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 in our last episode about purification, which was not last week's episode, but the week before, so I'm talking about episode number 1 47, we saw that purity is not just about moral behavior or personal sin, it's about the conditions that allow a holy God to dwell with his people.
[00:00:39] It's about ritual, covenant and divine presence from a unified conceptual frame. But how do we know that this isn't just reading the Bible through our theological lenses? What if we go back, well before the book of Leviticus, well before Sinai to the oldest texts in the ancient Near East, and ask how they understood purity, holiness, and sacred space?
[00:01:08] And then we can ask after that, how does Israel's system fit in with that world, but also how does it subvert it?
[00:01:18] That's what we're gonna start talking about today. This is going to be a deep dive episode. I've done episodes where I've read ancient literature before, and that might be partly what we'll do today. I really want to give you a taste of what we're looking at in the ancient literature here. Partly I wanna do that because I know that a lot of you have already started reading ancient literature.
[00:01:45] So maybe you're familiar with the book of First Enoch. Maybe you're familiar with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Maybe you're familiar with the Epic of Gilgamesh, or even Atrahasis or Enuma Elish. All of those things we've talked about here. So if you've only listened to the podcast, you are already well familiar with those things.
[00:02:07] But here's the thing that we might miss when we're talking about things in a biblical theology way, because when we're talking about biblical theology there's a risk that you're gonna come away from all of that and think it's a little bit more simplistic than it actually is.
[00:02:26] And so today part of my job is to make it more complex for you because I want you to see how things really are very complex in the ancient world. We have a lot of texts that are very similar, that draw upon similar themes that sound very similar to each other, but they're also very different. They have a lot of contradictions. They have a lot of differences.
[00:02:53] This is not surprising because we're looking at ancient texts that come from widely different geographical places or chronological times. And just like what we do today, ancient people saved ancient literature for themselves as well. They repurposed literature for themselves.
[00:03:14] This is just what happens when you have ideas and you have concepts and you have worldviews that track across time. Things both remain the same and they also change through time. This needs to be acknowledged because a lot of times in Christianity we kind of have this really rosy picture that it's really one thing through time and even within the church that is simply not the case. We have development of ideas. We have changes of ideas.
[00:03:49] We have ideas that come along and they have major impacts. And sometimes those ideas also pass out of use and ideas structure in the world, and sometimes they'll come back into the world. And that's a lot of what we see today, in fact, with biblical theology and all of the studying that we're able to do about the ancient world, we are finding ideas that have been lost through time sometimes.
[00:04:20] All of us are familiar with at least certain kinds of major changes. We're at least familiar with the Protestant Reformation and we're familiar with all of the different splits and denominations that have arisen from those time periods. It's a complex thing, and I'm not trying to answer that today. I'm just saying that there are complexities that make it difficult to really package it up perfectly.
[00:04:47] That doesn't mean you can't do that in some way, right? We can systematize things, we can create a narrative structure that makes more sense to us, and that's part of the Divine Council worldview, is, we're looking at the ancient narrative structure, the ancient cultural thinking, and how they were interacting with the world and seeing themselves in relation to God and all of these things.
[00:05:12] And we can take their stories and move them forward to today in some form. I actually think that studying the ancient world, studying ancient ideas, looking at the worldview, the ritual, all of these things in the ancient world, if we can see what those are all about, I think they can shed a lot of light on our complexity and problems today.
[00:05:40] It's not really about, we need to get back to those ideas exactly, because we have a lot of information and knowledge and concepts that the ancient world didn't have, and we shouldn't just jettison all of those things. But I really do think that ancient ideas can shed a lot of light on what we're thinking about today and how we're thinking about theology and doctrine and how we're reading our Bibles.
[00:06:09] So in episode 1 47, we explored biblical categories of purity and holiness. And we might still ask, why does it matter? And I'm bringing that question here today again because I think that today we have a very strong tendency to not have any understanding of sacred space, and I think that's a real problem.
[00:06:35] I'm going to suggest that many of us like to talk about how the body of Christ, the people of the church collectively and us as individuals, we like to say that we are now sacred space. And rightly so because of the Holy Spirit's presence, and we are the priesthood of all believers. As we go out and disciple people into allegiance to King Jesus, we are retaking contested ground from the territorial spirits.
[00:07:06] I really do believe that. But none of that has to necessitate that we cannot have any set aside sacred space.
[00:07:16] Just like we can have set aside time to worship, even though worship can and should be part of our daily lives and existence as we go about things, we can still have set aside time to specifically read our Scriptures, pray, worship with other people. And I would say the same thing about sacred space.
[00:07:39] If we have nothing set aside for us to be humbly reminded of how we are interacting with a holy God, then it's really unfortunate. I think we might miss out on the reminder of the experience that that can bring us.
[00:07:55] The Bible presents a story where God dwells with us. And the fact that we have these beautiful spaces and they're meant to be beautiful spaces. That's supposed to highlight and teach something.
[00:08:09] If holiness is just about what we're actually doing here and it's centered on us, centered on morality or it's centered on something here and now, then we're just not understanding the picture. We're not understanding who God is and how he is transcendent and other, and how that other transcendent, holy God, the one who has created the world as it is and who cares for all of us, who cares for the marginalized, who cares for the oppressed and the poor, who cares for our suffering. All of that is already embedded into the Christian narrative and Christian practice.
