Was God a working class sailor?

There is a bunch of word play in Genesis 1 and elsewhere in the bible. Many of the stories are written more as poems that may have been told and retold, acted or sung. There are repeating sounds like rhymes following a sort of rhythmic beat. More on that later, but one of these quite lyrical or poetic passages is Genesis 1.

I have talked earlier about Heb. /hashamayim/ typically translated «the heaven(s)» and how it contains Heb. /shem/ «name» in the dual form (suffix /-ayin/) of /hashemayim/ lit. «the two names». Another word contained is Heb. /mayim/ «two waters». Now the latter, Heb. /mayim/ is later used to describe the Flood of Noah, typically in the form Heb. מבול מים /mabul mayim/ «a deluge of waters». The /-ayim/ suffix denotes double as I've explained earlier. Could this dual denote a distant memory or a continuance of some kind, does it refer to the good old collective memory, that there had been floods before? A distant, almost unconscious memory of last time the world was destroyed?

For there was. Another flood that is. The Bible tells us, this world emerged from the ocean. The dry ground of Genesis 1:9 is called Heb. /eretz/ «Land» in 1:10, the following verse, and until then the Land was completely submerged in water i.e. flooded. From being /tohu/ «formless» and /bohu/ «void» in Genesis 1:2, by Genesis 1:9 it became visible, rising up from the ocean.

What it looks like is that once there was a void of formless watery mud, and and living with the head above water in the dark, suspended over this Norr. /ginnungagap/ «abyss», was exhaustive, but the King of the Oceans (/elohim/ alt. /elohayam/ «El of Yam» i.e. «King of the Seas» the «god» person of Genesis 1) saw the light in a distance and started to build and work with the mud, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, 'aight?

Mud. Right! He starts separating waters from waters, using his invention called Heb. /raqia/ (Genesis 1:6) typically translated «firmament». Right. My guess is that he turned the parabolically shaped /raqia/ around and used it as a boat named Heb. /shamayim/ or «Heaven II» and used a sieve or similar to sift the mud in order to collect biological materials in the muddy waters and get both soil and drinking water from the mud and so on. Exactly what this configuration was or how the work was done is unsaid, but there's lots of room to speculate. The way I see it, the Genesis 1 narrative displays a busy bee, making and building his own pile of drying mud that would one day become his new nation, something he could tie his boat to, sit down on top of and call his own. A pile of clay, rocks and mud and rotting seaweed which he would gather in one place, which he then names Heb. /eretz/ The nation of the dry land, Eretz, in Genesis 1:10.

In my opinion, it turns out God aka. The Navigator or King of the Oceans, was a kind of working class hero who was bored from just swimming around in the goo and darkness, so he made a boat and started harvesting from the ocean. In the next verse, Genesis 1:11, he plants his first garden. He gathers that the plants that live in the mud that have fruits or seeds, seem to work on dry land too, or that's how I understand it anyway. In 1:14 he discovers lights in the sky while out sailing the «Heaven II». The clouds would clear and the stars and luminaries became visible. «What tha?!?»

In Genesis 1:20 perhaps after having seen a bird one day and movements in the clearing waters, he starts studying the life around him and gives them life of the more eternal character, the kind Plato and Pythagoras talked about. In the oceans he discovers fish and a wide array of animals, some which may possibly live on land as himself? He starts hunting and fishing in the waters, and in the countryside he goes birdwatching and probably also hunts for birds until he discovers the land animals and eventually finds a lady by a fjord in the Norwegian woods where he could finally put his feet up and rest. Thus the world and everything got its story written again. Slightly differently perhaps, and not so fancy, but it may actually be read out of the Genesis 1 story.

Apart from that, I find it super humorous reading Biblical Hebrew. It sounds just like a two grumpy guys, one Norwegian and one Scot, obviously drunk, playing with their cats and rats, talking about everything and nothing while looking for something to do or what to eat. The first word of the Bible and the name of Genesis in Hebrew, /bereshi:t/ in my Norwegian dialect reads like «Merely mud» Rainbow reads like «Haven't seen» and the list goes on and on.

a reply to: Utnapisjtim

Hey, how come you know Hebrew so well and Norwegian, too? How did you learn your Hebrew?

Yes, a lot of the Hebrew OT is taken from old songs. I have seen that clearly, too. A lot of it has oratory roots. It is song/poetry in the oral tradition before writing was used. The Hebrews were country people. That is its charm that so much comes from common, rustic, nomadic, desert and pastoral roots as you have noticed from the narratives.

Abraham was the first Hebrew proper. He came from Sumeria. Obviously the Hebrew origin is in Ur, Mesopotamia. I think Abraham was a a kind of refugee from there. He and his clans people would have brought all the stories from Sumeria, including the flood. All the people's around there had their own version of the flood and common memory of a real Noah who obviously was an important Patriarch post some kind of disaster in the area?

