One such feature is the human brain’s built-in hyperactive agent detection device (HADD), which causes us to react automatically to unexplained sights or sounds as if they might be caused by agents, someone or something capable of initiating action—even though most of the time the imagined agent will prove to be a false alarm. Since it does produce false alarms, this brain feature is described as hyperactive or hypersensitive10—and it is found in nonhuman brains as well. It is the reason why your dog barks at almost anything, including the sound of snow sliding off the roof, and why a sudden creaking sound coming from a closet may suggest to you that someone is in there. But a thousand false alarms are worth it if one time our HADD gives us early warning of what turns out to be a real threat—there really is a burglar in the closet.
The HADD, it has been argued, combines with another basic feature of cognition, the human “theory of mind” (ToM)11—our attribution of mental activity to a perceived agent (usually another human being). Thus, if we see someone coming toward us, we assume that he (or it) has a mind like ours, and that this mind is what is directing him toward us. As a result, we seek to put ourselves in his shoes, trying to figure out what he is thinking and intending to do. All this, it was argued, is fine when it comes to other human beings, and maybe even some animals—it protects us and guides us in social interactions. But when ancient humans’ HADD caused them to imagine an unknown creature rustling through the grass or sailing across the nighttime sky, they not only attributed the perceived activity to an unknown agent, but they further supposed that this agent had a mind that was causing it to move (hence the name “theory of mind”). From there, this approach holds, it was only a small step to imagining unseen deities piloting the sun or driving the rain clouds in off the sea. Even if offering prayers or sacrifices to the imagined deity did not work every time, the small material loss was far outweighed by the potential gain if it did.
Religion is thus sometimes presented as an ancient human example of exaptation,12 or else it is seen as a mental spandrel,13 both terms referring to a feature originally evolved to fulfill one purpose but which ultimately came to fulfill another. A HADD was great for detecting potential enemies, and a theory of mind could help you figure out what to do when confronted with one. But once developed, these brain features ultimately led to the creation of religion—a mixed blessing in the eyes of some neuroscientists. Along with this, however, other scholars have sought to claim that the religious impulse is not a behavioral exaptation, but the expression of a built-in, physical part of the human brain, branded by critics as the “God spot,”14 an inborn predisposition to religious feelings and thoughts.15 In addition, scholars of varying approaches have highlighted a somewhat surprising characteristic of religion, the apparent necessity of including counterintuitive elements in religious beliefs—supernatural beings, reports of happenings that contradict experience or the laws of nature, and so forth.16
These various attempts to put things on a more scientific basis are certainly suggestive, though a number of basic shortcomings emerge from the scholarship so far.17 In general, the somewhat polemical character of the research (as mentioned, they basically all start from the assumption that religious consciousness is some sort of accidental byproduct of human evolution or an evolutionarily favored delusion), as well as the very multiplicity of their proposed conclusions, has done little to settle the matter of religion’s origins; although individual insights are promising, the work overall has been highly speculative, if not to say scattershot. My own point of departure is the belief that religious behavior is indeed rooted in reality, but a reality predicated on a mode of being quite different from our own, of which the semipermeability of the mind is only one representative aspect.
While neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists have been approaching religion through their disciplines, ethnographers and anthropologists have continued the study of specific religious rituals and worship in various non-Western civilizations. This undertaking has yielded a vast array of individual studies—indeed, charting the various practices and beliefs that might fall under the general heading of religion is now a steady feature of ethnographic fieldwork, widely recognized as a central concern of the whole discipline of anthropology. It would be difficult to name all the distinguished field anthropologists whose work has focused on religion over the last century, but certainly such a list would include such outstanding scholars as Bronislaw Malinowski,18 Franz Boas,19 E. E. Evans-Pritchard,20 Godfrey Lienhardt,21 Claude Lévi-Strauss,22 and Clifford Geertz.23
It should be stressed, however, that the work of these scholars has not been aimed at uncovering religion’s beginnings. Its major achievement has been in the development of new approaches and forms of analysis: the study of witchcraft and magic; the structural analysis of myth; religion as a symbolic system;24 and much more. These certainly have helped in broadening the very notion of what “religion” consists of, as well as how we might best go about trying to understand it as a phenomenon. But it is simply a fact that the religious ideas and behavior of the non-Westerners today are altogether the contemporaries of our own, Western religions. Only the notion that these non-Westerners are “primitive” and thus theoretically closer to religion’s origins might lead one to identify what they think and do as representing the beginning of it all—and such an assumption is methodologically suspect.*
Another approach to trying to understand how humans came to worship divine beings like Ba‘al is to go back to the earliest evidence of their existence. As far as the Bible is concerned, this means staying in the Bible’s own geographic and cultural orbit, since evidence from Mesoamerican religion or sub-Saharan Africa may provide some interesting parallels, but it will offer no direct, genetic connection to biblical Israel and environs.
