Purity before Sinai 2: Sacred Technology of Cosmic Repair - Episode 150

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 today's episode is going to be a continuation from last week's. I rarely do episodes where I really think you ought to listen to a previous episode before you listen to this one, but this episode is probably in that category.

[00:00:33] So if you haven't listened to episode 1 49, I suggest you go back and listen to that first. Although if you don't, really, you're just gonna miss a little bit of the context of what I'm going to be reading today. So either way, I will just leave that for you.

[00:00:49] But today we're gonna continue on with what we were doing last week where I was reading a Mesopotamian text. These are the Udug-hul tablets, and I have been reading from tablet 12. Now, whether or not I pronounced that correctly, I have no idea. So sorry if I didn't.

[00:01:09] But basically what we're doing is we're going back before Sinai and we want to look at the context of what purity was for people, how are they thinking about purification and things like that. And so that led me to actually come to these exorcism texts from ancient Mesopotamia. These are incantations and rituals where people are purifying somebody, usually somebody who's sick and who needs to be healed, and they're casting out demons as part of this process. Now, maybe that might surprise you a little bit to see that ancient context of demonology, if mostly you're familiar with the kind of demonology that comes from first Enoch and the New Testament and things like that.

[00:01:59] But really in Mesopotamia they had a really large catalog of spiritual beings in the spiritual realm. Like it's to the point that trying to map that exactly onto Scripture is actually pretty hard. Like there's ways you can do it and there's intersections there, but it does not map exactly.

[00:02:22] Part of that is because of the Bible's upending of the Mesopotamian structures in some ways . The Bible provides a polemic against Mesopotamian religion. But at the same time, the Bible is also very much in alignment with many things in that worldview. And so what we're doing is we're looking at the ancient context.

[00:02:46] We're looking at other texts outside of the Bible so that we can get a sense of how people were thinking about the world, their intersection with the world, the spiritual world, and the spiritual world's intersection with our physical world. So that's what we're looking at here. Because we need to understand what purification was, because if we're only starting with the New Testament idea of purification, we're missing out on a lot of context here.

[00:03:17] I'll repeat a little bit from last week just to get us caught up here and to make sure we have some of these ideas in our heads. Some of the questions we're asking in the comparison of this literature is that if Yahweh's holiness sets him apart from other gods, then how do those other gods relate to things like purity, sacred space and ritual?

[00:03:40] Another question we're gonna have in the back of our minds is, does the divine council and cosmic beings operate under purity structures?

[00:03:52] We're also going to ask, does impurity affect just humans or does it have a cosmic implications? And by that I mean, do the supernatural beings need an emphasis on purity? Is it important to them? And why would it be important to them?

[00:04:12] What did the ancient world mean when they talked about things like purity? How did they approach the sacred? What role did ritual play in accessing or avoiding the divine.

[00:04:27] All of these questions might seem really obvious, and they might have some really easy Sunday school answers, but we really want to look at this ancient context and ask how were they actually thinking about it?

[00:04:42] So I was reading some of our earliest attested purity concepts from the Sumerian and Akkadian world. This is centered on Mesopotamia.

[00:04:52] So today we're gonna continue with a reading of tablet 12 of the Udug-hul texts.

[00:04:59] Tablet 12 is a set of rituals and incantations against demons that are against nature. So the demon is destroying sheep folds, destroying pastures, destroying cultivated fields, gardens, trampling the fruits, covering it with weeds and disturbing fish and birds of the marsh.

[00:05:25] But not only that, this evil Utuku demon was tall in stature. He wasn't a god, but he was semi divine, obviously, he's a spirit, right? He's a demon, an evil spirit. Now if we get to the end of tablet 12, we'll see that this word demon that is translated into English as demon isn't always a bad guy. But here he's a bad guy and he's described in stormy terms, he's described in infection terms.

[00:05:59] But mostly what we have read up through line 33 of tablet 12 is that this demon has destroyed crops, destroyed things that people need to flourish. But he's also afflicted a person. There is a victim of this demon.

[00:06:17] So in tablet 12 of the Udug-hul exorcism, we find a demon who causes ecological destruction, tramples a garden, spreads darkness like a storm. He's not a god, but he's described as tall, powerful, and radiant. And last week I talked a little bit about how that seems to be some sort of equivalent to the Nephilim.

[00:06:43] Now we have to be a little bit careful with that kind of conflation because if the author or the authors of the Torah weren't thinking in terms of this comparison, then it's not fair for us to make it.

[00:06:57] But this will give us kind of a general picture of how things work. And the reason also for that is that these Udug-hul texts lasted a long time. We find them in tablets that have both Sumerian and Akkadian. So some of these have lasted a really long period of time within the Mesopotamian world, and so that makes them very rich potential for informing our views of the biblical world itself.

[00:07:27] Now, because some of us are familiar with the Hebrew terms like elohim and how elohim maps onto the spiritual realm ; in Hebrew, Elohim just means that you are a resident of the spiritual realm. And so it might be a little bit confusing that we have this demon who is not a god in this Mesopotamian text.

[00:07:50] But we have to realize that Sumerian and Akkadian are not Hebrew. And so they have different terminology. They really do have words that refer specifically to gods or deities that you're going to worship versus spiritual beings that you're not worshiping. And then we also have categories like ghosts who are the deceased human dead.

[00:08:15] So again, in Mesopotamia, they have a very large category of different kinds of spiritual beings that doesn't really necessarily map exactly onto the Hebrew conception of things, or at least the Hebrew terminology that we have that is actually used in Scripture itself.

[00:08:36] Okay. So to kind of set this up here, again, we're gonna remember our two main gods that we're talking about so far. We have Ea, who is basically the high god, and we also have Marduk, who is the son of Ea and in a way you could describe Marduk here in this text as an apprentice of Ea, like there's a hierarchy here.

[00:09:02] All right, so I'm gonna start reading tablet 12 and I'm gonna break it up into different sections. So I'll read a section and then we'll go through it and explain it a little bit and draw it out into particulars. Now, whether or not I'm going to actually get through all of tablet 12 today depends on how many rabbits I choose to chase along the way.

