by Brian Godawa
Jeremiah 16:5–8:
5 For thus says the Lord: Do not enter the house of mourning [house of marzeah], or go to lament or grieve for them, for I have taken away my peace from this people, my steadfast love and mercy, declares the Lord. 6 Both great and small shall die in this land. They shall not be buried, and no one shall lament for them or cut himself or make himself bald for them. 7 No one shall break bread for the mourner, to comfort him for the dead, nor shall anyone give him the cup of consolation to drink for his father or his mother. 8 You shall not go into the house of feasting to sit with them, to eat and drink.
Jeremiah references the house of marzeah as an analogy for the death about to come upon Judah at the Babylonian exile. We read of the marzeah mourning as well as the feast of eating and drinking for consolation. But this isn’t merely a generic mourning ceremony. It is the Ugaritic cult of the dead that also includes the cutting of flesh and beard that is part of the necromantic ritual of calling up the dead. This was the ritual that Anat was said to have done to herself as part of calling Baal back from the dead. It was also the same activity of cutting that the prophets of Baal did on Mount Carmel to try to call Baal back from his absence in the underworld during the drought.
This isn’t to say that Yahweh approved of cult of the dead rituals. But it certainly shows that Jews were well-acquainted with such activities and were most likely engaged in them as well. Otherwise it wouldn’t make sense for Yahweh to use alien liturgy against the Jews as judgment if they weren’t performing that liturgy themselves. Analogies and metaphors as judgment only work if they reflect the audience’s own lived experience.
The passage mentioned earlier in Psalm 106:28 about Israelites eating sacrifices for the dead at Baal-Peor during the time of Moses shows the Israelites engaging in marzeah feasts. Though the word isn’t used in the biblical text, later Jewish Targums reveal that ancient Jews understood the incident at Baal-Peor to be a marzeah banquet of the dead in which the Israelites were participating.
The MT of Numbers 25:2 reads “and they (the daughters of the Moabites) invited the people to the sacrifices for their gods and the people ate and bowed down before their gods.” Targum Pseudo-Jonathan adds “and the people ate in their mrzhn.” Similarly Sifre Numbers 131 reads “afterwards they (the Moabites and Ammonites) returned to make for them mrzbm, and they (the women) invited them and they ate.”[219]
The connection of the marzeah to the Baal-Peor incident by rabbinic sources also included the argument that marzeah feasts involved sacral sexual orgies.[220] The apostasy of the Israelites at Baal-Peor consisted not only of worshipping Baal, but of “whoring with the daughters of Moab” (Numbers 25:1), a sexual nuance that contextually involves more than metaphorically going after foreign gods. The Israelites were drawn to Baal through the sexual temptation of the women. Physical fornication led to spiritual fornication.
Marvin Pope has concluded, “The biblical and rabbinic correlation of the marzeah with both mourning and licentious pagan revelry may seem incongruous and even contradictory from our puritan and Victorian perspective, but not from the viewpoint of a fertility religion which recognized life and death as integral natural process and confronted death with the assertion and reaffirmation of life.”[221]
The Israelites were intimately familiar with the marzeah practice of eating a banquet as a means of calling up the dead. They did it themselves. But there is another element of the marzeah that adds an even deeper element of the cult of the dead: the participation of the Rephaim. We will look at those fascinating creatures next.
Rephaim
A small corpus of tablets from the excavated Ugaritic port city of Ras Shamra are sometimes called the Rephaim Texts because of their references to the Rephaim. One of them, A Royal Funerary Liturgy, describes a marzeah banquet on earth that gives the order of service for the funeral of a dead king. Wyatt explains that the ritual described is the invocation of the late king’s divinized royal ancestors, now called Rephaim, as part of the coronation ritual for the new king. They were calling upon the spirits of dead warrior rulers to empower the new sovereign. It was a royal cult of the dead.[222]
In the liturgy, the Rephaim are summoned from the underworld to gather in “assembly” called “Assembly of the Didanu,” which had its origins in a legendary contingent of Amorite warriors.[223] In another text, the Rephaim are sometimes translated as “netherworld shades,”[224] or “spirits like the ancient dead,”[225] sometimes as “saviors of the underworld,” “eternal ones”[226] or “eternal royal princes” with armed forces.[227] They arrive on royal warrior chariots and feast for seven days.
