By Stevie Green, October 26, 2024
For this drash, I will be quoting extensively from this book: Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence by Jon Levenson, Professor of Bible and of Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School. I’d like to thank Avi Havivi for lending me the book.
“In the Babylonian creation story, Enuma Elish, “creation,” if we may call it that, begins with the mingling of the subterranean fresh waters, Apsu, and the saline waters of the oceans, Tiamat. From these emerge new gods, whose clamor is so disruptive that Apsu resolves to annihilate them. But Ea, one of the intended victims, succeeds in anaesthetizing Apsu with a spell, despoiling him of his kingship, and then killing him. This so enrages Apsu’s wife, Tiamat, that she is easily persuaded to declare war on the other gods, appointing Kingu her field marshal. In the pantheon there is only great disconsolation, as god after god proves inadequate to the challenge. Finally Marduk, Ea’s son, undertakes to do combat with the sea goddess’s formidable hosts. But Marduk exacts his price-that he be proclaimed supreme among the gods and the command of his lips unalterable. The other gods submit, they acclaim him king, and in a horrific battle he overwhelms his foes. Marduk then proceeds to create the familiar world out of the body of Tiamat, which he has split in half. He fixes a crossbar and posts guards over the half from which the heavens were made, so that their waters might not escape and threaten his victory. Out of Kingu he creates humanity, to relieve the gods of some of their drudgery. In gratitude, a delegation of gods asks whether they might repay their debt to Marduk by building him a palace, or temple, and when he assents, they construct Esagila, the terraced Marduk temple in Babylon. The Enuma elish closes with the gods’ hymnic recitation of the glorious fifty names of Marduk, their hero, savior, lord, and king. (p3-4)”
This creation myth may sound quite different from Genesis, but elsewhere in the Bible there are descriptions of a cosmic battle between G-d and primordial aquatic forces of chaos.
Psalm 74: 0 God, my king from of old, who brings deliverance throughout the land; it was You who drove back the sea with Your might, who smashed the heads of the monsters in the waters; it was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan, who left him as food for the denizens of the desert; it was You who released springs and torrents, who made mighty rivers run dry; the day is Yours, the night also; it was You who set in place the moon and the sun; You fixed all the boundaries of the earth; summer and winter-You made them. (Ps. 74:12-1 7)
Isaiah 51: Awake, awake, clothe yourself with splendor, 0 arm of Hashem! Awake as in days of old, As in former ages! It was you who hacked Rahab in pieces, That pierced the Dragon [tannin]. It was you that dried up the Sea [yam], The waters of the great deep [tehom]; That made the abysses of the Sea a road the redeemed might walk. So let the ransomed of Hashem return, And come with shouting to Zion, Crowned with joy everlasting. Let them attain joy and gladness, While sorrow and sighing flee. (Isa. 51 :9-11)
Job: Who closed the sea behind doors When it gushed forth out of the womb, When I clothed it in clouds, Swaddled it in dense clouds, When I made breakers My limit for it, And set up its bars and doors, And said, “You may come so far and no farther; Here your surging waves will stop”? (Job 38:8-1)
Psalm 104: They fled at Your blast, rushed away at the sound of Your thunder, —mountains rising, valleys sinking— to the place You established for them. You set bounds they must not pass so that they never again cover the earth. (Ps. 104:7-9)
Jon Levenson explains:
“Two and a half millennia of Western theology have made it easy to forget that throughout the ancient Near Eastern world, including Israel, the point of creation is not the production of matter out of nothing, but rather the emergence of a stable community in a benevolent and life-sustaining order. The defeat by Hashem of the forces that have interrupted that order is intrinsically an act of creation… [weather] order is being restored rather [or] instituted was not a difference of great consequence. (p12)”
“These texts share with the combat myth the notion of the challenge of the Sea and its defeat. They share with Genesis 1 the sense of the creation of the habitable world through the containment of the waters by the efficacious utterance of God. They share with the story of the Flood a conviction that the habitable, life-sustaining world exists now only because of God’s continuing commitment to the original command. Absent that command, the sinister forces of chaos would surge forth again. The biblical drama of world order is defined by the persistence of those forces, on the one hand, and on the other, the possibility (or is it an inevitability?) that God will exercise his vaunted omnipotence to defeat them. (p15-16)”
“The overwhelming tendency of biblical writers as they confront undeserved evil is not to explain it away but to call upon God to blast it away. (p. xvii)”
For example, Psalm 104, the last biblical text I read, continues: “Till when, O God, will the foe blaspheme, will the enemy forever revile Your name? Why do You hold back Your hand, Your right hand? Draw it out of Your bosom! (Ps. 74:10-11)”
Turning back now to Genesis. The astronomy teacher in me begins with the cosmology. Modern scholarship agrees with Rashi that “Bereshit Barah Elokim” doesn’t mean “In the beginning G-d created” but rather “At the beginning of G-d’s creating heaven and earth— the earth being “Tohu and Bohu” – “bohu” isn’t actually a word in Hebrew – so Richard Elliot Freidman translates “Tohu and Bohu” as “chaos and shmaos”, and the Earth also apparently having been dark and wet. After a few days, there is a solid dome holding back the primordial waters. The dome has lights that illuminate the Earth and rule the day and the night. Meanwhile, another light that shines thru the primordial waters during the day thus making the sky blue. The waters below have been safely gathered together, allowing space for land, plants, land animals, and people. People, all people, are created in the image of G-d. In other ancient near-eastern myth, this term is exclusively used for royalty.
As for the combat myth: Tiamat, Yam, and Tannin– all named in the passage from Isiah quoted earlier as vanquished enemies – forces of chaos – all appear. Tiamat as inanimate Tehom, the others as deliberate creations. However, what Levenson points out is that “there is no active opposition to God’s creative labor. (p122)”
A key element of Ancient Near Eastern combat myths is that they lead to the construction of a Temple such as the construction of Esagila which concludes Enuma Elish. Many psalms refer to building the temple after G-d defeats Pharoh or unspecified enemies. Most prominently, Shirat Hayam concludes with “You brought them and planted them in Your mountain, The place You made to dwell in, Hashem,
The sanctuary, 0 LORD, which Your hands established. Hashem will reign for ever and ever! (Exod. 15:17-18)”
I think I got this idea from Bible scholar Ethan Shwartz of Villanova University, but I couldn’t find it while preparing this drash. Anyway he (or somebody?) suggests that Shabbat fills the role of the “Victory Temple” in Genesis’s. A sort of ‘temple in time’ as it were.
Levenson says something more specific:
“It is the attainment of rest which marks the completion of the act of creation in many of these stories; in others, it is the gods’ need for rest which initiates the creative process. In the Enuma elish, for example, … Ea, Marduk’s father, persuades him to allow the creation of humanity out of the blood of Tiamat’s general Kingu, in order to impose “the services of the gods [upon people] and set the gods free.” The lesser gods, acclaiming Marduk as the one “who has established our freedom …” demonstrate this gratitude by building him a temple, Esagila, and a royal city, Babylon. (p101)”
By contrast,
“…the Sabbath and the sabbatical year as institutions [are] mandated for the benefit of the needy, the slave, and the alien. In this way the historical event of the exodus from Egypt provides the human community the same experience of rest and relief that the creation of humanity provides the lesser gods in the Enuma Elish and Atra-Jjasis. One might put the transformation this way: in this Israelite literature humanity has assumed the position of the lesser gods of Babylonia, so that creation now works not against the human interest, but for it. The Sabbath, the sabbatical year, and the Sabbath of sabbatical years, that is, the Jubilee, recollect God’s primordial rest in a form that human beings do not dread, but instead can share. Israel participates, through the very forms of her collective existence, in the divine rest that consummated creation. (p103)”
Shabbat Shalom