Mythology

J and E had already been combined (according to the Documentary hypothesis), and had passed through several stages of editing. The Priestly editor has left the Yahwist’s story of Creation and Paradise practically untouched, so that we may infer that he agreed with the account as he found it there and accepted its religious point of view. But he has prefixed to the J account of Creation another account which, as we have already seen, differs from the I account in a number of important particulars. Hence we have to inquire, as we did in the case of the I account, what sources underlie the Priestly account, what is the religious point of P, and why he thought it necessary to prefix a second account of Creation to the J account. The break between the P and the J-E traditions occurs in the middle of 2:4. The P account ends with the words which sum up the divine act previously described, ‘These are the generations (Hebrew toledoth) of the heaven and of the earth when they were created.’ We have already seen that in both the Egyptian and the Babylonian myths the activity of creation consists in a process of begetting. The opening lines of the Akkadian Epic of Creation contain a genealogical table handed on from the earlier Sumerian form of the myth. The notion that creation consisted in an act of procreation has survived in the P account, in the word ‘generations’, but has entirely lost its original meaning; it has been demythologized. We have already seen that the general background of the J account is Mesopotamian, although there is a strong Palestinian colouring which suggests that the Mesopotamian material had been absorbed by Canaanite culture before it was used by the Hebrew writer. It has long been recognized that there is a general resemblance between the account of the Creation contained in the Babylonian Epic of Creation and the account given by the Priestly writer. In contrast to the waterless waste which is J’s description of the original state of things before Yahweh’s creative activities began, the primeval condition of the universe in P’s account is a disordered chaos of waters, a state which closely corresponds with the description of the primeval state given in both the Sumerian and the Babylonian forms of the Creation myth. Moreover, the Hebrew word used for the chaos of waters, ‘the deep’, is tehom, a word which is generally acknowledged to be a Hebrew corruption of the name Tiamat, the Babylonian name of the chaos-dragon slain by Marduk before he proceeded to create order out of chaos. We saw that in the Enuma elish Marduk splits Tiamat’s body in two and fixes half of it in the heavens to keep the waters above in their place. This corresponds to the P account of the creation of the firmament, which is depicted as a solid vault stretched out above the earth (cf. Job 38:4-II). There is also a general resemblance to the Babylonian order of Creation in the P account of the successive acts of Creation on the six days. Hence, in spite of the complete transformation of the Babylonian material effected by the Priestly writer, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the original form of the Creation story upon which he is depending is ultimately of Babylonian origin, unmodified, as was J-E’s material, by Canaanite influence. But we have still to deal with the question why the Priestly writer prefixed a second account to that which he found in the Yahwist’s document, and why the Priestly account is arranged in the formal order of seven days. It should be recalled that the members of the school or guild of scribes to which Ezra belonged were priests. Their interest centred in the Temple and the cult. Their attitude towards the material with which they were dealing was liturgical rather than historical. It was they who assigned the Psalms to their proper use at the great festivals of the Hebrew sacred

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