[00:08:49] And how do we understand that the intent of that holy and transcendent God is to dwell with us. And that intent is not to leave us common, but to transcend us past that.
[00:09:03] Now, that's going to be a common thing that we're gonna talk about in this little mini series about ancient purity ritual.
[00:09:11] But actually, I really think that looking at this ancient literature is going to really be helpful to us. I believe that looking at comparative literature is going to show us the heart of what we should be learning in the system of holy and common and clean and unclean. The Bible doesn't really explain itself in these things because it didn't have to. It was speaking to an audience who intimately understood the whole thing, but we don't quite get it. In order to understand the overall point or theological messaging, we need to steep ourselves in this ancient world and the literature is how we're gonna do that.
[00:09:57] Now as we go through this material, I want to point out a few things for starters. First of all, this is how we understand a lot of the context in the Bible, because if you hadn't noticed, it doesn't explain a whole lot of things going on in say, the book of Leviticus. It doesn't give us its internal logic.
[00:10:21] And unless we have a reason to think that the Bible is turning something on its head, really, we can presume that the Bible has similar ideas that are brought out in other ancient texts.
[00:10:35] But another point I want to make is that many of us are becoming familiar with the book of First Enoch, with the Dead Sea Scrolls, with the Epic of Gilgamesh, with Atrahasis, with Enuma Elish. All of these major stories that really are clear parallels to the Bible. But as I hope you will see here, there is a lot more than that out there.
[00:11:00] And it comes from different times, sometimes different geography. And even within the ancient Near East, it has differences and contradictions. The people in general were already doing what we'd like to call polemics. We don't tend to call things outside the Bible polemic, but it is, and a polemic doesn't have to be aggressive against something else.
[00:11:27] Note that the worship of multiple gods is welcome and even encouraged in some of this pagan literature, they didn't believe that you had to adhere to a monotheistic deity. Each place in time is going to write these things from their perspective, though, and that means changes in deities and who's the good guys and who's the bad guys sometimes, or even just taking other people's deities to worship yourselves.
[00:11:58] Which by the way, that itself is interesting for those who want to take the Divine Council worldview seriously, as in you think that the Bible is teaching something that we need to take on in application ourselves. Now, many of us do think that, and I put myself in that camp.
[00:12:19] But here's the thing about that. Here's the reason we need to be quite cautious with it. If the Bible is presuming the worldview of its neighbors, meaning that it's affirming that yes, those deities over there, they exist in a real way. And then we go on to say that this means that Marduk exists, for instance. If we're getting that specific about affirming the divine council worldview, and believe me, this is what people are doing. And sometimes they're doing it very meticulously. They're taking every little factoid that might be gleaned and saying that the Bible affirms that piece of information.
[00:13:07] Now, much of that is about how God assigns deities in territorial spaces, right? So the presumption there is that those deities are trapped in those spaces or they can't move across borders, at least not with authority and power. But if that's how we're seeing it, if we're seeing it that meticulously, then we really kind of have a problem.
[00:13:34] Because in the ancient world, we do have deities who move to different areas. Sometimes they're renamed, but it seems to be the same deity. And you know, a lot of us might say, well that's because it is the same spiritual being, but how do we explain how Marduk was pretty much just a functionary, and then he came to be a main player. But we don't have that really explained in the Bible.
[00:14:02] So are we taking the other ancient literature as inspired and saying it's correct? If you get meticulous with the divine council worldview and its data, you kind of have to presume that, and that gets us into some really muddy territory that really kind of bothers me personally. In ancient Near Eastern material, that's explained through cosmic warfare between the deities, right? But we don't have that kind of detail in the Bible.
[00:14:32] Do you see my problem here? If we want to affirm the reality of the divine council worldview, and then we want to take all of the details that we can with that as if all of them are factually true, then it is a mess and it would require a lot more explanation that we just don't have.
[00:14:56] And I suspect that this is partly why someone like John Walton or many others don't want to put so much credence into the divine council worldview as an affirmation of the text, as if it's teaching something. Because in reality, it unravels quickly because of its complexity and its differences, and its internal contradictions.
[00:15:22] So anyone going down the fringe Nephilim hunter path, or anyone who wants to make all of these intricate connections, yes, I'm referring to the kind of work that Gary Wayne or Timothy Alberino do. It's kind of just nonsense because although there are connections and similarities, there's a lot of contradiction and difference, and you should ask yourself, are these people who are making all of these connections, are they telling you about the differences or are they only giving you the connections and the similarities?
[00:16:01] As human beings, we are very good at storytelling. We're really good at making stories, right? Like it's October right now, and I drive around my city and I see all of these really, you know, the giant skeletons, right? And we make a lot of jokes about the skeletons and the nephilim and whatever situation they're in, in the yard, right? And we can do that because we're really good at making connections between two different things. It's easy to do because this is what people do.
[00:16:35] So we look at the Bible and we look at this other ancient literature, and we see that the ancient literature has a lot of conflict between the deities, right? This is called conflict theology. You see that a lot in Mesopotamian literature. You have the gods who are literally at odds with one another. There's good guys. There's bad guys. And in all of the stories, the good guys have won out over the bad guys.
[00:17:04] Or in the literature we'll see today, the good guys are supposed to help people against the bad guys. But with the Bible and the Old Testament, you have Yahweh, and sure there are rebellious spiritual beings, but those rebellious spiritual beings really aren't causing the problems in the way that you see in these Mesopotamian demon exorcism texts that I'm going to read.
