Angels, Demons, Leviathan and Other Monsters in the Bible

Our glossary of New and Old Testament creatures from God’s Monsters by Esther Hamori reveals some shocking surprises. Did angels actually have wings? How are cherubs described? You won’t believe the answers!

Those who take the Bible literally must believe in monsters — the Old Testament especially is filled with them. And in almost every case, they’re working for God.

“The biblical world is full of monsters,” writes Esther J. Hamori in her 2023 book, God’s Monsters: Vengeful Spirits, Deadly Angels, Hybrid Creatures and Divine Hitmen of the Bible. “Uncanny creatures lurk in every direction, from the hybrid monsters surrounding God in heaven to the stunning array of peculiar beings touching down on earth, and from giants in the land of milk and honey to Leviathan swimming beneath the seas. Most have been tamed by time and tradition.”

When you dig into the stories of the Old Testament, a horrifying revelation takes place. This God isn’t a loving god; in fact, he’s a major dick. Time after time, God unleashes his monsters to slaughter humans — and even his Chosen People aren’t safe from his wrath.

“Nowhere in the Bible are angels said to have wings.”

“God is surrounded by bizarre, monstrous creatures, and they commit remarkably violent acts on his command,” Hamori says.

Disclaimer: The findings put forth in this post are those of Hamori, not me. Please don’t kill the messenger. 

New and Old Testament Monsters Guide

Abaddon

What its name means: A word for the abyss or place of destruction (essentially Hell)

What it looks like: He’s not described, though he’s called the Angel of the Abyss.

What it does: He’s the one who brings forth horrific monsters with iron-like locust bodies, human faces, women’s hair, lion’s teeth and scorpion tails during the Apocalypse (Revelation 9:1-11).

angel

“Among the many monstrous creatures in the biblical heavens, angels are the most like us,” Hamori writes. “They’re the most human of monsters, not just in their sometimes-anthropomorphic appearance, but in their characters. They’re the best of it all and the worst, the most benevolent and the most brutal.”

What its name means: From the Greek word for messenger.

What it looks like: Most of the time, angels are described as looking like humans. And keep in mind, Hamori says, that they’re not White; they’d look like the people of the region — that is, Middle Eastern.

One aspect that’s never mentioned? Nowhere in the Bible are angels said to have wings.

They’re shapeshifters, taking other forms now and then. In Daniel 10:5-8, an angel is described as having a body like a gemstone, arms and legs like burnished bronze, a face like lightning and eyes like flaming torches. And the angel who led the Israelites through the desert appeared as a pillar of smoke during the day and a pillar of fire at night.

What it does: Most of the time, angels scare people, even when they come in peace. They tell Mary she’s going to give birth to God’s son, save Hagar and her son, Ishmael, and guard the Israelites during the Exodus. 

But they’re not always so benign. They’re also God’s warriors. One angel slaughters 185,000 Assyrians while they sleep. When Herod Agrippa is greeted like a god by the people, an angel strikes him down. He’s eaten by worms and then dies. “Not the other way around,” Hamori points out (Acts 12: 21-23).

And then there are the angels from the book of Revelation. At the end of the world, they’ll be throwing people into the fires of Hell for eternal punishment, and they’ll unleash hail and fire mixed with blood, throw a fiery mountain into the sea, poison the Earth’s freshwater, darken the sun, moon and stars, and unleash hybrid locust monsters.

See also: The Destroying Angel, the Destroyer

Azazel

What its name means: His name basically means The Goat That Departs.

What it looks like: Not sure

What it does: A goat (i.e., scapegoat) is designated “for Azazel” and carries off the burden of the people’s sins (Leviticus 16:8-10). (Sounds a bit like Jesus, doesn’t it?)

cherub / cherubim (plural)

“Like so many biblical monsters, the cherubim have been tamed over the centuries,” Hamori writes. “Their case is especially severe: They’ve been literally infantilized. Cherubim are imagined now as happy, fat angel babies. To the writers of the Bible, this image would be unrecognizable. They knew cherubim as something far more beastly, and far less friendly.”

What its name means: The Hebrew word is related to an Akkadian term for a type of hybrid monster.

What it looks like: This is where it gets confusing. They’re never clearly described in the Bible, though it’s thought they could be related to other guardian hybrids, like the lamassu of Assyria: winged lions or bulls with human heads.

But then there are the cherubim the prophet Ezekiel saw in a vision: “Their bodies appear humanoid, but they have four wings, straight legs with the hooves of a calf, and under their wings, human hands. Each cherub has four faces: those of a human being, a lion, an ox and an eagle,” Hamori writes. “But when he sees them again later, the four faces are those of a cherub, a human being, a lion and an eagle.”

So what exactly is the face of a cherub? Something indescribable? Or the four faces originally seen? If that sounds too bizarre to even consider, things get even more psychedelic: Their bodies sparkle like bronze, entirely covered with eyes and morphing to become a living chariot to carry God. 

And then they show up in the book of Revelations, which is one batshit crazy hallucination after another. The cherubim here still have four faces (though this time they’re of a lion, calf, human and eagle), and they’re still covered with eyes. But now they have six wings as well as hands, which they use to hold harps and golden bowls “full of the wrath of God” (Revelation 5:8-9; 15:7). 

What it does: They’re God’s bouncers, bodyguards and getaway drivers, Hamori tells us. God stationed cherubim at the gates of Eden to prevent Adam and Eve from reentering paradise. Statues of cherubim are also put to work guarding the Ark of the Covenant, where God resides on earth. (They seem a bit superfluous, since the ark, stolen by the Philistines, destroyed a statue of Dagon, one of the gods of the Old Testament, all by itself.)

As a chariot in Ezekiel’s vision, the cherubim flap their wings, which make a deafening noise. They’re fond of singing hymns and praising God. They also hand over the coals God uses to burn down Jerusalem. 

demon

In the Old Testament, demons are called upon to do some of God’s dirty work — though they’re not nearly as bloodthirsty as angels. “By the New Testament period, demons are definitively associated with Satan and are fully excised from the divine entourage,” Hamori writes. “God has banished his demons.”

What its name means: From Greek, describing an evil or unclean spirit

What it looks like: As vivid as later depictions of demons as hybrid horrors are, they’re glossed over in the Bible.

What it does: “If angels are the most like us, demons are the least,” Hamori writes. “They exist to cause harm. In the Hebrew Bible, they often take the form of plague, pestilence and disease. In the Gospels, an embarrassment of demons causes all manner of illness and disability.”

The Destroyer

What its name means: From a Hebrew word meaning “the Destroyer”

What it looks like: No description in the Bible

What it does: The Destroyer is the angel that murders all of the unprotected firstborn children in Egypt on God’s behalf during the 10th plague.

The Destroying Angel

What its name means: Pretty self-evident

What it looks like: A giant filling the sky, with a massive sword drawn

What it does: Don’t confuse this guy with the Destroyer, though they’re both capable of mass murder. 

giant

What its name means: Giant has an obvious translation, but the ancient Israelites used the name of one group of rivals, the Rephaim, as a generic term for giants.

What it looks like:  The bed of King Og, ruler of the Rephaim, gives us a clue as to their size: It’s 13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide. And the infamous Philistine warrior Goliath came in at over 9.5 feet tall.

What it does: They live in Canaan, a place where the people have been monsterized, turned into supersized cannibals. And so, in turn, they’re described as dehumanized foreigners (never mind that they were actually the indigenous inhabitants) that are “giants to be slain, food to be eaten, and animals to be killed,” Hamori writes.

Leviathan

What its name means: Coming from a Hebrew word, the name means something like the Twisted or Coiled One.

What it looks like: The primordial sea monster’s form is somewhat left to the imagination, though we get this description in Job:

His sneezes flash forth light; his eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn. 
Out of his mouth go flaming torches; sparks of fire escape! 
Out of his nostrils comes smoke, like a basket with bulrushes ablaze.
His breath could kindle coals; flames come out of his mouth. 
In his neck lodges strength; terror dances before him. 
The folds of his flesh cleave together, hard-cast and immovable.
His chest is hard as a rock, hard as the bottom grinding stone.
When he rises up, gods fear! at the crashing, they are beside themselves. (Job 41:18-25)

The beast evolves dramatically in the book of Revelation, becoming a giant red dragon with seven heads.

What it does: “The sea monster is God’s forever foe, fought and slain in days already ancient to the biblical writers but promising to resurface for another round, destined to be slain again in the most distant future,” Hamori writes.

Psalm 104:26 has a different take: It mentions Leviathan, declaring: “whom you formed in order to play with him.” Is this eternal battle with Leviathan just a game to God? 

Job once more has the most poetic descriptions of Leviathan: 

A sword reaching him will not endure, nor spear, dart or javelin.
He thinks of iron as straw, and bronze as rotten wood.
The arrow cannot make him flee; sling-stones become chaff to him. 
Clubs are reckoned as chaff; he laughs at the shaking of javelins. 

His underparts are like the sharpest of potsherds; he crawls like a threshing sledge in the mud.
He makes the deep boil like a cauldron; he makes the sea like a pot of ointment.
Behind him, he leaves a shining wake; one would think the deep to be white-haired. 
He has no equal upon the earth, a created thing without fear. 
He looks upon everything lofty, he is king over all the proud. (Job 41:12-34)

Mavet (aka Death)

What its name means: Death

What it looks like: He has an enormous mouth to feed his rapacious appetite.

What it does: “Mavet has come up through our windows, he has come into our palaces, to exterminate the children from the streets, the young men from the town squares” (Jeremiah 9:21). 

But you know him better as the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse: He’s the last to come, riding a pale horse. His mission? Kill one-quarter of the Earth’s population.

nephilim

What its name means: The word may mean something like “monstrous births.” It has to do with falling and is used to describe fetuses that are “fallen” — that is, miscarried. 

What it looks like: Hybrids who are the offspring of the daughters of men raped by the sons of God (lower-level divine beings, and not angels, Hamori points out). In one mention in Genesis, the nephilim are also described as giants.

What it does: The name is used to describe an ethnic group of “mighty men” from the land of Canaan.

See also: giant

Qetev

What its name means: Scholars aren’t sure and have translated it in a variety of ways, including Destruction or the Sting.

What it looks like: No description provided

What it does: In one story, he’s a destructive force of nature: “a whirlwind of Qetev, like a storm of mighty overflowing water he hurls down to the earth with his hand” (Isaiah 28:2).

Resheph (aka Plague)

What its name means: We’re not sure, though it’s most often translated as Plague.