The overall image of the Rephaim banquet is one of military action and procession. As Brian Doak concludes in his dissertation on the Rephaim,
the rp’um [Rephaim] were indeed once thought to be heroic warriors of old, and that these figures played an important role in funerary ritual as markers of monarchic legitimation and heroic identification… dead military heroes of a period thought to be in the distant past are invoked at local cult shrines, food and drink are offered, and the hero acts in some way—perhaps by guaranteeing fertility of land or empire, or some other status of legitimation—to benefit the supplicant.[228]
As it happens, the Rephaim are important to the biblical writers, and they appear in the Bible in one of two distinct contexts. The first is that of a race of giants in Canaan called Rephaim by the Hebrews.
Deuteronomy 2:10–1:
10 (The Emim formerly lived there [Moab], a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim. 11 Like the Anakim they are also counted as Rephaim, but the Moabites call them Emim.
Deuteronomy 2:20–21:
20 (It is also counted as a land of Rephaim. Rephaim formerly lived there—but the Ammonites call them Zamzummim21—a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim…
I want to draw a couple things from this introduction to the Rephaim of Canaan through Israelite eyes. First, Rephaim seems to be a generic description of a kind of people that are called by different names in different dialects or areas. Rephaim are called Emim in Moab. They are called Anakim in Canaan and Zamzummim in Amon. So despite the fact that Anakim, Emimn and Zamzummim were all names of people in different locations, they seemed to be interchangeable terms for a generic kind of people called Rephaim. So what kind of people were they?
The text says the Rephaim were giants, mighty warriors (“great”) who were “tall as the Anakim.” That height was not merely a metaphor for power but a literal reference to real physical stature. When the spies came back from Canaan, they reported the Anakim to be those who “came from the Nephilim” (Numbers 32:33). Nephilim in Aramaic and Hebrew literally means “giants.”[229] So the Anakim/Rephaim were giants from the stock of the ancient Nephilim. I explain the Nephilim and the importance of giants to the biblical storyline in my book When Giants Were Upon the Earth (paid link).
Some still argue that the Bible is using size as a metaphor for greatness. But the distinction between greatness and physical size is made in Deuteronomy 1:28 and 2:21 where the Anakim/Rephaim are described as both “greater and taller than we.” Yes, the Rephaim were a great people, but they were also physically tall. Hyperliteralists go too far when they claim giants twenty and thirty feet tall based on the obvious hyperbole of Amos poetically describing the Amorite Rephaim “whose height was like the height of the cedars and who were as strong as the oaks” (Amos 2:9).
Rephaim were not the ridiculous monsters of sci-fi or fantasy, rising to the height of buildings or trees. The biblical evidence indicates their size to be from seven to nine feet tall. Goliath was at most nine-and-a-half feet tall. Some legitimate biblical scholarship suggests he may have only been six-and-a-half-feet tall.[230] Because the average height of an ancient Hebrew male at this time was about 5 feet, 5 inches, that would still make Goliath a giant compared to the average man. The word “giant” simply means “unusually tall.”
Goliath’s brother Lahmi was as tall as Goliath
because he was described as carrying a spear as large as Goliath’s (1 Chronicles 20:5). Lahmi was also called a “son of Rapha,” the singular word for Rephaim, that may indicate a deity behind the name and a warrior cult devoted to that deity.[231] Some English translations use the phrase “descendent of the giants” in its place.
Other descendents of the giants or “sons of Rapha” are described as being of great stature and carrying weapons that only huge men could wield.
2 Samuel 21:16–22
16 And Ishbi-benob, one of the descendants of the giants [sons of Rapha], whose spear weighed three hundred shekels of bronze, and who was armed with a new sword, thought to kill David…18 After this there was again war with the Philistines at Gob. Then Sibbecai the Hushathite struck down Saph, who was one of the descendants of the giants [sons of Rapha]. 19 And there was again war with the Philistines at Gob, and Elhanan the son of Jaare-oregim, the Bethlehemite, struck down Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam. 20 And there was again war at Gath, where there was a man of great stature, who had six fingers on each hand, and six toes on each foot, twenty-four in number, and he also was descended from the giants [a son of Rapha]. 21 And when he taunted Israel, Jonathan the son of Shimei, David’s brother, struck him down. 22 These four were descended from the giants in Gath.[232]
The only other one of these “sons of Rapha” in the Bible whose actual physical height is given is an unnamed Egyptian who was seven-and-a-half feet tall (5 cubits) and carried a spear as large as Goliath’s.
