hays, c. b. 2012. job' s return to his mother' s womb in light of egyptian mythology

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/15685330-12341088

Vetus Testamentum 62 (2012) 607-621 brill.com/vt

Vetus

Testamentum

My Beloved Son, Come and Rest in Me: Jobs Return to His Mothers Womb (Job 1:21a)

in Light of Egyptian Mythology

Christopher B. HaysFuller heological Seminary

[email protected]

Abstract

Job 1:21a makes better sense when understood in light of the Egyptian idea of death as a return to the womb of the mother goddess; that mythology provides a much more likely context than the idea of Mother Earth, which is attested only in texts that are (or are likely to be) quite late. As in various other cases in the book (for example, in his expressions of preference for death) Job practices a kind of theological brinksmanship, crossing an apparent line only to pull back in the next breath or the next chapter. In light of the Hathor/womb headrests from the tombs at St. tiennes, it may be that Jobs theological rhetoric was not merely a literary invention.

Keywords

Book of Job, Egyptian mythology, mother goddess, Mother Earth, tomb, death, afterlife, womb, burial

And he said, Naked I came from my mothers womb, and naked I shall return there.

Jobs return to his mothers womb has consistently attracted special attention from interpreters of the book; it has been seen as a bump in the text requir-ing smoothing.1 Fifty years ago, Giuseppe Ricciotti argued with elegant brev-ity that the archaeological remains of ancient Near Eastern burials could shed light on this problem; the fetal positioning of many such burials could explain

1) I would like to thank Matthew Suriano, Kathlyn Cooney, and Joel LeMon for their input on various aspects of this article. Any remaining errors are my own.

608 C. B. Hays / Vetus Testamentum 62 (2012) 607-621

the image of returning naked to [the mothers womb].2 If this womb was not materially identical to that of the mother, Ricciotti wrote, it was so symbolically.3

A number of signicant commentaries have followed Ricciotti in treating the imagery as a poetic reference to burial,4 but as far as I can see, no one has pointed out that there are very clear Egyptian precedents for such imagery, in which the sarcophagus and/or tomb are described as the womb of the goddess in which the deceased undergoes a rebirth into the blessed afterlife. he fact that Job is already acknowledged as demonstrating awareness of Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife such as the judgment of the dead supports the idea of Egyptian inuence in 1:21. he recognition of the source of this imagery not only claries Jobs rhetoric and its roots, it also sheds light on a longstand-ing debate over unusually shaped headrests in certain Jerusalem tombs from First Temple period. Finally, it militates against arguments for a Mother Earth theology underlying the text; that is probably a later development, at least within Judean thought.

In Egyptian funerary texts, there is an astonishing consistency to the imagery of death as a return to a goddess womb, from the Old Kingdom through the Hellenistic period.5 he image of the goddess Nut as the one who gives birth to the deceased king as her soncausing him to revive and liveis pervasive in the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts.6 A few examples will suce. Nut calls the king her son in Tetis Spell 5a: Teti is my son, whom I caused to be born and who parted my belly; he is the one I have desired and with whom

2) Giuseppe Ricciotti, Et nu jy retournerai (Job 1:21), ZAW 67 (1955): 249-251.3) Ricciotti, Et nu jy retournerai, 251: Si ce ventre ntait pas materiellement identique a celui de la mre, il ltait symboliquement.4) his is particularly explicit in Carol Newsom, he Book of Job in he New interpreters Bible (Nashvville, Tenn.: Abingdon, 1996), IV:352; and less so to varying degrees in Samuel E. Balen-tine, Job (Macon, Ga.: Smyth & Helwys, 2006), 57; Norman C. Habel, Job (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981), 93. Mircea Eliade also alludes to burial in a fetal position as indicative of a hope for rebirth, though there is no indication that he is working with data as ancient as the book of Job, so it is of limited relevance: Eliade, Birth and Rebirth: he Religious Meanings of Initiation in Human Culture (tr. W. R. Trask; New York: Harper, 1958), 59.5) Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (trans. D. Lorton; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 165-73. See also Assmann, Death and Initiation in the Funerary Reli-gion of Ancient Egypt in Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt (ed. James P. Allen et al.; Yale Egyptological Studies 3; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 1989), 139-40. 6) Unis Spell 152: Nut, this Osiris here is your son, whom you have made revive and live. he deceased king Unis is here called Osiris; becoming an Osiris, being identied with the god, became a widespread hope for the Egyptian afterlife.

