The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination
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and she in turn gave birth to Ether and Day.
As the gods multiply, their lives become more violent and their glory more complicated. The first generation of Titans were the Cyclopes with their “single round eye that leered from their foreheads, and inventive skill and strength and power” and other “brazen sons,” each with “a hundred invincible arms” and fifty heads. One of these Titans, Kronos, castrated his father Ouranos as he lay with his mother, Gaia. From the flowing blood of Ouranos came the Furies, the Giants, and the Nymphs of the Ash Trees. Out of Ouranos’ genitals cast in the water arose the beautiful Aphrodite. All these were the beginnings of new procreations in unending generations. When Kronos coupled with his sister Rheis, also a child of Ouranos and Gaia, the greatest of their offspring was Zeus, who ever thereafter ruled gods and men from Olympus. The rest of Theogony is a saga of Zeus, who uses the thunder and lightning that the Cyclopes gave him and enlists the hundred-handed, fifty-headed monsters to defeat the rebellious Titans.
When Zeus drove the Titans out of the sky
giant Gaia bore her youngest child, Typhoeus;
goaded by Aphrodite, she lay in love with Tartaros.
The arms of Typhoeus were made for deeds of might,
his legs never wearied, and on his shoulders were
a hundred snake heads, such as fierce dragons have,
and from them licking black tongues darted forth.
From such couplings came the vast progeny of gods, even the Muses themselves.
PART TWO
A
CREATOR-GOD
What was God doing before He created the World? Martin Luther replied, “He sat under a birch tree cutting rods for those who ask nosey questions.”
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The Intimate God of Moses
THE idea of an original Creation by a single all-powerful Creator comes to the West through Moses, the greatest of the Hebrew prophets. It was Moses, too, who announced the paradoxical, mysterious nature of the Creator. Bards and philosophers, priests and princes around the world had found countless reasons to turn away from the riddle of Creation. But this Hebrew prophet, born in Egypt of obscure immigrant parents of a servant class, allowed himself to be named the ambassador plenipotentiary of the Creator. And he brought epoch-making answers to crucial questions.
There was a historical Moses, as even skeptical scholars agree. Recent archaeology puts the Exodus from Egypt at about 1290 B.C., and suggests that Moses was born sometime in the thirteenth century B.C. It is not easy to separate history from legend, but we have evidence that he was a talented priest and politician, a persuasive moralist and lawgiver. Some say that he may have been an Egyptian by birth. “Moses” (the Hebrew “Moshe”), derived from the Egyptian moser, simply means “is born” (as in the Pharaoh Thutmose, “The God Thoth is born”). Perhaps his full name was longer, appending the name of a god. The name “Mose” was also in use. The associations of the word mashah (to draw out) in Hebrew suggests that Moses’ name may have referred to the fact that as an infant he was “drawn out” of the Nile, or perhaps that he drew the Israelites forth from Egypt and from the flood.
“Hebrew” (from Egyptian Habiru) was the name for a class of serving people who had been in Egypt for many generations. One of the pharaohs must have feared them and enslaved them. By Moses’ time, it seems, the Pharaoh had ordered the death of every newborn Hebrew male. The Bible reports how Moses survived:
And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi. And the woman conceived, and bare a son; and when she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink. And his sister stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him.
And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river’s side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it. And when she had opened it, she saw the child; and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews’ children. Then said his sister to Pharaoh’s daughter, shall I go and call to thee a nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for thee? And Pharaoh’s daughter said unto her, Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman took the child, and nursed it. And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son. And she called his name Moses; and she said, “Because I drew him out of the water.”
During his years at the Pharaoh’s court (probably of Ramses II) not detailed in the Bible (Exodus 2:1–10), Moses must have had an opportunity to learn how a kingdom was governed and how an army was commanded. At this time the Pharaoh ruled a vast empire, including Canaan (Palestine) and some of Syria.
Probably knowing that he was born a Hebrew, Moses felt righteous anger at the oppression of his people. “And he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren. And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand.” The next day when he returned to the Hebrew workers, he found two of them fighting. He reprimanded the worker in the wrong, “Wherefore smitest thou thy fellow?” The guilty worker retorted, “Who made thee a prince and a judge over us? Intendest thou to kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian?” Moses was alarmed that his own crime had been discovered, for he knew the Pharaoh would seek to slay him.
With grim appropriateness, Moses began his career as prophet of Judaism and founder of the community of Israel in the role of a refugee. He fled to the land of Midian, in northwest Arabia, east of the Gulf of Aqaba. There, a fugitive from the Pharaoh’s justice, he began a new life. Until then we know nothing extraordinary about Moses except the circumstances of his rescue in the bulrushes. If he had stayed on in Egypt and had not committed murder he might have had a successful career in the Pharaoh’s service.
In Midian, when he sat down to rest by a well, he had the good luck to meet the seven daughters of Jethro, a shepherd priest (Exodus 2:15ff.), who had come to water their flock. When some unfriendly shepherds tried to drive them away, Moses stood up for them and watered their flock. When the daughters returned home their father asked why they had returned so soon. Jethro invited Moses to come live with them, and offered his daughter Zipporah to be Moses’ wife. She bore a son whom Moses, recalling his refugee status, named Gershom (by folk etymology from “stranger”), “for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land” (Exodus 2:16–25). Meanwhile, as the sufferings of the children of Israel in Egypt became intolerable, they cried to their God to help them escape.
Then, with no further biblical explanation, came the event that changed Moses’ life. He was tending his father-in-law’s flock in a remote “backside of the desert,” where he came to “Mt. Horeb”—probably the place later called Mount Sinai.
And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I. And he said, Draw not nigh hither; put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. Moreover he said, I am the God of thy 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 upon God. (Exodus 3:2–6)
Rationalists suggest that what Moses saw may have been the brilliant blossoms of one of the mimosa families, the desert acacia (Loranthus acacia).
Moses’ first encounter with his Creator-God already revealed the divine paradox of Creation. Historians of religion call this Moses’ “theophany,” their name for a visible appearance of God or a god to a man. But Moses had not da
red to look upon his Creator. The contradictory characteristics of this Creator-God appeared at once. For while the God was not to be seen or even to be named, He entered intimately into every man’s life and treated man as a kind of equal.
Responding to the cries from the children of Israel, God directed Moses to go to Pharaoh “that thou mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt.” Moses at first demurred. Who am I, an inept stammerer, he said, to take on this momentous task? When the children of Israel would ask the name of this God who had sent him, what was he to say? “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you … The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob … this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations” (Exodus 3:14–15). The precise meaning of the Hebrew “I am that I am”—usually transliterated as “Yahweh”—has been the subject of endless speculation.
Until then, it seems, the God of the Fathers had been known as “El Shaddai” (God of the Mountain or Almighty God) or “El ’Elyon” (God Most High). In the future the God of Moses would be Yahweh. A widely accepted explanation is that Yahweh comes from the Hebrew verb “to be.” As the causative form it means “to bring into being.” The name derived from it would mean “He who brings into being,” or the Creator. The magical uses of names, the power that knowing a name gives over the person named, and the fear of uttering the name of the Potentate—all these ideas are familiar enough to anthropologists. But for Moses, biblical scholar Martin Buber observes, Yahweh was not so much a name as a “dark, mysterious cry,” an elemental invocation of the Creator. To Moses’ diffidence, God had replied, “Certainly I will be with thee.”
The awe before this Creator-God, and the reluctance to utter or embody Him in a name remained strong in the Jewish tradition. The laity, to avoid irreverence, were still not to pronounce God’s name. Only priests at the benediction, and later only the High Priest, were allowed to utter the “unutterable” name. And the High Priest should whisper lest his fellow priests hear the name. The torture-death suffered by a famous rabbi (Hanina ben Teradion) during the persecutions of Hadrian was explained as God’s punishment for his sacrilege in having pronounced the holy name. Medieval Jewish philosophers still referred to “the proper, the great, the wonderful, the hidden, the excellent name, the written-but-not-read name.” Synonyms, abbreviations, and even deliberate mispronunciations were among the devices used to avoid the irreverence of naming the unnamable. A favorite epithet, with heavy theological and polemical overtones, was “He-who-spake-and-the-world-came-into-being.”
The belief that God existed but that His qualities could not be described became the basis of a whole new theology. In this way Philo of Alexandria (late first century B.C. to first century A.D.) would combine philosophy and theology in the style of Plato, foreshadowing Christian thought. At the same time Philo declared that the love which God had planted in man would help man become godlike. The great Unnamable had made men resemble Him.
Here was a path leading man to think himself a potential creator. Man would himself then be no mere object or victim or instrument of gods but part of the processes of creation. This was the paradox of the God of Moses. The God who would not reveal his name, and on whom Moses dared not look, promised Moses, “Certainly I will be with thee” (Exodus 3:12). The hint that man might himself possess Creator-like qualities appeared in a new intimacy between God and man. As the Bible explained in Genesis, the First Book of Moses, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him” (Genesis 1:27).
