Hebrew Myths Page 6

9. The many-headed Leviathan of Psalm LXXIV. 14, is the seven-headed monster on Hittite cylinder seals, and mentioned in Ugaritic mythology. It also occurs on a Sumerian mace-head, and on a Babylonian seal from the third millennium B.C.

  10. Mythical water-monsters in relief decorate six small panels at the base of the Menorah candelabrum shown on Titus’s triumphal arch at Rome. This arch commemorates his sack of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. King Solomon had placed five such golden candelabra on either side of the Great Altar, besides supplying silver ones. When Nebuchadrezzar destroyed the Temple in 586 B.C., he took them all away. Some decades later, another golden Menorah stood in the Second Temple, built by Zerubbabel. This, in turn, was carried off by Antiochus Epiphanes, King of Syria (175–163 B.C.), but replaced by Judas Maccabeus. Close correspondences between the candelabrum shown on Titus’s Arch and the account in Exodus of the pre-Exilic Menorah suggest that, though the author of Exodus has described no more than stem and branches, yet the monsters of the Maccabean Menorah also occurred on the Solomonic one.

  11. The Menorah’s cosmic significance was first mentioned by Zechariah (IV. 10), who had learned in a vision that its seven lamps were ‘the eyes of Yahweh that run to and fro through the universe’, namely the seven planets (see 1. 6). This View was endorsed by Josephus and Philo, contemporaries of Titus, and by midrashic writers of two or three centuries later. The annual lighting of the Temple candelabra at the autumn festival will have commemorated God’s creation of stars on the fourth day: because the Menorah’s central stem rises into the fourth branch, and because Babylonian priests held the fourth planet sacred to Nabu who invented astronomy. Probably, then, the Menorah monsters represent those which God overcame before He began His work of Creation.

  On the lower left panel, a pair of dragons face each other in similar positions, though their wings and tails differ. These may be read as two Leviathans: the Fleeing Serpent and the Crooked Serpent. The symmetrical and identical fish-tailed creatures with somewhat feline heads shown in the top left and right panels are, perhaps, the ‘great dragons’ of Genesis I. 21. The dragon on the lower central panel, with its head twisted haughtily up and backward, suggests Rahab (‘haughtiness’). An indistinct monster on the lower right may be Tehom or Ephes. A relief on the top central panel vaguely resembles the familiar pair of Phoenician winged creatures always shown facing each other: possibly they are cherubim, God’s messengers, whose effigies surmounted the Ark of the Covenant. It may have been in memory of these reliefs that a second-century Tannaitic rule explicitly forbids representations of dragons with spikes protruding from their necks as being emblems of idolatry, though smooth-necked dragons, such as those shown on the base of the Menorah, are permitted (Tos. Avodah Zarah, V. 2).

  12. Solomon is said to have won much of his wisdom from the ‘Book of Raziel,’ a collection of astrological secrets cut on sapphire, which the angel Raziel kept. The idea of a divine book containing cosmic secrets appears first in the Slavonic Book of Enoch (xxxiii), which states that God had written books of wisdom (or, according to another version, dictated them to Enoch), that He then appointed the two angels Samuil and Raguil (or Semil and Rasuil) to accompany Enoch back from heaven to earth, and commanded him to give these books to his children and children’s children. This may well be the origin of the ‘Book of Raziel’ which, according to Jewish tradition, was given by the Angel Raziel to Adam, from whom it descended through Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Levi, Moses and Joshua until it reached Solomon. According to the Targum on Ecclesiastes X. 20: ‘Each day the angel Raziel standing upon Mount Horeb proclaims the secrets of men to all mankind, and his voice reverberates around the world.’ A so-called Book of Raziel, dating from about the twelfth century, was probably written by the Kabbalist Eleazar ben Judah of Worms, but contains far older mystical beliefs.