What it looks like: Outside of the Bible, he’s a god who shoots poisonous flaming arrows.

What it does: He liked to use fire and lightning to kill people at God’s behest.

Satan (aka the Adversary)

What its name means: Satan is the Hebrew word for adversary.

What it looks like: Forget the red skin, horns, cloven hooves and tail. There’s no real description of the adversary in the Bible. 

Adversaries can make themselves invisible, though (just not to donkeys, apparently).

What it does: The prophet Balaam was doing what God asked him to do — and yet he got a sword-wielding angel called a satan sent to murder him. 

Tip: Ride a donkey. Somehow the donkey, not known as the fastest or most agile of beasts, evades the satan’s attack not once but three times. 

It’s in the story of Job that things take a much darker turn. God and the Adversary (now capital A, in his official role as prosecutor in the heavenly court) decide to punish another innocent man, this time to see if he wavers in his faith to God. It’s some sort of sadistic experiment. 

So, the Adversary summarily kills all of Job’s livestock and most of his servants. As if that’s not enough, he then sends a windstorm to blow down a house, which collapses, crushing all 10 of Job’s kids to death. Oh, and then they throw in some torture for good measure. Job’s body is covered with painful boils from head to foot.

seraph / seraphim (plural)

Much more impressive than their snakelike cousins, seraphim are mentioned in a vision the prophet Isaiah has, where he sees the giant form of God sitting on a throne in the Jerusalem Temple. He’s surrounded by seraphim calling out, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Armies!” (Isaiah 6:3).

What its name means:  The Hebrew word suggests burning; essentially these are “burners.”

Keep in mind that “all translation is interpretation,” Hamori writes. “In this case, translators decide that Isaiah’s heavenly seraphim are unrelated to the deadly seraphim-serpents in other texts — and so they leave the Hebrew word seraphim untranslated only in Isaiah 6. Readers then have the impression that these creatures are unconnected.”

What it looks like: They have six wings. In Isaiah’s vision, two cover their faces; two cover their feet (a euphemism for genitals in the Bible); and two are used to fly. They’ve also got humanoid hands and feet, as well the body of a snake.

What it does: Isaiah stupidly mentions that his lips are “unclean” — so a seraph takes a burning coal and shoves it on his mouth. After performing this horrifying act, “the seraph explains the logic of this assault,” Hamori writes. “It’s to get rid of Isaiah’s sin.”

seraph-serpent / seraphim-serpents (plural)

During the Exodus, the wandering Jews couldn’t catch a break. After they had suffered from dehydration and disease, God sicced a swarm of poisonous snakes called seraphim-serpents on them (Numbers 21:4-9).

What its name means: Again, the Hebrew word roughly translates to “burners.”

What it looks like: This is a much less intense version of the heavenly seraphim. It’s a deadly snake with a bite of burning poison.

What it does: Kill numerous people with its lethal venom. Tip: To cure those who haven’t yet succumbed to the agonizing pain, create a seraph (Moses made his out of bronze), put it on a pole — and, in a bit of sympathetic magic, when the inflicted look upon it, they’ll be miraculously cured. 

spirit

What its name means: The Hebrew word for spirit is ruah, which also means wind or breath.

What it looks like: In 1 Kings, a “spirit — which you’d think by definition, should be disembodied — comes forward from the group and stands before God,” Hamori writes. “It’s only when the spirit crosses into the human realm that it shapeshifts, as if disintegrating into myriad invisible particles that can enter the mouths of four hundred prophets.”

What it does: In 1 Samuel, we learn why Saul gets rejected by God. He’s told to slaughter every last Amalekite — but Saul has the gaul to spare one single life: that of the king. For this, he’s abandoned by God, who chooses David instead. The merciful Saul is punished, “tormented by an evil spirit that ravages his mind, sending him into fits of frenzied violence,” Hamori writes.

When they’re not driving people insane, God’s evil spirits also sow discord, as one does with Sennacherib: “I will put a spirit in him and he will hear a rumor, and he will return to his land and I will make him fall by the sword of his own hand,” God says in 2 Kings 19:6-7. (Sure enough, the king heads home — and is promptly murdered by his sons.)

Is God the Real Monster?

Esther J. Hamori’s book God's Monsters challenges the sanitized interpretations of biblical creatures and forces us to confront a more terrifying and complex vision of God. 

“We’ve seen this God do bad, bad things,” Hamori writes. “He rarely does his own dirty work, instead deploying an array of monstrous creatures to get the job done, and always just the right monster for the moment: seraphim to threaten and intimidate people into submission, cherubim to guard the gateways and periodically to burn down portions of the earth and usher in divine destroyers, the Adversary to condemn and torture the innocent, spirits to gaslight, demons to destroy, and for a good old-fashioned slaying, perhaps an angel (if the angels aren’t too busy dragging people to hell or murdering masses of the earth’s population.”

The God of the Old Testament has long been understood to be a more angry, vengeful and even petty deity, especially when contrasted with the more compassionate figure of the New Testament. But the harsher aspects of God’s character have been whitewashed over time, likely because they make people uncomfortable. Hamori presents God not as a benevolent figure but one who commands a terrifying and violent entourage to enforce his will. In many ways, that makes him the biggest monster of all. –Wally

Descriptions of God’s Body in the Bible

From his massive member to a horned head, there are plenty of references to God having a corporal body in the Old Testament. Some shocking findings from “God: An Anatomy.”

Perhaps the most famous depiction of God is this detail of the Creation of Adam, painted by Michelangelo on ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

What does God look like? 

Most people nowadays probably fall into two camps: those who say God is incorporeal, an entity without form — and those who imagine him as Michelangelo painted him, a powerful if elderly man with a flowing white beard and a penchant for long white robes.  

Those who think of God as bodiless haven’t paid enough attention to their Old Testament, though. In fact, the first clue is right there…in the beginning.

“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). 

That means God is humanlike — or should I say, humans are godlike?

It’s not so strange that God had a body. All his fellow gods did, from his competition in the Middle East to the pantheons of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. 

Add up all the descriptions of God in the Old Testament, and you get a red-skinned, powerfully built older man.

So what does he look like? Take all the Old Testament mentions of God, add them together and here’s what you get, according to Francesca Stavrakopoulou in her 2022 book God: An Anatomy:

A supersized, human-shaped body with male features and shining, ruddy-red skin, tinged with the smell of rainclouds and incense. His broad legs suggest he was accustomed not only to straining, leaping and marching, but sitting and standing resolutely stiff, posing like a ceremonial statue. His biceps bulge. His forearms are hard as iron. There are faint indentations around his big toes, left by thonged sandals. Beneath his toenails there are traces of human blood, as though he has been trampling on broken bodies, while the remnants of fragrant grass around his ankles suggest strolls through a verdant garden. The slightly lighter tone of the skin on his thighs indicates he was most often clothed, at least down to his knees, if not his ankles. Minute fibers of fine fabric — a costly linen and wool mix — indicate that his clothing was similar to the vestments of high-status priests. His penis is long, thick and carefully circumcised; his testicles are heavy with semen. His stomach is swollen with spiced meat, bread, beer and wine. The chambers of his heart are deep and wide. His fingers are stained with an expensive ink, and there are remnants of clay under his fingernails. On his arms are faint scars left from the grazes of giant fish-scales, and the crooks of his elbows, slightly sticky with a salty oil, bear the imprint of swaddling bands, suggesting he has cradled newborn babies. Traces of the tannery fluid used by hide-workers wind in a stripe around his left arm and down to the palm of his hand — a residual substance left by a long leather tefillin strap.

His thick hair is oiled with a sweet-smelling ointment, and shows evidence of careful styling: the hair-shafts suggest it was once separated and curled into thick ropes, while slight marks on the back of his scalp indicate it has been partly pinned beneath some sort of headgear, and his forehead is marked with the faint impression of a tight band of metal. Although his beard reaches beneath his chin, it has been neatly groomed, while his mustache and eyebrows are thick and tidy. The hair on his head and face shimmers — first dark with blue hues, like lapis lazuli, then white and bright, like fresh snow. And one glance, he has the beard of his aged father, the ancient Levantine god El; in another, it is the stylized beard of a youthful warrior, like the deity Baal. His ears are prominent, and their lobes are pierced. His eyes are thickly lined with kohl. His nose is long, its nostrils broad — the scent of burnt animal flesh and fragrant incense lingers inside them. His lips are full and fleshy, his mouth large and wide. It is at once the mouth of a devourer and a lover. His teeth are strong and sharp, his tongue is red hot. His saliva is charged with a blistering heat. The back of his throat is a vast, airy chamber, once humming with life. Below it is an opening of a cavernous gullet. Shadowy scraps of another powerful being, the dusty underworld king, cling to its walls.

The depictions of Yahweh in the Bible are disparate, but some common themes emerge.

Quite a picture, eh? All these details appear in various books of the Old Testament. Here’s a sampling.

God liked to walk in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve … before they dared to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Walking and Talking With God

Later in Genesis, Adam and Eve have eaten of the forbidden fruit and hide from God when they hear him “walking in the garden.”

Enoch, Noah and Abraham go for walks with God as well — as did Moses. Sure, God showed up as a burning bush when they first met, but after that, “the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11). 

Yahweh first showed himself as a burning bush to Moses, but after a while they became good friends and would often take walks together.

Holy Shit! God’s Ground Rules 

With all that walking, God had to be careful he didn’t step in something unpleasant. 

When the Israelites flee Egypt en route to the Promised Land during the Exodus, God declares, “You shall have a designated area outside the camp to which you shall go; with your utensils you shall have a trowel; when you relieve yourself outside, you shall dig a  hole with it and then cover up your excrement, because Yahweh your God walks in your camp” (Deuteronomy 23:12-14). 

Apparently his omniscience doesn’t extend to knowing how to avoid excrement. It’s heartening to know that God steps in shit just like we do. 

The prophet Ezekiel saw God in a chariot supported by hybrid heavenly creatures.

The Cherubim Chariot 

After the Babylonians destroyed and plundered the Temple, the worshippers of Yahweh surely wondered if their god had also been vanquished. So the book of Ezekiel offers up a scene of Yahweh’s escape. He is seated on his supersized throne, using the Ark of the Covenant as his footstool (!). Cherubim (not the chubby baby angels you’re thinking of but four-winged celestial beings with four faces — that of a man, lion, eagle and cherub) perch upon wheels and bear the throne aloft. 

You didn’t want to be on Yahweh’s bad side; he was prone to violent reactions — including stomping people to death.

