Noah Primeval (Chronicles of the Nephilim) (32 page)

And notice as well the reference to the Red Sea event also associated with Leviathan in the Biblical text. In Psalm 74 above, God’s parting of the waters is connected to the motif of the Mosaic covenant as the creation of a new world order in the same way that Baal’s victory over the waters and the dragon are emblematic of his establishment of authority in the Canaanite pantheon. This covenant motif is described as a
Chaoskampf
battle with the Sea and Leviathan (sometimes called
Rahab
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) in this and other Biblical references
.

Psa. 74:12-17

You broke the heads of the sea monsters in the waters.

You crushed the heads of Leviathan;…

You have prepared the light and the sun.

You have established all the boundaries of the earth;

Psa. 89:9-10

You
[Yahweh] rule the raging of the sea;

when its waves rise, you still them
.

You crushed Rahab
like a carcass;

you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm.

Isa. 51:9-10

Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of Yahweh;

Awake as in the days of old, the generations of long ago.

Was it not You who cut Rahab in pieces,

Who pierced the dragon?

Was it not You who dried up the sea,

The waters of the great deep;

Who made the depths of the sea a pathway

For the redeemed to cross over?

Is
a. 27:1

In that day the
Lord
with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea.

The story of deity battling the river, the sea, and the sea dragon Leviathan is clearly a common covenant motif in the Old Testament and its surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures.
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The fact that Hebrew Scripture shares common words, concepts, and stories with Ugaritic scripture does not mean that Israel is affirming the same mythology or pantheon of deities, but rather that Israel lives within a common cultural environment, and God uses that cultural connection to subvert those words, concepts and stories with his own poetic meaning and purpose.

Chaoskampf
and creation language are used as word pictures for God’s covenant activity in the Bible. For God, describing the creation of the heavens and earth was a way of saying he has established his covenant with his people through exodus into the Promised Land,
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reaffirming that covenant with the kingly line of David, and finalizing the covenant by bringing them out of exile. The reader should understand that the Scriptures listed above, exemplary of
Chaoskampf,
were deliberately abbreviated to make a further point below. I will now add the missing text in those passages in underline to reveal a deeper motif at play in the text—a motif of creation language as covenantal formation.

Psa. 74:12-17

Yet God my King is from of old,

working salvation in the midst of the earth.

You divided the sea by your might;

[A reference to the Exodus deliverance of the covenant at Sinai
]

You broke the heads of the sea monsters in the waters.

You crushed the heads of Leviathan;…

You have prepared the light and the sun.

You have established all the boundaries of the earth;

Psa. 89:9-12; 19-29

You rule the raging of the sea;

when its waves rise, you still them.

You crushed Rahab like a carcass;

you scattered your enemies with your mighty arm.

The heavens are yours; the earth also is yours;

the world and all that is in it, you have founded them.

The north and th
e south, you have created them…

I have found David, my servant;

with my holy oil I have anointed him,

so that my hand shall be established with him…

and in my name shall his horn be exalted.

I will set his hand on the sea

and his right hand on the rivers…

My steadfast love I will keep for him forever,

and my covenant will stand firm for him.

I will establish his offspring forever

and his throne as the days of the heavens.

Isa 51:9-16

Was it not You who cut Rahab in pieces,

Who pierced the dragon?

Was it not You who dried up the sea,

The waters of the great deep;

Who made the depths of the sea a pathway

For the redeemed to cross over?...

[Y]ou have forgotten the LORD your Maker,

Who stretched out the heavens

And laid the foundations of the earth…

“For I am the LORD your God, who stirs up the sea and its waves roar (the LORD of hosts is His name).
“I have put My words in your mouth and have covered you with the shadow of My hand, to establish the heavens, to found the earth, and to say to Zion, ‘You are My people.’”

[a reaffirmation of the Sinai covenant through Moses]

Is
a. 27:1; 6-13

In that day the
Lord
with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea…

In days to come Jacob shall take root,

Israel shall blossom and put forth shoots

and fill the whole world with fruit…

And in that day a great trumpet will be blown, and those who were lost in the land of Assyria and those who were driven out to the land of Egypt will come and worship the
Lord
on the holy mountain at Jerusalem.
[the future consummation of the Mosaic and Davidic covenant in the New Covenant of Messiah]

In these texts, and others,
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God does not merely appeal to his power of creation as justification for the authority of his covenant. More importantly, He uses the creation of the heavens and earth, involving subjugation of rivers, seas, and dragon (Leviathan), as poetic descriptions of God’s covenant with his people, rooted in the Exodus story, and reiterated in the Davidic covenant. The creation of the covenant is the creation of the heavens and the earth which includes a subjugation of chaos by the new order. The covenant is a cosmos—not a material one centered in astronomical location and abstract impersonal forces as modern worldview demands, but a theological one, centered in the sacred space of land, temple, and cult as the ancient Near Eastern worldview demands.
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It has been noted by scholars that the motif of
Chaoskampf
is absent from Genesis 1 where God creates the heavens and the earth, painting a very different picture of the Hebrew creation story than its ANE neighbors. However, its very absence in that text is most likely a part of the covenantal polemic in the text. For a close look at the original Hebrew shows us that the word for dragon that we have been talking about (
tannin
) is in fact used of the “great sea creatures” (
tanninim
) that God created on Day five:

Gen. 1:21-22

So God created the great sea creatures
(
tanninim
) and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm… And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.”

