Dark History of the Bible Read online

  The other thing about myths is that they tell a people who they are, embodying what would otherwise just be a ‘background’. Stories like this lend life and colour to what would otherwise be a pallid, genealogical inheritance; they help to construct a cultural identity that really seems worth identifying with.

  Not that background in the more abstract sense isn’t significant in itself: hence the Bible’s notorious ‘begats’. From Genesis 5, 9, for example:

  And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan; … And Cainan lived seventy years, and begat Mahalaleel … And Mahalaleel lived sixty and five years and begat Jared … And Jared lived an hundred sixty and two years, and he begat Enoch … And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah…

  ‘What makes the Bible so bewildering, so impossible to encompass, is what makes it so enriching for readers’.

  Methusaleh occupies a twelfth-century stained-glass window in Canterbury Cathedral. Just as Genesis’ genealogies established a sense of lineage for the Jews, the Bible as a whole gave Western Christians a sense of spiritual inheritance.

  History tells us who we are. The inscriptions on the so-called Palermo Stone provide a partial chronology for the Egypt of the third millennium BCE – everything from pharaonic reigns to military expeditions, flood-levels and cattle-counts.

  That Methuselah went on to live for ‘nine hundred sixty and nine years’ (5, 27) suggests that these lifespans too are what we would describe as mythical. It’s striking too how pointless this sort of cataloguing seems from a modern historical perspective: no attempt whatsoever is made to describe the specific contribution made by any of these patriarchs or the society over which they were to preside. At the same time, though, these listings can be seen to recall the Sumerian King List or the pharaonic chronology to be found on the Palermo Stone. For the Jews, as for the Sumerians and Egyptians, it was more important to establish legitimacy through a clear continuity of generations than to offer information on what the world was like at any given time.

  The Book of Life – and Death

  Ultimately, what makes the Bible so bewildering, so impossible to encompass, is what makes it so enriching for readers of every kind. That goes for its ethical challenges as well as its textual cruces. In finding space for rape and genocide it’s like life, in other words; Sarah’s jealousy would strike a chord with any wife. Sure, we can, if we’re determined to, hover fastidiously over the Bible’s text to extract a few uplifting anecdotes for our edification. It’s hard to see in that case how we’d really be engaging with a work whose ‘darkness’ is what makes it truly human. Or, for that matter, with any of the real challenges of life. The point about the Bible is that it contains the whole of existence, from alpha to omega, from creation to apocalypse: it may not be in every sense a ‘good book’, but it is a great one.

  Everything began with God (above). But, as the alpha and omega of his holy book remind us (left), he defines our end as well. Here an angel exhibits the treasures of the earth, holding up an astrolabe (an antique model of the heavens).

  I

  THE BIBLE

  GENESIS: FALL, FRATRICIDE AND FLOOD

  ‘Let there be light,’ came the famous fiat, but hardly was God’s creation complete than human disobedience plunged everything back into darkness and sin.

  ——♦——

  ‘Darkness was upon the face of the deep.’ GENESIS 1, 2.

  First things first. ‘In the beginning’, the Book of Genesis tells us, ‘God created the heaven and the earth.’ The idea of higher and lower states is central from the start. The difference is all-important: this is to be a universe articulated in the first instance by its divisions and its distinctions (‘And God divided the light from the darkness’, 1, 4), and only secondarily by its definitions of what things are (‘And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night’, 1, 5).

  Order is to be important too. No time is lost in establishing the essential rhythms and routines of earthly existence (‘And the evening and the morning were the first day’, 1, 5).

  ‘And God saw that it was good,’ we’re told (1, 13), and yet what has clearly been a codification, a laying-down of laws, inevitably brings with it at least an implicit thought of rule-breaking, of disorder. The goodness of God’s creation has been summed up in his command that there should be ‘light’ (1, 3); but every day, we’ve already been told, contains its darkness – ‘night’.

  Man and Woman

  The stars; the sun and moon; ‘the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth’; the ‘great whales’, ‘fish’ and ‘cattle’ and the ‘creeping thing’. Having brought all these beasts into being, God decides (1, 26) to ‘make man in our image, after our likeness’, resolved to give him ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle’. That man is made ‘in the image of God’ only underlines his special status among the wonders of creation: ‘Behold’, says God:

  Man, said his creator, was made ‘in our image, after our likeness’. The Renaissance liked to take him at his word. Michelangelo’s famous scene from the Sistine Chapel (c. 1511) makes the very most of the majestic beauty of the human form.

  I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

  So Good He Made them Twice

  ‘So God created man in his own image,’ says the Book of Genesis (1, 27): ‘in the image of God he created him’. Does the male pronoun encompass the female too? It seems to – at least to begin with, verse 27 continuing immediately on to elaborate: ‘male and female created he them’.

  That appears to be the end of it. God’s creation is complete, the whole thing being rounded off with the now customary note that God saw that it was ‘good’. Just a few lines later, though, in Chapter 2, verse 7, we find ourselves starting over: ‘the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.’

  And still no sign of Eve. Adam is alone when (2, 8) he’s given his own ‘Garden eastward in Eden’ as a home. Only afterwards does God consider that ‘It is not good that the man should be alone’ and resolves to make ‘an help meet’ for him. Even then, there’s the business of ‘every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air’ being brought to Adam, so that the first man could allot them all their names. Only when that day’s work is done does God cause a ‘deep sleep’ to fall upon him, during which ‘he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof’. It’s Adam who names this animal too: ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man,’ he says.

  Winds blow; the sun and moon both shine; fish, fowl, cattle and other creatures throng around as God completes his labours with the ‘birth’ of woman (2, 21). Eve emerges fully-formed from the side of her (miraculously sleeping) husband.

  GOLDEN AGE

  THE IDEA THAT the first men and women lived untroubled lives in a land of endless ease and pleasure was by no means unusual among ancient cultures. For the Greek poet Hesiod, in the seventh century BCE, he said that our first forebears were lucky enough to live during a ‘Golden Age’:

  They lived like gods and felt no sorrow. They did not toil, nor did they grow old, but remained strong in hand and foot. They ate and drank freely, with no sufferings to dampen the mood. Even when they died, they did so easily, as if simply falling asleep. All good things came to them without asking, for the fertile earth brought forth its bounty spontaneously and without limit: they could just sit back and enjoy their ease and comfort, beloved of the gods and rich in livestock.

  Hindu tradition talks of the Krita Yuga, a First and Perfect Age in which all were equal, with no divisions of wealth or caste; no death, disease nor even ageing; nor any need to labour in a world that gave freely of its plenty. In these traditions the ‘Fall’ of Ma
n is more a series of stages of decline: the Greek Golden Age is succeeded by epochs of Silver and Bronze – and a wretched present one of Iron. But the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh has pretty much the whole story as we see it in Genesis, including a mud-made man being tempted by a woman – and even a seductive snake.

  However problematic its account of her creation, the Bible is clear on the perfection of woman as counterpart and as companion to her husband, ‘the bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh’ in Adam’s words (2, 23).

  Already, by its second chapter, then, the Genesis account is proving problematic. The inconsistency is easily enough explained. So long, that is, as the reader is willing to accept the modern scholarly consensus that this narrative represents a composite of several different early sources – a sometimes clumsy synthesis, if truth be told. There’s no great difficulty or ‘darkness’ here, then, for most of us, but for those who’d hope to find in the Bible a literal, factual account of the world’s origins, and our own, the implicit warning could hardly be more clear.

  DEVIL WOMAN

  THE EARLIEST JEWISH readers don’t seem to have been much troubled by the discrepancies between Genesis’ two accounts of the creation of man – and, more to the point – of womankind. Only later did it start causing concern. The difficulty was easily resolved, however: seizing upon the fact that the ‘female’ of Chapter 1 is never named, writers came up with the idea of an earlier woman who had to be dispensed with as she proved unworthy.

  Hence the story of Lilith, Adam’s first wife – a monster of insubordination and sexual rapacity; the antithesis of all approved forms of femininity. It’s no surprise to find her mythical antecedents extending back into Mesopotamian demonology. No surprise because her first actual mention in the Bible comes in the Book of Isaiah, thought to have been written at least in part during the Babylonian Captivity; but also because her devilish nature suggests some such origins. Lilith didn’t really come into her own till post-Biblical times, in the Balmud Bavli (mid-First Millennium CE) and the medieval Alphabet of Ben Sira and other mystic writings in which she becomes the terrifying embodiment of femininity at its most seductive and its most threatening. Sexually insatiable, irresistibly appealing, she was Freud’s vagina dentata incarnate, her irresistible body the beguiling way to hell. In one thirteenth-century account, she abandons Adam for Samael, Archangel of Death and Destruction, her affinities and her loyalties all too clear.

  Modern feminist scholars haven’t of course been shy of registering their unease at the importance attributed to Eve, a woman, in the ‘Fall of Man’. The Lilith legend doubles down on this tradition, removing all question of ‘mere’ weakness or impressionability, replacing sexist condescension with a more aggressive misogyny.

  The prevalence of female spirits in Mesopotamian tradition gave the Lilith legend a doubly sinister status. This devil-woman didn’t just stand for the frailties generally associated with womanhood, but with all the evils associated with paganism by Jewish and Christian scholars.

  Cherchez la femme … The serpent stays in the background here: Eve stares insouciantly off into space as an ingenuous-and bewildered-looking Adam takes the apple in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s classic depiction of the Fall (1526).

  ‘But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it’.

  GENESIS 2,17

  Eve’s Temptation

  ‘Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat,’ God tells Adam (2, 17): ‘But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.’ But the serpent – ‘more subtil’, according to Genesis, ‘than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made’ – sets out to persuade Eve that this fearful warning is just bluster on the creator’s part:

  Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

  Eve, then, takes the fruit and eats it; and she gives it to her husband and he eats it too, ‘And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.’ This new-found bashfulness is what betrays them: their efforts to conceal themselves from God arouse his ire. ‘Who told thee that thou wast naked?’ he demands. Damning the serpent to crawl upon his belly and eat dust for all his days, he curses Eve to a life of suffering and subjection:

  Sent out of the sunshine of the earthly paradise into a dark, drear wilderness, Adam and Eve can now anticipate lives of suffering and toil. Ultimately, however, this disgrace was to open the way to a more meaningful paradise in heaven.

  I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

  As for Adam, his crime is in the first place to have ‘hearkened unto the voice of thy wife’, and only secondarily to have eaten the forbidden fruit. In punishment for his transgression, he’s condemned to a life of toil, trying to coax some sort of subsistence from an uncooperative earth.

  Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

  Holbein’s ‘The Curse’ (1547), copied in this engraving, shows Adam condemned to till the ground, with Death as his co-worker. Eve, in the background, is seen suckling her first son, whilst spinning wool upon a distaff – ancient emblem of women’s work.

  STRANGE FRUIT

  THAT THE FORBIDDEN fruit of Eden was an apple is no more than a convention: there’s no biblical basis at all for such a ‘fact’. Like the blonde Madonnas and blue-eyed Christs of so much medieval and Renaissance art, it’s a mark of the Eurocentrism of the Christian culture to which we have been heirs. According to the Quran, and to various ancient Hindu texts, the forbidden fruit was a banana; several scholars in medieval Christendom agreed. And not just because that tropical fruit seemed more likely to be at home in a paradisal garden in the Middle East: there were good iconographic reasons for the identification. Bananas hung down in bunches – drawn down in the mass, like a fallen humanity; but each individual fruit grew upwards, as though straining separately after salvation. As recently as the eighteenth century, this notion had its supporters – including no less a figure than the great Swedish naturalist Charles Linnaeus (1707–78). His adherence to the ancient theory was immortalized in the Latin name he gave the banana in his famous taxonomy of species: the Musa paradisiaca or ‘fruit of paradise’.

  Carnal Knowledge?

  In eating the forbidden fruit, it’s clear that the ‘knowledge of good and evil’ the first couple acquire is what we would nowadays call ‘self-consciousness’. Hence the sudden sense of embarrassment and shame at being naked – till now not just accepted but unnoticed. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to see the symbolic possibilities of the serpent – the phallus personified – nor to see the ‘Fall’ as a transition from prepubertal ‘innocence’ to sexual awakening.

  Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) is regarded as the father of modern zoology. His Latin taxonomy put the ordering of species on a scientific footing. Even so, he felt the influence of scriptural traditions.

  Prior to their Fall, it seems, Adam and Eve enjoyed an infant’s blissful obliviousness to their nakedness. Did they ‘enjoy’ the infant’s ‘freedom’ from adult sexuality as well? While it is of course possible that the first man and woman frolicked unselfconsciously together in their innocence, there’s no suggestion in the Bible that this was so – and a strong implication that they became aware of sexual difference only in the moments after eating the forbidden fruit.

  THE CURSE

  THE IDEA THAT menstruation is ‘the curse’ of Eve is these
days mostly aired in a spirit of grim humour, but it’s been advanced entirely seriously in the past. Writers in the Jewish midrashic tradition saw the subject of Eve as one on which they could really spread themselves, venting their misogynistic feelings to their hearts’ content. Already, in Genesis, we find woman condemned to suffer sexual desire for her husband (seen as a deficit, an affliction) along with subjection to him; pain in impregnation and in childbirth. But the punishment would not end there, according to the scholars: she would have to squat ‘like a beast’ to urinate; to grow her hair long, like Lilith – wild and unkempt – and to keep her head covered, in the style of a mourner. She would suffer pain at the loss of her virginity and the humiliation of being a cushion for her husband thereafter – lying under him in sexual congress; she should spend much of her life apart from men and be confined to her husband’s home.

  ‘And Adam knew Eve his wife,’ we’re to be told a little later (Genesis 4, 1); ‘and she conceived’: this is the original reference for all those arch allusions to the idea of ‘knowing’ someone ‘in the biblical sense’. If Christianity has had a ‘problem with sex’, as many of its modern critics have noted, that’s been largely down to its own moralists – perhaps most notably St Paul and St Augustine. It’s evident even so that there’s a sexual dimension to the story in Genesis, and one that even its earliest readers could hardly have ignored.