God’s Stomping Grounds

But God doesn’t only walk and rest his feet. Sometimes he goes on a murderous rampage. Yahweh marches back from a massacre in the enemy kingdom of Edom: “I trampled down peoples in my anger, I crushed them in my wrath, and I poured out their life blood on the earth,” he tells a sentry in Isaiah 63:6. 

“This is a god who has felt the crunch of bones and skulls under his feet; the warm, wet mulch of human flesh around his ankles; the heart spray of blood on his legs,” Stavrakopoulou writes.

In Isaiah’s vision of God, is that a massive robe filling the Temple — or something more phallic?

God’s Genitals on Display

A couple of prophets even boasted of seeing God’s oversized genitals — and yes, this is all in the Bible. Isaiah, in the middle of the 8th century BCE, entered the inner sanctum of the Jerusalem Temple, where he beheld a surprising sight. 

“My eyes have seen the King, Yahweh of Hosts!” the prophet declares in Isaiah 6:1. “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, tall and lofty! His lower extremities filled the temple!”

But the Hebrew word he used for “lower extremities” was shul, which actually means “genitals,” Stavrakopoulou informs us. (It’s worth pointing out that many scholars argue that the word actually means the hem of a robe.)

So Isaiah is saying he saw God naked — and, um, let’s just say he was impressed. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that God’s hung. 

Another prophet, Ezekiel, describes a much stranger encounter: He sees God and focuses on what “looked to be his motnayim” — another Hebrew word for genitals, Stavrakopoulou writes. He looks above and below and sees the rest of the Lord’s body engulfed in flames (Ezekiel 1:27). 

I’m not sure why Ezekiel seems hesitant about if he’s looking at God’s groin or not — perhaps all that fire is blinding him a bit — but heavens knows Isaiah had no doubts about what he was seeing. 

The Ancient Egyptian god Min was usually depicted as having a massive erection.

‘The Imposing Erect Virility’ of the Gods

As shocking as this might seem, depictions and stories of gods having erections were common at the time these Bible books were written. A carving of the Egyptian god Min at Luxor Temple, for example, shows the fertility deity with a massive hard-on as he greets Alexander the Great. 

“In the ancient cultures of southwest Asia [Stavrakopoulou’s non-Western-centric terminology for the Middle East], a sizable penis, and even its occasional overt exhibition, did not render male deities less godly, but appropriately divine. The imposing erect virility of masculine gods was vividly celebrated in these ancient societies and the religious literature they produced,” Stavrakopoulou writes. “[T]he penises of ancient southwest Asian gods embodied a conspicuous and powerful hyper-masculinity deemed essential to the ordering, fruitfulness and well-being of the cosmos and its inhabitants.”

Cain, who killed his brother, Abel, might have been God’s son, not Adam’s!

Cain’s Baby Daddy Isn’t Adam…But God?!

Most of us assume that Adam and Eve had children — but if you look at the Bible, Eve declares that Cain at least was actually the offspring of her and God: “I have procreated with Yahweh!” she shouts in Genesis 4:1. 

“The more literal translation of the Hebrew is rarely seen,” Stavrakopoulou writes. “Most renderings of this verse default to a theologically fudged interpretation, so that Eve is merely presented as claiming that Yahweh has ‘helped’ her to ‘acquire a man,’ as any good fertility god might.”

Yahweh, like the Greek gods, who had sex with many unwilling women, could be prone to lust.

God as a Sexual Predator 

In the book of Hosea, God not only has a body — he actually gets it on with a young woman who’s the personification of Israel. 

“Here, Israel is a capricious teenager whose sexual allure so intoxicates God, he falls to scheming obsessively and possessively to make her his wife,” Stavrakopoulou writes. “‘I will take her walking into the wilderness and speak to her heart … and there she will cry out.’ 

“These words betray more than the romantic fantasy of a love-struck deity,” she continues. “God’s language here marks a shift from passion to threat: In claiming he will ‘seduce’ her, he uses a Hebrew expression more usually employed in the Bible to describe the rape of captive women.”

This idea of God as a sexual predator — or even just a sexual being — has been problematic for centuries, and that’s certainly true with our current sensibilities. 

“Theologically, the sexual grooming and graphic violence God inflicts on his young wife is immensely difficult for some modern-day believers to reconcile with their idealized constructs of God,” Stavrakopoulou says. “But for many Jewish and Christian readers, it is more specifically the graphic portrayal of a sexually actively deity that has proved unbearable: It has been mistranslated, dismissed as ‘mere’ allegory, or simply ignored.”

Foreign books are immensely dependent upon their translations — all the more essential for the Bible, a book so many people take literally. That’s what makes this softening of the original message so alarming. 

“In standard modern translations of the Tanakh [the Hebrew Bible] and the Christian Bible, the graphic sexual imagery of these troubling texts is softened or obscured with sanitized vocabulary and clunky euphemisms,” Stavrakopoulou writes. 

Yahweh knew Moses couldn’t handle seeing him all in his glory — so he offered just a peek of his cheeks.

God Shows Moses His Glorious Backside 

Up on Mount Sinai, Moses asks God to reveal himself: “How shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people?” he asks in Exodus 33:16-18. “Please, show me your Glory.”

But God says that Moses can’t handle his awesomeness — he’ll only allow him to see his backside. It’s the same term used elsewhere in the Bible to describe the buttocks of an animal, according to Stavrakopoulou. 

God adds that no mortal could gaze upon his face and live. “In its narrative context, it is a capricious assertion, for Yahweh and Moses have already enjoyed a number of conversations ‘face to face’ — and Moses has survived,” Stavrakopoulou points out. 

Like other deities of the Middle East, Yahweh’s body is engulfed in a dazzling aura: He is “wrapped in light as with a garment” and “clothed with glory and splendor.” 

It’s all too easy to think of these descriptions as hyperbolic — but they’re meant to be taken literally, Stavrakopoulou asserts. 

Whether they were literal or beams of light, Moses came back from a convo with God bearing horns.

The Glory of God Makes Moses Horny

“In Exodus, however, God’s luminescent backside clearly gives off something more powerful than a wondrous afterglow. When Moses finally descends from the Holy Mountain, clutching the Ten Commandments, his own face is startlingly transformed,” Stavrakopoulou writes. “But quite how is a matter of some debate, for the ancient Semitic root of the Hebrew term used to describe this transformation probably means ‘horn,’ but is also associated with light. The earliest translations of this peculiar story indicate that, from at least the 3rd century BCE, Moses was understood to have developed horn-like rays of light, so that his face beamed with a divine radiance. Other ancient scholars would assume Moses’ face literally grew horns — a symbol of the divine elsewhere in the Bible — giving rise to startling medieval images of Moses as a double-horned being. Either way, Moses undergoes a bodily transformation so profound that the Israelites cannot look him in the face and are afraid to go near him. Moses’ visual encounter with God has left its mark on him, rendering him more divine than human.”

Poor Moses never entered the Promised Land — but was it God who took the care to bury him?

God the Gravedigger

Moses seems to have been the Old Testament character with the most face time with God. And that lasted right up until the moment of his death. The poor guy — being a favorite of Yahweh doesn’t get you much. Moses dramatically led the exodus of escaped Israelite slaves out of Egypt, delivered the Ten Commandments and wandered the desert for 40 years. Finally, the time has come to enter the Promised Land. But, in a shocking twist, God shows Moses the beautiful sight of their hard-earned payoff — and then tells him to literally drop dead: “Moses, the servant of Yahweh, died there in the land of Moab, at Yahweh’s command. And he buried him in the valley in the land of Moab” (Deuteronomy 34:5-6). 

“In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses’ gravedigger is God himself,” Stavrakopoulou writes. “Appalled by the idea that God could contaminate himself with the impurity of a corpse — even the corpse of so holy a man as Moses — some Jewish and Christian translators corrected what they perceived to be an error in the text: ‘he buried him’ simply became ‘he was buried’ or ‘they buried him,’ leaving generations of readers to assume that mourning Israelites or weeping angels had performed Moses’ mortuary rites, rather than God himself.”

Baal, one of Yahweh’s biggest rivals in the ancient Middle East

God Gets Horny

It’s an image that wouldn’t sit well with most modern Christians or Jews — especially given its connections to the Devil and demons — but one of the earliest descriptions of God describes him as having horns. “God, who brought [Israel] out of Egypt, has horns like a wild ox!” the prophet Balaam declares in Numbers 23:22. 

“In the Western imagination, a horned being tends to conjure images of the diabolical, and the grotesque. From the man-eating bull-headed Minotaur of Greek myth to the cloven-hooved goat-faced Devil of Christianity, horns have long served as a hallmark of horror,” Stavrakopoulou writes. “But in the world of the very ancient gods, horns were the most prestigious and alluring manifestations of divinity, and most deities would be equipped with them.”

Horns were a sign of power, designating that the gods who sported them “were beings of bullish virility and ferocious strength,” Stavrakopoulou explains. 

There’s a horrific description of a fiery God — right before he gobbles up a roasted king of Assyria.

The Nose Knows: God’s Wrath and a Kingly BBQ

“The God of the Bible was particularly proud of his nose,” Stavrakopoulou tells us. “In his lengthy monologue on Mount Sinai, he reels off a list of his best qualities, not only describing himself as merciful, gracious and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, but ‘long-nosed,’ too.” 

This is a way of saying he has deep nostrils, she says — meaning slower breathing, and by extension, being patient and slow to anger. 

But once that temper raged, you didn’t want to be anywhere near him. 

In the book of Isaiah, a seer spies Yahweh in the distance, his nose ablaze, “his lips full of fury, his tongue a devouring fire; his breath an overflowing stream, reaching up to the neck!” (Isaiah 30:27-28). 

What’s God up to? Oh, just sacrificing an Assyrian king upon a pyre and feasting on his charred corpse.

The ancient Levantine deity El

The Ancient Almighty: God’s Golden Years 

Our current image of God as a powerful older man comes from a portrayal in Daniel 7:9-10 from the 2nd century BCE. As Stavrakopoulou states, “God himself remains a picture of perpetual purity: Enthroned, in fiery splendor, and surrounded by thousands of divine courtiers, he is called ‘an Ancient of Days,’ dressed in robes ‘white as snow,’ with hair ‘like a lamb’s wool.’”

Again, this iconography is borrowed from neighboring deities, including El, whom Stavrakopoulou describes as Yahweh’s father — before Yahweh was retrofitted as the sole true god. El’s (and Yahweh’s) gray hair and beard were seen as signs of immortality and wisdom. 