[00:09:25] So we'll see how it goes. But there's just a lot of things here that are going to be either very different from Scripture or they will relate to Scripture in a way that we might talk about, and sometimes the Bible will totally upend it in some ways.

[00:09:43] All right, so starting in line 34 of tablet 12, it says quote, " Lord of the Apsu answered him." He's talking to Marduk, "The foremost one..." The tablet's broken and there's some benefit. " My son, the dragon," the tablet's broken. We don't know what it says. "...to his fate, concealed in the exalted shrine, the Enegara.

[00:10:12] "I drew up plans for them, for the lord and mistress of the temple, I decreed destinies for them. I apportioned lots for them and they decided for me that I would learn their rituals and ways, what was there and what was there not in Eridu." End quote.

[00:10:34] Okay, so here we have Marduk, who is coming up to Ea and telling him about the demon that is afflicting this person and Ea is going to respond to Marduk's concerns about this destructive demon.

[00:10:49] Ea is an Akkadian term for the highest god. The Sumerian term is Enki. Ea is the god of wisdom, purification, and the sweet waters of the Apsu, which is the fresh water deep beneath the earth. Now, in Mesopotamian cosmology, Ea or Enki is often the problem solver. The one who uses insight and magic to subdue chaos without brute force. Like he's not out there with the sword fighting the chaos demon himself.

[00:11:26] We can think of him as like a wise fixer, in contrast to like a storm god, such as Enlil or warrior gods like Ninurta. Now he is associated with the Apsu, which really parallels the deep in Genesis one. And of course we have Enki or Ea playing the role of saving humanity in the flood, in the books Atrahasis and Eridu Genesis.

[00:11:57] Okay, so that's who Ea is here. So in some way he is a little bit like Yahweh. But he is said to be Lord of the Apsu, right? Like specifically, there's the cosmological structure of the heavens, the earth, and the underworld and the Apsu is going to be associated with the underworld.

[00:12:19] Now the text is a little bit broken in this section, but the foremost one is probably Marduk. And one thing to track through this whole tablet is that there's a lot of conflation between the priest who is going to be doing the ritual and performing the incantations and Marduk himself . In a lot of the tablet it will say that Marduk does something, but really that is a description of the priest doing it because the priest is standing in as Marduk. He is Marduk's representative. And what the priest is doing, or what the priest is saying is supposed to be what Marduk is doing or saying.

[00:13:03] So again, in Mesopotamian hierarchy you have the highest god, Ea. You have an underling who is still really high up. He's Marduk. And the priest is not the representative of Ea, he's the representative of Marduk.

[00:13:21] So here's one of our differences between Mesopotamian religion and the Bible. In the Bible, the high priest is definitely the representative of Yahweh, but Yahweh is the high God, himself. And it's really rare to find that in the ancient world . Most people are going to be primarily associated with a lower tier deity and not the highest one. And that's really fascinating.

[00:13:48] So in line 36, it talks about a dragon. Now again, the text is a little bit broken here. The dragon could be referring to Marduk who defeats Tiamat, the chaos dragon, but probably the dragon is referring to the evil, Utuku demon who is causing chaos. Marduk is being sent to fulfill his role as the one who combats chaos, just like in the Enuma Elish. And the demon's fate is being sealed by the actions of Ea's planning.

[00:14:23] Like Ea isn't doing anything, but he's decreeing things and he's deciding that what is going to happen here, right? He's not the one going out to do battle. That's Marduk or the priest in Marduk stead.

[00:14:38] Now, what about this concealment of plans in the exalted shrine, the Enegara? Well, we noticed a mention of Eridu. And Eridu is probably the earliest city in southern Mesopotamia, at least according to this Sumerian King list, and it's a real city that people have found.

[00:15:03] There's a lot of temple connection here. And Eridu was very much associated with Enki or Ea. And Enki, as he was earlier known, was considered to have founded the city. He had a temple there, and he was believed to live in the Apsu, an aquifer from which all the life was thought to stem.

[00:15:24] And if you think about a city that digs wells, well, they're digging them into an aquifer, right? And so the aquifer is providing life for all people. So even though we think of the underworld as being associated with dead people and the grave, it's also associated as a source of life.

[00:15:46] Because if you dig a well down in the ground, you're accessing the waters of the deep. And in some places that's how you have to get water, right? So that's a life-giving thing. That seems a little bit different than what we are usually thinking when we're thinking of the three-tiered universe.

[00:16:06] Okay, so in the sacred space, there are plans being drawn up here. So this kind of parallels this idea that there are blueprints of what's gonna happen up in the spiritual realm. And even if we're thinking of the Apsu, we should still be thinking of a parallel realm that is associated with and affecting our human mortal realm, and we have that kind of a structure and those kinds of ideas in Scripture as well. It's really interesting that God shows Moses heavenly patterns for the tabernacle, for instance.

[00:16:43] Now there's this line about decreeing destinies and apportioning lots. That sounds really familiar to some scriptural things, like in Deuteronomy 32, for instance. You see a whole lot of language like this in Mesopotamian literature, the decreeing of destinies or tablets of destinies.

[00:17:06] So there's this divine decision making. It's often done in assembly or a sacred council. And apportioning lots is like assigning roles and responsibilities to maintain order. Now, is that like determinism? No, because there are evil forces that are going to act against that order and going to disrupt it.

[00:17:32] So the plans that the good guys are drawing up are gonna happen, but they have to keep doing them because their plans are going to be disrupted by the bad guys, right? So this is another reason why we might see less chaos kampf or chaos struggle imagery and ideas in the Bible. It's not like it's not there, but it is not anything like what we see in Mesopotamian texts.

[00:18:05] And again, it's really interesting how the gods will perform these things and their divine decrees really do affect the earth, usually through the priest though, right? There's a mediator, right? There's always levels of mediation here. And divine order gets disrupted all the time and has to be reestablished. That's kind of the point of all of these texts, actually .

[00:18:31] The line where it says, and they decided for me that I would learn their rituals and ways. That is probably directly referencing the priest. The gods decided for the priest that the priest would learn their rituals and ways like they're assigning him. This is the priestly call. Or the way that they are receiving the knowledge, right? The priest doesn't go up and find it himself. The god is deciding who to give it to, and the priest is the guy. He's the lucky guy.

