An Atheist Explores the Apocrypha Part 16: Talk Like The Qur’an Day. Plus: Statues = Bad (Wisdom of Solomon 11-15)
Wisdom of
Solomon 11-15
Talk Like The Qur’an Day. Plus: Statues = Bad.
Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Apocrypha version).
In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the Old Testament Apocrypha, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.
For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/3aEJ6Q5
For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP
And now:
Wisdom 11
“For a manifest reproof of that commandment, whereby the infants were slain, thou gavest unto them abundance of water by a means which they hoped not for.”
There’s something like the Qur’an in the tone and language of this chapter. Although it begins with a reference to “She”, the Holy Wisdom, it is mainly addressed to God and appears to be an elliptical reference to the Egyptian plagues intermingled with reference to the Exodus – “They went through the wilderness that was not inhabited, and pitched tents in places where there lay no way”. References to things like “a perpetual running river troubled with foul blood” and the slaying of infants mentioned above make me think that this references the Ten Plagues, and possibly in the verse “For these thou didst admonish and try, as a father: but the other, as a severe king, thou didst condemn and punish”, the “other” refers to Pharaoh. It might not, as the prior verses talk of God providing water to the thirsty (the Israelites on Exodus?) but also those who complained the most. The verses could also be read that the water for the thirsty is actually a metaphor for spiritual refreshment, the text is interestingly vague on the matter.
And it’s some of these verses that are pretty Qur’anic in tone – “For when they were tried albeit but in mercy chastised, they knew how the ungodly were judged in wrath and tormented, thirsting in another manner than the just”, as well as “For when they heard by their own punishments the other to be benefited, they had some feeling of the Lord”. It’s that counterpoint between punishment and reward, couched in slightly understated terms – “benefit” and “chastised”.
Beyond that, God punishes wrongdoers with “vile beasts”, as a punishment for worshipping “serpents void of reason”, idolatry in other words. Following on from talk of river of blood and the death of children makes one think of the plagues of locusts and frogs, but the text speaks of lions and bears (bringing to mind Elisha, and The Wizard of Oz, oh my), and also “unknown wild beasts, full of rage, newly created, breathing out either a fiery vapour, or filthy scents of scattered smoke, or shooting horrible sparkles out of their eyes”. And I don’t recall any magical beasts mentioned in Exodus.
The last few verses are also Qur’an-like in their effusive praise of God, how “the whole world before thee is as a little grain of the balance, yea, as a drop of the morning dew that falleth down upon the earth” and “how could any thing have endured, if it had not been thy will? or been preserved, if not called by thee?” We’ve turned from Wisdom to God Himself, and the text makes it clear who is really in charge of everything, despite earlier claims to power-sharing between God and Wisdom.
Wisdom 12
“For it was thy will to destroy by the hands of our fathers both those old inhabitants of thy holy land”
This chapter is all about God’s righteous punishment of the unrighteous. As such, it really doesn’t sound like the Solomonic writings we’ve seen before, which tend to veer towards an unfair universe where the wicked sometimes go unpunished and the good die young (to which the Biblical conclusion seems to be that they ways of God are understandable only to God).
And so, here, we see the Canaanites maligned for “doing most odious works of witchcrafts, and wicked sacrifices” and as “merciless murderers of children, and devourers of man's flesh, and the feasts of blood”. Maybe they were, possibly they weren’t. History, as ever, is written by the victors.
I don’t, to be honest, have much to say about this chapter. It claims that God inflicted punishnment on the Caananites “little by little”, presumably an apologetic for there not being an immediate end to their culture, if it was so wicked (especially if one compares it to the apparent pre-Flood civilisation or Sodom and Gommorah, both of which were destroyed in quick and dramatic fashion). Not so the Canaanites, where God apparently needed to use the Israelites as a weapon against them.
Nobody, according to the author, can gainsay God. There are no other gods (at least, not those that can speak against Yahweh), and “Neither shall king or tyrant be able to set his face against thee for any whom thou hast punished”. There are later hints that what the people punished by God called “gods” were just empty vessels – idols, I presume based on other Biblical context.
Wisdom 13
“Surely vain are all men by nature, who are ignorant of God, and could not out of the good things that are seen know him that is: neither by considering the works did they acknowledge the workmaster”
The intent here is obvious, with the supposed god or idol made from a deformed off-cut, good for nothing else, turned into a gaudy statue that needs to be fixed to the wall because it’s unable to stand itself – it lacks any inherent power.
