Jerusalem and Judaism before the Return 2.1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, September 16, 1999
Tuesday, 27 June 2006
Abstract
Masseboth
According to the bible, a popular Canaanite inspired apostasy from the cult of Yehouah was the worship of “masseboth” or standing stones. Eight of the Israelite cult places surveyed by Zevit featured standing stones, but hundreds have been found in the Negev and Sinai. They appear singly, but also in twos, threes, fives, sevens, nines, twelves, and even more. When there are two, one is often tall and the other shorter and squatter, and, sometimes, in the groups of threes, the third is a small stone, so they seem to stand for a holy family. It would likely be the influence of the Egyptian holy family of Osiris, Isis (Hathor) and the infant Horus. They may be inscribed with the word “masseboth” (msb or msbt) from the Semitic root “msb” meaning “to be erect”.
Bethel (Gk, baitylos) is literally the “house of God”, but it was a standing stone. At biblos, they often had niches cut into them into which figurines of the god or goddess were placed. Philo of Biblos who claimed what he had to say was from the priest Sanchuniathon, said that the stones moved! They had the same illusions then as the believers who see statues of the BVM move, but these were only roughly hewn or even unhewn stones. The use of stones was widespread over the world in primitive societies, and there is no reason to doubt that worshippers of Yehouah considered he lived in a stone at some time or other, the reason why there were standing stones in cult places in Israel. But no one knows it for sure. If we were to believe biblical proscriptions, we might think otherwise, but then unhewn stones are not “graven” in any way, so perhaps they were permissible images of Yehouah, and the prohibitions against masseboth generally meant stones that were the homes of other gods than Yehouah. That is Zevit’s view, though the evidence is weak. Since all the evidence in the ground is of Canaanite culture, the stones could have been any of the Canaanite gods and goddesses.
Both the bible and archaeological information testify to the presence in the religion of the Israelites before the exile of a Goddess—Anat or Asherah—as a consort of Yehouah. Papyri found at the Jewish Egyptian centre at Elephantine include an oath of Anat-Yeho or Anat-Bethel, Bethel evidently being a standing stone at the Elephantine sanctuary used as a cult symbol for Yehouah. A standing stone universally is a phallic symbol. Iron Age finds at Hazor included a standing stone of truly phallic proportions that seems to have been worshipped looking south, implying a solar connexion. Anat seems to have been the consort of both El and Yehouah, implying that the two were the same! Anat-Yeho is the “Queen of Heaven” who is defended by her worshippers (Jer 7:18; 44:17-19;44:25) as superior to the god, Yehouah, the version imported by the Persian “returners” from exile.
Archaeologists have also found Hebrew inscriptions at Kirbet el-Qom in the Judaean hills that speak of “Yehouah and his Asherah”. Asherah is also linked with Yehouah-Teman and Yehouah-Samaria in blessings inscribed at Kuntilla Ajrud in Sinai. Mesha of Moab also refers to an apparently dual god named “Ashtar-Chemosh”. Ashtar must have been a variant of Ishtar. Asherah was a Mother-Goddess known from the Canaanite Ras Shamra tablets. The “returners” were keen to be rid of images of the Asherim, phallic poles or pillars probably surmounted with an image, and Deuteronomy 12:3 orders their destruction. 1 Kings 18:19 and 2 Kings 21:7 prove that Israelites worshipped this goddess in both of the kingdoms of the Yehudim. Micah reiterates Deuteronomy in having Yehouah promise to destroy those who do not destroy these Asherim. Whether Asherah, when it occurs in the bible, refers to the goddess or to phallic pillars, the “returners” wanted to be shot of them, much to the annoyance of the Am ha-Eretz and their wives who, over the centuries, had grown fond of them.
It is this popular veneration of the goddess in her phallic form that explains the many cult fertility figurines found in Palestine but rarely spoken about—the pillar figurines. They are probably models of sanctuary images sold to worshippers for persoanl devotional purposes. The Astarte Plaques are low reliefs of the goddess often surrounded by a frame probably meant to be the recess containing the cult image in the sanctuary. The Astarte Plaques therefore depict the goddess in the context of her shrine.