Unseen and Unsculpted: The Theological Dance Around God’s Corporality

When thinking about this article, I realized something that shocked me: While I’ve seen a few paintings of God — Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel depiction of God (looking suspiciously like Zeus) reaching out to Adam springs to mind — I couldn’t think of a single sculpture of him.

Part of this is due to the fact that the mentions of God as having a body in the Bible make many Christians uncomfortable. They want the only depiction of God as corporeal to be that of Jesus. 

“Those troublesome verses in the scriptures attesting to God’s body would be smoothed, smothered or superseded by new interpretive frameworks and some fancy philosophical footwork,” Stavrakopoulou writes. “A favorite tactic employed by early Christian theologians was simply to reduce all biblical references to God’s body to the symbolic.” 

Even further back than that, after the Jerusalem Temple had been rebuilt in the 5th century BCE, Yahweh’s worshippers understood all too well the vulnerability and lack of transcendence of a corporeal god. 

It was around this time one of the Ten Commandments became “You shall not make for yourself a carved image.”

Once a vividly described giant, God lost his body. 

Are there few statues of God because one of the Ten Commandments forbids “carved images”?

And therein lies the main controversy around God: An Anatomy. The book has ignited a theological firestorm, dragging Yahweh off his lofty pedestal and into the gritty, grimy realm of human physicality. Some scholars are applauding Stavrakopoulou’s daring approach, while others are reaching for the nearest exorcism manual.

Biblical scholar Joel Edmund Anderson isn’t holding back. On his blog, Resurrecting Orthodoxy, he accuses Stavrakopoulou of having a “tin ear to the literary artistry and nuance of the biblical texts,” arguing that her interpretations are overly literal and lack proper contextual grounding. 

So, even though many Christians believe everything in the Bible to be literal, they prefer to skip over references to God’s form — it’s all too close to those pagan deities. Team Symbolic has won out; no one really talks too much about God’s body nowadays. It seems that the divine anatomy lesson is one lecture most would rather miss. –Wally

Shocking Revelations About the Virgin Mary in the Bible

The Gospels barely mention Mary. They get her name wrong. They show Jesus being rude to her. And they make us question if she was even a virgin.

The worship of Mary has taken over Catholicism. But there’s a surprisingly scant amount of appearances by her in the New Testament — and those that are there can be problematic.

The figure of the Virgin Mary holds a place of honor in Christian theology and devotion, where she’s revered as the mother of Jesus and an embodiment of purity and divinity. And for Catholics, she’s essentially a goddess in her own right — and some would argue, perhaps more revered than Jesus himself.

However, a closer examination of the biblical texts reveals a series of astonishing revelations that challenge commonly held beliefs about Mary. In her book Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, Marina Warner presents a compelling analysis of the Gospel accounts, shedding light on the limited mentions of Mary, discrepancies in her portrayal and even doubts about her virginity. Published in 1976, Warner’s research continues to shock almost 50 years later.

“The amount of historical information about the Virgin is negligible. Her birth, her death, her appearance, her age are never mentioned.

Of the four declared dogmas about the Virgin Mary — her divine motherhood, her virginity, her immaculate conception and her assumption into heaven — only the first can unequivocally be traced to Scripture.”

— Maria Warner, "Alone of All Her Sex"

The Annunciation by Paolo de Matteis, 1712

There’s a lot of beliefs about Mary that don’t come from the Bible. But one story that does is the Angel Gabriel telling her she’ll get pregnant by the Holy Spirit and will give birth to the Son of God.

1. Mary is hardly mentioned in the Gospels.

“The amount of historical information about the Virgin is negligible,” Warner writes. “Her birth, her death, her appearance, her age are never mentioned.” 

Warner explains that “the sum total of the Virgin’s appearances in the New Testament is startlingly small plunder on which to build the great riches of Mariology,” the part of Christian theology devoted to Mary. “Of the four declared dogmas about the Virgin Mary — her divine motherhood, her virginity, her immaculate conception and her assumption into heaven — only the first can unequivocally be traced to Scripture,” Warner continues.

The Immaculate Conception by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1769

The idea that Mary was born without sin like the rest of us can’t be found anywhere in the New Testament.

In the Bible, the Angel Gabriel appears to Mary of Nazareth. At first she’s troubled and confused, but Gabriel prophesizes Jesus’ birth, to which Mary answers (“her most precious speech in Mariology,” Warner states), “How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?” (Luke 1:34). 

Gabriel explains, “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:38).

The Annunciation, from an illuminated manuscript created at Gladzor Monastery in Armenia by Toros Taronatsi in 1323

Strangely enough, though, the Gospel writers can’t even get her name right: She’s called Mariám 12 times and Maria seven times, according to Warner. 

Only Luke hits the major moments in what has become our understanding of the Virgin Mary. Even so, in Luke’s Gospel, Mary speaks a mere four times. 

In Matthew, she is silent. After the account of Jesus’ birth, Matthew mentions Mary only one more time.

Mark has a single mention of Mary (and it’s hardly flattering as you’ll see). 

John’s Gospel was written after the other three, “and it differs so considerably from them that for a time even its inclusion in the canon was at risk,” Warner writes. In it, the mother of Jesus is never mentioned by name, and it doesn’t repeat any of the incidents concerning her from the other Gospels. 

Christ Crucified With the Virgin, Saint John and Mary Magdalene by Anthony van Dyck, 1619

Jesus wanted to make sure Mary and John viewed each other as family — and then he was able to die.

She’s shown, perhaps, in the best light in John at the Crucifixion. As Jesus is dying on the cross, he sees his mother and “the disciple standing by, whom he loved” (i.e., John) and calls out, “Mother behold thy son!” and “Son behold thy mother!” John takes Mary into his home from that time on, the Gospel says. And Jesus, “knowing that all things were now accomplished,” drank vinegar and hyssop, and said, “It is finished” — “and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost” (John 19:26-30). 

The Marriage at Cana by Marten de Vos, 1597

Jesus is snippy with Mary at the event where he turns water into wine — a biblical passage that makes many a Catholic cringe.

2. Jesus is surprisingly rude to his mother.

In Mark’s recounting, Jesus has been preaching and attracting crowds, but his friends decide he has lost his mind, and his charisma is the work of the Devil (Mark 3:21). They call upon Jesus’ mother and brethren for help. Jesus asks, “Who is my mother or my brethren?” Then, looking around at those who have gathered to hear him, he declares, “Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and my mother” (Mark 3: 34-5). “Thus Jesus rebuffs his earthly family to embrace the larger family of his spiritual fellowship,” Warner writes. 

Matthew and Luke feature the same story — but by the time Luke tells it, he’s defending Mary and the rest of the family, stating that they “could not come at him for the press” of the crowd (Luke 8:19). 

The episode is paralleled later in Luke. A woman in a crowd calls out, “Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.” Jesus states, “Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it” (Luke 11:7-8). “Mary is not necessarily excluded from Jesus’ reply, but it certainly rings harshly,” Warner writes, adding, “The Catholic Church has consistently overlooked the hard-heartedness in Jesus’ words.”

John tells of the miracle at Cana, one of two conversations between Jesus and his mother (John 2:3-5):

Mother: They have no wine.

Jesus: Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come.

Mother [to the servants]: Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it. 

Jesus goes on to turn water into wine. “Mary, apparently rebuffed quite brutally by her son, understands that he will nevertheless perform a miracle,” Warner explains. 

The Marriage of the Virgin by Giotto, 1306

The big question is: Did Joseph and Mary have sex after she gave birth? It’s the most likely explanation for Jesus’ brothers and sisters.

3. Her very virginity is at question.

For many Christians, it’s unfathomable to imagine that the Virgin Mary, whose moniker is tied to her purity, might be the result of a poor translation. “[A]s for her virginity,” Warner writes, “the evangelists, far from asserting it, raise a number of doubts.” 

Of all the Gospels, only Matthew makes a clear statement about the virgin birth. He says that Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost before Mary and Joseph “came together” (Matthew 7:20). 

But Matthew’s writer was using the Greek Septuagint translation of the Bible, where the Hebrew word “almah,” meaning a young girl of marriageable age, became “parthenos” in Greek — a word that carries a strong connotation of virginity.

Catholics “hold (not as an article of faith, but as a cherished and ancient belief) that Mary was virgo intacta post partum, that by special privilege of God she, who was spared sex, was preserved also through childbirth in her full bodily integrity,” Warner explains. Which, one has to imagine, means her hymen was intact. 

But Matthew’s language seems to suggest that Mary and Joseph had sex after the birth of Jesus: “Then Joseph … took unto him his wife: and knew her not till she had brought forth her first born son” (Matthew 1:24-5). Yes, that’s “knew” in the biblical sense. It’s basically saying Joseph and Mary didn’t have sex until after Jesus was born. But they did eventually do so — Mary didn’t remain a virgin. 

The Presentation of Christ in the Temple by Hans Holbein the Elder, 1501

If Mary was so pure, why did she have to undergo a period of cleansing before she could present Jesus in the temple?

Also problematic: Mary gives birth to Jesus and enters the temple only after the time for her purification has elapsed. Under Mosaic law, a woman must be cleansed of the impurity incurred at childbirth. But why would that be necessary if Mary was, miraculously, still a virgin?

A 16th century Russian icon of James the Just, one of Jesus’ siblings

And then there’s the issue of Jesus’ siblings, mentioned in Matthew, Mark and Luke. Some early thinkers of the Greek church came up with a solution that has no proof in the Bible: Joseph was a widower, and those children were from an earlier marriage. 

The Birth of Christ by Meister von Hohenfurth, circa 1350

Rethinking the Virgin Mary

Warner’s groundbreaking work Alone of All Her Sex challenges conventional beliefs surrounding the Virgin Mary, drawing attention to the limited scriptural references, Jesus’ puzzlingly brusque behavior to his mother and the ambiguity surrounding her virginity. These shocking revelations prompt a reevaluation of deeply ingrained perceptions and invite further exploration of the complex figure at the heart of the Christian and Catholic faiths. –Wally

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CLICK HERE: When Did Jesus Become God? 5 Startling Findings in the Gospels

Who Really Wrote the New Testament?

Many, if not most, of the Scriptures were written by people falsely claiming to be the apostles or other leaders of the early Christian church, says biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman. That means a lot of books of the Bible are actually forgeries.

The book of Mark, like the rest of the Gospels, was written anonymously. Why, then, do we believe they were products of the men that bear their names?

If your answer to any conundrum is, “It’s one of God’s miracles,” then this article is not for you. I seek the truth in facts — fully admitting that as we gain more and more knowledge, our previous beliefs can shift. 

