Goat-Demons and Night-Wraiths

If you've been with us for awhile, then you probably know who the Herald of Zion is; the mysterious author of the oracles that make up chapters 40-66 of the book of Isaiah, commonly referred to as "Deutero-Isaiah".

Some people subdivide these chapters even further, and claim that chapters 55-66 are yet another prophet, called Trito-Isaiah!

You might be wondering, Where do they get these ideas from???

For the most part, this comes down to three points:

1. Chapters 40-55 seem to presuppose that Jerusalem is already destroyed with the Judahites in Babylonian exile, then 56-66 seems to presuppose that those exiled have already returned and since begun to rebuild;
2. Isaiah's name ceases being used in chapter 40 and onwards;
3. Sudden changes in style and theology.

Those who reject the existence of a "Trito-Isaiah" can plausibly claim that the same prophet lived through the period of return. The situation changed, the person remained the same. Similar to Jeremiah speaking out oracles before, during, and after the Judahite defeat at the hands of Bavel.

But of course, there is a counter-model to the above, one that seeks to break up the book of Isaiah quite differently. Instead of focusing on authorship, some prefer to look at the oracles' literary and formal characteristics and see 2-parts, with part 2 beginning as early as chapter 34!

According to this model, the pattern that emerges is that the first 33 chapters focus on rebuke and warnings of judgement. From 34 and onwards, the shift is towards a forthcoming restoration.

With that, I want to turn to chapter 34 together, keeping in mind that this might be the very start of a whole, new section.

Not quite what I was expecting when I heard that beginning with chapter 34, we would get to start reading about "restoration." This sounds like kind of the opposite, if you ask me!

And that's true; Chapter 34 is all about retribution and destruction. Don't forget, the land and people of Judah have suffered terribly, at the hands of some of their own neighbors as well as the Big Bad Baylonians out east. We explored this in such places as Sibling Rivalry

https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/283219?lang=en ) as well as Glory! Glory Hallelu-YAH! (https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/260717?lang=en)

And so, while we might be uncomfortable with this idea, before this prophet can begin to speak of things taking a turn for the better for Judah, they must take a turn for the worse for those who did Zion wrong:

In verse 5, it is revealed that this prophet is picking on Edom specifically, resulting in many wanting to date this as a late text, given that prophetic rage towards Edom was a result of their collaboration with the Babylonians in Judah's downfall in 586 (see the two links above). Given this, let's just go ahead and assume we are reading oracles composed by our fried the Herald of Zion, as we've been doing for the later chapters in the scroll of Isaiah.

There's something pretty neat that the Herald does here that I want to show you.

In verse 9, the Herald starts to describe a despoiled Edom, such that it is now completely devoid of all signs of human civilization.

Let's take a look at this section, which is shocking in its vividness:

As I was reading through in the Hebrew, there was a particular phrase that jumped out at me in verse 11. Here it is translated as line of chaos And with weights of emptiness.

This is something that is missed in translation; In the Hebrew, it says kav tohu we'avnei vohu, which I think is a deliberate attempt to allude to the primordial, chaotic state of the cosmos before YHWH started to impose order on everything:

What I think our Herald is doing is deliberately using the language which was used to describe the primordial mess, to drive the point home that that is the fate that awaits Edom. It's an ironic twist that in describing the constructive efforts of wild animals such as hedgehogs and ravens, the result is destruction from the humanistic perspective.

Once I picked up on this, I couldn't help but notice that there are possibly a few other references to the Genesis 1 creation narrative here. "Night and day" of verse 10, for example, possibly echo the creation of the luminaries to rule over "day and night."

Also, the term used for stretching (na-tah) out the measuring line from verse 11 reminds me of the following:

In the passage above, a character named Job finds himself in the presence of YHWH, after Job had accused YHWH of not treating him fairly. YHWH accepts the challenge, and begins by reminding Job that he is picking a fight with the Creator, Himself.

To demonstrate the futility, YHWH starts off at the beginning. Where were you when, in beginning of Creation, I laid the Earth's very foundations? When I measured it with a line!

Yet again, the Herald's language in Isaiah 34 is reminiscent of a creation-passage.

I'll show you something else interesting; The word for line, i.e., kaw, has the same root for the word for the gathering together of water, which appears - you guessed it, in Genesis 1!

If you're keeping track, that brings us to three linguistic allusions to creation in this passage which describes, well, basically the very opposite of creation; The absolute falling-apart of Edomite civilization.

