Lilith Unfair

Dan McClellan Lilith and Adam are in the garden, and Lilith gets upset because she wants to, and the text says, "be on top." And some people try to interpret this figuratively as an authority question. I think it is far more likely that this is a reference to sexual positions. Mm. That Lilith wants to be on top, and Adam says, "You are not fit to be on top. I am the only one who is fit to be on top." And this would align with the longstanding notion that the only sexual position appropriate for a man is the dominant one, and the only sexual position appropriate for a woman is the submissive one. And so, for a woman to be on top throws a wrench into the social hierarchy, and dogs and cats running wild. It's pandemonium. I'm forgetting the "Ghostbusters" reference. Mass hysteria. Come on. Mass hysteria, yeah. Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the "Data Over Dogma" podcast, where we try to increase the public's access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are you doing today, Dan?

Dan Beecher I am doing fine. How are you doing?

Dan McClellan I'm doing well, although a tinge of regret. Someone told me that we really missed out on an opportunity to call our episode 12, "There's Something About Mary."

Dan Beecher Well, that's true. We could've done it. We missed it. I did title it after something that Elizabeth Schrader said in the show, so- Yeah ... I thought I was at least honoring her with that title. Yeah. But we miss opportunities all the time. That's a part of life. Yep. We win some, we lose some. Coming up on this week's show, we're going to be talking about a famous and infamous lady first, and then we're delving later into some of your personal work, some work that you have a lot of experience with.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I'm going to do a "What Does That Mean?" segment on the word stele, which I use every now and then, and I can count on getting a dozen references to Steely Dan- I was going to say ... every time I say that word. And some people say stela, and then for plural they say stele. Mm. I say stele for the singular and stelae for the plural.

Dan Beecher S-T-E-L-E? Is that what we're saying?

Dan McClellan S-T-E-L-E, yeah. Okay.

Dan Beecher All right. Well, we'll get to that later on in the show. Mm-hmm. But for now, let's do our first segment, "Who's That?" We're going to talk about a name that appears, I think only once-

Dan McClellan One time ...

Dan Beecher in the Bible, if it appears at all in your version. It might not appear in your version whatsoever. But it's a person/thing/who knows what. Well, hopefully, Dan, you know what. We'll see. It has become an icon of modern feminism, this person. Mm-hmm. Well, people of a certain age, you and I included, Dan, will recall that back in the '90s, singer Sarah McLachlan named a music festival after this person. So, who is or what is Lilith?

Dan McClellan Yeah, let's get into it. And speaking of Sarah McLachlan, a huge fan by the way. If I had the money or the time, or the know-how back in the '90s when I was in high school, I would've loved to have gone to the Lilith Fair.

Dan Beecher If you're listening, Sarah McLachlan, call us.

Dan McClellan She's not. She's got much better things to do. But yeah, Lilith. Well, we only have one passage in all the Bible that has anything at all to say about Lilith, and that passage is in Isaiah 34 in verse 14. And here we're talking about a threat of destruction to Israel, and part of this threat is to say, basically, "I'm going to turn you into a deserted land, a land that's going to be inhabited by a bunch of creatures that are associated with the wilderness, associated with a lack of habitation, a lack of civilization." So, in the NRSV, it says, "Wildcats shall meet with hyenas, goat demons shall call to each other, and there too Lilith shall repose." And the word in Hebrew there is lilith. And most scholars will tell you that this comes from a term in Akkadian, so from Mesopotamia, that ultimately derives from a Sumerian word. So, it's probably a borrowing into Akkadian from the Sumerian, which is a very different language from Akkadian. And I think the KJV renders screech owl, doesn't it?

Dan Beecher Yeah. The KJV says, let's see. Yes. It's so different. "The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow. The screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest."

Dan McClellan Yeah. So, it doesn't sound like they had a great idea what to do with lilith- No ... the only time it occurs there.

Dan Beecher But it seems to- NIV, by the way, the New International Version-

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah. What does that say? ...

Dan Beecher renders it as, "The night creatures will also lie down and find for themselves places to rest."

Dan McClellan Night creatures, night creatures. The night creatures. Oh, I just realized I probably shouldn't sing stuff because-

Dan Beecher No

Dan McClellan ... because we might run into copyright issues.

Dan Beecher Nobody report us. Yeah. That was for satirical purposes only.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and obviously I changed the lyrics. But the New English Translation, the NET, has nocturnal animals.

Dan Beecher Whoa. So nocturnal- I think I saw that movie. That's really interesting.

