Chapter 3 — GODS AND HEROES OF THE LEVANT: 1500-500 b.c.

I. The Book of the Lord

The world is full of origin myths, and all are factually false. The world is full, also, of great traditional books tracing the history of man (but focused narrowly on the local group) from the age of mythological beginnings, through periods of increasing plausibility, to a time almost within memory, when the chronicles begin to carry the record, with a show of rational factuality, to the present. Furthermore, just as all primitive mythologies serve to validate the customs, systems of sentiments, and political aims of their respective local groups, so do these great traditional books. On the surface they may appear to have been composed as conscientious history. In depth they reveal themselves to have been conceived as myths: poetic readings of the mystery of life from a certain interested point of view. But to read a poem as a chronicle of fact is — to say the least — to miss the point. To say a little more, it is to prove oneself a dolt. And to add to this, the men who put these books together were not dolts but knew precisely what they were doing — as the evidence of their manner of work reveals at every turn.

The first decisive step toward a reading of the Old Testament as a product, like every other piece of ancient literature, not of God’s literary talent but of man’s, and, as such, not of eternity but of time, and specifically an extremely troubled time, was taken by Wilhelm M. L. de Wette (1780-1849) in his epochal two-volume work, Contributions Introductory to the Old Testament (1806).^{Note 1} There he showed:

1. that the “Book of the Law,” described in II Kings as “found” by the priest Hilkiah in the year 621 b.c., during the repairing of Solomon’s Temple, was the nucleus of the Book of Deuteronomy;
2. that on the basis of this alleged find, all the earlier historical and mythological material of the Old Testament was later completely reworked; and
3. that the books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, which are represented as derived from Moses during the years of the wandering in the desert, actually were the end product of a long development: they were the law book of an already thoroughly orthodox priestly tradition, brought from Babylon to Jerusalem by the priest Ezra, c. 400 b.c., and, by virtue of the power invested in him by the Persian emperor Artaxerxes, ceremoniously established as a book of rules binding for all Jews.^{Note 2}

The biblical text in question reads as follows:

In the eighteenth year of King Josiah [i.e., 621 b.c.], the king sent Shaphan the son of Azaliah, son of Mushullam, the secretary, to the house of the Lord, saying, “Go up to Hilkiah the high priest, that he may reckon the amount of the money which has been brought into the house of the Lord, which the keepers of the household have collected from the people; and let it be given into the hand of the workmen who have the oversight of the house of the Lord; and let them give it to the workmen who are at the house of the Lord, repairing the house, that is, to the carpenters, to the builders, and to the masons, as well as for buying timber and quarried stone to repair the house. But no accounting shall be asked from them for the money which is delivered into their hand, for they deal honestly.”

And Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the secretary, “I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord.” And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan, and he read it. And Shaphan the secretary came to the king, and reported to the king, “Your servants have emptied out the money that was found in the house, and have delivered it into the hand of the workmen who have the oversight of the house of the Lord.” Then Shaphan the secretary told the king, “Hilkiah the priest has given me a book.” And Shaphan read it before the king. And when the kind heard the words of the book of the law, he rent his clothes.

And the king commanded the priest, and Ahikam the son of Shaphan, and Achbor the son of Micaiah, and Shaphan the secretary, and Asaiah the king’s servant, saying, “Go, inquire of the Lord for me, and for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of this book that has been found; for great is the wrath of the Lord that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book, to do all that is written concerning us.”

So Hilkiah the priest, and Ahikam, and Achbor, and Shaphan, and Asaiah went to Huldah the prophetess, the wife of Shallum the son of Tikvah, son of Harhas, keeper of the wardrobe (now she dwelt in Jerusalem in the Second Quarter); and they talked with her. And she said to them, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: ‘Tell the man who sent you to me, Thus says the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon this place and upon its inhabitants, all the words of the book which the king of Judah has read. Because they have forsaken me and have burned incense to other gods, that they might provoke me to anger with all the work of their hands, therefore my wrath will be kindled against this place, and it will not be quenched.’ ”^{Note 3}

It is interesting that, at this juncture of supreme religious crisis, the company was sent neither to a prophet nor to a priest, but to a prophetess to learn the judgment of their god. And still more interesting is the revelation itself, namely, that until this eighteenth year of the reign of Josiah, 621 b.c., no one had even heard of this Book of the Law of Moses, and all had been worshiping false gods. Moreover, the God of Israel now would punish them terribly — as he did, indeed, within thirty-five years, when their holy city was taken, its temple demolished, the people carried into exile, and another people put in their place. But Josiah, the prophetess declared, because of his piety and repentance, having rent his clothes and wept before the Lord, was to be spared the terrible sight: he would die in peace before it occurred.

The company of messengers brought back these words to their king, and when he heard, he undertook a purging of his land that is worth reporting here at length, as the first of an extensive series of such religious exercises throughout the length and breadth of all the great histories of all the great religions that have sprung from this epochal moment in the shaping of the religious spirit of the West.

The king sent [we read], and all the elders of Judah and Jerusalem were gathered to him. And the king went up to the house of the Lord, and with him all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and the priests and the prophets, all the people, both small and great; and he read in their hearing all the words of the book of die covenant which had been found in the house of the Lord. And the king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before the Lord, to walk after the Lord and to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes, with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of his covenant that were written in this book; and all the people joined in the covenant.

And the king commanded Hilkiah, the high priest, and the priests of the second order, and the keepers of the threshold, to bring out of the temple of the Lord all the vessels made for Baal, for Asherah [= Ishtar], and for all the host of heaven; he burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of the Kidron, and carried their ashes to Bethel. And he deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places at the cities of Judah and round about Jerusalem; those also who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, and-the moon, and the constellations, and all the host of the heavens. And he brought out the [image of] Asherah from the house of the Lord, outside Jerusalem, to the brook Kidron, and burned it at the brook Kidron, and beat it to dust and cast the dust of it upon the graves of the common people. And he broke down the houses of the cult prostitutes which were in the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the Asherah. And he brought all the priests out of the cities of Judah, and defiled the high places where the priests had burned incense, from Geba to Beersheba; and he broke down the high places of the gates that were at the entrance of the gate of Joshua the governor of the city, which were on one’s left at the gate of the city. However, the priests of the high places did not come up to the altar of the Lord in Jerusalem, but they ate unleavened bread among their brethren. And he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the sons of Hinnom, that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Moloch. And he removed the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun, at the entrance to the house of the Lord, by the chamber of Nathanmelech the chamberlain, which was in the precincts; and he burned the chariots of the sun with fire. And the altars on the roof of the upper chamber of Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars which Manasseh had made in the two courts of the house of the Lord, he pulled down and broke in pieces, and cast the dust of them into the brook Kidron. And the king defiled the high places that were east of Jerusalem, to the south of the mount of corruption, which Solomon the king of Israel had built for Ashtoreth the abomination of the Sidonians, and for Chemosh the abomination of Moab, and for Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites. And he broke in pieces the pillars, and cut down the Asherim, and filled their places with the bones of men.

Moreover the altar at Bethel, the high place erected by Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, that altar with the high place he pulled down and he broke in pieces its stones, crushing them to dust; also he burned the Asherah. And as Josiah turned, he saw the tombs there on the mount; and he sent and took the bones out of the tombs, and burned them upon the altar, and defiled it, according to the word of the Lord which the man of God proclaimed who had predicted these things. Then he said, “What is yonder monument that I see?” And the men of the city told him, “It is the tomb of the man of God who came from Judah and predicted these things which you have done against the altar at Bethel.” And he said, “Let him be; let no man move his bones.” So they let his bones alone, with the bones of the prophet who came out of Samaria. And all the shrines also of the high places that were in the cities of Samaria, which kings of Israel had made, provoking the Lord to anger, Josiah removed: he did to them according to all that he had done at Bethel. And he slew all the priests of the high places who were there, upon the altars, and burned the bones of men upon them. Then he returned to Jerusalem.

And the king commanded all the people, “Keep the passover to the Lord your God, as it is written in this book of the covenant.” For no such passover had been kept since the days of the judges who judged Israel [five to six hundred years before this date], or during all the days of the kings of Israel or of the kings of Judah [that is to say, for the past three hundred years]; but in the eighteenth year of King Josiah this passover was kept to the Lord in Jerusalem.

Moreover Josiah put away the mediums and the wizards and the teraphim and the idols and all the abominations that were seen in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem, that he might establish the words of the law which were written in the book that Hilkiah the priest found in the house of the Lord. Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the Lord with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might, according to the law of Moses; nor did any like him arise after him. …^{Note 4}

It is hard to imagine how it might have been stated more clearly that until the eighteenth year of the reign of King Josiah of Judah neither kings nor people had paid any attention whatsoever to the law of Moses, which, indeed, they had not even known. They had been devoted to the normal deities of the nuclear Near East, with all the usual cults, which are described clearly enough in this passage to be readily recognized. King Solomon himself, the son of David, had built sanctuaries to the gods and had placed their images in his temple. The convent of the cult prostitutes was in the precincts of the temple, and the stable of horses of the sun-god stood at the entrance. So that no matter what the primitive religion of the Hebrews may have been, or what Moses may have taught, the Hebrews, having settled in Israel and Judah, and having become people not of the desert but of the soil, had assumed the normal customs of that time and paid worship to the normal gods. But in this epochal year of 621 b.c. a priest of the temple (who was the father, by the way, of the future prophet Jeremiah) produced a book purporting to be the book of the laws of Moses (who had died, if he had ever lived, at least six hundred years before), and this book of laws then furnished the platform for a thoroughgoing, devastating revolution — the immediate effects of which endured, however, no longer than the lifetime of King Josiah himself. For, as we read, the following four kings “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.”^{Note 5} And in the year 586 b.c., Nebuzaradan, the captain of the bodyguard, a servant of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. And he burned the house of the Lord, and the king’s house and all the houses of Jerusalem; every great house he burned down. And all the army of the Chaldaeans, who were with the captain of the guard, broke down the walls around Jerusalem. And the rest of the people who were left in the city and the deserters who had deserted to the king of Babylon, together with the rest of the multitude, Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard carried into exile.^{Note 6}

II. The Mythological Age

The orthodox Hebrew schedule of world ages, culminating in the cataclysm of the Babylonian Exile, may be summarized as follows:

1. The Mythological Cycle
   1. The Seven Days of Creation(Gen. 1:1–2:3)
   2. The Garden and the Fall(Gen. 2:4–3:24)
   3. From the Fall to Noah’s Flood(Gen. 4–7)
   4. From the Flood to the Tower of Babel(Gen. 8:1–11:9)
2. The Legendary Cycle
   1. Abraham and the Entry into Egypt(Gen. 11:10-50:26)
   2. The Exodus(Ex. 1:1–15:21)
   3. The Desert Years(Ex. 15 through Deut.)
   4. The Conquest of Canaan(Book of Joshua)
3. The Documentary Cycle
   1. The Conquest of Canaan(Book of Judges)
   2. The United Monarchy: c. 1025–930(I & II Sam., I Kings 1–11)
   3. Israel and Judah: c. 930-721(I Kings 12 to 11 Kings 17)
   4. Judah alone: 721–586(II Kings 18–25)
   5. The Babylonian Exile: 586–538

The basic texts from which the Mythological and Legendary Cycles were constructed are five:

1. The so-called Yahwist (J) Text, representing the mythology of the southern kingdom, Judah, in the ninth century b.c. Here the Creator is Yahweh (always translated “the Lord”) and the mountain of the Law is Sinai.
2. The so-called Elohim (E) Text, representing the mythology of the northern kingdom, Israel, in the eighth century b.c. (as adapted, however, to the Yahwist point of view by an editor, apparently of the seventh century b.c., who brought J and E together). Here the mountain of the Law is Horeb and the Creator, Elohim (intensive plural of the word el, always translated “God”).
3. A ritual code known as the Code of Holiness (H), purporting to have been received by Moses on Sinai, but dating apparently from the seventh century b.c. Preserved in Leviticus 17–26.
4. The ritual code of the Deuteronomists (D), where the mountain of the Law is again Horeb, but the Creator is Yahweh. The nucleus of D was almost certainly the Scroll of the Law of 621 b.c. And finally:
5. ^*For a convenient and thoroughgoing analysis of the elements, dates, and critical theories, cf. W. O. E. Oesterley and Theodore H. Robinson, An Introduction to the Books of the Old Testament (New York: Meridian Books, 1958).The post-Exilic compound of priestly writings known as the Priestly (P) Text, with as nucleus the Law proclaimed in Jerusalem by the priest Ezra, 397 b.c., amplified and reworked until c. 300 b.c. The composite text of the Mythological and Legendary Cycles cannot possibly have been completed earlier than this date.^*

^†All of the following biblical texts are from the Revised Standard Version, with the names Yahweh and Elohim left untranslated, however, to make clear the contrast of the two cycles, J and E.Our first task, therefore, must be to separate, according to these findings, the earlier from later elements of the Mythological Cycle. Here two mythologies are distinguished, one from the Yahwist (J) Text of the ninth century b.c., the other from the Priestly (P) of the fourth. Set apart, they are as follows.^†

YAHWIST (J) CREATION CYCLE: 9th CENTURY b.c.

This version commences at Genesis 2:4b.

On the day that Yahweh made the earth and heavens [it begins], when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up — for Yahweh had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground — then Yahweh formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. And Yahweh planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground Yahweh made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.^{* *}Or possibly, “the tree of the knowledge of all things.” Cf. Rabbi J. H. Hertz, The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (London: Soncino Press, 5721–1961), p. 8, note 9, and p. 10, note 5. A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. … And Yahweh took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And Yahweh commanded the man, saying, “you may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

It is easy to see why the priestly editors of the fourth century b.c. were unwilling to let this charming fairy tale go, even though it differed in every detail from the version of creation in seven days already given in Genesis Chapter 1. We recognize the old Sumerian garden, but with two trees now instead of one, which the man is appointed to guard and tend. He is to be in the role, apparently, of the Gilgamesh-like personage of Figure 4; and we are reminded that Sargon as a gardener was beloved of the goddess Ishtar. Again as in Figure 4, four rivers flow from the garden. And finally, it is to be remarked that one of the chief characteristics of Levantine mythology here represented is that of man created to be God’s slave or servant. In a late Sumerian myth retold in Oriental Mythology it is declared that men were created to relieve the gods of the onerous task of tilling their fields. Men were to do that work for them and provide them with food through sacrifice.^{Note 7} Marduk, too, created man to serve the gods. And here again we have man created to keep a garden.

The next episode describes the creation of the animals, to be helpers fit for man, which is in striking contrast to the famous seven days of Chapter 1, where the animals were created first. Here we read, on the contrary, that, after God had created Adam, “out of the ground Yahweh formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.”

The idyllic scene is reminiscent of the days of Enkidu among the beasts, before he was seduced by the temple prostitute; whereupon the animals departed from him, and the woman, giving him a cloth to cover his nakedness, conducted him to the city of Uruk, where, presently, he died. In the present variant we read that, no fit companion being found for the man among the beasts, Yahweh caused a deep sleep to fall upon him, “and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which Yahweh had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.” After which, as everyone knows, there followed the fall and expulsion from the garden.

The next episode is that of the rivalry of the first couple’s two sons. The elder, Cain, was a tiller of the ground; Abel, the younger, a keeper of sheep. “And in the course of time,” as we read, “Cain brought to Yahweh an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel brought the firstlings of his flock and their fat portions. And Yahweh had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry and his countenance fell.”

Cain slew his brother, and, in punishment, Yahweh cursed him, as he had already cursed his father Adam. “ ‘What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength; you shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.’ ” Yahweh placed a mark upon him and Cain “went away from the presence of Yahweh and dwelt in the land of Nod [= “Wandering”], east of Eden.”^{Note 8}

As a whole, this early Judean myth — which has seared deeply the soul of Western man — is of the general category that I have discussed in Primitive Mythology as common to the planting cultures of the tropics, where numerous counterparts have been collected, from Africa and India, Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Polynesia, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. Typical features of such myths and their associated rites are: 1. the serpent, 2. the woman, 3. a killing of the serpent, of the woman, or of both, 4. the growth of food-bearing plants from the buried head or body of the victim, 5. the coming into existence at that time of death and procreation, and 6. the end, therewith, of the mythological age.

However, there is no Fall, no sense of sin or exile, in the primitive examples. They are affirmative, not critical, of life. Further, as we have already seen in our discussion of the early Mesopotamian seals, during the neolithic and High Bronze Ages the symbolism of the tree was read cosmologically and mystically as the world axis, where all pairs of opposites come together. (See again Figures 1 to 6, Figure 9, Figure 15, and Figure 19.) The ultimate source of the biblical Eden, therefore, cannot have been a mythology of the desert — that is to say, a primitive Hebrew myth — but was the old planting mythology of the peoples of the soil. However, in the biblical retelling, its whole argument has been turned, so to say, one hundred and eighty degrees; to which point, the following innovations are of particular interest.

1. Cain’s murder of Abel: Here the murder motif does not precede, but follows, the end of the mythological age, in contrast to the sequence in all the primitive myths.^{Note 9} Moreover, it has been transformed to render a duplication of the Fall motif. The ground no longer bears to Cain its strength and he is to wander on the face of the earth — which is, of course, just the opposite result to that which the ritual murder of the agricultural myth produced. The myth has been applied, also, to an exaltation of the Hebrews over the older peoples of the land. Cain was an agriculturalist, Abel a keeper of sheep: the people of Canaan were agriculturalists, the Hebrews keepers of sheep. The Hebrew deity therefore prefers the latter, though the other was the elder. In fact, all through the Book of Genesis there is consistently a preference for younger against elder sons: not only Abel against Cain, but also Isaac against Ishmael, Jacob against Esau, and Joseph against Reuben. The lesson is not far to seek. And as though to give it point, there has recently been found an old Sumerian cuneiform text of c. 2050 b.c., bearing the tale of an argument between a farmer and shepherd for the favor of the goddess Inanna — who prefers, of course, the farmer and takes him to be hei spouse. The following is the protest of the shepherd:

“The farmer more than I, the farmer more than I, The farmer, what has he more than I … ?

If he pours me his first date-wine, I pour him my yellow milk …

If he gives me his good bread, I give him my honey-cheese. …

More than I, the farmer, what has he more than I?”

To which the goddess:

“The much-possessing shepherd I shall not marry. …

I, the maid, the farmer I shall marry:

The farmer, who makes plants grow abundantly,

The farmer, who makes the grain grow abundantly. …”^{Note 10}

One millennium later, the patriarchal desert nomads arrived, and all judgments were reversed in heaven, as on earth.

2. The Two Trees: The principle of mythic dissociation, by which God and his world, immortality and mortality, are set apart in the Bible is expressed in a dissociation of the Tree of Knowledge from the Tree of Immortal Life. The latter has become inaccessible to man through a deliberate act of God, whereas in other mythologies, both of Europe and of the Orient, the Tree of Knowledge is itself the Tree of Immortal Life, and, moreover, still accessible to man.

