Conservation of Marys

Personally I blame Pope Gregory the Great. 

Don’t get me wrong; Gregory did some remarkable things during his papacy.  He was a prolific writer and made important contributions to the Catholic liturgy, including, it is said, inventing the Gregorian chant.  He sent St. Augustine (the other one) to Britain as a missionary to the Anglo-Saxons.  John Calvin, not an easy man to impress, called him “the last good pope”.  On top of that, Gregory was an able punster; a rare quality in pontiffs.  But against his notable accomplishments, there is one I have to question.  He was the one who decided that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute; an accusation which has hung on her ever since.

Why would Gregory want to malign this woman, whom some have called “the apostle to the Apostles”?  What did she ever do to him?

The answer is complicated and has a bit to do with what I call the Conservation of Marys.

There are several Marys mentioned in the Gospels, most of them popping in and out of the Passion and the Resurrection narratives.  There’s Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, Mary the Mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James; I guess the name was popular then; almost as popular as it later became among Catholics.  And, as George M. Cohan once observed, It’s A Grand Old Name.

Still, the plethora of Marys can get confusing.  I once wrote a puppet play for our church’s Sunday School about the Resurrection story and I found it challenging to deal with all the Marys running around; so I can understand the impulse to combine some of them into a kind of Marian Composite.

But who is Mary Magdalene?

She is mentioned in Luke chapter 8 as one of a number of women who had been healed by Jesus and who helped support his ministry by their own means.  Luke says that she is called Magdalene; which most interpreters have assumed means that she came from Magdala, a large town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee; and that she had been afflicted by several demons.

People tend to forget about these women, except when they turn up again in the Resurrection account; but woman had a greater role in the early Christian Church than a lot of us realize.  The first Christian convert in Macedonia was an independent businesswoman named Lydia.  Priscilla and her husband Aquila were close friends of Paul’s who worked with him in Corinth and then later in Rome.  The personal greetings in Paul’s epistles suggest that women were key organizers in the congregations he founded.  And Luke’s mention here of Mary Magdalene and these other women show that this was true for Jesus’ ministry as well.

Mary Magdalene was one of the women present at the foot of the cross when Christ was crucified and when his other disciples were in hiding.  She was also among those who went to his tomb the following Sunday to finish the funerary preparations they didn't have time to complete before the Sabbath.  Mary was the first to see the Risen Lord, and returned to tell the Disciples, which is why she has been called “the apostle to the Apostles.”

The story told in John 20:10-18 of how she encounters the Risen Christ in the garden and at first mistakes him for a gardener is a touching and familiar one; but it also provides storytellers with something the Gospels otherwise lack:  a Love Interest.

The sorrow Mary felt upon the death of Jesus, the way he made a special trip to reassure her, and particularly the enthusiastic glomp she gave him when she discovered he was alive, have all led many readers to suspect that Jesus and Mary were particularly close.  All right; I’ll come out and say it.  They suggest that Mary Magdalene was the Girlfriend of Christ.

A lot of people would find that sort of blasphemous; and I have to admit that the idea of Jesus boinking one of his groupies doesn't really fit with how I envision the Pure and Sinless Son of God.  Then again, we are also taught that Christ became incarnate as True Man, meaning that he was subject to the same joys and sorrows, the same temptations and the same experiences as ordinary folks.  By that reasoning it’s not that implausible – in fact it’s quite likely – that Jesus might have been in love at some point in his life as well.  And either way, I hardly find it heretical to suppose, as many dramatists have, that Mary might have been in love with him.

Some have taken it even farther, speculating that Jesus and Mary were married in Milwaukee, secretly, and ran off to Gaul; but that this fact has been suppressed, first by patriarchal Church Fathers wishing to downplay Mary’s role in Jesus’ ministry, and later by a Bourbon conspiracy in order to deny that her children by Jesus are the Rightful Rulers of France.  The former might be somewhat plausible; the latter, not so much.

Personally, I've sometimes entertained the notion that Mary was carrying on a romance on the side, but that she was really fooling around with the Disciple John.  But I don’t think even Dan Brown would buy that idea.

The Resurrection account is the last mention we have of Mary Magdalene in the Gospels.  But wait, you perhaps are thinking; wasn't there a story about her and her sister Martha?  And the Raising of Lazarus?  And there was hair involved somewhere, right?

Now we get to the Second Mary in our composite.

In Luke chapter 10 we find the familiar story of Mary and Martha, two sisters living in the town of Bethany, who were friends of Jesus.  One time while Jesus is visiting them, Martha becomes annoyed with her sister because Mary is sitting and listening to Jesus teach instead of helping her with the housework.  Jesus tells Martha to cut her sister some slack:

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed.  Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”  (Luke 10:41-42 NIV)

I suspect that Jesus might have been thinking of the time he got chewed out by his family because he got so caught up in listening to the learned rabbis discussing Scriptures in the Temple that he stayed there for three days.

Mary and Martha appear again in John chapter 11 when they summon Jesus because their brother Lazarus is deathly ill.  By the time Jesus gets there, Lazarus has already died; but Jesus raises Lazarus from death.

Shortly after the Lazarus incident, Jesus is again visiting the family.  Mary takes a container of nard, an expensive perfume, and uses it to anoint Jesus’ feet, then wiping them off with her hair.

