Grafted-In Ministries
Spiritual Mixing of Seed
Written by Nehemia Gordon
The bright Jerusalem sun reflected off the white sheen of the tiny marble panels. I was standing in front of a 1:50 scale model of the Second Temple created by one of Israel’s top archaeologists. I came to see what it might have looked like when the Temple priests proclaimed God’s holy name over the people. With the image of the Temple replica still burning in my mind, I shut my eyes tight and was transported 2,000 years back in time. Standing among the jostling crowd, I angled to get a glimpse of the priests decked out in their sacred regalia on the wooden platform. The multitude became quiet when the high priest raised his arms. He then began the Priestly Blessing by pronouncing slowly and carefully the first word. Ye-va-re-che-cha. May He bless you. Hundreds of voices thundered in unison from atop the platform, repeating every syllable. The first word of the holy blessing echoed through the Judean hills and ascended up into the heavens. Silence then gripped the Temple courtyard as the crowd held their breath in anticipation of the next word, God’s holy name, the name revealed to Moses at the burning bush. Suddenly, the words I read in the Talmud echoed from somewhere in the back of the Temple courtyard:
Is the Priestly Blessing really with the Tetragrammaton or with a title? Scripture says, “And they shall place My name.” My name which is unique to Me.
The image of the Temple quickly faded as I opened my eyes, leaving me with a burning question: What was it about the Priestly Blessing that made God’s “unique” name so important? I mean, what difference did it make if the priests blessed the people using one of God’s titles?
I found the answer months later when re-reading one of my favorite passages in the Bible. It was the section in Genesis in which Abraham fought against the raiders who pillaged southern Canaan, the ones he chased “as far as Dan.” On his way back from this victorious battle, two Canaanite leaders—Melchizedek and the King of Sodom—approached Abraham. Melchizedek was a mysterious figure described as “a priest of the Most High God” who opened the meeting with a blessing:
And [Melchizedek] blessed him saying, “Blessed is Abram by the Most High God, Creator of heaven and earth. And blessed is the Most High God who has delivered your enemy into your hand.”
I remembered learning that the Canaanites had a deity of their own called the “Most High God Creator of heaven and earth.” They believed that this god created the Universe before retiring and turning it over to his son, Baal. Abraham knew Melchizedek was righteous and was referring to the same God he worshipped. But the King of Sodom was a notorious idolater and might understand the title “Most High God” as referring to the retired Canaanite creator-deity. When the King of Sodom offered Abraham great riches, the patriarch responded by using the same title for God that Melchizedek used, but with one small and important difference:
And Abram said to the King of Sodom, “I lift my hand to Yehovah , the Most High God, Creator of heaven and earth.”
Abraham didn’t want the King of Sodom to think he was talking about the father of Baal so he added God’s actual name, Yehovah , to remove any ambiguity.
Abraham’s encounter with the King of Sodom made me realize one of the powerful things about the Tetragrammaton is that it really is unique to the one true God. Titles like “Most High,” “God,” and “Lord” could refer to Baal, Zeus, Krishna, or a whole host of foreign deities. The name Yehovah is unique to the God of Israel. It seemed to me that this was why God commanded the descendants of Aaron to proclaim the Priestly Blessing using His unique name—so everyone would know Yehovah was the source of the blessing. There was an inherent risk in using an ambiguous title like “God” or “Lord” in that the blessing could mistakenly be attributed to a pagan deity.
I learned how serious this risk was from a passage in the Book of Samuel that described one of King David’s major battles against the Philistines:
And David came to Baal-Peratzim and David smote them there and said, “Yehovah has burst forth (paratz ) upon my enemies before me as the water bursts forth (peretz ),” therefore he called the name of that place Baal-Peratzim .
I was sitting in the Hebrew University library reading the Bible on my laptop when the significance of this verse struck me. Heads all over the library turned as I suddenly blurted out a spontaneous “uh-oh,” the kind Dustin Hoffman blurted out in the movie Rain Man whenever something went wrong.
What I realized was that David was comparing his victory in this important battle to the flash floods common in the Judean Mountains. When it rains, a wall of water can come washing through seasonal mountain creeks in a matter of seconds, sweeping away everything in its path. I’ve only witnessed this a few times and can testify that it is truly an awe-inspiring spectacle. David was saying that God burst forth upon the Philistines like a flashflood suddenly bursting forth in a dry mountain creek during heavy rain. The word for bursting-forth is paratz and this is the source of the name of the battle-site: Baal-Peratzim . Here comes the “uh-oh.” Baal-Peratzim means “Baal Bursting-forth!” David should have called the name of the place, Yehovah -Peratzim (Yehovah Bursting-forth) or El-Peratzim (God Bursting-forth) or even Adonai-Peratzim (Lord Bursting-forth). Instead, he gave the chief Canaanite deity, Baal, credit for the blessing he experienced in his victory over the Philistines.
