About a hundred years ago, a farmer was plowing his field on the coast of the country of Syria. His plow hit a stone slab, and under it was an old tomb. When diggers came to look, they found a whole buried city called Ugarit. Inside it was a room full of clay tablets that had lain in the dark for more than three thousand years. The tablets were full of prayers and poems about the gods the people there loved. So for the first time in all those years, the people who prayed to those gods could tell us about them in their own words.
The first lesson told the stories of the side that won. These tablets come from the other side. In them you meet farmers, mothers and judges who believed their gods were real, and who loved them.
The gods of the coast
The most loved god in the Ugarit tablets is Baal, the god of storms and rain. The farmers on that coast had no big river to water their fields, so every crop needed rain, and the rain was Baal's gift. In the tablets, Baal beats Yam, the god of the sea, with two magic clubs, and the gods build Baal a house of silver and gold. Baal also kills a sea monster called Lotan, a twisting snake with seven heads. The same seven-headed monster shows up in the poems of the Bible, where it is called Leviathan. There it is the God of Israel who crushes its heads. People told the same story and gave the win to a different god.
Above Baal sat El, the oldest and highest of the gods, the father of the others and the maker of all things. The tablets call him "Bull El," because to them a bull meant strength. They say he is a wise old king with a gray beard, who lives where the rivers begin. His name, El, is the old word for God, and you can hear it in names like Isra-el and Beth-el. You will meet that word again in the next lesson.
Beside El sat Asherah, the mother of the gods. Women prayed to her when they hoped for a child and when they were afraid of the birth. People made small clay figures of her and kept them at home, and diggers have found them in plain houses all over that land, on both sides of every border.
The gods of the great rivers
Far to the east stood the city of Babylon, and its god was Marduk, the young god who became king of all the gods. Every spring the people of Babylon read aloud a long poem about him. We call it the Enuma Elish. In the poem, before there was any sky or ground, there was only Tiamat, the salt sea, and she went to war against the younger gods. Only Marduk was brave enough to face her, so he caught her in a net and split her body in two. He lifted one half up to make the sky and laid the other half down to make the earth. Then he made people out of a god's blood, to do the hard work the gods were tired of doing.
The sun god in that land was Shamash, the god of justice. He crossed the whole sky every day, so people believed he saw everything, and judges prayed to him for help with hard cases.
A statue was a meeting place
The old books of Israel made fun of the statues their neighbors prayed to. They said those people bowed down to wood and stone that could not see or hear. But that was one side's insult. The people who prayed before the statues did not think the statue was the god. To them it was more like an icon, the place where a god no one could see might be met.
Clay tablets from Babylon and the lands around it show how this worked. When a new statue was finished, the priests held a rite called the washing of the mouth. In Akkadian, the old language of Babylon, it was called mis pi. Again and again they washed the statue's mouth, and they prayed for the god to come and live in it. The men who had carved it swore, "I did not make it," and said a god had made it. Only after the rite did people believe the god was there, ready to smell the incense and eat the food set before him.
These gods cared how people lived
The Ugarit tablets tell a story about a good king named Danel. He sits at the gate of his city, where cases were heard, and he judges the case of the widow and stands up for the orphan. To the people who wrote that poem, a good man took care of the ones nobody else would help, and the gods loved him for it.
In Egypt, along the Nile River, people believed that after death they would stand in a great hall before Osiris, the king of the dead. There their heart was set on a scale and weighed against a feather, the sign of Maat, the goddess of truth. So the dead person would stand by the scale and say out loud the wrongs they had never done. I have not killed. I have not made anyone weep. I have not let anyone go hungry. I have not taken milk from the mouths of children. If you have ever lain awake hoping you did enough good, you know how those people felt.
The blood
But in every one of these lands, kings and priests also killed for their gods. Ur was an old city in the south of what is now Iraq. In its royal tombs, diggers found dozens of servants and guards who were put to death and buried with their king and queen.
