Middle Eastern religion
Introduction
any of the religious beliefs, attitudes, and practices developed in the ancient Middle East (extending geographically from Iran to Egypt and from Anatolia and the Aegean Sea to the Arabian Peninsula and temporally from about 3000 to 330 BC, when Alexander the Great conquered much of the area). They have had an enduring influence on Western civilization. While this article treats only those religions of Middle Eastern antiquity that have not survived to modern times, special attention is given in the introduction to their role as antecedents of the major Western religions (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and Islām), all of which originated in the region. For full treatment of these “inheritors” of the Middle Eastern tradition, including also the surviving Zoroastrianism and Parsiism, see under the names of the individual religions.
General considerations
The ancient Middle East constituted an ecumene. The term ecumene comes from the Greek word oikoumenē, which means the inhabited world and designates a distinct cultural-historical community. The material effects of the commercial and cultural interconnections that permeated the component regions of the ancient Middle Eastern ecumene are richly supplied by archaeological excavations, which provide evidence of the spread of architectural, ceramic, metallurgical, and other products of ancient Middle Eastern man's industry. Manufacturing and services tended to be monopolized by professional guilds (guild), including religious personnel specializing in sacrifices, oracles, divination, and other kinds of priestcraft. The mobility of such guilds throughout the entire area helps to explain the spread of specific religious ideas and techniques over great distances. Just as guild potters spread ceramic forms and methods, so also guild priests spread their religious concepts and practices from the Indian Ocean to the Aegean (Aegean civilizations) Sea, and from the Nile River to Central Asia. The Greek poet Homer, in the Odyssey, noted the mobility of guildsmen, mentioning religious personnel as well as architects, physicians, and minstrels. Guild priests called kohanim (cohen) were found at ancient Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria as well as in Israel. Moreover, Mycenaean Greek (Greek religion) (late Bronze Age) methods of sacrifice are similar to the Hebraic methods, which are preserved in many countries to this day in the traditional techniques of Jewish ritual slaughter.
The “archaeological (archaeology) revolution”
The decipherment of Mesopotamian and Egyptian literatures in the 19th century opened new vistas of ancient Middle Eastern history. Hitherto, scholarly knowledge had been limited to the contents of classical Hebrew, Greek, and Latin literatures. Explorations and excavations in the Middle East yielded not only texts but also an abundance of ancient art objects, artifacts of daily life, and architecture and thus have revolutionized scholarly knowledge of the ancient Middle East, including its religions. A ziggurat excavated at Babylon illustrates the form of the biblical Tower of Babel. The prototype of the biblical story of the Deluge has turned up in the Gilgamesh epic. A fragment (dating from about 1400 BC) of that Babylonian epic has been found at Megiddo in Israel, showing that the Mesopotamian version was current in Palestine before the Hebrews, under Joshua, conquered the land about 1200 BC. A previously little-known people, the Hittites, are, because of archaeological discoveries, now recognized as a major power of antiquity with a rich legacy of religious texts, especially rituals.
The earliest and certainly the most fundamental ancient Middle Eastern civilization—the Sumerian (Sumer)—had vanished without a reference in the literatures of the world. Sumerology is now an important field of investigation. Biblical studies have been revolutionized by the tablets (1400–1200 BC) found from 1929 onward at Ugarit. It has become extremely difficult to keep abreast of the continually growing body of material, and very few scholars today feel secure enough to venture beyond limited areas.
Literary sources of knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern religion
classical literature remains an important source for ancient Middle Eastern religion. The Roman historian Livy wrote many descriptions of religious rites of the ancient Middle East. The Roman poet Virgil's (Virgil) Aeneid and Eclogues reflect Egyptian, Semitic, and Anatolian, as well as Greek, antecedents. The Greek biographer Plutarch's (Plutarch) De Iside et Osiride (“Concerning Isis and Osiris”) is still the best description of the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris and of the cult of the dead. The Greek satirist Lucian's (Lucian) De Dea Syra (“Concerning the Syrian Goddess”) is of enduring value for an understanding of Canaanite religion. The writings of Herodotus, the 5th-century-BC Greek historian, remain an indispensable source for the cultural history and religion of the ancient Middle East. And owing to the discovery of texts from Ugarit, the Homeric epic of the Greeks is now firmly linked to Middle Eastern literature.
