The History of Evil in Antiquity

2000 BCE - 450 CE

Tom Angier, Chad Meister, Charles Taliaferro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138642300
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317245872
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

This first volume of The History of Evil covers Graeco-Roman, Indian, Near Eastern, and Eastern philosophy and religion from 2000 BCE to 450 CE. This book charts the foundations of the history of evil among the major philosophical traditions and world religions, beginning with the oldest recorded traditions: the Vedas and Upani?ads, Confucianism and Daoism, and Buddhism, and continuing through Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian schools of thought. This cutting-edge treatment of the history of evil at its crucial and determinative inception will appeal to those with particular interests in the ancient period and early theories and ideas of evil and good, as well as those seeking an understanding of how later philosophical and religious developments were conditioned and shaped.

1 Ancient Israel

Rüdiger Schmitt

Introduction

Writing a history of evil in the Hebrew Bible faces the problem that the polyphonic biblical texts do not contain a systematic or coherent treatment of the origins of evil or the way humans and God deal with it. The problem of evil in the Hebrew Bible, as well as in other ancient Near Eastern literary traditions, is linked to the realm of ethics and law and to the problem of mythological and demonic representations, as well as to the problem of a divine origin of evil (cf. Dohmen 2004). It is not the task of a historian of religion to outline a ‘theology of evil’, as this is the realm of systematic theology; rather, it is to reconstruct the different ways the biblical writers dealt with the problem in their historical and socio-religious contexts and to avoid apologetic or heavily theologically biased reasoning (as in Dietrich and Link 1995–2000) or (conversely) anti-theological polemics (cf. Dawkins 2006; Lüdemann 1997). Thus, the problem of evil has to be approached from different viewpoints: the semantics of evil, the history of Israelite religion in its ancient Near Eastern context, and the various kinds of biblical literature dealing with it.

The Hebrew term rā‘ā, ‘evil’

In the texts of the Hebrew Bible, the term rā‘ā, ‘evil’, and its derivatives occurs 787 times and denotes various aspects of the bad and negative, such as misfortune and bad luck, including the quality of things like fruit and water. Rā‘ā is most frequently found in the deuteronomistic history work (184 times in Deuteronomy to 2 Kings) and the strongly deuteronomistic reworked book of Jeremiah (146 times). The antonym of rā‘ā is tôb, ‘good’. In constructions together with ’āśāh, ‘to do’, rā‘ā can be applied to human as well as – less frequently – divine actions. In the human realm, rā‘ā denotes both the evil done and the evil or misfortune suffered by humans, whereas divine actions are mostly linked to punishment.

Yahweh as origin of evil

According to Augustine, God is the bonum solum simplex (De civitate Dei 11,10) or simply the summum bonum (Questiones 83,21). For Thomas Aquinas, God is the essentially good (Summa Theologiae VII.3). Martin Luther (Großer Katechismus, WA 30.1, 135–6) also stands in this tradition when he explains the etymology of the German word Gott (God) from gut (good). According to Luther, the deus absconditus, the hidden God, may be angry about human sins, but wrath is no part of the essence of the divine. Divine wrath is a deprivation of God’s essence as a reaction to human sin, but not the divine essence. That deities in general or the biblical Yahweh are essentially ‘good’, or even the summum bonum, is a conception which is not shared, however, by ancient Near Eastern sources, including the Hebrew Bible, where conceptions of the divine are much more ambivalent. As shown above, doing rā‘ā or ‘evil’ is attributed not only to humans but also to Yahweh, who is perceived in Isaiah 45:7 as the one ‘who creates peace/wholeness (shālôm) and evil (rā‘ā)’ and in 1 Samuel 16:14 and 18:10 torments Saul with his evil spirit.

