Lingering Questions about God’s Providence (1): Destroying Illicit Cult Places

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Assyria, Babylon, Hezekiah, Israel, Josiah, Judah, Persia

The Bible reliably informs us that all of the great empires of antiquity – such as the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, and the Persian Empire – only really existed to do God’s bidding. And what God’s bidding typically involved was giving Israel, or Judah, a comprehensive pants-down spanking. As a historical explanation, what such an account lacks in socio-economic realism it certainly makes up for in bold imagination.

But one thing, especially, puzzles me: why would God bother getting Kings Hezekiah and Josiah to destroy all the illicit cult places in the land, given that the Assyrian and Babylonian armies which he was controlling were doing just that, at much the same time?

“[King Hezekiah] removed the high places, broke down the pillars, and cut down the sacred pole … “

” … In the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah, King Sennacherib of Assyria came up against all the fortified cities of Judah and captured them.”

(2 Kings 18:4, 13)

“[King Josiah] … commanded [the priests] to bring out of the temple of Yahweh all the vessels made for Baal, for Asherah, and for all the host of heaven; he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron, and carried their ashes to Bethel. He deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places at the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem; those also who made offerings to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations, and all the host of the heavens … He brought all the priests out of the towns of Judah, and defiled the high places where the priests had made offerings, from Geba to Beer-sheba; he broke down the high places of the gates that were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua the governor of the city, which were on the left at the gate of the city … The king defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem … He broke the pillars in pieces, cut down the sacred poles, and covered the sites with human bones. Moreover, the altar at Bethel … he pulled down that altar along with the high place. … Moreover, Josiah removed all the shrines of the high places that were in the towns of Samaria … He slaughtered on the altars all the priests of the high places who were there … “

” … [But 3 years after Josiah’s death and 2 kings later] … Yahweh sent against him bands of the Chaldeans, bands of the Arameans, bands of the Moabites, and bands of the Ammonites; he sent them against Judah to destroy it, according to the word of Yahweh that he spoke by his servants the prophets. Surely this came upon Judah at the command of Yahweh… “

(2 Kings 23:4-20; 24:2-3)

A puzzling divine redundancy? A coincidence that might provoke a more economic and mundane explanation? Well… so it might justifiably appear to our admittedly finite minds.

Purity in Paradise: The Pure and Spiritual do not Excrete

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Artaxerxes, Bruce Lincoln, Cyrus, Mithridates, paradaida, Persia, Religion Empire & Torture, torture, two troughs, Zarathustrianism

The Zarathustrian Persian King Artaxerxes II imagined he could detect the moral turpitude of his enemies by the condition of their defecation. When it was discovered that Mithridates had killed a member of the royal family (Cyrus the Younger) in 401 BCE, Artaxerxes ordered his death by an unusually cruel means:

“Taking two troughs that were made to fit closely together, they laid Mithradates on his back inside one of them. Then they fit the other on top so that the man’s head, feet and hands stuck out while it covered the rest of his body. They gave him food, pricking his eyes to force him when he resisted. They also poured milk mixed with honey into his mouth, and they poured it over his face. Then they turned his eyes constantly toward the sun, and a multitude of flies settled down, covering his face. Meanwhile, inside, the man did what it is necessary for people to do when they have drunk and eaten. Worms and maggots boiled up from the decay and putrefaction of his excrement, and these ate away his body, boring into his interior. When he was dead and the top was removed, people saw his flesh all eaten away and swarms of such animals surrounding his vitals, eating them and leeching at them. Thus Mithridates was gradually destroyed over seventeen days, until he finally died.”

(Artaxerxes XVI.2-4)

According to Bruce Lincoln’s recent interpretation of the ordeal, for the spectators of Mithradates’ rotting and worm-infested flesh, his condition would be evidence of moral corruption. The king’s men had fed him only milk and honey, associated with goodness, light, happiness, and peace. Likewise, the land which was promised in the Bible to Israel is also described as “a land of milk and honey,” indicating its bounteous goodness and paradaisical quality. So, the troughs in which Mithridates was confined represented a reverse of the Persian conception of Paradise. Both the troughs and the walled gardens known as paradaida (Paradise) separated inner and outer spaces, erecting boundaries between corrupt and pure zones. But in the case of the troughs, the king and his men were standing guiltless outside in the light, while the accused was inside in the darkness. The trough ordeal served to prove Mithridates’ guilt, for only liars would transform pure milk and honey into impure maggots. It demonstrated that Mithridates’ body was inhabited by demons, for a pure body (as for example the king’s own body) ought not to produce such things.

Mithridates “vermin-laden excrement thus bore graphic witness to the corruption (moral and physical) of his body and the demons resident therein.”

(Bruce Lincoln, Religion, Empire & Torture: The Case of Achaemenian Persia, with a Postscript on Abu Ghraib. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2007: 93.)

Lincoln perceives two phases in the history of the Persian Empire. First comes an initial attempt to justify an empire centred in Persia as a divinely commanded plan to rebuild Paradise. Then, comes a stage of declining credibility, in which the empire has to work harder and harder to convince its people that its repugnant actions are pure and that its enemies are on the side of deceit and immorality. As Lincoln notes, the longer there exists an empire which defends a dualistic conception of good versus evil, a theology of election or manifest destiny and a sense of soteriological mission to the great unwashed in order to justify imperial violence, the greater the conflict which is produced “between sacred discourse and bestial practice.” The discourse gets stretched to the limit, issues get blurred, appeals to divine purpose increase, scapegoats get flogged, devotion to tradition gets reasserted stronger than ever, and the slightest criticism gets slandered or eliminated – “all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.”

And one day, Lincoln concludes, it all ends up like this:

“Sooner or later, the day comes when the king is driven to brandish his critic’s shit as evidence that the man was a demon, the king himself presumably being shitless and divine.”