6. The Mount of God, where certain pious Sethites lived near the ‘Cave of Treasure’, at the Gate of Paradise, will have been El’s holy Mount Saphon, not Hermon.
7. Istahar’s story is borrowed partly from the Greek writer Aratus (early third century B.C.). He tells how Justice, a daughter of Dawn, ruled mankind virtuously in the Golden Age; but when the Silver and Bronze Ages brought greed and slaughter among them, exclaimed: ‘Alas, for this evil race!’ and mounted into Heaven, where she became the constellation Virgo. The rest of this story is borrowed from Apollodorus’s account of Orion’s attempt on the seven virgin Pleiades, daughters of Atlas and Pleione, who escaped from his embraces transformed to stars. ‘Istahar’, however, is the Babylonian Goddess Ishtar, sometimes identified with Virgo. Popular Egyptian belief identified Orion, the constellation which became Shemhazai, with the soul of Osiris.
8. The right claimed by certain ‘sons of judges’ to take the maidenheads of poor men’s brides is, apparently, the ancient and well-known jus primae noctis which, as the droit de cuissage, was still reputedly exercised by feudal lords in Europe during the Middle Ages (see 36. 4). Yet at a time when the Sons of God were regarded as divine beings, this story may have referred to a custom prevalent in the Eastern Mediterranean: a girl’s maidenhead was ritually broken by ‘equitation’ of a priapic statue. A similar practice obtained among Byzantine hippodrome-performers as late as Justinian’s reign, and is hinted at in records of the medieval English witch cult.
9. Many details in the Genun story, taken from the fifth-century A.D. Ethiopian Book of Adam, are paralleled in midrashic writings. Although Genun’s name suggests ‘Kenan’, who appears in Genesis v. 9 as the son of Enoch, he is a composite Kenite character: the invention of musical instruments being attributed in Genesis to Jubal, and of edged brass and iron blades to his brother Tubal Cain. Genun was said to occupy ‘the Land of the Slime Pits’, namely the southern shores of the Dead Sea (Genesis XIV. 10), doubtless because the evil city of Sodom stood there (see 32. 6).
10. Enoch (‘Instructor’) won his immense reputation from the apocalyptic and once canonical Book of Enoch, compiled in the first century B.C. It is an ecstatic elaboration of Genesis V. 22: ‘And Enoch walked with God three hundred years after he begat Methuselah.’ Later Hebrew myth makes him God’s recording angel and counsellor, also patron of all children who study the Torah. Metatron is a Hebrew corruption either of the Greek metadromos, ‘he who pursues with vengeance’, or of meta ton thronon, ‘nearest to the Divine Throne’.
11. The Anakim may have been Mycenaean Greek colonists, belonging to the ‘Sea Peoples’ confederation which caused Egypt such trouble in the fourteenth century B.C. Greek mythographers told of a Giant Anax (‘king’), son of Heaven and Mother Earth, who ruled Anactoria (Miletus) in Asia Minor. According to Apollodorus, the disinterred skeleton of Asterius (‘starry’), Anax’s successor, measured ten cubits. Anakes, the plural of Anax, was an epithet of the Greek gods in general. Talmudic commentators characteristically make the Anakim three thousand cubits tall.
12. Megalithic monuments, found by the Hebrews on their arrival in Canaan, will have encouraged legends about giants; as in Greece, where the monstrous man-eating Cyclopes were said by story-tellers ignorant of ramps, levers and other Mycenaean engineering devices, to have lifted single-handed the huge blocks of stone that form the walls of Tiryns, Mycenae and other ancient cities.
13. The Nefilim (‘Fallen Ones’) bore many other tribal names, such as Emim (‘Terrors’), Repha’im (‘Weakeners’), Gibborim (‘Giant Heroes’), Zamzummim (‘Achievers’), Anakim (‘Long-necked’ or ‘Wearers of Necklaces’), Awwim (‘Devastators’ or ‘Serpents’). One of the Nefilim named Arba is said to have built the city of Hebron, called ‘Kiriath-Arba’ after him, and become the father of Anak whose three sons, Sheshai, Ahiman and Talmai, were later expelled by Joshua’s comrade Caleb. Since, however, arba means ‘four’ in Hebrew, Kiriath-Arba may originally have meant ‘City of Four’, a reference to its four quarters mythically connected with the Anakite clans: Anak himself and his ‘sons’ Sheshai, Ahiman and Talmai.