[00:17:33] But the Bible presents Yahweh as a supreme deity who does deal with rebellion under his ranks, but he can do that because he's supreme and he's not really going to be defeated by them. He's not fighting these demons as we have in these ancient texts. And in the New Testament, Jesus certainly doesn't have to fight them.
[00:17:59] I'm just saying it's a different picture in the Bible than it is that we have in Mesopotamian literature, and it's these differences that we can see that the Bible is both embedded into its context, but it's also turning its context on its head. Part of the reason I want to read these for you is to show this difference, and it's a very stark difference in some places, but there's also a lot of similarity that might surprise you. Again, I've already done that with some other texts, but we're gonna do that with some ritual texts today.
[00:18:36] So back to the holy and the common and the clean and the unclean. We saw how these categories form a ritual and spatial framework, not merely an ethical one. And that's part of the theological message, not that it's against or not about ethics at all in the Bible, because it is. But if we're not seeing the holiness factor, then we're missing something. If we're not seeing purification in the light of these ancient texts, then we're missing that message.
[00:19:11] We need to ask what the center of the idea is. What is the concept that is being brought to mind when the ancient person would think of these things or interact with them in some way?
[00:19:24] Now, I argued that the Levitical system is not about managing sin, but it's about making space for a holy God to dwell with an unholy people. Again, keeping morality as a part of that, certainly in the Bible, but it's not the overarching concept. I'll bring up frame semantics again. Within the concept of holy, morality will be a frame element within it, but it's not the frame itself.
[00:19:56] And we saw that many Christians misread these systems by importing New Testament moral categories too early, and this is part of a larger hermeneutical methodological concern, right? The way that we interpret. The past didn't have the categories of later theological systems. But the Bible moves forward. It moves from pure ritual to ethical considerations. It moves from sacred space to incarnate presence, and there's something to be learned in that.
[00:20:33] Now you could call that progressive revelation. It's not progressive in the sense that it's changing things, but it's progressive in the sense of its direction and its addition. In other words, we shouldn't read later theology back into Leviticus because we have to understand Leviticus first. So we read Leviticus forward through to Christ, to that telos that we have in Jesus.
[00:21:05] Now, I said ritual, covenant, and divine presence form a conceptual unity that is rooted in holiness, not just personal ethics. And I understand that that's a pretty big claim, but it's a claim that is based in how ancient people thought about the sacred.
[00:21:30] So today we're going to test that claim with real evidence. What did purity look like before Sinai? By necessity, what we will see first in historical chronological evidence, meaning the earliest examples that we have of ritual and purity, we will not find the center on purification of sacred space, but purification of other things. This is the evidence from our earliest texts that we have.
[00:22:04] This was part of my point last time, that purification has to precede holiness, and it's what we see in the actual literature.
[00:22:14] However, there is an important few things to see, including the fact that there are ancient rituals that provide for a god to make a temple his dwelling, and also some of these purification rights call for the making of a temporary hut type structure at the end of a sick person's bed. That is definitely some sort of sacred space there.
[00:22:40] So we're gonna look at what purity looked like. We're gonna look at the categories that the ancient world had, and we're gonna examine where does Israel echo those ancient systems and where does it depart from them.
[00:22:55] Again, how did people think about holiness, sacred space, death, divine presence, all before the Torah? And when I say people, I mean all of the people as a whole. Everyone who lived in this cultural river. The Bible affirms and utilizes much of this imagery, but it also has unique theological messaging, and you can see that in the differences.
[00:23:25] From a divine council lens, if Yahweh's holiness sets him apart, then what about the other gods? Do those other gods relate to things like purity, sacred space, and ritual, and are there any differences there?
[00:23:43] Does the divine council and cosmic beings in general, do they operate under purity structures? It might surprise us if they did, because we think of Yahweh as being special, right? And holiness is about that otherness. But it is the fact that we see this context in ancient literature.
[00:24:07] Another thing I want you to keep in mind is the question of whether or not impurity affects only humans, or does it have cosmic implications?
[00:24:19] Okay, so the first thing we're gonna look at is purity and impurity In ancient Mesopotamia. We're gonna be looking at Sumerian and Akkadian texts.
[00:24:31] The things that we want to note are what are the concepts that center around ritual or personal impurity? We're also going ask how impurity was cleansed. What kinds of things caused impurity? What is the theological logic that underlies these practices? We're pretty lucky that some of the texts give a little bit more explanation than what we might have in the Bible sometimes.
[00:25:01] So here's our historical and cultural background for this. We're talking about ancient Sumer, and we're thinking something along the lines of 3000 to 2000 bc. These are our oldest known written texts, and we see temple liturgies, incantations, and purification rituals.
[00:25:24] Then we also have Akkadian texts. This is the Assyrio- Babylonian world. And the neat thing about this is that a lot of these texts we have in this later Akkadian context, they have both languages in parallel, which is really fascinating and frankly really helpful to us to understand their way of thinking, right?
[00:25:49] This is how we know that they are not just new people thinking new things that happen to be similar, but they are taking their own ancient literature and reusing it. A lot of this stuff lasted a long time. A lot of this stuff we see into the Hellenistic era even. So we have successors who adopt and adapt and expand this purity language, especially in incantation and priestly ritual literature.
[00:26:25] Now, for these people, religion was deeply priestly and frequently transactional. It was set to maintain balance with the divine through offerings, through, things that they said and through their ritual action.
