Hebrew Myths Read online

  (d) God disdained to fetch Adam’s dust Himself, and sent an angel instead—either Michael to Mount Moriah, or Gabriel to the world’s four corners. Nevertheless, when Earth gainsaid the angel, knowing that she would be cursed on Adam’s account, God stretched forth His own hand.88

  Some insist that dust for Adam’s trunk was brought from Babylonia, for his head from Israel, for his buttocks from the Babylonian fortress of Agma, and for his limbs from certain other lands.89

  The various colours found in man are a reminder of these different kinds of dust: the red formed Adam’s flesh and blood; the black, his bowels; the white, his bones and sinews; the olive-green, his skin.90

  By using dust from every corner of the world, God has ensured that in whatever land Adam’s descendants die, Earth will always receive them back. Otherwise, if an Easterner should travel to the West, or a Westerner to the East, and the hour of his death came upon him, the soil of that region might cry. ‘This dust is not mine, nor will I accept it; return, sir, to your place of origin!’ But whereas Adam’s body was fashioned from terrestrial elements, his soul was fashioned from celestial ones; though some believe that this also proceeded from Earth.91

  (e) The hour at which God created Adam’s soul has been much disputed: whether at dawn on the Sixth Day (his body being made a little later), or whether on the Fifth Day before the appearance of sea-beasts; or whether this precious thing was the very first of God’s handiworks. Some hold that the creation of Adam’s inert clod preceded not only his soul, but even Light itself. They say that God, when about to breathe His spirit into it, paused and reminded Himself: ‘If I let Man live and stand up at once, it may later be claimed that he shared My task… He must stay as a clod until I have done!’ At dusk on the Sixth Day, therefore, the ministering angels asked: ‘Lord of the Universe, why have You not yet created Man?’ He made answer: ‘Man is already created, and lacks only life.’ Then God breathed life into the clod, Adam rose to his feet, and the work of Creation ended.92

  (f) God had given Adam so huge a frame that when he lay down it stretched from one end of Earth to the other; and when he stood up, his head was level with the Divine Throne. Moreover, he was of such indescribable beauty that though, later, the fairest of women seemed like apes when compared with Abraham’s wife Sarah, and though Sarah would have seemed like an ape when compared with Eve, yet Eve herself seemed like an ape when compared with Adam, whose heels—let alone his countenance—outshone the sun! Nevertheless, though Adam was made in God’s image, yet he too seemed like an ape when compared with God.93

  (g) All living things approached the radiant Adam in awe, mistaking him for their Creator. But as they prostrated themselves at his feet, he rebuked them saying: ‘Let us come before God’s presence with thanksgiving; let us worship and bow down, kneeling before the Lord our Maker…’ God was gratified, and sent angels to pay Adam homage in Eden. They bowed submissively, roasted his meat and poured his wine. The envious Serpent alone disobeyed; whereupon God expelled him from His presence.94

  Some say that all the ministering angels conceived a hatred for Adam, lest he might become God’s rival, and tried to scorch him with fire; God, however, spread His hand over Adam and made peace between him and them.95

  Elsewhere it is told that Adam’s huge frame and radiant countenance so amazed the angels that they called him ‘Holy One’, and flew trembling back to Heaven. They asked God: ‘Can there be two divine Powers: one here, the other on Earth?’ To calm them, God placed His hand on Adam and reduced his height to a thousand cubits. Later, when Adam disobediently ate from the Tree of Knowledge, God further reduced his stature to a mere hundred cubits.96

  (h) It has been said that God did not shrink Adam’s body, but trimmed innumerable flakes off his flesh. Adam complained: ‘Why do You diminish me?’ God replied: ‘I take only to give again. Gather these trimmings, scatter them far and wide: wherever you cast them, there they shall return to dust, so that your seed may fill the whole Earth.’97

  (i) While Adam lay a prostrate clod, stretched immobile across the world, he could nevertheless watch the work of Creation. God also showed him the Righteous Ones who should descend from him—not in vision, but by pre-creating them for his instruction. These Righteous Ones were dwarfed by Adam’s frame and, as they thronged about him, some clung to his hair, others to his eyes, ears, mouth and nostrils.98

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  1. It is doubtful whether the masculine word Adam (‘man’) and the feminine adama (‘earth’) are etymologically related. However, such a relation is implicit in Genesis II, and accepted by Midrashic and Talmudic commentators. A less tenuous connexion, first suggested by Quintilian (i. v. 34), exists between the Latin homo (‘man’) and humus (‘earth’): modern linguists trace both to the ancient Indo-European root which, in Greek, produced chthon (‘earth’), chamai (‘on the earth’) and epichthonios (‘human’).

