Intriguing Ancient Near Eastern myths, personal anecdotes, and popular cultural references from movies, musical theater, and writers ranging from Dr. Seuss to William Blake pepper the book throughout. Arresting chapter and section titles such as "It's Love That Makes the World Go 'Round" and "Lord Bezek's Big Toes" capture the imagination, and Mobley's own lyrical, energetic writing style — exercised on vibrant biblical material — propels the reader forward. Readers will find his enthusiasm contagious!
Intriguing Ancient Near Eastern myths, personal anecdotes, and popular cultural references from movies, musical theater, and writers ranging from Dr. Seuss to William Blake pepper the book throughout. Arresting chapter and section titles such as "It's Love That Makes the World Go 'Round" and "Lord Bezek's Big Toes" capture the imagination, and Mobley's own lyrical, energetic writing style — exercised on vibrant biblical material — propels the reader forward. Readers will find his enthusiasm contagious!
The Return of the Chaos Monsters: and Other Backstories of the Bible
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Overview
Intriguing Ancient Near Eastern myths, personal anecdotes, and popular cultural references from movies, musical theater, and writers ranging from Dr. Seuss to William Blake pepper the book throughout. Arresting chapter and section titles such as "It's Love That Makes the World Go 'Round" and "Lord Bezek's Big Toes" capture the imagination, and Mobley's own lyrical, energetic writing style — exercised on vibrant biblical material — propels the reader forward. Readers will find his enthusiasm contagious!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802837462 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company |
| Publication date: | 01/31/2012 |
| Pages: | 167 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.41(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Return of the Chaos Monsters — and Other Backstories of the Bible
By Gregory Mobley
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Copyright © 2012 Gregory MobleyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-3746-2
Chapter One
The Return of the Chaos Monsters The Backstory of Creation
God has subdued chaos, just barely.
The Bible's best-known creation account is the narrative that priestly editors used to introduce the Torah in Genesis 1:1–2:3, creation by divine command: "and God said, 'Let there be.' " A different story is told in Genesis 2:4b-25, about creation by divine touch. Here, the Lord God is a hands-on artisan, farmer, and surgeon who molds Adam ('adam) from soil ('adamah) that — inexplicably — is already there, breathes into Adam's nostrils, plants a garden, forms the animals and birds, removes a rib from Adam, and constructs Eve from his bone and flesh. The accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 have emerged as the "official" stories of Judaism and Christianity, but there is an alternate creation story alluded to in the Bible.
Priestly theologians buried this story of creation through a competition between the Lord and the dragon of chaos below the surface of their measured prose in Genesis 1, but in the less-constrained discourse of biblical poetry the dragon breaks free. A primordial battle between God and a dragon of chaos, called Leviathan or Rahab, is recalled in these psalms that celebrate creation:
You mashed the [seven] heads of Leviathan.... The day belongs to you; yes, even the night. You established the Lights and Sun. You erected all the boundaries of the earth, summer and winter you shaped. (Ps. 74:14, 16-17) You crushed Rahab like a carcass.... The heavens belong to you; yes, even the earth. The world and everything that fills it, you founded them. (Ps. 89:10-12)
These texts allude to a story so well-known to biblical audiences that it did not need to be the subject of the first priestly lesson in the primer that became our Bible. Psalmists and prophets assumed their hearers already knew that before time God had defeated the chaos monster, and they did not need to offer a blow-by-blow account.
... in the days of olden times, the generations of prehistory, was it not you [O Lord] who cut Rahab into pieces, who stabbed the dragon? (Isa. 51:9)
This story of a divine battle at the beginning of time between God and the dragon, between order and chaos, is the first part of the backstory to biblical creation narratives. But there is a second part to the story. As Timothy Beal puts it in Religion and Monsters, a survey of chaos monsters from ancient myths through contemporary films: "In the ancient world, as in the modern monster tale, it is difficult to keep a good monster down. They have a tendency to reawaken, reassemble their dismembered parts, and return for a sequel." The Babylonian creation story, identified in the ancient world by its initial phrase, "When on high," Enuma Elish, tells such a story and provides us with an explicit narration of matters that the biblical writers left implicit.
