Bookshelf: the Divine Woman II

Two more books I came across in reorganizing my shelves that touch on Israel's Divine Woman in different ways:

• Jacob of Serug, On the Mother of God.  This is ancient Christian (Syriac) poetry about Mary, and Jacob weaves deep mythological and liturgical roots into what he writes.
• G.W. Ahlstrom, Royal Administration and National Religion in Ancient Palestine.

Bookshelf: the Divine Woman

Here are some excellent books on the subject of Israel's Divine Woman.  Shame that none of them are written by Mormons.

• Margaret Barker, The Mother of the Lord.
• Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess.
• William Dever, Did God Have a Wife?
• Susan Ackerman, Under Every Green Tree
• Walter Maier, Asherah: Extrabiblical Evidence
• Saul Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel

There are many others on the subject; these are just the books that happen to be in my library.

These are not fringe voices or fringe ideas.  Mainstream biblical scholarship (by which I mean scholarship not tied to seminaries, and specifically scholarship that is not Evangelical), in part because of the force of archaeological evidence, is increasingly accepting the idea that Israel knew a divine mother as well as a divine father.

This should not surprise us.  We have Nephi and Eliza R. Snow.

Bookshelf: Cornelis Van Dam

Cornelis Van Dam's recent monograph The Urim and Thummim: A Means of Revelation in Ancient Israel is a great resource for understanding the UT in the OT.  It also opens up certain Book of Mormon passages: if you look closely, you'll see that, although the UT isn't mentioned, a couple of episodes in Alma track with the language of UT use exactly (high priest, gift of prophecy, national crisis, inquire of the Lord, possible indications of use in secluded / consecrated space, etc.), suggesting that the Nephites used the Urim and Thummim not only to translate, but also to make military decisions.  See, e.g., Alma 16:5-6 and Alma 43:23-24.

Bookshelf: Bible Dictionaries

Our Bible Dictionary is a work of scholarship.  It has the great advantage of including information from the other standard works, and the serious limitations of short length, committee authorship, and the necessity of maintaining a strictly orthodox point of view at all times (being published, as it is, by the church).  Here are some other English Bible Dictionaries you might consult, for longer, broader-ranging articles, with more diverse viewpoints:

The who's-yer-daddy of English BDs is the Anchor Bible Dictionary.  Six volumes, authoritative, expensive.  If you don't have the will to plunk down $300 for a used copy, you can always consult it in the library when you have a specific research project.

Smaller but more affordable is the HarperCollins BD.  I have and use this one.  Its advantages over the Anchor are portability, accessibility (it's written less for the scholar and more for the general user), and much more illustration.

I don't have the Eerdmans, but they're a reputable publisher doing mainstream scholarship, so this is probably a good one.

Regardless of which one you consult, remember that any article you look up is written by a scholar, and subject to that scholar's views and limitations.  Dictionaries aren't always right, but they can be a good first source to consult.  The larger the dictionary, the longer the articles, and the more the articles will point out disagreeing points of view and primary sources.

Bookshelf: Paul Hanson

"Apocalyptic" is a scholarly category that's very interesting.  It takes its name from the Revelation of John (apocalypsis is the Greek word for "revelation"), and Revelations has heavily influenced scholarly thinking and writing about this category of books / beliefs / social groups.  I don't talk about this stuff much in class because I think we have a better way to approach the same subject -- from the practitioners' side, rather than the after the fact scholarly guesses trying to figure out what the practitioners were thinking about.  In other words, I prefer Nephi's "visionary men" to scholars' "apocalyptic conventicles."

But once you're clear on the limitations of scholarship, literature on apocalyptic can be very enlightening.  Paul Hanson's The Dawn of Apocalyptic is classic and seminal.  Hanson looks for the origin of the people writing literature like Revelations, Daniel, Ezekiel, 1 Enoch, and so on, and he finds it in Lehi's day, among disciples of the prophet Isaiah, whom he even calls "visionaries."  Pretty good, for a Gentile.

Bookshelf: Lester Grabbe

The writing of ancient Israel's history is in a state of high agitation right now, that might even be called a crisis.  Major scholars differ over the dating of historical events by centuries, as well as over whether crucial events and persons are historical or legendary.

Lester L. Grabbe summarizes the state of the debate in his recent book Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?  As you read this and other books on the challenges relating to Israel's history, it's important to think clearly about the data the Book of Mormon provides.  In some cases (e.g., 1 Nephi 1-5), Nephi is a witness to events in Jerusalem.  In others, he demonstrates that certain texts existed by his time (e.g., Isaiah 2-14).  In still others, he tells us that certain ideas were known by Nephi's day, whether or not those ideas are actually historically accurate (for instance, see Jacob's remarks on David and Solomon -- these don't prove that David and Solomon existed, only that Jacob thought they did, or at least he and his audience knew them as figures Jacob could use as examples in a sermon, proverbial for their numbers of wives and concubines).