  7

  THE REEM AND THE ZIZ

  (a) So strong and fierce is the enormous wild-ox called Reem that any attempt at teaching it to draw a plough or harrow would be extreme folly. God alone can save mankind from those terrible horns.67

  (b) Only a single pair of reems ever exists at the same time. The bull lives at one end of Earth, the cow at the other. Every seventy years they meet and copulate, whereupon the cow bites the bull to death. She conceives twin-calves, a male and a female; but, in the eleventh and last year of her pregnancy, becoming too gravid to move, lies down and rolls from side to side. There she would starve, were it not for her copious spittle which waters the fields all around and makes them grow sufficient grass to sustain life. At last her belly bursts open, the twins leap out, and she expires. Immediately, the young reems separate—the male calf going east, the female west—to meet again after seventy years.68

  (c) King David, as a boy, led his father’s sheep up what he mistook for a mountain but was, in fact, a sleeping reem. Suddenly it awoke and rose to its feet. David clasped the reem’s right horn, which reached to Heaven, praying: ‘Lord of the Universe, lead me to safety, and I will build You a temple one hundred cubits in span, like the horns of this reem.’ God mercifully sent a lion, the King of Beasts, before whom the reem crouched in obeisance. Since, however, David was himself afraid of the lion, God sent a deer for it to pursue. David then slid down from the reem’s shoulder and escaped.69

  (d) Many generations later, Rabba bar Bar-Hana, the famous traveller, saw a day-old reem-calf bigger than Mount Tabor, with a neck measuring three leagues around. The dung it dropped into the river-bed of Jordan caused the stream to overflow.70

  (e) Yet the reem would have perished in the Flood, had not Noah saved two of its young. He found no room for them in the Ark, but bound their horns to the stern and let their nose-tips rest on deck. Thus they swam behind, leaving a furrow-like wake which spread as far as the distance between Tiberias and Susita on the opposite shore of Lake Gennesaret.71

  (f) In Rabbi Hiyya bar Rabha’s day, a newly born reem-calf came to Israel and uprooted every tree in the land. A fast being proclaimed, Rabbi Hiyya prayed God for deliverance; whereupon its dying mother lowed from the desert, and it went back to her.72

  (g) The Ziz is so named because his flesh has many different flavours: tasting like this (zeh) and like this (zeh). He is a clean bird, fit for food, and capable of teaching mankind the greatness of God.73

  (h) All birds, including the Ziz, their King, were created on the Fifth Day from marsh, and thus rank between land and sea-beasts.74 But if God had not given the weaker birds a merciful dispensation, they could never have held their own against eagle, hawk and other birds of prey; for in the month of Tishri, He commands the Ziz to lift his head, flap his wings, crow aloud, and fill birds of prey with such terror that they spare the lesser breeds.75

  (i) God set one of the newly created Ziz’s feet upon a fin of Leviathan, and found that his head reached the Divine Throne. His outspread wings can darken the sun, and restrain the fiery South Wind from parching all Earth.76

  (j) The same Bar-Hana reports that, on a sea voyage, he and his shipmates saw the Ziz standing in mid-Ocean; yet the waves wetted only his ankles. ‘We judged that the sea must be shallow,’ writes Bar-Hana, ‘and thought to disembark and cool ourselves. But a heavenly voice warned us: “Seven years ago, a ship’s carpenter dropped his axe at this spot and it has not yet touched bottom!”’77

  (k) There is also a hen-Ziz. Though taking good care of her single huge egg, and hatching it on some far mountain, she once accidentally let fall one that was addled. The stinking contents drowned sixty cities and swept away three hundred cedar-trees.78

  (l) Eventually, the Ziz will share the fate of Leviathan and Behemoth: to be slaughtered and served as food for the righteous.79

  ***

  1. Balaam, in his blessing, compared God’s matchless strength to that of a reem (Numbers XXIII. 22; XXIV. 8); and Moses used the same metaphor in his blessing of Joseph (Deuteronomy XXXIII. 17). According to Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, the reem of Northern Arabia, though called a ‘wild-ox’, is a large, very fleet antelope
(beatrix), whose venison is esteemed above all other by the Bedouin. Because its long, sharp, straight horns can transfix a man, Arab hunters keep at a respectful distance until their shots have wounded it mortally. Leather from a buck’s tough hide makes the best sandals; its horns serve as tent-pegs or picks.

  Since the Palestinian reem had become extinct by late Biblical times, and single horns from Arabia were imported to Alexandria as rarities, the third century B.C. Septuagint translators rendered ‘reem’ as monokerŏs, or ‘unicorn’; thus confusing it with the one-horned rhinoceros. Balaam’s comparison of God’s strength to that of a reem explains later exaggerated accounts of its size. The Noah’s Ark story answers a disciple’s question: ‘Why did the reem, if it were so huge, not drown in the Deluge?’

