The Planting of Man
Feb. 3rd, 2007 07:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ikhet_sekhmetI stumbled across a journal article about the creation of humanity in Sumerian and Biblical stories. The main Sumerian image that we have, and the only one in the Bible, has humans being created from clay. There's a second Sumerian tradition, though, in which human beings grow from the ground like grass. The author suggests this imagery, of human beings as plants, has survived in the Bible. She gives about a billion examples - trees, vines, you name it; the Tanakh is rich with agricultural metaphors for humanity and Israel. (Many of these tie in with my favourite image of Yahweh: the gardener, rather than the harsh "man of war".)
Here's a lovely example from the 103rd Psalm:
Man, his days are like grass,
his flowering that of a wildflower.
For a wind passes over it, and it is no more,
and one cannot find its place.
(To my ear, that sounds like Aztec poetry about the brevity and fragility of life.)
The author also points out the difference between creation stories in which humanity is deliberately created by the gods, and stories in which we just pop up as a result of spontaneous processes - "autochthonous" origins. It struck me as I was reading this that, considered as an origin story, evolution is one of these autochthonous processes - unplanned and automatic.
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Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. The Planting of Man: a Study in Biblical Imagery. In Marks, John H. and Robert M. Good (eds). Love and Death in the Ancient Near East: essays in honor of Marvin H. Pope. Guilford, Conn, Four Quarters, 1987.
Here's a lovely example from the 103rd Psalm:
Man, his days are like grass,
his flowering that of a wildflower.
For a wind passes over it, and it is no more,
and one cannot find its place.
(To my ear, that sounds like Aztec poetry about the brevity and fragility of life.)
The author also points out the difference between creation stories in which humanity is deliberately created by the gods, and stories in which we just pop up as a result of spontaneous processes - "autochthonous" origins. It struck me as I was reading this that, considered as an origin story, evolution is one of these autochthonous processes - unplanned and automatic.
__
Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. The Planting of Man: a Study in Biblical Imagery. In Marks, John H. and Robert M. Good (eds). Love and Death in the Ancient Near East: essays in honor of Marvin H. Pope. Guilford, Conn, Four Quarters, 1987.
