WWIE? (What Would Ishtar Eat?) Baking Cakes for the Queen of Heaven: Jeremiah 7 in Context Part 2

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So, this is not what I was studying. I was looking into Molech worship from the vantage point of Emperor Cult and cult prostitution in the light of this week’s Torah Portion – and then I stumbled upon this by accident. And it was way too cool not to dig into, explore and share.

“Oh Istar, merciful goddess, I have come to visit you. I have prepared for you an offering, pure milk, a pure cake baked in ashes (kamanu tumri), I stood up for you a vessel for libations, hear me and act favorably towards me.” – A hymn of Ishtar (there have been many different hymns preserved), quoted in Ackerman

What is Kamanu tumri? It is a thin unleavened loaf of fine flour baked in ashes – literally called an “ash cake” (as opposed to bread made in a formal oven, tumru bread is made on the go, in haste). In fact it is still made by Arabs to this day. (1) What is a pure cake? I believe that calling it a “pure cake” would probably be a reflection of the fact that it hasn’t had time to become leavened.

Not immediately a game changer until you look at Jeremiah 7:18

The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes (kawwanim) for the queen of heaven. And they pour out drink offerings to other gods, to provoke me to anger. (2)

Kawwanim is a loan word derived from the Akkadian kamanu (3) and the only other place we see it in scripture is Jer 44:19

And the women said, “Indeed we will go on making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her; do you think that we made cakes for her, marked with her image, and poured out libations to her without our husbands’ being involved?” (4)

In context, Jeremiah 44 concerns the return of the Jews to the worship of the Queen of Heaven as they feel they had been cursed since abandoning her. Going back to the first quotation from the Hymn of Ishtar, the entire reason the hymnist was offering milk, cakes and wine was in order to be heard and blessed.

ishtar owl

Look at that unique phrase in Jer 44:19 – marked with her image – l’ha’asibah. The only other place we see this in scripture is when Job is speaking of being fashioned by God’s own hands in Job 10:8. So we have unleavened, thin, fine flour cakes either fashioned in the image of Ishtar or bearing her mark. Her “mark” or fashioned shape, as we know from the plentiful archaeological finds (including her entire Temple excavated in Ninevah and a great many tablets giving us an incredible wealth of knowledge about her cult – heck, we even know that her priests were cross-dressers!), would have been one of four possible things – the eight pointed star, the lion, the owl, or perhaps they were fashioned in the shape of her body in some way as she was a unique sort of fertility goddess without being a mother goddess (goddess of the storehouse and of prostitutes, go figure – kinda like having a day job and a night job).

So what would Ishtar eat? Thin, fine flour, unleavened cakes fashioned or stamped with her sign – paired with a nice glass of Chianti. (well okay, probably not Chianti)

Does this mean that unleavened bread is somehow pagan? Or wine poured out on the altar? Of course not – no more so than the meat, leavened bread, honey, salt, milk and other foods. Unleavened bread is simply bread made without waiting for the leavening process, which in ancient times was a long and complicated process.

In the end, a pagan offering requires a pagan target and pagan intent. Form and function working together for the specific purpose of drawing near to another deity. Nothing offered to pagan gods was, in and of itself, pagan – but shaping or stamping a flat unleavened cake with the image of Ishtar and then purposefuly offering it up to her? Yeah that’s pagan. Context and intent change everything – and they especially change how we read and interpret the Bible.

(1) Barrows, E. P., The Manners and Customs of the Jews: pg 99; also Luzac’s Semitic Texts and Translation Series, Vol. 15, The Devils and Evil Spirits in Babylonia, p 19

(2) The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2001). (Je 7:18). Wheaton: Standard Bible Society.

(3) Ackerman, Susan, “And the Women Knead Dough: The Worship of the Queen of Heaven in Sixth Century Judah” in Bach, Alice, Women in the Hebrew Bible (1999) pp 21-32

(4) The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. (1989). (Je 44:19). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.

 

 



“So What About Christmas and Easter?” – From my rewrite of The Bridge: Crossing Over Into the Fullness of Covenant Life

The_Bridge_Cover_for_KindleA plea for civility and clear heads – it seems that no matter how clearly or politely or lovingly I present this material, emotions run high. People get defensive, they put words in my mouth and they misrepresent not only what I am saying – but also my reasons for saying it as they freely speculate on my motivations. I am a really straightforward person and my motivations are to correct MY error. I am not insulting anyone, or disparaging anyone’s character – I am setting the record straight about what I was teaching and about what happened when I actually dug deep into history and archaeology. This is not a subject that should drive people apart, or result in slander or the undermining of someone’s character. There should be no untouchable subjects if we are to truly call ourselves Bereans and if we are going to continually strive to represent the Gospel honestly – not only when preaching the Gospel, but in everything else we teach and do. If we cannot love one another and deal with each other with integrity, then we have a problem greater than Church holidays.