  2. The original meaning of ziz (in the phrase ziz sadai, or ‘ziz of the field’—Psalms I. 11 and LXXX. 14) seems to have been ‘insects’, or possibly ‘locusts’, from the Akkadian word zizanu, or sisanu. But when the Septuagint appeared, this had been forgotten, and it was translated in the First Psalm as ‘fruit of the field’, though in the Eightieth Psalm as ‘wild ass’. St. Jerome’s Latin Vulgate (completed A.D. 405) altered the Septuagint’s ‘fruit of the field’ to ‘beauty of the field’; and ‘wild ass’ to ‘peculiar beast’. The Aramaic Targum and the Talmud, on the other hand, explain ziz as tarnegol bar (‘wild cock’), or ben netz (‘son of the hawk’), or sekhwi (‘cock’), or renanim (‘jubilations’) or bar yokhni (‘son of the nest’); thus connecting it with elaborate Iranian myths about the sacred cock of Avesta, and with the roc or rukh also called saēna or simurgh, of the Arabian Nights and Persian folklore, which could carry off elephants and rhinoceroses as food for its young. Rashi of Troyes, the eleventh-century scholar, comes closer to the original sense with ‘a creeping thing, named ziz, because it moves on, zaz, from one place to another.’

  8

  THE FALL OF LUCIFER

  (a) On the Third Day of Creation God’s chief archangel, a cherub by name Lucifer, son of the Dawn (‘Helel ben Shahar’), walked in Eden amid blazing jewels, his body a-fire with carnelian, topaz, emerald, diamond, beryl, onyx, jasper, sapphire and carbuncle, all set in purest gold. For awhile Lucifer, whom God had made Guardian of All Nations, behaved discreetly; but soon pride turned his wits. ‘I will ascend above the clouds and stars,’ he said, ‘and enthrone myself on Saphon, the Mount of Assembly, thus becoming God’s equal.’ God, observing Lucifer’s ambitions, cast him down from Eden to Earth, and from Earth to Sheol. Lucifer shone like lightning as he fell, but was reduced to ashes; and now his spirit flutters blindly without cease through profound gloom in the Bottomless Pit.80

  ***

  1. In Isaiah XIV. 12–15, the King of Babylon’s pre-ordained fall is compared to that of Helel ben Shahar:

  How art thou fallen from heaven,

  O Lucifer son of the Dawn!

  How art thou cast down to the ground,

  Despoiler of nations!

  And thou saidst in thy heart:

  ‘I will ascend to heaven,

  Above the stars of El

  Will I lift my throne;

  I will sit on the Mount of Meeting,

  In the utmost North.

  ‘I will ascend above the hills of cloud;

  I will be like unto the Most High!’

  Yet thou art brought down to Sheol,

  To the bottomless abyss.

  This short reference suggests that the myth was familiar enough not to need telling in full: for Isaiah omits all details of the archangel’s punishment by God (here named Elyon, ‘the Most High’), who resented rivals in glory. Ezekiel (XXVIII. 11–19) is more explicit when he makes a similar prophecy against the King of Tyre, though omitting Lucifer’s name:

  Moreover the word of the Lord came unto me, saying:

  ‘Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the King of Tyrus, and say unto him: “Thus saith the Lord God: Thou sealest up the sum full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty.

  ‘“Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, the topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared for thee in the day that thou wast created.

  ‘“Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.

  ‘“Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.

  ‘“By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.

  ‘“Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kings, that they may behold thee.

  ‘“Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffic; therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee.

  ‘“All they that know thee among the people shall be astonished at thee: thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more.”’

  2. Helel ben Shahar was originally the planet Venus, the last proud star to defy sunrise: a simple Hebrew allegory which has, however, been combined with the myth of Phaethon’s fall—burned to death when he presumptuously drove his father Helius’s sun-chariot. This myth, though Greek, seems to have originated in Babylon where, every year, a masterless sun-chariot symbolizing the demise of the Crown—during which a boy-surrogate occupied the royal throne for a single day—careered through the city streets. The surrogate, a favourite of the Goddess Ishtar (who controlled the planet Venus) was afterwards sacrificed. Isaiah seems, therefore, to be prophesying that the king must suffer the same death as his surrogate. In Greek myth, Phaethon son of Apollo became identified with a namesake, Phaethon son of Eos (‘Dawn’); according to Hesiod, the Goddess Aphrodite (Ishtar) carried him off to guard her temple. Ezekiel’s King of Tyre worshipped Ishtar and watched boys being burned alive as surrogates of the God Melkarth (‘Ruler of the City’).

