God Against the Gods (6 page)

What does God demand of the chosen people that they find so objectionable? Sermonizers over the centuries have suggested that anyone who rejects the True God is rejecting the exalted moral and ethical teachings that are the glory of monotheism. To be sure, the Bible includes a few sublime passages that encourage us to be kind and gentle, caring and compassionate, not merely in our hearts but in our deeds, and not merely toward our own kin but toward the stranger, too. When Isaiah ponders what God demands of those who seek him, for example, the prophet insists that God himself disdains prayer and fasting: “What is the fast that I desire? It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home, [and] when you see the naked, clothe him.”
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To call such teachings the essence of biblical monotheism, however, misses the point that is made so forcefully and so fervently by the most rigorous biblical authors. They do not define wickedness and sin in terms of moral and ethical conduct. Indeed, they are far more concerned with the purity of religion than with the pursuit of justice. The very worst sin of all, as they see it, is not lust or greed, but rather the offering of worship to gods and goddesses other than the True God. Whenever a biblical author is moved to call something “abominable,” he is using a code word for every ritual and belief other than his own.

When it comes to spiritual purity, only a few of the Israelites are judged worthy to be counted among the holy seed, and the vast majority are characterized as wicked sinners. “They provoked him to jealousy with strange gods,” Moses is made to say of the Israelites in the Book of Deuteronomy. “They sacrificed to demons.”
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And the Bible warns that such sins will bring a terrible punishment: “For a fire is kindled in my anger,” announces God. “The sword without, and terror within, shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of gray hairs.”
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Any misfortune that befalls the wicked and the sinful, according to the cruel logic of monotheism, must be understood as the sure and awful workings of divine justice. Sometimes the instrument of God’s will is an angel of death from on high, sometimes an enemy from abroad, and sometimes a fellow countryman or even a blood relation. But, no matter who acts on behalf of the True God, the victim is always regarded as wholly deserving of his punishment. The Bible includes a generous measure of myth and metaphor, but if we read the biblical text literally, as so many rigorists urge us to do, it is clear that the True God is not only “a jealous god”
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but also a deeply resentful one—and what he resents above all is his own failure to win the hearts and minds of the people whom he has chosen as his own.

The Cuckolded Husband

Nowadays, the most punishing texts of the Bible are mostly passed over in favor of the more elevating and inspiring ones. But the kinder and gentler deity who can be teased out of the scriptures through a selective reading of the text is very different from the jealous and vengeful god who so inspired the rigorists in Judaism and Christianity during the early history of monotheism. They imagined God not as a heavenly father, bland and benign, but rather as a cuckolded husband who is so embittered and enraged by the promiscuities of his spouse that he is moved to torture and murder. Indeed, it is the image of the spurned lover—a favorite and even obsessive theme of the angriest biblical prophets, including Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Hosea—that allows us to feel the visceral emotions that drove (and still drive) the most zealous of monotheists to acts of terror and carnage.

Apostasy and idolatry are the theological equivalent to adultery and harlotry, according to these biblical authors, even if their poetry and prose are so lurid and so literal that the reader may forget that they are expressing themselves in metaphor. Thus, for example, the prophet Ezekiel conjures up a scene in which Jerusalem is likened to a woman who is abandoned at birth and left to die in an open field, then rescued and raised by a kind and caring man and finally—“[when] your breasts became firm and your hair sprouted”—betrothed to her rescuer, who turns out to be God himself. The passage begins like an enchanting fairy tale—“I clothed you with embroidered garments, and gave you sandals of dolphin leather, I decked you out in finery and put bracelets on your arms and earrings in your ears and a splendid crown on your head”—but it ends like a horror story told by the Marquis de Sade.

Your time for love had arrived, so I entered into a covenant with you by oath. But confident in your beauty and fame, you played the harlot, you lavished your favor on every passerby. You sullied your beauty and spread your legs to every passerby, you multiplied your harlotries to anger me. Yet you were not like a prostitute, for you spurned fees; you were like the adulterous wife who welcomes strangers instead of her husband.
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But God is not content with ranting and raving at his faithless wife. As his rage builds to a climax—“Now I will stretch out my arm against you, I will direct bloody and impassioned fury against you”—he spins wildly out of control, and he is moved to threats and acts of violence that are described in near pornographic language:

I will assemble all the lovers to whom you gave your favors, along with everybody you accepted and everybody you rejected, and I will deliver you into their hands. Then they shall assemble a mob against you to pelt you with stones and pierce you with their swords. They shall put your houses to flames and execute punishment upon you in the sight of many women. Thus will I put a stop to your harlotry.
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Here we behold the ugliest face of monotheism, an especially dark and dangerous one. The true believer is taught in the Bible that “the Lord is a jealous and avenging God, vengeful and fierce in wrath.”
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He is shown that God works his will through emissaries and deputies and surrogates of all kinds, and he is encouraged to regard himself as an instrument of God’s will. And, once he embraces the idea, he may feel inspired and empowered and even obligated to follow the example of Moses by strapping a sword on his thigh and taking it upon himself to punish the wicked and the sinful, whether they are strangers or “brother, neighbor, or kin.”

The impulse to translate an overheated biblical metaphor into an act of violence is self-limiting as long as the rigorists are small in number and lacking in political or military power. They are surely capable of inflicting punishment on those whom they regard as wicked and sinful, but only on a relatively modest scale. When the rigorist is also a king and the power of the state is put in the service of true belief, however, both the risk and the scale of religious persecution are vastly greater. That rude beast slouching toward Bethlehem, as we shall see, is the soldier and the secret policeman, the prosecutor and the public executioner.

CHAPTER TWO

WHAT DID PAGANS DO?

The Case Against Classical Paganism —and Why It Was Wrong

Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils.

—1 Corinthians 10:21

The biblical condemnation of polytheism, when stripped of its rhetorical overkill, rests on a single theological offense: the pagan commits an unforgivable crime when he or she prays to
any
god or goddess other than the Only True God. Although some of the biblical authors delight in describing (and, of course, denouncing) the exotic and provocative rituals of paganism, the manner of worship ultimately matters less to these ancient rigorists than the deity to whom worship is offered. Indeed, the rituals and practices of classical paganism were very much like those of the faith that is actually described in the Bible.

“Paganism” is a term that is used indiscriminately to describe a vast array of unrelated beliefs and practices, ranging in time, place and expression from the crude burial rites of the Neanderthals to the exquisite statuary and epic poetry of the Greeks and Romans—and much else in between. Among the fantastic variety of pagans who have come and gone over the centuries, to be sure, were men and women whose religious practices were bloody, bizarre and even deadly. But the only thing that all of these pagans share in common is the fact that they did not confine their worship to the Only True God as that deity is variously defined in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Because the final and decisive battle in the war of God against the gods was fought in the heart of the Roman empire at the very peak of its power and glory, as the most rigorous Jews and Christians saw it, the principal enemy of monotheism was the high culture of the classical world, a culture that began in Greece, reached its zenith in Rome and spread throughout the Roman empire. “Classical paganism,” then, was the official religion of a civilization that is recalled and honored today in the classical texts that are studied in our universities, the statuary that fills our museums and the architectural styles that grace our monuments and public buildings.

Still, the bad odor that clings to paganism begins with the alarming and sometimes revolting depiction of pagan ritual that we find in the Bible—paganism, we are taught, is hopelessly tainted with harlotry, idolatry, sorcery and, at its most wretched, human sacrifice. All of these notes are rung, for example, by Ezekiel in the passage that we considered in the last chapter. When God describes the debaucheries of the fallen woman who symbolizes faithless Jerusalem, he does not confine himself to her “harlotries.” Rather, he allows us to understand that her sin is spiritual as well as carnal.

You took your beautiful things, made of the gold and silver that I had given you, and you made yourself phallic images and fornicated with them. The food that I had given to you—the choice flour, the oil, and the honey—you set it before them for a pleasing odor. You even took the sons and daughters that you bore to me and sacrificed them to those images as food—as if your harlotries were not enough, you slaughtered my children and presented them as offerings!
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The Bible insists that all the rituals of paganism are “abominations,” even the ones that are strikingly similar to the rituals of monotheism, because they honor the wrong deity. And the biblical authors decorate their simple theological argument with atrocity propaganda, insisting that pagans are not only apostates and blasphemers but fornicators and baby killers, too. Indeed, the authors seem to protest too much, and their obsessive concern with harlotry only confirms that the most rigorous of the biblical sources were plainly fascinated by what they claimed to find so abominable.