Judas disapproves of this display of devotion, grumbling that the perfume would be better used if it were sold and the proceeds given to the poor.  John didn't like Judas and never misses an opportunity to remind the reader what a jerk he was.  Jesus replies with one of the more misused quotations from the Gospels:  “The poor you have always with you.” (John 12:8 KJV).

This verse is sometimes used to deride secular attempts to fight poverty, but in its context I don’t see Jesus saying that at all.  He recognizes that Mary has done this out of devotion to honor him and that her sincere act of love deserves no rebuke.

Mary of Bethany is not mentioned as one of the women at the cross; that is, unless she is also Mary Magdalene.  But is she?

Well, both women are named Mary.  It’s an obvious point, but I might as well make it.  And both women seem to have dearly loved Jesus.  And Jesus seems to display a certain amount of affection to them both.  So why shouldn't we combine the two?  It would make the cast of characters a little less confusing.  And Mary Beth is so cute; she’s like the Kitty Pryde of Jesus’ followers.  The Mary Beth who anointed Jesus’ feet would fit so well in the story of Mary Mags in the Garden.

I might be willing to buy it, if not for that Luke 8 passage.  Luke is the one, remember, who introduces us to Mary Magdalene.  Then a couple chapters later he tells about Mary and Martha.  If the two Marys were the same woman, wouldn't Luke have told us so?

But let’s waive that point.  By his own admission, the author of Luke got his material second-hand; perhaps he got the story of the Mary with the Seven Demons and one of the Mary with the Bossy Sister from two different sources and didn't realize the two women were the same person.

More significantly, as I read it, the Mary Magdalene described in Luke 8 is an independent woman with her own income, or at least a sizeable nest egg, who can afford to help support Jesus’ ministry and who can accompany his other followers.  The Mary of Bethany described in Luke 10 is a stay-at-home, the dependent younger sister of an older, more responsible sibling.  I don’t see the two portraits matching.

But why would Pope Gregory think that either Mary Beth or Mary Mags was a harlot?  Especially since Mary Beth seems like such a nice girl.

If she was such a nice girl, then where did she get the money for that perfume?  A pint of nard doesn't come cheap.  And nice girls keep their heads covered.  And for that matter, where did Mary Magdalene get her money?  We tend to get the impression that women didn't own property back in Bible times, they were property; so if Mary Mags had that much disposable income, it must have come from someplace disreputable, right?

Well… maybe not.  I don’t think that society in First Century Judea was quite that rigid, even if perhaps some of the more conservative element wished it were.  She could have been like Susanna, another woman mentioned in Luke 8, who was a member of an affluent household; or she could have been a single woman, widowed or otherwise, who was able to run her own business, like Lydia of Philippi.

Another more subtle point is that perhaps Gregory found the Marys’ affectionate attitude towards Jesus suspect.  The Church has a long tradition of looking with disapproval at anything remotely hinting of sex.  I’d like to blame St. Augustine (of Hippo, not of Canterbury) for this, but some of it can be found in Paul’s epistle as well. 

My Dad was once pastor in a small town that was equally divided between German Lutherans and Polish Catholics.  The previous Lutheran minister, who had served for something like twenty years, had been a life-long bachelor, so a lot of people in town regarded the idea of a Pastor’s Wife as something unusual, and my Mom always got the impression that some of her Catholic neighbors regarded her as a Scarlet Woman somehow for marrying a man of the cloth.

Likewise, I can imagine Gregory feeling uncomfortable with the public displays of affection both Marys show to the Son of God.  But perhaps I’m reading too much in here.

More significant is the story of the Anointing.  There is a parallel account of a woman anointing the feet of Jesus in the other three Gospels.

The accounts in Mark (Mark 14:3-9) and Matthew (Matt 26:6-14) are pretty similar to the story John tells, except that the woman who anoints Jesus is unnamed and the incident is said to take place at the home of a guy named Simon the Leper.  (Was that another name Lazarus went by?  Although in one of Jesus’ other parables he gives the name Lazarus to a fictitious leper).  Luke, however, tells the story differently.

Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee’s house and reclined at the table.  When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town leaned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears.  Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.  (Luke 7:36-38 NIV)

The Pharisee, whose name is also Simon, looks at this scene with disapproval and mutters to himself that if this Jesus was as hot a prophet as he was made out to be, he’d know what kind of woman was fondling his feet.

Jesus hears his muttering and responds with a mini-parable; and then goes on to add:

“Do you see this woman?  I came into your house.  You did not give me water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.  You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet.  You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet.  Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven – for she loved much.  But he who has been forgiven little loves little.”  (Luke 7:44-47)

When we get multiple parallel stories like this in the Bible, there are a couple ways we can treat them.  One is to assume that they are separate events that just happened to be similar in some ways to each other; the other is to assume that they are accounts of the same events and chalk any discrepancies to a different writer telling the story from a different point of view and emphasizing different elements.

This latter view is how Gregory chose to interpret the stories of the Sinful Woman and of Mary at Bethany.  And so we have the following chain of reasoning:

If: 

Mary Magdalene = Mary of Bethany 

And: 

Mary of Bethany = the Sinful Woman of Luke chapter 7 

Then: 

Mary Magdalene = a Whore 

Q.E.D.

And people say that the Church has no place for Reason.

