by Melissa Mohr
On a deeper level, Yahweh subsumes Baal. He takes over many of his rival storm god’s most famous mythological deeds. Baal battles Lotan, a seven-headed dragon; Yahweh defeats Leviathan, a great sea beast (and, as it happens, Leviathan is the Hebrew name for Lotan). Baal fights with Yamm, a sea god, and Mot, god of death; Yahweh conquers sea and death (Ps. 74:12–17; Isa. 25:8). These battles were major parts of Baal’s mythology, but in the Bible they are mentioned only in passing, and only in generalized form. Yahweh can fight “sea” or even “Sea,” as some translations put it, but he can’t fight Yamm. If he did battle directly with another god, that would be an outright acknowledgment that other deities existed, and Yahweh is now too powerful and dignified to acknowledge the existence of rivals.
Yahweh also takes on many attributes of El, the most important Canaanite god, including his name. Yahweh is called El—“I am God [El], and there is no other” (Is. 45:22)—and also El Elyon (El most high), El Shaddai (God of the uncultivated fields, God almighty), Elohim (God, gods), and El Elohe Israel (El, the god of Israel), among others. There is an interesting passage where Yahweh seems to acknowledge this syncretism, the melding of religious beliefs or concepts. In Exodus, he declares that he is changing his name—it used to be El, but from now on it’s going to be Yahweh. God tells Moses: “I am the Lord [Yahweh]. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty [El Shaddai], but by my name ‘The Lord’ [Yahweh] I did not make myself known to them” (Ex. 6:2–3). Anybody who used to pray to El should now worship Yahweh—Yahweh is the new and improved El.
Yahweh had perhaps the hardest time displacing the rival who was closest to him, his consort, Asherah. Many scholars believe that Yahweh adopted not just El’s name and titles but also those of his partner, at least in what is called popular or folk religion, as opposed to the priestly, orthodox religion of Deuteronomy and Leviticus. In the Near East, we have seen, gods often came paired with goddesses—El and Asherah, Baal and Anat/Astarte, Horus and Hathor (Egyptian deities)—and it would be highly unusual for a god not to have a consort or to show any interest in sexual relations, whether with other deities, humans, animals, humans in the shape of animals, or what have you. Archaeologists have found some evidence that Yahweh was not entirely out of the normal Near Eastern way in these matters, in the form of inscriptions linking his name and Asherah’s. Several come from a complex of buildings called Kuntillet Ajrud in the eastern Sinai Desert. Kuntillet Ajrud was a caravanserai—a stopover along a route between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean that served as a defensive fort and inn for travelers, as well as a shrine. “To [Y]ahweh [of] Teiman [Yemen] and to his Ashera[h]” is written on a wall in the shrine, while two storage jars are inscribed “I [b]lessed you by [or ‘to’] Yahweh of Samaria and by his Asherah” and “Yahweh of Teiman and his Asherah.” The pictures below were found on the former jar, and many scholars interpret them as an illustration of the inscription, which would yield a rare portrait not only of the famously image-averse Yahweh but also of his consort. But which image depicts Yahweh and Asherah? Yahweh might be the calf and Asherah the cow. Or Yahweh might be the obviously male figure and Asherah the also pretty obviously male figure next to him (this figure has breasts, too). Or Asherah is the lyre player in the background, Yahweh is the male figure, and the one with a penis and breasts is … who knows? The picture below, from the same jar, is easier to interpret—it is Asherah as the tree of life, upon whom the standing goats are feeding.
Pictures from the pithos inscribed “I [b]lessed you by [or ‘to’] Yahweh of Samaria and by his Asherah.”
Asherah, from the same pithos.
Asherah is originally included in Elijah’s wood-burning challenge—her four hundred prophets are supposed to light a fire too. (She also has a royal supporter, the wicked queen Jezebel.) We hear all about Yahweh’s subsequent victory over Baal and the slaughter of his prophets, as archaeologist William Dever notes, but nothing more is reported about Asherah. Did she manage to light a fire too?