The Hebrew Bible is still the most important single source for knowledge of the ancient Middle East, reflecting life from Egypt to Iran, and from the Bronze Age beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. There is very little in the Old Testament that does not follow the types of religious literatures in the older Middle East: psalms, hymns, laws, rituals, prophecy, wisdom literature, and other types. Sometimes parts of the Bible are related in detail to specific outside sources. The Egyptian Wisdom of Amenemope, first published in modern times in 1923, for example, parallels Proverbs 22:17–24:22 so closely that it effectively opened up the field of the comparative study of ancient Middle Eastern wisdom literature.
Middle Eastern worldviews and basic religious thought
The concept of the sacred
All of the ancient Middle Eastern people saw the agency of the gods in every aspect of life and nature (nature worship). Everything on earth was regarded as a reflex of its prototype in the divine or sacred sphere, such as in the biblical description of the creation (creation myth) of man “in the image of God”; God was viewed as the primary reality of the universe, and human beings were seen as the reflection of that reality. In Egypt, Thoth was the scribe in the pantheon. Mortal scribes were viewed as the human reflections of Thoth, and “the beak of the Ibis (i.e., Thoth) is the finger of the Scribe” (Wisdom of Amenemope, ch. XV, 17:7).
The ancient Middle Eastern people believed that the universe (cosmology) resulted from the injecting of order ( Cosmos) into chaotic primordial beings or matter, followed by divine acts of creation. Genesis 1:1–3 says that when God began to create the heavens and the earth, the “earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light'; and there was light.” Thus darkness (i.e., evil) was preexistent. Moreover, the deep (tehom in Hebrew) is the same as the primordial dragon called Tiamat (cognate to the Hebrew tehom) in the Babylonian (Babylonia) epic of creation. The first act of creation is God's evoking light (i.e., the forces of good) by fiat. Accordingly, God is not responsible for the forces of evil, which were there before he embarked on the creative process. Proceeding by fiat he separated the water-containing earth from the water-containing heaven, confined the earth's waters to the bodies of water (leaving the rest as dry land), created the various species of vegetation, the heavenly bodies, the animal kingdom, and finally man, who is to rule over the earth. All this takes six days, after which God rests on the seventh, so that the Sabbath crowns the epic of creation and imposes the obligation to observe the sabbath in keeping with the principle of imitatio Dei (the imitation of God).
The Babylonian creation epic (Enuma elish, “When on High”) states that at first there existed only the male (Apsu) and female (Tiamat) gods of the deep. They raised a family of gods that were so unruly that Apsu resolved to destroy them. Rebellion and chaos ensued. Among the deities was Marduk, the god of Babylon. Since the main version of the epic of creation is the Babylonian, Marduk occupies the role of Creator. (In the Assyrian version, Ashur is important.) Tiamat, who had embarked on a course of destruction, was slain by Marduk, who cut her in two and used her carcass to create the universe. Out of half her body he fashioned the sky containing the heavenly bodies to mark the periods of time. The epic culminates in the glorification of Marduk and the establishment of his order. The Enuma elish was read on the Akitu, or New Year festival, at Babylon, to reestablish order, in accordance with sympathetic transference principles, by reciting Marduk's creation. The function of the Akitu is thus to rejuvenate society for the new year.
Views of man and society
The lack of hard-and-fast barriers between gods and men left room for hybridizing. The aristocracy, in particular, claimed some divine (sacred kingship) form of ancestry. Gilgamesh, a mortal king who ruled Uruk in Mesopotamia, was, according to the Gilgamesh epic, born of the goddess Ninsun, even as among the Greeks Achilles was accepted as the son of the goddess Thetis. Sometimes kings claimed to have two divine parents. King Keret, whose epic was found at Ugarit, claimed to be the son of El, the head of the pantheon, and of Asherah, El's wife. Every Egyptian pharaoh was hailed as “the son of Re” (the sun god). This does not, however, imply the absence of a human father. The concept was one of paternity at two levels; qualitative superiority emanated from the notion of divine paternity, but one's position in society came from the human husband of one's mother. Odysseus “the Zeus-begotten son of Laertes” (Iliad 10:144) was a hero because Zeus presumably impregnated his mother; but he was also king of Ithaca because his mother's husband was King Laertes of Ithaca. In this regard the birth and station of Christ (Jesus Christ) differ only in that Mary was a virgin when she was divinely impregnated. Though the divine component of Christ is due to his divine paternity, his position as king of the Jews comes not from his heavenly Father but from Mary's husband, Joseph, who was descended from King David (Matthew 1).
In the ancient Middle Eastern worldview, gods could become mortal, and men could become gods. Utnapishtim, the hero of the Babylonian Flood story, was deified together with his wife by the fiat of the great god Enlil: “Hitherto Utnapishtim has been but human; henceforth Utnapishtim and his wife shall be like us gods” (Gilgamesh epic 11:193–194). In the Hebrew Bible, God so loved Enoch (Genesis 5:24) and Elijah (2 Kings 2:11) that he carried them aloft to heaven as immortals. But these were special cases, and in antiquity they set no precedent for common folk. Kings enjoyed deification regularly in Egypt, though in some other traditions only upon dying. The Hittite monarch Hattusilis III refers to his father's death as “when my father Mursilis became a god” (Apology of Hattusilis, line 22).
From the ancient Middle Eastern point of view, man (human being) was created to serve the gods, and he does so in the hope that the gods appreciate it and will reward him for it. The gods need food and drink and depend on men to supply them. After the Flood the biblical Noah won God's goodwill, for “the Lord smelled the pleasing odor” (Genesis 8:21) of the tasty flesh and fowl offered up to him. Noah was following a long tradition, for Utnapishtim (Gilgamesh epic 11:155–161) had, after the Flood, offered sacrifices (sacrifice) and libations to the gods who “crowded like flies” as they “smelled the sweet savor.” Though gods depend on man, man also depends on the gods, and therefore service (worship) to the deities must be maintained for the welfare of the state, even as the family and the individual must do what the gods expect of them for domestic and personal welfare.
Everything on earth reflects a divine prototype, and all human affairs are divinely ordered and scrutinized. Gods may even build the cities destined to be their cultic centres and in which they are to reside, at least part of the time. The Greek god Poseidon built the walls of Troy, according to the Iliad (21:446–447). At Ugarit, Baal's (Baal) temple was designed and built by Kothar-wa-Hasis (Kothar), the god of arts and crafts. The Israelite King David gave his son Solomon plans for the Temple (Jerusalem, Temple of) drawn up by Yahweh's (the Lord's) own hand (1 Chronicles 28:19).
National policy went hand in hand with theology. Ashur was the national deity of Assyria; (Assyria) the kings of Assyria were in theory his chief executive officers. Thus Sennacherib, king of Assyria, in undertaking a military campaign, recorded that he did so not on his own initiative but in conformity with Ashur's will: “In my second campaign, Ashur my Lord impelled me.” When the Hebrews and Ammonites had a border dispute, Jephthah told the Ammonites: “Will you not possess what Chemosh your god gives you to possess? And all that the Lord our God has dispossessed before us, we will possess” (Judges 11:24). There was no such thing as secular policy in the ancient Middle East.
Since the king was the human agent of the god, he was exalted above other men. In Israel, the king was chosen by God to rule his people. God's representative was a priest or prophet who consecrated the king by anointing his head with oil. But the king of Israel was not divine, neither while on the throne nor after death.
The divinity of kings evoked certain fictions (religious symbolism and iconography). By sucking the breasts of goddesses, crown princes imbibed a source of divinity. The baby pharaoh sucking the breasts of Isis (who was perhaps in real life represented by her high priestess) is a common motif in Egyptian art. In Mesopotamia (Mesopotamian religion), it was not the usual practice for kings to claim divinity, but now and then it cropped up. Naram-Sin (23rd century BC) prefixed the sign for divinity before his name and was officially a god. The same usage is attested among kings of the 3rd dynasty of Ur (c. 2112 BC–2004 BC).