The Enuma Elish
The Enuma Elish tells the story of how Marduk, a storm god and patron of the city-state Babylon, subdued Mother Ocean in primordial times and then created the orderly world from her body parts. This myth from ancient Iraq in the second millennium B.C.E. explains why we have a world that works. The reason why Wednesday follows Tuesday, the reason why we have a world that is not like some outdated tourist attraction in Chattanooga, the Upside Down House, the reason why we have a world where gravity prevails and dishes do not slide up tables and water does not flow upstream, is this: a long time ago, before time, a god of order defeated the dragon of chaos. We have a world that works because in the very first Western the good guys won, and there is now a cosmic sheriff in town who has locked up all the bad guys.
Who are the bad guys in the Enuma Elish? There is Tiamat, a feminine personification of saltwater, and her gang of eleven monsters:
[Tiamat] gave birth to monster snakes, ... fierce dragons, ... serpents, dragons, hairy hero-men, lion monsters, lion men, scorpion men, mighty demons, fish men, bull men.... Eleven on this wise she created. (Enuma Elish 1.134-46)
Tiamat's crew are referred to elsewhere in Mesopotamian literature as "the Eleven." These Malificent Eleven are monstrous hybrids of one form or another — fish-men, winged lions, bison-men, horned serpents — that is, variations on all the centaurs and griffins of ancient art and story, the gargoyles and hairy men of medieval art and legend, and the flying monkeys, X-Men, and mutant turtles of modern children's literature and comics. The very fact that they number eleven, and not the numerically charmed and mathematically soluble ten or twelve, testifies to their wild natures.
The battle itself between Tiamat and Marduk, the template for all subsequent epic showdowns between monster and hero, is dispatched within a mere dozen of the hundreds of lines in the myth incised on clay tablets in cuneiform script and the Akkadian language (4.93-104). At the key moment, Marduk throws a net over Tiamat and hurls a zephyr through the monster's open mouth.When Tiamat inflates like a balloon, the storm god shoots an arrow into her distended belly to slay her. The Eleven attempt to scatter but are captured. Just like that, reality is stabilized forever.
Or is it? Though Tiamat is slain, her body parts are reutilized to create the world. The recycling of Tiamat's carcass, the creation of cosmic and terrestrial structures out of the limbs and organs of the personified primeval waters, suggests that something indeterminate, fluid, and unstable lies at the substructure of physical reality, that everything fixed might yet sway. Even after Tiamat has been dismembered and eviscerated, watchmen must be assigned to ensure that none of her waters escape (4.139-40). In our final glimpse of Tiamat in the Enuma Elish she is "far off, distant forever" (7.134), but even as she ebbs from view, we have the unsettling sense that Mother Ocean might still flow back toward shore. Beal comments on the ambivalent role of the chaos monsters in creation: "The survival of the world ... depends on the creator god Marduk defeating [Tiamat] and keeping her from returning. On the other hand, [the chaos] that threatens cosmic and political order is also the source of that order." Chaos threatens order, yet the ordered world was constructed when the liquid, chunky mash of chaos was poured into forms. Chaos is the raw material of creation.
Marduk does not destroy the Eleven; rather, they are imprisoned and bound with chains. The imprisonment, but not the obliteration, of the chaos monsters suggests that a healthy world consists of checked raw energy. But chaos cannot be erased because to do so would eliminate change, novelty, drama, or conflict. No sand, no pearl. The Eleven are on leashes at the end of the myth, tied to Marduk's feet (5.72-73), but, presumably, they can still snarl, bare their fangs, and flap their gills. In other Mesopotamian literature and art, the Eleven frequently appear as guardians of the very order they had opposed in the Enuma Elish. As such, they are the avatars of all the hybrid superheroes of comic books: that subset of chaos monsters whom cultures depend on to protect them from alien monsters and new eruptions of personified chaos.
So, then, we have the foundation for the longest-running serial in the matinee of literary history: the Return of the Chaos Monsters. The griffins and centaurs and the Godzillas and Draculas, every so often, usually at the beginning of the story or film, escape from their cages and reconstitute their hideous symmetries, and heroes have to spend the rest of the story getting them back into the abyss from which they crawled out.
Creation and the Persistence of Evil
What does this story have to do with the Bible? The Bible alludes to this story in Job 3. But before we parse the opaque poetry of Job, we need to look more closely at the biblical creation story in Genesis 1, guided by the Jewish biblical scholar and theologian Jon Levenson in Creation and the Persistence of Evil.
Levenson writes that "the point of [the biblical account in Genesis 1] creation is not the production of matter out of nothing, but rather the emergence of a stable community in a benevolent and life-sustaining order." Levenson is challenging the commonplace assumption that the creation story in Genesis 1 describes creatio ex nihilo, "creation out of nothing." This religious doctrine reasonably contends that since God was and is all in all, the only raw material for world-making was the wild divine imagination. The idea of creation out of nothing may or may not be true — it has a kind of inescapability for monotheists — but it is not the story narrated in Genesis 1. The Bible begins midstream; the waters were already there. Creation begins when the ruah elohim, "the breath of God," moves over "the abyss," tehom (Gen. 1:2).
In Genesis 1, then, the primeval cosmic soup is there from the beginning. Where did the chaotic waters come from? The Bible does not say, and this great question must be added to all the "why's" and "how long's" of our dialogue with God. The shadow of Tiamat (Akkadian ti'amat) appears in Genesis, not as a personified serpent, but as instead tehom, its Hebrew cognate that means "the abyss." There are dragons, the tanninim, in Genesis 1 — they show up on day five — but they are just another phylum within creation and are neither personified nor cast as opponents of order. The biblical story of creation rejects the personifying style of myth in favor of a liturgically cadenced ("There was evening, there was morning"), didactic story that reinforces monotheism.
Levenson writes that "the confinement of chaos rather than its elimination is the essence of creation." Creation in Genesis 1 is not about making things out of nothing; it is about bringing definition and identity and differentiation to the amorphous chaos, the tohu wabohu, the "wild and waste." But the cosmic waters are not obliterated. They are fenced in behind a retaining wall (Hebrew raqi'a), a thin colander-like skydome that holds back the bulk of the water but allows for rain through its perforations. This firmament is our hedge against chaos.
But as the tale about Noah and the flood makes clear, the skydome can spring leaks, and the chaotic waters can return. This does not happen because the monsters have escaped; the priestly writer of Genesis rejects the myth he knows so well. In the biblical flood story, the chaotic waters return because of human trespass. "Now the earth was corrupt in God's sight, and the earth was filled with violence" (Gen. 6:11). This ethical breach compromises the terrestrial defense against chaos, leading to the return of the cosmic waters that had been restrained by the firmament. The violent disruption of orderly life, of harmony (Hebrew shalom), leads to the inundation of the world with watery chaos. As Levenson writes of Genesis 6–9, "Therein, humanity's injustice threatens to undo the work of creation, to cause the world to revert to the primordial aquatic state from which it had emerged." The remainder of the flood story charts the reversal of the orderly creation in Genesis 1, followed by the re-creation of the world as the tides of the cosmic ocean recede. Follow the water. "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep (tehom) burst open, and the windows of the heavens were opened" (Gen. 7:11). We are now back to before day one, and so the divine wind must again initiate the return of order, as it did in Genesis 1:2 when the breath of God first began to move over the face of tehom. "But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the domestic animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind (ruah) blow over the earth, and the waters subsided; the fountains of the deep and the windows of the heavens were closed. The rain from the heavens was restrained, and the waters began gradually to recede from the earth" (Gen. 8:1-3). Psalm 104:30 alludes to this primeval pattern of the divine breath animating life: "When you send forth your spirit/breath/wind (ruah), they [i.e., the creatures] are created." On both sides of the rainbow, in Genesis 1 before the flood and in Genesis 8 after, the stirring of the divine wind is the prelude to the creation of order out of chaos. This leads to the emergence of stable terrestrial life and the reissuance of the command, first seen in Genesis 1:28, to procreate. "In the six hundred first year, in the first month, on the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from the earth.... Then God spoke to Noah, '... Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh ... so that they may swarm on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth'" (Gen. 8:13, 15, 17).
