[The people of] Beit Shemesh were harvesting wheat in the valley, when they lifted up their eyes and they saw the ark. They rejoiced at seeing: the ark was entering the field of Joshua of Beit Shemesh and it stopped there. A large stone was there, so they split the wood of the wagon and offered up the cows [drawing the wagon] as a whole burnt offering to the LORD. And the Levites took down the ark of the LORD and the chest that held its gold utensils, and they placed it on the large stone; then the people of Beit Shemesh offered burnt offerings and other sacrifices to the LORD that day . . . And He [God] struck down the people of Beit Shemesh because they had seen the ark of the LORD; and He killed 50,070 people. The people mourned, because He had struck such a blow upon the people. The people of Beit Shemesh asked: “Who can survive in the presence of the LORD, this holy God?” (1 Sam 6:13–15, 19–20)
Touching, or merely coming close to, or, in fact, just seeing the sacred ark and similarly holy things could result in sudden death.11 The reason is that, as this text specifies, Israel’s God is a holy God, and contagious holiness spells danger.12
This fact reflects another fundamental difference between the ancient Near Eastern temple and the later “house of prayer.” The temple really wasn’t for everyone.13 In Mesopotamia, gods and goddesses were identified with a “main city” that housed their own temple; by the middle of the third millennium if not before, each city had its patron deity, although temples dedicated to other gods might also exist within the city.14 But ordinary citizens had little contact with the temple itself; they stood as outside spectators for festivals and other occasions. The temple’s main purpose was, in the pungent phrase of the Assyriologist Leo Oppenheim, “the care and feeding of the gods.”15 Only trained specialists could perform the various duties involved; others, for the most part, stayed away.
Feeding the Gods
As to what the “the care and feeding of the gods” consisted of, in much of the ancient world gods and goddesses wanted one thing in particular: fresh meat. Animal sacrifices have been, from most ancient times, the principal form of communication with the divine in much of the world, the gesture that humans could make toward the powerful causers. Naturally, this circumstance has aroused the curiosity of scholars, who have proposed a variety of reasons for it, for example: (1) animal sacrifices were a primitive form of feeding the deity and so gaining his/her favor;16 (2) along with this, to give up a healthy, living animal was to give up something very valuable—in some cultures, the most valuable possession people had; it was intended to impress the deity with the sacrificer’s devotion and largesse;17 (3) since some sacrifices were “shared” between the deity and the humans offering it, this sacrament had originated as a means of blunting the human horror at taking an animal’s life for food;18 (4) at bottom, sacrifices were a way for the humans involved to have a meat meal together—an essentially communal act that reinforced the social order;19 (5) humans had always, and happily, been a violent species, often beating and killing fellow-humans over a trifle: animal sacrifices were a way of channeling mankind’s love of bloodshed in a positive, harmless direction;20 (6) animal sacrifices were intended as a substitute for the sacrificer’s own life, a way of saying to the deity, “Take Bossie’s life and spare mine”;21 or perhaps (7) the very spectacle of a fellow mammal passing from life into death at a god’s altar spoke to some primal instinct in the human onlookers, a moment of heightened reality shared with the divine. The simple truth is that no one knows which, if any, of these considerations was responsible for the widespread adoption of animal sacrifices across the world, but whichever the reason, animal sacrifices had an unchallenged place in ancient worship. Wrestling with relatively new norms of divine behavior, ancient interpreters of the Bible wondered why Abel’s sacrifice gained divine favor while his brother Cain’s did not (Gen 4:4–5).22 Shouldn’t anyone who seeks to please God be rewarded? To an earlier generation of Israelites, however, the answer must have been perfectly obvious. Abel offered the “firstlings of his flocks” to God; Cain brought some vegetables. Meat was the ideal sacrifice, and it always spoke louder than a vegetable offering, and certainly louder than good intentions or heartfelt prayers. Much later, Sallust (Platonus Sallustius), the fourth-century CE Roman philosopher and author of On the Gods and the World, could still opine: “Prayer without sacrifice is just words.”23
The Death of Aaron’s Sons
According to the Pentateuch, the first sanctuary in which the Israelites as a whole people offered sacrifices to God was not a solid stone structure at all, but a large, portable tent, known as the tabernacle (the Hebrew term mishkan more properly means “dwelling place”) of God, which they carried with them during forty years of wandering in the wilderness before their entry into Canaan. Scholars have generally believed that the very existence of such a tabernacle, along with its particular dimensions, was a projection of later reality onto this formative period in the wilderness.24 Since temple worship was a central feature of Israelite religion in later times, so this argument went, priestly writers sought to claim that some sort of mini-sanctuary must have existed during all those early years of wandering. But precisely because these were years of wandering, the sanctuary must have been easily taken apart and reassembled—hence the retrospective invention of a portable tabernacle. Some scholars have recently taken issue with this reconstruction, however, arguing that in fact the theme of a tent shrine is an ancient Canaanite notion, embodying concepts and motifs now familiar from the writings of Ugarit.25
Whichever the case, the Pentateuch recounts at length how the tabernacle was constructed and made ready for Israel’s regular sacrifices to God. The cloth hangings that constituted the sanctuary’s “walls” were put into place, the priests were clothed in their ritual garments in a state of ritual purity, the altars were readied, and then—tragedy struck:
Moses and Aaron went into the Tent of Meeting. When they came out again they blessed the people, and the glory of the LORD appeared before the whole people. Fire came forth from in front of the LORD and consumed the burnt offering and the fats on the altar. When the people saw it, they exulted and fell down on their faces.
