Hebrew Myths (4 page)

15.
Though Astarte and Asherah were worshipped by all classes to the very end of the Judaean monarchy, nowhere in the Bible is any hint found of their connexion with El or Elohim—unless God’s repudiation in
Ezekiel
XXIII of the lecherous Aholah and Aholibah is directed against these goddesses rather than against Jerusalem and Samaria, the main seats of their worship. Nor does any Hebrew tradition assign to either goddess the rôle of Creatrix. Yet Astarte’s dove suggests that she had once been so regarded.

16.
The monotheistic editor of the cosmogony in
Genesis
I and II could assign no part in Creation to anyone but God, and therefore omitted all pre-existing elements or beings which might be held divine. Such abstractions as Chaos (
tohu wa-bohu
), Darkness (
hoshekh
), and the Deep (
tehom
) would, however, tempt no worshippers: so these took the place of the ancient matriarchal deities.

17.
Though the revolutionary concept of an eternal, absolute, omnipotent and only God was first proposed by Pharaoh Akhenaten (see 56. 1. 4.), and either adopted by the Hebrews, whom he seems to have protected, or re-invented by them, yet the name ‘Elohim’ (usually translated as ‘God’), found in
Genesis
I, is the Hebrew variant of an ancient Semitic name for one god of many—Ilu among the Assyrians and Babylonians; El among the Hittites and in the Ugaritic texts; II, or Hum, among the South Arabians. El headed the Phoenician pantheon and is often mentioned in Ugaritic poems (dating from the fourteenth century
B.C.
) as ‘Bull El’, which recalls the golden bull-calves made by Aaron (
Exodus
XXXII. 1–6, 24, 35) and Jeroboam (1
Kings
XII. 28–29) as emblems of God; and Zedekiah’s impersonation of God as an iron-horned bull (1
Kings
XXII. 11).

18.
In
Genesis
I, the name ‘Elohim’ is combined with a second divine name pronounced
Yahweh
(usually transcribed as
Jehovah
, and translated as ‘Lord’) and regarded as an abbreviation of the full name
Yahweh asher yihweh
, ‘He causes to be what is’ (Exodus III. 14). In personal names, this was further shortened into
Yeho
(e.g.,
Yehonathan
, or ‘Jonathan’), or
Yo
(e.g.,
Yonathan
or ‘Jonathan’); or
Yahu
(e.g.,
Yirm’yahu
or ‘Jeremiah’); or
Yah
(e.g.,
Ahiyah
). That
Yahweh
in
Genesis
is given the divine surname
Elohim
, shows him to have become a transcendental God, credited with all the great feats of Creation.

The titles and attributes of many other Near Eastern deities were successively awarded to Yahweh Elohim. For instance, in the Ugaritic poems, a standing epithet of the God Baal, son of Dagon, is ‘Rider of Clouds’;
Psalm
LXV. 5 awards it to this Hebrew God, who also, like Baal ‘The God of Saphon’, has a palace in the ‘farthest north’ (
yark’the saphon
), imagined as a lofty mountain (
Isaiah
XIV. 13;
Psalm
XLVIII. 3).

19.
Moreover, many of the acts attributed in Ugaritic mythology to the bloodthirsty Goddess Anath are attributed in the Bible to Yahweh Elohim. The Ugaritic description of how Anath massacres her enemies:

recalls the second Isaiah’s vision of God’s vengeance upon Israel’s enemies (
Isaiah
LXIII. 3):

Prophets and psalmists were as careless about the pagan origins of the religious imagery they borrowed, as priests were about the adaptation of heathen sacrificial rites to God’s service. The crucial question was: in whose honour these prophecies and hymns should now be sung, or these rites enacted. If in honour of Yahweh Elohim, not Anath, Baal or Tammuz, all was proper and pious.

