part0017

The Myth: And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. (Gen. 1:9–10)

The third day of Creation began with the gathering of the waters in one place. Then God named the gathered water “Seas,” a plural term indicating multiple bodies of water. Each sea would be a separately bounded area. Are the waters in one place or several places?

The problem arises because Hebrew scribes influenced by Babylonian surroundings and cultural influences in the latter part of the first millennium B.C. applied their current geographical understandings to a passage reflecting a different geographical environment. In Mesopotamia and the Levant, people knew of many separate and important major bodies of water, including the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, and the Orontes River in Syria.

The Egyptians, on the other hand, while knowledgeable about many bodies of water, considered only the Nile to be important. Herodotus referred to Egypt as the “gift of the Nile.” The most important feature of the Nile was its annual flooding, which provided the country with an abundant supply of fertile farmland. In addition, the river teemed with fish, fowl, and animal life, providing additional sources of food, and it gave Egyptians access to all the major cities along and near the Nile banks.

The Nile played such a prominent role in Egyptian life that it provided the setting for much of its mythology. Mythic ideas about the primeval flood at the beginning of Creation and the mountain that emerged out of it derived from images of the Nile. As the annual Nile flood produced life, Egyptians envisioned an initial world flood that gave rise to life. As the floodwaters retreated back to the Nile basin, leaving large mounds of fertile black soil in its departure, the Egyptians imagined a first hill emerging out of the floodwaters and the waters gathering together into a single stream.

An Egyptian Creation myth (preserved in a document known as Coffin Text 76) describing the separation of heaven and earth tells of Shu (the sky), son of Atum (the first light), gathering the waters together. “This god [Shu] is tying the land together for my father Atum, and drawing together the Great flood for him.”

The drawing together of the flood refers to the creation of the Nile and the text goes on to say that the event occurred on the same day that Atum appeared on the first mountain. If we strip this myth of its polytheistic elements, as the Hebrew scribes would have done, it provides a perfect parallel to the events transpiring across the second and third day of Genesis Creation.

Shu, who signifies the sky, is the offspring of Atum, the first light whom Egyptians associate with the emergence of the primeval mountain. Shu came into being on the very day that Atum appeared, following the emergence of the mountain from Nun (the Great flood). He (the sky) then separated Nut (heaven) from Geb (earth), tied the land together, and gathered together the waters of the flood into one place, (which created the Nile), the very same set of events as in Genesis.

The biblical Creation sequence, therefore, follows the Egyptian scheme. Shu’s gathering of the waters describes the origin of the Nile and corresponds to the biblical gathering of the waters in one place.

As with the description of heaven, one of the Hebrew scribes misunderstood the initial description of the waters because he no longer understood events in an Egyptian context. The final editing of the Bible occurred after the Hebrew elite were captured and moved to Babylon, and Babylon, as a great center of learning, exercised a powerful influence on the later biblical redactors. Since the Babylonian perspective recognized several separate important bodies of water, the Hebrew scribes took what was originally a description of the Nile, the waters gathered in a single place, and appended to it a phrase indicating that the gathered waters constituted several large bodies of water, again either ignoring or not recognizing the contradictory claim that resulted.