C. B. Hays / Vetus Testamentum 62 (2012) 607-621 609

I have become content.7 he connection between this image of birth and the restoration of the body via the resurrection to the afterlife is well expressed by Pepi Is Spell 337, which commands: Nut, give your arm toward Pepi with life and authority, join together his bones, assemble his limbs, join his bones to his [head] and join his head to his bones, and he will not decay, he will not rot, he will not be ended, he will have no outow, and no scent of his will come out. (he Egyptians did not seek to resolve the apparent contrast between the hope for mere preservation and the hope for rebirth; the two concepts coexist within the same texts.)

he idea of preservation also includes protection; this is expressed in a dif-ferent way in Pepis I spell 41a: Osiris Pepi, your mother Nut has spread herself over you that she may conceal you from everything bad. Nut has joined you away from everything bad: you are the eldest of her children. he com-forting aspect of these texts is quite clear in such examples; and again, the entrance into the sarcophagus (and perhaps also into the tomb itself )8 is viewed as an entrance into the mother goddess, who then births the deceased into the afterlife.

In the outer sarcophagus of Merneptah from the New Kingdom (13th cen-tury), one can perceive even more clearly the constellation of con and corpse as the union of mother and child,9 though here it is Neith instead of Nut who plays the maternal role (in still other places the role is played by Hathor):10

I am your mother, who nurses your beauty,I am pregnant with you in the morning,and I deliver you as Re in the evening.. . .When you enter me, I embrace your image,I am the con that shelters your mysterious form.

7) All translations of the Pyramid Texts in this article are taken from James P. Allen, he Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (SBLWAW 23; Atlanta, Ga.: SBL, 2005). Many, many more instances of the theme can be found by using the index for appearances of Nut in the texts. 8) On the idea of the whole tomb as symbolizing the womb and other parts of the female repro-ductive anatomy, see Suzanne Onstine, he Relationship Between Osiris and Re in the Book of Caverns, JSSEA 25 (1995): 66-77; and Mahmoud I. Hussein, Anatomy of the Egyptian Tomb: he Egyptian Tomb as a Womb. Discussions in Egyptology 49 (2001): 25-33. 9) Assmann, Death and Salvation, 166.10) he interchangeability and mutual assimilation of goddesses are well-established phenomena in Egyptian religion, and the argument here does not require the identication of any particular one.


. . .I unite your limbs, I hold your discharges together,I surround your esh, I drive away the uids of your decay,I sweep away your b3w, I wipe away your tears,I heal all your limbs, each being united with the other;I surround you with the work of the weaving goddess,I complete you and form you as Re.11

Assmann calls this an entirely typical image, that of a mother goddess who embodies the con and welcomes the deceased, as he enters her, as her son.12 A text from nearly a thousand years later echoes some of the same images:

My beloved son, Osiris PN, come and rest in me!I am your mother who protects you daily. I protect your body from all evil, I guard your body from all evil.13

hus, the endurance of the imagery through the entire period of the Hebrew Bibles composition is well established.

In some cases, as in Louvre Papyrus 3148, the human mother who bore and the divine mother who received were dierentiated, even in comparison:

Your (earthly) mother carried you for ten months,she nourished you for three years.I carry you for an undetermined length of time,I shall never bear you.14

his contrasts with the imagery of Job 1:21a, which identies the biological mother who bore Job with the mother to whom he would return. However, it is notable that other Egyptian texts did just the same thing. hey were not troubled by the seeming logical contradiction, any more than they were by the idea that the son should become an Osiris. For example, the vizier Paser is

