They might not have known about evolution, but they would have known, “Hey, snakes are dangerous and nobody likes them”.
I’m a Christian, so my views are obviously biased, but I’m not a fundamentalist.
Some parts of the Bible just aren’t meant to be taken literally (like, say, chopping off your hand because it causes you to sin). I don’t know if those first few passages of Genesis is one of them, but there’s a definite poetic (and occasionally mythological) flair to the passages.
Whatever happened in the Bible, the generic idea is clear. Adam and Eve literally had the whole world as their playground, but they just had to eat from that one tree they weren’t allowed to because they thought they knew better than God. Eve maybe have been tricked, yes, but Adam knew the rules and he disobeyed knowingly. And instead of defending his wife, he pins the blame on her. If anybody is the villain here (other than the snake, anyway), it’s Adam.
On a lighter note, a friend of mine thinks that the snake wasn’t trying to ruin Mankind, but instead merely attempting to hold an intelligent conversation with them.
As for the difference in God’s name, there are multiple interpretations of that, too. God the Creator is simply Elohim, that Power Out There who made everything possible, a rather Theist sort of God that just winds up the proverbial clock. But once God intervenes in human events, then He is known as Yaweh, the One-Who-Is. And God gets plenty of other titles in the Bible as appropriate to the situation. (One could say that the process worked in reverse, as Judaism slowly absorbed the cultures around it, but I tend to doubt that as syncretism was the #1 sin in the Old Testament, evidenced by the harsh treatment of those outside the faith.)
I can completely see your point on this one. God is not nice. For Christians you can see more “warm and fuzzy” aspects of God through the New Testament teachings of Jesus which taught us to love God and others, but the old testament Hebrew God is known for this type of thing. Having Abraham go up to the mountain to sacrifice his son to God, the ordeals of Job, David’s fall from grace after he becomes king. He asks his followers to do a lot of mean things to test their faith in Him. Modern religion explains that this happens because we are human and cannot comprehend the magnitude of God’s plan. We are only seeing little pieces of the plan. I’ve also heard religious teachings that the first 12 chapters of Genesis are the “folk traditions” of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian faiths and that the most important aspects of the story are what matter, not the little details. Things like God created the world (Creation story), men and women are meant to get together and have children(Creation story), humans learned the knowledge of what is good and what is evil (Creation story), people speak different languages (Tower of Babel), due to the weakness of humans and their jealousy there is war (Cain and Abel) are important. The world was created in 6 days(Creation story), the snake tempted me (Creation story), the type of fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Creation story) aren’t necessarily important from a religious standpoint, but are more important from a literary standpoint.
Back to the OP’s reference to the snake. I have to agree with earlier posters that the snake was picked because it will prey on weak mammals and was meant to stand for an enemy of humans. Had this story come out of Europe the creature might have been a wolf.
Exactly. I’m aware of all this, hence my comment about the alegorical content of Little Red Riding Hood. But hardly anyone telling the story (including the originator, I’d bet) has these thing explicitly in mind when telling it. They’re reasons why a wolf “works,” but they’re not the “meaning” behind the wolf.
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Alan, As for my acquaintance, I must have been wrong. She must have said something else than patriarchs. I’ve never read the Old Testament so I’m only have vague ideas of what is what, but it was pretty clear however that she felt that some group in that tradition supplanted what in her judgement was a far better religion.
…
I think I read that somewhere there is evidence of a palimpsest where Abraham treated as a foreign sheik.
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In that case, you really ought to read Genesis and Exodus. Even if you don’t believe a word of it, they are great ancient literature as well as foundational to Western culture. These two books aren’t that long or difficult, and have most of the stories that “everyone” knows, like Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark, Abraham and Isaac, Moses and the burning bush, etc. I recommend the NRSV for literal accuracy, the Everett Fox translation The Five Books of Moses, for the feel and poetry of the Hebrew, or Peterson’s The Message (which I personally can’t stand) for sheer readability. Frankly, if you aren’t a scholar or a believer, I don’t think there’s any point in getting bogged down in the legal stuff, but many books of Scripture have beautiful and entertaining stories.
