The treasures of the British Museum

London is a place of wonder. My mother brought me her from a small mining village in derbyshire at the age of five, and I have lived here, on and off  for most of my life. A very cosmopolitan city in its own right , it has several museums of great interest to me.

The Natural History Museum now has a large wing devoted to the Theory of Evolution, and it's place in biological science. the Geology Museum , right next door , tells the story of the earth and it's crust. We have already been to the Planetarium at Greenwich , and will be visiting the other sites in due course - but today, i want to take you to the British  Museum and tell you about it. 

For it is here that you will find the most fascinating artefacts in human history. there is a small ivory casket to be seen, with the Legend of Wayland on one side, and on the other, a strange inscription. the carving below the inscription appears to be of three men holding out small offerings to a seated woman with a child on her lap, and the inscription , in Saxon Runic script reads  Mann , Ansur, Gifu  Issa.  Which transliterates into our alphabet as M A G I - this casket was intended as a gift to a saxon warlord or local king , but the giver maybe hedged his bets and put a pagan scene on one side and a Christian scene on the other, as if he wa not sure which one the recipient would like most.. it dates from the 5th century, when Christianity was new to these islands.

You also find the Rosetta Stone here. It has an inscription in Arabic, Demotic Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Greek and Arabic are a perfect match for the same message - and the discoverers wondered if the Hieroglyphic text was another repeat - indeed it was, and so the code was cracked and many other inscriptions in many temples and other places could be deciphered.

But some of the most fascinating pieces on show , for me, are the ones where the Bible intersects with history.

Many years ago, I saw an inscription from Assyria, that mentioned Sennacherib.  He was the king of Assyria mentioned in the Bible. it told the story of the campaign he launched against Hezekiah, and how the Hebrew king was shut up like a bird in a cage in the city of Jerusalem as it was under siege.

Here is the bible intersecting human history. there really was a King Hezekiah , and a Sennacherib. secular , independent sources agree on that. We have yet to find any contemporary references to Solomon , though.

But here we see two people mentioned in the Bible, are also seen in a secular document.

Now, the Bible says that the Angel of the Lord came down and slew 185,000 of the Assyrian army in a single night. The Assyrian inscription says that Hezekiah  bought Sennacherib off  with an awful lot of gold, silver, precious stones and the like.  So which story do you want to believe here?

There has been no unearthing of a mass grave, and military historians tell us that Rome at it's hight did not deploy armies of that size in the field. So large a number represents a huge logistical problem in terms of supplying , feeding and deploying in the field. how did the smaller Assyrian Empire out do the much bigger and later empire of Rome many centuries earlier? the Bible does not say.

And the Bible is full of such encounters, where Secular History meets Biblical Narrative. And often , we have to choose which one we believe. for many years, scholars were sceptical of the references in Scripture to the  Hittites. Until fairly recently, the Bible was the only source that mentioned these people. Luke was also the only person who mentioned a Proconsul of Rome ruling over a comaratively small place somewhere in the Med. Luke was obviously making this encounter up, the sceptics said. there was no way that a great Procunsul  would have such a small remit. the whole tale was fabricated to put paul in front of a great Roman magnate, it was claimed. And yet, just as modern archeologists  discovered the whole powerful Hittite civilization in more recent times, an inscription has been unearthed hat names the very procunsul that Luke names, and says that he was ruling over this small place when Luke says he was. We cannot always dismiss the bible out of hand at every turn. And yet, there are still some places where the Bible has yet to be vindicated.

In the life story of Jesus , we read in the Gospels that he cast out demons , and that He even had a conversation with the Devil himself.. Now, I believe Jesus to be a historical figure, like Herod the Great or Pontius Pilate. These people are known and acknowledged as real people by secular historians. But Satan the Devil ? this , for me, is where Narratve and history clash instead of weaving and knitting together. but I hope to resolve this question , one way or another, befoe much longer.

The Tale of Helel ben Shacar

I have edited the title and intro to this post,  as the event it flagged up has passed, but the question is still an interesting one  -

Who is this chap 'Satan' , as mentioned in Scripture?