19
THE BIRTH OF NOAH
(a) Cain died several generations later at the hands of his great-great-grandson Lamech. This Lamech was a mighty hunter and, like all others of Cain’s stock, married two wives. Though grown old and blind, he continued to hunt, guided by his son Tubal Cain. Whenever Tubal Cain sighted a beast, he would direct Lamech’s aim. One day he told Lamech: ‘I spy a head peeping above yonder ridge.’ Lamech drew his bow; Tubal Cain pointed an arrow which transfixed the head. But, on going to retrieve the quarry, he cried: ‘Father, you have shot a man with a horn growing from his brow!’ Lamech answered: ‘Alas, he must be my ancestor Cain!’, and struck his hands together in grief, thereby inadvertently killing Tubal Cain also.
Lamech mourned all day beside the corpses, being prevented by blindness from finding his way home. In the evening, Adah and Zillah, his wives, found him. Lamech cried: ‘Hearken to me: I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt! If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech shall be avenged seventy-and-sevenfold!’ At that, Earth opened and swallowed all Cain’s nearest kinsmen, except Enoch: namely Irad, Mehujael, Methuselah and their families.
(b) Lamech told his wives: ‘Enter my bed, and there await me!’ Zillah answered: ‘You have killed our ancestor Cain and my son Tubal Cain; therefore neither of us shall lie with you.’ Lamech replied: ‘This is God’s will. Seven generations, the span allotted to Cain, have now elapsed. Obey me!’ But they said: ‘No, for any children born of this union would be doomed.’ Lamech, Adah and Zillah then sought out Adam, who was still alive, and asked him to judge between them. Zillah spoke first: ‘Lamech has killed your son Cain, and also my son Tubal Cain.’ Lamech declared: ‘Both deaths were caused by inadvertence, since I am blind.’ Adam told Adah and Zillah: ‘You must obey your husband!’
(c) Zillah then bore Lamech a son already circumcised: a sign of God’s especial grace. Lamech named him Noah, finding great consolation in him.200 Noah’s cheeks were whiter than snow and redder than a rose; his eyes like rays of the morning sun; his hair long and curly; his face aglow with light. Lamech therefore suspected him to be a bastard fathered on Zillah by one of the Watchers, or Fallen Ones; but Zillah swore that she had been faithful. They consulted their ancestor Enoch, who had lately been caught up to Heaven. His prophecy, ‘In Noah’s lifetime God will do a new thing on earth!’, gave Lamech his needed reassurance.
(d) At Noah’s birth, which coincided with Adam’s death, the world greatly improved. Hitherto, when wheat had been sown, half of the harvest was thorns and thistles. God now lifted this curse. And whereas hitherto all work had been done with bare hands, Noah taught men to make ploughs, sickles, axes and other tools.201 But some award the invention of smithcraft to Tubal Cain, his dead brother.202
***
1. This story recalls two Greek myths—Perseus’s accidental killing of his grandfather Acrisius, and Athamas’s mistaking of Learchus for a white stag—and is told to explain Lamech’s cry in Genesis IV. 23: ‘I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt!’, the original context of which has vanished. Although tautology—the pairing of two phrases, differently worded but of the same sense—is a common ornament in Hebrew poetry, Lamech has here been absurdly credited with killing not one warrior, but an old man and a youth; very much as when Jesus is said to have fulfilled Zechariah’s prophecy (Zechariah IX. 9) by ‘riding on an ass and on a colt, the foal of an ass,’ (Matthew XXI. 1–3), rather than on a single young ass. The law which required the next of kin to avenge murder, or even manslaughter, accounts for the Cities of Refuge instituted by Moses (Numbers XXXV. 13; Joshua XX. 1–9), where a man was safe until his case came before a judge. Thus Adam acts as judge and allows Lamech’s plea of manslaughter, when he points out that if vengeance were taken on him, his nearest kinsman would take even more merciless vengeance on the av
engers. But Earth has already supported Lamech’s plea by swallowing up all Cain’s kin. Although the etymology of ‘Lamech’ is uncertain, the midrash on this double homicide evidently connects it with three related Arabic roots lamah, lamakh, and lamaq, which mean ‘to strike with a flat hand’ and ‘to look stealthily or sideways’.
2. Tubal Cain, in Genesis IV, is a smith whose brothers are Jabal, a herdsman, and Jubal, a musician. These names evidently record the occupations of certain Kenite families. ‘Tubal’ stands for Tabali (in Greek: Tibareni), Anatolian tribesmen described by Herodotus as neighbours of the iron-working Chalybes. In Ezekiel XXVII. 13, ‘Tubal’ supplies Tyre with brazen vessels and slaves; ‘Tubal Cain’ thus probably means ‘the metal-working Kenite’. Jubal was a Canaanite god of music.
