Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [79]
And when they say to you, “Consult the mediums and the wizards who chirp and mutter,” should not a people consult their God? Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living for the teaching and for the testimony? 9 Surely for this word which they speak there is no dawn. They will pass through the land, greatly distressed and hungry; and when they are hungry, they will be enraged and will curse their king and their God, and turn their faces upward; and they will look to the earth, but behold, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish; and they will be thrust into thick darkness. (Isa 8:19-22)
The necromancers are even described as “chirping” with a word that normally describes the sound of birds and further suggesting the birdlike character of the transformed ancestors in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan. If so, Isaiah was satirizing the practice by describing the necromancers and not the dead as “chirping,” as if to say they are not contacting the dead, only making the sounds themselves.
Several laws in Israelite law codes prevented priests from serving actively in funerals. Leviticus ordains that priests can only attend the burials of their close kin (Lev 21:1-5). They should not indulge in ornate rituals of grief-appearing with dishevelled hair, rent garments, shaven heads, or gashed flesh (Lev 10:6; 19:27-28). The high priest is enjoined to even higher standards of abstention (Lev 21). These all seem designed to prevent the priesthood from serving in too prominent a way in rites for the dead or any cult divination. As Mary Douglas writes in her wise monograph on Leviticus:
Mediumistic consultation with the dead was to be punished by stoning (Lev 19:26, 31; 20:6, 27). The dead could neither help nor be helped. Any form of spirit cult was rejected. Seers, sorcerers, witches, and diviners, any who cross the divide between living and dead, were denounced as evildoers. The Pentateuch did not just ignore its ancestors. It violently hated to be in communication with them. And this too is in line with the prophet Isaiah: ’O house of Jacob, come let us walk in the light of the Lord. For thou hast rejected thy people, the house of Jacob, because they are full of diviners from the east and of soothsayers like the Philistines. (Isa 2:5-6) The surrounding peoples in the Mediterranean and Aegean regions all had cults of the dead, Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia, Ugaritic kings and commoners, and Canaan. But in the Pentateuch there is no sign of it. If it had been deliberately removed before the books were edited, why?10
This seems a true mystery until one considers the mind-set of the returning exiles. They see failure to heed to prophets as the cause of the disastrous end of the First Temple and the subsequent Babylonian exile. The main point is that YHWH does not allow necromancy, though there have been many Israelites who naturally think that their God not only allows it but sanctions it as a way to find out His will. Instead of finding food for the dead, the dead themselves, and the people who practice necromancy will themselves go hungry, for they have deeply offended the LORD. Furthermore, having dead around haunting the living would be even more disastrous.
The only question is: At what point in Israelite history does God actually forbid necromancy, and how many people hear the prohibition? There are precursors to the exilic campaign in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. For Mary Douglas, the radical change comes with the book of Leviticus, which she describes as “a totally reformed religion.”11 We have already seen that there were voices in the prophets and the earlier documents that strove for the surety which was achieved by the priestly redactors of Second Temple times (539 BCE-70 CE). Since both the books, Deuteronomy