Worshiping Idols

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The Hebrew prophet scholars call Second Isaiah loved to make fun of idols. He scathingly mocks them in as powerful a parody as anything in the Bible. But does he really understand the idols he condemns? I grant the literary artistry and effective polemic of this prophet, who is believed to have written the second section of the Book of Isaiah (chapters 40–55) in about 540 B.C.E., while exiled in Babylon. But would an Assyrian or Babylonian worshiper give us a different, perhaps more favorable, not to say evenhanded, picture?

“To whom then will you liken God?” the prophet asks. “An idol?” (Isaiah 40:18–19). In the following chapters, Second Isaiah ridicules both idols and the deluded men who think they can fashion gods out of wood and metal (see sidebar to this article). For Isaiah, these “deities” produced by human hands are as powerless and corruptible as the materials from which they are constructed.

The prophet Jeremiah shares Second Isaiah’s contempt for idols:

For it is the work of a craftsman’s hands.

He cuts down a tree in the forest with an ax,

He adorns it with silver and gold,

He fastens it with nails and hammer,

So that it does not totter.

They [idols] are like a scarecrow in a cucumber patch,

They cannot speak.

They have to be carried,

For they cannot walk.

Be not afraid of them, for they can do no harm;

Nor is it in them to do any good.

(Jeremiah 10:3–5)

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We get an entirely different understanding of cult images, however, from an astonishing passage in a seventh-century B.C.E. inscription of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon. In 689 B.C.E., Esarhaddon’s father, Sennacherib, had destroyed Babylonian cult images, what the Bible would call idols. Seeking to restore them, Esarhaddon prays to the supreme Babylonian deity, Marduk. In his prayer, Esarhaddon seems remarkably aware of the kinds of objections raised by Isaiah:

Whose right is it, O great gods, to create gods and goddesses in a place where man dare not trespass? This task of refurbishing (the statues), which you have constantly been allotting to me (by oracle), is difficult! Is it the right of deaf and blind human beings who are ignorant of themselves and remain in ignorance throughout their lives? The making of (images of) the gods and goddesses is your right, it is in your hands; so I beseech you, create (the gods), and in your exalted holy of holies may what you yourselves have in your heart be brought about in accordance with your unalterable word. Endow the skilled craftsmen whom you ordered to complete this task with as high an understanding as Ea, their creator [god]. Teach them skills by your exalted word; make all their handiwork succeed through the craft of Ninshiku [another name for Ea].¹

Esarhaddon is praying that the gods will imbue his manmade cult statues with divinity. But what did it mean to be divine?

Mesopotamian gods were believed to possess corporeality: They share with us size, age, gender, attractiveness and even, in rare cases, 032mortality. Of course, this is also true to some extent of the Israelite God Yahweh. In the Bible, God possesses a similar corporeality: He walks in the garden (Genesis 3:8), molds clay with his hands (Genesis 2:7), smells sacrificed incense (Genesis 8:21), grows angry and snorts through his nose (Psalm 18:8). But the Mesopotamian gods also need nourishment, drink, clothing, jewelry, cleansing, travel, music, perfume and sex.

This anthropomorphism is also implied by some of the oldest Sumerian names (dating earlier than 2300 B.C.E.) and by biblical names: The Sumerian personal name dingir-a-mu means “The god is my father,” and dingir-sûesû means “The god is my brother.”² In the Bible, Ahijah means “Yahweh is my brother” (1 Samuel 14:18–19).

But Mesopotamian deities also achieve a certain degree of transcendence. For example, the god Marduk’s appearance is described in the great Babylonian creation epic, the EnuÆma Elish, as “impossible to understand, difficult to visualize”—a fact made clear in the description of Marduk that follows: “Four were his eyes, four were his ears, when his lips moved, fire blazed forth. His four ears are enormous.”³ In a hymn to the warrior and farmer god Ninurta, the god’s body parts are described in cosmic terms: “Your eyes O lord, are Enlil [one of the most important gods in the Pantheon] and Ninlil [wife of Enlil]…your eyebrows are the corona of the sun…your mouth’s shape, O Lord, is the evening star.” Texts like these, in the words of one scholar, “emphasize the ineffable nature of the divine by offering descriptions that are only barely conceivable.”⁴

Mesopotamian cult statues often had wooden or bitumen cores (meÆsu-wood is called the “flesh of the gods” in the Erra Epic). They were plated with gold 033and silver, and clothed in costly robes with gold and silver spangles. A modern equivalent might be the famous Roman Catholic statue of Jesus known as the Infant of Prague.⁵

