EVERYTHING IS MAGIC.
A common misconception moderns have about the Bible is that prophets and prophecy were unique to ancient Israel. This could not be farther from the truth. The ancient Near East in literature and archaeology evinces a robust culture of divining. The kind of prophetic figures, institutional prophetic guilds, and eventually, prophetic literature that we read about in the Bible fit squarely into the social world of ancient Judahite and Israelite kingdoms. We ought to understand prophecy as a kind of divination.
Prophecy is a kind of divination.
Divination is a way humans try to make known the will of a god or a goddess. In the old world, prophecy that was spoken existed alongside all sorts of other kinds of divination. A person could train in and hold a profession as a diviner, or a professional interpreter of the gods. Divination was practiced through astrology (reading the stars), oneiromancy (dream interpretation), augury (hidden signals in the flight of bird), lecanomancy (divining how oil acted in water), necromancy (summoning the dead for a convo), to name some common examples.
Here is the big idea behind divination.
Divination presupposes that there are hidden messages from the gods all around us. The problem, is that these messages need to be decoded. So these messages, or the divine will, are hidden in bird flight patterns and livers and stars and deformed puppies. And specialists were trained how to read the signs.
Israel and Judah practiced these things like everyone else.
Israel and Judah most likely did practiced divination like everyone else. Know how you can tell? It bothers the biblical priests and scribes who wrote the Bible. The Deuteronomist school and the Priestly Editor rail against it. They proscribe almost every type of divination (save for whatever the Urim and Thummim is…):
DEUTERONOMY 18.9-14
When you come into the land that Yahweh your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. 10 There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to Yahweh. And because of these abominations Yahweh your God is driving them [the Canaanites that is…] out before you. You shall be blameless before Yahweh your God, or these nations, which you are about to dispossess, listen to fortune-tellers and to diviners. But as for you, Yahweh your God has not allowed you to do this.
Generally as scholars, we like to read commands like this against the grain. That is, the reason this author is so adamantly outlawing divination…is because it was a problem. Everyone did it. Archaeology in Israel and Judah confirms a robust cult of the dead, sacrifice at high places in decentralized locations (i.e. outside of Jerusalem), magic and rituals practiced inside domiciles, house idols, even a ton of bronze cast snakes. Religion in Israel was complex, layered, and danced between monolatry (worship of one God with belief in that many others exist) and pantheon (the divine council of most Canaanite religion).
Over time we move from pantheon, to monolatry, to monotheism… but it is a process and the writers of the Bible are all over the map, not to mention common people. Most folks seem to have practiced Yahweh worship in variant ways alongside ancestor worship, a cult of the dead, and lots of magic. Everything is Magic in the Bible— the gods leave messages and divination deciphers them. This is how people thought about the world across the board in the Iron Age.
In the midst of diverse religion expression, the Biblical authors are trying to remind Israel of her unique relationship and covenant with Yahweh, who is remarkably different in some fascinating ways. This God wants a slave people as his own, this God does not want to be imaged as a created thing or symbol, this God is interested in justice and mercy over might makes right, this God goes from being unrivaled in his divine council, to being the one, true God of the universe by the time we get to the latest biblical texts. The bottom line though, is that prophets and prophecy are one kind of divination allowed by the biblical writers. Prophets are understood to be the mouthpiece of God.
URIM AND THUMMIM
Other forms of divining are all over the place in the Bible which fit well in ancient Near Eastern divination context. In EXODUS 28.30 and 1 SAMUEL 14.41, we have this obscure reference to settling the will of Yahweh by employing the urim and thummim. We are not sure what these were, but they were supposed to be kept in a breastplate piece on the high priest’s super-fancy pants-diviner-outfit and could be casted like lots to figure out what Yahweh wanted the people to do. It’s super odd. That’s okay, it’s a foreign land…and everything is magic.
DREAMS
In 1 KINGS 3.5-15 and many other places, Yahweh speaks in dreams. When such a dream took place, the belief was that someone who knew what they were doing needed to interpret the message. Think of Joseph or Daniel interpreting the dreams of the king when no one else could. So Yahweh, like the other gods of the ancient Near East, will visit people in dreams in the biblical narrative. This makes people uneasy though, because anyone can claim to have a dream from God, right? JEREMIAH 23.28 and 29.8, for example, demonstrate that sometimes dreams are untrustworthy. Deuteronomy 13.1-5 even lays out how to tell whether it is legitimate when a prophet shows up with a dream: If he asks you to go after foreign gods, even if his vision comes to pass, he’s bad news bears.
SWEATER VESTS, WITCHES, THE NOT-SO-DEAD, AND STARS
All these passages contain types of divination. JUDGES 6.36-49 has this weird test by Gideon with a fleece or sweater vest or something. 1 SAMUEL 28 is a great story about Saul using a witch to call Samuel the prophet back from the dead (Samuel is super pissed by the way :D), DEUTERONOMY 18.10-11 is that long list of divinations not allowed, and DEUTERONOMY 4.18 is a nod to astrology.
The germane point for us, Text and Rockers, is that ancient Israel completely believed all of these forms of divination were possible. When we enter the world of the Bible, it is a magic world. That is to say, in Judah, Israel, and everywhere around them, people believed completely that the gods had left signs to be decoded by the trained seer. We need to get used to the time and cultural warp that happens when we enter Scripture: Here there are gods, monsters, ritual and incantation, otherworldly dreams, bird messages, and livers that speak through blood and bile. Enjoy your breakfast…and your Bible.