The Scribes, after the Babylonian exile, would have been educated in writing and cosmopolitan literature. Babylon conquests would have brought all the spoils of culture like Homer's Iliad to Babylon. I am convinced the Babylonian exiled Scribes were influenced by Homer and Greek presentation of its own culture heroes. A Hebrew cultural explosion happened during the exile and it developed hugely and led up to the building of the 2nd Temple (an obvious sign of cultural vigor and enterprise). In Sumeria writing was being used for even writing love poems, too, very early on. A lot of literary activity of those times was the recording of oral handed down poems and songs from very ancient origins (Scribes and Historians). We have evidence of a very ancient poem/ song from Sumeria:

The World's Oldest Love Poem

The exiled Hebrew Scribes and Historians work at that period was about gathering together the Hebrew oral tradition and the memories/ folk stories of their religion and culture into early literature of their own, most of what they gathered together was being written down for the first time. Remember, Homer's was a RELIGIOUS work at the time. It was written down from many songs and is meant to be sung with a harp as a very long poem indeed (where the expression "harping on" comes from). It's not so hard to comprehend that David's religious psalm writing is not so different to cultural literary/oral traditions of the Greeks. We all know the Greek influence on the OT as we know it today. David's roots were as a singing shepherd. His poetry/psalms/songs are pastoral.

Your name, Gilgamesh! Lol! Cool.

Sorry, text got garbled there as trying to precis very complex stuff into mere paragraphs. Hope I sorted it.

originally posted by: Revolution9
a reply to: Utnapisjtim

Hey, how come you know Hebrew so well and Norwegian, too? How did you learn your Hebrew?

Hehe, I don't really know Hebrew too well and I am Norwegian. English and German are my secondary languages and in addition, since I am also an amateur linguist I have what I need in order to understand just about any language, or at least have a slightly educated guess and try at it.

Biblical languages are relevant to me, since my OTHER big hobby apart from language, is religion, so over the years I have started understanding more and more of the lingual structures and mechanisms in the biblical languages, so nowadays, given I have lexicons and actual biblical texts and a few dictionaries etc., and internet if I may (makes it a whole lot easier) or other such searchable texts and other useful computer tools-- I can move across Hebrew and Greek, gathering details and contexts, often seeing that we may actually be mistranslating many of these texts today due to stuff like precedence and dogma-- simply since they are so old, and while copies of written texts may not morph much over time, language as such, does, and ever so often so do lexicons, semantics are watered out or changed, developed etc. resulting in gaps between the etymology and popular semantics.

In other words. I can read a Biblical Hebrew or Koine Greek text, but I wouldn't understand too much of it without my library. However, by entering the old stories without having been schooled and don't answer to anyone, I can move more freely in regards to these languages, do my own experiments like finding and isolating verbs and roots, further isolating morphological aspects like prefixes and suffixes, rules for voicing, finding pronouns, syntactical structures etc. (like how you soon understand that Hebrew puts the verbs before the subject and then the objects, and how all direct objects have AT- written in front of them etc. etc.), and finally putting together all the bits and pieces to discover a world that may still be beyond the horizon.

Modern Hebrew is just that. Modern. Biblical Hebrew is about as close to modern Hebrew as Old Norse is to Modern English. Almost pulled inside out in other words. The god-littered sod that once was reserved for the simple and unlearned, typically involving a bunch of hocus pocus (from «hoc est corpus») deities and sins, has become an intricate religious mess, and has become developed into the main line and way we read the OT-- over time and the old stories get new meaning, and some of them are lost, and bits added along side.

What I am trying to do, is reversing this or backwards-engineer it, understanding what the stories originally said. I don't believe in gods or miracles. I believe in poetry and science and man's incredible ability to screw up and the same time his incredible ability to come out of it as a bloody king or demi-god Homerian hero ftw.

Yes, a lot of the Hebrew OT is taken from old songs. I have seen that clearly, too. A lot of it has oratory roots. It is song/poetry in the oral tradition before writing was used. The Hebrews were country people. That is its charm that so much comes from common, rustic, nomadic, desert and pastoral roots as you have noticed from the narratives.

Abraham was the first Hebrew proper. He came from Sumeria. Obviously the Hebrew origin is in Ur, Mesopotamia. I think Abraham was a a kind of refugee from there. He and his clans people would have brought all the stories from Sumeria, including the flood. All the people's around there had their own version of the flood and common memory of a real Noah who obviously was an important Patriarch post some kind of disaster in the area?

