Judaism
Judges: a Book of the Persian Period 3
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, March 15, 2001
Samson
Three chapters are devoted to Samson, but the final one about Samson and Delilah is certainly much later than the other stories here. Its completeness is proof enough. The other stories often give the impression of incompleteless or being fragmentary, but Samson and Delilah is a complete and well preserved fairy tale. Samson is unmistakeably an Israelite Hercules. Samson belonged to the tribe of Dan which in Rabbinic astrology was under the sign of Scorpio, the sign under which the celestial Hercules rises. He might have been introduced in this form by Greeks settled in Palestine after Alexander’s conquest. Syncellus wrote:
In this time lived Samson, who was called Hercules by the Greeks.
The name of Shamash appears as Samsu in theophoric names from the time of Hammurabi, including that of his son and successor, and Shamshu on the tablets from Mari, the latter being more common. The Babylonian god was the hero of the legend about a praeternaturally strong man, who is called Samson, Hebrew for “of the sun”, implying “son of the sun”. In the Hebrew myth, he was born and buried near the temple of the Babylonian god, Beth-Samus, and the Jewish tale of his miraculous birth with celestial annunciations and influence, was the model for birth narrative of Jesus.
Samson is the sun god Shamash. Many of the places mentioned pertain to the sun cult, and Samson’s strength being in his hair equates to the strength of the sun being in its rays. Some of the stories told have their source in the solar mythology constructed about the sun’s annual journey through the heavens. In so doing, it passes through the twelve constellations having an adventure in each one. This is the origin of the twelve labours of Hercules, two of which at least are recognizable here in embryo. Samson, like Hercules, kills a lion (Jg 14:6), being the sun in Leo when the rise of the constellation at dawn is blotted out by the rise of the sun. He also calls upon God to slake his thirst and a spring opens, a suggestion of the passage of the sun through Aquarius.
The rest of the cycle has been suppressed but the Samson and Delilah story has been added. This story stands for the removal of the sun’s rays by the night (Hebrew, “laylah”), whereupon the sun loses its strength and everything becomes dark (blindness). The sun then recovers and eventually destroys the pillars of the night. The drama then repeats daily. Delilah is the “Goddess Night”, night being equated with the night hag, Lilith, ultimately the Babylonian Goddess Ninlil blackened.
In Judges 10:2, as if to set the right tone, we immediately meet the word “Zorah”, a word that equates with Ezra, Zoro (as in Zoroaster), Zeru (as in Zerubabel), the Indo-Euopean, “Surya” meaning sun, and therefore qualities of the sun, “might” and “strength”. After this Persian clue, the Angel of Yehouah appears immediately (the proper name, Yehouah, is always fatuously rendered as “the Lord” by translators). In Judges 13:8, “Manoah intreated the Lord and said, O Lord…” but two different words are translated “Lord”.
Angels were Persian inventions, and the specific “Angel of the Lord” is clearly Spenta Mainyu, the Holy Spirit that stands for Ahuramazda—and sure enough, the angel is God in Judges 13:22. No such ideas existed in Canaan in 1100 BC when this story is supposedly set. Sometimes the angel is described as the “man of the gods”, though gods is falsely translated as “God”. Probably, “man of the gods” simply means angel—one of the gods (angels) appearing as a man—but the Hebrew word (“malak”) normally used for angel means the same as “angel” and ought to be translated as “messenger”.
The switch from polytheism to a supposed monotheism required the abandonment of “the gods” in popular usage, but by the time it was effected, it seems people had accepted “Elohim” as a name for the singular God. This probably happened when no one any longer spoke Hebrew in their daily lives, and only heard it in the temple and synagogues. Judges 16:28 is quite remarkable:
And Samson called unto the Lord (Yehouah), and said, O Lord (Adonai) God (Yehouah), remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God (Elohim), that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.