3. The two Biblical accounts of Lamech’s family are inconsistent. According to Genesis IV. 19–22, he had Jabal and Jubal by his wife Adah; by his wife Zillah, Tubal Cain and a daughter Naamah. According to Genesis V. 28–31, Noah was Lamech’s first-born; other sons and daughters are mentioned but not named.
20
THE DELUGE
(a) Noah was so loth to lose his innocence that, though often urged to marry, he waited until God found him Naamah, Enoch’s daughter—the only woman since Istahar to have remained chaste in that corrupt generation. Their sons were Shem, Ham and Japheth; and when they grew up, Noah married them to the daughters of Eliakim, son of Methuselah.203
(b) Warned by God of the coming Deluge, Noah spread the news among mankind, preaching repentance wherever he went. Though his words burned like torches, the people mocked him with: ‘What is this deluge? If it be a deluge of flame, we have alitha (asbestos?), which is proof against fire; and if a deluge of water, we have sheets of iron to restrain any flood that may break from the earth. Against water from the sky, we can use an aqeb (awning?).’ Noah warned them: ‘Yet God will send the waters bubbling up beneath your heels!’ They boasted: ‘However great this deluge, we are so tall that it cannot reach our necks; and should He open the sluices of Tehom, we will block them with the soles of our feet.204
(c) God then ordered Noah to build, and caulk with pitch, an ark of gopher-wood large enough for himself, his family and chosen examples of all other creatures living on earth. He must take seven beasts and birds of every clean kind, two of every unclean kind and two creeping things of every kind. He must also provide them with food. Noah spent fifty-two years on this shipwright’s task; he worked slowly in the hope of delaying God’s vengeance.205
(d) God Himself designed the ark; which had three decks and measured three hundred cubits from stem to stern, fifty from gunwale to gunwale, and thirty from hatches to keel. Each deck was divided into hundreds of cabins, the lowest made to house all beasts both wild and tame; the middle deck, all birds; the upper deck, all creeping things, and Noah’s family besides.206
(e) Certain wandering spirits also entered the ark, and were saved. A couple of monsters too large for any cabin, nevertheless survived: the Reem, which swam behind, resting its nose on the poop; and the Giant Og. This was Hiya’s son by the woman who had since married Ham and who begged Noah to keep Og’s head above water by letting him cling to a rope-ladder. In gratitude, Og swore that he would be Noah’s slave; but though Noah compassionately fed him through a port-hole, he afterwards resumed his evil ways.207
(f) When Noah set about gathering the creatures together, he was appalled by his task, and cried: ‘Lord of the Universe, how am I to accomplish this great thing?’ Thereupon the guardian angel of each kind descended from Heaven and, carrying basketsful of fodder, led them into the ark; so that each seemed to have come by its own native intelligence. They arrived on the very day that Methuselah died, at the age of nine hundred and sixty-nine years, a full week before the Deluge began; and God appointed this time of mourning as a time of grace, during which mankind might still repent. He then commanded Noah to sit beside the door of the ark and observe each creature as it came towards him. Such as crouched down in his presence were to gain admittance; such as remained standing must be excluded. Some authorities say that according to God’s orders, if the male lorded it over the female of his own kind, both were admitted, but not otherwise. And that He gave these orders because it was no longer men alone that committed bestiality. The beasts themselves rejected their own mates: the stallion mounted the she-ass; the jackass, the mare; the dog, the she-wolf; the serpent, the tortoise; and so forth—moreover, females frequently lorded it over males. God had decided to destroy all creatures whatsoever, except those that obeyed His will.208
(g) Earth shook, her foundations trembled, the sun darkened, lightning flashed, thunder pealed, and a deafening voice the like of which was never heard before, rolled across mountain and plain. Thus God sought to terrify evil-doers into repentance; but without avail. He chose water rather than fire as a fit punishment for their unspeakable vices, and opened Heaven’s sluices by the removal of two Pleiades; thus allowing the Upper and Lower Waters—the male and female elements of Tehom, which He had separated in the days of Creation—to re-unite and destroy the world in a cosmic embrace.
