Divination in the Bible
A minor recurring question in the Ecosophia blog and discussion lists ( www.ecosophia.net )–
“Why are Christianity and Judaism so bent out of shape about ‘divination?’ The very word ‘divination’ refers to the activity of trying to discover messages from God. You would think that they would be in favor of this sort of thing...”
It IS mysterious, but we can take a look at what the Bible says about divination, and also read between the lines for some insights that also consider the point of view of occult studies;
There are any number of websites that list Bible verses condemning divination. Here’s one with 100 such verses:
You see common themes in these verses. A lot of the prohibited practices described include things that would not be considered divination today, such as:
Burning one’s children alive as sacrificial offerings to a deity.
Consulting mediums - seeking to speak with the dead.
Necromancy - Trying to get information from the dead.
Sorcery - Trying to cause spiritual beings to do works for you.
There are other things that might be thought of as divination today, such as:
Interpreting Omens –
Telling Fortunes –
At the same time, there are many instances of approved activities in the Bible that would also be considered divination today, such as:
The Urim and Thummim
These were two objects attached to the sacred breastplate (ephod) of the high priest of the Temple of God, which held the Ark of the Covenant. They were consulted to give guidance from God.
Casting Lots
Proverbs 16:33 “The lot is cast in the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.”
Why is divination sometimes approved, and sometimes not approved?
If we omit sorcery, mediums, necromancy and sacrificing children from the discussion and focus only on things that would be currently considered divination, we might be able to get some insights.
Things We Don’t Know
We don’t know the actual shape of the Urim and Thummim, their natures, or how they were used in the official and approved divinations of Ancient Israel. We don’t know much about ‘Lots’ either. Explicit instructions were not recorded in the scriptures that come down to us today, although there are a lot of speculations.
Lots being cast into the lap is a good clue. It implies some sort of object or objects that would give a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, like flipping a coin or using a dye (single dice) to roll an even or odd number.
Lots cast in a yes or no fashion could be used to answer quite complex questions.
We see this series of yes/no questions in Jonah, (Jonah 1:7) where the sailors used lots to determine ever-smaller groups of persons on the ship to find out which person had angered God.
Lots were used by the Apostles to pick a new 12th apostle after Judas hanged himself (Acts 1:26).
There is a game called ‘20 questions.’ One player decides to think about an object, and another player can ask up to 20 yes-or-no questions to determine what the object is.
The Urim and Thummim were used for divinations in the Israelite temple. The inquirer, usually a King, a general or other high-powered person, would ask a question of the High Priest in the temple, and the High Priest would use the Urim and Thummim to divine the answer given by YHWH.
No one knows whether the Urim and Thummim were a simple yes/no system or something more complex. Even the meaning of the names ‘Urim’ and ‘Thummim’ are uncertain. Different scholars have proposed ‘Accursed’ and ‘Blest’ as a name pair, or ‘Illumination’ and ‘Information.’
The Urim and Thummim were only to be used by the High Priest, and only within the Temple.
Are There Similarities Between the Use of Urim and Thummim and Current Divination Practice?
Well, yes! Best practices for divination today include the consecration of a sacred space; a prayer for guidance and the exclusion of spiritual forces bent on causing mischief; Meditation on the outcome of the divination; Closure of the sacred space and giving of thanks for the answer. All of these things fit very well with the practice of only using Urim and Thummim in the Holy Temple by a consecrated priest.
Why Are There Restrictions on Divinations by Non-Priests?
This is a question worthy of meditation. For myself, I remember that when I took up divination through Geomancy, it soon struck me that more than half of divination is asking the right questions. The questions should be precise, not ambiguous or open to multiple interpretations. Geomancy requires identification of the location in the House Chart where the answer to the question is likely to occur. The House Chart and the Shield Chart are maps of meaning, and understanding where to look on the map is also a large part of it.
Most surprising to me, a Geomantic reading often gives additional information. Besides the answer to the question, you often get hints or answers about other issues that you did not know you needed to know.
