Page:A critical and exegetical commentary on Genesis (1910).djvu/195



are found in Iranian legends, where we read of Meshia and Meshiane, who lived at first on fruits, but who, tempted by Ahriman, denied the good god, lost their innocence, and practised all kinds of wickedness; or of Yima, the ruler of the golden age, under whom there was neither sickness nor death, nor hunger nor thirst, until (in one tradition) he gave way to pride, and fell under the dominion of the evil serpent Dahaka (see Di. p. 47 ff.). But these echoes are too faint and distant to enable us to determine the quarter whence the original impulse proceeded, or where the myth assumed the form in which it appears in Genesis. For answers to these questions we are dependent mainly on the uncertain indications of the biblical narrative itself. Some features (the name Ḥavvah [p. 85 f.], and elements of ch. 4) seem to point to Phœnicia as the quarter whence this stratum of myth entered the religion of Israel; others (the Paradise-geography) point rather to Babylonia, or at least Mesopotamia. In the present state of our knowledge it is a plausible conjecture that the myth has travelled from Babylonia, and reached Israel through the Phœnicians or the Canaanites (We. Prol.$6$ 307; Gres. ARW, x. 345 ff.; cf. Bevan, JTS, iv. 500 f.). A similar conclusion might be drawn from the contradiction in the idea of chaos, if the explanation given above of 2$6$ be correct: it looks as if the cosmogony of an alluvial region had been modified through transference to a dry climate (see p. 56). The fig-leaves of 3$7$ are certainly not Babylonian; though a single detail of that kind cannot settle the question of origin. But until further light comes from the monuments, all speculations on this subject are very much in the air.

2. The mythical substratum of the narrative.—The strongest evidence of the non-Israelite origin of the story of the Fall is furnished by the biblical account itself, in the many mythological conceptions, of which traces still remain in Genesis. "The narrative," as Dri. says, "contains features which have unmistakable counterparts in the religious traditions of other nations; and some of these, though they have been accommodated to the spirit of Israel's religion, carry indications that they are not native to it" (Gen. 51). Amongst the features which are at variance with the standpoint of Hebrew religion we may put first of all the fact that the abode of Yahwe is placed, not in Canaan or at Mount Sinai, but in the far East. The strictly mythological background of the story emerges chiefly in the conceptions of the garden of the gods (see p. 57 f.), the trees of life and of knowledge (p. 59), the serpent (p. 72 f.), Eve (p. 85 f.), and the Cherubim (p. 89 f.). It is true, as has been shown, that each of these conceptions is rooted in the most primitive ideas of Semitic religion; but it is equally true that they have passed through a mythological development for which the religion of Israel gave no opportunity. Thus the association of trees and serpents in Semitic folk-lore is illustrated by an Arabian story, which tells how, when an untrodden thicket was burned down, the spirits of the trees made their escape in the shape of white serpents (RS$2$, 133); but it is quite clear that a long interval separates that primitive superstition from the ideas that invest the serpent and the tree in this passage. If proof were needed, it would be found in the suggestive combinations of the serpent and the tree in