Mythology

‘there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth’, implying the total destruction of the rest of mankind. Hence it is clear that we have here a fragment of a myth of the destruction of mankind which is independent of the Mesopotamian sources upon which the Hebrew traditions of the Flood rest. The story of the celestial visitants and their hospitable reception by Abraham, as contrasted with the reception accorded to two of them by the men of Sodom, finds an echo in Ovid’s story of the reception of Zeus and Hermes by Philemon and Baucis and its sequel in the flood which destroyed the inhospitable inhabitants of the district. The myth is referred to several times in the writings of the prophets of Israel in terms which suggest that another form of the myth may have been current. They use the word ‘overthrow’ to describe the destruction of the wicked cities, a word which in Hebrew usually describes the effects of an earthquake. [17] The Cult Myths It has already been pointed out that in the class of myths which we have called ritual myths the ritual was accompanied by a spoken or chanted element, its muthos or myth, which described the situation which was being enacted in the ritual. The Babylonian Epic of Creation which was chanted by the priests at the New Year Festival described a situation in which the central element was the victory of Marduk over the chaos-dragon Tiamat and its result, the achievement of creation, the bringing of order out of primeval chaos. The situation was a real one, although it could not be described as historical; somehow, at some unknown point of time, an activity had come into play which had produced the ordered scene which was the ancient Babylonian’s environment. This activity was described in symbolic terms of gods and dragons, of generation, of death and resurrection, but it could not be doubted that the symbols stood for some kind of reality. We have seen that much of this ancient mythological material had been taken up into the traditions of Israel, but something was happening in Israel which was new and had no counterpart elsewhere. A new sense of reality was coming to birth, the reality of Israel’s God. Its beginnings are shrouded in mystery; it may have begun with Abraham who is no longer regarded by most scholars as a mythical figure, or it may have begun with Moses, but by the time that the Yahwist was compiling or composing the early records of Israel, Yahweh, Israel’s God, stood out like a rock against the misty background of the surrounding polytheism. In contrast with the shadowy figures of the Egyptian, Babylonian, or Canaanite gods, Yahweh was a real person with a moral character, and a purpose which gave meaning to the events of Israel’s history. One of the results of this development was the conversion of the myth to a new use. The sagas of the patriarchs in Genesis show that tribal traditions had been preserved, orally or in writing, from a very early period, and the sagas of the deliverance from Egypt under Moses, the wilderness wanderings, and the conquest of Canaan under Joshua, show that national traditions had similarly been preserved from an early date. When the Hebrews entered Canaan the evidence of archaeology has shown ” that they took over the great Canaanite cult-centres, such as Shechem, Bethel, and Shiloh, and made them tribal or regional centres of the cult of Yahweh. Before Solomon made Jerusalem the chief national cult-centre, and probably long after, it was at these tribal and regional centres that the main seasonal festivals were celebrated. In Deut. 26:I-II we have an example of the pattern of ,such a seasonal ritual, probably describing what happened at a local shrine at the Feast of Ingathering, later called

Note: If you are looking for good and high quality web space to host and run your java application check Lunarwebhost java web hosting services