1 Chronicles 11:23
23 And [Benaiah] struck down an Egyptian, a man of great stature, five cubits tall [7 1/2 feet]. The Egyptian had in his hand a spear like a weaver’s beam.
A few extrabiblical sources add some more context to the size of Canaanite giants. The pseudepigraphal Book of Jubilees, when speaking of Og’s kingdom of Rephaim, measures the giants from the size of 10 feet to 15 feet tall.
Jubilees 29:9:
But before they used to call the land of Gilead the land of the Rephaim; for it was the land of the Rephaim, and the Rephaim were born (there), giants whose height was ten, nine, eight down to seven cubits [10 1/2 feet to 15 feet tall].
An ancient cubit was approximately one-and-a-half-feet long. One thirteenth-century B.C. Egyptian papyrus describes Bedouin nomads (Anakim) in Canaan as being “four or five cubits (7 to 9 feet) from their nose to their foot and have fierce faces.”[233]
So one context of Rephaim in the Bible is clans of very large warriors. The key to proper understanding of the word “giants” lies in realizing that our modern English notion of “giant” carries with it a bias toward our fantasies and myths of impossibly tall monsters as big as buildings. In ancient Israel, very tall people, six and a half feet and above, were considered giants, and an entire people of warrior giants had significant meaning because they represented the Rephaim warriors from the underworld on earth.
One of the most well-known biblical enemy kings of Israel was also a Rephaim giant who had a strong connection to the underworld. His name was Og of Bashan, “last of the Rephaim” who was conquered by Joshua before taking the Promised Land. Here is what the Bible says of him.
Deuteronomy 3:11:
For only Og the king of Bashan was left of the remnant of the Rephaim. Behold, his bed was a bed of iron…Nine cubits was its length, and four cubits its breadth, according to the common cubit.
If the size of his “iron bed” (a possible euphemism for sarcophagus) 13 and a 1/2 feet long, was an indication of his height, he would have been about nine to eleven feet tall. But there is a good scholarly argument that the bed is a literary reference to the god Marduk, whose “bed” relic in Babylon had the exact same measurements and was considered “a battle trophy and significant symbol of power…By analogizing Og’s bed alongside the bed of a major deity, the author likens Og to a god and bolsters his status as a superhuman warrior. The iron material of Og’s bed further emphasizes the fearsomeness of this enemy defeated by Yhwh.”[234]
And that fearsomeness was connected with the underworld both before and after Og’s death. Og is described in the Bible as living in Ashtaroth and Edrei and “ruling over Mount Hermon and all Bashan” (Joshua 12:4-5). As we described earlier, Mount Hermon was a diabolical cosmic mountain, considered ground zero for the incursion of the Watchers before the Flood. Their progeny were the Nephilim, or giants (aka Rephaim). We also discussed that region of Bashan as being translated as “place of the serpent” and abode of the dead. In agreement with this biblical notion, Ugaritic texts also refer to Og with the divine Rephaim and describe a Rephaim “king of eternity” who resided at Ashtaroth and Edrei, exactly like the biblical Og.[235]
In my novel, I combined this connection of Rephaim and the underworld with the other biblical oddity of a necromancer calling up Saul’s spirit from Sheol. This was the kind of stuff going on in that ancient world of ninth century Israel, despite it being forbidden by Yahweh (Deuteronomy 18:10-12). The result is depicted in the marzeah feast of Ahab’s death in the novel. Frighteningly and biblically possible.
But there is a problem. King David wiped out the Canaanite Rephaim giants in his days. After David, the Bible talks no more of giants on the earth. And that is why in my novel of Jezebel I don’t have clans of earthly giants as I do in my series Chronicles of the Nephilim. There may be individual stragglers, but not a clan of them with any real growth of numbers.
