The Age of Heroes
Moses rescued from the Nile, Wikimedia Commons
Gods and Heroes of the Levant: 1500 - 500 B.C.
The Book of the Lord
Origin myths are at the core of all mythologies, and mythologies serve to validate the customs, systems of sentiments, and political aims of their respective local groups. So do their traditional books. Until the eighteenth year of the reign of King Josiah of Judah neither kings nor people knew anything about the law of Moses. However, in the year of 621 B.C. the priest Hilkiah found (or “found”?) the “Book of the Law” during the repairing of Solomon’s Temple. The following kings did not heed the book’s commandments, and in the year 586 B.C. Nebuzaradan, the captain of the bodyguard of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. He burned the city down and brought the city’s inhabitants into exile.
The Mythological Age
The orthodox Hebrew schedule of world ages, culminating in the cataclysm of the Babylonian exile, is summarized by Campbell as follows:
1.The Mythological Cycle
a) The Seven Days of Creation
b) The Garden and the Fall
c) From the Fall to Noah’s Flood
d) From the Flood to the Tower of Babel
2.The Legendary Cycle
a) Abraham and the Entry into Egypt
b) The Exodus
c) The Desert Years
d) The Conquest of Canaan
3.The Documentary Cycle
a) The Conquest of Canaan
b) The United Monarchy: about 1025 – 930 B.C.
c) Israel and Judah: about 930 – 721 B.C.
d) Judah alone: about 721 – 586
e) The Babylonian Exile: 586 – 538 B.C.
The basic texts from which the Mythological and Legendary Cycles were constructed, are five: 1) The Yahwist text representing the mythology of the southern kingdom Judah (from the ninth century B.C.); 2) The Elohim text representing the mythology of the northern kingdom Israel (eighth century B.C.); 3) A ritual code known as the Code of Holiness, said to be received by Moses on Sinai (dating possibly from the seventh century B.C.); 4) The ritual code of the Deuteronomists, which corresponds to the texts found by Hilkiah; and 5) The post-exilic compound of priestly writings known as the Priestly text, the nucleus of which was proclaimed by the priest Ezra in 397 B.C. This latter date is the earliest date at which a composite text of the Mythological and Legendary Cycle may have been completed.
The early Judean Yahwist myth is of the category that is described in Primitive Mythology as common to the planting cultures of the tropics, where counterparts are found in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Polynesia, Mexico, Peru and Brazil. Typical features 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 of death and procreation at that time; 6) The end, therewith, of the mythological age.
The myth of Cain’s murder of Abel has been applied, also, to an exaltation of the Hebrews over the older peoples of the land. Cain was an agriculturalist, Abel 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. All through the Book of Genesis there is consistently a preference for younger against older sons: not only Abel against Cain, but also Isaac against Ishmael, Jacob against Esau, and Joseph against Reuben. There is an old Sumerian cuneiform text of about 2050 B.C. bearing the tale of an argument between a farmer and a shepherd for the favor of the goddess Inanna. She prefers of course the farmer and takes him to be her spouse. One millennium later, the patriarchal desert nomads arrived, and all judgments were reversed – as seen in the Judean myth.
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. Such dissociation is not part of the earlier agricultural mythology, where the spiritual forces – together with the human beings - are immanent in nature.
The Age of Abraham
Had there been no Fall, there would have been no need for Redemption. The image of the Fall is therefore essential to the Christian myth. The rites, festivals and meditations of the synagogue rest, rather, on the Legend of the Chosen People, which does not embody the doctrine of original sin.
The legend where Yahweh tells Abraham to go and find the land of Canaan is fundamental to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Abraham was assumed to have been born in the city of Ur of the Chaldeans slightly after 2000 B.C. This date falls within the period of the brief restoration and flowering of Sumerian culture during the reign of king Gudea of Lagash. This late Sumerian social order was a community of temple builders, comparable to the medieval Christian communities. There was a burgeoning of new, enormous ziggurats. Such towering ziggurats, city after city, may have been marking the landscape through which the patriarch Abraham wandered with his family and flock. This period was a complex historical period, with successive invasions by the Hurrians, Hittites and the Kassians from the Caucasus and Persia.
