Margaret Barker, The
Older Testament: The Survival of Themes from the Ancient Royal Cult in
Sectarian Judaism and Early Christianity. Sheffield Press, 2005.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
This
very important book has been very difficult to obtain for some years,
even through second-hand search services. It is not a book anyone is
likely to get rid off. And even if one has been able to fill in the
blanks by reading Barker’s more recent works (e.g., The Great Angel),
there is still much to learn in this one, the fountainhead of her
oeuvre. Thank Elyon it has now been reprinted in paperback!
As Morpheus asks Neo in the
great Gnostic epic The Matrix, are we willing to see how far down
the rabbit hole goes, even if it should transport us into another world
entirely? Barker says yes, and she is our guide to the unsuspected
religious world of the past. Some ecumenically correct scholars do not
like to draw the Germanic distinction between “Judaism” (since Ezra,
more or less) and “the religion of ancient Israel,” fearing that such a
boundary is a tool for imperialistic Christians to undermine Jewish
priority by claiming it is merely one path of evolution from the
original pre-Jewish Israelite stock, not much earlier than Christianity.
But I’m afraid we must draw that line. Barker shows why. As long as we
do not, we will never escape from the blinders of ancient Jewish (Deuteronomic)
apologetics and its systematic rewriting of history and doctrine.
How deep goes the rabbit
hole? Barker is following to new lengths the trajectory set by previous
scholars who demonstrated that what we had thought to be the ground
floor was really a superstructure. F.C. Baur demonstrated that the early
church was divided at least into Petrine and Pauline factions, and that
the subsequent fusion of (elements of) these groups resulted in the
Catholic/Orthodox Church whose spin doctors forever after proclaimed it
to be the original Christianity from which all others, ancient Gnostics
as well as modern Protestants, broke off. In the next generation, Walter
Bauer, in his Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity,
showed how the second-century church was not yet universal or uniform.
Christianity continued to exist in many irreconcilable forms, each with
its own set of roots. The first Christians in Edessa were Marcionites,
the first in Egypt Gnostics, etc. Only later did “official” Roman
Christianity crowd (stamp) the others out, like a religious Wal-Mart.
Jacob Neusner, Norman Golb, and others showed how there was in reality
no “mainstream Judaism” until the Yavneh sages erected it upon the
graves of a dizzying variety of earlier Jewish parties and sects. For
too long Christian and Jewish scholars alike had let themselves be
bamboozled by rabbinical apologetics which sought to read the “official”
Judaism of their own day back into history to lend it an illusory sense
of foundational priority.
Julius Wellhausen and the
original Higher Critics long ago demonstrated that a great gulf
separated the Israelite faith before the “reform” of Josiah and the
Deuteronomic School from what came after it. Both geographical (only
Jerusalem) and theological (only Yahve) centralization changed the face
of the ancient faith. And with Ezra, Judaism became a true religion “of
the Book,” an adaptation that would serve Jews in good stead once Exile
became a reality again, instead of just a memory. Margaret Barker (often
following in the pioneer footsteps of the Scandinavian Myth and Ritual
School) has learned to sniff out subtle and half-effaced clues to the
contours of that pre-Jewish, pre-Josianic faith. Her chief method is to
compare canonical Old Testament books (much edited by the bowdlerizing
scissors of Deuteronomic censors) with later writings not in the
official canon, especially 1 Enoch (itself a kind of canon of various
religious writings). Certain patterns of similarity run so strong
between the two bodies of literature as to suggest that the later books,
because they had lain beyond the long arm of the law, managed to
preserve the earlier doctrines. Thus Barker is able to fill in blanks in
Isaiah with material from Enoch. She shows that earlier Israelite faith
was complex and baroque. And she shows the surprising extent to which
the Old Testament text has been corrupted, almost like the Koran, with
numerous passages no longer readable. In both cases it seems that
theological zealots obscured the original, now-heretical, readings,
usually replacing them with a lot of text-critical throat-clearing.
