Purges, then and now

Many of our religious rituals date back farther and wider than we may think.

By UZI SILBER
Temple of Marduk 88 224 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Temple of Marduk 88 224
(photo credit: Courtesy)
'Tis the season when Jews engage in penitence, fasting and charity in order to strengthen their respective balance sheets as they plead before the heavenly judge. Attempting to help us in this regard, charities of all flavors jam our mailboxes with urgent heart-rending snail-mail, while synagogues issue friendly reminders to reserve our High Holidays seats. One would expect this to be an especially inauspicious time to send out such requests for contributions; the cataclysmic collapse and purge of Fannie, Freddie, Lehman, Lynch and AIG has certainly inflicted considerable financial damage on many of those normally generous. Think again. It's counterintuitive, but the timing of these mailings couldn't be better. Quite a few of the financially shellshocked will find themselves, despite their sudden hardship, dutifully mailing out checks to the needy and to houses of worship. "Who knows?" the thinking goes. "Recent losses might prove to be only the harbinger of something much bigger in the cosmic scheme of things, and a bit of charity could go a long way to prevent a fate worse than mere monetary loss." After all, the most poignant prayer of the High Holidays solemnly advises that Godly rejection of our penitence could mean a horrible sentence: death by drowning, fire or asphyxiation, if not by wind, hunger or sword. For more than 25 centuries we Jews have stood atremble before the highest of benches during the first days of the seventh lunar month, Tishrei. The peculiar rites we perform during the 10 High Holy days are designed to ensure another year of life. That at least is the belief of the 15 percent of Jews who think that God dictated the Torah and all Jewish laws to Moses at Mount Sinai - even laws promulgated by the rabbis centuries later, in the Middle Ages. However, the remaining 85% of us might be comforted to know that Jews haven't been the only nation performing such elaborate rituals of purging around this time of year. We might have our Rosh Hashana (once known as Yom Teruah - The Day of trumpeting) and Yom Kippur in the month of Tishrei, but our extinct Babylonian cousins celebrated Akitu and Kuppuru in the month of Tashritu. Many differences of ritual and theology existed between Babylonians and Jews. While they worshiped a pantheon of gods led by Marduk, we have only one. We have 10 High Holidays, but they had 12. And they observed two New Year celebrations: the other was held in the first month of Nisanu, during our Pessah. But the parallels are truly intriguing. First there is the obvious similarity of names above. Secondly, both Jews and Babylonians saw the beginning of the seventh month as the world's birthday. Third is the Kuppuru rite, where the blood of a ritually slaughtered animal was scattered around the temple of Marduk to purge demons and clear impurities for the upcoming year. While the jury is out on the efficacy of the carcass in demon purging, the parallel to Yom Kippur's scapegoat ritual as described in Leviticus 16 is obvious. Our ancestors borrowed a great deal from a towering imperial Mesopotamian culture that for centuries dominated the Fertile Crescent, of which the Land of Israel is the southwestern flank. That we used Babylonian calendar names is widely known. From time immemorial Semitic nations have used the lunar calendar but named their months differently. What the (Hebrew-speaking) Canaanites called Aviv, Ziv, Eytanim and Bul, the practical-minded Israelites renamed months One, Two, Seven and Eight. The Babylonians called them Nisanu, Ayaru, Tashritu and Archasamnu. In time, our ancestors replaced their numerals with the Babylonian names, many of which are named in honor of Mesopotamian gods. Yet it wasn't only Nisan, Iyar, Tishrei and Marcheshvan that our ancestors borrowed from the Babylonians. Our forefathers took Akitu and the ritual of Kuppuru and reshaped them in their own monotheistic image into what eventually became Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. Throughout the region, new moons were strictly observed. However, the new moon on the seventh month was considered - to paraphrase the last Mesopotamian dictator - the mother of all new moons. What made the new moon of the seventh month special? The number seven - a cosmically significant number among all nations of the Fertile Crescent, as well as in our own scriptures: the seventh day is Shabbat, the seventh year is a Sabbatical, while seven years squared is the jubilee. Even the Yom Kippur rite involves seven splatters of blood. Likewise, the new moon of the seventh month would have been seen as important. But how did the seventh new moon turn into the leading festival of Rosh Hashana we now know? And why did an obscure semi-voodoo ceremony evolve into the solemn Day of Atonement that follows? Despite the official theology, Israelites were as polytheistic and idol worshiping as all their heathen neighbors. The destruction of the northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE and of Judah in 587 BCE was declared by the biblical prophets as punishment meted out by an angry deity for rampant "whoring after other gods." Several monotheistic religious reforms centralizing worship in Jerusalem were enacted to appease a deity angry with his Chosen People. King Hezekiah led one in 700 BCE, while another was initiated during the reign of Josiah five decades later. More reforms followed in the years after the destruction of Judah by the Babylonians in 587 BCE. Opinions vary on when the High Holidays attained something closer to their present form. Julius Wellhausen, the 19th-century secular biblical expositor, assumed they emerged after the exile to Babylon. Richard E. Friedman, author of the classic Who Wrote the Bible? disputes this, suggesting that Yom Teruah and Yom Kippur are more likely to have emerged during King Hezekiah's reform. Kenton Sparks, writing in the Winter 2007 issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature, says that the scapegoat rite's origins may date back to the earliest Israelites (around 1000 BCE) but that it was expanded into a full-fledged solemn fast day in the Babylon exile more than four centuries later. Finally, Bible scholar Baruch Halpern feels that both Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur emerged in an early Israelite era - perhaps during Solomon's reign (930 BCE). Wherever our High Holidays originated and however they evolved remain fascinating and complex questions; but frankly, time has rendered the issue practically moot. The Jewish people have remained the sole keepers of these millennia-old festivals and obscure rituals, which once resonated so deeply among mighty nations and seemingly impregnable empires that crumbled eons ago. And now we bear witness to the sudden catastrophic collapse of the titanic financial empires of our day, just in time for the Day of Judgment. Whether this mass purging on Wall Street is Yahwistic retribution over egregious worship of the idol of mammon, we'll never know. But a little extra tzedaka this year and paying up those synagogue dues certainly can't hurt.