The ancient Near Eastern audience would read this text and know full well what was being implied against their cultural familiarity with the sea dragon. Apparently, the ANE notion of struggle against the dragon is subverted in this text by depicting God creating the dragon by the mere words of his mouth, rather than wrestling with a preexistent monster for control over the sea. And then God blesses that dragon as one of the many “good” creations that he commands to reproduce. This picture amounts to the reduction of the dragon to a mere domesticated pet in the language of Genesis 1
.

In this text, the conspicuous absence of the struggle of
Chaoskampf
is evidence of its subversion to the greater purposes of the Hebrew creation story. Sometimes Leviathan is used as a covenantal expression for the establishment of God’s world order out of chaos, and sometimes, it is used as a symbol of God’s authority over pagan religious expressions. In any case, its Biblical meaning is connected to its ancient Near Eastern symbolic context, not to a modern interpretation of a merely physical sea monster.

Appendix d

Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography
in the Bible

In my novel,
Noah Primeval
, I depict the universe as it was thought to be through the eyes of ancient Mesopotamians, as a three-tiered universe with a flat disc earth, surrounded by waters, which includes the watery Abyss and beneath that, the underworld of Sheol. Above the earth is a solid dome of the heavens, beyond which is the waters of the “heaven of heavens” where God’s throne sits on the waters. A generic illustration of this cosmography is the old public domain image depicted below. I decided to use this cosmic geography as creative literary license to capture the way the ancients saw and experienced the world. This essay explains the Scriptural expression of this worldview as held by the Biblical writers.

Cosmography
is a technical term that means a theory that describes and maps the main features of the heavens and the earth. A Cosmography or “cosmic geography” can be a complex picture of the universe that includes elements like astronomy, geology, and geography; and those elements can include theological implications as well. Throughout history, all civilizations and peoples have operated under the assumption of a cosmography or picture of the universe. We are most familiar with the historical change that science went through from a Ptolemaic cosmography of the earth at the center of the universe (geocentrism) to a Copernican cosmography of the sun at the center of a solar system (heliocentrism).

Some
ancient mythologies maintained that the earth was a flat disc on the back of a giant turtle; animistic cultures believe that spirits inhabit natural objects and cause them to behave in certain ways; modern westerners believe in a space-time continuum where everything is relative to its frame of reference in relation to the speed of light. Ancients tended to believe that the gods caused the weather; moderns tend to believe that impersonal physical processes cause weather. All these different beliefs are elements of a cosmography or picture of what the universe is really like and how it operates. Even though “pre-scientific” cultures like the Hebrews did not have the same notions of science that we moderns have, they still observed the world around them and made interpretations as to the structure and operations of the heavens and earth.

A common
ancient understanding of the cosmos is expressed in the visions of 1 Enoch, used in the novel
Noah Primeval
. In this Second Temple Jewish writing, codified around the third to fourth century B.C., and probably originally written much earlier, Enoch is taken on a journey through heaven and hell and describes the cosmic workings as they understood them in that day. Here is just a short glimpse into the elaborate construction of this ANE author:

1 Enoch 18:1-5

And I saw the storerooms of all the winds and saw how with them he has embroidered all creation as well as the foundations of the earth. I saw the cornerstone of the earth; I saw the four winds which bear the earth as w
ell as the firmament of heaven. I saw how the winds ride the heights of heaven and stand between heaven and earth: These are the very pillars of heaven. I saw the winds which turn the heaven and cause the star to set—the sun as well as all the stars. I saw the souls carried by the clouds. I saw the path of the angels in the ultimate end of the earth, and the firmament of the heaven above.
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The Bible also contains a picture of the universe that its stories inhabit. It uses cosmic geographical language in common with other ancient Near Eastern (ANE) cultures that shared its situated time and location. Believers in today’s world use the language of Relativity when we write, even in our non-scientific discourse; because Einstein has affected the way we see the universe. Believers before the 17
th
century used Ptolemaic language because they too were children of their time. It should be no surprise to anyone that believers in ancient Israel would use the language of ANE cosmography because it was the mental construct within which they lived and thought.
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The Three-Tiered Universe

Othmar Keel, leading expert on ANE art has argued that there was no singular technical physical description of the cosmos in the ancient Near East, but rather patterns of thinking, similarity of images, and repetition of motifs.
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A common simplification of these images and motifs is expressed in the three-tiered universe of the heavens, the earth, and the underworld.

