Superstition in the Old Testament

A superstition is an irrational belief based on ignorance, fear of the unknown, or trust in magic or chance. A misunderstanding of a cause and effect relationship is often the source of a superstition. In the Old Testament the causation was typically conceived to be supernatural. When presented in ancient religious texts as literal truth, superstitions are telltale signs of human shortcomings rather than divine inspiration.

      The Old and New Testaments are overflowing with the superstitious belief that certain numbers have special meanings. The numbers 7, 12 and 40 appear an inordinate number of times. If you know anything about the Bible you know it is just et up with the number seven and multiples of seven. Look up a few books in the Old or New Testament at random on the Internet, and do a search for the number of times the word seven appears. In the first book of the Old Testament, Genesis, the word seven appears 72 times (six and eight appear 16 and 14 times, respectively). In the next book, Exodus, seven appears 41 times. In the last book of the Bible, Revelation, seven makes 59 appearances. Ancient religious writers went out of their way to pack sevens and multiples of seven into their texts. Why?

      The source of this superstition isn’t certain, but it’s very likely related to astrology. The night sky served as a virtual billboard that was managed by the ancient gods. There was valuable information for earthlings who were able to glean meaning from the sky’s components and their relative position and motion. Comets, asteroids, the conjunction of planets, and eclipses were variously thought to be harbingers of doom, the announcement of royal births, a looming change to the world order, etc. Of particular interest was a set of heavenly bodies known as the “wanderers” that moved quite differently from the “fixed” stars. These were the sun, moon and five known planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—that were visible with the naked eye (the telescope had not yet been invented). There was surely a divine reason for the heavenly wanderers being seven in number. Likely adding to the special nature of seven was the fact that one of the wanderers, the moon, goes through phases approximately every seven days. Moon phases were observed closely for their relation to the best times for planting and harvesting. Seven became the number for fulfillment or completeness.

       The Old Testament has sevens embedded in “hidden” ways that some modern apologists think is evidence of a supernatural origin to the texts. For example, Old Testament writers would sometimes break a story into seven key components to imply a divine provenance. Was this evidence of God’s inspiration or evidence that an ancient writer had an agenda? There are several reasons to believe the latter. First, the fascination with the number seven is found in many ancient writings that predate the Old Testament (the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh is loaded with sevens), and thus predate the arrival of the God of Abraham in human affairs. Second, after the telescope was invented the number of known wanderers changed. Third, in God’s communications with Moses he sprinkled in sevens liberally, but modern critical scholarship has virtually proven that communications between God and Moses in the Old Testament were not historical.

       Fourth, in the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament we have a writer who tried to artificially force multiples of seven into his genealogy for Jesus, but failed miserably. Matthew breaks Jesus’ genealogy into three important eras of Jewish history and explicitly states that each era contains 14 generations, apparently to give them a divine provenance: “So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations” (Matthew 1:17). However, by actual count from Matthew’s list, the first era only contains 13 generations; the second era does contain 14 but only because four generations that are known from the Old Testament were left out by Matthew;³⁰ and the third era contains 13 generations if Jesus’ was biologically begotten by Joseph, but 12 generations if Jesus was begotten by God.

       The next suspicious number is 12, which is also incorporated an inordinate number of times. The origin of this superstition may relate to the 12 Tribes of Israel, which would of course be seen by the Hebrews as a special number. Or the origin of the superstitious nature of 12 may relate to the number of constellations in the zodiac. Constellations are in the eye of the beholder; any number can be imagined in the night sky. There is nothing special about the number of constellations being 12, other than perhaps giving ancient astrologers one constellation per month to catalog their prognostications.

       The artificial way the number 40 is shoehorned into so many narratives in the Old Testament betrays its superstitious nature. The Noachian flood began with 40 days and 40 nights of rain; Moses was 40 years old when he killed an Egyptian and fled Egypt; Moses spent 40 years away from Egypt before returning; the spies Moses sent out to survey the opposition in Canaan were gone for 40 days; the Hebrews spent 40 years in the wilderness; Saul was the king of Israel for 40 years; his successor, David, was the King of Israel for 40 years; and on and on it goes. In the New Testament Jesus fasted for 40 days and nights in the Judean desert while Satan tempted him to go astray.

       In the Old Testament a generation is a period of 40 years, which doesn’t fit the definition of a generation—the average span of time between the birth of parents and the birth of their children. (I use 25 years throughout the book). Assigning 40 years to a generation is like giving the geometry constant pi a value of 5 for some esoteric reason that has nothing to do with the definition of pi. In some contexts 40 may simply be a metaphor for a long period of time, but it’s  quite confusing when this might be the case and not.

       You’ll find other kinds of superstition sprinkled throughout Old Testament stories such as Samson’s hair being the source of his prodigious strength (Judges 16:17); the time Samson caught three hundred foxes, tied their tails together in pairs, attached flaming torches to their tails and turned them loose in the fields and vineyards of the Philistines to burn them down (Judges 15:4-5); when Samson killed one thousand men using nothing more than the jawbone of a donkey (Judges 15:15); the commandment to redeem the firstling of an ass with a lamb, “and if thou wilt not redeem it, then thou shalt break his neck” (Exodus 13:13); the commandment to “not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk” (Exodus 23:19); when David created a gift (bride price) for a bride, with the foreskins of 200 Philistine men (1 Samuel 18:27); when “sons of God” (thought to be fallen angels) descended to Earth to mate with “daughters of man” that produced a clan of giants called Nephilim (Genesis 6:1-4); and when the Israelites caused the walls of Jericho to collapse by blowing their trumpets on the seventh pass on the seventh day of marching around the city (Joshua 6:1-27).

       Unmatched for biblical superstition is God’s ritual for cleansing a person who had been healed of leprosy (Leviticus 14:2-32): The priest shall take two clean birds and cedarwood, scarlet (yarn), and hyssop; kill one bird in an earthen vessel over running water; dip the live bird and the cedarwood, yarn and hyssop in the blood of the dead bird; sprinkle the subject (healed leper) seven times with this blood; and release the bird. Next kill a lamb and place blood on the subject’s right ear, right thumb, and right big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe oil on the subject’s right ear, right thumb and right big toe. Repeat. Next the subject shall shave all hair on his body, wash his clothes, bathe his body and live outdoors in the city for seven days. On the seventh day repeat the shaving and cleansing. On the eighth day the priest shall take two unblemished male lambs and one unblemished ewe lamb and flour and a log of oil. At the Tabernacle the priest shall present one lamb as a trespass offering and wave the log of oil as a wave offering to the Lord. The priest shall slaughter the lamb as a trespass offering, then place some of its blood on the subject’s right ear lobe, right hand, and right big toe. … And on it goes for seven more verses.

       There are two superstitions involved in this ritual. First, in the Old Testament leprosy was normally attributed to sin (rather than innocent exposure to bacteria known today as Mycobacterium leprae). Atonement had to be made to God for the sin that “caused” the leprosy.  Second, the contrived ritual to atone for the sin is utterly irrational.

Notes:

30. Robert J. Miller, Born Divine, (Polebridge Press, 2003), p 79.