But after the time of David, the Bible does refer to the Rephaim in the underworld. Rather than affirming the Canaanite notion of them as power-giving underworld rulers, the biblical authors mock those Rephaim as being powerless and weak. It’s as if the Israelites were dispossessing the Rephaim in both life and literature, conquering them both on earth and under the earth.
The Hebrew word Rephaim is translated as “shades” or “the dead” in the few biblical cases when it is used in reference to the underworld of Sheol. While it could be interpreted as a generic reference to the souls or spirits of all dead people, there are a couple places that point to the Ugaritic notion of divinized warrior kings.
In Proverbs 21, the phrase “assembly of Rephaim” is used in a way that seems to echo the Rephaim “assembly of Didanu,” referenced earlier in the Rephaim Texts of Ugarit.
Proverbs 21:16:
16 One who wanders from the way of good sense
will rest in the assembly of the dead [Rephaim].
But Isaiah 14 is where the notion of mocking the Rephaim as dead divinized warrior kings comes to the foreground. The prophet is writing a condemnation of the king of Babylon. In verses 12-16, Isaiah likens that king to the Ugaritic god Athtar who sought to take the throne of Baal as the Most High god but failed.[236] As the Baal epic told the story, Athtar’s feet couldn’t reach the floor because he was too small to replace Baal’s kingship. So Isaiah condemns the king of Babylon, using Athtar as a model, for seeking to become divinized, to “ascend to heaven above the stars of God” (v. 12) to “make himself like the Most High” God (v. 14). “But you are brought down to Sheol,” writes Isaiah, “to the far reaches of the pit” (v. 15).
In Canaan, such kings when dead would join the assembly of the Didanu in the underworld as Rephaim, divinized warrior kings. But Isaiah mocks this belief. And he explicitly uses the Baal epic as his reference point.
Isaiah 14:9–11:
9 Sheol beneath is stirred up
to meet you when you come;
it rouses the shades [Rephaim] to greet you,
all who were leaders of the earth;
it raises from their thrones
all who were kings of the nations.
10 All of them will answer
and say to you:
You too have become as weak as we!
You have become like us!’
11 Your pomp is brought down to Sheol,
the sound of your harps;
maggots are laid as a bed beneath you,
and worms are your covers.
To Yahweh, all the pomp and circumstance about mighty Rephaim ancestral kings assembling in Sheol with the ability to confer blessing, prosperity, and legitimation is so much nonsense. For they are not mighty at all. They are weak, impotent, laying in the bed of maggots and worms, unable to do anything, much less “rising” from the underworld to grant favor or power upon the living. To Isaiah, the cult of the dead Rephaim is a fraud.
So despite the fact that the folk religion of Israelites and Judahites was often deeply infected with the corruption of Canaanite practices like marzeah feasts and the cult of the dead, Yahweh and his prophets did not affirm such appropriation of paganism. They mocked it.
Child Sacrifice
Jezebel: Harlot Queen of Israel is a story about the effect of pagan Baal worship upon Israel because of King Ahab’s marriage to the Tyrian princess Jezebel. One of the most serious aspects of that idolatrous religion was human sacrifice of children. Thus, the novel seeks to accurately capture what that monstrous ritual may have involved based on historical and biblical sources.
Human sacrifice is mentioned in the very first introduction of Ahab in 1 Kings 16, linking the abominable practice in some way to Ahab’s influence.
1 Kings 16:34:
34 In [Ahab’s] days Hiel of Bethel built Jericho. He laid its foundation at the cost of Abiram his firstborn, and set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son Segub.
Though some believe this to be a simple reference to the builder’s sons dying as a result of the reconstruction project, the language makes more sense as a reference to a common form of child sacrifice called “foundation sacrifice.” As commentator DeVries notes, in this particular ritual, “the children named were probably infants, dead or alive, placed in jars and inserted into the masonry, propitiating the gods and warding off evil.”[237]
Another reference to child sacrifice is in the story of Mesha the king of Moab sacrificing his son as a ritual way of warding off his enemies in battle. His enemies were the alliance of Israel, Judah and Edom in the ninth century B.C. Though this is not Israel or Judah performing the child sacrifice, it marks the reality of the activity during the same time period as Jezebel and Ahab.