Mythology

become historicized as a symbolic reference to the deliverance of Israel from Egypt: ‘Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord, as in the days of old, the generations of ancient times. Are not you it that cut Rahab in pieces, that pierced the dragon? Are not you it that dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep; that made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?’ We may now return to the two versions of the Creation which the editor of Genesis has placed side by side in the beginning of that book. It should be remarked that, although the Graf- Wellhausen Documentary hypothesis which analysed the Pentateuch into a number of literary sources denoted by the symbols J-E, D, H, and P, has been abandoned by one school of Old Testament scholars, and considerably modified by others, it still remains a useful means of distinguishing the different strata in the Pentateuch and the early historical books. In the case of the two narratives of Creation which we are now considering, the first is usually indicated by the symbol P and assigned to the priestly editors who collected and arranged the traditions of Israel after the Exile. The second is denoted by the symbols J-E, and is regarded as the joint work of the Yahwist and the Elohist, names which indicate two schools (or, possibly individual writers), who were active in the early period of the monarchy, editing the ancient traditions of Israel, preserved either in oral or written form. The symbols refer to the use of the names Yahweh and Elohim used by the two schools respectively. We shall now consider these two versions separately and compare their characteristics. As the second is the earlier of the two, it will be considered first. The J-E Version. We can see from the comparative table on p. 106 that in the tradition which the Yahwist was recording, the original state of the universe before the process of creation was very different from that depicted in the Priestly writer’s source. It may be pointed out here that neither of these accounts is concerned with the problem which the modern mind has to face, namely, the problem of an absolute beginning, creation ex nihilo. They both assume the existence of some kind of material world, and deal with the question of how the ordered universe in which it was possible to live came into existence. In both these accounts the act of creation consisted in bringing order out of chaos, not of bringing matter into existence out of nothing. In the Yahwist’s tradition, the original state of the scene of the Creator’s activity was an uninhabited waste, untilled by man, and without rain, or the vegetation which rain produced. This is a very different picture from that presented in the Priestly writers’ source. There the primeval state of the universe is a watery chaos, as it is in the Egyptian and Babylonian myths. The J-E account begins, ‘In the day when Yahweh God made earth and heaven (and) no plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up: for Yahweh God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till a the ground . . .’ The whole of this sentence is a temporal clause introducing the first act of Yahweh. It is clear that the P description of a watery chaos represents the point of view of the Mesopotamian myth, but the tradition followed by the Yahwist represents the scene of Yahweh’s creative activities as a soil (’adamah), potentially fertile, but waste and barren until Yahweh has brought rain to fertilize it and made man to till it. Both the Nile valley and the Tigris-Euphrates delta were dependent upon irrigation from the rivers for their fertility, but cultivation in Palestine has always depended upon the regular autumn and spring rains which

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