yahweh. Names which include the names of gods, such as El (or Elohim) and Baal are called theophoric names, and they include Elizabeth, Daniel, Samuel and Michael. The Baal-related theophoric names have been eclipsed by El-related ones (Jezebel), just as Baal was eclipsed by El/Yahweh.
Baal was a very popular Canaanite god in antiquity, and therefore a rival and threat to El/Yahweh, so the early biblical writers needed to deal with him (all these major gods were of course profoundly male), which they did in a story in the first book of Kings, in which a character called Elijah (a double theophony, El and jah for Yahweh) pitted himself, as the sole remaining supporter of Yahweh, against 450 supporters/priests of Baal (he ‘proves’, by miracles, that Yahweh is the only true god, then proceeds to slaughter all the Baal supporters!). In this tale, the Israelite king, Ahab, is depicted as a Baal supporter, under the influence of his Phoenician wife, Jezebel. Hamer points out that female-blaming of this sort is a commonplace in the early writings.
The Elijah story, which argues that the people have abandoned the one god, Yahweh, in favour of ‘foreign’ gods, such as Baal, is an inversion of history as uncovered by archaeologists and other researchers. That’s to say, the myth-making around Yahweh/El as a Henotheistic* god is the novelty, designed to bring the Jewish people together as a nation apart.
Disappointingly, supposedly objective sources such as Britannica present the Biblical narrative as true:
When Jezebel married Ahab (ruled c. 874–c. 853 BCE), she persuaded him to introduce the worship of the Tyrian god Baal-Melkart, a nature god. A woman of fierce energy, she tried to destroy those who opposed her; most of the prophets of Yahweh were killed at her command. These cruel and despotic actions provoked the righteous wrath of Elijah; according to 1 Kings 17, he accurately prophesied the onset of a severe drought as divine retribution. Sometime later Elijah had the Baal priests slain, after they lost a contest with him to see which god would heed prayers to ignite a bull offering, Baal or Yahweh. When Jezebel heard of the slaughter, she angrily swore to have Elijah killed, forcing him to flee for his life (1 Kings 18:19–19:3).
Since there is hardly anything known of this woman outside of Deuteronomic texts designed to promote El/Yahweh, it’s disappointing, to say the least, that Britannica presents this account of Jezebel as historical. But as far as I can gather, there is absolutely no record of Jezebel outside of this one Biblical account, written some 200 years after the reign of Ahab. It’s reasonably likely, but not certain, that she existed, but as the renowned archaeologist Israel Finkelstein points out:
the inconsistencies and anachronisms in the biblical stories of Jezebel and Ahab mean that they must be considered “more of a historical novel than an accurate historical chronicle”.
This comes from Wikipedia, which continually proves itself to be the most skeptical and reliable source of historical information out there.
Of course, this ‘wicked woman’ suffered for the crime of supporting the loser god over the winner.
Jehu [supposed successor to Ahab] later ordered Jezebel’s eunuch servants to throw her from the window. Her blood splattered on the wall and horses, and Jehu’s horse trampled her corpse. He entered the palace where, after he ate and drank, he ordered Jezebel’s body to be taken for burial. His servants discovered only her skull, her feet, and the palms of her hands—her flesh had been eaten by stray dogs, just as the prophet Elijah had prophesied.
All of which, of course, is bullshit. Or story-telling.
*Henotheism differs from monotheism, in that it argues for god x as the god you should be worshipping, rejecting all others (monolatry is a similar term). Monotheism goes further, claiming that there has only ever been one god, none of the others actually exist.
References
https://www.thecollector.com/powerful-women-in-christianity-history/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jezebel-queen-of-Israel
on the origin of the god called God, part 2: the first writings, the curse on women, the jealous god
2500 years of this BS? Time for a change
So now we come to the writings on the god we’ve come to call God, and his supposed activities, nature and purpose.
I’m no biblical scholar, and this is a daunting prospect, but here are some questions I need to ask myself. When? What language? Who? How many authors? Is ‘the Torah’ the same as ‘the Pentateuch’? Don’t look for too many answers here.
The first five books of the Bible, and presumably all of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, was written in Biblical Hebrew, and this is important to always keep in mind for English readers, who so often fail to realise they’re reading translations of translations. The first traces of Biblical texts discovered, the Ketef Hinnom scrolls, date back about 2600 years. They are fragments from Numbers, the fourth book. Of course we may never know if these are the oldest texts, but it’s unlikely they’ll find anything too much older. They date, therefore, from a little before the Babylonian exile, written up in various books (Jeremiah, 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, Ezra and Daniel). According to Wikipedia and its sources:
The final redaction of the Pentateuch took place in the Persian period following the exile, and the Priestly source, one of its main sources, is primarily a product of the post-exilic period when the former Kingdom of Judah had become the Persian province of Yehud.
