Hebrew Myths

The Book of Genesis

Robert Graves, Raphael Patai

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780795337154
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The I, Claudius author's "lightning sharp interpretations and insights... are here brought to bear with equal effectiveness on the Book of Genesis" ( Kirkus Reviews ). This is a comprehensive look at the stories that make up the Old Testament and the Jewish religion, including the folk tales, apocryphal texts, midrashes, and other little-known documents that the Old Testament and the Torah do not include. In this exhaustive study, Robert Graves provides a fascinating account of pre-Biblical texts that have been censored, suppressed, and hidden for centuries, and which now emerge to give us a clearer view of Hebrew myth and religion than ever. Venerable classicist and historian Robert Graves recounts the ancient Hebrew stories, both obscure and familiar, with a rich sense of storytelling, culture, and spirituality. This book is sure to be riveting to students of Jewish or Judeo-Christian history, culture, and religion.

1
THE CREATION ACCORDING TO GENESIS

(a) When God set out to create Heaven and Earth, He found nothing around Him but Tohu and Bohu, namely Chaos and Emptiness. The face of the Deep, over which His Spirit hovered, was clothed in darkness.

On the first day of Creation, therefore, He said: ‘Let there be light!’, and light appeared.

On the second day, He made a firmament to divide the Upper Waters from the Lower Waters, and named it ‘Heaven’.

On the third day, He assembled the Lower Waters in one place and let dry land emerge. After naming the dry land ‘Earth’, and the assembled waters ‘Sea’, He told Earth to bring forth grass and herbs and trees.

On the fourth day, He created the sun, moon and stars.

On the fifth day, the sea-beasts, fish and birds.

On the sixth day, the land-beasts, creeping things and mankind.

On the seventh day, satisfied with His work, He rested.¹

(b) But some say that after creating Earth and Heaven, God caused a mist to moisten the dry land so that grasses and herbs could spring up. Next, He made a garden in Eden, also a man named Adam to be its overseer, and planted it with trees. He then created all beasts, birds, creeping things; and lastly woman.²

***

1. For many centuries, Jewish and Christian theologians agreed that the accounts of the world’s origin given in Genesis were not only inspired by God, but owed nothing to any other scriptures. This extreme view has now been abandoned by all but fundamentalists. Since 1876, several versions of Akkadian (that is, Babylonian and Assyrian) Creation Epics have been excavated and published. The longest of these, known as Enuma Elish from its initial two words—which mean ‘when on high’—is assumed to have been written in the early part of the second millennium B.C. It has survived almost complete on seven cuneiform tablets containing an average of 156 lines apiece. The discovery did not altogether astonish scholars familiar with Berossus’s summary of Creation myths, quoted by Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea; for Berossus, born in the fourth century B.C., had been a priest of Bel at Babylon.

2. Another version of the same Epic, written both in Babylonian and Sumerian as a prologue to an incantation for purifying a temple, was discovered at Sippar on a tablet dated from the sixth century B.C. It runs in part as follows:

The holy house, the house of the gods, in a holy place had not yet been made;

No reed had sprung up, no tree had been created;

No brick had been laid, no building had been erected;

No house had been constructed, no city had been built;

No city had been made, no creature had been brought into being;

Nippur had not been made, Ekur had not been built;

Erech had not been made, Eana had not been built;

The Deep had not been made, Eridu had not been built;

Of the holy house, the house of the gods, the habitation had not been made;

All lands were sea.

Then there was a movement in the midst of the sea;

At that time Eridu was made, and Essagil was built,

Essagil, where in the midst of the deep the god Lugal-du-kuda dwells;

The city of Babylon was built, and Essagil was finished.

The gods, the spirits of the earth, Marduk made at the same time,

The holy city, the dwelling of their hearts’ desire, they proclaimed supreme.

Marduk laid a reed on the face of the waters,

He formed dust and poured it out beside the reed;

That he might cause the gods to dwell in the dwelling of their hearts’ desire,

He formed mankind.

With him the goddess Aruru created the seed of mankind.

The beasts of the field and living things in the field he formed.

The Tigris and Euphrates he created and established them in their place;

Their name he proclaimed in goodly manner.

The grass, the rush of the marsh, the reed and the forest he created,

The green herb of the field he created,

The lands, the marshes and the swamps;

The wild cow and her young, the wild calf, the ewe and her young, the lamb of the fold.

Orchards and forests;

The he-goat and the mountain goat…

The Lord Marduk built a dam beside the sea.

Reeds he formed, trees he created;

Bricks he laid, buildings he erected;

Houses he made, cities he built;

Cities he made, creatures he brought into being.

Nippur he made, Ekur he built;

Erech he made, Eana he built.

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:

Genesis I	Genesis II
Heaven	Earth
Earth	Heaven
Light	Mist
Firmament	Man
Dry Land	Trees
Grasses and Trees	Rivers
Luminaries	Beasts and Cattle
Sea-beasts	Birds
Birds	Woman
Cattle, Creeping things, Beasts
Man and Woman

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.

First Day	Fourth Day
Creation of Light its separation from darkness.	Creation of the luminaries—sun, moon and stars—to separate day from night and season from season.
Second Day	Fifth Day
Creation of the heavens and separation of the upper waters from the lower.	Creation of birds that fly through the heavens, and of fish that swim through the lower waters.
Third Day	Sixth Day
Creation of dry land and establishment of its immobile woods and herbs.	Creation of beasts, men and creeping things that walk on dry land.

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 i...