So idols are nasty pointless things, but the author also speaks of the polytheists who “deemed either fire, or wind, or the swift air, or the circle of the stars, or the violent water, or the lights of heaven, to be the gods which govern the world” because they delighted in their power and beauty. In this, the author says, they are not to be blamed because they were seeking that which is greater than themselves. But they stopped short, not seeing that all of these natural phenomena were not gods in themselves, but merely natural creations of God – “if they were astonished at their power and virtue, let them understand by them, how much mightier he is that made them”.
This amuses me somewhat because, to me, believing in a Creator is as much falling short of the truth as belief in polytheistic gods falls short of monotheism. Yes, you’re looking for reasons for things to be. The polytheist says “wind exists because of the wind god”, the monotheist says “wind exists because of God”, the scientist says “wind exists because of non-regular heating of the atmosphere by the sun due to axial tilt of the earth, coupled with the Coriolis effect creating atmospheric movement, with effects such as anabatic/katabatic or onshore/offshore winds caused by local geography.”
Wisdom 14
“Therefore even upon the idols of the Gentiles shall there be a visitation: because in the creature of God they are become an abomination, and stumblingblocks to the souls of men, and a snare to the feet of the unwise.”
Here the author has a go at idols and idolators in a lengthy diatribe. Sailors setting out to sea are depicted as putting their faith in weak wood, but the reason that they survive or not is due to God, with a reference to Noah’s Ark (“For in the old time also, when the proud giants perished, the hope of the world governed by thy hand escaped in a weak vessel, and left to all ages a seed of generation”). This is, however, “righteous” work, unlike using the talents of construction to build idols.
There’s a little (dubious) history of how idols came to be – “a father afflicted with untimely mourning, when he hath made an image of his child soon taken away, now honoured him as a god, which was then a dead man, and delivered to those that were under him ceremonies and sacrifices”. From this mourning ritual came the construction of statues dedicated to kings, which were then worshipped as gods (they weren’t, really. The statue was a cultic focus but it was the king that was worshipped). And then the sculptors got too good, “willing to please one in authority, forced all his skill to make the resemblance of the best fashion” and the statues too realistic and “so the multitude, allured by the grace of the work, took him now for a god, which a little before was but honoured”.
Because of this (apparently), people end up getting up to all sorts of immoral behaviour – “they slew their children in sacrifices, or used secret ceremonies, or made revellings of strange rites; They kept neither lives nor marriages any longer undefiled: but either one slew another traiterously, or grieved him by adultery. So that there reigned in all men without exception blood, manslaughter, theft, and dissimulation, corruption, unfaithfulness, tumults, perjury, Disquieting of good men, forgetfulness of good turns, defiling of souls, changing of kind, disorder in marriages, adultery, and shameless uncleanness.”
Well. And all because of some statues. I believe this book is actually quite late, and so it’s possible that the pagan idols being referenced here are Graeco-Roman ones, because the old Baalim worshippers seemed to be more focussed on sacred groves and “high places”. Possibly it refers to Mesopotamian or Egyptian gods and kings though, these would fit also.
Wisdom 15
“For the potter, tempering soft earth, fashioneth every vessel with much labour for our service: yea, of the same clay he maketh both the vessels that serve for clean uses, and likewise also all such as serve to the contrary: but what is the use of either sort, the potter himself is the judge.”
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, this being the Bible, but there’s a very sanctimonious judgemental style to this chapter.
It starts by declaring how much better the author and other worshippers of an ineffable God are compared to idol worshippers because “neither did the mischievous invention of men deceive us, nor an image spotted with divers colours, the painter's fruitless labour”. So yah. We’re so much better than youuuuu.
It goes on to denigrate the work of artisans that create idols, or possibly anything that may be taken as an idol; “And employing his labours lewdly, he maketh a vain god of the same clay, even he which a little before was made of earth himself” and as a consequence “His heart is ashes, his hope is more vile than earth, and his life of less value than clay”.
Charming. But this is more due to the idolatry itself, and not “knowing God” (“he knew not his Maker, and him that inspired into him an active soul, and breathed in a living spirit”), rendering the life of the faithless to be in effect worthless because they don’t see the thing that gives them worth. I’ve seen this line of argument from apologists. Doesn’t work. But then I guess the author of Wisdom had never heard of existentialism.
In the last couple of verses the chapter says (of the idolators) that “they worshipped those beasts also that are most hateful” and also says of these “beasts” that “Neither are they beautiful, so much as to be desired in respect of beasts”. I’m assuming animal or part-animal gods, otherwise it looks like the author here is having a go at animals that aren’t nice and fluffy, which I cannot agree with.
Talk Like The Qur’an Day. Plus: Statues = Bad.
Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Apocrypha version).
In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the Old Testament Apocrypha, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.
