Sunday, March 7, 2021

Christopher B. Hays on the Cult of the Dead vs. "Soul Sleep/Death"

  

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