The sequence of the plot is clear: human violence threatens cosmic order and health. God created a world that works by controlling chaos behind a firmament. But the chaos is ever ready to break free from its restraints, and human trespass erodes the stability of the dam behind which the waters mass.
Awakening the Monster
If one wanted to translate Levenson's observations into the idiom of personifying myth — and I do — it would be that "sin awakens the chaos monsters." I will not attempt to track this story, the Return of the Chaos Monsters, through the ages, but I will mention two contemporary examples.
When Janet Leigh's character embezzles money from her employer in the initial scene of Psycho, she unwittingly awakens the monster, Norman Bates, who later destroys her in a cascade of chaotic water. You may prefer Dr. Seuss to Alfred Hitchcock. In The Cat in the Hat, a mother goes out shopping and leaves her two children alone in the house with explicit instructions not to let anyone enter. What happens when they violate her commandment and open the door to the Cat in the Hat? The violation leads to the emergence of the chaos monsters, Thing 1 and Thing 2, and the rest of the story is devoted to putting them back into their suitcase.
This story is as old as Pandora's box (or, in the biblical version, the basket containing "Wickedness," Zech. 5:7-8) and as contemporary as the latest slasher movie where teenagers engaging in premature sex fall prey to a serial-killing sociopath on a remote lover's lane. The logic of this archetypal story is that sin awakens the chaos monsters and leads to the undoing of creation. Ethical structures and liturgical disciplines are among our defenses against chaos. By keeping the mitzvot, by doing mishpat and loving hesed, humans act as co-managers with God of chaos. Virtue keeps the cosmos structured. Virtue keeps the chaos monsters at bay.
So the song they taught us in Sunday school is true after all: it's love, it's love, it's love that makes the world go 'round.
Leviathan in Job 3
The primary, or at least best-known, biblical snapshot of creation morning is contained in Genesis 1. The priestly author of the biblical account of creation in Genesis 1, which probably achieved its present form during the exile in the shadows of Babylon's ziggurats and temples and in competition with that culture's treasury of myths and panoply of deities, is suppressing the role of the monsters in order to differentiate the Israelite view from the Mesopotamian. But if we enter the darkroom and develop some of the other biblical images of creation, we can see the profile of chaos monsters lurking in the background. The biblical text that is most explicit about the presence of the chaos monster in the snapshot of creation morning, the most candid negative of Genesis 1, appears in the book of Job.
There, in the opening statement of the cosmic legal proceedings in which a pious man sues the Creator for breach of contract, we read:
"Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said, 'A man-child is conceived.' That very day: let there be darkness!" (Job 3:3-4a)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Return of the Chaos Monsters — and Other Backstories of the Bible by Gregory Mobley Copyright © 2012 by Gregory Mobley. Excerpted by permission of William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
The Seven Backstories xi
Introduction: backstories 1
1 The Return of the Chaos Monsters 16
The Backstory of Creation
2 It's Love That Makes the World Go 'Round 34
The Backstory of Torah
3 Poetic Justice 47
The Backstory of the Former Prophets
4 Anger Management 67
The Backstory of the Latter Prophets
5 God Needs Us 97
The Backstory of the Psalms
6 The Blueprint 110
The Backstory of Wisdom
7 Conspiracy Theory 127
The Backstory of Apocalyptic
8 Windows 139
Subject Index 145
Author Index 149
Scripture References 151