Dark History of the Bible Read online

  God’s first explicit pronouncement on the whole question of human sexuality comes in his angry denunciation of Eve at Genesis 3, 16. It’s an aspect of her accursed state that henceforth her ‘desire shall be to [her] husband’ (3, 16) – her sexual longings will be part of her punishment, in other words.

  ‘What has thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground’.

  GENESIS 4, 11

  Our sense that such desires should be (at least) as much a source of happiness and fulfilment as of sorrow opens up an ambiguity at the very centre of the story of the ‘Fall’. This is the first hint we’ve had that, with all the wretchedness it brought, humanity’s loss of primal innocence might have its upside – an important point, as far as Christian theology has been concerned. Medieval scholars were to write of this primal offence as a felix culpa or ‘fortunate misdeed’: it was only this first fall, this loss of the earthly paradise, that allowed humankind, redeemed by Christ’s subsequent sacrifice, to aspire to everlasting life with God in Heaven. Even in more widely secular terms, it may be seen that, whatever the appeal of a life of Edenic ease, it offers little scope for striving or self-betterment. Bliss it may be, but at the same time it is a bliss that has no place for creativity or enterprise – or, it might even be suggested, for any of the things that make ‘post-lapsarian’ life worth living.

  First Blood

  Without further ceremony, then, Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden: an angel with a flaming sword barred their return. Only then (4, 1), as far as the scripture is concerned, did human history with its cycles of generation and regeneration begin in earnest: ‘And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived.’

  Francesco Bacchiacca’s Eve with Cain and Abel offers no hint of the hatred and violence to come. Does the blue of her loincloth foreshadow the gowns of Mary, the Madonna, whose child would one day redeem Eve’s sin?

  A son, named Cain, resulted; after him came another boy, Abel. They grew up not just as two brothers but two important archetypes, with much more to their mutual suspicion than sibling rivalry. ‘And Abel was a keeper of sheep’, says the Bible, ‘but Cain was a tiller of the ground’ – two entirely different economic models, in other words. Different, and incompatible, with opposing priorities in land-use and the marshalling of resources that have caused a great many clashes over the course of human history. From the raids of the nomadic Huns in Roman times all the way down to the massacre of Rwanda’s pastoralist Tutsi by the agrarian Hutu in the 1990s, the collisions between these cultures have only too often been explosive.

  In the case of Cain and Abel, though, the fault – from a modern perspective, at least – seems to stem less from lifestyle clash than from a difficult deity. If his punishment of their parents, although harsh, is strictly fair, God’s treatment of these two young men appears positively capricious. Both brought him pious offerings – Cain from the ‘fruit of the ground’ he had worked so hard to cultivate, and Abel from ‘the firstlings of his flock’. The Lord ‘had respect unto Abel and to his offering’, the Bible tells us (4, 4). But ‘unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.’

  Cain, understandably, ‘was very wroth’ – or angry:

  and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.

  When God came asking for Abel, Cain claimed not to know where he was – and why should he: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ But God berated him:

  What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground’ (4, 11)

  In the morning of the world’s creation, Cain creates the world’s first corpse. His murder of his brother Abel may be seen as the inaugurating act of a whole human history of conflict and of crime.

  THE SERPENT’S SON?

  THE FIRST HUMAN ever to see the light of day after a natural birth, Cain was also the first to be conventionally conceived – if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, at any rate. One midrashic tradition, though, suggests that the Serpent in the Garden of Eden didn’t just tempt Eve morally but that it also sexually seduced her: it was of this diabolical coupling that Cain was the result. The appeal of this version of the story, from the scholar’s point of view, presumably, was that it preserved the principle that man, as created by God, was intrinsically pure. It also offered an explanation of how sin had (quite literally) ‘entered’ woman, corrupting humanity as a whole.

  Cain fled in a frenzy of fear and guilt, ‘a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth’, although God now promised him his protection, and ‘set a mark’ on him, warning that any who harmed him would be punished sevenfold. So the ‘mark of Cain’, although the sign of an accursed spirit, was at the same time an emblem of God’s mercy.

  Sons of Seth

  And it’s at this point that the biblical ‘begats’ begin: to Cain’s son Enoch is born Irad (4, 18):

  and Irad begat Mehujael; and Mehujael begat Methusael; and Methusael begat Lamech.

