I’m reading through Jonah this week and came across this interesting note on the importance of three days and three nights in ancient near eastern mythology and culture. It seems to be understood as period of time that indicated a death that there was no coming back from – as in not mostly dead, which according to the austere religious scholar, Miracle Max, “is still slightly alive.” In the ancient near east, if you journeyed into the world of the dead there was hope – if you made it out before the third day. This ancient understanding of being utterly dead could also provide historical context for Lazarus and Jesus’ periods in the grave as well (four and three days respectively).
three days and three nights. This would have been equated with certain death; for example, in the Mesopotamian Descent of Inanna [a mythological text], the title goddess commands her servant to lament for her if she does not return to the earth within three days.
ESV Archaeology Study Bible, p. 1280
The scriptures are indicating that Jonah was as good as dead. Lazarus was more than dead. And Jesus was dead – as in all the way.
Patricius endured six years of this woeful isolation, and by the end of it he had grown from a careless boy to something he would surely never otherwise have become – a holy man, indeed a visionary for whom there was no longer any rigid separation between this world and the next. On his last night as Miliucc’s slave, he received in sleep his first otherworldly experience. A mysterious voice said to him: “Your hungers are rewarded: you are going home.”
Patricius sat up, startled. The voice continued: “Look, your ship is ready.”
Miliucc’s farm was inland, nowhere near the sea, but Patricius set out, whither he knew not. He walked some two hundred miles, through territory he had never covered before, without being stopped or followed, and reached a southeastern inlet, probably near Wexford, where he saw his ship. As he tramped toward his destiny, his faith that he was under God’s protection must have grown and grown, for it was virtually impossible that a fugitive slave could go so far without being intercepted. “I came in God’s strength… and had nothing to fear” is Patricius’s simple summation.
Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization, pp. 102-103
Typical evil eye amulets in the Middle East and Central Asia
Many cultures’ folk religions believe in the evil eye. In our area of Central Asia, some, particularly the elderly and rural, believe that certain persons secretly have the power to curse others by looking at them and envying them. This is said to be the evil eye, or the dirty eye as our local language puts it. In order to protect one’s self from this danger, certain eye amulets can be hung on persons, gifts, or in rooms.
It’s also important to assure others that you are not a secret possessor of the evil eye. Locals do this by prefacing a complement with the Arabic phrase, Mashallah, which means “what God has willed.” In complementing babies and small children, one should say, “Mashallah, what a cute baby!” This supposedly protects the child from an intentional or unintentional curse from the evil eye. Mashallah is also plastered on houses and vehicles in order to protect them from this curse.
A hidden ancestor of evil eye amulets in the West
I knew that the evil eye is a widespread belief in the Middle East and Central Asia. I had even come across it in strange places in Western history. Those unique geometric designs painted at the apex of Amish barns? Artistic descendants of attempts to protect their barns from the evil eye. But I had no idea just how ancient this belief in the evil eye is. Look at this Akkadian language (think roughly 2500 – 500 BC) evil eye incantation from the archives of ancient Assur.
The [eye] is evil, the eye is an eye which is evil, the eye is hostile… the eye which emerges is the eye of the terror of the enemy; (namely), the eyes of father, the eyes of mother, the eyes of brother, the eyes of sister, the eyes of a neighbor, the eyes of a (female) neighbor, the eyes of one who cares for or carries (a child).
The eye called out maliciously (at the) gate, the thresholds groaned and roofs shook. In the house which it enters, does the eye wreck (things)!
It has wrecked the potter’s furnace and caused the sailor’s boat to sink, it has smashed the yoke of the mighty ox, it has smashed the shin of the loping donkey, it has smashed the loom of the skillful weaving-ladies. It has removed the loping horse and the nose-rope of the plow-ox, it has scattered the bellows of the furnace when lit. It has deposited worm-pests at the command of the murderous Adad, it has raised quarrels between (otherwise) happy brothers.