I still fail to see how your friend considers the Canaanite religions, which as far as we can tell were based largely on fertility rites involving human sacrifice and sacred prostitution, were “better” than Judaism, which taught (and teaches) that God demands moral behavior and justice for the poor and opressed above anything else.
Oh, yeah, I forgot. Of course Abraham was treated like a foreign sheik. He was the head of his tribe, which arrived in Palestine from Mesopotamia. I’m not sure what this is meant to suggest, or what sort of palimpset you’re refering to, since this is all spelled out in the Bible.
Apparently you’ve not read James Thurber’s reworking of the story in one of his fables for our times.
In his version, the instant Little Red Riding Hood comes in the door she pulls out a gun and shoots the wolf because a wolf, even in a bonnet, doesn’t look anything like grandma.
The moral being that little girls aren’t as easy to fool as you think.
No, I haven’t. Suffice to say, the idea of equipping little girls with handguns is a fairly new one… 
Ah. You must have the same copy of the Bible that I have at home. It’s the one with the words of our Lord Jesus the Anointed in red in it. St Paul’s verses are of course in orange. The Hebrew propets merit yellow. And I think the allegorical verses to which you refer get the big green light.
Hey, no worries about being a christian. My brother is a christian, I read the Bible a lot, and we talk frequently. How can you tell which Bible passages are meant to be taken literally and which are to be taken allegorically? I get to go see him in a week or two so this should be fun.
Or in a lighter note, God threw a bunch of single edge razor blades into Adam and Eve’s crib and said, “Don’t touch those. I’ll be back in six weeks.”
Actually I think the Law (alledgedly) given to Moses talks about God being put before all else.
Deuteronomy 11:13b
“…love the LORD your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul”
Deuteronomy 13:3b
“…The LORD your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul.”
Mark 12:28b, 29b
“Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“…Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”
The OT actually punishes people who might already be oppressed. (who in today’s society would be tolerated or even helped)
e.g.
Exodus 22:18 - death for sorceresses/witches
Leviticus 20:13 - death for those who have gay sex (or whatever it is describing)
Leviticus 20:27 - death for mediums and spiritists
Leviticus 24:16 - death blasphemers of the name of God
Deuteronomy 13:5 - death for prophets or “dreamers”
There is also death for working on the Sabbath [sundown Friday to sundown Saturday] (Exodus 31:15, 35:2, Numbers 15:32-36). I think that punishes workaholics too harshly.
Well, I mentioned I read through the Genesis excerpts for my literature class, and we also read the entire books of Job and Jonah in the King James Version because it is considered so influential to literature in English. I’ve always heard that the New Jeruselem Bible was the most accurately researched Bible. I wonder how you think it compares to the NRSV.
My friend, who I haven’t seen her in years, was really into paganism. My point was only that she detested the Hebrews and their religion, but she didn’t seem to have well-formulated ideas about it. Jomo Mojo in his or her post has a cite about the Great Mother, and I remembered my friend talking about that when I read it. That was exactly what she thought was better, nature worship. Anyway, here’s what I was really interested in when I posted this thread. I’ve encountered this idea of a goddess a few times now, and I’m curious where it came from. Is the snake in Genesis really a phallic symbol and a polemic against this other diety? If so, how do we know it? If it’s true or false, where did the idea really come from? Kinda like what you might read about in the column (I enjoyed the one on Lilith, Adam’s “first wife”). Maybe I should write Cecil about this Great mother and phallic snake thing?
Anyway, I find all the other topics that evolved in this thread are more interesting.
I wouldn’t want to fall into the trap of asserting one culture is better than another, although its hard when faced with human sacrifice. It is my impression that the religion developed among the ancient Hebrews was cheifly one of laws. They had moral world view. But their morality is comes from the law. It doesn’t matter so much what you think or do as long as you follow the law.
A palimpsest is a work of literature with several layers, where it has been edited or changed, but the older layers are still apparent. This is what you see a lot with ancient texts where oral tradition is recorded. It seems to me that I read somewhere to the effect that Abraham was being described in the manner of someone of a outsider that suggests the text was taken from a non-Israelite source. Anyway, it’s probably not that important.
The Great Mother theory of prehistoric religion is widely accepted, but also controversial. Most of the archeological evidence for prehistoric religion consists of images of female figures, with an emphasis placed most often on the maternal functions of women’s bodies (swelling bellies and breasts). Scoffers at this theory are fond of saying that the female images are “nothing more than” prehistoric Playboy. As if the men of Ice Age hunter-gatherer tribes carried these images to masturbate with while away on long hunting trips.
I think this Playboy analogy argument is weaker than the Mother Goddess explanation. Anthropology has observed the religious tendency in all peoples and arts alive in the present day, as well as in the writings and arts recorded by past literate peoples, so there’s no reason to assume that prehistoric peoples weren’t also motivated by religious beliefs in their art. Also, swelling maternal pregnant bellies are not usually considered Playboy material. Certainly not in ancient Roman erotic art where the sexy nymphs and Venus figures are not shown pregnant; they are shown as lithe young virgins with small bellies and small breasts.
Occam’s Razor leaves us with the widespread predominance of female figures in prehistoric art as most likely Goddess images. Especially when they are found displayed with obvious reverence in the underground temples of Malta, or in the most important buildings of Çatal Hüyük.
Mother Goddess mythologies have been preserved in the earliest written accounts of religion, beginning with Sumeria and Egypt, as well as the adversarial accounts of Canaanite religion written by the priests of Yahweh who tried for centuries, without success, to get the Israelites away from Canaanite goddess worship. That’s why I think the connection drawn between Genesis and its garbled remnants of pre-Judaic Goddess religion is on solid ground.
To read up on the prehistoric Goddess theories, I suggest that Barbara Walker’s encyclopedia cited above is a good place to begin, because she footnotes and cites her sources extensively. Marija Gimbutas was an anthropologist who is still very controversial in the scholarly literature, as she makes wider claims than are necessarily supported by archaeology. The best book I can recommend that discusses the theory, resting on solid scholarly ground, is The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler.
Followers of the modern Goddess revival movement usually tend to combine all ancient Goddess myths into a single deity, “THE GODDESS.” I guess this may be because they are coming from monotheistic Jewish and Christian backgrounds, and the monotheist unification of the Deity is what their religious minds are accustomed to. However, in support of their position, I adduce the Hindu Goddess tradition, which for many centuries has combined all the different Hindu goddesses into one, called Devi (‘The Goddess’). Even though Hindus are notably polytheistic, they still have unified all the goddesses into one Goddess. Recently there have been some dissenting voices published against the modern Goddess movement in the West, arguing that the various goddesses are too different from one another and were never understood as unified before now. I think it’s really a question of whether your classificatory attitude is “Lumper” or “Splitter”; both approaches are always present in the intellectual debate.
I don’t own a New Jerusalem Bible, nor have I compared it directly with other translations or the original Hebrew. (Not to sound arrogant–I’ve only had two semesters of Hebrew, just enough to get a taste of it.) However, I’m aware that it is considered a beautiful and accurate translation, a bit more free and less word-for-word than NRSV.
I know what a palimpset is, but I wasn’t sure what the palimpset was meant to suggest–apparently that Abraham was a real person? I’ll see what I can find about this.
As for the rest, we don’t know exactly why the snake was chosen for the story, although there is lots of speculation which is great if you don’t let the absence of facts get in the way of a good story. What we know is what’s been said in this thread, that ancient near eastern cultures with which the Israelites would have come into contact often worshiped the snake, that it was often worshipped in the context of fertility, imortality, rebirth, and wisdom, and that Israelite religion often developed in direct opposition to the surrounding cultures (e.g., forbidding things that were directly associated with Canaanite worship). We also know that many ancient cultures, including many Canaanite tribes and at least some Israelites worshipped gods and goddesses, often as consorts of one another, and often placing great significance on the sexual relations between the chief god and goddess as the source of creation, life, and crop fertility. Some feminists have speculated that if male gods started off equal with female gods, and later took over in the religious imagination, surely going back even further you would find female imagery dominating over male imagery; hence there must have been a “Great Godess.” There is no direct evidence for this whatsoever.
