Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis

  Two of the three angels whose shape God had taken reached Sodom that evening. Lot saw them nearing the city gate, prostrated himself humbly and said: ‘Pray turn aside, my lords, wash your feet and spend the night in my house!’ They answered: ‘Do not trouble yourself. We can sleep in the street.’ Lot, however, persuaded them to visit his house, where he baked unleavened bread, and they feasted well in his company.

  Meanwhile a crowd of Sodomites surrounded Lot’s house, crying: ‘Where are the young strangers whom you brought here? Send them out for our pleasure!’ Lot went into the street and locked the door behind him, pleading: ‘Pray, neighbours, refrain from such wickedness! These are my guests, whom I cannot let you abuse. I would rather you deflowered my two virgin daughters; and will fetch them at once, should that satisfy your lusts.’ They shouted: ‘Stand back! A late-comer to Sodom, and you dare reprove us? Beware, lest we deal worse with you than with these strangers!’

  Thrusting Lot aside, they tried to force an entrance; but the angels blinded them, unlocked the door from inside, rescued Lot, and locked it again. The Sodomites, after groping about to no purpose, retired cursing.

  The angels asked Lot: ‘Have you any kinsfolk here—sons, daughters or sons-in-law? If so, gather them quickly and flee, because we are commanded to destroy this city.’ Lot went out, found his sons-in-law, and urged them to escape with him; but they laughed at this prophecy of immediate doom. Just before sunrise, the angels said: ‘Come now, take your wife and these two daughters and flee without delay, lest you perish!’

  Since Lot was slow to move, they caught him by the hands and dragged him off, with the warning: ‘Neither look behind you, nor pause anywhere in the Plain; flee to the hills!’ Lot replied: ‘Not so, my lords! You have shown us great kindness; yet if we flee to the hills, we will die of hunger and thirst. I know of a small city near by—give us leave to seek refuge there!’ They answered: ‘Do so, and for your sake we shall not destroy it. But make haste, because God’s vengeance on Sodom and Gomorrah is ripe!’

  As the sun rose, Lot and his family entered this small city—afterwards called ‘Zoar’, in memory of his plea. God then rained brimstone and fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah, which destroyed all the Cities of the Plain, except Zoar, together with their people, beasts and crops. But Lot’s wife, lagging behind, looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt. Meanwhile Abraham saw the smoke of Sodom and Gomorrah rise up like that of a furnace.272

  (b) The Sodomites were among the richest of nations; for if a man needed pot-herbs, he would say to a slave: ‘Go, fetch me some!’ The slave would visit a field, and discover gold beneath their roots; likewise, when corn was harvested, silver, pearls and precious stones were found to have bred beneath its stubble. Great riches, however, lead men astray. A Sodomite never gave so much as a crumb of bread to any stranger; and would even poll his fig-trees, so that no birds should eat fruit hanging out of reach.

  Sodom was secure against attack; yet to discourage visitors, its citizens passed a law that whoever offered a stranger food should be burned alive. Instead, the stranger must be robbed of all he had and flung from the city stark naked.273

  (c) Once a year they held a feast and danced on grass beside springs of water to the sound of drums. When they had well drunken, every man would seize his neighbour’s wife, or his virgin daughter, and enjoy her. Nor did any man care whether his own wife or daughter were sporting with his neighbour; but all made merry together from dawn to dusk, during those four days of festival, and returned home unabashed.274

  (d) Beds were placed in the streets of Sodom for measuring Strangers. If a man proved to be shorter than the bed on which he had been laid, three Sodomites would seize his legs, three more his head and arms, and stretch him until he fitted it. But if he proved to be longer than the bed, they forced his head downwards and his legs upwards. When the poor wretch cried out in a death agony, the Sodomites said: ‘Peace! this is an ancient custom here.’275

  (e) In the city of Admah, near Sodom, lived a rich man’s daughter. One day a wayfarer sat down by her house door, and she fetched him bread and water. The city judges, hearing of this criminal act, had her stripped naked, smeared with honey, and laid beside a wild bees’ nest; the bees then came and stung her to death. It was her cries that prompted God’s destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboyim; also those uttered by Lot’s elder daughter, Paltit—who had given a needy old man water, and was dragged to the stake for her obstinate ways.276

  (f) It is said that Idith, Lot’s wife, distressed at the fate of his other daughters, looked back to see whether they followed. Her body, a tall pillar of salt, still stands at Sodom. Though every day cattle lick the salt off until nothing is left but the feet, by night the pillar is always miraculously restored.277

  ***

  1. Strabo records a legend that near Massada, a massive fortress on the south-western shore of the Dead Sea, thirteen flourishing cities were once destroyed by an earthquake, eruptions of bitumen and sulphur, and a sudden advance of the sea which swept away the fleeing inhabitants. Josephus writes: ‘Lake Asphaltitis [the Dead Sea] borders on the territory of Sodom, once prosperous but now an arid waste, God having destroyed its cities by lightning. The “shadows” of five cities may be seen there.’