I had trouble accepting this at first. I was raised with an idealized view of King David, a view expressed in the Talmudic dictum:
Anyone who says that David sinned is in error.
The rabbis who defended this view of a sinless David created excuses for all his apparent wrongdoings. He didn’t really commit adultery with Bathsheba, they argued, because her husband, Uriah, gave her a provisional divorce when he went out to battle. Uriah, for his part, deserved to die, because he defied David’s order to go back to his wife and re-consummate his lapsed marriage. The excuses continued until even some of the Talmudic rabbis tired of them. One rabbi acrimoniously quipped that those who justify David only do so because they are his direct descendants and want to glorify their own lineage. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to confess that according to a family tradition, I am descended from King David on my mother’s side. Despite this, I am not going to try to justify David’s errors. He was not perfect, as David said of himself in the 69th chapter of Psalms:
O God, You know my foolishness; and my sins are not hidden from You.
Still, it was hard for me to believe David would name the site of his major battle after Baal. After all, he was a mashiach , a messiah. I don’t mean the one we expect to come in the future and bring world peace. David was a literal messiah, which means, “anointed one.” The prophet Samuel anointed him with oil, as it says:
Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers; and the spirit of Yehovah came upon David from that day forward.
In English, this might not sound like it has anything to do with a messiah . However, in Hebrew, when it says, “[he] anointed him,” it uses the same root-word as mashiach , “messiah.” You could legitimately translate this as “[he] made him a messiah” or “[he] messiah-ed him.” Here’s the thing: when Samuel anointed David with oil, at that very moment God anointed David with His own spirit, the “spirit of Yehovah .” Scripture says that God’s spirit was with David “from that day forward.” This means when David named the site of his important battle “Baal Bursting-forth,” the spirit of Yehovah was with him.
I was willing to adjust my assumptions to fit the historical and Scriptural facts. When David committed adultery with Bathsheba, tried to cover up his crime, and finally ordered Uriah to be murdered, God’s spirit was also with him. Having God’s spirit with you doesn’t mean you lose your free will and it doesn’t necessarily make you sinless.
David was anything but sinless. Flirting with idolatry was one of his perennial flaws. We get a glimpse of this when David was on the run from King Saul. On one occasion, Saul’s men descended upon David’s home to arrest him and he conveniently slipped out the window. As he fled, his wife Michal “took an idol and laid it on the bed; she put a net of goats’ hair on its head, and covered it with the clothes.” Michal pulled the old dummy-in-the-bed trick, like in the movie Escape from Alcatraz . The only difference was that she used a handy idol instead of a paper-mache head. My question was, “Why did David have an idol in his house?”
David’s invocation of “Baal” wasn’t a one-time, momentary lapse. I discovered that he actually named one of his sons after this false Canaanite deity. David was blessed with fifteen sons and one daughter whose names are listed in the Book of Samuel. His eleventh son appears in the list as Elyada, a perfectly kosher name comprised of two Hebrew words that mean, “God knows.” The problem is that this wasn’t the boy’s real name. His real name appears when the list of David’s sons is repeated in the Book of Chronicles as B’elyada, “Baal Knows.” Uh-oh!
David wasn’t the only anointed King of Israel to name a son after Baal. Saul had a son who actually reigned as king over Israel for two years. The Book of Samuel gives his name as Ish-boshet. This is a strange name for a king, because it means “Man of Shame.” Why would Saul name his son “Man of Shame?” The answer is he didn’t. His real name appears in the Book of Chronicles as Eshbaal, “Man of Baal.”
I was deeply troubled to find out David and Saul named their children after Baal. They knew Yehovah was the one true God and that Baal was a false Canaanite deity. Why would they name their children after Baal? I found a clue in an obscure verse in the Book of Chronicles that listed some of David’s warriors, who as it happens were disaffected relatives of Saul. One of these men was named B’elyah, a name that reveals what David and Saul were probably thinking. The name B’elyah could be translated as, “Yah is Baal.” Yah is the poetic abbreviated form of Yehovah ’s name, the one I heard on Mount Sinai, the one in Hallelujah. This warrior’s name meant, “Yehovah is Baal.”
