Most people have no clue.
When I rant a rave about the difference between our perverted Western Civilization against that of the Ancient Hebrew, I’m pointing to a really huge shift in thinking. I struggle to get that across, despite the wealth of information about that available in Christian academic literature. However, if I take you farther back along the story line to Abraham’s time and his cultural background in Sumeria, I confess it is so alien, you can scarcely imagine it, unless you’ve studied it yourself.
It’s every bit as murky as Egyptian Civilization. The narrative was in constant flux, and not least because of politics. Every new ruler wanted the mythology changed to support his “divine right” to reign. Everyone knows that the official propaganda was one thing, but what the common man was likely to believe was another entirely. Sadly, we are far more familiar with the official propaganda because the common man had no one to record his thoughts. We do well to catch glimpses in their behavior and hazard a guess as to what it might have signaled.
And then we have to filter all that through the modern political agendas and propaganda, which most assuredly affects academia today. Whole armies of college professors are little more than one big echo chamber for some current political orthodoxy. Here’s the deal: Do your own homework and don’t expect to ever really understand any better than some common fellow in ancient times who couldn’t even spell his own name. What matters is not what you know, but whether you have surrendered to God whatever resources you have and made an honest effort to know what He wants you to know.
Permit me now to offer the results of my own research regarding the vast territory of learning in the Ancient Near East. I am far more familiar with Mesopotamia and European mythology than that of Egypt, but I’ve studied all of it some. For the most part, I’ve studied all of that in the context of how it touched the Hebrew people and the resulting Bible narrative.
Today I want to mention Astarte, the name for a whole range of Canaanite goddesses. In the Bible, it’s pretty much all one thing. In general, she was the patron goddess of ritual prostitutes. That is, if a man in that day and time visited a prostitute at all, it was likely her services were in the name of Astarte. The Canaanites had their own take on her. The associations varied widely across the context. For example, in Moab, there was a period when a significant portion of all females in the nation were obliged to serve her periodically, such as during certain festivals. This is related to Balaam’s teaching King Balak how to subvert the invading Israelites during the Conquest Period.
First, let’s strip away all the cultural meaning for a moment: God’s eternal moral standard is one man and one woman paired for life, exclusive to all others. There was a bit of room to fudge in various Law Covenants, but Jesus nailed it down as to what God had in mind. The underlying principle was that social stability depended on the sanctity of the marriage bed for both partners. No deity has any business asking for you to spread it around just to fund their temple building project. To be honest, the Hebrews were rather unique in one thing: Virtually ever other culture expected men to spread it around and get their rocks off with almost anything. Israel gave wives ownership rights to the husband’s sexual vigor. The Levant was generally surprised when a man of wealth and power did not try to copulate with all and sundry.
Everybody in ancient times knew the Canaanites were the most perverted nasty scumbags when it came to sex. The Romans and Greeks both thought the Canaanites were degradingly perverted by comparison. For the bulk of Israel’s history, their entire experience with the name Astarte reflected this brazen debasement of womanhood. In the Hebrew mind, there could be no harmless female deity, since they were uniformly associated with rejection of the Covenant of Moses.
The Hebrews lumped together names that were linguistically similar, even if the meaning of the names were quite different. So Astarte was the same as Ishtar and Oester in their minds. In the case of historical associations of the name Oester, that’s not far from correct. That is, in terms of how her mythology influenced things in Europe broadly, she represents today the source of Western feminism. However, Ishtar is not unanimously so associated in the minds of people like Abraham. In some cases, she was simply the goddess of the hearth and noble motherhood — an entirely different meaning. Moses would have been familiar with Isis in a similar vein. The names could represent a certain amount of moral decency. Moses finally concluded that there was no other God but Jehovah, but he also knew that was a radical notion.
We are not under Moses. I’m not going to tell you what to believe. You can form associations in your own mind with the symbolism of this or that deity and name. Let me remind you of something Paul wrote regarding the Old Testament: We should be diligent in our own study of the Scripture to rightly divide what parts of Moses apply to us, while realizing that some of it cannot possibly bind us outside of the people, time and place of Ancient Israel. Most especially be careful to recognize that names and labels from that ancient world cannot possibly be nailed down to one precise meaning.
For that matter, there’s plenty of things associated with the name of Christ today in Western Christianity that surely embarrasses Him. If you come from any traditional Christian background, be aware of the broader meanings of pagan mythology. By the same token, if you come from a pagan background, don’t be shocked at the harshness of narrow Hebrew associations for things. We who are spiritual can afford to be indulgent of folks who don’t know what we know.
One of the biggest problems I run into is this knee-jerk reaction that our cultural substrate is the human default. It seems nobody wants to understand that what we have today is an anomaly, an intellectual tradition more radically different from all others than any of the rest are from each other. With this faulty assumption comes a typical Western Christian attitude that the Scripture canon is the compendium of all there is to know about the things it addresses. It was never meant to be that. It was the narrative of one particular nation and reflected what they had to know for their own covenant with God. Some of that narrative trumps all others, but not every bit of it.
So while I have a big objection to introducing Lilith into the Eden narrative because it changes the entire meaning of the story completely, that doesn’t mean every item of external mythology is relentlessly evil. You shall know them by their moral fruit, not so much by their words. Labels are fungible; the moral character of God is not. Our Western heritage has elevated the meaning of “truth” to some self-existent deity equal to our Creator. We tend to think language is objective, too. The folks who gave us the Bible would snicker at such nonsense.
Truth is not objective, but is the Person of God Himself.
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