Wayne Horowitz has chronicled Mesopotamian texts that illustrate this multi-leveled universe among the successive civilizations of Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and Assyria. The heavens above were subdivided into “the heaven of Anu (or chief god)” at the very top, the “middle heavens” below him and the sky. In the middle was the earth’s surface, and below that was the third level that was further divided into the waters of the abyss and the underworld.
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Let’s take a look at the Scriptures that appear to reinforce this three-tiered universe so different from our modern understanding of physical expanding galaxies of warped space-time, where the notion of heaven and hell are without physical location. Though the focus of this essay will be on Old Testament context, I want to start with the New Testament to make the point that their cosmography did not necessarily change with the change of covenants.

Phil. 2:10

T
hat at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those who are
in heaven
, and
on earth
, and
under the earth
.

Rev. 5:3, 13

And no one
in heaven, or on earth, or under the earth
, was able to open the scroll, or to look into it… And every creature
in heaven and on the earth and under the earth
and in the sea…

Ex. 20:4

“You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in
heaven above,
or that is
in the earth beneath
, or that is in the
water under the earth
.

Matt. 11:23

Jesus said,
“Capernaum, will you be
exalted to heaven
? You will be
brought down to Hades
. [the underworld].

Both apostles Paul and John were writing about the totality of creation being subject to the authority of Jesus on his throne. So this word picture of “heaven, earth, and under the earth” was used as the description of the total known universe—which they conceived of spatially as heaven above, the earth below, and the underworld below the earth. And not only did the inspired human authors write of the universe in this three-tiered fashion but so did God Himself, the author and finisher of our faith, when giving the commandments on Sinai.

One may naturally wonder if this notion of “heaven above” may merely be a symbolic or figurative expression for the exalted spiritual nature of heaven. Since we cannot see where heaven is, God would use physical analogies to express spiritual truths. This explanation would be easier to stomach if the three-tiered notion were not so rooted in a cosmic geography that clearly was their understanding of the universe (as proven below). A figurative expression would also jeopardize the doctrine of the ascension of Jesus into heaven which also affirms the spatial location of heaven above and the earth below, in very literal terms.

Acts 1:9-11

He was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing
into heaven
as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking
into heaven
? This Jesus, who was
taken up from you into heaven
, will come in the same way as you saw him go
into heaven
.”

John 3:13

No one has
ascended into heaven
except he who
descended from heaven
, the Son of Man.

John 6:62

Then what if you were to see the
Son of Man ascending to where he was before
?

John 20:17

Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet
ascended to the Father
; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am
ascending to my Father
and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Eph. 4:8-10

Therefore it says,
“When
he ascended on high
he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men.” (In saying, “
He ascended
,” what does it mean but that
he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth
? He who
descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens
, that he might fill all things.)

The location of heaven being above us may be figurative to our modern cosmology, but it was not figurative to the Biblical writers. To suggest that they understood it figuratively would be to impose our own modern cultural bias on the Bible.

Now let’s take a closer look at each of these tiers or domains of the cosmos through the eyes of Scripture in their ANE context.

Flat Earth Surrounded by Waters

I want to start with the earth because the Scriptures start with the earth. That is, the Bible is geocentric in its picture of a flat earth founded on immovable pillars at the center of the universe. Over a hundred years ago, a Babylonian map of the world was discovered
that dated back to approximately the ninth century B.C. As seen below, this map was unique from other Mesopotamian maps because it was not merely local but international in its scale, and contained features that appeared to indicate cosmological interpretation.
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That map and a translated interpretation are reproduced below.
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The geography of the Babylonian map portrayed a flat disc of earth with Babylon in the center and extending out to the known regions of its empire, whose perimeters were surrounded by cosmic waters and islands out in those waters. Of the earliest Sumerian and Akkadian texts with geographical information, only the Babylonian map of the world and another text,
The
Sargon Geography,
describe the earth’s surface, and they both picture a central circular continent surrounded by cosmic waters, often referred to as “the circle of the earth.”
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Other texts like the Akkadian
Epic of Gilgamesh,
and
Egyptian, and Sumerian works share in common with the Babylonian map the notion of mountains at the edge of the earth beyond which is the cosmic sea and the unknown,
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and from which come “the circle of the four winds” that blow upon the four corners of the earth (a reference to compass points).
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The Biblical picture of the earth is remarkably similar to this Mesopotamian cosmic geography. When Daniel had his dream
from God
in Babylon
, of a tree “in the middle of the earth” whose height reached so high that “it was visible to the end of the whole earth,” (Dan. 4:10) it reflected this very Babylonian map of the culture that educated Daniel. One cannot see the end of the whole earth on a globe, but one can do so on a circular continent embodying the known world of Babylon as the center of the earth.