I don’t subscribe to the school of thought that blind faith can solve any mystery. I think about what is scientifically feasible, what archaeology and history research reveals, and base my judgments from there. Virgins do not give birth; men are not raised from the dead; and illiterate peasants do not write well-argued religious tracts.

“Most of the apostles were illiterate and could not in fact write.

They could not have left an authoritative writing if their souls depended on it.”

— Bart D. Ehrman, “Forged”

All that being said, this post is not about my beliefs. These are the findings of Bart D. Ehrman in his 2011 work, Forged: Writing in the Name of God — Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. 

“Most of the apostles were illiterate and could not in fact write,” Ehrman declares. “They could not have left an authoritative writing if their souls depended on it.” 

Bart D. Ehrman was once an evangelical Christian who took everything in the Bible literally. Now he’s a biblical scholar whose works, like Forged, offer shocking truths about the supposed word of God.

So who wrote the New Testament, then? Most of the texts were composed by people with extensive schooling — that is, undoubtedly, members of the upper class elite.

Why would someone lie about writing these works? “Quite simply, it was to get a hearing for their views,” Ehrman explains. “If you were an unknown person, but had something really important to say and wanted people to hear you — not so they could praise you, but so they could learn the truth — one way to make that happen was to pretend you were someone else, a well-known author, a famous figure, an authority.”

Here are four shocking revelations about who actually wrote the New Testament (or, perhaps I should say who didn’t write it):

Peter and Paul had differing views of Christianity, but both were chosen as the “authors” of forged books in the Bible to lend authority to the writings.

1. Ancient writers forged writings to address infighting among early Christian groups.

Many people think of Christianity as always having been a well-defined, cohesive religion — as if the books of the New Testament were handed down from on high like the tablets of the 10 Commandments Moses received. But the truth is, the fledgling religion was a big old mess for hundreds of years.

“Christians in the early centuries of the church were in constant conflict and felt under attack from all sides,” Ehrman writes. “They were at odds with Jews, who considered their views to be an aberrant and upstart perversion of the ancestral traditions of Israel. They were at odds with pagan peoples and governments, who considered them a secretive and unauthorized religion that posed a danger to the state. And they were virulently at odds with each other, as different Christian teachers and groups argued that they and they alone had a corner on the truth and other Christian teachers and groups flat-out misunderstood the truths that Christ had proclaimed during his time on earth.” 

So, numerous writers turned to forgery to give more weight to their arguments — and nowhere was that more prevalent than among varying factions of early Christians. Those works favored by church leaders centuries after Jesus were chosen to become the New Testament. Those that were deemed heretical (such as, say, the Gnostic Gospel of Judas), were not only left out but hunted down and destroyed in an effort to totally obliterate their teachings.

The book of Jude was written too late to have been authored by Jesus’ brother.

The New Testament book of Jude, for example, claims to be written by Jesus’ brother. But the author is talking about false teachers (which he strangely calls “waterless souls” and “fruitless trees, twice dead, uprooted”) who have infiltrated the religion and need to be rooted out — something that didn't happen until much later than Jude’s lifetime.

James was the head of the first Christian church, but couldn’t have written the book of the New Testament that bears his name.

And the book of James was supposedly penned by another of Jesus’ brothers, this one the head of the first Christian church, in Jerusalem. But not only was this book written after James’ death, the author is fluent in Greek and its rhetoric. Even if the timing worked out, the historical James, Ehrman says, was an Aramaic-speaking peasant who almost certainly never learned to read.

The New Testament itself declares that Peter was illiterate — so how the heck could he have written all those Bible books?

2. Peter was an illiterate fisherman who died years before 1 and 2 Peter were written.

Like the book of James, the book of 1 Peter was written by someone who was very well educated, spoke Greek and practiced rhetoric. 

What do we know of Peter from the Bible? He was a fisherman from the town of Capernaum in Galilee. Archeological and historical records reveal that “Peter’s town was a backwoods Jewish village made up of hand-to-mouth laborers who did not have an education,” Ehrman writes. “Everyone spoke Aramic. Nothing suggests that anyone could speak Greek. Nothing suggests that anyone in town could write. As a lower-class fisherman, Peter would have started work as a young boy and never attended school.”

In fact, in Acts 4:13, Peter and his companion John are described as agrammatoi, a Greek word meaning “unlettered” — that is, illiterate.

There’s also the issue of timing. Tradition holds that Peter was martyred in Rome under Nero in 64 CE. But the author of 1 Peter alludes to Rome as “Babylon” — that is, the destroyer of Jerusalem and the Temple. The Romans didn’t destroy Jerusalem until 70 CE, six years after Peter died. 

Peter, like all of the apostles, believed that Jesus’ Second Coming would take place during his lifetime.

In addition, the author of 2 Peter comes up with a defense as to why Jesus hasn’t returned as the Messiah. To God, “one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years are as one day.” So time is relative and just be patient.

But such an argument wouldn’t have been necessary for a disciple writing so soon after Jesus’ crucifixion. The Second Coming was predicted “within this generation” (Mark 13:30) and before the disciples “tasted death” (Mark 9:1). At the time Peter lived, Jesus could have still been right on schedule.

Paul actually did write some of the books of the New Testament — well, seven of the 13 attributed to him.

3. Good news! More than half of the letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament are authentic.

That means, of course, that six of the 13 are forgeries, though. Almost all biblical scholars agree that these seven letters were indeed written by the apostle Paul: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. 

In the other books of the Bible attributed to Paul, there are words and phrases and writing styles not found in those that have been verified. And there are points made about Paul’s religious philosophy that just don’t jibe with what we know about his beliefs. For instance, the man was anti-marriage (even though he himself got hitched). In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul preaches that people should remain single. Why worry about procreation when the Rapture is going to happen any day?

But in the Pastorals (as 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus are referred to), “Paul” is insisting that church leaders be married. Side note: Why has this not become an argument to end the tradition of priests being celibate?

Scholars agree that at least a couple of the letters Paul wrote while under house arrest in Rome were actually penned by him.

Which brings us to another problem of timing: When Paul was alive, there weren’t any church leaders. His view was that every Christian was endowed with a supernatural gift (healing, say, or speaking in tongues) and all were equal: “In Christ there is neither slave nor free, neither male nor female,” he declares in Galatians 3:28.

Paul believed Jesus’ Second Coming would happen unexpectedly, “like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2), and he would be around to experience it. It wasn’t until a generation or more later, when people were still waiting, that some found it necessary to think more long term and offer up excuses. 

“The author of 2 Thessalonians, claiming to be Paul, argues that the end is not, in fact, coming right away,” Ehrman explains. “There will be some kind of political or religious uprising and rebellion, and an Antichrist-like figure will appear who will take his seat in the Temple of Jerusalem and declare himself to be God.” 

How could the same Paul declare in 1 Thessalonians that Jesus’ return would happen soon and suddenly, and then in 2 Thessalonians renege on that and state that a whole series of events had to take place first? 

And in Ephesians, there’s also an issue with Paul’s biography. The writer includes himself as someone who, before meeting Jesus, was guilty of “doing the will of the flesh and senses.” But that doesn’t fit with the man who says, in undisputed letters, he had been “blameless” when it came to the “righteousness of the law” (Philippians 3:4-5).

An angel is said to have whispered the words of the Gospel to St. Matthew. But it turns out there’s evidence Matthew didn’t actually write the book of the Bible named for him.

4. One-third of the authors of the books of the New Testament — including the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — were actually anonymous. 

In fact, those texts remained anonymous for about a century. It wasn’t until around 180-185 CE that the Gospels were definitely named for the first time, by a church father and heresy hunter named Irenaeus. 

And how did those authors get chosen? To lend the Gospels authority (and help assure they made the cut when choosing what would go into the New Testament), the writers were declared to be two disciples and two close associates of disciples. 

Matthew, for instance, was a Jew, and tradition held that he had written a Gospel. So the first was assigned to him since it was deemed the most “Jewish.” 

Church leaders ascribed authors of the Gospels about 100 years after they were written — anonymously, no less. There’s no evidence Mark actually wrote the book that bears his name, for example.

The second Gospel was determined to be by Mark on the scantest of evidence; he seems to have been chosen because of his connection to Peter. 

When you hear the reasons the Gospels were assigned authors, like the book of Luke, you’ll realize how flimsy the evidence really is.

The author of Luke also wrote the book of Acts, where he proclaims to be a companion of Paul’s. “Because Acts stresses that Christianity succeeded principally among Gentiles, the author himself may have been a Gentile,” Ehrman writes. “Since there was thought to be a Gentile named Luke among Paul’s companions, he was assigned the Third Gospel.” So it goes.

John, the son of Zebedee, was assigned the Gospel with his name by process of elimination.

John, meanwhile, was supposed to be written by “the Beloved Disciple” it mentions (John 20: 20-24). In early tradition, the closest apostles to Jesus were Peter, James and John. Peter was named elsewhere in the book, and James had already been martyred. So that left John, the son Zebedee, as the author of the fourth Gospel.

Not the most convincing of evidence — but the Gospels couldn’t remain anonymous if they were going to become part of the Bible.

But wait — there’s more. In addition, Ehrman writes, “The anonymous book of Hebrews was assigned to Paul, even though numbers of early Christian scholars realized that Paul did not write it, as scholars today agree. And three short anonymous writings with some similarities to the Fourth Gospel were assigned to the same author, and so were called 1, 2 and 3 John. None of these books claims to be written by the authors to whom they were ultimately assigned.”

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For biblical literalists, this evidence must be disturbing. Not only does it show that the New Testament contains lies, it makes us question the very beliefs at the core of what we know as Christianity. 

That’s something to take up with God — or, perhaps, Ehrman. As he writes, “The use of deception to promote the truth may well be considered one of the most unsettling ironies of the early Christian traditions.” –Wally

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King Josiah and the Formation of Jewish Law

Revised stories of the patriarchs proved powerful propaganda, and Deuteronomy presented the moral code of early Judaism — with a surprising amount of human rights. 

The penultimate king of Judah, Josiah is held up as the best of the best. We have him to thank for the Judaism practiced today.

King Josiah receives more superlatives of awesomeness than any other figure in the Old Testament. And with heavy hitters like Moses, David and Joshua, that’s saying something. 

“Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him,” gushes 2 Kings 23:25.

Not too bad for a kid who was crowned in 639 BCE at the tender age of 8, after his father, Amon, was assassinated in a coup, having reigned only a year.

King Josiah oversees a ritual sacrifice in this illustration from an Egyptian manuscript.

