Torah for Christians: Creation Myths
TORAH FOR CHRISTIANS
SEASON FIVE EPISODE THREE
CREATION MYTHS
And you thought that it was fun to study Greek mythology. We’re going to look at something even better: the myths in the Book of Genesis. Yes, myths.
I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is Torah for Christians.
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Welcome to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr.
We don’t often think of the first 11 chapters of Genesis as mythology. Instead, we think of these chapters, from the creation of the world to the Tower of Babel, as sacred writ. And yes, there is a sense of sanctity to these stories. Yet, because they predate Abraham and the bestowal of the Covenant upon him, they are little more than fables.
If that makes you uncomfortable, think of it in another way, as Israel’s pre-history. This is what happened to humanity before God chose Abraham to be the founder of the Jewish people. These chapters are a universal story, not just the story of the Jewish people but rather, the story of humanity, how all of us came into being.
The very word Genesis, which of course is not how the Jews call the book, means beginnings. Bereishit is the story of origins, how the world came to be, how the Jewish people came to be and, just as important, how the Israelites found their way to Egypt. Without Genesis, we cannot have the Exodus.
The Hebrew myths are etiological; they explain how the world came to be. We can think of them as a funnel, narrowing from the creation of the world to the creation of humanity to the creation of the Hebrews. Of course, there are some interesting detours along the way.
Let’s start at the very beginning. We have two creation stories. Creation stories are essential foundational pieces for any people. In the United States, for example, our foundational story is that of Christopher Columbus. Without getting into any controversies about him, all children learn that “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” And if Columbus isn’t for you, we still have the Pilgrims and Jamestown, followe by George Washington.
The first creation story, of course, is the six days of creation, culminating with the creation of the first man. In Chapter One, verse 27, God says, “And God created humankind in the Divine image…” This creation was ex nihilo, out of nothing. In this first creation story, the creation of humankind is the climax of the story; everything in this first chapter of Genesis leads us to this crowning of creation.
And then, God rested on the seventh day; this was the creation of Shabbat. While the creation of Shabbat is quite possibly a later insertion, it teaches us that if God rests, all the more should we rest.
But then, lo and behold, there is a second creation story. Beginning with verse four of Chapter Two, we suddenly find ourselves in a garden, with water flowing but no life anywhere. Then, we discover that God forms Adam from the earth as the first, not the last, creation. Vegetation and animals arrive after Adam; Eve of course is the final creation. But here, nothing is ex nihilo, from nothing. God is like a potter, fashioning the world from pre-existing elements. This is quite different than God saying, “Let there be light. And there was light.” Here, God is not thinking, as it were; God is doing.
We will return to Eve in a later episode. For now, let’s just say that Eve explains why women are in the world, why women bear children in pain, and why we are doomed to die.
I want to spend some time on the next story, however, the story of Cain and Abel. Often, we think of Noah as the first human to offer an animal sacrifice to God but in reality, it was Abel. And God preferred his meat to Cain’s grain. This story tells us several things: the rationale behind sacrifices, the dangers of sibling rivalry and God’s uncompromising position against murder. Coupled with the horror of the murder itself, we also learn in this story that God’s essence, also understood as our soul, the very thing that separates us from the animals, flows through our blood. And so, when blood is spilled, God is enraged. This is the very reason why Jews leech the blood from animals prior to eating them; it’s a fundamental law of Kashrut. And then, Cain wanders the world – a world in which there seem to be numerous humans and even cities.
Chapter Six, verses 1-4 is quite possibly my favorite creation myth of all. It is a story that is never taught to children and rarely, if ever, discussed amongst adults. It is the story of the sons of God descending to earth and copulating with the daughters of man. God, of course, hates this, and punishes humanity by limiting our lives to no more than 120 year – another etiological story that explains why we die. We don’t know why they came to earth, but they do leave a lasting legacy, the Nephilim.
In Hebrew, Nephilim means “fallen ones,” and appropriately so. But who are the Nephilim? The Niphilim are giants, “men of renown.” They don’t really appear again in the Torah until the Book of Numbers, when the spies return from scouting the Land of Israel and declare that the Nephilim live there – and will destroy Israel if they try to invade the land. This leads to God punishing the Israelites by making them wander another 40 years in the desert.
The second occurrence of the Nephilim is the story of David and Goliath. Goliath was, of course, a giant. He was of the Anakim, who were the children of the Nephilim. When David defeated him in battle, the Nephilim disappeared.
After our break, we will look at three more creation myths: the Flood, the origin of wine and the Tower of Babel.
I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is Torah for Christians.
