Abstract

To the people of Israel, their history was naturally integrated with myth

H Gottlieb, Myths of the Old Testament

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, June 18, 2001; Friday, 21 October 2005

The New Year Festival

The New Year Festival (NYF) in the ancient near east (ANE) was celebrated annually on the basis that the world was created every year, indeed was being continuously created. The main characteristic of a myth is that it is a timeless tale, timeless because it tells a story that is happening continuously. Its continuous happening explains the world, and its being acted out by the people each year was the human contribution to the sustenance of the cosmos. Each year, the celebrations gave humanity a fresh start—they helped to renew it, and then it felt to them renewed. The cosmos, including the people were born again, the bible even speaking of the birth pangs of the renewal and salvation that depended on it, even Yehouah feeling them. The “born again” idea is very old indeed.

The NYF came from the seasonal cycle upon which all life depended. The priesthood encouraged the people to believe that without human help the regularity of the seasons would cease and hostile forces would pent up. Doubtless even the priests believed it, and no one dare miss out the ceremonies for fear of the consequences. Fertility and human life would be threatened, indeed so would the very order of the universe.

Seasons favourable to life alternated with unfavorable seasons. The season of light and warmth or of rain alternated with the season of low light, frost or drought. Or, the season of rains alternated with a season of blazing heat that burnt up plant life. The period when the dry or cold season ended was a time low food supplies and genuine anxiety over survival, and consequent social tension. Would the season turn? Occasionally it did not and people starved. The anxiety induced religious fervour. It was an ideal time for priests to show their magical skills, by calling for the rituals of renewal, the acting out of the myths of origin. They would show how they could save the people. And most often the people were saved and suitably impressed by the benefits of religion.

The inauguration of a new summer was depicted as a cosmic event. The priests told the people how, and offered the explanations, but the people had to take part in the dramas or at least the processions and singing. People helped themselves to be saved by believing in it. Repeating the act of creation was not just symbolic to those people, but was an actual cosmic event in their lives. The drama was an actual creative act, essential to the continuation of life and reality. They participated each year in ensuring that reality continued for another year, and if the dramas were done properly, the following year would leave them secure, or at peace, as they described it, using the word “salem” (“shalom”) from which comes the name Solomon.

All of this was done at the NYF. The myths explained the actions and their purpose—the rituals of the cultic festival—and the people joined the festival to ensure the myths were properly enacted to secure the community’s prosperity in the coming season by reinforcing them. Thus the whole experience was continually salvific, indeed the mythological acts were considered to be going on continuously. It was endlessly repeating in the cosmos. All myth is a creation myth in that it is an explanation of something that continues to happen, like birth and marriage.

Scholars have classified myths into nine categories;

1. Theogonic—on the origins of the gods
2. Cosmogonic—on the establishment of the cosmos, the ordered universe by subjugating chaos
3. Cosmological—why natural things are as they are and the origins of the seasons
4. Anthropological—the origin of human beings and their relationship with the gods
5. Social—the origin of the tribe or the city, and its people
6. Cult—the origin of the cult, and the shrine, and why the people worship that god
7. Salvation—the gods plan to save humanity
8. Death—explanation of the afterlife and the journey to heaven
9. Eschatological—explaining the end of the world

Not that the early humans beings who were slowly evolving their myths invented them to fill these categories. We classify myths in this way now, but they evolved, without any conscious categorizing, to explain the hows and whys of social living—how and why certain rituals needed to be done.

The Babylonian Creation Myth

The focus in the NYF is the cosmogonic myth—how the world came to be ordered. In Babylon, it was celebrated at the Akitu festival, the Babylonian NYF. Here a theogony occurred by the union of sea water and freshwater, Tiamat and Apsu, chaos and order. Oddly, Apsu had been an Akkadian version of Tiamat, originally a creator goddess, the mother of heaven and earth. Patriarchy was responsible for Tiamat becoming a wicked chaos monster, and Apsu, changing her sex to become her wicked husband, a chthonic god, albeit with some good in him as guardian of freshwater. A brood of new gods emerged, but they disturbed the primeval pair who decided to kill off their whole brood. Ea (Enki) heard of the plot and killed his father Apsu, taking over his realm of fresh water, and assuming his father’s role.

Tiamat then paired up with another wicked god called Kingu to produce a brood of serpentine monsters to destroy the original clutch. Tiamat was the salt sea, chaos and disorder, and these qualities began to spread among the gods. At this point Ea spawned Marduk, a brave new god who offered to take on the monster Tiamat in single combat. He turned one of her own weapons against her, turning her monstrous gape into the evil wind and thus inflating her. Then while her belly was extended, he fired an arrow into her splitting her asunder, bursting her heart and leaving the massive carcase lifeless. With the monster into two parts, Marduk made the heavens with one half and the earth from the other. Then he made mankind from the earth and the blood of the dead rebel god Kingu, or some texts say from a god who was ordered to behead himself after the fashion of the Green Knight of Arthurian legend. He set aside realms for the gods and for humanity, and built a heavenly mansion as a home, and to serve as a model for earthly temples. Lastly, he instated the servitude of humanity to the gods.