[00:26:43] An important distinction to make along with all of this is that in Mesopotamia, impurity is often about danger and disorder and not sin in a moral sense. Now, if you understand the stories about the Mesopotamian deities, that might make some sense to you because those deities didn't seem to act all that nicely sometimes. They didn't have any better morals than most people did, so it kind of makes sense that impurity wasn't really about sin.
[00:27:17] The primary examples that we're gonna look at today is a series called Udug-hul. These are exorcism texts that are aimed at warding off demons or disease- bringing spirits. A lot of what we'll see here is what we would term as magic. That's going to be another thing I'll talk about . Magic versus, what do we have in Scripture? Does Scripture present magic as well?
[00:27:47] Typical phrases we'll see in these texts are things like, may the incantation water of purification cleanse me. Or, the evil that clings like pitch, may the pure river carry it away.
[00:28:02] Already we have some echoes of things we've already talked about, don't we? Water was often the main medium of purification, especially from unseen threats, but we'll also see things like fumigation, fire, and words that will actually do the purification.
[00:28:24] Today I will be referencing a book called Healing Magic and Evil Demons by Markham Geller. This is a book that's available online, and in fact, if you are a member of my community, On This Rock, I've actually provided a link to this book in my Genesis Marks the Spot space there in my community. So you can go and read all of these texts. It is a scholarly book, but if you skip to the sections where it has really good dense content or you skip to the translations, you can actually read these tablets .
[00:29:02] I'm going to read a quote from this book, which says, quote, " Of all the various kinds of misfortunes which befall people that can be ascribed to demons, certainly the most common would be illness, which will affect everyone as time or another in their lives. Other kinds of catastrophic events richly documented in omen literature consisted of the dissolution of the household, divorce, loss of property, and similar occurrences, including plague. But demons were especially feared for their reputations as bearers of disease more than for any other reason." End quote.
[00:29:47] Now here I am talking about demons in the ancient world, in the Old Testament context. In fact, before the Old Testament was written, they had this conception of the demonic. These are evil spirits. They don't always have a really clear cut reason for their existence in this ancient world or this ancient literature.
[00:30:13] And it might surprise some of us to see this because you look at the Old Testament and there isn't a whole lot of the same context. Now, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You can find certain places where there are some suggestions of demonic spirits and things, right? But it's really in the New Testament where we get all of that fully fleshed out.
[00:30:38] So first of all, we might ask, what is up with this? Why does the Mesopotamian world have this massive catalog of demonic spirits that we just don't see nearly as much in the Old Testament? Again, not saying we don't have it, but it's a stark difference.
[00:30:58] It is a stark difference because again, in this Mesopotamian literature, when you read it, you will see lists upon lists of the good guys and the bad guys. There's a lot of them. Now that's going to harken back to what I said about conflict theology. In the broader ancient Near Eastern world, conflict between the gods was a really big deal.
[00:31:23] It was the conflict between gods that was causing misfortune, that was causing sickness, and you would call upon the good guys to help you in that, to rescue you from it. That is the point of these exorcism texts. The exorcism text is going to call upon the good guy gods to banish the bad guy gods for you. That's what's going on here.
[00:31:51] Now, we will see a lot of parallel in these texts with what we have in the Bible, but it's a massive difference here. And in fact, I did a whole episode on sickness. I believe it was episode 60, if you haven't listened to that one.
[00:32:07] What I found in the Bible regarding who causes sickness, it is almost always accredited to God. That's the kind of thing that we see and why there's pushback against conflict theology in the Bible, because it is simply nowhere near what we have in Mesopotamian literature. The difference is massive.
[00:32:33] Now, we do have a few places where it seems like God uses agents in order to cause sickness, so there's a little bit of a distinction or a pulling back of God from the kind of bad things that happen, but Yahweh is still seen as sovereign over it all. There is no place in the Bible where that is not the case.
[00:32:56] And yet in this Mesopotamian literature that we're gonna look at, it is the good guys and the bad guys, and they have to duke it out.
[00:33:06] I'm going to continue to read from Geller here. He says, quote, " The principal divine authority authenticating the power of the incantations was Enki or Ea, god of wisdom, whose role within Sumerian mythology was primary. It was Enki who established the world order in Enki and the World Order. It was Enki who saved mankind from the flood. And it was Enki who had Inanna released from the world of the dead. Enki was assisted by his son, and this divine duo were seamlessly transformed into their Akkadian counterparts, Ea and Marduk, whose role within the incantations appears at first glance to have remained as before.
[00:33:57] " However, one of the innovations was the increased centrality of Marduk as the main god of healing independent of Ea, and no longer acting as Ea's emissary. Which is the picture which emerges from Marduk's Address to the Demons. At least three tablets focus primarily on Marduk's role as the chief protagonist against demons bringing illness, which is a major departure from his traditional role as Enki's assistant."
[00:34:29] Okay, so now I'm going to share some examples with you. I will summarize what is going on with tablet seven. Sometimes the tablets and the incantations have ritual with them, and sometimes they are just the text of the incantation, and tablet seven contains a ritual.
[00:34:49] What we have is a ritual vessel where the priest pours out water. After the water is poured out, you have two ritual plants, which are very common in ritual literature. We have the tamarisk and another plant that is not translated in English. These plants are then applied to the patient. The patient is sprinkled with water. The priest will take a torch from a censer. And finally, a ritual bell is used to make a frightening noise. In some tablets, it's explained that the frightening noise will scare off the demons. And all of this is being done while the appropriate incantations are being recited.