I realized from the name B’elyah that David and Saul didn’t abandon the worship of the one true God in favor of the Canaanite deity, Baal. What they did was much more subtle and far more insidious. They referred to Yehovah as “Baal,” mixing the worship of the true God with the false worship of the Canaanites. They violated the verse in the Book of Leviticus, which says:
You shall not sow your field with mixed seed.
I’m not saying David and Saul engaged in forbidden farming practices. What they did was worse. They engaged in spiritual mixing of seed. When they named their children after Baal, they were calling Yehovah “Baal.”
Strictly speaking, Baal is not a name; it is a title meaning, “Lord.” The actual name of the chief Canaanite deity was Hadad, but the Canaanites considered this an ineffable name . Only the priests of Hadad were allowed to speak his name in special rituals. Everyone else referred to Hadad by his primary title: Baal , “Lord.” Herein lies the source for confusion: one of the legitimate titles of Yehovah in the Hebrew Bible is Adonai, which also means “Lord.” David and Saul probably equated Adonai and Baal and ended up referring to Yehovah as “Baal.” This was probably what David was thinking when he said, “Yehovah has burst forth upon my enemies” and then named the site of his important battle Baal-Peratzim , Baal-Bursting-forth. When he said Baal, he was referring to Yehovah as if He were Baal/ Hadad.
David and Saul weren’t the only ones to identify Yehovah with Baal/Hadad. I found a prophecy of Hosea that revealed this was a widespread error in ancient Israel. The prophecy said:
And it shall come to pass on that day, says Yehovah , you shall call Me “my husband” and you shall no longer call Me “my husband.”
When this verse translates literally, it doesn’t make much sense. That’s because in Hebrew it uses a play on words with two different terms for “husband.” Ish and Baal . Baal means “Lord,” but it can also mean “husband.” God is saying, “You shall call Me Ish-i (my husband) and you shall no longer call Me Baal-i (my husband, my Baal).” The Israelites in Hosea’s day were spiritually mixing seed, identifying Yehovah with the chief Canaanite deity Baal/Hadad.
God was not pleased with this and in the very next verse foretells a time when the speech of the Israelites will be cleansed of this spiritual seed-mixing:
And I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall no longer mention them by name.
Using God’s unique name and avoiding pagan titles like Baal is a good start at staying away from spiritual mixing of seed, but it does not inoculate us against it. What makes spiritual seed-mixing so dangerous is that it’s not your run-of-the-mill apostasy. David, Saul, and the Israelites of Hosea’s day didn’t abandon the faith in Yehovah and outright convert to Baalism. They mixed the two faiths into an unholy hybrid. This was shocking to me. I had always been taught that idolatry would be something easy to identify, like a statue of the four-armed Indian elephant god Ganesh. No Jew in his right-mind would worship Ganesh. It’s just laughable. But spiritual mixing of seed is much more surreptitious than presenting something that looks completely alien and abhorrent. It is a counterfeit faith. The thing about counterfeits is that they need to look like the real thing. A hundred-dollar bill featuring the portrait of Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman would trick no one. The counterfeit needs to look real. Now dress up Ganesh in a kippah and tzitzit , hide his elephant trunk, and make him look like a righteous rabbi and you might get some people to worship him. The counterfeit deceives by taking the truth and mixing it with falsehood.
I decided to sit down and read the entire Hebrew Bible with this new understanding. I started to see the counterfeit faith as the major stumbling block of the ancient Israelites. The focus of this spiritual seed-mixing was the “high places” that the Israelites set up “on every high hill and under every leafy tree.” Most high places began as Canaanite places of worship that God commanded the Israelites to obliterate. Rather than destroy them, the Israelites converted them into spurious temples where the worship of Yehovah was freely intermingled with the worship of Baal/Hadad.
The prototype for these forbidden high places was the “House of God” built by a man named Micah. This wasn’t Micah the Judean prophet who had a book named after him. It was Micah the Ephraimite in the time of the Judges who stole a large cache of silver from his mother. When he returned it, his mother said:
I surely sanctify the silver to Yehovah , from my hand to my son, to make a molten statue… and she gave it to a smith who made it into a molten statue…
Micah’s mother didn’t dedicate her silver to Baal. In fact, Baal is not mentioned once in the entire story. Micah’s mother dedicated the silver to Yehovah and the statue made from that silver was presumably a statue of Yehovah .
Micah’s sin was classic spiritual seed-mixing. He took the manner in which the Canaanites worshipped Baal and used it to worship the true God Yehovah . God specifically forbade this in the 12th chapter of Deuteronomy when He instructed the Israelites to destroy the Canaanite high places. After commanding the Israelites to tear down the Canaanite altars, smash their monuments, and burn their sacred-trees, God concluded:
You shall not worship Yehovah your God in such ways.
