SOF Conference 10 Brindle Close Southampton SO16 3PJ sofconf10@yahoo.co.uk 02380 445275 www.sofn.org.uk How we Created a Creation Myth Dominic Kirkham looks at the biblical creation myth and criticises Howard Jacobson’s personal approach to it in his recent Channel 4 programme Earlier this year, the Channel 4 series of personal takes on the Bible kicked off with Howard Jacobson reflecting on Creation, or, more precisely, the creation narrative with which the Bible begins. With the saturnine bearing of an Old Testament prophet he confessed to being wrathful – with those fundamentalists of both religion and atheism, who have forgotten how to read this ancient story. The particular object of his wrath was Richard Dawkins, whose scientific reductionism ‘moved him to fury’ and whose presence hovered in the background of on-screen quotes like the ghost of Nebuchadnezzar.
Jacobson sought another, more personal, poetic approach to the Creation story, one which ‘roots us in the wonder of our own being’, steering us away from extreme literalism. But as his narrative unfolded this viewer at least was increasingly prompted to fury, not by Jacobson’s thesis, but by the hash he was making of it.
A personal view can presumably excuse anything. Jacobson cast himself as a non-believing Jew, but, with a typical sardonic feint, presented himself as one who nonetheless believed in belief, freely admitting that the God people didn’t believe in was often not believed in by believers either! First up was a visit to the Chief Rabbi to learn how Jews came by the idea of a Creator.
Over a friendly cup of tea he (we) learnt how a better brand of revelation enabled Jews to banish the old gods and come up with the ‘extraordinary, radical idea’ of monotheism, later to be shared with Christians and Muslims. This impressive ‘family’ achievement seemed to put a spring into the step of even an atheist, so it was then off to that hot house of belief, Jerusalem, where we were led to believe that belief in Creation had enabled Jews to come up with an even more influential idea, the seven day week. All of which, though commonplace enough, is also utter tosh.
The problem for Jacobson’s thesis was his apparent inability to look beyond his own Jewish identity to a broader cultural context. Once one makes this move the story changes dramatically.
So, it was not that the seven day week was the consequence of a belief in creation but the very opposite. The seven day period is the quartering of the lunar month, the origin of which goes back to Babylonian times. Celebrations of the full moon, sapatu, also provide the likely root of the word Sabbath, the seven day creation story being a later manipulation to confer significance on the Sabbath, whilst the astral basis of it commencing on the eve, marked by the rising of the stars, goes back at least to Neolithic times (a tradition carried on in the Christian liturgical calendar by the First Vespers).
As for the more substantial issue of the creation story itself, one has to look to the alien cultural context Jews were forced to endure in the sixth century during the Babylonian Exile.
Jacobson considered this traumatic period as a time when Jewish beliefs in God had seemingly been discredited, needing some new markers of religious identity to rejuvenate the demoralised community, but he entirely missed its real significance.
Not only did Jews pick up the format of many key ‘biblical stories’ which appear in Genesis from their sojourn in the East, but when they returned to Palestine their Judaism was significantly different from what went before. Not only was there a radically different organisation – now centred on synagogues and rabbis – but also belief. Judaism now took on a distinctly eschatological tone, accompanied by beliefs in the cosmic moral conflict of good and evil, the idea of a final judgment, the mediation of angels and a final apocalyptic coming of a righteous one (messiah).
Raffaello Sanzio (1483-1520) depicts Zoroaster in his fresco The School of Athens All of these beliefs were foreign to and predated Judaism. They arose in Persia under the influence of Zoroastrianism, where they were accompanied by belief in one supreme solar being, who resided in the heavens but was also the creator of all. Far from being a dualistic faith, the universal nature of Ahura Mazda entitles Zoroaster’s teachings to be viewed as the first real intimations of monotheism.
When the Jews did return home from the East after 538 BCE they found themselves further exposed to another powerful current of new thinking, this time from the West – from the Aegean, where from the beginning of the sixth century, Greek thinkers such as Thales and Anaximander, had been speculating on the rational principles underlying the cosmos. This esoteric form of natural philosophy, based on rational explanation, became the basis of what we now know as ‘science’. It was like an acid to the older Homeric world of chaotic polytheism and, in place of a capricious cosmos ruled by unpredictable immortals, it provided the seminal idea of an ordered, comprehensible, coherent universe. This sublime monism culminated in Platonism and rapidly spread with trade and Hellenism across the Middle East.
