Just good managers

In the discussion of cosmology, it is important to observe that the control attributes are not initially set up, established, or invented by the gods. Rather, creation is the process of operating within the parameters of these control attributes, or even manipulating or assigning them. In Enuma Elish Marduk is said to “make his control attributes” (ubašimu parṣišu). This is the only occurrence of parsu as the object of one of the verbs of creation. The parallel in the previous phrase (“rites”) suggests, however, that it should be understood as referring to the control attributes of ritual procedures rather than of the cosmos. The control attributes are carried, gathered, exercised, held in the hand, granted, and organized by the gods, but not initiated by them.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 163

What? A sea monster?!

"Reference to the תנין [tannin] as the sea monster or sea dragon often occurs in Hebrew texts in the context of creation imagery (e.g., Isa 51:9; Job 7:12; Ps 74:13); the תנין [tannin] represents the forces of chaos and is that which is defeated to bring about the cosmic act of creation. The cosmic dimension of this sign is reinforced when considered in relation to Egyptian mythology and culture. As Scott Noegel has argued, the serpent had cosmic import in Egyptian mythology in that Apophis, the giant serpent, was the divine enemy of Ra whom Ra would battle as he made his circuit through the underworld. Therefore, whether viewed from a Hebrew or Egyptian perspective, the action of throwing down the staff and transforming it into a תנין [tannin] has cosmic creation overtones. Moreover, the association of תנין [tannin] with chaos suggests that this sign of throwing down the staff to become a תנין [tannin] has to do with having the power to control or direct chaos, including unleashing it."—Suzanne Boorer, forthcoming from SBL Press

A healthy corrective

We have seen that the biblical cosmos seems to be spoken of as if it were animate—as if rocks and mountains and seas and stars were living creatures. I want to suggest that this emphasis can serve as a helpful corrective to our tendency to view the world as a lifeless machine.— The Biblical Cosmos, page 204

<idle musing>
That's the final post from this delightful little book. I highly recommend it; it's written in such a way that just about anyone can understand it—and loaded with excellent insight.
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Toward the absence of being

Taking this approach further still we might perhaps consider evil, when portrayed in terms of watery chaos or sea beasts, as a tendency in creation to move away from being and form towards nothingness. Here I am picking up on Augustine’s teaching that evil is not a thing, a substance, but a lack in a thing, a privation. Evil is when good things fall away from their nature.— The Biblical Cosmos, pages 202–3

God's ongoing creation

At a metaphysical level, the dragon motif also speaks truth. The biblical models of creation picture it as something that left to itself would collapse back into chaos. The world does not sustain itself or order itself. It is God who “in the beginning” ordered reality according to his Logos, thereby creating cosmos, and it is God who holds the chaos at bay from moment to moment by that same Logos. But the tendency towards dis-order is inherent in the world.

We might possibly wish to raise the discussion a notch and transpose this image into the philosophical categories of being. In that mode the sea represents non-being, literally no-thing. Read this way, the world in itself tends towards non-being, but God, through his Logos, is investing it with the powers of existence. God’s ongoing ordering of the sea then speaks of the world’s moment-by-moment dependence on God.— The Biblical Cosmos, page 202 (emphasis original)

Center or periphery?

It is also worth reminding ourselves that neither biblical nor Ptolemaic cosmologies understood the earth to be the most important part of the cosmos—the heavens took that role. (In fact, contrary to the modern myth, in the Ptolemaic cosmology that dominated the Christian Middle Ages, the earth was the least significant part of the cosmos, being located at the center, furthest from God’s heaven.)— The Biblical Cosmos, page 198

<idle musing>
It all a matter of perspective, isn't it? We think the center is the most important, but they didn't. The most important place was where God was/is. That's still true, but we don't acknowledge it...
</idle musing>

Throw it all out!

No modern Christian can say with any intellectual integrity that the biblical view is literally correct. It is not. But does that mean that we simply cast it aside as a disposable husk? No. I propose that this biblical view was not merely a phenomenological perspective on how things appear from our location on the surface of the earth; it was also a means of divine communication. The notion that the earth matters to God is an important part of Christian theology. Ancient cosmology understood that centrality in a physical sense, but geocentrism can still metaphorically point to the importance of earth in God’s purposes.— The Biblical Cosmos, page 197

Stars as connectors to the divine realm

Here is something important to notice about the stars in the biblical texts that we have been considering. The stars, closely linked with the divine council and with angels, were very clearly located in the sky but not in God’s heaven (they were this side of the sky-dome). Yet the divine council and the angels inhabited God’s throne room in God’s heaven (the other side of the sky-dome). So the stars functioned as a link—a visible manifestation of invisible powers; a pointer beyond themselves to the transcendent power structures of the created order.

