Mythology

be controlled. But, as we have seen, the various rituals had their spoken part, the myth, which possessed the same magic potency as the action which it accompanied and described. This was the source of the myths of Paradise, Creation, the Flood, and other similar material, which had passed into the traditions of peoples who had come under the influence of Mesopotamian culture. This material which the Yahwist found existing among the traditions of his own people he took and wove into a story embodying his own beliefs about the relation between God and man, beliefs which underlie the ancient dress which the Yahwist has so skillfully preserved. Before we examine the Priestly version of the myth of Creation it is desirable that we should consider what the Hebrew writer whom we call the Yahwist has done with the myths which we have described. Already, as the result of the settlement of Semitic peoples in Mesopotamia, the ancient and crude Sumerian myths had undergone a process of editorial revision. If we compare the Babylonian Epic of Creation with the Sumerian myths it is apparent that many of the cruder elements have been suppressed, and a greater degree of literary skill is manifest. But as the Semitic settlers had adopted or already possessed the same general ideas about the nature of the universe as their Sumerian predecessors, there was no fundamental change in the myths. When, however, we consider the revision and reshaping which the myths have undergone at the hand of the Hebrew writer, we discover that an essential change has taken place. His treatment of the traditional material is governed by a conception wholly absent from the outlook of those who composed or transmitted the ancient myths. Looking back over the history of Israel he sees in it an intelligent design in which the activities of a God, who is a moral being, all-powerful and all-wise, are discernible. The design begins with Creation and the writer traces its course through the divine choice of his own people Israel as the instrument of that design, on to a future whose outcome is expressed in terms of myth, as the beginning was. The Yahwist is writing what has been felicitously called Heilsgeschichte, ’salvation-history’. Later Hebrew writers often insist on the fact that there was no human witness to the divine act of Creation. The author of the book of job represents Yahweh as ironically asking job, ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?’ (Job 38:4). Hence the only way in which the beginning and the end of that ’salvation-history’ which the Hebrew writer is recording could be expressed is in terms of myth. The images and symbols of the myth, the slaying of the dragon, the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the serpent, all become the language in which to express that which could not be expressed in any other way. The other myths in Gen. I-II which we have yet to examine, episodical and isolated in their original setting, become woven into a continuous narrative whose theme is the development of a divine purpose. The P Version. When, after the return of a small body of exiles from Babylon as the result of the liberal policy of Cyrus, the Temple of Jerusalem was rebuilt and the cult restored, a class of priestly persons called scribes, of whom Ezra, the priest and scribe, is the prototype, began to concern themselves with the legal and historical traditions of their people. We know, both from the evidence of later Jewish literature and from internal evidence, that it was the labours of these pious and learned men which gave to the literature of Israel the form in which we have it now, the collection of books which we call the Old Testament. There can be little doubt that among the documents of which they made use in their task of compiling the records of Israel they possessed the account of the early history of mankind and of the ancestors of the Hebrews in the form which had been given to it by the Yahwist and the Elohist. The separate narratives of

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