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Welcome back to Torah for Christians. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr. Before we return to our discussion of the Creation myths, I want to thank you for listening to this podcast. Please remember to review and rate this episode on Apple, Spotify, or whatever service you are using. Also, please go back and listen to previous episodes if you have not done so already. A transcript is also available on our website, www.torahforchristians.net . And if you would like to read my weekly Torah Study, please go to Bible Stories They (Never) Taught You in Religious School, available for free on www.Substack.com or through our website. I have also started another Substack page called Wednesday Torah, where I share random thoughts on the Jewish experience. Please subscribe to both.
Let’s talk about Noah. Even though God limited our lives to 120 years, Noah was 600 years old when God commanded him to build an Ark, not an easy task for someone so old. The Torah tells us in Chapter six that the world was filled with hamas, which is usually translated as evil or lawlessness, but also has the connotation of sexual immorality. And since the story of the sons of God immediately precedes the Noah story, the inference is strong.
We won’t go too deep into the story, though. What is so fascinating to me about the Noah story is that is it not unique. While every culture has its unique origin myths, almost every ancient civilization in the world has a flood story. In ancient Babylonia, it was the Gilgamesh Epic, which is well known in the western world. Gilgamesh was the Babylonian Noah, who built an Ark and saved the world. There are obvious parallels and even more obvious divergences, and I would encourage you to google Gilgamesh and read it for yourself[1]. It’s online and so easily accessible.
We rarely read what happened to Noah after he left the Ark. In one story, Noah offers a sacrifice and so is considered the first man who made such an offering to God, Abel notwithstanding. By the way, the reason he can make an animal sacrifice without causing the extinction of a species, is because it is part of an alternate telling of the story, where Noah took seven pairs of kosher animals onto the Ark while only taking one pair of each unclean animal with him.
In a second story, Noah is the first human to make wine. He plants a vineyard and, in the usual Biblical telescoping of time, immediately makes wine and, not surprisingly, gets drunk and passes out in his tent, with his private parts exposed. His son, Ham, sees him there and runs to tell his brothers. His brothers take a cloak and walk backwards into the tent and cover his father without seeing his genitals.
But we don’t leave it there. For this impropriety, Noah curiously curses Ham’s son. But when we realize who that son is, we understand that this story not only tells us about the origin of wine, but also the reason why a certain people is cursed throughout the Bible. Who is Ham’s son? None other than Canaan, the people whom God instructs Joshua to annihilate as they tear through the Land of Israel. Of course, the Canaanites exist throughout Biblical history; both God and Prophets excoriate them and continuously warn Israel not to associate with them, for fear of the Israelites turning to worship Baal, the bull, the greatest of the Canaanite gods.
There is one more story that interests us here, the Tower of Babel. It explains why there is a multiplicity of languages in the world.
But it’s not that simple of a story. Let’s look at a Midrash to discover why God scattered the people and gave them different languages. The Tower is like a Zoroastrian ziqqurat, a high altar where these ancient Persians offered sacrifices to their gods. But to build a tower, they had to build scaffolding. This Midrash tells us that it took a full year to lift a brick from the ground to the top. So, when someone dropped a brick, everybody stopped and cried, bemoaning the fate of that brick. But when a person fell off the scaffolding, everyone just climbed up one level and carried on as if nothing had happened. Angry with the callousness of these humans, God decided to abort this project and confounded their common language, which of course was Hebrew. In Hebrew, we use the verb l’bavel, literally to cause babbling – and it is the origin of the word Babylonia, the land of babbling.
We can spend months on these creation myths and perhaps we will come back to them in the future. For now though, we must realize that these are the origin myths that Jews have taken as their own for thousands of years. Jews regard these stories as Divine, as much as the stories of Abraham and Moses. Perhaps that is the most important idea to take from this prehistory, that cherished myths are just as sacrosanct as the real history of a people – and sometimes even more sacred.
Next week, we will look at the story of Abraham and the origin of the Jewish people. We’ll look at him in some depth and, in the weeks to follow, also learn of Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and their wives. Finally, we will conclude the unit with an in-depth discussion of covenant, God’s formal binding with the Jewish people.
I want to thank you for listening to Torah for Christians. Please be sure to check out our website, www.torahforchristians.net, for a full list of podcast episodes; I’m sure that you will enjoy listening to all of them. In addition, you can subscribe to my Substack columns, Wednesday Torah – an occasional weekday musing about the world around us, based on the principles of the Torah – as well as Bible Stories They (Never) Taught You in Religious School, a weekly Torah Study, which is published every Friday morning. I’m sure that you will enjoy all these offerings.
Have a wonderful week and remember; Hinei Mah Tov … L’hitra’ot, till we meet again. I’m Rabbi Jordan Parr and this is Torah for Christians.