Meditation on the answer you get is also crucial, because it can take your understanding of the issues that prompted your question into the realm of ‘The Things You Don’t Know That You Don’t Know.’ This is a key benefit of Divination– We all live our lives based on a large number of assumptions and understandings that we share with those around us–a context, if you will. Divination provides an opportunity and a mechanism to get us outside of our own understandings and assumptions, and provide a viewpoint outside of the context of our society.
Why Did Ancient Israel Restrict Divination?
They didn’t always restrict it. The ‘lots cast in the lap’ form of divination is described for use in making business decisions and settling minor arguments.
Divination on National issues, however, was limited to the top echelons of society for political reasons. The Tribes and later Kingdom of Israel could not afford to have just anybody getting divinations that addressed national policy. What if someone got a conflicting divination? Things like this were regarded as treason, and punished harshly.
Divination gives a person practice in asking hard questions. They get a mechanism for receiving answers that lie outside the Overton Window of acceptable discourse, and also practice in meditation on the meaning of information from outside of the context of society. From the point of view of leadership, none of these benefits are desirable traits for people that they want to herd in predictable directions. This may be why diviners and divinations are firmly outside the pale of acceptable society.
So if you are a Christian, you might still have the option to use divination in the greater context of prayer, sacred spaces and your community of faith. Children are trained up by their parents until it is time for them to make a life of their own. As a spiritual adult, it is up to you to decide for yourself what to do with these options.
More on the Urim and Thummim
Many people have given opinions on the nature of the Urim and Thummim. I have opinions on them too, based on shaky and incomplete information and giant leaps of pseudo-logic. I cheerfully offer them for your review–
Cultures preserve things, and sometimes the things they conserve come down to us in a different form. It could be the same for the Urim and Thummim.
In ancient Ur, the birthplace of Abram, they made barrel-shaped stone or metal seals that were rolled across clay tablets as a way to sign documents. They were often family heirlooms, and the loss of a seal was as grave an emergency as the loss of a credit card today. It is not too much to suppose that Abram had a seal or two, and took them with him when he left Ur. There could be multiple images on these seals. An interesting article on them can be found here:
https://www.worldhistory.org/article/846/cylinder-seals-in-ancient-mesopotamia---their-hist/ Now, fast forward a millenium or so. Israel has been taken over by the Persian Empire. Esther, a Jewish girl, becomes queen of Persia. Court official Haman decides to eradicate the Jews and does divinations to pick the best day to do it. The plan is foiled, and Jewish people begin to celebrate a great deliverance from destruction in the brand-new holiday, which they name ‘Purim’ after the Persian word ‘Pur’ for a cast lot. For the full details, read the engaging story in the Book of Esther.
A childrens’ game becomes part of the celebrations that involves spinning a top called a Dreidel; The top has a square cross-section and each of the four sides has a Hebrew letter – Nun, Gimel, Chai, and Shin. These letters are the first letters of a phrase in Hebrew that means “A Great Miracle Happened There.” Here is a link to the rules for the game:
www.scholastic.com/content/dam/teachers/blogs/alycia-zimmerman/migrated-files/how_to_play_dreidel_game_directions.pdfNote the similarities between the Dreidel top and the cylindrical seals of the Mesopotamians:
A Dreidel has a Hebrew letter on each of its 4 sides, sometimes embossed into the side.
A cylinder seal has pictures embossed into the stone. Four pictures? Could happen...
OK, here’s where the really shaky guessing comes in. It could be that Abram carried a couple of cylinder seals with him when he left Ur in Mesopotamia to seek the promised land. These seals may have been passed down through the family as heirlooms, becoming the Urim and Thummim attached to the breastplate of the Jewish High Priest.
When it came time to make the Tabernacle that eventually became the Temple in Jerusalem, every part of it was made according to very detailed instructions that still take up a lot of pages in the Pentateuch. Even the breastplate (ephod) of the high priest has detailed instructions for exactly how to make it. But the Urim and Thummim? Not a word. Why not? Because (in my opinion) they were already in existence and being used. We have detailed instructions to attach them to one side of the ephod, but no instructions on how to make them or use them.
