Parallel Myths (13 page)
Authors: J.F. Bierlein
Second Account of Creation (Genesis 2:5—25)
A
t the time when Yahweh God made earth and heaven there was as yet no wild bush on the earth nor had any wild plant yet sprung up, for Yahweh God had not sent rain on the earth, nor was there any man to till the soil. However, a flood was rising from the earth and watering all the surface of the soil. Yahweh fashioned a man out of the dust from the soil. Then he breathed into his nostrils a breath of life and thus man became a living being.Yahweh God planted a garden in Eden, which is in the east, and there he put the man he had fashioned. Yahweh God caused to spring up from the soil every kind of tree, enticing to look at and good to eat, with the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the middle of the garden. A river flowed from Eden to water the garden, and from there it divided to make four streams. The first is named the Pishon, and this encircles the whole land of Havilah where there is gold. The gold of this land is pure; bdellum [an aromatic resin] and onyx stone are found there. The second river is the Gihon, and this encircles the whole land of Cush. The third river is named the Tigris, and this flows to the east of Ashur [Assyria]. The fourth river is the Euphrates.
Yahweh God took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and take care of it. Then Yahweh God gave the man this admonition, “You may eat indeed of all the trees in the garden. Nevertheless of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you are not to eat, for on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die.”
Yahweh God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helpmate.” So from the soil Yahweh God fashioned all the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven. These he brought to the man to see what he could call them; each one was to bear the name the man would give it. The man
gave names to all the cattle, all the birds of heaven and all the wild beasts. But no helpmate suitable for man was found for him. So Yahweh God made the man fall into a deep sleep. And while he slept, he took one of the ribs and enclosed it in flesh. Yahweh God built the rib he had taken from the man into a woman, and brought her to the man. The man exclaimed:This at last is bone from my bones
and flesh from my flesh;
This is to be called woman
for this was taken from man.
*This is why a man leaves his father and mother and joins himself to his wife and they become one body.
NOTE
: During the postbiblical period, Jewish rabbis debated and analyzed the fine points of the Old Testament, trying to clear up difficulties. The result of this process was the Talmud, the vast repository of commentary, wisdom, theology, and folklore that remains a priceless heritage of Judaism.
W
hen God decided to create the world, the twenty-two letters of the [Hebrew] alphabet came into His divine presence; each one of them wanted to be the first letter of the first word spoken by God in the creation of the world. But it was the letter Beth that was chosen, as the first word out of the mouth of God was
baruch
, meaning “blessed.” It was with a blessing that God began his work.
On the first day, God made the heavens and the earth, light and darkness, day and night. He took a stone and threw it into the great void, where it became the core of the earth. On the second day, God created the angels; on the third day he made the plants, including the giant cedars of Lebanon. That day he also created iron in the
earth for axes to cut the cedars down, lest they grow too tall and arrogant. The Lord created Gan Eden, the Paradise where Adam and Eve would dwell, and which the righteous enjoy when they die. The fourth day, the sun, moon, and stars were created. On the fifth day, the sea creatures were made including Leviathan, as well as the birds, including the legendary Zinn.
It was on the sixth day that God created the beasts, including the giant Behemoth. It was also on the sixth day that God made human beings. God had discussed the creation of humans with the angels, who weren’t too sure that it was a good idea. Some of the angels resented the idea that God would create another sentient being and they complained. God, tired of their impudence, pointed his finger at these angels and they were consumed by fire. God then ordered the angel Gabriel to go and bring soil from the four corners of the world, with which to make man.
When Gabriel began his task, he learned that the earth was reluctant to give up any soil for the creation of humans. The earth knew that mankind would someday ruin the earth and spoil its beauty. Upon hearing this, God himself scooped up the earth and fashioned Adam, the first man.
When God created the body of man, He prepared to join it with the soul, which had been created on the first day. The angels were again concerned that another creature with a soul would exist. Among the most contentious of these angels was Samael [meaning “venom of God”], who was also called Satan. He told God: “You created us, the angels, from your Shekhinah [“Divine Presence”] and now you would place us over a lowly thing made of dirt? You would waste a soul on a piece of mud? You would create a thinking being out of dust?”
God was tired of Samael’s incessant complaining and his arrogance in questioning Him. He then cast Samael and his followers out of heaven into hell.
Out of the dust of the ground gathered from the four corners of the earth, God fashioned Adam [Hebrew:
adamah]
, and into his nostrils breathed the breath of life. Some say that this Adam was like a twenty-year-old man.
Other Rabbis say that Adam looked out over the many animals on earth and noticed that they were all male or female, yet he had no female. So God first created a woman named Lillith out of dust. But Lillith set herself over Adam and balked at the way that he wished to make love, with the man on top. “Why?” She scowled. “Who are you to lord over me? We are both made of dust!” In her arrogance she recited the sacred, unspeakable name of God and disappeared from sight.