I'll show you another one. Verse 13 mentions that the place will be overrun by jackals. Note the word in Hebrew; Tanim. Sound familiar? We just spoke at length about this word last week in Predicting Egypt's Fate (https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/292411?lang=bi).

Perhaps this verse will ring a bell:

The sea monsters! (Remember those nasty crocodiles coming up from the Nile river?)

Isn't this interesting?

What do you think of all of this? Is the Herald evoking creation on purpose? Or is this all coincidental? And if on purpose, what is his rhetorical point in doing so? Do you think my suggestion above, that the Herald is trying to get across the totality of it all, such that creation itself is being undone, to be compelling? Or might there be something else going on?

I want to now look at something specific in verses 13-14:

This is a fascinating two verses, and are actually quite eerie if you slow down and read them carefully; I don't know, there's just something that gets my spine tingling about goat-demons and "night-ones," whatever that means.

Let's look at a few commentaries about them.

First, the Jewish Study Bible on the Hebrew of the term "night-one", or lilith.

Yup, that's pretty creepy, I'd say! Did you know that you could read about such figures in our ancient Israelite and Judahite literature?

But what in the world are these demon-women hanging around a desolated Edom for? I'm not really sure. Here is Alter's take:

below: Check out the goat horns. Could this have been influenced by the lilith juxtaposition in Isiah 34 with goat-demons?

Huh! ..... This is not infrequent? The overlapping of natural and mythological entities? Can you think of other cases?

Now that we already have a foot in the macabre, I may as well show you another related source before continuing to think about Isaiah 34; (But be forewarned - Don't read this passage at home, after dark if you are home-alone; I wouldn't want to be responsible for you keeping yourself up at night seeing specters and ghosts in in every corner!)

In this passage, we hear a man named Eliphaz the Temanize recounting an unexpected visitor in the black of night:

No need to head to the local movie rental and wander the horror section to give yourself a scare. Just open up your TaNaKh, and you'll find material that should most definitely do the trick.

What do we have in this case? Eliphaz is lying in bed at night trying to sleep; And suddenly thinks he heard a whisper. Looking around, he finds the room dark, empty and still. Maybe there's a bit of moonlight coming from the window. And then... a breeze on his face? But how can that be? The curtains have not budged! Hair stands on end; Bones, paralyzed with fright. And then, look! A figure! Right before his very eyes; A figure who then opens up its mouth and begins to speak, delivering a message from a realm beyond the world of flesh-and-blood.

Perhaps we can call such passages as this one in Job and in the Herald above but two in a sub-genre of Israelite Ghost Stories. Can you think of any others? (Ever heard of the Witch of Endor? See 1 Samuel 28).

There's one more comment about this passage from the Herald that I want to share. This comes from Bob Utley's You Can Understand the Bible:

(The Peshitta is an ancient Aramaic translation of all of the works in the TaNaKh, widely used during the 5th century CE.)

Okay - that's the second time we've seen a reference to these Akkadian night demons. So let's look into it.

Here is some information from the New World Encyclopedia:

Isn't that wild? 3,000 years BCE, going all the way back to the Sumerians!!!!

Does the term "Sumerian" sound familiar?

Recently, we spoke about the origin of the King-as-Shepherd idea, in our unit called Of Shepherds and Lions (https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/285121?lang=bi). That, too, went all the way back to these Sumerians, who now seems to have had quite a bit of influence on our texts in the TaNaKh.

Whatever meaning this lilith thing would come to mean by the Herald's time, I can't imagine it would have been pleasant for any lingering Edomites to encounter one.

And by the way, for those of you who haven't caught onto the word-game yet, lilith, or לילית, is a rarely used feminine form of the word for night; לילית/לית, which explains the translation choice of night-demon.

We now have to say something more about these "goat-demons," beings which actually make a few appearances in the TaNaKh.

As it turns out, the Israelites, once upon a time, might have been offering sacrifices, if you can believe it, to goat-demons.

According to the historian of Chronicles, YHWH's command would eventually be disregarded... by a Northern-Israelite king!

The following passage describes the moment when the northern Israelites secede from being a part of what had seemed to be an emerging Israelite Empire under the Davidic family.

(We're about to read about King Rehoboam and King Jeroboam. And just so you keep your Rehoboams and your Jeroboams right, remember that "Rehoboam" is Solomon's son and is King-of-the-South. Think of "R" as in, "Royal." He came from the legitimate Royal family that went back to David.

While "Jeroboam," on the other hand, was the newly-appointed King-of-the-North. "J" for Just-now-appointed. Or "J" for Jack-in-the-box, if you will; No one expected him, he just kind of POPPED UP, surprisingly, out of nowhere.)