That Yahweh himself is the origin of evil was first proposed in the history of scholarship by the French orientalist Ernest Renan (1858). According to Renan, monotheism was a natural outcome of life in the desert (‘le désert est monothéiste’), and the gods of the desert, like Yahweh, have a harsh and sometimes cruel character. Likewise, Paul Volz, a German Old Testament scholar of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, explained the dark side of Yahweh in his book Das Dämonische in Jahwe (The demonic in Yahweh, 1924), detailing the animistic origins of the deity. According to Volz, Yahweh was originally a demonic force of the desert and – following Renan – shows the qualities of the desert. He is a destroyer, terrible, frightening, full of wrath, punishing, hard, and merciless. He is a deity who demands atrocities and creates evil. The demonic character of Yahweh has agglomerated evil, so that the later Yahweh religion was not in need of demons or gods related to evils such as plagues. Volz’s theory of the demonic origins of Yahweh is nevertheless based on outdated evolutionary assumptions and is considered historically obsolete by most scholars (as early Yahwism was polytheistic, and demons play a role). It nonetheless has still had some influence on recent scholarship (Frey-Anthes 2007). The most influential figure of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule is without doubt Rudolf Otto, who made a distinction between the mysterium tremendum and the mysterium fascinosum (Otto 1987: 13–37). Otto picks up Schleiermacher’s theology of religious experience and develops his theory from the irrational perception of the frightening, the mysterium tremendum, of which the ‘emāt (‘wrath’) of Yahweh in Exodus 23:27 is an example. This ‘absolute unapproachability’ (schlechthinnige Unnahbarkeit) and ‘holy horror’ finds its clearest expression in Jacob’s outcry in Genesis 28:17: ‘And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”’ According to Otto, the wrath of God has nothing to do with moral qualities but is the very essence and natural expression of the holy. Rational and moral explanations for sin and punishment are secondary to this original experience of the divine.

Otto´s approach was widely received among Old Testament scholars, and in particular by Albrecht Alt. In his epoch-making article ‘Der Gott der Väter’ from 1929 (Alt 1968: 26), he describes the type of religious experience, the mysterium tremendum, as typical for the gods of the fathers, which found its expression in the name of the numen pachad jizchak, ‘Terror of Izaak’, which threw terror over Izaak and thereby bound him into his sphere of influence. Following Otto, Mircea Eliade (1984: 105–9) finds in the experiences of the tremendum and the majestas the typical mode of epiphany of the weather-god. Likewise, Thorkild Jacobson (1981: 151–8) has applied the ideas of divine majestas and mysterium tremendum to the storm- and weather-gods of Syria and Mesopotamia. The methodological problems with and shortcomings of Otto’s theory, principally its subjectivism, and the speculative identification of religious feelings and experiences in ritual and mythological texts are obvious. However, the dark, even evil sides of Yahweh have nothing to do with his proposed origin in the southern deserts and cannot be explained either by the theory of the accumulation of evil or by universalistic theories like Otto’s conception of the mysterium tremendum. The Hebrew Bible itself does not contain systematic reflection on the divine; thus the relation between Yahweh and evil is much more complex and is described in different ways according to the type of literature (myth, historical writings, laws, prayers, and wisdom texts) and the function of the deity described in these works. The negative aspects attributed to Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible are in most cases related to different functions of the deity, in particular his roles as creator (and destroyer) and divine king, divine judge, and divine warrior. As the national god of Israel and Judah in pre-exilic times, Yahweh also has the function of a god of war. ‘Yahweh is a warrior’ (Exodus 15:3) and, as a god of war, he has strongly violent aspects: he commands to go to war, and in deuteronomistic literature he demands utter destruction (chērem). Moreover, he himself participates in war, smashing the enemy by throwing stones from heaven (Joshua 10:11). These aspects are shared in particular with other warrior gods, the fierce Mesopotamian war-goddess Ishtar and her West-Semitic ‘sister’ the Ugaritic warrior-maiden Anat, the Assyrian national god Assur, the Mesopotamian pestilence-god Erra, who tries to reverse the cosmic order, or the Egyptian goddess Hathor (cf. Schmitt 2011a: 217).