Dan McClellan With Neve Campbell from- Yeah, something like that ... something like that. So when we go into Akkadian, we find these terms that seem to refer to an entire class of some kind of demon or entity that is associated with stormy winds and with the nighttime- Hmm ... and with kind of predatory behavior as well as deviant sexuality. So there's a feminine dimension of what's going on here,

Dan Beecher but- I kind of like all those things. Everything you just mentioned- This is like- I'm kind of a fan

Dan McClellan ... this is your jam, huh? You are vibing. And so in this literature, which spans many, many centuries, there's not a ton of consistency, so we can't really nail it down to one specific thing. We can just speak in broad terms about the different ways that it pops up. And when we get to some of the feminine aspects of it, this is some kind of creature or female entity that does not have a husband or seeks to ensnare men or husbands. And so it's kind of a deviant, aberrant sexuality, and so these are creatures that you are worried about. Mm-hmm. And I think that's what they're trying to get across in Isaiah 34. This is somebody that you really want to keep outside the walls of your city.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Don't let her take her rest there. Are you kidding me? Very dangerous.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And, oh, it reminds me of a time when I was in Beersheba, and I was walking through one of the little "streets," quote, unquote, streets of the ruins of Beersheba, and a fox darted across the path right in front of me and into a little hole- Ha ... right under the ruins of a little wall of a house or something like that. And it reminded me of somewhere else... What is it? No, it's actually in the New Testament, "Foxes have their holes, but the Son of Man has not where to lay his head." Oh. But I kind of thought of this area, these ruins were now places where foxes were making their dens. Very similar idea that this is going to be a place where it's uninhabitable by humans, and it's inhabited by these creatures that occupy the periphery of civilization. You have this kind of idea of center and periphery that is very influential in the way they think about the world anciently, where the city inside the city wall, that is kind of the height of civilization. That's where the best people live. That's where the temple is. That's what's considered the center of humanity, human civilization. And then the further away you get from the city and the city walls and human habitation, the closer you get to kind of the unknown and dangerous boundaries of what is out there. And so that's where demons dwell,

Dan Beecher and that's where- Yeah. I've seen "Mad Max." I know how-

Dan McClellan And that's where all the kind of unknown kind of fuzzy creatures that you don't really want to be around hang out. And so that's where they're going to put these demons, the satyrs as the KJV calls it, or the goat, I think. Goat demons as the NRSV puts it.

Dan Beecher And then- You've got to love the goat demons, man.

Dan McClellan And that's where you put Lilith. Yeah. And even in the Pentateuch when it talks about the scapegoat, this is the goat for Azazel, who's another demonic figure. And where do you take the goat to send it off to Azazel? Out into the desert, because the uninhabited region. Habitation kind of corresponds to proximity to deity. Hmm. And then the further away you get, the more you get the other half of the divine world, the malevolent half. And once you get to the sea, then you also have a similar situation where the sea is chaotic, and that's where ships get wrecked. That's where people drown. That's where things go wrong. So- Yeah ... you have order and chaos, center periphery, civilization, uninhabitable land. And it-

Dan Beecher So how do we get from a screech owl and/or some sort of demon thing? I guess you're going to get us to- ... feminist icon at some point, right?

Dan McClellan Yeah. I'm going to get us there. But the next thing to note is that in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in the Great Isaiah Scroll, it's not Lilith, it's Liliths. It's plural. And so- Oh, wow ... yeah, the name is Lilitot, so that's the plural of the name, and then the verb is in the plural, which suggests that kind of as a call back to how it originally worked in the Akkadian language, that this was more of a category of entity, not a single entity, but a category.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Now, when we get into early Jewish exegesis of the text, one of the things that the early rabbis and the early exegetes or interpreters of the Hebrew Bible tried to do is find meaning in everything. And so they needed to find out what these words meant, and they wanted to associate it with something that would make it significant. With this, it's kind of difficult, but there was a reading of Genesis in early Jewish interpretation that set the stage for Lilith to become relevant several centuries down the road. And that reading had to do with how the early rabbis reconciled the two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2. And we talked about this in our very first episode, but- That's right ... you've got two different creation accounts, and Christians today try to harmonize these in a lot of different ways. One was the spiritual creation, the other was the physical creation. One was a broad outline, one was more detailed. One was the 30,000-foot view, one was on the... Bunch of different ways to try to harmonize this. Right. One way that some early Jewish interpreters tried to harmonize this was to suggest there were two creations, and in the first creation, you had man and woman, or there are two references to creation. In the first one, you had man and woman created at the exact same time. Right. But in the second one, the human is created first, and the woman is created afterwards. Right. And so one way to reconcile this is to say when they were first created, Adam had a wife who was created at the exact same time as him. And then we've got this other woman who's created subsequently. And so this must be Eve is Adam's second wife. And so Genesis 1- As a friend

Dan Beecher of mine once put it, that becomes the first rolling out of the McRib.