[00:35:35] Then there is a second type of ritual vessel where water is sprinkled around the patient's bed. A torch is again taken from a censer and used, and again, we have the bell ringing. So they scare away the demons with the scary noise. Then they take a special kind of a flour. They scatter it around the gate and around the doors and the threshold of the house.
[00:36:01] So what's going on here is this flour is supposed to create a barrier. If you're familiar with Leviticus and other texts in the Bible, there's some similarities with other things going on in Scripture, right?
[00:36:15] The second ritual I'll describe. We have both the waters from the Tigris as well as the waters from the Euphrates. They are joined together. These waters from the two major rivers are described as angry or red. Now I want you to remember what I said about waters below and waters above. River water is living water, and it's going to be very often seen in ritual texts to scare off demons.
[00:36:48] There's a big connection with demons and running water or water on the ground. But there's also a connection with the demonic and storm gods, right? So you have a difference here. A difference between water that's running in a river and water that is pouring down from clouds.
[00:37:11] All right, so back to this ritual. We have the waters from the Tigris, the waters from the Euphrates, the angry waters combined together, sprinkled on the patient. Again, with the tamarisk and this other plant. Once again, we have the torch and the censer.
[00:37:29] And in this ritual it's probably a type of sympathetic magic. And sympathetic magic is something that like you're doing something and the thing that you are doing is supposed to demonstrate or physically replicate what is going on in the spiritual realm. The reason this is sympathetic is that the demon is ordered to flow or to drip out of the man's body. So he's sprinkled and the demon is supposed to then drip out of his body.
[00:38:04] We, again have the bell that creates the noise. A magic circle with two types of flour is drawn in a circle around the bed as a taboo or again, sacred space. It prohibits the demons from entering here.
[00:38:22] And it mentions ghosts. So we have both demons, which are spiritual entities as well as ghosts, which are the departed human dead, and both of those are being kept at bay. Finally, we have a particular type of a wood scepter or mace that is placed at the patient's head. It's not explained why that's there, but we see this kind of wood also show up in other rituals.
[00:38:51] Sometimes you have perfumed oil of cedar that is then taken and applied after all of that to the patient's body. And the priests who are performing the incantations, they are called to bind the patient with the pure bandage that contains these oils. And then there is a fumigation that is given. It's performed with a torch that is burning some sort of incense.
[00:39:18] All right, so tablet seven. There's a lot of information here. That's why I'm bringing this one out. What we have is water. We have water that is poured. We have water that is sprinkled. We have flour that is used to create a boundary marker. We have noise, we have words, we have fire, we have smells. All of those are parts of this purification ritual or this exorcism.
[00:39:47] The final instructions on tablet seven command ghosts to take leather pouches that are left out for them as food offerings and be satisfied and no longer to disturb the patient.
[00:40:01] Now, there is a difference between what we see with the sympathetic magic, where what you're doing is supposed to demonstrate or parallel what's going on and something like this where a food offering is given. The food offering is not sympathetic magic because it's not demonstrating what's going on. The food is just there to appease and to satisfy the demonic elements so that they go away and no longer bother the person.
[00:40:31] But note that the food is given to ghosts. Ghosts are human dead who are not happy, right? That's why they're here in this world instead of the under world, and they probably desire things that they used to have like food and drink. That's why there are regular offerings that are given to satisfy them and keep them at bay.
[00:40:56] Okay, so now let's move on to tablet eight. Tablet eight has a long list of different types of evil demons that afflict a particular patient, or it's not that they all have to be afflicting them, but maybe some of them are.
[00:41:12] On some of these tablets, like tablet eight for instance, there's a section where the priest claims to have been personally instructed by Ea and Ea's incantation has been placed in the exorcist's mouth. The priest is directly acting as Ea, the main deity.
[00:41:32] So the priest reports that he had seven censers of the pure rite in his hand and on tablet eight, he's got a raven on his right hand and a falcon on his left hand. The incantation says that he has dressed himself against the demon. He is dressed in red garments and he has a mouse that is hung from the gate of the house. He's also got a thorn bush on a peg. And it says that he whipped the demon with a whip like the body of a stray donkey.
[00:42:06] So in tablet eight, we don't have any water mentioned. We don't have the flour. We do have these birds. We have red garments, and red is a very common color when you see these kinds of purity texts or scapegoat rituals.
[00:42:25] Okay, I am gonna go ahead and summarize tablet nine here. Now, sometimes what we have in these tablets is multiple copies that have been found. Sometimes we only have a few, or even one, and unfortunately, a lot of times they're fragmentary.
[00:42:42] But tablet nine is about purifying buildings. In this incantation, the priest credits himself with bringing peace of mind of the god and the goddess and protective spirits to the domestic environment, the house or the hut or the shrine, whatever it is that he's blessing or exorcising.
[00:43:04] The priest will deposit pure water and food of Ea inside of the homes or the structure. He will use ritual flours and just really common ritual material. Sometimes different materials are associated with particular gods. So the ones that he will use is going to be dependent on which god they're petitioning, right? There's one god who has a particular ritual laver that's used. Another one has a torch. Another one has incense. Another one has flours and grains. Sometimes there's mineral substances or horns of a gazelle or an animal. So depending on who they're petitioning and if they're petitioning multiple deities, you might use multiple of these ritual elements.
