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By Root 438 0

gods in the Bible, and especially the lack of a divine consort, led scholars a generation ago to speak of biblical religion as being without myth, a purely this-worldly faith that created linear history precisely as a counterpoint to the rejected worldview of myth. Mythology referred to the interrelationships of the gods in a transworldly realm. Israelite religion, and hence later Judaism and Christianity, elevated history to become the site of divine concern and action, leaving no room for myth. Today we think about myth in somewhat broader terms, and it is indeed possible to speak of biblical religion as containing mythic elements. The sacred history of Israel takes on mythical dimensions, especially as it is celebrated and recreated in an annual ritual cycle. If myths are ancient and powerful narratives that contain deep truths reverberating through human life, surely such tales as the expulsion from Eden, the ‘aqedah or binding of Isaac, and the Exodus may be seen as essential myths of Judaism. I believe that myth is a positive and vital tool of religious expression, and understand our task as partly one of reinvigorating the mythic legacy of Judaism, depleted by a certain linearity or univocality of thinking characteristic of the modern era.9

There is nevertheless something distinctive about the mythic tales of Y-H-W-H in biblical and later Jewish tradition. Their setting is indeed this-worldly; they constitute a story about God's encounter with humans, featuring the seemingly near-total failure in this “experiment” of creating free-willed creatures. It is a mythology of relationship, a series of tales about how God, singular and independent, decides to create humans and enter into dialogue and relationship with them. The decision to bring forth these creatures in God's own “image and likeness,” we should recall, came at the last possible minute. The chief object of creation for the sixth day was that of land animals, complementing the birds and fish that had been fashioned a day earlier. But after the beasts emerged, God seems to have felt that creation was still incomplete. Perhaps uncertain about this next step, He turned to some unspecified partner (the angels, the Torah, His own heart, the future generations of the righteous — to name but a few candidates offered by later interpreters) and said: “Let us make a human.”

All this happened just before the Sabbath, when God would have to cease from labor. The first pair of humans had been in Eden, their intended home forever, just a few hours when they transgressed God's command and were ordered expelled. (They were allowed to stay for the length of the Sabbath, however, for a good host could hardly chase people out just before Shabbat when they had no place to go!)10 They were expelled from Eden, said Franz Kafka (not knowing that the Kabbalists had preceded him by seven hundred years), not because they ate of the Tree of Knowledge but because they failed to join it to the Tree of Life.11 With Adam and Eve's lifeless knowledge, perhaps the product of idle curiosity, comes the alienation that begins as we emerge from Eden, kept out by that ever-turning flaming sword (the sword of our ambivalence?) that guards the way behind us. Only at Sinai will the pain of that exile begin its long journey toward healing. But even this tale of expulsion, an attempt to explain human alienation, is a myth of relationship. Like many myths, it tells of trust betrayed, resulting in intimacy gone sour.

The first narrative after Eden is the tale of Cain, the Torah's hero of tragic rage. There is no difference between Cain's rejected sacrifice and Abel's, which the Lord accepts. Sacrifice was in fact Cain's idea; Abel was merely copying him, perhaps seeking to outdo his brother. But Cain's situation is all of ours; Scripture is shockingly frank in acknowledging it. That's the way it is once we are outside the fantasy garden of Edenic childhood. Life is tough and arbitrary; there is no reason why one flourishes and another suffers, none that has to do with justice, in any case. Cain is