It is from these disparate elements that the new God of monotheism became possible and it also made possible a theology of Creation, a theology that was more philosophical than religious. None of this was mentioned by Jacobson, whose biblical fare was proffered unadulterated. What was also not acknowledged was that the seemingly fluent narrative of God in the Bible was a highly contrived literary device. As the literary guru Harold Bloom points out in his biblical mimesis The Book of J: ‘Archaic Judaism is all but totally unknown to us… All I can see is that (it) has very little to do with the God of Ezra or the God of Akiba.’ What we see is now visible only through the lens of the greatest fictional creation in literature: God. It was the retrospective power of this later, new idea that was formative of the Bible as we now know it. Perhaps the best metaphor for this process is a geological one: the books and traditions of the Bible accumulated like great sedimentary layers over the centuries, finally to be metamorphosed and welded into one by the power of its last and greatest idea, monotheism.
It is not without note, and surely no coincidence, that writing and the possibility of narrative arose in the same cultural milieu as monism and monotheism. At first only a means of recording and ordering produce, writing began to release its hidden potential for the recording and ordering of ideas. It is interesting that in the creation story a key word is hivdil, divide. God is presented as dividing the light and dark, sea and land, etc. – everything is being sorted out, just as a scribe would, introducing order where before there had been chaos. And just as the accountant scribe sorted out his records, so there was the potential for critical reflection on stored information and ideas, thus providing a stimulus to abstract thought. In his study of The Origins of the Modern Mind, Merlin Donald saw this as a final decisive stage in the evolution of human consciousness (though modern information technology may now be providing another stimulus to further neurological development!) The creation story not only reassured a traumatised refugee community, it fulfilled a fundamental human need, to have things ordered and comprehensible. In other words, the story reflects not so much God but the human needs which at a certain point in human development created this supreme symbol of order.
In After God, Don Cupitt sagely noted that the idea of an individual God is inextricably linked with the rise of ‘a more individuated human selfhood’. In acting as the mirror by which we come to look at ourselves, God and human subjectivity are born together, with the individual, like Jacob, locked in constant struggle with his God. In the same way creation is not something that happened but is happening, now.
It is a drama in which we are involved and which is about us, happening now, as life for ever threatens to teeter back into chaos. Interestingly, this was the understanding of Jacobson’s sister as she explained the lighting of the Sabbath candles.
It is often forgotten that the first pages of the Bible – and the ideas they contain – were amongst the last to be written and their surreal glow casts an unnatural light over many of its later (earlier) pages. In fact, it seems highly ironic in terms of the present conflict between creationist and evolutionist that the Bible, far from being monolithic, is itself a product of evolution. As with any geological transformation, when one looks closely all sorts of incongruities emerge which betray a different past. So, after the sonorous opening the theme of monotheism gets entangled in more ancient beliefs: Abraham’s family are found fussing over their fertility figurines (an archeologist provided some for Jacobson to finger), there is the shady El Shaddai, the fertility god ‘of the breasts’, and evil Moloch, to whom long after Solomon the inhabitants of Jerusalem were sacrificing their first born. It is amongst this motley of tribal beliefs of the ancient Israelites that Dawkins finds his nasty, brutish and genocidal god. These earlier beliefs remain embedded in the narrative that later redactors did not bother to remove, leaving us now with some difficult explanations.
A recent example of this problem arose with the publication in 1966 of the Jerusalem Bible.
Under the sagacious influence of biblical scholars it was decided to replace God by Yahweh in many parts of the text, much to the mystification of the public, which had never come across the word before. For enlightenment they were informed that this was the supreme revelation of the divine being to Moses in the sublime event at the burning bush. More recently, in a remote part of the Sinai desert at an ancient travellers’ way station, archaeologists found bits of broken pottery inscribed with names like ‘Yahweh of Teman and his Asherah’ and even with crude graffiti befitting any public toilet with a gawky fellow be-sporting a large penis next to his consort – obviously some tribal fertility god.
Oops! No wonder Bloom irreverently notes that, ‘Yahweh constitutes one of the curious cultural comedies of Western religious tradition.’ Regardless of this, back in his home town of Manchester Howard Jacobson had decided to decamp on the in-laws, two of whom were orthodox rabbis – for further enlightenment on the clash between the findings of science and religious beliefs. Not that it seemed a problem: one rabbi acknowledged he would always believe the teaching of his religion ‘implicitly’ and the other dismissed rational speculation as feeble next to strong belief. To this conversation-stopper there is no answer, other than the sort of derisive dismissal of the self-contradictions implicit in ‘strong belief’ that Spinoza provided: if belief entails our accepting a supreme being who is almighty and benign, how do we explain evil which he is either not good enough or strong enough to stop? A recent attempt by a chief rabbi in Jerusalem to explain the Holocaust as a punishment for sin caused widespread outrage and disbelief.
