Reading Genesis, page 3
In the myths of surrounding cultures we are told that the gods have houses, that there is a non-earthly theater for the acting out of their desires and jealousies and quarrels, triumphs and defeats. Scripture returns repeatedly to insist that God is not like this, that is, that this conception of the divine is in error. When Solomon dedicates the famous temple in Jerusalem, when he has “built the house for the name of the LORD God,” he prays, “O LORD God of Israel, there is no God like thee in the heaven, nor in the earth; which keepest covenant, and shewest mercy unto thy servants … But will God in very deed dwell with man on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built.” In 2 Corinthians, Paul speaks of one “caught up to the third heaven.” This image of utter transcendence is sustained throughout the Scriptures, just at the limit of what can be apprehended and uttered, granting the astonishing human privilege of knowing about these things at all.
Humankind are very marginal in the Enuma Elish, servants of the gods in the sense that they perform the labor involved in building their temples and feeding them. The second narrative in Genesis with its anthropomorphisms seems meant to invite comparison with such myths. It says no, in fact it is the Lord who has created a habitation for humankind, and it is He who provides food for them. Humankind are the center of creation. They have no competitors for God’s attention. He is present with them in what must be a desire to share the pleasures that are intrinsic to Creation, for example, the evening and the morning. Their disobedience is a failure of trust in His benevolence toward them.
The Genesis narrative as a whole can be thought of as a counterstatement of this kind, retelling the Creation in terms that reject in essential points the ancient Near Eastern characterization of the divine, of humankind, and of Creation itself. We know that Babylon was a sophisticated culture, and we also know that in the modern period its myths have been understood as tending to support a project of demystification of the biblical texts that is invested in seeing them all, pagan and Hebrew, as primitive. So their myths deserve to be looked at again. For our purposes it is sufficient to say that these myths swept the civilizations of the ancient Near East and engaged the attention of Hebrew mythopoesis.
The biblical way of telling the story of Creation differs from ambient narratives precisely at the points of their likeness. Similar terms are adopted for the purposes of argument, God or gods, El or Elohim being important instances of this. Imagine proponents of different forms of government all using the terms justice or legitimacy. At these points the most important disagreement would occur. It seems appropriate to find a pattern of controversy focused on shared themes or images. This would allow for the possibility that the narratives of Babylonian myth were also philosophic, in Josephus’s sense of the word, existing somewhere between truth and parable, containing assertions about the nature of things that also render felt reality. The great rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, are lively and violent, humankind can be swept away as if by malice or whim. The world was created by gods who depend on it, sometimes overwhelm it on slight pretexts but otherwise care little about it. The first and second Creation narratives in Genesis, and the Flood, are the three passages most frequently seen as sharing in the mythic landscape of Canaanite or Babylonian culture.
The biblical narratives establish their unlikeness most powerfully in their reticence. What came before that first moment? If we imagine that time itself arose from that first event, which is perfectly possible by scientific standards of possibility, then we must also imagine that cause and effect, as we have understood them, would not exist in time’s absence. Time is the medium of change, the medium of the transactions among things and conditions. God is active in time and is beyond time, aloof from it. The biblical vision of Creation is structured around there being no preexisting reality of any kind, an absolute difference from other myth. The Bible ponders the anomaly of time, for example in Psalm 90, which is called “a prayer of Moses.”
Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting thou art God.
…
For a thousand years in thy sight
are but as yesterday when it is past,
and as a watch in the night.
God inhabits and is an eternal present, while the temporal world changes and the generations emerge and perish in their turn. Time is duration, say, the number of hours or years a hope lingers until it is fulfilled or abandoned. Such an interval can seem endless, though it occurs entirely as present experience, as the now that is gone as the word now is said. However inescapably a moment might come burdened with shock or grief or illumination, it is itself vanishingly, indefinably slight. Duration, which cannot be escaped, is the sum of unquantifiable, boundaryless moments that cannot be grasped. It is brilliant to compare time in the view of eternity with “yesterday when it is past.” The immediacy that is our experience is dispelled from it as present becomes past, becomes both irrecoverable and determining, another thing entirely. Moses’s one hundred twenty years of life and forty years of desert wandering end with a prayer or a plea: “Establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.” His work has had profound consequence for hundreds of generations. This great fact is another instruction in the complexity and mystery of time.
In the second Creation narrative, Genesis 2:4 to 3:24, the story uses mythic elements very selectively. God “appears,” but only to create and to enjoy His creation—the primordial orchard, the evening air, the beautiful moment. What is behind or beyond Creation is as exempt from fantasy or speculation in the second narrative as in the first. The second narrative is usually treated as if it were a borrowing from the ambient lore about the origins of things, especially from the Babylonian epic, Enuma Elish. God’s “presence” here is evoked in human-seeming terms, so the fact that He is not actually “seen” can be overlooked. He is anthropomorphic in the sense that He enjoys a pleasure He has prepared for His man and woman and all their descendants to enjoy as well, an evening breeze, a walk in a garden. This can be read as His unique identification with His creatures rather than as being mythic in any usual sense. His presence changes nothing and implies nothing in the way of a more primary or glorious reality or mode of being. Creation in its integrity is the whole ground of the narrative.
