Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel, and if you have been following along in my last few episodes, what I've been doing is unpacking some ancient Mesopotamian exorcism texts, and I've had a lot of rabbit trails along the way with that, and I hope that you've enjoyed it, and that hasn't been too overwhelming.
[00:00:36] I know for some people that kind of a deep dive can get a little bit too much, and I hope that this episode is going to help to bring all of that together. So we're gonna try and look at this whole picture, and I'm going to zoom out a little bit. What we've done so far is really get into this idea of purification as exorcism, casting out the evil demons, and that is being done through magical incantations and rituals that are connected to the Mesopotamian deities.
[00:01:11] There's a lot of parallels with that in the Bible, and that's going to make a lot of people uncomfortable, but I think that's kind of why we need to make this look into the ancient past a little bit more normal, because we need to see that these are really common things and we need to really appreciate that the Bible was situated in its ancient context and that it is not a fault that it is in that context.
[00:01:41] Part of my point in looking at this was to show a distinctive difference between purification ideas of the general ancient world and the Bible. And one of my things that I wanna talk about in that is the fact that the Bible's emphasis on holiness is a little bit distinctive from the ancient world.
[00:02:04] Now, it's not totally distinctive, so don't get me wrong. I was reading the Udug-hul tablet 12 the last few weeks, and that really has this idea of holiness and purification, but it's only for the purpose of healing. The idea here is not that the person being healed was going to be holy in the sense of morality.
[00:02:27] That's really not in the picture at all. What I don't wanna say is that there are no ancient texts or ideas that there is no emphasis on holiness and purity and ethics in Mesopotamia and the wider ancient world because we do see that, and we'll get into a little bit of that today, but the vast majority of purity and holiness texts are really about making things correct. If things are out of sorts because you are not getting the rain that you need, or maybe you're getting too much rain, or maybe you are sick, or maybe you're injured.
[00:03:09] All of those things were intersecting with how the gods are going to help people to right these types of problems. And it really is interesting that we have demonology in the sense that you're casting out demons. Sometimes you're casting out a demon from inside a person like they are possessed .
[00:03:30] So at any rate, today I want to really dig down into this concept of recentering cause and agency. And I'm going to repeat some of the things that I've said in previous episodes. I talked a lot about sickness and the causes of sickness and God's involvement in the causes of sickness. I did a whole episode on that, I believe it was episode 60.
[00:03:56] If you wanna go have a look at that, if you do a whole survey on your own of all of these texts in the Bible where we have sickness and we have some sort of entity that causes the sickness, it's simply not the case that we have this wide ranging demonology that is associated with those things in the Bible.
[00:04:19] And yet that's what we saw in this Mesopotamian text. So that's a really big difference there. And people might wonder and be shocked when somebody like John Walton says that he thinks that we should not see an overabundance of conflict theology in the Bible. Now, he's not saying that it's not there, but I think he is saying that what we have in the Bible is very different from the ancient world in general.
[00:04:51] Alright, anyway, so today we're gonna build on our prior case that Scripture attributes sickness and calamity to God's sovereign agency. Now, this is within covenant discipline and mercy. If you wanna run to the idea that this is a Calvinistic idea of God's sovereignty and determination where, oh, well look, we do see that God causes evil things and things like that.
[00:05:19] We're gonna run into some problems there because part of the reason that God does this is so that he can bring us back into repentance, and that's simply not an idea that really fits well into the Calvinistic theology world.
[00:05:36] Another one of the things I've been emphasizing is ritual versus technique or magic. The Bible does not prescribe incantations in the way that the Mesopotamian texts do. We do have texts that are later used as incantations. We have talismans, we have amulets. We even have the very name of God being used in a way where we're distancing ourselves from saying it because we're a little bit worried about overusing it or whatever. Right. This is the context in the early first century.
[00:06:14] And it's really is very striking to me that we have that context of things like the Dead Sea Scrolls and Jewish history, and that goes into rabbinic history and it goes into the church as well sometimes, where in the Bible it really is so against magic and incantation in charms and things like that, that we really can't say that it's prescribing or using things in that way.
[00:06:42] In fact, it seems to go out of its way to avoid those things, and it's shocking to me because the Bible is a set of texts that is used over time with many, many different authors, and yet we have this very distinctive absence of incantation. Now, we do have things like word as power and requests and praises and prayers of things where it might seem like people are trying to do the same kind of work as an incantation or a charm, but I'm still gonna suggest it's different.
[00:07:21] A couple of things for you, people who listen to the Naked Bible Podcast. If you are familiar with that, you might hear echoes of Psalm 91 and the evil eye in this episode, I probably will call back to those podcast episodes as well as we're talking. Dr. Heiser's episode on Psalm 91 did an excellent job of clarifying exactly how that Psalm could be used as an exorcism text, and also its very prominent use in Jesus's temptation narrative in Matthew four as well. If you haven't listened to that Naked Bible Podcast episode, I really highly recommend it as well as the episode on the Evil Eye.
[00:08:06] One of the things that Dr. Heiser brought out in that episode is that a lot of scholars think that the Bible doesn't even touch on this idea of the evil eye, but that's because the evil eye in the ancient world and even today, honestly, is used as a kind of magic. And so the Bible references it, but it's not referencing it in a way that we might expect it to be seen.