The Scribes, after the Babylonian exile, would have been educated in writing and cosmopolitan literature. Babylon conquest would have brought all the spoils of culture like Homer's Iliad. I am convinced the Babylonian scribes were influenced by Homer in their work at that period on gather together literature from the Hebrew oral tradition and the memories/ folk stories of their religion and culture. remember, Homer's was a RELIGIOUS work at the time. It was written down from many songs and is meant to be sung with a harp as a very long poem indeed (where the expression "harping on" comes from). It's not so hard to comprehend that David's religious psalm writing is not so different to cultural literary/oral traditions of the Greeks. We all know the Greek influence on the OT as we know it today.

I don't have much to add, other than showing there's a lyre (harp) in lyrical (poetic text meant to be sung). It's much easier to memorise the national anthem or a poem by Yeats-- than to memorise a few lines from the phone book.

Your name, Gilgamesh! Lol! Cool.

Hehe, I originally wanted to call meself Heimdall, after the Nordic variant of the Noah character, but I was unable somehow. Probably someone has used that name before. I ended up with choosing the name of Noah from Gilgamesh, using Norwegian orthography. Utnapisjtim. The name Utnapishtim is actually coded into the story about Noah in Genesis.


Take the first syllables of the first few words of Genesis 6:9 which tells the story of the Generations of Noah, and you get Utna(p)ishtim (the p replaced by a glottal stop) ==> biblehub.com... ==> no coincidence

a reply to: Utnapisjtim

God aka. The Navigator or King of the Oceans, was a kind of working class hero who was bored from just swimming around in the goo and darkness, so he made a boat and started harvesting from the ocean.

Not The Navigator but rather The Mariner.

I'm guessing that the reason there are so many people in that movie is to provide more exciting plot interactions. Realistic depiction would be rather boring: Dive, collect, surface, rinse, repeat.

a reply to: pthena

I never saw that movie, but seeing its trailer, I suspect the ones who made that movie took more than a glimpse at Genesis 1 and other tales that are relevant for the prehistory of modern civilised humans. A world of water. Most of my inspiration apart from the Torah and other ME traditions-- comes from Norse myths and reading Norse alternatively using etymology and roots more than semantics-- it is quite obvious that the powers who took over up here, wanted to obstruct the memory and legacy of the pre-Romanised North and destroy the old stories, dialects and language. I translate Norse, often from the top of me head, using (esp.) etymological dictionaries from several Germanic languages, Norwegian, Latin, German and English especially, as well as the other Scandinavian languages-- after noticing that many of the modern translations of the Norse words, the modern semantics, are often highly diverging with what you'd intuitively read as earlier variants of words still in use. Check out my example from Voluspå (Elder Edda, Snorre) below:

Norse:
jörð fannsk æva
né upphiminn,
gap var ginnunga
en gras hvergi.

Typical modern translations:
Best New Norwegian translation (imo. good flow):
Inga jord,
ingen himmel,
ikkje noko gras,
men berre Ginnungagap.

Compare modern consensus
That is in English:
No Earth,
no Heaven,
not any grass,
but only abyss.

With my translation:
No soil had ever existed,
not [even dust] in the air,
abysses swallowed our children,
one straw of gras protected.

Source: Heimskringla.no

a reply to: Utnapisjtim

Here is a North American tale. I don't know if there is any way to even intelligently guess how old it may be.

Iroquois Creation Myth

Long before the world was created there was an island, floating in the sky, upon which the Sky People lived. They lived quietly and happily. No one ever died or was born or experienced sadness. However one day one of the Sky Women realized she was going to give birth to twins. She told her husband, who flew into a rage. In the center of the island there was a tree which gave light to the entire island since the sun hadn't been created yet. He tore up this tree, creating a huge hole in the middle of the island. Curiously, the woman peered into the hole. Far below she could see the waters that covered the earth. At that moment her husband pushed her. She fell through the hole, tumbling towards the waters below.

Water animals already existed on the earth, so far below the floating island two birds saw the Sky Woman fall. Just before she reached the waters they caught her on their backs and brought her to the other animals. Determined to help the woman they dove into the water to get mud from the bottom of the seas. One after another the animals tried and failed. Finally, Little Toad tried and when he reappeared his mouth was full of mud. The animals took it and spread it on the back of Big Turtle. The mud began to grow and grow and grow until it became the size of North America.
Creation Myths

a reply to: pthena

Thanks, and here is a more modern tale of the same:



When we translate ancient tales about elusive things like organic matter, scarce foods and clean water-- we seem to translate them using our current measures and meters. Instead of red dirt we say Man, instead of soil we say Planet Earth, instead of naming traditions we talk of space and time, and instead of ideas we talk of the Sun. We are in the sod when it comes to these ancient tales. The ancients knew best.