ancient Judaism Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Scholars Have Discovered How to Pronounce the True Name of God

Today, most Jews, Christians, and Muslims simply call their god “God,” but it is fairly common knowledge that the texts of the Hebrew Bible refer to the God of Israel by his proper name, which, in Hebrew, is written as four letters: יהוה (YHWH), known as the tetragrammaton. At the time when the texts of the Hebrew Bible were written, the people of Israel and Judah regularly used this name to refer to their god. By the first century CE, however, a taboo forbade ordinary Jews from saying the proper name of God aloud. Instead, when a Jewish person was reading the Hebrew Bible and came across this name, they would substitute either the word אֲדֹנָי (ăḏonāi), which means “my Lord,” or הַשֵּׁם (ha-shem), which means “the name.” For this reason, English translations of the Hebrew Bible traditionally render the proper name of God as “the LORD.”

At the time of the Hebrew Bible’s composition, the written forms of the Hebrew and Aramaic languages recorded only consonants, not vowels. Much later, between the seventh and tenth centuries CE, the compilers of the standard text of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Masoretic Text, added symbols known as “vowel points” to indicate the vowels of most words, but, when the tetragrammaton occurred in the text, they gave it the vowel points of ăḏonāi, because that was the word a reader was supposed to substitute for it, and did not preserve the vowels of the name itself. For this reason, most Christian seminaries and Jewish rabbinical schools teach that no one today knows how the name of God was pronounced.

This makes for a good story, and it was actually true at one time. For roughly the past century now, though, scholars have actually had compelling evidence that the ancient peoples of Israel and Judah pronounced the proper name of their god Yahweh. There is slight ambiguity about the exact vowel qualities, but not much. In this post, I will explain the ancient evidence supporting this scholarly reconstruction. To do this, I will have to use some linguistics jargon, but I will do my best to explain the meanings of all the terms I use.

Why Do Ancient Egyptian Gods Have Animal Heads???

Modern people have often found ancient Egyptian depictions of their gods perplexing and strange, since many of them bear the heads or other features of animals. If you’ve ever wondered why the Egyptians did this, you’re certainly not the first. Even in ancient times, Greek, Roman, and early Christian writers mocked their Egyptian contemporaries for their animal-headed gods (even while some Greeks and Romans adopted them). Later, nineteenth and early twentieth-century western writers claimed the Egyptians’ animal-headed gods as evidence of their culture’s supposed primitivity and inferiority to Greece and Rome.

In reality, Egypt is far from the only ancient culture in which people depicted deities with mixed human and animal features. Therianthropomorphic (i.e., human-animal hybrid) deities are fairly common in the ancient Middle East, North Africa, and southern Europe, including even in ancient Greece and Rome. The Egyptians were no strangers to fully anthropomorphic deities either. By exploring the context and history of Egypt’s animal-headed deities, this post will show that, far from indicating lack of cultural sophistication, they actually display ancient Egypt’s creativity and cultural dynamism.

Did Any Non-Israelite Ancient Cultures Have Their Own “Bibles”?

The Bible is one of the most influential collections of texts in human history. Its influence goes far beyond the Jewish and Christian religious traditions, which regard different versions of it as sacred; it has fundamentally shaped how most people living in the west in the twenty-first century, even those who of us who are not religiously Christian or Jewish, think about religion in general. Because the Hebrew and Christian Bibles are so central to modern Judaism and Christianity respectively, many people have wondered whether any non-Israelite cultures of the ancient world had similar collections of sacred texts.

As it happens, a large number of ancient Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman texts have survived that were relevant in various ways to those peoples’ religious practices, including some texts that people considered to be “divinely inspired” in some sense and some that bear significant parallels to Biblical literature. Nonetheless, the Hebrew Bible bears some remarkable features that set it apart from other sacred writings that existed in the ancient world.

Don’t Blame “Paganism” for the United States’ Problems

On December 25th, 2023, The Atlantic published an op-ed by David Wolpe, a prominent American rabbi, titled “The Return of the Pagans.” In the op-ed, Wolpe asserts that both the political left and right in the United States have embraced fundamentally “pagan” ideas about the world (by which he means ideas derived from and characteristic of the traditional non-monotheistic religions of the ancient Mediterranean, particularly Greece and Rome) and that this supposed “pagan” influence is the cause of many of the problems that the United States faces today.

For those who don’t know, I’m a graduate student in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies and my main research focus is ancient Greek religion. Given this interest, I was quite intrigued to see an article published in a major news outlet with a title proclaiming that “paganism” has returned. Sadly, I soon found that Wolpe’s idea of “paganism” is a wildly inaccurate caricature that has more to do with nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophies than with the non-monotheistic religions of the ancient Mediterranean world. The op-ed got under my skin, so I decided to let it furnish an opportunity to educate interested readers about what ancient polytheistic religions were like—and, just as importantly, what they weren’t like.

Most Memorable Opening Lines in Ancient Literature

Today, if one looks around on the internet, one can find all kinds of lists that purport to present the most memorable opening lines “of all time,” but, invariably, these opening lines are always from famous works of English literature written within the past two centuries. I have therefore decided to compile my own list of most memorable opening lines—but only for works of ancient literature.