But as logical as Gregory’s argument looks when lined up in syllogistic form like that, I still don’t buy it.  For one thing, it depends on identifying Mary Mags with Mary Beth; and as I said before, I think there’s good reason to doubt it.  Neither do I think we have to identify the woman of Luke with the story in John.

Luke places his story near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry; and the Anointing at Bethany takes place nearly at the end.  Luke sets the story at the home of sanctimonious Pharisee; John has Jesus visiting friends.  The one story emphasizes the woman’s sorrow and her sinful past; in the other, Mary is simply performing an act of love.

None of these arguments, I’ll admit, are conclusive; and the other accounts in Matthew and Mark don’t really clarify things.  They name the host Simon, which links their version to Luke’s story; but they also place the incident in Bethany and include the criticism about wasting the perfume when it could be donated to the poor, which links it to John’s version.  And isn't it too much of a coincidence that the same thing would happen on two separate occasions?

Not necessarily.  Remember, this was a time when everyone wore sandals and traveled by foot on dusty roads.  It was customary for hosts to have a servant wash the feet of guests as they entered their home, or to at least provide water and a towel for that purpose.  Jesus alludes to this in the Luke account; and he uses the custom to make a point later in John chapter 13 when he washes the feet of his disciples.

It’s not surprising that Mary Beth, the youngest member of her household, would have been the one to wash the guests’ feet and might have wanted to do something special for Jesus.  It’s even possible that she had heard of the previous incident and used the perfume in imitation of the other woman’s gift.

And even if Mary of Bethany was the Sinning Woman of Luke 7, neither one of them was Mary Magdalene.

Nevertheless, thanks to Gregory, for something like fifteen hundred years Mary has been regarded as a prostitute and the term “Magdalene” synonymous with “whore”.  It was only in 1969 that the Vatican officially separated the three women comprising the Composite Mary.

I guess I’m of two minds about this.  On the one hand, I hardly think it fair that Mary Magdalene be tarnished with a reputation she doesn't deserve.

On the other hand, Jesus taught and ministered to and associated with all sorts of outcasts and sinners whom the Gospels never named:  the Sinning Woman of Luke 7; the Samaritan Woman at the Well; the Afflicted Woman who touched his garment; the Canaanite Woman with the sick daughter.

With his identification, whether right or wrong, Gregory gave a name to these women, upon whom Jesus shared his love and compassion.  I suppose that is worth something.

Abigail and Her Really Stupid Husband

Nabal was a wealthy property owner living near Carmel during the reign of King Saul.  He owned substantial flocks of sheep and goats as was married to a beautiful and intelligent wife named Abigail.  Nabal was a bad-tempered man and mean in his dealings.  Perhaps it was his name that made him so grouchy; “Nabal” in Hebrew means “fool”; and undoubtedly he was often mocked behind his back.

At this time David and his men were encamped in the Desert of Maron (or Paran, in some manuscripts) near Nabal’s lands.  This was during the time when David was a fugitive, on the run from King Saul.  Although Saul was not actively pursuing him at the moment, David was still keeping out of Saul’s way.

David heard that Nabal was shearing sheep.  Shearing season is usually a festival time for shepherding folk, as David would known from his own boyhood.  So he sent some of his men to Nabal with this message:

“Long life to you!  Good health to you and your household!  And good health to all that is yours! 

Now I hear that it is sheep-shearing time.  When your shepherds were with us, we did not mistreat them, and the whole time they were at Carmel nothing of theirs was missing.  Ask your own servants and they will tell you.  Therefore, be favorable towards my young men, since we come at a festive time.  Please give your servants and your son David whatever you can find for them.  (1 Samuel 25:6-8)

Nabal answers scornfully.  “Who is this David?  Who is this son of Jesse?  Many servants are breaking away from their masters these days.”  (v.10)

Nabal might have had reason to suspect David.  After all, what did he know about him?  David was an outlaw who had left the King’s service under a cloud.  And how did David support himself and his men during his years of exile?  The text is vague on this subject, but many in his position would have turned to raiding and banditry.  That’s probably why David emphasizes in his message that he and his men have stolen nothing from Nabal‘s men, that in fact they have protected Nabal‘s flocks; and that Nabal’s own men will vouch for his honesty.  Still, an uncharitable mind might interpret David’s protection as nothing more than an extortion racket; and charity does not seem to have been one of Nabal’s virtues.

Nevertheless, whether David was a bandit or a benefactor, he did command a small army, and insulting him as Nabal did was a remarkably boneheaded move.

One of Nabal’s servants went to Abigail and told her about her husband’s adventures in diplomacy, emphasizing that David and his men had always treated the shepherds well and deserved none of his master’s abuse.  “Disaster is hanging over our master and his whole household,” the servant warns.

He is right to be worried.  We like to think of David as compassionate and forgiving; and in some cases he was:  he respected King Saul and deeply loved his son Absalom, despite the wrongs both did him.  But in other cases we see that David had a temper; and that, although he would often forgive, he would rarely forget.  Upon hearing Nabal’s insulting response, David gathers his army together to teach the jerk a lesson.

Abigail, however, takes action immediately.  She gathers up enough bread, wine, dressed sheep and other foodstuffs to cater a small army, which is exactly what she intends to do, and has them packed up on donkeys and sent to David’s camp, following close behind.  She does not tell Nabal what she is doing.

