The Chaoskampf' Myth in the Biblical Tradition.

• Author: Tsumura, David Toshio
• Position: Critical essay

Three monographs appearing within four years of each other represent various approaches to the so-called Chaoskampf mythology and its relationship with the creation story of the Bible. The first, by Gregory Mobley, gives us a lively prose account of what he calls the "backstories" of the Bible, that is, the reality behind the biblical account. According to him, God did not destroy, but just "barely" subdued, the chaos dragons at the time of creation; hence they are constantly returning to the fore and God must deal with them.

The volume by Bernard F. Batto is a collection of his essays which cover a much wider area of creation motifs than the monographs by Mobley and Ballentine. They deal not only with the Chaoskampf mythology but also with subjects such as "Institution of Marriage in Genesis 2," "The Sleeping God," and the "Covenant of Peace." The articles are mostly from the 1980s and 90s, the most recent from 2004, though the undated first chapter is an overview of his earlier articles with a contemporary significance.

The monograph by Debra Scoggins Ballentine is specifically on the theme of the conflict myth and its relationship with the biblical tradition. She begins her book with a discussion of the ideological functions and uses of myths, and clearly distinguishes between the creation motif and the conflict motif in the ancient Near East and biblical traditions, concentrating on the latter motif.

MOB LEY 2012

Mobley accepts the traditional Gunkelian theory, following Jon D. Levenson (1988), and proceeds to present the Chaoskampf as an ideology, established behind the biblical theology. According to him, the entire story relates how God manages the power of chaos, namely the power of evil in the form of the chaos dragon.

Mobley divides the entire biblical story into seven sub-stories, or "backstories":

1) God has subdued chaos, just barely. 2) God has given humans an instruction manual for life on planet Earth so they can partner with God in the management of chaos. 3) God has enacted the tough love of moral cause and effect in order to reward fidelity to the instruction manual and to support management of the chaos. 4) God enlists prophets to mediate this dynamic partnership upon which the health of creation depends. 5) Through praise humans release energy that augments God's management of the chaos; through lament humans report on the quality of God's management of the chaos. 6) Here and there, humans catch a glimpse of the divine design for chaos management; living according to these insights is another expression of the partnership. 7) There are times when chaos gains the upper hand and humans in partnership with God can only hope that God is able, as in the beginning, to subdue chaos, (p. 1) In this way Mobley looks at the entirety of biblical history from the dark side of human reality in terms of a single theme: "how to make meaning from the chaos of experience, the human condition," or, "the dynamic interplay of order and chaos" (pp. 2, 9).

Mobley challenges the traditional view that Genesis 1 describes creation ex nihilo. He claims that "the primeval cosmic soup is there from the beginning" and, quoting Levenson (1988: 17), that "the confinement of chaos rather than its elimination is the essence of creation" (p. 20). He further holds that "priestly theologians buried this story of creation through a competition between the Lord and the dragon of chaos below the surface of their measured prose in Genesis 1, but in the less-constrained discourse of biblical poetry the dragon breaks free. A primordial battle between God and a dragon of chaos, called Leviathan or Rahab, is recalled in these psalms that celebrate creation:... Ps. 74:14, 16-17, 89:10-12, Isa. 51:9 ..." (pp. 16-17).

For him, creation in Genesis 1 is not about making things out of nothing; it is about bringing definition, identity, and differentiation (i.e., "function" in Walton's terminology [2011]) to the amorphous chaos, the tohu wabohu, the "wild and waste" (pp. 20-21).

Thus, Mobley's book is a kind of popularization of Levenson's thesis, with a keen postmodern sensitivity toward the stories, and the backstories, applying the methods of intertextuality and noting the resonance of the chaos motif throughout the Christian Bible. This way of reading the Bible is a reflection of the premise of this book "that the Bible is best understood as wholly narrative, with a single theme: the dynamic interplay of order and chaos" (p. 9). This, of course, is the conscious introduction of a kind of cosmic dualism, taking chaos as evil, into the biblical creation story. Karl Barth in his massive Church Dogmatics made an effort not to bring this into the biblical...