Now Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, each took his censer, put fire in it, and laid incense on top; but they offered unholy fire before the LORD, such as He had not commanded them. Fire came forth from the LORD and consumed them, so that they died in front of the LORD. (Lev 9:23–10:2)
The first of these two paragraphs is almost as important as the second; in fact, they form a kind of pair. In the first paragraph, everything goes right, and God actually appeared in some visible form in front of the whole people—just as Moses had earlier told them He would (Lev 9:4, 6). Along with this, some sort of fire came shooting forth from the place where God was, and it burned up everything on the altar. Seeing these miraculous things, the people roared their approval and fell to the ground in reverence.
This was not the sort of thing that happened every day; in fact, it corresponded to nothing that usually went on in temples. But clearly it was important to say that it had happened once. Like certain other occurrences in the Bible—the time that a select group of Israelites was allowed to see God face-to-face on Mount Sinai (Exod 24:9–11), or the time that Moses was permitted to see God physically pass by while he was sheltered in a cleft in the rock (Exod 33:17–23)—this was an assertion that God does have an actual, visible being, his “glory” (kavod) or “substance.” Even if we do not get to see it, some people have.
Then, what had been going so right suddenly went all wrong. Aaron’s two sons made a mistake, rather like Uzzah’s mistake in touching the ark or the mistake of the men of Beit Shemesh in looking at it—and they paid the same price. In fact, the very thing that had a moment earlier been the reason for rejoicing—namely, the fire that “came forth from in front of the LORD”—now came forth again, this time costing the lives of two young priests. What was their mistake? Apparently they brought ordinary censers into the mishkan (this is the meaning of t
he “unholy fire” here, incense burners that did not belong to the private world of the sanctuary but had been obtained from the outside), or perhaps they had prepared the incense in the wrong manner, or set it down in the wrong place, or had made some other error. As in the case of Uzzah, one might have thought that God would give Aaron’s sons some leeway: after all, this was their very first day on the job! But just as with Uzzah, the reaction was automatic: cross this boundary and you are done for.
Denying the Obvious
A larger question hangs over these “electrocution” narratives—in fact, over the whole phenomenon of worshiping the gods in the temples of the ancient Near East: What did the people who entered these temples actually think was going on? We have already seen that the very notion of a god in the ancient Near East was different from what one might expect. A Babylonian or Assyrian ilu could be in two places or more simultaneously and take different forms: the goddess Ishtar was located in the star Venus, but also in the earthly cities of Arbela (the modern Arbil in northern Iraq), Nineveh (the site of modern Mosul, also in northern Iraq), Carchemish (now on the Turkish-Syrian border), and apparently others. A hymn attributed to the Assyrian emperor Assurbanipal illustrates the same point: in it, the king seems to be speaking about two different Ishtars simultaneously—in the plural, but as if they were one goddess:
Exalt and glorify the Lady of Nineveh,
magnify and praise the Lady of Arbela,
who have no equal among the great gods.
Their names are most precious among the goddesses!
Their cultic centers have no equal among all the shrines! . . .
I am Assurbanipal, their favorite . . .
I grew up in the lap of my goddesses . . .26
Reading such things, one has to wonder: Did the people—perhaps not the common people, who had little to do with temples and sacrifices (or with fire coming forth from the LORD, for that matter), but the priests and the king and his servants—did these people really believe that any of this was true?
Much of this particular way of thinking has become clearer since the discovery and translation of a number of ancient texts written in Sumerian and Akkadian.* The texts describe the ceremony by which a divine statue was completed and set in its place in a temple, a ceremony that involved the “mouth opening” (pīt-pî) and “mouth washing” (mīs-pî) rituals.27 The purpose of these rituals was to pave the way for the statue to become a full-fledged deity. For this to happen, the mouth of the statue was symbolically opened. The reason is explained in an incantation that was part of the pīt-pî ceremony: “This statue, without its mouth opened, cannot smell incense, cannot eat food nor drink water”28—all things that a god was expected to do. In other words, it was just a statue until its mouth was ritually opened. In fact, while throughout the manufacturing process, the image (say, a statuette of the god Marduk) was referred to as the “image,” after the process was completed, it was no longer an image—it was now simply called Marduk. By the same token, a newly minted god or goddess was also, upon completion, described as having been “born in heaven,” and not, apparently, fashioned on earth. “You are counted with the gods, your brothers,” as one text puts it.29
Perhaps most surprising is what happened to the craftsmen who fashioned the image. After the statue had been completed—that is, after it had been clothed, given weapons and a crown, and last of all, after its melammu, a kind of halo of power, had begun to radiate outward to the beholder—the artisans who made it were, according to some texts, required to hold out their hands, which were then symbolically cut off with a sword. This was a way of asserting that they had nothing to do with the statue’s creation. Indeed, in one Babylonian mouth-washing ritual, the artisans were made to recite: “I did not make him [the statue]; Ninagal [who is] Ea, [god] of the smith, made him.”30
At this point, an obvious question arises: Who did these people think they were fooling? The craftsmen knew perfectly well that they had just finished making this spindly little statue with their own hands; they likewise saw what their fellow artisans had done. Yet here they were all denying the obvious and holding out their hands to be ritually severed as if to say that they had no role in the statue’s creation.