In the view of the priestly theology (P) of Genesis 1:31, God’s creation is entirely good (tôb mĕ’od), and the creation of men and animals stands under his blessing (1.28: wayebārek ’ōtām ’ēlōhîm). Yahweh’s decision to extinguish his creation by the flood in P is seen as a punishment for human evil (Genesis 6:5) and violence (Genesis 6:11: chamas), and he is perceived as the one who is able to reverse his creation by bringing back the chaotic powers of the flood. The statement in Isaiah 45:7 that Yahweh is the one who creates peace/wholeness (shālôm) and evil/misfortune (rā‘ā) has to be understood as an expression of the universal power of the creator-god. In the prophetic writings, the evil caused by Yahweh is often perceived in the context of divine judgement for his unfaithful people and the call to repentance. In some cases, it is said that Yahweh regrets the rā‘ā or ‘evil’ he has done or has decided to do to his people (Jeremiah 18:10; 26:3–13; 29:11; 36:3; 42:10; Jonah 3; also Exodus 32:14). The evil is not restricted to Israel, however; it comes also as a divine judgement on other nations – for instance, the Babylonians in Isaiah 47:11:

But evil shall come upon you,

which you cannot charm away;

disaster shall fall upon you,

which you will not be able to ward off;

and ruin shall come on you suddenly,

of which you know nothing.

Thus it is clear that the ‘evil’ coming from Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible is in most cases perceived as a divine reaction to human misbehaviour and is closely related to Yahweh’s functions as god of war, creator, and divine judge. Nevertheless, Yahweh could be seen as ambivalent, and with dark sides (like many other ancient Near Eastern deities), without being perceived as the source of evil.

Human evil-doers

The non-priestly strain of the primeval history contained in Genesis 2:4b–11 (formerly attributed to the so-called J (Yahwist) source) can be read as the continuing growth of human wickedness from the first sin (Genesis 3:1–24) to the decision of God to extinguish his creation and his final promise after the flood not to curse humankind again, because ‘the inclination of the human heart is evil (rā‘ā) from youth’ (Genesis 8:21; cf. Schmitt 2010: 196–201). The first sin committed by Adam and Eve, namely their attempt to become like God by eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, caused their expulsion from paradise and God’s curse (’ārūr) on the soil on which they have to live (Genesis 3:17). The curse as a Leitmotiv is found throughout the non-priestly strain of the primeval history and is found in Genesis 4:11, 5:29, and 8:21. After the first sin the wickedness of humans increases dramatically: Cain kills his brother Abel (Genesis 4:1–16) and is cursed from the ground (4:11) to be a wanderer on earth. The short story of Lamech in Genesis 4:23–4 gives both an aetiology of cultural techniques (Jabal as father of the shepherds, Jubal as father of the musicians, and Tubal-Cain as father of the smiths) and the Lamech song, which praises boundless bloody revenge even on small boys, which is in the light of the lex talionis (Exodus 21:23–5: wound for wound) incompatible with biblical and extra-biblical law, and has been seen as an increase of violence – worse than Cain murdering his brother. Thus it is human wickedness that leads to God’s decision to unleash the flood over humankind. The non-priestly strain of the primeval history may originally have served as an explanation for the catastrophe of the exile, but in the final composition it became an aetiology of the negative conditions of humankind in general. The perception that the flood is a punishment for human evil and violence is shared by the priestly strain (Genesis 6:5–11); nevertheless its Leitmotiv is that humankind, with its evil ambitions, stands under divine blessing (Genesis 1:28; 9:1). In the post-priestly addition of the story about the marriage of the ‘sons of God’ with human daughters (Genesis 6:1–4), which is placed right before God’s decision to initiate the flood, human sin is exculpated by the introduction of the angelic marriages which have caused a disturbance of the cosmic order by transgressing the borders between heaven and earth (Schmitt 2011a: 202–3).