Dan McClellan There are layers to that. Yeah. And so there arose this tradition, not a majority tradition, but a tradition that Adam was created simultaneously with a first wife, and then there was a second wife that was made, and that second wife was Eve. And so that then leads to the question for later exegetes, who on earth was his first wife? Yeah. And we get in a text called the Alphabet of Ben Sira, which was written sometime between around 700 CE and around 1000 CE. We get a text that links Lilith with Adam's first wife and suggests that according to this interpretation that has Eve as Adam's second wife, the first wife was Lilith.

Dan Beecher I take it that this Alphabet of Ben Sira was not a children's book.

Dan McClellan No. No, it was not a picture book. It was a chapter book. It was all words. Now, in medieval Judaism, Lilith had become somewhat of a succubus, one of these demons that kind of afflicts particularly men, particularly their sexuality, causes problems for them, but can also cause problems for newborn babies. And in the Alphabet of Ben Sira, we have a bit of an etiology for this character as a succubus. In the story, Lilith and Adam are in the garden, and Lilith gets upset because she wants to, and the text says, "be on top." And some people try to interpret this figuratively as an authority question. I think it is far more likely that this is a reference to sexual positions. Mm. That Lilith wants to be on top, and Adam says, "You are not fit to be on top. I am the only one who is fit to be on top." And this would align with the longstanding notion that the only sexual position appropriate for a man is the dominant one, and the only sexual position appropriate for a woman is the submissive one. And so for a woman to be on top throws a wrench into the social hierarchy, and dogs and cats running wild. It's pandemonium. I'm forgetting the "Ghostbusters" reference.

Dan Beecher Mass hysteria. Come on.

Dan McClellan Mass hysteria, yeah. And we can go all the way back to ancient Mesopotamian texts from 1000 BCE that talk about how if a man is on the bottom, that it robs him of his masculinity and his vitality. And we can go to, there's an early Jewish text, I'm blanking on what it is at the moment, but it talks about how if a man takes the bottom position in sex with his own wife, it will give him diarrhea. There's a notion that it renders one- That's amazing ... yeah. It renders one ritually impure. Yeah. And so this is an ideology that exists for thousands of years, and it's reflected in this idea that Lilith is like, "No, I want to be on top." And Adam's like, "We can't do this." "That's absurd." Yeah. "What kind of household am I running here?"

Dan Beecher And so she- It is amazing that the alpha male, the only male at the time- ... had alpha male ideals about sexual positions,

Dan McClellan but

Dan Beecher there you go.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, and it kind of shows you that these are characters that are used to tell stories about ourself. Right. And so she gets upset, and she storms out of the Garden of Eden, and she just takes off. And God is told about this, is not happy with this, and so sends three angels after Lilith to convince her to return to the Garden of Eden. And- They catch up with her and they say, "Hey, what's going on? You need to come back to the Garden of Eden." And she's not having it. And these three angels are Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof. And yes. Those are great names. Yeah. And what Lilith tells them is, "I'm not coming back. I am going to go be a succubus. I'm going to go afflict men. I'm going to go afflict newborn babies. I'm going to cause illness, I'm going to cause death among newborns, and the only way you can stop me is if a newborn baby is wearing an amulet that has your three names on it. And if I see that amulet, I will have no power over that newborn, that infant."

Dan Beecher Weird that she put her own strictures on herself. Yeah. That seems like an odd thing to do if you're going to just... If you're in an afflicting mood, don't make rules that you have to follow. That just seems weird.

Dan McClellan Yeah, don't just arbitrarily limit yourself.

Dan Beecher So,

Dan McClellan most likely this story is an etiology for why people were using amulets with maybe these three angels' names on them, Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof. Maybe they didn't have their name on them, but-

Dan Beecher Which, by the way, beautiful names. If you're considering naming your baby- ... I think if you're not going to name them Dan, which obviously you should- That's the easiest ... go with Semangelof, or whatever you just said.

