Hebrew Myths (3 page)

3
. The longer Creation Epic begins by telling how ‘when on high the heavens had not been named’, Apsu the Begetter and Mother Tiamat mingled chaotically and produced a brood of dragon-like monsters. Several ages passed before a younger generation of gods arose. One of these, Ea god of Wisdom, challenged and killed Apsu. Tiamat thereupon married her own son Kingu, bred monsters from him, and prepared to take vengeance on Ea.

The only god who now dared oppose Tiamat was Ea’s son Marduk. Tiamat’s allies were her eleven monsters. Marduk relied upon the seven winds, his bow and arrow and storm-chariot, and a terrible coat of mail. He had smeared his lips with prophylactic red paste, and tied on his wrist a herb that made him proof against poison; flames crowned his head. Before their combat, Tiamat and Marduk exchanged taunts, curses and incantations. When they came to grips, Marduk soon caught Tiamat in his net, sent one of his winds into her belly to tear out the guts, then brained and shot her full of arrows. He bound the corpse with chains and stood victoriously upon it. Having chained the eleven monsters and cast them into prison—where they became gods of the underworld—he snatched the ‘Tablets of Fate’ from Kingu’s breast and, fastening them upon his own, split Tiamat into halves like a shell-fish. One of these he used as firmament, to impede the upper waters from flooding the earth; and the other as a rocky foundation for earth and sea. He also created the sun, the moon, the five lesser planets and the constellations, giving his kinsmen charge over them; and finally created man from the blood of Kingu, whom he had condemned to death as the instigator of Tiamat’s rebellion.

4.
Much the same account appears in the Berossian summary though Bel, not Marduk, is its divine hero. In the corresponding Greek myth, perhaps of Hittite provenience, Mother Earth created the giant Typhon, at whose advent the gods all fled to Egypt, until Zeus boldly killed him and his monstrous sister Delphyne with a thunderbolt.

5
. The first account of Creation
(Genesis
1. 1–II. 3) was composed at Jerusalem soon after the return from Babylonian Exile. God is here named ‘Elohim’. The second account (
Genesis
II. 4–22) is also Judaean, possibly of Edomite origin, and pre-Exilic. Here God was originally named ‘Yahweh’, but the priestly editor has changed this to ‘Yahweh Elohim’ (usually translated as ‘the Lord God’), thus identifying the God of
Genesis
I with that of
Genesis
II, and giving the versions an appearance of uniformity. He did not, however, eliminate certain contradictory details in the order of creation, as will be seen from the following tables:

Jews and Christians have always been puzzled by these contradictions, and tried to explain them away. The seven-day scheme in the first account provides the mythical charter for man’s observance of the Sabbath; since God, who rested on the seventh day, blessed and hallowed it. This point is expressly made in one version of the Ten Commandments (Exodus xx. 8–11). Some early rabbinic commentators observe that the main elements were created in the first three days; and embellished in the second three; and that a close symmetry can be discerned between the first and fourth days, the second and fifth, the third and sixth.

6
. This scheme, and others like it, prove the rabbis’ desire to credit God with systematic thought. Their labours would not have been needed, however, had it occurred to them that the order of Creation was tied to the order of the planetary gods in the Babylonian week, and therefore to the seven branches of the Menorah, or Sacred Candelabrum—both Zechariah in his vision (IV. 10), and Josephus (
Wars
V. 5. 5), make this identification of the Menorah with the Seven Planets—and that God claimed all these planetary powers for Himself. Since Nergal, a pastoral god, came third in the week, whereas Nabu, god of astronomy, came fourth, pasture was given precedence to the stars in the order of Creation. The
Enuma Elish
has the following order: separation of heaven from earth and sea; creation of planets and stars; creation of trees and herbs; creation of animals and fish (but the fifth and sixth tablets are fragmentary); Marduk’s forming of man from Kingu’s blood.

7.
The second Creation account is vaguer than the first, divulges less about the pre-Creation Universe, and has no structure comparable to that of
Genesis
I. In fact, it implies that the work of Creation occupied a single day. The opening statement recalls several Near Eastern cosmogonies, by describing the pre-Creation Universe in terms of the various things which had not hitherto existed. Trees and shrubs were not yet in the earth, grasses and herbs had not yet sprung up because God had not yet sent rain, and there was still no man to till the soil (
Genesis
II. 5). Then came the great day in which God created the generations of heaven and earth (
Genesis
II. 4a): a mist rose from the soil (presumably at His command), and watered it. The soil (
adama
) was now in condition for man (
adam
) to be formed from it. God duly breathed life into man’s nostrils and gave him a living soul. Then He planted a garden, eastward of Eden, and ordered man to dress and keep it (
Genesis
II. 6–9, 15).