  3. Although Job XXXVIII. 7 describes the ‘morning stars’ singing together, the name ‘Helel’ occurs nowhere else in Scripture; but Helel’s father, Shahar (‘Dawn’), appears in Psalm CXXXIX. 9 as a winged deity. Ugaritic mythology makes Shahar, or Baal son of El, a twin-brother to Shalem (‘Perfect’). The Mountain of the North (‘Saphon’) which Helel aspired to ascend, can be identified with Saphon, Mount of God, upon which, according to Ugaritic myth, stood Baal’s Throne. When Baal was killed by Mot, his sister Anath buried him there. Saphon, or Zaphon, the 5800-foot mountain—now called Jebel Akra—on which the North-Semitic Bull-god El also ruled ‘in the midst of his divine assembly’, rises near the mouth of the Orontes. The Hittites named it Mount Hazzi, and held it to be the place from where Teshub, the Storm-god, his brother Tashmishu, and his sister Ishtar sighted the terrible stone-giant (the ‘diorite man’ as some scholars translate it) Ullikummi who planned their destruction; launched their attack against him, and finally defeated him. The Greeks named it Mount Casius, home of the monster Typhon and the she-monster Delphyne who together disarmed Zeus, King of Heaven, and kept him prisoner there in the Corycian Cave until the god Pan subdued Typhon with a great shout and Hermes, god of Cunning, rescued Zeus. The Orontes had been known as ‘Typhon’. Saphon was famous for the destructive North winds that whirled from it over Syria and Palestine. All these myths refer to conspiracies against a powerful deity; in the Hebrew alone no mention is made of God’s initial discomfiture.

  4. Lucifer is identified in the New Testament with Satan (Luke X. 18; 2 Corinthians XI. 14), and in the Targum with Sam
ael (Targ. ad Job XXVIII. 7).

  9

  THE BIRTH OF ADAM

  (a) On the Sixth Day, at God’s command, Earth was delivered of Adam. And as a woman remains unclean for thirty-three days after the birth of a male child, so likewise did Earth for thirty-three generations—until the reign of King Solomon, before which time God’s Sanctuary could not be built at Jerusalem.81 The elements of fire, water, air and darkness combined in Earth’s womb to produce living creatures;82 yet, though all her offspring were conceived on the First Day, herbs and trees made their appearance on the Third, sea-beasts and birds on the Fifth, land-beasts, creeping things and Man on the Sixth.83

  (b) God did not use earth at random, but chose pure dust, so that Man might become the crown of Creation.84 He acted, indeed, like a woman who mixes flour with water and sets aside some of the dough as a halla offering: for He let a mist moisten the earth, then used a handful of it to create Man, who became the world’s first halla offering. Being the son of Adama (‘Earth’), Man called himself ‘Adam’ in acknowledgement of his origin; or perhaps Earth was called Adama in honour of her son; yet some derive his name from adom (‘red’), recording that he was formed from red clay found at Hebron in the Damascene Field near the Cave of Machpelah.85

  (c) It is improbable, however, that God used earth from Hebron, this being a less holy site than the summit of Mount Moriah, Earth’s very navel, where the Sanctuary now stands: for there Abraham was blessed because of his readiness to sacrifice Isaac. Hence some relate that God commanded the Archangel Michael: ‘Bring Me dust from the site of My Sanctuary!’ This He gathered into the hollow of His hand and formed Adam, thus binding mankind by natural ties to the mountain on which Abraham would expiate his forefathers’ sins.86

  Some say that God used two kinds of dust for Adam’s creation: one gathered from Mount Moriah; the other a mixture culled at the world’s four comers and moistened with water drawn from every river and sea in existence. That, to ensure Adam’s health, He used male dust and female soil. That Adam’s name reveals the formative elements of his creation: its three Hebrew letters being their initials—epher (‘dust’), dam (‘blood’) and marah (‘gall’)—since, unless these are present in equal measure, man sickens and dies.87