Myth #13:
God gave man dominion over the creatures.
The Myth:
Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth…. I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat:…. (Gen. 1:26,29-30)
The Reality:
Granting man dominion over life on earth derives from Egyptian myths about the relationship between gods and humanity.
In the Genesis Creation story, God grants humanity dominion over the living things on earth, creatures and plant life, to use and to eat. (Notice that in making this gift, God allowed man to eat from every tree, free of the restrictions imposed in the story of Adam and Eve.) These Genesis passages portray a mutually benevolent and friendly relationship between God and humanity.
Such a view differs quite substantially from that in the Mesopotamian literature. There, while occasionally one particular deity or another favors some particular human, the gods have a generally negative opinion of mankind and see them mostly in a servile role intended to make life for the deities more pleasant. In the Babylonian flood myth, for example, the gods decree the destruction of mankind because they make too much noise.
By way of contrast, Egyptian texts paint a most positive picture of the relationship between the gods and mankind. The Instruction Book for Merikare provides a good illustration.
Well tended is mankind
—god’s cattle.
He made sky and earth for their sak
e
He subdued the water monster
,
He made breath for their noses to live.
They are his images, who came from his body
,
He shines in the sky for their sake;
He made for them plants and cattle, fowl and fish to feed them.
This advice was given by a Ninth Dynasty king (c. 2200 B.C.) to his son. Such philosophical sentiments would date prior to the Exodus and overlap Israel’s presence in Egypt, suggesting that such a view may have had a strong literary impact on the Hebrews. Indeed, the last sentence practically reads like a verse from the particular section of Genesis we are discussing.