[00:43:56] Then towards the end of tablet nine, the goddess Ninura heats all the ingredients together in her oven, which has further ritual connotations. You have, again, the copper bell that is rung to frighten off the demons. And here the door of the house is sealed with pitch and the threshold of the door is sealed with pure fat and pitch to prevent the demons from entering.
[00:44:25] Again, we have kind of a fragmentary text here, but in part of it, a pig is used as a substitute, and circles are drawn with flour around the bed or around the threshold of the house.
[00:44:40] Okay, so those are some of the examples of the different kinds of rituals and purity things that we have going on.
[00:44:47] But I wanna give you an example. So I'm going to go ahead and read directly from tablet 12. This is an incantation that is directed toward a demon against nature.
[00:45:01] Tablet 12 says, quote, "Incantation. The evil Utuku roared in the broad steppe and the sheep fold was destroyed. He slaughtered and all living creatures were diminished in number. They were weakened, and the pasture and watering place were ruined. Dignity was withheld and something was thrown down. In the abundant meadows, pasture and watering places were turned to smoke. The lofty mountains binds everything good. In the forests, which cast a pleasant shade, there is spilled out into the reed bed and thicket and something is broken there, so we can't say what spilled out. As for the fish and the birds of the marsh, he bound their joints.
[00:45:51] " In the proper time of cultivation, he called out maliciously and the life of the land was suppressed. After he had approached the garden spring and well, their fruit was knocked down, he trampled the fruit in the garden and covered it with weeds."
[00:46:08] The next section has Marduk, who reports to Ea." Marduk, the foremost son of the Apsu addressed this word to his father, Ea.
[00:46:19] " My father, the evil Utuku demon whose appearance is hostile and who is tall in stature is not a god, but his voice is loud and his radiance is lofty. He is cloudy. His shadow is very dark. There is no light in his body. He always slinks around in secret places, nor does he ever promenade proudly. Gall is always dripping from his fingernails. His tread is harmful poison. His belt cannot be loosened. His arms burn. He fills the target of his rage with tears. Nowhere does he hold back a lament.
[00:47:01] " Marduk reiterates, the demon is a storm. My father for the second time, the mighty, enormous, great, august, and tall demon is unrivaled. He infects and like an angry, furious rising wind, he does not turn back. The storm, which angrily and furiously rises up, spins around on its own axis. The south wind when it blows dizzies people with dust. The north wind when mightily blowing splits open the broad land. The east wind, which has caused the heavens above to rain down lightning, makes a man's body waste away. The west wind is evil and does not tire of devastation in the netherworld.
[00:47:51] " As for the storm demon, his tempest is really like a mountain installed in an exalted residence and planted like a garden, set into the netherworld like a trap. He trapped the distraught victim. Destroyed the victim's limbs and made his jaw twitch. He bent back the victim's arm up to the top of the head." End quote.
[00:48:17] Let's summarize what's going on here in Udug-hul Tablet 12. The first 12 lines, we have this evil Utuku demon. He causes ecological collapse. He destroys animal life. He ruins pastures and cultivation. He tramples the garden or the spring. This is an image of chaos, flood, and cosmic desecration here.
[00:48:45] Marduk addresses his father Ea. He describes the demon as tall, radiant, shadowy, secretive, venomous, and destructive. Then at the end of the section here, the demon is described as a storm. He is like an angry, furious, rising wind.
[00:49:06] Now, what we don't have here is a parallel exactly like this in the Bible, right? We don't have demons described like this. We have demons or demonic spirits that are associated with things like this, right? But this is partly why I wanna bring all this out to you.
[00:49:26] When you read something like The Unseen Realm and you read how Baal is a storm god, well that's certainly the case, but sometimes we don't have enough information, we'll think that, oh, that means that all storm gods are associated with Baal. But that's just not the case here. Here we have a demonic element that is associated with the storm.
[00:49:53] Now why is Baal associated with the storm? Partly that would be because he is a god that's worshiped for fertility purposes. So the fertility god is going to bring storms so that the people can have rain, so their crops can grow, so they can harvest. But here is an element where the storm is evil, the storm is not good. The storm is bringing a lack of fertility and the opposite of fertility.
[00:50:25] So here we have two different and opposite ideas using the same basic imagery. This is why you have to be careful. This is why you cannot just see an image that is used in Scripture or in literature and think that, oh, it's calling this idea up, therefore it must mean this thing or that thing. Sometimes the image that is called up is used for two diametrically opposing ideas.
[00:50:59] It's why context matters. It's why word studies is only gonna get you so far. It's why you have to look at the passage in context and what is describing as a whole. You can tell that a fertility god that's bringing storms is not acting in an evil way towards the people, right? This is a beneficial thing. But a storm god who is bringing storms that destroy, that's a different picture and it's context that's going to give us those things.
[00:51:32] Now I want to make a parallel here. When I do this, I want to say that I am not making a direct parallel as if I'm certain that the ancient person would have been thinking this because I have no idea. In order to think that a particular ancient text is associated with something in the Bible, there are particular cautions we should use in order to kind of go down those paths of interpretation and understanding.