The Deluge began on the seventeenth day of the second month, when Noah was six hundred years old. He and his family duly entered the ark, and God Himself made fast the door behind them. But even Noah could not yet believe that God would wipe out so magnificent a handiwork, and therefore had held back until waves lapped at his ankles.209
(h) The floods spread swiftly over the entire earth. Seven hundred thousand evil-doers gathered around the ark, crying: ‘Open the door, Noah, and let us enter!’ Noah shouted from within: ‘Did I not urge you to repent these hundred and twenty years, and you would not listen?’ ‘Now we repent,’ they answered. ‘It is too late,’ he said. They tried to break down the door, and would have overturned the ark, but that a pack of rejected wolves, lions and bears which were also trying to enter, tore hundreds of them in pieces, and dispersed the rest. When Tehom’s Lower Waters rose, the evil-doers first threw children into the springs, hoping to choke their flow, then climbed trees or hills. Rain cascaded down, and soon a rising flood bore up the ark, until at last it floated fifteen cubits above the highest peaks—yet so buffeted by waves that all inside were hurled to and fro like beans in a boiling pot. Some say that God heated the Deluge in the Pit’s flames, and punished fiery lusts with scalding water; or rained fire on the evil-doers; or let carrion birds tear out their eyes as they swam.210
(i) A pearl hanging from the ark’s roof shone calmly on Noah and his family. When its light paled, he knew that the hours of daylight had come; when it brightened, he knew that night was at hand, and thus never lost count of the Sabbaths. Some say, however, that this light came from a sacred book which the Archangel Raphael gave to Noah, bound in sapphires, and containing all knowledge of the stars, the art of healing and the mastery of demons. Noah bequeathed this to Shem, from whom it passed by way of Abraham to Jacob, Levi, Moses, Joshua and Solomon.211
(j) Throughout the next twelve months neither Noah nor his sons slept, being continually busied with their charges. Some creatures were accustomed to eat at the first hour of the day or night; others at the second, third or fourth hour, or even later; and each expected its own fodder—the camel needed straw; the ass, rye; the elephant, vine shoots; the ostrich, broken glass. Yet, according to one account, all beasts, birds, creeping things and man himself, subsisted on a single food: namely fig-bread.212
(k) Noah prayed: ‘Lord of the Universe, release me from this prison! My soul is wearied by the stench of lions, bears and panthers.’ As for the chameleon, no one knew how to feed it; but one day Noah opened a pomegranate, and a worm fell out which the starving creature devoured. Thereupon he kneaded shoots of camel-thorn into a cake, and fed the chameleon with the worms that it bred. A fever kept both lions sick all this time; they did not prey on other beasts, but ate grass like oxen. Seeing the phoenix huddled in a corner, Noah asked: ‘Why have you not demanded food?’ ‘Sir,’ it repl
ied, ‘your household are busy enough; I do not wish to cause them trouble.’ He then blessed the phoenix, saying: ‘Be it God’s will that you never die!’213
(l) Noah had parted his sons from their wives, and forbidden them marital rites: while the world was being destroyed they must take no thought for its replenishment. He laid the same prohibition upon all beasts, birds and creeping things. Only Ham, the dog, and the cock-raven disobeyed. Ham sinned in order to save his wife from disgrace: had he not lain with her himself, Shem and Japheth would have known that she was already bearing a child to the fallen angel Shemhazai. Nevertheless, God punished Ham by turning his skin black. He also punished the dog, by attaching it shamefully to the bitch after copulation; and the raven, by making it inseminate the hen-bird through its beak.214
(m) When one hundred and fifty—though some say, forty—days had passed, God shut the sluices of Heaven with two stars borrowed from the Great Bear. This still pursues the Pleiades nightly, growling: ‘Give back my stars!’ He then sent a wind that drove Tehom’s waters toppling over Earth’s brink, until the Deluge slowly subsided. By the seventh day of the seventh month, Noah’s ark had come to rest upon Mount Ararat. On the first day of the tenth month, summits of other mountains rose in sight. Having waited a further forty days, Noah opened a skylight and told the raven to fly off and fetch back news of the outside world. It replied insolently: ‘God, your master, hates me; and so do you! Were not His orders: “Take seven of all clean creatures, and two of all unclean”? Why choose me for this dangerous mission, when my mate and I are only two? Why spare the doves, which number seven? If I should die of heat or cold, the world would be bereft of ravens. Or do you lust after my mate?’ Noah cried: ‘Alas, Evil One! Even my wife is forbidden me while we are afloat. How much more your mate, a creature not of my kind?’ The raven thereupon hid itself. Noah searched the ark with care and, presently finding the truant hidden under the she-eagle’s wing, said: ‘Evil One! Did I not order you to see whether the floods have abated? Be off at once!’ The raven answered impudently: ‘It is as I thought: you lust after my mate!’ Noah, enraged, cried: ‘May God curse the beak that uttered this calumny!’ And all the creatures, listening, said ‘Amen!’ Noah opened the skylight, and the raven—which had meanwhile impregnated the she-eagle, and other carrion-birds besides, thus depraving their natures—flew out but soon came back. Again sent out, again it came back. The third time it stayed away, gorging on corpses.215
Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis Page 12