Dan McClellan Semangelof. Yeah. And, so this was likely a practice that was going on at the time, the use of apotropaic amulets to ward off evil, and specifically the evil that is the succubus, Lilith, who would cause illness and death in newborns. And there was probably- Which, by the way,

Dan Beecher was so common in the era. Newborn death and miscarriage was fully a third of children, wasn't it? Um- A third of pregnancies, something along those lines.

Dan McClellan Yeah, I'm sure it's changed over time, but certainly it's not until the modern era that infant mortality has dropped significantly- Right ... which is one of the main contributors to our huge populations these days. But-

Dan Beecher It's the biggest mistake we've made as a species. Just kidding.

Dan McClellan Well, a lot of people when they look at life expectancy in the ancient world, they're like, "Yeah, you live to an age of 40." It's like, no. Infant mortality drags that- Right ... average down, but even in the ancient world, if someone survived to adulthood, most likely they were going to live to be 60 or 70 or something like that. Right. So, the life expectancy has not changed significantly.

Dan Beecher Wait, I think you mean 969.

Dan McClellan Oh, please don't get me started on that.

Dan Beecher Well, we'll do that on another show. Yeah.

Dan McClellan Oh, gosh. I get asked about that all the time. People are like- Yeah ... "Did they mean months?" And they're like, "No."

Dan Beecher All right. So, we've got Lilith. She is going to afflict all of the children. She has made a deal with the angels that their names can protect them. It makes sense to me that this woman who was meant to be brought in, at least in this story, which is non-biblical again. But this story where she's Adam's first wife, and she refuses to subject herself to this sort of patriarchal notion that she is not equal to this man in some way- Mm-hmm ... and that he has to dominate her. Yeah, I'm starting to see Sarah McLachlan's point.

Dan McClellan Yeah. You can see how someone like this would become an icon for femininity. Now, there are pieces of misinformation in circulation out there. Some people will argue that the original version of Genesis talked about Adam's first wife as Lilith or something like that. Mm. And there are no data that support that. This is a much later tradition that's building on not just earlier accounts of Genesis, but medieval interpretive traditions regarding the accounts of the creation, and is kind of extrapolating and elaborating on those traditions to create this story of Adam having a first wife named Lilith. Yeah. So that's something that, that idea is created somewhere in that window between around 700 CE and 1000 CE. So, only a little over 1,000 years old.

Dan Beecher And the reason that it became... Sorry, I'm trying to piece this together. This alphabet of whoever, sorry. Ben Sira. Ben Sira is taking the exegesis of the difference between the two creation stories- Mm-hmm ... and inserting this already existing concept of, but vague and not well understood idea of an evil night spirit, a succubus, or whatever, and saying, "Let's create an origin story for both," basically.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Does that sound like a fair representation of what you're saying?

Dan McClellan Yeah, I think so. It's taking the blocks that are around them and just building something new out of them.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Which is what is so often the case with the texts that are in the Bible and the texts that are next to the Bible and that inform the Bible. And it makes sense because these texts that become authoritative, or these traditions that become authoritative, they're not going to gain any traction, any purchase, if they're just totally out of left field. Mm. And they have no relationship whatsoever to what's already going on in the discourse. And so that's why you pluck from- the existing discourse to find the building blocks for these ideas that you want to forward. And that way, once that new idea is out there, it's new in some sense, but in another sense, it's appealing to things that people already understand and have accepted and are already in widespread circulation. And that's how you build a tradition that's going to become popular and is going to last. If you come out of left field with something that has no relationship to what people are talking about, it's only going to have the novelty, and that's going to wear off pretty quickly. And so, you'll find a lot of these extra-biblical traditions, and even a lot of biblical traditions, are just incremental elaborations on stuff that is already out there. Interesting. And sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and people confuse it for the original idea.

Dan Beecher Well, if you want to wrangle Jewel and Lisa Loeb, and get them to rally around a cause, sounds like Adam's first wife is as good a one as any. Man,

Dan McClellan I feel all these restrictions on me now because I want to quote a bunch of song lyrics. Suddenly I'm like, "I probably shouldn't do that."

Dan Beecher So. Don't get us into any more trouble than we're already in. All right. Well, there you go. Lilith, the screech owl, which I'm sure that some people might say that about some of those singers that I just mentioned.

Dan McClellan But

Dan Beecher no. I think that's a really cool little tradition there.

Dan McClellan Yeah, it is interesting. I think it's important to know the origins of that, since that tradition kind of has some traction on social media. And I think it's interesting to know why it has informed this kind of feminist approach to the creation account in Genesis and the origins of Adam's wife. But yeah, it's definitely something that comes much later down the line and originates in this ancient Mesopotamian tradition about some kind of rather amorphous, demonic spirit of some kind associated with the nighttime, with the winds, and with a deviant kind of sexuality.