Smash the eye, chase away the eye! Make the eye pass through seven rivers and make it pass through seven canals! Make the eye pass over seven mountains! As for the eye, take it and bind each of the joints of its feet. As for the eye, take it and smash it like the oil-pot of a potter in front of its owner. Whether fish in the river or birds of heaven, (the eye) causes them to fall/sink and destroys them. Whether one’s father or mother or brother or sister, or stranger or…
Akkadian Incantation, ESV Archaeology Study Bible, p. 1270
Westerners struggle to feel the fear the evil eye has exerted over huge swathes of humanity. We tend to write it off as mere superstition. Even as Christians who believe in the power of the demonic, we are likely to miss when this belief might need a direct Christian response among our focus people groups. Yet for many, they are just as emotionally terrified of the evil eye as they are of Covid-19. It is real to them, even if it does not feel real to us.
What might a Christian response look like? Certainly the theological knowledge that the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit now protects believers from whatever demonic power could be manifest in the practice/belief of evil eye. He that is in you is greater than he that is in the world (1st John 4:4). Practically, all evil eye amulets should be discarded and the use of Mashallah discontinued as evidence of believers’ trust in Jesus for protection in the spiritual realm. It may also be appropriate to craft Christian prayers where believers actively “put on” the righteousness of Christ and the truth of God’s word, reaffirming their faith in God against their fears that the evil eye could still harm them. For one historical example of this kind of prayer, check out St Patrick’s Breastplate.
Whatever our response ends up looking like, it’s worth keeping “an eye out” for belief in the evil eye. This belief is surprisingly ancient and still surprisingly widespread.
The face of the Dying Gaul speaks for them all: each one of us will die, naked and alone, on some battlefield not of our own choosing. My promise of undying faithfulness to you and yours to me, though made with all solemnity, is unlikely to survive the tricks that fate has in store – all the hidden land mines that beset human life. What we can rely on are the comeliness and iron virtue of the short-lived hero: his loyalty to cause and comrades, his bravery in the face of overwhelming odds, the gargantuan generosity with which he scatters his possessions and his person and with which he spills his blood. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was heard to say that to be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart… Such an outlook and such a temperament make for wonderful songs and thrilling stories, but not for personal peace or social harmony.
The three adjectives – “genrous, handsome, brave” – used to describe the murdered man are a summation of the Iron Age moral code, a code that shines out clearly in all early literature (whether Gilgamesh, the Iliad, or the Tain) and that mysteriously survived in Ireland long after its oblivion in more sophisticated civilizations – and that endures to some extent even to this day… But there is also an unnamed virtue, hidden in these trinities: loyalty or faithfulness… In the heroic eras of various societies, including Ireland’s, loyalty served as the foundation virtue.
Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization, pp. 94-95
Loyalty above all. Generosity, beauty, and bravery as worthy of poetry and song. Sounds an awful lot like the traditional values of my Central Asian friends, though clothed now in an Islamic veneer. It seems to have hung on at the fringes of empires, protected by hard-to-reach places like islands, mountains, and deserts.
The Irish are part of a larger ethnic grouping called the Celts (preferably pronounced with a hard “c”) who first entered western consciousness about 600 B.C. – only a century and a half after the legendary founding of the City of Rome – when, like the German barbarians long after them, they crossed the Rhine. One branch of the Celtic tree settled in present-day France and became the Gauls, whom Julius Caesar would conquer in the century before Christ and who in their Romanized phase would produce the effete Ausonius. A cognate tribe settled the Iberian peninsula and became great sea traders; indeed, found as far afield as New Hampshire – which would make the Celts the first Europeans to reach the Americas. In the third century B.C., Celts invaded the Greek world, advancing as far south as Delphi and settling in present-day Turkey, where, as the Galatians (note the similarity of consonantal sounds in “Celt,” “Gaul,” and “Galatian”), they were recipients of one of Paul’s letters.
I’ve heard it said that the Protestant Reformation was a battle of Augustine vs. Augustine. It’s sad to read how he strengthened the precedent of the government using force to enforce the state-sanctioned faith. This would bear terrible fruit a millennium later – and give birth to the movements that would proclaim biblical freedom of conscience.
