When Gods Walked Amongst Mortals And Mortals Loved Violence

Odysseus conversing with Athena signals a perception shared by ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Hebrews

John Flaxman’s illustration of Achilles fighting the river-god, Scamander, on the Trojan plain, with another river-god, Simois, nearby.

I’ve been reflecting on the discussion of the gods in The Odyssey, following the release of Christopher Nolan’s film. This is an excerpt from my book, A Secret History of Christianity, offering a different take from the norm on the awareness of deities conveyed by Homer and the earlier parts of the Hebrew Bible, too.

The first archaeological evidence that there was a tribe called Israel is immediately suggestive of how different their consciousness of themselves and the gods was from ours.

The evidence is an inscription written into the Merneptah Stele, a granite slab that was found in the ruins of ancient Thebes. Dating from the reign of a thirteenth-century BCE Egyptian pharaoh, it memorialises a confrontation. The conflict was between the great civilisation of the Nile, which by then was already close to two millennia old, and a younger tribe of hill people who lived in northern Palestine. “Israel is laid waste and his seed is not,” it reads.

Pharaoh’s army had attacked Israel, presumably because it troubled the trade routes that ran between Egypt and Mesopotamia. It’s known from other sources that capture and removal was deployed by the Egyptians in the late centuries of the second millennium as a way of neutralising trouble spots. The policy may well lie behind the stories of Moses and the exodus as well as the Biblical “novella” that tells of the fortunes of Joseph, who was kidnaped and taken to the land of the black soil and sun (Genesis 37–50).

The Israelite hill people were followers of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the fathers of an ancient clan and, back then, these names would have carried a particular, immense power. As a Bronze Age community, the people would have felt the patriarchs as living, present realities. The names conveyed a felt rootedness to the land and a spirited belonging with their gods. The Bible echoes this vitality when it points out that “Abraham” carries the meanings of “exalted ancestor” and “ancestor of a multitude” (Genesis 17:5).

Pharaoh’s declaration of his victory over Israel was as much a boast or a warning as a report. Israel’s seed clearly wasn’t terminated, though in this seeming exaggeration, Egypt was engaged in a common feature of the times. A people revelled in their triumphs, and they did so in a particular way: by amplifying the bloodshed.

The first Israelites did it, too. In line with the received wisdom, they saw their conquests as an outflow of divine justice. The accounts of slaughter were experienced as restoring a right relationship between gods and peoples, and they showed little or no concern for those who were slain. Justice then meant cosmic balance not personal rights, as there was no conception of the individual who might have rights. Similarly, Odysseus, in Homer’s Odyssey, doesn’t feel guilt or shame for his city-sacking destruction, but the maintenance of his honour and the loss of his fellows.

There is a massive experiential gap between then and now; ancient people’s perception of life was dramatically dissimilar to our own - which explains, why, nowadays reading some sections of the Hebrew Bible can be profoundly uncomfortable.

The perception was linked to the way in which they shared their experience of life with the life of the land and of the deities who dwelt in the land, not least on sacred mountains. The divine saga was their saga; nature’s life was their life; its story was theirs.

Take Psalm 125. In modern translation, it begins: “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever. As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people, from this time on and for evermore.” The psalmist turns to the mountains that encircle Jerusalem, and the holy Mount Zion in particular. In front of him, the writer sees the source of his strength. He is not celebrating an inner resilience, hidden within, and composing metaphors to assert it, as we might do today, but is instead straightforwardly assured by Judea’s sacred geography. He doesn’t have an inwardness that is separate. He identifies with his god, place and people.

It is as if the psalmist sings: I am safe because I am in Judea, and in Judea is Jerusalem, and surrounding Jerusalem are the mountains where God dwells.

Similarly, consider what may be the oldest biblical reference to Israel, found in the Song of Deborah (Judges 5). It’s a victory hymn that comes from about the same time as the Merneptah Stele and includes the memorable detail of Jael, the wife of Herber, using a mallet to drive a tent peg into the head of Sisera, an enemy commander (Judges 5:24–27). And alongside the violence comes an exuberant celebration of the god and land that the Israelites took to be on their side.

When they marched against their Canaanite foes, they felt that this god was marching with them: “Lord, when you went out from Seir,” they sang (Judges 5:4, my italics). His presence was known to them not because they felt brave or just in their cause, as an embattled group might today, but because the earth trembled and the heavens opened, pouring forth life-giving water (Judges 5:5). The surrounding mountains, which is to say the nearby deities, fearfully acknowledged the advance, too. They “quaked before the Lord, the One of Sinai, before the Lord, the God of Israel” (Judges 5:4). And then, during the battle, the stars in heaven fought for Israel, as did the waters of the River Kishon. It disgorged a torrent that swept the enemy away (Judges 5:20–21).

Such experiences of divine entities fighting enemies in alliance with human warriors are common in stories from other ancient cultures that share this type of consciousness. In the Iliad, Homer describes Achilles’s fight with the river-god, Scamander. The watery deity was on the side of the Trojans and repeatedly tried to kill the Greek hero from the waves.

