Hesiod & The Bible
Basically myth is a pre-literary mode of experiencing the world because it is pre-reflective. The mode of mythic experience of the world is concrete, sensuous, and immediate. A phenomenon is directly experienced as mythic—it’s a dramatic event, charged with emotional content—that’s what releases the mythic imagination. The thunder god is seen in the thunderstorm, not behind it or above it. The event and the symbol are not separable. Any form of theogony, then, already represents an advance beyond primitive mythic consciousness. Theogony is a literary form. It requires a degree of reflection not originally present in myth. No one has directly experienced the creation of the world. Thinking about it requires some form of inference. You must work back from the observable world to its origins. You ground the ordinary world in its mythic origins. You charge ordinary events, no longer seen as themselves mythic, with mythic meaning. This “inference” is, however, not logical by our standards. Rather it’s a specifically mythic mode of inference. You need some sort of mythic connection to take us from the world as we see it back to some distant origin. You use human or natural analogies to account for the world coming to be: gestation, generation, and fabrication—often all 3 as we find in Hesiod.
Evidently genealogy is a very satisfying form of myth. You create a family tree for the world—this is why theogonies are so prevalent. It’s apparently sufficient to say that the Earth begat the Sky—together they begat Kronos, who together with Rhea, begat Zeus, and so on. We’re tempted to say that this sort of explanation gets you nowhere. You still would have to explain where the Earth came from in the first place. But genealogy seems to suffice for the purposes of myth. Every step of the way, you have a natural and readily comprehensible process—sexual generation. You have very human motives for each stage. What myth seeks to do is find a will, a personal will, behind every phenomenon. Eventually, you trace the world back to a sufficiently remote and primal phenomenon—the Earth or the sky. The mythic mentality can ask for no more—you’ve already arrived at a sufficient degree of remoteness from everyday life. When you consider the importance of the ancestral in all primitive communities, it’s not at all surprising that myth should try to trace the ancestry of the world back to some kind of mythic origin.
Hesiod’s Theogony provides a good example of this sort of creation myth. It presents a very natural process throughout. It seems in fact to beg the question at the beginning. At first there is chaos, and then the Earth comes into being. Nature just seems to grow, with one thing evolving out of another—day out of night, for example. Nature as a whole does not seem to have to come into being. Most primitive creation myths begin with some part of nature in existence already, and it gives birth to or generates all the rest. Human beings seem to experience nature primarily in the form of natural growth. The Greek word for nature, physis, is related to the Greek word for plant, phuton. “Nature” is what grows on its own, as opposed to what has to be made by man. One might sum up the original experience of nature this way: “Shoes don’t grow on trees, but apples do.” Immersed in farming as his primary activity, primitive man experiences nature first and foremost in its independent generative power. To primitive man, what makes nature numinous is its mysterious ability to grow things on its own. That’s what makes primitive men want to worship nature and natural objects—to make prayers to nature and try to ensure its natural growth cycles. And that’s what gives rise to primitive myths about nature, which always emphasize its ability to grow under its own power.
Mythic thought can never abstract completely from material reality. The unknown is always assimilated to the familiar. As Hesiod portrays the succession of the gods, we find all sorts of human, all-too-human motives among them. Sons rebelling against their fathers, fathers accordingly becoming jealous and suspicious of their sons. Deals made and deals broken. All this reflects the primitive experience of nature—nature as conflict. Primitive man is very aware of the conflicting forces of nature, since they govern his life. Sunshine and rain, heat and cold, day and night—in all these cases, primitive man sees a will behind the change from one to the other. It’s not simply a law of nature that day follows night. No, one god must overcome another to bring about the change. This means that the succession of night and day is not assured. It may have to be guaranteed or helped along by the gods and that means it’s time to get down on your knees and start praying. Certain mythic formulas or rituals may be necessary to ensure the regular operation of nature. Obviously primitive man is most aware of those forces that materially affect his daily experience and livelihood. In the midst of a drought, he sees it as the grip of a sun god and prays for the rain god to intervene on his behalf. Nature is shot through with such potential conflicts among the gods. This is mirrored in Hesiod’s account of creation. It’s a constant struggle among warring factions of gods.
