Depending on what kind of society you live in, you may often hear about doing “God’s Work” or “Work for the Lord”. For most, this is a straightforward idea which is perceived in different ways and manifested in some of the most unexpected ways. Christians often see “God’s Work” as spreading the gospel of Jesus to as many people as is physically possible. Some other, more fanatical segments of said religion as well as others see this as the allowance to slaughter non-believers and heretics. And even others will see as any kind of work they may be doing at the time to be “God’s Work”, or even “God’s Will”.
Though many see their own narrow perspective of what “God’s Work” as being the true form of such, there is hardly a definitive answer as to what “God’s Work” really is in the broader context. To find it, we will have to look back thousands of years to the earliest forms of organized religion and the beginnings of “work” itself.
Some five thousand years ago, in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, there lived a people known as the Sumerians. The Sumerians are credited with being some of the first builders of cities and the inventors of the diabolical idea of land ownership and tenancy. Every Sumerian city had a priest-king that ruled over it and a temple dedicated to a different god in the Sumerian pantheon. In Uruk, the chief god was Anu, the sky god. In Babylon, Marduk ruled. And in Kutha, the ruler of the underworld, Nergal, was worshipped.
In our modern society where church and state are supposedly separate, the perception of a god is very different now than it was five thousand years ago. For Sumerians, gods were not an abstraction of meta-physics, they were very real and extremely dangerous. Though the gods did not dwell on earth, they did rain their punishments down upon it. The only way to quell the constant onslaught of misfortune, the people would have to turn to the gods’ representatives on earth, the priests. The priests would give the god’s or goddess’ demands and the people would fulfill it, or suffer the consequences (flood, famine, drought, etc).
Typically we think a god as demanding sacrifices to fill its desire, but in ancient societies like Egypt, it was not strange for the people to actually feed the gods (This was before the invention of money, mind you). The workers would till the fields, weave baskets, shape gold and then present them to the priests, who would then present it to the gods; often manifested as an idol or wall carving. The god would then “eat” the foods presented to it, and the priests would then devour the material leftovers. It’s not hard to see how this kind of power the priests held over the people would be utilized to progress their ideals if not outright abused. However, it would have been typical for the priests to use the god’s “desires” to simply fill the need of the city itself. It can then be argued that the city did not house the god, but instead the city was the god itself. So any work which aided the city, the priests, or society at large, was “God’s Work,” realized.
Even though the Sumerian civilization and others like it fell, its practices and beliefs have endured throughout the millennia. Today, “God’s Work” is still in full-swing, and in a very big way. We live in some of the most sophisticated and largest urban centers that have ever graced the earth. Each and everyone in these cities do its work diligently…. diligently. I’m sure Marduk would be proud.