11) Cited in Assmann, Death and Salvation, 165-66. Robert K. Ritners A Uterine Amulet in the Oriental Institute Collection ( JNES 43 [1984]: 209-221) is not strictly on topic, but does demonstrate the prominent place of womb imagery in the protecting and healing role of amulets in ancient Egypt.12) Assmann, Death and Salvation, 169.13) Cited in Assmann, Death and Salvation, 170.14) Assmann, Death and Salvation, 170. See further discussion in Siegfried Schott, Nut spricht als Mutter und Sarg, RdE 17 (1965): 81-87.


depicted in his tomb being embraced by his own mother, who is specically named in the caption. However, Paser addresses his mother as a manifesta-tion of the goddess of the West:15

Rejoice, O great city,you region of the dead, from which I have gone forth!See, I have come to be at rest with you.

And the mother responds, in the vein of the mother goddesses:

How good it is! My heart is full of joyMy longing has been fullled.

he human and divine mothers are thereby eectively identied with each other.

Finally, it is worth noting that the image of nakedness in Job 1:21a is con-sistent with Egyptian burial practices: the Egyptian dead did indeed go into the womb (sarcophagus) naked. Unlike the Judean dead, who were com-monly buried in cloaks,16 the Egyptian dead were not clothed within the mummy wrappings.

Turning to the Semitic sphere, Job appears to be the earliest reference to the motif in Semitic texts. Much later, one can adduce Syriac and Arabic texts that employ the same motif, but these cannot be assumed to shed light on Job, since the theme continued to change and develop over time (see below).17 One might wish for indications from that this imagery was generally known north and west of Egypt prior to the book of Job. However, an even more signicant indicator of Egyptian inuence on Job is that one nds in the book a rather impressive array of references to Egyptian culture, and to mythologies of death and afterlife in particular.18 Four briey-sketched examples must suce to demonstrate the point:

15) Assmann, Death and Salvation, 172.16) Elizabeth M. Bloch-Smith, he Cult of the Dead in Judah: Interpreting the Material Remains, JBL 111 (1992): 218.17) See for example, G. R. Driver, Ancient Lore and Modern Knowledge, Hommages Andr Dupont-Sommer (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1971), 285. he Arabic and Syriac references to graves as wombs that G. R. Driver noted are, no doubt, relevant to the question, but these are much later than Job. One would prefer to work backwards in time from Job rather than forward, as has usually been done. he Egyptian data allows one to do just that.18) J. Gwyn Griths, he Idea of Posthumous Judgement in Israel and Egypt in Manfred Grg, ed., Fontes Atque Pontes: Eine Festgabe fr Hellmut Brunner (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,


here are references in the wisdom literature that suggest an awareness of longstanding Egyptian ideas about the judgment of the dead.19 A key scene in the afterlife judgment was the weighing of the heart against a feather,20 and references to weighing in the divine scales of justice include Job 31:6 Let me be weighed in a just balance, and let God know my integrity!21 Even more elaborate adaptations of the motif of the judgment of the dead appear in Job 33:22-26 (His soul draws near the Pit, etc.) and 19:25-27 (After my skin has been thus destroyed, then without my esh I shall see God.)

here is also a reection in Job of the negative confession of the Book of the Dead (Spell 125), in which the deceased denies wrongdoing before his divine judges. Jobs assertions of his righteousness in 31:1-40 and 29:11-17 (I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I was a father to the needy, and I championed the cause of the stranger, etc.) are reminiscent of those Egyptian autobiographical statements of goodness. Furthermore, the ensu-ing verses in Job 29 express Jobs hopes of multiplying his days like sand