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I rewrote The Bridge, as you might know, because of one paragraph in one chapter and then one thing led to another and all of a sudden it was 20,000 words longer. I had written in a few very popular urban legends that I found were without merit concerning the advent (no pun intended) of Christmas and Easter. I had assumed that the people who taught me had researched it, which was ridiculous because I didn’t research it and why should I expect from them what I hadn’t done myself? We all placed our trust in the people who went before us – a common human thing to do. After proving through massive archaeological evidence that there never was an Ishtar Sunday and that her cult never practiced human sacrifice (really, almost no one did in antiquity, come to find out and Rome formally outlawed it in 97 BCE), and that she was never associated with eggs or rabbits – I was forced to re-examine everything. So, after spending massive hours and a lot of money on learning about actual ANE paganism, I had to remove the book from the market and get rid of the urban legends that largely originated during the European Catholic-Protestant wars. I have to be honest – I couldn’t sleep because it had me so upset. First, I will give you an excerpt from the chapter about Sabbath, then one from the section on Sukkot and following those is the chapter that was responsible for the rewrite in the first place. I apologize for not doing my homework – for not being a true Berean. I apologize for doing what was easy instead of what was right, and I am really sorry for not just sticking with promoting the Feasts and the Sabbath – because they are enough.

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(Sidebar: something happened in the fourth century that was incredibly tragic. Between the Councils of Nicaea in 325 CE and Constantinople in 381 CE, Rome did what Rome always did best – they formally legislated, and clearly controlled through that legislation, what it meant to be a Christian and what it meant to be a Jew because for a long time everyone was meeting in the synagogues on Sabbath and Christianity was considered a valid expression of Judaism. Rome defined both religions – and we still live with under those definitions without even knowing why. You could not keep any of the Torah and remain a Christian, and you could no longer accept Yeshua as Messiah and remain a Jew. Church Fathers Jerome and Augustine both wrote during this time, voicing their approval for the marginalizing of all those who were still ‘in between’ – living like Jews while worshiping Yeshua.)[1]

[1] Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ is an excellent treatise on this subject

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Do you want to know why Christmas was first celebrated? I know the rumors but let me give it to you straight – I want you to imagine the Believers in Yeshua, separated from their Jewish brothers by an increasing legal and emotional abyss, wanting to celebrate and honor not living and dead Roman Emperors (as Roman law required) but instead their Messiah in a way that was perfectly culturally acceptable in the Roman Empire. Instead of honoring Imperial Cult birthdays (Augustus was known as the Savior of the World in the Roman Empire) they wanted to honor Yeshua, the true Savior of the World. So they, without any knowledge of the importance of the Feasts and having lost all Hebraic understanding of what they were reading, really miscalculated. They came up with December 25th   based solely upon the theory that Yeshua was conceived and died on the same day (Passover), which was a shame because God had already instituted a Feast that recognized the birth of Yeshua – the Feast of Sukkot (some people believe He was born on Passover). They created an illegitimate holiday because they had been stripped of the real celebration through Roman law. As with so many things, they had great intentions, but it was tragically unnecessary.

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Remember I told you about Deuteronomy 12:32, forbidding us to add and subtract from God’s Laws like the Pharisees did?  Well, we’ve done it too, or at least we’ve inherited what others did and lived by it much like the Orthodox Jews of today inherited many of the same laws of the Pharisees.  I look at what they do, not with contempt but with the realization that they inherited things just the same as we did, and they haven’t ditched their traditions any more than Christians have.

In fact, right now I want to make something very clear.  I do not have anything but positive feelings about Jews and Christians, and I have to give credit where credit is due.  Observant Jews care more deeply about obeying God than anyone on earth, there is a zealousness that I deeply admire and it touches my heart.  Their dedication to family is simply amazing, and their passion for the Scriptures is incredible. Everything I have shared with you about the Feasts was possible only because they never abandoned God.

Do you want to know why the Jews survived the Black Death that devastated Christians throughout the world?  Christians were not washing their hands in those days (or bathing), but the Jews were.  I mean that seriously.  (The American Indians were very upset about it when colonists started to arrive from Europe. They were clean people and the Europeans were not.) It became so evident that Jews were not dying of plague that people began accusing the Jews of witchcraft – of actually starting the plague through sorcery!  It was their laws, however, far in excess of what was written that we follow as good hygiene practices today (I have to add, however, that this was not done for hygiene purposes but for holiness).  So it is a good idea to wash hands, but as far as anyone calling ritual hand washing an actual commandment of God, that is not Biblical.  For the record, they were not simply washing their hands, but they also recited a prayer as they did it, and had to do it according to a specific ritual which is also practiced today.  Here is the prayer:

“Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with Thy commandments and has commanded us concerning the washing of the hands.”

Now there is no commandment to do this in Scripture, so this can only be justified as a commandment of the Oral Torah. We see something very similar with the prayer spoken while lighting the Sabbath candles. Is lighting candles before the Sabbath terrible? Of course not, but it also isn’t a Biblical commandment.