  2. After earthquake activity, masses of bitumen have been found floating on the Dead Sea. Diodorus Siculus, writing in 45 B.C., mentions this phenomenon, which occurred again in 1834. Siddim (‘slime pits’) seem to have been salt marshes on the southern shore, from which lumps of bitumen could be gleaned. The Dead Sea as a whole has never been dry land-soundings of 188 fathoms are recorded—and when recently the Israelis drilled for oil near Sodom (Jebel Usdum), salt was still found at a depth of 18,000 feet. Nevertheless, the shallower southern basin, beyond the Lisan peninsula, may once have been a plain, encroached upon by the salt waters after severe earthquakes about 1900 B.C. But the soil is sour, and there are no ruins near by earlier than a Roman jetty. Since the valley lies some 1300 feet below sea level, intense heat makes it too hot for residence in summer: a true fire from Heaven. It is difficult to believe in the thirteen flourishing cities mentioned by Strabo, or the five mentioned by Josephus.

  3. Cities divinely destroyed in punishment of ungenerous behaviour towards strangers are a commonplace of myth. Birket Ram, near Banias in Northern Galilee, an extinct volcano crater, is said by the local Arabs to cover with its waters a city whose inhabitants had this failing. Pherecydes records that Gortyna in Crete was destroyed by Apollo for its lawlessness. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, tells how an old Phrygian couple, Philemon and Baucis, hospitably entertained Zeus, who spared them the catastrophe he visited on their surly neighbours.

  4. Part of the myth is easily understood as one descends from the Beersheba-Elath road to Sodom, and looks left. The eye is cheated by roofs and minarets of a phantom city, which prove to be rock salt formations of the Jebel Usdum; and soon, near the shores of the Dead Sea, Lot’s wife herself appears—a huge pillar of salt, which closely resembles a woman wearing a grey apron, her face turned towards this phantom city. The account of how she looked back and thus lost her chance of salvation is paralleled in Plato’s well-known story of Orpheus’s wife Eurydice. A small Arab settlement on the farther shore is identified with Zoar (see 27. 3).

  5. The story of Lot and the Sodomites seems to be iconotropic; that is to say, based on a misreading of an ancient picture or relief. In the Hierapolis temple—the plan and furniture of which corresponded with that of Solomon’s—a yearly holocaust and orgy was celebrated: when pederasty between male worshippers and ‘Dog-priests’ dressed in female garments took place, and unmarried girls acted as temple prostitutes. That these were also temple practices at Jerusalem is suggested by the reforms of King Josiah (or Hilkiah, or Shaphan), commemorated in Deuteronomy XXII and XXIII: prohibitions against the wearing of women’s clothing by men, and the paying into Temple funds of ‘the hire of a harlot, or the price of a Dog’—meaning a Dog-priest.
That special quarters had been assigned to Dog-priests, or Sodomites in the Temple, is stated in 2 Kings XXIII. 7. Thus a fresco showing these legitimized sexual orgies against a temple background of swirling smoke, with a white aniconic image of the Goddess Anath on one side, and a priest standing at the Temple door on the other, could later be read as a warning tale of Sodomite excesses, Lot’s righteousness, his wife’s metamorphosis, and the destruction of their city.

  6. The tradition of sexual promiscuity at Sodom is paralleled by Yaqut’s fourteenth-century account of orgies at Mirbat in Southern Arabia: ‘The customs there are those of the ancient Arabs. Though good people, they have rough and repulsive customs, which explain their freedom from jealousy. At night, their women go outside the town and entertain such men as are not forbidden to them [by the laws of incest], sporting with them for the greater part of the night: a man pays no heed when he sees his wife, sister, mother or father’s sister in a neighbour’s arms; but himself seeks some other mate and is entertained by her as though she were his wife.’ But the Spanish-born editors of Sepher Hayashar may have observed similar Tuareg festivities in the Sahara.

  7. Whether the Sodomites’ torture-beds have been borrowed from Plutarch’s account of Procrustes the innkeeper, or from a common Oriental source, is arguable. Procrustes, whom Theseus killed for treating his guests in this manner, lived near Corinth, where the Palestinian Melkarth (‘Lord of the City’) was worshipped as Melicertes. Several Corinthian myths have Palestinian counterparts.

