Middle Eastern religion

Middle Eastern religion, any of the religious beliefs, attitudes, and practices developed in the ancient Middle East (extending geographically from Iran to Egypt and from Anatolia and the Aegean Sea to the Arabian Peninsula and temporally from about 3000 to 330 bc, when Alexander the Great conquered much of the area). They have had an enduring influence on Western civilization. While this article treats only those religions of Middle Eastern antiquity that have not survived to modern times, special attention is given in the introduction to their role as antecedents of the major Western religions (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and Islām), all of which originated in the region. For full treatment of these “inheritors” of the Middle Eastern tradition, including also the surviving Zoroastrianism and Parsiism, see under the names of the individual religions.

General considerations

The ancient Middle East constituted an ecumene. The term ecumene comes from the Greek word oikoumenē, which means the inhabited world and designates a distinct cultural-historical community. The material effects of the commercial and cultural interconnections that permeated the component regions of the ancient Middle Eastern ecumene are richly supplied by archaeological excavations, which provide evidence of the spread of architectural, ceramic, metallurgical, and other products of ancient Middle Eastern man’s industry. Manufacturing and services tended to be monopolized by professional guilds, including religious personnel specializing in sacrifices, oracles, divination, and other kinds of priestcraft. The mobility of such guilds throughout the entire area helps to explain the spread of specific religious ideas and techniques over great distances. Just as guild potters spread ceramic forms and methods, so also guild priests spread their religious concepts and practices from the Indian Ocean to the Aegean Sea, and from the Nile River to Central Asia. The Greek poet Homer, in the Odyssey, noted the mobility of guildsmen, mentioning religious personnel as well as architects, physicians, and minstrels. Guild priests called kohanim were found at ancient Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria as well as in Israel. Moreover, Mycenaean Greek (late Bronze Age) methods of sacrifice are similar to the Hebraic methods, which are preserved in many countries to this day in the traditional techniques of Jewish ritual slaughter.

The “archaeological revolution”

The decipherment of Mesopotamian and Egyptian literatures in the 19th century opened new vistas of ancient Middle Eastern history. Hitherto, scholarly knowledge had been limited to the contents of classical Hebrew, Greek, and Latin literatures. Explorations and excavations in the Middle East yielded not only texts but also an abundance of ancient art objects, artifacts of daily life, and architecture and thus have revolutionized scholarly knowledge of the ancient Middle East, including its religions. A ziggurat excavated at Babylon illustrates the form of the biblical Tower of Babel. The prototype of the biblical story of the Deluge has turned up in the Gilgamesh epic. A fragment (dating from about 1400 bc) of that Babylonian epic has been found at Megiddo in Israel, showing that the Mesopotamian version was current in Palestine before the Hebrews, under Joshua, conquered the land about 1200 bc. A previously little-known people, the Hittites, are, because of archaeological discoveries, now recognized as a major power of antiquity with a rich legacy of religious texts, especially rituals.

The earliest and certainly the most fundamental ancient Middle Eastern civilization—the Sumerian—had vanished without a reference in the literatures of the world. Sumerology is now an important field of investigation. Biblical studies have been revolutionized by the tablets (1400–1200 bc) found from 1929 onward at Ugarit. It has become extremely difficult to keep abreast of the continually growing body of material, and very few scholars today feel secure enough to venture beyond limited areas.

Literary sources of knowledge of ancient Middle Eastern religion

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Classical literature remains an important source for ancient Middle Eastern religion. The Roman historian Livy wrote many descriptions of religious rites of the ancient Middle East. The Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid and Eclogues reflect Egyptian, Semitic, and Anatolian, as well as Greek, antecedents. The Greek biographer Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride (“Concerning Isis and Osiris”) is still the best description of the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris and of the cult of the dead. The Greek satirist Lucian’s De Dea Syra (“Concerning the Syrian Goddess”) is of enduring value for an understanding of Canaanite religion. The writings of Herodotus, the 5th-century-bc Greek historian, remain an indispensable source for the cultural history and religion of the ancient Middle East. And owing to the discovery of texts from Ugarit, the Homeric epic of the Greeks is now firmly linked to Middle Eastern literature.