This was a different sort of idolatry from what I had always been warned about. It wasn’t about worshipping statues of false gods like Ganesh. God was commanding the Israelites not to spiritually mix seed by worshipping Him the way the Canaanites worshipped their deities.
As I explored the problem of spiritual seed-mixing in the Bible, I found that it emphasized three transgressions related to the high places. In addition to worshipping the true God through an idol, the prophets castigated the Israelites for sacrificing at the high places and consecrating non-Aaronic priests . At first, I couldn’t understand why these other two sins were important.
“Who cares,” I thought, “about illegitimate sacrifices and imposter priests when the people are bowing down to an idol?”
As I dug deeper, I found that these other two transgressions were, Biblically-speaking, no less severe than idol-worship itself.
The problem with the sacrifices at the high places was that the Torah only allows them to be offered at “the place that Yehovah chooses.” Originally, the chosen place was the mobile Tabernacle, but from the time of Solomon, God chose the stationary Jerusalem Temple. According to Leviticus, anyone who sacrifices outside the Tabernacle or Temple, “the guilt of bloodshed shall be imputed to that man. He has shed blood ; and that man shall be cut off from among his people.” Sacrificing at a high place was not just a trivial sin. Biblically it was considered tantamount to murder.
The problem with non-Aaronic priests is that only Aaron and his direct descendents were allowed to serve as kohanim , Temple priests. God commanded the Levites, direct descendants of Levi son of Jacob, to assist the kohanim . Any other Israelite who tried to carry out a Temple service was to be put to death. [79] Micah sinned by consecrating his own son, an Ephraimite, to serve as a priest. He later replaced his son with a Levite. While the Levites could carry out certain Temple functions, the Torah forbids them from serving as priests. This was an issue at the time of Moses when a Levite named Korah demanded that he be allowed to serve in the Tabernacle alongside Aaron. Korah and his disciples were swallowed up alive by the ground, showing God’s displeasure for their rebellion. Micah’s Levite erred in the sin of Korah by usurping the role of the Aaronic priesthood.
Far from the control of the Tabernacle and later the Jerusalem Temple, and supervised by a counterfeit priesthood, the high places flourished as centers of spiritual seed-mixing where the worship of Yehovah freely intermingled with the worship of Baal. The Book of Kings emphasizes the scope of this sin by mentioning for each King of Judah:
…but the high places were not removed; the people still sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places. [81]
Surely, Solomon, who built the Temple in Jerusalem, was free of the sin of the high places. However, the Book of Kings says:
And Solomon loved Yehovah , walking in the statutes of David his father, but he sacrificed and burnt incense at the high places.
Even Solomon was a spiritual seed-mixer.
After Solomon’s death, his realm split into two kingdoms: Israel, representing ten northern tribes, and Judah, representing two southern tribes. The first monarch of the northern kingdom was Jeroboam, who made spiritual seed-mixing an official state institution. Jeroboam was afraid he would lose his kingdom if his subjects made their annual pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem, which was controlled by his rival, the King of Judah. To prevent this, he set up two grandiose high places, one at Dan and the other at Bethel. At each of these high places, Jeroboam also consecrated non-Aaronic priests and a golden calf.
The first time I read about Jeroboam’s golden calves, I thought he was an idiot for choosing such a loathsome symbol. Now, I realized how ingenious he was. In Jeroboam’s day, people still remembered that their ancestors worshipped Yehovah through a statue of a golden calf right after receiving the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. To strengthen the association with Mount Sinai, Jeroboam presented his two new idols with the exact words that the Israelites in the desert used to present their golden calf:
Behold your God, O Israel, who took you up out of Egypt.
I had to go back and re-read this several times to believe it. I was always taught that the golden calf was a statue of Baal. However, when read in context, I saw it was clearly meant to represent Yehovah who took Israel up out of Egypt. Of course, the Torah tells us the golden calf was an abhorrent sin, but Jeroboam was not about to let a few Scriptural verses get in his way. There was a long-standing tradition of worshipping Yehovah through a statue of a golden calf and he was going to take full advantage of it.
