Archaeology’s Rediscovery of Religion

One of the most remarkable changes in archaeology in the 20th century has been its rediscovery of religion as a distinct field of inquiry. This change in attitude to the investigation of religion has occurred in direct contradiction to one of the key philosophical tenets underpinning the attitude towards science and religion of atheist polemicists such as Richard Dawkins. Archaeology’s rediscovery of religion thus marks the fall of one of the major philosophical supports for atheist worldview, while the stifling of proper scientific investigation of the religious beliefs of previous ages through their material culture because of the influence of this worldview demonstrates that atheist theorising has acted in this particular instance as an obstacle to scientific research.

The philosophical theory in question was the Logical Positivism of the Vienna school. As articulated in the 1930s, this held that all statements, rather than referring to an objective reality, were in fact descriptions of one’s own subjective state. Thus if someone said ‘it is hot’, what they really meant was not that it was objectively hot, but they felt hot. The Vienna Circle were ardent materialists who wished to uphold science’s position as the true method of describing reality against metaphysics. Metaphysics, they held, was nonsensical. Any language used of God was incoherent and thus meaningless. The world could only be investigated and described using the methodology of science.

The result of this was that during the heyday of Logical Positivism, roughly from the 1930s to the 1950s, there was a tendency in archaeology to eschew rigorously religion as a separate topic of investigation. Nothing could be said about the beliefs of past societies, and archaeology consisted to a large extent of the cataloguing of artefacts according to type, without considering the wider cultural, ideological or psychological factors affecting the manufacture of the item.

This began to change in the mid-20th century with Christopher Hawkes’ ‘ladder of inference’. This was a conceptual ladder which ranked the inferences that could be made about a past society from its archaeological evidence according to the ease with which such inferences could be made. At the bottom rung – the easiest level of inference – was technical processes. Next up were ’subsistence economics’, then social and political institutions. On the top rung, representing the most difficult level of interpretation, was ‘religious institutions and spiritual life’. Hawkes’ diagram of the levels of difficulty in interpreting the archaeological evidence, although categorising religion as the most difficult societal process to interpret, nevertheless showed that it was possible and made the archaeological investigation of religion more respectable.

More recently, developments within Processual and Post-Processual archaeology have led to the further rediscovery of religion as an area for archaeological investigation. The Processual archaeologist Lewis Binford recognised that religion was a distinct field of inquiry, but considered it a part of ideology. However, Processual archaeologists largely ignored religion as a superfluous area of research outside of the main concerns of archaeology, which were held to be about technology and subsistence. Religion was classified as part of ‘palaeopsychology’. However, the development of cognitive processualism, which is the attempt to enter the minds of past societies and recover their worldview, following the ideas of such cultural historians and philosophers as R.G. Collingwood and Benedetto Croce, has led to religion again emerging as a distinct area of archaeological investigation. Colin Renfew, for example, has argued that archaeology can examine cult and ritual through archaeological artefacts concerned with the focussing of attention, the boundary zone between this world and the otherworld, the presence of the deity and participation and offering. 1

This development has not gone uncontested, however, and there are still archaeologists such as Ian Hodder, Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley who continue to see religion as part of ‘ritual’ or the ’symbolic’ dimensions of material culture. This can have some odd consequences, however. One of the criticisms of Ian Hodder’s 1990 book, The Domestication of Europe, was that some of the material he described as merely ‘ritual’ and ’symbolic’ was indeed best understood as religious. However, despite this religion has nevertheless re-emerged as a distinct and respectable area of study for archaeologists.

Archaeologists interested in the study of religion are also particularly aware of the subjective nature of interpretation in this area. Some of the suspicion within archaeology towards the investigation of religion comes from the spurious recreations of palaeolithic and neolithic religion based on an overenthusiasic interpretation of the evidence, or applying modern conceptual categories to ancient artefacts. They are also aware that much depends on the individual archaeologist’s attitude to religion in his interpretation of the evidence: ‘Yet, equally, factors such as the perspective of the archaeologists writing about the archaeology of cult and religion must also be isolated as a potentially relevant factor. So that if religion is perhaps not of importance to the individuals themselves, this will inevitable be refelcted within the archaeological interpretations as well.’ 3 Thus a secular individual is as likely to misinterpret the evidence as a religious person.

While this doesn’t mean that the archaeologists investigating the religions of previous ages are themselves religious – indeed, many, perhaps most, are not – it does mean that religion has been increasingly established as a respectable area of archaeological inquiry against the Logical Positivist position that no statements about the religious beliefs of previous ages could be made. This has a particular relevance in other areas of the debate between science and religion. For example, despite the fall of Logical Positivism, many of the New Atheist polemicists like Richard Dawkins hold philosophical positions strongly reminiscent of it. Like the Logical Positivists, Dawkins seems to feel that metaphysics is nonsense, and that only empirical science can meaningfully describe reality. He is equally dismissive of religious language, and has written articles for atheist and Humanist magazines attacking it as meaningless. Apart from the fact that the Logical Positivism supporting this view is now rejected, there is a real irony here. Dawkins prides himself as a defender of scientific inquiry, yet the Logical Positivist attitudes he endorses and articulates were themselves an obstacle to scientists investigating religion from an archaeological perspective. One of the philosophical supports for Dawkins’ atheism, rather than assisting science, has really acted against it. Thus, one could be justified in stating that rather than supporting science and understanding, when it comes to the archaeological investigation of religion, atheism has in fact been an obstacle, a role atheists usually ascribe to religion.

Notes

1. Timothy Insoll, ‘Archaeology of Cult and Religion’ in Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn, Archaeology: The Key Concepts (London, Routledge 2005), p. 47.

2. Timothy Insoll, ‘Archaeology of Cult and Religion’ in Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn, Archaeology: The Key Concepts (London, Routledge 2005), p. 47.

Timothy Insoll, ‘Archaeology of Cult and Religion’ in Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn, Archaeology: The Key Concepts (London, Routledge 2005), pp. 47-8.

Just a Bronze Age Text

One of the most common sneers I’ve come across about the Bible is dismissive comments about its supposed origins in the Bronze Age. These are mostly offhand statements that the Bible is Christians’ and Jews ‘favourite Bronze Age text’ or that it’s just ‘Bronze Age mythology’. Such sneers are so common that they’re actually something of a cliché. Rather than being any kind of meaningful criticism of the Bible and its relevance, these dismissive references to the Bible’s ancient origins are based on nothing more than cultural chauvinism and a simplistic belief that the value of a belief system can be judged solely on the scientific knowledge of the culture that produced it. More specifically, it tries to dismiss the Bible and its witness to God’s actions in history based on the technical competence of the Israelites in one particular area: metallurgy. Because the Israelites at the time some Biblical texts were written could only smelt bronze rather than iron, this is somehow taken as a decisive indicator of their stupidity, a technological limitation that is indicative of the invalidity of their worldview as a whole. They believed in God, but could only work in bronze, while we now have science and have a metallurgical skill they could only dream about. This is somehow supposed to refute belief in God.