There. Now you know almost as much about it as anyone does, and can speculate on the meaning of the snake or the Great Goddess with as much authority as Cecil or anyone else. So what do you think it means?
I see Jomo Mojo beat me to the punch on the Goddess issue. I also see that Jomo is much better read on the subject than I am. I freely admit that my “no direct evidence whatsoever” was an overstatement, but then Jomo also admitted that the evidence there is is mostly indirect and controversial. I’m a skeptic by nature, and tend to favor conservsative scholarship over exciting new theories. What can I say? As in any discipline, you pays your money and you takes your chances.
Alan, the prehistoric Mother Goddess is hardly an “exciting new theory.” it was first published by Johann Jakob Bachofen in Das Mutterrecht in 1861. You call that new?! That’s what I meant when I said it’s “widely accepted.” It’s by no means free of controversy, but it has been a familiar theory in the history of religions for over 140 years now, and it still has “legs.” Plenty of other established historians of religion have written on it over the years, so it’s not just a crackpot theory noised about by a few fringe cranks. Not that I’m saying you meant to imply that.
All things are relative!
I certainly didn’t mean to imply that it was a crackpot theory of a few fringe cranks. It is quite clearly a crackpot theory of many well-respected and established cranks!
Seriously, I really don’t claim to know that much about it. I read one article sometime in the past eight years or so (probably in Christian Century or some similar “popular” journal) that convinced me that it was highly speculative. Being a natural skeptic, I tend to equate “highly speculative” with “flat-out wrong,” especially when the speculation appears (at least in my mind) to correlate with the social and political trends of the moment (in this case, a well-intentioned and generally needed feminism). This is my bias and nothing more.
As I said, I posted before seeing your reply. You obviously know much more about it than I do. In the context of the question at hand (Is the snake symbolic of a feminine deity opposed by the Israelites) I stand by my comments (Who knows?), but I overreached in taking on the whole Goddess Theory.
I thought that a SD column had actually covered this and had supported what I remembered from elsewhere. Searching the archive, I see not. Maybe Dex or another of Cecil’s tireless helpers would care to address the current thinking on the Great Goddess. (Hint, hint.)
Sorry for the hijack folks!
Phil Collins?
I’ve been a lurker on the boards for a while, but I had to register to dispute the posts in favor of Barbara Walker’s Great Goddess theory.
First up, the theory is widely accepted, but moreso by the pagan community and less so by scholars and archaeologists. It is very controversial. The idea that the critics’ main argument is that the Venus figures in stone are pornography is a great mischaracterization of their arguments, and, in fact, one I had not even heard expressed by any scholars.
The problem here is that finding a bunch of rocks that look like pregnant females says absolutely nothing about there being a Goddess-dominated society at the time. There’s nothing about them that implies that they were intended to be a deity and certainly nothing that would indicate that they were thought to be the supreme or only deity. Of course, this was such a long time ago that most forms of evidence for anything simply is not available to us. The most logical explanation for the figures (using Occam’s Razor properly instead of jumping to the conclusion that they were divinities) is that they were fertility symbols, good luck charms, intended to ease childbirth. It could be that there was an associated goddess to go with the charms, but it’s not a given.
Beyond that, we are supposed to believe this theoretical goddess was the supreme being of the culture from the mere fact that these are the predominant figures that have been found. That says nothing about any myriad of other artifacts that could have been used at the time for religious purposes that wouldn’t survive the long stretch of time that would be required to get to us. Carved rocks that weren’t predominantly round would have been much more likely to break or shatter. Other materials are much more fragile and often decay.
Yes, early cultures more powerful goddesses than we do today, but that’s a far cry from assuming that there was ever a dominant Great Goddess figure. The fact that some goddesses had a large amount of power does not mean that there were not also male gods of equal or greater power in other spheres of religious experience (and, in fact, the cultures that Jomo Mojo refers to – Egypt and Sumeria – had very strong and dominant male figures, especially in earlier times, so should not be used to support any Great Goddess theories). Studying ancient cultures shows no basis whatsoever for the assumption that goddesses ever ruled supreme.