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The fact that there is a Babylonian account of the origins of things, a “Babylonian Genesis,” has been oddly important to Old Testament scholarship. In theory, I suppose, these narratives could be more dissimilar, though in fact this is hard to imagine. When the existence of this epic broke upon the world—very dramatically, considering that it had been known of since antiquity—the tablets on which it was written were often fragmented and translation was difficult, sometimes speculative. This may have allowed early interpreters to supplement their reading with the expectation of influence, borrowing.
It is true that there is a deluge with human survivors in the Epic of Gilgamesh. There is also a mythic Greek flood, survived by Deucalion and Pyrrha. An all-overwhelming deluge is a powerful image. If the near obliteration of humankind brought on by the gods was a subject of interest to the ancients, then its recurrence indicates something deeper than borrowing.
There are details the Noah story has taken from the Babylonian tale of the Flood. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a man named Utnapishtim finds favor with the god Ea, who warns him to build a boat and stock it with all living things. Then a flood overwhelms the earth. Like Noah, in order to know when he can leave the boat, Utnapishtim releases birds. If they return to him the waters have not begun to recede. There is no sign of embarrassment in the appropriation by Hebrew Scripture of these story elements, which would have been widely known throughout the ancient Near Eastern world. The pretty business of the bird looking for a place to rest its foot, returning to Noah’s hand with a sprig in its beak in the more expansive biblical version, must have been too pleasing to omit, even while it made its literary indebtedness entirely obvious. This being true, the transformation in the meaning of the story from one telling to the next, Babylonian to Hebrew, is a study in how biblical thought can suffuse material originally foreign to it.
The Flood narrative in the Epic of Gilgamesh is framed by the story of a young king to whom Marduk gives an ideal friend, Enkidu, a wild man, his equal in strength. The two share adventures, struggle together with mythic beasts. Then Enkidu dies. Gilgamesh is heartbroken, and he is terrified of death despite somewhat consoling mentions in the text of a netherworld where something like life goes on. He hears that there is one man who has not died, Utnapishtim the Far Distant. Gilgamesh finds him and asks him how he became immortal. Though immortality seems to have little to recommend it, Utnapishtim tells him how he received it, having survived a great flood.
Utnapishtim’s patron god, Ea, knows that the other gods have all decided to exterminate humankind. He reveals the plan to his favorite, Utnapishtim—not directly but by speaking to a wall, so as not to have violated his pact with the other gods. On his overheard instructions, the man builds an ark, takes his wife, the creatures, and artisans as well, and waits out the flood. Afterward, when he is found to have survived, the gods are furious.
In Genesis there are no artisans on board the ark, only Noah and his family. The biblical Flood is a second Creation, a restoring of the world on somewhat altered terms. It is like the first Creation in that there is only one human family. Noah is a second Adam. The accounts that follow of Noah’s descendants spreading into the regions of the world as they knew it make the point again, and so does the story of Babel, in which differences of language scatter one people. The familial unity of humankind could not have been an issue for the Babylonians in the same way because in their epics people can be created simply as needed, for example, Enkidu, as well as the Fish-man, the Scorpion-man, and other half-human entities made to be weapons in the war of the gods. The Hebrews surely had as strong a consciousness of themselves as a group as any other ancient people. Their striking collective history and their belief in a privileged knowledge of God would have made this inevitable. But the implied genealogies that structure the primordial tales in Genesis preclude the idea that differences between groups could ever be of a qualitative kind, deeper than differences within a family. This is extraordinarily important to their ethics and law, and also to the meaningfulness of their exploration of the nature of humankind. Paul tells the Athenians that God “made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.”
Utnapishtim and his wife have no descendants, and yet the world of Gilgamesh has cities. Where do the people come from? The same question arises in the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Cain is afraid someone will kill him because he is a murderer—when he, with his father and mother, would have been the only people on earth. My theory about the composition of Genesis allows me to say that the story is about something important enough to justify a departure from a standard of realism that is impressive over against comparable Babylonian or Egyptian or Greek stories. For them, of course, the fabulous is at the center of the telling. In its literary context, the this-worldliness of Genesis feels like rigor. One God, and Adam’s children. These are its whole subject.
The question in the Epic of Gilgamesh is whether death is truly universal and inevitable, even for a hero king who is only one-third human. The ending is slightly equivocal—Utnapishtim tells him to find a particular water plant that will make him immortal, but a serpent steals it away from him. So the question is not really answered. It is a little disappointing that the resolution, such as it is, is not offered at the same level of seriousness as the problem. In any case, the single-minded intention of the gods to destroy all of humanity and their anger at finding that there were these few survivors is starkly different from the biblical version. The gods are reminded by the destruction they have brought down on humanity that they themselves can starve, that they are actually dependent on people to feed them. On these terms they accept a human presence.
