Hebrew Myths Read online

  3. Three-year-old heifers are widely associated with Moon-worship because their horns resemble a new moon and because the Moon has three phases. In Babylonian astrology (see 1. 14), the Moon held the planetary power of water; and, under Mosaic Law, perfect ritual cleanliness could be conveyed by a ‘water of separation’ (Numbers XIX. 2 ff) mixed with the ashes of a red heifer. Ridya’s appearance as a heifer at Tabernacles, which introduces the rainy season, is therefore mythically apt.

  4. The waters’ plea for pardon when God threatened to singe them, is reminiscent of the Iliad where Hephaestus kindles a brush fire on Xanthus’s banks and makes his waters boil until he surrenders. Yet a common source is possible: Homer’s debt to Near Eastern myths has become yearly more apparent.

  5. God’s use of snow and fire for Creation may be derived from Psalm CXLVIII. 4–8:

  Praise Him ye heavens of the firmament, and ye waters that be above the firmament.

  Let them praise the name of the Lord, for He commanded and they were created.

  He has established them for ever and for ever; He has made a decree which shall not pass.

  Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons and all deeps,

  Fire and hail, snow and vapours and a stormy wind fulfilling His word.

  6. There are parallels in Egypt to the Jewish Temple legend that a rock on which the Sanctuary stood was the first solid thing created. The Pythoness’s stone seat at Delphi also became known as ‘the world’s navel’.

  7. Rabbah, a Babylonian Jew of the third century A.D., had travelled far. An apocryphal collection of his adventures recalls Lucian’s early-second-century True History; but has a moralistic, rather than a satiric, intention.

  8. The name of the God of Israel came to be regarded as too holy to be pronounced, except by the High Priest in the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement. In Talmudic times the sages entrusted their disciples once every seven years with the secret pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton YHWH (B. Kiddushin 71a), which otherwise was always spoken as Adonai. At the same time, twelve-letter, forty-two-letter and seventy-two-letter names of Yahweh, perhaps connected with Calendar Mysteries (Graves, White Goddess, ch. xvi) were also known to the initiated; when, however, these names were abused by sorcerers, they were suppressed, and only the more pious priests continued to use them when giving their benediction; but even so purposely sang them indistinctly, ‘swallowing’ some phonemes and expanding others into sustained melodious lines (B. Kiddushin, ibid.). This is reminiscent of the Egyptian ritual in which, according to Demetrius of Alexandria, the gods were celebrated with seven vowels sung in succession.

  9. The allegory of the two stones from which Adam struck fire is based on Job XXVIII. 3:

  Man setteth an end to darkness and searcheth out the furthest bound, the stones of thick darkness and of the shadow of death.

  The midrash about the stone, rock or potsherd which God placed upon Tehom, thereby preventing her from rising up and flooding the earth, has a Sumerian prototype. An Enki-Ninhursag myth relates that the primeval waters of the Kur, or Nether World, rose violently to the surface, thus preventing any fresh waters from reaching fields and gardens. Thereupon Ninurta, god of the stormy South Wind and son of Enlil set a pile of stones over the Kur and restrained the flood.

  5

  EARLIER CREATIONS

  (a) In the beginning God created numerous worlds, destroying one after the other as they failed to satisfy Him. All were inhabited by man, a thousand generations of whom He cut off, leaving no record of them.45

  (b) After these first essays in creation, God was left alone with His great Name, and recognized at last that no world would satisfy Him unless it offered man a means of repentance. Hence, before making a new start, He created seven things: the Law, Gehenna, the Garden of Eden, the Divine Throne, the Celestial Pavilion, the Messiah’s Name, and Repentance.46

  (c) When two Divine Days—namely two thousand terrestrial years—had passed, God asked the Law, who had become His counsellor: ‘What if I should create yet another world?’ ‘Lord of the Universe,’ she asked in return, ‘if a king has neither army nor camp, over what does he rule? And if there is no one to praise him, what honour has he?’ God listened and approved.47

  (d) Yet some say that the Law pleaded against God’s creation of mankind with: ‘Do not leave me at the mercy of sinners who drink evil like water!’ God answered: ‘I created Repentance as a remedy for such; the Divine Throne as my Seat of Judgement; the Pavilion, to witness sacrifices of atonement; the Garden of Eden, to reward the righteous; Gehenna, to punish the unrepentant; yourself, to occupy the minds of men; and the Messiah, to gather in the exiles.’48

  ***

  1. It is not known whether the discovery of fossils far older than the four thousand years which had elapsed since Adam’s day troubled the rabbis. If so, their account of previous experimental creations was more plausible than the theory held by such Victorian zoologists as Philip Gosse: God, he said, had inserted fossils in the rocks to try the Christian’s faith.