(
a
) According to others, God created Heavens, complete with Sun, Moon and stars, by a single word of command. Then, clad in a glorious garment of light, He stretched out the Heavens like a round tent-cloth, exactly cut to cover the Deep. Having confined the Upper Waters in a fold of His garment, He established His secret Pavilion above the Heavens, walling it with a thick darkness like sackcloth, carpeting it with the same, and resting its beams upon the Upper Waters. There He set up His divine Throne.
³

(
b
) While performing the work of Creation, God would ride across the Deep upon clouds, or cherubs, or the wings of the storm; or catch at passing winds and make them His messengers. He set Earth on immovable foundations: by carefully weighing the mountains, sinking some as pillars in the waters of the Deep, arching the Earth over them and locking the arch with a keystone of other mountains.
⁴

(
c
) The roaring waters of the Deep arose and Tehom, their Queen, threatened to flood God’s handiwork. But, in His fiery chariot, He rode the waves and flung at her great volleys of hail, lightning and thunderbolts. He despatched her monstrous ally Leviathan with a blow on its skull; and the monster Rahab with a sword thrust through its heart. Awed by His voice, Tehom’s waters subsided. The rivers fled backwards up the hills and down into the valleys beyond. Tehom, trembling, acknowledged defeat. God uttered a shout of victory, and dried the floods until Earth’s foundations could be seen. Then He measured in the hollow of His hand what water was left, poured it into the Sea Bed, and set sand dunes as its perpetual boundary; at the same time making a decree which Tehom could never break, however violently her salt waves might rage—she being, as it were, locked behind gates across which a bolt has been shot.
⁵

(
d
) God then measured out dry earth, fixing its limits. He allowed Tehom’s fresh waters to rise as valley springs, and rain to fall gently on the mountain tops from His upper chambers. Thus He made
grass grow as fodder for cattle; also corn and grapes for the nourishment of man; and the great cedars of Lebanon for shade. He ordered the Moon to mark the seasons; and the Sun to divide day from night and summer from winter; and the stars to limit the blackness of night. He filled the earth with beasts, birds and creeping things; and the sea with fishes, sea-beasts and monsters. He let wild beasts roam about after dark; but once the Sun arose they must return to their lairs.
⁶

The Morning Stars, as they watched, burst into a song of praise; and all the sons of God shouted for joy.
⁷

(
e
) Having thus completed the work of Creation, God withdrew to a sanctuary on Mount Paran in the Land of Teman. Whenever He leaves this dwelling place, Earth trembles and mountains smoke.
⁸

***

1.
This third account of the Creation, built up from Biblical references elsewhere than in
Genesis
, recalls not only Babylonian, but Ugaritic and Canaanite, cosmogonies; and notably expands the brief reference to Tohu, Bohu and the Deep. Such a Creator as El, Marduk, Baal, or Jehovah, must first struggle against water—personified by the Prophets as Leviathan, Rahab, or the Great Dragon, not only because the Creatrix whom he displaces is a goddess of Fertility, and therefore of water, but because the matriarchate can be portrayed in myth as a chaotic commingling of the two sexes which delays the establishment of patriarchal social order—like rain pouring down into the sea, which delays the appearance of dry land. Thus male and female principles must first be decently separated, as when the Egyptian cosmocrator Shu lifted the Sky-goddess Nut from her embrace of the Earth-god Geb; or when Yahweh Elohim tore the Upper Male Waters from their embrace of the Lower Female Waters (see 4.
e
). The Babylonian Marduk, when slicing Tiamat in two, was really parting her from Apsu, God of the Upper Waters.

2
. In Ugaritic mythology, Baal fixes the sea bed as the abode of the defeated water, which is treated as both a deity and an element:

3.
What ‘Tohu’ and ‘Bohu’ originally meant is disputed. But add the suffix
m
to Tohu (
thw
) and it becomes Tehom (
thwm
), the Biblical name for a primitive sea-monster. Tehom, in the plural, becomes Tehomot (
thwmwt
). With the same suffixes, Bohu becomes Behom and Behomot (
bhwmwt
), a variant form of Job’s Behemoth, the dry-land counterpart of the sea-monster Leviathan. Leviathan cannot be easily distinguished from Rahab, Tannin, Nahash or any other mythical creatures that personify water. The story underlying
Genesis
I. 2 may therefore be that the world in its primeval state consisted of a sea-monster Tohu and a land-monster Bohu. If so, Tohu’s identity with Tehomot, and Bohu’s with Behemoth (see 6.
n–q
), has been suppressed for doctrinal reasons (see 1. 13,
16
)—Tohu and Bohu being now read as unpersonified states of emptiness or chaos; and God being made responsible for the subsequent creation of Tehomot (or Leviathan) and Behemoth.

