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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > February 1990

Sacred Sex, Sacrifice and Death

Understanding a prophetic poem

By Susan Ackerman

Sacred sex, child sacrifice, the cult of the dead—these are the subjects of a powerful, 11-verse poem in Isaiah 57:3–13. Our task will be to understand how the poet makes his points, why he juxtaposes these three seemingly different subjects and what they tell us about the times in which the poet wrote. In the sidebar is my new translation of this poem. It would be well to give it a first reading at this point. Read it again after you have read this article. I hope then you will do so with new eyes. Difficult as this poem […]

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Footnotes

1.

B.C.E. (Before the Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era) are the religiously neutral terms used by scholars, corresponding to B.C. and A.D.

2.

In the Septuagint, an early Greek translation of the Bible, the Hebrew ‘elim is translated into Greek eidola, which means gods, leaving no ambiguity about the sacred nature of the sexual intercourse here.

3.

Dry river beds through which water flows only intermittently when the winter rains come.

4.

See Lawrence E. Stager and Samuel R. Wolff, “Child Sacrifice at Carthage—Religious Rite or Population Control?” BAR 10:01.

5.

As noted above the RSV translates the first line of verse 9 as “you journeyed to Molech…” The Hebrew word wtsry is translated “you journeyed.” However you journeyed to the sacrificial offering with oil” makes little sense. Moreover there is no solid evidence from anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible that the verb sur, supposedly the root of wtsry, means to journey or travel in Hebrew. Nor does sur definitely mean “to journey, travel” in any of the languages cognate to Hebrew. The Septuagint does not translate wtsry as “you journeyed,” nor does the contemporaneous author in the Qumran community who penned the great Isaiah scroll.

Endnotes

1.

On the interpretation of Isaiah 6:13, see Samuel Iwry, “Massebah and Bamah in IQ Isaiah-a 6:13, ” Journal of Biblical Literature 76 (1957), pp. 225–232; also William F. Albright, “The High Place in Ancient Palestine,” Vetus Testamentum Supplement 4 (1956), pp. 254–255.

2.

The words are those of Marvin H. Pope, “Fertility Cults,” Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 2 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1962).

3.

Pope has argued that yad also has this meaning in Song of Songs 5:4. Pope, Song of Songs, Anchor Bible 7c (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), pp. 517–518.

4.

See M. Dietrich, O. Loretz and J. Sanmartin Die keilalphabetischen Texte aus Ugarit: Einschliesslich der keilalphabetischen Texte ausserhalb Ugarits I (Neukirchen-Vluyn:Neukirchener Verlag, 1976), vol 1, text 111, line 3; A. Herder, Corpus des tablettes en cunéiformes alphabétiques découvertes à Ras Shamra-Ugarit de 1929 à 1939 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale; Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1963), text 6, col. 6, lines 44–77.

5.

W.H. Irwin, “ ‘The Smooth Stones of the Wady’? Isaiah 57:6, ” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 29 (4967), pp. 31–40.

6.

The Tabnit inscription, line 8; the Eshmunazor inscription, lines 4–8, 10 and 21; the Deir ‘Alla inscription, Combination II, line 11.

7.

One final wordplay—in verse 13—demonstrates this. There we read: “But whoever takes refuge in me will possess the land, and will inherit my holy mountain.”

The Hebrew word for possess is ynhl; it is a verbal form of the noun nahala, a word that means “possession, property, inheritance.” More specifically, it refers to the ancestral estate of every Israelite, the family homestead. It is, of course, the fertility of the nahala, the family homestead, that is so essential to the well-being of the dead. Surely, then, it is no coincidence that when we look back at verses 5–6, we find a word similar to nahala, nahal, which means valley or wadi, and which is used to refer to the valley as the home of the perished, the dead. Indeed, W.H. Irwin has suggested that nahal may even mean grave in this context. The poet through wordplay is attempting to demonstrate to us precisely the point we made above: the crucial stake that the dead in the valley graveyard (the nahal) have in the fertility of the family inheritance (the nahala).

The wordplay continues. What, according to verse 13, will the living possess? They will possess the land (Hebrew: eres). The eres for the living is the land of their ancestral heritage. For the dead, eres is likewise this ancestral patrimony, but it is also the underworld, for eres can have this meaning in biblical Hebrew. That the living possess and nurture the fertility of the nahala, their eres, guarantees for the dead eternal rest in their nahala, the eres of the underworld. Fertility and death belong together.