The temptations of paganism are so powerful that God himself is held responsible for using them to tempt and then punish his chosen people. “They shall be a snare and a trap unto you, and a scourge in your sides, and pricks in your eyes,” warns Joshua after the Israelites have yet again driven God into a rage over their stubborn refusal to comply with his sacred law, “until ye perish from off this good land which the Lord your God hath given you.”
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Still, by late biblical antiquity, the paganism that the prophets found so abominable was something very different from the parade of horribles that is described in the Bible. Paganism in the Mediterranean world was an ornament of what was (and is) regarded as the highest expression of classical civilization. Its scripture consisted of the works of Homer, for example, and its “idols” were the statuary that is today displayed in museums all over the world. What, then, did pagans actually do that the rigorists in Judaism and Christianity found so appalling that they deemed it worthy of death?

The Sacred Whore

Harlotry, as we are asked to believe by both the biblical prophets and some secular historians, was an ancient, enduring and beloved practice of paganism. A “sacred” or “temple” or “cultic” prostitute is understood to have been a man or woman (and sometimes a boy or girl) who offered to engage in sexual intercourse with all comers at the temples of a goddess of love, like the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, or a goddess of fertility, like the Canaanite goddess Astarte. The pious pagan regarded “divine intercourse” as a sacred offering to the goddess in the hope that she would reward the ritual lovers with “abundant harvests and an increase of cattle.”
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And the ancient sources tell of a tradition that required brides to sacrifice their virginity to the goddess by presenting themselves at a shrine to be deflowered by strangers on their wedding nights, although the husband was sometimes allowed to put on a disguise and play the role of the stranger.

Such titillating scenes have always excited the human imagination, not only among strict monotheists like Ezekiel but even among the pagans themselves. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.C.E., was already shocking his readers with tales of sexual adventure in the service of the gods and goddesses of the ancient world. Even the high-born matrons of Babylon, he reports, were under a legal duty to serve as temple harlots at least once in their lives: “Such of the women as are tall and beautiful are soon released,” he writes with a leer, “but the ugly ones have to stay a long time before they can fulfill the law.”
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The historical reality, however, may not have been quite so lurid. The “harlotries” that so agitated the prophets may have been mostly or entirely metaphorical. Rituals of sacred sex, if they took place at all, probably consisted of a single act of ceremonial intercourse by a priest and a priestess on a holy day or at a moment of crisis such as a plague, drought or famine. Indeed, some revisionists openly wonder whether the sexual practices of paganism are mostly in the eye of the beholder. They point out that “
qedeshah
,” the Hebrew word that is rendered in conventional Bible scholarship as “temple prostitute,” literally means “a consecrated woman.” A fresh reading of ancient texts and archaeological evidence leads some recent scholars to believe that a
qedeshah
was not a sacred whore at all but a midwife, a wet nurse or perhaps a sorceress. “Tragically,” writes Bible critic Mayer I. Gruber, “scholarship suffered from scholars being unable to imagine any cultic role for women in antiquity that did not involve sexual intercourse.”

Pagans, in fact, were as intent on imposing sexual law and order on a lively populace as the most rigorous monotheists. The Roman Senate, for example, was outraged by the spectacle of the Bacchanalia, a festival that honored the god of wine, Bacchus (also called Dionysus), with orgiastic bouts of drinking, the display (and use) of phallic icons like the ones that Ezekiel complains about and even the occasional act of public sex, all carried out in plain sight in the streets. By 186 B.C.E., the senators, declaring themselves to be concerned that the initiates were at risk of anal rape, ordered that the Bacchanalia be suppressed by force of arms as a “depraved foreign superstition.”
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If we take the ancient sources at their word, some goddess-shrines in the more remote corners of the Roman empire served as functional equivalents of brothels. “A school of wickedness for all the votaries of unchasteness” is how the ancient Christian chronicler Eusebius of Caesarea describes the temple of Aphrodite at Aphaca (now Efqa, in Lebanon).
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The temple, for example, attracted prostitutes of both sexes, among whom were male transvestites—“men undeserving of their name [who] forgot the honour of their sex,” as Eusebius puts it, “and propitiated the demon by their effeminate conduct.” But the worship of the goddess may have had little or nothing to do with their sexual exploits—the “abandoned votaries of sensuality and impurity,” as Eusebius dubs them, may have included ordinary prostitutes offering their services to worshippers who were aroused by the ceremonies that they just attended inside the shrine.
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By late antiquity, sex in the sacred precincts of paganism was more a matter of private scandal than religious practice. During the reign of Tiberius (14-37 C.E.), for example, an unsigned note was delivered to a Roman noblewoman called Paulina. She was invited to the temple of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, where the jackal-headed god Anubis promised to grant her the privilege of bedding down with him. When she dutifully appeared at the temple, the figure wearing the mask of Anubis turned out to be a thoroughly mortal man—a Roman knight who was either the seducer of a gullible woman or the lover of a conniving woman.

