Meet The Real God of The Bible

Meet The Real God of The Bible

We are live here at the Myth Vision podcast. You don’t want to miss today’s episode. I mean that; I have literally called this my new bible. I reference this book all the time as far as educating people to understand what the god of the Bible really is—who the god of the Bible really is—or gods, especially if you take Yahweh usurping El. You are going to want to check out this episode. I am going to take a little different approach than the other views you have heard with Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou, and let’s have some fun. Let our intro begin.

We are Myth Vision. Welcome back to the Myth Vision podcast. I am hot. I am out in my garage; my AC unit isn’t working, and it is blistering hot out here in North Carolina. But it’s okay; I am willing to suffer for you, my friends. So, with that being said, welcome to the channel again, Dr. Francesca Stavrakopoulou. It is nice to be back. Thank you so much for joining me. You have such—well, I was on your Wikipedia page just showing people; I don’t even know where to begin on how to present your background. You have been part of documentaries and shows like “The Bible’s Buried Secrets.” You have an extensive CV, if you will, with a lot of credentials. If you don’t mind, tell us what your book is about and, if you will, some of your background as we are diving in.

The book is basically about the early career of the god who is described and adored in the Bible. It is basically tracking his early career from the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age through to about the sixth century of the common era. What I do is I basically perform an anatomy of God. I argue that this is a deity who was understood to have a corporeal form; he had a human-shaped body and a male, masculine body. I basically try to explore the reasons why this deity was gradually disembodied culturally and theologically to become the god that we are more familiar with today in Western cultural constructs. So, yeah, that’s what the book is about. I am a professor of Hebrew Bible and ancient religion at the University of Exeter in the UK. I am an atheist—always have been, always will be—and I did all my degrees at Oxford and my postdoctoral work before moving to Exeter.

Absolutely amazing. Your book was—I must admit—it is my favorite book right now, honestly. I have been reading a lot of different books, and I am like, “Okay, this is by far my favorite one.” So, I figured I would just lay out the outline of this episode because it is difficult with your time and my schedule and all of us trying to figure out what works. The time difference plays a significant role. So, I have some questions that I have come up with throughout your book, and then we can get to the Q&A, allowing anybody who sends Super Chats to get your question answered. We will try to do that in a timely fashion, of course, but still get your questions answered because I know there are a lot of people who have a lot of questions for you, and I still have questions for you. I am impressed; I reread it again. This is the second go-around, and I realized I missed so many things. I also want to mention if anybody who is watching this really wants to help us out, you can join our Patreon. I let everybody know early: I am going to be interviewing John Dominic Crossan here in the next week down in Florida while I am on vacation. I am working while on vacation with my family, interviewing ex-cult members—you name it. I am all about this. I am a humanist as well, so if you are interested in learning more and helping us here at Myth Vision, you could join and help us out.

Okay, I love this book. I cannot—there is not enough energy I can put into that. I wish I could download it, just plug it in, and people could go, “Oh, he really, really loves this book.” But I must start somewhere, and it is with this goddess called Inanna. Inanna and Yahweh. On your book, page 202, I made sure I stopped; I wanted to read something if I could. Did you want to grab your book, by the way? I was going to say, my god, I can’t remember what’s on page—whatever, no, no, it is the book. You read it, and I got a copy of my book. A miracle—an atheist miracle—happened because I ended up getting this copy in America. Remember, I don’t know how I did. That is amazing. It has come out in Italian recently, which looks very beautiful. So they are changing it up. The German cover is different, and the US cover is different, too. Awesome.

Well, I am going to read, and obnoxiously have your book up while I do so. In “Inanna and In-heduanna”—I hope I am saying this right—Inanna is a deity so powerful that her divinity surpasses even that of the highest gods, An and Enlil, who have willingly ceded their wisdom to her. “In your vast wisdom, amongst all the gods, you alone are majestic,” Enheduanna exclaims in this poem. Inanna not only governs the forms of wisdom graciously bestowed upon mortals—such as expertise in warfare, ritual, economics, sex, and medicine—but curates and controls the divine wisdom underpinning the very foundations of the cosmos. “To destroy, to create, to cut apart, to establish—Inanna, are yours. To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man—Inanna, are yours. A large and expansive heart—Inanna, are yours.” Almost two thousand years later, another poet was crediting just one deity with the wisdom to create and destroy, and for him, it was Yahweh. Do you want to comment on this just briefly?

So, there I am talking about a particular poem from Mesopotamia that was written by what we understand to be the world’s first named author that we know in the history of the world, and who is a woman: Enheduanna. She was the daughter of a king and also a priestess. Whether or not she actually wrote this poem is kind of debated by scholars; it may be that it was a poem to which her name was ascribed. But nonetheless, what it reflects when she is praising the goddess Inanna—who was also known as Ishtar (Inanna is her Sumerian name, Ishtar is her Akkadian name; these are two different languages that were used throughout the ancient Near East)—is that she is praising the goddess Inanna as basically being the most supreme deity imaginable.

What she is doing when she is talking about the various divine qualities and functions and roles that Inanna has is she is saying that even the high god, An—the god An, who is basically Heaven—has given Inanna, his daughter, these particular gifts. It is a way of talking about this fluidity that we see in divine functions and roles, in that you can, even in a very deeply complex polytheistic system, single out a particular deity, and that deity is held to basically incorporate all divine qualities and roles and functions. Inanna is incredibly important because she was probably the most important deity across ancient Southwest Asia, but particularly Mesopotamia. She was probably the most important deity in some ways—the longest, her importance stretched the longest throughout millennia. So it is an incredible poem, but it shows this very elevated, sophisticated, complex role of divine functions for a goddess. The kinds of things that we find thousands of years later in the Hebrew Bible—we find that Yahweh is being described in similar ways.

Would you be willing to say that Yahweh is a “Johnny-come-lately”? That is how I feel. I mean, I hate to be that way because a lot of people go, “Oh, well, atheists like you are antagonistic; you are trying to find something before.” All you have to do is have a Justin Martyr come on the scene and go, “Well, Satan knew; that’s why.” But yeah, it’s still silly. The thing is, it is very difficult. One of the big ideological, theological premises on which a lot of biblical theology is founded is the idea that Yahweh was somehow extraordinary, that ancient Israelite religion was somehow different from the religions of surrounding peoples and cultures, and that somehow that extraordinary quality means that this deity is a deity wholly unlike any other deity across ancient Southwest Asia. You know, that is what we find Yahweh himself saying in the Bible all the time. In Isaiah, in chapters 40 to 55, he is like, “I am God, there is no other, there is nobody else like me, I am the only kind of deity.” But, historically, we know that is just not the case. I am not saying that you don’t get innovative shifts in religious thinking and religious imagination—of course, you do—but there is nothing particularly unusual about Yahweh. There is nothing particularly extraordinary about him. The various different sorts of roles and functions and titles we find—examples of those used much, much earlier for lots of different types of deities. This was part and parcel of a much broader cultural landscape, and Yahweh, if you like, is kind of like a local iteration of broader understandings of what successful deities, front-line deities, were supposed to be doing.

I must skip to something interesting in my commentary about Inanna or Ishtar, if you will. I am vindicating Dr. Richard Carrier; he wrote an article about dying and rising gods. I made this really cool documentary, a little video about this, that I thought was interesting. He talked about how Inanna, this goddess, was, with all her powers, kind of lowered or defamed, if you will, taking off, stripped naked, then made into a corpse, then hung on a hook for three days and three nights, and then is brought back to life—or something like three days, the same motif we see with Jesus, we see it with Jonah, we see it with other mythologies. Is that true?

Yeah, I mean, certainly, that particular myth about Ishtar and Inanna I talk about in the book. It is very much the goddess’s decision; she basically wants to take over the underworld. I mean, she is a seriously kick-ass, ambitious goddess; I adore her. But that idea of her being stripped of all her divine bling, basically—her accessories—these were more than just decorative items worn on divine bodies. A bit like high-status human bodies, these were ways of making the body complete. By stripping off her headgear and her necklaces, she deliberately diminishes herself because she has to in order to enter the underworld.

But yes, some people think that that is an example of a dying and rising god. It is not quite—I mean, yes, she is turned into a corpse, a kind of like a hunk of meat, basically, so it is about her debasement in very material terms. The whole debate about dying and rising gods is really complicated. I think the main ancient Southwest Asian, pre-Christian, ancient Southwest Asian myth that we can certainly say is a dying and rising god is a myth concerning Baal from Ugarit—the late Bronze Age Syria, the city-state of Ugarit (the modern site name is Ras Shamra). In that, Baal is defeated by the god Mot, who is the god of death, who swallows him because death is a swallower, which is where we get all that imagery in the Bible about when the ground opens up and swallows idolatrous priests; that is exactly what is going on there.

The underworld swallows Jonah and the fish; exactly, Jonah being swallowed by the fish. But yeah, with Baal, he certainly dies because his sister, Anat, and the sun goddess, Shapash, go into the underworld to find him. They find his corpse; he is buried in a tomb, and then, yeah, about three days later, he is restored. So, that is—like I said, there is very little in the Bible that is completely original.

I love this. Thank you for coming; you are awesome. So, gods being so concerned with food. This is something as well. But before we get to that, Ezekiel and Genesis: this is something I thought was fascinating because I always read the Bible as a Christian and always thought Genesis, the beginning, Revelation—it is written in the chronological order in which they were really written or something, because you are just not told all these things. But you mentioned about this in Ezekiel; you know, it talks about this king, this ruler, who says in his heart—which is like where you think in the ancient world, or your heart, which is down here, is actually where you think, not your brain. But we are not going to go there because I think you have said that plenty of times on your other episodes. I really want to get something unique out of you in terms of this. So, “I will rise above the throne of God; I will sit upon…” He wants to go up the holy mountain and sit on the throne of El, the high god. And that this was written before Genesis?

Well, it is kind of complicated. The story that we have in Genesis 2 and 3—the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden—it is not a fall, it is an expulsion—has a lot of similar motifs to a lot of material that we find in Ezekiel. That material in Ezekiel is probably older, so that is probably sixth century, but drawing on an older motif, whereas the material—the story that we find in Genesis—is probably about fifth century. But what both share is the same mythic schema or trope in which you have the first human, who, across ancient Southwest Asian mythologies, was generally understood to be a paradigm of the king. The king was under the role of kingship—because a lot of these texts and myths were produced within royal, high-status contexts—so the first man, the paradigmatic man, is the royal figure, the king, who is fashioned and appointed to perform various tasks on behalf of the deity in the earthly realm.

The Ezekiel myth does talk about an anonymous ruler who, in the context in which we find the myth, is probably to be identified as one of the foreign kings that is harassing Yahweh’s own people, like an Assyrian king or a Babylonian king, or possibly an Egyptian king. He says, “I will ascend the holy mountain’s throne, I will make myself like a god, I will sit on the throne on the seat of the gods in the divine council on the top of the holy mountain.” And God—here, the terms used for God are both El and Yahweh—he is like, “No, you’re not; I am not having this at all. I am going to… you’re going to die like a mortal; you are not a god.” One of the qualities of divine nature is, in some ways, there is kind of perpetual immortality, so even if, like Baal, you die, you don’t die forever; you don’t stay dead, you come back.

So, yeah, this king is expelled from this holy mountain—which in Ezekiel is also called Eden; it is this beautiful garden of God—he is expelled and sent down into the underworld where he obviously dies, and then his corpse is exhumed and trampled by enemies. This is about wiping him out in every possible way. In the ancient world, you only exist for as long as you are remembered, so even after death, you have a post-mortem existence, and you continue to have a social relationship with the living. But if your tomb is desecrated, if your bones or your remains are destroyed, if you are eaten by wild animals and shut out on the ground, that is completely eradicating you in a material sense. Therefore, you no longer can be remembered, and you no longer exist. So that is what happens to this king. But, yeah, it looks like a lot of that myth—the way that Genesis material and Ezekiel material are both later reflections of what looks to be an earlier kind of mythic trope about one divine or semi-divine figure trying to usurp an older, more senior divine figure and being taken to task for it.

It just always excites me to learn this stuff. What about the gods and food? Right, so they are always concerned about food and not eating their food in the ancient world, or gods being so concerned with food and not you, humans, mortals, eating their food in the ancient world. Did the temple’s demise change the understanding of God eating in Jewish thought? I kind of wanted to get the idea—we are talking about him being a corporeal deity who needs to eat.

Yeah, exactly. When we use the language of sacrifice in our own cultures today, we have the sense that it is something that we are giving up—something that is hard for us to give up, something very precious. But the sacrifice in the ancient world—I mean, you didn’t just sacrifice living things, animals or humans sometimes; you could also sacrifice all the other things that were important and the mainstay products of human consumption. You could sacrifice wine and beer and honey and oil and bread and fruits and cakes. And so, sacrifices in temple economies were a way of not only getting money into the temple, but it was a way of sharing a meal with the deity.

So, say, if I was a worshiper—actually, let’s say you, because this would talk about a very masculinist kind of culture here—if you wanted to go to the temple because you want to petition the deity for a particular kind of blessing, you might take, I don’t know, a lamb or a couple of pigeons, and you would take it to the temple. The priest would sacrifice it on your behalf, and then some of that food would be burnt on the altar as food for the deity who would smell it. We are constantly told in the Hebrew Bible that Yahweh is attracted to the sweet aroma, the pleasant aroma of sacrifice, kind of like how you can smell the barbecue and you are like, “God, that smells really good.” It calls the deity into this social relationship around the altar with humans. So the deity would eat part of that sacrifice normally, and then the priests and other ritual officials would eat the rest, and then you would also get a little part as well. You are sharing in a meal with the deity, and this was a way of basically forging and maintaining a social relationship with the God. Just as the same way that meal times are important social family occasions for all of us—think about the great, big festivals that we celebrate, whether it is Thanksgiving or Christmas or whatever it is—food and a particular kind of feast is a focal part of that. That is because it is about this sense of bringing a community, a group of people together. You forge and maintain social identities and relationships, and that is exactly what temple sacrifice was about.

As far as the eating, that really caught my attention. You did it really well in making me think of something I never thought about, and that is God just got done flooding all humanity. Let’s forget that there are earlier Mesopotamian myths that really give us the precedence for why this is, and they kind of give you a different reason in the biblical account, getting God off the hook for just being annoyed by noises and whatnot. But here is like this complete genocide of the human race, and here is this one guy—he finds, “Well, you know what, I like Noah.” Okay, and his family can have this little group. Noah gets the barbecue up as soon as dry land comes up, and God smells it. Am I correct in assessing this and saying God was ready to eradicate all, and then he smelt that meat and he said, “Why did I kill all these humans?”

It is not so much that he said, “Why did I kill all these humans?” because within the narrative arc of that story—and obviously that story, in general, between Genesis 6 and 9, is drawing on all sorts of different other traditions, so it has been edited and redacted and shaped into a narrative—but within that narrative frame, you have the sense that God is not pissed off. He regrets—he regrets that earlier, you know, he floods the world because he regrets having made humankind because they have become so corrupt, mainly through having sex with divine beings, but that is another story that we can talk about. So, when he smells the smell of the sacrifice of Noah’s sacrifice, it is then when he says that he has decided that he will never again flood the earth. And not just he will never again destroy humankind; he will never again destroy living creatures. So, it is a kind of covenant, a relationship, an agreement with non-human life as well as with human life, which I think is a quite an important theological point given the state of the world and the climate crisis at the moment. It is quite an important point for these particular Christians who think that the earth is ours to exploit, no matter what. I think that is a really important theological point in those particular traditions.

