. . . worship in the
new temple is imaged as a cult of regeneration, in which Yhwh bestows fertility
blessings upon his worshippers. Verses 3-5 read:
3 The foreigner who
has joined himself to Yahweh must not say,
‘Yhwh will surely cut me off from his people’;
and the eunuch must not say,
‘I am a dry tree’.
4 For thus says Yhwh:
‘The eunuchs who observe my sabbaths,
who choose what I desire
and hold fast to my covenant:
5 I shall give them, in my house and within my walls,
a memorial and a name (יד ושם)
better than sons and daughters;
I shall give them (reading לחם in place of לו, following 1QIsaa, with Versional support) as everlasting
name (שם עולם)
which will not be cut off.
In this text, the
poet draws heavily on mortuary cult imagery as a means of asserting the
life-giving function of the cult of Yhwh in the Jerusalem temple. The combined
‘memorial and name’ (יד ושם) to which the writer
refers (v. 5) is here most plausibly understood as aspects of ancestral cult: יד is the mortuary
monument manifesting the ritualized remembering and cultic presence of the
dead, while שם is the post-mortem
memorialized ‘name’ of the dead, invoked in the cult to perpetuate (by
remembering) their ongoing existence. A concern for the perpetuation of the
existence of the dead is also made explicit in the parallel promise of a שם עולם (‘everlasting
name’), an expression carrying – most appropriately for its mortuary cult
context – connotations of divinity and deification, as is suggested by its
application to Yhwh (Isa. 63:17; cf. Gen. 22:13; Exod. 3:15; 1 Kgs 9:3; 2 Kgs
21:7; Ps. 135:13) and the king in the cult (Ps. 72:17). . . . overturning of
traditional kinsip ties to Jerusalem is reinforced at the close of the oracle,
in v. 8:
Oracle of Lord Yhwh,
who gathers the dispersed of Israel:
‘I shall gather still others to him
besides those already gathered.’
This is widely taken
as a promise of restorative ingathering: those exiled and dispersed beyond the
bounds of the land will be brought back to join those who have already returned
(cf. Deut. 30:4; Mic. 4:6; Zeph. 3:19-20). In this particular context, however,
the language of gathering (קבץ) also evokes images of the mortuary cult, in which the dead are united
with their ancestors by means of the one who gathers their bones to those of
the predecessors in the family tomb, here represented by the ancestor of ‘Israel’
(In Ezek. 29:5, both קבץ and אסף are employed to
describe the internment of the dead. As Lewis observes [Cults of the Dead,
151-52] Ugaritic qbṣ is similarly employed in a sense synonymous with asp,
‘gather’, to refer to the dead in the underworld; cf. KTU 1.161.2-3).
This reading is supported contextually not only by the ancestral cult motifs
employed in vv. 3-5, but also in the repeated allusions to burial and death
cults in the following chapter (57:1-13), including in 57:13 the designating of
Jerusalem’s ancestral dead as the ‘gathered ones’ (קבוצים). Thus in 56:8, Yhwh
is imaged in mortuary-ritual terms as the bone-gatherer, collecting the dead –
a metaphorical portrayal of the diaspora communities – to the ancestral grave,
here represented by the temple on Zion (vv. 7-8). (Francesca Stavrakopoulou, Land
of Our Fathers: The Roles of Ancestor Veneration in Biblical Land Claims [Library
of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 473; London: T&T Clark, 2010], 123-24,
126)