There were multiple authors, it seems. Famously, there were two origin stories, written presumably by separate persons. They’re designated as Gen 1 and Gen 2, and they each use a different name for the creator. The first, starting at Genesis 1:1, uses the Hebrew word Elohim, whereas the second, starting at Genesis 2:4, uses a tetragrammaton, YHWH, for Yahweh. Stylistically, they’re also very different. The first is fairly tightly organised and brief. Importantly from my perspective, the god, though male, is described as creating ‘man’ in its two forms, male and female, together. Here’s the the King James English version:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepers upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them (Genesis 1:26-27).
The second story begins immediately after the first story ends, and it is more detailed and lyrical, describing the garden of Eden, the river out of it, the tree of life, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the lands fed by the rivers, divided from the original, flowing from the garden. God spends a lot of time chatting with Adam (the name suddenly pops up), getting him to name all the beasts of the fields and the fowl of the air that he, the god, conjures up. He also tells him that he will create a help-meet for him, but Adam has to remind him of this later. So, the great moment arrives:
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man (Genesis 2:21-23).
So the male has the naming rights, and the woman provides unspecified help, and they quickly notice that they’re both ‘naked’ – though what might that mean? – but it didn’t apparently bother them – because, it seems, they hadn’t eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (TKGE), a useful tree for any garden. Clearly, none of this makes sense from a modern perspective, but the story goes on, with a talking serpent, who addresses the as-yet unnamed woman, convincing her that she should eat from the TKGE, to become wise. This sounds like good advice, and the woman judges the fruit of the tree to be good, and so she eats, and gets the man to eat, and they’re ashamed, and they hide from the god, who, being omniscient, eventually finds them. He asks why they’re hiding and Adam explains that they’re naked – sophisticated language already! – to which the god asks the very interesting question, Who told you you were naked? There’s no answer, and the god assumes that they’ve eaten from the TKGE. But he doesn’t appear to be sure, he has to ask them. So Adam blames the woman, who blames the serpent, though of course there’s no explanation as to why ignorance is bliss and devouring knowledge is bad.
Most important for my purposes here is the god’s treatment of the woman:
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee (Genesis 3:16)
So that sets the pattern of male-female inequality in Judaism. Pretty flimsy, needless to say.
Now to turn to the warrior god, who is also a jealous god (which is certainly not the same thing). The god of the Israelites, essentially YHWH, is deliberately mysterious, and amorphous. He must not be represented (this is called aniconism, against icons), to make a graven image is toto forbidden. The religious historian Christophe Lemardelé, in an essay of great complexity, finds that the tension between a jealous god, who seems in some kind of marital relation with his people, and a warrior-god seeking to save his people and fight for them, as in the books of Exodus and Judges, can best be resolved by examining the anthropology of the peoples who created this god:
The figure of the patriarch Abraham echoes a pastoral population located in Hebron and therefore leads to suggesting that the patriarchal ideology of Genesis—a book of Judean and rather late origin (Persian period, around the 5th century)—would have its background in the family and kinship structures of these nomadic groups. It seems difficult to us to envisage, without any migration, a late Iron age diffusion, however slow, of the Yahweh’s religion from south to north through these groups. The divine covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not at the origin of God’s privileged relationship with Israel but rather one of its final elaborations.
It seems the god evolved with an increasing patriarchy – the origin stories were by no means the first written, and their misogyny, such as it is, is partial witness to an increasingly endogamous patrilineal society. This god, through the stories of Judges, Deuteronomy and Exodus, becomes more tightly bound to his chosen people, increasingly jealous of other gods, and increasingly demanding and unforgiving. Such is the legacy of the Abrahamic religions, if you want it.
There is of course a great deal more to say and learn, but the WEIRD world continues to move away from these tales and life examples, into hopefully something more bonoboesque, something more in keeping with our actual and potential human nature. The religion that reinforced over a millennium of misogyny is failing, all too slowly, in its Western European heartland, and it would be nice if we could speed that up. We understand our world now well enough to know that keeping women out of positions of power, demeaning them, pretending that they are inferior, or that their roles should be circumscribed, has been disastrous. Nothing short of disastrous. I want to argue for a worldwide release of female power, and a promotion of female dominance. It’s happening slowly, but I’m impatient. I want to present the evidence and I want to continue to see changes bearing fruit. There are parts of the world that are going backwards, certainly – in Afghanistan, in Burma, in China and many other regions. We need to show them by example how good it can be. We need to work to reduce the macho thugocracies (the majority of the world’s nations), and find ourselves in a less brutal, more collaborative, more caring, inclusive and thoughtful world. The rise of female power, I believe, is absolutely central to that transition. Without which not.
References
https://www.bibleodyssey.org/en/passages/related-articles/two-creations-in-genesis