He isn't actually mentioned by name in Genesis. Oh , we get a talking snake appear, but no mention is made of a fallen angel leading a revolt or being set the task of looking after Adam and Eve and trying to Tempt them instead. I know we get that from Milton , but Paradise Lost was not in the Canon when last I looked.
So, where does Milton get the story of the fallen rebel angel who leads Adam and Eve into sin ?

To answer that, let us go back to the first mention of Satan  by name in the Bible. This would be the Book of Job. Now, when the book opens, the narrator tells us who Job is, where he lives, what he is like, for the first 5 verses. But when Satan appears  as well,  in Job 1 :6 we don't have anything to go on  from the previous books. Who is Satan , and what is he like ? Now, Job is not behind Esther chronologically speaking , but in the order they were traditionally thought to be written, we do not have any info. So what has happened?

One possible answer is to be got from a clue in Genesis. Remember how God puts 2 Cherubs to guard the gates of Paradise to stop Adam and Eve returning ? Well, what is a Cherub? Genesis chapters 1 - 3 do not tell us. God made the heavens and the Earth , the Moon and stars, but no mention of Seraphim or Cherubim is found here. So, whence this Cherub , and whence Satan , I ask ?

We must not suppose that the Scriptures were written in media vacuum. Jews of the day had doubtless had dealings with foreigners - people like Uriah the Hittite lived in Jerusalem, and there is therefore a strong possibility that Hebrew people would have heard of pagan myths and legends well before they went and wrote the Torah . They may have borrowed pagan ideas and concepts and my contention is that they almost certainly did.

I don't know if anyone else reading this has read and studied Funk and Wagnell's Encyclopaedia of Myth and Folklore, or read Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough , or perhaps Joseph Campbell's 'The Masks of God' - but I have. And it transpires that, Just as the Romans took all the Greek gods and gave them Roman names, the Canaanites, the Babylonians and Assyrians all took the old Sumerian gods , together with the associated myths and legends and put them in their own pantheons and theological theories. So did a few others, I know, but lets be brief here. the question is how much these ideas influenced Hebrew writers.

Now, the Sun god had two sons, Dawn and Dusk - and the Dawn god had a son of his own - Helel, if I recall correctly. His full name is "Helel ben Shachar', if I recall correctly, and there is a story about him known throughout the Levant.  Every time the sun rose up in the morning , the other stars deferred to his greater glory and went out - but Helel not only rose just before the sun , but arrogantly continued to shine in the morning sky even after sunrise. And this went on day after day , until  finally Samash , the Sun god , seized hold of the presumptuous Helel and hurled him down from  heaven.

Ok, anyone who knows  about ' just so ' stories and has a smattering of Astronomical  savvy will say " It sounds like they invented this myth to explain the movements of the Planet Venus - it rises in the morning until it gets so close to the Sun that it passes behind the sun and reappears on the other side, becoming the Evening Star instead."

Oh , yes indeed!  the Hebrews knew the myth , but did not write it down . they knew the story, we may surmise, because the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel both reference it,  ( Isa 14 ;12 translates 'shining one' as the Latin -  ' Lucifer', and it puzzled me even then why a Hebrew Archangel should have a Latin name ) and  in both cases, they liken  the rulers of Babylon and Tyre to Helel. the presumptuous star - rather in the same way as cartoonists liken politicians like Tony Blair and David Cameron to Pinnocio, the storybook character whose nose grows another inch when he tells a lie.

So, Ok, Satan has an origin in Pagan Myth. He is useful though , for explaining why bad stuff happens to good people. so he finds an unlikely home in the Jewish and Christian world-view as the Opposer, the Adversary or Resister - that is what Satan actually means. The Hebrews started with just having God, then needed some angels , so they borrowed them from the Babylonians. however, that was not enough. Satan then got promoted to the prosecuting counsel in the heavenly court, and from there , they turned him into a baddie - a bit like Goldstein in  Orwell's book, 1984.
Once we have that sorted, we can go on to say  more about him, and indeed I will. But not on this post.