Battling in the Deep

One of the really fascinating things that came up for me in reading The Book of J was Bloom's overview of ancient Israelite creation stories. The idea that there was more to the oral tradition of creation than what has come down to us in the Genesis account was eye-opening, and to be quite honest, I was first inclined to disbelief. I assumed I would have heard of this by now, after years of professional anthropological inquiry and amateur theology. And yet, there it was. I felt like I had made some sort of discovery. It underscored for me just how disciplined I had become over the past thirty-or-so years in reading the Bible through a very narrow, normative (to use one of Harold Bloom's favorite words) lens, and how I intuitively disregard or skip over things that don't quite fit the narrative to which I've grown accustomed; like they're literary white noise.

The traditional account of creation is found in Genesis 1-2, and includes some of the most famous and easily recognizable verses in the Bible. Although it contains plenty of idiosyncrasies worth a close reading, I want to focus on God's very first acts of creation:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day. 

Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so. God called the expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. 

Then God said, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so. God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters He called seas; and God saw that it was good.

These, then, are God's initial acts of creation: The creation of heaven and earth, the separation of night and day, and the separation of the waters. I'll return to this in a moment, but first I'd like to observe that, by identifying and circumscribing the creation account within these two chapters, we've handicapped our ability to recognize threads of the story in other places. There are many other instances in the Bible where themes of creation are employed, and yet whenever I personally had read these in the past, I glossed over them without a second thought. Not even an attempt to understand what it was the passages were about. They didn't make immediate sense, so I did the worst thing, which was to ignore them.

Let's return to the scriptural creation account. Before God goes on to create anything living, he first has to separate the waters. In the ancient world, the sea was a symbol of chaos, and the motif of a primordial struggle against that chaos is so ubiquitous in ancient mythologies that it has its own genre, chaoskampf (literally, the struggle against chaos). Note that "chaos" in a cosmogonical context can be employed in reference to either the void that preceded creation, or to the gap that was created by the separation of heaven from earth. The depiction of a culture hero battling the seas or some form of sea monster to create order in the universe is incredibly pervasive in Indo-European cultures, and indeed some have argued sets the narrative pattern for all later epics where a culture hero battles a monster of some kind, and ultimately, human adversaries.

In the religion of ancient Mesopotamia – the region in which the incipient Israelite religion was embedded – the sea goddess was Tiamat, who was not solely symbolic of the primordial chaos, but literally gave birth to it. Tiamat is often depicted as a sea dragon (although this has been debated), and is described in the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, as "Ummu-Hubur who formed all things". Together with Abzu, the watery deep, she birthed the twin deities Lahmu and Lahamu, who in turn gave birth to the heavens (Anshar) and Anshar's sister and consort, the earth (Kishar). As the pantheon progressed, Abzu was eventually upset by the chaos he had engendered, and plotted to kill the rowdy younger deities. A battle ensued, led by Tiamat, who was killed by the god Anu (later Enlil, then Marduk), each of whom was the supreme god of the pantheon in their iteration of the story. Her body was dismembered by her murderer to create the vaults of heaven and earth, the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, and the stars of the Milky Way. Similarly, in the Baal cycle of Canaanite mythology, Baal conquers Yam (the sea) along with a dragon or "twisting serpent" in order to become the supreme deity among the Canaanite gods. It should be noted that the Hittite myth of Illuyanka is very similar in its depiction of the sky god Tarhunt slaying a dragon. Parallels can also be drawn between the Vedic story of Indra and Vritra, the ancient Iranian narrative of Fereydun and Aži Dahāka, the Greek clash of Zeus and Typhon, and even the Norse myth of Thor battling Jörmungandr.

We can now look at a few biblical passages that have some bearing on this motif:

It was you who split open the sea by your power; you broke the heads of the monster in the waters. It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert. It was you who opened up springs and streams; you dried up the ever-flowing rivers. The day is yours, and yours also the night; you established the sun and moon. It was you who set all the boundaries of the earth; you made both summer and winter. Psalm 74:13-17	You rule over the surging sea; when its waves mount up, you still them. You crushed Rahab like one of the slain; with your strong arm you scattered your enemies. The heavens are yours, and yours also the earth; you founded the world and all that is in it. You created the north and the south; Tabor and Hermon sing for joy at your name. Psalm 89:10-15	He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved. You covered it with the watery depths as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. But at your rebuke the waters fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight; they flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys, to the place you assigned for them. You set a boundary they cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth. Psalm 104:5-9
Awake, awake, arm of the Lord, clothe yourself with strength! Awake, as in days gone by, as in generations of old. Was it not you who cut Rahab to pieces, who pierced that monster through? Isaiah 51:9	He alone stretches out the heavens and treads on the waves of the sea. He is the Maker of the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the constellations of the south. He performs wonders that cannot be fathomed, miracles that cannot be counted. When he passes me, I cannot see him; when he goes by, I cannot perceive him. If he snatches away, who can stop him? Who can say to him, "What are you doing?" God does not restrain his anger; even the cohorts of Rahab cowered at his feet. Job 9:8-13	"Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt’?" Job 38:8-10

With the exception of the Isaiah passage, each of these excerpts link the act of God's originating creation with a primary mastery of the waters. It is a victory that reverberates down through the other miraculous events of Israel's history: For example, when God parts the waters of the Red Sea for the Israelites as they flee from Egypt, the waters "writhed and convulsed" in sheer panic (Psalm 77:16). This is a surprisingly prominent theme once you know what to look for. A second and equally important commonality is the repeated mentions of Rahab, or Leviathan, which in context appears to be some sort of sea monster. This is made clear in a later verse of Psalm 104: "There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number – living things both large and small. There the ships go to and fro, and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there."