Zevit thinks the use of living trees as asherah increased after the Persian occupation while the use of treetrunks or poles for them decreased. It is true that the Persians revered trees. Coins from Tyre show masseboth sheltered by carefully trimmed trees. It would be interesting to know whether they were pre or post Persian. Deuteronomy 16:21 seems to prohibit asherahs but it could be read that the prohibition was on the cut pole, not on the living tree.
You shall not set up for yourself asherahs of any trees, which you make for yourself near the altar of Yehouah your God.Dt 15:21
If so, it would match the Persian period better than centuries before when the bible might imply it was written. The same is true of Genesis 21:33 when Abraham planted a living tamarisk at Beersheba not merely a pole.
Icons
Religious imagery was an important aspect of identifying monarch, god and people. It only changed when the Persians came into world power with an aniconic god—the first of them. The Persians doubtless found it advantageous that they had no image of their god, because it was then easier to impose him without anyone noticing. A god who is not pictured is not an obviously different god!
Scholars of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, have chosen to examine the many icons and images that have been found in Palestine with a view to providing a basis for understanding Israelite religion independently of the tendentious hagiography called the scriptures. No one is suggesting that the biblical writings can be thrown away. Even though they are much later compilations than most of the faithful have been led to believe, they still contain fragments of much earlier work and so can still be valuable historical information. The difference is that whereas the scriptures were formerly accepted as the standard, they no longer are. The hints at religious practice deducible from icons is likely to be a sounder yardstick and biblical information will have to fit in with the archaeological work, not the other way around.
Doubtless the modern interest in images rather than words is related to the ease with which we communicate with images in the modern world of TV, cinema and computers. The earlier obsession with documented religion led to Protestant scholars particularly looking down on religions for which there was no such documentation. Religions of the “book” had been seen as having progressed beyond the primitive religions of mere sacerdotal ritual. The modern view is that images can be as valuable as text.
The religions of the Hebrew God were thought of as being free of images because this advanced god could not be pictured. Images of goddesses were found in Israel but not images of Yehouah, a strange and illogical imbalance. If the god could have a consort, both must have been visible. The standing stones were symbolic of the god but there seemed not to have been any recognisable images of Him. The “Calf of Samaria” of Hosea 8:6, apparently the image of a bull in the temple of Bethel, has been apologized for as the pedestal supporting… nothing! Or an image of the invisible god, if you like!
In fact, of course, the prohibition of graven images in the bible is late. There are no identifiable images of Yehouah, the Persian religion forbidding representation of the God of Heaven. The incident of the “Golden Calves” (“These be thy gods, O Israel”) in Exodus 32:4 is a legend written in justification of it, but proving that image worship had occurred. Both the original Deuteronomy 5:8 and Exodus 20:4 also forbid the making of images of anything in heaven, on earth or in the sea. Despite this, images of the Canaanite gods from the earlier phase are found. So, if this was an ancient prohibition, as believers think, it was never followed, although art work does not seem to have been highly valued in these countries to judge by their quality, unless it was simply a sign of their poverty.
The Norwegian scholar, Mowinckel, in the early part of the twentieth century was already telling people who wanted to listen that the Jewish proscription of images was late and that the temple of Jerusalem for long had an image of Yehouah in some form. More recently a number of scholars have pointed out that references to the appearance of God in psalms such as Psalms 27:4,
One thing have I desired of Yehouah, that will I seek after, that I may dwell in the house of Yehouah all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of Yehouah, and to inquire in his temple,
imply that somewhere was a fine image of God to be seen! Here the implication is clear that the “beauty of Yehouah” is to be beheld in the temple, the “House of the Yehouah”. Cult statues of Yehouah must have been erected in his various sanctuaries. What signs there are of adoration of gods suggest they were local ones—Yehoauh of Samaria, Yehouah of Temen, “to the god who is in Dan” (a Greek inscription), as well as the place names suggestive of a local shrine such as Bethel, the House of El. The many towns called “Beth-something” in the bible must have been sites of sanctuaries to Yehouah or some other Baal. Only the “House” of a god is going to be remembered as a notable place. Evidently statues to Yehouah were present in the temples of Jerusalem, Samaria and Bethel. The capping evidence, that cannot be denied, is that Assyrian documents refer to cult images of the Israelites.