As far as the food goes, though, because they are so like, he is butt-hurt about Adam eating this fruit—like, it is obvious that food is so important in the ancient years for the gods—so I kind of wondered if that sacrifice he made to God was what made an impact, where he kind of has this like, “I have starved before,” where I am feeling like I am dying and then a fresh plate of barbecue comes before you, some really fresh cooked meal, and then it is like, “I am thankful for everything; I am willing to start over, a fresh start, because that food was everything to me.” I wondered if that food played that kind of role in God’s mind, like, “You know what, man is continually wicked; his heart is continually wicked,” it says in the context there. So, I am thinking it is like, “Tomato, tomato,” you know? Like, “Look, you made me some food, and I am really…” I don’t know if that made him convinced that he didn’t want to do this.

I think, yeah, I mean, I think because again within the narrative arc of the story, this is the first sacrifice that is offered. I mean, yes, you have got Cain and Abel offering their sacrifices in Genesis 4, but then that whole generation—you know, so that is pre-flood humanity—they have been wiped out. Noah is the only one left, and so this is the first kind of bonding moment, that new agreement with the new humanity that is going to stem from Noah and his kids and their families. So, yeah, it is exactly that thing about sitting around a table and this idea of forging intense relationships—social relationships—that is exactly what is going on with that sacrifice. It is, and he smells the pleasing smell, and it pleases God; he wants sacrifices. So, yeah, then fast forward to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, first in the 6th century BCE and then again in 70 CE, the loss of the temple for those scribal communities who are producing a lot of these texts. The loss of the Jerusalem temple was huge, and so the when the temple is not there, if you can’t sacrifice, then that doesn’t necessarily shift, theologically, the way in which you might understand those sorts of offerings to function for the deity.

I really, really appreciate your answer there. I was going to ask—I am going to skip the least important ones because I really want to get to some of the questions from our audience. Of course, “idols” are technically a derogatory term for other gods, which is better understood, and you do not steer around the bush, gods. So, you mind telling us what a god is, and what—and I want everyone to please get the book; I cannot brag enough about it—so please tell us what a god is, or better yet, an idol?

We get the word “idol” from the Greek Bible, so in other words, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and that is where this—quite often, the Greek term “idol” translates—particularly translates a Hebrew word, “gillulim,” which is a plural term which basically is best translated as “gods.” It comes from a word that means, that is used of dung and kind of rolled up, you know, like balls of dung, rolled up poo, basically. And it is a term that we particularly find in the book of Ezekiel and other priestly-type literature, and it is a way again of debasing cult statues of deities. Yahweh probably had his own cult statues within certain worshipping communities. You know, obviously, we have the prohibition on images in Deuteronomy and Exodus, which, you know, you don’t tell people not to do something unless they are doing it. So the term “gillulim” is used as a deliberate way of really talking down—talking, basically, and it is really talking down the cult statues of other deities. Because don’t forget, cult statues were understood to be the deity; they weren’t just a representation or a symbol. They were understood to be, to manifest, the deity. So, yeah, that’s where that term comes from.

Worry about Baal, where—you know, I used this recently because this is my new bible—I am like, “Okay, remember when Elijah is talking to the prophets of Baal?” He says, “You know, where is your god? Did he go, is he defecating now?” Yeah, he is basically saying, “Why is your god not answering you? What… your prayers? You know, maybe he is busy, maybe he is on a journey, maybe he is taking a…” It is basically like what Elijah says to the prophets of Baal. Yeah, and it is that sense—so I mean, there was a sense that in some cultures, there was a… it is perfectly well understood that deities might defecate. It is not something that we ever find described directly to Yahweh, but that kind of taunt that we find in the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, you know, it shows that the kind of scatology played a big role in theology. And that is exactly what is going on with Ezekiel’s language of the “shit-gods,” the “gillulim.” It is kind of like trying to smear them with something, you know, render them dirty and ritually dirty, as well as conceptually base.