In the Babylonian New Year ritual, the king is firmly identified with the community and has a central role in the New Year celebrations, the objective of which was to make sure that the king remained capable of representing his people. The king participated in a ritual combat in which the New Year fought the Old Year in a battle that also stood for the ultimate victory of Good over Evil and Order over Chaos. The hymn called the “Enuma Elish” was chanted. In it, the defeat of the dragon of Chaos, Tiamat, permitted the Creation to take place. Thus each year a new Creation was enacted and Chaos was defeated to ensure that the king maintained Order.

The Babylonian Akitu festival (NYF) was like a game between two teams, and consisted of a mock battle to represent the creation myth. The ritual fight actualized the continuous cosmic struggle between order and chaos. The actual battle was being fought while the ceremony was being conducted. At one stage, though not properly preserved, Marduk is a prisoner of the evil forces, surely meaning he is dead, thus experiencing what Tammuz and Adonis experienced of being confined to the underworld and then being released to arise again back to life. This dying and rising event, standing for the seasonal vegetative cycle, is another episode in the struggle of chaos and order. It is death against life with death prevailing in the dry season, and life springing forth with the rains.

The NYF came to be for twelve days in Persian times, standing for the twelve months of the year, and the twelve eras of cosmic time, both reflecting the twelve constellations that the sun travelled through in its heavenly journey. The eighth and eleventh days were when the gods assigned fate. Lots were cast to predict the events of the coming year. Each year was a run through of cosmic time in miniature. Events could be good or bad, according to the lottery, but Marduk had wrested the tablets of fate from the rebel, Kingu, and so the overall outcome of the cosmic battle would be good.

Another day was devoted to the “hieros gamos” (“hierogamos”), the sacred union or holy marriage. It too was a creation myth in that it created the cosmic sexual union that provided fertility to humans, beasts and plants. On that day, the king and queen or the high priest and high priestess, acting as Marduk and his consort, were united in a ritual marriage that inspired continuing fertility.

Biblical redacters have made the “hieros gamos” into a marriage of Yehouah and His people, or the state, personified as a faithless young woman, because the people were constantly unfaithful! Scarcely questionable evidence of the sacred marriage is the book of the Song of Solomon in the Jewish scriptures. It is embarrasingly erotic for puritan families and so is not mentioned by them. In an interplay of songs between the lovers, it tells of a divinely beautiful and sensuous young woman seeking her lover, but constantly being thwarted by watchmen. It is part of the myth of Inanna or Ishtar seeking Adonis or Tammuz in the underworld, and being hindered by the watchers over the different levels of the descent.

The battle motif constantly emerged in seasonal festivals, not only in the ANE. It is the battle between the good and evil suns, the summer and winter, or the dry and wet seasons. It was a metaphor adopted early in civilisation, and by the civilization of Babylon, had become the battle between order and chaos. Zoroastrianism, in its allegedly heretical form of Zurvanism, makes Time the primeval creator of everything. The Orphic creation myth seems to be from the same source, Time laying the cosmic egg which is the universe as seen by Time or the gods standing outside it.

Eternal Time came out of the solar year, the solar year being envisaged as cosmic or eternal time seen in microcosm. Within it the summer battled the winter, and from that the idea of the good and the evil cosmic spirits begat by Time were thought of by the Zoroastrian theologians. Each one succeeded in turn, so neither one nor the other was the stronger. The victory to celebrate was that of the summer over the winter, since summer provided the necessities of life, and so was considered good, while winter or drought took life away and was considered bad.

People could see sense in the order of things, whereas chaos made no sense, so they thought the good would ultimately come out on top because the good spirit had foresight whereas the evil spirit of chaos had none. That was the tiny difference between them, but it meant good would win. The Jews took it to the extreme of eliminating the evil god almost entirely, and making out that their purely good god was the author of good and evil!

Ugaritic Baal Myth

The god El was called “creator of the world”, “father of the gods”, and “father of the years”. He himself seems never to have been created. He sounds like Zurvan and Chronos (Saturn), the god of time, Time, actually representing eternal time itself. He was the high god of the Canaanites, distant compared with the popular gods, originally doubtless the god of the whole year as opposed to the seasonal gods who were more immediate.

The accessible and popular god of the Canaanites, described in the tablets of old Ugarit found at Ras Shamra, was Baal. He was the Canaanite saviour because he fought Yam and Mot the gods of chaos and death, to ensure the world remained fertile and orderly, and so suitable to feed the people. Yam, which means the sea, is a sea monster with seven heads, also called Lotan, the biblical Leviathan. The letter “v” was obviously pronounced as “oo”, and making the change makes the identity of the two names clear. The sea was considered chaotic, and Baal fought it to ensure the world remained in order. Mot stood for death and therefore infertility and famine. In Job 40, Yehouah boasts to Job of the dragon Leviathan that he had tamed, and another monster, plainly a fertility idol pictured as a hippopotamus, that he had also confined to reedy rivers.

