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Cain and Abel — The Farmer and the Shepherd
Eve says she has gotten a man from the LORD. He ploughs, his brother keeps sheep, and God looks at one offering only. Read beside Josephus on the plough, the Targum’s argument in the field, the smiths called Cain and Romulus at his wall, with the prodigal’s elder brother, seventy times seven and Pilate’s basin.
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Pre-Adamites, the People Outside the Garden
By the fourth chapter of Genesis the named population of the earth is four people, and one of them has just killed another. The murderer then says something that makes no sense in a world containing three people. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy…
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Sons of God, Daughters of Men, and Nephilim – The beginning of Ancient religions
Genesis 6:4 ends with a phrase that belongs to Homer more than to Moses. The children born to the sons of God by the daughters of men, it says, became mighty men which were of old, men of renown. That is heroic vocabulary. It is the language a poet uses of Achilles or of Gilgamesh,…
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1. Eden and Göbekli Tepe — Stories Before Scripture
Genesis opens with no man to till the ground and closes the garden by making one. Read beside the gatherers who raised Göbekli Tepe, Enkidu’s first bread, Hesiod’s golden race and the law that sent farmers back to gathering every seventh year, with the birds that sow not and the bread asked for daily.
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Endymion: Prince of Dreams
Endymion chooses to sleep forever, and the moon comes down to him. A reading of the shepherd who charted the moon, through Pliny, Lucian, Apollonius, Athenaeus, Pausanias, Nonnus’s link to Narcissus, and Kierkegaard on sleep as genius.
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?