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 since we just talked about Jonah last week, I thought it was time to talk about fish. This isn't going to be a full scope every fish in the Bible episode because there's way too much for that obviously But today I do want to get into some divine council worldview context here. And of course, I'm going to tell you that the theme of fish and fish as a metaphor in Scripture is just as complicated and contradictory as any other theme that we ever study. So it's gonna be very interesting, and our main overarching question for this episode today is what do fish and the waters that they inhabit mean in the biblical and ancient Near Eastern imagination? We have a really good runway here where God appoints a great fish to save a prophet who has been thrown into judgment water. But instead of just asking what kind of a fish is it, we get to ask why an aquatic creature is such an evocative vehicle for the story in the first place.
[00:01:28] Now, I will be drawing upon a few different references here in the episode. The one most accessible to you is a paper called Fish Offerings in Ancient Mesopotamia by Van Buren. You can go find that one online yourself. The resource that's harder to get is a monograph called Fishers of Fish and Fishers of Men by Tyler Yoder. And if you really want to do a deep dive into fishing imagery in the Bible and in the ancient Near East from a textual as well as somewhat of an archaeological perspective, this is the book I would recommend you go find. Even though fish imagery isn't super common, it is pretty important in Scripture. And it's another one of those things, kind of like the donkey theme, that not many people have done super deep dives into. If you are interested in that, go find yourself a copy of that book. But let's go back to the Book of Jonah and look at that fish again. And we'll remember that everything about the narrative in the first part of Jonah's story is that there is a downward movement toward death. Jonah goes down to Joppa, down into the ship, down into the sea. And the language in Jonah chapter two is associated with Sheol, and the depths, and engulfing waters. And then further on, he gets into the belly of a creature that actually belongs in that realm.
[00:03:03] Even though it looks like Jonah is eaten, he's actually preserved. And it's super interesting that the fish is not a threat in this story. The waters are a threat, but the fish is appointed by Yahweh, which is really interesting language right there. And like I said, we're gonna get into some divine council context. We're gonna ask some questions about fish and spiritual beings because it has been suggested by some people. And this is a legitimate scholarly thread that we can pull on, that fish are so closely associated with spiritual beings that we should have a lot of this context in our mind when we see fish.
[00:03:48] And I'm not gonna disagree with that, and I'm not gonna answer this question fully as to how much we can actually see that in Scripture. Because within the theme of fish, and within the theme of water, and within the ideas of chaos and judgment, and even positive protective things that we see in regards to the concept of fish, well, it's a very contextual thing. You have to understand the passage, how it's presenting the ideas, and we cannot just presume that just because something brings up waters or brings up even Leviathan, that we are necessarily getting into the context of what scholars have called the chaoskampf motif, or the struggle of chaos. Right? This is very clear theme and motif in Mesopotamia, where the gods are struggling against each other.
[00:04:48] They fight against each other, and waters and the deep, and these kinds of ideas are very much wrapped into that battle imagery in the ancient Near East at large. And we do have some of that in Scripture. But then the question becomes, what do we do with that? because there's a couple of different directions we could go with that. Some scholars will say that this is evidence of the evolution of religion or that Israel took its ideas about religion and Yahweh from other cultures and just changed it and tweaked it But we could go another direction with all of this and say that that's really not what's happening, but that the Bible does use these themes as a kind of polemic or a background And if it is a polemic and if it is using it in contradictory ways when we see these motifs and these ideas show up that are also in the ancient Near East, and they are about gods, sometimes about demons, sometimes about evil forces, often about battle, well, it's not like we don't have that context in Scripture. But that context is not the same. It has been shifted and is being shown that a lot of this battle imagery is just not what the Mesopotamian neighbors would think that it is. And so we'll get into a little bit of that today as well.
[00:06:20] I'm not trying to say that the fish that is in the Book of Jonah is some sort of protective spiritual being, although I do know that there are people out there who go with that kind of an interpretation. But this is why I say we need to be very careful in looking at the passage itself, the context of what it can tell us. And even though there is some background ideas here, that doesn't mean that we bring all of the background ideas into the text itself. All right. But the first controlling image that I want you to put up in your mind of this fish with Jonah is that the fish is acting like an animate ark. We have definite connections with Noah and Jonah. Noah is preserved above the judgment waters inside an ark, like he is protected and moved through the judgment, while Jonah is preserved within that judgment inside a living creature under the water.
[00:07:22] Now, I don't wanna make too much about the over and under kind of ideas here, but there is a similarity with the fish and Noah's Ark. And all of that just brings to mind, to me, a question. What sort of conceptual world makes a creature of the waters an especially fitting refuge from the waters? And this is where I think a lot of the contextual information that we can pull into from the time and the writing of Jonah that makes it particularly interesting, because we have a Neo-Assyrian background for the book of Jonah. We have the city of Nineveh. And because we have that context, we can presume that the people who were reading this book would pull in some of that Mesopotamian imagery from Nineveh And when we're doing that, one of the top things that we'll think about is the sea as a realm of chaos. Now I'm gonna give a little bit of pushback in some particular ways that I hope are gonna be clear to you. But they are kind of nuanced ideas. So I'm not trying to say here in this section of the podcast episode that the sea isn't a element of chaos.