The Hebrew Bible is still the most important single source for knowledge of the ancient Middle East, reflecting life from Egypt to Iran, and from the Bronze Age beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. There is very little in the Old Testament that does not follow the types of religious literatures in the older Middle East: psalms, hymns, laws, rituals, prophecy, wisdom literature, and other types. Sometimes parts of the Bible are related in detail to specific outside sources. The Egyptian Wisdom of Amenemope, first published in modern times in 1923, for example, parallels Proverbs 22:17–24:22 so closely that it effectively opened up the field of the comparative study of ancient Middle Eastern wisdom literature.

Middle Eastern worldviews and basic religious thought

The concept of the sacred

All of the ancient Middle Eastern people saw the agency of the gods in every aspect of life and nature. Everything on earth was regarded as a reflex of its prototype in the divine or sacred sphere, such as in the biblical description of the creation of man “in the image of God”; God was viewed as the primary reality of the universe, and human beings were seen as the reflection of that reality. In Egypt, Thoth was the scribe in the pantheon. Mortal scribes were viewed as the human reflections of Thoth, and “the beak of the Ibis (i.e., Thoth) is the finger of the Scribe” (Wisdom of Amenemope, ch. XV, 17:7).

The ancient Middle Eastern people believed that the universe resulted from the injecting of order (cosmos) into chaotic primordial beings or matter, followed by divine acts of creation. Genesis 1:1–3 says that when God began to create the heavens and the earth, the “earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” Thus darkness (i.e., evil) was preexistent. Moreover, the deep (tehom in Hebrew) is the same as the primordial dragon called Tiamat (cognate to the Hebrew tehom) in the Babylonian epic of creation. The first act of creation is God’s evoking light (i.e., the forces of good) by fiat. Accordingly, God is not responsible for the forces of evil, which were there before he embarked on the creative process. Proceeding by fiat he separated the water-containing earth from the water-containing heaven, confined the earth’s waters to the bodies of water (leaving the rest as dry land), created the various species of vegetation, the heavenly bodies, the animal kingdom, and finally man, who is to rule over the earth. All this takes six days, after which God rests on the seventh, so that the Sabbath crowns the epic of creation and imposes the obligation to observe the sabbath in keeping with the principle of imitatio Dei (the imitation of God).

The Babylonian creation epic (Enuma elish, “When on High”) states that at first there existed only the male (Apsu) and female (Tiamat) gods of the deep. They raised a family of gods that were so unruly that Apsu resolved to destroy them. Rebellion and chaos ensued. Among the deities was Marduk, the god of Babylon. Since the main version of the epic of creation is the Babylonian, Marduk occupies the role of Creator. (In the Assyrian version, Ashur is important.) Tiamat, who had embarked on a course of destruction, was slain by Marduk, who cut her in two and used her carcass to create the universe. Out of half her body he fashioned the sky containing the heavenly bodies to mark the periods of time. The epic culminates in the glorification of Marduk and the establishment of his order. The Enuma elish was read on the Akitu, or New Year festival, at Babylon, to reestablish order, in accordance with sympathetic transference principles, by reciting Marduk’s creation. The function of the Akitu is thus to rejuvenate society for the new year.

Views of man and society

The lack of hard-and-fast barriers between gods and men left room for hybridizing. The aristocracy, in particular, claimed some divine form of ancestry. Gilgamesh, a mortal king who ruled Uruk in Mesopotamia, was, according to the Gilgamesh epic, born of the goddess Ninsun, even as among the Greeks Achilles was accepted as the son of the goddess Thetis. Sometimes kings claimed to have two divine parents. King Keret, whose epic was found at Ugarit, claimed to be the son of El, the head of the pantheon, and of Asherah, El’s wife. Every Egyptian pharaoh was hailed as “the son of Re” (the sun god). This does not, however, imply the absence of a human father. The concept was one of paternity at two levels; qualitative superiority emanated from the notion of divine paternity, but one’s position in society came from the human husband of one’s mother. In some versions of the myth of Theseus, the Attic hero who succeeded his father Aegeus as king of Athens, his mother, Aethra, was impregnated by the sea god Poseidon while Aegeus slept. In this regard the birth and station of Christ differ only in that Mary was a virgin when she was divinely impregnated. Though the divine component of Christ is due to his divine paternity, his position as king of the Jews comes not from his heavenly Father but from Mary’s husband, Joseph, who was descended from King David (Matthew 1).