Notice the shakiness of Zeus’s rule. He was himself a usurper; indeed, he usurped the throne of a usurper. This seems to leave him open to deposition himself. Zeus is repeatedly threatened with rebellion by the forces he deposed, like the Titans. They seem to represent more elemental forces than Zeus himself; they embody more primitive energies. The Titans rely on brute strength; they are allied with all sorts of monsters, described in elaborate mythic detail. This is where the mythic imagination is most actively at work in the Theogony. There is a constant fight to keep these monsters down. This seems to reflect a primitive anxiety that all hell may break lose at any moment. The order of nature may break down and chaos come back again. This is one of the most basic fears that myths are meant to assuage. Again and again in creation myths, we see the victory of one set of gods over another. The victors stand for law and order, indeed, they are associated with law giving. The victorious gods are usually credited with legislation, with establishing the laws of the people who believe in them. Often we see a more primitive group of gods defeated by the cunning of new gods. You could turn to the history of religion to explain this. Theogonies often reflect political events. One people conquers another and this is reflected in myth by one generation of gods displacing another. When conquest occurs, you have to replace the old gods with the new. This is mythically portrayed as a battle in heaven, in which a new pantheon of gods shoves the old gods out.
William Blake was particularly aware of this pattern in theogonies. He knew of Hesiod, and he saw the same pattern in Norse mythology—Odin displacing the Giants. Blake also saw it in the biblical tradition—Jehovah facing the rebellion of Satan and the other devils. For Blake, the Bible had tampered with the story and even threatened to distort it beyond recognition. We have a hard time realizing that Jehovah is a usurper because his party triumphed and completely rewrote the history books as victors get to do. The Jehovah party made it look as if he had ruled from the beginning of time. Blake tried to find the truth behind all existing theogonies. They have all been told from the viewpoint of the winners, the establishment. He sided with the Giants or the Titans; he saw them representing man’s energies, his passions. All the myths of a war in heaven that we have reflect the struggle of reason to subdue the passions. The myths tell the story of the continuing struggle of the passions to break out of the artificial restraints imposed upon them by reason. You can see why Blake would be attracted to Hesiod—because of all the portraits he gives of elemental forces struggling to break loose from their restraints. Of course, since this story is traditionally told from the orthodox point of view, all the forces Blake views positively are portrayed as monsters. Blake’s revaluation of orthodox mythology can be seen in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 16: “The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains; are in truth the causes of its life & the sources of all activity, but the chains are, the cunning of weak and tame minds, which have power to resist energy, according to the proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning.” We’ll be seeing a similar idea in Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung—there the giants do all the physical labor—they build the great castle Valhalla; the god Wotan rules them through cunning, with the help of the wily half-god Loge.
The portrait of creation in Hesiod’s Theogony was thus very congenial to the Romantic imagination, as we will see. The gods are shown as having very dubious motives; they hardly have the welfare of humanity in mind. They certainly do not adequately provide for human beings. Hesiod’s “is a song of universal dissatisfaction. Social and political evil permeates the world of the deities, and men reflect that world as they suffer from it and contribute to its already abundant store of miseries” (Shklar, pp. 129-30). This becomes a basic Romantic notion—defective providence. Zeus did not want human beings to have fire; it had to be stolen for humanity by the Titan Prometheus. Accordingly, Prometheus becomes a hero for the Romantics, as we’ll see in Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. When you hear Hesiod’s account of creation, you’re not surprised to find out that men endure misery in this world; it was not completely designed for their benefit. There was no complete design at all. No one god is in complete control. No one god is all-powerful. Zeus faces some very powerful enemies. They restrict his range of rule; he has to make deals to stay in power. In Hesiod, the universe is throughout a mixture of good and evil, because it is the product of conflicting wills as to how things should be ordered. There are a lot of forces working against man, but some forces working for him, too. Man is not utterly at a loss in the universe. For all the wildness of the mythic detail, the Theogony projects a reasonable view of the universe. It accounts well enough for human life as we see it—a mixture of pains and pleasures, with pains perhaps predominating. There is no problem of evil in Hesiod—we don’t have to wonder why we suffer. “Hesiod’s genealogy of the gods accounts admirably for the obvious—that we live in a world of pervasive suffering, moral and physical” (Shklar, p. 132). The forces that work on man’s behalf in the cosmos are not all-powerful. In fact, they’re quite limited. The Titan Prometheus, for example, is punished and chained up for his part in aiding man. The Theogony fulfills its function as a myth quite well—it is in harmony with the way human beings experience their life as a mixture of good and evil. People are naturally polytheists. Looking at the world they live in, they cannot imagine that it is the creation of a single god; it is filled with so many conflicts and contradictions that it must be the result of some kind of warfare among antagonistic deities.
Against the background of the Theogony as a typical creation myth, we can appreciate the originality and even the daring of the creation account given in Genesis in the Bible. It attains a level of abstraction far above the ordinary mythic imagination. It’s also an account of a kind of creation that no one has ever experienced. The initial version of creation does not account for man’s life as it is today. Therefore Genesis needs to provide a second myth—the Garden of Eden story—to take us down to the present day. What characterizes the Genesis account is above all its emphasis on a single God—one God did it all. He had no struggle, no opposition to overcome, no predecessor to displace as in Hesiod, no monsters to fight down. We can see the polemical thrust of the Genesis account by comparing it with other Middle Eastern myths of the time, like the Babylonian creation myths. These stories generally begin with a fight against a sea monster or monsters, a figure who survives in the Bible under the name of Rahab (Cassuto, 8-10). We find allusions to or survivals from these other accounts elsewhere in the Bible. See, for example, Isaiah 51: 9-10: “Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in the ancient days, in the generation of old. Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not it which hath dried the seas, the waters of the great deep.” Those who compiled the Bible were aware of a tradition that creation involved a struggle against the sea. This is completely omitted in the Genesis account, so that God can be portrayed as being in complete control. In fact, later in Genesis, the sea monsters—the whales—are explicitly said to be God’s creation—so much for the Babylonian belief that the sea monsters threaten God’s power; they are, in fact, just another manifestation of it.
So that in the Bible we don’t get any real theogony at all, no account of the generation of the various deities that rule the world. The one creator God is himself ungenerated. Creation is not at all viewed as a natural process, not based on any analogy to human action. The Bible emphasizes the absolute mystery of creation: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” The emphasis is on the word of God. Unlike human beings, God can bring something into existence with a mere word. This shows the higher spirituality of the Genesis account. Creation is not a material process. In effect, that means that, strictly speaking, there is no myth of creation. The Bible is basically hostile to the mythic imagination. God is not present in his creations; they offer evidence of his power, but he is still separable from them. This is the novelty of Genesis—the absolute transcendence of the Creator God; he is not in nature, but above it. In most myths, one element of nature generates the others. Genesis denies the self-generative power of nature. In Genesis, all of nature is created by the non-natural act of a supernatural being. There is nothing supernatural about or in nature itself; it is just the handiwork of God. Nature could not have generated itself. Therefore, man need not be in awe of nature; only of God. The Genesis account removes all the miraculous elements from the story, beyond the basic miracle of God’s creative power. We don’t have the cute monsters of Hesiod or the Babylonian Genesis. When we get to the Garden of Eden, it’s a perfectly ordinary garden. There are middle eastern myths of paradisaical gardens (in fact our word “paradise” is derived from a Persian word for “garden”). In these mythic gardens, you can find precious stones on trees, and all sorts of fabulous elements. Genesis quietly omits all these. The basic point of the Genesis account is: God encounters no resistance in the act of creating, no intransigent matter, no conflicts. Hence the creation completely corresponds to his design. In God’s own words: “it is good.” No compromises have to be made, no bargains. Everything is just the way God wanted it to be.
The question now arises: what is that design? We’re so familiar with the Genesis account that we may not wonder about the peculiarities of the order of creation. But many of the details are peculiar. The account is highly organized—it’s built up out of the magic number 7. There are of course the 7 days of creation, but there is more than that—key words appear in multiples of 7. There are 7 paragraphs and the 7th paragraph consists of 35 words in the original Hebrew (Cassuto 12-15). This suggests that there may be an order to the account that doesn’t immediately meet the eye. The characteristic act of the creation is division: separating the light from the darkness, the waters from the dry land, something that Blake picked up on in his version of a creation myth (Urizen). Look at the order of creation:
1.Light 4.Heavenly bodies
2.Sea & firmament 5.Fish & birds
3.Earth, dry land, vegetation 6.Land creatures & man
There are many peculiar details here. Above all, the creation of light occurs well before the creation of the heavenly bodies, and vegetation is created before the Sun. This isn’t very “scientific” by modern standards. The creation seems to divide up into 2 groups of 3 days each, and you can see the correspondence between 1 & 4, 2 & 5, and 3 & 6. The first group of 3 seems to provide the platforms for the second group of 3. This points to the basic difference between the two groups. The objects created on the first three days don’t move; the objects created on days 4-6 do move. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his commentary on Genesis, points out that the Creation begins with fixed objects: “The world of the fixed, the firm, the unchangeable, the unliving comes into being [first]. It is characteristic that those works of creation which are most distant and strange to us in their fixedness, immutability and repose, were created in the beginning. Unaffected by human life the fixed world stands before God, unchangeable and undisturbed” (Bonhoeffer, 29). Even within the second group of three days, the order of creation appears to be based on motion. As Leo Strauss writes: “The creatures of the first three days cannot change their places. The heavenly bodies change their places, but not their courses; the living beings change their courses, but not their ‘ways;’ men alone can change their ways’” (Strauss 153).
As Strauss points out, “The most striking characteristic of the biblical account of creation is its demoting or degrading of heaven and the heavenly lights. Sun, moon and stars precede the living things because they are lifeless: they are not gods. What the heavenly lights lose, man gains; man is the peak of creation” (Strauss 153). In Genesis, the creation of the heavenly bodies is conspicuously out of order. In most creation accounts, they would be created on the first day or participate in the act of creation themselves. Look at any other creation myth, and the heavenly bodies figure earlier in the story. Often the Earth and/or the sun begin the story. In accord with the Bible’s denial of divinity in nature, the creation of the heavenly bodies is postponed until the fourth day. This is the Bible’s subtle but forceful way of suggesting that the sun and the moon are not gods—they’re not all that important; they can be put off until the fourth day. When Moses is instructing the Israelites in the laws God has imposed on them, he warns them against worshiping graven images, particularly in the likeness of beasts, and then he cautions them about worshiping the heavens: “And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven” (Deuteronomy 4: 19). In the Bible, the heavenly bodies are denigrated; after all, they are available to all peoples. But the Lord God is available only to his chosen people, the Hebrews.
The heavenly bodies are demoted by being relegated to the second group of 3 days, and then within that second group, they seem to be placed at the bottom. Living creatures are superior to inanimate things. In Genesis, the fish and the birds are the first to be addressed directly by God. Meanwhile, man, the one creature with a soul, is superior to the other living creatures. Man is the only being created in the image of God. Man more closely resembles God than the sun or the moon do. We’re so much the heirs of this biblical view of the natural world that it’s hard for us to see that it’s distinctive and not universally accepted. In, for example, Aristotle’s notion of divinity, God is the unmoved mover, and hence much closer to a heavenly body than a human being. We have to look at rival creation accounts to see the polemical thrust of Genesis. In many creation myths, the sun, the moon, and other heavenly bodies have important roles to play in the creation. But in the Bible, there’s nothing supernatural or even special about the sun and the moon. At most, they’re a particularly eloquent testimony to God’s power. They are there for “signs”—of the seasons, days, and years. That is to say, the creation of the heavenly bodies points to the creation of man. The heavenly bodies exist for the good of man. Their creation points ahead to the beings for whom they will serve as signs. The biblical creation account is geocentric and anthropocentric. In that, it’s quite different from the Theogony. Everything seems to be well-designed and well-executed, and designed and executed for the sake of man. This is the very definition of a benevolent providence. In Genesis, the account of creation suggests that man should accept and welcome his place in the order of creation, since it was designed for his benefit. By contrast, Hesiod’s Theogony offers many examples of rebellion against divine rule; they may not be successful, but they do seem at least in some sense to be justified, given the tyrannical behavior of the deities in Hesiod. The image of the cosmos in the Theogony would seem to legitimate rebellion against divine rule; the image in Genesis seems to call for peaceful submission to God’s rule.