Dan Beecher And if you would like an amulet for your child- ... please go to our webpage, where it's in our merch section. We don't have a merch section yet. We'll come up with one soon. Anyway, that's great. Let's move on to our next segment.

Dan McClellan All right. Let's do it.

Dan Beecher Well, Steely Dan. Talk to us. What's that mean?

Dan McClellan What's that mean?

Dan Beecher We're looking into the steles. You teased it before.

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher Talk to us. What have we got here?

Dan McClellan So, I use this word a lot, stele, mainly in my writing, but also in some of the social media content that I put out there. And it's basically a standing stone. The Hebrew word here is matzevah, and the plural is matzevot. And when you see in your translation of the Bible a reference to a pillar, sometimes it will be standing stone, sometimes it will be pillar. I can't imagine anybody is translating stele. But this is a stele. This is an upright stone. It is sometimes carved, sometimes as it is found naturally, but it is something that is taller than it is wide. Frequently, and in the periods of the composition of the Hebrew Bible, almost all the time, it had a flat front, and then the back was usually rounded or angled or something like that. Hmm. And that flat front would be the face of this stele. And this could be used for a number, well, not a number, a few different purposes. Now, we begin to find these in the area of the Levant or ancient Southwest Asia or Israel-Palestine, way back in the Neolithic period. And they're kind of scattered around the deserts, and archeologists identify two different uses for stelae, which is the way I refer to the plural of stele. One use is as a commemorative marker for a burial. So it's very similar and, in fact, in many ways looks almost exactly the same as a contemporary headstone that you might see in a cemetery. You also find them, in the Neolithic period, in groups, in arrangements that indicate to many archeologists that they are there to represent or give presence to, manifest the presence of deities. Now, I've argued in my book that there's actually some overlap between these two different uses, that the concept of deities is very closely related to concepts of deceased ancestors. These are unseen, imagined agents. And when I say imagined agents, I'm referring to agents that we cannot see but can only engage with our minds. Hmm. And so this is not to say fake, made up, fairy tale agents. It's to say it's the exact same thing as talking about the United States of America. It's something that you cannot see or touch or smell or taste. It's something that you conjure up in your mind. And so these imagined agents They are able to interact with people, and one of the main ways people try to interact with them is by offering things like food and water and light and shelter in exchange for maybe not hurting them, maybe protection, maybe information about what's happening in the future. Now, these kinds of interactions take place with regard to deceased ancestors as well as with regards to deities. And when you find these standing stones, sometimes they're set up in mortuary chapels, the little rooms that are designed for people to go and engage with their deceased kin. So, they might go there annually and have a feast with the person. They might go there to recite their name so that their memory continues on so that their afterlife is extended. They might go there to petition them for help, leave what are known as little votive offerings, little objects intended to remind the deceased ancestor of them or something like that. And we see the exact same kinds of behaviors in temples where you go to have a feast, where you go to appeal to them for protection or for aid, and where you go to recite their name. And so the difference between ancestors and deities is not a very clear one anciently. So there are a lot of similarities between the way these things functioned in relation to deities as well as in relation to ancestors. And there was an interesting discovery from 2008 that shines a lot more light on the overlap in the way these things worked. There was a stele that was discovered that had a drawing and an inscription on it, and the drawing was of a deceased person who is holding up some stuff, and they're in front of a table with some pita bread and some duck and things like that on it, and they're holding a pine cone and a bowl. But the inscription is the really cool part. It identifies, it says, "I am Katumua, who made this stele." And it is basically a prescription for what kinds of offerings should be given to the stele in their mortuary chapel on a regular basis. And it refers to giving these things to my nephesh, which can be somewhat uncomfortably translated as my soul, which is in this stele.

Dan Beecher Oh, wow. So, okay. Somehow the stele has become the receptacle for the eternal nature of this person.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And we see very similar ideas at work in most of the mortuary practices around this area. We see it in Mesopotamia, we see it in Anatolia, we see it in Egypt, where somehow the deceased's something, spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it, it's conceptualized in a variety of different ways, but somehow this thing is hanging around. Mm-hmm. And you engage with it by creating some kind of material media to house it. Interesting. And that becomes the index and the medium for engaging with it. And this Katumua stele is kind of making explicit this idea that my soul is going to reside in this stele, and so put the food right in front of it,

Dan Beecher put

Dan McClellan the offerings right

Dan Beecher in front of it. Give me pine cones.

