School of Suspicion

Why Do Different Cultures Have Similar Myths?

I read every myth twice.

The first reading looks for the Christ-shape: the son handed over by his father, the descent into the dark and the return, one victim substituted for another, the god who dies and comes back. The second looks for the crime: the massacre written up afterwards as a deliverance, the population relabelled as giants so that killing them reads as heroism, the dynasty that did well out of the story being told that way.

Most people do one and stop. Devotional readers hold the first so tightly that the text is never allowed to say anything ugly. Critical readers take the second, demolish the sacred claim and leave. Both are true at once, of the same sentences, and running both over one passage is what this site is for.

Stories people lived by

A story can be imaginary in its events and real in its consequences. A garden need never have existed for its loss to become an image of human exile. A serpent need never have spoken for its words to become a way of thinking about knowledge, temptation and disobedience. The action can be imagined while the fears, loyalties and obligations it gives shape to are lived.

Whether an event happened and what people did with its story are different questions. Historical claims need evidence. A story’s influence can be traced in the rituals, laws, images and interpretations built around it. People can take a story seriously without all taking it in the same way; literal belief and symbolic meaning can inhabit the same tradition.

That is the purpose of reading these traditions together. The same story can give courage to the frightened and permission to the powerful. I want to understand what people found sacred in it, what it taught them to value, and whose authority it helped preserve. Suspicion asks what the story conceals; the recovery of the symbol asks what it can still reveal.

One passage, both readings

Deuteronomy 3:11 keeps Og of Bashan’s iron bedstead, nine cubits by four, in Rabbah of the Ammonites: not a trophy in Israelite hands but an object in a foreign city the reader is invited to check. A conquest account needs an exhibit, and this one is a bed too big for a man.

The formula surfaces across Deuteronomy 2 and 3. The Emim were in Moab before the Moabites, tall as the Anakim, reckoned Rephaim, but the Moabites call them Emim (2:10-11). The Zamzummim were in Ammon before the Ammonites, same note (2:20-21). The Horim were in Seir before Esau. The prior people are always large, always extinct, always renamed by whoever replaced them; and Israel is forbidden to touch Moab or Ammon at all (2:9, 2:19), so the label is not Israelite property. It is what three incoming peoples call the ones whose land they now hold: the labelling caught in the act, inside the canon.

Israel’s own herem, חֵרֶם, the ban that devotes a people to destruction, falls on Sihon (2:34), Og (3:6), and the Anakim at Joshua 11:21; Deuteronomy 20:16-17 gives the rule plainly, save alive nothing that breathes. Numbers 13 has the propaganda in draft: the scouts report Nephilim and call themselves grasshoppers, and the narrator has already called their report a dibbah raah, דִּבָּה רָעָה, an evil report, a slander (13:32; 14:37). The text brands the giant-talk as lying in the act of preserving it. Joshua 11:22 then keeps the books a population requires and a species of monsters does not: none left, except in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod, where the tradition later finds Goliath.

Most of the field holds that the conquest did not happen as Joshua describes it, and reads the total-destruction formulae as conventional war rhetoric. I accept the archaeology; it does not touch the claim, because the claim is about the text. A people that writes an extermination it did not carry out has still written it, and built the vocabulary that made it tellable. Giant is that vocabulary. Dehumanise, then kill, then write it down in the order that reads best.

The same word, read the other way

Outside the conquest chapters, rephaim, רְפָאִים, names the shades of Sheol (Isaiah 14:9, Job 26:5, Psalm 88:10). Isaiah 26:14 says they are rephaim and shall not rise; five verses later the earth gives birth to the rephaim and the dead live. Hold both senses over Deuteronomy 2 and 3 and the war diary turns into a descent: a people crosses a boundary, goes down into the country of the shades, kills the last king of the dead and comes back holding an inheritance, the shape Christians recognise in the harrowing of hell. None of that cancels the mass grave. The theology is laid over the crime, and the layering is the interesting part.