[00:19:04] So here's going to be one of our major points that we're gonna be talking about when we go through this text, and probably beyond. I want to point out that in Mesopotamia, ritual knowledge and incantations and spells, it's kind of like a sacred technology that is revealed by a deity or by a spirit being of some sort.

[00:19:30] Now that should be contrasted with what we see as ritual in Scripture. I think that when we look at this text, we will be able to see very easily the difference in magic versus ritual. Not that there is no crossover in the ideas because there is crossover, but there is a difference between magic that is, you do these things and if you do those things right, then you will get a stated result, versus ritual in Scripture where you are to do it, but you're not doing it to convince God of anything.

[00:20:11] You're not doing it to appease God. You're not doing it to control a fate or a destiny, but somehow it's different. But the point of the ritual in Scripture is that you are engaging in a physical way and interacting with God. Like it's a communal and ritual thing. That doesn't mean it doesn't do particular things that are very similar to the things that are done in Mesopotamian magic ritual because the crossovers are there.

[00:20:45] They're very distinctively there. But I think you'll see differences here and it'll be much more obvious later as we go.

[00:20:54] The last line that I read was, what was there and what was not there in Eridu. So Eridu is kind of this mythical first city of the gods, the source of culture, wisdom, temples, and the question kind of implies that everything sacred and essential comes from Eridu. And it positions Eridu as a type of prototype of divine order.

[00:21:22] So in a way, it's a little bit like Eden. Source of wisdom, source of understanding what you're supposed to do in relation to God. And here we're going to get into the idea of purification. So remember I've talked about Eden a lot before about how Eden is a sacred space, but it's kind of a proto sacred space.

[00:21:46] So it doesn't have all of the qualities that you'll see in the tabernacle or the temple or from the New Testament context, the church . There's a stream of themes that connect all of those things, and they begin in the story of Eden.

[00:22:03] No, no. Strike that. They don't begin in the story of Eden.

[00:22:08] They begin in the story of the cosmic temple in Genesis one. Because as I like to say, the Bible starts in Genesis one and not Genesis three, but Eden is kind of this earthly instance of it, right? It's like a limited version of it.

[00:22:25] So even though we have a cosmic temple and everything is sacred to God, and God dwells everywhere, we still somehow need an instance of it. And that is also my point, that even though the church, like the people of the church are now sacred space, where we meet together and where we do things and where we are disciples, that is an instance of sacred space.

[00:22:53] But that doesn't mean we don't also need very particular examples of sacred space that we can actually engage in and practice in. Because if we don't have that, then we're going to lose the knowledge of it and the understanding of what it even means to have sacred space.

[00:23:13] If everything is sacred space, then nothing really is sacred space because nothing is separate, nothing is distinct. And maybe that's the goal eventually, but we gotta get there. And even in Genesis two, not everything was exactly the same.

[00:23:32] So anyway, for the Mesopotamians, ritual was survival. They had to align with the divine pattern to restore order when the cosmos unraveled. And that's the kind of idea we have at the beginning of tablet 12 here . Things are not ordered the way they should be, so therefore, something divine has to come in and set it all right again.

[00:24:00] Okay, so the next section we're going to read continues the theme of divine deliberation and the search for ritual remedy within the framework of the Mesopotamian divine council. So we're gonna look at sacred knowledge, heavenly inheritance, and we're going to get another deity mentioned here.

[00:24:21] We're going to have Belet-ili, the great mother figure. She is also known as Mami, MAMI, or Nintu. We've talked about her before in Atrahasis. She was probably synonymous with the deity Ninhurtsag, and she was involved in the creation of people with the elements of blood and clay.

[00:24:46] So she pinches off 14 pieces of primordial clay, and she forms those into kind of like wombs, seven on one side and seven on the right. And there's a brick in between. And those are the first 14 people. So in this story, it's not just a couple, but it's seven couples.

[00:25:07] So in this section I'm going to read, Ea is going to send Marduk, or the priest in his place, to consult Billet-ili, the great mother goddess, and he's going to obtain ritual knowledge to deal with this demonic crisis here .

[00:25:25] Starting in line 41, quote, " Where a search is to be made, bring up to me the august rites. With the incantation of Billet-ili bring up to me the august rites in her possession. As for the gravest acts, the behavior which you have explained, explain it again to Billet ili. Oh, Billet ili, elder sister of Sin, great mother of Kesh, and the Egula, the exalted temple, where she has the fate of heaven and earth, as well as the fate of the gods in her hands. Hurry to her to learn the ways of the demons." End quote.

[00:26:07] So for us who want to be really particular and say that only one deity can have fates in their hands, it starts to get a little bit confusing, right? How does she have the fate of everyone in her hands if she's not the one who's decreeing all of the destinies and all of this stuff. I'm, I'm just saying it's confusing and complicated, and not to get too worked up on all of the things that seem like contradictions to us.

[00:26:33] But what's going on here is that Ea is giving instructions to initiate a search for specific sacred knowledge. And you know, oh, secret knowledge. That might sound very gnostic to us. Here's my question, like I kind of get how we end up using gnosticism as synonymous with secret knowledge. But listen, that did not start with gnosticism.

[00:26:59] It's like through all of human history. For all of our records of writing, we have people who are seeking secret knowledge. It is not just a gnosticism thing, but what we have going on here is finding the ritual responses to the chaos that is caused by the Utuku demon.

[00:27:18] The august rites are going to refer to the rituals that are going to be performed, which is again, kind of the sacred technology of cosmic repair. If you can think of magic as a type of technology, then you have to do the thing in order for the thing to work, right? That's what we have going on with the idea of magic.

[00:27:44] Later on, we'll try and kind of unpack why, again, ritual is not just magic, or at least it's not always magic. And sometimes in some instances or traditions of Christianity, we might fairly ask, are you seeing things like the sacraments as being a type of magic? But we're gonna leave that question for much, much later.

[00:28:10] So we get the mother goddess figure here. She's the keeper of powerful incantations and rituals that they have to receive or at least consult.