The drama of Baal and Mot was enacted at the New Year Festival, in the autumn, after the dry season and in anticipation of the autumn rains. Mot threatens Baal, “I shall surely pierce you”. It seems he did indeed, and Baal entered the underworld as if dead—the season when the crops burnt off in the summer sun. But before descending to the underworld, Baal had fertilised the earth and its beasts. Baal sent word to Mot, described as the gods’ (plural) son, asking whether he means him to be Mot’s slave. (One of the main words for God in the Jewish scriptures is “elohim”, which literally means gods.)

The goddess Anath descended into the underworld seeking Baal, just as Ishtar and Inanna did in the myths of Adonis and Tammuz. Having found him, helped by the sun god, she took the dead Baal to the sacred mountain, and placed him in a cave. Then in a rage, she descended from the mountain to find Mot, fought him furiously, killing him, cutting him to tiny pieces, and winnowing them like ripe grain. Then she baked the pieces and sowed them into the dried up fields for the birds to eat.

With the defeat of Mot, Baal was resurrected with universal rejoicing, and the autumn rains arrived to fertilize the fields. The god commanded that a temple must be built with an open roof to admit the rains. As in John 12:24, the Canaanites believed that new life sprang from the dead grain the birds fed on, metaphorically the death of Mot and the resurrection of Baal.

In Jeremiah 12:16, the expression “as Yehouah lives” is explicitly compared with the parallel expression “as Baal lives”. It suggests that “as Baal lives” was a common oath of the time. El in the Ugaritic Baal cycle says:

Then I know that Aliyn Baal has revived.

So the oath “as Baal lives” refers to his resurrection from death, implying there was an equivalent tradition for Yehouah. In Isaiah 37:17, Hezekiah declares that Yehouah was “a living god” (“elohim hay”) with the possible implication that the people were always worried that one day their rising god might not rise. He might actually remain a dead god! The god would be considered as dead if he failed to give the people the protection they needed, so when the Assyrians were threatening Jerusalem, it was Hezekiah’s propaganda that “Yehouah lives!”, meaning the city would not be defeated by the Assyrians, and, of course, it was not because Hezekiah had surrendered a large fortune to the Assyrians in tribute. As long as God continued to arise on schedule, the people were protected by Him. So, although Yehouah is always known as the living god, a rising and dying god, Baal, seems to have been thought of in just the same way.

In Isaiah 51:9, the call goes out:

Awake! Awake! Clothe yourself in power, O arm of Yehouah.

The implication is that Yehouah was still sleeping, the biblical euphemism for death, and so leaving his people in danger. The dying and rising god had not arisen.

It all suggests that Yehouah was the same sort of god in the minds of the Canaanites, and that Yehouah might have been a name or another title of Baal. The two gods were originally the same. It was the Persian colonists who separated them.

The Jewish New Year Festival

H Gottlieb, in Myths of the Old Testament, observes that history and myth were intimately mingled for the Jews. So it was with everyone in those distant times when life was lived entirely in the present, but it is particularly absurd that it should have to remain true today for educated modern people quite conscious of the temporal dimension.

Some of the psalms belong in the context of a Jewish New Year Festival. The NYF was the harvest festival or the Feast of Booths, the details of which are set out in Numbers 29, but are reiterated elsewhere more summarily:

You shall keep the Feast of Tabernacles seven days after you have gathered in from your threshingfloor, and from your winepress. And you shall rejoice in your feast, you and your son, and your daughter, and your male slave, and your slave-girl, and the Levite, and the alien, and the fatherless, and the widow that are inside your gates.

Deuteronomy 16:13

Also the Feast of Harvest, the first fruits of your labor, of what you sow in the field. Also the Feast of Ingathering, at the end of the year, at your gathering your work from the field.

Exodus 23:16

And you shall observe a Feast of Weeks for yourself, the firstfruits of the harvest of wheat, also the Feast of Ingathering at the turn of the year.

Exodus 34:22

In the fifteenth day of this seventh month shall be a Feast of Booths seven days to Yehouah. On the first day shall be a holy gathering. You shall do no work of service. Seven days you shall bring a fire offering to Yehouah. On the eighth day you shall have a holy gathering, and you shall bring the fire offering to Yehouah. It is a solemn assembly. You shall do no work of service.

Leviticus 23:34-36

In 1 Kings 8:65, extended back into the mythological time of Solomon, it is simply called a feast. The passages from Exodus show that it was the New Year Feast, and it was held in autumn. So the Festival of Booths was the New Year Feast whether or not it was understood as it, because that is when it was held. Some elements of the NYF hinted at in the Jewish scriptures were:

1. The creation myth of a battle with the sea
2. The death and resurrection of the seasonal fertility god, called “The Lord”
3. The “hieros gamos” of the Lord with his consort
4. The enthronement of the God.