Now I have an interest in the literature and culture of the ancient Near East, and comments about the Bible being just a ‘Bronze Age text’ and the like aren’t rational rebuttals to the Bible’s truth, but simple statements of prejudice. There’s an underlying assumption that people that far back in time were either so stupid that their ideas aren’t worth listening to today, or else they suffered from a mythopoeic mindset which does not related to the objective reality revealed by science. In fact what is abundantly clear when you start to read texts from the ancient world is not how alien the peoples who wrote them were, but how little different they are. They knew less, and their culture was profoundly different to our own, but at the same time they were as intelligent as we are and were capable of making the most profound statements about the human condition through their mythology and secular literature. And if our science and mathematics are better than theirs, it’s because they laid their foundations. So let’s examine the intellectual and cultural world of the ancient Near East to see if the Bible’s background in the Bronze Age really does make it meaningless in today’s technological world of space travel, atomic power and cloning.

Firstly, the point needs to be made that the Bible is not just a Bronze Age text. If one takes the view that the various books of the Bible were written between c. 1000 B.C. to c.100 A.D., that’s a period of about 1,100 years of revelation and theological reflection, going from the Bronze Age into the Iron Age. It’s roughly the same period that produced the ancient Sceptical texts that produced modern atheism when they were printed and began to circulate more widely in the 17^th century. Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who argued that the gods could not and did not interfere in nature, and that this cosmos was only one of a number of cosmoi that had arisen by chance through the fall of atoms in a cosmic void, lived from 341 to 270 BC. Pyrrho of Elis, the founder of methodical Scepticism who attacked all statements about the gods as nonsensical and taught a ‘suspension of disbelief’, lived from 365 to 275 BC, and his noted successor, Carneades, from c. 214 to 129 BC. If sneering at the Bible as just ‘Bronze Age’ myth constitutes an effective refutation, then it is just as valid to dismiss Scepticism and atheism as mere Iron Age thinking. Clearly dismissing the validity of either theological or philosophical perspective, based solely on when it was being formulated, doesn’t count as an effective refutation of either God and the Bible, or atheism and the arguments of the ancient Epicurean and Sceptical philosophers who produced it.

So how stupid, or technologically and culturally inferior were the peoples of the Bronze Age?

Firstly, although their technology was vastly inferior to ours, they were certainly not stupid. They knew how to build great temples and public monuments using tools very little different from those used by masons today. If you look at the hammers, mallets, saws and chisels used by the Egyptian craftsmen, what actually strikes you is how little they have changed. The metal used might be copper and bronze, rather than iron and steel, but their form and function has hardly changed in millennia. When you come to the tools in use in the Roman period, there’s very little difference between them and those of modern craftsmen.

Both ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia were highly sophisticated civilisations with an advanced mathematics. The Babylonians used a system of base 60, before moving to base 10, the system used today, about the time of Seleucid kings. They were acutely interested in geometry because of the necessity of accurately assessing field sizes for the correct payment of tribute and taxes. One common school exercise to provide training in this was the ‘six brothers problem’. This involved dividing a trapezium in strips between three pairs of brothers. The area of the strip each pair of brothers received was to be equal, while the strips declined in length. Although an exercise in solving a practical problem, it’s been suggested that this shows that the Babylonians were also interested in knowledge for its sake. 1 Amongst the 8,000 or so square metres of streets and houses excavated in 1930-1 by Sir Leonard Woolley in Ur was a private school, whose headmaster, Igmil-Sin, taught writing, religion, history and mathematics, recording his pupil’s work, their timetable, achievements, competitiveness, and also their truancy and physical punishment. 2 Babylonian civilisation also included academies, termed bit mummi – ‘house of knowledge’, a particularly fine example being that of Nineveh. Although the ancient Greeks’ admiration for the Babylonians as magicians has coloured the modern perception of them as superstitious, modern scholars of Babylonian civilisation have been impressed by their scientific skill and cast of mind. ‘Far from being the last word in Babylonian wisdom, witchcraft and popular astrology developed as a sign of decay in a dying civilisation, and we now know for certain that Sumerians and Assyro-Babylonians alike were blessed with almost all the qualities required for a truly scientific attitude of mind.’ These scholars point to the Babylonians’ insatiable scientific curiosity, a curiosity which saw them collect ancient tablets, establish museums of antiquities and collect rare and unusual plants and animals from foreign countries. 3 They understood with astonishing precision the lunar cycle, drew up observations of Venus, detailed star catalogues and could accurately predict eclipses of the moon and sun. The astronomer Kidunu (Cidenas), active in about 375 BC, calculated the length of the solar year with an error of only 4 minutes and 32.65 seconds. His calculations were more accurate than that of Oppolzer in 1887. And this is despite the fact that these astronomers possessed as technological guides only a primitive sundial, the waterclock and the polos. This last was a device for registering the shadow projected by minute ball suspended over a hemisphere. 4

In medicine, as well as the baru-priest who divined the sin responsible for the sufferer’s sickness, and the ashipu-priest who used magico-theological rites to treat it, there was also a tradition of rational, pragmatic medicine, asutu. 5 There were manuals of symptoms and their prognosis, including treatments for depression. They also possessed a pharmacopaeia’ of medicines and their preparation. Some of these medical procedures would still be considered good medicine today after all these centuries. One scholar has said of the treatment for epistaxis recommended by king Ashurbanipal’s personal doctor, Arad-Nama, who stated that the nose should be blocked to its end to stop bleeding that ‘modern physicians would not change a word of this procedure.’ 6

The ancient Egyptians too were skilled mathematicians, scientists and doctors. They were interested in probability theory, and had a number system based on ten which advanced to a million. 7 They had an excellent grasp of the mechanics of buildings and were well able to calculate the frustrum of a pyramid.8 While the Egyptians did not recognise the year as possessing 365 days, they knew that it took the sun this long to return to its original mythological birthplace in the south-eastern horizon at the winter solstice in 4500 BC. 9 They used a precursor of the theodolite, a notched palm rib called a bay, along with an L-shaped instrument with a plumb-bob, which measured the vertical, the merkhet, for surveying. 10 The ancient Egyptians too have won the admiration of contemporary scholars for the advanced state of their medicine. They new how to set bones, perform surgical operations to remove the parasitic guinea worm, and cataracts with thorns. They also valued oratory and intelligence. The Instruction for King Merikare of c. 2020 BC includes the advice ‘Be a craftsman in speech that you may be strong … Speech is more valorous than any fighting.’ 11

So we are dealing here with sophisticated, complex civilisations, which valued science and mathematics, and considered intelligence more important than skill in war. And in their personal observations on politics some of their comments are both acute and timeless. The modern tax-payer who feels that his hard-earned money is being squandered by greedy officials on themselves, rather than providing material results, can readily appreciate this complaint from ancient Egypt:

‘Seizers! Robbers! Plunderers! Officials! – and yet appointed to punish evil! Officialdom is the refuge of the arrogant – and yet appointed to punish falsehood!’