The perpetual “covenant” between a Creator-God and a Man-in-God’s-Image was an extraordinary idea. In religions and mythologies where the gods had been made in man’s image, it was not surprising that Zeus or Juno, or Poseidon or Aphrodite should be angered at their human rivals. But this God of the Unutterable Name actually entered into an agreement, a covenant, establishing mutual obligations with his God-like human creations. The Bible offers numerous examples of “covenants,” solemn agreements between individuals or peoples. One of the most memorable was that between Jonathan and David (1 Samuel 18:3). God covenanted with Noah (Genesis 9:13) and with Abraham (Genesis 18–21; 17:4–14). And it was when “God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob” and the sufferings of their descendants in Egypt that He commissioned Moses, at the burning bush, to lead out the children of Israel (Exodus 2 and 3). The covenant negotiated through Moses—that He would be their God taking them to their promised land, and they would take Him for their God above all others—dominated the Five Books of Moses (the Pentateuch). The word “testament” itself is an archaic synonym for “covenant.” Some versions still distinguish the two divisions of Scripture as the Books of the Old Covenant (The Old Testament) and the Books of the New Covenant (The New Testament). God’s ambassador, Moses, sealing the covenant with the children of Israel, brought into being the community of Israel. In this way Moses himself became a creator. Some students of religious history are tempted then to call Judaism by the name of “Mosaism.”
For man’s awareness of his capacity to create, the Covenant was a landmark. It declared that a people become a community through their belief in a Creator and His Creation. They confirmed their creative powers through their kinship, their sharing qualities of God, their intimate and voluntary relationship to a Creator-God.
In biblical times, there were many ways of sealing a covenant. One was to dismember and sacrifice a lamb or some other animal. Eating the sacrifice would symbolize a bond of union between the covenanters, just as the dismemberment of the sacrificial victim symbolized the fate of a faithless covenanter. Circumcision was the biblical symbol of sealing the covenant between God and the children of Israel. The removal of the foreskin of male members of the community is an ancient custom with varied forms around the world. It appears to have been common among the primitive Semites. As the use of a “sharpened stone” (probably a flint knife) by Moses’ wife, Zipporah, in the circumcision of their son suggests, it may even have preceded the age of metals (Exodus 4:25). In the Books of Moses, the ceremony on the organ of procreation affirmed the covenant between Yahweh and the children of Israel, past, present, and future.
In earlier times circumcision was performed (as in much of the world today) at puberty or perhaps (as in some Muslim communities) just before marriage. But, God told Abraham (Genesis 17:7–13), “a token of the covenant betwixt you and me” was the rite of circumcision (Genesis 17:11). “And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generation … and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant” (Genesis 17:12–13). The covenant with God, first sealed when the male child received his name and his identity in the community, affirmed every man’s godlike qualities, his share in the processes of creation.
Between God and the children of Israel, another symbol of man’s relation to his Creator was the Sabbath, which had precedents in the Babylonian Sabbath and their seven-day week. But for the Hebrews the Sabbath, like circumcision, became a sign of the Covenant. The Commandment to keep the Sabbath and its meaning came through Moses.
And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying … Verily my sabbaths ye shall keep: for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations; that ye may know that I am the Lord that doth sanctify you.… Ye shall keep the sabbath therefore.… Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the sabbath of rest, holy to the Lord.… Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the sabbath, to observe the sabbath throughout their generations, for a perpetual covenant. It is a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed. [Exodus 31:12–17]
These were the words that the Lord spoke to Moses and then affixed on the “two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18).
In the Jewish tradition, the Sabbath began at sundown on Friday and lasted till sundown on Saturday, in the pattern of the biblical days. “And the evening and the morning were the sixth day” (Genesis 1:3). During the Babylonian exile and in later generations, the Sabbath became a binding custom, sustaining the community sense of the Jews even when they were dispersed, far from Temple or synagogue. For the Sabbath observance was moved into the home, and the covenant with the God of Moses was celebrated in every family. The differing attitudes toward observance of the Sabbath have become a touchstone of the different sects of Judaism, and have divided the community of modern Israel. At times the commandment to rest on the Sabbath was interpreted so strictly that Jews refused to take up arms to defend themselves on that day. And they became an easy target for enemies who knew their customs. Those in the Jewish community who refused such a suicidal interpretation of the Sabbath insisted that “the Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath.”
Through the five Books of Moses (the Pentateuch) Moses led Western man’s effort to understand the Creation and find a human share in its processes. The Bible reports that Moses “wrote all the words of the Lord” (Exodus 24:4), but some modern biblical scholars credit Moses with recording only a fifth of the text. This would still include crucial parts—the Ten Commandments, the Covenant, and its interpretations.