The middle two elements seem to have been deliberately suppressed, and only re-emerged in Christianity. Calls for God to awake seem an odd thing to urge a god to do, but they make entire sense when the god is thought to be dead, the euphemism for which, as it is still, is sleep:

Awake! Why do You sleep, O Lord? Awake! Do not cast us off forever.

Psalms 44:23

That the sleep was thought of as being possibly forever shows that death was meant.

Stir up thyself and awake to my judgment, to my cause, my God (elohim) and my Lord (adonai).

Psalms 35:23

Awaken to help me, and look on me. And You, O Yehouah God of Hosts, the God of Israel, Awake to visit all the nations. Be not merciful to any plotting evil.

Psalms 59:4-5

So, the call was for the sleeping king to awake and save the people. It is a tantalising hint of the dying and rising god so popular at the time. The story in 2 Kings 23:4-14 of Josiah purifying the Jerusalem cult of Canaanite features explains what happened when the Persians colonised the city. That is when the purification happened, but such changes cannot be made by strangers without inviting trouble. The Persians claimed to be restoring religions! So, they needed something to restore the Jerusalem cult to! Of course, there was nothing because the Jerusalem cult had been precisely what any Canaanite cult was, and so the propaganda claim was that good king Josiah, a king from 200 years before, had made the changes when he had found a lost book of law. The Persians were restoring the cult to that most pure version that the good king had already inaugurated. Since it was all long before anyone had ever been born, and the country had been under foreign rule in the meantime, who could argue?

The Psalms contain several descriptions of the arrival of Yehouah at the temple and his enthronement, apparently the highlight of the ceremony. Thus, Psalms 47, 93 and 95-100 celebrate Yehouah’s enthronement. It stood for the present—the Now—so will have followed the seven days of the creation drama. Psalms and the poetic parts of the scriptures were the spoken or sung parts of the cultic drama. The purpose of poetry is to aid memory. The drama was not spoken like a modern play, but will have been mimed and accompanied by a chorus describing what was going on, and inviting the audience to respond from time to time. Cantors were important members of the temple staff. They recited, chanted or sang the hymns, psalms and poetry of the bible.

Making an aniconic god sit on a throne seems quite a difficult trick, though. The bible tells of a box that the Jews had, to carry about the tablets of the law brought down to them from God by Moses. The box was also able to act as a seat—a seat for God. It was therefore God’s throne, and, if there ever was such a peripatetic throne, the enthronement ceremony is likely to have been one of putting God’s throne in its place in the temple, whereupon God will have taken His place upon it, everyone will have imagined.

When the ark pulled out, Moses said, Rise, O Yehouah, and Your enemies shall be scattered, and those hating You shall flee from Your presence. And when it rested, he said, Return, O Yehouah, to the myriads of the thousands of Israel.

Numbers 10:35

Magicians among the temple staff would perhaps have supplied a cloud of smoke or vapour to demonstrate the divine enthronement. Because the biblical myths have been edited for different theological reasons doubtless to do with who ruled in Judah, and in what manner, and also because there are suggestions that even the edited versions have been scattered and had to be recompiled (unless this was an excuse for shockingly bad editing), the myths of the bible are often fragmentary, and the psalms jumbled out of sequence. The incoherent fragments that remain seem to suggest a visual spectacle:

Come, behold the works of Yehouah, who sets ruins on the earth, causing wars to cease to the end of the earth; He breaks the bow and cuts apart spears; He burns the chariots in the fire.

Psalms 46:8-9

Come and see God’s works, who is feared in His acts toward the sons of men. He turns the sea into dry land. They go through the river on foot. There we will rejoice with Him.

Psalms 66:5-6

If Psalms 18:6-15 and 97:1-5 are anything to go by, the occasion was indeed a spectacle with a fine display of temple trickery laid on to impress the yokels. Yehouah was for the Canaanites a storm god, and effects and noises suitable for such a god seem to have been produced. Though there were no fireworks then, so far as anyone knows, the effects should not have been too hard to achieve, bearing in mind that the people were standing off from the main temple building. The Greeks were well able to do such things. Temple priests were known for laying on such magic trickery, the very word magic coming from the skills of the Persian Magi.

Mimed enactments would have involved the king or the king’s regent—in Yehud, probably the High priest. The same sort of mimes have come down to us in the mechanical motions of the clergy conducting services like the holy communion. The aim in all cases is to make the “reality” of the myth actual. The congregation or audience were to re-experience the perpetual happening of the myth. Christ dies perpetually for believers in him.

The immediacy in the NYF is emphasised by the repetition of the word “today”—similar to the many “straightways” in Mark’s gospel with the obvious implication—though it is less obvious by modern translaters wrongly using “stylistic variation”. The film Last Year in Marienbad gives the feel that the procedings must have conveyed to the participants. Cosmic events are never ending, and never beginning. They just go on, rather like a temporal hologram, so long as the world lasts.

It is today that Yehouah acts.
We shall rejoice and be glad now.

Christians do the same. The perpetual greeting of the Orthodox Christians at Easter is, “Christ is risen!”, and the formulaic reply is, “Yes! He is risen, indeed, today!” Similarly western Christians sing at Christmas:

O come, all ye faithful, joyful and tiumphant,
O come ye, O come ye, to Bethlehem.
Come and behold him,
Born the king of angels…

The events of Easter and Christmas are perpetual events. Most Christians think they are celebrating a singular historical occurrence, but regard it just as the earlier religions regarded their annual celebrations of continuous reality, a reality they felt they had to take part in.

Psalms 48:12 refers to a sacred procession through the holy city, to count its towers and ramparts, but beforehand they were singing:

As we have heard, so we have seen in the city of Yehouah of Hosts, in the city of our God. God establishes it forever.

Psalms 48:8

It seems that a cultic drama was followed by a parade through the city, and Psalms 48:9 says something that provoked thought had been seen in the temple. The Psalms seem to contain a myth that Jerusalem was defended by Yehouah in the “battle of the nations”. All the kings of the earth were thought of as massing for an attack on Jerusalem, then, Yehouah appeared at the crucial moment and saved the city from conquest.

God is known in her strongholds for a refuge. For, lo, the kings met together, they passed by together, they saw, so they marveled, they were troubled and fled away. Trembling and pain seized them there, like a woman in labor. You break the ships of Tarshish with an east wind.

Psalms 48:3

In the next verse the audience sing that they have seen it and heard it, and it was apparently seen and heard in the temple.

No historian knows of any such threat to Jerusalem. If meant as historical, it has been exaggerated. Persia certainly set up Jerusalem as a citadel to collect taxes from “the nations” of Abarnahara, and to watch against the Egyptians who were a constant threat. The nation of priests in Jerusalem will have felt threatened by their responsibilities, and depended on Persia for protection. In Psalms 2, the nations are disloyal vassals of a great king in Jerusalem. Jerusalem never had a great king once David and Solomon are dismissed as mythical. The great king in Jerusalem was the Persian shah, who had effectively made Jerusalem the capital of Abarnahara, in respect of raising taxes if not administratively. This great king is called Yehouah’s anointed and the king of the world.

Why have the nations raged and the peoples are meditating on vanity? The kings of the earth set themselves, yea, the rulers have plotted together against Yehouah and His Anointed, saying, We will break their bands in two, and throw off their cords from us. He who sits in the heavens shall laugh, the Lord shall mock at them. Then He will speak to them in His anger, and He will terrify them in His wrath. Yea, I have set My king on My holy mount on Zion. I will declare concerning the statute of Yehouah:
He said to Me, You are My Son. Today I have begotten You. Ask of Me, and I will give the nations as Your inheritance; and the uttermost parts of the earth as Your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron, You shall dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel. Now, then, be wise, O kings, be taught, O judges of the earth. Serve Yehouah with fear, yea, rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and you perish from the way, when His wrath is kindled but a little. Oh the blessings of all those who flee to Him for refuge!

Psalms 2

Yehouah made a covenant with David and his descendants mentioned in Psalms 132:12, but given more fully in Psalms 89:19-37. In these Psalms, the king is divine. He is god’s anointed and the son of God (Pss 2:7, 89:27f). In Psalms 45:6, the king is addressed as God. The psalm is addressed to the king, and this is not a title of God because this king is “the fairest of the sons of man”. This is the king being addressed by God! And we read:

Your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of Your kingdom is a scepter of uprightness.

Psalms 45:6

Your sons shall be in the place of your fathers. You will make them for rulers in all the earth. I will make remembered Your name in every generation and generation, on this account people shall thank You forever and ever.

Psalms 45:16

Davidic kings thus described are more important than most Christians might imagine. What was envisaged in Psalms 89 was not just one Davidic messiah but a dynasty of them reigning forever! Any king of this line is exalted as God’s “chosen one”. He would be God’s “first-born”, “higher than the kings of the earth”. His seed, and so the entire line of Davidic kings, would be forever. This is not an eternal supernatural kingdom, but a promise of an eternal dynasty to this king, supposed to be David, but whose characteristics are those of the king of the world of the time, the Persian shah.

Many of these characteristics are those Christians take to apply to Christ, a supernatural king, but that is not the intention here. Moreover, the Davidic kings did not last forever, or for very long even in the biblical account. It begins to look as if the myth of David, a glorious king from the prehistory of Judah, had to be invented after the fall of Persia to hide the plain truth that the king meant was the Persian shah. Only the accidental survival of Ezra, almost certainly in the confusion of the Maccabean uprising has preserved enough of the truth for it to be worked out.