As well as

‘The land is diminished, but its rulers are increased. The land is bare, but its taxes are heavy. The grain is little, but the grain measure is large and measured by the tax officials to overflowing.’ 12

Similar the person who today feels that the law protects only the rich and powerful, and punishes the victim while protecting the criminal can find such sentiments expressed millennia earlier in Jewish legend. For example, in the legends that grew up about Sodom, the town was reviled as the epitome of evil and criminality because of the predatory avarice of its citizens and the extreme corruption of their judges. If a stranger entered the city, he was immediately robbed of his property and clothes by the citizens, who sent him naked and poor on his way. Their judges and rulers even passed an act which outlawed charity. Anyone who gave something to another for free, even if it was giving a piece of bread to a starving beggar, was to die. Even physical assault was rewarded under their perverted laws. If a man wounded another man in a quarrel, the wounded man was obliged to pay his assailant for performing the medical operation of bleeding him. 13

Obviously the complaint of the ordinary, tax-paying citizen against civic corruption and criminality is timeless, going down the centuries. The cry of the ancient Egyptian or Israelite can be heard today in London, New York and a million other great cities.

So the people of the Bronze Age were sophisticated, with an interest in science, mathematics and wisdom, and whose attitudes in many ways were very similar, if not identical to those of today. In reply to this, it can be stated that this does not mean that their religious ideas were correct, and that science has not overturned them.

Actually, this reply makes the same mistake. It has a mistaken view of the nature of religion, and ignores the continued existence of supernatural experience amongst contemporary people. Or rather, it stigmatises it as a mental aberration, or perhaps a false evolutionary vestige in human cognition that science has shown to be false. And it still overestimates the difference between modern people and their ancient forebears.

Firstly, positivists who see science as undermining religion by correctly explaining the objects of the natural world make the mistake of seeing religion solely as providing an explanation for events. But this is not the case. Religion is not merely about providing an explanation for a particular phenomenon, but about experiencing that phenomenon as a ‘Thou’, a mind, according the view of the great German Jewish scholar, Martin Buber. This ‘Thou’ was encountered by the whole man, as life confronting life, involving every faculty of man in a reciprocal relationship. 14 The particular images of Mesopotamian myth ‘had already become traditional at the time when we meet them in art and literature, but originally they must have been seen in the revelation which the experience entailed. They are products of imagination, but they are not mere fantasy. It is essential that true myth be distinguished from legend, saga, fable and fairy tale. All these may retain elements of the myth. And it may also happen that a baroque or frivolous imagination elaborates myths until they become mere stories. But true myth presents its images and its imaginary actors, not with the playfulness of fantasy, but with a compelling authority. It perpetuates the revelation of a ‘Thou’. 15 Thus in ancient Egypt contradictory explanations for the same phenomenon could appear in myth at the same time without apparent friction. The sun was conceived as both the boat of the god Ra travelling across the sky, and as rolled across the heavens by a giant scarab beetle. Both myths explained the phenomenon, but both looked deeper to a transcendental experience, a ‘Thou’, which the myth encapsulated. It is this transcendental experience, which is the essence of myth and religion.

And such supernatural and mythopoeic experiences still occur today. Scholars of Contemporary Legends – the mythic rumours and stories which circulate today – note that humans are also Homo Religiosus – religious, as well as rational, and that the legends that circulate may also be narrated by those to whom a supernatural experience personally occurred. 16 Sceptics and secularists such as Charles Krauthammer decry the increased interest in the paranormal as ‘a flight to irrationality, a retreat to pre-scientific primitivism in an age that otherwise preens with scientific pride.’ 17 Yet this is to make the same mistake of seeing religion and science as somehow performing the same role, whereas they operate in separate, but overlapping spheres. Moreover, it underestimates just how sceptical ancient people actually were. Denyse O’Leary in her excellent ID blog, Post Darwinist, has remarked on how the great Anglo-Polish anthropologist, Boleslaw Malinowski, was surprised at how many sceptics there were about the gods in the primitive societies he studied. Even amongst believers in antiquity, not all were at all pious. Some considered themselves far more intelligent than their supernatural masters. One ancient Egyptian scribe reproached another for his impiety thus: ‘I am astonished when thou sayest: “ I am more profound as a scribe than heaven, or earth, or the underworld!’ 18 The ancient Israelites were concerned to account for the origin of the false religions around them, and sought them in what we would recognise as rational explanations. For the writer of the apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, the origin of idolatry lay in the manufacture of images by the grief-stricken parents of dead children, and subjects to impress their kings with their devotion:

‘For a father afflicted with untimely mourning, when he hath made an image of his child soon taken away, now honoured him as a god, which was then a dead man, and delivered to those that were under him ceremonies and sacrifices. Thus in process of time an ungodly custom grown strong was kept as a law, and graven images were worshipped by the commandments of kings. Whom men could not honour in presence, because they dwelt far off, they took the counterfeit of his visage from far, and made an express image of a king whom they honoured, to the end that by this their forwardness they might flatter him that was absent, as if he were present. Also the singular diligence of the artificer did help to set forward the ignorant to more superstition. For he, peradventure willing to please one in authority, forced all his skill to make the resemblance of the best fashion. And so the multitude, allured by the grace of the work, took him now for a god, which a little before was but honoured as a man. And this was an occasion to deceive the world: for men, serving either calamity or tyranny, did ascribe unto stones and stocks the incommunicable name.’ 19 Looking at the evidence of contemporary interest in the paranormal, and the rationalist scepticism of the ancient Israelites towards the false religions of the surrounding nations, there seems much less supposed difference between credulous, mythopoeic Bronze Age people and their scientific modern descendents.

It also has to be considered that the Bible isn’t a typical Bronze Age text, and its view of God and the process of creation is radically different from the mythologies of the contemporary peoples of the ancient Near East. While scholars have pointed to the similarities between the Biblical account of creation in Genesis and that of the Babylonians, there are several crucial differences.

Firstly, in the mythologies of ancient Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia, the gods are created from a long chain of personified natural forces. In Genesis, this process is reversed. God comes before nature, and all nature is the result of God’s creative action. 20

Secondly, there is a plurality of gods in the other, pagan myths. In Genesis, there is only the One God, who acts alone. And Genesis is structured to deny any kind of divinity to the objects of His creation. The sun and moon, for example, which were worshipped as gods in Babylonia, are merely described as the greater and lesser lights. It’s a rationalist restructuring of pagan myth to bring out the point that the various objects of the created universe are only that – created objects. The true power lies behind it.

Thirdly, the actual process of creation in Genesis is rather different from the very anthropomorphic account in contemporary paganism. While the Enuma Elish gives a very graphically anthropomorphic account of the gods knotting veins when they create the first man, for example, Genesis is much less anthropomorphic. It doesn’t describe how God creates the objects of the universe, only that He does. ‘The language of Genesis 1 tells us nothing about the mechanism or mode of ‘creation’.’ 21 Clearly the description of Adam being formed from the ‘dust of the earth’ and having life blown into him by God is anthropomorphic, but less compared to the surrounding myths.

