Hebrew Myths (13 page)

God said: ‘O evil Samael, are you astonished at Adam’s wisdom? Yet he will now foresee the birth of his descendants, and give every one his own name, until the Last Days!’
¹⁴⁷
With that, He hurled Samael and his attendant angels from Heaven. Samael clutched at Michael’s wings, and would have dragged him down too, had God not intervened.
¹⁴⁸

(
c
) Some allege that Satan was not Samael, but the oxlike Prince of Darkness who had opposed God’s creative will even before He commanded ‘Let there be light!’ When God said: ‘Away! I will create My world in light!’, the Prince asked: ‘Why not from darkness?’ God replied: ‘Beware, lest I subdue you with a shout!’ The Prince, loth to acknowledge himself God’s inferior, feigned deafness. Whereupon God’s shout subdued him, as He had threatened.
¹⁴⁹
Samael and his angels were banished to a dark dungeon, where they still languish, their faces haggard, their lips sealed; and are now known as the Watchers.
¹⁵⁰
In the Last Days, the Prince of Darkness will declare himself God’s equal, and claim to have taken part in Creation, boasting: ‘Though God made Heaven and Light, I made Darkness and the Pit!’ His angels will support him; but the fires of Hell shall quench their arrogance.
¹⁵¹

***

1
. ‘Samael’, though said to mean ‘Venom of God’, is more likely a cacophemism for ‘Shemal’, a Syrian deity. In Hebrew myth, Samael occupies an ambiguous position, being at once ‘chief of all Satans’ and ‘the greatest prince in Heaven’ who rules angels and planetary powers. The title ‘Satan’ (‘enemy’) identified him both with Helel, ‘Lucifer, son of Dawn’, another fallen angel; and with the Serpent who in the Garden of Eden plotted Adam’s downfall. Some Jews (Ginzberg, LJ, V. 85) also hold that he had
planned to create another world, which identifies him with the Gnostic ‘Cosmocrator’ or ‘Demiurge’. The Orphic Greek Cosmocrator Ophion, or Ophioneus, was also a serpent (see 1.
10
).

2
. Adam’s naming of the beasts is a tale derived perhaps from a myth of how the alphabet was invented: the first and third Hebrew letters being
aleph
and
gimmel
, namely ‘ox’ and ‘camel’.

3
. That darkness (
hoshekh
) had existed long before Creation not as a mere absence of light, but as a positive entity, was believed by all Middle Eastern and Mediterranean peoples. The Greeks spoke of their ‘Mother Night’; the Hebrews of their ‘Prince of Darkness’, relating him to Tohu (see 2.
3
), and placing him in the north. The shout with which God overcame this Prince recalls Pan’s when, according to Apollodorus, he subdued Typhon: a monster whose wings darkened the sun, and who also lived in the north, on Mount Saphon (see 8.
3
).

4
. ‘Watchers’ (
egrēgorikoi
in Greek), the name given to Satan’s angels in the
Second Book of Enoch
, seems to be a rendering of two Aramaic words:
irin
, applied to angels in
Daniel
IV. 10, 14, 20; and
qaddishin
, ‘holy ones’. A nearer translation would be ‘guardian angels’, which agrees both with their functions and the meanings of their names. According to
Midrash Tehillim
on
Psalm
I,
ir
refers to the deity
Eloah
.

(
a
) Some say that Samael disguised himself as the Serpent and, after vengefully persuading man to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, fathered Cain upon Eve; thus defiling all the offspring of her subsequent union with Adam. Only when the Children of Israel stood beneath Mount Sinai and received the Law at Moses’s hands was this curse finally lifted. It still taints the other nations.
¹⁵²

(
b
) According to some accounts, Samael never lay with Eve before Adam had done so. God at first intended Samael to rule the world, but the sight of Adam and Eve coupling, naked and unashamed, made him jealous. He swore: ‘I will destroy Adam, marry Eve, and truly rule.’ Having waited until Adam had lain with Eve and fallen asleep, he took Adam’s place. Eve yielded to him, and conceived Cain.
¹⁵³