For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/3aEJ6Q5
For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP
And now:
Wisdom 11
“For a manifest reproof of that commandment, whereby the infants were slain, thou gavest unto them abundance of water by a means which they hoped not for.”
There’s something like the Qur’an in the tone and language of this chapter. Although it begins with a reference to “She”, the Holy Wisdom, it is mainly addressed to God and appears to be an elliptical reference to the Egyptian plagues intermingled with reference to the Exodus – “They went through the wilderness that was not inhabited, and pitched tents in places where there lay no way”. References to things like “a perpetual running river troubled with foul blood” and the slaying of infants mentioned above make me think that this references the Ten Plagues, and possibly in the verse “For these thou didst admonish and try, as a father: but the other, as a severe king, thou didst condemn and punish”, the “other” refers to Pharaoh. It might not, as the prior verses talk of God providing water to the thirsty (the Israelites on Exodus?) but also those who complained the most. The verses could also be read that the water for the thirsty is actually a metaphor for spiritual refreshment, the text is interestingly vague on the matter.
And it’s some of these verses that are pretty Qur’anic in tone – “For when they were tried albeit but in mercy chastised, they knew how the ungodly were judged in wrath and tormented, thirsting in another manner than the just”, as well as “For when they heard by their own punishments the other to be benefited, they had some feeling of the Lord”. It’s that counterpoint between punishment and reward, couched in slightly understated terms – “benefit” and “chastised”.
Beyond that, God punishes wrongdoers with “vile beasts”, as a punishment for worshipping “serpents void of reason”, idolatry in other words. Following on from talk of river of blood and the death of children makes one think of the plagues of locusts and frogs, but the text speaks of lions and bears (bringing to mind Elisha, and The Wizard of Oz, oh my), and also “unknown wild beasts, full of rage, newly created, breathing out either a fiery vapour, or filthy scents of scattered smoke, or shooting horrible sparkles out of their eyes”. And I don’t recall any magical beasts mentioned in Exodus.
The last few verses are also Qur’an-like in their effusive praise of God, how “the whole world before thee is as a little grain of the balance, yea, as a drop of the morning dew that falleth down upon the earth” and “how could any thing have endured, if it had not been thy will? or been preserved, if not called by thee?” We’ve turned from Wisdom to God Himself, and the text makes it clear who is really in charge of everything, despite earlier claims to power-sharing between God and Wisdom.
Wisdom 12
“For it was thy will to destroy by the hands of our fathers both those old inhabitants of thy holy land”
This chapter is all about God’s righteous punishment of the unrighteous. As such, it really doesn’t sound like the Solomonic writings we’ve seen before, which tend to veer towards an unfair universe where the wicked sometimes go unpunished and the good die young (to which the Biblical conclusion seems to be that they ways of God are understandable only to God).
And so, here, we see the Canaanites maligned for “doing most odious works of witchcrafts, and wicked sacrifices” and as “merciless murderers of children, and devourers of man's flesh, and the feasts of blood”. Maybe they were, possibly they weren’t. History, as ever, is written by the victors.
I don’t, to be honest, have much to say about this chapter. It claims that God inflicted punishnment on the Caananites “little by little”, presumably an apologetic for there not being an immediate end to their culture, if it was so wicked (especially if one compares it to the apparent pre-Flood civilisation or Sodom and Gommorah, both of which were destroyed in quick and dramatic fashion). Not so the Canaanites, where God apparently needed to use the Israelites as a weapon against them.
Nobody, according to the author, can gainsay God. There are no other gods (at least, not those that can speak against Yahweh), and “Neither shall king or tyrant be able to set his face against thee for any whom thou hast punished”. There are later hints that what the people punished by God called “gods” were just empty vessels – idols, I presume based on other Biblical context.
Wisdom 13
“Surely vain are all men by nature, who are ignorant of God, and could not out of the good things that are seen know him that is: neither by considering the works did they acknowledge the workmaster”
The author considers polytheists and idolators,
speaking of a carpenter who “hath sawn
down a tree meet for the purpose, and taken off all the bark skilfully round
about, and hath wrought it handsomely, and made a vessel thereof fit for the
service of man's life” and uses the off-cuts of wood to construct a
figurine, “being a crooked piece of wood,
and full of knots, hath carved it diligently, when he had nothing else to do,
and formed it by the skill of his understanding, and fashioned it to the image
of a man or made it like some vile beast”, painted it red and fixed it in
an alcove in his house.
The intent here is obvious, with the supposed god or idol made from a deformed off-cut, good for nothing else, turned into a gaudy statue that needs to be fixed to the wall because it’s unable to stand itself – it lacks any inherent power.