If Jesus was of this line of kings and the bible is infallible then there are members of the holy blood still out there, and the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and its imitation for those who can only read novels, The Da Vinci Code, must be right! The only trouble is that Jesus denied he was of the Davidic line, and since David was himself a mythical hero like king Arthur (unless it is accepted that David was really Darius II of Persia) it has to be so.

So Psalms 132, which ends up as a hymn to the king and his dynasty, was not a hymn to a king of Judah but actually the king of Persia. Psalms 47 identifies God as “the king of the earth”, a title that could only have applied to the Persian shah. In Psalms 24, the procession at the gates of the temple seeks admission. God is announced as “king over the nations”! The whole world was asked to pay homage to him as the king of Zion. God is enthroned as if He were king, and the call is made “Yehouah of hosts is king”, just as we read in the bible “Absalom is king” (2 Sam 15:10), and “Jehu is king” (2 Kg 9:13) at their enthronements. Here the call should have been “Darius is king”. David is Darius, so when the promises are being made to the line of David, they were being made to the line of Darius, though no doubt only the top officials of Yehud knew it. Of course, if knowledge that the royal line of David really meant the Persian Achaemenids, then the visit by the three kings in the gospel takes on a new light, as would the antipathy the Romans had towards a Davidic pretender, Persians being their arch enemies in the east.

Part of the annual coronation ceremony of the king seems to have been a ritual humiliation, whereby the king is rejected, stripped of his regalia and reduced to commonality and confession—he has to confess his misdeeds! It still survives in the mischief nights preceding Guy Fawkes’ night in the UK and the trick and treat nights of the USA, both corresponding to the ancient autumnal new year, and there is a similar tradition associated with the twelve nights of Christmas because it is the modern new year.

But You have cast off and rejected us. You have passed over on Your anointed. You have turned away from the covenant of Your servant. You have defiled his crown on the ground. You have broken down all his hedges. You have brought his strongholds to ruin. All who pass by the way plunder him. He is a curse to his neighbors. You have set up the right hand of his enemies. You have made all his enemies rejoice. And you have turned back the edge of his sword, and have not held him up in battle. You have made his glory to cease and have hurled his throne to the ground. You have shortened the days of his youth. You have covered him with shame.

Psalms 89:38-45

Psalms 22, 69 and 88 seem to be other aspects of this cultic humiliation and cultic rejection. It reflects the known ceremonies of the ANE when the king is struck firmly on the face, a blow that had to produce tears. The Jewish scriptures speak of a blow with a staff. Micah 5:1 says someone “shall strike the Judge of Israel with a rod on the cheek”. The same idea arises in Lamentations, suggesting that the people were familiar with some such custom, followed by forgiveness and restoration:

I, the man, have seen affliction by the rod of His wrath… He gives his cheek to Him who strikes him. He is filled with reproach. For the Lord will not cast off forever.

Lamentations 3:1,30-31

The recommendation of Jesus to turn the other cheek comes from the same known custom. In the rites the blow is followed by prayer, forgiveness and restitution, and so it makes sense to turn the other cheek. You are forgiven for one blow, so why not suffer two!

If the suffering servant passages of Isaiah refer to the ritual suffering of the king in the annual confirmation of his position at the NYF, Isaiah 53 expresses the ritual suffering, death, resurrection and justification of the king. Either king is a synonym for God (the heavenly king) as it was elsewhere in Canaan such as Phœnicia, or the king or his local proxy undertook the role of the suffering, dying and resurrected God, who suffers only to triumph.

The king was stripped of his regalia, his symbols of office and his fine clothes, in the Babylonian ritual by the Urigallu Priest. Psalms 89:38-45 has the same sort of procedure, a ritual apparently followed in Christ’s passion in the gospels, but attributed to Roman soldiers, possibly a deliberate deception to hide the fact that the Christian son of god actually went through an ANE enthronement ritual, just as the ancient sons of god, the king or the king’s regents did. The explanation might be that the Essenes maintained the ancient rituals of the original Persian temple after they had been largely dropped by the Greeks and the Maccabees. it is why they tended to set themselves apart and behaved secretively. Christians have had to maintain the fairy tale that Jesus was the revealed son of God contrary to all the evidence that tells against it, including all of this evidence that rituals strangely reminiscent of key parts of the gospel story were common in the ANE centuries before Christ, and evidence of them being practised in Judah exists even in the Jewish scriptures.

Biblical Creation Myths

Biblical “scholars” are utterly incapable of relating their ideas to history that actually happened rather than the mythology of the bible that is barely confirmed anywhere else. Genesis and the Psalms suggest that the bible has fragments of a record of a NYF in which Yehouah ensured a victory for cosmic order over chaos. Scholars presume, by accepting the biblical chronology as fact, the great NYF hinted at in the Jewish scriptures was in the monarchic period. The kingship of the god Yehouah and his victory over chaos and evil—the forces opposing the purpose of Israel in the world—was shown as a ritual drama. The evidence, they say, is in the kingship and the royal psalms, but the psalms are mainly if not quite entirely post-Persian! The countries that were known to celebrate an elaborate New Year ceremony of the victory of God over Chaos were Persia and Babylonia.