Reading for the archetype

Christians have two moves for finding Christ before the incarnation: appearance and type. Appearance is the Angel of the LORD who speaks as God and is addressed as God, to Hagar and to Moses out of the bush (Genesis 16:7-13; Exodus 3:2-6). Type is resemblance without identity: Melchizedek, whom Hebrews calls without father or mother, or the bronze serpent on the pole (Numbers 21:4-9) that John’s gospel takes over outright (John 3:14). There the New Testament performs the typology on itself, which makes it the best exhibit either move has.

I take both and refuse to keep them inside the canon. If the pattern is real it is not one library’s property, and declining to look for it in Homer or the Rigveda is a territorial claim rather than an argument.

The pedigree is older than the objection. Justin Martyr, about 155, held that Christ is the Word of whom every race of men partook, and that those who lived with reason were Christians before Christ, Socrates and Heraclitus among them (First Apology 46): the seed of reason implanted in every race, each speaking well in proportion to his share of the spermatic word (Second Apology 8 and 13, ANF numbering). He also argued that Plato took his material from Moses (First Apology 44, 59-60). Two arguments, and I take one. The seed of the Word costs nothing historically; Moses-priority is a diffusionist claim about texts, it can be tested, and it fails. Eusebius industrialised that one in the Praeparatio Evangelica, which treats Greek philosophy as preparation and pagan religion as error. I want the division reversed: the philosophy is not the interesting part. And the method was a minority report before I touched it, the Angel of the LORD being read as the pre-incarnate Christ until Augustine dropped it in De Trinitate II-III.

The modern form is Tolkien’s. On the night of 19 September 1931, on Addison’s Walk at Magdalen with Hugo Dyson, he told C. S. Lewis, who had called myths lies breathed through silver, that they were splintered light instead. Lewis became a Christian nine days later and wrote to Arthur Greeves on 18 October that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, working on us as the others do, with the difference that it really happened; he later called the pagan versions good dreams. They all use the resemblance to win an argument for one religion and then stop reading. I use it as an instrument, and I am prepared for the answer to be unflattering to everybody, me included.

Reading for the crime

Paul Ricoeur named the school of suspicion in Freud and Philosophy (1965, English 1970): Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, agreed that consciousness deceives. A miracle is a claim about an event, made after it, by the party with most to gain from that version. An event may lie behind the account, or the scene may be imagined. Either way, the frame can do work: a god who commands a thing lifts the weight of it off the men who claim to act in his name.

Jephthah is the specimen, and the reticence is the point. He vows a burnt offering, olah, עֹלָה, of whatever comes out of his door (Judges 11:31). He wins. His daughter comes out. The text then says only that he did with her according to his vow, and that she had not known a man (11:39). A sacred text going quiet at the moment of the killing is the thing I am claiming happens.

The binding of Isaac matters most. Jon Levenson’s The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son (Yale, 1993) argues that God’s claim on the firstborn son was a live institution, not a figure of speech, eradicated in the late seventh and sixth centuries, and that the motif kept generating texts long after, down to the Church’s Jesus. He does not say Genesis 22 covers up a killing; for him the ram is a concession within the institution. The next step is mine. If the practice was real, the substitution stories are written over something, and I read the near misses as evidence about the hits.

The plainest question in ideology critique, Marx by way of Ricoeur, is who benefits from this story being told this way. Which family’s claim on the priesthood does the genealogy settle; which conquest does the divine command authorise. The question goes to Greek myth, Vedic myth and the Torah alike, or it is not a method but a grudge.

Suspicion is the entrance and not the address, which is why the site is named for it. Ricoeur described the far side five years earlier, in The Symbolism of Evil (1960): the second naivete, where a symbol can be heard as a symbol again by someone who cannot go back to not knowing. Almost everyone who borrows the phrase stops at the demolition. A school of suspicion that only demolishes is not a school. It is a habit.

The resemblances are real, and not all of one kind

The Vedic sky god is Dyaus Pitar, द्यौष्पितृ; Homer’s men shout Zeu pater, Ζεῦ πάτερ, in the vocative. The Romans said Iuppiter, beside an older Diespiter, and the Umbrians of Iguvium cut Iupater into the bronze of the Iguvine Tables: four languages across three branches of one family, one inherited phrase, *dyeus ph2ter. Then the knife turns. Latin deus and Greek theos, θεός, mean the same thing and are unrelated. Deus is built on *deiwos, from the root behind Dyaus and Iuppiter; theos goes back to *dheh1s-, whose Latin relatives are festus and fanum. The Greek word that really shares the root of deus is Zeus, Ζεύς. The obvious pair is a coincidence and the unobvious one is the inheritance.