Dan McClellan Pine cones and bowls and ducks with the heads still on

Dan Beecher and

Dan McClellan I want some-

Dan Beecher I need a duck and a pine cone or I'm going to be mad. Get in here.

Dan McClellan Take the cannoli. And this stele is very much shaped like a contemporary headstone.

Dan Beecher Can you give me the size? How tall are we talking?

Dan McClellan They're different sizes. Some of them might only be like a foot high. Okay. So the earlier in time you get, the smaller they tended to be. But the Katumua one is probably, if I recall correctly, about a meter high. Oh, wow. It might be shorter than that. I have spoken about the Judahite temple at Arad, and if you go there, you can see a stele set up, and you can actually enter the Holy of Holies. It's a reconstruction, and the stele and the two incense altars are replicas. They're not the originals, which are in display in the Israel Museum. And so there's not a rope. You can walk up into it. You can stand on the incense altars. You can- You can give it a duck. You can touch the standing stone. Yeah, I'm sure no one would notice if you went up and poured some oil on it or something like that

Dan Beecher and- Bring a pine cone. Who knows?

Dan McClellan ... rubbed its head for luck, yeah. And that's about a meter high as well and about a foot and a half wide.

Dan Beecher Interesting. Okay.

Dan McClellan And one thing I pointed out in my book is this is not unrelated to the way we engage with headstones today. Because you see it in movies, you see it in TV shows. Maybe some people who are listening have had the experience of talking to a headstone, visiting a cemetery. And because the headstone is kind of the only thing you have to focus your attention on, and maybe the name on the headstone, that kind of becomes the medium for communication. That becomes- Right ... the object that represents the presence or the agency of the deceased loved one.

Dan Beecher Even if it's just metaphorical, it's just a stand-in for that person- Yeah ... so that you can process whatever you need to as you I spoke to a headstone of my grandparents' headstone at one point. Yeah. I didn't anticipate that I was going to do that, but it was there. Yeah. And I was having thoughts, and I just thought I'll just speak them to this headstone.

Dan McClellan And it's cognitively natural because we want to have some kind of material media to represent these imagined agents that are in the world around us according to our perception. Sometimes people will just look up and just talk to the sky, but if you've got something that has the person's name on it, maybe even a picture of them, excuse me, it just feels kind of natural to do that. And so we treat headstones in many ways just like they treated stelae anciently, and not just for deceased kin, but it's the exact same thing for deities. They conceptualize the deity as inhabiting this stele the exact same way that Katumua conceptualized his headstone as his eternal inhabitation. And so in my book, "Adonai's Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach," I make the argument that the cognitive motivations are the same, and that the concept of divine images, and particularly stele, builds on the exact same cognitive foundation as our engagement with headstones today, and as ancient engagement with headstones as kind of the habitation, the home of the deity. And even in the Hebrew Bible, we have a reference to Jacob refers to this place as Bethel, which means house of God. And in the Greek transliteration, we have Beth-el. And Beth-el in ancient Greek became a noun that meant a stele. Oh. And so Jacob, when he talks about this will be the house of God, not saying this region, he's saying this object that I have set up and that I have anointed will be where God will dwell. And so it's all interrelated.

Dan Beecher Yeah, that's kind of crazy. You think of house of God and you think of a building, or you think of a structure or something, but you don't think of it as being an object that is literally inhabited by God. That's fascinating.

Dan McClellan Yeah. I think so too. And there are other ways that we see this kind of bubbling to the surface in places in the Bible, and one of my favorites is the fact that standing stones seem to be a perfectly legitimate divine image in very, very early literary layers in the Hebrew Bible. We have standing stones set up. We have a standing stone that we discovered in a Judahite temple. Divine images were in use in the First Temple period. They represented Adonai. They represented the God of Israel. And then in the Exilic period, we have a transition where we have some stories about Moses and Joshua being commanded to write the words of the law on standing stones. And then they offer worship and burn offerings before Adonai. In other words, they're kind of combining the words of the law with the standing stone that represents or that reifies the presence of, manifests the presence of the God of Israel. So this is kind of overlaying the law on the standing stone, and the law has God's name repeated in it a number of times. In fact, the very first words of the Decalogue are Ani Adonai. I am Adonai. Right. I am the Lord. And so just like Katumua says, "I am Katumua. Here's my stone." The Decalogue, the Ten Commandments say, "I am Adonai. Here are my laws." And what are they written on according to the tradition of Moses and Sinai? Tablets. Right. Stone. Which are mini standing stones. So we go from Moses and Joshua writing the law on the big, full-size standing stones that allow us to worship God to this commandment, "Hey, Moses, write the words of the law on itty-bitty standing stones." Travel size. Travel size. Precisely. Because what does that do? That allows you to put them in the Ark of the Covenant and then carry them around. So they're not limited to a building that can't move. We can now mobilize the divine image. And we have numerous examples of what are called model shrines from the ancient world and from ancient Israel, and from Israelite locations. And a model shrine is a miniaturized temple where you put a mini divine image inside, and that miniaturizes, mobilizes, and personalizes the divine space and the divine image. And so I argue that the Ark of the Covenant, which is treated precisely as a divine image in several places in the Bible, is exactly a model shrine or a shrine model. And the tablets, the miniature standing stones, are miniature divine images.