In the ancient Middle Eastern worldview, gods could become mortal, and men could become gods. Utnapishtim, the hero of the Babylonian Flood story, was deified together with his wife by the fiat of the great god Enlil: “Hitherto Utnapishtim has been but human; henceforth Utnapishtim and his wife shall be like us gods” (Gilgamesh epic 11:193–194). In the Hebrew Bible, God so loved Enoch (Genesis 5:24) and Elijah (2 Kings 2:11) that he carried them aloft to heaven as immortals. But these were special cases, and in antiquity they set no precedent for common folk. Kings enjoyed deification regularly in Egypt, though in some other traditions only upon dying. The Hittite monarch Hattusilis III refers to his father’s death as “when my father Mursilis became a god” (Apology of Hattusilis, line 22).

From the ancient Middle Eastern point of view, man was created to serve the gods, and he does so in the hope that the gods appreciate it and will reward him for it. The gods need food and drink and depend on men to supply them. After the Flood the biblical Noah won God’s goodwill, for “the Lord smelled the pleasing odor” (Genesis 8:21) of the tasty flesh and fowl offered up to him. Noah was following a long tradition, for Utnapishtim (Gilgamesh epic 11:155–161) had, after the Flood, offered sacrifices and libations to the gods who “crowded like flies” as they “smelled the sweet savor.” Though gods depend on man, man also depends on the gods, and therefore service to the deities must be maintained for the welfare of the state, even as the family and the individual must do what the gods expect of them for domestic and personal welfare.

Everything on earth reflects a divine prototype, and all human affairs are divinely ordered and scrutinized. Gods may even build the cities destined to be their cultic centres and in which they are to reside, at least part of the time. The Greek god Poseidon built the walls of Troy, according to the Iliad (21:446–447). At Ugarit, Baal’s temple was designed and built by Kothar-wa-Hasis, the god of arts and crafts. The Israelite King David gave his son Solomon plans for the Temple drawn up by Yahweh’s (the Lord’s) own hand (1 Chronicles 28:19).

National policy went hand in hand with theology. Ashur was the national deity of Assyria; the kings of Assyria were in theory his chief executive officers. Thus Sennacherib, king of Assyria, in undertaking a military campaign, recorded that he did so not on his own initiative but in conformity with Ashur’s will: “In my second campaign, Ashur my Lord impelled me.” When the Hebrews and Ammonites had a border dispute, Jephthah told the Ammonites: “Will you not possess what Chemosh your god gives you to possess? And all that the Lord our God has dispossessed before us, we will possess” (Judges 11:24). There was no such thing as secular policy in the ancient Middle East.

Since the king was the human agent of the god, he was exalted above other men. In Israel, the king was chosen by God to rule his people. God’s representative was a priest or prophet who consecrated the king by anointing his head with oil. But the king of Israel was not divine, neither while on the throne nor after death.

The divinity of kings evoked certain fictions. By sucking the breasts of goddesses, crown princes imbibed a source of divinity. The baby pharaoh sucking the breasts of Isis (who was perhaps in real life represented by her high priestess) is a common motif in Egyptian art. In Mesopotamia, it was not the usual practice for kings to claim divinity, but now and then it cropped up. Naram-Sin (23rd century bc) prefixed the sign for divinity before his name and was officially a god. The same usage is attested among kings of the 3rd dynasty of Ur (c. 2112 bc–2004 bc).

Views of basic values and ends of human life

The good life was one lived in accord with the regulations of one’s god. In the realm of ethics and morals there was more international uniformity than there was in taboo and ritual. Honesty and kindness were universally recognized as good, theft and murder as bad. Wisdom literature tended to stress the same virtues and to condemn the same vices, regardless of the region and cult. It remained for the prophets of Israel to single out uncompromising virtue as the overriding consideration in the good life required by God. The most important factor in that system was “social justice,” whereby the weak was always protected in conflicts of interest with the strong. This had an important place in what may be called “international religion”—i.e., that governing relations between men from different areas belonging to different cults. That level of religion, called “fear of the gods,” is tested when the strong man confronts the weak. The strong man who injures the weak lacks the fear of the gods; the strong man who helps the weak has the fear of the gods. This was religion transcending all the regional cults, and it came into play when strangers abroad were at the mercy of the local inhabitants. Odysseus in a foreign land wanted to know if the people there feared the gods or were lawless so that no stranger was safe (Odyssey 9:176). Abraham, too, was concerned in Philistia lest the inhabitants might kill him because there was no “fear of God(s)” (Genesis 20:11). Men of all nations and all cults knew that only among god-fearing men was there decency or safety.