Or consider again how ancient Egypt celebrated its triumphs. Amongst the ancient inscriptions at Luxor are those that describe the famous battle of Kadesh, in which Ramesses II fought the Hittites. They, too, deploy “mythic history,” as Jeremy Naydler calls it. For instance, they commemorate the battle taking place at night, which in practice probably didn’t happen because ancient generals preferred the daylight, though the inscriptions are not a piece of clumsy misreporting. Rather, they’re an attempt to express how human affairs are reflections of timeless encounters between gods, in this case the victory of the sun god Ra over the serpent-god, Apophis.

Apophis is the enemy of the divine sun. Hence, at a mythical level, the battle of Kadesh took place before a new dawn, which is to say that, by the wisdom of the times, it is more correct to report that the conflict occurred at night.

This points to a further difference between then and now. You could say that if time is a unit of measurement for us, time was a playing field of heavenly conflicts and purposes for them. Instead of working out what had happened, they worked out what things meant. That depended upon resonant mythological explanations, not good evidential support. The story that was told was shaped by the prophetic discernment of outward signs, not the weighing up of hard facts. As is sometimes noted by biblical scholars, Israel’s god is presented as a “lord of history” though that meant that “whatever happened was ultimately Yahweh’s doing,” as Michael Coogan explains. The old tales are interpreted, therefore, as attempts to fathom what Yahweh was up to, and why. It was a natural and spontaneous way to gain understanding.

Mythic history was not fanciful history but true history, as ancient peoples saw it.

The early gods of Israel were also known through these multidimensional cross-currents of experience and event, which is why scholars today stress that there is not one religion or theology in the Bible, but a superposition of many. It couldn’t be otherwise. The research shows that the deities who formed the lives of the first early Israelites were not singular or simply identified with Yahweh. Solomon’s temple, for example, clearly contained altars to Baal, Asherah and others (2 Kings 23:4).

It was only subsequently that this became a scandal, when Yahweh was adopted as a favored protector-deity by the first kings of Israel and Judah, around 1000 BCE, and then, as ninth- century BCE prophets like Elijah and Elisha championed a “Yahweh-alone” movement. Before then, most people’s experience of the divine was inherently plural and dispersed. Gods were encountered as diffuse presences associated with various mythologies, different times of the year, and assorted sacred places.

Some were felt day by day. They make an appearance in Genesis 31:19, in the form of the clan deities that Rachel steals from Laban the Aramean in a bid to gain the upper hand in a local dispute. These are the gods of the ancestors. They were attended to at the fire of the encampment, the natural focus for offerings and prayers, as is still half-caught in the intimate phrase “hearth and home.”

Another set of deities were those associated with sacred locations, like Mount Zion. This category of gods known to the early Israelites included a number mentioned in the Bible, such as El, Baal, Asherah, Ishtar, and Yahweh. I think you can go so far as to say that a tribe of the time would have known they were in a different place not only by changes in the landscape and geography but by changes in the gods who manifested themselves as they travelled. The experience is implicitly acknowledged in the Bible. “When the Most High [Elyon] apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the numbers of the gods.“ (Deut 32:8). It may explain why the Israelites developed the practice, in their periods of wandering, of carrying a tabernacle. A portable altar was an innovative way of keeping one particular divine presence with them.

A few of the old gods stood out. “El,” for example, means “high god.” So, when Jacob had a vision of a ladder reaching between earth and heaven, at the top of which he saw “the Lord,” he assumed that he had seen El (Genesis 28:13). In time honored fashion, he raised a stone to commemorate the revelation, remarking that the Lord is in this place, and therefore naming it, “House of God,” Bet-El or Bethel (Genesis 28:18–19). Similarly, Baal can mean “master” or “lord,” and Yahweh “the one who is” – a meaning that was to become overwhelmingly important from the eighth century BCE onwards.

But before that perception developed, the many gods reigned and they formed a pantheon. “God [Elohim] has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment,” says Psalm 82:1.

The importance of sacred places for this mode of consciousness is reflected in another way: the significance the Bible gives to one particular place, Mount Horeb. Also called Mount Sinai, it is the location for what appear to be at least two theophany traditions. The first is that of Moses, featuring a bush on Mount Horeb that burned without being consumed (Exodus 3:2). The second is that of Elijah and the peak of Mount Horeb; there is no burning bush, but instead an experience “of sheer silence” (1 Kings 19:12).

Stephen Geller argues that Horeb-Sinai was recognized as a place where divinity dwelt. “Horeb is said to have ‘burned with fire to the heart of heaven,’” he notes. The place spoke of God, so it was natural that Moses and Elijah were remembered as going there. At Horeb-Sinai, the people of Israel realized just how thoroughly their life was connected with this divine life.

There’s a deeper insight, too, one that is crucial to the way consciousness was subsequently to evolve. Back then, there could be no monotheistic perception of God because it takes the focused mind of an individual to apprehend it and, as we've seen, people of such eras did not experience life as singular individuals. The experience of deity was inevitably scattered because that was how human beings experienced themselves.

They lived in flows of divine activity that moved through them and moved them about; peoples were waves on a cosmic sea. I suspect this is the fundamental reason why the radical monotheism of Pharaoh Akhenaton, in the fourteenth century BCE, faded as quickly as it flared. No one knew quite what to make of the idea that there is only one God, which he called the Aten, including the visionary pharaoh himself. So, upon his death, beliefs reverted back to a nuanced form of pantheism.

But things were to change. The age in which gods and mortals mingled was to pass and the ancient Greeks and Hebrews played a pivotal role in that shift.

Read on in A Secret History Of Christianity.