The favoured image of the old Canaanite Yehouah seems to have been a bull or a calf, and it seems at least likely that some of the earlier colonists from Persia saw nothing wrong in depicting Yehouah thus, probably because the Persians themselves revered their cattle and favoured them as sacrifices. Bull figurines have been found. Seated figures, gods or kings, smiting gods, animals and animal head’s, sphinxes, plamate trees, and lotus plants of Egyptian style are found but not a whisker of the splendour of Solomon. Jeroboam I in particular might be a legend based on such images being set up by an early colonist.
Israelite religion had, from beginning to end, much in common with Canaanite religion or even depended on Canaanite models.B S J Isserlin, The Israelites
Images were commonplace in the Canaanite religion as they were in others of the time. Ahab made an asherah (1 Kg 16:33). Maacah’s “abominable image” (1 Kg 15:13) was an asherah. Good king Hezekiah cut down an asherah set up in the temple (2 Kg 18:4), but bad king Manasseh replaced it (2 Kg 21:3,7), only for good king Josiah to chop it down again, and a lot of other asherim beside (2 Kg 23:6,14). Even Moses set up a bronze serpent (Num 21:8-9).
All of these images will have been of Canaanite deities, the Israelites being themselves, of course, no less Canaanite than a New Yorker is an American. The Israelites were Canaanites. It is the Jewish religion that differed from Canaanite models even though the Jewish god had a Canaanite god’s name. The model was Persian Zoroastrianism, but the convergence of the two ended with the defeat of Persia and the destruction of the power of the Magi by Alexander.
Israelites from the ninth century on worshipped at least one goddess, represented by the variety of pillar figurines both in the north and the south , but what is more likely, a few goddesses.Z Zevit
Besides the “goddess” figurines, many animal figurines have also been found, cattle and horses being among them, and possibly indicating a sun cult. The Jewish scriptures testify that families had household gods (described as “gods”—elohim) called teraphim. They were small enough to hide easily underneath a woman’s skirts in the story of Rachel stealing Laban’s (Gen 31:30-35). They are quite likely to have been the figurines found widely in Palestine. And just as “elohim”, a plural word often means God, so too teraphim, in at least one passage (1 Sam 19:13,16), is used similarly as a singular despite its plural form—the head (singular) of the teraphim (plural) is mentioned. Perhaps it was generally used thus before an editor “corrected” it, accidentally missing one instance. Genesis 30:2 suggests that part of their function was to represent the fertility of the family. Laban scolds Rachel that God had made her infertile, then the story of the stolen teraphim follows. The daughter of Saul, Michal, was barren and had an unuaually large teraphim, as big as a man ( a rare example of a biblical smutty joke?).
One biblical author (Ezekiel) used a derogatory expression (gillulim) loosely meaning “turds” for terephim presumably because of their colour and shape, particularly that they rolled because of their roundness (gll). In short , they were quite phallic! Many of the female figurines look like dildos.
The Bull Cult
Now despite all this religious imagery which ties in perfectly well with what we know of the history of the region, the Israelites had been told almost a millennium before by their great and revered leader, Moses, according to Jewish mythology, not to make images of their aniconic god, Yehouah, and he had destroyed images that his own brother had made in error. He brought down from a mountain, where Yehouah seemed to live in those days, tablets with the rule clearly inscribed on it, among others:
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
The bible has Moses making this clear when he first was handed the tablets (Ex 20:4), and later when he made his last speech summarizing their adventures before he departed this world (Dt 5:8). Both of these events he wrote down in full in his own works, supposedly the five books in which these two appear called the Pentateuch or Torah. These constitute the Jewish law of God that was held sacrosanct from then until today, except that the bible spends most of its time saying that no Jews took any notice of them until Ezra a Persian official told them to in the fifth century BC, 900 years after Moses had died. Some will say it was really good king Josiah who reintroduced the law of Moses when it had been forgotten, in which case it had been forgotten again a second time, because the bible is certain that Ezra had to read out the law again!