Apart from the physical act of creation, God acts in history in a way that transcends the mythological time of contemporary paganism. The Babylonian myth of Adapa has been compared to the Genesis account of the creation of Adam. In the Babylonian myth, Adapa is created by the gods to serve them. Travelling to heaven to clear himself after he angers them by breaking the wing of the south wind with a curse, he loses the opportunity of immortality by refusing the bread and water of life offered him by the gods, mistaking them for the bread and water of death. It is similar to the Biblical story of the creation of Adam by narrating how the gods create a man, and how this man then loses the opportunity for immortality. However, the Adapa myth is set in an ahistorical mythological time. It does not have the genealogies present in Genesis, which link the events in Eden to the figures of Israelite history.22 In Genesis the story moves from myth into history, pointing to the effects of the primal theological events in the contemporary world of historical experience.

This experience of God as apart from nature, and acting in history, set ancient Israel profoundly apart from the neighbouring peoples, their mythologies and ideologies.

‘Not cosmic phenomena, but history itself, had here become pregnant with meaning; history had become a revelation of the dynamic will of God. The human being was not merely the servant of the god as he was in Mesopotamia; nor was he placed, as in Egypt, at a pre-ordained station in a static universe which did not need to be – and, in fact, could not be questioned. Man, according to Hebrew thought, was the interpreter and the servant of God; he was even honoured with the task of bringing about the realization of God’s will.’ This task saw humanity ‘possessed of a new freedom, and of a new responsibility’. 23

Whatever one believes about the literal truth of the account of Creation in Genesis, the movement away from God as the personification of natural forces, as a transcendent being active in time and yet apart from it, paved the way for modern science and was far superior to the pagan cults of nature. Franz Cumont, the great pioneering scholar of the Roman cult of Mithras, observed that if the cult of Mithras had survived.

‘it would not only have preserved from oblivion all the aberrations of pagan mysticism, but would also have perpetuated the erroneous doctrine of physics on which its dogmatism reposed. The Christian doctrine, which broke with the cults of nature, remained exempt from these impure associations, and its liberation from every compromising attachment assured it an immense superiority. Its negative value, its struggle against deeply-rooted prejudices, gained for it as many souls as did the positive hopes which it promised.’ 24

Thus attempts to discredit the truth of the Bible by pointing to its origins in the Bronze Age are profoundly wrong and inadequate. The peoples of the Bronze Age weren’t stupid or uninterested in science and mathematics, even if their knowledge in these areas was much less than ours. They were capable of profound philosophical insights and expressing timeless truths of human existence in their myth and wisdom literature. The same period that saw the formation of the Bible also saw the formulation of the classic atheist arguments. Furthermore, the Bible and ancient Israel in their view of God and His relationship with the world transcended the mindset of the other ancient Near Eastern peoples to create a view of the world that was both deeply religious and rational and sceptical. Rather than sneer at the Bible for being just a ‘Bronze Age text’ or ‘Bronze Age mythology’, the arguments and experiences recorded in the Bible need to be judged according to their own merits as the result of timeless human experience.

And despite the claims that modern science has somehow disproved them, the arguments against the Bible’s truth are all deeply flawed. The testimony of the Bible still stands, and the glory of the Lord does indeed proceed from age to age, from the Bonze Age into our own.

Notes

1. Ivor Grattan-Guinness, The Fontana History of the Mathematical Sciences (London, Fontana Press 1997), p. 30.
2. Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (London, Penguin 1992), pp. 220, 223.
3. Roux, Ancient Iraq, p. 358.
4. Roux, Ancient Iraq, pp. 365-6.
5. Roux, Ancient Iraq, p. 367.
6. Roux, Ancient Iraq, p. 370.
7. Grattan-Guinness, Mathematical Sciences, p. 32.
8. Grattan-Guinness, Mathematical Sciences, pp. 34-6.
9. Ronald A. Wills, ‘Astronomy in Egypt’ in Christopher Walker, ed., Astronomy before the Telescope (London, British Museum Press 1996), p. 34.
10. Wills, ‘Astronomy in Egypt’ in Walker, Astronomy, pp. 36-7.
11. Esmond Wright, ed., History of the World: Prehistory to the Renaissance (Feltham, W.H. Smith 1985), p. 57.
12. John A. Wilson, ‘The Function of the State’ in Henri Frankfort, Mrs. H.A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson and Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books 1949), p. 97.
13. Angelo S. Rappaport, Ancient Israel: Myths and Legends (London, the Mystic Press 1987), pp. 264-5.
14. H. and H.A. Frankfort ‘Introduction: Myth and Reality’ in Frankfort, Frankfort, Wilson and Jacobsen, Before Philosophy, p. 14.
15. H. and H.A. Frankfort ‘Introduction: Myth and Reality’ in Frankfort, Frankfort, Wilson and Jacobsen, Before Philosophy, p. 14.
16. Linda Degh, Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre (Bloomington, Indiana University Press 2001), p. 68.
17. Degh, Legend and Belief, p. 267.
18. John A. Wilson, ‘The Nature of the Universe’ in Frankfort, Frankfort, Wilson and Jacobsen, Before Philosophy, p. 69.
19. Wisdom of Solomon 14: 15-21, The Apocrypha, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), p. 68.
20. Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Chicago, University of Chicago Press 2003), pp. 40-45.
21. Roger Forster and Paul Marston, Reason, Science and Faith (Crowborough, Monarch 1999), p. 276.
22. Roux, Ancient Iraq, p. 107.
23. H. and H.A. Frankfort, ‘The Emancipation of Thought from Myth’ in Frankfort, Frankfort, Wilson and Jacobsen, Before Philosophy, p. 245.
24. Franz Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithras, Thomas J. McCormack, trans., (Chicago, The Open Court Publishing Company 1910), p. 198.

Mithras Myths

Okay, it’s November, and with Christmas fast approaching I thought I’d better turn my attention to the ancient god Mithras. Since the 19^th century antichristians have been claiming that Christianity is based, to a greater or lesser extent, on the ancient Roman cult of Mithras. This claim has been repeated and elaborated by contemporary atheist polemicists and propagandists like Acharya S and the Rational Response Squad to support their belief that Jesus Himself did not exist, but was merely copied and invented by the early Christians from existing pagan deities. In support of this position, it has been claimed that Mithras was born of a virgin, had 12 disciples, was crucified, ascended into heaven, and that his followers shared a ritual meal of bread and wine which served as the basis for Christian holy communion. However, these supposed parallels with Christianity either don’t exist at all, or are common to a number of religions.

Furthermore, although some of the speculation that Mithraism had a profound impact on Christianity was based on the sincere, though mistaken, speculations of respected and entirely respectable scholars such as the great Belgian classical scholar, Franz Cumont, there is a very sinister aspect to late 19^th and early 20^th century European fringe religious fascination with Mithras. To the volkisch neo-pagans in central Europe, Mithras was an indigenous monotheistic saviour god whom the ancient Aryans had worshipped, and whose replacement by the Semitic religion of Christianity had damaged the Aryans peoples of Europe intellectually and spiritually. The promotion of Mithraism as the true religion of the Indo-European peoples and the pattern on which Christianity was modelled was part of the wider, racial-nationalistic campaigns against Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage, a campaign that reached its worst excesses in the Nazi party.