How did the Mesopotamians regard the relationship between the cult image and the deity? Answers vary. One scholar says that “the Mesopotamians believed that the deity was present in the cult statue.”⁶ Another says that the cult statue was only “to remind” the worshiper of the deity’s presence, much as an icon does in an Orthodox Christian Church.⁷

In several papers I have used the analogy of the “eucharistic presence” in Roman Catholic theology. To Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians, the bread and wine during the Eucharist ritual become the real presence of the divine Jesus, while still subsisting under the appearance of bread and wine. During Mass, the priest states that the eucharistic bread, “which earth has given and human hands have made,” will become “the bread of life.”⁸ That is, when the eucharistic prayer is recited and (in Orthodox tradition) the Holy Spirit invoked, the bread and wine “made by human hands” become the real presence of Jesus. In Roman Catholic theology this is known as transubstantiation. A variation on this doctrine known as consubstantiation holds that the body and blood of Christ coexist in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

Of course, these scholastic subtleties would never have occurred to Babylonian priests. But the priests did have a ritual called Miµs PiÆ (pronounced “miss pee”), the Washing (or Opening) of the Mouth, by which cult images were consecrated. During the ceremony, the 034wooden statue was transformed into a divine image that either represented or was the deity.⁹ Until this happened the statue was just a piece of wood, a dead product of human artisans: “This statue cannot smell incense, drink water, or eat food without the Opening of the Mouth!” we read in an ancient Mesopotamian account of the ritual (see sidebar to this article).¹⁰

In truth, however, even though the unconsecrated statue was “just a piece of wood,” it did have a disposition toward the divine. That is because it is made of sacred materials. According to the ancient account of the ritual, the statue was carved from “bright wood, (like) the spring of a stream, which is born in the pure Heavens, [it] spreads out on the clean earth. [Its] branches grow up to Heaven. Enki [the Sumerian equivalent of Akkadian Ea, craft god of the underworld] makes [its] root drink up pure water from the Underworld.”¹¹ The wood of which the statue is composed thus spans three levels—heaven, earth and underworld.

Moreover, the craftsmen who form the statue are specially chosen and installed. King Esarhaddon in his inscription notes that the “great gods” themselves had to designate the workers. Thus, he employed diviners to “determine the experts who should do the work.”¹² Credit for the statue does not go to these earthly craftsmen, however, but to the craft deity Ea. The account of the Miµs PiÆ ritual notes that the image was sculpted in the temple’s biÆt mummi, the craft atelier, which is probably the same place King Esarhaddon refers to in his prayers as “a place where man dare not trespass.”

The sacredness of the materials and the craftsmen is made apparent in the following passage from the 035eighth-century B.C.E. theological masterpiece, the Erra Epic. The god Marduk’s statue has been damaged, and the plague god Erra is questioning the statue’s ability to be restored:

Where is the wood, flesh of gods,

suitable for the lord of the universe,

The sacred tree, splendid stripling, perfect for lordship,

Whose roots thrust down a hundred leagues

through the waters of the vast ocean to

the depths of hell,

Whose crown brushed Anu’s heaven on high?

…

Where is Ninildum, great carpenter of my

supreme divinity,

Wielder of the blinding hatchet, who knows

that tool,

Who makes it shine like the day

and puts its subjection at my feet?

Where is Kusig-banda, fashioner of god

and man,

whose hands are sacred?¹³

Thus, in a very real sense the statue anticipates the divine from the moment of its construction. It becomes divine only at the Miµs PiÆ ceremony, which is intended to sever any ties between the statue and the earthly realm and to install the statue-god in its divine abode.

The ritual is a two-day affair. On day one, which takes place along the riverbank, the god-statue is first distanced from the human craftsmen who worked on it in the temple workshop. The workers’ tools are sewn up in the body of a sheep and consigned to the river, the domain of the craft-god Ea. On the second day of the Miµs PiÆ, the craftsmen’s hands are bound with red yarn and symbolically cut off with a wooden tamarisk sword while each swears, “I did not make you, rather the craft-god made you.” The cult image is thus ritually established as acheiropoietos, Greek for “not made by (human) hands.”

The Miµs PiÆ rite uses language of gestation and birth to re-create the cult statue as a god. The very title of the ritual, the Washing of the Mouth, may allude to the action of the midwife who cleanses and opens a newborn’s breathing passage.