Reams of grave and preachy
Old Testament scholarship, even in the supposedly critical twentieth
century, took for granted Deuteronomic history and theology. Scholars
might have been able to penetrate the veils of the Priestly Writer and
the Chronicler, but that’s about where it stopped. Like African
aborigines who find certain aspects of pre-Christian biblical culture
(including polygamy) to their tastes, theologians like Von Rad and
Eichrodt found congenial the theologies of recital and covenant that had
replaced the more colorful creed of pre-Josianic Israel and Judah. That
was a religion centered upon the king as the earthly vicar and son, even
incarnation, of the nation’s deity, who was one of many. Cultural
clashes and political conflicts on earth visibly mirrored invisible wars
in heaven. Yahve was one of the seventy sons of El Elyon (until 2 Isaiah
fused the two gods, Israel’s patron and the head of the pantheon). Yahve
created the world by killing deep-sea dragons, as did his mythic
counterparts in neighboring mid-eastern mythologies. Evil infiltrated
the world because of the wiles of fallen sons of god. This last occupies
more space in the book, and in the whole ancient scheme of ideas, than
my mention of it here might suggest. Indeed, I am tempted to invoke an
analogy with the role played by extraterrestrials in the belief of
today’s Flying Saucer religions, like the Raelians or Scientology. The
comparison is not meant to imply any sort of eccentricity in Barker’s
theory; it is just hard to find a suitable analogy to this element of
ancient pre-biblical thinking because the Deuteronomic redaction was so
effective in expunging it from our religious thinking.
There are, however, a few
other analogies to the ancient theology in modern times. Much of the
ancient Israelite angelology/polytheism has been rediscovered in
Mormonism (whose scholars are understandably great fans of Margaret
Barker), the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, and in Christian
Theosophical works like C.G. Harrison’s The Transcendental Universe
(1893). But the old belief has broader implications for all students of
the history of biblical religion. For instance, we are used to the
notion that the early Christian view of the Messiah had assimilated
several features of Hellenistic Jewish martyr theology as well as
Mystery Religion sacramentalism. As per Jewish apologists, it was from
paganism that the distinctly Christian messianic job description came.
It must have been so, since Judaism seemed always to have possessed a
far more modest concept of the messiah as a human Jewish king with no
divinity, no atonement, no death and resurrection. But what if Barker
(to say nothing of Mowinckel) is right? What if the Christology that
makes Messiah God’s Son, even in a metaphysical sense, and has him
suffering in battle for Israel’s sins, etc., even resurrecting,
represents an earlier, pre-revisionistic, pre-rationalistic and pre-reductionistic
form of Israelite faith? It looks as if Jews, worrying about the
prospect of God sharing his divinity with another, shrunk the outlines
of the divine hero to those of a mortal king. The Christian Jesus looks
a lot more like the ancient kings of Judah than the righteous warrior of
the Psalms of Solomon or the Yavneh rabbis. Oh my: what if the Christian
framework is older? If Barker is right, early Christians did not
have to rediscover this stuff (as Mormons did); they were direct heirs
of archaic popular religion that had never been eradicated no matter how
many of Josiah’s or Hezekiah’s or Judah Maccabee’s “revenuers” made the
rounds smashing the stills of hilltop worship and sacrifice. They knew
it had always been good Israelite religion, no matter that the priests
had begun labeling it as “Canaanite.” (In fact, even to draw such a
distinction presupposed the legend of the Exodus, seeking to hide the
fact that Israelites simply were Canaanites whose ancestors had
never left.)
Vatican II hardly spelled
the end of old-time Catholicism. Likewise, Wareeth Deem Muhammad tried
to expunge the heresies of his father, but they only bounced back, full
strength, with Minister Farrakhan. There are still a lot of
Episcopalians out there piously turning the loosening pages of 1928
prayer books. Old beliefs do not politely take the hint and retire. And
the early Christians, as Barker sketches them, happily continued in the
faith of their remote forbears, who had mourned for Tammuz and rejoiced
at his resurrection, who had called Baal “my husband,” who had made
cakes for the Queen of Heaven, who had run into Jehovah in human form on
the threshing floor, and who had worshipped him enthroned alongside his
white-haired Father, Elyon.
As I said, this wonderful
book was followed by many more including The Lost Prophet, The
Great Angel, The Risen Lord, The Gate of Heaven,
The Great High Priest, and The Revelation of Jesus Christ.
I’d say that, if your goals include understanding the Old Testament and
the faith of ancient Israel and early Christianity, you’ve got your work
cut out for you. But so does Margaret Barker. I hereby summon her to do
her duty: she owes us her own heavily annotated translation of the
“Older Testament” books, at least the main ones she deals with, those
most relevant to the ancient belief. She ought to indulge freely in
hypothetical reconstruction of the texts, labeled as such, that the
ancient censors garbled. She’s got my permission! Speculate! The
collection ought to include annotated versions of Enoch, Jubilees, etc.,
even sections of Philo and some of the Nag Hammadi texts.
What a delight it is to
read Barker’s books! Through their pages breathes the fresh breeze that
animated the works of Wellhausen, Robertson Smith, Colenso, Kuenen and
the other pioneers of the Higher Criticism of the Old Testament. The day
of the angels and giants imparting their wisdom to the human race is not
over!