Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing

by Melissa Mohr

  God also swears to give people a model for the use of this powerful language. He swears a lot in the Bible, almost always by himself or by a part of himself: “By myself I have sworn” that I will be everybody’s God (Isa. 45:23); “As I live, … I will do to you the very things I heard you say: your dead bodies shall fall in this very wilderness” (Num. 14:28–29); “Once and for all I have sworn by my holiness; I will not lie to David” (Ps. 89:35); “The Lord has sworn by his right hand and by his mighty arm: I will not again give your grain to be food for your enemies” (Isa. 62:8); “For I lift up my hand to heaven and swear: As I live forever, when I whet my flashing sword, and my hand takes hold on judgment; I will take vengeance on my adversaries, and will repay those who hate me. I will make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh” (Deut. 32:40).

  We can infer some rules about swearing from these divine examples. You must swear by God, or by some synecdoche for him, in which an attribute or a part of God stands for God himself—his name, his holiness, or his arm. You must swear seriously and only in weighty matters, and you must never use an oath as expletive or insult. Most of all, you must swear sincerely, as God does—if you are swearing to the truth of something, it had better be true; if you are swearing that you will do something, you had better do it.

  The Bible is full of explicit rules about swearing as well, the most famous of which is of course the third commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain: for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain” (KJV Ex. 20:7).* What does it mean to take God’s name “in vain,” or “wrongfully,” “idly,” or “for no good,” as this phrase can also be translated? This commandment is usually understood to prohibit the making of false oaths, picking up on God’s earlier instruction that “you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God” (Lev. 19:12). False oaths invoke God as a witness to a statement that isn’t true, or to a promise you don’t intend to fulfill. When you swear by God, you ask him to guarantee your words, and to punish you if you have not spoken the truth. If you swear falsely, you are asking God to give his imprimatur to a lie, implicating him in your dishonesty and dishonoring him in turn. As the catechism of the Catholic Church puts it in its explanation of this commandment: “Promises made to others in God’s name engage the divine honor, fidelity, truthfulness, and authority. They must be respected in justice. To be unfaithful to them is to misuse God’s name and in some way to make God out to be a liar.”

  The commandment also prohibits what scholars call “vain” oaths, which means oaths sworn to no purpose. Vain oaths were seen as a major problem in the Middle Ages, when the swearwords of choice, as I’ve suggested, were “by God” and “by God’s bones [hands, nails, feet, blood, etc.].” These expressions had the form of an oath but the force and register of an expletive. “Telle us a fable anon, for cokkes bones!” (Tell us a fable now, for God’s bones!) the Host of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales swears again, this time at the Parson on the pilgrimage. The Host is not swearing to the truth of his statement, not intentionally asking God to witness his words. He is instead using the oath as an intensifier, to convey how much he wants the Parson to tell a story, and to show his frustration because the holy man is obviously reluctant to oblige. Paraphrased in modern English, the Host is saying something along the lines of “For God’s sake, tell us a story!” or perhaps rather “Tell us a fuckin’ story already!”

  The third commandment doesn’t just forbid false or vain oaths, however—it prohibits any abuse of God’s name, any reference to him that is not respectful, that doesn’t acknowledge his majesty. People use the divine name today in imprecations like “God damn it, he took my parking space!” or a simple “Jesus Christ!” upon, say, surveying the wreckage of a living room after four toddlers have passed through. And nearly everyone uses “Oh my God” (helpfully shortened in text-speak to OMG). These are not oaths per se, but they still misuse God’s name, calling on God for trivial purposes or in demeaning circumstances. As with the Host’s oath, these words have been more or less emptied of content, of what linguists call “referential meaning”—they are nonliteral uses. It doesn’t matter, though, that most people who use these phrases don’t intend to dishonor God. When God’s name passes your lips, according to the third commandment, it must be reverently and in full knowledge of what you are saying—anything more or less than this is blasphemy.