1983), 186-204; Hugo Gressmann, Israels Spruchweisheit im Zusammenhang der Weltliteratur (Berlin: K. Curtius, 1925); Paul Humbert, Recherches sur les sources gyptiennes de la littrature sapientiale dIsral (Neuchtel: Secrtariat de lUniversit, 1929); N. Herz, Egyptian Words and Idioms in the Book of Job, Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 16 (1913): 343-46.19) Gressmann, Israels Spruchweisheit, 43-44; R. B. Y. Scott, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes: Introduction, Translation, and Notes (AB 18; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), 106; J. Gwyn Griths, he Divine Verdict: A Study of Divine Judgement in the Ancient Religions (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 299-302. 20) he complex Egyptian tradition can be discussed only briey here. he idea of judgment after death by some sort tribunal is as ancient as the Old Kingdom; by the Middle Kingdom a distinct mythological tradition emerged in which Osiris oversaw the weighing of the heart of the deceased to determine its righteousness by the measure of Maat (mt, justice, both an abstract concept and a goddess). he god hoth functioned as prosecutor; those who failed the inquisition would be drowned or devoured by the monster Ammut. hose who failed the judgment could also be portrayed as decapitated, bound, boiled in a cauldron, or burnt by snakes and other divine crea-tures spitting re. However, this punishment is always reserved for other people; not surprisingly, Ammut is never portrayed devouring the heart of the owner of a tomb. his traditional scene endured in Egyptian religious texts for thousands of years; in the Late Period, it was emblazoned in a band across the chests of sarcophagi. See further Stephen G. J. Quirke, Judgment of the Dead, in Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (ed. Donald B. Redford; Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2001), 2:211-14.21) Perhaps also 6:2: O that my vexation were weighed, and all my calamity laid in the bal-ances! Cf. Prov 21:2: All a mans ways are right in his own eyes, but YHWH weighs the heart (also 16:2; 24:12).


(v. 18),22 being reborn like a tree (v. 19; cf. 14:7-9), renewing his glory and the power of his bow (, almost surely a reference to the phallus)23all ideas very much at home within Egyptian expectations of the afterlife and few other places in the ANE.

Various other passages in Job have been compared to the encyclopedic list of things created by Ptah in the Onomasticon of Amenemope, the ques-tions of Papyrus Anastasi I, and the Admonitions of Ipuwer.24

As a nal example, in 14:7-9 Job entertains the idea that he might experi-ence rebirth, like a tree (there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again), but in the next moment he draws back from that hope (14:12: Mortals lie down and do not rise again).

Job 1:21 shows a pattern similar to this nal example above: Job entertains the idea of a return to the comforting creator god in the tomb, only to confess in the next breath that no such comfort in the afterlife is promised to believers in Yahweh. he piety of the comments emphasis on YHWH (three times in the

22) It has also been argued that this bicolon should be translated, hen I thought, I shall die with (or in) my nest (),/ and I shall multiply my days like the phoenix () (cf. NRSV), where the phoenix is understood to be related to the Egyptian bennu-bird, a symbol of revivica-tion in the Book of the Dead. his is a dicult matter to adjudicate with certainty, but meta-phors comparing a great number to grains of sand () are easy to nd in the Bible: Gen 22:17; Ps 139:18; Isa 48:19; Jer 33:22; Hab 1:9, whereas never elsewhere means a bird in classical Hebrew or contemporaneous Semitic languages. It was also the opinion of R. van den Broek that the supposed phoenix in 29:18 is an invention of the tradition (he Myth of the Phoenix, Accord-ing to Classical and Early Christian Traditions [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972], 58-60).23) (bow) as a euphemism for penis is noted in passing by Pope, Job, 190, where he makes reference to Gen 49:24, Jer 49:35, and Hos 1:5. In Egyptian literature, the motif of the restoration of the penis in the happy afterlife is consistently attested in the afterlife books; see, e.g., spells 376 and 486 of Pepi I in the Pyramid Texts, or chapters 42, 49, 93, and 162 of the Book of Going Forth By Day. he last of these reads: You are lord of the phallus, strong when you rise. In light of the foundational myth that Osiris penis was the only part of his body not recovered after he was killed and dismembered by Seth, the prominence of the penis in these texts is not surprising. Some further possible instances and citations of literature may be found in Gershon Hepner, Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 145-46.24) Gerhard von Rad, Job xxxviii and Ancient Egyptian Wisdom in he Problem of the Hexa-teuch and Other Essays (trans. E. W. Trueman Dicken; London: Oliver & Boyd, 1966), 281-91; Annette Schellenberg, Hiob und Ipuwer: Zum Vergleich des alttestamentlichen Hiobbuches mit gyptischen Texten im Allgemeinen und den Admonitions im Besonderen, in T. Krueger et al., Das Buch Hiob und seine Interpretationen. Beitraege zum Hiob-Symposium auf dem Monte Verita vom 14.-19. August 2005 (AhANT 88; Zurich: TVZ, 2007), 55-79.


verse) deracinates the foreign imagery, transforming the image of a return to the mother goddess in death into a safe expression of submission to YHWH; indeed, it could be said that the history of interpretation of 1:21a starts with 1:21b.