Of course, it turns that the early books of the Old Testament were written in the 7th century BCE, when Josiah ruled the kingdom of Judah. The writings were planned specifically to bolster his vision of a unified Israel, where everyone abandoned all other deities to worship only YHWH (aka Yahweh, or God), according to Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. 

The book of Law that King Josiah discovered in the Temple was, most likely, the original book of Deuteronomy. We’re not sure why this prompted him to tear his robe, though.

Finding the Book of Law

In the 18th year of Josiah’s reign, 622 BCE, the king commanded his high priest to renovate the Temple. During the work, a new book of Law turned up. 

“That book, identified by most scholars as an original form of the book of Deuteronomy, sparked a revolution in ritual and a complete reformation of Israelite identity,” Finkelstein and Silberman explain. “This was the formative moment in the crystallization of the biblical tradition as we now know it.”

King Josiah has the idols of Baal destroyed (and the priests killed) in this illustration by Gustave Doré.

According to Josiah and other hardcore monotheists, there was a lot of work to be done (and undone). 

The new book of Law “suddenly and shockingly revealed that the traditional practice of the cult of YHWH in Judah had been wrong,” the authors continue. 

Pagan practices were taking place even within the confines of the Temple itself. Josiah had all the iconography of Baal removed, along with anything used to worship the sun, moon and stars, and had it all burned. He also broke down the houses of the male cult prostitutes (!!!). 

That was just the beginning. Josiah marched northward, smashing stone altars to other gods and killing their priests. 

The frontispiece to the book of Deuteronomy in the Nuremberg Bible

A Revolution in Human Rights

The new Law wasn’t all just destruction and death, though.

Josiah made Passover an official holy day, which linked him with Moses, who was involved in the holiday’s gruesome origin. 

More than this, “Deuteronomy calls for the protection of the individual, for the defense of what we would call today human rights and human dignity,” write Finkelstein and Silberman. “Its laws offer an unprecedented concern for the weak and helpless.” 

For example, Deuteronomy 15:7-8 states, “If there is among you a poor man … you shall open your hand to him, and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be.” Imagine if that were still in practice today.

Joseph’s awful brothers sold him into slavery. He was born too soon — thanks to the book of Deuteronomy, his servitude would only have lasted six years.

In addition, Josiah’s law gave inheritance rights to wives, instructed farmers to give tithes to the poor every third year, protected resident aliens from discrimination and freed slaves after six years of servitude. 

The Death of King Josiah by Francesco Conti, who lived 1681-1760

Josiah’s Lasting Legacy

Was Josiah successful in his campaign of religious centralization? Perhaps not on as broad a scale as he would have liked. Evidence suggests that he “failed to stop the veneration of graven images, since figurines of a standing woman supporting her breast with her hands (generally identified with the goddess Asherah) have been found in abundance within private dwelling compounds at all major late-seventh century sites in Judah,” explain Finkelstein and Silberman. 

One god just wasn’t enough for the ancient Judahites — many a household had figurines of the goddess Asherah like this one.

In 610 BCE, the new pharaoh, Necho II, launched a military expedition, allying with Egypt’s old foes the Assyrians to battle an even greater threat: the Babylonian Empire.

No one is quite sure why Josiah joined the fray against Egypt. Whatever the reason, it was a decision that led to his death. 2 Kings 23:29 glosses over the loss of the greatest king of Judah as if the writer were embarrassed: “In his days Pharaoh Necho king of Egypt went up to the king of Assyria to the river Euphrates. King Josiah went to meet him; and Pharaoh Necho slew him at Megiddo, when he saw him.”

Pharaoh Necho II, who killed King Josiah. The Old Testament glosses over this event, as if the writers were embarrassed and wanted to downplay it.

“In his days Pharaoh Necho king of Egypt went up to the king of Assyria to the river Euphrates. King Josiah went to meet him; and Pharaoh Necho slew him at Megiddo, when he saw him.” (2 Kings 23:29)

“One thing is clear. The Deuteronomistic historian, who saw Josiah as a divinely anointed messiah destined to redeem Judah and lead it to glory was clearly at a loss to explain how such a historical catastrophe could occur and left only a curt, enigmatic reference to Josiah’s death,” write Finkelstein and Silberman. “Decades of spiritual revival and visionary hopes seemingly collapsed overnight. Josiah was dead and the people of Israel were again enslaved by Egypt.”

By 597 BCE, all the cities of Judah had been crushed under the Babylonian assault, culminating with the defeat of Jerusalem, which was burned to the ground. The Babylonian ruler, Nebuchadnezzar, looted the Temple and deported all but the poorest inhabitants of Judah. 

The Babylonians, led by King Nebuchadnezzar, defeated Judah, enslaved its people and burned Jerusalem to the ground.

Judah’s last king, Zedekiah, was captured. He had to watch the Babylonians slaughter his sons before he was blinded.

Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, didn’t fare so well. Tragedy of Zedekiah by Charles Monnet, 1750

Nebuchadnezzar had Zedekiah blinded — only after the king of Judah had watched his sons get slaughtered.

Nevertheless, there was a power in Josiah’s movement. His revisionist history and rallying cry have become parts of the most popular book on the planet. And the laws of Deuteronomy found within “served as the foundation for a universal social code and system of community values that endure — even today,” write Finkelstein and Silberman. –Wally 

The True Story of the Assyrian Conquest of Judah

The Old Testament says that good King Hezekiah fended off the Assyrian army at Jerusalem, but his triumph was undone by bad King Manasseh. Archaeology proves otherwise.

Instead of scurrying home in defeat, did the Assyrians actually successfully conquer Jerusalem?

It just doesn’t seem fair that the fate of an entire kingdom would be dependent upon its king’s behavior — namely whether or not he worshiped other gods besides YHWH (Yahweh). 

But that’s exactly what happens throughout the Old Testament. In general, the kingdom of Judah fared much better than its northern neighbor, Israel, which was ultimately laid to waste by Assyria.

“A contemporary record explains how Sennacherib laid siege to city after city throughout Judah, conquering them with ramps and battering rams.

He captured King Hezekiah and kept him “like a bird in a cage.” ”

The Bible tells us that King Hezekiah defeated the Assyrians with divine intervention. But archaeological evidence from the time suggests otherwise.

Hezekiah and the Miraculous Defeat of Assyria

With King Sargon II of Assyria dead since 705 BCE, Hezekiah (who reigned from 727-698 BCE) decided it was time to rebel, entering a coalition backed by Egypt. Of course, that prompted the new ruler of Assyria, Sennacherib, to gather his formidable army and march upon Judah. 

The book of 2 Kings in the Bible tells the story of a miraculous defeat: The Angel of the Lord went forth, slaying 185,000 soldiers in the Assyrian camp. Needless to say, that frightened King Sennacherib enough that he scurried home — only to be murdered by two of his sons. 

After his supposed defeat, the Assyrian ruler Sennacherib was killed by two of his own sons.

For some reason, Hezekiah’s son and successor, Manasseh (698-642 BCE), isn’t impressed enough with the power of Yahweh to insist upon sole worship of the deity. He makes a theological about-face, and even goes so far as to burn his son as an offering to one of the local gods, practice soothsaying and augury, and deal with mediums and wizards. (Sounds like fun to me — except for the human sacrifice bit.)

The evil King Manasseh had to repent for his sins in the Old Testament — but historical evidence doesn’t jibe with the Bible’s version of events.

Archaeology Tells a Different Story

Were the Assyrians defeated during their invasion of Judah? If the story in the Old Testament seems almost too fantastical to believe, that’s because it probably is. Archaeological evidence — granted, some from the Assyrian point of view — tells another version.

A contemporary record explains how Sennacherib laid siege to city after city throughout Judah, conquering them with ramps and battering rams. He captured King Hezekiah and kept him prisoner in his palace, “like a bird in a cage,” while the Assyrian army plundered his land. 

So who’s telling the truth? The authors of the Bible or the Assyrian historians?

Bad news for biblical literalists: “The devastation of the Judahite cities can be seen in almost every mound excavated in the Judean hinterland,” write Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts.

Sennacherib, the ruler of Assyria at the time of Hezekiah and Manasseh

Manasseh and Assyria

Perhaps Manasseh is remembered so poorly because he actually became one of Assyria’s most loyal vassal states — despite the prosperity it brought. 

“[A] seventh century text reporting tribute given by south Levantine states to the Assyrian king indicates that Judah’s tribute was considerably smaller than that paid by the neighboring, poorer Assyrian vassals Ammon and Moab,” write Finkelstein and Silverman.

Manasseh was said to be captured and marched to Assyria in chains — including one through his nose. But a contemporary record says it was Hezekiah who was captured and kept “like a bird in a cage.”

In another document, Manasseh is reported as giving gifts to the Assyrian king and helping him conquer Egypt. And while this certainly would have displeased anyone who wanted a free, unified kingdom of Israel, Manasseh’s long reign of 55 years was a peaceful time for Judah. 

The Defeat of Sennacherib by Peter Paul Rubens, 17th century

“For all the Bible’s talk of Hezekiah’s piety and YHWH’s saving intervention, Assyria was the only victor,” Finkelstein and Silverman write.  “Sennacherib fully achieved his goals: he broke the resistance of Judah and subjugated it. Hezekiah had inherited a prosperous state, and Sennacherib destroyed it.”

The author of the books of Kings seems to have hoped that by the time he wrote his version of the account, people would have forgotten what actually had happened. For centuries, this is what people have believed — until archeological evidence has come along to prove them wrong. –Wally

The (Belated) Rise of Jerusalem and the Jewish Religion

Despite the stories of the Old Testament, the kingdom of Judah did not rise to power or become a monotheistic center until much later than the reigns of King David and Solomon.

Within one generation, thanks, in part, to an influx of refugees from Israel, Jerusalem swelled as a city, and its Temple became the center of the budding Jewish religion.

The Bible makes it very easy to determine which of the kings of ancient Judah were sinful and which were not. Those who are described as doing “what was right in the eyes of the Lord” typically had nice long reigns and avoided defeat in the many skirmishes of the time.

“Most shockingly, an inscription from Sinai refers to the goddess Asherah as the consort of Yahweh!

It seems God originally had a wife!”

We three kings: The rulers of Israel were judged good or bad in the Bible, and it seemed as if the traits skipped generations. Here’s Ahaz (bad), Hezekiah (good) and Manasses (bad).

It’s almost as if a king who had the misfortune of losing a war was later recast as someone despicable. Take Ahaz, who was accused of burning his son as an offering to a pagan god and, heaven forbid, burning incense in high places and under every green tree (2 Kings: 16:2-4). 