  33

  LOT AT ZOAR

  (a) Lot and his daughters took refuge in a cave near Zoar. Since both girls thought that God had destroyed all mankind but themselves, the elder said to the younger: ‘Our father is old, and there are no other men left alive. Let us therefore speedily make him drunken and be, as it were, his wives: to preserve mankind from extinction.’ That night, they gave Lot much wine to drink, and the elder daughter lay with him; yet he remembered nothing the next day. Again they made him drunken; and that night, the younger daughter did what her sister had done. Both conceived. The elder called her son Moab, saying ‘he comes from my father’; and the younger called hers Ben-Ammi, saying ‘he is the son of my kinsman’. Moab became the ancestor of the Moabites; and Ben-Ammi, of the Ammonites.278

  (b) Some see God’s hand in this, because when the family fled from Sodom they brought away no wine. Except for God’s plentiful provision of drink in the cave, the daughters of Lot could never have persuaded so righteous a man to lie with them.279

  (c) The sons of Moab were ‘Ar, Ma‘yun, Tarsion and Qanvil, whom the Moabites honour to this day. Ben-Ammi’s sons were Gerim, ‘Ishon, Rabbot, Sillon, ‘Aynon and Mayum, each of whom built a city called after his own name.280

  ***

  1. Though this myth serves to vilify Israel’s warlike south-eastern neighbours, the Moabites and Ammonites, as having been born in incest, it recalls the Ionian Greek myth of Adonis, or Tammuz, whose mother Smyrna had made her father, King Theias of Assyria, drunk and lain with him for twelve nights. It also reads as if iconotropically based on a familiar Egyptian scene: the ithyphallic Osiris lying dead in a grape arbour and mourned by the Goddesses Isis and Nepthys, each with a son crouched at her feet. Moreover, the famous Moabite Stone (late ninth century B.C.), which records Mesha King of Moab’s successful revolt against, King Ahab, and his subsequent defeat of Ahab’s son Jehoram (2 Kings I. 1 and III. 4 ff), is written in language so close to Biblical Hebrew that the Israelites may, at one time, have read the names ‘Of my Father’ and ‘Son of my Kinsman’ as implying Moabite brotherhood and Ammonite cousinage with themselves.

  2. Lot’s daughters are not here reproached for their breach of the incest taboo, since they acted innocently; a midrash even suggests that God aided them. Much the same situation occurs in a South Arabian myth told by Bertram Thomas: of one Bu Zaid, chief of the Beni Hillal, who always practised onanism when he lay with his wife. Since the tribal elders wished Bu Zaid to beget an heir, his sister visited him one night at their request, disguised as his wife, and pricked him with a bodkin at the critical moment of intercourse. This so startled Bu Zaid that she became pregnant by him, and her son Aziz ben Khala, ‘Aziz, son of his uncle’, achieved great fame in battle.

  3. The names of Moab’s four sons and Ben-Ammi’s six are deduced from those of Moabite and Ammonite cities known to the twelfth-century Spanish author of the Sepher Hayashar or to his sources. The four ‘sons’ of Moab can be identified without much difficulty. ‘Ar is the capital city of Moab, also called ‘Ar Moab or ‘Ir Moab (Numbers XXI. 15, 28; Isaiah XV. 1) located on the bank of the Arnon River, after which also the district south of the Arnon was named (Deuteronomy II. 9). Ma’yun seems to be a misspelling for Ma’on—full name: Ba‘al Ma’on (Numbers XXXII. 38), or Beth Ma’on (Jeremiah XLVIII. 23), or Beth Ba‘al Ma’on (Joshua XIII. 17)—a city on the border between Moab and Israel, mentioned also on the Moabite Stone, today Ma’īn, a large Christian Arab village four miles south-west of Madeba. Tarsion could be an abbreviated and distorted form (perhaps under the influence of the name of the Spanish city and district Tarseion—Polybius III. 24. 2) of the Biblical Atroth-Shophan (Numbers XXXII. 35), a town in Moab, near the Arnon River. Qanvil could be a distortion of Biblical Beth Gamul (Jeremiah XLVIII. 23), a city in Moab; today Khirbet Jumayl, north of the Arnon.

  4. Of the six ‘sons of Ben-Ammi’, Rabbot is derived from the name of the capital of Ammon, Rabbah (Joshua XIII. 25), or in full form Rabbat bnei Ammon (‘Rabbah of the Sons of Ammon’—Deuteronomy III. 11) situated near the sources of the Jabbok River. ‘Aynon seems to be Ai (Jeremiah XLIX. 3). ‘Ishon is possibly a corrupt form of Heshbon (Jeremiah, ibid.), another Ammonite city; and Mayum of Malcam, the god of Ammon (Jeremiah XLIX. I, 3). No conjecture can be made about the origin of Gerim and Sillon.

  34

  THE SACRIFICE OF ISAAC

  (a) God appeared to Abraham at Beersheba, saying: ‘Take your son, and together ascend a mountain that I shall show you in the Land of Moriah!’

  Abraham answered: ‘Lord, I have two sons. Which of them is to come with me?’

  ‘Your only son!’

  ‘Lord, each is the only child of his mother.’

  ‘Take the son whom you love!’

  ‘Lord, I love both.’

  ‘Take the son whom you love best!’

  ‘Lord, what must I do in the Land of Moriah?’

  ‘Lay a burned offering upon My altar!’

  Abraham asked: ‘Am I then a priest, to offer sacrifices?’

  God said: ‘I will consecrate you My High Priest; and your son Isaac shall be the sacrifice!’281

  Abraham rose early, saddled an ass and, having cut faggots for the burned offering, tied them on its back. Then he set out northward, accompanied by Isaac and two servants. On the third day he saw Mount Moriah from afar, and told his servants: ‘Stay here, with the ass; I and the lad will go yonder, worship God, and presently return.’ He loaded the faggots on Isaac’s shoulders, and himself carried the sacrificial knife, also charcoal embers in an earthen pot.

  Isaac said: ‘Father, we have a knife and faggots; where is the lamb for sacrifice?’ Abraham replied: ‘God will provide it, my son!’ At the mountain top, Abraham built a stone altar, heaped the faggots around, tied Isaac and laid him upon it; but as he reached for the knife, a voice from Heaven cried ‘Abraham!’ He answered: ‘I am here, Lord!’ The voice cried again: ‘Put down your knife and do the lad no harm! Since you have not grudged Me so great a sacrifice, I know that your heart is perfect.’

  Abraham turned about and saw a ram with its horns caught in a thicket; this he sacrificed instead of Isaac, and called the place Yahweh Yireh, saying ‘God watches over me!’

  God swore by His Name to multiply Abraham’s posterity like stars in Heaven or sand on the seashore, because he had obeyed without faltering. Abraham and Isaac thereupon rejoined the servants, and all together made for Beersheba.282

  (b) Some say that these
servants were Ishmael, Hagar’s son, and Eliezer of Damascus; and that Ishmael told Eliezer, when they were alone: ‘My father has been commanded to sacrifice Isaac; now I shall be his heir!’ Eliezer replied: ‘Did not your father expel Hagar at Sarah’s plea, and thus disinherit you? Surely he will bequeath all his goods to me, who have served him faithfully day and night, ever since I became his bondman?’283

  (c) As Abraham ascended Mount Moriah, the fallen angel Samael stole up, in the shape of a humble grey-beard, and said: ‘Can a command to kill the son of your old age proceed from a God of mercy and justice? You have been deceived!’ Abraham, seeing through Samael’s disguise, drove him away; but he reappeared in the shape of a handsome youth, who whispered to Isaac: ‘Wretched son of a wretched mother! Was it for this that she awaited your birth so long and patiently? Why should your besotted father slaughter you without reason? Flee, while there is yet time!’ Isaac repeated these words to Abraham, who cursed Samael and sent him about his business.284

  (d) On the summit of Mount Moriah, Isaac willingly consented to die, saying: ‘Blessed be the Living God, who has chosen me as a burned offering before Him today!’ He also handed Abraham stones to rebuild the broken altar which stood there; it had been raised by Adam and used in turn by Abel, Noah and Shem.285 Then he said: ‘Bind me tightly, my father, lest I shrink from the knife and make your offering unacceptable to God! Afterwards take the ashes and tell my mother Sarah: “These bear witness to the sweet savour of Isaac’s sacrificial flesh!”’286

  Having offered up the ram, Abraham prayed: ‘When You demanded the life of my beloved son, O Lord, I could have cried in anger: “Only yesterday You promised me a large posterity by him; must I now burn his bloodless body upon Your altar?” Yet I stood as though deaf and dumb. Therefore I pray that, if my descendants ever do evil, You will likewise refrain from anger; and that each year, when they have repented of their sins, and the ram’s horn sounds on the First Day of the Seventh Month, You will recall how I bound my son and, rising from the Throne of Judgement, will seat Yourself upon the Throne of Mercy!’287