When I was in middle school, I loved reading from the Book of Job because of its vivid imagery: God walking across the ocean, shaping the constellations, setting the earth in motion amid empty space like a spinning top. Then of course, there were the descriptions of God's care for and knowledge of his creatures, including one that was called Leviathan. I read from a study Bible targeted at the tweenage demographic and one of the notations that always stood out to me was its explanation of what a Leviathan was: The editors said was an alligator. When I read further, they posited that alligators were probably bigger at the time Job was written, which would explain the character's perplexing awe of what is essentially a large lizard.

The Leviathan of the above accounts is a far cry from that. Leaving aside the obvious fact that alligators do not live in the ocean, Leviathan (alternately referred to as Rahab) is a creature with whom God does battle, piercing it and crushing its skull. God proves his mastery over Leviathan in the same way he proves his mastery over the seas; in fact, the two seem rather synonymous. This is made explicit when one observes that the Hebrew word used to describe the waters in these passages is also the name of the Canaanite sea god with whom Baal does battle, yam. The deep over which God hovers in the Genesis creation account is tahom, which is cognate with the name of the Mesopotamian sea goddess Tiamat.

All of this points to dimensions of the Creation narrative that, though not included in the opening chapters of Genesis, remain woven into the fabric of Hebrew Bible. And really, this shouldn't be a shock, considering the milieu in which the nation of Israel developed. Yet many are loathe to accept even the possibility. Pete Enns, in a topical article for BioLogos, describes a common reaction to the position that the ancient Israelite account of Creation was more complex than the Genesis narrative:

[S]ome are not convinced, because Psalms and Job are “just poetry.” Poetry tends to use colorful metaphors and images, so some claim that Psalms or Job don’t tell us what Israel “really” thought about creation. “Sure, some psalms talk about Leviathan and Rahab and the sea going into a panic attack, but that is ‘just poetry.’ If you want the straight scoop, go to Genesis 1-3. No cosmic battle there. Just sober history.” It’s not quite as neat as that.

As Enns points out, there are muted echoes of God's cosmic battle even within the traditional creation account. Namely, "splitting [the waters] in two" to create the waters above (heaven) and the waters below (the seas). More importantly, to the point of genre, poetry was not a form of excused nonsense writing. Quite the contrary. "The Psalms," Enns writes, "were used in worship. The presence of the cosmic battle motif in Psalms actually tells us how important this notion was to them for praising the Lord. He is worthy of praise in part because of the defeat of his ancient 'foes.' That is how the Israelites understood it."

It's easy to feel disoriented when presented with information that upends the normative interpretation of a beloved biblical narrative. The vision of God speaking the world into existence, breathing life into the cosmos with the exhalations of his creative presence, is a treasured one. But I would argue that that vision is not necessarily contradicted by the idea that there was struggle at the beginning of creation. A fuller understanding of the ancient Israelite account of creation, by virtue of being the ancient Israelite account, cannot contradict the Judeo-Christian interpretation because the former is the entire basis of the latter.

There's a common idea that so-called creationist and evolutionist views are, are their core, not incompatible. The foundation of this idea is that the Genesis account, by and large, matches what contemporary science offers us in terms of a chronology: The earth is formed, covered in water, but a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, and volcanic gases prevents light from reaching the surface. The atmosphere gradually evolves to allow light to shine through, the clouds eventually lift and the water vapor is reduced. The continents appear, joined together, and gradually shift. Plant organisms arise in the sea and spread to land. Because of them the air becomes rich with oxygen and nitrogen, transparent to visible light. The moon and stars can be seen. It goes on.

The really salient point here is that everything that led to life was connected to water. Is it such a stretch to imagine that wresting life from the primordial oceans required an effort akin to battle? After all, the images of earth before life are not pretty: a planet shrouded in darkness, bombarded by meteors, drowned in tumultuous oceans and oozing with lava. It seems as though it was very much like a war.

Although a purely hypothetical exercise, Harold Bloom indulges an attempt to ascertain how the original narrative of creation read before its redaction(s) to the final form of the Hebrew Bible. It is an interesting story to consider, and the reasons for the edits are more interesting still. "I would suggest," writes Bloom,"that what is now Genesis 1-2:4a was deliberately composed to replace a rather outrageous Yahwistic vision of a very combative cosmological Creation... The God of the Priestly Author1 is too transcendent, and too powerful, for anyone to imagine his stooping to a struggle with a sea serpent." (28-9) His reconstruction is below:

Job, if combined with the Psalms and Isaiah, and with passages scattered through Kings, Nahum, Proverbs, Jeremiah, and Habakkuk, would give one composite vision of the archaic cosmogony something like this. 

Yahweh with one word created the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars. He stretched out the skies like a tent cloth to shroud the Deep, and placed his secret court above the skies, founding it above the Higher Waters. In creating, Yahweh rode above the Deep, which rose against him. Tehom, queen of the Deep, sought to drown out Yahweh's Creation, but he rode against her in his chariot of fire, and bombarded her with hail and with lightning. Yahweh destroyed her vassal Leviathan with one great blow to the monster's skull, while he ended Rahab by thrusting a sword into her heart. The waters fled backward, awed by the voice of Yahweh, and Tehom fearfully surrendered. Yahweh shouted his triumph, and dried up t he floods. He set the Moon to divide the seasons, and the Sun to divide the day and night. Observing Yahweh's victory, the Morning Stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. Thus the work of Creation was completed.