The Origin of Lag BaOmer

Today we celebrate Lag BaOmer. Lag BaOmer is a mysterious jewish holiday. There is no commandment in Jewish law to celebrate this day, and in fact, until recent generations, it was not the festival it has become recently. Secular Jews certainly did not celebrate it, and there was no defined “order” for how it was celebrated. Even great religious authorities do not know its origin, and the customs associated with this holiday are inconsistent. This leads to the assumption that it is an artificial holiday that gained political significance since the establishment of the State of Israel, charged with the “heroic” karma infused by Zionism. This, of course, is not accurate.

Elchanan Reiner helps clarify this in his article “Joshua is Rashbi, Hatzor is Meron: On the Typology of a Galilean Foundation Myth” (2012). Reiner claims that the 18th of Iyar (the date of Lag BaOmer) is the festive day of Joshua bin Nun, a foundational hero of the Galilee. In truth, it is not clear if it is the 18th, 17th, or even the 14th of Iyar. What is clear is that this story has a strong folkloristic background, and it was never a national holiday. It is relevant only to the Galilee and only to those familiar with the religious and cultural history of this region. The Galilee is filled with sites that attribute themselves to milestones in the founding story of Joshua as described in the Bible. One of these is Mount Meron, where according to ancient traditions, either he was buried or there was the event of “the sun standing still at Gibeon”.

For example, the place where Joshua was buried is said to be on a volcano. Are there volcanoes in the Galilee? We know there are many extinct volcanoes in the Golan, but the Golan is not the Galilee. However, it turns out that on Mount Arbel, there are remnants of basalt and volcanic ash. It is unclear if our ancestors were geologists who knew about this, though it is very tempting to think they did. Perhaps the mountain became sacred because it was an extinct volcano. In any case, the midrashim (rabbinic literature) describe that “Gaash” (hebrew for volcano) means an earthquake. This region of the Galilee suffers a lot from earthquakes; in fact, the power of God (and any pagan thunder god) is in earthquakes. The midrash describes how an angel was angry and stomped on the ground after Joshua’s death, and the earth quaked. The angel’s footprint is still present today at Karnei Hittin, in what became the shrine of Nabi Shu’ayb. The Druze attribute the footprint on the stone to Moses. However, Reiner shows how medieval traditions firmly claimed that Joshua bin Nun and his comrades like Caleb ben Jephunneh are buried there. It is likely that because of this tradition regarding “converts” who joined the people of Israel, like the Kenizzites, the tradition that Jethro and the Kenites are buried there is based. Anyway there are other traditions about Joshua’s burial place, and one tradition of interest to us is Mount Meron.

It is needless to say that near the cave at Nabi Shu’ayb, there is also a spring. The spring plays a crucial role in the myth of Meron. In Meron, it is testified, there were water celebrations. On the 17th of Iyar, it is written in the Torah that Noah’s flood occurred. It was believed that the spring in Meron emerges on this day. For this purpose, they circled the spring seven times, as a fertility charm. Note, there were no fire celebrations. According to Reiner, the fire celebrations are a late development from the 17th century, an invention or revival of a concealed tradition by the Kabbalists in Safed, who claimed that burning clothes at the grave “is a great virtue for Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai”. But there is no source for this. On the other hand, the water ceremony has a source, and this source is likely very ancient, and from a pagan origin.

Water ceremonies for fertility purposes are known from various mythologies, including the Bible and Talmud. In the midrashim, attempts were made to wrap such water ceremonies in the guise of righteous and miracle workers praying to God, like Honi the Circle-Drawer, but these stories are essentially a Jewish adaptation of folklore tales about religious leaders conducting fertility ceremonies. These fertility ceremonies took place at pilgrimage sites to temples of the gods about whom these myths were told. These places were identified as the locations of the mythical stories.

For example, in Caesarea Philippi (Banias), there is a cave from which the Banias spring was believed to originate. This myth is also found in Midrash Rabbah, where it is said, “The Jordan river emerges from the Cave of Pamias and flows into the Hula Lake”. This cave is called “Pan’s Grotto”. Pan is a pastoral fertility god who lived in desolate places, and a cave with a spring was considered his embodiment. In Caesarea Philippi, it is described in the New Testament how Jesus gave Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Peter himself is named after the rock from which the spring emerges. The place is called “Galilee” because a “galil” or a “gilgal” in hebrew is a description of the ritual circling ceremony of a holy place, as we described above how they circled the spring in Meron. Generally, in the Torah, there is a myth about a water source emerging from a rock, like Marah, waters of Meribah, Miriam’s Well, etc. All these elements contain ancient foundations that go back to the Neolithic period.

