The Prometheus

Extract

We are familiar only with the highlymoralised version which appears in Genesis. There it has been moulded by the teaching of the Hebrew prophets as to the nature of God and His relation with mankind. In Genesis the myth is used as the vehicle of a meditation on the origin and nature of sin, the permanent value of which is not in dispute. But what was its original form before it had undergone this moralising process ? I do not know whether any information is available. But it is not impossible that in the original form of the myth, common to all the Semitic peoples, the moral character of God was not beyond criticism from the Christian standpoint; which every modern writer does, in fact, adopt instinctively. An a-moral or immoral deity may be a contradiction in terms to us. But only to us. Such a being might well be defied by man, and perhaps eventually defeated by him. The Babylonian version of the story of the Flood, which is older than the one in Genesis, shews that the idea of a deity hostile to mankind presented no difficulty to the Semitic mind. This conception, with Prometheus in the role of Adam, might help to solve the problem of the relations between Prometheus and Zeus which Mr. Kitto regards as the heart of the difficulty (p. 14).