The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible

by Jonathan Kirsch

  According to the Bible, the altars and shrines of these pagan gods and goddess were sited on hilltops and mountaintops, the “high places” that figure so importantly in the biblical accounts of where and how the Israelites and their neighbors worshipped. Rituals were apparently conducted under the boughs of sacred oaks and around stone columns placed upright in the ground, a faintly druidical practice that was never completely eradicated by the priests and prophets of early Israel. The Canaanite goddess known as Asherah was depicted and venerated in the form of living trees or carved wooden poles, the so-called Asherim of biblical usage. Pagan gods and goddesses were depicted in statues and figurines crafted of precious metals as well as wood, clay, and stone, including the teraphim or household idols that figure in the stories of the patriarchs—these are the “graven images” that are specifically condemned in the Ten Commandments and yet have been found in remarkable profusion by archaeologists in the Holy Land.

  The worship of idols, by the way, was probably not the crude and almost childlike practice that the Bible and earlier Bible scholarship suggest. According to pious tradition, the ancients were gullible and deluded souls who regarded idols as living embodiments of their gods, caring for and even feeding the statues and figurines as if they were alive. The Bible itself attributes these notions to idol-worshippers—and scoffs at them. “[T]he work of men’s hands, wood and stone,” is how the Deuteronomist describes the objects of pagan worship, “which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell” (Deut. 4:28). But according to recent archaeological evidence, the ancient pagans understood that idols were man-made artifacts rather than living gods, and they regarded an idol as a source of inspiration and comfort rather than a Pinocchio that might come to life if they prayed hard enough. Thus the graven images of antiquity may have been similar in function to the icons and other ritual objects that can be found in places of worship in our own day.42

  If we believe the testimony of the prophets as recorded in the Bible, the worship of pagan gods and goddesses is the occasion for displays of sexual depravity, whether in the form of bacchanalian orgies or of more discreet visits to the sacred prostitutes, male and female, who supposedly ply their trade at the temples of pagan gods and goddesses. (See chapter seven.) Although contemporary scholars question whether sacred prostitution was ever as common as the Bible suggests, the prophets are plainly obsessed with the interplay between sex and the worship of pagan deities, and something more than a metaphor is found in the words of Jeremiah: “Upon every high hill, and under every leafy tree, thou didst recline, playing the harlot” (Jer. 2:20).

  Even the greatest kings of Israel were apparently susceptible to the temptation of goddess worship. King Solomon, who built the first temple at Jerusalem and whom the Bible regards as both mighty and wise, is plainly described as an apostate, too. “God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding exceeding much, and largeness of heart,” we are told at first (1 Kings 5:9). But the love-smitten old king is seduced into idol worship by his several hundred foreign wives: Solomon “turned away his heart after other gods,” “went after Ashtoreth,” and raised up a “high place” where he conducted pagan rituals. “I will surely rend the kingdom from thee,” God vows, although the Almighty defers the punishment to a later generation out of solicitude for David, whose many sins of the flesh did not include paganism (1 Kings 11:5–11).

  Now the priestly editors who collected the sacred texts and rendered them into the book we now know as the Bible insist on drawing bright lines between the worship of Yahweh, which is presented as the only acceptable act of faith in ancient Israel, and the worship of pagan gods and goddesses, which is routinely condemned in the Bible as an “abomination.” Although the Bible confirms that the Israelites repeatedly and obsessively turned to the forbidden deities, the biblical authors always insist that the Israelites are committing apostasy—and suffer grievous punishment from on high—whenever they indulge in the forbidden pleasures of pagan worship.

  The worship of pagan goddesses is made out to be the sin that finally turns God against the Chosen People once and for all Even though God stayed his hand against Solomon, the Bible is full of outrage toward a long-reigning king of Judah named Manasseh who first took the throne at the age of twelve and proceeded to do “that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, after the abominations of the nations.” The biblical author condemns Manasseh for offering his own son as a human sacrifice, practicing the black arts of soothsaying, and divination by ghosts and spirits. But his worst offense by far is held to be the erection of a graven image of the goddess Asherah in the Temple at Jerusalem. Although Manasseh himself is damned for the shedding of “innocent blood,” the crime of idolatry brings divine punishment on the guilty and innocent alike.