[00:08:35] So again, one of my points here is to watch for magical drift, especially during the church age, which is really prominent and important for us Christians, Right? And this is so hard. That's why I'm dedicating so many episodes to it and talking about it so much because I don't want us to get really legalistic about it and really overly point towards things like, oh, look at those Catholics over there. They believe in magic because of this, that, and the other thing.
[00:09:07] Well, maybe there's some of that going on and maybe there isn't. We have to be very careful and not overly accuse people in this, but I do think it's worth thinking about and worth warning people about.
[00:09:22] Are we using objects as things of power? Are we using words as things that actively do something? Whereas if you don't use those words, that thing will not happen. Those are some of the distinctive things we might see between ritual, properly seen, and magic.
[00:09:42] I mean, this is not to say that we can't do things like pray and expect that to have some efficacy. Obviously that's something that really is very deeply embedded in Scripture, deeply embedded in the church.
[00:09:57] And like I said, this is why it's so hard to talk about these things because people really want it to be black and white, either or. And there's all of these little shades of gray where we have to ask ourselves what's going on.
[00:10:13] I mean, ultimately, are we trying to pull levers and do things through mechanistic ways, or are we trusting in a living God who is actively embarked on a program of relationship with us? That's very different. The Mesopotamian deities weren't seen to have that kind of personal relationship to people.
[00:10:36] Now, here's another really interesting thing about all of this, and that is the element of protection. Now, the Bible does not reject protection language. It uses it quite often. In the pagan frame, protection tends to be apotropaic. That means, again, that we're warding off harm or evil with technique, with objects, with words or names.
[00:11:06] And there again, we're thinking, well, we use Jesus' name as part of an exorcism, right? And that's not wrong to do, but are we treating the name as a magical thing or not? You know, I try not to engage with random people on Facebook too much, but sometimes I get in a mood and sometimes I see something that triggers my mood.
[00:11:29] And this week I actually commented on some random thing that popped up for me. The random thing was about how we need to make sure that we know the proper pronunciation and the proper name of Jesus. Because if we don't, if we're not saying the name of Jesus in a correct pronunciation in this particular Hebrew way, then that means we're not gonna be saved because it's only in Jesus' name that we're saved.
[00:11:58] And so if we don't have the right name, then we're not saved. And so I just mentioned that this is an instance of treating Jesus's name like it's magic. Salvation is not magic. God is not beholden to us to do the correct thing in order for God to save us. It's just not what we have in Scripture.
[00:12:21] And yet when I made this comment, I had multiple other people scratching their heads going, what are you talking about? They couldn't understand how the idea of having the proper name of Jesus in a particular pronunciation in the right way, they couldn't understand how that's really a form of magic and incantation.
[00:12:45] So yeah, that's why I'm spending so much time here, because I don't want this to be misunderstood, and I don't want it to be misapplied either, because that's another thing that we see so often in the church between different traditions. People love to go point their fingers at those other guys over there because they're doing it wrong, right?
[00:13:09] And I think a lot of times what we're supposed to do is examine ourselves and examine our own consciences, examine our own motivations, examine our understanding of things rather than calling out other people. Now again, that's not to say that we can't warn people and we can't bring things up.
[00:13:31] It's the same kind of conversation with people who talk about mega churches and particular types of worship practices. Like on the one hand I can see the point where some people are like, well, in these mega churches it's all about numbers and it's all about the show that they're putting on. And it's all about their coffee bar in the lobby.
[00:13:55] And maybe they're right. Maybe there is something that needs to change in some of these places because maybe some people's hearts aren't really in the right place and maybe they don't realize it. Maybe a warning is needed there.
[00:14:11] But on the other hand, I think a lot of times a lot of our critique and criticism is just slapping the label on it. Like we don't go over and get to know those people personally. We're not talking to them on a personal level. We're talking on social media: I'm going to warn you about the evils of what I think is not right.
[00:14:34] There's a difference there. Like are you talking to real people? Are you addressing their actual situation? Because I can tell you that I have gone to larger churches that have that kind of a feel. I really don't think they're always like that. And it's certainly not the case that God cannot use those places and those people and those worship services.
[00:14:58] So it's a careful ground that we need to walk where on the one hand, we really do need to put forth warnings and we really need to put forth corrections. I am all about thinking how to do that in a warm healthy way. But on the other hand, it's really easy for us to go overboard with those things and we're just doing that in a self-righteous way.
[00:15:25] Part of the reason I'm really hitting hard on this purification topic is that I really think that the evangelical world in particular struggles with understanding holiness. Because if we equate holiness purely and mostly with ethics and morality, then we are not seeing it in the way that the Bible is presenting it. Again, ethics and morality is part of it. Certainly it's part of it. But those are elements that are underneath the purification and the holiness umbrella rather than being the holiness umbrella itself.
[00:16:09] And if we don't see holiness as this core thing in Scripture and if we're not reading our Bibles in the way where it's directing our minds in the way that the ancient people would be thinking of it, where we have sacred space, where we have the focus of God with us, then we end up veering off into saying that we can do whatever we want. And it kind of doesn't matter. You don't have to baptize people if that's too difficult for you. You don't actually have to have the Lord's Supper if it's too difficult for you.
