Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton: A Religio-Historical Study of Genesis 1 and Revelation 12

THE BIBLICAL RESOURCE SERIES

General Editors

ASTRID B. BECK

DAVID NOEL FREEDMAN

Editorial Board

HAROLD W. ATTRIDGE, History and Literature of Early Christianity

JOHN HUEHNERGARD, Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Literatures

PETER MACHINIST, Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Literatures

SHALOM M. PAUL, Hebrew Bible

JOHN P. MEIER, New Testament

STANLEY E. PORTER, New Testament Language and Literature

JAMES C. VANDERKAM, History and Literature of Early Judaism

ADELA YARBRO COLLINS, New Testament

THE BIBLICAL RESOURCE SERIES

Published Volumes

Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography, Second Edition

John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination, Second Edition

John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora, Second Edition

Frank Moore Cross Jr. and David Noel Freedman, Studies in Ancient Yahwistic Poetry

Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions

S. R. Driver, A Treatise on the Use of the Tenses in Hebrew and Some Other Syntactical Questions

Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Semitic Background of the New Testament

Volume I: Essays on the Semitic Background of the New Testament

Volume II: A Wandering Aramean: Collected Aramaic Essays

Joseph A. Fitzmyer, To Advance the Gospel, Second Edition

Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript and Tradition and Transmission in Early Christianity

Hermann Gunkel, Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton: A Religio-Historical Study of Genesis 1 and Revelation 12

Richard B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11, Second Edition

Colin J. Hemer, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia in Their Local Setting

Sigmund Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship

Sigmund Mowinckel, He That Cometh: The Messiah Concept in the Old Testament and Later Judaism

Anthony J. Saldarini, Pharisees, Scribes, and Sadducees in Palestinian Society

Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel, Second Edition

Samuel Terrien, Till the Heart Sings: A Biblical Theology of Manhood and Womanhood

ἰδοὺ ποιῶ τὰ ἔσχατα ὡς τὰ πρῶτα

[idou poiō ta eschata hōs ta prōta

(Behold, I make the last things like the first things.)]

EPISTLE OF BARNABAS 6:13

Originally published in German as Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit:

Eine religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung über Gen. 1 und Ap. Jon 12;

© Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, Germany, 1895 (1921).

English translation © 2006 K. William Whitney Jr.

All rights reserved

Published 2006 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

Printed in the United States of America

11 10 09 08 07 067 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gunkel, Hermann, 1862-1932.

[Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit. English]

Creation and chaos in the primeval era and the eschaton: a religio-historical study of Genesis 1 and Revelation 12 / Hermann Gunkel, with contributions by Heinrich Zimmern; translated by K. William Whitney, Jr.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-10: 0-8028-2804-3 / ISBN-13: 978-0-8028-2804-0

1. Bible. O.T. Genesis I — Criticism, interpretation, etc. 2. Bible. N.T. Revelation XII — Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Zimmern, Heinrich, 1862-1931. II. Title.

BS1235.52.G8613   2006

222′.1106 — dc22

2006010896

www.eerdmans.com

Albert Eichhorn

in friendship and gratitude

by the author

Contents

Foreword, by Peter Machinist

Translator’s Preface

Transliteration

Introduction

GENESIS 1: CREATION IN THE PRIMORDIAL AGE

1. Literature (Concerning the Babylonian Origin of Genesis 1)

2. Genesis 1 Is Not a Free Construction of the Author

The ancient features transmitted in Genesis 1 (chaos; the divine spirit; darkness; origin of plants; stars; the creation of humanity; good,; the commandment concerning food; the Sabbath) show that Genesis 1 originates from ancient traditions. Some features (chaos, stars) point to the Babylonian origin of the tradition

3. The Babylonian Cosmogony

Greek descriptions by Damascius; and Berossus. The cuneiform account, paraphrased and elucidated in its important features; the ambiguity of the myth in its Babylonian form; variants

4. Allusions to the Myth of the Struggle of Marduk against Tiʾāmat in the Old Testament, apart from Genesis 1

I. The dragon traditions

— Rahab: Isa 51:6f.; Ps 89:10-14; Job 26:12f.; Job 9:13; Ps 87:4; Isa 30:7; Ps 40:5

— Leviathan: Ps 74:12-19; Isa 27:1; Job 40:25–41:26; Ps 104:25f.; Job 3:8

— Behemoth: Job 40:19-24; 1 Enoch 60:7-9; 4 Ezra 6:49-52; Isa 30:6; Ps 68:31

— The Dragon in the Sea: Job 7:12; Ps 44:20; Ezek 29:3-6a; 32:2-7; Jer 51:34, 36, 42; Pss. Sol. 2:28b-34

— The Serpent: Amos 9:2f.

(The examination continues on 200ff.)

Compilation of the mythological materials discovered; variants; application

II. The traditions of a primeval sea

— The conquest of the sea in primeval times : Ps 104:5-9; Job 38:8-11; Prov 8:22-31; Jer 5:22b; 31:5; Pss 33:6; 65:7f.; Sir 43:(25)23; Prayer of Manasseh 2-4; Isa 50:2b, 3

— Applied to the end time or in reminiscences: Psalm 46; Isa 17:12-14; Hab 3:8; Nah 1:4; Ps 18:16-18; Ps 93:3f; Ps 77:17; Ps 106:9; Isa 59:15-20

— Compilation

III. Comparison of the Old Testament dragon- and primeval sea-traditions with the Babylonian Ti ʾ āmat traditions

5. The Babylonian Origin of the Creation Account of Genesis 1, Its Character and the Time of Its Introduction into Israel

I. Babylonian origin of Genesis 1

II. Character of the recension of Genesis 1

III. Time and manner of the adoption of the myth

— The material which was adopted during and after the exile, [into Zechariah, into Ezekiel, Lilith, Shedim, Hêlal ben Shahar, etc.], the character of Genesis 1 itself; and the allusions in Deutero-Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah. This all teaches that the myth was not adopted during the exile.

— The assignation to prophetic times is just as impossible for the creation account as for the sagas of Paradise, Noah, Nimrod, and the Tower of Babel.

— The creation myth entered into Canaan in ancient times; Babylonian influence at that time; antiquity of creation faith in Israel; positive evidence

— Conclusion: Account of the migration of the Babylonian creation myth into Israel

REVELATION 12: CREATION IN THE END TIME

1. Revelation 12 Is Not of Christian Origin.

— The Christ of the chapter does not refer to Jesus. The difficulty of this exegesis; the usual particulars

— The woman cannot be understood in a Christian manner. The person of the woman; her flight

— The aim of the chapter cannot be understood by recourse to Christian composition. Has a description of something bygone made its way into an apocalyptic setting?; application of the results to Revelation 12

— The Christian pieces of the chapter

— Arguments from the arrangement of Revelation

— Rebuttal of the objections against a Jewish interpretation of the chapter.

— The parallel tradition of y. Ber. 5, 1

— Hebraic composition of the chapter

— Results

2. The Interpretation of Revelation 12 according to Contemporaneous Exegesis

— Contemporaneous exegesis of Revelation: methodology; contemporary exegesis comprises, in reality, two different exegetical methods; traditio-historical exegesis

— Some contemporary exegeses: classification; the five classes: (1) the two witnesses, the hellhole, Ἀπολλύων (apollyōn), the white stone, the tail of the serpent; (2) the cavalry, the grasshoppers, the frogs; (3) the martyrs, the refuge, the great multitude; the ἄνομος (anomos) and the κατέχων (katechōn); (4) the four riders, the seventh vision; (5) the sixth seal, etc.; appendix: concerning chapters 13 and 17

3. Revelation Is Not of Jewish Origin.

— Negative evidence: the exegesis of the chapter from the Jewish standpoint is prudent.

•The method of this exegesis, the linkage method

•Examples of this exegesis of Chapter 12 — the travail, the casting down of the stars, the birth and flight of the Christ, the battle with the dragon, the flight of the woman

•The organizing principles

•The fantastic narratives of the apocalyptists

•Results

— Positive evidence: the chapter is the codification of a tradition.

•Evidence from the nature of the chapter; method of perceiving a tradition; instances where the continuity of Chapter 12 is broken; insubstantial and substantial themes in juxtaposition; Armageddon; three and a half

— Positive evidence, continuation: this tradition is of extra-Judaic descent.

•The original form of this tradition is of a mythological nature.

•The Jewish pieces of the chapter are interpretive appendages.

4. Babylonian Material in Later Judaism

— Revelation 12 is not of Greek descent.

— The materials in Revelation 12 which are related to materials elsewhere in Revelation, as well as in Enoch, Daniel, and Zechariah, stem from extra-Judaic, oriental religion.

— Babylonian materials in Judaism

•The seven spirits; the 24 presbyters; the 12 angels of the zodiac, the seven levels of hell

•Esther = Ishtar

•Leviathan and Behemoth; the dream of Mordecai in the Add Esth 1:4-10; the dragon of Babylon

•Daniel 7; its interpretation; its objective; the vision is an allegorizing tradition; this tradition is the chaos myth; reconstruction of the tradition; the relationship of the author to the tradition

— Revelation 13 and 17.

•Relationship of the chapters to each other and to Chapter 12

•The chapters illustrate different recensions of the same tradition.

•Relationship of Chapter 13 to Chapter 12

•Reconstruction of This Tradition

°This tradition has not been radically affected by contemporary history.

°Separation of the tradition and contemporary materials in Chapter 17

°Separation of the tradition and contemporary materials in Chapter 13

°The lineage of the tradition

Not with Christianity or Judaism

Kinship with Daniel 7

And with Babylonian/Old Testament chaos tradition, indicating Babylonian origin

°The otherwise undocumented themes of the tradition

°The individuality of the chapters

The transference of the primal myth to the eschaton

The Jewish interpretation of chaos as Rome

The mystery of the beast of Chapter 17 and of the number 666

5. The Tradition of Revelation 12 Is of Babylonian Origin.

— Evidence from the relationship with Revelation 13 and 17; with Daniel 7; and with the Babylonian/Old Testament chaos tradition

— The otherwise undocumented themes

— The material of Revelation 12 as a Babylonian myth

— Interpretation of the myth by Judaism and by Christianity

— Conclusion: Review

APPENDICES

I. The Babylonian Creation Epic

II. The Second Babylonian Recension of the Ti ʾ āmat-Marduk Battle

III. The Second Babylonian Recension of the Creation

IV. The Adapa Myth

V. The Flood

Notes

Bibliography

Foreword

The appearance of this English translation of Hermann Gunkel’s Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit is an event in biblical studies. By common acknowledgment Gunkel’s volume is one of the great classics of the modern critical study of the Bible, both Old Testament and New. First published in its German original in 1895, it was reprinted unchanged in 1921, yet unlike the rest of Gunkel’s major works — and some minor as well — it was never translated into a foreign language. The rest all appeared in English and, in a few cases, in other languages over the course of the twentieth century,¹ but up to now there has been only a rather abridged rendering of the first part, dealing with Genesis 1 and its proposed Babylonian antecedent, in an anthology.²

William Whitney thus deserves our sincere thanks for his devoted labors in presenting Gunkel’s classic, finally, in its full form. The task was a challenging one, and Whitney has succeeded not only in producing a careful translation but also in clarifying the many references to primary and secondary literature that Gunkel, in the convention of his time and place, cites in highly abbreviated fashion, without supplying a key to their complete form. Since a number of these references are to studies that are rarely noticed in contemporary discussions, Whitney’s success in tracking down virtually all of them and providing for them a full bibliography is especially welcome, as is his effort to enlarge the rather parsimonious index in the original German volume so as to embrace all biblical and other texts to which Gunkel refers, all scholars mentioned, and the principal topics discussed. When these additions are joined to Whitney’s long introduction, laying out the main arguments and contributions of Gunkel’s volume, together with something of its background, it is plain that the present edition will be of value not simply to readers who cannot understand the original German, but even to those who can.

Creation and Chaos, as Whitney makes plain, is about the history of a particular mythological motif in some of the literatures of the ancient Near East, namely, the cosmic conflict between the forces, or, more precisely, the deities, of chaos and order. Taking as his central focus the treatment of this motif in the Old and New Testaments, preeminently in Genesis 1 and Revelation (Apocalypse) 12, Gunkel proposes that this treatment formed a single biblical tradition. Its matrix he finds in the ancient Babylonian myth of cosmic and human creation, represented most completely in the composition called Enuma Elish, which began to be edited and translated only in the two decades before Gunkel published his book. This myth, Gunkel argues, underlay the treatment of creation in Genesis 1 as well as in other Old Testament texts, whose authors considerably modified it to suit their views of their god, Yahweh, and his control of creation. In turn, the author of Revelation 12 and related chapters not only fastened onto this Old Testament usage and its extension in Second Temple Judaism but also in some way went back to the Babylonian mythic tradition itself in order to describe the final period of history that was to usher in the eschatological age. Central to this period, as Revelation lays it out, was the revival of the cosmic forces or monsters of chaos/evil, after their defeat in the primeval drama of creation, and then their renewed battle with the God of order/good, who this time brought upon them a final, irrevocable destruction, so allowing his eschatological kingdom to reign in perpetuity in the universe.

Gunkel’s view of this combat tradition — or what he labels the chaos tradition — in the Bible and Babylonia was not entirely new. General interest in the Babylonian, and, more broadly, the Mesopotamian, background to biblical culture had been given a decisive boost in 1872-75, thus twenty years before Creation and Chaos was published, by George Smith’s discovery and publication of a Babylonian account of the primeval flood, whose remarkable similarities to the biblical account in Genesis 6–8 Smith then discussed in a volume on the subject.³ By the 1880s, when Gunkel became a university student, Assyriology was a going concern in the universities and academies of Europe and North America, though Gunkel himself did not pursue it at first, being focused on the New Testament for his doctorate at Göttingen, which entailed, of course, work in the Old Testament as well. But Gunkel’s association at Göttingen with the history of religions school — see William Whitney’s introduction to the present volume for an extensive discussion — sensitized him to the wider field of ancient religions and their impact on the biblical communities. And he made good on that wider vision when he left Göttingen in 1889, after the completion of his degree, to teach at the University of Halle, shifting in the process his focus from New to Old Testament. At Halle, Gunkel met as a faculty colleague the Assyriologist Heinrich Zimmern, one of the principal students of arguably the leading Assyriologist of the day, Friedrich Delitzsch. Zimmern, like virtually every Assyriologist of the period, was well acquainted with the Bible and biblical studies and particularly interested in its connections to Mesopotamia. He not only brought Gunkel into his field but also assisted him with the Babylonian portion of Creation and Chaos, and translated for inclusion in that volume Enuma Elish and other Mesopotamian mythic texts.⁴

Gunkel, it should be said, was not the only scholar of the period who was interested in the relevance of Enuma Elish to the Bible. W. G. Lambert⁵ has drawn attention to two others who anticipated some of Gunkel’s work, T. K. Cheyne and G. A. Barton. The latter is mentioned in Creation and Chaos, but his article is not fully engaged though at one point it is criticized for mixing significant insights … with outlandish ideas.⁶ Yet as J. Day has observed,⁷ Gunkel probably started working on this combat tradition independently of Barton — Barton’s article on the subject being published only in 1893, just a year before Gunkel concluded his Creation and Chaos (his preface to it is dated October 1894). More importantly, when one compares Creation and Chaos with Cheyne’s and Barton’s publications, it is easy to see that, in the depth, range, and subtlety of his examination, Gunkel goes well beyond them.⁸

The value of Creation and Chaos, indeed, is not only its treatment of the mythic combat motif. It is also that, with the combat motif as a case study, Gunkel was able to demonstrate the importance of myth as a fundamental category in the religions of the ancient Near East, including that of biblical Israel. More particularly, he showed that apocalyptic thought, whose core is the final battle of order and chaos ushering in the eschatological kingdom, was not a crazy, aberrant phenomenon in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity. It was, rather, something with deep roots in ancient Near Eastern religions, more particularly in what Gunkel perceived as the cosmogonic conception basic to them; and it attempted, then, to resolve the theological challenges posed by this cosmogony.

Creation and Chaos is also significant as an exercise in comparative literary analysis: to construct the history of a particular literary theme or motif, as expressed in a particular narrative form, across several related cultures in time and space. This approach Gunkel called tradition history — he used the German term Überlieferungsgeschichte — and anticipated thereby, as Douglas Knight has noted,⁹ the more fully developed usage of the term, for which he is largely responsible, in biblical studies. The heart of Gunkel’s approach in Creation and Chaos is exegesis: coaxing out of a group of texts the language and motifs that connect them. The two parts of the volume are arranged in the same way, starting from a base text, Genesis 1 in the first part and Revelation 12 in the second, and seeking to understand by close reading what each says, that is, what its motifs mean. Gunkel demonstrates that in each text the motifs often appear as fragments, not fully expounded nor coherently integrated, and thus cannot really be understood within the contexts of these two texts alone. The motifs, and the texts themselves, must rather be linked up with related motifs elsewhere in the Old and the New Testaments. But even these Testaments, Gunkel argues, do not supply the full context for understanding the motifs; and so we are forced outside, to other Jewish and Christian texts, but ultimately behind them all to another culture, Mesopotamia, and to what Gunkel regards as the Mesopotamian base text for creation, Enuma Elish, where the motifs not only occur but occur in the full and connected context that he has been seeking. In the course of this exegetical sleuthing, it should be noted, Gunkel pays attention not only to the particularities of language and literary form in which the motifs are formulated; he also asks the question — though extensive examination would come only later in such publications as his commentary on Genesis — whether and when these formulations, in their compositional history, were in poetry or prose, in oral or written mode. The important point in all of this is clear: for Gunkel, internal analysis of an ancient text must be balanced by external comparison with analogues elsewhere in its environment. Such an approach is necessary because Gunkel believed, in concert with many of his contemporaries, that to understand the meaning of a text, its language and motifs, is to understand first where they came from. It is not enough, indeed it is misleading, to focus simply on the individual text alone, as though it were a completely independent, free creation of its author. The text must rather be seen as one link in a complex chain of tradition; and interpretation, therefore, must try to discover how its author worked within the tradition, what conditions in his community he was responding to, and why he adapted the tradition as he did in order to produce the text that he did.

Creation and Chaos was Gunkel’s first substantial publication in Old Testament studies, and while it was greeted favorably, as by the noted ancient historian Eduard Meyer,¹⁰ that reaction was not universal. A particularly outspoken critic was Julius Wellhausen, one of the greatest of biblicists, who wrote initially to a colleague: ‘Schöpfung und Chaos’ is a telling title for the writing of its newcomer; chaos, however, prevails.¹¹ In a later, published essay on apocalyptic literature, Wellhausen offered a more extended evaluation, conceding, against his first impression, that Creation and Chaos did contain good observations and that Babylonian influence was indeed to be recognized in biblical apocalyptic. Nevertheless, he went on, Gunkel had exaggerated the role of this influence in understanding what the biblical texts mean; even more, Gunkel had placed much too much emphasis on the origins and prehistory of a text as crucial to its understanding. The last point was, of course, a central one, but in making it Wellhausen does not appear entirely fair to the close analysis of the biblical texts and their meanings that Gunkel in fact provides. Gunkel himself was clearly wounded by the critique, and replied immediately in a sharply worded essay.¹² The whole controversy, as Werner Klatt has seen,¹³ played into a growing alienation that Gunkel, together with some others of his generation, felt from the methods and conceptions of Wellhausen and his associates. Whether this controversy, or alienation, had a professional impact on Gunkel is difficult to assess, but the fact is that his academic career had more than its share of disappointments. It was, for example, not until 1907, when he was in his mid-forties — much later than would have been the case for a rising star in the German system of his day — that he finally achieved a full professorship, and then in Giessen, not one of the major German universities.¹⁴

Wellhausen probably overreached in his critique of Creation and Chaos, but in the hindsight now of more than a century since its publication, it is clear that Gunkel’s volume is not without its problems. Most prominent, perhaps, is its too exclusive focus on Mesopotamia, and the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, as the matrix of the biblical texts of cosmogony and apocalyptic. Discoveries made after the appearance of Creation and Chaos, which Gunkel could probably not have anticipated, demonstrate that the myth of cosmic combat had, in various forms, quite a wide distribution throughout the ancient Near East. Attestations from the Canaanite, or more precisely, West Semitic world have attracted particular attention, given the fact that it was in this world that Israel and the Bible emerged. The main evidence is the Baʿal and Anat cycle of texts excavated from the city of Ugarit in the 1930s and a more recent publication (1993) of a cuneiform letter from the city of Mari — both texts dating from the second millennium B.C.E., with the Mari earlier than the Ugaritic.¹⁵ As William Whitney notes in his introduction to the present translation, this evidence has suggested to a number of scholars in the century after Creation and Chaos — and the work here has been abundant in quantity and often elaborate in execution¹⁶ — that the West Semitic or Canaanite world was the immediate source for the biblical authors. Indeed, as Whitney adds, this West Semitic world has even been proposed as the origin of the combat motif in Mesopotamia, although that issue is hardly settled.

Creation and Chaos, thus, has not remained a definitive statement of the problem it has studied. But this is only to be expected in a dynamic field like the study of the Bible and the broader ancient Near East. The point is that the importance the combat myth has assumed in this field is largely due to the impetus and commanding analysis offered by Gunkel’s volume. And if certain particulars now require revision, still fundamental and challenging are the questions Gunkel asked of his texts, and the method he formulated for answering them, with its rigorous and integrated balance between close internal analysis of the primary biblical sources and comparative assessment of analogues to them. William Whitney’s translation of Creation and Chaos now allows a new audience to appreciate and appropriate Gunkel’s great achievement.

PETER MACHINIST

Translator’s Preface

I first looked at Hermann Gunkel’s work Schöpfung und Chaos shortly after I began research on my doctoral dissertation at Harvard¹ in 1988. I had been asked to teach a course at Harvard Divinity School on the Concept of God in the Hebrew Bible. Given that topic, I thought it logical to begin with a view of God as Creator. Both Professor Paul D. Hanson and Professor Frank Moore Cross Jr. suggested that I take the time to look at Gunkel’s work on the creation myth. So I checked Schöpfung und Chaos out of the library, took out my trusty Cassell’s German-English Dictionary, and began to plow my way through Gunkel’s work. It was a formidable task, but I did succeed in getting almost 125 pages of the work translated so that my students could have relatively easy access to Gunkel’s thoughts, which I considered quite relevant, even if slightly out of date.

Out of date? Gunkel sought to show that the Hebrew creation account was derived from the one found in the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish. At the time that Gunkel wrote Schöpfung und Chaos (the early 1890s) this was certainly a powerful new idea. Since then, however, discoveries in the Canaanite area have shown that the Hebrew creation account probably arose from that milieu. Gunkel’s argument (from slightly later in his career) that Canaanite myths were also derived from Babylonian sources now appears to be unlikely. Thorkild Jacobsen has argued, quite convincingly, that the West Semitic/ Canaanite (i.e., from the Mediterranean eastern coastal areas) myths of the divine creative battle, rather, had a profound influence on the shape of the East Semitic (i.e., Mesopotamian/Babylonian) myth concerning the divine battle at the beginning of creation and that the process was not the other way around (i.e., east to west), as Gunkel presumed.²

Despite this, however, the methodology Gunkel devised and used in this work has had a profound and lasting significance on biblical scholarship in the time since Schöpfung und Chaos appeared. One thing you will often hear when Gunkel’s name is mentioned in Hebrew Bible scholarly circles is the phrase Old Testament form criticism. While Gunkel was a very important instigator of this way of examining Hebrew biblical texts (he spoke of it as Gattungsgeschichte),³ that is not the primary significance of Schöpfung und Chaos. Rather, in this work we witness the first major movement away from the literary-critical approaches of the nineteenth century, approaches which were exemplified by the works of Julius Wellhausen and which are usually described under the designation source criticism.

It is very important to understand that source criticism, as practiced by Wellhausen and those who followed him, was more than anything else a literary-critical form of analysis. The sources Wellhausen sought out were viewed as written documents, written documents which, over history, were combined together by some sort of editorial activity into the form in which we now find them. Though later in his life Wellhausen would admit that some oral history probably lay behind these documents, the fact that the form in which we now have them is a written one meant that his primary interest was in the written history thereof.

One should not belittle the tremendous accomplishments of Wellhausen and his followers. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, biblical scholarship had, if you will, hit something of a snag. For both Wellhausen and many of those who followed him Israel’s history was a history of Israel alone. It was as if Israel was a solo actor who came out onto an empty stage and developed as a character on that same empty stage, that development being affected only occasionally by the physical presence of a few others who would periodically wander across the stage, maybe say a word or two to the main character, maybe even do something to which the central actor just had to react, but who eventually would disappear from view. It was a very nice fantasy, but as the latter part of the nineteenth century progressed, archaeological discoveries throughout the area of the ancient Near East (including Egypt) made it very clear that it was a false view of historical reality. Even Wellhausen, later in his career, did have to concede this fact.