I have a question for you; How believable do you think this description is? Can you accept that this Norther King, Jeroboam, would have the nerve to steer his people away from YHWH and back to the goat-demons of their past, that they were warned about in Leviticus 17 above?

OR

Might this historian not only be writing strict history, but crafting a religious polemic in order to delegitimize the norther-religious establishment?

Which of the above two possibilities do you find most likely? Which do you find more disturbing? That the northerners would do such a thing? Or that this historian would falsely accuse them of it?

below: I'd caution against looking too closely at this picture.

I'll show you another place where we see these goat-demons, in a similar context to our Herald describing a desolate Edom, actually. It comes from Isaiah son of Amoz predicting a desolated Babylon:

In more ways than one, our Herald's passage about Edom echoes this passage of the fate of Bavel. In addition to the goat-demons, some of the same types of creatures will be inhabiting both places, once their respective civilizations have been brought to an end.

I find this particularly interesting given what we've seen in a few places from the lament-poem of Psalm 137, in which a poet laments the destruction of Solomon's Temple at the hands of the Babylonians, as well as rage directed towards Edom for their complicity.

You've probably picked up on the fact that chapter 34 is not the most "pleasant" of passages for everyone involved. I can't imagine that were I an Edomite, it would make for nice bed-side reading.

I therefore think we owe it to ourselves to take a look at chapter 35 as well, where we finally get the "good stuff."

It is a very short chapter - just 10 verses. But to preface our reading of it, I want to share a comment from Jerome Smith's Ultimate Cross-Reference Treasury:

Let's now see how things take a turn entering chapter 35; In my opinion, it is one of the most uplifting and joyous of passages in the works in the TaNaKh!!!

I'll give it all to you at once, so that you can truly bask in it, line-by-line, as the Herald intended:

Isn't that incredible?

Imagine being an ancient Israelite in exile, perhaps one who was old enough to suffer through the trauma of the death and destruction of Judah at the hands of the Babylonians. You have long-since given up hope that you would be able to return to Judah, to Zion once again, to worship YHWH, the eloha-of-your-fathers.

And then word starts getting around of a prophet who is in short saying, Get ready. It's nearly time go home...... And with singing, with dancing, with the Splendor-of-Elohim!

If you read through chapters 34 and 35 together, you'll see what Smith meant when he calls this a "beautiful poem." For a few times in chapter 35 we get mirror-images of the various ways that desolation and waste were represented in chapter 34. My recommendation is to to give it a full read through, and then to line them up side-by-side to see what you can find.

I'll give you a nice, but slightly subtle example, and then let you see what you can dig up on your own.

In the destruction of chapter 34, there are a lot of corpses:

Yikes. (As we said - not the most pleasant of bed-side readings.)

Do you remember anything about corpses elsewhere in the works in the TaNaKh?

How about this?

Corpses are basically oozing with impurity; So-much-so that it has such power to spread and infect everything under the same roof, whether there was any direct contact or not. If this impurity spreads to a person, it will take at least 7 days for this impurity to be able to be washed off completely.

For the Israelites, corpses were basically synonymous with impurity.

But look what happens in chapter 35:

This highway that appears, leading the Judahites back home, will be one that is completely devoid of uncleanness, of impurity, of corpses; Rather, it is paved and pure all the way through, not a corpse in site.

How else does chapter 35 provide a contrast to what we see in 34?

I just want to draw your attention to one more line here which I love:

I find this to be just so stirring; The image of Israel hearing the news that YHWH is alive and well and is on his way to meet with his people once again, and Israel being so ecstatic at this such that she begins to leap like a prancing deer...... wow.

below: Ever see gazelles prancing? Here is a video of the closely-related springbok, found in southwestern Africa. Try watching this without feeling the urge to get up and "pronk" around right along with them!

This is not the only place in the works in the TaNaKh where a dancing deer is used to illustrate excitement and euphoria. An ancient Israelite poet, composing love-poetry between, saw fit to do the same:

First of all; Beautiful!!!

Second of all, are you thinking what I'm thinking? How similar is this to what we were just looking at in Isaiah 35! We have "dancing stags," we have a lover calling out to his beloved and inviting her to join him elsewhere, we have blossoming (springtime?) imagery; There are some lovely parallels.

I'm not sure which of these came first, the love-poetry or the Herald; But do you think it is possible that one of them was inspired by the other?

And to round out our readings, as usual, here is some worthwhile wisdom from the treasure-chest of Israelite proverbs that we still have with us to this day: