Controversial Theories of Cain and Abel

Why would God pit brother against brother — and what exactly was the mark of Cain? 

The tale of Cain and Abel reveals that it didn’t take long for sibling rivalry to manifest — and in a horrific manner. It’s a narrative of jealousy, fratricide and divine judgment. Yet, beneath the surface, this story is a theological Rorschach test, challenging assumptions about justice, fate and the very nature of God. Why did God favor Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s? Was Cain always destined to be the villain? And does this story reveal more about human failure — or divine caprice? Scholars have wrestled with these questions for centuries, offering interpretations that range from moral instruction to thinly veiled critiques of the text itself.

“Believe it or not, in some Jewish traditions, Cain kills Abel by biting his neck.”

The Favoritism Dilemma: Why Abel?

The story’s most unsettling moment is also its crux: The two sons of Adam and Eve bring offerings to God, and one is inexplicably favored. Abel’s offering of “the firstborn of his flock” is accepted, while Cain’s “fruits of the soil” are rejected (Genesis 4:4-5). But why? The text remains maddeningly silent, leaving readers to puzzle over a seemingly arbitrary divine preference. 

Gerhard von Rad argues in Genesis: A Commentary that the lack of rationale is deliberate, underscoring a recurring biblical theme — God’s choices often defy human logic, much like the seemingly unjust suffering of Job.

Some interpreters, however, shift the blame from divine whim to Cain’s own shortcomings. In The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis, Leon Kass suggests that Cain’s offering reflects his inner state: a heart not fully invested in his act of worship. The offering of fruit was less important than the spirit in which it was given, Kass argues. Cain, in this view, was the architect of his own downfall, his half-hearted devotion sealing his rejection.

Was Cain Set Up to Fail?

But was Cain ever given a real shot at divine favor? Some scholars argue that the narrative stacks the deck against him from the start. Robert Alter, in The Art of Biblical Narrative, notes that Cain’s name echoes the Hebrew word for “acquisition,” signaling his fixation on ownership and control — a precursor to his fatal envy. Alter sees this as foreshadowing, subtly positioning Cain as a tragic figure whose sin is less a spontaneous act and more an inevitable outcome of his character. 

An Allegory of Agricultural vs. Pastoral Societies?

The Cain and Abel story also serves as a lens through which scholars view broader social dynamics in ancient Israel. Cain, the farmer, stands in tension with Abel, the shepherd — a reflection of the historical friction between settled agriculturalists and nomadic pastoralists. 

John Van Seters, in Prologue to History, interprets the story as a mythologized conflict between two ways of life. The narrative reveals a deeper cultural tension, with God’s favoritism elevating the pastoral above the agrarian — it’s a dig at the encroachment of settled civilization on nomadic traditions.

How Exactly Did Cain Kill Abel?

The Bible keeps it cryptic, as though nudging readers to ponder over the messy reality of human conflict. Genesis merely tells us that “Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him” (Genesis 4:8). But the lack of details has sparked centuries of debate, each theory a reflection of the storyteller’s time and place.

The Stone

Many scholars, from ancient rabbis to modern theologians, argue Cain used a stone to strike his brother. This idea makes its way into commentary like The Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg, where it’s suggested Cain saw the stone as both a weapon and a twisted reminder of the dust from which humanity was formed.

The Neck Bite

Believe it or not, some Jewish traditions add a far more primal touch. In these interpretations, like those found in The Talmud, Cain allegedly kills Abel by biting his neck. This brutal method underscores the story’s raw, animalistic nature — Cain attacks not with a weapon but with his own body, as if driven to murder by a more visceral rage.

A Sword or Tool

Medieval Christian artists sometimes depicted Cain wielding a crude sword or farming tool, suggesting he struck Abel with something close at hand, a symbol of Cain’s role as a tiller of the earth. This is the perspective you’ll see in certain illuminated manuscripts, where artists added their own medieval flavor to the story.

God’s Hand

An outlying theory, often linked to Gnostic or mystical interpretations, is that Cain’s anger somehow triggered a divine consequence. In these readings, Cain’s jealousy creates a rupture, allowing Abel to die without a physical act — almost as though God allows the anger itself to kill. This unusual perspective can be found in some early Christian texts, like those discussed in Gnostic Truth and Christian Heresy by Alastair Logan.

