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Enki and Ninmah — The Gods Who Made Us Work
The gods are tired of their own labour, so humans are made from clay to carry the baskets. Then Enki and Ninmah get drunk and turn creation into a contest: she shapes bodies no one has planned for, and he must find each of them a use.
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Ra — Blood, Beer, and Rebirth
Ra sends his Eye against the humans who plot against him, then floods the fields with beer dyed red to stop the slaughter he ordered. Creation, rebellion, substitution, and a sun that has to be reborn every night.
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Jonah — Rebirth in the Heart of Darkness
The prophet who drew Israel’s border is sent to save the city that will erase it. The whole book of Jonah with its Hebrew: four descents, a fish on an errand, five words that come true twice and a question he never answers, beside Jesus asleep in the storm, Caiaphas, the sign of Jonah, Inanna’s…
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The Serpent Slayers
Genesis 3:15 is usually called the first messianic prophecy, and the reading is old and serious. God turns to the serpent, promises lasting hostility between its offspring and the woman’s, and says that one will be struck on the head and the other on the heel. Christian tradition has read that as the announcement of…
Every ancient culture tells stories about a god who fathered a son on a mortal woman. This site reads those stories beside one another, and beside the Bible.
One way of reading them is very old and entirely Christian. The Church Fathers held that the seed of the Word had been scattered among the nations, so that people who had never heard of Israel still managed to say true things. Lewis and Tolkien called the myths good dreams, and called one of them fact. Taking that seriously means going to look for the same shape in Greece, India and Egypt, and it is there.
The second way of reading asks what a story was for. A miracle can cover a crime, and an account of slaying giants can be the tidied version of killing people. Whoever wrote these things down had usually won.
Both readings run here at once. New readers should start with Why do different cultures have similar myths?