Grabbe offers the following "summary of the principles" to be followed in writing the history of Israel (p. 219):

• All potential sources should be considered.
• Preference should be given to original sources.
• The longue duree needs always to be kept in mind.
• Each episode or event has to be judged on its own merits.
• All reconstructions are provisional.
• All reconstructions have to be argued for.

Bookshelf: 1 Enoch

If you're going to get into the extra-biblical books, 1 Enoch is the place to start.  This book was held to be scripture by lots of ancient Christians -- including Jude, who quotes from it -- and by Ethiopian Christians to this day.

If you don't want to get 1 Enoch (it's called 1 Enoch because there are a 2 Enoch and a 3 Enoch; 1 Enoch is also the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Enoch) in a big anthology, there's a recent standalone translation by George Nickelsburg and JamesVanderKam.  The same guys also have a two volume (one and two) commentary on 1 Enoch, well worth the read.

Margaret Barker's first two books, The Older Testament and The Lost Prophet, are about how the earliest Christians new a different Old Testament than we have today... an Old Testament that included, among other things, 1 Enoch.  More about Margaret later.

Bookshelf: Stories from Ancient Canaan

Here's a great recent translation of some of the most famous stories of Canaanite mythology, as preserved at Ugarit.

Bookshelf: Henri Frankfort

Henri Frankfort's classic Kingship and the Gods is another book on Egypt you must read, especially if you're looking for the ordinances and spiritual ideas underpinning what's going on in the Book of Mormon and the Old Testament.

Frankfort compares Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Israelite ideas about kingship.  I think his analysis of Israelite ideas is misguided, in that he relies too much on one point of view present in ancient Israel's history, and that is the late and revisionist point of view of the Deuteronomist.  The real interest here is Egypt: look for what he has to say about the Egyptian rites of kingship, including temple feasts of bread and beer and the divine embrace across the temple veil between the living king and the dead one.

Bookshelf: Israel and Egypt

Ugarit is Israel's nearest neighbor in space and time, but Egypt was also hugely influential.  William Dever argues for the importance in the makeup of Israel of a group of people identifying themselves as the descendants of Joseph, and bearing Egyptian traditions... Nephi tells us the same thing.  So it behooves us to look a little bit at Egypt, and especially at Egypt during the period of Israel's history.

I suggest Kenneth Kitchen's The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt and Donald Redford's Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times.  You'll find Book of Mormon names, political patterns, and the background for the Nephites' concerns about priestcraft as a form of government.

Bookshelf: Philo Judaeus

Philo was an Egyptian Jew who was a generation older than Jesus.  His writings have survived, I suspect in part because we have generally asked the wrong questions when reading them, and not realized the significance of things Philo says.

Philo writes to convince educated Greeks that his religion is acceptable, and if you read his books for the argument they make, they're boring, and relevant only to classicists and maybe intellectual historians.  The interesting way to read Philo, the way we generally don't do it, is to ignore his strained analogies and instead ask what must Philo's religion be like, for this analogy to make sense?

Let me quote one excerpt, by way of example:

...if there be any as yet unfit to be called a Son of God, let him press to take his place under God's First-born, the Word, who holds the eldership among the angels, their ruler as it were.  And many names are his, for he is called "the Beginning," and the Name of God, and His Word, and the Man after His image...  (from The Confusion of Tongues, XXVIII)

God has a firstborn son among many sons, who are the angels, and among whose numbers people can aspire to be.  This firstborn Son is also called the Word and the Name, and appears to be in some way connected with Adam.  Whatever Philo believes, it isn't Judaism, as we know it.

You can get a cheap one-volume English translation of all Philo's writings.  The Loeb Classical Library also publishes bilingual Greek-English editions -- Philo fills ten volumes.

Bookshelf: Gregorio del Olmo Lete

Before I leave Ugarit, I have to recommend another book on the subject.  Gregorio del Olmo Lete's book reconstructing Ugaritic religion from its texts is not as easy to read or as accessible as Smith's work, but it has the great virtue of including lots of translated texts.  This makes it easier for us (bearing in mind the difficulty of translation) to make our own judgments as to what the folks at Ras Shamra were up to.

Bookshelf: Mark S. Smith

Ugarit is Israel's nearest neighbor in space and time of which we have significant archaeological data, and also texts.  Since most of the archaeological discoveries at Ras Shamra (Ugarit) came after 1970, Ugarit-related material is one of many reasons why early 20th century scholarship is systematically out of date (see also The Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi Library, the Bar Kochba texts, etc.).