[00:28:21] One of the things to notice here is the elevation of powerful speech. And in order to be powerful speech, it's got to come from the gods themselves. It's not like people are just going to determine what those things are. We have to know what they are from the gods because that's where the power rests.

[00:28:42] So then we have to go back to the mother deity. They have to explain what's going on, probably so that they can get the proper rites.

[00:28:51] Couple of other deities are mentioned. Sin is the moon god. And the great mother of Kesh. Kesh was another important cult center that it was often associated with fertility and definitely temple worship.

[00:29:08] So if you're thinking about hierarchy and things, it kind of makes sense that you're gonna go to the mother deity as a foundational figure to maintain cosmic balance.

[00:29:19] Now they're to go and learn the ways of the demons, which implies that demons operate by discernible patterns, by their own kind of logic. And that those patterns can be counteracted in ritual ways if they're done properly. So both the good guys and the bad guys have patterns of order.

[00:29:45] Now, this is something interesting to me because when we think of chaos versus order, we're thinking that chaos is completely and utterly unorganized. Right? That's how we're thinking of it.

[00:29:59] And I've asked this question myself, I have it written somewhere in my notes. Does chaos actually have a kind of order? And if you're only looking at the biblical text, that's a hard question to ask because chaos is contrasted with God's order.

[00:30:17] But here it is quite interesting and quite clear that both divine order, which is good and it's going to cause the flourishing of everybody, it's going to heal things to the way they should be, is contrasted with like a chaos demon. But the chaos demon is going to be bound by its own patterns and logic.

[00:30:42] It's going to have its own type of order. And I find that really interesting. So I kinda wonder if when we're thinking of order versus chaos, if we're kind of bringing some of our analytical scientific ideas and importing that into the past here . Because if chaos is not entirely without pattern, then that's going to shift things in my mind, the way that I'm thinking about it.

[00:31:11] And then it seems to me that we could map all of that onto humans. Like humans have what I would call disordered desires.

[00:31:22] I think that's what we see in the story of Eden, right? Humans have desires. Those desires are not necessarily always bad, but they're disordered compared to God's desires. And what we wanna do is align our desires with God's desires. We want to order our desires in a way that aligns with God . So our disordered or chaotic desires, they're not completely without organization, but they're just not in alignment with God.

[00:31:59] So it's kinda like the opposite of divine order is just anything that is not in alignment with that. You can have some sort of other order, but it's going to technically be disordered because it's not in alignment with the divine. I just thought that was pretty interesting to consider here.

[00:32:22] Okay, so the next section up. This is going to be a bit of a divine apprenticeship scene. Remember we have Marduk, who is under Ea. Marduk is a younger warrior deity, and he's actually seeking to understand and perhaps inherit the sacred wisdom so that he can battle spiritual chaos.

[00:32:46] Now we're gonna have a lot of repetition and poetry here. It probably sounded a little bit better in the original language maybe, but the repetition is going to really highlight the fact that we've got ritual here.

[00:33:01] Starting in line 47. Quote, "May the foremost son, Marduk, the one whose divine plan is found in Eridu show you. May he show you especially. May the great god Ea show you. May he show it especially to you. May my father, the great Lord Ea show you. May he show you especially. May he show you the rite and the master plan of Ea's wisdom. May he show you, especially. He, Marduk, was searching. He was searching there for the supreme word of his, Ea's, command.

[00:33:40] " Show me these rituals and restore them. Marduk entered intoEa, speaking, my father for the fourth time, may Belet ili, the elder sister of Enlil, whose master plan is deposited in Eridu, show me. May she show me especially. May her father, the great Lord Ea, show me. May he show me, especially. May he show me the rite and master plan of Ea's wisdom. May he show me especially." End quote.

[00:34:12] Again, lots of repetition here, lots of conflation of Marduk and Ea, and the mother goddess. But again, we've got a story going on here of sacred transmission of wisdom and ritual rite. There's a master plan, a divine strategy that is going to deal with the demonic disruption.

[00:34:33] And it's an active thing. They actually have to go search. They have to plead, they have to really do something in order to find these. It's not just like they're making them up. So like there's a blueprint of order that they have to find, and they have to align our world with that blueprint to restore what was lost and make things healed again.

[00:34:56] So if you are losing or not in contact with sacred knowledge, if it's lost, if it leaves, then the world is vulnerable to demonic attack and disorder and chaos.

[00:35:12] Okay, so now we're going to get into the initiation of the scapegoat ritual. This is a really interesting scapegoat ritual. Some of them are very similar to what we have in Leviticus 16. This one is similar but also quite different, so it's going to be interesting.

[00:35:31] We're gonna have a black goat, we're gonna have an incantation. We're gonna have the idea of breath and purity here.

[00:35:40] I'm gonna go ahead and read from line 59. Quote, " Ea answers his son Marduk. Go my son Marduk. Make a sacrifice in the daytime and call out the name of the victim's personal god. May the prayers and offerings, the path of mercy for the distraught man, son of his god , be there at the start and not cease. Speak of the matter to Shamash so that Shamash offers him renewed life.

[00:36:11] " Set up on a pedestal, a black goat, the face of which is multicolored, or a knobbly horned sheep, strong, a splendid protector like a bison figurine and purify it. Recite an incantation to the black goat. With the Eridu incantation appearing in your pure mouth, may the scapegoat sustain the breath of life for the victim from your pure, august mouth. Let the victim exhale normally so that the alu demon is removed from that man." End quote.

[00:36:51] Okay, so lots of really interesting things to talk about in this section. Ea instructs Marduk, who is again going to be personified by the actual priest performing the ritual. Ea instructs Marduk to perform the purification ritual to heal this distraught man who is possessed by the demon.

[00:37:16] So it's not just that the demon's afflicting him in some way. He is actually possessed by the demon. He has to be removed from the person. This is going to hit on a lot of elements of Mesopotamian ritual logic. It's gonna give you a fascinating point of contrast with biblical theology , particularly in regard to spirit, breath, life and mediation.