[00:08:44] But when we think of chaos, we kind of think of good and evil, right? Or we think of order and chaos, and we map order and chaos onto good and evil. And like I said, I think we do have that context because we have battle imagery. We even have battle imagery in the flood in regards to water. And we talk about the flood quite often as a decreation, an uncreation where the water is bringing the world back into its original state at the beginning of Genesis 1. And then God has to go and kind of do a little bit of recreating again in a sense I'm not objecting to any of that, but I want to bring in this idea that chaos is not just one thing all the time. Because when we're thinking about this idea in scholarship, for instance, of the chaoskampf motif, that's like chaos war. And the idea here is that chaos is destructive, and that it is opposed to God, and that it is something that is evil, right?
[00:09:54] But I don't think that's always the associations we should be bringing into the text, even if there's an undercurrent of chaos to the themes going on. Because within the flood narrative and within the story of Jonah, the water isn't against God. It is being used by God as a form of judgment. And so in some sense, we can say that water is an environment that humans cannot inhabit. I mean, that is pretty obvious, especially in the ancient world before scuba diving and submarines and all of that. So when we think of this idea of chaos, it's not the opposite of all order, because there is divine order But nonetheless, the sea and the water is a place where fish belong, but humans and things that breathe air do not. And so that makes water quite uniquely available for several different biblical functions. It can signify abundance and life because there is life in that water. Fish are moving, and they breed, and they are meant to multiply just like the animals and birds and humans. But the water is a boundary where humans and other air breathers cannot survive. All right, so I'm going to suggest a third reference for you, and this is a dissertation by Andrew Dean Sargent called Wind, Water, and Battle Imagery in Genesis 8 verses 1 through 3. And he offers kind of a nuanced way of thinking about this. His argument is not that Genesis turns the floodwaters into some sort of supernatural deity or deities that compete with Yahweh
[00:11:51] But he does read Genesis eight from kind of a mythic standpoint. Mythic doesn't mean fake or false or made up, okay? But there's a larger picture that is being portrayed in the genre of Genesis eight. And that is that the waters are being portrayed in language that is resonant with battle and divine victory. And so Sargent is specifically arguing that this passage in the beginning of chapter eight of Genesis is more than a report about water levels. Because in the end of chapter seven in Genesis, we have the water prevailing. But in Genesis eight, we have Yahweh who sends the ruach, and the waters are calmed. And so it seems like the waters are some sort of a being that is doing something, or at least it's metaphorically being described as such. Again, does that mean that the waters are being directly associated with spirit beings? Possibly in some form, but not necessarily. And I really wanna make a distinction here, where it can be very difficult to separate out those two things, especially because in the ancient world, the spirit realm and the physical realm were not nearly as distinct as we think of them
[00:13:15] Okay. So whether or not the waters in the flood are actual divine opponents, they are certainly an opposing force. They're not opponents against God though. And that is kind of one of the keys to understand the biblical use of any themes that have to do with chaoskampf, or this battle imagery around the forces of chaos. Because again, in Mesopotamia, you have the theme where the gods were really actually battling each other, and they could defeat each other. That is simply not the case in the Bible, because Yahweh is never presented as a being who could be genuinely opposed in a legitimate way. I mean, he does get opposition and rebellion, but it's not gonna work out because none of that can work out against the sovereign creator. whether or not we decide that the water is more than just water in the flood and might represent spiritual beings as well as being water, even if we don't quite go that supernatural way with the associations with water and spirit beings, we still have the picture in Genesis 7 of the waters coming from below and above. This is ordered mortal world, I wanna say human world, but it's also animal and bird world. The boundaries are really being crossed and separations are being removed. And so that is a kind of decreation. It's a kind of return to chaos. But more than that, and I think a little bit more precisely, The flood is a collapse of the conditions that make the earth habitable for human and terrestrial life. And in all cases, the waters are God's instrument. I'll just take a moment here to point out this language of waters prevailing in Genesis seven. We get it several times at the end of the chapter. Verse eighteen, the waters prevailed and increased greatly. Verse nineteen, the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth. Verse twenty, the waters prevailed above the mountains.
[00:15:32] Verse twenty-four, the waters prevailed upon the earth for a hundred and fifty days. Now for those who are thinking more geographically about the flood, like just thinking of it as mainly water that is covering the whole face of the earth, and they're picturing the water above the mountains as like a geological thing that's going on. Well, that's certainly a way to read things, but this word in Hebrew has quite a particular distinction. It's not just that the waters were covering everything, but this word gabar, and you might associate that with other words like gebor and things that were otherwise associated with other things in the Book of Genesis and elsewhere. The context is to be strong, to be mighty, to be superior, and that is why we have the word prevail here. There's a sense that the word means that the waters are winning. In Exodus 17 verse 11, we see the same verb describing the battle between Israel and Amalek. When Moses' hand is raised, then Israel prevails. When it falls, then Amalek prevails. One side prevails over the other. We have places where the context is not explicitly about battle. But this word has nonetheless been chosen in the flood narrative to portray superiority or victory. It's not just that the water level kept increasing, but it became the dominant force upon the Earth, like the waters were stronger than the Earth.