  2. The myth of Man’s creation from earth, clay or dust is widely current. In Egypt, either the God Khnum or the God Ptah created man on a potter’s wheel; in Babylonia, either the Goddess Aruru or the God Ea kneaded man from clay. According to a Phocian Greek myth, Prometheus used a certain red clay at Panopeus; what was left there continued for centuries to exude an odour of human flesh.

  3. A halla was the priest’s share in ‘the first of your dough’ (Numbers XV. 17–21); but the rabbis ruled that dough should be subject to the Law only if it amounted to an omer, and that the priest’s share should be one-twelfth of the whole, or one-twenty-fourth if mixed at a bakery rather than a private dwelling (M. Eduyot i. 2; M. Halla ii. 17).

  4. The ancient Hebrews regarded what we call olive-green as the ideal complexion. Thus it is said of Esther, in praise of her beauty, that ‘her skin was greenish like the skin of a myrtle.’ (B. Megilla 13a).

  5. Speculations about Adam’s origin vexed Christians and Moslems who knew no Hebrew. According to the Slavonic Enoch, based on a Greek original, ‘Adam’s name comes from the initials of the four principal winds: Anatole, Dysis, Arctos and Mesembria,’ because his body was made of dust gathered at the cardinal points of the compass. According to the Syriac Cave of Treasures, God’s angels saw His right hand stretched across the world, and watched while He took dust, as little as a grain, from the whole earth, and a drop of water from all the waters of the universe, and a little wind from all the air, and a little warmth from all the fire, and placed these four weak elements together into the hollow of His hand, and thus created Adam. The Moslems relate that the angels Gabriel, Michael, Israfil and Azrail brought dust from the four corners of the world, and with it Allah created the body of Adam; to form his head and heart, however, Allah chose dust from a site at Mecca, where the Holy Ka‘aba later rose. Mecca is the navel of the earth for Moslems; as Mount Moriah was for the Hebrews; and Delphi for the Greeks.

  6. An Arab tradition of Jewish origin agrees that Earth had rebelled against Adam’s creation. When Allah sent first Gabriel and then Michael to fetch the necessary dust, she protested on each occasion: ‘I invoke Allah against you!’ Thereupon he sent the Angel of Death, who swore not to return until he had accomplished the divine will. Earth, fearing his power, let him gather white, black and copper-red dust—hence the different-coloured races of mankind.

  7. That God made Adam perfect, although liable to be misled by a wrong exercise of free will, is the main moral of these myths and glosses. It deprives man of an excuse to sin, and justifies God’s command to Abraham: ‘I am Almighty God, walk before Me and be perfect!’ Nevertheless, the origin of evil continued to puzzle the sages. They invented a myth of Eve’s seduction by Samael, who begot Cain the murderer on her (see 14. a), though Genesis specifically makes Adam father Cain as well as Abel.

  8. Adam’s rebuke to the angels is borrowed from the Ninety-Fifth Psalm.

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  ADAM’S HELPMEETS

  (a) Having decided to give Adam a helpmeet lest he should be alone of his kind, God put him into a deep sleep, removed one of hi
s ribs, formed it into a woman, and closed up the wound. Adam awoke and said: ‘This being shall be named “Woman”, because she has been taken out of man. A man and a woman shall be one flesh.’ The title he gave her was Eve, ‘the Mother of All Living’.99

  (b) Some say that God created man and woman in His own image on the Sixth Day, giving them charge over the world;100 but that Eve did not yet exist. Now, God had set Adam to name every beast, bird and other living thing. When they passed before him in pairs, male and female, Adam—being already like a twenty-year-old man—felt jealous of their loves, and though he tried coupling with each female in turn, found no satisfaction in the act. He therefore cried: ‘Every creature but I has a proper mate!’, and prayed God would remedy this injustice.101

  (c) God then formed Lilith, the first woman, just as He had formed Adam, except that He used filth and sediment instead of pure dust. From Adam’s union with this demoness, and with another like her named Naamah, Tubal Cain’s sister, sprang Asmodeus and innumerable demons that still plague mankind. Many generations later, Lilith and Naamah came to Solomon’s judgement seat, disguised as harlots of Jerusalem.102

  (d) Adam and Lilith never found peace together; for when he wished to lie with her, she took offence at the recumbent posture he demanded. ‘Why must I lie beneath you?’ she asked. ‘I also was made from dust, and am therefore your equal.’ Because Adam tried to compel her obedience by force, Lilith, in a rage, uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air and left him.