There was another common trend in international religion. No matter how polytheistic a cult may have been, it left a place for the god shared by all peoples. Theos, “God” (not merely “a god”), is in Homer; pa netjer, “the God,” occurs in Egyptian exactly like Elohim, “(the) God,” in Hebrew. Nebuchadrezzar II, the 7th–6th-century-bc Babylonian king, made Zedekiah, the Judaean king, swear by Elohim (2 Chronicles 36:13), the God of the universe for Babylonians and Hebrews alike. Similarly, when the Hebrews spoke of truth uttered by Pharaoh Necho, which fell on the deaf ears of the Judaean King Josiah, the text (2 Chronicles 35:21) states that Elohim, “God,” had spoken through the mouth of the pharaoh.

In Egyptian religion (followed by Judaism, Christianity, and Islām), the concept of a happy afterlife depending on one’s ethical and moral record in this world was developed. Vignettes in the various Egyptian books of the dead show the deceased’s heart being weighed against the feather of truth in the balances before the scribe god Thoth, who records the text. When the Bible speaks of God as “who tests the heart and the kidneys” (Psalms 7:9; Jeremiah 11:20 and 20:12) it refers to the same concept.

Myths as the basic mode of religious thought

Myths were developed to account for the cosmos. How did the gods bring heavens, earth, plants, beasts, and human beings into existence? What is the divine origin of human institutions and of the ecumene? What divine process is responsible for prosperity or failure? To explain such basic questions, etiological (origin or causal) myths were developed. For example, the attraction between man and woman (and the consequent institution of marriage) is explained by the myth that primeval man was one creature, subsequently divided into two parts, male and female, which are attracted to one another to regain their pristine unity. Aristophanes expresses this theory of sexual attraction in Plato’s Symposium. Genesis relates the same theory in the familiar myth that a rib, taken out of Adam, was fashioned into Eve; and precisely because woman was taken out of man, man forsakes his father and mother to cleave unto his wife so that they become one flesh.

Myths are often invoked in magic (which, unlike religion, aims at compelling, instead of imploring, the gods). To banish evil from the life of a client, the magician may invoke the cosmic myth whereby the forces of good triumph over the forces of evil. Evil is depicted on a seal of the Akkad period (late 3rd millennium bc) in Mesopotamia as a seven-headed monster whose heads are being successively killed by good anthropomorphic (human-form) beings. At Ugarit, in mythological poems of the late Bronze Age, the good gods Baal and Anath slay the wicked Leviathan of the Seven Heads, providing the precedent for the victory of good over evil. The Hebrews also nurtured this myth whereby God slays the many-headed Leviathan (Psalms 74:14) and will do so again at the end of days, to quell evil and establish good for all eternity (Isaiah 27:1).

Association of religion with the arts and sciences

Religion in the ancient Middle East was associated with both the arts and the sciences, though in the literature of the area it is difficult to disentangle the secular from the sacred. Hymns, at one level, and omen or ritual texts, at another level, are clearly religious. Yet it would be difficult to categorize the Gilgamesh epic of Mesopotamia or the Homeric epics of Greece as definitely either secular or religious. They deal with human events or worldly problems, but the gods are constantly on hand. The same may be said for two Ugaritic epics, the epic of Keret and the epic of Daniel and Aqhat, which date from the late Bronze Age. This also holds for the patriarchal narratives in the biblical book of Genesis about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in which God and his messengers play the same kind of role in human affairs as do the gods in the Homeric or Ugaritic epics.