This gives me a mental picture of two stone cylinders that were originally Mesopotamian seals, hanging from the side of the High Priest’s ephod. Seals typically had a hole down the center so that they could be worn around the neck with a cord through the center. If each of them had four pictures, they could be rolled on a hard surface until they stopped with one face upwards, or spun in the air and dropped into sand for readings of divination.
Someone will wonder, “How useful could that be for divination?”
Someone else may ask, “Hmmm! I have seen something like this before, but where?”
Both of them may be on the right track. Here is where Geomancy comes in–
There are sixteen geomantic figures used in Geomancy; Four horizontal lines for each figure that are stacked on top of each other;
With a little examination, you can see that the sixteen figures can be created from combinations of four sets, each with two lines:
Geomantic DreidelsNow, what if we make two dreidels, each of which has four two-line sequences of dots on its faces? Let’s also make one dreidel white and the other one black, and call them dreidel 1 and dreidel 2. If Dreidel 1 generates the top two lines of a Geomantic figure, and Dreidel 2 generates the bottom line, then you have a mechanical means to generate the sixteen figures of Geomancy, a simple divination system that can address complex questions.
Am I saying that the Jewish High Priest had a couple of Dreidels attached to his breastplate, and that he spun them to perform divinations in the Jewish Temple? Well, it could have been something like two dreidels. At the time of Esther, there may have been living memory of the form of the Urim and Thummim. Why did they pick the square-sided top as the format for the Dreidel? It could have been an adaptation of the form of the Urim and Thummim to celebrate the deliverance of Purim. No one knows for sure, but I think that this could be true.
How Deep Does the Rabbit Hole Go?
The Ark of the Covenant may have been removed before the destruction of Jerusalem, and some reports place it in Aksum, Ethiopia. If it is there, it has been there for about 3000 years.
Geomancy came from North Africa, a divination system where the figures are generated by striking marks into sand. Another method to generate the figures involves spinning two or four beads mounted on a wire, then clapping them onto a table to stop the rotation and give a geomantic figure. This format is much like the Mesopotamian cylinder seal with a hole through the center. It makes me wonder if the tradition of divination with Urim and Thummim was carried through Ethiopia, then back up through the Arabian peninsula, where it eventually became the Geomancy we know today. Of course all this is just speculation, and we can never know the answer. Or, can we?
Geomantic Reading
07 Jan 2023
Question: Is Geomancy a current form of the divination done with Urim and Thummim?
Selection: House Chart
Querent: House I, Quesited: House VIII
Mothers: Puer, Carcer, Populus, Populus
Analysis:
Querent: Puer
Quesited: Fortuna Minor
Conjunction: Fortuna Minor moves to XII, next to Querent;
Interpretation:
Querent: Puer – “Well, that’s a rash assertion you have made.”
Quesited: Fortuna Minor – Unearned luck. “However, through no skill of your own, you are correct.”
Fortuna Minor also moves to V and is trine to Puer in I. House of news/information; Confirms it is a lucky guess that happens to be correct.
Company Capitular: I and II, III and IV, V and VI, IX and X.
Note that Populus in X is beseiged by Rubeus in IX and XI.
XII and VIII (Fortuna Minor) further besiege the Rubeus-Populus-Rubeus group.
Since Populus amplifies the figures associated with it, this grouping could mean that a lot of powerful people are going to be very upset with this interpretation–Hard to believe, since few people read this blog, but there it is...
Populus rejoices in IV, and weakened in X; Puer rejoices in I; Laetitia weakened in VI; Fortuna Minor strengthened in V. – Really, really lucky guess.
Court Story: Rubeus, Fortuna Minor, Laetitia – Controversial at first glance, but evidence will bear it out.
Summary:
For Christians--
Divination can be done in a sacred space as a part of the other disciplines of a spiritual life, including prayer and participation in the community of faith. However, there is no Biblical support for Mediumship, Necromancy or human sacrifice.
Generally–
Divination was practiced and approved in Ancient Israel for guidance from God at the top levels of their society (Urim and Thummim by the high priest in the Temple) and in everyday life by the casting of lots. The Urim and Thummim may have been Mesopotamian seals adapted for use in Divination, continued in the form of the Dreidel today, and may survive today in the form of Geomancy.
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