Religion in the Ancient Near East

Review: Egyptian irrigation canals; how an ancient city and fortress-storage might have looked: divine and human; the nature of the evidence: fragment and restoration

The Problem: Not concerned with ancient religions, but with ancient religion (sing.), to look at the religious phenomena that united ancient society, rather than the details that set societies apart. To address this problem we need to understand several concepts.
  1. Background: There is a difference between reformed and un-reformed religion.
    1. Most (and Hinduism is the major exception) modern religions have received their form and direction from the teaching of a great religious reformer who, according to believers, brought a divine revelation. aka monotheism
    2. All of the religions of the ancient world (except Judaism and Christianity) were unreformed religions. That is, they did not have a "reformer", or articles of faith, or dogma, or religious discipline. Gods were local and national, rewarded those who worshipped them. aka polytheism
    3. Significance:
      1. Because reformed religions were based on divine revelation and because they assertively denied the existence or power of another deity, reformed religions tend to be intolerant. In contrast, all the unreformed religions of the ancient world were by subsequent standards remarkably tolerant. No missionaries.
      2. Because of the prevalence of reformed religion, the civilizations of the west [including Islam] tend to see religion in terms of doctrines or ethical systems, or even social programs. They also tend to be less tolerant of alternative perspectives. In unreformed religion, gods not associated with ethics.
  2. If we are to understand how un-reformed religion unified society, we need to reconstruct the basics of religious thinking. The kinds of questions asked reveal basic assumptions.
    1. It makes a difference to ask: Who made the stars? or: How were the stars made? Namely, there is a theological explanation.
    2. Polytheistic religions evoked 'meaning' on a collective and individual basis, through myth and ritual. That is, the imposed a kind of order on nature by assuming that nature responds to human behavior. Consider:
      1. the qualities of ancient religious texts--an intimate connection between divinity and human:
        1. Story myth: traditional, popular, oral (as distinct from conscious literary creation), aetiological character. p,ni
        2. Ritual myth: the libretto (or text) of religious liturgy. pa,ma
      2. Basic questions: the relationship between natural events, divine power and human behavior.
        1. There are powerful forces in nature. How can they be controlled? [su-ni]
        2. Do the manifestations of those forces reflect a world beyond the world one can see and touch? If so, how do they relate to the visible world? And what are the implications for human institutions and for human behavior? It is apparent that those forces / gods were not only powerful, but could take any form, be invisible, cause events.
        3. Note in unreformed religion every event is unique; there is no sense of natural order or 'laws of nature'; indeed the apparent unpredictability of nature reflects the conflicts among the divines. How could humans, individually or collectively, affect the divine world for their own advantage? pa/ch
    3. Humans come to understand the will of the divine being through revelation. E.g Noah and the Ark; Moses and the laws.
  3. Stages in the development of the theological explanation:
    1. Numen/numina: mysterious and impersonal forces in natural process. A numen. [sylv; stwa]
    2. With time, a distinction developed between the force itself and the form of expression, between rain and the force that brings rain. A thundercloud looks like a birth spreading its blackwings. The latter expressed in theriomorphic terms. Horus.
    3. In the anthropomorphic stage, the gods begin to take on the appearance and personality of humans (though they are more powerful and immortal). Because they have human personalities they do get angry (fld), they love, and they can be manipulated. E.g., Anubis, Isis and Horus.
    4. There is an implicit connection between human behavior, divine beings, and natural events; gods reveal their will through natural events, they reward and punish human behavior through nature.
  4. Polytheism. Its characteristic features
      1. No clear separation of the natural and the supernatural. The gods were everywhere, and involved in everything (see the sourcebook for reading in Genesis and Exodos, also the omens below). What happens on earth is magically connected to what happens in the heavens.
      2. Tensions in world explained by competition between deities, there can be no 'pattern' in this context, for the gods are not so much as representatives of good and evil, but of opposing, natural forces. In this cosmic struggle how were humans to know what was right? Led to fatalism. This attitude left humans with a limited choice, namely one could only
        1. try to comply with the will of the gods (or risk being punished) or
        2. secure the favor of the gods / king by gifts and services. Noah and the Flood, for example.
        3. the response of the god, for better or worse, proportional to the effort.
      3. This system of prayer, honor, services, designed to secure the good will of the gods, helped to motivate people not only to build temples, but also to maintain the dikes and build walls. Hence, religion became also the justification for obedience to a priest-king / divine king. And when things go wrong...
    1. Significance...how did religion serve to unify society?
      1. Nature/the gods/kings were immensely powerful and appeared to act in sometimes arbitrary and often destructive ways (see Ex 10.1 below).
      2. Moreover,the good will of the gods/nature and of the organizing powers of kings were essential for survival of groups and of individuals. How could one bring those forces under control?
      3. By "personalizing" those forces, religion provided a measure of "security",
        1. for if gods were like human beings they could be induced by gifts and prayer to respond to requests. The best evidence? consider the story of the Flood in Genesis;
        2. moreover, if gods could be like humans, then [some] humans [aka kings] could be like gods. ''Majesty'', the aura of power, applies to both. To obey the king / god secures the blessings of heaven and ensure the social order. Hence, by vesting civil authority with the aura of sacrosanctity or majesty, religion also served as a legitimizing force =>divine right.(saul,dav, louisxiv)
  5. Israelite religion. Critical is the transformation from a tribal to a universal religion
    1. Genesis
      1. shares many notions with other religions of ANE. Creation tale, the great flood being but two examples.
      2. Note also that monotheism not clearly established in Gen. and Ex.
      3. There are important differences: most significantly that all of 'creation' is good." [1] In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. [2] 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. [3] And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. [4] And God saw that the light was good...14] And God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, 15] and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth." And it was so. [16] And God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. [17] And God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth, [18] to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good....And God said, "Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens." [21] So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. [22] And God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth."...So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. [28] And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
      4. But we find also an ethical system based on a contract/covenant, the possibility of divinely revealed ethical system. After making Adam and Eve, God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. [30] And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." ...And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; [17] but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die." Gift ==> responsibility to comply with will of God...to disobey means punishment thru nature..
      5. General observations on Judaism
        1. Creation is good; humans have nothing to fear from nature; indeed it is god's gift that humans rule creation.
        2. Gifts carry responsibilities to the giver. Suffering is the result of neglecting those responsibilities of contract or covenant.
        3. Major contribution especially developed in prophetic period: belief in one god and his moral government of the world. Only with monotheism can ethics and religion be unified.
        4. The great weakness: the divine purpose was concentrated on a single people. Little recognition that a single moral god produced a single creation but had little or no interest in the overwhelming majority of creation.
    2. Synthesis of ancient religion
      1. Polytheism is not "empty"; indeed it met the emotional needs of many: people [that is, the community] believed; made sacrifices, participated in rituals; it worked often enough to motivate believers to build temples and ziggurats. Just as in middle ages belief encouraged people to build cathedrals to insure their safety in the here-and-now.
      2. Individuals worked together as communities because they accepted the notion that their collective behavior (expressed in ritual, myth, worship, etc.) gave them at least some control of natural forces; the more anthropomorphic the deity, the more humans can control.
      3. Note: Unreformed religion does not provide much to support an ethical system; that must arise out of local tradition.

Selection of Images: The Flood; Noah's sacrifice; Abraham and Sarah; Abraham and Isaac.

Selected Texts from the Sourcebook: