The Bible as Warrior-Herder Mythology: Impact of “Edible Landscape”

[My spin on the origins of the Hebrew Bible, written in June, 2007 for the class "Myths and Legends"]

Summary

Herding was a novel concept that forged its own unique mythology, the Bible. This paper investigates how prehistoric hunting myth co-evolved, first with plant, then with animal domestication resulting in two great mythologies: agrarian goddess and Hebrew God. Biblical dualism is symbolic of the dualism suffered by a nomadic herding people caught between their hunter-gatherer ancestors and their agrarian neighbors. A new mythology, the Bible, served to make sense of their place in the world.

Historical Background

Tens of thousands of years before Abraham, the sub-Saharan ancestors of the Semites were early hunter-gatherers who hunted gazelle and presumably celebrated hunter mythologies. Things changed. Jared Diamond estimates that plants were first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent by 8500 B.C. and animals by 8000 B.C. (362). The hunter mythology lost relevance as new agrarian societies (e.g. 4000 B.C. Egypt) slowly developed earth-goddess based mythology. Eventually, the remaining hunters became herders, outside agrarian mythology. There was simply no established mythology for herders, just as there’s no established mythology for modern man; these things take time.

Let’s view the Hebrews through their pre-Egypt herder “landscape.” Imagine a tribe of mythic hunters who overexploited gazelle, (Diamond 142) forced to make a career choice: herding or farming. Farming was already established, widespread and required legal land ownership or lease, concepts foreign to hunter-gatherers. However, hunters knew animals, so they became the domesticators, raising animals for meat, diary, and wool.

Hebrews lorded over, and were mired in, an ever-moving mammalian mass of sheep and goats that were noisy, aggressive, wandering, cud-chewing, regurgitating, ruminating, festering, flatulating, burping, baaing, bleating, copulating, menstruating, gestating, birthing, lactating, dying, defecating, urinating, and perhaps most significantly, insatiably consuming strangers’ grass and farmland. Cont'd at unabridged-blogowitz