Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [82]
Many of the Old Testament accounts of Jewish history continue the theme of two contending beliefs—the one god of Judaism against the many false gods of the Canaanites. The final insult paid to Baal by the Hebrews was a pun that changed his name and connected it to another familiar biblical word, Beelzebub. In an Old Testament story, an evil Jewish king, who is sick, requests help from the god he calls “Baalzebub.” This is a wordplay on the Canaanite name meaning “Lord Baal,” because in Hebrew, it was mockingly translated as “lord of the dung” or “lord of the flies.” By New Testament times, Beelzebub became associated with the name of Satan.
What’s a Canaanite demoness doing at a rock concert?
The third intriguing figure from Canaanite myth is a character who entered the American pop-culture pantheon in the 1990s through a series of female-oriented summer concerts called the Lilith Fest. The name Lilith comes from the Canaanite storm demon Lilitu, with perhaps deeper connections to the Mesopotamian goddess Ninlil. She has a most intriguing side story—Lilith was once thought to be Adam’s first wife, the predecessor to Eve.
There is no mention of Lilith in Genesis—and the only biblical reference to her at all is a single mention in the Book of Isaiah. But in folklore and in the Talmud—which is a collection of ancient commentaries on the Bible made by Jewish rabbis over many centuries—Lilith has a rich history.
The issue of Adam’s first wife arises because there are two Creation stories in Genesis. In the first, which describes the six-day Creation in poetic terms, men and women are created simultaneously, both in God’s image. The second version tells the longer, more folkloric story set in the Garden of Eden. In this version, man is formed first and woman only later, out of the man’s rib. Troubled by this discrepancy or contradiction in the two biblical accounts, early Jewish commentators suggested that the wife in Genesis 1 was a different woman from Eve. Some of these early biblical scholars proposed that she was Lilith.
In this old folk version told outside the Bible, God made Lilith, like Adam, out of clay, but he used unclean earth. When Adam and Lilith had sex, Lilith balked at being on the bottom all the time. Since she thought that they had been created equally, she wanted to be on top and made the mistake of uttering the unspeakable name of God. For this crime, Lilith was sent away and turned into a demon who haunted men in their sleep, causing the nocturnal emissions, which drained their fertility for ordinary women. She was also thought to cause barrenness and create miscarriages, and frighten babies in their sleep—perhaps a mythic explanation for the modern term “crib death” (or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).
With the sexually adventurous Lilith gone, the Jewish folklore went on, Adam was lonely, and God created Eve, a more docile woman. There is even the suggestion in some accounts that it was Lilith who came into the Garden of Eden in the guise of the serpent and tempted Eve to taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
What are three Persian magicians doing in Bethlehem on Christmas?
Perhaps the most beloved of Christian holidays is Christmas, the day celebrating the birth of Jesus, the divine son of God, in Christian belief. It is also a holiday loaded with pagan trappings, hung, like too many ornaments, on the Christmas tree of lore and legend. One vestige of this pagan past is