God solicitously preserves a human family. In Genesis there is a reconciliation between God and humanity after the Flood, or an accommodation of God’s expectations to the reality of human nature. God makes a covenant with Creation never again to destroy it by flood, and He gives the survivors a few essential laws. This is the second “beginning,” this time setting the terms on which the human race will continue and will exist in relation to God, by His grace. This is an entire departure from the Babylonian narrative.
In Genesis, the Flood is a judgment brought on by human evil. Here divine expectation has nothing to do with dependency and everything to do with human moral behavior, notably our propensity to violence. The Flood is a great instance of an “event” in narrative functioning as a term in a controversy. Flooding was a factor in Mesopotamian life but not in Canaan or Israel. Granting the occasional fact of catastrophe in one form or another and assuming the reality of deities that would unleash it, what would their motives be? For the Babylonians they might have been a tetchy indifference coupled with a lack of foresight. The gods would have learned restraint from their own terror, their own potential mortality. The God of Genesis is moved by human evil. The text, as usual, does not draw particular attention to the nature of the sin, though violence is mentioned several times. Human beings are making earth a hell so He acts to put an end to it all, saving only Noah, “a just man and perfect in his generations,” with his family and the male and female of all the creatures.
These two stories differ crucially at their points of similarity. The Deluge might well arise as an instance of the problem of evil among people who experienced catastrophic flooding. The tale was popular and influential, and philosophically minded Hebrews might have said: Granted such things do happen. Famine, pestilence, and invasion destroy great cities indiscriminately. The Deluge is a good metaphor for the world returned all at once to a primal state. So, granting the Deluge for purposes of argument, why would such a thing happen? Modern readers struggle with this narrative, asking, as if it were a real event, whether a good God would wipe away almost His whole creation, when surely the idea of divine goodness could not include such an act. If the ancients had been writing fiction, they might well have omitted the episode entirely and many more like it. But in fact they were trying to conceptualize something true, that disasters which obliterate life as if it had no value are a factor in human experience. In the myths of Babylon, the gods were volatile, impulsive, but also needy, therefore constrained and able to be placated. Evil in the large sense is always an aspect of their nature. This is to read back from experience, to attribute disaster to the great forces that had created reality, and that animated all its properties, both wonderful and terrible, in order to form some conception of these makers.
In adapting the narrative of the Deluge for its purposes, the biblical tradition compounded every difficulty with its loyalty to the conception of God as one, as wholly good, and as engaged by and committed to humankind. At the same time, the evil that, according to Genesis, brought on the Deluge was found in “the thoughts of his [man’s] heart.” Humankind is a moral actor in this drama, not simply a victim. It is in the nature of these primordial stories that they never really end. They define the terms of everything that follows. It is not just anyone who disgraces himself when the world is first being restored, but righteous Noah, a second Adam, the progenitor of us all, human like us all.
After the Flood come the earliest laws, a distinctively Hebrew response to the problem of evil and to the possibility of human righteousness in a reality that clearly does not enforce virtuous or even rational behavior. Utnapishtim the Far Distant cannot share immortality with Gilgamesh. This is to say, we all die. Noah brings transgression into the restored world. This is to say, we all sin. But God has made a covenant with Noah and with the whole Creation, which He will honor despite all. This is the climax in the Hebrew telling of the tale. The goodness of God is affirmed in His forbearance and loyalty. The value of humankind is affirmed by them as well. “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” This great question, from a psalm of David, is a profound reversal on the problem seemingly posed by the Deluge. It reverberates through the whole great narrative. Turbulence is introduced into the Genesis Creation by human beings, and it is utterly meaningful.
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This world is suited to human enjoyment—“out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight”—in anticipation of human pleasure, which the Lord presumably shares. This is an extremely elegant detail. The beauty of the trees is noted before the fact that they yield food. It is a rich goodness that the Lord intended and created for our experience. Two things are signified, that God as the creator of beauty intends it for us to see and enjoy, and that He gives us the gifts of apprehension this pleasure requires, which is nothing less than a sharing of His mind with us in this important particular. That God Himself in some celestial sense has and enjoys this kind of perception gives us an insight into the meaning of our being made in His image. The world is imbued with these reminders that there is a beautiful intention and assurance expressed in every perception we have of loveliness in the natural world.
I enlarge on this detail about the trees because it contains statements about the nature of God and humankind and Creation that are radically unlike those offered in Babylonian myth. Those gods can be disturbingly human in their emotions, which cluster around self-aggrandizement, but they are not of a kind to let us know that our pleasure has been anticipated in the art of Creation. In this deep sense we are made to be companions with God.
