The Powers and Cult of
the Dead
There are many
examples in the biblical literature of polemic against the power of the dead.
The dead, it is said, do not praise (e.g., Pss. 30:9; 88:10); instead, they “go
down into silence” (ps. 115:17). They know nothing (Eccles. 9:5, 10), and sit
in darkness (Lam. 3:6).
Other texts, however,
complicate the picture. The numerous references to the Rephaim
attest that Israel clearly knew of the common Syro-Palestinian belief in a
group of supernatural dead. The biblical Rephaim fall into two categories:
sometimes they are reckoned as a mythic ancient tribe (Gen. 14:5; 15:20; Deut.
2:11) of giants (Deut. 3:11), and at other times the term refers to the
assembled dead, whether royal (Isa. 14:9) or unspecified (Prov. 2:18; cf.,
e.g., Job 26:5; Ps. 88:10). The two usages probably are related. In any case,
despite the biblical claims about the weakness of the Rephaim, the Hebrew
etymology of their name suggests that originally they were seen as supernatural
healers/protectors (Hayes, Christopher B. 2011. Death in the Iron Age II and
in First Isaiah. FAT 79. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Republished as A Covenant
With Dead: Death in the Iron Age II and Its Rhetorical Uses in Proto-Isaiah.
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015, 167-68).
The idea that the
dead are a source of divinatory knowledge is richly attested. Necromancy is
banned or condemned in various places (Lev. 19:31; 20:6, 27; Deut. 18:11; 2
Kings 21:6; 1 Chron. 10:13-14). The story of Saul and the necromancer in 1
Samuel 28 has become a touchstone; despite the condemnation of Saul for employing
necromancy, the story makes no effort to deny that ti “worked.” Samuel was
summoned, and he was correct. The Hebrew term ‘ob appears in relation to
the female diviner and may denote both a spirit of the dead and a cultic
object. This situation finds analogies in West Semitic npsh/nbsh, which
came to mean both the soul and the funerary monument; and in Hebrew ‘asherah,
typically thought to be both a goddess and the wooden pole that symbolized her.
Israelites did not
have figurines representing ancestors that were used for divination; in other
contexts, these are called teraphim (Ezek. 21:21; Zech. 10:2). The teraphim
clearly were physical objects of some sort (Gen. 31:19-35; Judg. 17:5;
18:14-20; 1 Sam. 19:11-17). There is reason to think that the teraphim were
once an accepted part of Israelite family religion. They are never condemned in
the legal codes, but only in 1 Samuel 15:23 and the report of their removal by
Josiah in 2 Kings 23:24.
Ancestor cults may
have been banned for several reasons. Most basically, necromancy had the
potential to come into conflict with central forms of Yahwistic divinzation,
especially prophecy. Chancing social conditions in Neo-Assyrian period that
changed family patterns and stained the authority of elders may have given the condemnation
additional momentum (Douglas, Mary. 2004. “One God, No Ancestors, in a World
Renewed.” Pp. 176-95 in Mary Douglas, Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of
Reconciliation [Oxford: Oxford University Press]). (Christopher B. Hays, “Death
and Burial in the Iron Age Levant,” in Jonathan S. Greer, John W. Hilbert, and
John H. Walton, eds., Behind the Scenes of the Old Testament: Cultural,
Social, and Historical Contexts [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2018],
386, emphasis added)
Further Reading
Response to Douglas V. Pond on Biblical and LDS Anthropology and Eschatology