She meets up with David just as he is telling his men, “It’s been useless -- all my watching over this fellows property in the desert so that nothing was missing.  He has paid me back evil for good.  May God deal with David ever so severely if by morning I leave alive one male of all who belong to him!”  (v. 21-22)  This oath, “May God deal with me ever so severely...” is one which appears frequently in the Books of Samuel, and shows he means business.

Abigail goes to David and asks his clemency.  “Do not pay attention to him,” she says of her husband, “As his name says, he is a fool”  (v. 25).  She begs David not to stain his own honor and reputation with an act of bloodthirsty vengeance.

David is moved by her plea, (and no doubt also by the gifts of food), and calls off the raid.

When Abigail comes home, she does not tell her husband about what she did right away.  It’s festival time, remember, and Nabal is busy partying.  She waits until the next day, when he’s sober.  Nabal does not take the news well.  “His heart failed him and he became like a stone,” the NIV says.  (v. 37)  “...his heart died within him” is how the King James Version puts it.

Various commentators have interpreted this to mean he suffered an apoplexy or a stroke.  Some have suggested that he was stricken with terror when he realized how closely he came to being slaughtered by David’s vengeance.  Another possibility, and given what we've seen of Nabal’s personality, I think it the more likely one, is that Nabal was furious that his wife had gone behind his back and given away his stuff in defiance of his express wishes.  He grew so enraged that he worked himself into an aneurysm.

However it was, ten days later Nabal dies.

David hears about Nabal’s death and offers to take Abigail as a wife, and she agrees.  Under the culture of the time, she has no rights to her late husband’s property.  The best she can hope for is to find a new husband.  Whether David gained any claim to Nabal’s lands and livestock by marrying Abigail, I’m not sure, but he was impressed by the wisdom she showed and grateful to her for preventing him from rashly attacking.  David already had one wife, Ahinoam of Jezreel; (one-and-a-half, if you count Michal, the daughter of Saul, whom Saul had given him and then taken away again), but polygamy was still accepted at this time.

I would like to think that Abigail proved a wise and prudent wife and that her advice became valuable to David.  Unfortunately, she falls out of the narrative.  She is mentioned a couple of times later, but only as one of David’s wives, and we hear nothing about her once he becomes king.

She deserved a happy ending; and she certainly deserved better than the fool she was married to.

Moses's Horns

“You’re a preacher’s kid, maybe you can answer this,” my high school art teacher said; “Why does Moses have horns?”

“Moses has horns?” I said.

He showed me a picture in the encyclopedia of Michelangelo’s statue of Moses in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli.  Sure enough, it looked like he had horns.  “Maybe those are supposed to be locks of his hair,” I suggested, but I didn't really believe it.

“They’re horns,” Mr. Schmidt said.

So I asked my Dad, who was a Lutheran minister, about it.  Dad said, “Moses has horns?”

On thinking it over, he guessed that it was a mistranslation from the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible, confusing the Latin word for “beams” with the one for “horns.”

I found out later that his guess was mostly right; but there was more to it than that.

Exodus 34:29-35 tells how when Moses came down from Mount Sinai after speaking with God, his face was transformed in a manner which frightened the Israelites so much that he was forced to wear a veil. How was his face transformed? Interesting question.

Most translations of the Bible say something like "the skin of his face shone" (KJV), or "his face was radiant" (NIV). A more literal translation would be "the skin of his face sent forth beams". The thing is, the key word in the Hebrew phrase: qâran ‘ôr pânâw can be translated either as "rays of light" or as "horns". In the context, "rays of light" or "beams" makes more sense, and that is how it was translated in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures composed in the First Century BC. But every where else the word qâran appears in the Bible, it means "horns".

(Which, to be fair, would also have freaked out the Israelites).

When Jerome, the medieval scholar responsible for the Vulgate translation of the Bible which was used for most of the Middle Ages, translated this passage, he chose a wording which kept this ambiguity,.  Whether by coincidence or by design, the Latin word he used could be translated either way. Jerome has a lot to answer for.

Jerome’s translation led to an artistic tradition in the Middle Ages  of depicting Moses with horns that lasted well into the Renaissance . You can see it in the statue by Michelangelo that Mr. Schmidt showed me.  In the 20th Century, the Russian-Jewish artist Marc Chagal combined the two interpretations in his paintings of Biblical themes; his Moses had two rays like the beams of headlights coming out of his forehead and looking much like horns.

This tradition about Moses also led to a peculiar superstition that all Jews had horns, which lasted well beyond the Middle Ages.  There’s a klezmer band which references it; they call themselves -- what else? -- “Jews With Horns”.

But one of the sources I came across while researching this story makes an interesting point.  Moses was not transformed the first time he ascended Sinai to receive the Tablets of the Law.  It happened the second time, when he went up the mountain in order to plead with God to show mercy on His people.  It was not when he acted as the Lawgiver that Moses reflected God’s Glory, but rather when he acted as Intercessor.

Something to keep in mind whenever we're tempted to toot our own horns.

Who the Heck's Melchizadek?

Every once in a while in the Bible, a righteous, God-fearing person will pop up out of the blue, with no connection to the rest of the Biblical narrative.  They are not descended from the Holy Line and received no instruction from the Established Patriarchs.  Nevertheless, they know and believe in the One True God and are honored by Scriptures as righteous men.