Other heories

he two conicting theories that have previously been most inuential are (1) that the return to the mothers womb in 1:21 implies a belief in Mother Earth;25 and (2) that the term (hence/to here) was a euphemism for the underworld.

To begin with the second of these theories, the idea that here is simply a euphemism for Sheol is unworkable, because has a clear referent preced-ing it: the womb.26 Euphemism relies on something being left unsaid, which the reader must ll in; that is not the case here.27 hus, the cognate data some-times cited for this is irrelevant since the syntax of the verse is determinative.

he theory that Job refers to Mother Earth has understandably been attrac-tive, since later texts interpret the tradition in just that way, e.g. a second-century composition such as Sirach 40:1:

Hard labor has God apportioned, and a heavy yoke upon humankind,from the day of his coming forth from his mothers womb ( ), until the day of his return to the mother of all the living ( ).

One can doubt the extent to which this is even an allusion to Job 1:21a, given that it uses instead of ; the clearer intertext is Gen 3:20, where Eve is referred to . heological interpretations have long treated the biblical texts synchronically, so that the more clear interprets the less clear, but this is not advisable from an historical perspective.28 G. B. Gray was probably correct

25) E.g. Gustav Hlscher, Das Buch Hiob (HKAT I/17; Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck: 1952), 12-13; Nicholas J. Tromp, Primitive Conceptions of Death and the Nether World in the Old Testament (BO 21; Rome: Pontical Biblical Institute, 1969), 122-24.26) he theory is relatively widely repeated. See, e.g., Herz, Egyptian Words and Idioms in the Book of Job, 343-44; Driver, Ancient Lore and Modern Knowledge, 286.27) Dan Mathewson describes it as a euphemism (there) for a euphemism (womb) for death, which indicates the strained nature of the euphemism theory. See Death and Survival in the Book of Job: Desymbolization and Traumatic Experience (New York: T & T Clark, 2006), 53.28) his procedure is reminiscent of the principle stated in the Westminster Confession I.9: he infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture, is the Scripture itself; and therefore, when there is a


to observe that had the writer [of Job 1,21a] intended his mothers womb in the rst line, and the womb of mother earth in the second, he would doubtless have expressed the idea as clearly as Ben Sirach.29

Recent studies by Gregory Vall helpfully lay out these texts as instances of what is essentially inner-biblical exegesis.30 he primary exemplars are:

Qohelet 5:14 (ET 5:15) is the most similar formulation, but it weakens the idea of return that is present in Job, replacing with , woodenly he will return to go, a formulation that is more compatible with idea of death as departure:

As he came from his mothers womb, so he shall go again, naked as he came;he shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away with his hands.

Wisdom 7:1-6 adds a clear reference to humans as descendants of Adam (cf. Wis 10:1), who was formed from the earth and returned to it (Gen 2:7; 3:19):

I also am mortal, like everyone else, a descendant of the rst-formed child of earth; and in the womb of a mother I was molded into esh, within the period of ten months, compacted with blood, from the seed of a man and the pleasure of mar-riage. And when I was born, I began to breathe the common air, and fell upon the kindred earth; my rst sound was a cry, as is true of all. I was nursed with care in swaddling cloths. For no king has had a dierent beginning of existence; there is for all one entrance into life, and one way out.

1 Tim 6:6-8: Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it; but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these.

question about the true and full sense of any scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it may be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly. 29) S. R. Driver and G. B. Gray, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Job (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1921) I.19-20. he comment is ascribed to Gray alone since the preface explains that it was a section completed after Drivers death.30) Gregory Vall, he Enigma of Job 1,21a, Bib 76 (1995): 325-42, which is based on his From Womb to Tomb: Poetic imagery and the Book of Job, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, he Catholic University of America, 1993.