[00:37:42] Okay, so we're gonna go through this a little bit more carefully. Ea answers his son, Marduk, and he says, go, my son, Marduk, make a sacrifice in the daytime. It's pretty specific. We have authorization, we have hierarchy and delegation, and mediation. Like I said, it says Marduk, but you're supposed to be thinking that the priest is actually gonna be doing this . The priest is representing Marduk.

[00:38:10] It's supposed to be done in the daytime, probably in contrast to the night, which might seem to be more demonic, right? More of a space or a time where the demonic is going to hold more power. Now, just like in the Bible, in Mesopotamian thought, light represents order and truth . And we also have the mention of Shamash, who is the sun god.

[00:38:36] Now, of course, Israelite sacrifices also occurred during daylight hours, often in the morning and the evening. So there's probably some sort of connection with purity, with visibility, and again, less power to the demonic realm at that time.

[00:38:56] Now Marduk or the priest is supposed to call out the name of the victim's personal god.

[00:39:03] As I've said many times, there is no suggestion that you only had to worship one deity. And in fact, already in this tablet, we've had many deities mentioned and they're all interrelated and working in some fashion.

[00:39:19] So this personal god, was this like a personal deity, kind of like a guardian angel, you might think? Or was this a particular deity that his particular tribe or family actually worshiped? It's not really clear, and there could be a little bit of conflation here. But regardless, the victim has some sort of personal relationship to a particular god. That particular god is going to be called upon in the ceremony . Invoking the deity's name is going to call him to provide favor in all of this situation and help what's going on.

[00:39:59] Now , it might also be the case that if there is demonic interference going on, that has blocked the relationship of the victim with his deity. And so some of the making things right is going to help that influence and that relationship, perhaps.

[00:40:17] Now in Scripture, of course, people are told to call on the name of the Lord. And they do. Yahweh comes to the aid of Israel at large when they call to him during their time of slavery in Egypt.

[00:40:32] Now, what would be the difference between a covenant relationship with Yahweh and this relationship with this man's personal god? Well, one of the things we see is that when the people call upon Yahweh, there's really nothing blocking that, right. Although, interestingly, we do have in the book of Daniel that Michael, the Prince of Israel, was blocked in coming.

[00:40:59] So that might call upon some of these ideas that yes, there is demonic resistance to the workers of God, right? But most of the time, we don't see any kind of blockage there. There's no interference between people calling upon the Lord and the Lord hearing that . Although of course in the Old Testament, we usually see it associated with things like the sacrificial system.

[00:41:27] And we presume that in the Old Testament, there is not really such a personal relationship between God and each person, but that there has to be a mediator between, right? Like there has to be the priest or there has to be the prophet, and it's the priest or the prophet that are directly calling upon God.

[00:41:52] Now, I think that's probably fairly fair to say in the Old Testament context, but I don't think we can rule out the possibility that Yahweh in the Old Testament, not just the New Testament, but the Old Testament, that an individual could call upon the name of the Lord and that the Lord would respond.

[00:42:13] I mean, we see that a lot in the Psalms, right? Now, granted, a lot of the Psalms are written by David, who has a unique relationship with Yahweh. But even so, the people are using those Psalms as prayers. They are using those Psalms in their own worship. So even though David wrote those psalms, we use those Psalms for ourselves to pray to God.

[00:42:39] And I don't really think there's anything that would prevent the people of the Old Testament to also do that. So here's an interesting point, just that we tend to really separate out the New Testament and the Old Testament in ways that I actually think they're more alike than we give them credit for.

[00:42:59] Like just because Jesus came doesn't mean that nobody had a personal relationship with God or that they couldn't call upon God and pray to God because we see that, like we see Hannah's prayer. We see many instances in the Old Testament where God really does respond directly and personally to people.

[00:43:22] So I don't think that is just an artifact from the New Testament and the institution of the church.

[00:43:30] Okay, so the next line we have here. "May the prayers and offerings, the path of mercy for the distraught man, son of his god, be there at the start and not cease." Okay. Lots of interesting things here. First thing to note is that prayers and offerings are connected together. Like they're related somehow, like praying and offering things are somehow doing the same kind of work.

[00:44:01] And I find that interesting. For a lot of us, especially from New Testament context, that might feel really obvious. And why am I pointing this out? I'm pointing it out because some people really will disconnect prayer from offering or sacrifice and no, this word offering is not directly sacrificial. But we're gonna see that it's connected to sacrifice in this text . The offering is going to be a sacrifice.

[00:44:33] So I think even way back in the day, we have prayers and offerings again connected. That is not just a New Testament thing or a church thing, and it's not really right to just separate those two things out as if they can't be the same thing.

[00:44:52] Now, they might not do exactly the same thing, but nonetheless they're connected. And I don't know, it just seems like, again, we enter into this Old Testament context, and one of the things I do see is that people seem to presume that prayer isn't really a big deal in the Old Testament, and I think it's connected to this idea that, oh, well, nobody could relate to Yahweh without a mediator.

[00:45:21] I don't think that's the case. I don't see it. I mean, the question then would be, well, why are there mediators? That is part of our question for this little mini series here. Why are there mediators? And the part of the point there is this teaching and practice of purity and sacred space.

[00:45:45] So if there is sacred time, if there is sacred space, then those need to be under some sort of rule of law, right? They need to have boundaries. They need to be done in a certain way. So it makes sense that we have some sort of mediator and representative who is going to set all of that up.

[00:46:06] But that does not then mean that you have zero connection to God outside of sacred space or even outside of sacred time. Like they had the Sabbath, which was holy and set apart to them. That doesn't mean that the Sabbath was the only time they ever interacted with God, right. That seems to be fairly obvious, but sometimes we just get these funny ideas that, yes, the Old Testament's different than the New Testament. Sometimes we just go too far with that. It's not always the case that the Old Testament is disconnected from the New Testament. We just go too far with it. That that's all I'm saying here.

[00:46:48] So then we have this part about the path of mercy for the distraught man. So just this idea of mercy is, oh look, there it is, even in Pagan literature. Like I said last week, I think that we get a little bit too overly confident in our dismissal of pagan people. Now, that's not a defense of pagan religion.

