Given that the Office works on a three-year lectionary
cycle, I must surely have read the Book of Bel & the Dragon publicly at Morning
Prayer before, but I really can’t remember doing so. In fact I am so shamefully
unfamiliar with it I couldn’t even recall what happens. You can see why it’s confined
to the Apocrypha: having already been vindicated in his worship of the God of
Israel, the prophet Daniel, in Babylon along with the other Jewish exiles, is rather
illogically tested again by being called on to do obeisance first to a brazen
image and then a hideous beast. At least the text attaches this story, or two
stories, to a different Babylonian king, Cyrus rather than Artaxerxes, but it
has Daniel being cast into the lions’ den for a second time. This time, not
only does the Lord shut the lions’ mouths, but rather charmingly the prophet
Habbakuk is magically transported to Babylon with a bowl of stew so Daniel won’t
go hungry. Angela Carter once defined a fairy story as ‘one in which a king can
call on another king and ask to borrow a cup of sugar’, and Bel & the Dragon
clearly falls into the same category, dare I say it.
It's the brazen image which interested me. Every day
twelve bushels of flour, forty sheep and fifty gallons of wine are sacrificed
to this thing, Bel, and King Cyrus adduces its daily disappearance as evidence
that Bel is indeed a god. Daniel naturally scoffs, and persuades Cyrus to test
the divinity of Bel by scattering ash around his sanctuary and sealing his
temple after the daily sacrifice. Lo and behold, when the door is reopened, the
offerings have vanished, but there in the ash are the tell-tale footprints of the
priests of Bel and their families who have sneaked in through a secret trapdoor
to snaffle the lot. Enraged, Cyrus has them all slaughtered and the temple
pulled down forthwith.
Enraged; and one might imagine humiliated, as Cyrus
the Mede would have had to have been prenaturally unobservant not to realise
this was happening at the Temple of Bel given something similar took place at
every other temple in the ancient world, even at the Temple in Jerusalem
where it was quite explicit that, apart from the portion of offerings that were
burned to a crisp ‘as an odour pleasing to the Lord’, the priests ate the
sacrifices. It was standard practice. In this story the great conqueror of much
of the ancient world is shown up as the equivalent of a grown-up who still thinks
Santa consumes the brandy and mince pie left out on Christmas Eve. Yes, all
across the ancient Levant gods were ‘woken up’ in the morning and put to sleep
at night in the persons of their statues, but while everyone felt there was
some sense in which the deity was connected with their cult image, nobody really
thought it was them. Does this tale, then, show that the Jews really thought
the pagans did?
My mind goes back to a parallel we talked about some years ago – the non-existent scandal of the mechanical statues of medieval
cults mocked and vilified by the 16th-century Reformers who had
never actually seen them move or knew how they had functioned in their
contexts. They felt comfortable ridiculing the credulous believers of the past
precisely because they were far enough in the past to do so. The writers
of these Biblical texts were also sufficiently distant from the worship
patterns they described to be able to tell such mocking stories. Nobody was
going to say them nay.
But there was some point to it all. The other night I led a discussion
about the Exodus story for a group of folk from other parishes on a diocesan
course, and we touched on the ways in which the worship of the God of Israel
differed from that of pagan deities, and what it meant for the Hebrews to be in
relationship with him. I decided not to stray into the hazardous area that had
occurred to me when I was preparing that in some ways the whole narrative reads
uncomfortably. You can caricature the Lord’s declaration to Israel as ‘You are
in a relationship with me; you have entered voluntarily into this relationship;
and if you try to leave it, I will hurt you’. Once upon a time this kind of
thing might not have raised any concern at all but nowadays we know what to
call it. It occurs to me that the Church has to do some work to say why this
image of God as an abusive partner is not in fact accurate.
The nature of the pagan gods
is I think part of the answer. After all, they are not real. When the ancient
Hebrews neglect YHWH and put up images of Baal and Ashtoreth they are not
really exchanging like for like, one partner for another, even if that’s the language
the scriptures couch it in. The pagan gods are the manufactures of human
beings: they are projections of our longings, fears, and failings onto the world
around us. A temple of Dagon is a shrine essentially to ourselves. Hence the
urgency of God’s objections – when his people wander faithlessly away, they are
going somewhere they will find nothing that will help them or improve them.
They will find themselves bargaining with aspects of their own natures without
knowing, and there is every likelihood that they will spiral downwards into the
worst elements of who they are.
Paganism now is different. The pagans I know personally almost invariably regard their worship as a form of meditation and self-improvement, not dealing with deities who are actual personalities. But I wonder whether the danger is not still there. Bel is no more true now than he was when that text was written.
