Shalom everyone,
You get this statement a lot from atheists – that biblical customs actually come from pagan religions, as if saying this invalidates them and destroys our faith.
In ancient times, and still very much so in non-western cultures, one’s culture, customs and traditions were a big part of one’s daily life. They played a huge part in one’s cultural identity – so much so, that in an era where ethnicity was not based on genetic ‘race’, it was your culture that determined your ethnic identity.
Today in the West, very few people practise the traditions of their ancestors, to the extent that many people who are culturally western consider traditions, outside of Christmas and Thanksgiving, to be irrelevant and a waste of time. This was not the case in ages past, and was certainly not the case in the biblical period. But what purpose can possibly be served by practising all these customs and traditions?
In a time where life was relatively harsh, festivals and cultural occasions were moments which dotted life with joy and togetherness, where you were given the opportunity to be part of something bigger than merely your household or family – to be part of a people, which gave you your heritage, identity and history. Festivals are basically occasions for people to get together and bond. The modern West has largely lost this facility, especially the secular West.
Israelite culture did not come out of nowhere; it did not leap suddenly from a void. Atheists argue from a place which erroneously thinks that religious people believe it did come out of nowhere – that somehow we think it was all invented by the God of Israel at a fixed period in time. When atheists discover that other cultures had similar customs, they think that they have devastating evidence which proves Israelite and Jewish culture to be pagan in origin, thereby destroying its foundations. It does nothing of the kind. An important principle in Talmidaism is to know why you are doing something, and not just blindly follow without question.
The worship of the golden calf tells us so many things. Pertinent to this present topic is, ‘What would the Israelites have done if God had not given them any cultural or religious rules?’ The answer that the golden calf incident gives us, is that the ancient Israelites would have gone off and done their own thing, which would have led them to pagan models of worship, which then would have led them to embrace pagan ethics and morality, thus misrepresenting their God.
You cannot stop human beings from wanting to do things together, or from having a culture. If you ban them from practising a range of traditions, and simply give them a whole set of new ones which never existed before, it doesn’t help – it doesn’t work. They’ll just look at the brand-new customs, and then the old ones, and most ancient peoples would have said, “Meh, no thanks, we’re good, we’ll stick with what we know!”
Does anyone think that God didn’t know this about human nature? Does anyone think that the God of all Knowledge and Wisdom didn’t realise that, human beings, being what we are, would stick with what was familiar?
When Christian missionaries went to far-off cultures they were not familiar with, they started with banning the local people from attending their traditional places of worship, and from practising their people’s centuries-old traditions. It didn’t work. Given a choice of whether to attend their people’s own places of worship, and the foreign-imposed Christian places of worship, what choice do you think those people made? And what do you think might have been the missionaries’ subsequent solution?
The local people chose their own places of worship, the places they were familiar with. The solution that Christian missionaries came up with was to tear down the old places of worship, and build their churches on the same site. We would view this as cultural genocide today, but it worked.
Knowing this, how do you think that God resolved the problem of whether to give the Israelites a brand-new set of customs and traditions right from the start, which never existed before, or whether to keep the customs they were familiar with? What choice do you think a wise and all-knowing God would make – the God who already knew about consequences and human nature?
God chose to stick with the customs and festivals the Israelites were familiar with – but with one major difference. If God had simply allowed the Israelites to celebrate the agricultural festivals exactly as they had before, they would still have gone off and joined the pagan Canaanites, and they would have been no better than before. So God did the equivalent of building a church on a previously pagan worship site: God let them keep their Canaanite festivals, but made sure they observed them in a strictly non-pagan way – that is, the agricultural festivals had to be celebrated according to strict, Yahwist principles and rules – so cultic prostitution and child-sacrifice were forbidden, for example.
The cultural rules in Torah exist, in order to strictly confine Israelite culture to the Yahwist way of approaching religion. Not being aware of what the historical circumstances were in ancient times, we in the west might think that these rules are completely unnecessary and oppressive, but they were given by YHVH for a reason. And yes, these rules were given by God – they were given to us in order to stop Israelites being attracted to pagan religion. If you are used to celebrating, for example, building booths after the main harvest in Autumn, then God gave the Israelites a way of celebrating this same festival, but in a very Yahwist way. Same with the Passover sacrifice, a custom which already existed with Canaanite shepherds, but YHVH overlaid the practice with a whole new message and meaning.
A non-Jew in the West might look at all these unnecessary rules and laws in the Bible and think, “I don’t need these; these rules are oppressive and didn’t come from God!”. You are right – you, as a non-Jew, don’t need them, but alongside God’s ethical values and principles, this regulated culture has sustained and preserved the Jewish people using very distinctive cultural traditions, which have acted as a visible hallmark for the Yahwist identity and an invisible God; celebrating these things together has bonded us as a people, and given us a many joyful times for millennia. YHVH had a deliberate plan in all this!
So when atheists say that all Jewish festivals are of pagan origin, they are right; they are trying to faze you and upset you. Don’t be. Most well-educated Jews already know all this (Hayyim Schauss’s book on the Jewish Festivals is excellent in this regard), but most Christians don’t know this. YHVH, in YHVH’s great wisdom, knew exactly what God was doing when God gave us the rules for our customs and festivals: to stop us being attracted to the pagan alternatives, and thereby prevent us from bringing ourselves into contact with pagan ethical values and practices. As a result of the golden calf episode, YHVH took the decision to copy festivals the Israelites were familiar with, but to strictly regulate them, so that they were observed in a very Yahwist way.
Blessings
Shmuliq