Hebrew Myths (16 page)

2.
This myth is constantly quoted in the Apocrypha, the New Testament, the Church Fathers, and midrashim. Josephus interpreted it as follows:

These Greek giants were twenty-four violent and lecherous sons of Mother Earth, born at Phlegra in Thrace, and the two Aloeids, all of whom rebelled against Almighty Zeus.

3
. Josephus’s view, that the Sons of God were angels, survived for several centuries despite Shimon ben Yohai’s curse. As late as the eighth century
A.D.
, Rabbi Eliezer records in a midrash: ‘The angels who fell from Heaven saw the daughters of Cain perambulating and displaying their secret parts, their eyes painted with antimony in the manner of harlots;
and, being seduced, took wives from among them.’ Rabbi Joshua ben Qorha, a literalist, was worried by a technical detail: ‘Is it possible that angels, who are flaming fire, could have performed the sexual act without scorching their brides internally?’ He decided that ‘when these angels fell from Heaven, their strength and stature were reduced to those of mortals, and their fire changed into flesh.’

4. Hiwa
and
Hiya
, the names given to giants begotten by Shemhazai and Azael on mortal women, were merely the cries of work-teams engaged in tasks demanding concerted effort. In one Talmudic passage, Babylonian sailors are made to shout as they haul cargo vessels ashore:
‘Hilni, hiya, hola, w’hilok holya!’
The giants’ voracious flesh-eating was, however, a habit of El’s Hebrew herdsmen, not of the agricultural Daughters of Adamah; and this anecdote suggests that the myth originated in an Essene community whose diet was severely restricted, like that of Daniel and his three holy companions, to pulses. (
Daniel
I. 12).

5
. The names of several fallen angels survive only in careless Greek transcriptions of Hebrew or Aramaic originals, which make their meaning doubtful. But ‘Azael’ does seem to represent ‘Azazel’ (‘God strengthens’). ‘Dudael’ is sometimes translated ‘God’s cauldron’, but it is more likely to be a fantastic modification of
Beth Hadudo
(
M. Yoma
VI. 8)—now Haradan, three miles to the south-east of Jerusalem, the Judaean desert cliff from which ‘the scapegoat for Azazel’ yearly fell to its death on the Day of Atonement (
Leviticus
XVI. 8–10). This goat was believed to take away Israel’s sins and transfer them to their instigator, the fallen angel Azazel, who lay imprisoned under a pile of rocks at the cliff-foot. The sacrifice did not therefore rank as one offered to demons, like those which
Leviticus
XVII. 7 prohibits.

6
. The Mount of God, where certain pious Sethites lived near the ‘Cave of Treasure’, at the Gate of Paradise, will have been El’s holy Mount Saphon, not Hermon.

7
. Istahar’s story is borrowed partly from the Greek writer Aratus (early third century
B.C.
). He tells how Justice, a daughter of Dawn, ruled mankind virtuously in the Golden Age; but when the Silver and Bronze Ages brought greed and slaughter among them, exclaimed: ‘Alas, for this evil race!’ and mounted into Heaven, where she became the constellation Virgo. The rest of this story is borrowed from Apollodorus’s account of Orion’s attempt on the seven virgin Pleiades, daughters of Atlas and Pleione, who escaped from his embraces transformed to stars. ‘Istahar’, however, is the Babylonian Goddess Ishtar, sometimes identified with Virgo. Popular Egyptian belief identified Orion, the constellation which became Shemhazai, with the soul of Osiris.

8
. The right claimed by certain ‘sons of judges’ to take the maidenheads of poor men’s brides is, apparently, the ancient and well-known
jus primae
noctis
which, as the
droit de cuissage
, was still reputedly exercised by feudal lords in Europe during the Middle Ages (see 36.
4
). Yet at a time when the Sons of God were regarded as divine beings, this story may have referred to a custom prevalent in the Eastern Mediterranean: a girl’s maidenhead was ritually broken by ‘equitation’ of a priapic statue. A similar practice obtained among Byzantine hippodrome-performers as late as Justinian’s reign, and is hinted at in records of the medieval English witch cult.

9
. Many details in the Genun story, taken from the fifth-century
A.D.
Ethiopian
Book of Adam
, are paralleled in midrashic writings. Although Genun’s name suggests ‘Kenan’, who appears in
Genesis
v. 9 as the son of Enoch, he is a composite Kenite character: the invention of musical instruments being attributed in
Genesis
to Jubal, and of edged brass and iron blades to his brother Tubal Cain. Genun was said to occupy ‘the Land of the Slime Pits’, namely the southern shores of the Dead Sea (
Genesis
XIV. 10), doubtless because the evil city of Sodom stood there (see 32.
6
).

10
. Enoch (‘Instructor’) won his immense reputation from the apocalyptic and once canonical
Book of Enoch
, compiled in the first century
B.C.
It is an ecstatic elaboration of
Genesis
V. 22: ‘And Enoch walked with God three hundred years after he begat Methuselah.’ Later Hebrew myth makes him God’s recording angel and counsellor, also patron of all children who study the Torah.
Metatron
is a Hebrew corruption either of the Greek
metadromos
, ‘he who pursues with vengeance’, or of
meta ton thronon
, ‘nearest to the Divine Throne’.

11
. The Anakim may have been Mycenaean Greek colonists, belonging to the ‘Sea Peoples’ confederation which caused Egypt such trouble in the fourteenth century
B.C.
Greek mythographers told of a Giant Anax (‘king’), son of Heaven and Mother Earth, who ruled Anactoria (Miletus) in Asia Minor. According to Apollodorus, the disinterred skeleton of Asterius (‘starry’), Anax’s successor, measured ten cubits.
Anakes
, the plural of
Anax
, was an epithet of the Greek gods in general. Talmudic commentators characteristically make the Anakim three thousand cubits tall.

12
. Megalithic monuments, found by the Hebrews on their arrival in Canaan, will have encouraged legends about giants; as in Greece, where the monstrous man-eating Cyclopes were said by story-tellers ignorant of ramps, levers and other Mycenaean engineering devices, to have lifted single-handed the huge blocks of stone that form the walls of Tiryns, Mycenae and other ancient cities.

13
. The
Nefilim
(‘Fallen Ones’) bore many other tribal names, such as
Emim
(‘Terrors’),
Repha’im
(‘Weakeners’),
Gibborim
(‘Giant Heroes’),
Zamzummim
(‘Achievers’),
Anakim
(‘Long-necked’ or ‘Wearers of Necklaces’),
Awwim
(‘Devastators’ or ‘Serpents’). One of the Nefilim named Arba is said to have built the city of Hebron, called ‘Kiriath-Arba’
after him, and become the father of Anak whose three sons, Sheshai, Ahiman and Talmai, were later expelled by Joshua’s comrade Caleb. Since, however,
arba
means ‘four’ in Hebrew, Kiriath-Arba may originally have meant ‘City of Four’, a reference to its four quarters mythically connected with the Anakite clans: Anak himself and his ‘sons’ Sheshai, Ahiman and Talmai.

(
a
) Cain died several generations later at the hands of his great-great-grandson Lamech. This Lamech was a mighty hunter and, like all others of Cain’s stock, married two wives. Though grown old and blind, he continued to hunt, guided by his son Tubal Cain. Whenever Tubal Cain sighted a beast, he would direct Lamech’s aim. One day he told Lamech: ‘I spy a head peeping above yonder ridge.’ Lamech drew his bow; Tubal Cain pointed an arrow which transfixed the head. But, on going to retrieve the quarry, he cried: ‘Father, you have shot a man with a horn growing from his brow!’ Lamech answered: ‘Alas, he must be my ancestor Cain!’, and struck his hands together in grief, thereby inadvertently killing Tubal Cain also.

Lamech mourned all day beside the corpses, being prevented by blindness from finding his way home. In the evening, Adah and Zillah, his wives, found him. Lamech cried: ‘Hearken to me: I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt! If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech shall be avenged seventy-and-sevenfold!’ At that, Earth opened and swallowed all Cain’s nearest kinsmen, except Enoch: namely Irad, Mehujael, Methuselah and their families.

(
b
) Lamech told his wives: ‘Enter my bed, and there await me!’ Zillah answered: ‘You have killed our ancestor Cain and my son Tubal Cain; therefore neither of us shall lie with you.’ Lamech replied: ‘This is God’s will. Seven generations, the span allotted to Cain, have now elapsed. Obey me!’ But they said: ‘No, for any children born of this union would be doomed.’ Lamech, Adah and Zillah then sought out Adam, who was still alive, and asked him to judge between them. Zillah spoke first: ‘Lamech has killed your son Cain, and also my son Tubal Cain.’ Lamech declared: ‘Both deaths were caused by inadvertence, since I am blind.’ Adam told Adah and Zillah: ‘You must obey your husband!’