Each of these texts successively interprets Job 1:21, and with each step some of the mythological elements that expressed in dierent ways by Job 1:21 and Sir 40:1 are removed, until in 1 Timothy there is no longer any mention of the mother at all. Vall quite rightly observes that [s]ome commentators have not recognized how the three texts discussed in this section modify the thought of their models . . . these exegetes mistakenly read the thought of the later formu-lations back into the earlier text.31 Instead, Vall asserts that such interpreta-tions are avoiding the notion of Mother Earth in Job 1:21a.

A nal relevant intertext may be found in Ps 139:13, 15:

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mothers womb ( ). . . .My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth ( ).

his psalm, which is probably late,32 does indeed conate the earth itself with the mothers womb in an extended metaphor. But since it does not refer to a return, it is not clear that it could lie behind Jobs curious phrasing, which as Vall himself notes, even late biblical authors might have found objectionable.33 If there is any implicit reference to Job 1:21a, one should include Ps 139:13-15 in the above list of texts that re-interpreted Job 1:21a, rather than treating it as if it claried it. Instead, Job 1:21a reects Jobs subtle entertaining of heterodox ideas.

If this is correct, then what the later texts are primarily avoiding is not mythology in general, since mythology is also very much present in Ps 139:13-15 and Sir 40:1, but specically Jobs reference to an afterlife hope in which the mother goddess protects and re-creates her son, the deceased. It is that foreign idea that was unacceptable to Jewish (and later, Christian) tradents, and so it was absorbed, transformed, and nullied by the tradition. However far back the motif of Mother Earth goes in the Bible (and Ps 139 seems to be the only clear reference to it), it is much later than the Egyptian belief in a

31) Vall, he Enigma of Job 1,21a, 341-42. Even the comments of Marvin H. Pope, Job (AB 15; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965) show a surprising disinterest in the development of the idea.32) See the remarks about the canonization of the latter portions of the Psalter in, e.g., Peter W. Flint, he Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls and the Book of Psalms. Leiden: Brill, 1997.33) As Vall writes of Qoh 5:14: While it is clear that Qoheleth did not nd the notion of death as a return to the earth objectionable (cf. 3,20; 12,7), he may have found the notion of returning to the womb problematic or objectionable (Vall, he Enigma of Job 1,21a, 340).


goddess who receives the dead as their sarcophagus, and perhaps later than the book of Job as well.

It is also signicant that Nut was a sky goddess, not an earth goddess. here-fore, if there is any historical relationship between the Egyptian religious ideas described above and the formulation of Mother Earth, it must have been a later conation of the two motifs of the (astral) mother goddess and the cre-ation of humankind from the dust.

One would not want to practice reductionism in identifying inuence on the book of Job or underestimate its gifted author. Some of the most thor-ough recent studies end up expressing frustration about the quest to explain Job 1:21a, preferring to emphasize the authors literary creativity. For example, Vall objected that Ricciotti restricts each of the words of Job 1:21a to a single meaning.34 and Nicholas Tromp opined that authors who seek concrete expla-nations for the imagery are victims of a special kind of logical thinking. By contrast, he marvels at how natural and evident these things are for men who are not alienated from nature and perhaps even from biblical thinking.35 More recently, David Clines asserted that it would be a wooden exegete who would nd the metaphors self-contradictory. So here too the imagery of the individuals birth is silently fused with the imagery of humankinds creation, so that thither is indeed the earth, not as a technical term or a euphemism for it, nor because it is precisely identied as Mother Earth. 36 One can happily agree to entertain the complex nature of the imagery, even while insisting that it requires a dierent explanation from the one Clines gives.

hese objections helpfully emphasize a healthy respect for the potential complexity of literary compositions, but they ended up prematurely closing o the investigation into the cultural inuences on the author of Job. We should perhaps be suspicious of cultural associations that seem natural and evident to those of us who stand at the end of the long history of cultural development.

