Three starting observations about myth. First, myths are not univocal. The names, details, places, and relationships of myths change as a function of geography and time. Mythography—the collocation and perusal of many different forms of the same myth—is a more useful exercise than the absorption of mythology, since every mythology is an abstract imposition of order onto the original pluralism of the mytheme. Second, myths usually stand in relation to other ways of thinking and talking about the divine, sacred, or transcendent realm of reality, including more experiential modes of engagement like cult or oracle, and more abstract modes like philosophy, of which theology and science are both expressions. Myths alone do not convey everything one needs to know about a god, gods, or God: deprived of their setting they are texts without contexts, in which we might have trouble discerning subtext. And third, myths do not map easily onto the dichotomy of true and false. Consider, for example, a myth like the Big Bang. On the one hand, we have a great deal of scientific evidence for the Big Bang—the scientific theory that in the first instants of the universe’s existence it experienced an intense expansion of its available space, which is still ongoing as the universe continues to enlarge today. On the other hand, our narrativization of that event is not the event itself. To the same degree that our myth about the event gives us access to the data, it also separates us from the event. Myths are slippery and subtle: they transcend ordinary categories of true and false, spatial and temporal, historical and scientific and theological, human, cosmic, and divine. Myth is one of the fundamentally human things.
In the West, some of us still get a thorough education in Greek and Roman myths. Partly, this is because the dead religions which produced those myths are no longer our own, and so we can, we think, safely categorize their stories as “mythology” in a way that does not threaten our dominant religious or secular paradigms (but does subtly reinforce them). We also may, if we are interested, peruse other mythologies: Celtic, Nordic, African, South and East Asian, Australian and Pacific Islander, and Amerindian/First Nations in North and South America, all of which our line between “dead” and “living” religion fails to cover effectively. After all, we can speak about “Hindu myths,” but we have to acknowledge that Hinduism is a very vibrantly alive religion; we can speak about the myths of the First Nations peoples in Australia, but only if we acknowledge that the cultural ethnoreligions they practice are still alive, too. This forces us to reckon with the idea that “myth” does not mean “false” and cannot be used to categorize “dead” religion after all—indeed, we may even realize in confronting this fact that those faiths we typically regard as dead are much less dead than we might otherwise think.
I mention this habit of Western education as a way of prefacing the approach to a particular Near Eastern myth that we are unlikely, unless we are academically trained, to acknowledge as a myth. It is a story of an elderly deity, a junior up-and-coming divinity, and a sea monster, one that was extremely popular and widespread in Southwest Asia, from Mesopotamia to Canaan. In this story, the junior divinity, on a quest for glory and power in the divine court, takes on a much older and more powerful adversary in the form of the Sea, the primordial force of universal chaos, and sometimes the children of the Sea, any or all of whom may be personified as monstrous dragons and aquatic creatures. And we often fail to recognize it as a myth because it has primarily endured not in any of those religions we regard as either foreign or dead but in our own sacred texts. I mean, of course, the Son of Man cycle.
The broader mytheme is often called the chaoskampf or the serpent-slaying myth. Its most historically influential forms go back to Indo-European migrants across the Eurasian steppe and down southeast to the subcontinent, who produced many versions of the tale.1 In it, a young god or hero, usually associated with thunder, lightning, and the storm cloud, goes to battle with a snake or dragon typically associated with water. Again, details change, but this myth, like the serpent it includes, rears its head from the waters of history as Tarhunt and Illuyanka, Indra and Vrtra, Fereydun and Zahhak, Zeus and Typhoios, Herakles and the Hydra, Apollo and the Python, Thor and Jörmungandr, Sigurd and Fafnir, Dian Cecht and Meichi, Susanoo and Yamata no Orochi, Vahakn and Vishap, Marduk and Tiamat—the idea is the same in each. The dragon is associated with water, whether as the guardian of life-giving waters or as water in its destructive, maritime aspect. The dragon often possesses multiple heads or appendages: he or she is aquatic, monstrous, and even chimeric, a freak of nature that threatens the natural order. The storm god, hero born from the storm god, or otherwise youthful, energetic deity (also sometimes associated with the sun) goes to battle with this dragon and is successful, kills it, and restores peace. Many mythic systems use this story as a creation narrative, either of the first origin of the cosmos or the re-creation of the universe by the newly regnant deity. When Zeus slays Typhoios, for example, it is on the tail end of the Titanomachy, and is the last thing Zeus must do before recreating the world. When Marduk slays Tiamat, though, it is closer to the beginning of things, and Marduk is the first deity to create the world, from Tiamat’s very corpse.