Samson’s parents sacrifice to Yehouah and see the angel ascending with the flames, a purely Zoroastrian concept—the flames of the sacred fire being the vehicle for taking messages to Ahuramazda. Originally in Mazdayasnaism, the holy flame was the domestic hearth fire, and here it is too, for the angel is invited to participate in a meal, but declines in favour of the sacrifice. The whole scene is similar to when Gideon did the same (Jg 6:21).
The Samson myths are a way of bringing the sun god down to earth to leave room for Yehouah as the Almighty. We can be sure that Shamesh was among the Baals worshipped by the polytheistic inhabitants of Canaan before the Persian conquest. Besides Baal, El and Astarte, the sun god had to be contended with, and the Samson stories kept the god as a hero while mortalizing him. He was however retained as specially holy by the device of having him consecrated to Yehouah from birth as a Nazirite, even though this is an obvious device because the mortal Samson is nothing more than a bullying, drinking, brawling, murderous, womanising lout. Perhaps that was how the sun god was perceived in hot arid countries, when the sun seemed irresponsible, if not cruel, at the height of the dry season.
The identification of the Philistines as uncircumcized in Judges 14:3 shows that this was written when the practice of circumcision was well established among the Jews. It was therefore well after the Tophet had been abandoned in favour of eighth day circumcision, and so was well into the Persian period or after it. The bees that make their nest in the lions carcase (Jg 14:8) are creatures of the sun, that become active when the sun is out. In the first set of tales, Samson marries an unnamed woman, but she is, of course, Delilah because she tricks the solar god just before sunset. The later tale is an elaborate reworking of this simpler original one.
The burning of the fields by tying burning brands to the tails of foxes is hardly the sort of story one wants to tell children these days, yet Samson, who openly uses a prostitute in Judges 16:1, is regarded as a biblical children’s story. Burning the fields is what the sun does in the near east in the height of the summer, but the association with foxes so treated is supiciously like the practice of the Romans at the spring wheat festival in April, when they did something similar. Unless some worldly Greeks brought this story into Palestine, it could be as late as the Roman period which began when Pompey annexed the country in 63 BC. A compromize would be that it was introduced by the Maccabees who had Roman military advizers in their war with the Seleucid kings.
The original Samson cycle ended in Judges 15:20 with the formula, “he judged Israel 20 years”. The reappearance of the termination formula at the end of chapter 16 (Jg 16:31) shows that the whole chapter on Samson and Delilah was added. Note that both are speaking of Israel over a hundred years before it was supposedly founded, according to biblical chronology.
Eli
The sequence of names leading to Samuel have curious meanings. Zuph seems to be “Watcher”, one of the wicked angels of Enoch, Elihu means “He is my God”, Jeroham means “Pity him” and Elkanah means “God (or El) is a reed”. Elkanah is the father of Samuel. Some of these names do not seem flattering, which is odd if Samuel is their object. However, El might be their object, since the story is written by the successful Yehouah faction.
The family of Elkanah make an annual journey to the sanctuary at Shiloh to worship Yehouah Sabaoth (the Persian name for Yehouah), whose priests were the two sons of the elderly Eli. Commentators note that Eli is almost a cipher in these stories. The reason is that he is the god of the sanctuary at Shiloh not the priest. Eli means “My God”, possibly an abbreviation for “My God is El”, Eliel. The scriptures are therefore still relating the events that led from the worship of El to the worship of Yehouah.
The ancient Canaanite gods were represented by pillars or posts and in 1 Samuel 1:9, Hannah, the mother of Samuel, prays by a doorpost, next to which sits none other than Eli. Plainly she was praying to Eli who was represented by a post in the sanctuary at Shiloh. A later editor has added the anachronistic references to Yehouah and changed Eli into an old priest sitting by a doorpost instead of an old god represented by a post in the ground. Many of these Judges have turned out to be mortalized gods, and Eli is another. 1 Samuel 1:16,18 seems to confirm it because Hannah was not a maidservant of the priest, but all worshippers can be called servants of their god (see her prayer in 9:11). She has the child and dedicates him to Yehouah in the editor’s revision but it is plain that she originally offered the bull as a sacrifice to the god El and dedicated the child to him:
And they slew a bullock, and brought the child to Eli.1 Sam 1:25
In 1 Samuel 1:20, the name of the son of Elkanah and Hannah is explained as meaning “Asked For”. The same explanation suffices for the name of Saul, but it is false. The name Samuel has no implication of asking or being an answer to a prayer. On the face of it, it has the strange meaning “the Name of God”, taking El here to mean God. It is more curious in the context of the hypothesis that a struggle was going on over the name of God.