How about Christianity?  There are more people being cared for around the world because of everyday Christians than I could write about in a thousand books – orphanages built and maintained, sex slaves rescued from the streets, hospitals built, abused women and children sheltered, drug addicts counseled. The list of good works just goes on and on – the weightier matters of Torah, all done in the name of Jesus. And right now as I am writing this, I weep for my brothers and sisters and their children in the Middle East and Africa who are daily being slaughtered by ISIS for refusing to deny our Master Yeshua, whether they call Him Jesus, Isa, Yesu, or any other variation.

Each faith sadly also has a legacy of adding to the commandments of God their own traditions and judging people based on them.  Each faith added and subtracted as they saw fit.

Christmas and Easter are on the top of that list for Christians.  The verses preceding Deut 12:32 are very sobering verses indeed.  And I ask you to consider them carefully, because Christmas is a tradition, not a commandment of God, and Easter is a tradition, not a commandment of God – just like ritual hand washing.  We should never judge, nor hate another person based on their nonconformance to our traditions because if we do, we will do violence to one another (even if it is only in our hearts) as some of the Pharisee leaders plotted to do violence to Yeshua because He challenged the traditions that they enforced as authoritative laws.

Deut 12:28-32 Observe and hear all these words which I command thee, that it may go well with thee, and with thy children after thee forever, when thou doest that which is good and right in the sight of the Lord thy God.

When the Lord thy God shall cut off the nations from before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their land;

Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before thee; and that thou enquire not after their gods, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise.

Thou shalt not do so unto the Lord thy God: for every abomination to the Lord, which he hateth, have they done unto their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods.

What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it.

First verse, He reiterates that His commandments are forever.  Then He warned the Israelites not to find out about anything related to the heathen worship of the nations they were going to destroy and do it in order to worship Him.  He called every single unique thing they did for their gods an abomination.  It’s His absolute harshest word for the things He hates.  Then He says, in a nutshell, that His Laws are good as they are and have no need to be added to or subtracted from.

(Note: everything legitimate about the worship of our King was also practiced by heathens and so we cannot say that everything they did for their gods was inherently evil – many of their practices boiled down to cultural expressions of honor like the anointing of the feet of a king or god with perfumed oil. What we do not dare do is take something directly from pagan practices that is not in the Scriptures and ‘reclaim’ it for God.)

Passover is enough

Unleavened Bread is enough

First Fruits is enough

Shavuot is enough

Yom Teruah is enough

Sukkot is enough

Shemini Atzeret is enough.

Easter replaced the Spring Feasts and so we lost sight of God’s prophetic plan and calendar, leaving us blind and unable to explain or even truly understand what Yeshua did and fulfilled.  It left us unable to explain to our Jewish brothers and sisters why Yeshua is not an idolater and a blasphemer, but instead their Messiah.

Christmas replaced the Fall Feasts, and so we became blind there as well to what He will do and fulfill.  The end will largely come upon the Church like a thief because we have not been aware of the times and seasons.

I am not going to rehash what you can find on the internet, some of which is true but so much of which is unsubstantiated and falsified that it takes too much precious time for the average person to sort out the lies from the facts. We have inherited holidays that are full of European traditions, some of questionable origin. The world celebrates these holidays in the same manner as Christians do, and each year more and more Bible believing Christians are giving them up. I can’t remember the last time I saw the world trying to celebrate any of the Biblical Feasts, which is a sobering reality check – the world never wants to participate in anything that is actually holy.

To me, knowing the history of the fourth century CE – that Rome forcibly legislated the removal of Christians out of the synagogues and Torah keepers out of the assemblies of Messiah – Christians celebrating Christmas and Easter seem very much like children celebrating the consequences of having a broken home. Without the Christians, the Jews lost their Messiah and without the Jews, the Christians lost their inheritance. It’s like a child celebrating the absence of a parent who wasn’t even a bad parent. Christmas and Easter happened because of a broken home, and that grieves me – it doesn’t make me want to celebrate. At one point all believers in Yeshua were called Nazarene Jews, for hundreds of years – Rome robbed us of a stable home life.

I understand not wanting to abandon those holidays because of the memories associated with them and because of the fear of family disapproval.  Yes, it will happen, people won’t understand – and they will judge you for not keeping their traditions, but that is what they are – traditions.  When we judge people by traditions and value the traditions more than we value the truth, we become like the people who conspired to kill Yeshua.

Traditions blind.  Whereas people do not get angry if you break a commandment, they will get angry if you question their tradition because to break a tradition is to challenge someone’s life choices, while to break a commandment is to challenge God.  People will take it personally, and this is why we have to choose whom we will serve.  I speak from heartache and experience on this.

No one is telling you to ditch your memories or to feel guilty about having enjoyed precious hours as a family, just to put those memories into proper perspective. It was always difficult for everyone coming into Covenant to leave some aspects of their cultures behind in order to follow YHVH exclusively, in fact it was so difficult that when Moses delayed in coming back down from the mountain, the people demanded that Aaron, Moses’ own brother, make them a golden calf that they could worship – as they had undoubtedly learned in Egypt.  And this is what Aaron did –

Ex 32:4-5  And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, Tomorrow is a feast to the Lord.