Asherah was worshipped by erecting sacred poles or planting trees, as her symbol was the tree of life—she was a goddess of fertility. On pots, pendants, seals, and offering stands, she was often depicted as a tree or bush flanked by two animals standing on their hind legs, who are nibbling her leaves—she gives nourishment. Sometimes the bush they are nibbling is pretty explicitly her pubic hair.
In the Bible, there is only one moment of happy union for Yahweh and Asherah, involving an oath. It occurs after Abram cuts a covenant with the Philistine king Abimelech, resolving a dispute they had been having. Abraham claims that Abimelech’s servants have seized a well that belongs to him. Wary of antagonizing someone so obviously under the protection of a powerful god, Abimelech immediately cedes the well to Abraham, and “the two men made a covenant… . Therefore that place was called Beer-sheba [Heb.: “well of the oath”]; because there both of them swore an oath” (Gen. 21:27–31). Abimelech goes on his way, while Abraham “planted a tamarisk tree in Beer-sheba, and called there on the name of the Lord, the Everlasting God” (Gen. 21:33). In the Hebrew, Abraham calls on “El Olam,” “El the everlasting” or “El the eternal”—this is one of the places in the Bible where we can see evidence of the convergence of Yahweh and El. Then he invokes Asherah, El/Yahweh’s consort, by planting one of her sacred trees. It seems that he would like both gods to witness his covenant with Abimelech, Yahweh and his Asherah.
(Though he is the founder of the Jewish nation, Abraham is not a good role model when it comes to swearing. He not only plants a tree for Asherah, he makes his servant swear an oath on his genitals. He wants his servant to travel back to his homeland to find a wife for his son, Isaac, and engages him to do it with an oath: “put your hand under my thigh,” he tells the servant, “and I will make you swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and earth” [Gen. 24:2–4]. In the Bible thigh sometimes means what it appears to, but more often it refers to the penis and/or balls [and occasionally to the female genitals]. This is a very old form of swearing, an oath not by God but by Abraham’s powerful reproductive organs, which founded the tribe of Israel. Of course the servant has to swear by God as well—Abraham is hedging his bets. This oath is used once more in Genesis, when Jacob makes Joseph put his hand under his thigh and swear to bury him with his ancestors [Gen. 47:29], but then it falls into disuse. God wants people to swear by him, not by their own procreative powers.)*
Goats nibbling Asherah’s, ahem, bush.
While ordinary Israelites who practiced folk religion and even the first patriarch, Abraham, paired Yahweh with Asherah, the priestly authors of Leviticus and Deuteronomy rejected her. “You shall not plant any tree as a sacred pole beside the altar that you make for the Lord your God; nor shall you set up a stone pillar—things that the Lord your God hates,” Deuteronomy 16:21 instructs believers. In Exodus 34:13–14, God warns the Israelites not to make covenants with the inhabitants of Canaan—instead they should “tear down their altars, break their pillars, and cut down their sacred poles (for you shall worship no other god, because the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God).” In both cases, what gets translated as “sacred pole” is the word asherah—these poles or trees are sacred to Yahweh’s (former) partner but must now be destroyed as relics of idol worship, along with stone pillars used in the worship of Baal and other Canaanite gods.
Eventually Yahweh won out over Asherah as well, and monotheism was born. These traces of other gods, which we’ve made so much of, are just that, traces. The Bible on the whole did a much more thorough job of erasing evidence of Yahweh’s battles than did those monks when they wrote over Archimedes. There is a famous statue (actually a pair of them) of a black and gold goat, standing on its hind legs and supported by a stylized tree, that was unearthed in Ur, in modern-day Iraq. It probably represents Asherah, or at any rate is very much in line with her iconography—the goddess as sacred tree, flanked by goats standing on their hind legs and nibbling. The figure is known as the “Ram in a Thicket,” t
hough. The archaeologist who discovered it named it after the scapegoat God provides when Abraham is about to sacrifice his son: “And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns” (Gen. 22:13). Poor Asherah has no claim anymore even on her most famous symbol. Yahweh’s victory over the other gods, even his nearest and dearest, was so complete that the memory of them was practically erased. God’s covenants (which are themselves oaths) with the Jews, his commands to swear by him, and his prohibition of oaths on other gods were key factors in his victory.