Now let’s examine the historical cult of Mithras, and see if it matches the claims of Christ-mythers.

Firstly, it should be noted that Mithras is a genuinely ancient god. One of the most ancient documents recording his cult is a treaty from the 14^th century BC between the Hittites and the Mitanni carved into the rock at Boghaz Koi, in which he is invoked as a witness. As one of the Spentas – the hypostases of the good god and creator, Ahura Mazda, Mithras was worshipped by the Achaemenid kings of Iran, and by Zoroastrians around the world today. However, there is a profound difference between the ancient Persian and Zoroastrian cults of Mithras and his Roman cult. Scholars of the Roman cult of Mithras consider that it ‘is originally and substantially a Greek religion with only a few Iranian elements.’ 1

Such scholars state that ‘no direct continuity, either of a general kind or in specific details, can be demonstrated between the Perso-Hellenistic worship of Mitra and the Roman mysteries of Mithras. The oft-repeated attempts to traces a seamless history of Mithras from the second millennium BC to the fourth century AD simply tell us something quite general about the relative stability, or, as it may be, flexibility, of religious ideas. We cannot account for Roman Mithras in in terms borrowed from Persian Mitra.’ 2

Roman Mithraism similarly evolved separately from and was not a predecessor to Christianity ‘There is another reason too for thinking that it makes little sense to treat the mysteries of Mithras as but one stage in a longer evolution. The mysteries cannot be shown to have developed from Persian religious ideas, nor does it make sense to interpret them as a fore-runner of Christianity. Both views neglect the sheer creativity that gave rise to the mystery-cult. Mithraism was an independent creation with its own unique value within a given historical, specifically Roman, context.’ 3

Now let’s examine some of the specific claims regarding the supposed similarity between Christ and Mithras.

The Virgin Birth

There is actually no parallel or influence here between Roman Mithraism and Christianity. Mithras was not born from a virgin, but from a rock. Indeed, one inscription to Mithras reads ‘To the almighty God Sun invincible, generative god, born from the rock.’ 4 The scene of Mithras’ birth from a rock was a particular favourite of the cult’s devotees, and is found in sculptures and medallions from all over the Roman Empire, from Rayanov Grich in Croatia, St. Alban’s in England, Cologne, Metz, Rome, Resca in Romania, Bingen and Trier. 5 Mithras was not always considered to have been born from a rock, however. A relief at Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in England shows the god being born from an egg, which itself becomes a celestial globe. 6 There is a similar scene at Housesteads on Hadrian’s Wall, which shows Mithras being born from the cosmic egg surrounded by a zodiacal ring. 7 He also sometimes appears being born from a tree, possibly developed from stylised representations of the rock as a pine-cone. 8

So there was no conception of a virgin birth in ancient Mithraism. Zoroastrians do expect the Saoshyant, the Saviour who will eventually defeat the forces of Angra Mainyu, the god of evil, at the end of the world, to be born of a virgin. There is a profound difference between the virgin birth of the Saoshyant and of Christ, however, In Zoroastrianism, the Saoshyant will be born from the physical seed of Zoroaster, which has been taken by the yazad Neryosang and preserved in Lake Kayansih. The Saoshyant’s mother is expected to become pregnant after she bathes in that lake. The Zand, one of the Zoroastrian holy books, describes it thus:

‘Three times Zardusht [the prophet Zoroaster] approached his wife, Hvovi. Each time his see fell to the ground. The yazad Neryosang took all the light and power of that seed, and .. it was consigned to Lake Kayansih, in the care of the Waters …. It is said that even now three lamps are seen shining at night in the depth of the lake. And for each, when his own time comes, it will be thus: a virgin will go to Lake Kayansih to bathe; and the Glory (of Zardusht) will enter her body, and she will become with child. And so, one by one the (three) will be born thus, each at his own time.’ 9

Thus for Zoroastrians, the Saoshyant will be born from the spiritually transformed physical semen of a human being. It is not like Jesus, who was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and whose father is truly God Himself, rather than Joseph, who made no contribution to the process of physical conception.

Even those scholars in the 19^th century who claimed that the Christian doctrine of the Virgin birth, the adoration of the Magi and the visit of the shepherds admitted they had no evidence for this. 10 Thus the claim that Christ’s virgin birth must have been taken from Zoroastrianism or Mithraism simply doesn’t stand up, and must be rejected.

Crucifixion

This simply doesn’t occur at all in the Roman cult of Mithras. The events in the god’s life, at least as reconstructed from existing iconography, are the birth of Mithras from a rock or tree, his shooting at a cloud to bring forth rain; his shooting at a rock, which causes a spring to gush forth; cutting the corn; taming and sacrificing the holy bull; his contract with the sun god; a holy meal, and final ascent to heaven on the chariot of the sun god. 11 It is true that the bread broken in the communal meal held by the initiates of the cult of Mithras was marked with a cross, but this was for ease of breaking the bread and does not represent any event in the god’s life. 12

The Twelve Disciples

These simply don’t appear in Roman Mithraism either. There are a number of animals shown present at Mithras’ birth, including the Greek god Chronos, a raven, dog, serpent and scorpion, as well as two figures, Cautes and Cautopates, bearing torches. These torch-bearers sometimes appear to be helping Mithras out of the rock, but there is no connection with the Christian birth narrative and they cannot be called ‘shepherds’. 13 They may instead represent the gods Sol and Luna, or the rising and setting sun, or alternatives Cautopates may represent death, while Cautes joy, fertility and new life. 14 It’s possible that the idea of 12 disciples for Mithras arose through confusion with astrological imagery found in the cult motifs, such as the birth of the god from the rock and the slaying of the bull. However, these are very definitely signs of the zodiac, not 12 earthly humans. So again, there isn’t a parallel with Christianity.

The Ritual Meal

The initiates of the cult of Mithras did, however, share a meal of bread and wine that was seen by the Christian apologists Justin Martyr and Tertullian as pagan distortions and parodies of the Christian eucharist. It’s considered that the ritual meals held in the Mithraic temples were a symbolic re-enactment of the celebratory meal Mithras and the god Sol held after Mithras’ slaying of the bull, which produced the universe. 15 Scholars of the cult of Mithras state very clearly that neither Christianity nor Mithraism borrowed anything from the other regarding this, as the sharing of a communal meal is a common element in many religions all over the world.