It is a matter of social bonding for Jews to believe this, and, for Christians, it is even a matter of the salvation of their immortal souls, so a lot of people do believe it, even though it is utterly unbelievable. Such is the power of religion. The original law might have been the curse on graven and cast images presented in Deuteronomy 27:15, as being called out along with other curses by the Levites, the Jewish Magi.
The law was taken to mean images of the god were forbidden but not other cult images such as the decorated ark, the cherubs and the menorah, seven branched lampstand. The biblical descriptions of Solomon’s temple include many more images such as the twelve bronze bulls that supported the molten sea, the cherubs, lions and bulls supporting basin stands, palms and pomegranates. J Gutmann surveyed all the evidence and deduced that Judaism was never against all imagery. What was forbidden were represenations of the god only. Cherubim did not stand for the god but only what supported him, so were not forbidden. Images of animals might have been controversial, some saying they did not stand for the god but only symbolized him, while others thought they could only be considered as representing the god and that was forbidden.
It is not true, as some have said, that images are not found in the archaeology of Israel. Female images of a crude kind but evidently cult objects are extremely common. Broken pieces of more substantial statues are also sometimes found, though rarely. This evidence is not evidence of a long time deep seated aversion to imagery but evidence of a culturally deserted place in which the making of images was at some stage suppressed, so that those that were made were destroyed leaving only fragments.
The Persians did not picture Ahuramazda except as a symbol of a winged figure, apparently with the face of the king, emerging from a winged circlet or disc. They must have seen this picture as only symbolizing the god, or was a picture of something associated with the god, but not the god himself such as his fravashi.
In the northern kingdom of Israel, the calf or young bull “yegel” was the icon associated with Yehouah.Z Zevit The Religions of Ancient israel
Yehouah in Canaan was a bull or a calf. The scriptural evidence is oblique at best but it is unmistakeably there suggesting that editors have tried to disguise it over the years. If it were not there more obviously at first, it is hard to see why it is there at all, oblique though it may be. Jeroboam, Aaron and the golden calf, Yehouah described in Balaam’s oracles as being “like the horns of a wild ox”, the imagery also being associated with the Exodus, Yehouah answering from the horns of an ox in Psalms 22 when correctly translated, the twelve bulls of the flaming dish of Solomon’s temple, the heads of calves modelled above Solomon’s throne (1 Kg 10:19) when “round behind” is correctly translated.
The god of the fathers called the “Mighty One of Jacob” appears five times in the scriptures (Gen 49:24; Isa 49:26; 60:16; Ps 132:2; 5) but the name is an outrageous mistranslation of the “Bull of Jacob”. The same word is a bull in Isaiah 10:13, 34:7, Psalms 50:13, and Psalms 68:31(30). So, the god of the fathers, or one of them, was the Bull of Jacob. Even the bible is clear that such images of Yehouah were set up at Dan and Bethel (1 Kg 12:28-29; 2 Kg 10:29). Jacob traditions in Genesis seem to center on Bethel (Gen 28:10-22; 35:1-15) where the god was worshipped as a bull. In Judges 20:28, Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron of the golden calves, ministers before the ark at Bethel. Jeroboam had identified his calf images with the “god who brought you up out of Egypt”—Yehouah, and should there have been any doubt Aaron, having made the golden calf, declares, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to Yehouah”, although Yehouah is mistranslated “The Lord” therefore seemingly just any old lord god, including a cow!
Believers have found the excuse that the bull was not Yehouah but the base upon which the invisible God stood. Ancient gods were sometimes depicted standing or riding on animals. The Goddess was often standing on a lion. Syrian cylinder seals from the end of the Bronze Age through into the Hellenistic age seem to show Baal Shaman, the sun god, as an empty throne. Lucian describes an actual empty throne at Hierapolis in Dea Syria, adding that there is a throne for the sun god in the temple…
…but there is no image upon the throne for the effigy of the sun and moon are not exhibited…
It was not a taboo, but it was vain to try to illustrate them when they could be seen in reality by everyone. So, even supposing that the bull was meant to be carrying an invisible god, what would simple country peasants imagine they were worshipping when they bowed before it? In fact, Jeroboam announced:
It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem. Behold your gods, O Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt!