Now, I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m just saying that there isn’t the logical supporting evidence there to jump to that sort of conclusion. Many of the people who have that opinion are appropriately tentative, but others, for various reasons, jump headlong into assuming it is true and making up facts to try to support it. Barbara Walker is a perfect example of someone who has gone completely off the deep end.
Walker is not respected as a scholar – not even within the educated members of the neopagan movement – because of the tremendous amount of wishful thinking, twisted facts, and pure invention she tries to pass off. Her supporters say, hey, it’s extensively footned, it must be right. Well, sorry, but if you actually check most of those sources, you will find that they are a whole lot less supportive than you would expect. She most frequently sources Graves, whose conclusions are thought of as wildly speculative and lacking in supporting details. (In Graves’ defense, we had a lot less information about old cultures then as we do now, and much of the contrary evidence was found after his writings.) But then other sources are often downright dishonest. She’ll often make a statement of opinion as fact, cite a footnote, while the actual reference being cited either says that the opinion may be valid (i.e. not proven, as Walker asserts) or does not mention the opinion and only mentions the some of the facts (and often only a few, leaving one to wonder where she got the other supposed facts) that Walker used to come to her opinion.
Time after time, when Walker’s claims are investigated, we find that they simply are not factually based. She’ll claim that certain mythological figures are goddesses and then looking them up shows that they were actually male (Mara, for example) or didn’t even exist as anything except as a name for some natural object with no religious tradition whatsoever. Her claims that there was a goddess named “Mari” and so forth are based solely upon playing with words in languages she doesn’t understand. She makes claims that a relatively recent story of a gypsy girl in love with a woodsman and who is tricked by the Christian Devil who curses her family is actually about a goddess killing Dionysus (completely wrong culture and century) with her supernatural powers – something that even a massive amount of twisting should not naturally come up with.
I can pick any page at random and start naming off the blatant errors she makes. People who don’t already have a background in history or mythology (or who don’t check the references carefully) wouldn’t be able to spot them though (which, I think, explains why newspaper reviews loved the books and scholarly reviews hate it). Frankly, while there are some things in Walker’s writing that are correct, it appears to me to be a very small fraction, based upon the information I already know and the source checking I have done so far. Sorting through it and trying to determine which is which is so exhausting that you’d be better off ignoring everything she says and finding other sources (ones that don’t use her work as a reference!) about the topic to get a more informed opinion of what’s true and what’s not.
Let’s take a look at the Barbara Walker quote already posted here:
“The male serpent deity became the phallic consort of the Great Mother, sometimes a “father” of races, because he was the Mother’s original mate. In some myths, he was no more than a living phallus she created for her own sexual pleasure. In other myths, she allowed him to take part in the work of creation or to fertilize her world-producing womb.”
Note the conspicuous lack of footnotes for these assertions. This is all speculation and not supported by any recorded myths of early cultures that I have found in my decades of research into world mythology.
“When the serpent-creator turned arrogant and tried to pretend that he alone made the universe, the Goddess punished him, bruising his head with her heel and banishing him to the underworld. 1 (Robert Graves, The Greek Myths v. 1, p. 27.)”
Graves, as I mentioned in my earlier post, was a proponent of the matriarchy theory and one who made theoretical conclusions that most modern mythology scholars find unsupportable.
The myth being discussed does not appear in Greek mythology. I don’t have that book handy, but I’d be willing to bet that it’s some speculative interpretation that Graves came up with after trying to imagine the early myths that formed later Greek ones. If so, Walker has no business presenting as an actual fact instead of as a theory.
“On this version of the creation myth the Jews based their notion of Eve’s progeny bruising the serpent’s head, and the rabbinical opinion that the serpent was Eve’s first lover and the true father of Cain. 2 (F. R. Tennant, The Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin, p. 154.)”