[00:17:14] The terrestrial realm cannot withstand them. And so then we can ask a better question than just geography. What exactly do the waters prevail over? Well, at different levels of understanding, we don't just have to go with one answer here. It can be the land that disappears beneath the water. It can be the land-dwelling creatures that all die because of that. Everything outside of the ark that breathes air is said to die. The waters can be said to prevail over human civilization. The inhabited world is erased and destroyed, and it's a very destructive imagery. But then we can also have the ordered separation of environments where aquatic space now occupies terrestrial space. So humans and animals and birds have lost their environment. But importantly, and very interestingly, fish have not lost their environment. For those who are associating the concept of fish and fish life with spirit beings, we might notice something here about the waters prevailing over the mountains. Because remember also from a cosmic geography perspective, the tops of the mountains were places where the gods lived. So we have kind of two ideas here. One of them is that the mountains had been taken over by the waters, and yet at the same time, the fish are not gonna die. So if the fish are associated with spiritual beings, their land or their cultic sites are taken away, but the spirit beings are not destroyed in the process. So, like I say, I really wanna be very careful in not presuming that the Genesis author is taking this idea of water and fish and running with it in quite that particular of a direction. It's possible that they would be thinking along those lines
[00:19:21] I'm pretty sure that some of them would be. But the fact that some of them would be doesn't mean that everybody would be. Because as we can see, as we look at the concept of fish in Scripture and in the ancient world, it's not just one thing. there's very much different imagery from Mesopotamia to Egypt in regards to fish and the use of fish and the perspective of what a fish is and what kind of meaning that a fish has. All right. So then, of course, we have Genesis eight where the waters subside. And that dissertation, Sargent argues that that's not really a great verb that we're gonna be using in English because it doesn't convey the calm aspect of what's going on. Like the spirit or the wind, the ruach is quelling the waters.
[00:20:19] Not just that the waters are going down and decreasing in volume, but that Yahweh's ruach is calming the waters in an active sense. And once those are calmed, the sources of them are closed and the waters retreat. Genesis 8 verse 1 is an obvious turning point in the narrative, but it's also a turning point for the battle metaphor that's going on at the end of Genesis 7. So the floodwaters are narrated as though they prevail in battle, kind of an idea. They're winning in victory, and then they are defeated. The conflict is literary, and it's theological imagery that is describing Yahweh's mastery over his own creation and how Yahweh will use elements of whatever sort, whether this is only about water or whether it's about water and spirit beings, in either case, both of those things, all of it, is under Yahweh's mastery. So here's our conceptual sequence in the whole thing. When waters remain inside their God-appointed sphere, then they teem with life, which, you know, is fish and all kinds of things under there. When those waters invade human or terrestrial space, they become judgment and death. And when God restrains them, then habitable space returns And so this is a matter of boundaries and God using those boundaries for His justice and His judgment purposes
[00:21:57] Now, I don't need to make a really big point about the fact that fish belong where humans don't live, but they do become interesting as boundary creatures from a human point of view. So water invading and crossing boundaries is bad, and water being separated and staying in its boundaries is good. And whether a creature belongs in a space or not is dependent on what kind of creature that is and where God has decided it will live. And so this is the picture we have when we come into the Book of Jonah, and we see that Jonah is radically dependent upon God's provision because he's thrown into the sea, and pretty much every human means of agency that he has at his disposal is now gone. He can't stand up, walk, breathe, go where he wants, control his descent, remain there, rescue himself. None of that is under his power. He is completely dependent upon something that is native to the environment that he has entered. Because the fish can do all of the things that Jonah can't. Yahweh doesn't remove Jonah immediately from that realm of judgment, doesn't take him out from the water and plop him out onto land. But God provides a refuge that is adapted to that realm
[00:23:20] And there is also a creation order irony here because in Genesis 1, humans exercise dominion over the creatures. But once Jonah crosses from human space into fish space, that relationship is effectively inverted. Jonah is no longer the creature with environmental mastery. He is helpless, and the fish becomes the creature with all of the relevant capacities. But even the fish's agency is subordinate to Yahweh because Yahweh appoints the fish. Yahweh speaks to the fish. So the hierarchy isn't that the fish is now over Jonah, but it's Yahweh over the fish over the helpless Jonah. There's many ancient Near Eastern traditions that use fish or fish skins or even hybrid aquatic forms in connection with supernatural beings and primordial sages and even protective figures, as well as cultic imagery. Now, there is a lot of that, but I don't think that necessitates us to say that fish are spiritual beings, well, especially in a zoological sense, or that every time a fish shows up that it has a particular meaning or intentionality behind it. Now, of course, the Akkadian Apkallu are, for this audience anyway, the most famous Mesopotamian aspect to this theme because they are sages associated with primordial wisdom, and they are actually depicted as being cloaked with fish. So they are representatives of and connected to ancient flood traditions.