  Adam complained to God: ‘I have been deserted by my helpmeet.’ God at once sent the angels Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof to fetch Lilith back. They found her beside the Red Sea, a region abounding in lascivious demons, to whom she bore lilim at the rate of more than one hundred a day. ‘Return to Adam without delay,’ the angels said, ‘or we will drown you!’ Lilith asked: ‘How can I return to Adam and live like an honest housewife, after my stay beside the Red Sea?’ ‘It will be death to refuse!’ they answered. ‘How can I die,’ Lilith asked again, ‘when God has ordered me to take charge of all newborn children: boys up to the eighth day of life, that of circumcision; girls up to the twentieth day. None the less, if ever I see your three names or likenesses displayed in an amulet above a newborn child, I promise to spare it.’ To this they agreed; but God punished Lilith by making one hundred of her demon children perish daily;103 and if she could not destroy a human infant, because of the angelic amulet, she would spitefully turn against her own.104

  (e) Some say that Lilith ruled as queen in Zmargad, and again in Sheba; and was the demoness who destroyed Job’s sons.105 Yet she escaped the curse of death which overtook Adam, since they had parted long before the Fall. Lilith and Naamah not only strangle infants but also seduce dreaming men, any one of whom, sleeping alone, may become their victim.106

  (f) Undismayed by His failure to give Adam a suitable helpmeet, God tried again, and let him watch while he built up a woman’s anatomy: using bones, tissues, muscles, blood and glandular secretions, then covering the whole with skin and adding tufts of hair in places. The sight caused Adam such disgust that even when this woman, the First Eve, stood there in her full beauty, he felt an invincible repugnance. God knew that He had failed once more, and took the First Eve away. Where she went, nobody knows for certain.107

  (g) God tried a third time, and acted more circumspectly. Having taken a rib from Adam’s side in his sleep, He formed it into a woman; then plaited her hair and adorned her, like a bride, with twenty-four pieces of jewellery, before waking him. Adam was entranced.108

  (h) Some say that God created Eve not from Adam’s rib, but from a tail ending in a sting which had been part of his body. God cut this off, and the stump—now a useless coccyx—is still carried by Adam’s descendants.109

  (i) Others say that God’s original thought had been to create two human beings, male and female; but instead He designed a single one with a male face looking forward, and a female face looking back. Again He changed His mind, removed Adam’s backward-looking face, and built a woman’s body for it.110

  (j) Still others hold that Adam was originally created as an androgyne of male and female bodies joined back to back. Since this posture made locomotion difficult, and conversation awkward, God divided the androgyne and gave each half a new rear. These separate beings He placed in Eden, forbidding them to couple.111

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  1. The tradition that man’s first sexual intercourse was with animals, not women, may be due to the widely spread practice of bestiality among herdsmen of the Middle East, which is still condoned by custom, although figuring three times in the Pentateuch as a capital crime. In the Akkadian Gilgamesh Epic, Enkidu is said to have lived with gazelles and jostled other wild beasts at the watering place, until civilized by Aruru’s priestess. Having enjoyed her embraces for six days and seven nights, he wished to rejoin the wild beasts but, to his surprise, they fled from him. Enkidu then knew that he had gained understanding, and the priestess said: ‘Thou art wise, Enkidu, like unto a god!’

  2. Primeval man was held by the Babylonians to have been androgynous. Thus the Gilgamesh Epic gives Enkidu androgynous features: ‘the hair of his head like a woman’s, with locks that sprout like those of Nisaba, the Grain-goddess.’ The Hebrew tradition evidently derives from Greek sources, because both terms used in a Tannaitic midrash to describe the bisexual Adam are Greek: androgynos, ‘man-woman’, and diprosopon, ‘two-faced’. Philo of Alexandria, the Hellenistic philosopher and commentator on the Bible, contemporary with Jesus, held that man was at first bisexual; so did the Gnostics. This belief is clearly borrowed from Plato. Yet the myth of two bodies placed back to back may well have been founded on observation of Siamese twins, which are sometimes joined in this awkward manner. The two-faced Adam appears to be a fancy derived from coins or statues of Janus, the Roman New Year god.

