Hebrew Myths Read Online Free PDF Page B

God over the waste of waters in
Genesis
I. 2 suggests a bird, and in an early Biblical poem God is compared to an ‘eagle hovering over her young’ (
Deuteronomy
XXXII. 11). But the word
ruah
, usually translated as ‘spirit’, originally means ‘wind’, which recalls the Phoenician creation myth quoted by Philo of Byblus: the prime chaos was acted upon by Wind which became enamoured of its own elements. Another Byblian cosmogonist makes Baou, the female principle, impregnated by this wind. The Goddess Baou, wife to the Wind-god Colpia, was also identified with the Greek Goddess Nyx (‘Night’), whom Hesiodmakes the Mother of All Things. In Greece she was Eurynome, who took the Serpent Ophioneus for a lover (see 1. 10).
    6.
The heretical Ophites of the first century A.D. believed that the world had been generated by a serpent. The Brazen Serpent made, according to Hebrew tradition, by Moses at God’s command (
Numbers
XXI. 8–9) and revered in the Temple Sanctuary until the reforming King Hezekiah destroyed it (2
Kings
XVIII. 4), suggests that Yahweh had at one time been identified with a Serpent-god—as Zeus was in Orphic art. Memory of Yahweh as a serpent survived in a late midrash according to which, when God attacked Moses (
Exodus
IV. 24 ff) in a desert lodging place in the dead of night, He assumed the shape of a huge serpent and swallowed Moses as far as his loins. The custom at Jerusalem of killing the sacrificial victims on the north side of the altar (
Leviticus
I. 11; M. Zebahim V. 1–5) points to an early North-Wind cult, like that at Athens. In the original myth, presumably, the Great Mother rose from Chaos; the wind of her advent became a serpent and impregnated her; she thereupon became a bird (dove or eagle) and laid the world-egg—which the serpent coiled about and hatched.
    7.
According to a Galilean psalm (LXXXIX), God created Heaven and Earth, north and south, Tabor and Hermon, only after subduing Rahab and scattering His other enemies. And according to
Job
IX. 8–13, when He stretched out the Heavens and trod upon the sea-waves, the ‘helpers of Rahab’ stooped beneath Him. These helpers suggest Tiamat’s allies in her struggle against Marduk, when he ‘subdued’ her with a sacred imprecation.
    8.
Biblical allusions to Leviathan as a many-headed sea-monster, or as a ‘fleeing’ serpent (
nahash bariah
), or ‘crooked’ serpent (
nahash aqalaton
), recall the Ugaritic texts: ‘If you smite Lotan… the crooked serpent, the mighty one with seven heads…’ and: ‘Baal will run through with his spear, even as he struck Lotan, the crooked serpent with seven heads.’ The language approximates Biblical Hebrew: Leviathan (
lwytn
) appears as
lot an; nhsh brh
as
bthn
(= Hebrew
pthn
, ‘serpent’)
brh;
and
nhsh ‘qltwn
, as
bthn ‘qltn
in Ugaritic (
ANET
138b).
    9.
Tiamat’s mate Apsu, a personification of the Upper Waters, has been correlated (by Gunkel and others) with the Hebrew term
ephes
, meaning ‘extremity, nothingness’. The word usually appears in dual form:
aphsayim
or
aphse eres
, ‘the ends of the earth’ (
Deuteronomy
XXXIII. 17;
Micah
V. 3;
Psalm
II. 8; etc.). Its watery connotation survives in a Biblical prophecy (
Zechariah
IX. 10): ‘His dominion shall be from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth,’ where poetic convention requires that ‘the ends of the earth’ should also mean ‘river’, presumably the Ocean Stream. Similarly, in
Proverbs
XXX. 4,
aphsayim
corresponds with ‘waters’:
    Who hath bound the waters in His garment?
    Who hath established all the
aphsayim
of the earth?
    That the Creator holds the cosmic elements in his fist, or hands, is a favourite theme of Near Eastern myth. God’s victory over
ephes
or
aphsayim
has been recorded in
Psalm
LXVII. 8 and 1
Samuel
II. 10. Isaiah (XLV. 22), after declaring that God alone created the earth, addresses the
aphsayim
in His name: ‘Look unto me and be saved, all ye
aphsayim
of the