I was equally impressed with Jeroboam’s choice of locations for his two high places. Dan and Bethel were at the northern and southern ends of his kingdom, making them accessible to everyone. Furthermore, Bethel was the site where Jacob had the dream of the ladder, and the Tabernacle was located there at one time. [84] Dan for its part had an ancient high place that traced back to the period of the Judges. Its non-Aaronic priests boasted an ordination that went back to Jonathan, the grandson of Moses. [85] Whatever Biblical verses the Judahite enemies might bring to undermine Jeroboam’s high places, he had ancient venerable traditions on his side. If this doesn’t warrant an “uh-oh” then I don’t know what does.
Jeroboam’s spiritual seed-mixing continued to plague the northern kingdom up until its destruction in 720 BCE . Meanwhile, in Judah, only two kings made any serious effort to stamp out the sin of the high places. The first was Hezekiah, whose attempt at eradicating this false worship really highlighted for me how deep spiritual seed-mixing ran in ancient Israelite society.
Hezekiah fought a desperate war of survival against the mighty Assyrian Empire when King Sennacherib invaded the Kingdom of Judah in 701 BCE . The Assyrian king sent his cupbearer, Rab-shakeh, to Jerusalem to demand Hezekiah’s surrender. Hezekiah’s ambassadors refused to submit, insisting they would be safe trusting in the God of Israel. Rab-shakeh responded with bewilderment:
…when you say to me, “We trust Yehovah our God,” did not Hezekiah remove His high places and His altars and say to Judah and Jerusalem, “Bow down before this altar in Jerusalem.”
When I read this passage, I wondered how Rab-shakeh could have known that Hezekiah destroyed the high places. Judah was a backwater at the edge of the vast Assyrian Empire. I could see Rab-shakeh knowing about Judah’s military strength or economic wealth, but this was an internal religious conflict of what was, to the Assyrians, an exotic and mysterious faith. This would be like the American president knowing what some minor Afghani mullah preached in his mosque on a Friday morning. The only way he could know this internal matter is if he had Judahite collaborators. Rab-shakeh’s bewilderment must have reflected the attitude of his Jewish collaborators. These traitors were evidently upset that Hezekiah destroyed their beloved high places and considered him an enemy of Yehovah for doing so. They laughed when the destroyer of their God’s altars and high places said he was going to trust in that very same God.
This was a revelation for me. I had assumed those who worshipped at the high places would welcome Hezekiah’s destruction of their false houses of worship. All he would have to do, I imagined, was read to them from Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and they would fall down in repentance before dismantling the high places themselves. I was wrong. They saw Hezekiah as a persecutor and hated him for destroying their ancient altars. Hezekiah must have sounded like a maniac to them, quoting some obscure verses from the Torah that their ancient sanctuaries were a violation of God’s will. I could just hear their objections to Hezekiah, “Why would God allow our high places to flourish for seven hundred years if they were against His will?” “Haven’t these high places kept us together as a people for all these centuries?” The devotees of the high places must have seen the Assyrian invasion as a godsend. These foreigners had come to remove Hezekiah and to restore their ancestral worship. The story of Rab-shakeh made me realize that spiritual seed-mixers are devoutly dedicated to their counterfeit faith and that Scriptural facts mean little when compared to ancient traditions of worship. This was more than “uh-oh,” it was “oy vay!”
After the death of Hezekiah, the high places came back vigorously. It wasn’t until the time of his great-grandson, King Josiah, that the high places were eradicated. Josiah’s campaign to cleanse Judah of these forbidden houses of worship met with stiff resistance. The Book of Kings reports:
And [Josiah] desecrated the high places where the priests had burnt incense from Geva to Beersheba… But the priests of the high places would not come up to the altar of Yehovah in Jerusalem and ate unleavened bread amongst their brethren.
Rather than embrace the Scriptural truth Josiah was teaching, many of the Jewish multitudes and their non-Aaronic priests continued to practice their seed-mixing traditions, even after Josiah destroyed their illicit altars. Major uh-oh!
In the movie Rain Man , Dustin Hoffman’s character was described as an “autistic savant.” His doctor explained that he was obsessed with “routines, rituals, it’s all he has to protect himself… any break from the routines and it’s terrifying.” The priests of the high places in Josiah’s day suffered from spiritual autism. They religiously followed their seed-mixing rituals, believing they were protecting themselves. When Josiah tried to force them to break from routine and follow Scripture, it terrified them. I don’t want to be like Rain Man, stuck saying “uh-oh.” I don’t want to be like the imposter priests of Josiah’s day, bogged down in man-made routines and rituals. I don’t want to be fooled by a counterfeit faith. As terrifying as it is, I am ready to tear down the high places in my life, trade in mixed seed for the real thing, and be blessed in God’s unique and holy name.
This article is taken from the book: Shattering the Conspiracy of Silence
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