Eros, Creation and Holiness - Tazriah - Mythic Torah

Welcome back to Mythic Torah, my regular article investigating monsters, heroes and gods in the weekly Torah reading. This week's reading is Tazriah, the 4th reading of the book of Leviticus, that deals with purity/impurity laws surrounding birth and leprosy.

If you had to write a creation myth, what would be your basic image? How would the world come into being?

When Tolkien answered this question, writing the Ainulindalë that begins his most mythic work of fiction, the Silmarillion, he had the world created out of music and song. Illuvatar, the chief of the Ainur, the gods of Middle Earth, has all the ainur join in a song before presenting them with the work of their artistry:

"But when they were come into the Void, Ilúvatar said to them: ‘Behold your Music!’ And he showed to them a vision, giving to them sight where before was only hearing; and they saw a new World made visible before them, and it was globed amid the Void, and it was sustained therein, but was not of it. And as they looked and wondered this World began to unfold its history, and it seemed to them that it lived and grew. And when the Ainur had gazed for a while and were silent, Ilúvatar said again: ‘Behold your Music! This is your minstrelsy; and each of you shall find contained herein, amid the design that I set before you, all those things which it may seem that he himself devised or added."
-The Silmarillion

Tolkien's vision of creation through singing is a powerful statement of creation through art, and art as creation. It is an abstract kind of creating, that arises from the mind and soul before being expressed through vocal chords and sounds.

But almost all mythologies of the ancient near east went in very different directions, choosing instead one (or both) of two basic motifs - sex and combat.

I've spoken a fair amount about the combat motif of creation, in which the earth is carved from the carcass of a slain monster such as Tiamat (in Babylonian myth). But with our parasha's interest in the process of procreation, Tazriah seems a good time to look at the other kind of creation.

Gaia by Feuerbach, 1875

Most versions of this kind of creation myth involve a male sky deity and the female earth having relations. The Greek story of Gaia (earth) and Uranus (sky) giving birth to the first generation of gods, chief among them Cronus, is a good example.

Hesiod describes this in his Theogony:

And Earth first bare starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods... afterwards she lay with Heaven and bore deep-swirling Oceanus, Coeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was born Cronus the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and he hated his lusty sire.

Egyptian mythology also has a sexual creation myth, though instead of a male and a female principle, the great god Atum creates the universe in an act of masturbation.

What about the Bible?

Genesis 1's creation story ultimately is a lot more similar to Tolkien's version (that it certainly inspired) than to the sexual creation myths of Greece or Egypt. We've looked at some similarities between our creation and that of Babylon's Enuma Elish, in which the world is created through slaying Tiamat and splitting her carcass into two parts, but all overt combat elements have been removed and there are no sexual aspects at all.

So what about the second creation story, in Genesis 2-3?

This version begins with the line: "These are the generations (Toldot) of heaven and earth in their creation" (Gen 2:4). Toldot in other contexts implies procreation and children, but here there is nothing explicitly sexual, though there are other hints (the large amounts of water, the fertility symbols of trees and fruit, the concern about rain falling and watering the earth).

What does all this have to do with Tazria?

Where the Greeks have Aphrodite, the Canaanites had Astarte and the Babylonians had Ishtar, the Jewish Bible has very little sense of the holiness of sex. While relics remain in our scriptures of God going to war with the primeval chaos monster, we have almost no relics of a sexual creation story, that might enshrine physical relationships at the heart of the sacred. Instead, intercourse leads to impurity, the primary focus of the opening of this week's reading:

"1] The Lord said to Moses, 2] ‘Say to the Israelites: “A woman who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son will be ceremonially unclean for seven days, just as she is unclean during her monthly period."

Even without pregnancy and birth, genital discharges, even normal, healthy ones, cause impurity and requires immersion in a mikvah before a person can enter the Sanctuary.

For the Bible then, sex and procreation is like death - a normal part of life certainly, but a part of it that should be kept separate from that which is holy, that which is pure.


This view may sound both resonant and deeply challenging for us today. In our normal lives we tend to hide away the sexual, considering it an extremely private matter and a taboo subject for much of polite conversation. On the other hand, there is a tendency to elevate sexuality to the highest of human experiences, something to be celebrated and even worshipped.

The Torah's view of sex, that it is normal but to be kept away from the holy, reminds us that human physical experience isn't the pinnacle of reality, that there is more to life than the flesh and pleasures of the body. Sex may be great but it isn't kadosh, holy.

And yet by including it, along with graphic descriptions of leprosy, Tazriah shows a realistic world, one with blood and sweat and tears, far from the intellectual, abstract vision of Tolkien's universe that emerges from his creation myth.

We are physical beings, living physical lives that are messy, and beautiful, and gross - but the Torah gives us a path to transcend that physicality, an opening to go beyond our limited experience to embrace the holy, the pure, and the infinite.