  “Behold, I will bring such evil upon Jerusalem and Judah,” God vows, “that whosoever heareth of it, both his ears shall tingle” (2 Kings 21:12, 16).

  Still, the line between piety and apostasy—the boundary between the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the worship of the gods and goddesses of the Canaanites—cannot be drawn with such clarity or certainty. The Bible itself seems to suggest that the faith of ancient Israel appears to owe much to the pagan beliefs and practices of its neighbors. In fact, some of the holiest moments in the lives of the patriarchs and matriarchs bear a curious and telling resemblance to the very practices that are so heatedly condemned by the biblical authors.

  For example, God chooses a tree—not unlike the trees that are regarded as sacred by pagan cults—as the place where he will appear to Abraham, first at Shechem (Gen. 12:6) and later at those famous “terebinths of Mamre” (Gen. 18:1). Rachel steals her father’s household idols when she returns with her sister, Leah, and their husband, Jacob, to Canaan* —and such “detestable things” are not wholly banned in Israel until the reign of the reformer-king, Josiah (2 Kings 23:24). When Jacob struggles with (and defeats) an angel of God—or perhaps it is God himself—he commemorates his victory by taking the stone he had used as a pillow, setting it upright in the ground, and anointing it with oil. “And this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house,” declares the patriarch (Gen. 28:22). According to some scholarly speculation, both Tamar, Judah’s seductive daughter-in-law, and Rahab, the good-hearted harlot who shelters the Israelite spies, may have been priestesses of Canaanite fertility cults whose allure proved to be irresistible to Israelite men.43 (See chapter seven.)

  Until the Book of Deuteronomy was belatedly and rather mysteriously discovered during the reign of King Josiah in 622 B.C.E.—and the worship of Yahweh was restricted to the Temple at Jerusalem by King Josiah in hasty compliance with the newly discovered laws of Deuteronomy (2 Kings 23:1–3)—the Israelites felt free to offer sacrifices at a number of “legitimate” altars and sanctuaries that had been erected throughout the land of Judah and Samaria. “The sanctity here was linked with the site itself and its natural features, such as a sacred tree, a sacred spring or the like,” wrote the venerable Bible scholar Martin Noth, who pointed out that “a natural rock formation” might be used as “an altar for the presentation or burning of offerings.”44

  So, despite the best efforts of the priests and scribes who were its censors and guardians, the Bible betrays the fingerprints of deities that may have preceded or coexisted with Yahweh. The Bible refers to God as Elohim, a plural form of the Hebrew word for “god,” and the Almighty uses the plural when announcing the creation of humankind in Genesis: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). Biblical scholarship holds that these are grammatical rather than theological eccentricities, as Ephraim Speiser insisted,45 but we are left to wonder whether even the ancient Israelites regarded Yahweh as merely one god among many until the priestly redactors cleaned up the sacred texts and imposed the strict theology that we find in the Bible.

  Certainly the Israelites saw some relationship between the god (et) called Yahweh and the supreme god whom the Canaanites called El—and perha
ps, at some early moment in their history, the Israelites saw the two gods as one and the same. Abraham, for example, encounters a Canaanite king and high priest who blesses him in the name of El Elyon—“God Most High, Maker of heaven and earth”—and Abraham seems to identify and embrace the deity as his own (Gen. 14:19). Later, when God discloses to Moses that his personal name is actually Yahweh, the Almighty explains: “I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac and unto Jacob, as El Shaddai”—a phrase that is conventionally translated as “God Almighty” but one that also harkens back to the all-mighty god of Canaan (Exod. 6:3).