The land of Palestine, the link between west Asia and Egypt, situated in the middle of those two ancient cultural centers, implicated the people in the vortex of world history, and even the religion was influenced by this vortex, although it was not eliminated thereby, but was successfully lifted up out of it.⁴

But even having conceded this, Wellhausen did not actually incorporate it into his ongoing theological or historical work. He still remained almost totally focused on Israel.

Part of the problem was the complexity of both Assyriology and Egyptology, a complexity which effectively put them beyond the reach of many late-nineteenth-century biblical scholars. Even those who could deal in scholarly terms with the materials being discovered found that their personal intellectual and religious interests made it very difficult to incorporate these other ancient Near Eastern materials into their theological/biblical scholarship.⁵ One scholar of the period, Rudolf Kittel, noted well the frustrating situation within which those who attempted to deal with the biblical materials in light of these new discoveries found themselves. Kittel pointed out

… that it was no longer possible to get by with the previous custom of nobly ignoring the ancient Near East. What was brought to the system by Wellhausen was, namely, that everything was right out in front of the Old Testament itself, and to some degree in Arabian antiquity, … everything, at the very least, which is necessary for the comprehension of Israel, which corresponds totally to the tradition into which I was raised.⁶

It was onto this scene that Hermann Gunkel gazed as he began to think about writing a commentary on the book of Genesis.

First a bit of background about Hermann Gunkel.⁷ He was born May 23, 1862, at Springe (near Hannover) in Germany. He was the first son of Karl Wilhelm August Philipp Gunkel (1829-97), who dwelt there as the pastor of a local parish. His paternal grandfather was Johann August Kunkel (born ca. 1760), who had been an administrative official in the electoral district of Mainz. Originally a Roman Catholic, Kunkel had converted to evangelical Protestantism, an event which significantly changed his life since it cost him his job. On becoming a businessman in Heiligen-Stadt, Kunkel changed his name to Gunkel. His son, Johann Friedrich Gunkel, at first tutored in the Göttingen area, but later he became a pastor, first at Lutterberg and then at Landolfshausen, both near Göttingen.⁸

As a young man Hermann Gunkel attended the Johanneum in Lüneburg. Even at this early stage Gunkel exhibited a theological interest. Despite the weak light of his early morning Hebrew class (which eventually damaged his eyesight), he nevertheless pursued his study of the language resolutely. He graduated from the Johanneum on March 14, 1881. Shortly thereafter he went to the University of Göttingen. Very quickly he attained a high standing in the study of theology. In the course of his studies he worked with, among others, Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) and Bernhard Stade (1848-1906). He continued his theological studies from the spring of 1885 to the fall of 1888 in Lüneburg, Göttingen, and Leipzig, supporting himself by working as a tutor.

On October 16, 1888, Gunkel received his Licentiate in Theology from the University of Göttingen. It was granted on the basis of an outstanding dissertation which is described in the university archives as testifying to … learned dexterity, exegetical skill, and impressive discernment.⁹ After a trial lecture on the eschatology of Jewish apocalypses, Gunkel was allowed to teach in the area of biblical theology and exegesis for a period of two years. At this point in his career Gunkel was fairly inconspicuous in the scholarly field. It took the agitation of his father, whose financial means were so decimated that he could offer no monetary support either to Hermann or to Hermann’s younger brother Karl, … it fell to his father’s agitation with the national Ministry of Culture to raise even the possibility that Hermann Gunkel might find longer-term employment in the academic sphere. After a protracted process, these parental inquiries paid off, as on October 19, 1888, Gunkel was offered a position on the theological faculty at Göttingen. Just before the new year he was given a modest but sufficient stipend for a two-year appointment beginning on April 1, 1889, with the possibility of an extension remaining dependent on his performance.¹⁰

During his days as a student, Gunkel had acquired a profoundly historical orientation. Historical methodology at that time was heavily influenced by the thought of Albrecht Ritschl. Ritschl had focused on the historical revelation of Jesus Christ as that which freed theology from philosophical development and which made it possible to perceive ongoing revelation within the text of the Bible.¹¹ For Ritschl this ongoing revelation required the concerted application of historical method to the text. Theology, acquired in this way, became for Ritschl the very basis for any authentic ecclesiastical community life.

This Ritschlian view did have its opponents. Ritschl attempted to construct a systematic theology based on the testimony of the New Testament. In the process, he tended to overlook things which did not easily conform to the systematization he was constructing. Later in his career Gunkel noted the problems he had had with the Ritschlian approach.¹²

All those who have sat at the feet of Ritschl will recall the violence with which the old theologian dealt with the New Testament texts. It is, therefore, no accident, then, that the younger school has sincerely shown itself in opposition to this type of exegesis.

This younger school to which Gunkel alludes was known colloquially among theological students at Göttingen as the little faculty. It included, among others, Albert Eichhorn (1856-1926), Wilhelm Wrede (1859-1906), Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932), Wilhelm Bousset (1865-1920), Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), Wilhelm Heitmüller (1869-1926), and, to some degree, Johannes Weiss (1863-1914). Clearly it was an impressive assemblage of minds.¹³

Under the strong influence of Adolf von Harnack and in critical dialogue with the theological thinking of Ritschl, Gunkel and his scholarly colleagues began to develop a religio-historical approach to the study of biblical religion. This religion could, to their way of thinking, be understood only in light of its historical development.¹⁴ Writing later, Gunkel noted the ultimate goal which he and his colleagues pursued. This then was our truest and ultimate endeavor: to comprehend the religion itself in all its depth and breadth.¹⁵ Since this was an historical endeavor, an examination of the developmental history of the biblical religion was very necessary for Gunkel. He was not concerned with developing a theological or an ecclesiastical theory. What interested him was, rather, the history which lay behind the religion as it was expressed in the biblical text, or the manner in which various ancient traditions came together and interacted to form the present tradition as it was embodied in the biblical text. For Gunkel, though, that present tradition was a given. It was a given, however, only insofar as it embodied the end product of a formative process, a traditioning process. It was the developmental history of that process which Gunkel sought to uncover, and to understand. Gunkel was primarily concerned with tradition history.

