Tuesday, September 27, 2022

Application of Solar Imagery to Yahweh and other Male Deities in the Ancient Near East (cf. Malachi 4:2)

 Mal 4:2 (Heb: 3:20) in the KJV reads:

 

But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.

 

The Hebrew literally reads “healing in her wings,” as “sun” (‎שֶׁ֣מֶשׁ) and “wing” (כָּנָף) in Hebrew are grammatically feminine. However (and this is lost on a lot of people, including a few LDS) sexual gender and grammatical gender are not one-to-one equivalent to one another. Indeed, scholars believe that YHWH is in view here, and “his” is a correct interpretation of this verse.

 

In his 2022 essay, “Iconography on Hebrew Seals and Bullae Identifying Biblical Persons and the Apparent Paradox of Egyptian Solar Symbols,” Stanhope notes that YHWH (and, in related literature, other male deities such as El and Marduk) have solar imagery applied to them, including Mal 4:2:

 

1. Biblical Evidence. In the case of the first, evidence for a solarized Yahweh in the Iron Age is now widely recognized by scholars, and I briefly belabor it here since it must be held in mind when considering all of the remaining artifacts to be examined in this study. The Isaiah tradition unambiguously figures Yahweh as the luminous ‘breaking’ and ‘rising’ ‘dawn’ in Isa. 58.8 and 60.1. In 60.19, it is even said that Yahweh’s glory will eternally replace the sun in the New Creation. Deuteronomy 33.2 likewise speaks of Yahweh ‘dawning from Seir . . . shining forth from Mount Paran’. Psalm 84.11 figures Yahweh as a ‘sun and shield’ and ‘would seem to constitute a description in accordance with the divine presence in the Jerusalem temple’.

 

Malachi 3.20 (Eng. 4.2), contains language that conceptually interfaces with Isa. 58.8, and refers to Yahweh as a sun with healing in his wings ‘‎שׁמשׁ צדקה ומרפא בכנפיה’. In his rebuttal to Cross, Lubetski reasonably opposed the use of Malachi to contextualize the theology of Hezekiah’s period. However, an interesting recent study by Whitely proposed on the basis of Phoenician parallels that Amos 4.13 uses the term עיפה to refer to the winged sun as well, indicating that an ‘interpretatio Hebraica’ of the icon may span across these earlier centuries. Additionally, Smith has even argued on the basis of parallels between Genesis 1 and Psalm 104 that Yahweh produced the sunlight that marked the first few days of creation before the sun was created on the fourth creation day, and some Egyptologists have adopted this position.

 

As several final pieces of evidence, one may note biblical and inscription documentation for solar theophoric personal names of this period like Yhwzrḥ (‘Yahwh has risen’), or Nryhw (‘light of Yahweh’), and it seems quite likely that this indigenous, and originally orthodox, association of Yahweh with the sun contributed to the solar worship scandals at the Temple reported in Ezek. 8.16 and 2 Kgs 23.11.

 

2. Evidence from the Broader Near East. Second, overwhelmingly, the broader context of the ancient Near East attests that co-opting the sun disk to represent a local chief deity was culturally normative. Seever and Korhonen cite the cultic adoption of the symbol as far abroad as Hatti, Persia, and the Mesopotamian cradle, where the winged sun disk and explicitly solarizing language were applied to the Babylonian deity Marduk, the gods Shamash, Asshur of Assyria, and the Persian god Ahura Mazda. Smith likewise observes the use of the sun disk as a deity symbol on an Ugaritic Stele depicting El. One may add to this the Syrian examples identified by Ornan, or the wide Phoenician attestation of the motif as a representation of Ba’al recognized by Culican. It seems likely that the Bible participates in this tradition since, following general Near Eastern convention, its authors from all periods frequently borrow titles, hymns, and mythic features of foreign deities and attribute them to Yahweh, often as an orthodox strategy of elevating the God of Israel above his competitors. (Benjamin Stanhope, “Iconography on Hebrew Seals and Bullae Identifying Biblical Persons and the Apparent Paradox of Egyptian Solar Symbols,” in Epigraphy, Iconography, and the Bible, ed. Meir Lubetski and Edith Lubetski [Hebrew Bible Monographs 98; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2022], 187-89, emphasis in bold added)