Dan Beecher So it becomes almost a little temple unto itself.

Dan McClellan Yeah. If you're on the move, you can take it with you. If your army is going out to battle, you can trot your divine image, your god, out before you. So in 1 Samuel 4, when the Israelites are going to battle against the Philistines, they trot out the Ark of the Covenant, and the Philistines say, "God is in their camp." And you have Moses, in the Book of Numbers, it talks about in the morning, Adonai would come out with the ark, and in the evening, they would put Adonai back in the temple. And it's basically treating the presence and the movement of the Ark of the Covenant as isometric with God's own presence and movement. Wow. And so it's doing the exact same thing that divine images prior to the exile and divine images in the nations around Israel did. Only in this transition, we move away from standing stones. We have the full-size standing stones, then we have the law, and we have miniature standing stones with the law, and then we have no standing stones, and we just have the law, but the law still has the divine name on it. And so if you go to a synagogue today and you look at the very front, they're probably going to have a cabinet of some kind that's been richly decorated, and they open up that cabinet, and you have the scrolls of the law. And you know what they call that cabinet? I don't. They call it the Ark.

Dan Beecher Oh, interesting. Because,

Dan McClellan yeah, this holds the text of the law. And- So- Go ahead.

Dan Beecher Sorry. So I know that in Jewish tradition, the writing of the name of God, or the speaking of the name of God is a sacred thing, you don't do it under most circumstances. Yeah. So I'm taking that to you emphasizing that the name of Adonai is written on these things. That is of great import- Yeah ... in this tradition.

Dan McClellan Yeah. The name, materializing the name, whether materializing it vocally, anciently, and kind of intuitively, speech is a type of materialization. It brings something into being. And literally as well. We're moving particles, well, waves. And so if you are writing or are speaking the name of God, there is a sense in which you are invoking God's presence or manifesting God's presence. Because, on the standing stone, there were ceremonies that you would go through to enliven the standing stone. So in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, you had the washing of the mouth ceremony, and you had the opening of the mouth ceremony, and it was basically like this divine image's mouth is now open. It can breathe. It is alive. The agency, however that is conceptualized, of the deity has now entered into the divine image, and the divine image is enlivened. And so there were ceremonies that did that, and inscribing the name was an integral part of the ceremony because the name was considered one of the main vehicles for agency. And so to speak the name, to write the name, was to materialize it, and in a sense, was to invoke that presence and was to manifest that presence. And this is why one of the cool things that we saw in the Israel Museum were two little silver scrolls. One of them is about almost four inches long, the other one's only a little over an inch long and about half an inch wide, and the other one's about an inch wide. They're called the Ketef Hinnom silver scrolls, and they have a version of the priestly blessing on them, but the divine name is written a handful of times on there. And these scrolls were, excuse me, found rolled up tight and buried with somebody, and they probably would've been an amulet that that person wore in their lifetime, and they were buried with, and the amulet probably had apotropaic functions, or it functioned to ward off evil. Much like the amulets of Senoi, San-Senoi, and Semangolof, the names allowed the amulet to be activated, to have that power. And so the divine name allowed those little amulets to ward off evil.

Dan Beecher Wow.