Far from confirming the “harlotries” that so concerned the prophets, the incident at the temple of Isis in Rome only suggests that polytheists could be as prudish and puritanical as monotheists: the emperor ordered the crucifixion of a few priests of Isis, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, as a caution against any further sexual outrage in the holy places where the gods and goddesses were worshipped.

A Mirror to Juno

The images of gods and goddesses that so outraged Moses and his fellow monotheists can now be found in museums all over the world, where they are displayed as works of art, historical artifacts or anthropological specimens—and sometimes all three at once. To the propagandists of monotheism, however, they are “idols,” and their worship is the emblematic sin of paganism, so offensive to God that the second of his ten commandments is specifically directed against the making of
any
image that might be mistaken for a deity.

The installation of an idol in the temple of the True God reduces the biblical author to a kind of sputtering rage: “The abomination of desolation” is how it is described in the Book of Daniel and echoed in the Gospel of Matthew.
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And those who make and use idols are the target of open ridicule and bitter irony—the idol maker, says the prophet Isaiah, is a man who chops down a tree and uses some of the wood to build a fire in order to warm himself, and some to bake bread or roast meat in order to feed himself. “Of the rest, he makes a god—his own carving!” scorns Isaiah. “He bows down to it, worships it, he prays to it and cries: ‘Save me, for you are my god!’ ”
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But the pagans of high antiquity were not quite so naïve or simpleminded about the use of statuary in rituals of worship. Among some of the more exotic cults, of course, the statues of gods and goddesses were still the object of elaborate rituals in which the priests and priestesses treated them as if they were alive. At the temple of Isis in Rome, for example, the statue of the goddess was awakened every morning, bathed and anointed with oil, “covered with sumptuous raiment and ornamented with jewels and gems,” as historian Franz Cumont puts it, seated at a banquet table and offered meals, and then returned to bed every night.
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Such practices, however, had been already regarded with skepticism by Greek philosophers of distant antiquity—and with open ridicule by the more refined and sophisticated pagans of imperial Rome. “We should like to forbid offering linen garments and a stiff brush to Jupiter, and holding up a mirror to Juno,” writes the philosopher Seneca the Younger (c. 4 B.C.E.-65 C.E.). “The god needs no domestic servants.”
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And the poet Horace (65-8 B.C.E.), adopting the same stance that we find in the Book of Isaiah, pokes fun at the Greek god of procreation, Priapus, who was symbolized by the figure of an outsized phallus: “Once I was a fig tree’s stump, a useless log, then a carpenter, uncertain as to whether he would make a stool or Priapus, decided for a god.”
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The images of the gods and goddesses were more commonly treated with the same affection and respect that Judaism and Christianity still offer to their own holy objects, and for much the same reason. A pagan entering a house in the ancient Rome, for example, might pause to kiss the image of the goddess-protector that was customarily placed at the threshold just as a Jew in ancient Palestine (or, for that matter, anywhere in the world today) might pause to kiss the
mezuzah
that was customarily mounted on the doorpost. The kiss was intended to show respect and reverence to the deity, of course, but in both cases the gesture also betrays a primitive but enduring and thoroughly human belief, shared by polytheists and monotheists, that a man-made object may possess the miraculous power to bring good fortune.

Similarly, the images of the gods and goddesses were intended to inspire the worshipper as he or she offered prayer and sacrifice in the same way that icons or altar paintings or altarpieces are meant to inspire the worshipper in a Christian church. Indeed, the same can be said of
all
religious art, whether it consists of the letterforms and geometric shapes that adorn Islamic calligraphy and architecture, the golden crowns and silver shields that decorate the scrolls of the Torah, the
Pietà
of Michelangelo at the Basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican—or, for that matter, the statuary of pagan Greece and Rome, which provided Michelangelo with such exalted models when he set his own chisel to stone.