Death as Return to the Goddess in Iconography

It would be remiss to omit mention of archaeological and iconographic data the interpretation of which may be aected by this study. Certain elite Judean bench tombs from First Temple period have stone-carved headrests roughly in

34) Vall, From Womb to Tomb, 15.35) Tromp, Primitive Conceptions of Death, 123.36) D. J. A. Clines, Job 1-20 (WBC 17; Dallas, Tex.: Word Books, 1989), 37.


the shape of a horseshoe, but with curved or ared sides like a Greek omega (); see Fig. 1. hese headrests, in Cave Complex 2 on the grounds of St. tiennes monastery in Jerusalem, have been given two interpretations, which have been thought to be in competition with each other: Archaeologist Gabriel Barkay has interpreted them as representing the Hathor headdress, named for the Egyptian goddess usually associated with it (Fig. 2);37 while Othmar Keel interpreted them as symbols of the womb, since very similar shapes can be understood as womb symbols elsewhere in Levantine iconography. In his rst publication, Keel described them (primarily on the basis of Ps 139) as representing a womb of the earth motif, but he supported this with reference to Bronze Age Mesopotamian and Canaanite iconography.38 Barkay responded in another article that this interpretation was far-fetched, since the return to the womb . . . was not part of the philosophy and belief of the ancient Israelites.39 He was right to cast a skeptical eye on the somewhat distant and murky data Keel adduced, and right to point out that the Cave Complex 2 headrests are the only ones of their kind thus far discovered in the region, but he went too far in claiming that First Temple Judeans had no mythology of death except the idea of sleep in Sheol.

Keel (writing with Christoph Uehlinger) responded again, and implicitly agreed that the Hathor and womb ideas were not complementary: he re-asserted that he saw the headrests as a late remnant of the idea that the earth

37) Gabriel Barkey and Amos Kloner, Jerusalem Tombs from the Days of the First Temple, BARev 12 (Mar-Apr 1986): 29, 36.38) Othmar Keel, he Peculiar Headrests for the Dead in First Temple Times, BARev 13.4 (1987): 50-53.39) Gabriel Barkay, Burial Headrests as a Return to the Womba Re-Evaluation, BARev 14 (1988): 48-50.

Figure 1. Hathor headrest from St. tienne Cave Complex 2 tomb. (Keel, Gods, Goddesses and Images of God, 368.)


is symbolically the mothers womb,40 but backed o his earlier claims about mythological signicance, saying that [i]t is unlikely that we have a dim reection of a mythological theme [i.e. in reference to Hathor], used now in a context that is decidedly unmythological in its literature.41 his cannot be wholly correct; the idea that the inhabitants of First Temple Jerusalem were unmythological in their approach to death (or that they uniformly believed only that death meant sleep in Sheol) is one that one can safely reject as an artifact of an earlier generation of scholarship. here is now an extensive lit-erature on the diversity of beliefs about death that circulated in First Temple Judah, which were much more extensive than a prima facie reading of the biblical text might suggest.42 On the specic point of tomb as womb,

40) Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel (trans. T. H. Trapp; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 367.41) Keel and Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God, 367.42) Cf. Christopher B. Hays, Death in the Iron Age II and in First Isaiah (FAT 79; Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), esp. 133-201.

Figure 2. Hathor amulets from Iron Age Ekron. (Christian Herrmann, gyptische Amulette aus Palstina/Israel: Mit einem Ausblick auf ihre Rezeption durch das Alte Testament [OBO 138; Freiburg, Schweiz: Universittsverlag;

Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994], 260.)


Job 1:21 can now be seen to supply a rather clear reference to the mythological return to the womb in death.