  The Bible doesn’t just define and forbid bad swearing, however; it actively encourages, indeed commands, believers to swear properly: “The Lord your God you shall fear; him shall you serve, and by his name alone you shall swear” (Deut. 6:13; also 10:20). When the Israelites are having one of their periodic flirtations with idolatry, God tells them that he will welcome them back if they get rid of their idols and “if you swear, ‘As the Lord lives!’ in truth, in justice, and in uprightness” (Jer. 4:2). God even swears by himself that “to me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear” (Isa. 45:23).

  God wants people to swear by him because oaths are crucial to the smooth running of human society, and as always, he has our best interests at heart. But there is also something in it for God. At the beginning of the Bible, God is waging a war for supremacy with the other gods of the Near East, and swearing is a powerful weapon.

  Top God

  God was one of hundreds of gods a person could worship in the ancient Near East. It is no wonder that the Israelites were constantly going off and committing adultery or fornication, the Bible’s metaphors of choice for idolatry, with foreign gods. A list in the Book of Judges helps to define the scope of his competition: “The Israelites again did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, worshiping the Baals and the Astartes, the gods of Aram, the gods of Sidon, the gods of Moab, the gods of the Ammonites, and the gods of the Philistines. Thus they abandoned the Lord, and did not worship him” (Judg. 10:6). Baal is the Canaanite god of storms and war, and Astarte is another name for his consort Anat, goddess of war and fertility—the rest of the names indicate city-states or ethnic groups, each with an entire pantheon of gods. A list of just a few of God’s rivals includes El, ruler of the Canaanite pantheon; Asherah, his consort; the aforementioned Baal and Anat/Astarte; Haddad, a storm god; Sin, god of the moon; Yamm, Canaanite god of the sea; Mot, god of death; Yarih, another moon god; Eshmun, a god of healing; Deber and Resheph, gods of pestilence and plague; Marduk, chief Babylonian deity; Chemosh, chief god of Moab; Milcom/Moloch, who demanded child sacrifice as part of his worship; Dagon, a fertility and crop god; Derceto, a half-fish fertility goddess; Shapash, goddess of the sun; and Athtar, god of irrigation.

  The ancient Israelites had a surfeit of choice. Luckily, most of these gods didn’t mind if people worshipped more than one of them—hailing from polytheistic cultures, they had polytheistic worldviews. It was fine with Eshmun if you were a partisan of Baal too, since the two were supposed to work together to protect the Sidonians. If you sacrificed to El, it made sense to slit a few doves’ throats for Asherah as well—they were a couple. The Judeo-Christian God alone is a jealous god; it was his great innovation to demand exclusive worship.

  There is a surprising tension in the Bible as to whether these other gods are real, like God, or merely what Jeremiah calls “no-gods” (Jer. 2:11) and Ezekiel “turd-gods” (Ezek. 22:3–4)—nothing but idols that can lure the Israelites into sin but have no power to help their worshippers or otherwise affect the world. Many of the prophets are in the turd-god camp. Isaiah, for example, rails against the stupidity of worshipping mere pieces of wood or iron: “Half of it I burned in the fire; I also baked bread on its coals, I roasted meat and have eaten. Now shall I make the rest an abomination? Shall I fall down before a block of wood?” (Is. 44:19). But some parts of the Bible reveal traces of other gods who do exercise real power. The Bible is like a palimpsest. Before paper, books were written on parchment, specially treated animal skin, which was expensive and hard to produce. When a scribe wanted to copy a new
text, he sometimes scraped the old ink off parchment he already had and started over. Traces of the old writing remained under the new text, still faintly visible in places. In 1998, for example, scientists used multispectral imaging (taking photographs of the text at different wavelengths of light) to reconstruct two works of the Greek mathematician Archimedes, which had been erased and covered over in the thirteenth century with a Greek religious text. Likewise, traces of the Israelites’ polytheistic past can be still be seen, dimly, in the Bible. If we use our own, rather more low-tech, version of multispectral imaging, we can reconstruct how some of these other gods related to God, working with him and competing against him. Some of them, it turns out, even helped with the creation of the world.