  Modern scholarship has detected in the Bible certain distinct influences of the pagan civilizations that surrounded ancient Israel. Genesis echoes the creation myth recorded in a Mesopotamian text called the Enuma Elish. A tale very like the story of Noah and the Ark is told in a still more ancient Sumero-Babylonian saga, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Certain passages found in the Book of Proverbs—“Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye….” (Prov. 23:6)—appear to have been copies almost verbatim from ancient Egyptian texts.46 Even the famous curses and blessings that are found in the Book of Deuteronomy, a relatively late addition to the biblical canon, resemble the legal boilerplate that can be found in contracts and treaties throughout the ancient world. The notion that the faith of ancient Israel was something entirely new and unique is betrayed by the hard evidence in the Bible that many of the laws, rituals, and beliefs were borrowed from other cultures and civilizations.

  Some passages of the Bible are simply so weird, so fundamentally at odds with the cosmology of the rest of Holy Writ, that they present themselves as wild atavisms of some far older and long-suppressed faith that existed in ancient Israel before the biblical authors created the Bible. The night attack on Moses in Exodus is one example, and the sudden appearance of the “sons of God” in Genesis is another: “And it came to pass … that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives, whomsoever they chose…. and they bore children to them, the same were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown” (Gen. 6:1–3, 4). Bible scholars of several faiths have struggled to explain away the unsettling fact that the Bible conjures up a randy gang of demigods who are fathered by the Almighty himself and go on to sire a race of giants on earth, the so-called Nephilim. But even the most cautious exegetes are forced to concede that the Hebrew phrase translated as “the sons of God” can also be rendered “the sons of the gods” and appears to refer to “lesser deities or godlings,”47 a reading that cannot be squared with the fundamental credo of monotheism in the Hebrew Bible: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One” (Deut. 6:4).

  In fact, the Book of Judges itself contains more than one intriguing reference to the rivalry between God and the pagan deities of the Canaanites, a rivalry that is frequently expressed in terms of sexual adventure. When God scolds the Israelites for their apostasy, he shows himself to be “sick and tired” of the faithlessness of Israel in precisely the same tone that a man or woman might use to address an unfaithful spouse who returns home once too often from a romantic fling. “Go and cry unto the gods which ye have chosen,” a hurt and angry God blurts out to his Chosen People in the story of Jephthah. “[L]et them save you in the time of your distress” (Judg. 10:14). And the same sense of sexual betrayal is frequently used by the biblical authors to characterize the relationship between God and Israel. By the time we reach the prophetic books of the Bible, the sexual imagery is explicit. “Plead with your mother,” God scolds the Israelites, likening them to the bastard children of his faithless wife, the nation of Israel. “For she is not My wife, neither am I her husband” (Hos. 2:4). And the prophet Ezekiel works himself into a frenzy of reproach in which sexual infidelity, idol worship, and child sacrifice are conflated into one vile sin. “Wherefore, O harlot,” he addresses Jerusalem, “hear the word of the Lord!”

  Because thy filthiness was poured out, and thy nakedness uncovered through thy harlotries with thy lovers; and because of all the idols of thy abominations, and for the blood of thy children, that thou didst give unto them; therefore behold, I will gather all thy lovers, unto whom thou has been pleasant, and all them that thou hast loved, with all them that thou has hated; I will even gather them against thee from every side, and will uncover thy nakedness unto them, that they may see all thy nakedness (Ezek. 16:35–37).

  The biblical authors favor the stinging imagery of a cuckolded husband to convey the sense of betrayal that God feels toward his Chosen People—but something else is going on here, something shocking and revealing. When God bitterly turns away the Israelites and sends them back to “the gods which ye have chosen,” he appears to concede that these pagan gods and goddesses may, in fact, be able to do some good for the Chosen People. Jephthah, too, tacitly confirms not only the existence of rival deities but also their authority when he invokes a pagan god named Chemosh in his parlays with the king of Ammon: “Wilt thou not possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to possess?” (Judg. 11:24).

  The conventional wisdom is that the references to rival gods in the Bible are intended by God and the biblical authors to be merely ironic or patronizing or both—the One God is taunting the Israelites to seek the favor of the illusory gods that the Almighty knows to be powerless because they do not really exist at all, and Jephthah is only flattering the god worshipped by the deluded Ammonites in an effort to make peace through diplomacy. But so many gods and goddesses show up in so many surprising places in the Bible—and the Israelites find them so alluring, so seductive—that we may be tempted to believe that the Israelites did not always regard Yahweh as the One and Only God.