Each theory reflects the cultural lens of its time. Whether it’s a stone, a primal bite or divine intervention, the lack of specificity gives the story a mythic quality, inviting readers to consider not just the act but the consequences of unchecked anger.

The Mark of Cain: Curse or Protection?

Driven by jealousy and anger after God favors Abel’s offering over his, Cain lures his brother into the field and murders him in a fit of rage (Genesis 4:8). 

After this horrifying act, Cain is marked by God — not as a curse, but as protection, ensuring that anyone who tries to harm him will face vengeance sevenfold (Genesis 4:15). 

And what exactly was the mark? The nature of the mark of Cain has sparked wild speculation, ranging from a physical scar to a distinct feature like darkened skin, although these later interpretations often twisted the mark into a symbol of racial or social stigma. In its original context, however, most scholars agree that the mark was likely symbolic, representing divine mercy and protection rather than any visible disfigurement.

Ancient Jewish and Christian traditions offer a variety of theories. Some rabbinic texts suggest the mark was a supernatural sign, such as a glowing forehead or even the Hebrew letter tav etched onto his skin. Early Christian commentators like Augustine speculated that the mark was a form of trembling or perpetual wandering — an internal affliction more than an external brand. 

But they all agree that the mark wasn’t a punishment. As Victor P. Hamilton points out in The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17, the mark is a striking blend of judgment and grace, revealing a God who, even in the act of condemning Cain, extends protection.

In this way, the mark of Cain complicates the straightforward idea of divine punishment. The first murderer in biblical history isn’t cast out entirely; instead, he’s given a form of protection that hints at God’s ongoing commitment to flawed humanity. 

A Deeper Moral: Envy, Responsibility and Restorative Justice

At first glance, Cain and Abel reads like a straightforward morality tale about unchecked envy. God’s warning to Cain — “Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it” (Genesis 4:7) — is often interpreted as a timeless lesson in self-control. 

But beneath this warning lies a story of complex responsibility. Walter Brueggemann, in Genesis: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, suggests that Cain’s fate remains unresolved after the murder, leaving room for redemption. He sees a God who, even in judgment, allows space for healing and transformation. Of course, God’s favoritism is what caused the entire ruckus in the first place. –Wally

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MORE: Theories about the Creation

Controversial Takes on the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man

Shocking alternative theories of biblical interpretation of Eden, Eve, the forbidden fruit, the serpent and original sin.

The Garden of Eden is considered the quintessential paradise — an untouched, idyllic realm where rivers flowed, trees bore fruit in abundance, and harmony reigned. At its heart stood the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, both laden with mystery and meaning. But was Eden a literal place, a symbolic lesson or something altogether different? Are you willing to take a bite of the Tree of Knowledge — and face the consequences?

RELATED: Did God Really Create the World in Seven Days?

Was Eden an Actual Garden?

The Hebrew word translated as “garden” (gan) doesn’t fully capture its significance. In fact, some scholars argue that Eden was more akin to a sanctuary or a royal park — a sacred space where divine and human realms intersected. 

For some, this shifts the narrative from a picturesque plot of land to a space designed for communion between humanity and God. If Eden is a sanctuary, it might suggest that this story is about something deeper — less about location, more about the intended relationship between humanity and the divine. Remember: God would hang out and take walks with Adam and Eve. 

RELATED: What Does God Look Like?

The Tree of Knowledge: To Be Godlike?

The Tree of Knowledge is central to this story — a tree that was off-limits yet irresistible. Putting this temptation right in the middle of the garden wasn’t the nicest thing God could have done. 

Scholars have long debated what the tree truly represents. Is it about moral discernment, free will or something darker? 

Ellen van Wolde, in Reframing Biblical Studies, argues that the Hebrew word for knowledge (da’at) implies more than just knowing good from evil. It’s about power, authority and wisdom traditionally reserved for the divine. The tree, then, may be less about moral choice and more about the dangers of encroaching on knowledge and power intended only for God.

East vs. West: Interpretations of the Serpent

The serpent slithers in as the story’s most cryptic figure. While popular culture casts the serpent as Satan himself, the original text never makes that connection. Instead, the serpent’s role is open to interpretation. 

James Barr, in The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality, suggests that the serpent is a trickster figure, a symbol of chaos and subversion found in myths across cultures (think Loki, Hermes, the Joker and Deadpool). 

Gnostic traditions even flip the script entirely, portraying the serpent as a liberator who offers true knowledge, freeing humanity from an oppressive deity. 

In many Eastern cultures, snakes are revered as symbols of wisdom, fertility and even immortality. For example, in Hinduism and Buddhism, the serpent (naga) is seen as a powerful, protective force — often associated with deities and cosmic balance. In Chinese mythology, snakes are linked to longevity and good fortune, with the snake being one of the 12 zodiac animals, symbolizing deep intuition and transformation.

Contrast that with the Western tradition, where snakes have often been portrayed as malevolent creatures tied to deceit and danger. This demonization largely stems from the influence of the Bible, particularly the story of Eden. Over time, Christian theology increasingly equated the serpent with Satan himself — despite the original Genesis text never explicitly making that connection. The idea solidified through later interpretations and religious art, reinforcing the image of the serpent as a vessel of evil.

This stark difference in cultural symbolism reflects a deeper divide in worldview. In Eastern traditions, the snake’s ability to shed its skin is seen as a metaphor for renewal and spiritual growth. Meanwhile, in the West, this same attribute is often viewed with suspicion, implying deception and the capacity to mislead — qualities emphasized in the Eden narrative.

So, the serpent’s reputation as a trickster in the Garden of Eden could be interpreted through a dual lens: one that either condemns it as the catalyst of humanity’s fall or respects it as an agent of transformative knowledge. 

The Fruit: Apple, Fig or Something Else?

The forbidden fruit is widely portrayed as an apple, but the Bible is conspicuously silent on the specifics. Some scholars speculate that it could have been a fig, linking it to the fig leaves Adam and Eve later use to cover themselves (Genesis 3:7). 

Others suggest a pomegranate, a fruit rich in symbolism across ancient cultures, often associated with fertility and the underworld. 

Apples are originally native to Central Asia, specifically the area around modern-day Kazakhstan. They eventually spread to Europe, but they wouldn’t have been a common fruit in the ancient Near East. So how did apples become the go-to symbol for the forbidden fruit?

The answer lies in a combination of linguistic coincidence and artistic tradition. In the 4th century, when the Bible was translated into Latin, the word for evil, malum, closely resembled the word for apple, malus. This play on words may have led to the association between the apple and the forbidden fruit. Over time, Western art reinforced this image, depicting Eve handing Adam an apple in countless paintings and sculptures, cementing the fruit’s place in popular imagination.

Eden and Other Myths: A Remix of Ancient Stories?

The Garden of Eden narrative shares striking similarities with older myths from the ancient Near East, particularly the Sumerian tale of Dilmun, a paradise described as a place without sickness, death or  suffering. In this story, Dilmun is a garden blessed by the gods, where pure waters flow and all living creatures thrive in harmony. Much like Eden, Dilmun is portrayed as a utopia, symbolizing a world untouched by the corruption of mortality.

What’s fascinating is how these myths overlap and diverge. The Sumerian myth, which predates the biblical account by several centuries (the earliest versions of Dilmun date back to around 2100 BCE, as opposed to the Genesis story, which was written sometime much later, sometime around 580 BCE), emphasizes the idea of a divinely created paradise. Genesis, on the other hand, reinterprets this concept in a monotheistic framework. 

One key difference lies in the purpose of these narratives. While Dilmun is primarily a tale of divine blessing and the ideal state of life, Eden’s narrative centers on a moral test, the introduction of human free will and the consequences of overreaching divine boundaries. 

Another parallel is found in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, which contains a scene where the hero seeks a plant that grants immortality, only to lose it to a serpent. This echoes the Eden story, where a serpent plays a central role in the loss of paradise. The Epic of Gilgamesh, likely written around 1800 BCE, also predates Genesis and suggests that the themes of a lost paradise and a deceiving serpent were circulating in the cultural consciousness long before the Hebrew Bible was compiled.

The Fall of Man: Paradise Lost

We all know the basics: Adam, Eve, a serpent, a forbidden fruit and the catastrophe that supposedly cursed all of humanity. But what if this story isn’t just a cautionary tale of disobedience? Scholars have long debated whether the so-called “Fall” was a tragic mistake or a necessary event — perhaps even one destined from the start. Is this exile merely a punishment — or is it part of humanity’s necessary evolution? 

Traditionally, the Fall is framed as humanity’s catastrophic lapse — the moment Adam and Eve traded paradise for suffering, death and toil. But what if it was less about disobedience and more about the maturation of humanity? Elaine Pagels argues in The Gnostic Gospels that eating the fruit was a catalyst for growth. Rather than a “fall” from grace, the story can be seen as a necessary step toward knowledge and independence. The departure from Eden marks the beginning of human history, with all its ambiguities, tensions and possibilities. 

The garden may have been a place of bliss, but it was also a place of ignorance. Leaving Eden means entering the world of complexity — where knowledge, creativity and culture become possible. In this reading, the “Fall” is less a tragedy and more the first step toward becoming fully human.

In this light, the knowledge of good and evil isn’t simply a curse but the beginning of human moral consciousness — the first moment when humans took responsibility for their choices and lives.

Eve as the Scapegoat: Misogyny in the Making

It’s impossible to discuss the Fall without addressing Eve’s role. For centuries, she’s been painted as the original temptress, responsible for humanity’s descent into sin. But feminist scholars like Phyllis Trible in God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality argue that this reading is a distortion. Eve’s act is often presented as malicious and subversive, yet the text itself describes her as thoughtful and engaged in ethical reasoning. 

The vilification of Eve has led to centuries of misogynistic interpretations, turning her into a scapegoat for humanity’s flaws. A more nuanced reading might see Eve as curious, rational and willing to take risks — qualities that are both human and, in many ways, admirable.

Original Sin: A Later Invention

The concept of “original sin” — the idea that Adam and Eve’s disobedience condemned all future generations — largely comes from Saint Augustine’s interpretation, which heavily influenced Christian doctrine. But is this really what the Genesis authors intended? John Hick, in Evil and the God of Love, suggests that inherited guilt was an overlay imposed by later Christian theology. There’s no evidence that early Jewish interpretations saw the Fall as a hereditary curse, he argues. 

The original story, then, may have been more concerned with the inevitability of human frailty rather than branding all of humanity with perpetual guilt. The shift in interpretation has had profound consequences, shaping millennia of theology and human self-perception.

Exile From Eden

The tale of Eden and the Fall of Man is a story that has sunk its teeth into human imagination for millennia — a seemingly simple narrative of temptation and transgression that, upon closer inspection, reveals layers of meaning and controversy. 

From a sanctuary more akin to a divine throne room than a garden, to a serpent who might be more liberator than villain, and a bite that offered not just forbidden fruit but the bitter-sweet taste of knowledge and independence, this story challenges our notions of innocence, guilt and what it means to be human. Perhaps we never lost paradise after all. –Wally

Controversial Takes on the Creation: Rethinking the Genesis Story

Explore the Genesis creation story through the lens of symbolic timelines, ancient mythological influences, and the evolving dialogue on gender roles and the imago Dei. 

It all starts with a void, a formless, dark abyss. Then, a single command — “Let there be light” — kicks off the creation of the universe. In a mere seven days (or was it?), God separates light from darkness and land from sea, populates the animal kingdom and eventually crafts humanity in his image. It’s a tale almost everyone knows, but beneath its simplicity lies a world of debate, alternative interpretations and a bit of controversy.

“Things get even more interesting when you look at the original Hebrew. The word for God here is Elohim, which is a plural noun.

So what gives? ”

The Cosmic Timeline: Literal Days or Epic Metaphor?

While many people believe that Genesis lays out a precise timeframe — six 24-hour days followed by a well-earned divine rest — others argue that this timeline is more symbolic. 

Let’s recall that the Bible isn’t a science textbook. The Old Testament was composed by various authors over many centuries, reflecting a range of perspectives and historical contexts. Many scholars believe that large portions were never intended to be taken literally, but were instead written as symbolic narratives or moral lessons.

The Day-Age Theory

One interpretation, known as the Day-Age Theory, suggests that each “day” represents a long epoch rather than a 24-hour time period. This perspective attempts to reconcile the biblical narrative with scientific understandings of the age of the universe. Advocates of this view point out that the Hebrew word used in Genesis, yom, can refer to different lengths of time, depending on the context.

This discussion enriches the Genesis narrative by allowing for interpretations that align with both ancient cultural contexts and modern scientific perspectives. For example, on the third day, God separated the land from the sea — an event that, according to this view, could have unfolded over millennia.