  2. It became an article of belief that the Law was eternal (cf. Matthew V. 18), and had existed before Creation. Hebrew myth, a charter confirming successive historical changes in religion, becomes allegorical at this late stage and defines the doctrine of individual salvation (see 61. 5).

  3. Gehenna was the Jewish Hell. Its name is borrowed from the Valley of Hinnom at Jerusalem, which included Tophet (2 Kings XXIII. 10): a site originally used for human sacrifices to the God Moloch (2 Chronicles XXXIII. 8), afterwards for burning the city’s rubbish.

  4. The equivalence of one divine day with a thousand terrestrial years is derived from Psalm XC. 4: ‘A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday.’

  6

  THE PRIMEVAL MONSTERS DESCRIBED

  (a) In the days before Creation, Rahab, Prince of the Sea, rebelled against God. When commanded: ‘Open your mouth, Prince of the Sea, and swallow all the world’s waters,’ he cried: ‘Lord of the Universe, leave me in peace!’ Whereupon God kicked him to death and sank his carcase below the waves, since no land-beast could endure its stench.49

  (b) Others hold that God spared Rahab’s life, and that afterwards, when envious angels stole and threw into the sea ‘The Book of Raziel’, a compendium of divine wisdom which God had given Adam, He ordered Rahab to dive down and recover it. The Prince of the Sea obeyed without demur, yet later comforted God’s enemies by supporting the Egyptians in their quarrel with the Children of Israel, and pleading for Pharaoh’s army which God was about to drown in the Red Sea. ‘Spare the Egyptians’, he cried, ‘be content with the rescue of Israeli’ But God, lifting His hand, destroyed Rahab and all his helpers. Some style Rahab ‘the Celestial Prince of Egypt’. Others do not distinguish him either from Leviathan or Oceanus; or from the boastful Great Dragon who claimed to have created all seas and rivers, but whom God hauled ashore in a net, with his progeny, afterwards shattering their skulls and piercing their sides. When they still would not die, He set guardians to watch over the Great Dragon, who will finally be despatched on the Day of Reckoning.50

  (c) Leviathan’s monstrous tusks spread terror, from his mouth issued fire and flame, from his nostrils smoke, from his eyes a fierce beam of light; his heart was without pity. He roamed at will on the surface of the sea, leaving a resplendent wake; or through its lowest abyss, making it boil like a pot. No weapon in the armoury of mankind could dint his scales. Heaven’s inhabitants themselves feared him. Yet God caught Leviathan with a hook, hauled him up from the Deep, tied down his tongue with a rope, thrust a reed through his nostrils, and pierced his jaws with a thorn—as though he had been a river fish. Then He threw the carcase in the bottom of a boat and took it off, as if to market.51

  (d) When God created fishes and sea-beasts from light and water, He allowed Leviathan, who was larger than all his fellows put together, to rule them from a throne raised on a colossal underwater rock. Some say that he had many heads, or that there were two Leviathans—the
Fleeing Serpent and the Crooked Serpent—both of whom God destroyed. Others, that He spared Leviathan as being one of His creatures, but wholly tamed him (or ordered the archangel Jahoel to do so), and still deigns to sport with him on the wide seas for three full hours a day. Great sea-dragons serve as Leviathan’s food. He drinks from a tributary of the Jordan, as it flows into the ocean through a secret channel. When hungry, he puffs out a smoky vapour which troubles an immense extent of waters; when thirsty, he causes such an upheaval that seventy years must elapse before calm returns to the Deep, and even Behemoth on the Thousand Mountains shows signs of terror. But Leviathan fears one single creature only: a little fish called Chalkis, created by God for the sole purpose of keeping him in check.52

  (e) Others hold that Leviathan has been confined by God to an ocean cave, where the world’s whole weight rests upon him. His huge recumbent body presses down on Tehom, which prevents her from flooding the earth. Yet, since sea water is too salt for Leviathan’s taste, thirst often compels him to raise one fin; the sweet waters of Tehom surge up and he drinks awhile, then drops the fin again.53