Views of basic values and ends of human life
The good life was one lived in accord with the regulations of one's god. In the realm of ethics and morals there was more international uniformity than there was in taboo and ritual. Honesty and kindness were universally recognized as good, theft and murder as bad. Wisdom literature tended to stress the same virtues and to condemn the same vices, regardless of the region and cult. It remained for the prophets of Israel to single out uncompromising virtue as the overriding consideration in the good life required by God. The most important factor in that system was “social justice,” whereby the weak was always protected in conflicts of interest with the strong. This had an important place in what may be called “international religion”—i.e., that governing relations between men from different areas belonging to different cults. That level of religion, called “fear of the gods,” is tested when the strong man confronts the weak. The strong man who injures the weak lacks the fear of the gods; the strong man who helps the weak has the fear of the gods. This was religion transcending all the regional cults, and it came into play when strangers abroad were at the mercy of the local inhabitants. Odysseus in a foreign land wanted to know if the people there feared the gods or were lawless so that no stranger was safe (Odyssey 9:176). Abraham, too, was concerned in Philistia lest the inhabitants might kill him because there was no “fear of God(s)” (Genesis 20:11). Men of all nations and all cults knew that only among god-fearing men was there decency or safety.
There was another common trend in international religion. No matter how polytheistic a cult may have been, it left a place for the god shared by all peoples. Theos, “God” (not merely “a god”), is in Homer; pa netjer, “the God,” occurs in Egyptian exactly like Elohim, “(the) God,” in Hebrew. Nebuchadrezzar II, the 7th–6th-century-BC Babylonian king, made Zedekiah, the Judaean king, swear by Elohim (2 Chronicles 36:13), the God of the universe for Babylonians and Hebrews alike. Similarly, when the Hebrews spoke of truth uttered by Pharaoh Necho (Necho II), which fell on the deaf ears of the Judaean King Josiah, the text (2 Chronicles 35:21) states that Elohim, “God,” had spoken through the mouth of the pharaoh.
In Egyptian religion (followed by Judaism, Christianity, and Islām), the concept of a happy afterlife depending on one's ethical and moral record in this world was developed. Vignettes in the various Egyptian books of the dead (Book of the Dead) show the deceased's heart being weighed against the feather of truth in the balances before the scribe god Thoth, who records the text. When the Bible speaks of God as “who tests the heart and the kidneys” (Psalms 7:9; Jeremiah 11:20 and 20:12) it refers to the same concept.
Myths (myth) as the basic mode of religious thought
Myths were developed to account for the cosmos. How did the gods bring heavens, earth, plants, beasts, and human beings into existence? What is the divine origin of human institutions and of the ecumene? What divine process is responsible for prosperity or failure? To explain such basic questions, etiological (origin or causal) myths were developed. For example, the attraction between man and woman (and the consequent institution of marriage) is explained by the myth that primeval man was one creature, subsequently divided into two parts, male and female, which are attracted to one another to regain their pristine unity. Aristophanes expresses this theory of sexual attraction in Plato's Symposium. Genesis relates the same theory in the familiar myth that a rib, taken out of Adam (Adam and Eve), was fashioned into Eve; and precisely because woman was taken out of man, man forsakes his father and mother to cleave unto his wife so that they become one flesh.
Myths are often invoked in magic (which, unlike religion, aims at compelling, instead of imploring, the gods). To banish evil from the life of a client, the magician may invoke the cosmic myth whereby the forces of good triumph over the forces of evil. Evil is depicted on a seal of the Akkad period (late 3rd millennium BC) in Mesopotamia as a seven-headed monster whose heads are being successively killed by good anthropomorphic (human-form) beings. At Ugarit, in mythological poems of the late Bronze Age, the good gods Baal and Anath slay the wicked Leviathan of the Seven Heads, providing the precedent for the victory of good over evil. The Hebrews (Judaism) also nurtured this myth whereby God slays the many-headed Leviathan (Psalms 74:14) and will do so again at the end of days, to quell evil and establish good for all eternity (Isaiah 27:1).
