First of all, Stevie Wonder's Superstition is one of my all-time favorite songs. My wife doesn't enjoy it quite as much as I do (although she digs the bass line, which disappointed us both greatly to learn it was a synthesizer). Anyway, it rifles through some of the "classic" superstitions: ladders, the number 13, breaking a mirror. Here are the superstitions I remember hearing/having growing up:
What do we do with these? Some of these are so inherently ridiculous that only the staunchest defender of the occult would care about them, but I know plenty of people - even Christians - who fastidiously avoid some of these just to be safe. (And no, I'm not picking on Christian baseball players.) And I can't tell you the number of church settings I've been in where someone will say something positive and then immediately knock on wood. Does that matter? Should we care whether or not someone is superstitious? First, the basics. What is a superstition? According to our friend Mr. Google, a superstition is "excessively credulous belief in and reverence for supernatural beings" or "a widely held but unjustified belief in supernatural causation leading to certain consequences of an action or event, or a practice based on such a belief." For example, if you get married in May, your marriage with not last. Not exactly sure why that is, but okay. Or, if you see a white moth in your house, someone is about to die. That could simply be fate, or more likely, some supernatural being has sent the white moth as its harbinger. Or, in my case, if I could only have found the right chair to sit it, the Oilers would not have given up a 32 point lead to Buffalo in the '93 playoffs. (Ask my wife; I'm sports-superstitious.) In other words, my location in my house has a direct impact on a football game. Did you know that the Canadians believed a loonie bird embedded in center ice at the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics enabled their teams to win gold in hockey? That bird is preserved and on display in the Canadian Hockey Hall of Fame. Second, the caveat. There is a different between a superstition and tradition. What started out as a "luck" thing many years ago may now simply be passed along as a tradition, such as eating black eyed peas at New Years, or rubbing the foot or a statue. Some so-called superstitions are also rather prudent, such as not walking under a ladder, or not returning a food dish empty. Those things really don't have anything to do with luck, but they have become so automatic (traditional) that it's an almost reverential observance. I don't think that's what I'm about to talk about. It's more about intent than content. Is one doing something out of old habit, or is one doing something because deep down inside he's thinking about luck? Third, the catch. What is luck? That's really what this is all about. The idea of luck (Fortune, Fate) is as old as human civilization. Winds are outside of a sailor's control. Therefore Fortune directed the winds that would enable a ship to reach its destination. Roman troops could not explain how Saxon "barbarians" could best them in combat on the British Isles, so we have the beginning of the "luck of the Irish." If you believe that luck exists, luck as some sort of entity or force (some call it karma) you are going to be superstitious. When you tell someone "Good luck," what are you actually saying? If you think about it, you're basically calling on some force to provide a favorable outcome to whatever endeavor that person is engaging. Yes, I understand those who say, "I make my own luck," or "Luck is where preparation and opportunity meet." In some ways, that's changing the definition of luck. But at the end of it all, you still have the intervention of opportunity which itself cannot be predicted or controlled. At some level, these are basic theological questions. Predestination: do you believe that every last thing is predestined by God or do you believe in some level of "chance"? Powers and authorities: do you believe that there are supernatural beings out there that can influence events and that respond to human impetus? Fortune: how do you explain some people who seem to be luckier than others (or those people who seem to be unluckier)? Once someone believes in forces outside of one's self that impact one's life, such as luck, one begins a never-ending quest to manipulate or control those forces. Hence superstitions. In religion, those superstitions can manifest themselves as prayers and rituals. So, are they innocent or not? My understanding of the Bible is that God would say they are not innocent. They are not acceptable for Christians to hold for any reason. On the day of the Lord’s sacrifice Zephaniah prophesied during a critical period of Judah's history. The northern kingdom of Israel had fallen 100 years before, and Judah had gone from good king Hezekiah to the disastrous reigns of Manasseh and Amon. Now, Josiah was on the throne. He did not want to be like his predecessors, but he did not have much to go on. God sent Nahum early in his reign to warn him to the right path. Then, a few years later, God sent Zephaniah to repeat the message with emphasis. (Not surprisingly, a few years after that, when some Jews discovered a scroll of Deuteronomy in the Temple, Josiah was quite ready to obey everything in it exactly!) In these messages, God keyed in on foreign influence in Jerusalem. There are two big ones just in these verses: (1) foreign culture, adopted for the purpose of currying foreign favor ("dressed in foreign clothing") and (2) foreign superstitions, adopted out of fear of foreign gods ("skip over the threshold"). We're going to focus on "skip over the threshold." Note that the translation is up for debate; Hebrew scholars call the construction obscure at best (some say that Zephaniah is coining a term to use a play-on-words, meaning that this is almost invented language). However, with the understanding that I am about to propose, it makes perfect sense in context. Lots of cultures have a threshold superstition. How do we know? Because lots of cultures have liminal deities (don't believe me? check out wikipedia - I didn't realize there were so many). I am