Augustine aligns himself with the civil arm to persecute the Donatists and bring them forcibly within the walls of Catholicism. He subsequently writes the first Catholic justification for state persecution of those in error: error has no rights; to disbelieve in forced conversions is to deny the power of God; and God must whip the son he receives – “per molestias erudito” (“true education begins with physical abuse”). This from the man who condemned the “punishments and cruel threats” of his childhood classroom. Augustine, the last great man of Roman antiquity, is going over the edge. The doctrine he has enunciated will echo down the ages in the cruelest infamies, executed with the highest justification. Augustine, the father of many firsts, is also father of the Inquisition.
Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization, pp. 64-65
With the deaths of the apostles (apostoloi, or envoys), who had been the chief conveyors of Jesus’s message, the role of the bishop grew; and by the beginning of the second century we find him being treated in a more exalted manner – as a successor to the dead apostles and symbol of unity for the local congregation – but still the appointee of his congregation. As its symbol of he was duty-bound to consult his congregation in all important matters. “From the beginning of my episcopacy,” the aristocratic Cyprian of Carthage, monumental bishop of third-century Africa, confided to his clergy, “I made up my mind to do nothing on my own private opinion, without your advice and without the consent of the people.”
By the end of Augustine’s life, such consultation was becoming the exception. Democracy depends on a well-informed electorate; and bishops could no longer rely on the opinion of their flocks – increasingly, uninformed and harried illiterates – nor, in all likelihood, were they averse to seeing their own power grow at the expense of the people. In many districts, they were already the sole authority left, the last vestige of Roman law and order. They began to appoint one another; and thus was born – five centuries after the death of Jesus – the self-perpetuating hierarchy that rules the Catholic church to this day.
Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization, pp. 61-62
Whether insoluble political realities or inner spiritual sickness is more to blame for the fall of classical civilization is, finally, beside the point. The life behind the works we have now been studying – the passionate nobility of Virgil, the cool rationality of Cicero, the celestial meditativeness of Plato – this flame of civilization is about to become extinguished. The works themselves will miraculously escape destruction. But they will enter the new world of the Middle Ages as things so strange they might as well have been left behind by interstellar aliens. One example will suffice to illustrate the strangeness of books to medieval men. The word grammar – the first step in the course of classical study that molded all educated men from Plato to Augustine – will be mispronounced by one barbarian tribe as “glamour.” In other words, whoever has grammar – whoever can read – possesses magic inexplicable.
Cahill, How The Irish Saved Civilization, pp. 59-60
Daniel chapter 4 is an epic tale in itself, one in which Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon begins as the king of the most powerful empire in the world and then dreams a foreboding dream. He does not heed Daniel’s prophetic interpretation of his dream, instead falling into pride and being cursed for seven years to live like a cow. But in the end, proud Nebuchadnezzar is humbled and restored to an even greater glory than before. Someone needs to turn this into a musical.
It wasn’t until I took a seminary class on the book of Daniel though that I learned that Nebuchadnezzar’s seven-years-a-cow punishment is most likely a documented psychological disorder, known as boanthropy. The Pharmaceutical Journal defines boanthropy as “a psychological disorder in which the sufferer believes he or she is a cow or ox.” Fascinating that this is still happening to the extent that it is mentioned in the medical literature. Am I the only one who missed this in Sunday school? Apparently, this was not limited to Nebuchadnezzar, but is a possibility for any one of us, should God in his providence choose to let our minds go. Beware, prideful world rulers! Beware, prideful self, prone to take credit for your own limited works when they were all gifts of sheer grace. God opposes the proud. How? Sometimes he turns us into cows.
I also can’t help but appreciate whenever the Old Testament is demonstrated to be sound history, in spite of all the skepticism hurled against it. After an initial reading of this text, many would be tempted to dismiss this narrative as mythological moralizing. Yet here we have an ancient text proving not only that truth is stranger than fiction, but also that we can trust the seemingly mythological text of Daniel to present reliable history. If Daniel is proven reliable with such a strange thing as boanthropy, then we should be willing to trust the text in other areas we might be tempted to scoff at. Indeed, that would have something to do with the humility the king’s boanthropy is meant to cultivate.
Entrusted to the Dirt 