  (f) Some say that Leviathan has as many eyes as the year has days, and radiant scales that obscure the very sun; that he grips his tail between his teeth and forms a ring around the Ocean. The firmament’s lower band, which carries the signs of the Zodiac, is therefore also called ‘Leviathan’.54

  (g) Few men have ever been granted even an inkling of Leviathan’s bulk; but once Rabh Saphra, as he sailed in a ship, saw a two-horned beast lifting its head from the waters. Engraved upon the horns he read: ‘This tiny sea-creature, measuring hardly three hundred leagues, is on his way to serve as Leviathan’s food.’55

  (h) Some sages reconcile the rival traditions that God killed, and did not kill Leviathan, by believing Him to have created both a male and a female. According to these, God butchered the female and gelded the male, to prevent them from mating and thereby destroying the world—they say it would have been unseemly for Him to kill the male and sport with the female… When this lonely survivor sees God approach, he lays aside his grief; the righteous, watching the play, are likewise cheered by anticipation of what awaits them—knowing that on Judgement Day they shall banquet off its flesh. From the female’s hide, God made bright garments to clothe Adam and Eve; and preserved her flesh in brine for the same banquet.56

  (i) Leviathan, like Rahab, exudes a fearful stench. Were it not that from time to time the monster purifies himself by sniffing the sweet flowers of Eden, all God’s creatures would surely stifle.57

  (j) Those who hold that Leviathan’s life was spared, foresee a great angelic hunt in which he is the quarry. Yet even the boldest angels must flee from him as he stands at bay; and, if they rally to the attack, can only blunt their weapons on his scales. When, at length, Gabriel tries to haul him out of the Deep to which he has returned, Leviathan will swallow hook, line and fisherman. Then God in person must net and slaughter him.58

  (k) God will not only prepare a magnificent banquet from Leviathan’s flesh, distributing for sale in the streets of Jerusalem what the righteous cannot eat, but make them tents from his hide, and adorn the city walls with what is left—until they shine to the ends of the world.59

  (l) Others predict a duel between Leviathan and Behemoth. After an earth-shaking struggle on the sea-shore, Behemoth’s curved horns will rip Leviathan open, while Leviathan’s sharp fins mortally stab Behemoth.60

  (m) Yet others hold that Leviathan was to have been Behemoth’s mate; but that God parted them, keeping Behemoth on dry land and sending Leviathan into the sea, lest their combined weight might crack Earth’s arches.61

  (n) Behemoth, the first land-beast created, resembles a prodigious hippopotamus: with a tail bigger than the trunk of a cedar, and bones like pipes of brass. He rules the land-creatures, as Leviathan those of the sea. They gambol around him, where he takes his ease among lotus, reed, fern and willows, or grazes on the Thousand Mountains. It is disputed whether Behemoth was fashioned from water, dust and light, or simply told to arise from Earth; also, whether he was born solitary, or once had a mate, as have all living creatures.62 Some say that if Behemoth did possess a mate, he cannot have coupled with her: since their offspring would surely have overwhelmed the world. Others, that God prudently gelded the male and cooled the female’s ardour; but spared her until the Last Days, when her flesh will delight the righteous.63

  (o) God lets Behemoth graze on the Thousand Mountains, and though he crops these bare in a single day, yet each night the grass grows again and, by morning, stands as high and rank as before. Behemoth is said to be a flesh-eater also: the Thousand Mountains supporting with their pasture many beasts that serve as his food. Summer heat makes him so thirsty that all the waters flowing down Jordan in six months, or even a year, barely suffice for a single gulp. He therefore drinks at a huge river issuing from Eden, Jubal by name.64

  (p) Behemoth is called ‘the Ox of the Pit.’ Every year, at the summer solstice, he rises on his hind legs, as God has taught him, and lets out a fearful echoing roar that restrains all wild beasts from preying on man’s flocks and herds for the next twelve months. He will often raise his great bushy tail and let the birds of the air take shelter there; then lower it gently and let the beasts of the field do likewise. Behemoth, despite his enormous strength, is as merciful as a good king should be: solicitous that none of the birds shall be harmed by their fellow-subjects, the beasts.65

  (q) Although some believe that Leviathan and Behemoth will murder each other, it is predicted by others that God will send Michael and Gabriel against both creatures and that, when they fail to despatch either, He will shoulder the task Himself.66

  ***

  1. God’s watch over the Great Dragon even after its death, and His restraint of Tehom by use of a magical sherd (see 4. k), recall the Enuma Elish, where Marduk sets watchers over Tiamat’s carcase to prevent an escape of water.

