Divine Scents

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A remarkable series of children’s books called Smelly Old History explains the basics of life in the ancient world with an unusual twist. They include scratch-and-sniff panels, which is what makes the books so appealing to kids. For example, in Mouldy Mummies, we learn that Egyptian homes suffered from rats; just scratch for a whiff of the premiere rat repellant: cat’s grease mixed with gazelle dung. But perhaps you’d prefer to smell the roses on Cleopatra’s barge? Roman Aromas offers this sweet scent along with the pungent odors of Celtic sweat and stuffed thrush soaked in fermented fish sauce.¹

As far as I know, there is no comparable scratch-and-sniff book about ancient Israel. Perhaps this is not surprising. The sense of smell does not, at first glance (whiff?), seem to feature largely in the Bible, nor were the authors of the Bible interested in the commonplace smells of ancient Israel. A great recent book, Life in Biblical Israel,² redresses this lacuna somewhat. For example, a section called “A Day in Micah’s Household” reveals that most Israelites shared their houses with their livestock, whose aromas drifted up to the second floor where everyone slept; overnight, animals and humans would relieve themselves on the stable straw in the courtyard that needed mucking out each day. Household members shaped the resulting midden into dung cakes, which provided an “excellent fuel” for cooking and heating. Mingling with the less than savory smells of excrement, sweat and bad breath in “Micah’s” house were the enticing aromas of cracked wheat and flat bread.

In the biblical text, however, the primary senses through which God and humans connect seem to be hearing and seeing. [The prophets are regularly guided by the voice of God; Moses is given a rare glimpse of the divine backside (Exodus 33:21–23)] However, in two familiar episodes—one in the Old Testament-Hebrew Bible and one in the New Testament—the sense of smell steps dramatically onto center stage.

The first is Genesis 8:21, in which Yahweh “smelled the pleasing odor” of Noah’s sacrifice and promised never again to curse the earth.

The second example occurs in the Gospel of John’s story of the Raising of Lazarus, in which Lazarus’s sister Martha warns Jesus, “already there is a stench because he has been dead four days” (John 11:39). Martha’s remark is intended to make clear that Lazarus is definitely (and definitively) dead. (In the photo above, Duccio shows an onlooker covering his nose to fend off the emanations from Lazarus’s putrifying green corpse.)

Together these two episodes relate to an important and often overlooked aspect of Israelite religious belief: In ancient Israel, the sense of smell, like the senses of sight and hearing, provided an important link to God. And it wasn’t only the Israelites’ sense of smell, but God’s sense of scents, too!

As our two examples suggest, there was a great difference between good smells, which please God, and bad, which don’t.

God’s delight in Noah’s sweet-smelling sacrifice is neither aberrant nor merely symbolic but an accurate reflection of essential Israelite belief and practice. The main form of worship in ancient Israel was animal sacrifice. This consisted of killing an animal on an elevated altar, draining its blood into the ground and burning the flesh (for example in the twice-daily Olah sacrifice in the Temple). The part of the sacrifice that “reached” God and connected the worshiper to the divine was the savory odor that rose up in the smoke.³ The sweet-smelling incense burning on the golden altar before the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple similarly ascended pleasingly up to God’s nostrils. On the human side, the smoke (the “cloud”) from the sacrifice and from the incense indicated God’s presence (Leviticus 16:2). A good smell is thus an indication of Israelite devotion to 061God and a sign of God’s presence.

Conversely, the stench of decay characterized that which was not holy, that which was wholly apart from God. Death and decay constituted the diametric reverse of life and fertility, God’s gifts. In other words, where there is putrefaction, the connection to God is broken. That is why the stinking maggoty weekday manna in Exodus 16:20 served as a sign to Israel that they had compromised their relationship with God. (Compare this with the acceptable holy Sabbath day manna, which cannot rot [Exodus 16:31].)

In the idiom of biblical Hebrew, when God is angry at humans, God’s nose (‘ap ) gets “hot” because misbehaving humans “stink” (the Hebrew ba’ash is usually translated “become odious”). Therefore in Isaiah 5:25 we read: “Yahweh’s nose burned hot against his people” (see also Exodus 4:14). Only God’s nose gets “hot” in the Bible, but plenty of people “stink” (usually translated “become odious to”; see Genesis 34:30; 1 Samuel 27:12). What do we do when we encounter a stench? Like Duccio’s onlooker, we act to avoid it. God does the same. In the Bible, God draws away from humans whose breaches of the law make them stink. In Psalm 38, the speaker’s broken relationship with God is described in terms of stinking wounds that “foul and fester” and unsound flesh.

With all this in mind, the Raising of Lazarus takes on an additional nuance. When the divine man Jesus draws near Lazarus’ rotting corpse, either the divine must retreat from the stench—clearly not an option in John’s gospel—or the stench must retreat from the divine: that is, death must turn into life.

A remarkable series of children’s books called Smelly Old History explains the basics of life in the ancient world with an unusual twist. They include scratch-and-sniff panels, which is what makes the books so appealing to kids. For example, in Mouldy Mummies, we learn that Egyptian homes suffered from rats; just scratch for a whiff of the premiere rat repellant: cat’s grease mixed with gazelle dung. But perhaps you’d prefer to smell the roses on Cleopatra’s barge? Roman Aromas offers this sweet scent along with the pungent odors of Celtic sweat and stuffed thrush soaked in fermented fish sauce.1 […]