Geography influences mythology, and that’s also true in the character of this myth’s various forms. For the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds, where the unpredictability and danger of the Mediterranean and auxiliary seas were prominent features in their consciousness, the image of the water dragon is the primeval image of chaos; so too for Mesopotamians for whom the river valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates could often flood without warning and with great destruction, bringing devastation to all in their path. For Egyptians on the Nile, though, which flooded far more predictably and stably, the chaoskampf is not necessarily associated with waters of chaos, but more with abstract forces of isfet that it falls to the creator deity, more typically associated with the sun, to subordinate once more to maat.2 The point is that the local geography always becomes the cosmic geography: the world is shaped the way it appears to you where you live, just as the myths you know are the ones that your own city, temple, and locale espouse.
So in tracing this mytheme in the Bible, it is interesting to note that it seems to go deep into human prehistory, but the more useful place to start is the Semitic reception of it in the Mesopotamian and Canaanite traditions. I have already mentioned Marduk, who takes on the role of the young champion divinity in Enuma Elish, adopting the role from earlier deities whose succession in previous phases of Mesopotamian imperial history is now lost to us with the texts that described them. Marduk, instead, agrees to fight Tiamat on behalf of the gods that are his more immediate parents and grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles, on one condition, that they accept his cosmic supremacy forever afterwards, and the text ends with the construction of his temple in Babylon. This is our cue that Enuma Elish is making use of an older mytheme, one that precedes it, but for a new purpose, the legitimization of a particular city and cult, presumably that did not enjoy such status beforehand. It seems likely that the biblical authors of Genesis 1-11 had read Enuma Elish, and they creatively respond to its mythic qualities above all in their counter creation story in Genesis 1:1-2:4a, in which the major beats of Enuma Elish are repeated but also overcome. So like in Enuma Elish, Genesis 1 opens on a vast abyss (tehom in Hebrew, etymologically cognate with Tiamat); like in Enuma Elish, the deity must split the waters and make a firmament (raqiya in Hebrew); like in Enuma Elish, creation is completed in a seven day cycle; and like in Enuma Elish, its denouement is with temple language, at the end of which the deity takes up residence within the shrine. But unlike Enuma Elish, the chaoskampf is muted in Genesis 1: there may be a reference to it in the parting of the waters, but if so, it is not narrated. God simply speaks, and things happen. Unlike Enuma Elish, where humans are created as a divine afterthought to do work, in Genesis 1 they are the imago Dei, the cult image of the deity, and this implies that the heavens and earth themselves are the deity’s temple, not any one temple located somewhere on the earth. That is why the whole creation takes place in six days and God rests on the seventh: God takes up residence in the universe itself as his temple.
Yet one reason scholars feel decently confident that this creation story is young in Ancient Judaism is precisely because of how keyed it is to the Enuma Elish, implying the exilic social context of its authors in Babylon during the sixth century BCE. And, moreover, other biblical texts already have their own version of the chaoskampf in which Yhwh, the god of Israel and Judah—not named as such in Genesis 1!—must fight the dragon to exert control over chaos and create the universe. Exempli gratia:
God is my King from of old;
working salvation in the earth.
You divided the sea by your might;
you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters.
You crushed the heads of Leviathan;
you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.
You cut openings for springs and torrents;
you dried up ever-flowing streams.
Yours is the day, yours also the night;
you established the luminaries and the sun.
You have fixed all the bounds of the earth;
you made summer and winter. (Ps 74:12-17, NRSVue)
In this text, Yhwh did battle with the sea serpent, here Leviathan, in the distant past, and out of its body constructed the cosmos. Other times the creature in view is called Rahab (Job 26:12; Ps 89:10; Isa 51:10). Other times still, the expectation of the chaoskampf is reserved for the eschatological future (Isa 27:1), or it is appropriated to explain an event of redemptive history. Consider, for instance, the miraculous salvation of the Israelites through the sea: just like at creation, God parts the waters, dry land appears on which the Israelites can escape to safety, and an enemy of God is slain in the process. In this, the dragon of the original myth is metaphorically, and implicitly, graphed onto the pagan king. But it is the same fundamental story.3
So, here are two afterlives of chaoskampf in the Hebrew Bible: one in which the narrative of theomachy at the beginning of time has been muted or at least toned down in favor of a more transcendent deity, and one in which the earlier, more raw story of Yhwh’s origins as a young upstart god fighting a dragon have been preserved. Where exactly did the early Yahwists get this version of the story, and how did they come to apply it to Yhwh?