The Age of Moses
Sigmund Freud, in his work “Moses and Monotheism”, advanced the hypothesis that Moses was not a Jew, but an Egyptian noble of the household of the pharaoh Ikhnaton who reigned 1377 – 1358 B.C.. At Ikhnaton’s death, both his court and his cult of monotheism collapsed, and Moses departed from Egypt with a company of Semitic settlers in the Delta in the years directly following Ikhnaton’s death. Freud’s hypothesis goes on to say that Moses strove to impress Ikhnaton’s monotheistic belief on his Semitic followers. 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, the memory of him and his and his teaching continued to linger in the background, until it slowly gained momentum in the mind of the people and transformed the god Yahweh into the Mosaic God.
Freud’s hypothesis has of course been attacked from all sides. However, Freud’s view is that this hypothesis gives 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.
Freud believed that this theory also accounted for the dual nature of Yahweh, who, on the one hand exhibits the barbarious 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 in this theory 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 who turns, in the end, into a desert shaman.
So much for Freud’s hypothesis. According to Campbell, the legend of Moses’ birth is modeled on the earlier birth story of Sargon of Agade (about 2350 B.C.). The episode is from the Elohim text mentioned above, composed in the eighth century B.C. in Israel. The general mythic formula followed is that of the Myth of the Birth of the Hero. The legend also bears comparison with the Greek story of about the same period, told of Perseus, who was born of the princess Danaë. In the case of Moses, the Elohim text provides the noble Egyptian background and legend of hero birth, while the Yahwist text tells the tale of his marriage to one of the seven daughters of a Midianite priest of the desert.
Common to both the Elohim and the Yahwist 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 the desert flight leads to a direct meeting with God and reception of a great destiny. The priestly texts of the fourth century B.C. have edited and spliced these texts into one coherent tale.
Viewed as an origin myth, instead of as a clue to actual history, the narrative is of a great cycle of descent into the underworld and return. What is brought forth is a) the knowledge of Yahweh, b) the nuclear force of the Chosen People, and c) the promise to that people of a destiny, with a 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 people. It is highly significant that the later festival of the Passover which 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 cult, the resurrection is of a god, whereas in the Jewish it is of the Chosen People.
Origin myths are at the core of all mythologies, and mythologies serve to validate the customs, systems of sentiments, and political aims of their respective local groups. So do their traditional books. Until the eighteenth year of the reign of King Josiah of Judah neither kings nor people knew anything about the law of Moses. However, in the year of 621 B.C. the priest Hilkiah found (or “found”?) the “Book of the Law” during the repairing of Solomon’s Temple. The following kings did not heed the book’s commandments, and in the year 586 B.C. Nebuzaradan, the captain of the bodyguard of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, came to Jerusalem. He burned the city down and brought the city’s inhabitants into exile.
The Mythological Age
The orthodox Hebrew schedule of world ages, culminating in the cataclysm of the Babylonian exile, is summarized by Campbell as follows:
1.The Mythological Cycle
a) The Seven Days of Creation
b) The Garden and the Fall
c) From the Fall to Noah’s Flood
d) From the Flood to the Tower of Babel
2.The Legendary Cycle
a) Abraham and the Entry into Egypt
b) The Exodus
c) The Desert Years
d) The Conquest of Canaan
3.The Documentary Cycle
a) The Conquest of Canaan
b) The United Monarchy: about 1025 – 930 B.C.
c) Israel and Judah: about 930 – 721 B.C.
d) Judah alone: about 721 – 586
e) The Babylonian Exile: 586 – 538 B.C.
The basic texts from which the Mythological and Legendary Cycles were constructed, are five: 1) The Yahwist text representing the mythology of the southern kingdom Judah (from the ninth century B.C.); 2) The Elohim text representing the mythology of the northern kingdom Israel (eighth century B.C.); 3) A ritual code known as the Code of Holiness, said to be received by Moses on Sinai (dating possibly from the seventh century B.C.); 4) The ritual code of the Deuteronomists, which corresponds to the texts found by Hilkiah; and 5) The post-exilic compound of priestly writings known as the Priestly text, the nucleus of which was proclaimed by the priest Ezra in 397 B.C. This latter date is the earliest date at which a composite text of the Mythological and Legendary Cycle may have been completed.