The problem with this approach, as scholars themselves readily admit, is that such evidence does not go back particularly far.25 Walter Burkert, an outstanding historian of ancient Greek religion, has stated the problem clearly:
Ancient religion is a tradition as old, perhaps, as mankind itself; but its tracks are lost in prehistory as time scales expand. The measurement of epochs from the eighth century BC onwards is made in centuries or even decades, but before this lie four “dark centuries,” and then [before these] some eight centuries of Bronze Age high civilization. The Early Bronze Age stretches back over an additional thousand years, and [before these,] the Neolithic [Age] extends over more than three millennia. The Upper Paleolithic, which then spans more than 25,000 years, still leaves the beginnings of human history almost as remote as ever; there are indications of religi[on] stretching from the Lower Paleolithic.26
The problem is the same with regard to Israel’s religion(s),27 or more broadly, the religions of the ancient Near East to which Israel belonged. Considering the ever-widening periods of time past, the specific evidence of religious practices and beliefs that can be gathered will always fall hopelessly short of religion’s theoretical starting point and tell us little about the earliest gods and their worship.
Yet this is the evidence that we possess, and if it comes eons too late to give us the whole story, it can at least offer us a glimpse of times far distant from our own. Indeed, the ruins of ancient temples and related structures, and even the (somewhat later) remains of the earliest writings from the ancient Near East, can tell us a great deal about how divine beings were conceived long before the time of the human encounter with God as presented in the Hebrew Bible. Particularly crucial for this endeavor is the historical evidence of ancient Mesopotamia, starting with Sumer, where evidence of writing appears as early as the late fourth millennium BCE. From only slightly later times comes the adaptation of the Sumerian pictographs to a system of signs made by a wedge-shaped tool sunk into wet clay: these are the cuneiform signs used by the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians, ancient Canaan’s neighbors to the east.
The Enchanted World
One thing we know from the oldest writings of Mesopotamia is that ass
ociating “religion” only with gods and goddesses is far too narrow. (This is one way in which the neuroscientists’ focus on the HADD and the like falls far short of the whole picture.) To borrow a phrase from the philosopher Charles Taylor, this was the “enchanted world,” vibrant and alive and brimming with the unknown. It was enchanted in general, since what I mean to describe above all is an attitude, a way of looking out at, and conceiving of, reality. So people slogged along in their usual, scruffy, human activities, but always up ahead loomed the possibility of something wholly different, the sudden realization that things are not at all as they seem, that the upper shelf was at it again; one could never really know for sure what was going on up there. “Enchanted” here is also meant to suggest this word’s connection to incantations and magic, since this was a world in which all sorts of spiritual entities held sway, known and unknown, visible and invisible, animate and inanimate (such as sky and wind): these were the different agents responsible for all that happens on earth. Perhaps one of them had cast some sort of spell.
Some of the oldest evidence of religious ritual that we possess is concerned with demonic powers, invisible creatures who brought disease and death to humans. In Mesopotamia, as elsewhere, their malign influence was not easily countered; all people had were certain rituals, including sacrifices, incantations, and apotropaic prayers, any of which might help to get rid of them.28 One of the relatively few “religious” texts surviving in Akkadian from the Archaic period (2300–2000 BCE) describes a ritual performed to protect someone who has been afflicted by the evil eye. It required bringing a sheep into the victim’s house, holding it up at each of the house’s four corners, and then slaughtering it:
One black virgin ewe: In (each of) the corners of the house he will lift it up (?). He will drive out the Evil Eye and the [ ] . . . In the garden he will slaughter it and flay its hide. He proceeds to fill it with pieces of . . . plant. As he fills it, he should watch. The evil man [ ] his skin. Let [him] car[ry (it) to the river], (and) seven (pieces of) date palm, seven (pieces of) oak, and seven (pieces of . . .) let him submerge.29
Surely no one would waste a whole sheep and these other edibles if he did not believe, or at least hope, that this might work in getting rid of the evil eye—which is to say that being attacked by the evil eye was a part of a feared reality toward the end of the third millennium BCE. Moreover, the very fact that this ceremony was written down suggests that it was believed to be effective, perhaps even that it had worked in the past—if not every time, then at least sometimes.
In ancient Mesopotamia, fighting off curses uttered by humans was also a real concern: the curses often called upon a specific demon to attack the victim, making him sick or even killing him. The terror inspired by such demons was, at least for some, a real aspect of daily life. Here is a description of the malevolent spirit Lamashtu in another Akkadian text from the same Archaic period:
She is singular, she is uncanny.
She is a child born late in life (?), she is a will-o’-the-wisp,
She is a haunt, she is malicious,
Offspring of a god, daughter of [the god] Anu.
For her malevolent will, her base counsel,
Anu her father dashed her down from heaven to earth,
For her malevolent will, her inflammatory counsel.
Her hair is askew, her loincloth is torn away.
She makes her way straight to the person without a (protective) god.
She can benumb the sinews of a lion,
She can . . . the sinews of a youngster or infant.30
If we now fast-forward to ancient Israel, many things will be seen to have changed, but much of the enchanted world remains. King Saul is thus reported to have gone to a medium for advice, a woman who knew how to rouse the dead. The medium succeeds in summoning the dead prophet Samuel from his sleep in the grave (1 Sam 28): Samuel is angry at being disturbed, but then he tells Saul that his death is imminent—a piece of information from the “other side” which, it turns out, was altogether true. In other words, the dead continue to exist somewhere “down there,” and a medium can force them to come up to the surface and reveal what they know.