Ironically, our clue comes from one of the very latest passages of the Hebrew Bible, the vision attributed to the exilic prophet Daniel in Daniel 7:9-14, which was in fact written by a pseudonymous author in his name in the second century BCE:
As I looked,
thrones were set in place,
and an Ancient of Days took his throne;
his clothing was white as snow
and the hair of his head like pure wool;
his throne was fiery flames,
and its wheels were burning fire.
A stream of fire issued
and flowed out from his presence.
A thousand thousands served him,
and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him.
The court sat in judgment,
and the books were opened. (Dan 7:9-10, modified)
In the meantime, a “beast”—one of four that arises from the cosmic waters—was put to death and cremated (7:11), while the others were allowed to endure for differing periods of time. But then,
I saw one like a son of man
coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
To him was given dominion and glory and kingship,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not pass away,
and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed. (7:13-14)
John Collins is largely responsible for the correct insight that this is the same chaoskampf mytheme we encounter elsewhere and for identifying a specific chain of origination for its presence in the Bible: the Baal Cycle from Ugarit.4 In the Baal Cycle, the eponymous deity is in the role of the thunder god-hero, and the dragon is Yamm, the Sea, and his children. Baal goes to war against them in his quest to become king of the gods, and after returning victorious, he flies on the clouds the mountain of the gods where El, the patriarchal creator god, sits enthroned, and receives him with welcome. Baal’s story does not end there: he must also build his palace and eventually submit to the maw of Mot, Death, who demands Baal’s life in exchange for the havoc he has wrought on the universe in slaying Yamm, which El consents to. But Baal then returns from Death itself, and his kingship over the gods from his palace on Mt. Zaphon in northern Syria (on which there was a temple to him throughout classical antiquity), from which he sends out the life-giving, fecundating rain in the storm cloud and rebukes his enemies on the land, is only periodically challenged by Death (probably a reference to the irregular reality of famine and drought in the region).5
El was certainly the original deity of Ancient Israel: this is why his name and its cognates are freely used to refer to “God” or “gods” in the Hebrew Bible and why El himself never comes under censure from the biblical authors and redactors. Baal, on the other hand, is one of their targets, but this appears to be out of a fear of syncretism more than anything else. When Yhwh was introduced from the south by Transjordanian caravans circulating in and out of northern Canaan, where the Proto-Israelites were, Yhwh came to share the shrine of El and his consort, Asherah, in different places, and he was eventually adopted by the emergent entity of Judah as their national god, too, in imitation of the north. Probably one way that this transition was commonly managed was by assuming that Yhwh, also a warrior deity (scholars debate whether he was already a god of storms), was understood to be a local manifestation of Baal, and vice versa. Inadvertently, some biblical texts witness to the idea that this exact kind of interpretatio was active in Ancient Israel and Judah (e.g., Hos 2:16). Certainly, the Jerusalem Temple interpreted Yhwh as a deity very much like Baal: a storm god, a fertility god, a warrior god, and even appropriated the name of Baal’s sacred mountain, Mt. Zaphon, for Mt. Zion, the mountain of the Jerusalem Temple (Ps 48:1). Yhwh also, as already mentioned, has a future date with destiny and with Death, his cosmic enemy, at the eschaton. So this implies that early in the history of Yahwism, Yhwh was understood through the filter of Baal’s mythography: Yhwh was the junior divinity to El, who achieved dominance through his slaughter of the sea dragon; in the Prophets, at least, Baal’s conflict with Death is transposed onto Yhwh as an item of the future rather than the past, though other biblical texts implicitly link Yhwh’s victory over the Sea with victory over Death and see them as belonging to events in the primordial past, like creation or exodus.
