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| 13 2 Myths of Creation According to the ancient rabbis, at twilight on the sixth day of creation God created the first pair of tongs. This detail appears in the tractate Avot of the Mishnah, known as the Sayings of the Fathers.1 It is one of a list of ten things created at twilight on the sixth day of creation, a liminal time in prehistory. The rabbis’ reasoning is as follows: A blacksmith needs a pair of tongs to grasp the iron to make another pair of tongs, and so on; therefore, the first pair must have been created by God himself.2 This statement is one detail among many in a rich tradition of myths of creation and precreation in rabbinic Judaism. The most famous of these is the idea that the Torah existed before creation. This chapter examines the relationship of this myth to alternatives, in which entities other than the Torah, especially the Temple, God’s earthly sanctuary, were created before the world. Myth in Judaism? For generations scholars have recognized that ancient Judaism is rich in sacred stories reflecting the culture’s worldview, a category known to historians of religion as myth.3 But what does it mean to say that there is myth in Judaism? Historians of Midrash, the classical Jewish literature of biblical exegesis, and of Jewish mysticism have identified elements of myth in the literatures they study and have examined this question and its history.4 Yehudah Liebes, following a pattern set by Gershom Scholem, the founder of the modern study of Jewish mysticism, defines myth as “a sacred story about the deity” and sees the history of Jewish thought from the rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity to the medieval Kabbalah as one in which conflicts between God and external forces are integrated increasingly into conceptions of God’s inner life. For Michael Fishbane, however, the proliferation of mythological patterns in Midrash represents “the reverse process of domesticating original nature myths in the rabbinic framework.”5 14 | Myths of Creation In these and earlier studies, the mythological element in Jewish lore is usually identified with creation. Fishbane, for example, argues that the Midrash allows the emergence of myths of God’s struggle with the forces of chaos, represented by primordial monsters like the Leviathan as well as the personified sea.6 In his study, Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, who shows how early medieval midrashic texts tend to express myths more directly than their late antique antecedents, takes an Eliadian view of myth. To him, myth “tells of the paradigmatic acts of the gods (God) or the ancestors.”7 Definitions of myth often expand the category to sacred stores that do not necessarily focus on origins. Most descriptions of myth also emphasize their use in the various contexts of performance, ritual, and social structure. Moreover, myths not only express the tellers’ worldviews but also can reveal deeper structures of thought (mentalit é) that underlie a culture’s explicit stories and theories about the world in which it lives. Chapters 2 and 3 in this book focus on such a relationship among the making of myth, exegesis, and worldview in Judaism in late antiquity . We begin with a central myth in ancient Judaism and its alternatives. The Blueprint for the World One of the best-known myths of rabbinic Judaism is the idea that the Torah was created before the universe and was used as the blueprint for the world. There are alternatives to that myth, however, that can be found in Midrash and synagogue poetry. One of the principal alternatives, of equal antiquity and importance, is the idea that not only was the Torah created before the world but the Temple and the ritual system were as well. One significant idea emerging from that myth is that God implanted signs in the world to be read for the purpose of Temple worship and ritual observance. The myth that the Torah was the blueprint for the world has its origins in ancient interpretations of chapter 8 of the book of Proverbs, in which Wisdom is personified as a woman, calling out to all men to abide with her and learn from her. At one point she proclaims that she was with God at the beginning of creation: The Lord created me at the beginning of His course, The first of His works of old. In the distant past I was fashioned, At the beginning, at the origin of earth. (Prov. 8:22–23) Later on she...

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