[00:52:04] We can understand that the apkallu and or the book of First Enoch are related not because they are connected in time, but they're connected in geography. There is a reason, like I talked about last week with Mike Chu in episode 1 48, there's a reason why the sons of God of Genesis six in the way that Dr. Heiser describes it, the strongest defense for his picture of that is if Genesis one through 11 is written or at least heavily redacted during the time of the exile, either during or shortly after or whatever, because he's calling upon and drawing upon Mesopotamian imagery that is definitely going to be part of the exile's world.
[00:52:57] Now, if you take a text that is removed either in time or geography, and you wanna make a connection with another text where there is no connection in geographical terms or historical chronological terms. You really need to be very careful. We have a lot of people who are going and doing this kind of work where they take things from South America and they take things from Australia and they take things from the Middle East and they make this big, beautiful picture of, look at this story and look at these connections.
[00:53:36] And I don't wanna say that there's nothing that can be seen there. I certainly don't wanna say that because human experience is very broad and when you add in any kind of spiritual influence, well, who knows, right? I'm not trying to say that there's no way of doing that. But there is a difference between digging into the text in an exegetical way, which is what we should be doing when we're doing interpretation.
[00:54:06] We should be interpreting exegetically. Exegesis is based on the text. The text is set in a particular context in a particular place with a particular people who have a particular culture. All of these things, right? If you drag it out of that context and connect it to something that is unrelated in geography or time, you're making a connection that just is less secure.
[00:54:39] So I say all of that because I'm going to be going into some speculative territories here. I'm not calling what I'm doing exegesis, okay? But I saw some similarities and parallels here and. It was interesting to me. So I'll share them with you. Again, we are just human story makers.
[00:54:59] So I'm gonna look at what I just read with tablet 12, and I'm going to look at the parallels that I see with Genesis six through nine. Again, this isn't exegesis because I have no idea what the historical context of tablet 12 is, really. I haven't done all of the work to dig into the culture and time period and all of this. But it does seem to me there are some echoes here. I won't call them allusions. I won't even call this exegesis, but I see some echoes.
[00:55:32] The first thing I see is cosmic disorder and ecological collapse. The demon causes devastation to livestock watering, places, fish and birds cultivated land, and the garden spring.
[00:55:48] You move into Genesis six. The earth is filled with violence and that's going to really center on people, right? And this is not ecological, but it's corrupt. And what do we have with the flood? The flood is certainly ecological. The flood destroys animals, birds and creeping things.
[00:56:10] And in Genesis six, we don't have any other entities except for God who is involved in the flood. But if you put your mind back into this ancient world and back into the biblical story where yes, God will even cause sickness, but sometimes he'll use mediating spirits, right? And the fact that weather is very connected to the spiritual realm and particular spiritual beings, I think it is fair to presume that what's going on in Genesis six is connected to elements of the air, right? Spiritual elements in the air. That doesn't mean it's not a flood, it doesn't mean it's not rain, but it's probably not just flood or just rain.
[00:56:57] So both of these texts frame this disorder as affecting realms of creation. Animals, plants, humans, and space. So it seems to me like the demon in Udug-hul mimics the violence of the flood narrative, at least when we get to the actual flood part.
[00:57:17] A second really interesting point is that a garden is trampled. In Genesis three we have Adam and Eve being banished from the garden. Access to life is blocked, the fruit of the tree, and we can see that the flood may be viewed as reversing the ordered edenic world, a return to chaos.
[00:57:38] And in second temple literature, like First Enoch, the watcher's sin that parallels what we have in Genesis, it seemed to corrupt edenic space as well. In the New Testament, it seems to be corrupting heavenly space, cosmic space. So the garden destruction is like a return to chaos, and both of these texts are presenting a loss of paradise or life giving, and it's a desecration, and there's a lot of cosmic consequences. And I use the word cosmic because this is an exorcism text we're looking at.
[00:58:14] The third point, which may have been the most obvious to you, is that the figure of the demon is cast as a giant, and pseudo divine. He's called not a god. He's tall in stature. He has a loud voice, lofty radiance. He's unstoppable. These are all semi divine traits. He's rogue, he's dangerous, he's causing havoc. And in Genesis six, we have the story of the sons of God who came into the daughters of men. Their offspring were the nephilim, the giants, the mighty men. And then we have the context of violence in Genesis six.
[00:58:54] Certainly in first Enoch giants and violence and cosmic corruption are all connected. Now we think of the giants and the Nephilim as physical material beings, right? Like we have the spiritual sons of God, the human daughters of men. They mate, they produce physical offspring. So it's really interesting that this demon, we don't have the context quite of First Enoch, we might have some apkallu kind of things floating in the background, but again, we should not presume too much, but we see this connection. It's really fascinating.
[00:59:34] So this demon who is not a god, but who's god-like, does seem to really closely mirror the Nephilim, the watcher's mythos, especially in the Enoch where we have beings of power, height, radiance, corruption, all of these connections, right?
[00:59:54] So why do I bring all of this up though? Because again, I'm not really trying to do exegesis because in order to do exegesis, I would need to look into the exact background of this tablet and the likelihood that it is actually impacting the biblical narrative. And I simply don't have that information. I'm not trying to make exactly that leap, but I am showing you how complex things are.
[01:00:20] ' Cause even though we have the apkallu narrative and we have first Enoch, and we have all of these things that are really, really closely related, this tablet 12 is not nearly as connected to the biblical story as the apkallu story and first Enoch. We don't have quite as many parallels. Some of these are probably actual leaps that I'm making, but it's interesting, right?