The first biblical account of Creation (attributed to P, a priestly editor) ends at Genesis 2:4a. It is taken from the liturgy of the Babylonian and Persian New Year festival. It is quite different from the second (J-E) account which continues from then on. It assumes a watery basis on which reality is created by God who completes the job in six days, resting on the seventh, thus giving an explanation of the seven days constituting the week. The origin of the myth is Zoroastrian and so it is post-Persian, as Julius Wellhausen recognized over 100 years ago, but which Jews and Christians still have not realized.

In the Persian period, the Babylonian ceremonies would have been Persianized, especially after Xerxes put down the Babylonian rebellion and destroyed the temple of Marduk. The priestly prayer of Nehemiah 9 shows that Ezra’s book of law had an account of the creation that must have been chanted at the NYF when the forces of chaos were overcome to allow creation. The Genesis account has the rhythm of a repetitive hymnic chant, so the chant will have been Genesis 1:1 to 2:4, which has the right metre for a chanted song, each stanza beginning “And God…” For the whole week of the festival, each day saw a new act of creation, and the final day was given over to resting.

Contrary to the claims of professional religionists, the biblical myth does not show the world as made ex nihilo but as an ordering of the chaos already present. The first creation of Genesis is all about separating and parting things. It reflects a cosmic dualism in which good and bad things have to be separated, as in Persian Zoroastrianism. Robert Alter in the Art of Biblical Narrative, recognizes that the Persian creation story of Genesis is utterly dualist. God splits heaven from earth, darkness and light, night and day, evening and morning, water and sky, sets of pairs of opposites.

Genesis 1-3 is replete with bipolar oppositions that must be held together, heaven-earth, night-day, man-woman, good-evil, death-life, mortality-immortality.

Tamara Cohn Eskenazi

The word used repeatedly here and often in the priestly legislation is “hibdil”. It emphasises the priestly concern with separating the clean from the unclean, but the attempt of scriptural editors to make God almighty has removed the sense that it once had. Genesis has animals and plants separated into their kinds not because the authors were inventing biological taxonomies but because clean life had to be distinguished from unclean life. This myth of Genesis also allowed the priest’s sacred day, the sabbath, to be established by God at the very foundation of the world. The NYF took up twelve days but part of it was a holy week in which the six stages of creation were celebrated. This holy week was the Festival of Tabernacles or Booths.

The whole “In the beginning” pericope sets the tone of the bible, yet Christians and Jews try to deny that their religions are dualist at all. The good God is destined to be the ultimate victor in the struggle of good and evil, so these religions are not dualist, but Zoroastrianism, from which they both derived, is dualist, they insist on telling us. Yet the Zoroastrian god is also destined to be the ultimate victor.

The difference is that the Persian religion is more logical because the Zoroastrian god is not omnipotent against his evil rival until the eschaton. The Judaeo-Christian god is however omnipotent, so we are left with a problem. Why does God not stop all the evil now? We have to believe that God could not stop a rebellion in heaven giving us bad angels and their chief, the Devil, who is a match for the Almighty, just like the Zoroastrian religion, until the eschaton, so God is not omnipotent and His religions are equally dualist. Or, He has to let human beings introduce evil into the world—as a by product of free will—since otherwise they would not be loving Him voluntarily—thus making God into some sort of sadistic megalomaniac.

Both Judaism and Christianity are imperfect copies of Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism has an answer for evil, but these religions do not—within the scope of their own dogma. In Zoroastrianism, the good principle and the evil principle are created equal at the outset, except for one small difference. Of the twin spirits, Ahuramazda is Prometheus—he has foresight—whereas Angra Mainyu is Epimetheus—he has none. The gift of foresight ensures victory for the good.

In the Beginning?

Paul Humbert, from the grammar of the Hebrew text and parallels in all the other creation myths, argues that Genesis begins with a subordinate clause:

When God began to create heaven and earth, the earth was then waste and void, and there was darkness upon the deep, and a storm of God, raged upon the surface of the waters, then God said, Let there be light, and there was light.

Baal and Hadad, the chief gods of the Canaanites and Aramaeans, were storm gods, and here the creation is described as happening in a storm. God creates a raging wind on the surface of the water and orders lightning to appear. Lightning literally divided the darkness, and was not the same as daylight because there was as yet no sun, but the account recognizes that lightning is light, and God calls it day!

The conventional translation gives the impression the wind is a zephyr, or even that is it actually the spirit of God, the Holy Ghost, from the change in meaning of the word, through its religious usage, from wind to breath to spirit (Latin “spiritus”, breath). In fact, the breath of a storm god must have been thought of as a howling gale! The Septuagint, the Greek version of the Jewish scriptures, uses a word which implies “attacked”, so the wind “attacked the surface of the waters”! The metaphor takes us directly back to the battle of Tiamat and Marduk, and wind and water battling each other reappear in the account of the Flood and the crossing of the Red Sea.

