Thomas Kelly Cheyne

“ The Serpent.—The keen-witted, fluently speaking serpent gives rise to fresh riddles. How comes it that Adam’s ruin is effected by one of those very “beasts of the field” which he had but lately named (ii. 19) , that in speech he is Adam’s equal and in wisdom his superior? Is he a pale form of the Babylonian chaos-dragon, or of the serpent of Iranian mythology who sprang from heaven to earth to blight the “good creation”? It is true that the serpent of Eden has mythological affinities. ”

“ He may have been a prince among the demons, as the magic tree was a prince among the plants. Hence perhaps his strange boldness. For some unknown reason he was ill disposed towards Yahweh-Elohim (See iii. 3b) , which has suggested to some that he may be akin to the great enemy of Creation. To Adam and Eve, however, he is not unkind. He bids them raise themselves in the scale of being by eating the forbidden fruit, which he declares to be not fatal to life but an opener of the eyes, and capable of equalizing men with gods (iii. 4, 5) . ”

“ Elsewhere eating the fruit of the “tree of wisdom” is given as the cause of the expulsion of the human pair. In the Wisdom of Solomon (x. 1, 2) we find another view. Here, as in Ezekiel, the first man is pre-eminently wise and strong; though he transgressed, wisdom rescued him, i.e. taught him repentance (cp. Life of Adam and Eve, §§ 1-8) . Elsewhere (ii. 24; cp. Jos. Ant. i. 1, 4) death is traced to the envy of the devil, still implying an exalted view of Adam. It is held that, but for his sin, Adam would have been immortal. Clearly the Jewish mind is exposed to some fresh foreign influences. ”

“ EDEN, the name of the region in which, according to the Hebrew paradise-tradition in its present form, God planted a garden (or park) , wherein he put the man whom he had formed (Gen. ii. 8) . Research into primitive beliefs, guided by the comparative method, leads to the view that the “garden” was originally a celestial locality (see Paradise) , and we cannot therefore be surprised if, now that paradise has been brought down to earth, the geographical details given in the Bible are rather difficult to work into a consistent picture. ”

“ Some better monumental illustration may some day be found, for it is clear that the Babylonian sacred literature had much to tell of offences against the gods in the primeval age.
The student may naturally ask, Whence did the Israelites (a comparatively young people) obtain the original myth? It is most probable that they obtained it through the mediation either of the Canaanites or of the North Arabians. Babylonian influence, as is now well known, was strongly felt for many centuries in Canaan, and even the cuneiform script was in common use among the high officials of the country. ”

“ Was it not a greater thing to ennoble them than to destroy their artistic representation? There is no precise Babylonian or Egyptian equivalent, though attempts have been made to produce points of contact with Babylonian or Egyptian beliefs. ”

“ One is that Adam is said to have had from the first a wicked heart, owing to which he fell, and his posterity likewise, into sin and guilt. All men have the same seed of evil in them that Adam had; they sin and die, like him. ”

“ To the phrase “ye shall be as gods” a later writer may have added “knowing good and evil,” but “to be as gods” originally meant “to live the life of gods—wise, powerful, happy.” The serpent was in the main right, but there is one point which he did not mention, viz. that for any being to retain this intensified vitality the eating of the fruit would have to be constantly renewed. Only thus could even the gods escape death. [14]
6. The Divine Command broken.—The serpent has gone the right way to work; he comprehends woman’s nature better than Adam comprehends that of the serpent. ”

“ Still there are four Babylonian stories which may serve as partial illustrations of the Hebrew Adam-story.
The first is contained in a fragment of a cosmogony in Berossus, now confirmed in the main by the sixth tablet of the Creation-epic. It represents the creation of man as due to one of the inferior gods who (at Bel’s command) mingled with clay the blood which flowed from the severed head of Bel (see Cosmogony) . ”

“ The glorious first man of Ezekiel, and the god-like first men of the cosmogony (cp. Ps. viii. 5) who held the regency of the earth, [18] require a dwelling-place as far above the common level of the earth as they are themselves above the childlike Adam of the second creation-narrative (Gen. ii.) . On this sacred mountain, see Cosmogony.
8. Origin of the Adam-story—That the Hebrew story of the first man in both its forms is no mere recast of a Babylonian myth, is generally admitted. ”

“ In Gen. ii. 4b-8 we read thus:—”At the time when Yahweh-Elohim [1] made earth and heaven,—earth was as yet without bushes, no herbage was as yet sprouting, because Yahweh-Elohim had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and no men were there to till the ground, but a stream [2] used to go up from the earth, and water all the face of the ground,—then Yahweh-Elohim formed the man of dust of the ground, [3] and blew into his nostrils breath of life, [4] and the man became a living being. ”

“ Similarly Zimrida, king of Sidon, declares, “All my cities which the king has given into my hand, have come into the hand of the Ḫabiri.” [12] Nor had Palestine any immunity from the Arabian invaders. The king of Jerusalem, Abd-Ḫiba, the second part of whose name has been thought to represent the Hebrew Yahweh, [13] reports thus to the Pharaoh, “If (Egyptian) troops come this year, lands and princes will remain to the king, my lord; but if troops come not, these lands and princes will not remain to the king, my lord.” ”

“ Kĕna, a short, collateral form of Kenaʽan or Kanʽan The form Kanʽan is favoured by the Egyptian usage. Seti I. is said to have conquered the Shasu, or Arabian nomads, from the fortress of Taru (Shūr?) to “the Ka-n-ʽ-na,” and Rameses III. to have built a temple to the god Amen in “the Ka-n-ʽ-na.” By this geographical name is probably meant all western Syria and Palestine with Raphia—“the (first) city of the Ka-n-ʽ-na”—for the south-west boundary towards the desert. ”