Other Ancient Myths: Genesis in a Broader Context

The Genesis creation story isn’t a one-of-a-kind tale; it’s more like a remix of the ancient world’s greatest hits. Back in the day, everyone from the Babylonians to the Egyptians had their own origin stories, where gods shaped the world. 

One of the most famous of these is the Babylonian Enuma Elish, a myth dating back to the 2nd millennium BCE.

In both Genesis and the Enuma Elish, creation begins in a world of water and darkness. Genesis opens with “the Spirit of God hovering over the waters” (Genesis 1:2), while the Enuma Elish starts with the mingling of the freshwater god Apsu and the saltwater goddess Tiamat. 

The key difference lies in how order is brought out of this chaos. In the Enuma Elish, creation is the result of a violent divine conflict. The god Marduk slays Tiamat and slices her body in half, using one part to create the heavens and the other to form the earth. In contrast, Genesis depicts an orderly and peaceful process: God speaks, and creation happens. The text emphasizes that the world is brought into being through divine command rather than conflict. 

The Divine Council and the Elohim Mystery

Another similarity lies in the presence of a divine council. In both Genesis and the Enuma Elish, the idea of a higher assembly is present. Genesis hints at this in phrases like, “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1:26), which have led some scholars to suggest that the pluralization in the text is alluding to a divine council. In the Enuma Elish, Marduk consults with a council of gods before he takes action. 

Things get even more interesting when you look at the original Hebrew. The word for God here is Elohim, which is a plural noun. So what gives? Is this a slip-up, a relic from polytheistic roots or a majestic way to express the fullness of God? 

Gender Roles and the Imago Dei

Genesis 1:27 famously states, “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” This single verse has sparked endless debates about what it means to be made in God’s image and what it implies about gender roles. Is the imago Dei (image of God) about physical form, moral capacity, the ability to rule or something else entirely? And does the verse suggest that men and women were created as equal partners, or is there an embedded hierarchy that reflects traditional patriarchal structures?

Some scholars, like Phyllis Trible, argue that this verse in Genesis 1 speaks to an egalitarian creation — where male and female are equal partners from the outset, challenging the patriarchal interpretations that became more prevalent later in history. In her book God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Trible contends that the language used here emphasizes a shared humanity and mutuality between men and women. The simultaneous creation of male and female in God’s image resists any notion of hierarchy, positioning both as equal bearers of divine likeness and true partners.

The Creation Sequence in Genesis 2: Hierarchy or Partnership?

However, interpretations shift when moving to Genesis 2, where the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib introduces what some see as a declaration of male supremacy. In this version, Adam is created first, given the command to name the animals, and then put to sleep so that Eve can be made from his side. For many, this sequence has been used to argue that men hold a leadership role over women, with Eve’s creation from Adam symbolizing her derivative nature.

Bruce Waltke, in his book Genesis: A Commentary, explores how this narrative has been employed regarding gender roles. There are two schools of thought: Those who support a complementarian view argue that the sequence indicates a divinely ordained leadership role for men, while those who support egalitarianism emphasize the unity and mutual dependence expressed in the phrase “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23).

Another angle in this debate revolves around what it means to bear the image of God in relation to rulership. Genesis 1:26 says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

The plural “them” suggests that both male and female share in this dominion. John H. Walton, in The Lost World of Genesis One, argues that rulership is a key aspect of what it means to be made in God’s image, and that this dominion is intended to be a joint responsibility. The image of God in humanity is primarily functional, emphasizing our role as God’s representatives on Earth, with male and female equally in charge.

As Trible and others have pointed out, the so-called “curse” of patriarchy in Genesis 3, where God tells Eve, “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16), is framed as a consequence of the Fall, not a prescriptive mandate for all time. Trible argues that this shift is a distortion of the original egalitarian ideal and that the redemption of humanity should seek to restore the balance intended in the creation narratives.

The demonization of Eve (and, by extension, all women) continues in the telling of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man. 

The Creation Story: Timeless, Yet Ever-Evolving

The Genesis creation story may be ancient, but its interpretations continue to evolve. From questions about the cosmic timeline to debates over the roles of men and women, these texts invite us to look deeper, challenging us to explore the intersections between faith, history and science. 

The conversation is far from over — and maybe that’s the point. Genesis opens with the words, “In the beginning,” reminding us that even in our understanding, we’re still at the start of a much larger journey. –Wally

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

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