(
c
) Zillah then bore Lamech a son already circumcised: a sign of God’s especial grace. Lamech named him Noah, finding great
consolation
in him.
²⁰⁰
Noah’s cheeks were whiter than snow and redder
than a rose; his eyes like rays of the morning sun; his hair long and curly; his face aglow with light. Lamech therefore suspected him to be a bastard fathered on Zillah by one of the Watchers, or Fallen Ones; but Zillah swore that she had been faithful. They consulted their ancestor Enoch, who had lately been caught up to Heaven. His prophecy, ‘In Noah’s lifetime God will do a new thing on earth!’, gave Lamech his needed reassurance.

(
d
) At Noah’s birth, which coincided with Adam’s death, the world greatly improved. Hitherto, when wheat had been sown, half of the harvest was thorns and thistles. God now lifted this curse. And whereas hitherto all work had been done with bare hands, Noah taught men to make ploughs, sickles, axes and other tools.
²⁰¹
But some award the invention of smithcraft to Tubal Cain, his dead brother.
²⁰²

***

1
. This story recalls two Greek myths—Perseus’s accidental killing of his grandfather Acrisius, and Athamas’s mistaking of Learchus for a white stag—and is told to explain Lamech’s cry in
Genesis
IV. 23: ‘I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt!’, the original context of which has vanished. Although tautology—the pairing of two phrases, differently worded but of the same sense—is a common ornament in Hebrew poetry, Lamech has here been absurdly credited with killing not one warrior, but an old man and a youth; very much as when Jesus is said to have fulfilled Zechariah’s prophecy (
Zechariah
IX. 9) by ‘riding on an ass and on a colt, the foal of an ass,’ (
Matthew
XXI. 1–3), rather than on a single young ass. The law which required the next of kin to avenge murder, or even manslaughter, accounts for the Cities of Refuge instituted by Moses (
Numbers
XXXV. 13;
Joshua
XX. 1–9), where a man was safe until his case came before a judge. Thus Adam acts as judge and allows Lamech’s plea of manslaughter, when he points out that if vengeance were taken on him, his nearest kinsman would take even more merciless vengeance on the avengers. But Earth has already supported Lamech’s plea by swallowing up all Cain’s kin. Although the etymology of ‘Lamech’ is uncertain, the midrash on this double homicide evidently connects it with three related Arabic roots
lamah, lamakh
, and
lamaq
, which mean ‘to strike with a flat hand’ and ‘to look stealthily or sideways’.

2.
Tubal Cain, in
Genesis
IV, is a smith whose brothers are Jabal, a herdsman, and Jubal, a musician. These names evidently record the occupations
of certain Kenite families. ‘Tubal’ stands for
Tabali
(in Greek:
Tibareni
), Anatolian tribesmen described by Herodotus as neighbours of the iron-working Chalybes. In
Ezekiel
XXVII. 13, ‘Tubal’ supplies Tyre with brazen vessels and slaves; ‘Tubal Cain’ thus probably means ‘the metal-working Kenite’. Jubal was a Canaanite god of music.

3
. The two Biblical accounts of Lamech’s family are inconsistent. According to
Genesis
IV. 19–22, he had Jabal and Jubal by his wife Adah; by his wife Zillah, Tubal Cain and a daughter Naamah. According to
Genesis
V. 28–31, Noah was Lamech’s first-born; other sons and daughters are mentioned but not named.

(
a
) Noah was so loth to lose his innocence that, though often urged to marry, he waited until God found him Naamah, Enoch’s daughter—the only woman since Istahar to have remained chaste in that corrupt generation. Their sons were Shem, Ham and Japheth; and when they grew up, Noah married them to the daughters of Eliakim, son of Methuselah.
²⁰³

(
b
) Warned by God of the coming Deluge, Noah spread the news among mankind, preaching repentance wherever he went. Though his words burned like torches, the people mocked him with: ‘What is this deluge? If it be a deluge of flame, we have
alitha
(asbestos?), which is proof against fire; and if a deluge of water, we have sheets of iron to restrain any flood that may break from the earth. Against water from the sky, we can use an
aqeb
(awning?).’ Noah warned them: ‘Yet God will send the waters bubbling up beneath your heels!’ They boasted: ‘However great this deluge, we are so tall that it cannot reach our necks; and should He open the sluices of Tehom, we will block them with the soles of our feet.
²⁰⁴