Association of religion with the arts and sciences
Religion in the ancient Middle East was associated with both the arts and the sciences, though in the literature of the area it is difficult to disentangle the secular from the sacred. Hymns, at one level, and omen or ritual texts, at another level, are clearly religious. Yet it would be difficult to categorize the Gilgamesh epic of Mesopotamia or the Homeric epics of Greece as definitely either secular or religious. They deal with human events or worldly problems, but the gods are constantly on hand. The same may be said for two Ugaritic epics, the epic of Keret and the epic of Daniel and Aqhat, which date from the late Bronze Age. This also holds for the patriarchal narratives in the biblical book of Genesis about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in which God and his messengers play the same kind of role in human affairs as do the gods in the Homeric or Ugaritic epics.
Religion had close ties with science (science, history of) as well as with literature and art. Astronomy, mathematics, and time reckoning are sciences in which the ancient Middle East made great strides at an early date, long before 3000 BC. Heavenly bodies were at the same time both deities and personified numbers. The planet Venus was the “star” that the Assyrians and Babylonians called Ishtar, which was at the same time both the goddess Ishtar and the deified number 15. The Moon was not only Earth's satellite but also the lunar deity Sin and the deified number 30. The most perfect number was one, for by advancing from zero to one men believed they proceeded from nonexistence to existence. Moreover, all other whole numbers were regarded as multiples of one, representative of the Creator, the Prime Mover, of the universe. The Egyptians called Re “the one One”; the Babylonians identified the divine “One” with Anu, the god of heaven. When the Hebrew prophet Zechariah (14:9) proclaimed “on that day the Lord will be one and his name One,” he indicated that the Hebrews, like their neighbours, reckoned with sacred numbers and saw in the number one a symbol of the Creator. Biblical monotheism, therefore, has more than one dimension, including not only the monotheistic principle that there is one God and none beside him but also the mathematical principle of the primacy of “one” and its deification as the Prime Mover.
The role of magic
The loftier trends of ancient Middle Eastern religion did not as a rule threaten to eliminate magic. White, or protective, magic was never seriously discouraged. Black, or destructive, magic (sorcery) was frowned on by organized society, regardless of whether the official religion was monotheistic or polytheistic, because black magic makes its victims unfit for functioning productively in society. Section II of the Babylonian king Hammurabi's (Hammurapi's) code punishes witchcraft (as well as false accusations of witchcraft) with the death penalty. Moreover, all organized religion tended to oppose magic that circumvented the official clergy. King Saul of Israel had characteristically banned sorcery, driving it underground. Yet when he wanted guidance from the dead prophet Samuel, Saul consulted the Witch of Endor (Endor, Witch of), who was practicing her art illegally (1 Samuel 28:6–25). She was able to call up the spirit of the prophet from the underworld, which, incidentally, illustrates one of the reasons why society opposes spiritualism. The witch, by claiming to bring the greatest authorities of the past onto the current scene, threatens the authority of the establishment.
The Letters to the Dead (Book of the Dead) of pharaonic Egypt were written by living persons to the dead (death rite) in order to achieve practical results, in keeping with the pragmatic, down-to-earth nature of the ancient Egyptians. It was unquestioningly assumed that the dead continued to exert influence on the living. Difficulties experienced by widows, widowers, and other survivors were attributed to the malevolence or negligence of the ungrateful dead who failed to defend their dear ones in the land of the living.
The letters were most often inscribed on ceramic vessels but were sometimes written on papyrus, linen, or even on a stela. They were deposited in tombs, not necessarily those of the persons addressed. It was believed that all burials were part of one interconnected system and that the mail would be delivered to the deceased addressee as long as it was posted anywhere in this network.
The writers sometimes remind the deceased addressee of the water and offerings they have brought to the tomb. Occasionally they threaten to discontinue such services if the deceased persists in refusing to help them. A frequent grievance is that malevolent persons (often relatives) are defrauding the rightful heirs of the deceased person's estate. The writer may even vow to take legal action against the dead in the divine court of the West (i.e., of the realm of the dead).