Melchizidek is one such person.  His name means “Righteous King” or “King of Righteousness” and the text calls him “king of Salem”, which is presumed to be an older name for Jerusalem, and is related to the Hebrew word for “Peace.”  In addition to being a king, the text also says he was a priest of the God Most High.  He brings out bread and wine to refresh Abram and pronounces a blessing on him.

Blessed be Abram by God Most HighCreator of heaven and earthAnd blessed be God Most HighWho delivered your enemies into our hand.(Gen 14: 19-20 NIV)

Abram gives Melchizadek a tenth of the spoils.  How this works out, since a couple verses later Abram rejects the King of Sodom’s offer of a share of his own, the text doesn't explain.

That is the last we hear of Melchizadek, at least in Genesis.  Psalm 110 makes an interesting reference to him, though.  The psalmist, in this case identified as King David, speaks of one to come, who will be exalted to the LORD’s right hand and who will rule from Zion, (the mountain on which Jerusalem was built).  In the midst of his description of glory and might and his military imagery, the psalmist adds:

 “The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind.  “You are a priest forever, in the Order of Melchizadek.”  (Psalm 110:4)

Granted, the Psalmist might not be referring to a proper name here; a more recent Jewish translation renders this verse as “... You are a priest forever, a rightful king by My decree.”

Either way, Christians have interpreted this psalm as speaking of the Messiah.  In fact, the author of the Book of Hebrews cites this passage in his lengthy meditation on Christ the Great High Priest; (Hebrews chapter 7, and heck, most of the rest of the epistle as well).  But what does it mean to be a priest in the Order of Melchizadek?

The priests of the Old Testament, who served in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple in Jerusalem, were all descendants on Aaron, the brother of Moses, and so can be considered the Order of Aaron.  Melchizadek predated Aaron and Moses and even, one might argue, Abraham.  So if there is a priestly tradition of Melchizadek, then it lies outside of and independent from the Abrahamic tradition; yet also parallel to it, in that it grows out of the same Semetic culture that Abraham did, and also worships the One True God.

Unlike the priests of David’s day, Melchizadek was both a priest and a king.  It actually wasn’t all that uncommon in ancient times for kings to participate in religious duties; we get a glimpse of this much later in the Roman Empire, where one of the Emperor’s titles was Pontifex Maximus, and performed public sacred rituals on important holy days.  Moses, however, decreed a kind of separation of church and State.  The priesthood was a hereditary vocation with rigidly defined duties and qualifications; and secular leadership was something else.  In the book of 1 Samuel we see King Saul getting in trouble for presuming to perform a sacrifice himself, (1 Sam. 13) and later on King David’s desire to move the Ark of the Covenant to his political capitol caused problems as well.

Martin Luther speculated that Melchizadek might have been Shem, one of the sons of Noah.  If you want to play the game of trying to reconcile the various genealogies listed in Genesis, you can work out a fair argument that Shem could have been alive at the time of Abraham, and therefore he could plausibly have been the King of Salem around then.  Maybe.

Another idea is that Melchizadek was the pre-incarnate Christ, on the theory that the Second Person of the Trinity must of been doing something while he was hanging around waiting for The Fullness of Time and so he’d pop into the Biblical narrative every now and then and do cameos.

Put that way, it does sound kind of silly, and I don’t think I buy it.  It gains a little support when we remember that the name “Melchizadek” means “Righteous King” and that as ruler of “Salem” he was in a sense the “Prince of Peace”; but I still think it works better to regard him as a pre-figuring of Christ rather than a ret-conned previous appearance.

I prefer to think of Melchizadek as a reminder that although the Old Testament is mostly concerned with the Line of Abraham and with telling the story of the Children of Israel, that God was interested in other people too; and that other people sought him and worshiped him in their own ways.

The Patriarch's Posse

We don’t really think of the Patriarchs as butt-kickers.  The Patriarchs are more... well... Patriarchal.  They wear long beards; they do a lot of begetting; and they administer the complex soap opera of their extended families.  It’s hard to imagine someone like Abraham leading warriors into battle.  And yet this is just what he did.

When Abraham, then known as Abram, left the land of Ur at God’s command and journeyed to the Promised Land, his nephew Lot accompanied him.  Both men possessed considerable herds of livestock, and they found that there wasn't enough water and grazing land where they had camped to support the both of them.  Their herdsmen kept fighting with each other and Abram saw that this could not go on.

So Abram said to Lot, “Let‘s not have any quarreling between you and me, or between your herdsmen and mine, for we are brothers.  Is not the whole land before you?  Let‘s part company.  If you go to the left, I‘ll go to the right; if you go to the right, I‘ll go to the left.” (Gen. 13:8-9)

Lot chose the rich verdant lands surrounding the Cities of the Plain of Jordan, and pitched his tent near the city of Sodom.  Abram moved west to Hebron and set up camp near the great trees of Mamre.

Unfortunately, Lot wasn't the only one who liked the rich, verdant plains of the Jordan.  The five Cities of the Plain had been subject to  Kedorlaomer, the King of Elam, a land east of Mesopotamia on the Persian Gulf, for about twelve years, but had recently rebelled.  A year following the rebellion, Kedorlaomer and three of his neighboring kings embarked on a campaign to subdue several of the tribes in the region.