[00:47:15] I'm not saying that what's going on in Mesopotamia is like right and good and fine or whatever. But I am saying that we tend to be a little bit overly judgmental as if they did not presume that their gods gave them mercy. Like, yes, their gods seem a little bit persnickety. They're not as faithful as Yahweh, but they were still trusting in them for mercy and for blessings.

[00:47:43] And I just think that should be a human understanding that we can actually relate to these people in Mesopotamia for having the same kinds of desires and goals and sometimes even relationships with the beings that they were worshiping.

[00:47:59] Another really big point here is that the victim is called the son of his god . And it's like, wait a second, I thought that only the king was the son of the god, was the image of the God.

[00:48:15] Well, that's interesting, isn't it? And again, part of my point of reading all of these is to show you the complexity of this. If you're only reading the major texts and seeing things from that perspective, then you're not seeing the complexity here. You're not seeing that if somebody's worshiping their god and this isn't the high God, this is a lower tier deity .

[00:48:41] So it's probably the case that this was kind of baked into their social strata. Like a farmer would not be the son of a major deity. That would just be the king. But a simple farmer might be the son of a lower tier deity. And so I just think that's really interesting because again, we just don't quite get this ancient mindset of the hierarchy of the deities and the council and all of this.

[00:49:12] A big contrast with this and the Old Testament and the way that the Bible's presenting things. Because even if this victim could be the son of his god, he wasn't the son of Ea, he wasn't the son of Marduk. He wasn't the son of the mother goddess. He was the son of the personal god that they are now invoking.

[00:49:36] And so that's different than saying that all of humanity is the image of God because we are all the image of the highest God. So even though you still see this language in the Mesopotamian, you think, oh, well maybe everybody was some sort of image of their deity. Well, hang on, now. You have to take into account the heavenly hierarchy.

[00:50:03] And so in any case, the Bible is giving a polemic against Mesopotamian ideas and the Bible is relating all of humanity to the very highest deity. And that is just unheard of in Mesopotamia.

[00:50:21] Okay. So again, couple of points to be thinking of as we're going through this. Sacrifice and prayer working together. We can see the divine mercy as being a little bit similar to righteousness in Scripture. And maybe possibly even that kind of covenantal idea.

[00:50:41] But the similarities should not surprise us because even though there are crossovers and similarities, that doesn't make what this Mesopotamian text is saying to be really exactly the way that Yahweh's working in the Bible.

[00:50:58] And another thing to note about the mercy here. it is activated through proper ritual performance. That is clearly not what we have in Scripture with the relationship of the people with God.

[00:51:13] When God says, I desire mercy, not sacrifice in the prophets, that doesn't mean that there's no place for sacrifice, but the people are treating Yahweh like he's a pagan deity, and that's a problem, right? So there's a very distinctive difference here. When the people of God are either worshiping other deities entirely, or they're doing some sort of worshipping other deities plus Yahweh to kind of hedge their bets, they're thinking that the deities and God himself, Yahweh, actually works through magical means, and we gotta try all of the things because we're not sure what's gonna work here. That's kind of a Mesopotamian mindset.

[00:52:04] Now we bring in the deity Shamash. Shamash is going to offer him renewed life. Shamash is a major deity. He's a sun god associated with justice, judgment, truth. Often we see him presiding over decisions and verdicts . So Marduk, or the priest, is instructed to go and consult Shemash so that the victim can receive renewed life, which is a restoration of vitality, health, even divine favor in some form.

[00:52:37] Okay, now we come to the goat. There's a black goat, the face of which is multicolored. Or if there's no black goat, you can use a knobbly horned sheep and you're supposed to purify the goat. Now, unlike in Scripture where we have all of the animals used in sacrifice, they're supposed to be a particular age, they're supposed to be unblemished.

[00:53:01] That's not quite that particular here. So the goat or the sheep is supposed to be purified. Doesn't give any indication as to how you do that. My guess would be that it's going to be washed. So, but even though the goat isn't supposed to be unblemished, it is physically distinct. So the goat has to be purified before it itself can also purify. So the ritual instruments, we might call them , there's a concern that if you don't use a pure thing, then it's going to contaminate things. We don't want that.

[00:53:41] In Scripture we never see any purifying of the animal, but the animal itself was supposed to be unblemished and whole. So that's probably why, because again, we shouldn't be thinking in terms of germs or anything like that. That's not what they had in mind.

[00:53:59] So then they're going to recite an incantation to the black goat. Later on in the tablet, we'll get into more of that incantation language. So it's directly to the goat. So the goat isn't just kind of an element there, it's actually spoken to. And we're gonna see in the actual speaking of the ritual, that there is a transfer of something here along with an assignment of ritual function, but like it seems like a kind of a mechanism.

[00:54:30] So this is really magical speech that is designed to activate the ritual's power. Now, of course, in Leviticus speech is involved. Especially in the scapegoat ritual in Leviticus 16, Aaron confesses the sins over the scapegoat.

[00:54:48] But there note that it's confession, like it's not magical, something mystical is going on here with the goat in, Leviticus 16. So in Leviticus, the power is going to lie in God and his relationship with us. It's not that our words are going to convince God and make something happen.

[00:55:10] Now, we do have to keep in mind that the words that are used in Mesopotamian text are divine words. That's why they had to go and actually get these words directly from the deities and the sacred divine blueprints. So that's why they're magic. So it's kind of similar to how in Scripture, the whole point is God, but Yahweh God is not requiring us to say exactly the right words or else, golly gee, you didn't actually perform anything that made things set in order. No, it's actually God's actions that directly put things in order in Scripture. It's not that we have to use particular incantations.

[00:55:58] Okay, now this is really interesting. "With the Eridu incantation appearing in your pure mouth, may the goat sustain the breath of life for the victim from your pure august mouth." So the Eridu incantation is the one that they went and retrieved from the heavenly blueprints, right? Specific. It's ancient. It's this ritual formula.

[00:56:23] And the pure mouth would be Marduk's mouth or the priest's mouth. And so probably indication that the incantation has to be spoken correctly, cleanly, and like perfectly, and the goat is going to sustain the breath of life for the victim. So there's a channeling of a breath that's happening through this divine ritual speech.