really only familiar with Hermes and Janus. Janus was the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, looking forward and backward (which is why he was a god of thresholds). Obviously, the Ancient Near Eastern liminal gods would have predated any Roman or Greek god, but all of these traditions had to come from somewhere. A number of scholars look to 1 Samuel 5 for the background of these words: After the Philistines had captured the ark of God, they took it from Ebenezer to Ashdod, brought it into the temple of Dagon and placed it next to his statue. When the people of Ashdod got up early the next morning, there was Dagon, fallen with his face to the ground before the ark of the Lord. So they took Dagon and returned him to his place. But when they got up early the next morning, there was Dagon, fallen with his face to the ground before the ark of the Lord. This time, both Dagon’s head and the palms of his hands were broken off and lying on the threshold. Only Dagon’s torso remained. That is why, to this day, the priests of Dagon and everyone who enters the temple of Dagon in Ashdod do not step on Dagon’s threshold. That is certainly a possibility! But there are others. Apparently, many of these cultures believed that the walls of a house (or city) served as a barrier in a spiritual war. Good, benevolent gods protected the inside of a house. Evil, malevolent gods inhabited the outside world, waiting for a chance to get into the house (have you heard the superstition that a vampire cannot enter a house unless invited in? that's what we're talking about here). One way gods could get in would be if anyone stepped on the threshold. Not sure exactly why that did anything, but that's what many believed. Therefore, one would jump over the threshold of a house in order to prevent calamity. Another application would be that if someone were trying to steal something from a house, he would jump over the threshold so as not to disturb the on-duty liminal deity. Not a very effective alarm system if you just jump over the doorframe, but no one asked me. Threshold superstitions were rather varied, and it could be any of those.
The long and short of it is that these are foreign superstitions based on foreign gods. Just think about it. Play it out in your own mind. A people group/different cultural group has moved into your area or you go to live somewhere far away. You watch those people consistently jump over the threshold. After a while, you start to do it just not to stick out. That's not a problem. (At Texas A&M, we don't let anyone walk on the grass outside our Student Center. That's not a superstition but a symbol of respect, but the point is that we make sure that even non-Aggies follow that behavior.) If you've watched any of those entertaining shows like Brain Games, you know that people are conditioned by group behavior. In fact, we can be conditioned to do some rather strange things. Again, that's not a problem. Here's the problem. Let's say that after a while of doing this, you finally ask someone, "Why are we jumping over the threshold?" They answer, "It's to keep such-and-such god out of the house." Now what do you do? Perhaps you'll say to yourself, "That's silly, but I don't want to offend, so I'll keep doing it out of respect." For a behavior such as stepping over a threshold, I don't think that's a problem. I would probably do the same thing. But some behaviors aren't so incidental. But perhaps you'll say to yourself, "Well, that sounds kinda nuts, but just in case they have a point, I'll keep doing it." It's that just-in-case that becomes a big problem. In essence, you're validating the existence and power of whatever god being appeased by this behavior. The One True God, Yahweh, says in this prophesy that He will not countenance any such behavior. How does this connect with the following verse about filling the master's house with violence? Most commentators separate that idea from skipping over the threshold, as if they are two different situations. I don't think they have to be. I believe this particular superstition is a gateway to bad behavior. Track with me: someone adopts a culture's superstition; what is superstition? a means of manipulating a force beyond one's control; by adopting that superstition, you are adopting that cultural worldview of gods and control; superstitious cultures can justify practically any means of manipulation or force because that is the basis of their understanding of the way things work in life; violence and deceit are two primary human ways of manipulation and control. In this case, I see the superstitious behavior as a path that leads one to the (what we would call) worse behaviors of violence and deceit. Does that make sense? If it does, then let's push this argument to its conclusion. I doubt many of you skip over the threshold. But you might engage in some of the other behaviors in that giant list above. Perhaps you get nervous when you break a mirror. Or perhaps you avoid major plans on a Friday the 13th. Or you don't open an umbrella indoors. Or walk under a ladder. Ask yourself this question: why? If the answer is, "I'm worried about bad luck," then I think we have a problem. Does "luck" exist? Is it a force to worry about? In this case, luck is officially in the same category as the false god described above. You are in a just-in-case mode of thinking. The True God of the universe, Yahweh, would ask you, "Why are you worried about luck? Don't you know that you can't serve any other gods but Me?" If your concern for luck causes you to modify your behavior (as in where you open an umbrella, and so on), then you are serving it as if a god or idol. I don't think there's any other way to look at this. Superstitions are not innocent, but something we want to remove from our lives. The next time you have a superstitious though, pray to God with a request for forgiveness and to ask Him to help you discover where that superstition came from. I doubt that a superstition goes away overnight, but with God's help, we can root out all of those silly concerns and put God and God alone at the center of our thoughts, motives, and hopes.
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