Mythology

Then follows, in Chapter 3, the story of ‘man’s first disobedience’, the guile of the serpent, the eating of the fruit of the tree and its consequences, and the expulsion of the guilty pair from the garden lest they should eat of the tree of life and become immortal like the gods. Many scholars hold that the semi-mythical geography of Paradise in 2:10-14 does not belong to the Yahwist’s narrative but is an editorial gloss containing very ancient ideas about the location of Paradise. Now, even apart from these verses in which the Mesopotamian colouring is very clear, we can see that the back-ground of the Paradise myth is not that of the Palestinian myth of Creation which the Yahwist has used to form part of his narrative. The place where Yahweh has planted the garden lies away in the east, in a region called Eden. There is, certainly, a locality called Eden which is mentioned several times in the Old Testament (2 Kings 19:12, Ezek. 27:23; Amos I:5), but the Eden of this ancient myth belongs rather to ‘the land east of the sun, west of the moon’, than to any geographical locality. The Akkadian word edinu means ‘plain’ or ’steppe’, and it has been plausibly suggested that the garden was conceived of as springing magically out of the sandy wastes of the waterless steppe. It is possible that the Yahwist may have had in mind a contrast between the well- watered soil of his own land (cf. Deut. 8:7) and the desert where the Bedouin wandered, a place where only a miracle of divine power could create a garden. The thought of Yahweh’s power as causing an Eden to arise in the wilderness is a favourite one with the prophets (cf. Isa. 41:19; 51:3). Another form of the Paradise myth is to be found in Ezek. 28:12-I9 containing features which do not appear in the Genesis form of the myth. The allusions are not all intelligible to us now, but the garden is in the mountain of the gods, a concept which occurs in the Ugaritic myths; the king-god of Tyre has his dwelling there, and is described as ‘the covering cherub’, and as ‘walking up and down in the midst of the stones of fire’; music is there, and in the end this inhabitant of the garden of the gods is cast out as profane. The idea of the dweller in the garden as the embodiment of wisdom is referred to in job is : 7-8, where the first man is described as the possessor of wisdom and as having heard the secret counsel of God. Hence it seems clear that the Yahwist is using for his own purpose a myth which formed part of ancient Hebrew tradition, and something must be said about the source of the myth and the way in which the Yahwist has used it. Recent Sumerian studies [5] have shown that the conception of a divine garden and of a state when sickness and death did not exist and wild animals did not prey on one another is to be found in Sumerian mythology. The description of this earthly Paradise is contained in the Sumerian poem which Dr Kramer has called the Epic of Emmerkar : The land Dilmun is a pure place, the land Dilmun is a clean place,’ The land Dilmun is a clean place, the land Dilmun is a bright place. In Dilmun the raven uttered no cry, The kite uttered not the cry of the kite, The lion killed not, The wolf snatched not the lamb, Unknown was the kid-killing dog, Unknown was the grain-devouring boar . . .

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