It wasn’t just that Aaron made something attached to that abominable Egyptian heathenism, but He set up a feast on a day never commanded and said it was too, in the Hebrew, YHVH.  YHVH was so angry that He threatened to kill them all, saying that they had corrupted themselves.  This was a very serious betrayal, an act of National treason. considering what YHVH had done for them.

But isn’t that what Christmas is?  When we detach ourselves from the emotional aspects of the holiday, from our fond memories, didn’t our forefathers simply announce their own ‘feast to YHVH’ while ignoring His Feasts – and all because Moses, or in this case the Laws of God, were  no longer there for them?

I can’t force you to give up those holidays.  I can’t even force you to want to give them up.  I do ask you very bluntly, what does YHVH deserve from us in terms of loyalty?  Is it to keep His Feasts His way, or to do things our way and expect Him to approve?  Do we truly honor Him when we do what we want when we want?  The Scriptures, from front to back, say no.



Nation of Priests IV: The Initiation of a Nation

mysterionSo on Sunday I was preparing for Context for Kids Episode #19, Terumah, when I saw something in the text that I hadn’t seen before. Of course, that’s how it goes when you study Ancient Near Eastern context. A bit of random context will pop into your mind in an unexpected place. It changed what I decided to teach, and then a sinus infection popped up and now I am trying to get rid of my sniffles so that I can record without grossing everyone out.

Greco-Roman times saw the rise in popularity (but not the origins) of what were called “mystery” religions, Mithraism being the most famous, but there were many other non-exclusive voluntary mystery associations in the ancient world (meaning they didn’t compete with each other, you could belong to none, one or many). They were, more than anything, simply clubs designed for the purpose of keeping this or that deity happy and the cosmos, therefore, functioning better. We get our word “mystery” from the Greek “mysterion” – not simply meaning something that we do not know, like the identity of the murderer in an Agatha Christie novel, but instead a divine secret or relationship that one is initiated into and therefore available only to initiates. We see it used twenty-seven times in the First Century Writings, as well as twenty-five times in the late date LXX (Septuagint) books – Daniel, Enoch, Sirach, and the other wisdom and apocryphal books that came to be within the 500 – 600 years before Messiah when Babylonian and Assyrian influences were at their peak and which were then translated into Greek in the few centuries before Messiah.

Lest you be wise in your own sight, I do not want you to be unaware of this mystery, brothers: a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And in this way all Israel will be saved, as it is written, (1)

Here we see Paul very clearly using mystery religion language – something that would have been very familiar to his audience, but then he does something interesting, he shares it with them as though they were all elite initiates. He is telling them something that is a mysterion, in an open letter, something that would probably never have occurred in an actual mysterion.

Of course, all Ancient Near Eastern religions were, to some extent, mysterious. Laymen simply did not know what went on within the cult of the major Temples. Priests were initiated into esoteric knowledge and a special relationship which was quite easy to keep a secret because so very few people were literate – as was the case in Egypt. In many ANE cultures (Mesopotamia and Syria in particular), even kings were illiterate (2) and therefore relied on the integrity of their priests and scribes (not to be confused with first century Jewish scribes). Kings didn’t necessarily need to read, evidently! They had people for that! They could write down their secrets and it didn’t even matter in those days because, first, they kept them within the Temples where no one else could get to them and second, almost no one could read. Fortunately, in the ANE, they often recorded them on baked tablets which have been uncovered and have given us volumes of information within the last 100 to 150 years – completely changing what we thought we knew and relegating much “common knowledge” to the status of urban legends. It’s an exciting time to be alive and studying such things.

So what made the Hebrew religion different? Why did I write this under the heading of “A Nation of Priests?” Very simply put, initiates to a mystery religion were privy to knowledge that normal people couldn’t and didn’t know. Not only does one, in a mystery cult, have to be initiated into the mystery, but they often have to be initiated into greater mysteries at higher levels. Mormonism and Masonry are two excellent examples of modern mysterion. They won’t tell outsiders much of anything, and the knowledge that the higher ups have is not the same as what they are teaching newcomers.

Judaism, on the other hand, as well as Christianity, are decidedly not mysterion religions. Well, of course there are some aberrant cults under the umbrella of Judeo-Christian religion but in general you can learn everything you want about them from the outside. There are no mysterion, no divine secrets for initiates. In Romans 11, Paul is speaking in metaphoric language – comparing the believers to mysterion insiders because as we see in the Torah – God had Moses spell out the details of what would be going on within the Tabernacle to everyone. Unlike every other religion on earth at that time, the knowledge of the workings of the Temple were not reserved for the literal priests – in that way, everyone in the nation was treated as though they were priests and privy to what would be esoteric knowledge in other cultures.

Do you see now why it was a commandment for Torah to be read, out loud, once every seven years to everyone? NO SECRETS.

The Israelites knew that God wasn’t actually eating the sacrifice or the shewbread as pagan gods were thought to do – because He told them exactly what was happening. They knew there was no idol in the Holy of Holies because He told them so. They knew there were no secret incantations because they were told what the priests were in there doing – and the priests did the majority of their work in full view of the people. The workings of the Tabernacle/Temple were not shrouded in mystery – God was treating the nation like priests in allowing them the knowledge of the inner workings of His Divine Palace, the Tabernacle.

Because of this, there are thousands of books about YHVH, His worship, His Tabernacle/Temple and His Word and we are left with almost nothing concrete about the Mithras cult. YHVH doesn’t play around with initiation into mysterion – you can know what you are getting into when you enter into covenant with Him. You don’t keep going up in levels and all of a sudden discover something horrible. This isn’t the induction into a frat house where they blindfold you and humiliate you – as they did in the Mithras cult.

“For other initiatory rites we depend primarily on the fresco scenes in the mithraeum at S. Maria Capua Vetere. These depict usually a triad of figures: the initiates, small, naked, humiliated; and two initiators, one behind and the other in front of the initiates, manipulating the instruments of initiations.” (3)

Through the Scriptures, we can know more information about YHVH than we could adequately explore in a lifetime. But in a mysterion like Mithraism, we are limited to external references by non-cult members to their worshiping in caves or rooms decorated to look like caves, we know that they had no bishops or centralized authority but were simply local groups, we know that Roman Mithras sprang full grown from a rock that served as his mother, we know he killed a bull, we know that he dressed like a Persian even though he had almost nothing else in common with the Persian Mithras, and we know that he ate said bull with Sol, the Sun God (despite the fact that he was also presumably Sol himself ) while sitting on the hide of the bull. (3) We know his festival was celebrated in October. (4) The problem is that, unlike the Bible, which spelled things out for the benefit of the layman, giving him a sort of honorary priestly status, we have no existing writings from any person who was a Mithraicist about Mithraism. Either they never survived or people took this mysterion thing pretty seriously – mysterion is for insiders, not outsiders! What we think we know, is just that, we think we know it. We can look at artwork and excavated Mithraeum (meeting places) and make educated assumptions. We can look at the very few inscriptions and see that this or that person was an initiate. This informational vacuum has resulted in a great many modern myths having sprung up.

What happened in the Mithras cave stayed in the Mithras cave.

What happened in the Temple, on the other hand, was completely above-board and knowable to anyone. God didn’t want there to be any mistaking His worship for any of the mysterion, He wanted it known exactly what was going on with no room for whisperings of secret rituals. He wanted people thousands of years later to still have access to that information.

This is a really quick article on some of the aspects of the Mithraic mysterion by Roger Beck, who is probably the world’s most balanced expert. Although I disagree with him in his assessment of the meaning of Judaic sacrifice as well as “Christian” baptism (which of course isn’t Christian at all but Jewish) his emphasis is on Roman studies and that is where he needs to be evaluated and considered an expert. He is very methodical. I encourage you to take a look at the other links I have provided below, the Mithraism article in particular is incredibly well documented and can give some direction on deeper study with some legitimate sources. Beck has also written a book about Mithraism – The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun. It is very scholarly, not an easy read but the articles I have provided below are very good. Mystery religions are a valuable study in showing us how different the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is than the other gods in the Ancient Near East and First Century.

(1) The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (2001). (Ro 11:25–26). Wheaton: Standard Bible Society.

(2) Amanda H Podany, Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East, p 71

(3) Roger Beck, Mithraism

(4) Stephen Hijmans, Usener’s Christmas: A Contribution to the Modern Construct of Late Antique Solar Syncretism



“This is the beginning of months for you:” Egyptian Calendars, the birthdays of the gods, and why Goshen was the “best of the Land.”

sphinxEx 12:2 This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you.

Slaves don’t live by their own timetable, and after over eighty years in slavery (we know they were enslaved during the reigns of two Pharaohs but we are not told when the actual slavery started), they once again had to be set straight – this article will show you the reason for the confusion. 

In preparation for teaching Exodus, I reviewed all my Egyptian books because it was very much Egyptian religion (the first mention in scripture of anything is important and Egypt is where we have the first mention of heathen priests, magicians and our first real exposure to false religion) that infected Israel during their sojourning. Like I always say, “Aaron didn’t figure out how to make a golden calf out of his own imagination, that took a specific skillset.” He had seen something that was generally only seen within the confines of a Temple or in a public processional and on top of that, he actually made one – but we’ll talk about that in a few weeks.

Egyptian literature is full of interesting and funny stories like this one about the birth of the “big five” gods and goddesses that also gives us an insight into the Ancient Near Eastern mindset of what gods (unlike YHVH) were like and this one provides a window for the ancient calendar system as well. I enjoy studying this because we see in these stories, oftentimes, the reasons for the plagues on Egypt.

Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis and Nephthys were born during the last five days of the Egyptian year (called epagomenals) but their year is unlike the Hebrew year which starts in the Spring, or the late era Roman year which started in January (beginning in about 45/46 BCE). Egyptian years are tied into the inundation (flooding) of the Nile, which begins in late June – and is today celebrated in August at the culmination. You know, in the ancient world you really don’t find the birthdays of any gods pointed out, Egypt seems to be rather unique and only seems to be mentioned as a way of “correcting” the calendar by acknowledging that 360 days was’t truly a solar year. In fact, I have found birthdays of gods to be singularly unimportant (and unmentioned) until we get to Imperial Cult, when the deified Emperor’s birthday became a holiday. Up until then, the focus was on their lives and their birth would only be mentioned in relationship to the circumstances around it, not related to the dates which were hard to pin down with any accuracy. It was the legend around the birth, and not the date, that was mentionable because calendars worldwide were a total mess until 45 BCE (before then, Roman months alternated between having either 29 or 31 days, ugh) and we cannot accurately tie ancient events to a Roman calendar system that wasn’t even set in stone until then. In fact, the Roman year for a long time only had ten months with the entire winter kinda left out in the cold, so to speak. Hence in Egypt we have rare birthdays of gods pinpointed to the last five days of the Egyptian year. That’s why we see ancient events narrowed down to a year and a season within that year, as best as possible, but even that can sometimes be debatable. The Bible, of course, will sometimes name a date on the Hebrew calendar which then still cannot be absolutely lined up with a Roman calendar date that was not yet in existence.

The Egyptian calendar was 360 days long, with three ten day weeks in a month, and only three seasons, beginning with the inundation (flooding) of the Nile – the time when all the silt was washed down from Upper (southern) Egypt into Lower (northern) Egypt and most significantly, into the Land of Goshen – making it the fertile “best of the Land” – the ideal place for YHVH to place the Israelites. Remember that everyone had to sell their land to Pharaoh in order to pay for food during the last years of the famine but that would not have extended to Joseph’s family because they received their provisions for free. Can you imagine the animosity towards his family once a Pharaoh came to power who did not know Joseph and all these foreigners were landowners and the native-born Egyptians were tenant farmers??

Anyway, I digress, again. So the Egyptians had a dilemma – they had a 12 month calendar with 30 days each month but that left them with a problem at the end of their calendar year at the arrival of the inundation – the beginning of new life in Egypt. So they developed a mythology about the goddess Nut who was cursed with the inability to give birth during all 360 days of the year by her grandfather Re (after having given birth already to the sun, stars and planets). After playing dice with Thoth, she won five more days and was able to bear children during those days, evading her grandfather’s curse – as they were not considered actual days of the year. Egyptian legalism! During this time she gave birth to Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis and Nephthys – the “big five” in Egypt.

(Note: Horus started out as the brother of Osiris and Isis and in later years became identified as their son – in this type of early period mythology he is called Horus the Elder)

People often ask me about my source material for Egyptology, so I am going to try and list all the useful books I have on it. Egypt, as I was explaining in yesterday’s Context for Kids video, is where Israel was born – during the hundreds of years they spent there, Egypt became their cultural context and it caused a lot of problems in the wilderness. They had to relearn everything and become an entirely new people – and one of their chief problems was a continual turning back to Egypt. For my Context for Kids parents who are reading this – exercise great caution in simply handing over any Egyptian book to your kids. Egyptian mythology is filled with the abominations spoken of in Leviticus 18 – pretty much all of them.

This specific myth, I took out of Barbara Watterson’s The Gods of Ancient Egypt but you can find it in practically any Egyptian book. I like to recommend this book to people because it is a very easy read – and considering it was written by a PhD Egyptologist that is rare. PhDs generally don’t write the language I call “normal people” but instead write to impress other scholars.

Information on the actual epagomenal days – Anthony Spalinger, Some Remarks on the Epagomenal Days in Ancient Egypt, Journal of Near Eastern Studies Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1995), pp. 33-47

Donald B Redford, The Ancient Gods Speak is what I have been reading lately. The information I have been teaching lately about the Egyptian priestly/magician class, the mummification of Jacob and Joseph, and such have been coming from this book. He compiled articles from the best of the best of Egyptian experts from all over the world, in their respective specialties – which is always helpful because no one knows everything and it is nice to hear from the people who really know their stuff in the one area. 

John D Currid, Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament. Dr Currid has been the Project Director for Bethsaida Excavations Project in Israel for almost 20 years.

Anthony S Mercatante, Who’s Who in Egyptian Mythology – this was my first Egypt book, very readable but not very detailed

Sir Wallis Budge, Egyptian Religion – One of the first books on Egyptology and okay but we have learned a lot since 1899. Never use him as your sole source of information, make sure that modern research backs him up because there were many misconceptions in his time.