I have chosen which lines to include in this post based on how impactful and memorable they are, not on how famous they are. As a result, many of the works I have included on this list are not well known to the general public. Meanwhile, I have omitted the opening lines of certain works that are extremely famous, but not especially memorable in their own right, such as the opening lines of Plato’s Republic and Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, which are famous because the works they come from are famous, not because they are especially memorable. I have chosen opening lines from works produced in a range of ancient cultures, including ancient Mesopotamia, the Levant, India, Greece, and Rome, and have chosen openings that I find memorable for a variety of different reasons.

The Dumbest Fictional Law in Ancient Literature

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I haven’t posted nearly as much in the past few months as I have previously. Part of the reason for this is because I’m taking several courses this semester with workloads that take up a large proportion of my time. One of these courses is NEJS 113a (“Biblical Aramaic in Context”). The first five weeks of the course were a fast-paced introduction to the grammar of Aramaic, a West Semitic language closely related to Hebrew that was the most widely spoken vernacular language in Mesopotamia and the Levant from around the seventh century BCE to around the third century CE and was also the primary language of administration and public life in the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Currently, we are reading the Book of Daniel chapters 3, 6, and 7 in the original Aramaic and, later in the semester, we will be reading Aramaic texts from inscriptions and papyri.

In doing my readings for this course, I’ve been reminded of what I have long thought is possibly the most poorly-conceived law in all of ancient literature: a supposed Achaemenid law that held that no one—not even the king himself—could ever revoke or alter any decree that had been made in his name for any reason under any circumstances. The law is definitely made up; there’s no attestation of it anywhere in any Persian or Greek sources. Nonetheless, it manages to cause all kinds of trouble as a plot device the Books of Esther and Daniel.

What Do Angels Really Look Like According to the Bible?

There is a popular meme that has been going around on the internet for several years now claiming that “Biblically accurate angels” are actually terrifying, Lovecraftian, otherworldly beings who have all kinds of body parts from different animals and are covered all over in eyes. It’s a fun meme. Unfortunately, as an ancient historian, I’m the sort of person who ruins everything fun, so I’m here to tell you that the “Biblically accurate angel” meme isn’t really “Biblically accurate.”

In both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, beings who are described as angels are always either expressly described as looking like male humans or assumed to look like male humans. Although some texts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament do indeed describe a variety of heavenly beings with bizarre and frightening appearances, these beings are only described in a few places, were not originally viewed as angels, and are never described as angels in any canonical Biblical text.

Men Have Been Finding Weird and Unsettling Ways to Describe Women’s Breasts Since Ancient Times

It is common knowledge that cisgender straight and bisexual men frequently possess an overriding fascination with women’s breasts—to such an extent that they often devote more attention to a woman’s breasts than to any other aspect of her person. As a result of this fixation, some male writers have a habit of throwing in references to or descriptions of breasts in places where they are contextually inappropriate. Sometimes they also describe breasts using goofy or perplexing figurative language.

These sorts of references and descriptions have become a subject of widespread memes and satire. There is even an entire subreddit called r/menwritingwomen, which is dedicated to examples of male authors writing about women in incompetent (and often comical) ways. A significant proportion of the examples discussed in the subreddit are breast references and its satirical headline reads: “She breasted boobily down the stairs…..”

One thing some people may not realize is that gynophilic men have been doing this exact same thing for literally thousands of years. In this post, I will discuss three different examples of goofy, weird, unsettling, or just downright creepy descriptions of women’s breasts in texts from the ancient Mediterranean world in three different languages: Biblical Hebrew, Ancient Greek, and Latin.

Yes, King David Raped Bathsheba

The legend of how King David saw Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, bathing naked, lusted after her, sent messengers to bring her to the royal palace, had sex with her, impregnated her, and then had her husband effectively murdered to prevent him from finding out is one of the most famous stories in the Hebrew Bible—but also one of the most routinely misunderstood.

Many Christian readers have interpreted Bathsheba as a depraved and nefarious seductress who deliberately bathed in a location where she knew David would be watching in order to seduce him, caused him to lust after her, and gleefully betrayed her husband to have sex with the king. There is, however, absolutely nothing in the Biblical text to support this interpretation. In fact, in the text itself, all the evidence strongly indicates that David spies on her without her knowledge or consent and then rapes her. Bathsheba, far from being a malicious temptress, is actually an innocent rape victim who has been wrongfully victim-blamed for far too long.

How Did People in the Ancient Mediterranean World View Abortion?

The United States Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision in the landmark abortion case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health at some point before the end of the present term, which will most likely end sometime in June or early July of this year. An initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that has been obtained by Politico indicates that the majority of the justices have already privately decided to completely overturn the previous Supreme Court rulings in the cases of Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which held that the U.S. Constitution protects the inherent right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion until the point when the fetus becomes viable outside the womb, which is generally agreed to occur at around twenty-three or twenty-four weeks gestational age.

In this new case, the court is expected to rule that the U.S. Constitution does not protect any right of a pregnant person to choose to have an abortion at any point during pregnancy. Although the verdict is not final and the justices still have time to change their minds, it is unlikely at this point that they will do so. This will be the first (although possibly not the last) time in living memory that the Supreme Court has completely revoked something that it previously deemed a major fundamental right.

Given the current situation, I thought it would be useful to write a post about attitudes toward abortion in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world. This post will cover attitudes among peoples of the ancient Near East, Greeks, Romans, and early Christians and will give some insight about how and why ancient Christians came to disapprove of abortion in the first place.