Dan McClellan And so the speaking, the writing the name, in some sense, was like creating a little mini divine image, was creating something that could manifest God's presence. And so outside the temple, you weren't supposed to do that. Once the temple's destroyed, there is no place where it's appropriate to do that. And so, there are a lot of ways that the Torah scrolls and Torah manuscripts are treated like divine images. You have to go through certain procedures in order to create it. Once it has been created, you have to go through certain procedures if you have to dispose of it. And the divine name is treated particularly carefully in the creation and the disposal of these texts. And so, one of the things I conclude in the book is that in many ways, they didn't outlaw all divine images. They just renegotiated what a divine image was, and it went from a big stone that you had in your Holy of Holies in the temple to the text of the Torah. And this is why even Christians today, many of them will treat their Bible as somehow metaphysically special Like this brings God's presence, and when I read it, I can feel the spirit of God, the presence of God. That's exactly how a divine image functioned. A divine image wasn't necessarily for worship. It could be for worship, but the primary function, the overarching function, was to facilitate God's presence. And so if you are looking at your Bible, if you're reading your Bible to facilitate God's presence, you're doing the exact same thing with your Bible that they did anciently with divine images.

Dan Beecher Now, I'm going to keep our conversation, since we already have been playing around with feminism in this episode. Uh-huh. When I was doing some research before our interview with Francesca Stavrakopoulou- Mm-hmm ... who talked to us about Asherah, there was a whole thing about Asherah poles. Mm-hmm. Now, would these be similar to this idea of a standing stone, of a stele, of a whatever? Is it the same kind of concept?

Dan McClellan So it's a related concept. In some of the earlier periods and some of the larger empires, they had a lot more flexibility, and they had a larger market, and they had a lot more resources to be able to create divine images of all different shapes and sizes. So some of them were anthropomorphic statues. Some of them were crowns. Some of them were thrones. You had a lot of different ways to create divine images. Bronze bulls that we've found in Israel from the Bronze Age are examples as well. And so an Asherah would've been a kind of stylized tree, and we have a handful of drawings of these. The Tanach cult stand is an example of a cult stand that stands about three feet high. There's an argument to make that this is a species of shrine model, and on it, it shows a stylized date palm, so a trunk and then some kind of branches that curl off of it, and on either side are feeding ibexes. And this is also drawn on a large pot, a pithos, from Kuntillet Ajrud that is largely understood by scholars to be a symbol that represents Asherah. So one of the interesting things, there's a scholar named Reinen Eichler, I think he's an Israeli scholar, but he published a paper a little bit ago that said, "Isn't it interesting that in the Ark of the Covenant, we have perhaps too many standing stones, two divine images?" Do you recall, Dan, maybe you don't, this is kind of a trivia question, what else was put into the Ark of the Covenant at different periods?

Dan Beecher I'm trying to remember my "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Dan McClellan So there were two other things that were said to go in the Ark of the Covenant. Some of the manna, the manna, which- Mm ... is not important here, but the other thing was Aaron's budding staff.

Dan Beecher Oh, that's right.

Dan McClellan Yes, I do remember that. The staff that had flowers growing out of the top of it, which Eichler argues sounds suspiciously like an Asherah pole.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And was put in the shrine model with the other many divine images, and his argument is that the whole story of, "Oh, look, the staff magically budded, and that's how we could tell who was in charge," was a secondary creation as kind of a, "What is that doing in there? Oh." Like an etiology for the presence of an Asherah pole in the Ark of the Covenant. Oh, wow. And so yeah, it is very much a related concept that this pole could have been a piece of material media that helped facilitate access to the presence of the goddess.

Dan Beecher And there's something very interesting about the idea of laying an Asherah pole next to these tablets that end up being an image of- Adonai ... Adonai. Yeah. Yeah, that's a very interesting idea.

Dan McClellan So we've got the, I mentioned the pithos that has the drawing of the stylized date palm and the ibexes, very similar to Asherah. The other side of the pithos has the two anthropomorphic figures with the inscription above it that refers to Adonai and Asherah. And so the association of Adonai and Asherah there is pretty clear. One other thing that I find interesting is we've got another very early iconographic depiction of two ibexes feeding on either side of a tree. However, rather than that stylized date palm, that tree is the menorah. Oh. It is a trunk and then three branches that kind of swoop down and then up on the other side. Okay. A seven-branched menorah. And that's called the Lachish eur, that piece of art. It has an inscription, it's dedication to the goddess, it says. But I haven't seen an argument before that this looks suspiciously like a menorah. I'm sure that somebody has to have made that association before. I'd like to track that down. I think that's worth some more looking at. Yeah. Because that would be another thing that would be interesting to find, if maybe the menorah is actually a conflation of the source of light that was used in the temple with... Another way to kind of get rid of the Asherah pole would be to conflate it with- whatever is offering the lampstand, whatever is offering light in the temple. Yeah. I haven't formalized that argument. That's just a curiosity that I've noted. So don't-