Cultural Repertoire
- Direct Borrowing: "When Shakespeare sat down to write King Lear, he had before him Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kinds of Britain, Holinshed's Chronicles, Harrison's Historical Description of the Island of Britain, Higgins's Mirror for Magistrates, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Sidney's Arcadia, and the anonymous True Chronicle History of Kind Leir and His Three Daughters." (Goldblatt, p. 37)
- Idioms: e.g. Kick the bucket or Greet the Sabbath Bride
- Allusion: "Just another Watergate"
- Style: Psalm 29 borrows from Uguritic Style and Form
(1) By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we thought of Zion. (2) There on the poplars we hung up our lyres, (3) for our captors asked us there for songs, our tormentors, for amusement, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” (4) How can we sing a song of Adonai on alien soil? (5) If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither; (6) let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you, if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour. (7) Remember, Adonai, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall; how they cried, “Strip her, strip her to her very foundations!” (8) Fair Babylon, you predator, a blessing on him who repays you in kind what you have inflicted on us; (9) a blessing on him who seizes your babies and dashes them against the rocks!
Historical Frame
For a thousand years or more, the Hebrews had done without a single, collective sacred text. But in Babylon they had heard over and over again the Enuma Elish with its praise of Marduk, who created the first humans. The trauma of exile, along with the threatened loss of cultural memory, may well have triggered the key determination to bring together the stories and the laws with which the Hebrews defined who they were. For it is in this strange soil...that the Bible as we know it seems to have taken root....
Before the exile [partially in 597 and more substantially in 586], a fear of contamination [read: assimilation] had been a major theme...Exile had only made things much worse. The Hebrews had adopted the customs, beliefs, and dress of others. They had intertwined the cult of Yahweh with cults devoted to rival gods. And most threatening of all, they had begun to intermarry...
[So] how do you eradicate old legends to which people had been long devoted...How do you uproot deeply held beliefs?
You change the story.
The writer/compiler/transmitter who set out to construct a Hebrew counternarrative to the Babylonian creation story may have had more than one old manuscript in from of him; he may have had other old stories stored away in his memory; he may have turned to colleagues for suggestions and support and criticism...But the Genesis storyteller had to pull the multiple pieces together and to write the Hebrew creation story that has come down to us over the centuries...The Hebrew Bible that was stitched together so brilliantly after the return from exile could not begin with Abraham and the origins of the Hebrews. It had to begin with Adam and Eve.
The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, Stephen Greenblatt
Enuma Elish
When on high the heaven had not been named,
Firm ground below had not been called by name,
Naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter,
(And) Mummu Tiamat, she who bore them all,
Their waters commingling as a single body,
No reed but had been matted, no marsh land had appeared,
When no gods whatever had been brought into being, Un-named, their destinies yet undermined—
[Marduk] let loose in her face The Evil Wind, which followed behind.
When Tiamat opened her mouth to consume him,
He drove in the Evil Wind and she could not dose her lips.
As the fierce winds encumbered her belly,
Her body was distended and her mouth was wide open.
He released an arrow, it tore her belly,
It cut through her insides, splitting her heart.
Having subdued her, he blotted out her life.
He threw down her carcass and stood upon it...
Then the lord paused to view her dead body,
That he might divide the monster and do artful works.
He split her into two like a dried fish:
One half of her he set up and stretched out as the heavens.
He stretched the skin and appointed a watch
With the instruction not to let her waters escape...
He put her head in position and poured out . . [ . . ] .
He opened the abyss and it was sated with water.
From her two eyes he let the Euphrates and Tigris flow,
He blocked her nostrils, but left . .
He heaped up the distant [mountains] on her breasts,
He bored wells to channel the springs.
“It was Kingu who contrived the uprising,
And caused Tiamat to rebel, and join battle”
They bound him, holding him before Ea.
They imposed on him his guilt and severed his blood vessels.
Out of his blood they fashioned humankind.
He imposed upon it the service and let free the gods.
(26) And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth.” (27) And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (28) God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.” (29) God said, “See, I give you every seed-bearing plant that is upon all the earth, and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food. (30) And to all the animals on land, to all the birds of the sky, and to everything that creeps on earth, in which there is the breath of life, [I give] all the green plants for food.” And it was so.
The ancient Near Eastern context sheds remarkable light on the audacity of the Torah's message [that human beings are created in the image of God]. In the ancient world, various kings (and sometimes priests) were described as the images of god. It is the king who is God's representative or intermediary on earth, and it is he who mediates God's blessings to the world.
In dramatic contrast to this, the Torah asserts that ordinary human beings – not just kings, but each and every one of us – are mediators of the divine blessing. 'The entire race collectively stands vis-a-vis God in the same relationship of chosenness and protection that characterizes the god-king relationship in the more ancient civilizations of the Near East.'
Genesis 1 thus represents a radical democratization of ancient Near Eastern royal ideology. We are, the Torah insists, all kings and queens.
The Heart of Torah, Rabbi Shai Held, Bere'shit #2