Pan, as mentioned, is a fertility god depicted as guarding flocks and considered a satyr, a man-goat. The German linguist Hermann Collitz suggested in 1924 that his origin is shared with the Vedic god Pushan, a sun god. Worship of a pastoral and protective deity was a common feature of the religious traditions of ancient Indo-European peoples, and in these traditions (and of course not only them), fertility was attributed to the sun. Joshua is such a solar hero, a man by whose word the sun stood still, a man said to be buried in a place associated with the sun, Timnath-heres (Heres = Sun in ancient hebrew). This scenario of sun, spring, cave (and also sacred trees) fits well with the worship of Joshua’s figure. It is only fitting to see Mount Meron as a substitute for the worship on Mount Hermon, or perhaps a competing worship. We also see in the Bible quite a few times where these two mountains are compared: “North and south, you created them, Tabor and Hermon rejoice in your name”. The north is the name of Hermon, the place where Baal established his palace. Therefore, the south is the equivalent of “Tabor”, which is the biblical name for Mount Meron. Mount Tabor has been considered since the third century CE as the place where the Transfiguration occurred, and some claim it is Mount Meron (William Hendriksen).

What is the meaning of the migration of this cult site between Arbel, Hermon, and Meron? In ancient pagan cults, there are precedents for the migration of worship under various circumstances, including political ones. It is possible that at some time, the water worship was not possible in Banias and therefore moved to the nearby peak, Meron. And perhaps because the Christians appropriated Banias, the Jews, who did not want to worship a place identified with Jesus, moved it. Elchanan Reiner shows how the figure of Joshua evolved into various local heroes named Joshua, the last of whom was Jesus. After Christianity became the state religion of Rome, the Jews did not want to name their local hero after Jesus, so they concealed the memory of Joshua the local hero in the mythical figure of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, making Jesus and Rashbi essentially incarnations of the same figure.

There are also precedents for dual identifications. As mentioned, Reiner shows how Joshua’s grave is identified once in Arbel with what is now Nabi Shu’ayb in Karnei Hittin, and once on Mount Meron. Joshua’s grave also has other contenders in areas that are not in the Galilee, in Samaria there are at least two such places, in Kifl Hares near Ariel and in Timnath near Neve Tzuf. The multiplicity of these “maqams” was not created solely for political reasons. Reiner speculates that the artistic freedom of the local inhabitants to live the biblical story as if it happened in the region where they lived, led to this. It is not a competition between places, but the actualization of the biblical story that over time became a tradition as if the story indeed happened in that place. Specifically, Joshua was the founding hero of the Galilee, so various settlements in the Galilee tried to actualize the story in various ways.

The wine as a satanic substitute for coffee according to the Arab legend

According to historians, the use of coffee as a common drink began in Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula in the 12th century. Its systematic cultivation as a domesticated plant began in Yemen probably in the 16th century, and it was called “mocha” after a city in Yemen. To this day he is called “the Yemenite” “El Yamania” among the Bedouin in Sinai. In the 16th century, coffee became a kind of national drink for all Arabs, and soon the custom of drinking it spread to all Islamic countries, and its preparation became a social ritual. Drinking coffee was one of the great pleasures in Arab life in general and Bedouins in particular, and no hospitality ceremony is complete without it.

It seems that the Arabs adopted coffee so easily because it was a substitute for wine, the drinking of which was forbidden in Islam. They dedicated themselves to the serving of coffee to such an extent that they were no longer able to think of the Arab hospitality as an institution with the absence of coffee before the historic cultivation of coffee. And therefore, they brought forward the appearance of coffee to the days of Abraham the Patriach. Even before the appearance of wine. In fact, wine was invented as a substitute for coffee, by a competitor of the one who invented coffee. The one who invented the coffee is Allah, and the one who invented the wine is Satan aka Iblis. And furthermore, on a background of cheating, Lot the nephew of Abraham (Nabi Lut) got drunk and sinned and did whatever he did. Although in the Arab legend it is not specified exactly what he did, because in general the Quran does not indicate at all in the many stories about Lot what his sin was, or that he sinned at all, neither in drunkenness nor in fornication. A legend brought by Aryeh Yitzhaki in volume 3 of his book “The legend of the place” (1990) tries to apologyze Lot, he did not sin knowingly but went astray after the devil who took advantage of his innocence and kindness. His sin was only drinking wine, but it was done unknowingly.

According to the legend, after the destruction of Sodom, Lot sat destitute in a cave with his daughters, and suddenly a guest arrived. Lot wanted very much to host him but he had no coffee. He apologized to the guest, and the guest said he had brought a pot of coffee with him. What Lot didn’t know was that the guest was the devil, and coffee is wine. Lot got drunk. When he sobered up from the wine, he decreed that he would not drink wine anymore, and that the wine would be forbidden. He asked for atonement, and the angel Gabriel said that he would atone for him if he tended the tree above Adam’s grave in Hebron

Note that Adam was buried in Mecca according to the Muslims, but in the Hebron area there are plenty of maqams that were attributed to different figures from the Muslim tradition under political circumstances. For example there is Nabi Yaqin, which is considered such a maqam, and of course the Cave of the Patriarchs in the Jewish tradition is considered the burial place of Adam. What is this tree? First of all, above every maqam there is a sacred tree. Second, in Hebron specifically there are some ancient trees. One of them is Eshel of Abraham aka Oak of Mamre, which is considered according to local legends to be the same tree under which Abraham hosted the angels. There may be a mixing of traditions here, which is not uncommon.