  3. Divergences between the Creation myths of Genesis I and II, which allow Lilith to be presumed as Adam’s first mate, result from a careless weaving together of an early Judaean and a late priestly tradition. The older version contains the rib incident. Lilith typifies the Anath-worshipping Canaanite women, who were permitted pre-nuptial promiscuity. Time after time the prophets denounced Israelite women for following Canaanite practices; at first, apparently, with the priests’ approval—since their habit of dedicating to God the fees thus earned is expressly forbidden in Deuteronomy XXIII. 18. Lilith’s flight to the Red Sea recalls the ancient Hebrew view that water attracts demons. ‘Tortured and rebellious demons’ also found safe harbourage in Egypt. Thus Asmodeus, who had strangled Sarah’s first six husbands, fled ‘to the uttermost parts of Egypt’ (Tobit VIII. 3), when Tobias burned the heart and liver of a fish on their wedding night.

  4. Lilith’s bargain with the angels has its ritual counterpart in an apotropaic rite once performed in many Jewish communities. To protect the newborn child against Lilith—and especially a male, until he could be permanently safeguarded by circumcision—a ring was drawn with natron, or charcoal, on the wall of the birthroom, and inside it were written the words: ‘Adam and Eve. Out, Lilith!’ Also the names Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof (meanings uncertain) were inscribed on the door. If Lilith nevertheless succeeded in approaching the child and fondling him, he would laugh in his sleep. To avert danger, it was held wise to strike the sleeping child’s lips with one finger—whereupon Lilith would vanish.

  5. ‘Lilith’ is usually derived from the Babylonian-Assyrian word lilitu, ‘a female demon, or wind-spirit’—one of a triad mentioned in Babylonian spells. But she appears earlier as ‘Lillake’ on a 2000 B.C. Sumerian tablet from Ur containing the tale of Gilgamesh and the Willow Tree. There she is a demoness dwelling in the trunk of a willow-tree tended by the Goddess Inanna (Anath) on the banks of the Euphrates. Popular Hebrew etymology seems to have derived ‘Lilith’ from layil, ‘night’; and she therefore often appears as a hairy night-monster, as she also does in Arabian folklore. Solomon suspected the Queen of Sheba of being Li
lith, because she had hairy legs. His judgement on the two harlots is recorded in 1 Kings III. 16 ff. According to Isaiah XXXIV. 14–15, Lilith dwells among the desolate ruins in the Edomite Desert where satyrs (se‘ir), reems, pelicans, owls, jackals, ostriches, arrow-snakes and kites keep her company.

  6. Lilith’s children are called lilim. In the Targum Yerushalmi, the priestly blessing of Numbers VI. 26 becomes: ‘The Lord bless thee in all thy doings, and preserve thee from the Lilim!’ The fourth-century A.D. commentator Hieronymus identified Lilith with the Greek Lamia, a Libyan queen deserted by Zeus, whom his wife Hera robbed of her children. She took revenge by robbing other women of theirs.

  7. The Lamiae, who seduced sleeping men, sucked their blood and ate their flesh, as Lilith and her fellow-demonesses did, were also known as Empusae, ‘forcers-in’; or Mormolyceia, ‘frightening wolves’; and described as ‘Children of Hecate’. A Hellenistic relief shows a naked Lamia straddling a traveller asleep on his back. It is characteristic of civilizations where women are treated as chattels that they must adopt the recumbent posture during intercourse, which Lilith refused. That Greek witches who worshipped Hecate favoured the superior posture, we know from Apuleius; and it occurs in early Sumerian representations of the sexual act, though not in the Hittite. Malinowski writes that Melanesian girls ridicule what they call ‘the missionary position’, which demands that they should lie passive and recumbent.

  8. Naamah, ‘pleasant’, is explained as meaning that ‘the demoness sang pleasant songs to idols’. Zmargad suggest smaragdos, the semi-precious aquamarine; and may therefore be her submarine dwelling. A demon named Smaragos occurs in the Homeric Epigrams.