“ It is perhaps even more noteworthy that figures thought to be cherubs have been found at Zenjirli, within the ancient North Syrian kingdom of Ya’di (see Jeremias, Das Alte Testament im Lichte des Alten Orients, pp. 350 f.) ; we may combine this with the fact that one of the great gods of this kingdom was called Rakab’el or Rekūb’el (also perhaps Rakab or Rekūb) . A Sabaean (S. Arabian) name Karab’el also exists. The kerūbim might perhaps be symbolic representatives of the god Rakab’el or Rekūb’el, probably equivalent to Hadad, whose sacred animal was the bull. ”

“ Thus the Phoenicians and the Amorites belong to the first stage of the second great Arabian migration. In the interval preceding the second stage Syria with Palestine became an Egyptian dependency, though the links with the sovereign power were not so strong as to prevent frequent local rebellions. Under Thothmes III. and Amen-hotep II. the pressure of a strong hand kept the Syrians and Canaanites sufficiently loyal to the Pharaohs. ”

“ Similarly the Zoroastrians speak of their Paradise-mountain Alburz both as heavenly and as earthly (Bundahish, xx. i, with West’s note) . It appears that originally the Hebrew Paradise-mountain was placed in heaven, but that afterwards it was transferred to earth. It was of stupendous size; indeed, properly it was the earth itself. ”

“ We also find (1 Sam. iv. 4; 2 Sam. vi. 2) as a divine title “that sitteth upon the cherubim”; here it is doubted whether the cherubim are the material ones in the temple, or those which faith assumes and the artist tries to represent—the supernatural steeds upon which Yahweh issues forth to interfere in human affairs. In a poetic theophany (Ps. xviii. 10) we find “upon a cherub” parallel to “upon the wings of the wind” (cp. Isa. xix. 1; Ps. civ. 3) . One naturally infers from this that the “cherub” was sometimes viewed as a bird. For the clouds, mythologically, are birds. ”

“ CANAAN, CANAANITES. These geographical and ethnic terms have a shifting reference, which doubtless arises out of the migrations of the tribes to which the term “Canaanites” belongs. Thus in Josh. v. 1 the term seems to be applied to a population on the coast of the Mediterranean, and in Josh. ”

“ We now return to the accounts in Ezek. xxviii. and Gen. ii. The references in the former to the precious stones and to the “stones of fire” may be grouped with the references in Enoch (xviii. 6-8, xxiv.) to seven supernatural mountains each composed of a different beautiful stone, and with the throne of God on the seventh. ”

“ The Mahommedan’s Paradise is a sensuous transformation of the Jewish; see especially Koran, Sura lv., and note the phrase " gardens of Firdaus, " Koran, xviii. 107. For the Koran and the Zoroastrian books see the Sacred Books of the East (Oxford Series) . The doorkeeper of the mountain-Paradise of the Parsees is the Amshaspand Vohu-mano (Vendidad, xix. 31) . (T. K. C.)
↑ It was the Babylonian “mountain of the lands,” which meant not only mother earth, but the earth imagined to exist within the heaven ”

“ Cush, M-ṣ-r-i-m, and Put are in north Arabia, and Ḥam is the short for Yarḥam or Yeraḥme’el (see i Chr. ii. 25-27, 42) , a north Arabian name intimately associated with Caleb, all becomes clear, and Canaan in particular is shown to be an Arabian name. Now it is no mere hypothesis that beginning from about 4000 B.C. [7] a wave of Semitic migration poured out of Arabia, and flooded Babylonia certainly, and possibly, more or less, Syria and Palestine also. ”

“ The former is in the third heaven, which explains the well-known saying of St Paul in 2 Cor. xii. 2, 4; the latter is conventionally called the Paradise of Eden. In fact, the belief in an earthly Paradise never wholly died. Medieval writers loved it. The mountain of Purgatory in Dante’s poem is “crowned by the delicious shades of the terrestrial Paradise.” ”

“ The types of the divine form vary in the different places. The other images which have been found represent Egyptian deities. We must not, however, infer that there was a large Egyptian element in the Canaanitish Pantheon. ”

“ If a moderately early tradition may be trusted, the “Gihon” is another name for the “Shihor,” which was either in or beside “Mizraim” (= Egypt) or Mizrim (= the North Arabian Muṣri) , and indeed according to most scholars means the Nile in Jer. ii. ”

“ Quite different, however, is the view taken in Gen. xv. 16, xlviii. 22, Josh. xxiv. 15, Judg. i. 34, Am. ii. 9, 10, &c., where the name of Amorite is synonymous with “Canaanite,” except that “Amorite” is never used for the population on the coast. Next, as to the extra-Biblical evidence. In the Egyptian inscriptions and in the Amarna tablets Amar and Amurru have a more limited meaning, being applied to the mountain-region east of Phoenicia, extending to the Orontes. ”

“ On the illustrative value of Gaokerena see Cheyne, Origin of the Psalter, pp. 400-439. ↑ See Life of Adam and Eve (apocryphal) , §§ 36, 40; Apocal. Mos. § 9; Secrets of Enoch, viii. 7, xxii. 8, 9. “Oil of life,” in a Bab. hymn, Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament, ed. 3, p. 526. ↑ Cp. the Bab. myths of Adapa and of the Descent of Ishtar. ↑ W. R. Smith, Relig. of Semites, pp. 133, 442; Ency. Bib., “Serpent,” §§ 3, 4. ↑ Note the food and drink of the gods in the Babylonian Adapa (or Adamu?) myth. ↑ The mortality of man forms no part of the curse (cp. iii. 19, “dust thou art”) . ”