[00:16:48] And I'm sorry, but if the obstacle of too difficult in a modern American evangelical church is that you can't baptize or you can't have the Lord's supper, even in some form that approximates the Bible's form, if that's a bar too high for you, then what are you even doing? How are you creating disciples where you can't even bother people?
[00:17:20] And the core of the gospel is to follow and to be allegiant to King Jesus. And he led the way in suffering. He led the way in difficult things. So if we can't pursue our discipleship life and enter into hard things, then this is where I'm drawing a line of we should be giving people warnings about are you actually trying to make disciples?
[00:17:49] Are you actually discipling people into the knowledge of the ancient text, which is our rule of faith, and which tells us about King Jesus and which tells us about the practices of the early church and which tells us about the people of God in the Old Testament.
[00:18:09] We are supposed to be a community oriented towards God, which includes things like repentance, obedience, prayer, discipleship. This isn't supposed to be some Sunday morning breakfast club.
[00:18:25] So ultimately, I think we really do go wrong when we start with death instead of holiness. Like in Scripture, sacrifice is first and foremost about drawing near. It's not about appeasing God's wrath or anger. The whole logic of Leviticus and the whole logic of the Torah runs through all of this.
[00:18:49] You start in Genesis and it's less obvious there, but that's why I talk about Eden as a proto sacred space, and Adam as a proto priest. Genesis gets the whole ball rolling and it's a ball that goes all the way through history into today, and it's going on into the future to the eschaton where our ultimate goal and purpose is seated in Christ.
[00:19:16] Yes, that's about allegiance, but it's also about holiness. If we drop the ball in understanding holiness, then we're missing a really key part of this.
[00:19:28] And again, backing up to our major theme that we've been going through, baptism belongs in this same frame. It's not just a symbol of death, it's not just a connection to the Old Testament circumcision. It's not just washing. It's not just dedication. It's not just part of that passage into the new exodus and our life with Jesus. But it's all of those things and it's more.
[00:20:00] We are buried and raised with Christ so that we walk in newness with him. And that's holiness language. So if you just write off baptism as this ancient practice that we don't really have to do today, man, we're missing so much core narrative that we could be incorporating into our lives. Baptism, marks incorporation into a purified people and participation in the Spirit's in dwelling.
[00:20:29] And all of those themes run from Genesis through Revelation, and we are in the middle of that. So if we're treating baptism and atonement as about appeasement and death and sacrifice in a bloody way, we're missing the actual center of gravity, which is God making a holy people for his presence.
[00:20:53] If we start there, then all of the other things will line up.
[00:20:58] Purification, communion, indwelling of the Spirit, and even the missional activity of the church, which is an outpouring and a demonstration of our allegiance to King Jesus. So none of this is about particular technique and none of it's about magic. But if we take out any of those elements of ritual, then how are we going to understand it very well?
[00:21:26] Because even today, even in our world of scientific approach: well, that's just a ritual. Well, we do a ritual because it does a thing for us. It gives us an understanding of something in a way that you couldn't otherwise. Think about the difference between reading a technical manual about something versus reading a story that has the same information versus you actually doing that thing.
[00:21:59] With each one of those things, you are getting into a deeper level of understanding for yourself. You're embedding it into your actual human experience in a way that just reading the textbook is not going to do for you.
[00:22:16] Well that was a whole big tangent I wasn't expecting, but I'll go ahead and just give you another brief layout of some of the things that we have in these ancient texts. Again, divine sovereignty over disease is a hard thing to wrap our minds around without going into a deterministic mindset.
[00:22:37] But we have places like Exodus 1526, which says, quote, " And he said, if you carefully listen to the voice of Yahweh, your God, and you do what is right in his eyes and give heed to his commands and you keep all his rules, then I will not bring about on you any of the diseases that I brought about on Egypt because I am Yahweh your healer." End quote.
[00:23:04] Now unfortunately, if we're reading our Bibles in English, we might come to a verse like that and read that and think, aha. God won't give us diseases if we do this list of rules. But if you've listened to this podcast long at all, you'll know that that's simply not the case, and this is why we need to get our minds into this ancient world.
[00:23:28] But they were steeped in the idea of curses and how those relate to violation of a covenant. . So in Deuteronomy 28, we have a whole bunch of curses, right? And those are all about covenant violation. They include things like diseases sent by God. We have several times where God sends a plague, like in two Samuel 24, and this one's interesting.
[00:23:55] Let me go ahead and read two Samuel 24, 15 through 16, quote, "Then Yahweh sent a plague into Israel from the morning until the agreed time. And from the people from Dan to Beersheba, 70,000 men died. When the angel stretched out his hand to destroy Jerusalem, yahweh regretted about the evil, and he said to the angel who brought destruction among the people, Enough, now relax your hand." End quote.
[00:24:28] A couple of things to note is that Yahweh is sending the plague, but there's an angel who's actually doing the destroying, and that's going to matter when we get into the context of protection. And there are frequently intermediaries or ambiguous agents who are actually doing a thing, but overall, it's always Yahweh who has the full sovereignty. Yahweh is doing it, even if there are intermediaries.
[00:24:57] Certainly we have that kind of language going on in the original Passover in Exodus 12. You have a destroyer, and yet it's still described as being Yahweh. Now, of course, we have a whole lot of intermediary layers in Mesopotamia and other ancient texts like that. And yet, there's always a hierarchy to some higher deity, right? And depending on what's going on, people are going to call to this or that deity, depending on how serious a situation is.
