Chapter IX: Argument From the Use of Mythology

One of the peculiarities of our poet (which I have elsewhere compared with a similar characteristic in Dante) is his willingness to appropriate mythic forms of expression from heathendom. This willingness was certainly not due to a feeble grasp of his own religion; it was rather due partly to the poet’s craving for imaginative ornament, partly to his sympathy with his less developed readers, and a sense that some of these forms were admirably adapted to give reality to the conception of the ‘living God.’ Several of these points of contact with heathendom have been indicated in my analysis of the poem. I need not again refer to these, but the semi-mythological allusions to supernatural beings who had once been in conflict with Jehovah (xxi. 22, xxv. 2), and the cognate references to the dangerous cloud-dragon (see below) ought not to be overlooked. Both in Egypt and in Assyria and Babylonia, we find these very myths in a fully developed form. The ‘leviathan’ of iii. 8, the dragon probably of vii. 12 (_tannīn_) and certainly of xxvi. 13 (_nākhāsh_), and the ‘rahab’ of ix. 13, xxvi. 12, remind us of the evil serpent Apap, whose struggle with the sun-god Ra is described in chap. xxxix. of the Book of the Dead and elsewhere. ‘A battle took place,’ says M. Maspero, ‘between the gods of light and fertility and the “sons of rebellion,” the enemies of light and life. The former were victorious, but the monsters were not destroyed. They constantly menace the order of nature, and, in order to resist their destructive action, God must, so to speak, create the world anew every day.’[98] An equally close parallel is furnished by the fourth tablet of the Babylonian creation-story, which describes the struggle between the god Marduk (Merodach) and the dragon Tiamat or Tiamtu (a fem. corresponding to the Heb. masc. form _t’hom_ ‘the deep’), for which see Delitzsch’s _Assyrische Lesestücke_, 3rd edition, Smith and Sayce’s _Chaldæan Genesis_, p. 107 &c., and Budge in _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, Nov. 6, 1883.

Nor must I forget the ‘fool-hardy’ giant (K’sīl = Orion) in ix. 9, xxxviii. 31, nor the dim allusion to the sky-reaching mountain of the north, rich in gold (comp. Isa. xiv. 13, and Sayce, _Academy_, Jan. 28, 1882, p. 64), and the myth-derived synonyms for Sheól—Death, Abaddon, and ‘the shadow of death’ (or, deep gloom), xxvi. 6, xxviii. 22, xxxviii. 17, also the ‘king of terrors’ (xviii. 14), who like Pluto or Yama rules in the Hebrew Underworld. Observe too the instances in which a primitive myth has died down into a metaphor, e.g. ‘the eyelids of the Dawn’ (iii. 9, xli. 18), and especially that beautiful passage,

Hast thou ever in thy life given charge to the Morning,
and shown its place to the Dawn,
that it may take hold of the skirts of the earth,
so that the wicked are shaken out of it,
and the earth changes as clay under a seal,
and (all things) stand forth as in a garment,
and light is withheld from the wicked,
and the arm lifted up is broken? (xxxviii. 12-15).

How very vivid! The personified Dawn seizes the coverlet under which the earth has slept at its four ends and shakes the evil-doers out of it like flies; upon which form and colour return to the earth, as clay (a Babylonian image) receives a definite form from the seal, and as the sad-coloured night-wrapper is exchanged for the bright, embroidered holiday-robe. Could we only transfer the poet to an earlier stage of mythic consciousness, we should find him expressing the same ideas—that morning-light creates all fair things anew, and discomfits the evil-doer—very much in the style of the Vedic hymns to Ushas (the Dawn), from which I quote the following in Grassmann’s translation (Rig Veda, I. 123, 4, 5),—

Die tageshelle kommt zu jedem Hause
und jedem Tage gibt sie ihren Namen;
zu spenden willig, strablend naht sie immer
und theilet aus der Güter allerbestes.
Als Bhaga’s Schwester, Varuna’s Verwandte,
komm her zuerst, o schöne Morgenröthe;
Wer frevel übt, der soll dahinter bleiben,
von uns besiegt sein mit der Uschas Wagen.

(There is also an Egyptian parallel in a hymn to the Sun-god, _Records of the Past_, viii. 131, ‘He fells the wicked in his season.’) How far the poet of Job believed in the myths which he has preserved, e.g. in the existence of potentates or potencies corresponding to the ‘dragon’ of which he speaks, we cannot certainly tell. Mr. Budge has suggested that Tiamat, the sky-dragon of the Babylonians, conveyed a distinct symbolic meaning. However this may have been, the ‘leviathan’ of Job was probably to the poet a ‘survival’ from a superstition of his childhood, and little if anything more than the emblem of all evil and disorder.

And now for the bearing of the above on criticism. It is a remarkable fact that there are mythological allusions, very similar to some of those in Job, in the later portions of the Book of Isaiah (Isa. xxiv. 21, xxvii. 1, ii. 9). This evidently suggests a date for the Book of Job not earlier than the Exile. It is not necessary to assume that the authors of these books borrowed either from Egypt or from Babylonia. They drew from the unexhausted store of Jewish popular beliefs. They wrote for a larger public than the older poets and prophets could command, and adapted themselves more completely to the average culture of their people.

Footnote 98:

Maspero, _Histoire ancienne de l’Orient_, ed. 1, p. 30. Comp. Chabas’
translation from the Harris papyrus, _Records of the Past_, x.
142-146.