Hebrew Myths Read Online Free PDF

upper chambers. Thus He madegrass grow as fodder for cattle; also corn and grapes for the nourishment of man; and the great cedars of Lebanon for shade. He ordered the Moon to mark the seasons; and the Sun to divide day from night and summer from winter; and the stars to limit the blackness of night. He filled the earth with beasts, birds and creeping things; and the sea with fishes, sea-beasts and monsters. He let wild beasts roam about after dark; but once the Sun arose they must return to their lairs. 6
    The Morning Stars, as they watched, burst into a song of praise; and all the sons of God shouted for joy. 7
    (
e
) Having thus completed the work of Creation, God withdrew to a sanctuary on Mount Paran in the Land of Teman. Whenever He leaves this dwelling place, Earth trembles and mountains smoke. 8
    ***
    1.
This third account of the Creation, built up from Biblical references elsewhere than in
Genesis
, recalls not only Babylonian, but Ugaritic and Canaanite, cosmogonies; and notably expands the brief reference to Tohu, Bohu and the Deep. Such a Creator as El, Marduk, Baal, or Jehovah, must first struggle against water—personified by the Prophets as Leviathan, Rahab, or the Great Dragon, not only because the Creatrix whom he displaces is a goddess of Fertility, and therefore of water, but because the matriarchate can be portrayed in myth as a chaotic commingling of the two sexes which delays the establishment of patriarchal social order—like rain pouring down into the sea, which delays the appearance of dry land. Thus male and female principles must first be decently separated, as when the Egyptian cosmocrator Shu lifted the Sky-goddess Nut from her embrace of the Earth-god Geb; or when Yahweh Elohim tore the Upper Male Waters from their embrace of the Lower Female Waters (see 4.
e
). The Babylonian Marduk, when slicing Tiamat in two, was really parting her from Apsu, God of the Upper Waters.
    2
. In Ugaritic mythology, Baal fixes the sea bed as the abode of the defeated water, which is treated as both a deity and an element:
    O fisherman…
    Take a large seine in thy two hands,
    Cast it into El’s beloved Yamm,
    Into the Sea of El, the Benign,
    Into the Deep of El…
    3.
What ‘Tohu’ and ‘Bohu’ originally meant is disputed. But add the suffix
m
to Tohu (
thw
) and it becomes Tehom (
thwm
), the Biblical name for a primitive sea-monster. Tehom, in the plural, becomes Tehomot (
thwmwt
). With the same suffixes, Bohu becomes Behom and Behomot (
bhwmwt
), a variant form of Job’s Behemoth, the dry-land counterpart of the sea-monster Leviathan. Leviathan cannot be easily distinguished from Rahab, Tannin, Nahash or any other mythical creatures that personify water. The story underlying
Genesis
I. 2 may therefore be that the world in its primeval state consisted of a sea-monster Tohu and a land-monster Bohu. If so, Tohu’s identity with Tehomot, and Bohu’s with Behemoth (see 6.
n–q
), has been suppressed for doctrinal reasons (see 1. 13,
16
)—Tohu and Bohu being now read as unpersonified states of emptiness or chaos; and God being made responsible for the subsequent creation of Tehomot (or Leviathan) and Behemoth.
    4.
The Babylonian sea-monster corresponding with the Hebrew Tehomot appears as Tiamat, Tamtu, Tamdu and Taawatu; and in Damascius’s
First Principles
as Tauthe. Thus the root is
taw
, which stands in the same relation to Tiamat as Tohu does to Tehom and Tehomot. Moreover, that
tehom
never takes the definite article in Hebrew proves it to have once been a proper name, like
Tiamat.
Tehomot, then, is the Hebrew equivalent of Mother Tiamat, beloved by the God Apsu, whose name developed from the older Sumerian Abzu; and Abzu was the imaginary sweet-water abyss from which Enki, God of Wisdom, emerged. Rahab (‘haughtiness’) is a synonym of Tehomot; in
Job
xxvI. 12 occur the parallel lines:
    By His power He threatened the Sea,
    And by His skill He shattered Rahab.
    5.
The hovering of the Spirit of