The linking function of stars meant that a complete disjunction of heaven and earth was impossible because the stars, existing in different modes on both sides of the firmament, blurred the dividing line. The stars reminded people of the duality of heaven and earth—that there is more to creation than can be seen with the eye—but countered any tendency towards dualism: the thought that God’s heaven is some self-contained world disconnected from the visible creation. The “space” and “light” of heaven are connected to the space and light of the visible cosmos, and the light of the sun, moon, and stars represent that connection.— The Biblical Cosmos, pages 192–93

Theosis

Sin corrupts this human icon of God, making humanity a broken vessel. The story of redemption is, in one important sense, simply the story of the restoration of the divine image in humanity, enabling us to function as bearers of divine glory. Our eschatological destiny is thus, in the language of classical Christian theology, deification (theōsis). This is not about us “becoming God” (which is an incoherent notion, if taken in a strictly literal sense) but it is about a union with God of such intimacy and profundity as to enable us to function as the divine image we were made to be.— The Biblical Cosmos, page 177

A second naivete

Unlike the biblical authors and their original audiences, we cannot take some of their beliefs literally any longer. That option is not open to scientifically literate people. But “beyond the desert of criticism” there is a second naïveté in which the text can again disclose divine truth and God can speak afresh. This is not a return to a pre-scientific view of the world but is rather a post-critical retrieval—a willingness to let God speak anew precisely through the strangeness of the ancient text. We cannot simply strip away the out-of-date views and throw them away like the peel of an orange in order to get to the ripe juice of revelation contained within. I believe that God wants to speak to the modern world through the insights of ancient cosmography.— The Biblical Cosmos, page 167 (emphasis original)

<idle musing>
What do you think? I've heard about second-naivete before and it's an attractive idea. I guess my hesitation is because I believe too much of the supernatural realm (which we as Westerners throw away) is real.

Am I mixing apples and oranges here? Is this a different issue from second-naivete? Help!
</idle musing>

Temple writ large

So the temple is the cosmos writ small. When the priests and the high priest move around the temple performing their sacred duties, they are symbolically moving around the biblical cosmos. This may help explain why the temple was so central to ancient Israel and why its desecration and its destruction by pagan nations were understood as such catastrophic events. The destruction of the temple—first at the hands of Babylon and later at those of Rome—was in a very real sense, the end of the world.

The final vision in the book of Revelation now makes a little more sense. Not only was the temple the biblical cosmos writ small, the biblical cosmos was the temple writ large. In other words, in the world of the Bible the cosmos is God’s house. As Philo put it, “The whole universe must be regarded as the highest and, in truth, the holy temple of God” (Spec. 1.66). As such the biblical cosmos is a sacred place indeed.— The Biblical Cosmos, page 150 (emphasis original)

<idle musing>
The world comes full circle in Revelation. What God intended in the garden gets fulfilled.
</idle musing>

Netherworld or night sky?

In Mesopotamian cosmology, the night sky is identical to the netherworld, stemming from an understanding that the celestial sphere steadily rotated from east to west, bringing the heavenly bodies up and down the horizon (Woods 2009: 209). Accordingly, the heaven of daytime turned into a netherworld after the sunset, which was also a form of the cosmological ocean, Apsû, where the stars were thought to originate. During the night, the cosmic order and divine wisdom submerged to occultation into the greater netherworld, not only understood in its grim, infernal aspects, but “in its more complex capacity that encompasses certain pure or ‘blessed’ lands located around the ‘edges of the earth’ as well” (Ataç 2010: 161).—The Overturned Boat, page 40

Don't sell yourself short

A metal or stone image (ṣelem) of a god cannot see or hear or act and so cannot represent the living Jehovah. The only authorized image (selem) of God in Scripture is humanity; thinking, hearing, seeing, speaking, acting humanity, filled with the Spirit of God. In Genesis 1, human beings are created to be the equivalent in creation of the cult statue in a temple! That is an astonishing claim.— The Biblical Cosmos, page 143

<idle musing>
I recently taught a two-day class on the ANE backgrounds to the OT. This is one of the things I mentioned to them, but I don't think they fully understood the import of it (not that I fully understand the import of it either!). This is radical stuff, mind-boggling in its ramifications.
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He's bigger...

The paradox fundamental to biblical thinking is that God is present in the temple while transcending the temple. And the same paradox is found on the cosmic scale. God dwells in heaven, but heaven cannot contain God, for in the end heaven is an aspect of creation but God is the creator.— The Biblical Cosmos, page 136

Is he there?

Heaven is not eternal in the sense that God is. It is, if you will, the dimension of creation that serves as an interface between God and the rest of creation. As such, even though biblical writers will regularly speak of God dwelling in and ruling from heaven they are also aware that God is “bigger” than heaven. In fancy language, God transcends not only the earth but heaven itself. As Solomon so beautifully put it in his prayer at the dedication of the spectacular temple he had built: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth [in this temple]? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built!” (1 Kgs 8:27).