In Oriental Mythology I have discussed a number of variants of the basic Oriental view, which has been generally dismissed by theologians of the West as “pantheistic” — though it is clearly not theistic, since “god” (theos), as a personality, is never its final term. Nor is the prefix “pan-” quite proper either, since the reference of the teaching goes beyond the “all” (pan) of creation. As we read in the Upaniṣads:

It is other, indeed, than the known

And, moreover, above the unknown.^{Note 11}

 

His form is not to be beheld.

No one ever sees him with the eye.^{Note 12}

But then, directly, in the same texts:

Discerning It in every single being, the wise

On departing from this world, are immortal.^{Note 13}

 

The wise who perceive Him as standing within themselves:

They, and no others, know eternal bliss.^{Note 14}

Or, in the language of the Chinese Tao Te Ching:

The ways of men are conditioned by those of earth. The ways of earth, by those of heaven. The ways of heaven, by those of the Tao, and the ways of the Tao by the Self-so. … If one looks for the Tao, there is nothing solid to see; if one listens for it, there is nothing loud enough to hear. … The Tao never does; yet through it all things are done.^{Note 15}

Or again, the Buddhist Japanese verse:

A long thing is the long body of the Buddha;

A short thing is the short body of the Buddha.^{Note 16}

The reason for the Occidental rejection — or one might perhaps better say, fear of comprehension — of this doctrine is that our notion of religion, as based on the recognition of a Creator distinct from his Creation, is fundamentally threatened by any recognition of divinity, not simply as present in the world but as inherent in its substance. For, to quote again the Upaniṣad:

Whoever thus knows, “I am the Imperishable,” becomes this universal: and not even the gods can prevent him from becoming so, for he becomes thereby their very self. Hence, whoever worships another divinity thinking “He is one, and I am another” — he knows not. He is like a sacrificial animal for the gods. But if even one animal is taken away, it is unpleasant. What, then, if many? And so it is not pleasing to the gods that men should know this.^{Note 17}

Nor was it pleasing to Yahweh. Nor is it pleasant to those who worship any god. For, according to this view, not any envisioned deity, but the individual, in his own reality, is that which is the reality of being:

You are the dark-blue bird and the green parrot with red eyes.

You have the lightning as your child. You are the seasons and the seas.

Having no beginning, you abide with all-pervadingness,

Wherefrom all beings are born.^{Note 18}

Moreover, not only the individual, but all things, are epiphanies of this reality, which has entered into all things “even to the tips of the fingernails, as a razor is hidden in the razor case or as fire in the material from which it blazes.”^{Note 19} And as a consequence of this all-affirming, mystically poetic point of view, it has been possible for even the highest spiritual teachings of the Orient to unite directly with the simplest. For what in the simple way of popular devotion is addressed as a god outside of oneself, may honestly and sincerely continue to be so addressed — as a manifest aspect, in reflex, of the Self that is the mystery of oneself.

He holds the handle of the hoe, but his hands are empty.^{Note 20}

According to our Holy Bible, on the other hand, God and his world are not to be identified with each other. God, as Creator, made the world, but is not in any sense the world itself or any object within it, as A is not in any sense B. There can therefore be no question, in either Jewish, Christian, or Islamic orthodoxy, of seeking God and finding God either in the world or in oneself. That is the way of the repudiated natural religions of the remainder of mankind: the foolish sages of the Orient and wicked priests of Sumer and Akkad, Babylon, Egypt, Canaan, and the rest — no less than the witch doctors and shamans of the jungle and the steppes, “who say to a tree, ‘You are my father,’ and to a stone, ‘You gave me birth’” (Jeremiah 2:27); for, as the prophet Jeremiah has declared: “the customs of the peoples are false” (10:3).

In any comprehensive view of the great and small mythological systems out of which the beliefs of mankind have been drawn, the biblical idea of God must be clearly set apart, as representing a principle nowhere else exclusively affirmed; namely, of the absolute transcendence of divinity. In the sacred books of the Orient, the ultimate mystery of being is said to be transcendent, in the sense that it “transcends” (lies above or beyond) human knowledge, thought, sight, and speech. However, since it is explicitly identified with the mystery of our own being, and of all being whatsoever, it is declared to be immanent, as well: in fact, that is the main point of most Oriental, as well as of most pagan, primitive, and mystical initiations. And it seems to me to be the point, also, of Yahweh’s fear lest man, in the words of the Upaniṣad, should come to know “I am the Imperishable!” and himself thus become God’s very self. “Behold, the man has become like one of us,” Yahweh declared; “and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever …” It is the same mythology, but transformed to other values; namely, toil on earth, not the realization of bliss.

3. Sin; the Forbidden Fruit: “Once,” said the Indian saint RamaKṛṣṇa to an English-educated visitor who had asked how God could be said to dwell in a sinner, “once a man gave me a copy of the Bible. A part of it was read to me, full of that one thing — sin and sin! One must have such faith that one can say: ‘I have uttered the name of God; I have repeated the name of Rama or Hari; how can I be a sinner?’ One must have faith in the glory of God’s name.”^{Note 21} — Which may or may not be a bit too easy; but it illustrates the idea of the force of divinity within, which requires only the thought and love of God to be effectively awakened, as compared with that of an absolute distinction in being between Creature and Creator, which can be bridged, and even then but precariously, only by man’s obedience to a particular, quite specific, schedule of announced rules.

In the case of Adam and Eve the announced rule was of a type very popular in fairy tales, known to folklore students as the One Forbidden Thing; for instance, the One Forbidden Place (forbidden chamber, forbidden door, forbidden road), the One Forbidden Object (forbidden fruit, forbidden drink), the One Forbidden Time (sacred day, magical hour), etc.^{Note 22} The motif has a world distribution. The Orpheus taboo, Not to Look Back, is related.

There is an interesting use of the One Forbidden Road motif in certain primitive monster-slayer myths, where the young hero deliberately violates the taboo, which has been given to protect him, and so enters the field of one or more malignant powers, whom he overcomes, to release mankind from their oppression.^{Note 23} One could reread the episode in the Garden from such a point of view and find that it was not God but Adam and Eve to whom we owe the great world of the realities of life. However, it is certain that the ninth- and fourth-century b.c. shapers of this tale had no such adventurous thought in mind — though something similar is implicit in the Roman Catholic idea that “the essence of the Bible story is that the Fall, the disintegration, is permitted in order that a greater good may come.”^{Note 24} The greater good, according to this view, is, of course, salvation by the cross, the Second Tree. And there is precedent for this view in the great words of Paul: “God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all.”^{* *}Romans 11:32. This reference, by the way, is the secret sense of the number 1132 that occurs and recurs in all kinds of transformations throughout James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The idea is expressed in the words, O felix culpa! “O fortunate sin,” “O happy fault,” of the service, Holy Saturday, at the Blessing of the Paschal Candles: O certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est! O felix culpa, quae ialem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorem! ^{Note 25}

The fact that this theme, developed rhapsodically in Finnegans Wake, can so readily be drawn from the myth of the Fall in the Garden illustrates my argument that the mythic imagery of the Bible bears a message of its own that may not always be the one verbalized in the discourse of the text. For this book is a carrier of symbols borrowed from the deep past, which is of many tongues.

We may turn now to the much later priestly myth of Genesis, Chapter 1.

PRIESTLY (P) CREATION CYCLE: FOURTH CENTURY b.c.

In the beginning Elohim created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the wind of Elohim was moving over the face of the waters. And Elohim said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And Elohim saw that the light was good; and Elohim separated the light from the darkness. Elohim called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

And Elohim said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” And Elohim made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so. And Elohim called the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.

The next day it was dry land and the growth of vegetation. The fourth day, sun, moon, and stars were made; the fifth, birds, sea monsters, and fish. The sixth day animals were made, and man. “ ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,’ ” Elohim said.

“And let them have domination over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So Elohim created man in his own image, in the image of Elohim he created him; male and female created he them. … And Elohim said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. …^{Note 26}

It is not at all easy to understand how people could have supposed for centuries that the Yahwist myth of Paradise, where man was created first and the animals after, was to be read as Chapter 2 of a tale of the opposite sequence, and where the male and female appear, furthermore, together, “in the image of Elohim,” not with Eve drawn from Adam’s rib only after a companion for him had been sought among the beasts.

Neither is it clear why the myth of Elohim should ever have been thought to be one of creation ex nihilo, “out of nothing,” when it describes creation from the power of the word, which in primitive thought is far from “nothing,” but on the contrary, is the essence of its thing. As early as c. 2850 b.c. there was an Egyptian myth of creation by the power of the word.^{Note 27} And as recently as fifty years ago, a youngster, six and a half years old, said to the Swiss psychologist Dr. Jean Piaget, “If there weren’t any words it would be very bad; you couldn’t make anything. How could things have been made?”^{Note 28}

Moreover, in this creation myth there is no forbidden tree.

And finally, if, when made in the image of Elohim, Adam and Eve appeared together, then Elohim must have been not male alone but androgyne, beyond duality — in which case, why should the godhead not be worshiped as properly in a female as in a masculine form?

Love, they say, is blind. In the curiously baffled history of mythological thought in the West, this chapter of Elohim’s creation has played a formidable part; for when it was thought to have been a report from the old World Artificer himself, rendered to Moses on the mountaintop, the majesty and simplicity of its lines carried a force that has now departed. We know today that they were set down by a poetizing priestly hand in the century of Aristotle; and to find the form of the universe described in the fourth century b.c. in terms of the imagery of the mythic world of Marduk, fifteen hundred years before, with a firmament separating the waters above, which fall as rain, from those beneath, which pour forth as springs, is, to say the least, disappointing. But even more so is the present custom of communicating all this archaic lore to our children, as God’s eternal truth.

I have already discussed the myth of the Flood in Oriental Mythology,^{Note 29} so that here it need only be added that in Genesis two versions have been combined. The earlier, from the ninth-century J Text, declares that Yahweh commanded Noah to herd into his ark, “seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and his mate, and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and his mate; and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive upon the face of all the earth” (Genesis 7:2–3); while according to the other, from the P Text, Elohim said to Noah: “And of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every sort into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kinds, two of every sort shall come in to you, to keep them alive” (Genesis 6:19–20).

The Tower of Babel story is from the J Text, and is original to the Bible. It, of course, reverses the meaning of the ziggurat, which was not meant to storm and threaten heaven, but to provide a means by which the gods of heaven might descend to receive the worship of their slaves on earth.^{Note 30} However, one of the glories of the Bible is the eloquence of its damnation of all ways of worship but its own. Furthermore, Yahweh’s frustration of the work through a multiplication of the people’s languages and scattering of them over the earth (as though until c. 2500 b.c. there had been but one language in the world and no dispersion of peoples) is chiefly valuable as a text to the old Hebrew notion that all languages except Hebrew are secondary. On opening a pleasant little Hebrew primer dated as recently as 1957, the student learns that “this is the language which God spoke.” The idea is the same as that which underlies the Indian regard for Sanskrit, namely, that the words of this holy tongue are the “true” names of things; they are the words from which things sprang at the time of creation. The words of this language are antecedent to the universe; they are its spiritual form and support. Hence, in their study one approaches the truth and being, reality and power, of divinity itself.

III. The Age of Abraham

Had there been no Fall, there would be no need for Redemption. The image of the Fall is, therefore, essential to the Christian myth; whereas the rites, festivals, and meditations of the synagogue rest, rather, on the Legend of the Chosen People.

In the usual Christian view, all mankind has inherited from the revolt of the first couple a corruption of nature that has so darkened understanding, weakened the will, and inclined to evil, that without the miracle of God’s merciful assumption to himself of the guilt and punishment due to that sin, the human race would have remained forever divorced from its proper end in the knowledge, love, service, and beatitude of its Creator. The optimistic Oriental notion that by introversion one may come, of oneself, to rest in a realization of godhood within (mythic identification) is here absolutely rejected; for there is nothing within, according to this view, but a corrupt creaturely soul, neither godly in itself, nor capable of achieving, of itself, any relationship with God (mythic dissociation) — who, in forgiveness, on the other hand, has proffered a way, a path, a light, back to himself, in the person of his Son, whose cross, Holy Rood, has countervailed the Tree (mythic restoration). And the meaning of the Legend of the Chosen People, in this Christian view, is that through Abraham and his seed there was prepared a people of God fit to participate with God in the miracle of the Redemption by rendering the flesh, the womb, the manhood of the Son, who was to be True Man as well as True God (therein the miracle). At his death, however, the veil of the temple in Jerusalem was torn asunder (Matthew 27:51, Mark 15:38, Luke 23: 45), and the Mosaic ritual law, which up to that time had been the vehicle of God’s purpose in this world, ceased to be so. The sacramental system of the church became the only vehicle of God’s will and grace on earth, and the symbols of Fall and Redemption, Tree and Cross, shall now remain, world without end, the ultimate terms of the ontology of man.

In the view, on the other hand, of the continuing synagogue, the Christian doctrine of original sin is rejected. As we read in the words of the late Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, J. H. Hertz:

Man was mortal from the first, and death did not enter the world through the transgression of Eve. … There is no loss of the God-likeness of man, nor of man’s ability to do right in the eyes of God; and no such loss has been transmitted to his latest descendants.

Although a few of the Rabbis occasionally lament Eve’s share in the poisoning of the human race by the Serpent [Rabbi Hertz continues], even they declare that the antidote to such poison has been found at Sinai; rightly holding that the Law of God is the bulwark against the devastations of animalism and godlessness. The Psalmist often speaks of sin and guilt; but never is there a reference … to what Christian theology calls “The Fall.” One searches in vain the Prayer Book, of even the Days of Penitence, for the slightest echo of the doctrine of the Fall of man. “My God, the soul which Thou hast given me is pure,” is the Jew’s daily morning prayer. “Even as the soul is pure when entering upon its earthly career, so can man return it pure to his Maker” (Midrash). …

Mankind descending from Adam became hopelessly corrupt and was swept away by the Deluge. Noah alone was spared. But before many generations pass away, mankind once again becomes arrogant and impious, and moral darkness overspreads the earth. “And God said, Let Abraham be — and there was light,” is the profound saying of the Midrash.^{Note 31}

“Now Yahweh said to Abram,” we read in the opening lines of this fundamental legend, not only of Judaism but also of Christianity and Islam, “ ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth will bless themselves.’ So Abram went, as Yahweh had told him. …”^{Note 32}

The text is from the ninth-century J document, about a millennium later in date than the incident itself, which, however, no one is quite able to place in the chronology of historical time. For many years it was customary among certain Bible readers to assign a date of c. 1996 b.c. to Abraham,^{Note 33} who was born, as the Book of Genesis declares, in “Ur of the Chaldeans,” which he left, together with his wife, father, and nephew, to go into the land of Canaan, where he paused a while in Haran.^{Note 34} This date falls within the period of the brief restoration and flowering of Sumerian culture that took place during the reign of the pious King Gudea of Lagash (c. 2000 b.c.), whose vision of Ningizzida was the inspiration of our Figure 1. The great Semitic monarch Sargon of Agade (c. 2350 b.c.), whose birth story we have read, had been succeeded by a dynasty of ten descendants, which, however, was overthrown c. 2150 b.c. by an incursion of barbarians from the northeast. “The dragons from the mountains,” they were called, “who ravished the wife from her spouse, children from their parents, and the kingdom from the land of Sumer.” Their racial affinities are unknown; their kings called themselves “the Kings of the Guti and the Four Quarters”; and their reign was for a hundred years: c. 2150–2050 b.c.^{Note 35}

This baneful disaster was followed by an impressive and promising, yet pitifully brief, restoration of the old Sumerian culture forms under the native Sumerian Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2050–1950 b.c.) and our pious King Gudea of Lagash. Numerous cuneiform tablets from this period have preserved to us all that we know of the old Sumerian epics; and there was a veritable burgeoning of new, enormous ziggurats.

“Viewing the vast extent and complex organization of the area of such a sanctuary,” writes Professor Moortgat of the ruins of the ziggurat of Ur, which was constructed at this time, “and considering thereby that the magnitude of Ur was far less than, for instance, that of the much greater temple city of the goddess Inanna at Uruk, we begin to have some sense of the still fundamentally theocratic character of the late Sumerian social order, which was in the truest sense a community of temple builders, comparable to the medieval Christian communities. But then we realize, too, with regret,” he adds, “how far from a deep and real understanding is our comprehension of that world.”^{Note 36}

Such towering ziggurats, city after city, then, may be thought of as having marked the landscape through which the patriarch Abraham wandered with his family and flock.

“With Abraham,” states Rabbi Hertz, “the nature of the Book of Genesis changes. Hitherto, in its first eleven chapters, it has given an account of the dawn of the world of human society. The remainder of the Book is the story of the founders of the People whose destiny, in the light of God’s purpose, forms the main theme of Scripture. … With the Patriarchs, we leave the dim, Primeval world and enter the full daylight of historical times.”^{Note 37}

To some it may seem a little strange to read of the period of Sumer and Akkad and of the great Egyptian pyramids as a “dim, Primeval world” and to be told in a work published 1961 that with Abraham, whose date cannot be fixed within a margin of four centuries, we have entered into full daylight. However, if Abraham lived, as he may have lived, c. 1996 b.c., a little daylight will perhaps be thrown upon his life by what we know of one of the builders of the ziggurats of that time, who might actually have been seen by him on some notable state occasion, namely, King Gudea of the not too distant city of Lagash.

There is a precious account of the building of Gudea’s ziggurat 10 the god Ningirsu of his city, which may serve to communicate a sense of the piety of the people of that day — whose gods, in contrast to the god of Abraham, were not of a promised future, but already of the fading past, and so may represent to us in requiem the old heritage about to be dismembered and passed on.

The river Tigris having failed to rise, flood, and fertilize the fields, Gudea proceeded to the temple of the god Ningirsu of his city, and there learned the will of that god through a dream, which, however, he could not interpret. So he turned, next, to the neighboring temple of his goddess-mother, Gatumdug; and here we read his prayer to her for help:

“O my Queen, Daughter of Purest Heaven, whose counsel is of profit, occupier of the highest celestial place, who make the land to live: Queen, Mother and Foundress of Lagash! Those whom you favor know the wealth of strength; those whom you regard, the wealth of years. I have no mother, you are my mother; no father, you are my father. In the sanctuary you bore me. O my Goddess, Gatumdug, yours is the wisdom of all goodness. Mother, let me tell you my dream.

“There was in my dream the figure of a man whose stature filled the sky, whose stature filled the earth. The crown upon his head proclaimed him a god, and at his side was the Imdugud bird.^{* *}The Imdugud bird is the lion-bird of Figure 16. Storm was at his feet. To right and left two lions lay. And he ordered me to build for him his house. But who he was, I did not know.

“Thereupon the sun rose from the earth before me. A woman appeared — Who was she? Who was she not? — In her hand she had a pure stylus; in the other a clay tablet on which celestial constellations were displayed. She was rapt, as it were, in thought. And there appeared in that dream a second man, a warrior, holding a lapis lazuli tablet on which he drew the diagram of a house. A litter was set before me: upon it, a brick-mold of gold, and in the mold, the brick of destiny. And at the right of my king stood a laden ass.”

“My Shepherd,” said the goddess, “I shall read for you your dream. The man whose stature filled sky and earth, whose crown proclaimed him a god, and at whose side was the Imdugud bird; storm at his feet, and to right and left two lions, was the god, my brother, Ningirsu. His command to you was to build his temple Eninnu. Now, the sun that rose from the earth before you was your guardian god, Ningizzida: like a sun, his serpent form rises from the earth. The woman holding a stylus and tablet of constellations, rapt as it were in thought, was the goddess, my sister, Nisaba, showing to you the auspicious star for your building of the temple. The second man, a warrior, with lapis lazuli tablet, was the god Nin-dub, designing for you the temple’s structure. And the ass, laden, at the right of the king; that was yourself, ready for your task.”

Gudea caused a wagon of precious wood to be made, ornamented with gems; spanned before it an ass; placed upon it both the emblem of his city, with his name inscribed upon it, and the lyre of his delight, the celebrated tones of which were his thought and peace; then he came with this gift to the temple of his city, and day and night offered up prayer. Also in the sanctuary of awe, the temple of the blood sacrifice, where the deity Ningirsu dominates his realm, Gudea offered sacrificial beasts, burned aromatic woods, and flung himself before his god in prayer, to be given a sign.

“O my King and Lord, Ningirsu, tamer of the raging waters, begotten of Enlil, masterly and fearless; Lord, I would build for you a house, but have not yet received the sign. Hero God, oh let me know what is to be known; for I know not the meaning of these things. Like the heart of the sea, you burst forth; like the world tree, you stand firm; you seethe like boiling water, and displode upon the enemy like storm. My King, you are as unfathomable as heaven. — But I? What know I?”

Said the god: “The day that Gudea, my shepherd true, sets hand to the building of my temple, Eninnu, there will be heard in the sky a wind of rain. And there will fall upon you abundance. The realm will swell with abundance. When the groundwork of my temple has been laid, abundance shall appear. The great fields shall produce bounteously. Water shall rise in ditches and canals: from the cracks of the earth water shall gush. There shall be oil in Sumer in abundance, to be poured; wool in abundance, to be weighed. The day that your pious hand is turned to the building of my temple, I will set foot upon the mountain, the place of the dwelling of the storm; from that dwelling of storm, the mountain, the pure place, I will send a wind, so that it may bring to your land the breath of life.”

The King awoke; he had been sleeping. He shook himself: it was a dream. And when the temple was constructed, the god was carried to his shrine, and the marriage of Ningirsu with his goddess, Baba, was acclaimed. “For seven days,” we read, “the handmaid and the mistress were equal; slave and master walked together; high and lowly sat side by side; and on evil tongues, bad words became good: orphans suffered no injustice from the rich, and righteousness shone from the sun.”^{Note 38}

With the fall, c. 1950 b.c., of the last king of Dynasty III of Ur before an invasion from the cities of Elam, the end came of the unity of the old culture world of Sumer and Akkad; and, to quote once again Professor Moortgat:

A Mastery of “the four quarters” could no longer even be imagined. Everywhere the old city states again arose — for the most part governed, however, not by native, but by alien princes. The lesser number of these were of Elamite stock, a people strongly Semiticized, whose land had been a province of the empire of Sumer and Accad. But the larger number were desert nomads, members of a new Semitic wave, linguistically distinguishable from the earlier, Accadian, Eastern Semitic peoples, both by their dialect and by their names, their nearest kin being the Canaanites then moving into Syria and Palestine. … In Isin, Larsa, Babylon, Mari and later in Assur, these desert folk assumed the lead, gave battle to each other, combined in coalitions, and waged war everywhere for top place — until, after a century and a half, Elamites and Semites, each, found their greatest warrior-statesmen: respectively, the Elamites Rimsin and the Semites Hammurabi. Then the greater of the two, Hammurabi of Babylon, finally contrived to restore for a time the unity and glory of the ancient world of Sumer and Accad.^{Note 39}

Now it used to be the custom to place the reign of Hammurabi somewhere between the years 2067 and 1905 b.c.,^{Note 40} and it was, in fact, this dating that was then assigned also to Abraham on a supposed identification of King Amraphel of Shinar (Genesis 14:1) with Hammurabi. Hammurabi’s date now having been lowered by new evidence to 1728–1686 b.c., however, Abraham’s date has been lowered too. And as Professor T. J. Meek remarks: “Although these identifications are now known to be false, the date for Abraham may still be close to that of Hammurabi.”^{Note 41}

Hammurabi’s dynasty in Babylon survived until c. 1530 b.c., and then, like everything else in that fluent world, collapsed. But the new waves continuing to pour in from all sides were now coming largely from the north, and of these there were three main groups:

1. The Hurrians: A people of prodigious power and expansive force, who had begun as early as c. 2200 b.c. to press down from the Caucasus into northern Mesopotamia. By 1800 b.c., they had reached the Persian Gulf, and thereafter they were moving westward into Syria and Palestine, where they displaced or infiltrated with their blood many of the settled western Semites.

“It has long been noted by scholars,” states Professor Meek, “that there are certain details in the stories of the early Hebrew patriarchs that do not fit into a purely Semitic background because we have no Semitic parallels, but with our enlarged knowledge of the Hurrians we now have exact Hurrian parallels.” Esau’s selling of his birthright for a price, for example (Genesis 25:31–34), was an unparalleled episode until the same sort of exchange was found to have been practiced among Hurrians; and Rachel’s theft of her father’s household goods and gods (Genesis 31:19), which had long been a puzzle to scholars, became clear when it was found that, according to Hurrian law, her possession of these ensured for her husband, Jacob, title to her father’s property. “These and similar analogues between the early Hebrews and the Hurrians,” states Professor Meek, “along with the occurrence of Hurrian names and references to the Hurrians in the Old Testament, indicate quite clearly that the two migrations went together. Hurrians and Habiru, or Hebrews, were found together in Mesopotamia, and it is likely that they would be found together in the west. …”^{Note 42}

Which opens a vast new prospect that no one has yet explored. For the Hurrians set up a short-lived but powerful kingdom — known as the kingdom of the Mitanni, c. 1500-c. 1250 b.c. — southwestward of Lake Van (in the area now called Kurdistan, at the juncture of Syria, Turkey, and Iraq), which included Abraham’s station at Haran. Furthermore, in a treaty signed c. 1400 b. c. between these Mitanni and the neighboring Hittites — by whom they were presently to be conquered — the names appear of five Vedic gods: Indra, Mitra, Varuna, and the two Ashvins. The Hurrians, it now appears, were led, for some time at least, by an aristocratic upper class of chariot fighters of Indo-Aryan stock; and it may well have been these who introduced to the Near East the new war machine of the light two-wheeled battle car drawn by two steeds. For the war chariot was developed in the Aryan zone, c. 2000-1750 b.c., and appeared within the next three hundred years in almost every part of the ancient historic world, entering Egypt with the Asian Hyksos kings, c. 1670-1570 b.c., India with the Aryan tribes, c. 1500-1250 b.c., Greece at about the same time, and China, c. 1523, with the Shang. The prospect yet to be explored, therefore, is that of the possible — indeed inevitable — interplay, in the period ascribed to the Patriarchs, of Semitic and Aryan factors in the building of biblical myth. And some of the parallels with Chinese myth noted in Oriental Mythology^{Note 43} may also find their explanation here.

The other great intrusive groups of the period were the following:

2. The Hittites: Possibly related to the Hurrians, but surpassing them both in diplomacy and in war, these became the rulers, presently, of the better part of what is known today as Turkey. The dates of their rise, at about the time of Hammurabi, their apogee, and then their abrupt collapse at about the time of Homer’s Trojan War, were c. 1750-1150 b.c.

3. The Kassites: Descending from Elam (now Persia), whence China, from c. 2000 b.c., had been receiving a significant portion of its fundamental neolithic heritage, the Kassites occupied the riverine lands of Babylonia proper. And they appear to have made some kind of connection, before entering Mesopotamia, with the Indo-Aryan stems who were at that time entering India. The Kassites have left no written mythic texts, but we know from their personal names some of their gods; as, for example: Surias (Sanskrit, Surya, the Sun), Maruttas (Sanskrit, Marut, the Wind), and Burias (Greek, Boreas, the North Wind). Apparently, in some measure at least, they were of Aryan, perhaps Indo-Aryan, stock.

It was a world, in other words, of extreme complexity from which the book that has been the inspiration of the greater part of Occidental religious thought and practice took its rise. And it would be reasonable to believe that that complexity itself was one of the sources of its power and atmosphere of validity. However, although this power may convince and move our sentiments, the min d of the conscientious scholar striving to place his Patriarchs in the context of their time — even the time, let us say, of Hammurabi — is left still greatly in the lurch. For, as the eminent excavator of the city-mound of Jericho, Dr. Kathleen Kenyon, writes:

It is certain that one cannot build up a chronology on the spans of years attributed to the Patriarchs, nor regard it as factual that Abraham was seventy-five years old when he left Harran and a hundred when Isaac was born, or that Isaac was sixty when Joseph was born and that Jacob was a hundred and thirty when he went into Egypt, for the evidence from the skeletons in the Jericho tombs shows that the expectation of life at this period was short. Many individuals seem to have died before they were thirty-five, and few seem to have reached the age of fifty.

But though an exact chronology is impossible, the setting of the period reflects that recorded in the Biblical story. The Patriarchs were semi-nomadic pastoralists, moving into the more fertile coastlands, and living in their tents among, but separate from, the Canaanites living in the towns of the type which archeology reveals. Pastoralists in their tents leave no evidence which archeology can recover, but we now know something of their surroundings.^{Note 44}

In the main, however, the episodes suggest mythology much more convincingly than chronicles of fact; as, for example, in the following curious tale, which already includes some of the motifs of the later Exodus under Moses:

Now there was a famine in the land. So Abram went down to Egypt to sojourn there, for the famine was severe in the land. When he was about to enter Egypt he said to Sarai his wife, “I know that you are a woman beautiful to behold; and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife’; then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, that it may go well with me because of you, and that I may be spared on your account.” When Abram entered Egypt the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. And when the princes of Pharaoh saw her, they praised her to Pharaoh. And the woman was taken into Pharaoh’s house. And for her sake he dealt well with Abram; and he had sheep, oxen, he-asses, menservants, she-asses, and camels.

But the Lord afflicted Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife. So Pharaoh called Abram, and said, “What is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her, and be gone.” And Pharaoh gave men orders concerning him; and they sent him on the way, with his wife and all that he had. So Abram went up from Egypt, he and his wife, and all that he had, and Lot with him, unto the Negeb.^{Note 45}

This episode is from the Yah wist (J) Text; and to supplement it, we have the following from E, referring to a time, many years later, when Abram’s name was called Abraham and his wife’s Sarah; she now being over ninety years of age and he beyond a hundred.

Abraham journeyed toward the territory of the Negeb, and dwelt between Kadesh and Shur; and he journeyed in Gerar. And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, “She is my sister.” And Abimelech king of Gerar sent and took Sarah. But Elohim came to Abimelech in a dream by night, and said to him, “Behold, you are a dead man, because of the woman you have taken; for she is a man’s wife.” Now Abimelech had not approached her; so he said, “Lord, wilt thou slay an innocent people? Did he not himself say to me, ‘She is my sister’? And she herself said, ‘He is my brother.’ In the integrity of my heart and the innocence of my hands I have done this.” Then Elohim said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know that you have done this in the integrity of your heart, and it was I who kept you from sinning against me; therefore I did not let you touch her. Now then restore the man’s wife; for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you, and you shall live. But if you do not restore her, know that you shall surely die, you and all that are yours.”

So, as the tale goes on to tell, Abimelech returned Sarah to Abraham, along with sheep and oxen, male and female slaves, and a thousand pieces of silver; after which Abraham prayed, and, as we read: “Elohim healed Abimelech, and also healed his wife and female slaves so that they bore children. For Yahweh had closed all the wombs of the house of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.”^{Note 46}

Still another variant of the adventure is attributed to Abraham’s son Isaac — once again in a Yahwist (J) passage — where it is declared that “Isaac went to Gerar, to Abimelech king of the Philistines.” And when the men of the place asked about his wife, he said, “She is my sister,” thinking, “lest the men of the place should kill me,” etc.^{Note 47}

It is difficult to imagine how tales such as these could have been read even centuries ago as chronicles of fact, in “the full daylight of historical times”; but today the difficulty is even compounded, for we have found that the people called Philistines first arrived on the shores of Palestine from Crete only in the year 1196 b.c.,^{Note 48} which, as we immediately perceive, carries the history of this remarkable family from Ur through a span of centuries that not even the lengths of life attributed to Abraham and his son suffice to explain. Furthermore, there is the additional inconvenience that Isaac, father of Jacob and grandfather of Joseph, is here described as flourishing in a period subsequent to Moses and the Exodus: which difficulty is again compounded when it is recalled that Abraham, his father, when passing through Gerar, also played this turn on Abimelech.

Does it not, then, appear that we are dealing with the laws rather of myth, fairy tale, and legend than of any order of fact yet substantiated for either natural or human history? The past, as in every other folk tradition of the world, is here portrayed not with concern for what is known today as truth, but to give a semblance of supernatural support to a certain social order and its system of belief. That was then — as it is now and ever has been for those in whose mind the good of a society holds a higher place than truth — adequate justification for any fabrication that the mentality of the time might be persuaded to accept. All that is really exceptional about the present remarkable examples is that, whereas no modern thinker in his right mind would argue for the historicity of the fragments of myth brought together in the Odyssey, we have a modem literature of learning reaching from here to the moon and back, doing precisely that for those sewn together in these ancient tales of about the same date.

IV. The Age of Moses

Sigmund Freud delivered a shock to many of his admirers when he proposed in his last major work, Moses and Monotheism, that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian noble — specifically, of the household of the heretic pharaoh Ikhnaton, who reigned 1377 — 1358 b.c. — and that in the years directly following this pharaoh’s death, which had entailed the collapse both of his court and of his cult of monotheism, Moses departed from Egypt with a company of Semitic settlers in the Delta, upon whom he strove to impress Ikhnaton’s monotheistic belief. However, in the desert these people, oppressed by his disciplines, slew him, and his place of leadership was taken by the Midianite priest of an Arabian volcano god, Yahweh. Yet his memory and teaching (in Freud’s words) “continued to work in the background, until it slowly gained more and more power over the mind of the people and at last succeeded in transforming the god Yahweh into the Mosaic God, and in waking to a new life the religion that Moses had instituted centuries before but which had subsequently been forsaken.”^{Note 49}

Freud’s theory has, of course, been attacked from every side, both with learning and without. However, according to his own by no means unlearned view, it furnishes the only plausible psychological explanation of the peculiarly compulsive character of biblical belief, which is in striking contrast to the relaxed, poetic, and even playful approaches to mythology of the Greeks of the same period. Biblical religion, according to Freud, has the character of a neurosis, where a screen of mythic figurations hides a repressed conviction of guilt, which, it is felt, must be atoned, and yet cannot be consciously faced. The screening myths are there to hide, not to reveal, a truth. Hence, they are insisted upon as factual — or, as people say today, “existential.” The Jewish God is supposed to be, as die saying goes, a “living God,” not a mere mythic god, like the others of the world; not a merely phantasmagoric symbol of something stemming, like a dream, from his worshipers’ imagination. He was introduced from without by Moses and remains without, as a presumed fact.

Freud believed that his theory also accounted for the dual nature of Yahweh, who, on the one hand, exhibits the barbarous traits of the Midianite volcano god and of primitive serpent worship, but then comes forward with ever-increasing force in the teachings of the prophets as the universal God of righteousness of Moses and Ikhnaton. Also accounted for, Freud believed, were the inconsistencies of the Moses legend, where he appears at one time as an Egyptian noble and the next moment as an Arab shepherd boy who turns, in the end, into a desert shaman. “We cannot escape the impression,” he wrote, “that this Moses of Kadesh and Midian, to whom tradition could even ascribe the erection of a brazen serpent as a healing god [Numbers 21:1–9], is quite a different person from the august Egyptian we have deduced, who disclosed to his people a religion in which all magic and sorcery were most strictly abhorred. Our Egyptian Moses differs perhaps no less from the Midian Moses than the universal god Aton differed from the demon Yahweh on his divine mountain.”^{Note 50}

The great historian Eduard Meyer had also remarked this contrast. “Moses in Midian,” he wrote in a passage aptly cited by Freud, “is no longer an Egyptian and Pharaoh’s grandson, but a shepherd to whom Yahweh reveals himself. In the story of the ten plagues his former relationships are no longer mentioned, although they could have been used very effectively, and the order to kill the Israelite first-born is entirely forgotten.”^{Note 51}

Now I am not going either to defend or to attack the views of Freud. They were not easy views for him to publish; for, as he wrote in the opening lines of his book, “to deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken lightheartedly — especially by one belonging to that people. No consideration, however, will move me to set aside truth in favor of supposed national interests.”^{Note 52} Those are noble words, and I shall let them stand as the parting sign of one of the bravest creative spirits of our day — my own small intention being simply to offer a sketch of the setting of the problem of the Exodus, first in its screening, mythological aspect, and then in its screened, historical.

To begin with: the legend of Moses’ birth is obviously modeled on the earlier birth story of Sargon of Agade (c. 2350 b.c.), and is clearly not of Egypt, since in Egypt bitumen or pitch was not used before Ptolemaic times, when it was introduced from Palestine.^{Note 53}

Now a man from the house of Levi [we read] went and took to wife a daughter of Levi. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. And when she could hide him no longer she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch; and she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds at the river’s brink. And his sister stood at a distance, to know what would be done to him. …^{Note 54}

The episode is from the Elohim (E) document, which, as we know, was composed in the eighth century in Israel, not in Egypt; and the general mythic formula followed is that of the Myth of the Birth of the Hero discussed by Otto Rank in the work already named. However, as Freud has pointed out, among the seventy-odd examples of the formula analyzed by Rank, this is the only one in which the exposed and adopted infant passes from a lowly to a noble house. The usual order is the other way.

Freud writes: “The first family, the one from which the babe is exposed to danger, is in all comparable cases the fictitious one; the second family, however, by which the hero is adopted and in which he grows up, is his real one. If we have the courage to accept this statement as a general truth to which the Moses legend also is subject, then we suddenly see our way clear: Moses is an Egyptian — probably of noble origin — whom the myth undertakes to transform into a Jew.”^{Note 55}

The name Moses itself is Egyptian. It is the normal word for “child” and occurs among the names, for example, of the pharaohs of Dynasty XVIII. Years ago, Eduard Meyer suggested that in Moses’ case the first part of the name — Ra-moses, Thut-moses, Ah-moses, or the like — may have been dropped, to obscure his Egyptian origin.^{Note 56} And in any case, the idea that an Egyptian princess could have thought the word to be Hebrew shows that story-tellers do not always think their problems through. As the pretty tale continues:

Now the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, and her maidens walked beside the river; she saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to fetch it. When she opened it she saw the child; and lo, the babe was crying. She took pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.” Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away, and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed him. And the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son; and she named him Moses [Hebrew Mosheh], for she said, “Because I drew him out [Hebrew mashah] of the water.”^{Note 57}

The legend bears comparison with the Greek story, of about the same period, told of Perseus, who was born of the princess Danae. She was the daughter of Acrisius, king of Argos; but Acrisius, fearing the son prophesied, had imprisoned her in a dungeon, together with her nurse. Zeus, however, sent down a shower of gold, from which the virgin conceived. Mother and child together were then cast into the sea in a chest, which a fisherman drew ashore — and in the end, Perseus, by a curious slip, killed his grandfather, Acrisius, with a discus, symbol of the sun.^{Note 58}

We shall have more of Perseus later. For the present, the point is simply that there is precedent in legend for representing the Future Savior as a foster-grandson within the Tyrant Monarch’s house. Whether Moses was actually such, we do not know. In fact, we do not really know whether the hero of such a legend should be thought of as an actual historical or as a merely symbolic figure associated with a certain body of teaching and belief. Either way, in the case of Moses, the Elohim (E) Text has provided this noble Egyptian background and legend of hero birth, while the Yahwist (J) tells the tale of our hero’s marriage to one of the seven daughters of a Midianite priest of the desert.

“One day,” this other story goes,

when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens; and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. When he went out the next day, behold, two Hebrews were struggling together; and he said to the man that did the wrong, “Why do you strike your fellow?” He answered, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid, and thought, “Surely the thing is known.” When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh and stayed in the land of Midian. And he sat down by a well.

Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters; and they came and drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father’s flock. The shepherds came and drove them away; but Moses stood up and helped them, and watered their flock. When they came to their father Reuel, he said, “How is it that you have come so soon today?” They said, “An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds, and even drew water for us and watered the flock.” He said to his daughters, “And where is he? Why have you left the man? Call him, that he may eat bread.” And Moses was content to dwell with the man, and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah. She bore a son, and he called his name Gershom; for he said, “I have been a sojourner [Hebrew ger] in a foreign land.”^{Note 59}

The legendary analogues of this episode lead back to the matter of the Patriarchs: the motifs suggest the marriage of Jacob. Like Moses, fearing for his life, Jacob fled into the desert. He had not murdered an Egyptian but had cheated Esau of his birthright, and Esau, his brother, had said to himself, “I will kill my brother Jacob” (Genesis 27:41). In the desert Jacob met his beloved Rachel at a well and became her father’s shepherd. He served seven years to win her. (In the present case, we have seven daughters.) Cheated by Laban, Jacob was given Leah instead of Rachel and to win the latter had to work seven years more — after which he fled with his two wives, two concubines and daughter, much wealth, and his precious tribe of twelve sons.

Common to both tales are the lethal danger at home (associated with a relative: the brother Esau, the grandfather Pharaoh), flight into the desert, the bride at the well (associated with the number seven), and then servitude as shepherd to her father. In both stories, furthermore, the desert flight leads to a direct meeting with God and the reception of a great destiny: Jacob at Bethel, where he lay with his head upon a stone and dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of which reached to heaven, the angels of God ascending and descending upon it, and behold, Yahweh stood above it (Genesis 28:11–13); and comparably, Moses by a burning bush, where he heard the voice of the same desert god.

As it comes to us, this episode presents an extremely complex interlace of J and E Text elements, illustrating elegantly the manner of cutting, splicing, and blending of the priestly fourth-century editors. I reproduce J in roman type, E in italic, and retain the numbers of the verses. The chapter is Exodus 3.

THE GOD IN THE BURNING BUSH

(1) Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian; ^{* *}Compare J text, where the name is Reuel. and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of Elohim. (2) And the angel of Yahweh appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. (3) And Moses said, “I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.” (4) When Yahweh saw that he turned aside to see, Elohim called to him out of the bush, "Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here am I.” (5) Then he said, “Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” (6) And he said, “I am the Cod of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at Elohim.

(7) Then Yahweh said, “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, (8) and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of the land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, and Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. (9) And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. (10) Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring forth my people, the sons of Israel, out of Egypt.”

(11) But Moses said to Elohim, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?”

(12) He said, “But I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you, that I have sent you: when you have brought forth the people out of Egypt, you shall serve Elohim upon this mountain.”

(13) Then Moses said to Elohim, "If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The god of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

(14) Elohim said to Moses, “I Am Who I Am.”^{† †}Or, “I Am What I Am,” or “I Will Be What I Will Be.”And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I Am has sent me to you.’ ” (15) Elohim also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘Yahweh, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: this is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. (16) Go and gather the elders of Israel together and say to them, ‘Yahweh, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, has appeared to me, saying, “I have observed you and what has been done to you in Egypt; (17) and I promise that I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt, to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey.” ’ (18) And they will hearken to your voice; and you and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, ‘Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; and now, we pray you, let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to Yahweh, our God.’ (19) I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand. (20) So I will stretch out my hand and smite Egypt with all the wonders which I will do in it; after that he will let you go. (21) And I will give this people favor in the sight of the Egyptians; and when you go, you shall not go empty, (22) but each woman shall ask of her neighbor, and of her who sojourns in her house, jewelry of silver and of gold, and clothing, and you shall put them on your sons and on your daughters; thus you shall despoil the Egyptians.”

The question of the age and origin of the name and cult of Yahweh has been discussed by many, and the most lucid recent summary of the discussion is that of Professor T. J. Meek. He notes that in the text just quoted of Exodus 3:15, the god in the Midian desert gave his name as “Yahweh, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob,” and then defined the meaning as “I am”; whereas in the priestly fourth-century text of a later passage, Exodus 6:3, the same god states that “I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but by my name Yahweh I did not make myself known to them.”

The name [states Professor Meek] … was foreign to the Hebrews, and in their attempted explanation of it they connected it with the word hāyāh, “to be,” just as the Greeks, who did not know the origin and exact meaning of “Zeus” connected the name with ζάω, “to live,” whereas it is derived ultimately from Indo-European dyu, “to shine.” The contention that Yahweh was of Arabian origin is clearly in accord with the Old Testament records, which connect him with the Negeb and with southern sanctuaries Hke Sinai-Horeb and Kadesh. … The most probable [origin of the name] in our opinion is … from the Arabic root hwy, “to blow.”^{Note 60}

And so there we are: with an unsubstantial phantasmagoria of folklore motifs and a congeries of considerably differing gods: 1. a cruel, unnamed, fairy-tale pharaoh, persecuting a people whose presence in the Delta no one has explained (Tyrant-Ogre motif), 2. has a daughter, also unnamed, who finds a baby in a basket in the waters of the Nile and takes him to be reared, naming him Moses (Egyptian, “child”), which she believes to be a Hebrew word suggesting mashah, “to draw out” (modified Virgin Birth motif, with inverted Infant Exposure: from humble to noble household); 3. a Midianite priest of Kadesh, who is to become the hero’s father-in-law (named Reuel in J Text, Jethro in E); 4. has seven daughters (magical 7: seven celestial spheres, colors of rainbow, etc.), 5. who are met at the well by a desert fugitive from Egypt who has just killed an Egyptian; 6. he marries one and becomes the shepherd of his father-in-law (parallel of the Jacob legend: flight to desert, bride at the well, service as shepherd of father-in-law, twice seven years); 7. the voice of Yahweh in the burning bush commits to this shepherd the cosmic task of rescuing his people from the clutches of the Tyrant Ogre; after which there follows 8. his magical contest, assisted by his suddenly present brother Aaron (Twin Hero theme), against the priests and magicians of Egypt (shaman contest), culminating in 9. the Plagues of Egypt (which, for some inhuman reason, Yahweh prolongs unconscionably by repeatedly “hardening Pharaoh’s heart”) and 10. the Exodus (Magic Flight motif, Passage through Water, Dissolution of Underworld Power at Threshold, Boon of Spoil from the Underworld, etc.: compare Abraham and Isaac despoiling Pharaoh and Abimelech by clever device).

Now the task of the priestly (P Text) editors of the fourth century b.c., who put all this together, was to intertwine these two threads of legend into a single thread of argument, an argument, moreover, to which neither had been originally turned. As we read in the crucial P Text passages through which their new theme was introduced:

These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each with his household: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin, Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. All the offspring of Jacob were seventy persons; Joseph was already in Egypt. … But the descendants of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong; so that the land was filled with them [Exodus 1:1–5 and 7]. … So the Egyptians made the people of Israel serve with rigor, and made their lives bitter with hard service, in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field; in all their work they made them serve with rigor [Exodus 1:13–14].

The great overall priestly argument by which the Pentateuch is unified was that all of the tribes of Israel were descended from a single parent, to whom a divine blessing had been given that was to be realized in their common history; namely, Abraham, the father of Isaac, who in turn begot Jacob, the father of those twelve sons who were supposed to have been the authors of the twelve tribes. The large narrative problem, therefore, was to bring the old myths and legends of the pastoral Patriarchs of the late Bronze Age into relation, first, to a supposed Egyptian interlude, and then to the epic lore of the Iron Age conquest and settlement of Canaan. Three obvious inconsistencies can be readily detected, however, which the masters of the priestly school either failed to recognize or ignored.