The creation of the god is a supreme act of synergy between the heavens and the earth (or the underworld). The statue has been produced by earthly and godly artisans. However, as the Miµs PiÆ ritual makes plain, the earthly craftsmen play a theologically diminished role. Despite the work of human artisans on the cult image, it was ultimately not a product of human craft (pace Second Isaiah), but was born of the gods.

Coda: Second Isaiah mocks the craftsmen for using corruptible materials. But according to Assyrian tradition, if a statue’s appearance becomes corrupt, the deity can temporarily separate from the image. In the Erra Epic, the face of Marduk’s statue is covered with soot and its clothing deteriorates. When this happens it also happens to Marduk himself. The conniving god Erra asks Marduk: “What happened to your attire, to the insignia of your lordship, magnificent as 036the stars of the sky? It has been dirtied! What happened to the crown of your lordship, which made Ehalanki as bright as Etemenanki? Its surface is shrouded over!”¹⁴ Erra reassures Marduk that Erra will rule in his stead while Marduk leaves his statue during its restoration.

Although the deity is “really present” in the statue, the statue is not coterminous with the deity. Indeed, several divine statues of the same deity could coexist within a city or even within the same temple. Many statues of Marduk, each with a different name, were housed in the Esagila temple in Babylon.

A god could even abandon his or her cult image altogether. Esarhaddon describes the gods fleeing their statues like birds: “The gods and the goddesses who dwelt therein flew off like birds.”¹⁵

The nexus between statue and deity could also be maliciously disrupted. When the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668–627 B.C.E.) destroyed the temples and statues of Elamite Susa, the gods became like disembodied spirits: “I desecrated the sanctuaries of Elam and counted their gods and goddesses as powerless ghosts.”¹⁶ Here is an almost Aristotelian dualism of body and soul, so that the destruction of the body (that is, the cult statue) leaves the deity a disembodied zaqiqu, a ghost. In the fourth century C.E., the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (361–363 C.E.) similarly explained the relationship between a deity and its statue as soul to body.

As an Israelite living in exile in Babylon in the mid-sixth century B.C.E., Second Isaiah would have had personal knowledge of Babylonian cult images and their dedication ceremonies. Isaiah’s familiarity with the rite may be reflected in his use of Akkadian loan words to describe the statues’ wood (erenu in Isaiah 44:14 and musukkannu in Isaiah 40:20). But in the end, Isaiah was not a historian of religion. He was not trying to provide a complete and accurate account of Mesopotamian beliefs. His goal was to counter the apparent supremacy of the Babylonian creator deity Marduk over Yahweh. Marduk had destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem. Isaiah hoped to restore Yahweh to his rightful position by dismissing Marduk and his pantheon and showing them to be powerless, as wooden and lifeless as their statues.

As the Assyriologist H.W.F. Saggs once noted, an eloquent Babylonian might have made a similar case against Yahweh. Saggs wrote,

The Babylonian might have pointed out that for several centuries Yahweh, after emerging from the obscurity of a remote desert, had lived inside, or at the least in close association with, a decorated chest made of acacia wood. He was of rather uncertain temper, but in the main could be kept good-humoured by regular offerings of the smoke of burnt beef fat, of which he was inordinately fond. In contrast, Marduk was a spiritual being, creator of heaven and earth, and so transcendent that it was impossible to see or to comprehend him.¹⁷

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The Babylonian, of course, would thus demonstrate as limited an understanding of Israelite worship as Isaiah had of Mesopotamian beliefs. As the historian of religion Mircea Eliade once stressed, if God could assume human nature, he or she could certainly assume the form of wood or stone.¹⁸

Jews and Christians have long struggled with the concept of divine immanence or presence in the universe. The uncommonly eloquent cuneiform texts that are now coming to light suggest the Mesopotamians once wrestled with the same theological issues.

30 The Hebrew prophet scholars call Second Isaiah loved to make fun of idols. He scathingly mocks them in as powerful a parody as anything in the Bible. But does he really understand the idols he condemns? I grant the literary artistry and effective polemic of this prophet, who is believed to have written the second section of the Book of Isaiah (chapters 40–55) in about 540 B.C.E., while exiled in Babylon. But would an Assyrian or Babylonian worshiper give us a different, perhaps more favorable, not to say evenhanded, picture? “To whom then will you liken God?” the […]