Drasha
This past Thursday, Shoshana and I were lucky enough to attend our first Broadway show in years, because of the pandemic. We saw Hadestown, and while undoubtedly Moshe Bloxenheim can tell you more about the production, the basic gist is a play about the Greek myth of Orpheus, Euridyce, Hades, and Persephone. And while now isn’t the time to get into the details of the story, earlier this week when I was describing the myth to a friend– and how it accounts for the origins of seasons in nature– I couldn’t help but be struck with the familiarity and resonance with the origin myths we’ve been reading about last week and this week in the Parshah.
Unsurprisingly, some modern biblical commentaries read all of the first 10 chapters of Genesis as being God’s polemical response to the myths of the time. For example, Umberto Cassuto, the early 20th century Italian rabbi, understands all of the cryptic references in Genesis to a “Leviathan” or “Behemoth” as being responses and subversions of publicly worshipped Ancient Near Eastern deities. While other entities may worship or fear a Leviathan, our God made it as a play thing. Such satirical subversion serves to polemicize against the popular religious myths of the time while providing Jewish alternatives.
Yet, while the polemical message of rejecting other Gods may be clear, sometimes the function of paralleling popular mythology in the Torah seems less obvious. Perhaps most famously– and most troublingly– our Parshah this week, Parashat Noach, seems to have been almost ripped out of the pages– or, really, tablets– of the Gilgamesh Epic. By far one of the coolest things I got to see in person at the Penn Museum, the Gilgamesh Tablets are an ancient pagan myth, preserved in 4000 year old stone writing, of a world-ending flood sent by the gods, and a hero who is selected to survive the flood in an ark and rebuild the world. It goes without saying that this story calls to mind the Parshah we just read about Noach, before even getting into the more detailed parallels between the two stories, and begs important questions about how we relate to the bible and the stories it tells.
Of course, to some extent, we can justify this undeniable parallel by drawing attention to the differences between the two stories. Most prominently, and perhaps most importantly, the cause of the flood, and the goal it’s being brought to accomplish, differ dramatically between the pagan tale and the Jewish account. While we know in the Jewish account, the flood is brought as punishment for moral corruption between humans and their fellows, in the Pagan account, the flood is merely a random and capricious act of the gods– its cause and circumstance so unimportant as to not be directly addressed and justified. Such is the way of pagan gods, ruling the world on their own largely hedonistic whims, as the humans below live with the repercussions... CONTINUE HERE
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