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL
A good indication of the polemical thrust of Genesis with regard to the heavenly bodies can be found in the commentary on the creation account by Philo of Alexandria. Philo is a good Jew, but a Hellenized Jew, and he has a Greek respect for the heavenly bodies. He feels it necessary to deny that their being created on the fourth day is any form of demotion (while still being hesitant to worship them): “On the fourth day, the earth now being finished, [God] ordered the heaven in varied beauty. Not that He put the heaven in a lower rank than the earth, giving precedence to the inferior creation, and accounting the higher and more divine worthy only of the second place; but to make clear beyond all doubt the mighty sway of His sovereign power. For being aware beforehand of the ways of thinking that would mark the men of future ages, how they would be intent on what looked probable and plausible, with much in it that could be supported by argument, but would not aim at sheer truth; and how they would trust phenomena rather than God, admiring sophistry more than wisdom; and how they would observe in time to come the circuits of the sun and moon, on which depend summer and winter and the changes of spring and autumn, and would suppose that the regular movements of the heavenly bodies are the causes of all things that year by year come forth and are produced out of the earth; that there might be none who owing to shameless audacity or to overwhelming ignorance should venture to ascribe the first place to any created thing, ‘let them,’ said He, ‘go back in thought to the original creation of the universe, when, before sun or moon existed, the earth bore plants of all sorts and fruits of all sorts; and having contemplated this let them form in their minds the expectation that hereafter too shall it bear these at the Father’s bidding, whensoever it may please Him.’ For He has no need of His heavenly offspring on which He bestowed powers but not independence: for, like a charioteer grasping the reins or a pilot the tiller, He guides all things in what direction He pleases as law and right demand, standing in need of no one besides: for all things are possible to God. This is the reason why the earth put forth plants and bore herbs before the heaven was furnished” (Philo, p. 35 and 37).
In Philo, Greek accounts of creation clash with the biblical account of creation. He shows a Greek respect for the heavenly bodies and the beauty of an orderly cosmos, in which the regular motion of the heavenly bodies is correlated with the cycle of the seasons and therefore with agricultural production. In fact, Philo thinks of the heavenly bodies as divine, and he thinks of the earthly world as an “inferior creation.” He understands that the unaided human intellect, in studying nature, will come to conclusions about a natural order independent of God. But as a Jew, Philo understands that God must always trump nature. And so even if the heavenly bodies are not exactly demoted in Genesis, they have to be put in their place; we are reassured that the Earth could have produced plant life even without the sun. Philo points to a fundamental opposition between the Greeks, who are impressed by the orderliness of nature, and the Hebrews, who are in effect impressed by the disorderliness of nature (the fact that God can intervene and make the sun stand still, as opposed to a Greek god, who can make it rise and set in orderly fashion). Philo, very much aware of the Greek view of nature, nevertheless ultimately opts for the Hebrew view.
[This lecture is largely based on the work of Umberto Cassuto and Leo Strauss; cited below]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Creation and Fall/Temptation: Two Biblical Studies. Trans. John C. Fletcher. New York: MacMillan, 1971
Umberto Cassuto. A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part One: From Adam to Noah. Trans. Israel Abrahams. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1961
David Erdman, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Newly Revised Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982
Hesiod. Theogony. Trans. Norman O. Brown. Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill, 1953
Philo in Ten Volumes, Vol. I. Trans. by F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971
Judith N. Shklar. “Subversive Genealogies.” Daedalus. Vol. 101, No. 1 (Winter, 1972): 129-54
Leo Strauss. “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections.” Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983
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