[01:00:48] And it shows that there might be multiple layers and multiple things that the biblical author is drawing upon as a background, right? Like the demon is cast as a storm. In the Udug-hul, He's like a rising wind that does not turn back. So we have storm destruction imagery here, and of course in the flood it's brought on by water and storm. Lots of storm language. It's like we have a divine weaponization of the elements here that mirrors the storm god motifs that are showing up in this tablet.
[01:01:25] Both of these things cast destruction as stormy, unstoppable, and linked to divine and or semi divine energy of some sort. Right? Some of the violence that's going on before the flood , there's things I'll bring out later in further podcasts when we dig more into the flood, where we have these connections between demonic elements and the actual flood waters.
[01:01:51] Again, this is just the ancient mindset, the way that they're thinking.
[01:01:56] Another point we might have here that isn't really in Genesis six, but it is in other literature. Marduk reports to Ea. So a younger god intervenes to address chaos to the higher god. Now, again, we don't have that in Genesis six, but it appears in other places where angelic watchers are reporting to God. In intertestamental literature like 1 Enoch, angels intercede for or report about humans all over the place. So divine intercession structure, it's very common. We've got divine hierarchy and responsibility and accountability.
[01:02:36] So again, I'm not trying to directly connect tablet 12 to the flood narrative in exegesis. I'm just gonna keep saying that because it's really important that you make those distinctions because it's too easy to make the leaps and then go off into la la land sometimes.
[01:02:54] But in tablet, 12 of the Udug-hul exorcism here, we find a demon who causes ecological destruction, tramples a garden, destroys fruit, spreads darkness like a storm. He's not a god, but he's tall. He's powerful, and he's radiant. And that does sound familiar, doesn't it? It at least comes close to these ideas that we have with the Nephilim, with the apkallu, and all of this other stuff, right?
[01:03:24] Now in Genesis, the solution is actually judgment and the flood. But in Udug-hul, the solution is a ritual scapegoat, and magical speech. So that's just light years apart, right? Okay. I could get into all of that scapegoat stuff, but I think it'll be more helpful if I kind of stop here, put a pause on the episode, let you guys ponder all of the things that I've brought out in this episode because in the future, I'll probably provide a more cohesive little summary for you.
[01:03:57] But it's just fascinating to me to really look at this ancient literature. If you want to get the ancient person in your head, it's not all that hard to do, I think. But it does require some work. It does require digging into these ancient texts. ' Cause there's a lot here, there's a lot to think about.
[01:04:17] And I get that there feels like a little bit of a barrier here sometimes, right? How do I read this stuff and understand any of it, but that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm hoping to set things up so that you are then empowered to actually go into the literature yourself, if you are so inclined.
[01:04:36] Or you can just listen to me ramble on about it here, that's okay too. But I wanna provide all of the resources and all of the information because once you dig into this ancient world, you'll actually find so much similarity to how they're thinking.
[01:04:54] What are they dealing with? What are their concerns? It is so easy for us to look back on the past and to just simplify it. And I mean we have to, to some degree. Otherwise, we would literally go crazy. There would be so much information, so much complexity that we would go insane if we tried to really take it all in.
[01:05:18] But we've got a structure here. We've got the Bible that is going to produce our rule of faith, right? This is our actual revelation from God. It is what is recorded in salvation history as what God is doing and why he's doing it, how he's doing it. And he's doing it in real time with real people in a real culture that is complex and it's different than ours, but it's also a lot similar because they're just dealing with life like we all deal with life.
[01:05:51] So today I want just to leave this here with you. Consider that the ancient Mesopotamians were dealing with sickness, disease, crop destruction, storms, famines, all of these things that would impact their lives. It was a scary world. It still is a scary world.
[01:06:13] We tend to think of all of the pagan gods as being wicked and rebellious. And I mean, sure the rule of faith and our lens for all of this stuff is the Bible and is God himself.
[01:06:25] But we can also look back at this literature and empathize with the people who were living here dealing with these things, who were genuinely getting sick, who were genuinely losing crops and who were in famine and plague and disease.
[01:06:41] And they were working to interact with the divine in an honest way. And the gods here are seen as caring for people, right? We point to things like the Mesopotamian creation stories and we say, oh, well, look how badly the gods were treating people. The gods are inconsistent, and whatever else. And certainly that is absolutely true.
[01:07:06] But we also see these texts where the gods care about the people. They want to help the people, or at least that is what these exorcism texts are describing. They are concerned about the welfare of people. They're concerned about making things right when something goes wrong.
[01:07:26] All right, so anyway, I'm gonna leave that with you for today. We will pick up again next week, probably still talking about tablet 12 here. And I've got a whole lot of context about holiness and magic and a bunch of other really interesting things. So I hope you guys are ready for that.
[01:07:45] If you've got any questions, you can always shoot them over to me. You can ask me through my website at genesis marks the spot.com. You can find me on Facebook or you can come on over to my biblical theology community, On This Rock, on this rock.com, but you have to put hyphens between the words there, and I will leave a link to that in the show notes.
[01:08:10] And come on over to my community because I've left a link to the book that I'm reading from today. Might be interesting to you. At any rate, thank you guys for sharing the episode. Thank you guys for supporting me. And I want to say that I'm very blessed by many people who are choosing to support me financially.
[01:08:29] If you're interested in helping me out, you can support me through my website at genesis marks the spot.com. There's a tab that says donate, or you can come and join and subscribe on my community platform, but that is it for this week. I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.
