An Atheist Explores the Apocrypha Part 29: Dear Babylonians, Your Gods Are Rubbish. Love Jeremiah xx (Letter of Jeremiah 1)
Letter of
Jeremiah 1
Welcome to the next instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts
(Apocrypha version).
For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/3aEJ6Q5
Letter of
Jeremiah 1
Dear Babylonians, Your Gods Are Rubbish. Love Jeremiah xx.
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.
“A
copy of an epistle, which Jeremy sent unto them which were to be led captives
into Babylon by the king of the Babylonians, to certify them, as it was
commanded him of God.”
This is mostly a lengthy diatribe against the idols of
the Babylonians, after first stating that the Israelites have ended up in
captivity because of their sins against God and that they will stay so for “seven generations”. As I recall, it was
seventy years. Is a generation ten years? My understanding is that it’s
generalised as 25 years, so, three generations. Evidently this wasn’t written
after the Exile like some other books.
Anyway, most of this book is a warning to the
Israelites not to get taken in by the gold and silver of the statues of
Babylonian gods, since this merely shows that they aren’t proper gods. They
can’t get up if they are knocked over, the priests have to lock the temples so
that the gold and silver doesn’t get stolen (the gods are unable to defend
themselves), they need to be wheeled around on carts, they need to be dusted, “Upon their bodies and heads sit bats,
swallows, and birds, and the cats also”, and so on. Possibly the verse “They wipe their faces because of the dust of
the temple, when there is much upon them” refers to the mis pi ritual where the mouth (and eyes
and ears) of an idol were ritually cleaned so that the god could partake of the
offerings given to it.
(explained here by Dr. Josh of the excellent Digital
Hammurabi channel -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcG5y720hwg)
Which raises an interesting point. I would, generally,
argue that idols and images of gods aren’t necessarily thought by the
worshippers to be the god itself, but in Mesopotamian religions it seems that
generally, yes, the worshippers thought that the god inhabited the statue. So
in some senses the writer of the Letter of Jeremiah (whom I don’t think is the
same as the writer of the prophecy book of Jeremiah since the language is
completely different) has a point.
But in many other ways, however, he doesn’t. For one
thing his attitude towards ritual cleanliness is particular to his religion – “Menstruous women and women in childbed eat
their sacrifices: by these things ye may know that they are no gods: fear them
not”. Ugh. It’s that weird female biology again. We all know that makes God
feel icky. “And the priests sit in their
temples, having their clothes rent, and their heads and beards shaven, and
nothing upon their heads”. How many times do we see Old Testament prophets
rending their clothing and putting on mourning? Or railing against the finery
of the priests?
“They can save
no man from death, neither deliver the weak from the mighty”. As much as
the author might want to claim it, neither can his God. Nor can He demonstrably
“restore a blind man to his sight, nor
help any man in his distress”. And it’s amusing that the author complains
of the Babylonians that “How then cannot
men perceive that they be no gods, which can neither save themselves from war,
nor from plague?” when at the beginning he has to excuse the conquest of
the Israelites as having been a punishment from God (not to mention that
various plagues “sent by God” as punishment as well). In other words, there are
plenty of instances of Yahweh bringing war and plague onto His own people, but
not so many of Him saving them. At the very least if you analyse the
occurrences I’d be willing to bet that it would be indistinguishable from what
you would expect from pure chance.
The chapter then pretty much repeats itself, going on
about gods made by carpenters and silversmiths who can’t escape when the temple
catches fire, although there’s a fun verse that “For as a scarecrow in a garden of cucumbers keepeth nothing: so are
their gods of wood, and laid over with silver and gold”. I like the
specificity of cucumbers, nice touch. Also that the gods “are like to a white thorn in an orchard, that every bird sitteth upon”.
Is the thorn white because it’s covered in bird droppings? That fits with the
earlier verse about birds and cats sitting on them. The same verse also
includes the strange wording “as also to
a dead body, that is east into the dark”. I’m suspecting that this is a
typo and it’s meant to read “cast into
the dark”, because otherwise, makes no sense. Unless there’s something
about laying dead bodies in an east-west position?
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