part0039

The Myth: And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (Gen. 3:14–19)

In the Osiris story, after Set killed Osiris, the deceased god managed to impregnate his wife Isis. Fearful that Set would also kill her son, Horus, she hid him away in a swamp. Set discovered the hiding place and in the form of a serpent slithered up to the child and nipped at his heel. But for the intervention of the gods, Horus would have died. When Horus reached adulthood, he challenged Set and won the right to succeed his father.

Consider some of the images in the Egyptian myths and compare them to the Genesis story. God punished the serpent by having him crawl on his belly and putting enmity between him and the woman and him and the child. While crawling on his belly, he would seek to bruise the child’s heel. In the Osiris cycle, Set crawled on his belly towards the child, nipped at his heels, and became enemies with the mother and child.

In the Egyptian scenes depicting the Great Cat of Heliopolis, Re in the form of a cat is shown bruising the head of the serpent who resides in a tree. In Genesis, Adam is directed to bruise the head of the serpent that dwelled in the tree.

The last of the major punishments was pain in childbirth for womankind. Implicit in this infliction is that childbirth until then had been painless, an idea that we find in the Sumerian myth of Enki and Ninhursag, where childbirth in paradise is painless. That myth, however, has no punishment resulting in painful deliveries. The Osiris cycle, though, does have a story about difficulties in childbirth and it is in connection with the violation of a directive by the chief deity.

According to the Egyptian story, Geb and Nut were lovers, and Re forbade them to couple. Ignoring Re’s commandment, they made love and outraged the chief deity. He ordered Shu to separate them (the separation of Heaven and Earth) and declared that Nut would not be able to give birth on any day of the year, causing her no end of personal discomfort. The god Thoth took pity upon her and managed to obtain some light from the moon and used that light to create five extra days at the end of the year. Since these five days did not belong to the regular year Thoth’s action enabled Nut to give birth to her five children on those five days.

We have previously identified Geb and Nut with Adam and Eve, and the parallels continue here. Both sets of spouses ignored a direct order from the chief deity and both women were punished with difficulty in childbirth. Because the biblical authors needed to portray this history in monotheistic terms, it became necessary to transform the many Egyptian deities into humans. In doing so, they transformed the specific story of Nut’s difficulty with childbirth into a general myth about the birth process for all women.