  God goes by several different names in the Bible. His personal name—his “real name”—is the Tetragrammaton, Yhwh, usually written Yahweh in English. In the original Hebrew of Genesis 1, though, creation is attributed to Elohim. The noun elohim is plural in form, like Hasidim (Hasidic Jews) or kibbutzim (more than one kibbutz), and means “gods.” Elohim is usually paired with a singular verb, however, indicating that the plural title has been adopted by a single god: “In the beginning when God [Elohim; plural] created [bara’; singular] the heavens and earth … ” We can see a similar transition from plural to singular in United States before and after the Civil War—from “the United States are” to “the United States is.” America’s gradual evolution from a fairly loose collection of former colonies to a tightly knit federal nation is encoded in the transition from plural to singular. Likewise, the word Elohim is a reminder of a time when Yahweh was not alone in the formless void and darkness but had other gods for company.

  We can see the traces of these other gods even more clearly when humankind is created: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’” (Gen. 1:26). Here, “God said” uses the combination of a plural noun and singular verb, but “Let us make” is a plural verb, and “our” is a plural pronoun. There is no disputing (or rather, there is very little disputing—you can never say never) the plurality of entities involved here. Scholars who are invested in the immediate and complete monotheism of the Bible see the plural here as referring to God and his heavenly court of angels, or to the Trinity; scholars who see monotheism as developing slowly throughout the Bible cite these lines as evidence that Yahweh once had co-creators.

  The early Yahweh doesn’t always work together with these other gods. Sometimes he appears as just one of many, with his own, limited, sphere of influence. In Deuteronomy’s Song of Moses, he is depicted as a rather junior member of the council of gods:

  When the Most High [Elyon] apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods;

  the LORD’S [Hashem’s] portion was his people, Jacob his allotted share. (Deut. 32:8–9)

  Hashem (“the Name”) is one of Yahweh’s standard titles in the Hebrew Bible, used by Jews to avoid pronouncing his sacred personal name. So here we have a puzzling account of the Most High assigning responsibility for the tribe of Israel (Jacob) to Yahweh, just as, the verse suggests, he might have given the Ammonites to Milcom, the Sidonians to Eshmun, the Babylonians to Marduk, and so forth. Who is Elyon, the Most High? Scholars committed to the Bible’s monotheism tend to see the name Elyon as another title of Yahweh, and so interpret these verses as a description of Yahweh dividing the peoples of the world and taking the Israelites for himself. The New Oxford Annotated Bible even adds the word own (“the LORD’S own portion”) in order, as the editors explain, “to identify Yahweh with Elyon and avoid the impression that Yahweh is merely a member of the pantheon.” Scholars of a less determinedly monotheistic bent identify Elyon with El, the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon, and see in these verses remnants of a time when Yahweh was a minor war and storm god in Canaan and El ruled the roost. El, then, would have divided the people and given the Israelites to Yahweh.

  Even one of the most famous Mosaic declarations of monotheism actually, upon closer inspection, reveals hints of the existence of other gods. When the Israelites are about to cross the Jordan River into the Promised Land, Moses exhorts them to remember all that God has done for them. Has “any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by terrifying displays of power, as the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?” Moses ends his speech by asking the Israelites to “acknowledge” that “the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other” (Deut. 4:32–39). This assertion of monotheism seems to be implying, though, not that God is the only god, but that he is the best god. If there aren’t any other “real” gods, Moses’s speech is a bit silly—it falls victim to Isaiah’s mockery of people who worship idols. Where is the glory in taking a nation from the midst of another nation if there is no one around who could make the least attempt to stop you? What is the point in boasting that “God has done more signs and wonders than a lump of wood”?

  All this puts God’s first covenant with Abraham in a different light. When God puts himself under a self-curse, he does it knowing that there is a plethora of other gods who could cut him into pieces just as Abraham slaughtered the sacrificial animals. Looked at this way, there is no worry about God handling a situation that he cannot handle—El, the ruler of the Canaanite pantheon, or Baal, the fierce war god, could handle it for him very capably. It also becomes clearer why in the second version of the covenant God insists that Abraham swear loyalty to him (and circumcise the males of his family as a sign of it): the possibility that Abraham will worship other gods too, and perhaps eventually abandon him. He wants to lock Abraham into an exclusive relationship with him, just as he has thrown his lot in with the tribe of Israel, to the exclusion of everybody else.