One of the letters, known as the Leiden Papyrus, is particularly interesting because of the light it sheds on Egyptian life as well as on the relations between the living and the dead. The author is a widower who has been in a bad state since his wife's death. He is convinced that his misfortunes are due to his late wife's ill will. In the letter he reminds her that he was a model husband and threatens to testify against her in the court of the West. He goes on to say that he was a young and busy officer in the pharaoh's service at the time he married her. In spite of the pressures of his important duties, he writes, he stood by his wife and did not abandon her. He even made the soldiers under his command defer to her and render service to her. Moreover, he refrained from having affairs with other women. Before his wife's death he was assigned a mission to the wild south, on which he could not take her. Nevertheless, he provided for all her needs and gave nothing to other women. When she fell ill he engaged a skillful physician who gave her the best possible care. While death was overcoming her, he virtually abstained from eating and drinking for eight months. When he finally returned home to Memphis, he gave her a first-class funeral, complete with a shroud of the finest Upper-Egyptian linen. At the time of the letter, three years have passed since the wife's death. During this time he has lived alone and remained faithful to his departed wife. Yet in spite of this flawless record, she has been afflicting him and behaving like one who does not know the difference between right and wrong. He has therefore decided to prosecute her. In closing the letter he reaffirms his fidelity, declaring that he has not touched any of the female members of the household.
Religious practices and institutions
Nature (nature worship): the framework of ideas and practices
Fertility of agriculture (agriculture, origins of), of edible animals, and of the human population was a paramount factor in the life and religion of the ancient Middle East. The forms that the fertility rites assumed varied from region to region, depending on climate and geography. Rain and dew were all-important in Canaan but of little significance in Egypt (Egypt, ancient). In both areas water was crucial, but the source of the life-giving water was entirely different. The agricultural year varied in the two regions. In Egypt the year was divided into three seasons: inundation, sowing, and harvest. In Canaan there were two seasons: the winter, characterized by rainfall, and the summer, characterized by dew. The year was punctuated by different agricultural activities, as is indicated in the Gezer Calendar, in which all 12 months are accounted for as times of profitable agricultural activity, with harvests in the rainless summer as well as in the green winter. Anxiety was caused by the uncertainty of rain in the rainy season and of dew in its season. All of the regions of the ancient Middle East schematized the blessing of good years and the threat of bad years in terms of seven-year cycles. A Mesopotamian text illustrating this is the Gilgamesh epic (8:101–113), in which the slaying of the hero Gilgamesh would initiate seven lean years. At Ugarit the slaying of the hero Aqhat (Aqhat Epic) evokes a curse depriving the land of rain and dew for seven (or, climactically, eight) years. The seven lean and seven fat years in the biblical story of Joseph in Egypt reflect the same system. In Egypt, of course, rain and dew are out of the picture; instead, generous Nile (Nile River) risings mean prosperity; inadequate risings in the season of inundation spells misery. A text of the Ptolemaic period (4th–1st century BC), purporting to record events of the Pyramid age, tells of seven lean years in the reign of Djoser (3rd dynasty; i.e., c. 2650–c. 2575 BC). The pharaoh appealed to the gods, who responded by restoring an abundant flow of the Nile.The population desired the normal pattern of times and seasons, so that “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Genesis 8:22). But since the seasonal pattern is not dependable, the need for order evoked a system of cycles, notably the sabbatical, or seven-year, cycle. The sabbatical year was the seventh year, and the jubilee year followed seven sabbatical cycles. This was a pervasive system in the ancient Middle East. A Ugaritic liturgical text specially designed for this phenomenon aims at terminating a sabbatical cycle of privation and ushering in one of fertility by celebrating the birth and triumphal entrance of the deities Shahar (“Dawn”) and Shalim (“Dusk”), whose advent brings an abundance of food and wine.