(In case you were interested, his allies were Amraphel, the king of Shinar, Arioch king of Ellasar, and Tidal king of Goiim.  Shinar is a region in Mesopotamia, and Amraphel was once mistakenly identified as Hammurapi, the great lawgiver of Babylon.  He probably wasn't, though.  The word “goiim” in Hebrew means “foreign nations,” so it’s unclear if it’s meant to be a name for a specific nation here.  Ellesar is the elvish name for King Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings, but he has even less to do with the story than Hammurapi.)

The five Kings of the Plain, (Bera, king of Sodom; Birsha, king of Gomorrah; Shinab, king of Admah, Shemeber, king of Zebolim; and the king of Zoar who isn't named; remember, there‘ll be a test) prepared to meet the Four Kings in the Valley of Siddim, near the Dead Sea.  They were overwhelmed by Kedorlaomer’s forces.  Many of their men perished in the tar pits of the valley and the rest fled into the hills.

The army of the Four Kings sacked the Cities of the Plain, carrying off everything that wasn't nailed down.  This included Lot, who as you'll recall had moved his tents to the neighborhood of Sodom.  The text suggests that he had actually moved into the city by this time; although I have to wonder if the attack by the Four Kings were what convinced him to settle down someplace with walls.

This raid by Kedolaomer and his cohorts presents something of a problem.  We’d like to see Kedoraomer as the bad guy, for coming in with an army and carrying off Abram’s nephew.  Except that Sodom and Gomorrah are bad guys too.  Some commentators have been so uncomfortable about presenting Sodom in a sympathetic light, that they insist that the Cities of the Plain were wrong to rebel against Kedolaomer, and that the raid by the Elamites was God’s just vengeance against the disobedient cities.  I don’t think I’d go that far.  But whether their rebellion was justified or not, Lot found himself caught up in the Elamites’s retaliation.

One of the survivors of the battle came to Abram, who at that time was swelling near Hebron, near the great trees of Mamre, an Amorite chieftain who along with his brothers were allies of Abram.  We don’t don’t think of the Holy Land in conjunction with big trees, but the rocky landscape of today is the result of centuries of deforestation.  These huge trees on Mamre’s lands were apparently local landmarks.  We also don’t think of Abraham schmoozing with Canaanite chieftains, but Abram and his neighbor Mamre seem to have been on good terms.

Wen Abram heard of Lot’s predicament, he gathered up his own men, “318 trained men, born in his household”  (Gen. 14:14).  The word in Hebrew is obscure; in other ancient sources it means “armed retainers.”  These men seem to have been Abram’s private security force, a cadre of fighters who protected his herds and flocks from wild animals and marauders.  That’s my guess anyway.

Abram led his men in pursuit of he army of the Four Kings all the way to Dan, near the headwaters of the Jordan River.  He split his forces into two groups and defeated Kedorlaomer’s army, recovering the plundered loot and rescuing Lot and the other captives.

And this brings up a puzzle the text does not address.  How did Abram manage to defeat the army of the Four Kings with only 318 men?  Kedorlaomer and his allies had just conquered several other tribes in the area as well as defeating the armies of the Kings of the Plain.  You’d think they’d have more soldiers than a guy in a tent with some livestock, no matter how affluent that guy was.  The text doesn't say.

Perhaps the 318 men the text mentions are just Abram’s own men and that his buddies Mamre and his brothers, who accompanied Abram, contributed men of their own.  Perhaps  he might have gathered additional troops from the survivors who escaped the battle of the tar pits, as Gandalf gathered the scattered troops of Rohan to relieve Helm‘s Deep.  It’s also possible that Kedorlaomer’s forces were burdened by all the prisoners and plunder and so fought under a disadvantage.  Or perhaps the text is exaggerating Kedorlaomer’s importance; maybe Kedorlaomer was never that big a king after all and Lot was simply carried off by a desert warlord and his large band of brigands.  In the 19th Century, Biblical scholars thought they had identified some of the kings named in Babylonian sources, but later scholarship disagrees.

The text says that Abram divided his forces into two groups.  Possibly he caught the enemy in a narrow valley where they’d be pinned between the two flanks.  Perhaps Abram caught them by surprised as Gideon did to the Midianites (Judges ch. 7), and that is how he was able to defeat a superior force.  Once again, the text is annoyingly vague.

What it does say is that Abram returned with all the captives and plunder.  They are met by the King of Sodom, who was among the refugees from the previous battle.  The King of Sodom offers Abram a generous share of the recovered loot to repay him, but Abram refuses.  He allows Mamre and his brothers to take a share, but he won’t take anything for himself, “so that you will never be able to say ‘I made Abram rich.’” (Gen. 14:23)

Another guy shows up at this time accompanying the King of Sodom.  His name is Melchizadek, and he’s another of the the Bible’s mysteries.  We’ll get to him next time.

They Might Be Giants

The pious Iowa revivalist found himself in a discussion with a skeptic.  “You don’t really believe all those stories in the Bible about giants and such, do you?” the fellow scoffed.  The minister vehemently asserted that he did, and pointed to a verse in Genesis to support him:  “There were giants in the earth in those days.”

Some of the most tantalizing stories in the Bible are the untold ones; the passages that make a passing reference to something but never tells us any more.  Of these untold stories, perhaps the most intriguing is the introduction we get to the story of Noah:

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.  ... There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.  (Genesis 6:1-2, 4 King James Version)

This passage presents us with two mysteries:  Who are these “sons of God” and who are the giants they begat?

Well, if you grew up in the ‘70s as I did, the first question has only one answer.  They were space aliens obviously.  At least that’s what Erich von Däniken used to say.

The phrase translated as “sons of God” literally means “sons of the powers”, and in some places, such as Job 1:6 and Jude 6-7, it refers to angels.  In this particular context it certainly sounds like the text is referring to some kind of demigods or semi-divine beings, especially since the offspring of these beings are described as giants.  This interpretation doesn't fit so well with the traditional Jewish and Christian views of God.  Perhaps this passage, like a few others in Genesis, might be cultural relics of a time before the Hebrews adopted monotheism which the writer who compiled the Book of Genesis neglected to fix.  If that’s the case, the Holy Spirit could have used a better copy editor.

Orthodox Judaism interprets the phrase differently; as “sons of nobles“.  Similarly, an ancient Christian tradition holds that “sons of God” refers to the godly descendants of Seth, Adam and Eve’s third son, those who had a Covenant Relationship with God; and that the “daughters of men” belonged to the line of Cain.  This seems possible, but doesn't capture the imagination quite like the notion of angelic space aliens getting it on with sexy earth girls.

The apocryphal Books of Enoch, written between the 3rd and 1st Centuries BC, expands considerably on the Genesis 6 passage.  Ostensibly written by the patriarch Enoch before the Flood, it identifies the “sons of God” with angels called Watchers, whose job was to watch over humanity. Uatu the Watcher from Marvel Comics is probably related to them.

Some of these Watchers were the ones who began fooling around with human women and who also taught humans forbidden knowledge like astrology, weapon-making, and cartooning; (well, “the art of writing with ink and paper“). The movie Noah plays around with this idea and represents the Watchers as huge creatures whose angelic forms are encased in rock and earth, embodying their fallen state.

Which brings us to the children of the sons of God and the daughters of men.  King James follows many ancient translations and calls them “giants”, but the Hebrew word used in the passage is “nephilim”, which means, depending on your point of view, either “fallen ones” or “those causing others to fall.”  (Or, it could be related to the Aramaic word “Nephila” for the constellation of Orion, which brings us back to space aliens.)

But were they giants?  A more prosaic interpretation suggests that the Nephilim of Genesis were giants in a metaphorical way rather than a literal one; that they were simply “mighty men of renown”, the same way we might call a corporate CEO a Titan of Industry, or a mathematical genius a Colossus of Intellect, or a college football star the Big Man on Campus.

I suspect that the identification of the Nephilim with giants comes from the only other place in the Bible where they are mentioned.  In the Book of Numbers there is a story in which Moses sends twelve spies into the land of Canaan to do reconnaissance.  Their initial report was not promising:

But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes and we looked the same to them.” (Numbers 13: 31-33 NIV)

Are these the same Nephilim from Genesis? The reference to Anak, who was one of the Canaanite kings, would suggest that they were, or at least were descended from them.  Then how did these ancestors of Anak survive the Deluge that wiped out the rest of humanity?  I don’t know.

But another strong possibility is that the spies were exaggerating.  “These guys were huge, man!  They were like freakin’ King Kong!”  It’s not all that implausible to suppose that the Canaanites, living as they did in a Land Flowing with Milk and Honey, had a better overall diet than the nomadic Israelites and were on average taller; but all that stuff about looking like grasshoppers?  I don’t think so.

That’s the last mention we get in Scriptures of the Nephilim.  Maybe the writer who compiled Genesis didn't know any more about them than a name passed down in oral tradition.  Or maybe the writer was more interested in recording the history of Abraham and his ancestry, and that he regarded these half-mythical beings as peripheral to his story.

Either way, the giants of those days stuck in people’s minds.  In 1869, when a farmer in upstate New York digging a well uncovered what seemed to be the petrified remains of one of these giants, it seemed vindication at last for the Genesis account.  The “Cardiff Giant”, of course, was a hoax, perpetrated by the same scoffer who had argued with the Iowa revivalist, and who decided that if people wanted to believe in such things, he would give it to them.

And so, for a time at least, there really were giants in the earth.

Adam's Ex

I have to admit:  I’m cheating.

Having said I was going to blog about obscure stories in the Bible, my first week I wrote about the Creation -- not exactly unknown here -- and this week I’m writing about a character who isn't even in the Bible.  Well, not technically.

Although Lilith is never exactly named in the Bible, she does have an association with Adam. She‘s part of the pop theology which has accumulated around Creation these past few millenia.  Some people think she was in the Bible, and some others think she should have been.

The name Lilith is thought to derive from Lilitu, a type of female spirit or demon from Babylonian and Assyrian mythology associated with the night wind. An ancient Mesopotamian tablet depicting a nude goddess with bird’s feet and wings has been thought by some to represent Lilitu, although other scholars identify her with Ishtar or other goddesses of the region.  There’s also an incident in the Epic of Gilgamesh in which the hero rids a goddess’s huluppu tree of a snake, a zu bird and another garden pest which some translators have identified as a Lilith.

It  seems likely that Lilith entered Hebrew folklore during the Babylonian Captivity, where she was seen as a demonic spirit who preyed on women and young children.  She was frequently portrayed as a beautiful woman, sexually preying on men as they slept giving them wet dreams and enticing them to grow hair on their palms.  I made up the last part.

