Thursday, May 25, 2023

Susan Niditch on the Bull being an Image/Reference to God, not a Pedestal of God

  

EPITHETS

 

Some of the briefest and most basic recurring phrases of the Hebrew Bible are noun-epithets comparable to those John Foley explores in Serbo-Croatian, Anglo-Saxon, and classical Greek sources. An archaic epithet for Yahweh, god of the Israelites, provides an interesting case study: ăbîr ya’ăqōb. The translation for this phrase in the RSV, the NRSV, and others is “the Mighty One of Jacob.” This translation is itself countermetonymic, a theologically motivated attempt to invoke only one aspect of the phrase’s meaning. More basically and literally, the ăbîr in Northwest Semitic languages means “bull,” as P. D. Miller has shown in a classic study and as poetic texts such as Isa. 10;13; Ps. 22:13 (v. 12 in English); and Ps. 50:13 strongly confirm. In the latter two passages in particular, “bull” is in synchronic parallelism with “steer” (Ps. 22:13) and “he-goat” (Ps. 50:13).

 

The horned bull includes implications of strength (hence the translation “Mighty One”), youth warrior skills and fertility with a particular sort of machismo. Americans of a particular generation might speak similarly of a “young buck” or a “stud.” Ancient Canaanite religion is rich in tales of the god-power throughout the ancient Near East. As metonymic symbols of various deities, such crowns were set upon thrones in temples representing and ensuring divine indwelling presence.

 

In part because of the association of the bull with Canaanite and other ancient Near Eastern deities, not all Israelites were comfortable with bull iconography or the related mythology—hence the condemnations in Exodus 32 and 1 Kings 13—and yet for many, perhaps most Yahweh worshipers the bull symbol invoked a range of positive aspects of the deity as powerful, youthful bringer of plenty, rescuer from enemies. When in Ex. 32:4 the Israelites shout toward bull icons, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” it is the power symbolically and metonymically represented by the bull that captures their imagination. The bill is not Baal or El or Marduk, but the God of Jacob Israel, bound to this people in a shared history of experience in a narrative tradition that creates, preserves, and maintains the relationship. The Israelite tradition no doubt contained many additional references to the Bull of Jacob beyond the few found in the Hebrew Bible—stories, proverbs, longer formulas in which the Bull of Jacob appeared—but even the limited biblical references are instructive. Each time the epithet is used, a larger tradition of associations is brought to bear on the context at hand, which may deal in an immediate way with only certain aspects of the Bull of Jacob.

 

Thus in Gen. 49:25, the literary setting is Jacob’s testament, his old-age blessing to each son, considered in the tradition to be ancestor hero of a particular tribe or tribes. Joseph, father of Ephraim and Manasseh, the northern Israelites, is described in a warrior context. Archers strive against him bitterly but his bow stays firm, his arm agile. The translation at verses 23-24 is difficult, but the phrase employing the bull epithet follows these indications of fortitude in battle with a phrase meaning literally “from the hands of the Bull of Jacob.” In other wors, Yahweh, Bull of Jacob, supports his charges in battle like an Athena or a Zeus supports their favorite warriors. The image of the bull brings this agnostic power to bear. So too at Isa. 1:24 and 49:26. The latter describes the victory over oppressors in the ghoulish language of a cannibalistic postvictory banquet:

 

I will cause those who oppress you to eat their own flesh
As with sweet wine they will become drunk on their blood.
All flesh will know that I Yahweh am your savior
Your redeemer is the Bull of Jacob.

 

As we have discussed for Ezekiel 38-39, the victory of Israel over the enemies takes the cosmogonic form of the victory-enthronement pattern, the victorious banquet motif intertwining with the blood-soaked imagery of the battlefield—in this case of the enemies’ self-consumption of defeat. The “savior” and “redeemer” who makes that possible is the Bull of Jacob. Warrior is also world-maker, establisher of cosmos after chaos, destroyer and builder, wager of battles and peacemaker, the guarantor of fertility. All of these nuances are contained in the bull.

 

Isaiah 60:16 in context emphasizes the paradise aspect of the bull, the plenty and fertility he brings in the victory over enemies as Israel sucks the milk of nations, the breasts of kings. Instead of a cannibalistic self-consumption, there is an image of absorbing the enemies’ strength as a baby would drink nurturing milk at its mother’s breast—an image of ultimate security and freedom from oppression. This too is within the power of the Bull of Jacob. And yet within this epithet emphasizing fecundity, complete security, and peace is also metonymically reference to the warrior, the aggressive male power.

 

As Foley has pointed out, the epithet brings to a passage a full range of a character’s personality in the tradition, qualities beyond those emphasized in the context at hand. Psalm 132 is a pro-Davidic, pro-Jerusalem, pro-Temple hymn, in which the worldview is similar to that of 1 and 2 Chronicles. David is imagined as an ideal ruler who establishes Yahweh’s holy city and prepares for God’s dwelling place on earth (132:3-7). The covenant with the Davidic dynasty is emphasized (132:11, 12) as is the role of the priests (132:9, 16) and the eternal bond between God and an inviolable Zion (132:13-15). This passage deals directly neither with war (v. 8 contains only hints of the warrior enthroned, returned from battle) nor employs extensive fertility imagery (see v. 15), but Yahweh is addressed as Bull of Jacob (v. 2). David seeks a dwelling place for the Bull of Jacob (v. 5). This epithet introduces into the passage the full mythology of the bull, the special sort of male power, the fecundity, all of which contribute to the message of security under the eternal rule of David in Zion blessed by Yahweh, but the contribution is of the immanently referential or metonymic variety.

 

A similar sort of metonymy applies to other biblical epithets. When Yahweh is called “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” the context does not always overtly and directly deal with covenant or genealogy, but this epithet metonymically brings these themes to bear on a context for those who share the tradition; the epithet is a template of the larger tradition. (Susan Niditch, Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature [Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996], 15-17)

 

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