[00:25:30] Now, there's a lot more we could say about ancient world magic. We have a lot of information about Mesopotamian magic 'cause we have quite a few texts, but we also have things in Egypt.
[00:25:43] Primarily Egyptian magic is a funerary in nature, which probably doesn't surprise us because we're very familiar with the cult of the dead in Egypt, all of the mummies and all of these ideas here. Then we have Greek magic and Greek magic deals with curses, love potions, amulets, witchcraft and aggressive spells to the point that magic had a pretty poor reputation amongst doctors in the Greek context.
[00:26:14] Although there also seems to be a difference in ritual incantation text, like an exorcism text in Mesopotamia and other Mesopotamian texts that would be used by a doctor in relation to healing medicines and things like that. One of those things would be done by a priest or somebody who is adjacent to the temple, and another would be a different kind of a functionary, something along the lines of a doctor or a healer of some type.
[00:26:47] And in all of these contexts, we have the idea of witchcraft, which is an aggressive type of magic, and it was seen as illegitimate. It was bad. You weren't supposed to engage in witchcraft, but of course people did it anyway because the idea was they're targeting somebody. And this is where we get that context of the evil eye.
[00:27:12] Now let's get into ethics and magic in Mesopotamia. We did not really see any ethical considerations In the Ugug-hul text that I read, but we do have other texts that are called the Shurpu texts. They're a little bit later and they consist of a long list of confessions which the client or the afflicted person needs to recite in order to merit protection from the gods.
[00:27:41] So it's a kind of incantation combined with a list of confessions. A lot of times these confessions would be things that they didn't know if they actually committed them or not, but I better confess it anyway just in case. A lot of it might be unintentional, which gives us echoes back into Leviticus, right? Much of Leviticus is about unintentional sin.
[00:28:07] Now I mentioned before this idea that I have where water purification comes chronologically earlier in history, than does fire purification. Again, I can't promise you that that is just completely consistent across all of the texts, but several of the have to do with fire and burning as a purifying action.
[00:28:34] So the afflicted person will confess their sins or their ritual offenses or their taboo breaches. Any kind of offense against the moral or social order would be mentioned here, and then depending on the text, perhaps they were confessing over a piece of dough or something that was going to be shaped into a particular shape, and then they would burn the dough. Sometimes the dough would be wiped over the person.
[00:29:03] This is probably an indication of transferring all of their sins to that object that is going to be burnt, and thus it's going to provide relief from the consequences of what they've done. Things they could confess are things like adultery, murder, theft, perjury, witchcraft, arrogance against the gods, or doing something that was just socially taboo.
[00:29:30] Sometimes things involved in these rituals are like onion peels or red wool, and those would be burned in the fire while the incantation was recited. And of course after the burning, a statement of purity or holiness would be said upon the person.
[00:29:47] It's a really interesting set of texts because now we're starting to see morality associated with purification, but there is a lot of suggestion that guilt might be treated as a psychological burden. Like we're not sure that anything is actually wrong, or that this person actually did something, but they're worried about it, so let's do something about it.
[00:30:10] Now, the subtle difference between these things and what we have in say, Leviticus or some of the Psalms, is that, in the Bible, the consequence of not doing the right thing, which is exile, basically. You know, sometimes that's cast as disease and things like that, but exile is the major thing here. And exile is not cast as happening because of unintentional sins.
[00:30:39] Unintentional sins are still a problem that needs to be rectified, but they are not the reason for exile and curse in the Bible. And in the Shurpu texts, there's no clear distinction between moral sin and ritual impurity. And you get that in the Bible too sometimes.
[00:30:59] But again, in these Mesopotamian texts, there is no indication that that god is going to internally transform the person or help them be a more moral person. The whole goal of the ritual is relief and appeasement. It's not so that the person himself can become better.
[00:31:19] It's like, oh no, I did something bad, or I feel like I did something bad, or I might be worried that I did something bad, so let me confess a bunch of things and make sure that the gods are appeased. So if they are the ones afflicting me, then they will stop afflicting me.
[00:31:39] And it's quite clear that the Bible doesn't go that direction. This is why prophets condemn sacrificial rituals when it's disconnected from justice and mercy and right living.
[00:31:50] If you're actually out of covenant with God, it's not because you did this, that, and the other thing, but it's because there is something very wrong that needs to be rectified in your heart.
[00:32:04] So for the Sh the goal is to alleviate misfortune and anxiety and hopefully to fix whatever disease or other kind of problem that they're experiencing, right? But in the Bible, it's to restore relationship with God so that God can be with them and God can also make the people holy.
[00:32:27] An interesting thing that we'll see in some Mesopotamian texts is the idea of the righteous sufferer. He complains about his unfortunate and unmerited fate, and one of the concerns that a person like that might have is that somebody else is performing magical things against them, right? They are the target of witchcraft, basically.
[00:32:49] Now, what about the difference between an incantation and a prayer? It's not always easy to really pull those apart in Mesopotamian texts, but often in a Mesopotamian text, there will be two different functionaries here. You'll have an exorcist priest. And you'll have a liturgical priest. An exorcist is going to be the one going out there and helping afflicted people, casting demons out of homes and particular places.