The same sentence is found in Exodus 32:4, spoken by Aaron, and then repeated by Yehouah in Exodus 32:8 to Moses. Now “gods” is elohim in all these passages, the word usually translated as “God” in the context of Yehouah, and, in the two Exodus examples, the subject was the golden calf, a single calf. Aaron was saying, “Behold your God”, referring to the calf. Was he using the plural of majesty for the calf, or was he using a plural, as believers hope, because the calf carried the invisible God, or was the whole phrase being re-used from the earlier work 1 Kings? Even if he was using a plural because the calf was supposed to be carrying Yehouah, the calf was still a god! It seems, however you look at it, the bible is admitting that the Israelites worshipped a young bull.
Moses was, of course, outraged in Exodus and had 3000 people killed for the offence—except his brother Aaron, who had instigated it, and went on to found the family of inherited priests. Why should he have been, if the calf was only the footstool of Yehouah? His anger only makes sense if the calf was Yehouah or some other god, or the people took it to be the god. What seems more likely is that the story was written originally with two calves, and one has been edited out. It was a golden cow, and will have represented a goddess like Hathor (Isis). The golden calves were a bull and a cow, or a cow and a calf. Interestingly, the illuminated pithoi at Kuntillet Ajrud had images on them of a cow suckling a calf, and the two so-called Bes figures look very much like two cattle, walking erect like a man and a woman, and inscribed as being Yehouah Shomrom and his Asherah.
The modest deduction of some scholars is that Moses and Aaron were associated with a calf or bull cult. Ahuramazda, the name of the god of heaven of the Persians, seems to contain the names of both Aaron and Moses, a curious coincidence, unless it is not one. The Persians sacrificed cattle and held them in esteem as the epitome of the Good Creation among animals. The ox-soul was the soul of all being and the sacrifice of the primaeval bull set the world in motion. But, though the Persians had a high regard for their cattle, they never made them into gods, unlike the Iranians who went on to India. The later Persian goddess, Anahita was associated with a bull sacrifice, was confused with Mithras by Herodotus, and Mithras was associated with a bull sacrifice in the Roman cult of Mithras. With all this background relating the new Persian influenced god of Yehud to cattle, perhaps it is not surprising that some of the settlers thought it was an ox cult, and since that would fit in nicely with some of the Canaanite cult, they thought it would make their task of conversion, or rather adaptation, easier. Evidently later settlers did not like the direction that had been taken.
Hosea, whose name means salvation, argues against bull imagery (Hos 8:1-6; 10:1-6; 13:1-3) and he condemns altars, pillars and shrines, sounding much more orthodox Persian than Aaron. It seems that a backlash left Aaron carrying the can for the golden calf but it did not harm his standing with Moses although it led to the elevation of the Levites and the murder of many otherwise innocent people in the myth. Moses has been lifted out as politically correct, but the guilty party remaining already has a lmyth behind him, so remains unpunished.
Any erroneous bull imagery had now to be removed. Ahaz removed the bronze bulls from the molten sea before Solomon’s temple, but he was not known as a reforming king. He was obliged to remove the precious metal to melt it down to pay the tribute demanded by the Assyrians. (2 Kg 16:17). Hezekiah and Josiah were equally discomforted, no doubt.
In the legends, the destruction of the divine images by these kings was their own choice, a supposed deliberate return to wrongly abandoned practices contrary to aniconism. In fact they were probably obliged to continue what Ahaz had had to do, namely use whatever could be found to pay off the suzerain. Later, the absence of images out of political necessity was made into a virtue by the Deuteronomistic Historian who pretended that the kings had already introduced the “return” to aniconism that the Persian priests were insisting upon. The propaganda of the Deuteronomistic Historian was that the Persian colonists were not doing anything unusual. Yehouah was not supposed to be pictured and some of the last kings before the Babylonian conquest had realized it.
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Moses and Exodus