[00:25:10] They're connected to wisdom and civilization, and specifically, they have an association with the Apsu, which is the subterranean freshwater realm. And there is possible connection with protective uses of fish in ancient Mesopotamia. But we do need to be a little bit careful with those as well, because they don't have to be the same thing. Now, of course, if you've seen the pictures of the apkallu, there's a lot of speculation about what they're wearing And it looks like they're just wearing the body of a fish like a cloak. Some people will think that they are actually hybrid creatures, and that doesn't have to be the case. Other people will even say that they are wearing some sort of space suit or I don't know what. There's a lot of crazy ideas out there
[00:26:00] But what the pictures show is that there is a fish head above the human head, and the fish body extends down the back. We still have human arms and legs visible. I can't really imagine how these look like spacesuits to anyone, but I know people go there. But look, when you have an ancient flood tradition, and you have this idea of waters, and you have those waters connected to some form of giving of wisdom and culture and civilization, or the erasing of it either way, that's pretty easy to have these connections. The Mesopotamian traditions, the first of the apkallu is quite frequently associated with Uanna. Now, much later, Berossus, who is a Greek bringer of the Mesopotamian flood traditions, I guess we could say, he preserves a related figure under the Greek form Oannes, and he is famously portrayed as emerging from the sea and teaching humanity the arts of civilized life. He isn't exactly like the apkallu figures, but there's a whole lot of similarity here to the point that we can be pretty sure that this is not just a Greek idea, but it stems from much older than that What it does show is that there is a persistence of a tradition in which wisdom comes to humanity through a figure associated with the aquatic realm. We don't really need to make a whole lot more of it than that, especially if we don't have any direct connections within the text. Sometimes we do. And I do believe that the Genesis flood story is directly calling upon these images of the apkallu. I don't really see how you can disagree with that because there are so many associations here. But at any rate, like I said, not all fish-type beings in even Mesopotamia were the same thing
[00:27:59] It is true that apkallu imagery has an apotropaic function. That means that they're protecting spaces from evil or threatening forces. This is also why we have connections to the watcher tradition, because watchers are a kind of a being who would watch over things, right? And protect them. So protective context, but again, sometimes things can transmit and be similar without taking all of the ideas along with them. But there's also other beings in Mesopotamia. One of them is the kululu, which is a genuine fish-human hybrid, kind of closer to what we would call a merman. That's not a human sage wearing a fish skin cloak, but like a half-human, half-fish being. And this figure seems to be in places where he is serving as some sort of protective element or demon that does some protecting. Now, a little bit of an excursion here. You may have encountered the argument that the ancient god Dagon was a fish god. Well, if you like that interpretation, I'm sorry to tell you it's not a very sound one. The association of Dagon's name with the Hebrew word dag or fish does show up in later interpretations but we really don't have any ancient evidence that Dagon was a fish deity. Now what about fish and cultic uses in the ancient Near East?
[00:29:42] This might not have been a question on the top of your mind because the Bible does not use fish in a cultic ritual sense. But there are quite a few offerings of fish in Mesopotamia. It was a pretty big deal. And this is where I will point you to that paper called Fish Offerings in Ancient Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia had a really big deal with rivers and lakes and marshes, and they had a lot of fish. So fish was an ordinary and economically significant part of life. so it makes a lot of sense that they would be part of their religious practice. People ate fish, and so the gods also ate fish. But again, another thing we need to be clear on is that just because a fish is offered to a god, that does not mean that that particular fish was necessarily sacred to that god. It could just be as simple as the fact of this is what we're all eating. And the offering of fish goes back really quite early. Archeological work has been done that has evidence for fish offerings at Eridu. And that's particularly interesting because of Eridu's longstanding association with the god Enki or Ea, the deity who is connected to the subterranean freshwater realm or the Apsu. So now we have a few things kind of clustering around in our mind here. Eridu, Enki, the Apsu, fish, temple, and offerings. So all of that is gonna bring up a whole lot of divine council context in our minds if we're into those kinds of things
[00:31:23] But fish appear around a whole lot of other deities, and they're a very, very common symbol as well. So we can't really consistently say that fish were only or primarily offered to this deity or that deity. But there is an intriguing repeated association between fish and Ishtar in her warlike aspect, including scenes where a fish appears near her characteristic tripart standard, But again, context, context, context. That doesn't mean that the fish are part of the attributes of Ishtar. Okay, so that's a lot of what we have with Mesopotamia. Now let's move over into Egypt, and Egypt gives us a rather different religious fish world. And this is really important because it helps us to kind of put the brakes on our comparative data to some extent in, a useful way. Mesopotamia gives us the idea of fish, the idea of the Apsu, lots of associations with gods and offerings and spiritual beings. And Egypt gives us a particularly strong connection between fish and regeneration and fertility and renewed life. And that's kind of the trajectory for Egypt. And in particular, when we're talking about species, a really interesting one is the Nile tilapia. Because the tilapia's reproductive behavior appears to have contributed to its symbolism. Tilapia are mouth brooder fish. That means that eggs and their young are carried in the mouth of the parent.
[00:33:08] So when ancient people would see them, the young would appear straight out of their mouths. Would be kind of a shocking thing to see, right? Compared to the way other things seem to breed. And so Egyptian ideas of life and regeneration seem to be connected to tilapia in this way. Although fish offering in ancient Egypt is a very different one compared to ancient Mesopotamia, in part due to Osiris and his aversion to that. But nonetheless, there is this context of fertility and rebirth and we also see it in amulets, so that would be for protective purposes, potentially against drowning as well. And that's quite interesting, because the water creature would serve in that amulet in a protective way against the very danger that is associated within its habitat. I don't think the story of Jonah is the only ancient story about fish and protection. Now how far we can put that, again, ancient Egypt is not ancient Mesopotamia and is certainly not ancient Persia, which may be the source of the story of Jonah. But for anyone familiar with Egyptian imagery, we know that Nile water is overwhelmingly seen to be as life-bringing because it would be the reason why they could actually grow crops. Water doesn't carry a single intrinsic symbolic meaning. It can mean death or it can mean fertility and regeneration.
