101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

Myths of the Beginning 67
enmity between him and the woman and him and the child. While crawling on his
belly, he would seek to bruise the child’s heel. In the Osiris cycle, Set crawled on his belly
towards the child, nipped at his heels, and became enemies with the mother and child.
In the Egyptian scenes depicting the Great Cat of Heliopolis, Re in the form of a
cat is shown bruising the head of the serpent who resides in a tree. In Genesis, Adam
is directed to bruise the head of the serpent that dwelled in the tree.
The last of the major punishments was pain in childbirth for womankind. Implicit
in this infliction is that childbirth until then had been painless, an idea that we find in
the Sumerian myth of Enki and Ninhursag, where childbirth in paradise is painless.
That myth, however, has no punishment resulting in painful deliveries. The Osiris
cycle, though, does have a story about difficulties in childbirth and it is in connection
with the violation of a directive by the chief deity.
According to the Egyptian story, Geb and Nut were lovers, and Re forbade them
to couple. Ignoring Re’s commandment, they made love and outraged the chief deity.
He ordered Shu to separate them (the separation of Heaven and Earth) and declared
that Nut would not be able to give birth on any day of the year, causing her no end of
personal discomfort. The god Thoth took pity upon her and managed to obtain some
light from the moon and used that light to create five extra days at the end of the year.
Since these five days did not belong to the regular year Thoth’s action enabled Nut to
give birth to her five children on those five days.
We have previously identified Geb and Nut with Adam and Eve, and the parallels
continue here. Both sets of spouses ignored a direct order from the chief deity and
both women were punished with difficulty in childbirth. Because the biblical authors
needed to portray this history in monotheistic terms, it became necessary to transform
the many Egyptian deities into humans. In doing so, they transformed the specific
story of Nut’s difficulty with childbirth into a general myth about the birth
process for all women.