  Swearing is a key weapon in God’s campaign to become the one true God. When you swear by God, you make an appeal to him—you ask him to listen to your words, assess their truth, and punish you if they are false or if you don’t perform what you have promised. An oath by God, then, implicitly acknowledges that he is omnipresent, able to hear you whatever you say and whenever you say it; that he is omniscient, able to judge the truth of your words; and that he is omnipotent, able to punish you no matter how far you run. If you swear by Baal, Yahweh’s rival war god, though, you acknowledge his omnipotence instead. God seems very worried about this possibility in the Bible. In Jeremiah, we have seen, God tells the apostate Israelites to return to him and swear “as the Lord lives!”—to swear by him, not by those other gods they’ve been worshipping on “the multitude of mountains” (3:23).*

  God makes this connection between swearing by him and worshipping him again and again. We have already come across the Deuteronomic command to fear God, to serve God, and to swear only by his name. In the Book of Joshua, God urges his people to keep the laws of Moses so they do not mix with the Canaanite tribes, “or make mention of the names of their gods, or swear by them, or serve them, or bow yourselves down to them, but hold fast to the Lord your God” (Josh. 23:7). He seems to be warning against a chain reaction in which first you simply mention that you heard about Moloch at the marketplace, then you’re swearing by him, and pretty soon you are sacrificing your firstborn son to him on a giant fiery bier. In Jeremiah, he charges that the Israelites, false again, “have forsaken me, and have sworn by those who are no gods” (Jer. 5:7)—swearing by other gods means abandoning Yahweh.

  Vows are another important way that Yahweh gains influence over the Israelites and power over his rival gods. We use the term vow fairly loosely today, and mostly during weddings. In the Bible, a vow establishes a reciprocal economic relationship between God and the person vowing—it is an exchange. If God does something for me, I will do something for God. A farmer might vow that if God helps him have a successful crop, he will sacrifice a heifer to him at the end o
f the harvest. Hannah, an infertile woman, vows that if God gives her a son, she will make her son a Nazarite, a person specially dedicated to the service of the Lord. If God comes through and does what you have asked, you must “pay” your vow, fulfilling your side of the bargain. If you do not pay your vow, “the Lord your God will surely require it of you, and you would incur guilt” (Deut. 23:21). Vowing means going into debt, and payback is always involved.

  Vowing is a very useful practice for a deity such as Yahweh, interested in increasing his influence. If a person’s wish comes true, God gets the credit since it is obvious that he has fulfilled his side of the bargain. If the wish isn’t granted, it is probably because you did something wrong, or because Yahweh is angry with you; such failures can always be explained away. Psychologically, when you “pay” something to God in return for his help, you feel invested in the relationship—there are sound economic principles acting here to strengthen faith. So the Bible includes quite a long and intricate series of laws abut vowing, detailing what kinds of animals are acceptable as payment to God (none with “bruised or crushed or torn or cut” testicles [Lev. 22:24]) and who can be held legally responsible for making vows (not women, unless their fathers or husbands give their okay [Num. 30: 1–16]).

  Despite the Israelites’ occasional backsliding into idolatry, Yahweh’s trusty weapons, oaths and vows, stand him in good stead, and in the end he wins his war against the other gods. Partly by encouraging swearing and vowing, Yahweh goes from being a fairly minor god among many to being the best god among many and then to being the only God who exists.

  Fallen Idols and God’s Wife

  What happens to the other gods, Yahweh’s competition? Historically, they fell into obscurity as the peoples, cities, or empires they were supposed to protect were conquered or collapsed into ruin. In the Bible, they are disposed of in two ways. On the text’s surface, narrative level, Yahweh has several face-offs with other gods, which he wins handily. He triumphs, for example, over Baal. His prophet Elijah arranges a contest in which the first god to set a pile of wood on fire wins (1 Kings 18:20–40). The 450 priests of Baal try everything to get their god to start a fire, but nothing happens. When Elijah, the Lord’s lone prophet, asks Yahweh to light his pile, it goes up spectacularly, even though Elijah has drenched his wood with water. The people watching feel that this settles the matter—they declare, “The Lord indeed is God,” and capture the priests of Baal so that Elijah can kill them, all 450.