Richard H Wilkinson, Reading Egyptian Art – this has been more useful than I first imagined. I originally bought this book because Rico Cortes recommended it for it’s description of the Djed column, the backbone of Osiris that I believe was the Column of Fire that terrified the Egyptians in the wilderness because it would have been seen as a harbinger of death for Pharaoh. But I found better information on this in Redford.

Also, Wilkinson’s The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt.

Ogden Goelet, The Egyptian Book of the Dead – huge and gorgeous book about Egyptian afterlife beliefs, which are vital to understanding the mindset of the Egyptians and especially the Pharaohs.

The Anchor Bible Dictionary

Karel Van der Toorn, Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible – can’t even begin to tell you how much I respect this author, one of the best minds on the subject of ANE religion as it pertains to the Bible. His Nimrod research is amazing, well documented, and does not at all line up with what is being taught in the online urban legends of religious evolution.

Sir J Gardiner Wilkinson Manners and Customs of the Egyptians Vol 1, 2 and 3 (it’s an older book – available for online download at archive.org) – originally printed in 1836 and is probably most well known as having been misrepresented by another author in an age where checking references was a lot harder than it is now.

Douglas J Brewer and Emily Teeter, Egypt and the Egyptians – Brewer spent 18 years in the field in Egypt and is a professor of anthropology, Teeter is research associate and curator of ancient Egyptian and Nubian antiquities at the Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago.

I have some other books, and I hope I haven’t forgotten any good ones as my book shelf is in disarray at the moment, but mostly I wouldn’t want you to waste your time or money on a lot of them.



Who would actually say “Jesus is accursed” in Corinth? Was Yahweh *really* the name of a pagan god? Of course not!

Abraxas,_Nordisk_familjebokSomeone sent me a meme, months ago, with a rather serious charge that tied into something that I had previously studied on and since it ties in with an important piece of Corinthian context, I wanted to add it into what I was already planning to teach. Corinth was a hodge-podge of a mess of just the worst problems in Greco-Roman society. I encourage you to check out my previous blogs on the geography, teacher/disciple relationship problems, and lawsuit controversies as well as my teaching on head coverings in Corinthian context.

So, what’s the skinny here? Some Greco-Roman “magical” Abraxus amulets were found with one of the Greek forms of the four letter Hebrew Tetragrammaton (there are actually quite a few since it doesn’t directly translate into Greek sounds) on it. Should this be shocking and is it a magic bullet against “Yahweh?” Of course not – it is simply a logical extension of the Jewish Gnosticism that was practiced by Jews in the first century – even those Jews who accepted Yeshua as Messiah (as well as by converted gentiles). When Jews mixed magic rituals with the true faith, what name would one expect them to use? They certainly wouldn’t make one up – after all, they were performing these rituals as part of their observance of “Judaism” – an exceptionally twisted form, I might add. Magic papyri have been unearthed with many Greek forms of the Tetragrammaton, including (1) “Iaoouee,” “Iaoue,” “Iabe,”; (2) “Iao,” “Iaho,” “Iae”; (3) “Aia”; (4) “Ia.” (Source) Not only are forms of the Tetragrammaton used in these magical Abraxus amulets and papyri, but also the names of the patriarchs as well as archangels – Iao, Eloai, Adonai, Sabaoth, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, Onoel, Ananoel, Raphael, etc. Jewish forms were not the only ones placed on these amulets, mind you – everyone was fair game, including the Persian, Egyptian and of course Greek deities and none of them were serpentine war chickens either. If Yahweh was actually equated with a serpentine war chicken, then so was the Persian Mithras* (god of truth and justice, cattle, harvest and water), the Greek Venus (goddess of love and sexuality), and the Egyptian gods Thoth (god of knowledge and literacy) and Anubis (embalming god, protector of dead) as well as many others – as you can see, there really wasn’t a common theme in who got put on the amulet.

It’s absolutely no different than what we see in I Corinthians 12:2-3 –

You know that when you were pagans you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says “Jesus is accursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit.

where we see a situation where the Name of Messiah is being spoken in conjunction with curses, as well as with pagan practices. It sounds strange because it seems as though Paul is stating that it is impossible for someone who is not saved and filled with the Holy Spirit to say that Yeshua is Lord – but we all know that isn’t true! What’s impossible, is for someone to perform quite another act with the blessings and authority of the Holy Spirit.

Bruce W Winter suggests (based on LXX scholarship into language usage throughout the Deuteronomy curses pg 175) that the phrase is not “curse Jesus (Yeshua)” but instead “Jesus curse!” In fact, in Corinth alone, 27 curse tablets have been unearthed – calling on the pronunciation of a deity’s name in order to induce them to curse (or counter-curse) one’s enemies. This was an ancient practice among pagans and becoming believers evidently did little (if anything) to change this belief.