[00:33:22] But a liturgical priest where the prayers are centered in, that's usually a formal temple functionary. And a prayer is going to approach a deity with a lot more praise. It's gonna do things like acknowledge a lot more dependence on the deity. It's not gonna give necessarily a list of confessions or problems that they're hoping that the god will help with. It's a little bit more general, I guess.
[00:33:49] So both liturgy are designed to cultivate divine favor, but in slightly different contexts. And we might say that prayer even within a Mesopotamian context is a more relational approach. Although I doubt that most Mesopotamian priests would be praying something like, not my will be done, but yours, god. In Scripture, prayer rests on God's character and covenant and faithfulness.
[00:34:22] And although a prayer might be formulaic, it is not meant to function as a charm. A lot of prayer has to do with expressions of faith rather than as a mechanism. A mechanism is presumed to be guaranteed if you do it right, whereas you're just not sure with a prayer. A prayer is more like a petition where you're hoping for something.
[00:34:46] Prayer aims at communion and formation for the Christian, and incantation aims at relief or avoiding bad things.
[00:34:56] And even in Jesus's temptation in Matthew four, Jesus is rejecting the use of Psalm 91 in any kind of a magical way. Jesus also condemns performative verbosity, we might say, when he's talking about prayer. You don't just add a whole bunch of words and think that that's going to make it more effective because that would be magic.
[00:35:22] Yes. We do have a template for prayer, the Lord's Prayer, right? We have many, many templates of prayer in Christian history and tradition. They don't have to be used like magic, though.
[00:35:36] We can see things like in the book of James, where we have prayer and the elders and the anointing with oil and all of that associated with healing. And again, is that magic? We're using an object and we're trying to get a stated result. Right?
[00:35:55] But again, with the presentation in Scripture of God as divine sovereign, we are always in a state of petition rather than trying to control. In the Book of Acts, we have Jesus's name being attempted to be used as an incantation and it fails. All of these things might not be obvious differences, but they're there when you look.
[00:36:22] So another thing we might talk about is magic and divination. It might seem pretty obvious that magic and divination are connected, but they're not connected in a way that we might expect, sometimes. Divination isn't necessarily connected with magic.
[00:36:41] While we might think of divination as a means of control of the unseen realm and the beings behind the unseen realm, it's really this influence of the gods over the oracles there, right. Divination is a means to process warnings of the future, and omens are to be interpreted by people and that is supposed to conform to the divine will.
[00:37:08] But if it's not associated with causation of some sort, then it's a little bit different than magic. We can have magic come into that equation. If divination has some sort of formula where the practitioner is like, if I do this, then something else might happen and there might be some association with technique and mechanism there, but a lot of divination has to do more with probabilities rather than predetermined outcomes.
[00:37:39] We also have the fact that predictions and forecasts could be nullified through magic. So something might be predicted to happen then that's gonna cause somebody to find a magical formula or a charm or incantation or ritual to prevent the thing from happening. So there's a connection there, but it's not direct and distinct.
[00:38:05] Now let's look Psalm 91 and this language of protection. I'm gonna go ahead and read Psalm 91. But I'm not gonna go into all of the detail that we have in the Naked Bible Podcast episode. I believe it's episode 3 21.
[00:38:21] Psalm 91 says, quote, " One who lives in the secret place of the most high will lodge in the shadow of Shaddai. I will say to Yahweh, you are my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust, for he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler, from the plague of destruction. With his feathers, he will cover you. And under his wings you can take refuge. His faithfulness will be a shield and a buckler. You need not fear the terror of the night or the arrow that flies by day, or the plague that spreads in the darkness. Or the destruction that devastates at noon.
[00:39:01] " A thousand may fall at your side and 10,000 at your right hand, but it will not come near you. You will only look with your eyes and see the punishment of the wicked. For you, oh, Yahweh, are my refuge. You have made the most high your dwelling place. No harm will befall you and no plague will come near your tent.
[00:39:23] "For he will command his angels concerning you to watch over you in all your ways. In their hands they will bear you up lest you strike your foot against a stone. You will tread on lion and viper. You will trample young lion and serpent. Because he loves me, therefore, I will deliver him. I will protect him because he knows my name. He will call upon me and I will answer him. I will be with him in trouble. I will rescue and honor him. With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation." End quote.
[00:39:57] Now, as I said, during the second temple period, this psalm was grouped with exorcism texts. We have indications that it was inscribed and recited for protection. Now again, if we're treating that as a petition or a prayer, that doesn't necessarily have to cross into the realm of magic, but it might especially in the context of exorcism. But crucially, the incantation use is post biblical. It's not commanded here in any form whatsoever.
[00:40:34] For those of you who have a hard time seeing this in the sense of exorcism, go listen to the Naked Bible Podcast. You'll see that terror, arrow, pestilence, destruction, are all connected to personal powers. They're demonic powers, but importantly, they are under Yahweh's rule, and we've seen Yahweh before use angels for his purposes here.
[00:41:02] And then we move into the temptation scene with Satan and Jesus. Satan quotes Psalm 91. It's really interesting that Satan is using an exorcism psalm, but he only quotes part of it. And Jesus does not call up that angelic host to protect him. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, this psalm is ascribed as a Psalm of David, so there's our Messianic context right there.