Biblical laws forbade consulting mediums and other things that never would have been forbidden if people were not still doing them:
You shall not let a witch live. (Exod 22:17)
Let there not be found among you anyone who passes his son or daughter through fire, or someone who casts magic spells, or a soothsayer, or a diviner, or a magician, or a sorcerer, or someone who consults ghosts or informing spirits, or one who summons up the dead. (Deut 18:10–11)
Do not consult ghosts, and as for the informing spirits, do not seek to be defiled by them . . . Anyone who consults informing spirits and goes astray after them—I will set My face against that person and cut him off from among his people . . . A man or woman who has a ghost or an informing spirit shall be put to death. (Lev 19:31, 20:6, 27)
[God says:] I will destroy the sorcery you practice, and you shall have no more soothsayers. (Mic 5:11)
Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling-block in the path of a blind person. (Lev 19:14)
Why should cursing the deaf be forbidden, but cursing other people apparently permitted? The obvious answer is that curses were believed to work actual harm; someone who hears himself being cursed, or hears about his being cursed, can try to ward off the curse’s effects—with prayers and sacrifices, or by counter-cursing—but a deaf person is defenseless, just as defenseless as a blind person who trips over a stumbling-block.*
A Fishy Plural
Looking back at Hosea’s battle against Ba‘al worship, it is clear that he is still very much in the enchanted world. Those powers that are on the upper shelf are still dealing out weal and woe; the matter of who really is “Mr. Rain,” Ba‘al or YHWH—or even if the two names were sometimes deemed to belong to a single, syncretized deity—was probably far less important to the ordinary Israelite than the much-needed help that invoking one or both of them could bring.
But one aspect of Hosea’s speech has yet to be mentioned. What does the prophet mean by telling Mother Israel to get rid of her “lovers,” in the plural? If her crime is pursuing Ba‘al instead of YHWH, isn’t that just one lover? Why does Hosea have her say, “I’ll go after my lovers, who gave me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink”? And a few verses later, God says:
I’ll destroy her vines and her fig trees, which she thought were payments for service, given to her by her lovers,
And I’ll turn them into a forest, where beasts gobble up their prey.
That is how she’ll be punished for the days of the Be‘alim,
when she used to bring offerings to them. (Hos 2:12–13)
“Be‘alim” is the plural of “Ba‘al,” so there can be little doubt that these Be‘alim are her lovers.31 But how can there be more than one god named Ba‘al?
Hosea is not the only one to refer to this god in the plural. Elsewhere, in the book of Judges, it says: “The Israelites did what was wrong in the eyes of the LORD, and they worshiped the Be‘alim” (Jud 2:11). And a little later: “And the Israelites did what was wrong in the eyes of the LORD and they forgot their God YHWH, and they worshiped the Be‘alim and the Asherot.”*32 After Gideon’s death, according to Judges 8:33, “the Israelites went back to whoring after the Be‘alim.” “We worshiped the Be‘alim,” the Israelites confess in Judges 10:10 and in 1 Samuel 12:10. Elijah reproves King Ahab: “You have forsaken the commandments of the LORD and gone after the Be‘alim” (1 Kings 18:18). Why do these texts keep referring to a singular god in the plural?
A Basic Misconception
Here the evidence from the ancient Near East has proven particularly enlightening, since recent research has revealed a basic misconception that has long existed about the way in which ancient divinities were actually conceived. We tend to think of the gods as divine humanoids, equipped with bodies that look very much like our own�
�rather like those statues of gods and goddesses familiar to us from classical Greece and Rome. But there was always something rather fluid about the very idea of divine beings in the ancient world. Even those human-looking gods and goddesses portrayed in Greek statuary were, in ancient myths, sometimes said to change their shapes: Zeus could become a swan or a bull, Callisto was turned into a bear and later put up in the heavens, and Aphrodite could become an old lady wool-comber, while her Roman equivalent, Venus, could take on the disguise of a teenage huntress. Go back into the ancient Near East and the whole idea of reducing a god to a single, humanoid being is sharply refuted by the evidence. Gods were many things at once.
Thus, according to the Egyptologist Hans Bonnet, gods in ancient Egypt could take up residence inside various things or people—or even other gods:
Just as any god can take up his abode in a fetish or in an animal, or even in the king, so he can inhabit the body of another deity. The formula “Amon-Re” does not signify that [the god] Amun is the same as [the god] Re or that one god has merged into the other. It simply notes that Re is in Amun—but not in such a way that both would be indissociably attached to each other and could continue to exist only in partnership. No inhabiting is permanent. The partners can separate again and be manifest independently; they can also form unions with other deities. So it is not a contradiction for there to exist, alongside Amon-Re, such figures as Min-Re, Khnum-Re, Re-Atum, or simply Re.33
The Great Shift Page 11