‘In the case of these analogies, there can be no question of imitation in either direction. The offering of bread and wine is known in virtually all ancient cultures, and the meal as a way of binding the faithful together and uniting them to the deity was a feature common to many religions. It represented one of the oldest means of manifesting unification with the spiritual, and the appropriation of spiritual qualities.’ 16

The Mithraic ritual meal may not have been an exact parallel to the Christian eucharist either. It’s assumed that both Christian eucharist and the Mithraic ritual meal consisted of bread and wine, but the Mithraic ritual meal may also have included cake and meat – bull, cock, ram or pig, grapes, and less, frequently, fish. The krater containing the blood from the sacrifice of a bull, in re-enactment of Mithras’ slaying of the primeval bull, may have held water as well as wine a substitute. 17 Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the Mithraic liturgy, suggesting that it consisted of a sacrifice of an animal or bird in commemoration of the bull-slaying by the cult’s Pater as representative of Mithras, the coronation of the Heliodromus, the Courier of the Sun, the member of the grade representing the sun, by the Pater, representing Mithras, a pact, perhaps made by offering part of the sacrifice on the small alter by the Pater and Heliodromus, followed by the cult meal with the Pater and Heliodromus as chief officials, which represented the future ascent of the participants’ souls to Mithras and Sol. 18 If this reconstruction is correct, then the supposed parallel to Christian holy communion is much weaker, as animal sacrifice was firmly rejected by the early Church, which ridiculed its persistence in paganism.

Regarding the Christian eucharist, the evidence of the two eucharistic prayers in chapters 9 and 10 of the Didache seem to be based on the Birkat ha-Mazon, the Jewish table prayer. 19 Here the origin is both the commemoration of the Last Supper, and also an expectation of the Messianic banquet, which in Jewish belief will be held for the followers of the Messiah at the end of time.

The Ascent into Heaven

After the sacrifice, Mithras appears to have ascended into heaven on the chariot of the sun god, Sol, with whom he had made a pact. It is thus strikingly different from Christ’s ascent into heaven, alone and unaided. The only common element between the two is that heaven – the abode of God – is located in the sky, a view that is found in all religions.

The Water Miracle

One of the events in the Mithraic narrative which appears to have the closest resemblance to Christianity is Mithras’ bringing forth of water from a rock. In a number of sculptures and reliefs, chiefly from the regions of the Rhine and Danube, Mithras is shown sitting on a stone aiming a bow at a rock. One figure either stands behind him or clasps Mithras’ knees in supplication, while another figure kneels in front of the rock. A votive altar from Poetovio proclaims Mithras to be the fons perennialis, the ever flowing spring. 20 This is similar to the scenes on Christian sarcophagi showing Moses striking the rock in the desert to produce water as an illustration of the New Testament’s view of Christ as a water-bearing rock, such as in1 Corinthians 10: 4 ‘And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ’.

However, there is again, no question of influence from either religion on the other. Water played an important part in the mysteries of Mithras, and Mithraic temples could include water pipes, basins and cisterns, and were often located near holy springs, such as at Mackwiller, the Morava valley in Serbia and Bijelo Polje in Bosnia. 21 Thus the cult of Mithras was part of a widespread veneration of holy springs common in pagan Europe and the Near East. The importance of water, and the symbolism of water for life or immortality also derive from both religions’ origins in the arid conditions of the Near East, where drought was a perennial problem and real threat. ‘The thinking that underlies these features of each cult is naturally rooted in the same traditions. The water-miracle is one of the wide-spread myths that originate from regions plagued by drought and where the prosperity of humans and nature depends upon rain.’ 22 The symbolism of Christ as offering living water is based very solidly on Old Testament imagery for God. Jeremiah 17:13 describes God as ‘the Lord, the fountain of living waters’. The image of Christ as the rock that gives water to His followers, as expressed in 1 Corinthians 10: 4, comes from the incident in Exodus 17:1-7, where, finding themselves without water at Rephidim, the Israelites complained to Moses who struck a rock with his rod so that water came out of it. Its depiction on Christian sarcophagi was a way of representing Christ’s own words to the woman of Samaria, as recorded in John 4:14 ‘But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst: but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a w ell of water springing up into everlasting life’. If Mithraism did influence Christianity here, it was through the depiction of the water miracles of Christ and Mithras, with the water-miracles of Mithras forming the model for the depiction of Moses striking the rock at Horeb. 23 However, the underlying Christian symbolism is authentic to Christianity and Judaism and the witness of the Old and New Testaments.

Thus, Mithraism and Christianity actually aren’t that similar, and where similarities do occur it’s through their common origins in the Middle East, rather than through direct borrowing. Also, some contemporary scholars consider that where Mithraism did appear to be disconcertingly similar to Christianity, it was an illusion created by the scholars themselves, who viewed Mithraism through a model of religious development based on Christianity.

‘Clearly, Christianity was the paradigm. The Cumontian model was cloned from the then dominant model of Christianity, not deliberately but simply because that was the way the late nineteenth-century Western mind confronted religion.’ 24

Thus modern Christ-mythicists who see Christianity as modelled on the religion of Mithras do so because the intellectual model of Mithraism on which they base their theories is actually modelled on Christianity. Their image of the cult of Mithras is really Christianity, as seen through a distorting mirror of classical scholarship and pseudo-scholarship, rather than a true image of the ancient religion itself.

There is also a sinister, racist aspect to the elevation of Mithraism as a rival to and original prototype of Christianity. The 19^th century volkisch neopagans of Central Europe embraced Mithraism as a particularly Aryan religion, a direct survival of the Ur-religion from the ancient homeland of the Aryan peoples. Following the attempts of the great anthropologist and scholar of comparative religion, Frederick Muller, to trace the origins of Aryan religion in a primeval solar cult, the 19^th century Germanic neo-pagan milieu saw this original Aryan religion as a cult of the sun, and Mithras, as Sol Invictus, was seen as the true Aryan saviour cult, in contrast to the alien religion of Christianity with its roots in Judaism. This view of Mithras and Mithraism was taken up and expanded by Jung, who viewed Mithraism as religion of nature in contrast to the stifling forces of civilisation created by Christianity. ‘Two thousand years of Christianity makes us strangers to ourselves. In the individual, the internalisation of bourgeois-Christian civilization is a mask that covers the true Aryan god within, a natural god, a sun god, perhaps even Mithras himself.’ 25 While Jung most definitely was not a Nazi or even a proto-Nazi, he did share some of the racist views that there was a real cognitive difference between Jews and Aryans at certain points in his career. Jung’s book, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, which explored solar mysticism and Mithraism, was shaped by 19^th century conceptions of Christianity as fundamentally alien to Aryans through its roots in Judaism.

‘Hence, for the educated volkisch neopagan circa 1911 or 1912 who may have stumbled across this work, it would seem that Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido was the scientific confirmation of everything that one would believe about the necessity for the repudiation of Christianity and the practice of sun worship.Jung’s volume is indeed the “volkisch liturgy”.’ 26

Thus the atheist conception of Mithraism is an ancient rival to and prototype of Christianity is not born out by the actual features of the religion itself, and the similarities to Christianity which some have seen in the cult are the product of the two religion’s common origins in the ancient Near East, and the distorted view of Mithraism by 19^th century scholars who examined it through the concepts and model of Christianity, and so made it resemble Christianity more than it really did. Lastly, the continued persistence of the claim of Mithraism as the model from which Christianity was copied has been informed by 19^th century Neopagan attempts to re-establish a rival Aryan religion to Semitic Christianity. The Christ-mythers who continue to promote Mithraism as the true origin of Christianity are very much following the intellectual programme of these Neo-pagans, though without adhering to their racism.