The only place in the Bible that comes close to mentioning Lilith is a passage in Isaiah describing the destruction of Edom.  It describes the land becoming a desolate place, inhabited by unclean beasts and supernatural terrors.  This is how a modern Jewish translation puts it:

“Wildcats shall meet hyenas, / Goat-demons shall greet each other; / There too the lilith shall repose / And find herself a resting place” (Isaiah 34:14)

The King James Verison renders the word “liylith” in the original Hebrew as “screech owl”; which is perhaps appropriate given Lilith’s associations with the night and with birds of prey.  Other translations translate it as “night creature”, “night hag” or “vampire”.

Over time, Lilith developed two aspects: the slayer of newborns, and the seducer of men. The latter can be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls,  which contain a reference identifying  Lilith with the warnings in the Book of Proverbs against seductive women.

The former is reflected by a Hebrew tradition that an amulet bearing the names of three angels, (Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelof, which would make a great name for a law firm), would protect a newborn boy in the crucial eight days before his circumcision, , when he was vulnerable to evil influences.

But what does any of this have to do with Adam?

As we've seen, the Creation account in Genesis 1 suggests that Man and Woman were created at the same time, but the account in Genesis 2 states that Adam was created first and that Eve came later.  The Genesis Rabbah, a Jewish commentary on the Book of Genesis written some time after the Babylonian Talmud, explains this apparent discrepancy by postulating a First Wife for Adam, created with him on the Sixth Day.

(Personally I don’t have a problem with assuming that the “male and female” from chapter one refers to Adam and Eve from chapter two; but these learned rabbis did; and this is how they reconciled the two texts).

In the Middle Ages, sometime between the 8th and 10th Centuries, a book titled The Alphabet of ben Sirach identified this hypothetical First Wife as Lilith.  The book was a series of acrostic proverbs modeled after those in the Apocryphal book Wisdom of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus; along with commentary.  Many scholars consider the work to be satirical due to the number of fart jokes in it.

According to the Alphabet, Lilith was Adam’s first wife; but because they had both been created from the earth, Lilith refused to take a subordinate role to her husband.  Specifically, She Wanted To Be On Top during sex, and Adam insisted that she could only be Underneath.

Lilith’s demand for equality has made her popular with modern day feminists, although I doubt that the author of The Alphabet intended her as a role-model.  She left Adam and took up a new career devouring children.  And things for Lilith kind of went downhill from there.

In Medieval Jewish and Christian folklore, Lilith became known as the mother of all manner of supernatural creatures, some demonic and monstrous, like giants and trolls; some just otherworldly, like elves and fairies. C.S. Lewis alludes to this idea in his Narnia books, when he has a character comment that although the White Witch claims to be a Daughter of Eve, she is actually descended from Adam’s first wife, Lilith.  The Victorian fantasy writer George MacDonald, who was one of Lewis’s inspirations, wrote a novel called Lilith in which she is portrayed both as a seducer of men and as an enemy of children, but who nevertheless receives a chance for redemption.

But back to the legend.  God had to try again making a new mate for Adam, and this time he created the woman out of Adam’s flesh so that there would be no question as to who had seniority and who was in charge.  This fits in with the way a lot of people interpret the story of the Creation of Eve; that being formed out of Adam’s rib is supposed to symbolize Eve’s inferiority to Adam.

I don’t read the story quite like that.  As I see it, the Genesis account’s depiction of Eve being created out of Adam’s rib is not a matter of who wears the pants in the family; (which at that point in the story was neither; pants came later); but rather to portray Eve as a part of Adam; “Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” as Adam himself puts it.  And the story concludes with a passage later quoted by Jesus and which is frequently used as a wedding text:

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.  (Genesis 2:24 NIV)

To me, that verse says nothing about which one is in charge, but rather that both form a partnership.  The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 provides us with a brief glimpse of the ideal of marriage.  Perhaps the bickering Adam and Lilith of legend is closer to the reality, but it’s a cynical view.

Some have claimed that Lilith was “left out” of the Bible; which is rather like complaining that Rudolph was “left out” of the poem “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.”  Even though the Lilitu of Sumerian myth existed before the writing of Genesis, she did not become associated with Adam until much, much later.

Some feminists have tried to rehabilitate Lilith, claiming that she was originally a goddess of childbirth and fertility, like Ishtar or Isis, who was vilified when patriarchal religions gained ascendancy.  I suppose it’s possible that the name Lilith was once associated with such a deity; but I don’t see that having anything to do with Adam.  And for all Lilith’s assertive independence that we might admire, her portrayal in legend is to my mind more misogynistic than anything in Genesis.

Sadly, we don’t see much of Eve’s character in Genesis.  She gets the spotlight in one story:  the story of her Temptation; and she doesn't come off very well in it.  We don’t really know what she was like apart for her apparent willingness to believe talking snakes, and she quickly recedes into the background. Which is a pity, because I’d like to know more about her.

Brash, ballsy, bad-girl Lilith grabs our attention, but I can’t help but feel that her story diminishes both Eve and Adam.  I guess I prefer to think of Adam and Eve as the First Couple.

And Adam certainly has enough screw-ups to his name without having him be a jerk to his ex on top of everything.