[00:34:49] And then we have Apsu water, which is about divine wisdom and life. And then we have in places like Ezekiel, water is a fish-filled restored creation. So the question isn't what does water symbolize, but within a particular context or passage, what water is it? What is it doing? Who controls the water? And what kind of life can inhabit it? So that's a pretty good kind of checkpoint on over-emphasizing things and bringing in things that just do not belong within the context of a text. So that's a very brief overview of fish in the ancient Near Eastern context. And now I'm gonna ask what happens when products associated, possibly quite literally, with that aquatic world become part of the material architecture of sacred space? Now we're gonna talk about the tabernacle, in other words.
[00:35:53] So we have a really interesting word in regards to the construction of the tabernacle. This phrase is erot tehashim, which literally means something like skins or hides of tahash. Now what is tahash? The term predominantly is in the tabernacle material. It appears 14 times in the Hebrew Bible and so we have it in Exodus, we have it in Numbers four, and we also have it in Ezekiel 16 verse 10, where tahash is used for footwear. So whatever tahash is, it has to make some sense as a large covering material for the tabernacle, as well as something suitable for luxury fancy sandals. One longstanding approach has tahash as an animal name. So it's either a porpoise or a dolphin or a seal or perhaps a sea cow. And a major reason for this is comparison with an Arabic cognate word. There is a very strong pull towards the idea that it is about dolphin skin. But there is a lot of question about it because it's just not a very common word But if you look at English translations of the tabernacle, you'll see wildly different renderings for this, from badgers to dolphins to just fine leather. Now, if the aquatic identification is right, then we have something really striking here. That would be that the outer covering of the tabernacle incorporates the hide of a creature whose natural home is in the waters. It's not that dolphins are particularly sacred, but that the material belonging to the aquatic world now becomes protective material for sacred space. Very interesting for Jonah connections as well
[00:37:51] But again, there's a lot of debate about this. It could also mean beaded leather, like it's just decorative. In the Ezekiel 16 context, God is describing Jerusalem as a luxuriously adorned woman with embroidered clothing and jewelry and linen and fancy sandals. So there's definitely something to do with high status, but we also don't know. There's a third idea here is that it is associated with color identification, which brings us to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The Septuagint renders the expression with something that is like hyacinth-colored skins or hides. So it could be the color purple. And that's also interesting because the color purple very frequently came from aquatic sources, particularly a type of a snail. There's a type of ancient dye that could be a bluish purple to a reddish purple depending on the species and the process of dyeing. so even if we're not talking dolphins, we could still be associated with the sea even in the Greek translation. Now whether or not we're talking about actual dolphin skins or purple skins or beaded leather, we are clearly dealing with a specialized high-value covering material of a really high level of luxury craftsmanship. So our theological observation of what's going on doesn't have to depend on solving this sort of zoological riddle.
[00:39:33] The tabernacle is wrapped in material that is unusual, valuable, protective, visually distinctive, and possibly aquatic. Again, that could connect back to all of the concepts of fish as protective symbols and things like that. Another interesting layer on all of this actually is Numbers chapter four, where we have the same word used as a travel covering. So it's not just the roof of the tabernacle, but it's also associated with how holy things pass safely through ordinary space. Again, very protective kind of connotations here. The sacred object can't just be exposed for everyone to look at or for it to fall on the ground or whatever else. It has to be enclosed and carried safely through some sort of environment that is outside its proper bounded sanctuary. So that's a fascinating connection where we have Jonah who is protected by a living aquatic enclosure while passing through waters that are lethal to him. And then we have tabernacle furnishings that are protected beneath specialized coverings while passing through ordinary wilderness space. Now, whether or not those coverings are protecting the furnishings more or the people outside of them more, who knows? But we have a broad conceptual pattern here of a enclosure that allows something to survive passage through a realm in which it cannot safely remain exposed
[00:41:11] And if these are indeed aquatic coverings of some sort, then it's really quite a vivid image that materials derived from a creature that is adapted to one realm now becomes a protective skin by which sacred objects can traverse another realm. Just really fascinating ideas there. Okay, so, so far fish have been creatures of another realm. Sometimes they have cultural and cultic significance. Sometimes they have protective significance. But then we get into the prophets, and humans can also be fish. And a really fascinating and dominant idea here is that to become a fish is to become vulnerable to capture. And that fits really well with what we've seen in Jonah. He has been captured. He has lost his agency and he is within a protective realm. We get further into other prophetic narratives, and now we have conquest, exile, and divine judgment absolutely associated with fish and fishing
[00:42:24] Have a look at Habakkuk chapter one Where Habakkuk complains to Yahweh that you have made humanity like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler. And then Babylon takes them with a hook, with a net, with a dragnet. The NET makes the predatory force especially explicit in their translation. The Babylonian pulls them all up with a fish hook, hauls them in with a net, and rejoices over the catch. So we have this really vivid imagery where we have several things going on because they are like fish that have no ruler, which is quite interesting. It's not that the people are small or weak, it's that they don't have a ruler to protect them. They are politically helpless. The fish cannot organize resistance against the fishermen above them. They can't control that world in which the hook or the net descends. They're just there available for capture. So humans here as fish is a kind of loss of sovereignty, agency, and protection. And Babylon becomes the fisherman who can sweep whole peoples out of their environment. And if you're familiar with the history of Babylon and Assyria and exile and how they would replace people, how they would take people out of one environment and put new ones in that same environment, it's a pretty fitting image. But the theological imagery becomes really pointed as well because Habakkuk says the conqueror sacrifices to his net, burns incense to his dragnet.