Of crucial importance to this shifting of focus from sources to traditions was the realization that the biblical text was itself the product not simply of written composition, but that even that written composition was the product of a long process of oral composition. In the larger sphere of scholarship the work of Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and his brother Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) perhaps provided a theoretical stimulus for Gunkel’s scholarly belief in the importance of oral tradition for understanding the biblical accounts. The Grimms devoted themselves to the study of the folklore of the Germanic peoples. In 1812 and 1814 they had published the product of their early work in Kinder- und Hausmärchen, a two-volume collection of Germanic folktales for children.¹⁶ In 1816 and in 1818 they followed with another two-volume work entitled Deutsche Sagen.¹⁷ This was more concerned with folktales in general and the various forms in which they appeared in German culture. Methodologically this was a very important work. Largely in response to these early works, in 1829-30 they became professors at Göttingen.¹⁸

Though the Grimms were no longer physically on the scene at Göttingen when Gunkel was there,¹⁹ it seems likely that their work did have an effect on the way in which the study of narrative was pursued at that institution. Most important was their recognition of the crucial importance of orality for the understanding of narrative tradition. Whether Gunkel was directly affected by them or not, his focus on orally transmitted traditions within the biblical materials is at the very least indicative of a shift in scholarly interest from textually transmitted biblical materials (i.e. sources) to orally transmitted biblical materials (i.e. traditions). In point of fact, he was a leading and groundbreaking proponent of such a shift.

Because of this, Gunkel was greatly concerned with the here and now of those who transmitted the tradition at each discernible stage along the way. In his first work, Die Wirkungen des heiligen Geistes, nach der populären Anschauung der apostolischen Zeit und nach der Lehre des Apostels Paulus: Eine biblisch-theologische Studie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1888), among other things he attempted to explicate, as closely as possible, exactly what the meaning and significance of the Holy Spirit was to Paul when the apostle spoke of it.

It must first be clear exactly what Paul meant by Holy Spirit. Having worked this out, however, it was certainly not as clear whether the Pauline concept was identical to that of the nineteenth-century theologians. The Pauline comments had to be placed within the intellectual thought-world which was the environment of the apostle. In other words, without an awareness of the thought-world of the primal Christian community, Paul remains unidimensional!²⁰

In Wirkungen Gunkel began to work out the methodology by which he could discern the thought-world within which a biblical tradition arose and the ongoing thought-worlds within which it developed. It was in his next major work, Schöpfung und Chaos, that he actually put that methodology to the test, dealing in a very careful way with the manner in which the biblical traditions relating to creation arose, developed, and shifted in temporal focus (from primal to eschatological time) over the historical life of the Hebrew people, early Judaism, and early Christianity. Crucial to this study was the understanding that within an orally developed tradition vestiges of the developmental history of that tradition may be discerned and can allow the historian to understand something of the history of the communal consciousness out of which that tradition arose and within which that tradition developed. It is that understanding toward which the tradition historian strives.

Now, having placed Gunkel’s work in some sort of historical and intellectual context, let us ask what exactly he does in Schöpfung und Chaos. The work is divided into two major units. The first (pp. 1-111 in our translation) deals with the manifestation of the creation myth in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Starting with the Priestly creation account of Genesis 1, Gunkel carefully traces out the similarities of that account to the Babylonian creation account found in Enuma Elish. Though there are few direct connections, he does discern some, and from them he concludes that the tradition itself could not have arisen in Israel.²¹

Unlike his scholarly contemporaries, Gunkel does not hesitate in his resolve to discern the origins of the biblical creation account outside of the immediate historical locus of Israel. Despite the pristine and methodical picture given of creation in the Priestly account of Genesis 1, Gunkel finds, even there, traces of a far more tumultuous and violent myth of creation, a myth which, he argues, undergirded ancient Near Eastern culture.²² He also finds numerous other references to this mythic tradition, references of varying lengths and comprehensiveness, elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible and in the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical works connected to it.²³ Since this tradition begins with the idea that the world was once water, Gunkel sought the ultimate source of the tradition in a land the character of which is defined by great rivers.²⁴ He identified this land as Mesopotamia (from Gk. Μεσοποτάμιος [mesopotamios], between [the] rivers), and it was there that he turned to look for a less fragmentary form of the myth than that found in the Bible. The Babylonian Enuma Elish creation account provided him with just such a fuller form of the myth, a form which, he argued, undergirds the primal Hebrew form, which is reflected only fragmentarily within the biblical account. That Babylonian account, which presents the story of a battle between the young warrior-god of Babylon Marduk and the olden goddess²⁵ Tiʾāmat, has come to be described since Gunkel with the word Chaoskampf (chaos battle or chaos struggle).²⁶

Gunkel discerns this mythic motif as present in the background of a large number of texts from the Hebrew Bible. He divides these texts into two large groups: those dealing with the dragon (Die Drachentraditionen, original German text, 29-90; my trans., pp. 21-61); and those dealing with the primal sea (die Traditionen vom Urmeer, original German text, 81-111; my trans., pp. 61-75).

Having noted and carefully examined these two groups of texts, Gunkel raises the question as to when the Babylonian myth made its way into Israel. He rejects the logical assumption that it came into Israel during the period of the Babylonian exile (597-535 B.C.E.), though he does consider it.²⁷ He notes the presence of the myth in Isa 14:12-14 (preexilic),²⁸ and the presence of a distinctively Israelite form of the myth in exilic and early postexilic texts from Zechariah (4:1-6a, 10b-13),²⁹ Deutero-Isaiah, and, with Egyptian motifs, Ezekiel 29 and 32.³⁰ Most significantly, he discerns a clear reference to the myth in the undoubtedly preexilic Jer 4:23-26.³¹

All of this, however, raises the question whether the myth could have made its way into Israel only slightly earlier, i.e., during the period of Assyrian domination (ca. 721-621 B.C.E.).³² Using techniques similar to those employed in relation to the time of Babylonian hegemony, Gunkel also rejects this possibility. Noting the importance of the myth in the prophetic corpus he concludes:³³

The acceptance of the creation myth into our prophetic tradition is explicable only if it had made its way into Israel at a much earlier time, so that its Babylonian origin had already been forgotten over several generations by the time of the prophets. This thesis, demanded by the course of religious history, would be supported by the observation that the other Babylonian myths concerning primordial history had also been received en toto at an earlier time.