[00:56:48] Now, this might make us think of something like God breathing life into Adam or Ezekiel 37, God breathing life into dry bones. But again, it's only Yahweh who's doing it. It's not really exactly life transfer mechanism between the goat and the human, but the goat seems to be serving as kind of a canister or preserver while the demon is leaving the man. In any case, at least the goat is functioning as a mediator and a channel of breath of life in some form. Now, it's probably not about soul and spirit, but there is some sort of divine life energy that is probably at play here.

[00:57:39] Actually, let's step back for a second and look at the goat's function here. The goat is purified, so he is prepared as a vessel of divine favor. The incantation is spoken over the goat, so it kind of activates the goat. The breath of life is sustained by the goat, so it enables the life to return to the man or still be present in the area and not just be gone forever.

[00:58:07] So then the man is going to exhale normally, and that is going to drive the demon out and the life is going to be restored. So the goat is kinda like a ritual capacitor. Storing or transmitting life-giving ritual energy. I don't think it's supposed to be seen as holding the man's soul or anything like that, but it's, it's a really interesting little incident here, right?

[00:58:37] The next thing that's gonna happen is that their victim is going to exhale normally, and the demon is going to be removed from the man. So there's a restoration of normal breath or healing.

[00:58:49] When you think of somebody who's sick, they're lying in bed, they may be struggling to breathe . You bring the goat in. The goat is going to hold onto your life essence or your life breath. You're going to exhale the demonic breath, and you can then still have your life breath with you. It's a, it's a strange image, but if you picture it in like a real world situation, you can kind of see what I think is going on here.

[00:59:18] There's a transfer, there's a liberation from the spiritual affliction and possession. And interestingly, we actually see Jesus breathing on people and he casts out demons with words. So there's some sort of continuity here with the idea of breath as healing or expulsion, and that probably connects to speech and life as well.

[00:59:43] I don't know, I just like to think about all these things. It's like the goat has absorbed something of the purity and power of the ritual speech. So in this case, the goat is not absorbing anything bad right here. Now, it might have something to do with the man's impurity, but it's also sustaining his life in some way. The goat's presence is part of that function.

[01:00:09] Now, would we say that he's bearing the affliction or anything bad? It's harder to say in this section right here, but certainly in Mesopotamian thought, breath was considered a vital essence. I mean, that kind of should be obvious to anyone. When you don't breathe, then you die. If your breathing is obstructed, like you can't breathe very well, that's associated with demonic oppression, and so to restore the breath would mean something like, to liberate the life force from what bound it. And in this case it's the demon.

[01:00:48] And so there's this connection of spirit and breath . It doesn't say that the goat is holding the man's spirit or soul, but there's that connection there is somehow, which makes things really difficult because when we think of spirit and body and soul and all of these ideas, we're really kind of dividing them in very particular ways and acting like spirit or soul and body, are separate components. They're separate elements, like they're separate Lego pieces and that when you put the Lego pieces together, you get the whole person. I think that's kind of how we tend to think of it. And it doesn't seem to be that's how they're thinking of it here, because if that's how they were thinking of it, then the goat would seem to be holding the person.

[01:01:42] And I think the goat seems to be a representation or even a direct substitute for the man in some ways. But it seems more like a containment vessel. And I don't know. I just think we're missing a little bit of something here in thinking of it as an ancient person.

[01:02:02] Certainly in Scripture and in the ancient world at large, breath and life are very connected to spirit, soul, nefesh, whatever. All of these ideas are kind of put into the bucket of, this is how you are alive. And if you don't have one of those things, you're not really alive.

[01:02:22] So if you're missing a body, are you really alive? No, you're dead. So yeah, you are not alive if you don't have these things together, but it's, I don't think we should see it as the Lego pieces connecting together.

[01:02:36] It's hard to describe what I'm even trying to get at here, because I don't think our conception of the world quite matches up to the ancient conception. But either way, both in Leviticus 16, as well as this text, the goat is a mediator or a bearer or a carrier of something.

[01:02:57] Whether or not there is some actual spirit substance that the goat is holding onto here , what we can see throughout the whole thing, both between the deities in the divine council in Mesopotamia as well as what's going on with the distraught man here in the text , there's always some element of mediation, representation , and that's necessary. And we'll see further instances of that as we read more in the text here, actually.

[01:03:30] So I'm really curious about what you guys think. Have you ever thought of the difference between magic and ritual? What do you think the comparison is and the overlap is ? Is it ever okay to talk about ritual as a type of magic?

[01:03:50] If something like baptism, like we're headed towards talking about here in this series, 'cause we're talking about things like purification. Does baptism work in any way magically? And I think that's kind of the pushback a lot of people have when they're thinking about, does baptism actually save you?

[01:04:12] Because if baptism actually saves you, like you have to be baptized in order to be saved, you have to have a water baptism. If that's the case then that really seems to fit in that realm of magic, doesn't it? It seems to be like, if God doesn't have this thing that you have to do in order to save you, then he can't save you.

[01:04:37] And I think that's a lot of the concern that people have with this idea that baptism saves. But on the other hand, we have the New Testament that literally says baptism saves, uses those words. So what do we make of that? And I think that it can be helpful to really distinguish what magic is and what ritual, properly seen, is.

[01:05:04] But that doesn't mean that ritual cannot have some quote unquote magical aspects. And by that I mean, does ritual actually do anything? Like, does Ritual magically do something real?

[01:05:22] Well, first of all, why would you do a thing if it didn't actually do anything at all? What is the purpose of it? Like there's some sort of purpose that you're doing the thing, and I mean, I've talked about this pretty recently as well, and here's a distinction. Magic is something that you're going to do in order to get prescribed results. If I do X, Y, and Z, then I will get A, B and C.

[01:05:52] There's like a one-to-one correspondence. If you do this, you'll get that . And that's why I was talking about sacred technology. If you push the brake on your car, your car is going to stop as long as the technology's working properly, right? And everything like there's no ice on the road or whatever. So magic in a sense is a type of technology that input and output are related.

[01:06:22] You do some sort of action, you get some sort of output. And so when people are talking about baptism saving, they're worried that it means that you do the baptism act and out pops salvation.