[00:44:07] And he does that because those are the instruments that have made him wealthy and successful. There is a definite connection between Babylon and their military and their cultic presence, right? Like their sacrificial system. The empire looks at how it's capturing nations, and it's treating that whole thing as a source of its power. So the metaphor is developing in these layers where people or nations are fish, the empire is the fisherman, the military power is the fishing gear, the imperial ideology is the worship of that fishing equipment. Now then, in comes the prophetic language here. Who actually controls history? Is it the fisherman? Is it really his net? Or is it Yahweh? And I don't think that this background is absent in the Book of Jonah. When a human enters fish space, the human becomes prey. We will also see that with Leviathan. And that is what should happen to Jonah, but it doesn't. Like his capture should equal his death, but it doesn't. His capture is preservation instead. Now let's look at the Book of Jeremiah. This is a particularly interesting one that I wanna spend a moment on. In Jeremiah 16 verse 16, Yahweh sends the fishermen. And they will fish for the people. In Habakkuk, Babylon is the one who fishes the nations.
[00:45:42] In Jeremiah, it is Yahweh who sends the fishermen. So imperial conquest in the hands and the purposes of Yahweh is an instrument of divine judgment. Now let me read a quote from this book by Yoder, Fishers of Fish and Fishers of Men, as this is going to bring out something I think you'll find very interesting. He says, quote, "A very recent and quite creative interpretation from Sang Yeol Cho maintains Judah is the object of divinely decreed judgment, but identifies the fisher agents as divine beings or lesser deities.
[00:46:24] According to Cho, the thoroughness and totality evoked by the fishing and hunting metaphors in the passage betray divine omniscience and thus divine agency. Furthermore, the context offers no reason to apply the two images to Gentile armies. Cho endeavors to reinforce this idiosyncratic reading by establishing the existence of other divine fishers And warrior deities throughout the ancient Near East, such as Ataratu's emissary, Kadesh wa Amrar. It is this perusal of cognate literature, especially that of Ugaritic, that leads Cho to merge the mythological reality of Kadesh wa Amrar with Jeremiah sixteen sixteen. While both passages involve divine conscription, commanding animate beings to take up fishing equipment and catch their enemies, basic differences with regard to context and genre severely weaken this argument. End quote. All right, I'm gonna stop there for a second. So we have this author, Yoder, who's bringing out another author's argument. Now, apologies, I haven't gone to chase down this argument, so not really sure exactly what Cho says in extreme detail. But Cho is arguing that the fishers in Jeremiah 16 are divine beings. Now, from a divine council standpoint, we might go, "Well, of course it is. We love this argument. This is awesome. Of course."Yeah, well, let's put a little bit of caution in here, first of all, because the suggestion here is not that Babylon is, but that it is literally spiritual beings, okay? So again, not discounting or dismantling the existence of divine beings here
[00:48:17] But is this the context of Jeremiah 16? Yoder is gonna go on and say that it's not. But never fear. That does not mean that there is no divine council context here, because Yoder is going to go on to connect what's happening in this imagery with the Mesopotamian temple cult. So it's not that there are no connections with divine beings in this metaphor, but the metaphor would be bringing up something a little bit different than God sending out divine beings as his agents here. Okay, I'm gonna continue reading from Yoder, who's going to say why he disagrees with Cho's argument. Quote, first, reading an obscure epithet of a particular messenger deity within the Canaanite pantheon into Jeremiah sixteen sixteen infuses foreign mythological evidence that overlooks Jeremiah sixteen's own literary and historical contexts.
[00:49:22] The preceding two verses firmly established the expectation of a physical return from exile in the land of the north, a common designation in Jeremiah for Babylon, and more precisely, Babylonian captivity. Second, the creative claim that the theme of totality or thorough judgment presumes divine agency remains dubious in light of other prophetic evidence. The very motif in question, fishers as executors of divine discipline, shows up elsewhere in the prophetic literature, designating humans as the agents of deportation. While Yahweh plays an integral role in such references, foreign nations fulfill his command by enforcing the prescribed punishment. Cho's reading thus lifts Jeremiah sixteen sixteen from its broader context and levels out differences in genre between the two corpora. The Ugaritic references revolve around activity pertaining to the pantheon confined to the divine realm, while Jeremiah sixteen revolves around Judah's sin and consequent punishment. Identifying the fishers and hunters of Jeremiah sixteen sixteen as lesser deities overlooks the manner in which prophetic literature uses fishing imagery elsewhere, namely divine appointed retribution and unnecessarily divorces prophecy from history. End quote. Now, okay, so obviously, Yoder is not coming at this from the perspective of the divine council worldview. That isn't a bad thing, by the way, and it doesn't really mean anything terrible because he's got a real point here. The point is that the prophets are talking about a real physical reality, and the boots on the ground is that there are real humans who are doing the actions, okay?