These rabbinical opinions are conclusions formed rather recently, typically within the last thousand years. Presenting them as Jewish beliefs is not the same as showing that they had anything to do with the original Jewish beliefs.
Tennant, it should be mentioned, claimed that the Jews believed the serpent of Eden was a demon (like Satan) and thus produced demon children, like Cain could be considered (as the first murderer). The footnote above only applies to the very last part of the statement it is attached to (“true father of Cain”) and does not support the entire sentence. Thus Walker’s unsupported conclusions again take up most of the sentence and are presented as factual instead of as her own theoretical construct.
“Actually, the serpent was worshipped in Palestine long before Yahweh’s cult arose. Early Hebrews adopted the serpent-god all their contemporaries revered,”
Funny, I haven’t found evidence of a serpent god that all other nearby cultures revered. In fact, most of them had a snake as a symbol of evil. Snakes do occasionally pop up in other ways (often as side attributes of various gods or goddesses), but there doesn’t appear to be a large group of followers for any snake god back then.
“and the Jewish priestly clan of Levites were “sons of the Great Serpent,” i.e., of Leviathan, “the wriggly one”. 3 (Theodor Gaster, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament, p. 576.)”
The Levites had nothing to do with Leviathan. This is another example of taking similar sounding but unrelated words and trying to smash them together. Walker does this constantly. The Levites descended from someone named Levi. They did not worship Leviathan or any snake, and, in fact, were extremely devoted to the Jewish laws. Trying to link them to a figure that was considered an enemy of their religion is just ludicrous. I don’t know if the error is in Gaster’s work or if Walker came up with that. It’s typical for her footnotes to focus solely on a small part of a sentence, so in the case it may refer to the fact that Leviathan does mean “the twisted one” as you’d expect out of a snake instead of the idea that the Leviates followed Leviathan in any way.
“He was worshipped in combination with his Goddess, the moon. 4 (Robert Briffault, The Mothers, v. 3, p. 108.)”
The Mothers is a 1927 book written by a proponent of matriarchical goddess theory. He is no longer regarding as a scholar of serious note.
One of the neopagan core beliefs is that all early cultures believed that the moon was a goddess. This is patently untrue, as it was male in Egyptian and Sumerian beliefs (some of the oldest cultures) and in many others as well. The Briffault book is rather obscure and rare, but an online summary by a proponent of the theory ( http://mythopedia.info/briffault.htm ) claims that it was a moon god, not a goddess, that was associated with serpents. It would appear that Walker changed the moon’s gender as it was mentioned in the reference she cited to better fit her own theories.
“The Bible shows that Yahweh was a hostile rival of the serpent Leviathan, for the two gods battled each other (Psalms 74:14, 89:10, Isaiah 51:9).”
Yes, they did. It’s been very clearly linked to earlier tradition of the storm gods in nearby cultures clashing with a monsters of evil, such as Marduk and Tiamat, Baal and Lotan, Zeus and Typhon, etc. How that’s supposed to make any sense with what she said earlier about the Jewish priests (and protectors of Yahweh’s tabernacle) being followers of Leviathan is beyond me.
In fact, the idea that anyone worshipped Leviathan, Tiamat or Lotan is completely unsupported and illogical. These beings represented the force of evil in life. Some neopagans would have us believe that they were originally good beings and that evil patriarchical cultures painted them as bad, but there is no evidence of that. They have been represented as pure evil from as far back as we have written records of religious beliefs. Ra versus Apep, Hercules versus the Hydra (and Ladon the serpent guarding the golden apples), and so forth and so on.
So, just sorting through that small section of Walker’s work finds rampant speculation presented as fact, sloppy footnotes, errors, misrepresentations of sources cited, and overall poor scholarship.
Barabara Walker’s writings should be approached very cautiously and not used to try to make any arguments about history or mythology.
Just interesting to note, this appears to be a mutation and continuation of an archetype as represented by the Pandora mythos. Pandora (All gifted) was endowed by several Greek gods. Hermes endowed her with persuasion. Herme’s sigil is the Caduceus (intertwining snakes). Probably a connection here.