Based on this finding, the book concludes that the two beasts represent the imperial power and the imperial cult, as most commentators believe.
In congruence with the criteria of the three hierarchical levels in Dumezil's system, the dragon concerns the ultimate sovereignty in a supernatural sphere, while the sea beast and land beast are found, respectively, as a warlike figure in a war context and as a figure relating to the economic theme. The core of the book, however, seeks to demonstrate that the relationship of the two beasts and the dragon fits well with the tripartite hierarchy that Georges Dumezil has discovered as one of the dominant structures of relationships in Indo-European mythological traditions. The early sections of the book provide a review of previous scholarship, the influence of Daniel 7 in understanding Revelation 13, and the Leviathan-Behemoth motif in several apocalyptic writings. This book aims to identify the beast from the sea and the beast from the land in Revelation 13 by studying their unique link together with the dragon in Revelation 12: the land beast is subordinate to the sea beast, which in turn is subordinate to the dragon. William Whitney, Gunkel's Creation and Chaos will appeal to serious students and scholars in the area of biblical studies. Including illuminating introductory pieces by eminent scholar Peter Machinist and by translator K. Discovering a number of parallels between the biblical creation accounts and a Babylonian creation account, the Enuma Elish, Gunkel argues that ancient Babylonian traditions shaped the Hebrew people's perceptions both of God's creative activity at the beginning of time and of God's re-creative activity at the end of time. Even though available only in German, this work by Gunkel has had a profound influence on modern biblical scholarship. The contributions are organized into five sections that address various aspects of the issues raised by Gunekl’s theories.įoreword by Peter Machinist Hermann Gunkel's groundbreaking Schöpfung und Chaos, originally published in German in 1895, is here translated in its entirety into English for the first time. Creation and Chaos attempts to address some of these issues. On the other hand, one is not entitled to insist that there was no cultural conversation among peoples who spent the better part of several millennia trading with, fighting, and conquering one another. The problem with Gunkel’s theory is that it did not simply identify common elements in the mythologies of the ancient Near East but imposed upon them a structure dictating the relationships between the elements, a structure that was based on inadequate knowledge and a forced interpretation of his sources. In other words, in this theory, one imagines God in Genesis 1 as first having battled Rahab, Leviathan, and Yam (the forces of Chaos) in a grand battle, and only then beginning to create. Gunkel’s thesis, inspired by materials supplied to him by the Assyriologist Heinrich Zimmern, was to take the Chaoskampf motif of Revelation as an event that would not only occur at the end of the world but had already happened at the beginning, before Creation. Hermann Gunkel was a scholar in the generation of the origins of Assyriology, the spectacular discovery by George Smith of fragments of the “Chaldean Genesis,” and the Babel-Bibel debate.
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