By the tenth century BCE, El and Yhwh had fused and were treated as one deity in Israel and Judah, and certainly almost nine hundred years later when Daniel was written, Yhwh is the Ancient of Days, no longer the one like a Son of Man. Instead, Collins argues, that honor belongs to the Archangel Michael in Daniel’s book. In other texts, though, this association gets transposed onto other figures. In Parables of Enoch, for instance, Enoch sees visions of the “Chosen One,” the Son of Man, a divine, angelic, preexistent, humanoid figure who will play a role at the eschatological crisis as judge and king, hidden from the ages, only to then be told that “You are that Son of Man” (1 En 71:14). In the Daniel Apocryphon from Qumran, it seems obvious that the Son of Man, the junior divinity, is also the eschatological messiah, which role he also possesses in the later apocalyptic text of 4 Ezra. This is the context in which to understand the application of the title to Jesus, both by the Gospel authors and perhaps (probably, I would contend) by the historical Jesus himself. The historical Jesus almost certainly, if we have access to any of his voice or words, spoke about the Son of Man as a future messiah coming to judge the nations and save Israel; in the wake of his death and resurrection, the early followers of Jesus concluded that the figure of his preaching was him. It is not too far a step to assume that Jesus himself also believed he’d be revealed as messiah in the age to come. Long after the rise of Christianity, and the specifically messianic flavor of Christologies of exaltation had been eclipsed by the philosophical questions raised by Christologies of incarnation, other Jews continued to associate the Son of Man figure with a deified Enoch, to the chagrin of the rabbinic editors of the Bavli.6
The myth of the Son of Man—the young warrior deity who ascends to the exalted creator god to receive a kingdom after doing battle with serpentine chaos and death—is baked into the essential metanarrative of the Christian story. In Paul, the Synoptic Gospels, and the Apocalypse of John, Jesus’s debut as Son of Man is reserved for the eschatological future, the parousia when he comes to preside as judge and king; in John, that moment of the Son of Man’s exaltation happens, paradoxically, on the cross, in Jesus’s passion which is also his passing over to the life of the Kingdom above. For Christians, this application of the mytheme to the life of Jesus becomes the controlling lens through which all of Jewish scripture, and indeed all of cosmic history, is read. But this comes at a price, and the price is that the myth so frames the contours of our vision that we can’t see it anymore. And that is much to be regretted, because it is a myth whose constant reuse testifies to its imaginal power.
To trace the myth’s long afterlife in subsequent religious and artistic themes would take us beyond my (newly reasserted) word count limits for posts, but I will instead focus on one such instance: mecha anime. (I can pretty much guarantee that no one who started this article thought these words would occur within it.) I have already written on the myth’s influence on one recent anime entry, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron. And as I’ve mentioned a few times in the dispatch, my friend Roberto De La Noval and I have all but completed our volume on Anime, Religion, and Theology, in which I wrote an essay on Gurren Lagann. So, the topic’s on my mind. GL follows a young boy, Simon, and his adoptive older brother, Kamina, rebel against the repression of humanity by the Beastmen—theriomorphic humans—and the Spiral King, Lordgenome when they find a small mecha, Lagann, and combine it with a larger, stolen mecha, Gurren. The combined Gurren Lagann is a samurai warrior who fights with drills—a symbol of Spiral Power, the energy of love and evolution that powers life and achieves its ultimate form in human beings. Later, the true adversary against which Gurren Lagann must contend—assuming ever greater, more cosmic bodies in the process, until becoming Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, achieving metacosmic form—is revealed to be the Anti-Spiral, a malevolent, demiurgic consciousness that seeks to repress Spiral Life generally in the universe. In the film adaptation, The Lights in the Sky Are Stars, this final form of Gurren Lagann simply assumes the shape of the deified Kamina, who goes toe to toe with the monstrous, evil god.
GL simply follows a trend in the wider genre. The giant mechanical warrior, and/or its human pilots—Gurren Lagann, Voltron, Evangelion, the Gundam, Ultraman, etc.—are simply the Son of Man broadcast onto a cosmic vantage, the chaos dragon replaced by a host of aliens, cosmic, and metacosmic threats. The young warrior god of iron and steel (or interdimensional metallic alloy, in Voltron’s case) often wields a weapon that utilizes the power of raw energy (think lightning and thunder in a modern idiom) against such threats; his victory means the universe’s stability for generations to come, and salvation for countless worlds.
I chose the mecha anime rather than some other modern iterations of the myth (Marvel Comics is filled both with new riffs on it as well as older versions rehashed in a new cosmic setting) because it seems to me that this particular genre of literature (in manga), television, and film emphasizes the salvific value of the Son of Man’s theomachy but with attention to concerns unique to our late modern, scientific worldview, and the value of this is that it forces us to translate the ancient significance of the myth from the ancient context into ours. Marduk, Baal, Yhwh, and Zeus did battle with sea dragons at a time when ancient people still generally envisioned a geocentric universe and water as the cosmic first principle. But Gurren Lagann and Voltron do battle with serpents that swirl out of the void between worlds, out of black holes and into exploding supernovae. When the Son of Man ascends in our modern mythologies, it is not simply through the seven pre-Copernican heavens but through the measureless skies, across innumerable galaxies, into dimensions beyond. The sea he contends with is the abyss of nothingness, the Death the annihilation of planets, stars, and civilizations.