[01:06:38] And if that's the way we're seeing it, then yeah, that's a magical thing. But then you could say that people who talk about the Jesus Prayer, invite Jesus into your heart and you'll be saved. So you do the thing. You say the prayer. You ask God to save you and then out pop salvation on the other end.

[01:06:59] That's just as magical of thinking. If I believe the right thing, then I will be saved. That's just as much as magical thinking in a way. Is it problematic? I mean it's either that or there's absolutely nothing that we do whatsoever and God will save us or he won't. That kind of extreme calvinistic thinking. That is running miles away from magical thinking in a sense, right?

[01:07:32] There's nothing we do that has any bearing whatsoever on our salvation. No belief is connected to our salvation. No prayer is connected to our salvation. Nothing is connected because if there's anything that's connected, then that makes it magic. And that's not what I'm trying to bring out here in the contrast between magic and ritual, at least not according to how I'm thinking about it and how I would like you to consider the difference between magic and ritual.

[01:08:05] And that's why I say we have to have some sort of crossover. Because if we're doing a ritual, we're doing it because it benefits us, it does something, it forms us. But that does not then mean that it's magic. Because as we see here in this Mesopotamian text, magical thinking is that the people are doing the thing in order to create divine order.

[01:08:33] If you don't do the ritual properly , then you're not creating the proper divine order. That's why you have to have a blueprint from heaven in order to do the ritual. That's why you have to have the proper words to say in order to heal things. And that's what makes it like a type of technology.

[01:08:54] So then you go into the realm of ritual. Does performing a ritual and having that performance actually impact something and actually have some sort of real transformation of you or impact in your salvation or whatever, that doesn't necessarily make the ritual magic.

[01:09:15] Because the thing that happens when you do the ritual doesn't have to be mechanistic like that. It just has to be a thing that you're doing because you'll get something out of it. Something will happen, but you're not binding God to anything by your action.

[01:09:34] And I think that's the difference here. In Mesopotamian incantations that we have and these rituals, if you do the thing, the demon has to leave. The demon is bound by it, and we could maybe see the same kind of thing with our situation in Christianity and casting out demons.

[01:09:54] If you invoke Jesus's name and his authority, the demons have to leave, right? That's kind of the way that we think of that, and I think that's the right way to think of it. Because you are invoking God's authority and it's God's authority and God's power that will cast out all of the demons. The demons are not being cast out because you used Jesus's name properly.

[01:10:20] So that kinda gets us into the, can we still use the word Jesus or do we need to use the pronunciation that they had back in the first century? If you don't pronounce it right, then you're not performing the right magic. See, that would be like magic, if you have to have the right name, the right pronunciation, the magical words.

[01:10:45] If it's the magical words that is actually carrying out the burden of what's going on, then yeah, that would be like magic. As opposed to the magical words are just a component, part of what you're doing, but they're not actually carrying the heavy lifting of the actual act of exorcism or act of healing or act of salvation.

[01:11:11] Anyway, I think I'll just leave you guys with that thought and those things to meditate on. These are things that are difficult to get across using words, which is why I think that ritual exists because ritual as a practice can speak more than a whole book full of words. It can describe more, it can show you more, it can teach you more. It can have a bigger impact on you than just reading a whole bunch of words on a page.

[01:11:41] That's part of why I think that ritual and liturgy and actual practice matters. That's why I think we need a, both a theology as well as a real practice of something like sacred time and sacred space in the real world, like set apart things.

[01:12:00] Because if you don't have those things, then it's a lot harder to tell people about them and to have people understand them and to have people experience it. You are experiencing sacred time and sacred space when you are worshiping with other people, when you are praying, when you're doing a whole host of other things, or probably even going about your daily lives.

[01:12:24] But then you're not really learning anything about sacred time and sacred space, right? It just becomes a normal thing to you, to the point that it means nothing.

[01:12:35] So if we don't have these stories to connect us to the past, if we don't have these actual practices that we do. If we don't go to church and worship with real people, if we don't have a practice of doing something real and physical, like baptism and the Lord's Supper, then we are cutting ourselves off from a very real type of engagement, learning, and human transformation.

[01:13:03] That does not mean that God needs those things in order to do anything himself. That's part of our difference here. But because we are human embodied people, we need something that is human, embodied, and tangible that is going to help us grasp these spiritual realities.

[01:13:24] So it's not like spiritual and physical are opposites, but because we are physical, we kind of need some physical things in order to participate. That doesn't make a spiritual reality less real. That doesn't mean we can't engage in a spiritual reality through something like meditation and just pure prayer.

[01:13:47] But spiritual practices need to be made physical because we're physical beings. Those impact us and do something real for us. And with the idea of the mirroring of heaven and earth, if something happens here on earth, then it is somehow reflected on that spiritual realm. I would say that we need to regain this idea of the meeting of heaven and earth together and how essential those two things are.

[01:14:16] It's not just the heavenly reality, it's the physical reality that we're experiencing here on Earth ourselves. There's varied and real reasons that God came here to earth in the incarnation. He came as a physical man and that did not dismiss or dismantle or take apart any of his divine nature, but it brought together the divine and the human in a real way, and that's what we can experience in ritual as well, that meeting together of heaven and earth .

[01:14:50] We're not doing it in order to convince God of something. Or to make something happen in a technological way, in a mechanistic way. I really reject the idea of mechanism here. But that does not mean that it doesn't do something. it's hard to talk about, like I said, because on the one hand I'm saying I'm not talking about mechanism. But on the other hand, I'm saying it really does do something and those sound contradictory, or at least they can. But I just think it's a difference between a modern way of thinking and an ancient one, an embodied practice.

[01:15:27] At any rate, I've rambled long enough for this episode, I think. Next week we will again get back to tablet 12 here. I'm sure we'll be able to finish it up next time. We'll talk more about purity, holiness, ritual and magic and incantations. So stay tuned. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Really appreciate your listening and engaging with all of the things. If you wanna come on over to my biblical theology community at On This Rock, I would love to have you there. I will leave a link in the show notes, and I want to thank all of you who join, all of you who subscribe there, and also in particular, my Patreon and PayPal supporters. You guys absolutely rock. I really appreciate you all. But at any rate, I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.