Clearly, there are problems that the serene simplicity of the creation story does not address in terms of its later relation to science and modern knowledge. But then perhaps it was never intended to, and fundamentalists are now radically misinterpreting it. The genre of ancient myths, to which the Creation story belongs, was the expression of humans struggling to find meaning and their place in the world; the existential questions which hang in the unknown: what are we? where do we come from? where are we going? In her Short History of Myth Karen Armstrong writes: ‘A myth is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information.’ Myth is an art form. It tells us about ourselves, not some trans-historical reality.
It was to this sort of understanding that Jacobson felt himself drawn; the point at which we can escape the impasse between religious and scientific fundamentalists. For Jacobson it was the poetic world of creativity, surrounded by ‘doubt, uncertainty, mystery’ that was the most important aspect of myth. Paradoxically, this is also the point to which modern scientific knowledge has brought us once more. Between the infinitely small and infinitely large, between the quantum world and black holes, there are incomprehensible worlds which we will never be able to comprehend. With our limited senses we are attuned to just one narrow band of reality, but there is reason to believe there is more, much more, of which we will never know. Science has relativised and diminished us in the world of postmodernity.
But we still need myths. Perhaps Gaia is one such modern creation myth, also the Freudian myth of the tripartite self (the id, ego and superego). Such thinking enables humans to find meaning. One of the more curious, and perhaps unexpected, features of our times is the way in which belief has defiantly set aside the implications of science. The assumption that somehow science would bring with it the thinking and values of modernity has not happened as expected. The men who flew planes into the twin towers all had a scientific background but they certainly didn’t have the values of modernity.
Similarly, the pseudo-science of Intelligent Design manipulates modern research to underpin Creationist ideology. The paradoxical thing in all this is that, as the biblical scholar Thomas Thompson writes: ‘The Bible’s theology is not a theology of truths. It is a way of critical reflection.
It is learning and discourse.’ we still need myths It was through critical reflection on later experience that biblical material was recast and reedited. It is not a finished process, yet it is this central feature of the Bible that is discarded in modern controversies by the very people who claim to follow its guidance. Biblical belief has become a deracinated ideology.
The modern problem is that the ancient myths no longer work for us. To work, myth must lead us into deeper understanding of reality, perhaps forcing us to change our minds and the way we live. But the ancient myth no longer seems to do this: it conflicts with reality as we now understand it. Instead of leading to enlightenment it has the opposite effect – it obscures reality by negating the knowledge we have. Of creation we now know that there is no necessary point of beginning, that species are not isolated but all part of the seamless web of life, that humans are not set apart but inextricably linked by their DNA to all other animals, that life is not morally good but the result of a savage struggle for survival which is unrelenting and unending, that creation of life goes on regardless of us and will do after us. The world of the ancient myths is not our world.
As if to underline this point, Jacobson’s programme was followed by the News, which contained an item which epitomised the problem.
A directive had been sent from the EU to Parliament about the unacceptable toleration of religious discrimination in employment, for example regarding gay people. Such practices reveal the old religious process of dividing and separating, discriminating and prohibiting, reflecting the ancient fear of things falling apart, yet by their obduracy causing it. As always, Nietzsche, so keenly attuned to our modern condition, perceptively noted what was happening in The Birth of Tragedy, how religions tend to die: ‘The mythic premises of a religion are systematised beneath the stern and intelligent eyes of an orthodox dogmatism, into a fixed sum of historical events; one begins nervously defending the veracity of myths, at the same time resisting their continuing life and growth.’ What is now required is a continuation of that process of critical reflection, which typified the biblical tradition itself in its formative period. The sort of thing Rabbi Lionel Blue did so well in his daily radio presentations. It was whilst reflecting on growing up in London’s East End during the war that he tells the story of his religiously observant parents, who always separated everything according to orthodox tradition. That was until the German bombs came and blew everything to pieces; since then in his own personal life, as in modern society, it has been a matter of sorting out the pieces: making a meaning out of the mess, order out of chaos. As it was in the beginning, the process is ongoing!
Dominic Kirkham is an interested follower of SOF and writes regularly for Renew (Catholics for a Changing Church).