There King Ahaz goes again, worshipping other gods than YHWH. This one likes tasty babies as offerings.

Much of the Old Testament deals with the comparison of sinful Israel in the north and the sometimes good, sometimes bad kingdom of Judah in the south.

“Despite Judah’s prominence in the Bible, however, there is no archaeological indication until the eighth century BCE that this small and rather isolated highland area, surrounded by arid steppe land on both east and south, possessed any particular importance,” write Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts.

A model of ancient Jerusalem, which didn’t rise as a power until the late 8th century BCE, after Israel fell to the Babylonians

The Rise of Jerusalem

It wasn’t until the fall of Israel in the late 8th century BCE, that Judah was finally in a position to prosper. 

“The royal citadel of Jerusalem was transformed in a single generation from the seat of a rather insignificant local dynasty into the political and religious nerve center of a regional power — both because of dramatic internal developments and because thousands of refugees from the conquered kingdom of Israel fled to the south,” the authors explain. 

New suburbs developed, which were enclosed within a defensive wall. The city of Jerusalem grew from a mere 12 acres to 150, and its population increased from 1,000 to 15,000 — all in the span of a generation.

The ruins of the citadel and Tower of David

The rest of Judah, including its agricultural hinterland, also experienced rapid growth. Where there were once only a few villages and modest towns, about 300 settlements of all sizes popped up. The population of the region grew from 30,000 or so to around 120,000.

Long after the reign of Kind David, Israelites worshipped multiple deities — fertility goddesses like these were particularly popular.

Yahweh: One God of Many 

Despite the Bible’s claim that the worship of YHWH (aka Yahweh, or, you know, capital-G God) was, for the most part, the norm from the reign of King David on, archaeological evidence shows that there were numerous instances of other gods being worshiped throughout the time of the kingdom of Judah. Clay figurines, incense altars, libation vessels and offering stands throughout the region reveal that people worshiped a variety of fertility deities as well as their ancestors — and certainly not just Yahweh. 

It must come as a surprise to most people that Judaism, one of the first monotheistic religions — Pharaoh Akhenaten previously decreed the worship of a single deity for a brief time in Ancient Egypt — actually started out as polytheistic. 

“[T]he great sins of Ahaz and the other evil kings of Judah should not be seen as exceptional in any way,” write Finkelstein and Silberman. “These rulers merely allowed the rural traditions to go unhampered. They and many of their subjects expressed their devotion to YHWH in rites performed at countless tombs, shrines and high places throughout the kingdom, with the occasional and subsidiary worship of other gods.”

Judahites at the time treated hilltops as holy sites, burning incense there to honor the sun, moon and stars.

“[T]he clearest archaeological evidence of the popularity of this type of worship throughout the kingdom is the discovery of hundreds of figurines of naked fertility goddesses at every late monarchic site in Judah,” write Finkelstein and Silverman.

The goddess Asherah, as carved on an ivory box from around 1300 BCE found in Syria, was once worshipped as the wife of Yahweh, the Jewish and Christian God!

Most shockingly, there’s an inscription from northeastern Sinai that refers to the goddess Asherah as the consort of Yahweh! Could God originally have had a wife?!

In the late 8th century BCE, Jerusalem grew rapidly in size (from 12 to 150 acres) and population (1,000 to 15,000 residents).

The Birth of Judaism

Despite the perception that the Israelites were monotheistic long before this time, it wasn’t until Jerusalem was a booming metropolis that we at last had the rise of the exclusive worship of Yahweh at the city’s impressive Temple. 

The true monotheism of the Judeo-Christian tradition most likely began in the 8th century BCE — 200 years after the Bible claims. Part of this movement to worship YHWH alone was born of a new political aim: the unification of Israel. Coming out of this, the religious establishment decreed the “proper” way to worship — not just at the Temple but throughout rural Judah as well. 

“It is easy to see why the biblical authors were so upset by idolatry,” write Finkelstein and Silberman. “It was a symbol of chaotic social diversity; the leaders of the clans in the outlying areas conducted their own systems of economics, politics and social relations — without administration or control by the court in Jerusalem.”

Perhaps it’s cynical to suggest that Judaism (and by extension, Christianity) arose because of a desire to consolidate power and economic control — but heavens knows it wouldn’t be the first time a religion was guilty of that. –Wally

Israel Finkelstein (top) and Neil Asher Silberman, authors of The Bible Unearthed

The Fall of Israel in the Old Testament Explained

The Bible states that the kings of Israel sinned greatly. But Israel fell because it was just too attractive to the Assyrians. 

At first the Assyrians ignored Samaria, then the capital of Israel, thinking it was too isolated. But eventually they attacked it and conquered the city, along with rest of the kingdom.

If you believe the Old Testament, the kingdom of Israel suffered and ultimately fell because its rulers and people just couldn’t be monogamous with the god Yahweh. (They also supposedly burned their sons and daughters as offerings and practiced divination and sorcery, among other sins.) 

But, looking at the archaeological record, “Israel’s greatest misfortune — and the cause of its destruction and the exile of many of its people — was that as an independent kingdom living in the shadow of a great empire, it succeeded too well,” write Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts.

Yes, Israel fell because of jealousy — not God’s but the Assyrians’. 

“Israel — with its rich resources and productive population — was an incomparably more attractive target than poor and inaccessible Judah,” the authors explain. 

Israel’s prosperity sparked Assyria’s envy. The minute the Israelites considered a revolt, the Assyrians launched an attack.

Assyria’s Bitch: The Complaints of the Prophets Amos and Hosea

For a time, Israel was a subservient vassal to Assyria, paying tribute to maintain peace. 

This age of prosperity began around 800 BCE and greatly upset two biblical prophets, Amos and Hosea. They abhorred Israel’s dependence upon Assyria and its economic disparity between the ruling elite and the poor. Amos railed against those who slept on beds of ivory, chilled out on couches, ate lamb and calves, sang songs while playing the harp, drank wine from bowls, anointed themselves with fine oils and built houses of hewn stone, amongst other egregious transgressions. 

The prophet Amos railed against the rich and their exploitation of the poor.

His contemporary Hosea didn’t appreciate deals made with Assyria or the export of oil to Egypt. 

Hosea, another prophet, ridiculed allegiances with Assyria and Egypt.

This condemnation of a wealthy lifestyle and foreign influence on the Israelite way of life would greatly influence the Old Testament’s stodgy philosophy.

The Assyrian monarch Tiglath-pileser III, who conquered Israel

The Decline and Fall of the Israelite Kingdom

A new Assyrian king, Tiglath-pileser III, also known as Pul in the Bible, began a campaign to conquer and annex the region, deporting its residents at his whim.

Israel at this time had been subject to the assassinations of four kings in 15 years. A military officer named Pekah joined with King Rezin of Damascus to attempt a united resistance against Assyria. 

The plan backfired. Tiglath-pileser III conquered and/or destroyed city after city, executing Rezin and bringing Israel to its knees. Ironically, the one city that was spared Assyria’s wrath was Samaria, which happened to be the capital of Israel. Why? Tiglath-pileser felt it was too “isolated,” as he boasted on a monumental inscription. 

A man named Hoshea assassinated Pehkah, becoming what would be the last king of Israel. In the time between the death of Tiglath-pileser and the succession of Shalmaneser V to the Assyrian throne, Hoshea devised a plan. He asked the lords of the Egyptian delta for help and, in the meantime, stopped paying tribute to Assyria. It didn’t turn out well.

Shalmaneser instantly marched upon Samaria, laying siege to the city. Either he or his successor, Sargon II, who came to the throne in 722 BCE, finally bested Samaria’s defenses. Many Israelites, possibly the aristocracy and artisans, were deported deep into Assyrian territory, while people from other conquered countries were brought to repopulate Samaria. 

The kingdom of Israel fell to the Assyrians, its cities conquered and its people deported.

“It was all over,” write Finkelstein and Silberman. “Two stormy centuries had come to a catastrophic end. The proud northern kingdom and a significant part of its population were lost to history.” –Wally

The Forgotten History of King Ahab, Jezebel and the Omride Dynasty

The Old Testament maligns these rulers, glossing over the fact that they founded the first Israelite kingdom — not David and Solomon. 

Vilified in the Bible, King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, as seen in this painting by Frederic Leighton, circa 1863, were among the first rulers of Israel as a true kingdom.

King Solomon, son of the legendary giant-killer David, has long been held up as a founder of the first Israelite kingdom. Historical and archeological evidence, though, shows that this wasn’t the case. 

King Solomon has been given credit for many of the impressive building projects that actually happened during the Omride Dynasty.

“Most Jews and Christians don’t want to hear that the first kingdom of Israel wasn’t founded by David or Solomon but by the supposedly devious sinners Ahab and Jezebel. ”

A true kingdom — featuring monumental building projects, a professional army and bureaucracy — didn’t appear on the ancient Near East scene until the early 9th century BCE, during what’s known as the Omride Dynasty. 

This won’t sit well with biblical literalists, given that the most famous figures from this line are King Ahab and his notorious wife, Jezebel, a demonized princess from Phoenicia. 

Jezebel, in an 1896 painting by John Liston Byam Shaw, wouldn’t be the first woman to get a bad rap in the Bible. (Incidentally, she was originally painted nude, but the work wasn’t selling, so Byam Shaw added clothes.)

Ahab and Jezebel’s Bad Rap

The most famous (or should I say “infamous”?) Omride couple, King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, are accused of “repeatedly committing some of the greatest biblical sins: introducing the cult of foreign gods into the land of Israel, murdering faithful priests and prophets of YHWH, unjustly confiscating the property of their subjects, and violating Israel’s sacred traditions with arrogant impunity,” explain Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origins of Its Sacred Texts. 

Judging by the evidence, the authors of the Bible could instead have said that Ahab was “a mighty king who first brought the kingdom of Israel to prominence on the world stage and that his marriage to the daughter of the Phoenician king Ethbaal was a brilliant stroke of international diplomacy,” the authors write. “They might have said that the Omrides built magnificent cities to serve as administrative centers of their expanding kingdom.”

Part of their success was certainly due to the fact that they had one of the most powerful armies in the region. 

Omri, the founder of the dynasty, and his son Ahab weren’t particularly pious and did act brutally on occasion. “But the same could be said of virtually every other monarch of the ancient Near East,“ say Finkelstein and Silberman. 

King Omri founded the first powerful Israelite dynasty — sorry, King David!

