that such a coincidence should be accidental; and the question comes
to be whether the Assyriologists or the biblical critics can produce the
most convincing explanation of it. Now Hommel (AOD, 26 ff.) argues that if the word for Man is preceded by two others, these others must have been names of superhuman beings; and he thinks that his interpretation of the Bab. names bears out this anticipation. The first, Aruru, is the creative earth-goddess, and the second, Adapa (= Marduk) is a sort of Logos or Demiurge—a being intermediate between gods and men, who bears elsewhere the title zir amiluti ('seed of mankind') but is not himself a man.[1] And the same thing must, he considers, hold good of Adam and Seth: Adam should be read (
Hebrew characters), a personification of the earth, and Seth is a mysterious semi-divine personality who was regarded even in Jewish tradition as an incarnation of the Messiah. If these somewhat hazardous combinations be sound, then, of course, the inference must be accepted that the Sethite genealogy is dependent on the Bab. original of Berossus, and the Cainite can be nothing but a mutilated version of it. It is just conceivable, however, that the Bab. list is itself a secondary modification of a more primitive genealogy, which passed independently into Heb. tradition.[2] VI. 1-4.—The Origin of the Nĕphîlîm.
This obscure and obviously fragmentary narrative relates how in the infancy of the human race marriage alliances were believed to have been formed by supernatural beings with mortal women (vv.1. 2); and how from these unnatural unions there arose a race of heroes or demi-gods (v.4), who must have figured largely in Hebrew folklore. It is implied, though not expressly said, that the existence of such beings, intermediate between the divine and the human, introduced
- ↑ But against this interpretation of the phrase, see Jen. KIB, vi. 1, 362.
- ↑ Thus, it might be conjectured that the original equivalent of Aruru was not Adam but Ḥavvah, as earth and mother-goddess (see pp. 85 f., 102), and that this name stood at the head of the list. That in the process of eliminating the mythological element Ḥavvah should in one version become the wife, in another remain the mother, of the first man (Adam or Enoš), is perfectly intelligible; and an amalgamation of these views would account for the duplication of Adam-Enos in 425f. 5. The insertion of a link (Seth-Adapa) between the divine ancestress and the first man is a difficulty; but it might be due to a survival of the old Semitic conception of mother and son as associated deities (Rob. Sm. KM2, 298 ff.). It is obvious that no great importance can be attached to such guesses, which necessarily carry us back far beyond the range of authentic tradition.