[00:51:17] Now, I do think that Yoder's reading could be enhanced by the Divine Council worldview in the context that we have the mirroring of heaven and earth. And that is just a necessary part and parcel of the biblical worldview. And this is what Dr. Heiser kept stressing: the supernatural worldview of the biblical authors is not that the gods of the nations did absolutely everything and that humans did nothing. The context is that there is a mirroring or a connection between heaven and earth, as above, so below, or as below, so above. Both things are connected. So what Yoder is saying here, there's nothing really wrong with it because I think he's right. I think there is that human context here in view. Again, I have not read Cho's work, so I don't know how much that's going on. But from Yoder's description of Cho's work, that's what is happening here, is that we're like, well, there is a similarity and therefore we're going to impose this context in the prophetic works. And I'm like, well, hang on there. We can't quite do that, even though I do think that there would be a spiritual reality behind what's going on still. What I'm trying to say is that gods are always associated with the nations, and the actual people, will play their part in the return, in the exile, as well as the return of the people. And that can potentially mean that the nations and their gods have parts to play here. But I will also say that it is problematic to presume that the gods are actively in view every time people or nations are in view.
[00:53:09] Like there would be the background there. There would be the presumption of connection, absolutely. But sometimes I think we are a little bit too quick to jump on the, "Oh, look, this is about spiritual beings."I mean, maybe. Maybe they're part and parcel of it, but we really miss so much of the message if we're not seeing the actual boots on the ground people involved. Again, we cannot just take similarities across context. We need linguistic connections if we're gonna see this kind of reality here. For instance, Psalm 91 and other places which probably do invoke a thought of demons or lesser spiritual beings, those have legitimacy as interpretations because of multiple words used in the text. And even then, we need to take care that we first view those as cultural context and background, things people would have in their minds where they would associate sickness with divine being activity. But that doesn't mean that every time we see this word, it's referring to a divine being. And it can be both and, absolutely. But importantly, it is both and. We can't take out the context of the physical reality. And another thing I really want to say is that, when Yahweh sends things, that kind of language is associated with more things than just divine beings or messengers.
[00:54:45] Yahweh can send fish. He can send people. He can send kings and national armies. And I think we should not make the divine council worldview be the thing that we cram everything into. It has its associations because the physical and spiritual realms were fully integrated in the ancient mind in ways that we just don't quite grasp today. But it's kind of problematic if we see Yahweh as the high creator deity who only mediates through spirit beings, even though he does and can do that. But he's the high creator who acts through whatever he wants to act through, and that can include the whole scope of creation, spiritual beings, people, and real physical elements like water. So we can have both things going on where we have mediation and God directly acting in whatever ways He wants using whatever He wants. We shouldn't remove the fact that mediators are used, but at the same time, that doesn't mean that every time we have something happening, that it has to be some particular type of mediation going on. Okay, so I hope that was a little bit clear. I know maybe clear as mud to some of you. Just because someone throws out the idea that something in the Bible is about spiritual beings, and we want to attach ourselves to that kind of interpretation because it kind of aligns with other ideas we have, we really need to be careful to not just assign it to those spiritual beings, that unseen reality, without realizing that there are physical realities going on as well. And I think that Yoder is right that we see Yahweh as genuinely working with people and nations. That does again mean that their gods are involved because those weren't separate things. Okay, I wanna read a little bit more from Yoder here. He says, quote, "The use of a fishing metaphor to connote divinely appointed exile fits naturally within the literary context of Jeremiah 16, which revolves around the theme of impending exile
[00:57:04] It also accords with the historical context of late sixth and early fifth century BC Judah, when social injustice and political turmoil at home converged with the rise of a powerful world power abroad. In fact, one that had just recently been incited to quash rebellion. What is more, this imagery complements the conceptual relationship Yahweh shares with fishing instruments elsewhere in the prophetic corpus, where he appoints a foreign nation, typically Babylon, to fulfill a decree of discipline. The effect of sixteen verses sixteen through eighteen as a whole communicates the theme of inescapable and total punishment. The figurative language of sixteen sixteen likens the horde of conscripted fishers and hunters to death eaters capable of capturing the guilty not only in large numbers, for example, in nets, but also in the remotest of locales. The two images together signify a merism, illustrating the totality of judgment that extends from the depths of the sea to the far-flung mountain precipices. There is thus a palpable irony in the description of what is supposedly inaccessible, as in fact quite within reach. In so doing, the prophet draws on a well-established ancient Near Eastern literary motif where a deity delegates to his or her subordinate, the king, the task of accomplishing divine retribution, exiling a people group with fishing tackle. End quote. Okay, so a merism is a metaphor where you give the two extreme examples, and it means that you're meaning the whole thing. So fishers and hunters, all of the things. There is no environment in which the judged can escape. We see this imagery come up in other places like the Book of Amos
[00:59:00] And so fishing can be an exile metaphor, and this picture of the fish caught in the net is a picture of a creature who's about to be carried out of its own environment. And also there's a context of death, which is part of the picture of exile One more quote from Yoder. He says, quote, "The mining of ancient Near Eastern evidence for divine fishers reveals an array of disparate forms. Both Mesopotamia and Ugarit conceived of deities governing the waters and tangentially the fishing industry. Gods bear the epithet of a fisher in both of those locations.
