God´s monsters

 

MythVision Podcast strikes again, this time with a YouTube documentary titled “God´s MONSTERS in the Bible - The Shocking HIDDEN truth”. It turns out that Yahweh was (is?) surrounded by fierce guardian angels, downright demonic creatures, and Satan himself! In other words: like any self-respecting *pagan* deity. The cherubim and seraphim were not angels as we think of them, but rather something akin to the wrathful deities of, say, Hinduism and Buddhism. They were “good” in the sense that they served God and protected him against various adversarial powers, but in order to do so, they would have to be fierce and terrifying. The weird beings described by Ezekiel is a case in point.

MythVision interprets the two cherubim at the Ark of the Covenant in this light. They protect the gateway between God and this world. In a sense, they don´t just stop humans from reaching the divine, they also restrict God from entering our world (presumably because it would be burned to cinder if he would be completely unleashed). An alternative interpretation, of course, is that the cherubim represent Yahweh himself together with his “wife” Ashera, the ancient Israelite religion really being polytheist.

More terrifying still are the literal demons who seem to work for Yahweh. Their existence is covered up in modern Bibles by literal translations such as “pestilence” and “plague”. Actually, these natural phenomena were personified and seen as members of God´s retinue or army. It´s even possible to see them as a kind of demon-gods, since some of them were based on pagan deities. Rephesh (Plague) was widely worshipped in Egypt and the Levant. Habyon or Haby, mentioned twice in the Bible, was a chthonic deity depicted with horns and a tail by the Ugaritic pagans. So one of God´s hirdmen looks like the Devil?! What on earth am I supposed to do with this information? There is also Barad (simply rendered “hail” in English Bibles), a Syrian god of cold storms, but again also part of Yahweh´s host.

Oh, and then there´s the Adversary, later known as Satan. He was originally part of God´s heavenly court…

While Christianity usually depicts Satan and the demons as evil (probably the result of Zoroastrian influence on exilic and post-exilic Judaism), there are also more “classical” traits in the New Testament. Satan is said to have God´s permission to test the disciples of Jesus. At the end of days, Jesus appears together with terrifying apocalyptic riders. They seem clearly modelled on the demon-kings accompanying Yahweh. But *I´m sure* it´s all just allegorical, right? Right.

MythVision is surely correct that the worldview of the Biblical authors and redactors was very different from ours – including most Christians in the Western world – and intensely supranaturalist. Their world truly was a demon-haunted one. It was brutal, too. But even if you interpret the Bible literally and hence accept all these monstrous beings working for God, awkward questions arise. What´s the difference between the Old Testament worldview and, say, Hinduism with its strange gods and goddesses. Yahweh comes across as an asura, or at best a deva surrounded by asuras. And can a true god of love really be the same creature as Yahweh? I get some kind of sympathies (again) for Marcion after watching “God´s monsters”. Both the material and the supernatural worlds were created by the Demiurge (a very powerful demon-king, perhaps?). The real god of pure love and compassion stands outside this bizarro universe altogether. Let him now step forward!