4.
The Babylonian sea-monster corresponding with the Hebrew Tehomot appears as Tiamat, Tamtu, Tamdu and Taawatu; and in Damascius’s
First Principles
as Tauthe. Thus the root is
taw
, which stands in the same relation to Tiamat as Tohu does to Tehom and Tehomot. Moreover, that
tehom
never takes the definite article in Hebrew proves it to have once been a proper name, like
Tiamat.
Tehomot, then, is the Hebrew equivalent of Mother Tiamat, beloved by the God Apsu, whose name developed from the older Sumerian Abzu; and Abzu was the imaginary sweet-water abyss from which Enki, God of Wisdom, emerged. Rahab (‘haughtiness’) is a synonym of Tehomot; in
Job
xxvI. 12 occur the parallel lines:

5.
The hovering of the Spirit of God over the waste of waters in
Genesis
I. 2 suggests a bird, and in an early Biblical poem God is compared to an ‘eagle hovering over her young’ (
Deuteronomy
XXXII. 11). But the word
ruah
, usually translated as ‘spirit’, originally means ‘wind’, which recalls the Phoenician creation myth quoted by Philo of Byblus: the prime chaos was acted upon by Wind which became enamoured of its own elements. Another Byblian cosmogonist makes Baou, the female principle, impregnated by this wind. The Goddess Baou, wife to the Wind-god Colpia, was also identified with the Greek Goddess Nyx (‘Night’), whom Hesiod
makes the Mother of All Things. In Greece she was Eurynome, who took the Serpent Ophioneus for a lover (see 1. 10).

6.
The heretical Ophites of the first century
A.D.
believed that the world had been generated by a serpent. The Brazen Serpent made, according to Hebrew tradition, by Moses at God’s command (
Numbers
XXI. 8–9) and revered in the Temple Sanctuary until the reforming King Hezekiah destroyed it (2
Kings
XVIII. 4), suggests that Yahweh had at one time been identified with a Serpent-god—as Zeus was in Orphic art. Memory of Yahweh as a serpent survived in a late midrash according to which, when God attacked Moses (
Exodus
IV. 24 ff) in a desert lodging place in the dead of night, He assumed the shape of a huge serpent and swallowed Moses as far as his loins. The custom at Jerusalem of killing the sacrificial victims on the north side of the altar (
Leviticus
I. 11; M. Zebahim V. 1–5) points to an early North-Wind cult, like that at Athens. In the original myth, presumably, the Great Mother rose from Chaos; the wind of her advent became a serpent and impregnated her; she thereupon became a bird (dove or eagle) and laid the world-egg—which the serpent coiled about and hatched.

7.
According to a Galilean psalm (LXXXIX), God created Heaven and Earth, north and south, Tabor and Hermon, only after subduing Rahab and scattering His other enemies. And according to
Job
IX. 8–13, when He stretched out the Heavens and trod upon the sea-waves, the ‘helpers of Rahab’ stooped beneath Him. These helpers suggest Tiamat’s allies in her struggle against Marduk, when he ‘subdued’ her with a sacred imprecation.

8.
Biblical allusions to Leviathan as a many-headed sea-monster, or as a ‘fleeing’ serpent (
nahash bariah
), or ‘crooked’ serpent (
nahash aqalaton
), recall the Ugaritic texts: ‘If you smite Lotan… the crooked serpent, the mighty one with seven heads…’ and: ‘Baal will run through with his spear, even as he struck Lotan, the crooked serpent with seven heads.’ The language approximates Biblical Hebrew: Leviathan (
lwytn
) appears as
lot an; nhsh brh
as
bthn
(= Hebrew
pthn
, ‘serpent’)
brh;
and
nhsh ‘qltwn
, as
bthn ‘qltn
in Ugaritic (
ANET
138b).

9.
Tiamat’s mate Apsu, a personification of the Upper Waters, has been correlated (by Gunkel and others) with the Hebrew term
ephes
, meaning ‘extremity, nothingness’. The word usually appears in dual form:
aphsayim
or
aphse eres
, ‘the ends of the earth’ (
Deuteronomy
XXXIII. 17;
Micah
V. 3;
Psalm
II. 8; etc.). Its watery connotation survives in a Biblical prophecy (
Zechariah
IX. 10): ‘His dominion shall be from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth,’ where poetic convention requires that ‘the ends of the earth’ should also mean ‘river’, presumably the Ocean Stream. Similarly, in
Proverbs
XXX. 4,
aphsayim
corresponds with ‘waters’: