Life's Inanities and Ironies

  Chemosh was the national god of Moab, the people east of the Dead Sea who came from Lot’s line and lived as Israel’s near neighbor and frequent enemy. His name sits on Moab the way the Lord’s name sits on Israel. Numbers calls them “the people of Chemosh” in the same breath that it sings their ruin (Numbers 21:29). Jeremiah later picks up the line: Chemosh shall go forth into captivity with his priests and his princes together, and Moab shall be ashamed of him as Israel was once ashamed of Bethel (Jeremiah 48:7, 13, 46). A national god does not stay in the shrine. He becomes the explanation of the nation’s wins, the excuse for the nation’s losses, and the owner of the nation’s wars. The Moabite Stone, cut for King Mesha in the ninth century before Christ, says this in Moab’s own words. Mesha built a high place for Chemosh because the god had delivered him from all kings and let him look down on his enemies. Omri of Israel had oppressed Moab many days, Mesha writes, because Chemos...

Marduk began as a local god of Babylon, a storm and fertility power, marked on early monuments by a triangular spade. He did not stay local. In the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, the younger gods are terrified of Tiamat, the salt-water chaos. Marduk steps forward with a condition. He will fight if they will make him king, if his word will fix fates, if no other decree will stand against his. They agree. He kills her, splits the carcass, and builds sky and earth from the body. Humanity is fashioned afterward from the blood of a slain rebel god, made so the gods can rest and men can do the labor. Then Marduk is handed fifty names, each one a title taken from some other deity. Babylon shortens the whole claim to one word. Bel. Lord. His temple was Esagila. Beside it rose Etemenanki, the ziggurat called the house of the foundation of heaven and earth. At the New Year festival, the Akitu, the creation story was recited in his court. The king was stripped of his regalia, struck, ...

Molech, also written Molech and Milcom, enters the Bi Molech ble as a name Israel was forbidden to speak over a child. He is called the abomination of the Ammonites. Solomon, old and turned aside by his foreign wives, built him a high place on the hill east of Jerusalem, facing the city of the Lord (1 Kings 11:7). The law had already closed that door. “Thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the Lord” (Leviticus 18:21). The penalty is not a fine. Anyone who gives his seed to Molech is to be put to death. If the people hide their eyes, God says he himself will set his face against that man and against his family, and will cut them off (Leviticus 20:2–5). This is not a private taste. It is a public defilement of the name. The place became as infamous as the god. In the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, south of the city, stood the Tophet. Ahaz burned his son there. Manasseh made his son pass through the fire (2 K...

  Baal means lord. In Canaan he was not one quiet statue in a back room. He was the storm, the rider of the clouds, the god who each year went down to struggle with Mot, death itself, and, if the rites worked, came back with the rain. Without him, the story ran, the fields died. With him, grain, wine, oil, flocks, and children followed. His places were the high hills, open to the sky he was supposed to rule: a stone pillar for the god, a wooden Asherah pole for the goddess beside him, an altar, incense, sometimes a grove. Worship was imitative. Sexual acts at the shrine were meant to wake Baal so the earth would conceive. When the rain came, he received the praise. When it failed, the priests cut themselves, shouted louder, and limped about the altar, which is exactly what Elijah watched from morning until the time of the evening sacrifice (1 Kings 18:26–29). Israel’s besetting sin was not a clean exchange of Yahweh for Baal. It was the blend. Keep the feasts. Keep the name of the ...