In the second part of the work (pp. 115-250 of our translation) Gunkel turns to the examination of Revelation 12. Up to this point he has carefully laid the groundwork for this shift from a primeval mythic focus to an eschatological one. Throughout his examination of the Hebrew Bible and apocryphal and pseudepigraphical texts relating to it in the first part of this work, he has often discerned an eschatological dimension within the texts. At the conclusion of his examination of the dragon traditions he notes:³⁴

Furthermore, one should conclude from Isa 29:1; 30:7; 51:9; Ezekiel 29; 32; Pss 68:31; 74; 87:4; and Psalms of Solomon 2 that before its prophetic-apocalyptic expression, the myth was already being applied eschatologically, i.e. had become a prophecy: YHWH will vanquish the dragon in the future. 1 Enoch 60:24f., 4 Ezra 4:52, and 2 Apoc. Bar. 29:4 have this form of the myth.

Gunkel discerns a similar eschatological shift in his examination of the later manifestations of the traditions dealing with the sea. Just as the myth of the struggle against the dragon is to be interpreted eschatologically, so also are to be understood the applications of the defeat of the sea to the great judgment of the nations in the final days.³⁵ Again he carefully examines passages which exhibit this shift in temporal focus.³⁶

Having noted all these things, Gunkel concludes the first half of his work, the portion in which he treats the Hebrew Bible and its early related Jewish texts, with these words:³⁷

The creation myth had — so it appears — also come to Israel in an eschato-logical form, and had called forth from the prophets and the prophetic schools an impression of the coming judgment. We have, from the latest period, faint clues that it also began to be significant for the tenor of the eschatological final hope. Thereupon a new epoch of Babylonian influences began!

Going on, he states:³⁸

As a result of our exposition of Revelation 12 up to now, we have gained a confirmation of the thesis of Vischer: the chapter is not of Christian origin since it could not be understood from the standpoint of a Christian composition and since the statement found therein about Jesus’ birth and journey to heaven is totally untenable.

Here, as previously, Gunkel perceives the chapter as the literary deposit of a gradually developed oral tradition, the historical background of which he sets out to discern. He describes the crystallization of the whole of Revelation as a complicated compilation of very many individual visions.³⁹ These visions, he argues, must be treated as originally independent. They must be treated in this way prior to the search for any insights into their present setting.⁴⁰

First of all, the internal connection of the material is to be established. The boundaries of the material from independent individual visions are to be sought out. The detail within the vision, as far as it is possible, is to be explained from these contexts. And only after these questions are answered will it be permissible to investigate the present literary context. By this it is clearly to be thought that one will arrive at the present context only later in the process.

If Revelation 12 does not ultimately originate in Christian tradition, whence is its origin? In order to ascertain this, Gunkel moves to a closer examination of the chapter’s text. To do this, however, he begins with a strong critique of contemporary biblical exegesis in relation to the Revelation of John. This exegetical methodology, he notes, focused on the ‘contemporaneous’ explication⁴¹ of the text. He explains this in the following manner:⁴²

According to the contemporaneous explanation the apocalyptist in his writing portrays the events of his time and the expectations which are the result of the current state of affairs.… The task of contemporaneous explanation would, consequently, be to rediscover from the varied forms of the revelation the historical realia artistically hidden within it.

Gunkel notes that this ideal is usually methodologically corrupted by his contemporary critics’ zeal to find even within the most fantastic images the proper historical referent.⁴³

… even within the contemporaneous descriptions themselves a purely fantastic sequence must stand close to the actual contemporary feature which the features of other things frequently overshadow. So a reason has to be given for the vision of fabulous cavalry in chapter 9:13ff., a reason according to the customary explanation, i.e., the Parthian threat. But the vision itself, with its many remarkable individual themes, far surpasses this supposed reason.

Gunkel does admit that some of his contemporaries have exercised greater discretion in this regard. For them, however, …onlya small part of the Apocalypse is, all in all, understood ‘contemporaneously,’ … and the main body of it must … consist of fantasy images.⁴⁴

This leads Gunkel to question whether the contemporary exegesis of the Revelation of John actually deserves the ideal designation of contemporaneous exegesis at all.⁴⁵ He goes on to argue that …it is urgent that one adhere to a unified definition of the word ‘contemporaneous.’ The definition he proposes is that which he has already put forward, i.e., that the contemporaneous interpretation should be concerned not simply with the contemporary moment of the person composing a passage, but also with the inherited tradition which shapes that person’s vision of the moment. In short, Gunkel argues that contemporaneous exegesis cannot overlook the cultural, social, and communal tradition which has shaped the outlook which is embodied in a text composed within that culture, that society, that community. And, he goes on, that tradition bears within it marks of the cultural, societal, and communal history within which it developed, marks which may or may not be specifically relevant to the actual life situation (Sitz im Leben) of the one who composes a specific manifestation of the tradition at any point in time but marks which may remain nonetheless. Gunkel’s goal is to discern those marks within the text, to examine them carefully, and to uncover something of the history by which the tradition which shaped the thinking which led to the text which is being examined…the history by which that tradition attained its present (i.e., contemporary) form. In short, his view of his task dictates that he trace the history of the tradition as clearly as he possibly can. That, he argues, is the ultimate goal of contemporaneous exegesis.

Having thus laid out his exegetical methodology Gunkel moves more directly to an examination of Revelation 12. He has already denied its ultimate Christian origin. He now argues that it is not ultimately of Jewish origin either. The problem is that certain features of the passage do appear totally consistent with a Jewish viewpoint:

the birth of the Messiah after the seventh trumpet;

the birth of the Messiah in heaven;

the rescuing of the Messiah from the dragon, up to the throne of God, while the Messiah is still a child;

the Messiah’s appearance on earth as a grown man.

But even recognizing that all of this in no way renders a Jewish viewpoint out of the question, Gunkel goes on to note that these features themselves do not sufficiently explain the whole of the chapter.…⁴⁶

The problem which now arises is one of understanding the origin of the whole point of view, the point of view both of the messianic image and of the many quite remarkable details of the chapter, understanding the origin of these things as having been derived from Jewish assumptions.

Gunkel points to those contemporary critics who have attempted to understand Revelation 12 in this manner, and he demonstrates their failure to do so. In place of the usual contemporaneous treatments proposed by such critics, Gunkel puts forward a methodology for approaching this text which is much more consistent with his understanding of a correct contemporaneous approach.⁴⁷

Even though noncontemporaneous events could have been a factor, and even though the images of the Apocalypse certainly cannot easily be grasped, the force within the Hebrew Bible by which the imagination of the author was moved and set into motion… this force is to be sought out and discovered.