8. Genesis
I resembles Babylonian cosmogonies, which begin with the emergence of earth from a primeval watery chaos, and are all metaphorical of how dry land emerges annually from the winter floods of Tigris and Euphrates. Creation is thus represented as the world’s first flowering after the primeval watery chaos: a Spring season, when birds and beasts mate.
Genesis
II, however, mirrors Canaanite geographic and climatic conditions. The pre-Creation Universe is sun-scorched, parched and barren, as if after a long summer. When finally autumn approaches, the first sign of rain is morning mist risen dense and white from the valleys. Creation as pictured in
Genesis
II. 4 ff took place on just such an autumn day. The Babylonian version, which made Spring the creative season, was borrowed during the Captivity, and the first of Nissan became a Jewish New Year’s day. The
earlier autumnal version, however, required the first of Tishri to be observed as the true New Year’s day.

9.
Irreconcilable views as to the season of Creation were held by rival Jewish schools from the first century A.D. onward. Philo of Alexandria maintained, with the Greek Stoics, that the Universe had been created in the Spring, and was followed by Rabbi Jehoshua and others. But Rabbi Eliezer preferred the autumnal Creation, and his view gained the upper hand among the Orthodox; it was decided that the first of Tishri had been God’s New Year’s day. Others, while agreeing on an autumnal Creation, held that God’s New Year fell on the twenty-fifth of Elul, and that the first of Tishri, five days later, celebrated Adam’s birth.

10.
Creation being originally understood in terms of procreation, not fabrication, its central figure was a matriarch. Thus in the Greek myth, Eurynome, Goddess of All Things, rose naked from Chaos, divided sea from sky, danced upon the waves, stirred up the wind, was impregnated by it in the shape of a great serpent named Ophion or Ophioneus, and laid the World Egg. A similar story is told in
Orphic Fragments
60, 61, 70 and 89: Night, the Creatrix, lays a silver egg from which Love is hatched to set the Universe in motion. Night lives in a cave, displaying herself in triad as Night, Order and Justice.

11.
Most Near Eastern myths, however, derive from a time when part, at least, of the matriarch’s divine prerogatives had been delegated to her male warrior-escort. This stage is reflected in the
Enuma Elish’s
account of how the Universe proceeds from a union between Apsu the Begetter and Mother Tiamat; and in Berossus’s account of the Creation—summarized by Alexander Polyhistor—where after El’s victory over Tiamat, the Goddess Aruru formed man from El’s own blood kneaded with clay.

12.
The Syrian philosopher Damascius (early sixth century
A.D.
) summarizes a primitive version of the
Enuma Elish
myth, paralleled by the Egyptian Sky-goddess Nut’s union with the Earth-god Geb; and by the Greek Sky-god Uranus’s union with the Earth-goddess Gaia. Damascius names Tiamat before Apsu, and accords similar precedence to the female of each divine couple he mentions.

13.
Were it not for the Tehom-Tiamat parallel, we should never guess that Tehom represents the formidable Babylonian Mother-goddess who bore the gods, was rebelled against by them, and finally surrendered her own body to serve as building material for the Universe. Not even the female gender of the Hebrew name ‘Tehom’ can be read as significant in this connection, since in Hebrew every noun must either be male or female, and many cosmic terms are female even when lacking the female suffix
ah
, or of ambivalent gender.

14.
Yet goddesses were well known to the Hebrews of Biblical times who worshipped in the groves of the Goddess Asherah (
Judges
III. 7; VI. 25–26, 30; 1
Kings
XVI. 33; XVIII. 19), and bowed down to her images (2
Kings
XXI. 7; 2
Chronicles
XVIII. 6, etc.). They also honoured Astarte, the goddess of the Phoenicians and Philistines (
Judges
II. 13; X. 6; 1
Samuel
XXXI. 10; 1
Kings
XI. 5, 33; 2
Kings
XXIII. 13, etc.). Not long before Nebuchadrezzar’s destruction of the Judaean Kingdom (586
B.C.
), Jewish women were offering cakes to her as the ‘Queen of Heaven’ (
Jeremiah
VII. 18):
alias
Anath, whose name survives in the Bible as that of Shamgar’s mother (
Judges
III. 31; V. 6) and of the priestly village Anathot, Jeremiah’s home, now Anatha, north of Jerusalem. She had become so dear to Jews of both sexes, that those who escaped to Egypt vowed to serve her with libations and cakes made in her image (
Jeremiah
XLIV. 15–19).