Here is an example of this thought process in action from a Coptic Christian curse tablet (and it sounds frightening in the way it presumptuously orders God around):

“Any person, every one, who adjures bad things upon me and every one who calls my name evil, and those who curse me… God WILL perform MY judgment against them all… You SHALL bring all of them down… The cherubim, the seraphim, the ten thousand angels and archangels SHALL appeal to the God of Heaven and Earth and He SHALL perform MY judgment against everyone who opposes me. Anyone who curses me, You MUST bring down and abandon him to demons. Yes true, beloved savior.”

Dang. #gotagrudge?

I ask you, how can someone call Yeshua Lord and then boss Him around demanding that He curse their enemies? That isn’t the Holy Spirit they are calling on to enact those curses, no sirree bob. That being said, I once had a social media contact who bragged about cursing her grandma to death in Yeshua’s Name (she was a Pentecostal who was claiming to keep Torah but evidently forgot all the parts in there about loving folks and honoring parents). Couldn’t hit that block button fast enough.

Not only do papyri contain these curses, but so do graves (kept grave robbers at bay… mostly). Cursing was a huge part of the ancient world of magic, it was very much cultural and accepted. As with anything, just because divine names were co-opted by pagans – well, it doesn’t make the Name itself pagan – if anything, it lends legitimacy to that Name. Why would Jews NOT use the Name of God in their gnostic magic rituals if they indeed believed that was the Name of power? Why would early Christians not use the name of Yeshua in curse tablets if they held a belief in the power of that Name? Like everything, it all ties into what things meant to them and of course, in magic rituals it was 100% about pronunciation and ritual. To perform a curse, one needed a tablet with the formula, and to perform magic rituals, one would want an amulet. In pagan magic rituals, pronunciation = power = authority. You would go with the real thing, or you’d go home.

yehwehNow as for the specific charges listed on this meme (which I edited to remove the name of the ministry who made it – I do not attack ministries so please do not do so in the comments) –

Is the anguiped (abraxas) is a chicken-snake war god – the answer is absolutely not. I can’t find a shred of real evidence anywhere. This is the big problem with simply looking at an amulet, or anything ‘pagan,’ and making assumptions. Yes, the Greek Tetragrammaton is on a pagan amulet, but so are many other names in the same exact format – it is only if we ignore that, that we can even begin to equate Iao with a chicken god – I hope you get that we actually have to ignore the overwhelming cultural and visual evidence (which I will get to in a bit here) in order to argue this point. Context sorts out the bad information from the good. In the same way, a little bit of medical knowledge can lead us to think we are dying, but in the larger context, we realize that our bodies are sometimes actually operating within normal parameters.

Iaoue wasn’t some late date Gnostic construct that was created by Gnostics to describe anything – it was simply a reflection of their recognition of a Name of power – and yes, people that wrote Gnostic documents used those names. Of course, they would!

On the surface, we might see a serpentine war chicken – but what did the ancient Corinthians see? They saw a representation of powers through symbolism. A rooster’s head meant something to them – namely vigilance (crowing) and foresight (they stand taller than other birds and discern morning before there is any light in the sky – unfortunately). The flail is seen commonly in antiquity as the symbol of power and authority. The shield is not a weapon of war but of protection, defense, and wisdom. Serpents are routinely associated with knowledge, cleverness, and guile – but this is not a serpentine war chicken, this is a man with the head of a cock, carrying the flail of divine authority, the shield of wisdom – and from the waist down he has some pretty messed up snake legs. This all meant something specific to them – it was the Greco-Roman way to be figurative in their displays of divinity, not necessarily accurate. Gnosticism was about esoteric knowledge, and the abraxas motifs fit right in. Hellenism was about promoting concepts, and as it was focused on wisdom and perfection it was as infectious as the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

As for the name of that thing – Abraxas? Scholars admit that all they have are guesses as to what it actually means.

As with anything, we need to be deeply familiar with the things that we teach others. Nowhere do we see this more clearly than with those who ‘teach’ about ancient paganism without intensive studying – how things appear to us are generally 180 degrees off from what it really was to them. I liken it to a person with some aches going onto the internet and learning that they are dying, only to go to the ER and find out that they were simply a bit dehydrated. A little bit of knowledge is the devil’s playground – so if we really want to understand, we need to do the hard research – which generally takes a lot of time, dedication, a willingness to accept that people have not always thought the thoughts that we think now, and in my experience, it takes money as well because the real experts generally don’t give their knowledge away for free (and the book publishers wouldn’t allow them to anyway).

Be sure to check out the related posts about the words Lord, Lord and God, Christ, IHS, and Amen.

*Note: this is Persian Mithras – for an interesting scholarly article on the Roman Mithras by Roger Beck, Professor Emeritus, U. Toronto, a recognized scholar in Mithraism, click here and he is the author of The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire which I have been perusing through. His writings explore the evidence that we actually have in existence of both Persian and Roman Mithras (sadly very little except iconography and inscriptions, no written records of beliefs – that’s the problem with mystery religions, they purposefully kept them mysterious, go figure, they weren’t very accommodating to future historians) and the difficulties of saying exactly what they believed or what they did in spite of the legends that have popped up