  2. Leviathan, in some aspects, resembles a whale; in others, a crocodile. Why he is called ‘the Celestial Spirit of Egypt’, and why Ezekiel (XXIX. 3) calls Pharaoh ‘the great dragon that lies among his rivers’, can be seen from a victory song in honour of Thotmes III: ‘I let [the vanquished peoples] behold your Majesty in the likeness of a crocodile feared in the waters, which no man dares approach.’

  3. Crocodiles were worshipped at Crocodilopolis, Ombos, Coptos, Athribis and Thebes. Their mummies have been found in several Egyptian cemeteries. According to Plutarch, crocodiles were believed to lay their eggs exactly above the level of the next Nile flood—a great assistance to farmers who came across them. Crocodiles were also native to Palestine, and survived in the River Zerka until the beginning of this century. A small Gnostic stele from Caesarea shows them being hunted; according to Diodorus Siculus, they were caught on baited hooks, and killed with iron forks, though seldom, because of their sanctity. He wrote that the crocodile feared only the ichneumon, a creature no bigger than a little dog, which ran up and down the banks of the Nile breaking their eggs for the benefit of mankind.

  The chalkis, a substitute for the ichneumon in Jewish tradition, is a gregarious fish. Some commentators make it a sardine, others a herring: which seems an apter choice, because in Northern European folklore the herring is preferred to the whale as King of the Sea.

  4. Leviathan perhaps borrowed his stench from Tehom-Tiamat, whose name seems to have been connected by early popular etymology with the Arabic tahama (‘stinking’), and Tihama, a name for the low-lying southwest Arabian shore. This etymology would have been strengthened by the phenomenon of a stranded whale: no dead animal smells stronger.

  5. Behemoth resembles a wild ox in so far as he roved on the Thousand Mountains—doubtless at the sources of the Nile—and would one day rip Leviathan open with his curved horns. For the most part, however, he is a hippopotamus. Herodotus, Diodorus and Pliny, in writing of the Nile, all pair the hippopotamus and crocodile. That the hippopotamus has enormous strength, frequents the reedy
parts of rivers, can stay under water for as long as ten minutes, but is herbivorous and therefore inoffensive to other beasts, agrees with the account of Behemoth in Job XL. 15–24. According to Herodotus, the female hippopotamus was worshipped at Pamprenis as Set’s wife. She was called Taurt (‘the great one’), and made patroness of pregnancy, but never humanized like other animal deities. Diodorus notes that it would be disastrous to mankind if hippopotami were to breed unmolested, and that some Egyptians therefore harpoon them. Possibly this comment and Diodorus’s praise of the ichneumon’s concern for the future of mankind has suggested the inevitable castastrophe if Leviathan and Behemoth were to mate. The mild hippopotamus caused such damage to Nile crops that by Roman times it had been practically exterminated.

  6. Both crocodile and hippopotamus were sacred to Set, and supernatural pictures of them in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which honours Osiris, Set’s enemy, may have prompted Jewish mythologists to identify them with the Babylonian monsters.

  7. Crocodiles and hippopotami are, according to Diodorus, all but inedible, but Herodotus says that they were sometimes eaten, presumably at an annual totem feast: hence the flesh of Leviathan and Behemoth reserved for the righteous on the Last Day. The poor of the Middle East have always hungered for flesh feasts to supplement their predominantly cereal diet.

  8. Oceanus, whom Hesiod makes the eldest of the Titans and father of three thousand rivers, and whom Homer calls a god inferior only to Zeus, was supposed to girdle the earth like a serpent, just as the Zodiac girdles the sky. He was thus readily identified with Leviathan, the Great Dragon and Rahab; Scandinavian myths also make him a dragon. His appearance on the coins of Tyre, a city against which Isaiah (XXIII. 1–18), Amos (I. 10) and Joel (IV. 4) prophesied destruction, may account for the brutal kick which God dealt him (see 4. h).