Soon, however, she repented of her faithlessness and cried tearfully: ‘Alas, Adam, I have sinned! Banish me from the light of your life. I will go westward, there to await death.’ Three months later, having reached the Ocean, Eve gathered branches and built a hut. When the pangs of labour overcame her, she prayed God for deliverance, but fruitlessly, and could only beg the Sun and Moon to tell Adam of her plight on their next eastward circuit. This they did. Adam hastened to Eve’s side and, finding her still in labour, joined his prayers with hers. God sent down twelve angels and two Virtues, led by Michael, who stood at Eve’s right hand, stroking her face and breast, until she gave birth.
¹⁵⁴

(
c
) Since the infant Cain’s face shone angelically, Eve knew that Adam had not been his father and, in her innocence, exclaimed: ‘I have
gotten
a man-child from Yahweh!’
¹⁵⁵

(
d
) Others account for Cain’s name by saying that he stood up as soon as born, ran off and brought back a wheat straw, which he gave to Eve; who thereupon called him Cain, which means ‘stalk’.
¹⁵⁶

(
e
) Afterwards Eve bore a second son, whom she named Abel, which means ‘breath’ or, some say, ‘vanity’ or ‘sorrow’, foreseeing his early doom.
¹⁵⁷
This knowledge came to her in a dream: she saw Cain drinking Abel’s blood and refusing his mournful plea to be left
a few drops. When Eve told Adam her dream, he said: ‘We must part our sons.’ Cain therefore grew up as a husbandman, and Abel as a shepherd; each living in his own hut.
¹⁵⁸

(
f
) Some, however, believe that Cain was Abel’s twin, begotten on Eve by Adam; their conception being one of the miraculous happenings which occurred on the Sixth Day. In the first hour, God collected Adam’s dust; in the second, Adam became an inert clod; in the third, his limbs were stretched out; in the fourth, God breathed a spirit into him; in the fifth, he stood upon his feet; in the sixth, he named the beasts; in the seventh, God gave him Eve; in the eighth, ‘two went to bed, and four came out’—since Cain and Abel were twins, immediately conceived; in the ninth, Adam was forbidden to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; in the tenth, he sinned; in the eleventh, he was punished; and in the twelfth, cast out of Eden.
¹⁵⁹

(
g
) Others again hold that the first act of love between Adam and Eve produced at least four children: Cain with his twin sister, Abel with his; or even with two twin sisters.
¹⁶⁰

***

1
. An alleged desire of divine serpents to impregnate mortal women appears in many mythologies. Sacred serpents kept in Egyptian temples acted as the god’s procreative agents. The second
Tanis Papyrus
contains a list of sacred titles given to such beneficent serpents housed in the larger temples. Among the Greeks, too, barren women would lie all night on the floor of Asclepius’s temple, hoping that the god would appear in serpent shape and impregnate them during sleep. At the Phrygian Mysteries of Sabazius, women ritually married the god by letting live snakes, or golden replicas, slide between their breasts down to the thighs.

2
. Such rites may have originated in an identification of snakes, emerging
from holes underground, with the spirits of dead heroes. These were frequently portrayed as snakes, or half-snakes—among them Cecrops, Erichthonius and Cadmus—and given divine honours, as happened to Asclepius and Sabazius. Alexander the Great believed that he had been fathered on Olympia by Zeus Ammon wearing serpent disguise; and his was not an isolated case. Barren women would also bathe in rivers, hoping for impregnation by the serpentine river-god. Trojan brides bathed in the Scamander, crying: ‘Scamander, take my maidenhead!’ The Babylonian Ea, as god of the Euphrates, was shown in serpent shape, or riding a serpent.

3
. Menstruation is ambivalently regarded by most primitive people as both holy and impure: holy, because marking a girl’s readiness for motherhood; impure, because men must avoid contact with menstruous women. Some tribes believe that menstruation results from a snake bite; though snake venom is a coagulant. The myth of Eve’s defilement by the Serpent was first told, perhaps, to explain the origin of menstruation: as caused by the lecherous Serpent whose bite made her nubile. According to one Talmudic passage, menstrual pains are among the curses that God laid on Eve.