Hannah sang a song of joy over her birth of a son after many years of being barren. Yehouah is the subject but there are significant references in it. God is a rock, just as Mithras was. He is the god of knowledge just as Ahuramazda was. Like Ahuramazda, he judges the ends of the earth, and at the Judgement, he weighs people’s deeds in the balance. Resurrection is highlighted at the centre of the song, bringing to life, raising up from Sheol, raising up from the dust and the ash heap. The wicked will be cut off in darkness. The magic number seven is also mentioned. It has eschatological connotations standing, as it does, for the joining of heaven to earth. Heaven and earth are joined by the rainbow with its seven or six colours, probably the origin of the Cinvat Bridge by which only the righteous can enter heaven. The pillars of the earth, the mountains, support the heavens—the world. Finally, he thunders in heaven and gives strength to the king and power to his messiah. This poem with its complex of ideas sounds Essenic, because it is strongly Persian coloured.
In 1 Samuel 2:2, the sacrificial meat is boiled in Zoroastrian fashion so as not to pollute the sacred flame, which was fed only by the fat (1 Sam 2:15) usually from the omentum. The corruption of the priests was shown above all by their desire to roast the meat, thus polluting the sacred flame. These practices were not, of course, those of the priests of El, but those of the new religion. The aim was not to give a memoriam of the ancient religion but to discourage its use, so violations of holy practice of the new religion were used to show how wicked the old one had been. Besides this, the wicked sons of Eli (El’s followers) had sexual relations with the women serving the god, as they might in a fertility religion.
Eli was very old, as indeed El the god was, but the story is preparing for him to be replaced by a new young priest, Samuel. The editor in mortalizing the god makes him 98, which must have seemed old for a man, though not as old as the patriarchs who were soon to be added to the story, but further back in time. In 1 Samuel 2:27, the priesthood said to have been promised to Eli and his line for eternity was taken from him, another reference to the god being changed, not merely the priesthood:
Behold, the days come, that I will cut off thine arm, and the arm of thy father’s house, that there shall not be an old man in thine house. And thou shalt look in distress on my habitation, on all the wealth which God shall give Israel: and there shall not be an old man in thine house for ever.
The old god’s arm is severed and with it his power, and that of his sanctuary and its people. The new god will provide prosperity, and the old god will never return. Chapter three continues the description of the decline of the god, El:
Eli was laid down in his place, and his eyes began to wax dim, that he could not see. And ere the lamp of God (Elohim) went out in the temple of Yehouah, where the ark of God was…
Eli is being treated like an idol or a totem, being carried into his place, but his powers were waning. Metaphorically, the lamp of the gods was going out, in the temple of Yehouah, anachronistically, as we soon learn in 1 Samuel 3:7:
Now Samuel did not yet know Yehouah, neither was the word of the Lord yet revealed unto him.
Here is a boy supposedly consecrated as a Nazirite to Yehouah, being guided by a great priest and judge who is depicted as faultless himself, in the rewriting, and being trained in the temple to fulfil the highest office and he has never heard of Yehouah. He had not because the god until this usurpation had been El.
When the Philistines kill off 30,000 foot soldiers of Israel and capture the ark of the covenant in Chapter four (1 Sam 4:18), the god El dies dramatically. He was toppled over backwards from his seat and his neck was broken.