Notes

1. M.P. Speidel, Mithras-Orion: Greek Hero and Roman Army God (Leiden, E.J. Brill 1980), p. 2.
2. Manfred Clauss: The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, R. Gordon trans., (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press 2000), p. 7.
3. Clauss, Roman Mithras, p. 7.
4. Clauss, Roman Mithras, p. 62.
5. Clauss, Roman Mithras, pp. 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68.
6. ‘Mithras’, in Encyclopedia of World Mythology (London, Peerage Books 1975), p. 162.
7. Clauss, Roman Mithras, p. 70.
8. ‘Mithras’, in World Mythology, p. 162; Clauss, Roman Mithras, pp. 70-1.
9. ‘On the Three World Saviours, From the Zand’ in Mary Boyce, ed. and trans. Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism (Chicago, University of Chicago Press 1984), p. 91.
10. F. Cumont, T.J. McCormack, trans., The Mysteries of Mithras, 2^nd Edition (Chicago, the Open Court Publishing Company 1910), p. 195.
11. ‘Mithras’, World Mythology, p. 162, ‘Chapter 8: the Sacred Narrative’ in Clauss, Roman Mithras, pp. 62-101.
12. Clauss, Roman Mithras, p. 110.
13. Clauss, Roman Mithras, pp. 68-9.
14. Clauss, Roman Mithras, pp. 95-98.
15. Clauss, Roman Mithras, p. 110l; R. Beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire (Oxford, OUP 2006), p. 22.
16. Clauss, Roman Mithras, p. 109.
17. J. Stewardson and E. Saunders, ‘Reflections on the Mithraic Liturgy’ in S. Laeuchli, ed., Mithraism in Ostia: Mytery, Religion and Christianity in the Ancient Port of Rome (Garrett Theological Seminary/ Northwestern University Press 1967), p. 72.
18. Stewardson and Saunder ‘Mithraic Liturgy’, in Laeuchli, Mithraism in Ostia, p. 71.
19. M. Staniforth and A. Louth, eds. and trans., Early Christian Writings (Harmondsworth, Penguin 1987), p. 188; J.F. White, A Brief History of Christian Worship (Nashville, Abingdon Press 1993), p. 26.
20. Clauss, Roman Mithras, p. 72.
21. Clauss, Roman Mithras, pp. 73-4.
22. Clauss, Roman Mithras, p. 72.
23. F. Cumont, Mysteries of Mithra, pp. 196-7.
24. Beck, Mithras Cult, p. 54.
25. R. Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (London, FontanaPress 1996), p. 128.
26. Noll, Jung Cult, p. 130.

Mithras and the Rational Response Squad

As avowed supporters of the view that Jesus is an entirely mythological figure, it’s not surprising that the vehement atheists of the Rational Response Squad should cite Mithras as one of the ancient religions from which Christianity was copied. The complete absence of any real support for their position can be seen in this debate http://rationalresponders.blogspot.com/2007/11/kabane52-forces-rook-hawkins-to-face.html at Frank Walton’s Rational Response Squad blog between Kabane52 and the Rational Response Squad’s Rook Hawkins.

Yahweh – Tribal War God or Only God?

Vigilante, one of the great guys who posts his comments and observations over at Frank Walton’s awesome blog Atheism Sucks, has remarked on the need for a resource to counteract some of the claims regularly made against God and Christianity by atheists. One of these claims, which he recommends should be specifically addressed, is the statement that the God of the Bible, Yahweh, is really only a tribal war god. Now I’ve also come across this type of comment before, and absolutely agree. It’s one of those statements, which is blandly made as if it were obviously true. However, like many such statements, it is only partially correct and needs to be carefully critiqued.

Now there is clearly some truth in that statement. The Bible clearly describes Yahweh as the God of Israel. The other nations surrounding Israel also had their own national gods – Qos was the god of Edom, Asshur of the Assyrians, and Chemosh of Moab. These gods were believed to reside in their temples and shrines, and bring victory in battle to their worshippers. The Babylonian Weidner Chronicle, supposedly correspondence between from king Damiq-ilisu of Isin to Apil-Sin of Babylon or Rim-Sin of Larsa, stresses the power of Marduk in giving sovereignty and victory to his worshippers: ‘Naram-Sin ravaged the populace of Babylon, and twice he (Marduk) called up the Gutian armies against him [He/They put to flight (?)] his people as with a donkey-goad [and] he (Marduk) gave his royal sovereignty to the Gutian armies.’ (from ‘Late Bronze Age Inscriptions from Babylon, Assyria, and Syro-Palestine’, Frans van Koppen, Kyle Greenwood, Christopher Morgan, Brent a Strawn, Jeff Cooley, bill T. Arnold, Eva von Dassow, and Yoram Cohen, Historical Sources in Translation: The Ancient Near East, Mark W. Chavalas, (ed.) (Oxford, Blackwell 2006), p. 167.

Similarly, the Bible often describes the Lord in very martial language, as expressed in 2 Samuel 7:26 ‘And let thy name be magnified for ever, saying, The Lord of hosts is the God over Israel; and let the house of thy servant David be established forever’. This very martial conception of God is also expressed in Psalm 18: 34-50, which has the lines ‘He teacheth my hands in war, so that a bow of steel is broken by mine arms. Thou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation; and thy right hand hath holden me up, and thy gentleness hath made me great’. Psalm 68 also describes the Lord’s warlike prowess in delivering His people and raising them to a position of international honour and rule: ‘The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels’, (v. 17); ‘But God shall wound the head of his enemies, and the hairy scalp of such an one as goeth on still in his trespasses.’(v.21); ‘because of thy temple at Jerusalem shall kings bring presents unto thee’ (v. 29), and ‘Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God. Sing unto God, ye kingdoms of the earth; O sing praises unto the Lord; Selah; To him that rideth upon the heavens of heavens, which were of old; lo, he doth send out a voice, and that a mighty voice. Ascribe ye strength unto God: his excellency is over Israel, and his strength is in the clouds. O God, thou are terrible out of thy holy place; the God of Israel is he that giveth strength and power unto his people. Blessed be God.’ (vv. 31-5).

Scholars of the Old Testament, such as Helmer Ringgren have also pointed out how God’s spirit in the Book of Judges gives Gideon, Jephtha and Samson the power to defeat the Israelite’s enemies. (see H. Ringgren, Israelite Religion (London, SPCK 1966), pp. 46-7). In these passages God ‘is the war god who leads the holy wars of his people’. (Ringgren, p. 46). However, scholars stress that these passages should be read within the context of the situation they describe, and that these martial traits are only one aspect of God’s character. ‘This does not simply mean that Yahweh was only or even primarily a warlike national god with atmospheric traits. It is the situation that leads to emphasis on these characteristics.’ (Ringgren, p. 46).

It should be noted that some of the warlike language describing Yahweh is ambiguous, and that contrasting images of God may appear in the same passage. The passage from Psalm 18 quoted above, verse 35 moves from God as the martial defender of the singer to stressing God’s gentleness: ‘Thou has also given me the shield of thy salvation: and thy right hand hath holden me up, and thy gentleness hath made me great.’ This is part of the strong motif of God’s righteous mercy declared in verse 25: ‘With the merciful though wilt shew thyself merciful; with an upright man thou wilt shew thyself upright.’