The first of these inconsistencies, which has not yet been quite rationalized either by theology or by science, derives from the fact that the Hebrew conquest of Canaan had already commenced long before the earliest plausible date yet assigned to the Exodus from Egypt; namely the date suggested by Freud, which, as we have seen, falls in the period just following the death of the heretic pharaoh Ikhnaton: specifically, the span of eight years, 1358–1350 b.c., that elapsed before the forceful restitution of the Amun orthodoxy under Haremhab.

“Moses’ active nature,” wrote Freud,

conceived the plan of founding a new empire, of finding a new people, to whom he could give the religion that Egypt disdained. It was, as we perceive, a heroic attempt to struggle against his fate, to find compensation in two directions for the losses he had suffered through Ikhnaton’s catastrophe. Perhaps he was at the time governor of that border province (Gosen) in which — perhaps already in “the Hyksos period” — certain Semitic tribes had settled. These he chose to be his new people. A historic decision!

He established relations with them, placed himself at their head, and directed the Exodus “by strength of hand.” In full contradistinction to the Biblical tradition we may suppose this Exodus to have passed off peacefully and without pursuit. The authority of Moses made it possible, and there was then no central power that could have prevented it.

According to our construction the Exodus from Egypt would have taken place between 1358 and 1350 b.c. — that is to say, after the death of Ikhnaton and before the restitution of the authority of the state by Haremhab. The goal of the wandering could only be Canaan. After the supremacy of Egypt had collapsed, hordes of warlike Aramaeans had flooded the country, conquering and pillaging, and thus had shown where a capable people could seize new land. We know these warriors from the letters which were found in 1887 in the archives of the ruined city of Amarna. They are called the Habiru, and the name was passed on — no one knows how — to the Jewish invaders, Hebrews, who came later and could not have been referred to in the letters of Amarna.^{Note 61}

Freud, we see, solved the difficulty by assuming out of hand that the Habiru were not Hebrews, whereas most scholars today think they were.^{Note 62} Furthermore, to complicate things, there is the often cited biblical statement that the persecuted Jews were forced to build the cities of Pithom and Raamses (Exodus 1:11, from J Text). These were constructed only in the period of Ramses II, who reigned 1301–1234, which is one entire century later than Ikhnaton. Hence, most of those modern scholars who think that the Exodus can be dated situate it in this later time. Yet even here there is disagreement. And the late dating even magnifies the problem of associating the Exodus with the beginnings of the Habiru plundering and settlement of Canaan. As a way of letting the reader choose a dating for himself, therefore, let me simply indicate in a schedule of Dynasties XVIII and XIX some of the recently made suggestions, together with Thomas Mann’s interesting guess, in his novel Joseph in Egypt, that the Patriarchs arrived precisely at the time when Freud was causing their descendants to depart.

EXPULSION OF HYKSOS (EXODUS?):^{Note 63} c. 1570 b.c.
DYNASTY XVM: 1570-1345

• Ahmoses I 1570-1545
• Amenhotep I 1545–1524
• Thutmoses I and II 1524–c. 1502
• Queen Hatshepsut 1501–1480
  • (The “Pharaoh’s daughter” who saved Moses?)^{Note 64}
• Thutmoses III (contesting reign of Queen H.) 1502–1448
  • Exodus? (J. W. Jack’s thesis)^{Note 64}
• Amenhotep II 1448–1422
• Thutmoses IV 1422–1413
• Amenhotep III 1413–1377
  • (Beginnings of Aton heresy)
• Amenhotep IV (Ikhnaton) 1377–1358
  • (Amarna period: Habiru incursions)
  • Joseph enters Egypt? (Th. Mann’s thesis)^{Note 65}
• Tutankhamon 1358–1349
  • (Period of slack: virtual interregnum)
  • Exodus? (Freud’s thesis)^{Note 66}
  • (Amun cult restoration: 1350)
• Eye (Haremhab the virtual ruler) 1349–1345

• DYNASTY XDC: 1345–1200

• Haremhab 1345–1318
• Ramses I 1318–1317
• Seti I 1317–1301
• Ramses II 1301–1234
  • (Building projects: cities of Pithom and Raamses)
  • Exodus? (Albright’s thesis): c. 1280^{Note 67}
    • (Scharff’s thesis): c. 1240-1230^{Note 68}
• Memeptah 1234–c. 1220
  • Exodus? (Scharff’s thesis): c. 1240-1230^{Note 68}
  • (“Israelite Stele” mentioning suppression of an “Israelite” revolt in Palestine: first appearance of the term “Israelite”)
• Seti II 1220-1200
  • Exodus? (Meek’s thesis): period of confusion following death of Seti II (Meek’s dating of Seti’s reign, however, is c. 1214–1194.)^{Note 69}

So much, then, for the first of the inconsistencies involved in the fourth-century priestly narrative deriving all the invading Hebrews of Canaan from the seed of Abraham by way of Egypt. A second difficulty derives from the fact that the Bedouin tribes in question were not of one family but many, having entered Canaan, furthermore, not in one fell swoop but in stages and from various directions. And a third very serious difficulty remains, that already mentioned, of finding a time when Joseph and his brothers could have entered Egypt, to remain.

Let us concede, in short, that no one has yet been able to explain when, how, or why any part of this imposing legend took place, let alone the continuity of its stages. Viewed, however, as a normal origin myth, instead of as a clue to history, the narrative reveals immediately both the form and the function of its message. The form is of a great cycle of descent into the underworld and return. What entered Egypt (Underworld: Land Below Waves) were the Patriarchs (Joseph into the well and on down to Egypt); what emerged were the People (Passage of the Red Sea).

As in all such myths of descent and return, what is brought forth is a boon or elixir; in the present case: a) the knowledge of Yahweh, b) the nuclear force of the Chosen People, and c) the promise to that people of a destiny, with the gift of a Promised Land. However, in contrast to all other myths of this order, the hero here is not an individual — not even Moses — but the Jewish folk. It is highly significant that the later festival of the Passover which, as we have seen, was first celebrated 621 b.c. in commemoration of the Exodus, occurs on the date of the annual resurrection of Adonis, which in the Christian cult became Easter. In both the pagan cult and the Christian, the resurrection is of a god, whereas in the Jewish it is of the Chosen People — who received the knowledge and support of their God while in the torment of the underworld of the King of Death. Thus a fundamental distinction emerges, which throughout the history of Judaism has remained its second point of high distinction among the religions of the world: namely, that whereas elsewhere the principle of divine life is symbolized as a divine individual (Dumuzi-Adonis-Attis-Dionysos-Christ), in Judaism it is the People of Israel whose mythic history thus serves the function that in other cults belongs to an incarnation or manifestation of God.

In the Hagadah of Passover, in the course of the family ceremonial, the following meditation is read aloud by the father of the household: “In every generation, one ought to regard himself as though he had personally come out of Egypt.” Every Jew, that is to say, is of one substance with Israel — somewhat as every crumb of the transubstantiated wafer of the Roman Catholic Mass is the entire body and blood of the sacrificed and resurrected Christ, who descended into Hell and in three days rose from the dead. And the force of this Jewish principle of identification, not with God, who is transcendent, but with the People of God, which is the only entity in the universe through which his will for the future works, is even so strong that for a valid act of orthodox worship there must be present at least ten males above the age of thirteen (the minyan). The individual has no relation to God save by way of this community, or consensus. God — the only God there is — is apart, and the body of his Chosen People is the one holy thing on earth. The individual apart from that is null.

Contrast to this emphatically social emphasis the Indian idea that the ultimate realization of truth is to be experienced alone, in yoga, in the forest; or the Chinese, that an accord is to be experienced with the Tao, the Way of nature and the universe, which is the Way of one’s heart, as well. In the Book of Moses, on the contrary, the way of God, who is transcendent, is neither within nor in nature, but in the group — this group alone, with its laws, which are the only facts of real moment to be known.

The first two parts of the legendary cycle of the Chosen People may be said, then, to represent: I. The Entry of the Patriarchs into the Underworld of Death and Auguish, for Rebirth to a Higher Life, and II. The Rebirth, as a People, under Yahweh. Part III, The Desert Years, represents the phase of confirmation of the people in the ritual structure of the new life under Yahweh, to which they have been raised; and IV, The Conquest of the Promised Land, celebrates the entry of the Law of Yahweh, through the victory of his people, into world history.

The murder of Moses, deduced by Freud from the evidences both of Jewish psychology and of the numerous accounts of seriously violent revolts against Moses in the wilderness (for example, Numbers 16), would have supplied, according to his view, the nuclear event (latent content) of this entire mythic dream; and the myth (manifest content) he interprets, consequently, in the way rather of a screening than of a revealing structure. I do not wish to enter into any discussion of the relevancy of this theory specifically to this powerful and immensely influential legendary cycle of the Jewish people, but only to remark, with reference to the larger, general theory of our subject, that, indeed, two types of mythology must be recognized; namely, one (of which the biblical myths are the best-known examples) where all stress is placed on the historicity of the episodes, and the other (of which Indian mythology is an instance) where the episodes are meant to be read symbolically, as pointing through and beyond themselves. Of course, in Freud’s view, the ultimate reference (latent content) of both types, finally, is an infantile desire to kill the father (Pharaoh: Moses) and enter the mother (Promised Land). However, my own impression is that even myths of the first type have something more to say than that; and that Freud in his Oedipus dogma has carried forward into science the biblical penchant for concretization. Exactly how much of the Patriarchal and Mosaic legend derives from factual occurrences of the second millennium b.c., and how much from creative priestly pens at work only in the first, remains — and will perhaps remain for all time — a question to which every answer must be symptomatic rather of the mind of him who answers than of the truth either of history or of God.