Samuel
Before this, the change had already been admitted in 1 Samuel 4:1: “And the word of Samuel came to all Israel”. The old god, El, had been replaced by Yehouah, and incidentally the curious name of the judge, Samuel, is explained. What is “the name of god” now? It is Yehouah. Yehouah is “the name of God”. Yehouah is Samuel. The young god, Samuel, son of “El is a Reed”, had replaced his weak cosmic father, El. The monotheistic editor could not let it be obvious that the old god had been replaced by his son, the young god, so instead of writing Yehouah when he should have, he wrote “the name of God”, thus creating a great prophet of the Jewish scriptures.
The adoption of the young god has the effect of the immediate defeat of the previously all-conquering Philistines, and the return of the ark of God. To commemorate the event Samuel erects a new standing stone called Ebenezer, the “Stone of Salvation”. Such a stone must have existed and this was folk ætiology because it has already been mentioned twice in verses 4:1 and 5:1.
The later editor, who is leading up to his long bogus history, has mistakenly introduced the temple of Yehouah several times when there was no such temple, even on the biblical scheme of things. Plainly, the earliest worshippers of Yehouah, the Persian colonists, had a circuit of several sanctuaries, and 1 Samuel 7:16-17 lists them as Bethel, Gilgal, Mizpah, Ramah and presumably Shiloh. Shechem is not listed, though it too seems to have been an early sanctuary.
We are in the period of the first colonists entering the hill country sometime in the fifth century BC. Their mission from the Persians was to introduce a new ethical religion to replace the fertility religions of the Canaanites. The new god, Yehouah, was represented, in this story admitting the take over, by Samuel. Canaanite gods actually dwelt in each sanctuary. Statues of them were permanently kept in shrines of stone. The colonists seemed not to have had any major center at first and worshipped their new god at the different sanctuaries listed. Canaanite gods were carried on the shoulders of the priests during religious ceremonies in palanquins made of gilded wood, resting on two long wooden poles. The Jewish Ark of the Covenant was evidently the same. If the ark of God had any meaning for the Yehouists, it was simply a mobile shrine carried from sanctuary to sanctuary, so that the worshippers knew they were worshipping the same god at each and not different local gods as before.
The service performed to the image of the god was private, being in the room in the temple furthest from the entrance and the public courts, in total darkness (cf 1 Kings 8:12). The Jewish god had no physical form, and needed no house. King Solomon supposedly erected his temple as a house for the Ark of the Covenant, but this was itself the place where God resided during the supposed wilderness years, so God did not live in the temple but in the mobile shrine that legend said was deposited in the Holy of Holies. Its decorations sound Mesopotamian rather than Egyptian though it is supposed to have been made by fugitives from Egypt, but this was the later invention.
In 1 Samuel 8:2, the names of the sons of Samuel confirm that Samuel stands for Yehouah and a change of god from El. The first is Joel, meaning “Yehouah is God”, and the second is Abijah, meaning “My Father is Yehouah”. Since his father is Samuel, Samuel must be Yehouah.
This is almost the end of Judges. The refined authorship of the Historian is felt from now on, inventing the mythology of the Jewish and Samaritan kings. Only the first part of the farewell address of Samuel in 1 Samuel 12:1-6 looks to be genuine Judges tradition. Samuel dies and leaves Yehouah in his proper godly role.
Samuel says he had given Israel a king (1 Sam 12:1), seeming to mean Saul but really meaning a god as king, Yehouah. The Persians had set up the state of Yehud as a temple state ruled by God. The historian pretends though that the mythical Saul that he had introduced by an interpolation was meant. And so the history of the Jewish state continues first as pure myth and then based on the records the Persians had access to from the Assyrians. His sons are present at his final address, though the editor had already told us they were worthless, allowing him to introduce Saul and end the mythical reign of the Judges. From 1 Samuel 12:7, the historical novel continues, beginning with the novelist summarising the story so far, as if it were Samuel’s recollections.
An examination of the period of the Judges in biblical history shows that it is better explained as being in the fifth century after the work of Ezra rather than in the twelfth century as traditionally considered. It reveals that a change was made from a High God called El to one called Yehouah.