  The beginnings of the human family tree: the sons of Cain are shown on the branch to the left; those of Adam and Eve’s third son Seth to the right. Abel, of course, was killed before he could become a father.

  Lamech ‘took unto him two wives’: one was Adah, the other Zillah. (The scripture seems to take his bigamy in its stride.) The stock of humans, if not perhaps the gene pool, had meanwhile been extended by the birth of another son, Seth, to Adam and Eve – who by now were 130 years old. Seth’s son Enos had his own son, Cainan, along with an unspecified number of other unnamed sons and daughters; Cainan in his turn sired Mahalaleel, whose eldest son was Jared. He had a son named Enoch – again, among many others. Enoch’s son Lamech had a son named Noah.

  INCESTUOUS ORIGINS

  THE INCEST TABOO, we’re told, is universal, and has been so for all known societies – even if the specifics of which relationships have been barred and which accepted may have varied. The Bible sidesteps the issue: ‘And Cain knew his wife,’ it tells us, without ever naming her; ‘and she conceived, and bare Enoch,’ it concludes (4, 17).

  The midrashic writers weren’t so coy, suggesting that both Cain and Abel were born with twin sisters. Twin sisters whom they assumed that they would marry when they came of age. Abel’s intended was the more beautiful, one version of the story says: Cain was envious and wanted her for himself. This, the writer claims, was the occasion of the brothers’ quarrel. Abel, the stronger, defended himself and, their fight seeming at an end, turned his back on Cain who, taking cowardly advantage, struck and killed him with a stone.

  As for the incest question, the midrashim don’t engage with this any more than the Book of Genesis does. Different rules applied at the beginning of the world, it seems.

  Cain goes into exile with his wife and family. Genesis doesn’t dwell on the details, though there’s no getting round the fact that, by its own account, Adam’s son was married to – and had several children by – his sister.

  Gradually, as all these patriarchs and their anonymous siblings married and had children, the overall population of the earth grew. And growing more wayward and unruly, it would appear. By the time Noah came to manhood, God was thoroughly disenchanted with the human race he had created (6, 5):

  And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

  Noah and his sons laboured long and hard on the construction of the ark. God gave them detailed instructions on its dimensions, the materials it should be made of and on how exactly it should be built (6, 14).

  ‘The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits.’

  GENESIS 6, 14

  F
ortunately, however, ‘Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord’ (6, 8). Although resolved that ‘the end of all flesh is come before me’ and that the earth was to be destroyed, God decided that the patriarch should be spared.

  The World Washed Away

  So, God told Noah (6, 14):

  Make thee an ark of gopher wood: rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shall pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of. The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark … and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second and third stories shalt thou make it.

  Why such a big and solid vessel? ‘Behold’ (6, 17):

  I do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and evey thing that is in the earth shall die. But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee.

  There was to be hope for animal-kind as well (6, 19):

  Filing in two-by-two, the birds and the mammals, the predators and the prey, the boarding of the ark has been re-imagined innumerable times over the centuries. It remains one of scripture’s most vividly memorable scenes.

  DIVINE DELUGES

  ‘NOAH’S FLOOD’, AS specific as its details seem, has much in common with the deluge visited on the Mesopotamian world by the angry gods in the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. If it’s not too much of a surprise to find similar sounding stories cropping up in the mythologies of neighbouring civilizations. The same might be said for the occurrence of the idea in the Puranas of early India – and even, perhaps, for the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha in Greek tradition. Deucalion and his wife are spared when the earth is otherwise destroyed in a flood sent by an angry Zeus: they build a wooden chest that they stock with provisions to help them through the ordeal.

  How, though, are we to account for the fact that floods like this appear in the folklore of a number of Native and South American people? The obvious answer is the powerful appeal of the idea of the destructive deluge as a symbol. Inevitably, given the appearance of such similar stories across so many different cultures, so geographically remote from one another, some have wondered how merely mythological they are. Could it be that they record a real event? That life on earth was cataclysmically disrupted by a genuine deluge in the distant past?

  In one sense, of course, it only too obviously was. No scientist seriously doubts that sea levels rose markedly after the end of the last glaciation, around 18,000 years ago. Between about 16,000 and 6000 BCE, the level went up by well over 100m (330ft), radically redrawing the map of world and profoundly shaping the development of those early urbanizing civilizations whose emergence had been made possible by the discovery of agriculture in the ‘Holocene’.

  A dramatic rise, then – but could it really have been experienced as such when it took place over so many human lifetimes? In the 1990s, geologists William Ryan and Walter Pitman put forward the hypothesis that the Black Sea had been formed by a sudden inundation, following the collapse of a sill of rock and mud, in what is now the Bosporus, in around 6000 BCE. An elegant theory, but with little in the way of reliable evidence to support it – and a great many grounds for scepticism, most geologists believe.

  Utnapishtim, the Sumerian ‘Noah’, thanks the gods for his family’s preservation. So widely does the idea of the cleansing world-flood recur in ancient myth that some scholars have suggested that all these stories may just have been based on fact.

  And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female. Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive. And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them.

  In sparing Noah’s family and these animals, God would ‘keep seed alive upon the face of the earth’ (7, 3). Everything else would be destroyed by ‘forty days and forty nights’ of heavy rain.

  And so it proved:

  The waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man. All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.

  ‘The waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days,’ we’re told (7, 24). Stocked with examples of every animal species – including man, of course – the ark was a little world, afloat in what amounted to a primal chaos.

  We are back where we were at the outset, then: ‘in the beginning’, when ‘darkness was upon the face of the deep’ (1, 2), and the spirit of God was moving ‘upon the face of the waters’. This time, though, the emptiness isn’t quite complete. It must have been a nerve-racking time for Noah and his crew, a mere speck upon an endless ocean, safely afloat yet still adrift.

  The waters having receded, the ark rests atop Mount Ararat. Drowned bodies litter the hillside. We tend to see the story of the deluge as one of deliverance, of redemption. This engraving doesn’t spare us its destructive force.

  ‘He sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up’.

  GENESIS 8, 6

  Home and Dry

  After 150 days, says Genesis (8, 3), ‘the waters were abated’:

  And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.

  As day followed day, and more and more mountaintops became visible above the waters around him, Noah sent out scouts to see if wider areas were becoming dry (8, 6):

  Noah opened the window of the ark which he had made: And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from the earth. Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground. But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him in to the ark, for the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark. And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark. And the dove came in to him in the evening, and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth. And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent forth the dove; which returned not again unto him any more.

  Soon, Noah was able to step back on to solid ground with his wife and family. He was able to disembark his animal passengers as well. They set off in their pairs to repopulate the earth. As the human survivors set up altars to offer their thanks to their creator, God announced that he was making a new ‘covenant’ with Noah and his descendants: no flood would ever again be sent to destroy the earth. He set his bow in the sky – a rainbow – in a token of his faith.

  Despairing of the raven, Noah released a dove from the window of the ark to fly out and scout for patches of emerging land. Philip R. Morris (1836–1902) painted this scene in the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ style – simple but haunting.

  The Curse of Ham

  To Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, fell the responsibility for repeopling the earth: ‘Be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein’ (9, 7). Noah himself, meanwhile, was busy bringing the earth back into cultivation. He established a vineyard – the first one ever known. And, it seems, he made the first wine and became the first man to drink
it. He had too much, and collapsed, completely helpless, in his tent. There he lay ‘uncovered’, in the Bible’s words (9, 21), in which condition his son Ham came in and saw him. He went out and told his brothers, who came in and covered up their father’s shame.

  Noah’s sons cover their father’s nakedness, turning as they do to remonstrate with their brother Ham, who’s deemed to have dishonoured him – how is never clear. Ham was held to have condemned his descendants to disgrace and servitude.

  What, precisely, that shame consisted of – the exact nature of Ham’s offence against his father – the account in Genesis doesn’t make too clear. All we are told is that the patriarch’s younger son ‘saw’ Noah’s nakedness, which hardly seems to justify his rage. When Noah ‘awoke from his wine’ (9, 24), ‘and knew what his younger son had done unto him’, he cursed his son, and his house of Canaan, to be ‘a servant of servants’:

  BLACK PROPAGANDA

  THE RACE THEORY of the nineteenth century, scientific as it was in its pretensions, was happy enough to reach back to the Old Testament for its account of human origins. In this analysis, the human family was divided up into different races, all of them descended from Noah and his three sons. Since Japheth had been ‘enlarged’ by God (9, 27), it made sense for his descendants – the ‘Japhetic’ peoples – to be the master race; the whites. Shem’s descendants were the Semitic races (not just Jews but Arabs and other Middle-Eastern people).