The famous “Ram in a Thicket,” formerly known as the “ram eating the tree that grows out of Asherah’s vagina.”
Out with the Old, In with the New
In the New Testament, Christ changes the rules. In contrast to what his Father commands over and over in the Old Testament, Jesus appears to tell his followers not to swear, ever. In the Sermon on the Mount, he preaches:
Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.” But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be “Yes, yes” or “No, no”; anything more than this comes from the evil one. (Matt. 5:33–37)
Scholars have argued about this passage almost since it was written (around AD 80 or 90). Is Christ contradicting earlier scripture and really telling his audience not to swear at all? Is he in effect urging people to abandon the very means by which God established his dominion? Or is he asserting something less revolutionary, something like “Swear only when you really have to, as required in legal cases or by certain authorities”?
The argument starts within the New Testament itself, with James asserting that it is not allowable to swear in any case: “Above all, my beloved, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath” (5:12; italics mine). Other almost equally venerable authorities contend that Christ would never ban all oaths, because they are so crucial for the functioning of society. St. Augustine (fourth century) and Thomas Aquinas (thirteenth century) claim that Christ forbade only false or vain swearing; oaths are too important to dispense with entirely. Philipp Melanchthon, the German reformer who collaborated with Martin Luther, provides a concise summary of this view: to prohibit swearing is “a destruction of secular government and justice, for government and justice are based on oaths.”
These were not abstract academic arguments. In the early fifteenth century, proto-Protestants called Lollards were persecuted because they would not swear oaths on the Bible, though they would swear by God alone.* Many were imprisoned and some were executed because of their belief in the lawfulness of one form of swearing but not another. The Quakers, in contrast, believed (and still believe) that all forms of swearing were forbidden. The movement’s founder, George Fox, argued in the late seventeenth century that Christ means exactly what he says when he tells people not to swear: “plainer words than these, cannot be in the scriptures.” This refusal led to endless problems for the Quakers. They could not take the oath of allegiance to the king, or the oath of supremacy acknowledging that the king was head of the English Church, which made them liable to a sliding scale of punishments that increased with each repeated offense, from a five-pound fine to transportation to America. They also couldn’t give testimony in court, whether as a witness in a criminal trial or in their own defense. A good technique for getting rid of a Quaker you didn’t like was to accuse him of doing something illegal. Whether or not he was guilty, when he refused to take an oath his property would be confiscated and he would be thrown in jail for contempt of court.
So who is right here? The Quakers whose lives were ruined because they insisted that Christ forbade people to swear? The Lollards who would swear in some ways, but not on a Bible? The many theologians who, through the years, have argued that it is perfectly fine to swear under any circumstances? George Fox had a point when he said that nothing in the scriptures could be clearer than Christ’s command not to swear at all. But God is no less clear when he has Moses tell the Israelites that they should swear by his name—and Christ declares that he has “come not to abolish but to fulfill” the law (Matt. 5:17). Other parts of the Gospels support both the anti-oath and pro-oath positions. We have seen that the letter of James restates even more clearly the command not to swear. But the other time Christ himself talks about oaths, he condemns the scribes and Pharisees only for chopping logic about which oaths are binding and which are not (Matt. 23:16–22). He tells them not that they shouldn’t be swearing but that they should be swearing properly.