A related case of denying the obvious: during the spring and fall New Year’s festivals in Babylon, the statue of Marduk/Enlil, the supreme deity, was carried from the silent peace of his temple out into the bustling streets of the capital. This was a rare occasion for the townspeople to come close to the god, and they eagerly crowded around him. At the same time, priests or sages would study the statue’s face, because they knew that the real god inhabited his statue, so that any slight changes in the statue’s expression might be a sign of what the god was thinking and planning for the future:
When Marduk, leaving the Esagila temple at the beginning of the year, has an open mouth—Enlil will raise his voice in anger against the land.
When Marduk has his eyes closed—the land’s inhabitants will feel sadness.
When Marduk has a somber face—famine will take hold of the countries.
When Marduk has a face that shines—Enlil will make the land shine forever.
Once again, these human beings seem to be denying the obvious. A statue is a statue; its expression never changes.
Footsteps of the Divine
One must be careful with broad, cross-cultural comparisons. Still, this “denying the obvious” with regard to a Mesopotamian temple’s deity is somewhat similar to another sort of denial, embodied in some steps leading up to the entrance of an ancient temple excavated at ‘Ain Dara in northern Syria.31 The temple resembles others located in that part of the world (including, incidentally, Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, according to the biblical description)—except for one striking feature. On the steps leading up to this temple’s doorway, the builders made a set of huge footprints, symbolically representing the god’s entrance into his sanctuary. The footprints are sunk into the temple’s steps in the same way that human footprints might be sunk into mud or wet cement—but the feet themselves are many times bigger than human feet, and the length of the stride they mark off is far greater than a human stride. Archaeologists estimate that, on the basis of this stride, the god or goddess of that temple would have been some sixty-five feet tall! How could the builders have imagined such a huge deity ever making its way through the rather normal-sized entrance of the temple? This, apparently, did not trouble the temple’s otherwise careful planners.
Not unrelated to the foregoing: the late Assyriologist William Hallo once described what he saw as a hierarchy of ongoing offerings that the Mesopotamian worshiper could present to the god in his temple. As already mentioned, the common folk had little to do with what went on inside the temple. But some people could afford to submit to the god a written text, a “letter prayer” that would be deposited in the sanctuary and perhaps taken into consideration by the god or goddess concerned. Of course, things get lost in the mail or overlooked in an Oriental bureaucracy. Some wealthier petitioners would therefore submit a gift to accompany their request: a votive stone carving or a replica of a bowl, a mace head, a seal, or some other object taken from daily life. These would be inscribed with a standard formula, “for the sake of the long life of the donor,” or “for the life of the king,” “for the donor’s family,” and so forth. Alternately (or in addition), a more specific prayer, such as a petition for success in a given venture or thanks for favors previously asked and now granted, might be joined to this basic dedicatory inscription.
But at the very top of this hierarchy of gifts was what Hallo called the “optimal dedicatory, or votive offering, the statue of a worshiper set up in the cella of the deity and inscribed with his prayer, which was conceived thereby as proffered perpetually by the statue of the worship to the statue of the deity, both statues serving as images or surrogate of their originals.”32 At first blush, this seems like a strange sort of gift. If I were the deity, I’d take the bowl or the mace head
; what pleasure could I derive from having a statue of the king or other high official crouching before me day after day?
A Foreign Embassy
The common thread that seems to run through the various phenomena treated so far in this chapter reveals something basic about the ancient Near Eastern temple and the holiness of the deity inside. Did Uzzah, the people of Beit Shemesh, and Aaron’s two sons actually meet the sudden death described in the Bible? Whatever really happened, these three narratives all seem to be imparting the same lesson. The boundary between what is God’s and what is man’s is absolute: if an ordinary human crosses that border, even with the best of intentions, destruction will usually follow. The reason is that, at bottom, the gods don’t belong down here, among us, at least not in a space continuous with our own. Their essence is entirely different from ours. As the artisans asserted once the little statue of the god was completed, “this god was born in heaven.” That was where divine beings were from, axiomatically, so no matter who created the outer shell, the god was an emissary from “up there” to down here. For this reason, we humans have to create a little island in our midst, a temple or some other sacred precinct whose borders are inviolable, in order for the divine ones to sojourn among us. One might thus think of the temple as a kind of foreign embassy. It is right in the middle of our town, but normally we cannot enter it; its border guards will open fire automatically on anyone who tries.
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