Religion had close ties with science as well as with literature and art. Astronomy, mathematics, and time reckoning are sciences in which the ancient Middle East made great strides at an early date, long before 3000 bc. Heavenly bodies were at the same time both deities and personified numbers. The planet Venus was the “star” that the Assyrians and Babylonians called Ishtar, which was at the same time both the goddess Ishtar and the deified number 15. The Moon was not only Earth’s satellite but also the lunar deity Sin and the deified number 30. The most perfect number was one, for by advancing from zero to one men believed they proceeded from nonexistence to existence. Moreover, all other whole numbers were regarded as multiples of one, representative of the Creator, the Prime Mover, of the universe. The Egyptians called Re “the one One”; the Babylonians identified the divine “One” with Anu, the god of heaven. When the Hebrew prophet Zechariah (14:9) proclaimed “on that day the Lord will be one and his name One,” he indicated that the Hebrews, like their neighbours, reckoned with sacred numbers and saw in the number one a symbol of the Creator. Biblical monotheism, therefore, has more than one dimension, including not only the monotheistic principle that there is one God and none beside him but also the mathematical principle of the primacy of “one” and its deification as the Prime Mover.

The role of magic

The loftier trends of ancient Middle Eastern religion did not as a rule threaten to eliminate magic. White, or protective, magic was never seriously discouraged. Black, or destructive, magic was frowned on by organized society, regardless of whether the official religion was monotheistic or polytheistic, because black magic makes its victims unfit for functioning productively in society. Section II of the Babylonian king Hammurabi’s (Hammurapi’s) code punishes witchcraft (as well as false accusations of witchcraft) with the death penalty. Moreover, all organized religion tended to oppose magic that circumvented the official clergy. King Saul of Israel had characteristically banned sorcery, driving it underground. Yet when he wanted guidance from the dead prophet Samuel, Saul consulted the Witch of Endor, who was practicing her art illegally (1 Samuel 28:6–25). She was able to call up the spirit of the prophet from the underworld, which, incidentally, illustrates one of the reasons why society opposes spiritualism. The witch, by claiming to bring the greatest authorities of the past onto the current scene, threatens the authority of the establishment.

The Letters to the Dead of pharaonic Egypt were written by living persons to the dead in order to achieve practical results, in keeping with the pragmatic, down-to-earth nature of the ancient Egyptians. It was unquestioningly assumed that the dead continued to exert influence on the living. Difficulties experienced by widows, widowers, and other survivors were attributed to the malevolence or negligence of the ungrateful dead who failed to defend their dear ones in the land of the living.

The letters were most often inscribed on ceramic vessels but were sometimes written on papyrus, linen, or even on a stela. They were deposited in tombs, not necessarily those of the persons addressed. It was believed that all burials were part of one interconnected system and that the mail would be delivered to the deceased addressee as long as it was posted anywhere in this network.

The writers sometimes remind the deceased addressee of the water and offerings they have brought to the tomb. Occasionally they threaten to discontinue such services if the deceased persists in refusing to help them. A frequent grievance is that malevolent persons (often relatives) are defrauding the rightful heirs of the deceased person’s estate. The writer may even vow to take legal action against the dead in the divine court of the West (i.e., of the realm of the dead).

One of the letters, known as the Leiden Papyrus, is particularly interesting because of the light it sheds on Egyptian life as well as on the relations between the living and the dead. The author is a widower who has been in a bad state since his wife’s death. He is convinced that his misfortunes are due to his late wife’s ill will. In the letter he reminds her that he was a model husband and threatens to testify against her in the court of the West. He goes on to say that he was a young and busy officer in the pharaoh’s service at the time he married her. In spite of the pressures of his important duties, he writes, he stood by his wife and did not abandon her. He even made the soldiers under his command defer to her and render service to her. Moreover, he refrained from having affairs with other women. Before his wife’s death he was assigned a mission to the wild south, on which he could not take her. Nevertheless, he provided for all her needs and gave nothing to other women. When she fell ill he engaged a skillful physician who gave her the best possible care. While death was overcoming her, he virtually abstained from eating and drinking for eight months. When he finally returned home to Memphis, he gave her a first-class funeral, complete with a shroud of the finest Upper-Egyptian linen. At the time of the letter, three years have passed since the wife’s death. During this time he has lived alone and remained faithful to his departed wife. Yet in spite of this flawless record, she has been afflicting him and behaving like one who does not know the difference between right and wrong. He has therefore decided to prosecute her. In closing the letter he reaffirms his fidelity, declaring that he has not touched any of the female members of the household.

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