Calvert Watkins built a book on one sentence. How to Kill a Dragon (1995) reconstructs the formula HERO SLAY SERPENT on the root *gwhen-, whose best exhibit is Vedic ahann ahim, अहन्नहिम्, he slew the serpent (Rigveda 1.32.1), beside its exact Avestan cognate in the Hom Yasht, yo janat azim, 𐬫𐬋 𐬘𐬀𐬥𐬀𐬝 𐬀𐬲𐬍𐬨 (Yasna 9.8): same verb, same object, same word order, in two traditions that ended up calling each other’s gods demons.

Isaiah 27:1 has the LORD punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent; Ugaritic tablets some centuries older give Baal’s enemy Lotan as btn brh, 𐎁𐎘𐎐 𐎁𐎗𐎈, and btn ‘qltn, 𐎁𐎘𐎐 𐎓𐎖𐎍𐎚𐎐, the same two adjectives in the same order on the same monster (KTU 1.5 i 1-3). Hebrew and Ugaritic are close cousins inside Northwest Semitic: inheritance, not borrowing from a foreign cult.

A fragment of Gilgamesh was picked up at Megiddo, and petrography and neutron activation put its clay in the southern Levant near Gezer, not Mesopotamian, and not made at Megiddo either (Goren, Mommsen, Finkelstein and Na’aman, Archaeometry 51, 2009). A Canaanite scribal school had Mesopotamian literature on the shelf and was copying it onto local mud. Nothing miraculous was needed to reach the people who wrote Genesis, only scribes.

Four kinds of claim

Equipment, not thesis. Every parallel gets one of four labels.

  • Genealogical. Inherited from a common ancestor. Needs sound correspondences or a reconstructed formula.
  • Diffusionist. Borrowed. Needs a contact zone, a date and a medium, like the Megiddo tablet.
  • Typological. Independent convergence. Asserts no history and must not smuggle any in.
  • Theological or archetypal. A reading of what a story means. Makes no historical claim, and is not refuted by one.

The fourth is what lets the Christ-shaped readings be bold without pretending to be history. I say which label I am using, every time.

Genesis 4 has other people in it

Cain is exiled, fears whoever finds him, takes a wife and builds a city, and the text never says where those people came from. The standard answer is Genesis 5:4, Adam begetting sons and daughters, so Cain marries a sister; but that verse covers the years after Seth is born, and says nothing about the people Cain fears before he has a nephew, or about a city. The term for pressing that gap, pre-Adamite, has a career in polygenist race theory, from La Peyrere’s Prae-Adamitae of 1655 through Nott and Gliddon to Winchell (David Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors, 2008). I know the company the word has kept. The hole in the text is still there.

The motifs I am tracking

Six shapes recur, and each recurrence is a data point: slaying the giant, the flood, animal symbolism, curses and boons, the sacrificed son, the serpent. The work gathers into seven sections: The Bible and Its Neighbours, The Serpent and the Slayer, Ascent and Descent, Sacrifice and Substitution, Makers and the Made, Stolen Fire, and Judgment and Mercy.

A note on the contents

Ancient myth is adult literature. The sources deal in human sacrifice and child sacrifice, murder inside families, rape, incest, cannibalism, mutilation, theft and betrayal, because those were the terms in which these cultures thought about power and the sacred. Kronos eats his children. Tantalus serves his son at a feast. Lot’s daughters get their father drunk. Jephthah keeps his vow. This is not the margin of the tradition but usually its centre, and sanitising it makes the texts unreadable. Nothing here is written for shock and nothing is softened.

These stories are older than the religions that own them, they are shaped like something, and they are also covering something up. I am writing both books at once. If you think the double reading is illegitimate, that a man cannot look for Christ and for a cover-up in the same chapter, that is the objection worth having, and this site is the answer to it.