  As Jephthah’s story reaches its tragic climax, as his daughter goes up in flames on the altar of El Shaddai, we might imagine that she is being punished for doing something that the pious authors of the Bible simply refuse to speak aloud.

  A GODDESS OF ISRAEL

  Another curious feature of the Hebrew Bible is the absence of a female counterpart to God, a deity who is supposedly above and beyond mere gender but is always described in words that unmistakably suggest his masculinity. “The God of Judaism is undoubtedly a father-symbol and a father-image,” as one scholar pointed out, “possibly the greatest such symbol and image conceived by man.”48

  Virtually every other people in the ancient Near East—and, in fact, throughout the world—imagined that gods came in pairs, male and female, just like human beings, and their sacred writings describe courtships, marriages, childbearing and child-rearing, and a fantastic variety of sexual encounters among their deities. The Israelites alone are told that their God is a bachelor and a loner who lacks father or mother, brothers or sisters, friends or lovers. A female consort to the Almighty—“the divine woman who appears in different forms throughout the world, yet remains basically the same everywhere”49—is nowhere in be found in the Bible, or at least not in plain sight.

  Although the Bible itself seems to allow no place for her, a celestial consort to the Almighty can be found in the writings of the ancient rabbis, the secret books of the medieval savants who studied the mystical tradition called Kabbalah, and the rich folklore of the Jewish people. A figure known as the Shekinah came to embody and symbolize the feminine qualities of God—“the loving, rejoicing, motherly, suffering, mourning, and, in general, emotion-charged aspect of deity.”50 By the thirteenth century, when Kabbalah was in full flower, the Shekinah—sometimes called the Matronit, the Lady, or the Queen—“emerged as a distinct female deity, possessing a will and desire of her own, acting independently of the traditional but somewhat shrunk masculine God, often confronting and occasionally opposing him and playing a greater role than He in the affairs of Her children, the people of Israel.”51

  Did the Shekinah suddenly and spontaneously appear in Jewish folklore and rabbinical literature long after the Bible was a closed book? Or can the Almighty’s consort be regarded as a remnant of a long and unbroken tradition of goddess worship that
reaches all the way back to the ancient Near East? At least one iconoclastic scholar, anthropologist Raphael Patai, argues that the Israelites experienced the same goddess-hunger that can be found in peoples and cultures around the world in every age—and Patai insists, too, that the worship of a female deity by the Israelites was not an act of apostasy but rather “an integral part of the religion of the Hebrews.”52

  The pioneers of feminist Bible criticism—a movement in biblical scholarship that has refreshed and even revolutionized the study of the Bible over the last twenty years or so—argue that a “submerged goddess” can be detected in the Bible itself and that “goddess functions”53 are performed by various women depicted in the biblical text. But Patai goes even further. The Israelites did not merely adopt the deities of their neighbors, a common enough practice in the ancient world; rather, Patai suggests, they borrowed various aspects of the Canaanite goddesses and used them to conjure up a female deity that they embraced as their very own. Not until the coming of King Josiah was the goddess of Israel driven underground.

  “[T]he goddess to whom the Hebrews clung with such tenacity down to the days of Josiah, and to whom they returned with such remorse following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple,” writes Patai, “was, whatever the prophets had to say about her, no foreign seductress, but a Hebrew goddess, the best divine mother the people had had to that time.”54

  A poignant story told by the rabbis captures the intimate attachment that the Jewish people felt toward the Shekinah throughout the centuries of exile from the Promised Land—and suggests, too, that the human longing for a female counterpart to the Heavenly Father is fundamental and undeniable. According to one rabbinical tradition, God stayed behind in Jerusalem even after the Temple was destroyed by the legions of Rome and the Jewish people were forcibly dispersed throughout the ancient world. But the Shekinah, a tender and loving mother to the children of Israel, insisted on accompanying them into exile and succored them during the long years of oppression in the lands of the Diaspora.