The early Judean Yahwist myth is of the category that is described in Primitive Mythology as common to the planting cultures of the tropics, where counterparts are found in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Polynesia, Mexico, Peru and Brazil. Typical features 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 of death and procreation at that time; 6) The end, therewith, of the mythological age.
The myth of Cain’s murder of Abel has been applied, also, to an exaltation of the Hebrews over the older peoples of the land. Cain was an agriculturalist, Abel 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. All through the Book of Genesis there is consistently a preference for younger against older sons: not only Abel against Cain, but also Isaac against Ishmael, Jacob against Esau, and Joseph against Reuben. There is an old Sumerian cuneiform text of about 2050 B.C. bearing the tale of an argument between a farmer and a shepherd for the favor of the goddess Inanna. She prefers of course the farmer and takes him to be her spouse. One millennium later, the patriarchal desert nomads arrived, and all judgments were reversed – as seen in the Judean myth.
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. Such dissociation is not part of the earlier agricultural mythology, where the spiritual forces – together with the human beings - are immanent in nature.
The Age of Abraham
Had there been no Fall, there would have been no need for Redemption. The image of the Fall is therefore essential to the Christian myth. The rites, festivals and meditations of the synagogue rest, rather, on the Legend of the Chosen People, which does not embody the doctrine of original sin.
The legend where Yahweh tells Abraham to go and find the land of Canaan is fundamental to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Abraham was assumed to have been born in the city of Ur of the Chaldeans slightly after 2000 B.C. This date falls within the period of the brief restoration and flowering of Sumerian culture during the reign of king Gudea of Lagash. This late Sumerian social order was a community of temple builders, comparable to the medieval Christian communities. There was a burgeoning of new, enormous ziggurats. Such towering ziggurats, city after city, may have been marking the landscape through which the patriarch Abraham wandered with his family and flock. This period was a complex historical period, with successive invasions by the Hurrians, Hittites and the Kassians from the Caucasus and Persia.
The Age of Moses
Sigmund Freud, in his work “Moses and Monotheism”, advanced the hypothesis that Moses was not a Jew, but an Egyptian noble of the household of the pharaoh Ikhnaton who reigned 1377 – 1358 B.C.. At Ikhnaton’s death, both his court and his cult of monotheism collapsed, and Moses departed from Egypt with a company of Semitic settlers in the Delta in the years directly following Ikhnaton’s death. Freud’s hypothesis goes on to say that Moses strove to impress Ikhnaton’s monotheistic belief on his Semitic followers. 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, the memory of him and his and his teaching continued to linger in the background, until it slowly gained momentum in the mind of the people and transformed the god Yahweh into the Mosaic God.
Freud’s hypothesis has of course been attacked from all sides. However, Freud’s view is that this hypothesis gives 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.
Freud believed that this theory also accounted for the dual nature of Yahweh, who, on the one hand exhibits the barbarious 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 in this theory 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 who turns, in the end, into a desert shaman.
So much for Freud’s hypothesis. According to Campbell, the legend of Moses’ birth is modeled on the earlier birth story of Sargon of Agade (about 2350 B.C.). The episode is from the Elohim text mentioned above, composed in the eighth century B.C. in Israel. The general mythic formula followed is that of the Myth of the Birth of the Hero. The legend also bears comparison with the Greek story of about the same period, told of Perseus, who was born of the princess Danaë. In the case of Moses, the Elohim text provides the noble Egyptian background and legend of hero birth, while the Yahwist text tells the tale of his marriage to one of the seven daughters of a Midianite priest of the desert.
Common to both the Elohim and the Yahwist 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 the desert flight leads to a direct meeting with God and reception of a great destiny. The priestly texts of the fourth century B.C. have edited and spliced these texts into one coherent tale.
Viewed as an origin myth, instead of as a clue to actual history, the narrative is of a great cycle of descent into the underworld and return. What is brought forth is a) the knowledge of Yahweh, b) the nuclear force of the Chosen People, and c) the promise to that people of a destiny, with a 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 people. It is highly significant that the later festival of the Passover which 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 cult, the resurrection is of a god, whereas in the Jewish it is of the Chosen People.