Now, I think it’s important to sit with the way this myth keeps playing upon our imaginations in our modern setting for many reasons, but one of them is that it might prove theologically useful. Too often, Christians are content to remain at the level of the letter of our premodern mythological language about the glorification of Jesus, either moving backwards from it to the cultic practice and oracular expansion of our vision of Christ or forwards from it to philosophical or theological interpretation. These are important moves, but our failure, if not to update then to continually reimagine, the mythological language itself works against our interest. Myth is the verbal icon of the imaginal, the place where the conceptual and the corporeal come together. It is not merely a layer of mist obscuring our view of the truth, but a revelation of the truth in a spacetime and linguistic corridor that exists in some sense above the physical world we know, though not yet in the uttermost metaphysical heights of the spirit. So we do well to ask: what would it mean to think of Jesus the Son of Man in the language of our modern versions of the myth? What new meaning could we find in the term?
By way of closing, I might suggest one that seems to bring together traditional Christology with the imaginative worlds of the mecha anime genre. Like Voltron or like Gurren Lagann, whose quest to save the universe takes them to the uttermost cosmic reaches of reality, but whose identity is also a corporate identity, that is, an entity existing on one level in the singular and on the lower level of the pilots and members of its team as their plurality, being both one and many, so too the Son of Man. Just as Gregory of Nyssa intuited in his concept of the human being created in the image and likeness of God as the collective of all intrahistorical human beings, and just as Augustine of Hippo intuited with his theology of the totus Christus, I think likewise that the Son of Man is the entirety of humanity, made just and glorified by God through the combat with the sea of this world and with Death, our last enemy (1 Cor 15:26). And in some way that remains hidden from my view, I feel rather than know that there shall be some sense in which this restored humanity indeed acts to save the cosmos, if not within history then in a way beyond it, slaying the dragon which entwines the universe, encircling it within the coils of Death at any cost, even that of consuming its own tail.7 At least, that is what I feel in my own soul whenever I read or hear those words, “You are that Son of Man…”
See Calvert Watkins, How to Kill A Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); M.L. West, Indo-European Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Like Watkins, Michael Witzel argues that the origins of this among other tales are in fact even deeper in the prehistoric, “Laurasian” (to borrow his term for it) human past. See Witzel, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
There is in general a larger atmospheric grouping of Sun, sky, and storm deities in the ancient world. Zeus, for example, was at some point in his mythographic history a solar and sky deity (his name is derived from the Indo-European -deiwos*, which means the flash of daylight, and is the name for the “Sky Father” deity, who gives his name to Zeus and his equivalents like Iuppiter and Dyaus Pitr).
The original idea that chaoskampf influenced the Hebrew Bible is Hermann Günkel’s. But for more recent treatments, see K. William Whitney, Two Strange Beasts: Leviathan and Behemoth in Second Temple and Early Rabbinic Judaism (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006); Koert van Bekkum et al, eds., Playing With Leviathan: Interpretation and Recpetion of Monsters from the Biblical World, TBN 21 (Leiden: Brill, 2017); and John Day, God’s Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea: Echoes of a Canaanite Myth in the Old Testament (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2020). I owe this helpfully short bibliography to this great post by Alessandro Rivera and Dexter Callender for Bible Odyssey.
See John J. Collins, Daniel: With an Introduction to Apocalyptic Literature (FOTL; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984); idem, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994).
See Michael D. Coogan and Mark S. Smith, Stories from Ancient Canaan, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012) to read the tale in English translation.
Peter Schäfer, Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish God Concepts in Antiquity, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). For this distinction of Christologies, see Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014).
See inter alia Andrei Orlov, Supernal Serpent: Mysteries of Leviathan in Judaism and Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).
Great stuff, I would once again just like to push back against what I feel is a somewhat simplistic reduction of Paul to Enoch, I think there are considerable nuances to Paul's Christology (and, particularly, even Christ's role and status in the eschaton) that resist such facile assimilation). I understand how natural and tempting it is to fit an ancient writer's theological language to a single preexistent parallel or category, but I think in the case of Paul there was genuine innovation in how he reread biblical texts in light of his experiences, just as there was obviously continuity of language with a myriad of 2TJ figures.
I actually don't even think Schafer's thesis is incompatible with seeing Christ as sharing the personal identity of Yhwh/God, even as the parallels he presents illuminate how Paul (and other Xtian writers) may have conceived of the relationship between God and Christ (though I'm not sure how I feel about the way he seems to present ancient Jews as having literally believed in a commonly identified second god – it seems more so to me different characters and figures presented as intermediaries).