The description of the primeval state is one of “waste and void”, not an attempt to describe non-existence, which they would have found hard to imagine, but to describe disorder or disharmony, whence the analogies of the sea and the wilderness or wasteland. “Tohu” is a desert wasteland, hot arid, unusable land. “Bohu” echoes the name of the Canaanite goddess of the night as she is called in Greek texts, “Baau”. Both conjured up the emotion of fear, the panic of being isolated in a wasteland, and the fear of the night, so the joint image is of hot bright emptiness and cold dark emptiness, primordial fears of people living on the edge of the desert.

The introduction of the waters, brought in another one. The sea was also frightening and chaotic, and constantly tried to encroach on the land. Indeed, the word “tehom”, the deep signifies the chaos of the sea, the Babylonian Tiamat, the chaos dragon, identified in the Jewish scriptures with the dragon Leviathan or Rehab.

Hermann Gunkel long ago pointed out the clues in the Jewish scriptures of a combat with a dragon, matching Marduk’s combat with Tiamat. He comments:

Nowhere in extant literature is the myth of Yehouah’s combat with the dragon actually narrated… Nevertheless, the fact that in all the passages that speak of the dragon, the myth is not portrayed but simply presupposed, proves that it was very well known and very popular with the people. The absence of the myth in the canon is distinct and conclusive evidence that we possess in our Old Testament a fragment only of the old religious literature.

It looks as if the explicit myth has even been suppressed. Job has a theme of God fighting with monsters. Thus Job 40-41 describe God’s oppression with reference to fights with monsters. Amos 9:3 warns that even those hiding at the bottom of the sea will be bitten by its serpent. Psalms 89:9-11 describes a victory over a sea monster called Rahab, and Psalms 74:12-17 describes the victory of God, described as a king, over the monster, Leviathan. The creation follows. In Isaiah 51:9-10, Yehouah also defeats a dragon. The Jewish seven branched candlestick, shown as a spoil of war on the arch of Titus, has at its base figures of dragons, which must be Leviathan, Behemoth, and Rahab, the mythological monsters of chaos of the missing Jewish creation myth.

An attempt has been made in the Jewish scriptures to erase suggestions that anything could oppose Yehouah, and even “tehom” has some positive qualities as beneficial and even life-giving currents, so that even tehom does the will of God. B Otzen writes (Myth in the Old Testament)

There is an unexplained element in the Israelite view of chaos. On the one hand, the mythological, virtually dualistic idea makes itself felt, that chaos is a real power over against Yahweh, one with which he is forced to do battle and, repeatedly, to subjugate. On the other hand, it is quite obvious that… Yahweh is the sovereign ruler who uses chaos as his willing tool.

Otzen goes on to speak of “priestly craftsmen” setting out to suppress older mythological ideas because they echoed an older popular religion that conflicted with the one they preferred of a monotheistic almighty god. Yet elements of the old mythology remain to give the game away, despite the desperate attempts of apologists to explain them away, or even keep them hidden. Thus, God does not make the herbs of the fields but He commands the earth to bring them forth, as if the earth was a subsidiary god—or goddess! It is as if an originally independent divinity was subjected to God’s will, then got erased almost completely. In most myths of this time and region, the earth is a goddess, Mother Earth, in one form or another.

The word “tannin” is translated as dragon and is used of the chaos monster in fragments of a creation myth in Psalms and Isaiah:

Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength. Thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness. Thou didst cleave the fountain and the flood. Thou driedst up mighty rivers. The day is thine, the night also is thine. Thou hast prepared the light and the sun. Thou hast set all the borders of the earth. Thou hast made summer and winter.

Psalms 74:13-17

In that day the Yehouah with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent, and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.

Isaiah 27:1

Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of Yehouah; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not it which hath dried the sea, the waters of the great deep, that hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?… But I am the Yehouah thy God, that divided the sea, whose waves roared…

Isaiah 51:9-10,15

Similar too without mentioning the word dragon is:

You rule the pride of the sea, when its waves rise high, You still them. You have broken Rahab in pieces, as one slain. You have scattered Your enemies with Your mighty arm.

Psalms 89:9-10

The dragons of Genesis 1:21, mistranslated as “great whales”, “sea serpents” and “great sea monsters” is the same word as is actually translated “dragon” in these other places, and it is a disguising of the one original sea dragon, Tiamat in the Babylonian epic, but Leviathan here—the Chaos that God defeated in preparing to create the orderly world. Indeed in the examples from Psalms, the story gets rather like Anath’s treament of Mot in feeding the pieces of him to the birds in the wilderness. The division of Tiamat that made the heaven and the earth in the original myth is revised here to seem to refer to the parting of the sea for the Israelites, a much later adaptation of the original. It is interesting that 1 Kings 7:23-26 tells us the cultic paraphernalia in the temple included a large cauldron of water like a swimming bath called a “sea” (“yam”).

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