[00:41:30] Anyway, I want to just focus on the angelic protection idea here. If this was somebody else other than Jesus, then perhaps they would've had to call upon angels to act as a mediator of protection for them, and Jesus didn't need that.
[00:41:48] Well, let's stop here for a second and think about amulets and incantations. Again, if you have something like an amulet, then it's like a ritual protection. We have Jewish amulets, we have Greek amulets, we have Egyptian amulets, we have Mesopotamian amulets. Usually they're worn on the body. Sometimes you have like a scroll to protect your house. These can be on metal, on leather, on papyrus, and they'll have some sort of a formula.
[00:42:22] And we certainly see amulets used in Christian tradition. We have amulets that have the names of angels. We have amulets that have cross symbols on them. We have amulets with powerful lines on them.
[00:42:37] Now when we talk about amulets and all of this context, we might think of some of the things that we tend to do as habits, or perhaps we have particular cross that we wear, or rosary that we use, or something that we hold that seems to have some sort of power.
[00:42:57] Is that always magical? Is that always wrong? That's not what I'm saying. I'm gonna leave that to you and your conscience and you can take that up with your own local spiritual leader or your particular tradition, and that's fine.
[00:43:13] It is quite possible that we can use those things as reminders, as ritual practices to focus our minds and bodies on what we should be focused on, right? Do those things help us to trust in God? Do those things help us remember God? Do those things help us to really focus our minds and bodies in right directions, because that doesn't have to be magical technology.
[00:43:45] We are physical people and as physical people, sometimes we need physical reminders and things to help us focus. The ritualization of something or the use of something in a way that might seem a little bit like an amulet is very natural. We might think of the child who has his teddy bear in his bed. We might think of the mother who has the lock of hair of a child in a locket.
[00:44:14] Those things do not have to be bad in and of themselves.
[00:44:18] Again, I just going to keep repeating myself. Is it something that you see as having innate power in and of itself? Like the wooden stake that you have to kill the vampire with. A wooden stake that is made out of a cross is gonna hold more power than a wooden stake that is made out of a garden hoe. That's the kind of thing that really definitively crosses over into magic.
[00:44:43] Okay. I don't wanna miss out on talking about ancient Egypt in all of this as well. What did ritual purity look like in the Egyptian world? What role did cleanliness and sacred space and priestly behavior play? And how does all of that in the Egyptian context compare to Israel's system, especially in light of the biblical call to imitate our Holy God?
[00:45:12] Well, the Egyptian context is really very interesting. They had a concept called maat, and it's hard to really describe this in modern terms to people today. There's a lot of different metaphors and things we could use, like the scales of truth and justice that have to be balanced. And in fact, that's literally a metaphor from the ancient world.
[00:45:38] In some ways there's a lot of similarity to platonic forms and things like that. So depending on the scholar you're reading from and their perspective, this is going to be described differently. But you can kind of think of it as cosmic order. Now, temples were considered to be the homes of the gods. Priests functioned as servants who cared for the gods. So that's very similar to Mesopotamia, a little bit similar to Scripture. And in Egypt, ritual purity was really essential for temple function. Impurity was seen as disruptive to this cosmic order, but again, it's functional and not really relational.
[00:46:25] You had to be purified to perform duties in sacred space, and if you weren't the Pharaoh, you really didn't have a divine connection to the gods.
[00:46:36] There's a lot of really interesting connection between Egyptian priests and biblical priests. This isn't like perfect crossover, but priests in Egypt were required to bathe twice daily and twice nightly. They shaved all of their body hair. They had to abstain from sex. They had to wear clean linen. They had to avoid certain foods. They had to avoid contact with impure things.
[00:47:04] And they had texts that said things like, he shall be pure as Ra is pure. He shall not enter the temple unless he's washed and free from impurity. This has nothing to do with morality, but about ritual, sacred readiness.
[00:47:22] Of course, a lot of the ancient Egyptian texts are for funerary purposes. So you had the pyramid texts and all of this is connecting purity to the afterlife by the way. The king had to be purified to ascend to the realm of the gods. So really here we have purity as fitness for immortality as well. Not just moral likeness, but we do have confessions and things like that, as well as divine judgment.
[00:47:52] Somebody had to put up a moral self-defense to enter the blessed afterlife. And so there is this connection with purity and ethics, but primarily we're talking about after death so that you can continue to live into that realm. It's not really that the God's demand or really cared about your holiness. But they did evaluate it for your fitness to enter their space.
[00:48:19] Now, I think we could connect that with Scripture and the idea of God dwelling with his people, but it's not really the gods who are motivated, right? It's that people want to participate in the divine realm.
[00:48:33] Now I'm tempted to do a whole episode on purity in the Hittite world, but I really don't want to belabor the point too much, but suffice to say, if you are interested in all of this kind of thing, that's another realm that you're gonna want to look at. The Hittites appear in the Bible as inhabitants of Canaan or adjacent to that, and so there's a lot of influence there. They definitely had the ideas of purity and ritual in very similar ways. It would be interesting to go into all of the differences, but that's kind of not really our point here, exactly.
