Israelite Divination and the Mysterious Teraphim

My latest video is on the story of King Saul and his visit to the so-called Witch of Endor to summon the spirit of dead Samuel. It’s based on an article I wrote several years ago, but as usual, I’ve added some new material.

A biblical topic that intersects the practice of necromancy—though not specifically the ritual at Endor—is that of the teraphim. These religious objects play a minor role in several stories and are also occasionally mentioned by the prophets, but their physical appearance and their purpose remain conjectural. Based on parallels in neighboring cultures, scholars have often thought that they were household idols of some kind, inherited from one generation to the next. Knowing more about them could be the key to a better understanding of Israelite folk religion. Let’s take a look at some key passages.

Babel: History, Mythology, and Meaning (Video)

Episode 2 is now up. This time, it’s about the Tower of Babel story and how it fits into both the biblical narrative and the typical patterns of Near Eastern mythology. It’s broadly based on this article about Babel that I wrote several years ago, but I have some new material and a new approach to the topic that I think many of my readers will find interesting. The YouTube description also links to a transcript if you prefer to read that instead.

Announcing a New Video Project

My media consumption increasingly comes in the form of YouTube videos these days — particularly documentary-style video essays on a variety of topics that interest me. One of my primary interests is obviously biblical studies, but there aren’t a lot of video channels that take biblical research seriously and communicate it to general audiences. So I decided I would give it a try.

Noah’s Flood: Competing Visions of a Mesopotamian Tradition

December of 1872 marked a watershed in biblical studies. At a highly publicized lecture for the Society for Biblical Archaeology, with British Prime Minister William Gladstone in attendance, an Assyriologist named George Smith revealed the startling contents of a tablet he had recently discovered. The tablet, one of 25,000 or so that had been excavated from the ruins of ancient Nineveh and sent back to the British Museum in London, told the story of a universal flood that sounded very much like the tale of Noah’s Ark that every churchgoer is familiar with. The tablet turned out to be one of twelve that made up the now-famous Gilgamesh Epic.

Michael the Great Prince and Saviour of Israel

 

In the New Testament, Christ is mankind’s divine mediator and intercessor, their high priest in the heavenly temple, the Holy One who sits at God’s right hand, and the saviour who descends to earth at the end of the age to vanquish Satan. But this multifaceted, cosmic identity wasn’t introduced by an itinerant Galilean preacher, nor did it originate with the teachings of the early apostles, for the notion of a divine saviour described in these terms was already widespread in Judaism before Christianity was born. He went by many names, but the one he was known by most often was Michael. In this article, I want to explore his development and his importance to both Judaism and Christianity.

The Structure of Heaven and Earth: How Ancient Cosmology Shaped Everyone’s Theology

The Bible is often difficult to make sense of without the proper conceptual framework. Why is Paul concerned about mysterious angels, principles, powers, forces, and archons in his epistles? Why are interactions with demons at the forefront of Jesus’ ministry in Mark? Why is heaven sometimes described as having different levels? Why does Paul describe people under the law as being enslaved to the elements? What motivated early Christians to worship a heavenly saviour? It’s hard to answer these questions without a detailed understanding of ancient Jewish and Greek cosmology, so I’ve spent a great deal of time reading the best books I can find on the subject. Much of what I learned surprised me; perhaps it will surprise you too.

This article might seem to ramble at first. There are dozens of different threads that need to be explored before we can see the tapestry they produce in Christianity.

Shamgar Son of Anat and Israel’s Age of Heroes

Few biblical characters are as obscure as Shamgar ben Anat. To be sure, there are many names that appear just once or twice in the genealogies, but Shamgar is a character whose actions distinguish him within the biblical narrative, and not just a forgotten name on a list. Although he is mentioned in only two verses, he is supposedly one of the judges of Israel who was remembered for a mighty feat in battle. However, I knew practically nothing about him beside the name before I set about writing this article, and I chose him as an experiment to find out how much biblical studies could tell me about such a marginal character. 

Bethel, the Forgotten God of Israel

Few literary sources about the early religion of Israel are available to us. There is the Old Testament of course, and although many of its stories and traditions are old, the text itself comes to us through redacted manuscripts produced by Judean scribes at a fairly late date. From archaeological evidence and careful analysis of some of the Bible’s earliest passages, scholars have developed a view of early Israel that was much more polytheistic right from its origins than the traditional story would have us believe.

In the early 20th century, a collection of Aramaic papyri discovered in Egypt opened a new window on Israelite religion. They consist of letters, legal documents, and literature written by and for a colony of Israelites and Arameans who were apparently recruited as mercenaries to guard the southern frontier of Egypt at what is now Aswan. Dated to the fifth century BCE, these papyri are far older than any biblical manuscripts we possess, and unlike the Bible, they are original documents with no opportunity for editing and revision over the centuries. Although Yahweh is frequently mentioned in the form “Yaho” (YHW or occasionally YHH), the letters also mention the god Bethel and the goddesses Anat-Bethel (i.e. Anat consort of Bethel), Anat-Yaho, and the Queen of Heaven in association with people who are clearly Israelites. There seems to be a clear implication that these were other deities venerated by at least some Jews and Israelites. Can we find other evidence that such was the case? For this article, I am particularly interested in Bethel, but others may occasionally come into the picture.

Some Curious Numerical Facts about the Ages of the Patriarchs

“Why did the people in Genesis live to be hundreds of years old?” is a question that surely everyone who ever took the Bible seriously has asked. Those who have moved on from their childhood (or childish) adherence to a literal interpretation of Genesis are still generally curious about the ages and if there is any symbolism to the numbers that the Bible records with such tedious exactitude.

Some of the typical answers provided by biblical scholars are less than satisfying, and the fact is that most of the numbers themselves may simply be meaningless on their own. However, some odd facts concerning the ages of the patriarchs have recently been analyzed in biblical studies journals, adding to our knowledge of the Bible’s composition history in the process. There are two issues of particular interest: the numbers in the genealogies taken as a whole, and a problem introduced by the Flood story, which required some tampering with the genealogies by the Bible’s editors.

Gog and Magog: Israel’s Mysterious Northern Foes

Like many children raised in an Evangelical, charismatic church environment in the 80s, I was surrounded by a simmering fervour regarding the End Times and the Rapture, which we were constantly reminded could happen at any time. And like so many Christian households of that era, our bookshelf held a copy of Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth¹, which warned of a looming world war that had been foretold in the Bible. When we visited certain friends of my parents, the grown-up conversation would inevitably turn to current events and biblical prophecy, and my curious ears always perked up. I also remember my first encounter with the extremely lucrative End Times media industry — an episode of Jack Van Impe Presents — which left a lasting impression on me. Host Jack Van Impe would quote snippets from Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation in rapid fire, showing how they all described the coming apocalyptic war against Israel. Even the identities of the participants were helpfully provided by the Bible, Jack assured his viewers; Russia would be the main aggressor, leading a coalition of such diverse nations as Iran, Germany, Egypt, and Ethiopia against Israel and her Western allies. To reach this undeniable conclusion, one simply needed to convert the names provided by Ezekiel — Magog, Meshech, Tubal, Gomer, etc. — into their modern equivalents. Welcome to modern dispensationalism.