Mark S. Smith is a top guy in Ugaritic studies who also happens to be an accessible and fairly prolific writer.  I recommend at least these two books of his: The Early History of God and The Origins of Biblical Monotheism are both about the fact that underlying the Bible as we have it in its final edited state is an earlier Israelite religion that looked a lot more like what we see at Ugarit, being not obsessively monotheistic but instead possessed of a divine family.

Bookshelf: The Septuagint

The ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament is important.  Since it's likely to come up in class and will definitely come up in your study, I want to make sure you know a few things about it, and point you to where you can find an English version.

It's called the Septuagint (sep-TOO-uh-jint), from the Greek word for "seventy," and is therefore also identified by the Roman numeral for 70: LXX.  The number 70 is an old Hebrew stereotype meaning the whole world, or sometimes the world outside Israel (the idea being that there are seventy nations).  You can see this idea in both the Old Testament and the New.  The LXX is the earliest known translation of the Old Testament into another language -- some parts of it are pre-Jesus, even as early as 200 B.C.

The really interesting thing about this old Greek translation is that it's often very different from the Hebrew, in two ways: First, it contains books or parts of books that aren't preserved in Hebrew, but were considered by the ancient Jewish translators part of scripture (for instance, the Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirach or the extra chapters of Daniel and Jeremiah).

Second, the LXX contains some very different readings from the traditional Hebrew text of the Bible (the Masoretic text, or MT).  For instance, Deuteronomy 32:8 in the MT says that God divided the world up according to the sons of Israel, but in the LXX the same verse says that God divided the world according to the sons of God... these are radically different ideas.

To really come to grips with the differences between the LXX and the MT and why they matter, you'll need some Greek and Hebrew (there's my little pitch, again).  But for starters, you can find the New English Translation of the Septuagint in its entirety online, here (I know, the web-page looks a little hokey, but the LXX translation itself is good, and downloadable in .pdf).  You can also buy a physical copy of the book.

Bookshelf: Menachem Haran

The classic book on the temples of ancient Israel is Menachem Haran's Temples and Temple Service in Ancient Israel.  It's a little dated now, so you'll want to supplement it with recent archaeological studies that touch on sites like Arad and Kuntillet 'Ajrud -- Dever's The Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel is a good one for that.

But Haran's book will get you a good overview of the Tabernacle and Solomon's Temple.  It will also get you into some of the issues relating to the conflicts among different priesthoods in ancient Israel, and the composition of the Old Testament.  Haran shows his real integrity and excellent when he touches on points he can't explain... for instance, that there are drinking vessels in Solomon's Temple, and no one quite knows what they're for (pp. 216-217).  Kings and Chronicles don't tell us anything about it, but there was a feast of bread and wine inside Solomon's Temple.

Bookshelf: William S. Dever (Archaeology)

I'm going to try to post once a week a recommendation of books bearing on Old Testament study and in particular on our class.  This is the first.

Archaeology has a lot to say about the history of ancient Israel; most of what it has to say is ignored by Biblical scholars, who are mostly really literary analysts, and nearly all of it is ignored by Sunday Schools.  Partly, this is archaeologists' fault -- the way they generally write is even drier and more inaccessible than the output of the literary guys.

William Dever is an exception.  He's punchy and readable, he sees the gap between Biblical criticism and archaeology and tries to fill it, and he knows what he's talking about.  Because he's engaged in a fierce running debate with a group of dogmatic historians who claim there was no ancient Israel as we think about (he calls them "revisionists"), sometimes he takes detours into issues I don't care very much about.  Still, I give all these books five stars and recommend you take a crack at one or two.  In that they touch on issues relating to Deuteronomy and the editing of the Bible, the origin of the Israelites, the alteration of Israel's temple religion, and the ancient suppression of Mother in Heaven (see 1 Nephi 11 and 13), they are relevant to important themes we'll talk about in class.

In Did God Have a Wife?, Dever looks at what archaeology has to say about Mother in Heaven (my words, not his).  It turns out, a lot.  Israel had a female divinity, She was different from the goddesses of the nations around Israel, and there were parties in Israel who hated Her.

In Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?, Dever examines Israel's origins.  The archaeological record gives us reason to be skeptical about some aspects of Israel's origin story (in Exodus and Joshua in particular), but confirms other aspects, including the likelihood that a "House of Joseph" group was part of Israel's ancestry and brought with it Egyptian knowledge and traditions (see, ahem, the Book of Mormon).

Others: What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? is also good, though it gets more than the others into Dever's debate with the revisionists.  The Lives of Ordinary People in Ancient Israel is another of his, and also excellent.