After this miserable creature went to live among the demons, God felt sorry for Adam and decided to make him a good woman, Eve. Adam ruled over all the plants and male animals in the east and north of the Garden of Eden, while Eve ruled the female animals in the south and west. Adam and Eve went about naked, except for a band over their shoulders that was inscribed with the sacred name of God.
And Adam and Eve lived in perfect innocence at this time. But Samael and Lillith were busy plotting how to confound these good people.
A
nd God stepped out on space
And he looked around and said:
I’m lonely—
I’ll make me a world.As far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.Then God smiled, And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other
And God said: That’s good!Then God himself stepped down—
And the sun was in his right hand,
And the moon was in his left;
And the stars were clustered about his head,
And the earth was under his feet.
And God walked, and where he trod
His footsteps hollowed the valleys out
And bulged the mountains up.Then he stopped and looked and saw
That the earth was hot and barren.
So God stepped over the edge of the world
And he spat out the seven seas—
He batted his eyes, and the lightning flashed;
He clapped his hands and the thunder rolled—
And the waters came down,
The cooling waters came down.Then the green grass sprouted,
And the little red flowers blossomed,
The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,
And the oak spread out his arms,
The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,
And the rivers ran down to the sea;
And God smiled again
And the rainbow appeared,
And curled itself around his shoulder.Then God raised his arm and he waved his hand
Over the sea and over the land
And he said: Bring forth! Bring forth!
And quicker than God could drop his hand,
Fishes and fowls
And beasts and birds
Swam the rivers and the seas,
Roamed the forests and the woods,
And split the air with their wings,
And God said: That’s good!Then God walked around
And God looked around
On all that he had made.
He looked at the sun,
And he looked at the moon,
And he looked at the little stars;
He looked on his world
With all its living things,
And God said: I’m lonely still.Then God sat down—
On the side of a hill where he could think;
By a deep wide river he sat down;
With his head in his hands,
God thought and thought,
Till he thought: I’ll make me a man!Up from the bed of a river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This great God,
Like a mammy bending over his baby
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till he shaped it in his own image;
Then into it he blew the breath of life
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.—James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938),
African-American poet
The Serpent
The serpent is common in many Creation stories and has been interpreted in a number of interesting ways. The most common, and obvious,
is as a phallic symbol, but this is only one facet of a complex image.
On the theme of the serpent in mythology, Joseph Campbell writes in
The Mash of God: Occidental Mythology:
The wonderful ability of the serpent to slough its skin and so renew its youth has earned for it throughout the world the character of the master of the mystery of rebirth—of which the moon, waxing and waning, sloughing its shadow and again waxing, is the celestial sign. The moon is the lord and measure of the life-creating cycle of the womb, and therewith of birth and equally of death—which two, in sum, are aspects of one state of being. The moon is the lord of tides and of the dew that falls at night to refresh the verdure on which cattle graze. But the serpent, too, is the lord of waters. Dwelling in the earth, among the roots of trees, frequenting springs, marshes and watercourses, it glides with a motion of waves; or it ascends like a liana into branches, there to hang like some fruit of death. The phallic suggestion is immediate, and as swallower, the female organ is also suggested; so that a dual image is rendered, which works implicitly on the sentiments. Likewise a dual association of fire and water attaches to the lightning of its strike, the forced darting of its active tongue, and the lethal burning of its strike. When imagined biting its tail, as the mythological “uroburos,” it suggests the waters that in all archaic cosmologies surround—as well as lie beneath and permeate—the floating circlar island earth.
Isaac Asimov, in his book,
In the Beginning
…, notes that there is a connection between the serpent in the book of Genesis and the dragon in the Babylonian Creation myth.
The serpent contradicts God [when he tells Eve that ‘Ye shall not surely die if she eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge’]. Why?
It seems motiveless, but the mere fact that the serpent does this gives us cause to suspect that it may be the principle of Chaos. In the Babylonian Creation-myth, Tiamat, the personification of Chaos, is described as a dragon, but a dragon is essentially a huge serpent, sometimes shown with wings (indicating perhaps the smoothness with which the serpent can slither here and there) and with fiery breath (indicating the serpent’s poison).
Isaiah refers to all the terms used for Chaos when he promises the victory of God over the destructive forces: “In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Isaiah 27:1).
In later times, when Judea was a province of the Persian Empire, the Jews picked up the notions of the eternal conflict between the principles of Good and Evil and abandoned the notions of a once-and-for-all victory of Good at the start.
Satan came into existence in Jewish thought as an eternal anti-God, striving constantly to undo the work of Creation and restore Chaos; eternal vigilance was required to prevent that. The thought then arose that the serpent was really the embodiment of Satan, a thought presented with unparalleled magnificence in Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
There is, however, nothing in the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden to indicate that. The notion of Satan seems to have been entirely an afterthought.