It was only natural that fertility rites should include sexual myths (sexual behaviour, human) that were acted out dramatically. The Ugaritic text just alluded to describes El, the head of the pantheon, copulating with two human women. This has echoes in Hosea and Ezekiel (Old Testament) where God, as in the Canaanite literary tradition, is referred to as having a love affair with two women, symbolizing Judah and Israel. The Hebrews (Judaism), however, eventually eliminated sex from their official theology as well as from their religious practices. Up to the time of King Josiah's (Josiah) reform (621 BC) there was a women's cult of Asherah (under qedeshim (qedesha) auspices 【consecrated for fertility practices】, according to 2 Kings 23:7) in the Jerusalem Temple, alongside the male cult of Yahweh. Asherah's devotees considered her the chief wife of Yahweh, even as she was the wife of El, head of the Canaanite pantheon, for in the Bible El is identified with Yahweh. But Josiah eliminated the cult of Asherah, and official Judaism has since then left no place for other gods, which meant the elimination of every goddess. Popular religion, to be sure, persisted in the female fertility principle until the destruction of the Temple in 586 BC. In Judaean excavations Astarte figurines were found in private homes down to that time. Further purification of the Hebrew religion, which was intensified by the catastrophe of 586, put an end to the practice of pagan fertility rites, including the use of goddess figurines. Without goddesses there could be no sexual activity in the pantheon, and thus Judaism has developed without a divine mother figure.
The ancient Middle East made a place for homosexuality and bestiality (zoophilia) in its myths and rites. In the Asherah cult the qedeshim priests had a reputation for homosexual practices, even as the qedeshot priestesses for prostitution. Israel eventually banned both the qedeshim and qedeshot, while in Ugarit the qedeshim and kohanim were priestly guilds in equally good standing. Baal is portrayed in Ugaritic mythology as impregnating a heifer to sire the young bull god. The biblical book of Leviticus (18:22–27) bans homosexuality and bestiality expressly because the Canaanite population had been practicing those rites, which the Hebrews rejected as abominations.
Phoenician (Phoenicia)/Punic sites include an area called the tophet that contains large numbers of infant burials. One explanation of the tophet is that it reflects a major aspect of a fertility cult in which the first-born child (infanticide) belonged to the deity. The deity rewarded the parents who had sacrificed (sacrifice) their child (human sacrifice) with future fertility. In the Hebrew Bible, just as the firstfruits of the harvest belong to God, so do the first-born of the people and their domestic animals (Exodus 13:1, 12–13, 15).
The actual cases in the literature do not always specify infant sacrifice. The Bible describes how King Mesha of Moab sacrificed his crown prince to avert a military disaster (2 Kings 3:27). King Ahaz of Judah sacrificed his son in pagan fashion (2 Kings 16:3). King Manasseh of Judah sacrificed his sons by fire (2 Chronicles 33:6), filling Jerusalem with innocent blood.
The Jewish practice of redeeming a first-born son at the age of one month (Numbers 18:16–17) appears to be a milder substitute for the practice of child sacrifice. Another alternative to sacrificing a child was to dedicate it to the service of God. Hannah, by fulfilling her vow to dedicate her first-born, Samuel, to God's service (1 Samuel 1:27–28) was rewarded by the birth of five other children whom she and her husband could keep for themselves (1 Samuel 2:20–21).
According to ancient views, the myth came first, and the rite (ritual) imitated or reenacted it. This sequence, however, is not necessarily the order in which religion develops. Rites can be very tenacious, and when the origin of a rite has been forgotten, a myth has often been invented to explain it.
Types of religious organization and authority
Religion occurs at different levels of society: personal, familial, local, national, and international. At the personal and international extremes there is need for but little organization. And yet in religion, as the people of the ancient Middle East saw it, there was a progression from one stage to the next. In the early myths of Genesis, God and Noah have direct personal relations. This leads to a covenant between God and all who went out of the ark: birds and beasts as well as mankind (Genesis 9:9–10). Through the sons of Noah and their descendants, who form the nations of the world (Genesis 10), there is a theoretical progress to international religion. This scheme of the relations between God and mankind, from the personal to the universal level, mirrors the historical record of religion. Judaism (followed later by Christianity and Islām) traces “the Religion” back to Abraham, who had personal and direct relations with God, as was customary in the ancient Middle Eastern milieu. Abraham's intimacy with God is similar to the intimacy between Odysseus and the Greek goddess Athena. The next step is a covenant between a particular deity and a particular person, binding the two together in a contractual relationship for all eternity from generation to generation. Such covenants were not rare; the Hittite King Hattusilis III made such a covenant with Ishtar. Abraham's covenant is unique simply because it was the only one destined to last in history.