I think this is going to sound a little awkward, but the next question I have is about the Sabbath and the seventh-day idea. There is a guy who has floated around on the internet—those in the chat know—he has been very kind to me, don’t get me wrong, but he has gone around bragging victory over all these academics that I have had on and saying we are all under a seventh-day calendar, and this all started with the God of the Bible, a seventh-day calendar. Therefore, we are all technically responsible, and you know, we are under this god’s jurisdiction, so we are all technically sinners who need to repent to this god because this is the true god. “Look, we have seven days!” And I was reading—I know—and I was reading the book. The origin of the seventh-day Sabbath was my question. Maybe you have a thought on it? But you mention a Sumerian lament where Inanna is singing to Enlil because he is sleeping while his people and their land are in famine. On page 256, maybe I can read it—teasing people to really get this book. I can’t tell you how much I am impressed with this:

“The goddess Inanna traveled from her temple to Uruk, to Nippur, in the hope of rousing Enlil. ‘Feigning my father’s pains, lying down,’ she cried, ‘may I soothe his heart, may I pacify his liver, may I direct my words to his distressed heart.’ Sitting on his lap, she sings him awake with the refrain: ‘O, sleeping one, how long will you sleep?'”

Inanna’s lament was considered so powerful that her cult singers recited it in her temple at Uruk on the seventh day of each month in the hope of appeasing the gods for any unknown misdemeanor which might prompt untimely or stimulated slumber. Precautionary measures were only sensible; discerning the difference between a sleeping god and a sulking god was not always easy. Many centuries later, in the sixth century CE, Yahweh’s worshippers were singing petitions to awaken him to the devastating aftermath of the Babylonian attack: “Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Yahweh? Awake! Do not cast us off forever.”

Yeah, so there is lots of stuff to unpack there. I mean, the seventh day—seven is a very significant number in a lot of ancient Southwest Asian cultures, and so time is very commonly divided up. I mean, not always—I mean, in some contexts, like in certain Egyptian contexts, the number 10 is very important—but seven is very common in a lot of ancient Southwest Asian cultures as a means of marking time. And probably, primarily, scholars think because you could see seven planets in the night sky, you know, with the naked eye at that time. So these seemed—you know, it was a particularly powerful, special number. So it is not unusual to have seven pop up a lot across these cultures, and not unusual to have the idea of a period of time being seven days—it was not unique to Yahweh-worshipping cultures either.

So that is one thing. I mean, the idea of a—the bit that you read is when I am talking about the notion that for a lot of Yahweh’s worshippers, inaction—divine inaction or divine neglect—could be understood to reflect either a god who was sleeping or a god who had simply withdrawn. You know how we all kind of, you know, if you are kind of depressed or tired or sulky, you take to your bed and you just don’t want to engage with anybody? It is kind of a similar kind of thing for the gods in the ancient world. You know, they might just withdraw socially completely. And so when the—when in that particular poem that I referred to in the Hebrew Bible, “Rouse… wake up, O arm of Yahweh,” that is because that was set—written in the time of the Babylonian destruction and exile. So, destruction of the temple, the exile of elites to Babylonia, and they are saying, you know, they are singing to Yahweh’s arm, you know, “He is fighting… on, wake up! Wake up! You have to—you have to, kind of, rescue us from enslavement in a foreign land. You have to come and fight for us.” You know, they just assumed that his withdrawal is because he is sleeping, you know? So he has completely disappeared from their lives. So that was very common.

The idea of Sabbath meaning “seven,” but also “is rest”—is this predating the Bible by millennia? I mean, the Yahweh cult is late, “Johnny-come-lately” again, right, on this notion. But the unique way that they have kind of instrumented it to be that might be unique, right? How they have made it into be, or is there Sabbath preceding this culture where they are resting with their god?

I mean, yeah, I mean, some scholars would certainly argue that in certain cults of particular deities that you had a “shabbat,” a day of rest, so and that was as much for the deity as it was for worshippers. But yeah, like I said, there is very little that is purely innovative in some ways. Like when you are looking at these kinds of—the ways in which ritual, the ritual calendar is organized, and ways in which certain sacrifices function, the ways in which certain, you know, ideas about what a temple is, what a deity is—you know, there is… I am not saying there is nothing— [Audio ends]