So idols are nasty pointless things, but the author also speaks of the polytheists who “deemed either fire, or wind, or the swift air, or the circle of the stars, or the violent water, or the lights of heaven, to be the gods which govern the world” because they delighted in their power and beauty. In this, the author says, they are not to be blamed because they were seeking that which is greater than themselves. But they stopped short, not seeing that all of these natural phenomena were not gods in themselves, but merely natural creations of God – “if they were astonished at their power and virtue, let them understand by them, how much mightier he is that made them”.
This amuses me somewhat because, to me, believing in a Creator is as much falling short of the truth as belief in polytheistic gods falls short of monotheism. Yes, you’re looking for reasons for things to be. The polytheist says “wind exists because of the wind god”, the monotheist says “wind exists because of God”, the scientist says “wind exists because of non-regular heating of the atmosphere by the sun due to axial tilt of the earth, coupled with the Coriolis effect creating atmospheric movement, with effects such as anabatic/katabatic or onshore/offshore winds caused by local geography.”
Wisdom 14
“Therefore even upon the idols of the Gentiles shall there be a visitation: because in the creature of God they are become an abomination, and stumblingblocks to the souls of men, and a snare to the feet of the unwise.”
Here the author has a go at idols and idolators in a lengthy diatribe. Sailors setting out to sea are depicted as putting their faith in weak wood, but the reason that they survive or not is due to God, with a reference to Noah’s Ark (“For in the old time also, when the proud giants perished, the hope of the world governed by thy hand escaped in a weak vessel, and left to all ages a seed of generation”). This is, however, “righteous” work, unlike using the talents of construction to build idols.
There’s a little (dubious) history of how idols came to be – “a father afflicted with untimely mourning, when he hath made an image of his child soon taken away, now honoured him as a god, which was then a dead man, and delivered to those that were under him ceremonies and sacrifices”. From this mourning ritual came the construction of statues dedicated to kings, which were then worshipped as gods (they weren’t, really. The statue was a cultic focus but it was the king that was worshipped). And then the sculptors got too good, “willing to please one in authority, forced all his skill to make the resemblance of the best fashion” and the statues too realistic and “so the multitude, allured by the grace of the work, took him now for a god, which a little before was but honoured”.
Because of this (apparently), people end up getting up to all sorts of immoral behaviour – “they slew their children in sacrifices, or used secret ceremonies, or made revellings of strange rites; They kept neither lives nor marriages any longer undefiled: but either one slew another traiterously, or grieved him by adultery. So that there reigned in all men without exception blood, manslaughter, theft, and dissimulation, corruption, unfaithfulness, tumults, perjury, Disquieting of good men, forgetfulness of good turns, defiling of souls, changing of kind, disorder in marriages, adultery, and shameless uncleanness.”
Well. And all because of some statues. I believe this book is actually quite late, and so it’s possible that the pagan idols being referenced here are Graeco-Roman ones, because the old Baalim worshippers seemed to be more focussed on sacred groves and “high places”. Possibly it refers to Mesopotamian or Egyptian gods and kings though, these would fit also.
Wisdom 15
“For the potter, tempering soft earth, fashioneth every vessel with much labour for our service: yea, of the same clay he maketh both the vessels that serve for clean uses, and likewise also all such as serve to the contrary: but what is the use of either sort, the potter himself is the judge.”
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, this being the Bible, but there’s a very sanctimonious judgemental style to this chapter.
It starts by declaring how much better the author and other worshippers of an ineffable God are compared to idol worshippers because “neither did the mischievous invention of men deceive us, nor an image spotted with divers colours, the painter's fruitless labour”. So yah. We’re so much better than youuuuu.
It goes on to denigrate the work of artisans that create idols, or possibly anything that may be taken as an idol; “And employing his labours lewdly, he maketh a vain god of the same clay, even he which a little before was made of earth himself” and as a consequence “His heart is ashes, his hope is more vile than earth, and his life of less value than clay”.
Charming. But this is more due to the idolatry itself, and not “knowing God” (“he knew not his Maker, and him that inspired into him an active soul, and breathed in a living spirit”), rendering the life of the faithless to be in effect worthless because they don’t see the thing that gives them worth. I’ve seen this line of argument from apologists. Doesn’t work. But then I guess the author of Wisdom had never heard of existentialism.
In the last couple of verses the chapter says (of the idolators) that “they worshipped those beasts also that are most hateful” and also says of these “beasts” that “Neither are they beautiful, so much as to be desired in respect of beasts”. I’m assuming animal or part-animal gods, otherwise it looks like the author here is having a go at animals that aren’t nice and fluffy, which I cannot agree with.
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