The descendants of able men who established a dynasty or tradition would worship the God of their father, or fathers, and adhere to the original covenant. Genesis 31 portrays Jacob and Laban swearing by their respective ancestral gods: Jacob by the god(s) of Abraham and Laban by the god(s) of Nahor. Once a group expanded into a federation of clans or tribes (tribe), religious organization became necessary. A central shrine (such as the one at Shiloh in Israel) for amphictyonic (amphictyony) (religious confederational) pilgrimage festivals required a professional priesthood and other religious personnel to take care of sacrifices, give oracular guidance, interpret dreams and omens, as well as to provide instruction. In an amphictyony of 12 tribes, each tribe could render federal service for religious and secular purposes, one month each year. A special tribe (such as the Levites in Israel, or the Magians in Iran) could be dedicated full-time to cultic duties.
A greater degree of centralization and organization of the cult would generally follow from the establishment of a powerful state. The cult of Marduk of Babylon (Babylonia) spread in importance and influence because Babylon became the capital of a powerful kingdom in the time of Hammurabi (18th century BC) and of a mighty empire during the reign of Nebuchadrezzar (604–562 BC). The Egyptian cult of Amon-Re not only became powerful but took on the form of a universal religion as a result of the military and political triumphs of the rulers of Thebes, particularly during the reign of Thutmose III (1479–26 BC). Under Solomon, Jerusalem became the centre of a great commercial empire. The Temple of Solomon and its God, the God of Israel, were catapulted into an international prominence that was quite different from the national status that marked the extent of Hebraic religion previously. The new internationalism of Israel's involvements paved the way for the universality of the views of the prophets. The God of Israel was subsequently concerned with all mankind and not merely with one people in one small land. This ultimately meant the transformation of biblical religion from the cult of a single people to a more subtle, spiritual movement that required different organization and different personnel. The priesthood became defunct with the destruction of Herod's Temple and the cessation of sacrifices in AD 70. The new religious leaders (rabbis (rabbi)) were rather teachers and spiritual guides who were united by dedication to the same scripture. The spread of the devotees over the face of the earth meant that they were now divided into regional groups, serving under different sovereigns, and the individual Jewish communities were organized independently, each with its own house of worship.
There were various devices for holding an ethnic-religious group together even though it might be fragmentized into scattered communities. Laws of purity (purification rite), especially those pertaining to diet, kept different groups apart. Each normally respected the other's rules, but the fact that each group had different taboos kept them from breaking bread together and mingling socially. They could do business with each other in the marketplace, but they could not fraternize in each other's homes. Above all, laws of purity were deterrents to intermarriage, the major factor that breaks up religious communities and encourages homogenization.
Additional Reading
An excellent unified cultural history of the ancient Middle East is Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, 5 vol. in 8 (1884–1902), available also in numerous later printings in various editions. Articles on the individual religions are to be found in Mircea Eliade (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Religion, 16 vol. (1987); and in Geoffrey W. Bromiley et al., The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, rev. ed., 4 vol. (1979–1988). Essays in various volumes of The Cambridge Ancient History (1923– ), are also useful. Overviews include Helmer Ringgren, Religions of the Ancient Near East (1973; originally published in Swedish, 1967); Cyrus H. Gordon, The Ancient Near East, 3rd ed., rev. (1965), a concise treatment; and John Gray, Near Eastern Mythology, new rev. ed. (1983). Two excellent works that provide a background for the whole subject are Sabatino Moscati, The Face of the Ancient Orient: A Panorama of Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations in Pre-Classical Times (1960; originally published in Italian, 1956); and Henri Frankfort et al., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (also published as Before Philosophy, 1946, reissued 1977), a collection of essays on ancient Near Eastern speculative thought.
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