Notably, the term rā‘ā is missing in the priestly law codes and is most frequently used in the book of Deuteronomy (41 times): in the deuteronomic law texts Yahweh demands that ‘you shall purge the evil from your midst’ (13:6; 17:7–12; 19:9; 21:21; 22:21; 22:24; 24:7; cf. Judges 20:13). The evil addressed in these texts ranges from cultic to legal and social offenses: instigation to apostasy by prophets and seers, veneration of astral deities, disobedience to a priestly law decision, false testimony at court, disobedient sons, adultery, sexual intercourse with unmarried women, and kidnapping. These deeds are conceived of as being a violation of the social and divine world order, which can be annulled only by the death of the perpetrator. In the epilogue to the law in Deuteronomy 28, it is explicitly said that the evil Israel will do, in particular the disobedience to the law and thereby the breaking of the covenant with God, will bring a curse upon the people, disaster, consumption, and exile. It is widely acknowledged by scholars that this conception of covenant has close parallels with Assyrian vassal treaties; nevertheless, there is discussion among scholars whether these parallels result in a direct literary dependence or are based on more general similarities with ancient Near Eastern treaties (cf. Steymanns 1995; Otto 1999). Another phrase often found in deuteronomistic literature is ‘to do evil in the eyes of Yahweh’ (Deuteronomy 4:25; 9:18; 17:2; 31:29; Judges 2:11; 3:7–12; 4:1; 6:1; 10:6; 13:1; 1 Samuel 15:19; 2 Samuel 12:9, and more than 20 times in 1 and 2 Kings). In these texts, evil is related mostly to apostasy from Yahweh and to idolatry. In the books of Kings, it is related particularly to veneration of foreign gods, idolatry, and cultic atrocities, such as offering children to Molech (which seems to be a deuteronomistic chimera, not a real practice), as well as to general disobedience to Yahweh (attributed to the kings of Israel and Judah). From the viewpoint of the exilic and post-exilic authors and redactors of the deuteronomistic history, committing these sins has caused Yahweh’s wrath and the loss of the land.

As already noted above, in prophetic literature, evil suffered by humans is mostly perceived as Yahweh’s judgement for the evil done by his people in not obeying his commands. This is reflected in Isaiah 31:8:

Yet he too is wise and brings disaster;

He does not call back his words,

But will rise against the house of evil-doers,

And against the helpers of those who work iniquity.

The evil addressed in Ezekiel 6:9 is the practice of idolatry: ‘Then they will be loathsome in their own sight for the evils they have committed, for all their abominations.’ Thus, deuteronomic/deuteronomistic and prophetic literature coincide in their (retrospective, mostly exilic and post-exilic) view that the evil done by the Israelites is a distortion of the relation with Yahweh, which thus has to be punished.

In the Psalms, the term rā‘ā occurs 80 times. In the psalms of complaint, the evil suffered by humans is attributed to human enemies (Psalms 34:16; 35:12; 38:20; 109:5, etc.). The evil caused and suffered by humans is often not specified, as the Psalms provide general templates for prayers against any kind of evil: envy, jealousy, malicious gossip, defamation, the evil tongue (Psalm 140:12, literally ‘man of the [evil] tongue’), the evil eye (Psalm 35:19), and other kinds of witchcraft such as curses (Psalm 10:7; 109:18). In some Psalms...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Series introduction
• Introduction
• 1 Ancient Israel
• 2 The Book of Job
• 3 Early Christian thought
• 4 Saint Paul
• 5 Early Zoroastrian thought
• 6 Manichaeism
• 7 The Gnostics
• 8 The Presocratics
• 9 Socrates and Plato
• 10 Aristotle
• 11 Epicureanism
• 12 The Stoics
• 13 Scepticism
• 14 Neoplatonism
• 15 Philo of Alexandria
• 16 Evil in Graeco-Roman religion and literature
• 17 Vedas and Upaniṣads
• 18 Buddhism
• 19 Ancient China
• 20 Representations of evil
• Index