The paradox of God’s dwelling in the temple in Jerusalem captures in a scaled-down way this same tension. The Bible holds together the idea that God dwells in the Jerusalem temple with a resistance to the idea that God’s presence can be contained there. God’s presence is everywhere, even outside the Promised Land, even to the ends of the earth, and even in sheol! More than that, God’s presence is in heaven, while the temple is on earth. So while God’s presence is in the temple, it is not there in quite the same way that it is in heaven.

Some texts speak obliquely of the temple as “the place that Jehovah your God will choose to make his name dwell” (Deut 26:2). This way of speaking beautifully captures the balance. It speaks of God’s real presence in the temple (for in ancient thinking the name of a person is profoundly connected to the person; it was no mere label) while at the same time pushing against a simplistic understanding of that presence. There is a subtle distance inserted between God and the temple in the very words that speak of his dwelling in it—he causes his name to dwell there. Israel’s theologians are seeking to speak of the reality of God’s presence but also of the way in which God’s presence is unlike any other presence. Words fail when God is the topic under discussion.— The Biblical Cosmos, page 135 (emphasis original)

<idle musing>
I've been gone for the last week (in case you didn't notice!); we were visiting kids and grandkids. I also had the privilege to teach for two days on the ancient Near Eastern backgrounds to the Old Testament. This excerpt from Robin's book nicely encapsulates much of what I was trying to teach.
</idle musing>

Rule number one

First and foremost, Jehovah is never identified with any astral entity nor with their totality. Rather, the sun, moon, and stars are entities created by Jehovah.— The Biblical Cosmos, page 110

<idle musing>
Indeed! That is the most essential element of biblical theology!
</idle musing>

What about those stars?

Now there is indeed a very interesting shift in emphasis in biblical literature, when it is compared with other ancient Near Eastern literature, away from a focus on their deity of astral bodies. We shall consider that in a moment. But this shift in emphasis is not a result, I suggest, of biblical authors rejecting the idea of the sun, moon, and stars as divine. What they unanimously and emphatically rejected was any idea that humans should serve and worship these astral gods. I suggest that it is this radical and decisive move that explains the theological shift in the biblical literature. The sun, moon, and stars may be gods, but they are created by Jehovah, are under his control, are appointed by him to serve humanity (giving light and overseeing the rhythms of time), and their glory serves to point to his greater glory. These are the things that interest the writers of the texts that became Scripture. Biblical writers have no interest in identifying specific stars with specific deities (except when condemning Israelites for worshipping stars as gods). The identification of stars with gods is, in biblical religion, generic rather than specific. Perhaps the worry was that an over-interest in the stars would lead to their being worshipped. And to worship the stars, in effect, upsets the order of creation and effectively makes them idols and even demons.— The Biblical Cosmos, page 109

Re-creation and the exodus

The story of the exodus from Egypt can be read as a story of the God-guided journey of Israel from the periphery to the center. Israel was in Egypt, the land of slavery and chaos and death. God delivered them by leading them through the boundary-marking sea (yam suph, literally, “sea of the edge”). There God defeated the chaos dragon and led Israel into an in-between place, the wilderness. Here was great danger—hunger, thirst, and hostile peoples—but God provided and protected. He led the people to the land where they would dwell with him and find rest. This is not simply mundane geography or history as we know it—this is meaning-full geography and history, rich in sacred symbolism.— The Biblical Cosmos, page 69

Away with you!

In the geography of the ancient Near East, deserts were seen as liminal in-between places representing the zone between civilization and order, on the one hand, and chaos and disorder, on the other; between life, on the one hand, and death, on the other. To be cast out of a community into the desert was to be sent away from the ordered human world and thereby to lose one’s social status. In the symbolic thinking of ancient Israel the barren desert, associated with death, was further away on the holiness spectrum from the temple, associated with the living God. It is not that going into the wilderness made one unclean, but simply that the wilderness was symbolically further from the life end of the spectrum and as such represented uncleanness.— The Biblical Cosmos, page 56

<idle musing>
Which is why the Akkadian exorcist spells and Hittite scapegoat ritual, to say nothing of the Day of Atonement in Israel, sent the evil spirit into the wilderness. It was their natural home.
</idle musing>

Yamm, take two

Interestingly the dominion that God gave humanity in Genesis 1 extends to “the fish of the sea,” but no mention is made of the sea itself. That remains beyond human rule. is may explain why the sea never responds to humans in the Bible—it does not obey human orders [see note] and it never addresses humans—nor do humans ever call it to. God is the creator of the sea and thus its line-manager, so it is to God alone that it responds.

[Note] Moses’ activity with the staff at the “Red Sea” might suggest otherwise. However, note that Moses simply “stretched out his hand over the sea [follow a direct divine command to do so], and Jehovah drove the sea back . . .” (Exod 14:21).— The Biblical Cosmos, page 47