In light of what has been laid out above, the interpretations of the headrests as Hathor and as a womb can be seen to be complementary rather than con-tradictory. Indeed, within Egyptian mythology, they are completely compati-ble: Hathor was associated with the night sky, and she was another of the mother goddesses. Indeed, Hathors name in Egyptian (Hwt Hr) meant Tem-ple of Horus, but Hwt came to be understood metaphorically as womb, so that Hathor was the womb/mother of Horus and later Re:43

It was believed that Hathor, as the night sky, received Re each night on the west-ern horizon and protected him within her body so that he could be safely reborn each morning. Based on this divine paradigm, Hathor was seen as a source for rebirth and regeneration of all the deceased, royal and nonroyal, and they all hoped for similar protection form her.44

hat is precisely the same hope that we have seen expressed with respect to the mother goddesses described above. Hathors iconography in Egypt seems to allude to the shape of a womb as well.45 (his is not to deny that some varia-tion on the womb as a symbol of the mother goddess was present in Mesopo-tamia as well, but it has not been clearly demonstrated that it was associated with death and rebirth in that context.)

In short, Hathor was very closely associated in Egypt with the womb and with hopes for rebirth, so the only surprise in nding the same association in First Temple Judah is for some biblical scholars and archaeologists who are accus-tomed to thinking that ancient Judeans had less awareness of Egyptian(izing) mythology than they probably did. Egyptian inuence on First Temple tomb architecture is well established.46 Stones cannot speak for themselves, but it is eminently plausible that the elites who commissioned the impressive tombs of

43) Deborah Vischak, Hathor, OEAE, 84.44) Vischak, Hathor, 82.45) Dietrich Wildung, Zur Formgeschichte der Landeskronen in Studien zu Sprache und Reli-gion gyptens: Zu Ehren von Wolfhart Westendorf (Gttingen: F. Junge, 1984), 967-980; Christian Cannuyer, Aton, nourrice dans le sein, succdan des matresses de la mnat, Gt-tinger Miszellen 157 (1997): 11-14; Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, Amours et fureurs de La Lointaine. Cls pour la comprhension de symboles gyptiens (Paris: Stock/Pernoud, 1995).46) See, for example, David Ussishkin, he Necropolis from the Time of the Kingdom of Judah at Silwan, Jerusalem, BA 33 (1970): 33-46. For discussion and further literature, see Hays, Death in the Iron Age II, 232-49.


Cave Complex 2 also had contact with Egyptian ideas and were alluding to them in a way as subtle as Jobs. Both the headrests (which are as yet unique to First Temple burials) and the various biblical manifestations of Egyptian ideas can be considered minority reportsthey are probably not reective of mainstream beliefsyet they still do testify again to the signicant intercul-tural exchange of religious ideas in the ancient Near East.47

Conclusions

Job 1:21a makes better sense when understood in light of the Egyptian idea of death as a return to the womb of the mother goddess; that mythology provides a much more likely context than the idea of Mother Earth, which is attested only in texts that are (or are likely to be) quite late. To say that the passage references Egyptian mythology is not to say that it fully embraces it. Rather, as in so many other instances in the book, it plays with diverse ideas about death and afterlife in its complex theological conversation.48 As in various other cases in the book (for example, in his expressions of preference for death) Job prac-tices a kind of theological brinksmanship, crossing an apparent line only to pull back in the next breath or the next chapter.49 In light of the Hathor/womb headrests from the tombs at St. tiennes, it may be that Jobs theologi-cal rhetoric was not merely a literary invention, but reected the hopes of at least a few elite citizens in Judah.

47) It would be more surprising if one did not nd such exchange, given the longstanding reality of intercultural theological discourse in the ANE. See, for example, Mark S. Smith, God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World (FAT 57; Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).48) On the conversation about death and afterlife in the book of Job more generally, see esp. Matthew J. Suriano, Death, Disinheritance, and Jobs Kinsman-Redeemer, JBL 129 (2010): 49-66. I oer a discussion of Jobs interaction with ANE death and afterlife imagery in You Destroy a Persons Hope: Job as a Conversation About Death, Reading Job Intertextually (Eds. Katharine Dell and Will Kynes; LHBOTS; London: T&T Clark, forthcoming).49) his might be understood much as Carol Newsom describes the issue of cursing God in the book: he possibility of such cursing is raised (1:5, 11; 2:5) only to be defused (1:5) and rejected (1:22; 2:10). Newsom, he Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 55.

hays, c. b. 2012. job' s return to his mother' s womb in light of egyptian mythology

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