[00:49:11] One of the things I want to caution you on, though, is not over conflating things. Just because you have similarity over here and similarity over there doesn't mean that there has to be dependency or anything. Part of the point here is just to see how much of this is embedded into the mind of the ancient person, embedded into their entire world, and it's going to frame it for them. Again, it's just so essential to see that, especially when we live in a world where we're missing so much of it.
[00:49:46] A lot of the Hittite ritual and things were really very focused on the king and the king's association with cosmic and political order. There isn't a whole lot of connection with moral guilt and things like that in the hitite logic here. They definitely had things like scapegoats and incantations, washing and burning.
[00:50:11] The gods were very political. They expected clean conditions, but they weren't sanctifying the people or trying to dwell with them. A lot of the ritual seems to be meant to shield the king and the kingdom from the divine wrath, rather than drawing near to Kevin in presence.
[00:50:31] Now, here is a shared frame, which is the danger of the sacred. This is where we're gonna get into the conversation about protection. Both in the ancient Near East as well as in Israel, sacred space is dangerous if approached incorrectly. It's defiled by impurity, which could be moral, ritual, or just spatial in general. It had to be maintained by regular purification. It was closely regulated by ritual specialists of some sort. Priests, diviners, a whole host of staff at the temple.
[00:51:09] And in Leviticus, we see the danger of approaching sacred space inappropriately. We also have the context of the land vomiting out its inhabitants and this is a warning of the exile.
[00:51:23] And the Passover blood is a kind of protection. Now that is a really fascinating element that still just makes me scratch my head. It actually seems very apotropaic, right? I it really is because you put on the blood on the doorposts and it's going to ward off the destroyer.
[00:51:48] So what's the difference here? Why do we need protection in the Bible? Well, one suggestion I would have for you is that there is a difference between protection from and protection for. In pagan ritual, purity protects you from the god. The ritual is meant to protect you from activity from the divine realm of some sort.
[00:52:16] The gods might be volatile, moody, potentially hostile, or there just might be good guys and bad guys out there. And so you have to maintain purity to keep them away or to appease them. Ritual protects the individual or the community from divine punishment or wrathful intrusion. That is the context in the pagan world, but we come into Israel's theology and purity prepares the person for the presence of a holy God who wants to dwell with them.
[00:52:50] Yahweh is not capricious. He is consistent. He is faithful, and he is holy, and he invites people into his space. But at the same time, his holiness is lethal if it's profaned. And so the rituals teach to protect the relationship, and it is an embodied practice that gives people knowledge of what God is doing here.
[00:53:17] A really good analogy I've seen multiple times is the contrast between radiation and rage. In ancient Near Eastern pagan systems, the gods are like tyrants. They're unpredictable, they're dangerous, or they're chaotic, or they're evil. But in Israel, Yahweh is kind of more like the sun or some nuclear energy.
[00:53:46] Those things are inherently good, useful, life-giving, potentially in the case of nuclear energy if you use it right. But they're also dangerous if approached wrongly.
[00:53:58] So you shield yourself from a tyrant because he might lash out. But you prepare yourself for radiation because it's powerful, not evil.
[00:54:12] Now, in the question of Passover blood versus pagan apotropaic ideas. In the Passover, in Exodus, we have divine judgment against the injustice of Pharaoh and his insistence that he's not going to allow the people to go worship Yahweh.
[00:54:32] That's why we have that divine judgment upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt's gods. In pagan protection rites, we have capricious or chaotic deities and demons. Possibly even bad luck that people don't know why they're having it or they've crossed a line that they need to fix, and that if they don't fix it, they're gonna keep having a problem.
[00:54:58] Notice the difference between injustice and pagan ideas. Part of the purpose of the Passover was to mark out the covenant people and to honor God's instruction. But in pagan ritual, it's a magic to block evil incursion.
[00:55:17] In the Passover, Yahweh, and his angelic messenger, they pass over the people. But in pagan rites, we have incantation or sacrifice to ward off spirits.
[00:55:30] Blood in Passover is a sign of obedience and covenant loyalty. Blood in a pagan rite, was not often used, but if it was, it didn't have this idea of covenant, that's for sure.
[00:55:47] So in the Passover, God is sparing those who have chosen to align themselves in obedience with him. But in pagan practices, the spirits or the gods or the demons, they're staying away if they're tricked or they're appeased or they're forced to do so by some mechanistic law, perhaps. I hate using the word mechanism even for the Mesopotamian text, but that is basically what we have with magic.
[00:56:17] So again, we have Israel, they inherit a lot of this context. They just live in it. They presume that all of these things have their logic that everyone else has, but they also transform or redeem some of those ideas and shift them in polemic ways or just in ways that are going to teach the Israelites something different.
[00:56:43] Their purity texts echo the ancient world all over. They follow similar ritual forms, similar conceptual patterns, possibly even similar meanings at times, but they shift it into a radically new idea of a holy God dwelling amongst people that he has chosen to be in covenant with.
[00:57:05] And that's us in Christ, right? That's the whole concept of the incarnation. God actually dwelling with us and the Spirit in dwelling with us as well.
[00:57:18] And we have the context of water baptism. We have the context of fire, not just at the end of the world, but fire as associated with the Spirit. Unlike water purification, which kind of washes something away and just kind of removes it, the act of burning destroys it fundamentally. That's fascinating difference here.