4
. The
Fourth Book of Maccabees
contains evidence for a popular belief that snakes desire intercourse with women. A mother of seven sons tells them proudly that, until marriage, she was a modest virgin whom Satan could not defile in desert or field, nor the smooth-tongued Serpent rob of her maidenhead. This belief continued to be held so strongly that a discussion is recorded in the Talmud as to the best method of safeguarding a woman so threatened:

This recalls the Serpent Samael who, grown jealous from watching Adam and Eve couple, seduced her.

5
. Michael led the hosts of Heaven against the false Cosmocrator (a planetary power of the Fourth Day—like Nabu in Babylonia, and Thoth in
Egypt) because he had been appointed Archangel of that day. Among the Greeks, Hermes (‘Mercury’) held the same planetary power and had, with Pan’s help, rescued Zeus from the rebel Typhon in the deadly struggle on Mount Saphon.

6
. According to
Genesis
IV. 1, Eve called her first son Cain (
qayin
) because, as she said: ‘I have gotten (
qaniti
) a man from Yahweh.’ A later account derives his name from
qaneh
, a reed or stalk. Abel’s name,
Hebel
, remains unexplained perhaps because the word
hebel
was well known to mean ‘breath’, ‘nothingness’, ‘fleetingness’, in reference to human life (
Psalm
CXLIV. 4;
Job
VII. 16). However, in the Septuagint translation,
hebhel
was written ‘Abel’ which, transcribed into Hebrew, becomes
abhel
or
ebhel:
‘mourning’ or ‘sorrow’.

7
. The twin sisters will have been invented in answer to the question: ‘Where did Cain and Abel find wives?’

8
. Samael’s fathering of Cain is intended to explain the origin of evil. In the early generations the evil Cainites and the pious Sethites formed separate branches of the human family. When however the daughters of Cain succeeded in seducing the sons of Seth (see 18,
n
–
p
), both good and evil became parts of man’s heritage. The two strains were considered to be continuously fighting for supremacy in every human heart: only knowledge of and obedience to the law could keep Cain’s blood in check.

(
a
) Cast out of Eden, Adam and Eve rested on a riverbank and, though glad to have escaped immediate death, brooded on their loss of immortality, wondering how they might still assure the continuance of mankind. Samael, aware of Adam’s preoccupation with this problem, planned to take further revenge. He and ten of his angels escaped from their underground dungeon and, assuming the shape of incomparably beautiful women, came to the riverbank. There they greeted Adam and Eve, and Adam cried incredulously: ‘Has the earth truly bred such matchless creatures as these?’ Then he asked: ‘Friends, how do you multiply?’ Samael answered in a woman’s seductive voice: ‘Men lie beside us in love. Our bellies swell, we bear infants, they mature and do as we have done. If you disbelieve me, I will prove it!’

At this, other fallen angels in disguise swam up from the riverbed. Samael said: ‘These are our husbands and children; and since you wish to know how infants are engendered, let us show you.’ Whereupon the women lay down in their nakedness, each with her supposed husband, and all did ugly things before Adam’s eyes. Afterwards Samael said: ‘Do thus and thus with Eve, for only so can you multiply your race.’

The fire of sin began to burn in Adam’s veins, yet he refrained from performing an act of shame publicly in daylight, and implored God’s guidance. God then sent an angel, who married Adam to Eve, commanding them to pray forty days and forty nights before coupling as husband and wife.
¹⁶¹

(
b
) Some say that Adam and Eve were the first living creatures to perform the act of love.
¹⁶²

***

1
. The Essene character of this myth is unmistakable: marital embraces being here called ‘ugly things’; and marital desire, ‘the fire of sin’. Nevertheless,
certain Free Essenes, recognizing the physical and mental dangers of cloistered celibacy—such as sexual dreams and homosexual temptation—compromised by permitting marriages in which the act of love was performed in obedience to God’s command ‘Increase and multiply!’, but without sensual pleasure.

2
. A Hittite myth,
Appu from Shudul
, also contains the notion that coition is not an inborn human instinct, but must be taught.