The old books of Israel tell the same kind of story about their own leaders. A war leader named Joshua burned the town of Jericho. He killed every person and every animal in it, and he called it a gift to his God. A man named Jephthah, who led the people in war, made a promise to that God before a battle. When he won, he gave up his own daughter to keep it. In every land, the men in charge believed their god wanted blood, and they gave it. The ones who paid were servants, daughters and strangers.
The flood before Noah
In the year 1872, a young man named George Smith was fitting together broken clay tablets at the British Museum in London. They came from Nineveh, an old city in what is now Iraq. When he found a story about a flood on them, he was so excited that he jumped up and ran around the room.
It was part of the tale of Gilgamesh, a king who wanted to never die. On his journey he met a very old man named Utnapishtim, who had lived through the great flood. The gods had made up their minds to drown the world, but the wise god Ea warned Utnapishtim in secret. So he built a huge boat, covered it with pitch inside and out, and brought his family and the animals on board. The storm raged for six days and seven nights, and then the boat came to rest on a mountain. He sent out a dove and a swallow, and both came back. Then he sent a raven, and when it found dry ground and stayed away, he came out. He offered a sacrifice, and the gods gathered over the smell like flies.
Then there is the story the Bible tells about a man named Noah. God decides to drown the world because people have become so wicked, but he warns one good man. So Noah builds a boat and covers it with pitch, inside and out. When the rain stops, the boat comes to rest on a mountain, and Noah sends out a raven and then a dove. When at last he comes out, he offers a sacrifice on a fire, and God smells the pleasing smell and promises never to send such a flood again.
If you grew up with Noah, you can hear that it is the same story, told one more time. The book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, did not come from a quiet place where only one God was known. It came out of this same world of many gods, where people believed a god could drown the whole earth and then be calmed by the smell of meat on a fire.
Then Jesus came
Into that world Jesus came, and he did not tell one more story about a god who fights the sea or floods the earth. Instead, he sat down to supper.
The Gospel of Matthew tells it in chapter 9, just after Jesus healed a man who could not walk. Jesus saw a tax collector named Matthew sitting at his tax booth, and he asked him to follow. Tax collectors took money for Rome, the empire that ruled the land, and people hated them as cheats. That evening Jesus sat down to eat in the house with many tax collectors and other people everyone called sinners. Some Pharisees, a group of strict religious teachers, saw it. They asked his followers why their teacher would eat with people like that. Jesus heard them, and he answered with words from an old prophet named Hosea.
But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (Matthew 9:13)
Every god in this lesson wanted something on a fire or someone in a grave. The kings of Ur took their servants into the tomb, Jephthah gave up his daughter, and the gods of the flood crowded around the smoke. Jesus said the Father wanted mercy, not sacrifice. Then he showed what mercy looks like, by eating supper with the very people the religious teachers would not touch.
The farmers of Ugarit and the people of Egypt already knew that God cared about the widow and the hungry child. What no one had ever told them was that this was what God wanted all along, and that he never wanted blood at all.
What this gives you
The people who prayed to Baal, to Shamash and to Asherah were not fools. They were mothers who were scared of giving birth and farmers who were scared of a dry year. They were looking for God the same way every person does. Before Christ, people in every land tried to describe God Almighty, the one who made all things. In land after land, and in the old books of Israel too, people believed that the highest God, the only one worth worshiping, was a God who made murder and killing right, as long as it was done in his name.
Jesus turned away from that picture of the true God. He refused blood, he refused revenge, and he refused to harm anyone, whether they were descendants of Jacob or not. That was a break from thousands of years of teaching. The God Jesus showed us is not the God those old stories describe. He is a Father who belongs to no tribe and wants no one's blood. After him, rulers and kings with armies pulled people back into one god set over the others, but his words were written down and kept anyway. If the angry God of the old stories ever made you feel afraid or far away, that feeling was honest, and it was leading you somewhere good. You were looking for the Father Jesus showed, the one who sat down to supper with the people nobody wanted, and who would be glad to sit down with you.