[00:57:45] Again, with the concept of blood, it's really very rarely used. In Mesopotamian and other contexts there. Blood is generally seen as polluting and chaotic. But in Leviticus 17, we're told that the life is in the blood and that God has given it to the people to make atonement. It's a ritual cleanser and it forms a sanctifying effect, and it's also associated with cutting of the covenant. A really important distinction there. If we're just seeing blood as being this connection to death and gruesome ideas. Again, missing the point.
[00:58:28] I love reading the scapegoat rituals and things like that because they have such strange details. And just like what we have in the Day of Atonement, strange details. And we might say that there is a mechanistic kind of a background here. We have transfer and we have actual sending out and all of these things, but there is a real distinctive emphasis here . But why?
[00:58:57] The categories appear in both Israel as well as the broader ancient Near East and it's connected to life and death. But for the Israelite, death isn't the end of the matter. There's a connection between life and presence here, and it's just a lot to meditate on. That's all I'm saying. It's not like we can really completely disassociate death from the sacrificial system, but the place that it holds is not a presumed paganistic concept here.
[00:59:32] All right, so let me just go ahead and wrap all of this up. For the Israelite, Yahweh is holy in a way that nothing and nobody else was. His very being is set apart, pure, and moral. And it might be a little bit hard for us to define it just because it's so closely associated with God that you can't distinguish it from him.
[00:59:58] And His holiness is not just dangerous, but it's good and it's life giving. And are there rules that you have to kinda follow for that? Yes. But those rules and those practices are teaching the people something important. And the people even take all of those things and think that they can manipulate them.
[01:00:21] And that's what gets them the exile. And not just manipulating the holiness of Yahweh, but combining Yahweh's worship with worship of all of the other deities.
[01:00:32] The self-revealing holiness of God in Scripture has no parallel in ancient Sumeria, in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, or anywhere else in the ancient world. It's fascinating this difference, and I just have to say that it frustrates me if we don't see it and we don't see the importance of it. Really, we should see holiness as being missional and ethical, but we don't equate those two things as if they are the same.
[01:01:03] By being in alignment with the Holy God, we are transformed into something different. And so our moral and ethical layers likewise are going to play a different part. And it's also the case that if you're worshiping those deities over there, then your morality and your ethics are not gonna be good.
[01:01:26] So when you bring impurity and non holiness into the equation, why would that be dangerous? Well, it disrupts the relationship, first of all, but it disrupts the moral and ethical categories of the people. They're not gonna live in moral ways, and that's the point. It's not random. It's not that the rules are there just because God is a big old meanie.
[01:01:52] These are things to teach reconciliation and goodness and life. If we reorient purity toward covenant fidelity and God's desire to remain present with us, then that's a whole different thing. It's transformative and it was meant to be transformative even in the Old Testament.
[01:02:16] You know, I get tired of all the people who say that, oh, the ancient Old Testament sacrificial system couldn't do what it was meant to do. Well, it couldn't do what Jesus did, but it was not meant to do what Jesus did because there is a reason that Jesus is the better covenant.
[01:02:34] There is a reason that following Jesus and being in Jesus is the better thing. He does do things that the ancient sacrificial system wasn't meant to do, but the ancient sacrificial system was pointing to that, and it did the things that it was supposed to do, which was to purify and cleanse sacred space so that people could worship Yahweh.
[01:03:01] And if they're doing that and they're only worshiping Yahweh, then they're going to remain in covenant with him. And if they remain in covenant with him, then they're not gonna go follow the path of the pagans. They're not gonna follow the path of the other capricious non holy, in a moral sense, gods.
[01:03:22] So ethics and morality need to be wrapped up into this, just not in the way that we often do. It's not just that Yahweh is pure and holy, it is that he is literally transformative and that worship of him is impactful in the world. It changes things and it does things. And if you are not worshiping Yahweh and you're worshiping something or somebody else, then you are not getting that transformative action.
[01:03:54] It's not magic. It's being in relationship and seeing God's faithfulness and being rightly ordered in the world. You have a core of that and a shadow of that in places like Mesopotamian religion, but it's simply not the same. And yet we have this crossover that we have to understand in order to understand the Bible well and to understand God's purpose as well.
[01:04:25] If we bring all of this back into the flood narrative, it fits perfectly there too. Noah, who was righteous because he was worshiping the true God was saved. He was saved through the waters. That is, as opposed to all of the other people who were violent. And why were they violent? Because they weren't righteous, they weren't worshiping Yahweh.
[01:04:49] You see a very strict distinction here. I don't know if that's easy for people to see, but it, I feel like it should be easy to see in the flood narrative, and it should be easy to see when you bring all of this context into the idea of baptism as well.
[01:05:06] Baptism is a really complicated thing, and I think that's the power of ritual. When you have a ritual and you have it happening through time and it's connected to multiple actual events in time, then what we have here is just loaded with things that we can spend a whole lifetime contemplating.
[01:05:31] So I hope I've given you a few thoughts to think about. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you guys for sharing the episodes with others. If you wanna come and talk more in my community, November, 2025, we are talking about the church, which is a really big topic.
[01:05:49] It's a really important topic. Sometimes it's a very divisive topic. So I invite you all into my community at On This Rock. I will provide the link in the show notes for you. And a big shout out and a big thank you to all of my supporters who, however you are supporting me, I thank you for that. But at any rate, I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.