Israel vs. Judah: The North vs. the South

The Bible tells us that the Israelite kingdom of Judah developed in the south, home to the city of Jerusalem. But it was actually the northern region of Israel that progressed faster.

“Judah was always the most remote part of the hill country, isolated by topographical and climatic barriers,“ write Finkelstein and Silberman. “By contrast, the northern part of the highlands consisted of a patchwork of fertile valleys nestled between adjoining hilly slopes.”

That northern region, Israel, was a more productive area, allowing for grain growing as well as the cultivation of olive orchards and vineyards. With the specialization of oil and wine, some villages turned to trade to get the grain and animal products they needed.

“The result was increasing complexity of the northern highland societies and, eventually, the crystallization of something like a state,” write Finkelstein and Silberman. “Export trade to the people of the lowlands and, more important, to the markets in the great cities of Egypt and the ports of the Phoenician coast pushed things still further.“

King David didn’t rule over a powerful kingdom — he was a mere hill country chieftain.

A Look at the Evidence 

The story of Ahab and Jezebel’s bad behavior was written over 200 years after their deaths. “The biblical narrative is so thoroughly filled with inconsistencies and anachronisms, and so obviously influenced by the theology of the seventh century BCE writers, that it must be considered more of a historical novel than an accurate historical chronicle,” write Finkelstein and Silberman. 

In the 9th century BCE, we finally have firsthand testimonies of events and personalities from the Old Testament in the records of the Assyrians and other neighboring powers. Omri is mentioned in the Mesha stele, found in 1868 in Jordan, at the site of biblical Dibon, the capital of the kingdom of Moab. 

Most famously, the Monolith Inscription, discovered in the 1840s at the ancient Syrian site of Nimrud, mentions how fierce an enemy Ahab was. 

The archaeological evidence shows that Omri and his court arrived at Samaria, what would become their capital city, around 880 BCE. The remains of an impressive palace have been unearthed there. 

“For visitors, traders and official emissaries arriving at Samaria, the visual impression of the Omrides’ royal city must have been stunning,” write Finkelstein and Silberman. “Its elevated platform and huge, elaborate palace bespoke wealth, power and prestige.”

The cities of Megiddo, Hazor and Jezreel followed. The architectural styles all follow certain patterns and were built during Omride rule — and not a century before by King Solomon, as had been previously supposed. 

The Monolith of Shalmaneser III mentions a battle the Assyrian army fought against “Ahab the Israelite.”

On top of this, there’s the pottery. You'd be amazed by how much archaeologists can learn from broken pots. They’re all distinct in their way and help pinpoint dates and populations in the various layers of ancient sites. The shards of pottery at these and other locations can be used as a clear dating indicator for the Omride period. 

In a battle with the king of Aram, Ahab disguised himself — but was slain by a stray arrow.

Israel’s Forgotten First Kingdom

I’m sure most Jews and Christians don’t want to hear that the first kingdom of Israel wasn’t founded by David or Solomon but by the supposedly devious sinners Ahab and Jezebel. But that’s what happens when you don’t take the Bible as the gospel truth (so to speak) and look to architectural and historical evidence to corroborate (or, as the case may be, disprove) the ancient stories. 

Ahab coveted a garden, but when its owner, Naboth, refused to sell it, Jezebel had him stoned to death. The prophet Elijah shows up to curse the couple.

Looking with an open mind and trusting in science — two admittedly rare qualities when dealing with religion — we learn “that David and Solomon were, in political terms, little more than hill country chieftains, who in administrative reach remained on a fairly local level, restricted to the hill country,” write Finkelstein and Silberman. 

The supposedly sinful Jezebel is thrown from the palace to her death.

For those with whom the evidence doesn’t sit well, take heart in the prophecy of Elijah, described in the Old Testament book of 1 Kings, which supposedly came to pass: Jezebel was thrown from an upper window of the palace, with only her skull, feet and palms remaining. The rest had been eaten by stray dogs. –Wally

As prophesied by Elijah, dogs tore apart and ate most of the corpse of Queen Jezebel. Queen Jezabel Being Punished by Jehu by Andrea Celesti, from the second half of the 17th century

Did King David and King Solomon Really Exist?

Shocking evidence answers this question as well as whether David was a successful warrior king and Solomon built his legendary temple and palace. 

Historical evidence reveals that the legendary kings of Israel, David and Solomon, actually existed.

They’re the first two legendary kings of Israel: David, who as a youth defeated the Philistine giant Goliath with a single stone from his slingshot, and Solomon, gifted with otherworldly wisdom and wealth. (Okay, so there was one king before them, Saul — but God was already planning his replacement when Saul committed suicide after the Philistines killed his sons.)

The City of David, thought to be the original site of Jerusalem, is now Wadi Hilweh, a predominantly Palestinian neighborhood.

“The actual extent of the Davidic ‘empire’ is hotly debated,” write Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. “Digging in Jerusalem has failed to produce evidence that it was a great city in David or Solomon’s time. And the monuments ascribed to Solomon are now most plausibly connected with other kings. Thus a reconsideration of evidence has enormous implications.”

“A shard of a monument sent shockwaves throughout the world of biblical scholarship — and provided the oldest proof of a biblical patriarch: namely, the legendary King David.”

We’ve seen that the first books of the Old Testament, the Jewish Torah, fudged the facts: There wasn’t a mass Exodus out of Egypt. There wasn’t a conquest of Canaan by God’s Chosen People. So how about David and Solomon — are they a myth as well?

Michelangelo’s iconic statue of David

King David: What’s the Proof He Existed?

“David and Solomon are such central religious icons to both Judaism and Christianity that the recent assertions of radical biblical critics that King David is ‘no more a historical figure than King Arthur,’ have been greeted in many religious and scholarly circles with outrage and disdain,” Finkelstein and Silberman write.

At first, things didn’t look good: “for all their reported wealth and power, neither David nor Solomon is mentioned in a single known Egyptian or Mesopotamian text,” the authors continue. 

Was King David, who, as a mere boy, killed the giant Goliath with a single blow, just a myth? David und Goliath by Osmar Schindler, 1888

But often it only takes one single archeological artifact to revolutionize our version of history. We see this constantly in Egypt, where a scrap of papyrus or engraving on a statue completely alters our understanding of a pharaoh’s reign. 

And it was a shard of a monument that sent shockwaves throughout the world of biblical scholarship — and provided the oldest proof of a biblical patriarch: namely, the legendary King David.

David holds up the head of the giant Goliath.

In 1993 at the site of Tel Dan in northern Israel, archeologists discovered a fragment of a black basalt monument that dates to around 835 BCE. While it spoke of a horrific defeat of Israel and Judah (which were separate kingdoms at the time) by Hazael, the king of Damascus, amidst his boasting he mentions the House of David. 

The Tel Dan Stele, dating from 835 BCE, mentions defeating the House of David — making it the oldest proof of a biblical patriarch.

This means that David’s dynasty “was known throughout the region; this clearly validates the biblical description of Judahite kings in Jerusalem,” Finkelstein and Silberman write.

David wasn’t actually the best guy. As described in the Bible, he fell in love with another man’s wife and sent him off to the front line of a battle to be killed.

But Was David a Warrior King?

While biblical literalists can be pleased to find evidence that King David did once live and rule in the Levant, they’re sure to be bummed that there’s no way he could have embarked on a military campaign of any sort. 

“There is absolutely no archaeological indication of the wealth, manpower and level of organization that would be required to support large armies — even for brief periods — in the field,” according to Finkelstein and Silberman.

Next thing you know, they’ll be saying David didn’t actually slay the gigantic hero of the Philistine army with a single shot from a slingshot.

A color sketch by Edward Poynter for his 1890 painting The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon

King Solomon: Was He Really a Master Builder?

David’s son Solomon, to whom God gave “wisdom and understanding beyond measure,” is said to have commissioned numerous building projects, including a magnificent temple to YHWH and a nearby palace. The Old Testament, as well as the Nevi’im section of the Hebrew Bible, describes him as fortifying Jerusalem, along with the important provincial cities of Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer. 

Ancient Jerusalem, with Solomon’s Temple at its center (note: probably not drawn to scale)

So some archaeologists and biblical scholars were downright giddy at the discovery of somewhat similar six-chambered gates at Hazor, Megiddo and Gezer. Surely this was a sign of Solomon’s famous public works projects! 

If that is indeed the case, though, I wonder why there isn’t a gate like that at Jerusalem, Solomon’s capital city? 

The six-chambered gate at Gezer was once thought to have been built by Solomon — but it was actually constructed decades after his reign.

It turns out that renewed analysis of the archaeological styles and pottery showed that they dated to the early 9th century BCE. The trouble with that? It happens to be decades after Solomon had died. 

Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem — though it probably wasn’t anything as grand as it’s depicted.

Petitioners came to Solomon for his judgements. He was basically the Judge Judy of his time.

Solomon was said to possess a magic ring that allowed him to control demons and jinn.

Mythic Kings as Propaganda

“The material culture of the highlands in the time of David remained simple,” Finkelstein and Silberman write. “The land was overwhelmingly rural — with no trace of widespread literacy that would be necessary for the functioning of a proper monarchy.” Jerusalem was no more than a typical highland village. Only about 5,000 people lived in the vicinity.

Archeological remains of King David’s palace show that at the time, Jerusalem was a relatively small town.

And even though King David’s deeds have been aggrandized, he must have been a talented ruler who joined his region together. “Such a small and isolated society like this would have been likely to cherish the memory of an extraordinary leader like David as his descendants continued to rule in Jerusalem over the next four hundred years,” the authors say. 

At the time these stories in the Old Testament were written, in the 7th century BCE, Jerusalem had grown into a relatively large city, dominated by the Temple to the God of Israel, with an impressive army and administrative bureaucracy. 

The stories of the powerful King David made for good propaganda at the time of Josiah. David and Goliath by Titian, circa 1544

God gives Solomon his famous wisdom.

Building up the reputation of legendary kings of the past served the current ruler, Josiah. This useful bit of propaganda connected Josiah as an heir of David, the man who was said to have conquered the Promised Land and established an empire. It helped bolster support for Josiah’s “vision of a national renaissance that sought to bring scattered, war-weary people together, to prove to them that they had experienced a stirring history under the direct intervention of God,” according to Finkelstein and Silberman. “The glorious epic of the united monarchy was — like the stories of the patriarchs and the sagas of the Exodus and conquest — a brilliant composition that wove together ancient heroic tales and legends into a coherent and persuasive prophecy for the people of Israel in the seventh century BCE.” 

If they had to fudge the truth to accomplish that, so be it. –Wally

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