This ambiguity even extends into some of the epithets describing God in the Old Testament. One of the common phrases for God, which has traditionally been taken as indicating His warrior aspect, is ‘Lord of Hosts’, in Hebrew, Yahweh Sabaoth. These hosts are often considered to be the Israelite armies, based on the role of the Ark as a war shrine, such as in Samuel 6:2

‘And David arose, and went with all the people that were with him from Baale of Judah, to bring up from thence the ark of God, whose name is called by the name of the Lord of hosts that dwelleth between the cherubims.’

In this connection, it’s noted that ‘Lord of Host’s is explicitly linked with Yahweh as God of the armies of Israel in Samuel 17:45

‘Then said David to the Philistine, thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou has defied.’

However, in contrast to this, scholars like Ringgren have also pointed out that ‘the ark, as we have seen, is also connected with the conception of Yahweh as an enthroned king; and the vast majority of occurrences of “Yahweh Sabaoth” as a divine name are found in the prophets, where emphasis upon the warlike aspects of Yahweh is not suggested by the context.’ (Ringgren, p. 68). The hosts therefore described may also refer to the stars, as in Isaiah 40: 26

‘Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hat created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he called them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth.’

The hosts may also be the Lords’ angels in heaven, as described in Psalm 103:19-22:

‘The Lord hath prepared His throne in the heavens; and his kingdom ruleth over all. Bless the Lord, ye His angels, that excel in strength, that do His commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word. Bless ye the Lord, all ye His hosts; ye ministers of His, that do His pleasure. Bless the Lord, all His works in all places of His dominion: bless the Lord, O my soul.’

Thus, the epithet is used not simply to describe God as warlike, but to emphasise His immense power and majesty. ‘In any case, “Sabaoth” is used particularly in those contexts that speak of Yahweh as the almighty Lord and king. The Septuagint accordingly often translates it as pantokrator, “all-powerful”.

Even within these passages extolling the warlike qualities of the Lord are verses indicating that Yahweh is far more than simply a god of war solely guarding Israel. For example, verse 30 of Psalm 68 asks God to ‘rebuke the company of spearmen, the multitude of the bulls, with the calves of the people, till every one submit himself with pieces of silver: scatter thou the people that delight in war’. The ‘people that delight in war’ are Israel’s enemies, here seen very much as militaristic aggressors in contrast to Israel. Furthermore, although Yahweh is God of Israel, He is far more than that. He is the God of all the Earth, whose kingdoms will come to praise Him. Indeed, Scripture makes it clear that God is sovereign over all the Earth who will eventually establish a reign of peace and justice amongst the nations as the Earth’s peoples worship Him. Isaiah 2:2-4 prophesises that

‘And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.

And many people shall go and say, Com ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.’ The same revelation is given, in almost identical words, by the prophet Micah, in chapter 4: 1-3 of his book. This promise of universal salvation granted to gentiles as well as Jews is at the heart of the prophet Jonah’s ministry. God commanded Jonah to preach to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, powerful and hostile towards Israel. The book contrasts God’s mercy on Nineveh, whose king and people repent so that God does not destroy them, with Jonah himself, who runs from the Lord to avoid giving the prophetic message, and thus the opportunity to avoid God’s punishment, to the people of Nineveh, preferring that God’s salvation should be kept only to Israel. This universalism is present from the very beginning of the Bible. The covenant God makes with Noah not to destroy the world again is described as between God and ‘every living creature of all flesh that is on the Earth’, (Genesis 9: 16). As for war, Genesis states that God destroyed the world with the Flood because it ‘was filled with violence’. (Genesis 7: 11). This is very far from the idea of a God who delights in violence and warfare.

So, although Yahweh is the God of Israel, He is also the Lord of all the earth, and even within the Old Testament God is seen to call gentiles to communion with Him along with His chosen people. Jewish scholars such as Louis Jacobs and I. Heinemann have pointed to the universalistic framework in which the Jewish people were chosen by God to show the profound differences between God as the God of Israel and the idea of a tribal god. For these scholars the crucial difference is choice: Yahweh, the Lord of the universe, made a deliberate choice of Israel to be His people. This doesn’t occur in the relationship between a tribal people and their god.

‘The Biblical conception of the election of Israel has nothing in common with the idea of a tribal god protecting his people, responding to their attempts to buy his favour and capable of suffering defeat at the hands of some more powerful deity. The relation of a tribal god to his people is a ‘natural one’. He does not ‘choose’ his people any more than they are members of the tribe by choice. In the Bible it is the universal God who ‘chooses’. (Louis Jacobs, ‘The Chosen People’, in Whitfield Foy, ed., The Religious Quest:A Reader (London, Routledge/ The Open University Press 1978), pp. 410-11.

The profound difference between the conception of Yahweh as the only God and the national gods of Mesopotamia is shown in the different attitudes towards national defeat and subjugation in Israel and Babylon. For ancient Israel, defeat and oppression by nations such as the Babylonians, Assyrians or Greeks could only be part of God’s unfolding plan, occurring through the Almighty’s will. No other gods existed, and so the foreign forces that conquered, enslaved and deported them could only be acting through the will of God. For the other nations in the Ancient Near East, such as the Sumerian city states, defeat by an enemy was the result of their national or city god being stronger. Israel’s entire conception of itself was informed by the knowledge that the Lord wasn’t just the God of the Jewish people, but the God of all the world who chose them as part of a wider plan for the world’s salvation. For scholars such as Jacobs and Heinemann, this has been made particularly clear in Isaiah 42: 5-7: ‘Thus saith God the Lord, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it; he that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein: I the Lord have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles; To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.’ Talmudic legend also stresses God as the God of all the Earth’s peoples. In one legend, the status of the Jews as God’s chosen people is explained as a result of the rest of the Earth’s nations rejecting God’s offer of communion except Israel.

The universal mission within Judaism to call gentiles as well as Jews to knowledge and love of God was taken over and developed in Christianity, so that as St. Paul said, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’ (Galatians 3:28).

As the only God, Yahweh is clearly more than just a war god as the Bible also makes abundantly clear. The violent imagery used of God reflects not only the turbulent history of the ancient Near East, but also the fundamental nature of human political life. For many political theorists, states have their origin in warfare and the need for military protection against enemies, and until very recently kings were war-leaders, expected to lead their nation’s armies into battle to defend their people. The violent depictions of God as a warrior scattering Israel’s enemies are part of a general picture of what kings have traditionally been expected to do: use their military prowess and resources to safeguard their realm and establish justice. Rather than being simply the activities of a war god, a specialised member of a wider pantheon of gods, the martial imagery and descriptions of the Lord in the Bible do so to illustrate the Lord as the monarch of the universe, scattering and destroying the wicked to establish peace and justice, in which God as the ‘Lord of Hosts’ is a compelling symbol of God as the true, almighty sovereign of the Universe, the pantokrator of the Septuagint.