But there are other factors than simply the Hebrew Bible which influenced the thought of early Judaism.⁴⁸

The allusion to the Jewish faith in reference to the resurrection, to hell, to an eternal life in heaven — beliefs which are not Old Testament beliefs and have not even developed organically out of the Old Testament—… the allusions to the Jewish faith in reference to these things is sufficient to demonstrate that in Jewish apocalyptic thought, in addition to that which is inherited from the Old Testament, there stand eschatological ideas which are of a greater originality than the Old Testament. It follows methodologically for apocalyptic exegesis, that it is not completely necessary to understand the details from the Old Testament alone, but that we have also to deal with the peculiarly Jewish possibility of traditions independent of the Old Testament.

Even having done this, however, Gunkel notes that where pieces of the tradition are ultimately derived from the Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew Bible itself may have only an indirect influence on the present tradition embodied in a specific passage. In this regard he suggests:⁴⁹

More direct or indirect dependence of these modalities on the Old Testament must be discerned in a clear manner in those cases in which the author writes down a tradition already present in the Old Testament, without, for some reason, that tradition necessarily being dependent on the Old Testament.

In light of this he suggests that two questions must guide the methodology used in approaching apocalyptic motifs where the motif is not clearly a literal reference to the Hebrew Bible:⁵⁰

Does a striking, conceptually terminological correspondence within the Hebrew Bible actually exist?

Could such an apocalyptic form plausibly have developed from contemplation of the Hebrew Bible?

Gunkel then turns to a close examination of the current scholarly claims concerning the conceptual dependence of Revelation 12 on the Hebrew Bible. His discussion is very critical of those claims. He comes to the conclusion that, under critical examination, … Almost all similarities which are believed to be found quietly disappear.…⁵¹ Gunkel sums up the results of his analysis.⁵²

We have raised up the need for a stronger methodology, and we have discovered that the usual explanations, judged according to that methodology, are altogether insufficient. So the result is that the details of the chapter cannot be understood in terms of the Old Testament.

Comparing Revelation 12 to Revelation 4 and 18 (which he sees as descriptive assemblages of individually received traditional pieces), Gunkel argues, instead, that the former is a conceptually unified narrative.⁵³ Though he does discern some originally independent pieces of traditional material within the chapter, for him the authorial intent was clearly one of unity. Materials drawn from the Hebrew Bible are used as conceptual illustrations.⁵⁴

Gunkel asserts that many of his contemporaries have treated chapter 12 as a statement of the apocalyptic writer that certain traumatic events would unfold prior to the final judgment, and that those difficulties would be overcome by the overpowering might of God’s love.⁵⁵ He sharply assesses this judgment in light of the biblical account itself.⁵⁶

An exegesis, therefore, arises which, lacking the necessary care, gropes blindly about seeking the concepts of the apocalyptic writer, an exegesis in which the pressing danger is to deduce ideas from the writer’s imagery, ideas which either stand conceptually pallid in very flagrant contradiction to the colorful richness of the apocalyptic forms, or, at the very least, are of such a different outlook that it becomes extremely difficult to comprehend exactly how the apocalyptic writer, working with such ideas, could even have come up with such depictions.

The very impossibility of the imagery, Gunkel concludes, speaks against such an interpretation. Since the discrepancy of the chapter’s imagery with the imagery of the Hebrew Bible is quite clear, he argues,⁵⁷

… the actual creative impetus which has produced this portrayal must have been the imagination of the author! He, in a totally individual fashion, a fashion in which he allows his imagination to break in quite freely, has created a completely refined innovation.

Even the attempts of certain of Gunkel’s contemporaries to incorporate the authorial imagination into a view that the imagery ultimately stems from the Hebrew Bible … even these attempts he condemns. He notes that such a view, in effect, overthrows the clear reality of the text, i.e., that the author’s faith, which he had ‘ardently’ asserted with such visions, has been abdicated!⁵⁸ In other words, in ultimate terms, the critics whose work Gunkel so strongly attacks here, say, in effect, that the words of Revelation 12 are nothing more than fanciful poetic imagery, i.e., that the author did not actually believe what he wrote.

In place of such a view, Gunkel points to the use in Revelation of the Greek phrase ὁ μάρτυς ὁ πιστός [ho martys ho pistos — the faithful witness] at 1:15, 14:9, 21:5, and 22:6. This he sees as testimony which directly contradicts the so-called nonbelief of the author of the work. The writer of Revelation, he contends, seeks to impart truth. It should not, therefore, contain, to any great extent, imaginary creations of its author!⁵⁹

Gunkel therefore asserts that critics have a choice: either Revelation reports that which was actually seen, or it does not! This choice has resulted, he argues, in uncertainty as to the truth of what is reported therein. For this reason one must be on the lookout for another authority which affirms the ‘meaning’ of Revelation’s depictions. That authority can be none other than — THE TRADITION!⁶⁰ For Gunkel, then, Revelation 12 is a piece of Jewish apocalyptic tradition. And that tradition has a history, a history which can, to some degree, be uncovered by the discerning critical eye. At this point he puts forward what can only be described as a classic statement of traditio-historical methodology:⁶¹

It is in the very nature of oral tradition, when passing O so tenaciously from generation to generation, that it is subject to certain fluctuations. Such omissions, additions, displacements, which later generations have imposed on the ancient materials, are revealed in the present codification of the tradition. They are revealed by the fact that the continuity of the narrative, which had formerly been uninterrupted, currently exhibits some obscurities or peculiarities! Or they are revealed by the fact that certain features, features which had a proper meaning at the time of their origins, are neither intelligible from the present context, nor are they able to be considered as generally intelligible. They are, therefore, viewed as strangely brief and incomprehensible! Just as the age of a painting may be recognized by the degree of darkening which presently characterizes it, so too is the antiquity of a tradition recognized by such darkenings. In any examination of a tradition this darkening has to be brought into play. The ultimate object of the investigation, however, is to reconstruct the original context and to indicate the basis of its alteration, i.e., to write the history of the tradition!

Gunkel’s subsequent analysis of Revelation 12 follows this statement. He concludes that thorough analysis addresses the question of the original tradition which lies behind the text as it currently exists. He also deduces that, as he has already seen in the first half of his work, the original tradition which underlies this text is the Babylonian