There is no right answer, at least for us wandering in the wilderness of error. But in a sense the debate doesn’t matter. History has resolved that swearing is permitted. In fact, it is more than permitted, it is necessary—our government and legal system would have a hard time functioning without it. The indications are that for Christ, swearing wasn’t very important—it certainly wasn’t as much of an issue for him as it was for his Father. When Yahweh was insisting that people swear by him and only him, there were, as we’ve seen, hundreds of other gods competing for the affections of the polytheistic Israelites. More than a thousand years later, when Christ arrived on the scene, these other gods were no longer so much of a concern—the Jews were monotheistic. Yahweh had won his battle to be the only God of the Israelites, and Christ could lay down his father’s arms.
Thou Shalt Not Piss on the Wall: Obscenity in the Bible
The Hebrew Bible has its share of obscenity as well as oaths. When the Assyrian king Sennacherib is planning to besiege Jerusalem, he sends an emissary to the city to ask its people to surrender. This official paints the horrors of the coming siege as vividly as possible, telling the Jewish leaders and the ordinary people of the town, “the men which sit on the wall,” that they “may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss” (KJV 2 Kings 18:27). They will starve, the Assyrian warns, until they are so hungry and thirsty that they eat and drink their own waste in desperation. It is a powerful image, helped by the forthright, vulgar language, but it doesn’t do the job. The Jews don’t surrender, and Yahweh ends up killing 185,000 Assyrians, forcing Sennacherib to withdraw to his capital, Nineveh, where he is murdered by two of his sons while worshipping his (obviously powerless) god Nisroch.
To the ancient Israelites, excrement and bodily effusions such as semen and menstrual blood were defiling. The Bible details an elaborate code of purification for various emissions so that people do not dishonor God’s tabernacle by approaching it in an unclean state. Here is a small sampling of the rules:
When any man has a discharge from his member [actually flesh, in Hebrew], his discharge makes him ceremonially unclean. The uncleanness of his discharge is this: whether his member flows with his discharge, or his member is stopped from discharging, it is uncleanness for him… . If a man has an emission of semen, he shall bathe his whole body in water, and be unclean until the evening… . When a woman has a discharge of blood that is her regular discharge from her body, she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. (NRSV Lev. 15:2–19)
God also tells the Israelites how and where they can relieve themselves—they must go outside the camp, dig a hole with a trowel each must carry among his tools, and cover it up. Depositing excrement inside the camp would be defiling, obscene in the second Roman sense of the word. The Lord is with the Israelites, and “therefore your camp must be holy, so that he may not see anything indecent among you” (NRSV Deut. 23:14). Yahweh is not only a jealous god but a fastidious one. Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Many versions of the Bible shy away from rendering all this excrement in its full glory. With a passage like “eat their own dung and drink their own piss,” translators usually keep the slightly vulgar dung but go for the more decorous “
drink their own urine” (NRSV, NIV, ESV, NASB, Douay-Rheims; the Vulgate uses stercora, “excrement,” and urinam). Some go more formal and have the Israelites eating “excrement” and drinking their own “water” (Young’s Literal, Word English, ERV). And some just do their own thing: one version has the Israelites devouring their “vilest excretions” (Webster’s), while another leaps from the toilet into the crib without a look back: “they’ll be eating their own turds and drinking their own pee” (The Message).
If eating dung and drinking urine make translators hesitate, another famous crux stops them short. Several times God makes dire threats like the following: “Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall” (KJV 1 Kings 14:10).
What does this phrase mean? Some scholars argue that “him that pisseth against the wall” is simply a vivid way of saying “all men.” In biblical times (and right up to the Victorian era), it was socially acceptable, indeed the normal practice, for men to urinate in public. All men would pee on walls, trees, or whatever was handy when the urge struck. God is not using bad language, in this view. The translators of the King James Bible used pisseth to render the Hebrew shathan, “to make water, to urinate,” because that was their usual, though still slightly vulgar, word for it. Englishmen of 1611 shared the ancient Israelite disregard for micturational modesty, and they had no problems saying what they were not embarrassed to do.