[00:59:42] Though the Ugaritic and biblical evidence differ in fundamental ways, they also share comparable ideas. For example, both Atteratu and Yahweh hold supervisory roles over a cast of fishers. The depiction of Yahweh as one who sends out fishers in Jeremiah sixteen introduces this concept by emphasizing his action and control. Like Mesopotamian deities equipped with personal fishing tackle, Yahweh also has both the authority to judge and the capacity to ensure commensurate and comprehensive judgment. It is this heavy emphasis on his action and the resulting ambiguity regarding the agent commissioned to fulfill his task that brings to light the intimate connection between the one who authorizes the fishing and the ones who go out and do the actual fishing. From a general perspective, Yahweh's recruitment of human fishers to accomplish his plan echoes a fundamental facet of Mesopotamia's fishing industry. The temple alone authorized fishing rights within its jurisdiction in order to provide fish offerings for the patron deities. More specifically, this passage in Jeremiah sixteen draws from a well-established inventory of imagery that uses fishing terminology to signal divine retribution. The characterization of a deity equipped with a cosmic net designed to mete out punishment pervades both Mesopotamian and biblical literature. Though Jeremiah sixteen does not present Yahweh as a fisher, but rather as one who conscripts fishers, the Hebrew Bible elsewhere portrays him just this way. As one who controls justice, Yahweh uses his own fishing tackle to punish offending parties, whether foreign, for example, Egypt in Ezekiel twenty-nine to thirty-two, domestic, for example, Israel itself in Amos and Ezekiel. It is no surprise then that when things fall apart for Job, he compares God's punishment to a net that encircles him. Ancient Israelite thought thus adapted a foundational theological tenet, divine retribution, by adopting common ancient Near Eastern imagery, divine fishers. End quote. Okay, so I said, don't worry, there's still a divine council context here. And this is where it's seated. So in Mesopotamia's fishing industry, as far as we can tell, it was controlled by the temple. The temple authorized fishing rights, at least as far as it had jurisdiction. And so then when people would go out and do this fishing for the temple, they would have to provide some of the fish offerings for the patron deities.
[01:02:37] So this picture of the people in exile is still associated with Mesopotamia and their cultic context and all of that. So we do not have to presuppose that the fishers that Yahweh sends are actual divine beings. We still have a divine council context here where the people would be presuming that there is context in a Mesopotamian sacrificial temple context. It is putting all of that on its head and saying that it is Yahweh who has power and authority over things. We have a larger pattern We have the empire that fishes humanity, where Babylon is the fisherman and the nations are the fish. We have a context of Yahweh commissioning fishermen. We have Yahweh himself catching great aquatic powers in Ezekiel and the Book of Job. And so the question is, who is holding the net? Who has the power over another creature's destiny and their realm and the boundary lines there? And so then we get into Jesus, we have that context of fishers of men. That doesn't arrive in a symbolic vacuum. We have a whole grounding of the Hebrew Bible's fishing imagery with humans that is heavily associated with things like judgment, capture, conquest, removal, divine pursuit. And none of that Old Testament context tells us automatically what the book of Mark or Matthew is saying that Jesus is saying there. But it does mean we shouldn't assume the phrase simply derives from the apostles' occupation and just make it a really superficial metaphor, because there is a much larger prophetic fishing tradition that is sitting behind this phrase.
[01:04:39] I'm gonna give you guys all of that to kind of land on for this episode. We don't have time to get into Leviathan and Job. Of course, there's a lot of really interesting imagery there, and also with Pharaoh as the monster in his own river, but I hope you have some really interesting things to consider as the fish as refuge meeting sacred space, and then developing that picture in the prophets as judgment and connections with death and exile, and how Jesus is going to come along and overturn that because He is the one who's the true fisherman.
[01:05:19] One of the common threads with all of this is boundary mediation, judgment, provision, protection, and all of those are wrapped up in some really complex ways in these pictures. Fish are not fundamentally creatures of death or even necessarily supernatural beings, but they are creatures also of blessing, of pictures of fruitfulness. And so the judgment imagery is really secondary to the creation imagery. Perhaps it's the case that without the creation imagery, we don't get so much power behind the judgment imagery. But I just want to land with the idea that biblical symbolism and themes, always their meaning has to come through the context. The meaning of the fish emerges from what kind of water the fish is swimming in. And so the deeper question is always who controls the water? Who belongs there? And who can cross the boundary safely and in a way that is in alignment with what God wants. As always, I really appreciate you guys listening to these episodes and sharing them with somebody who might enjoy hearing it as well. That is one of the best ways that my content gets out there for other people. So deeply appreciate all of your prayers and all of your support in other ways, such as through Patreon, PayPal, or my biblical theology community.
[01:06:53] I am so grateful to know so many amazing people in the pursuit of understanding Scripture better. And so with all of that, I wish you all a blessed week, and we will see you later.
