Secret_History

444 The Secret History of the World
slaying of Goliath by David and Medusa by Perseus. In those stories, the Osirian
hero prevails over the Setian serpent.
Melam and ni are two Sumerian words which are often linked. Strictly speaking
ni seems to denote the effect on human beings of the divine power melam. The
Babylonians used various words to capture the idea of ni, including puluhtu,
“fear”. The exact connotation of melam is difficult to grasp. It is a brilliant, visible
glamour which is exuded by gods, heroes, sometimes by kings, and also by
temples of great holiness. While it is in some ways a phenomenon of light, melam
is at the same time terrifying and awe-inspiring. Ni can be experienced as a
physical creeping of the flesh. Gods are sometimes said to “wear” their melam like
a garment or a crown, and like a garment or a crown, melam can be “taken off”.
While it is always a mark of the supernatural, melam carries no connotation of
moral value since demons and terrifying giants can “wear” it too. 332
So, it seems that this is very likely the point that the writer of P was trying to
make about Moses. Moses was being compared to Huwawa/Humbaba, the horrible
guardian of the cedar forest, a variation on the sun-god whose face is so brilliant
that it must be “veiled”; following which Huwawa/Yahweh demanded that his
sacrifices contain cedar, and his house be built of cedar!
The author of P was not only eliminating things that he specifically rejected for
theological or political reasons, he was also eliminating the long tales of the J and
E texts. Retelling the wonderful stories of the people was not his intent; his intent
was the business of establishing Yahweh and his agents: the Aaronid priesthood.
He shows no interest whatsoever in the literary interests of the people, alluding to
them only in short lines or paragraphs where they are mostly dismissed as pagan
nonsense. In all of P there are only three stories of any length that are similar to
JE: the creation, the flood and the covenant with Noah (excluding the sacrifice
after the flood), the covenant with Abraham, (excluding his almost sacrifice of
Isaac). He also added a story that is not present in the older documents: the story
of the death of Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu which is presented to instruct the
people that the sacrifice must only be performed as commanded by god, even if it
is performed by bloodline Levites! He was leaving no angle uncovered! The
repeated emphasis on this point tells us that he was trying to change something
that had existed for a long time: that anybody could enter the Tent of Meeting. But
now, with a fake ark of the covenant in there, only the priests could enter. In this
way, only they were able to see that the replacement ark was not the original.
Clever, yes? The P writer seems overwhelmingly concerned with Sinai and the
giving of the law, since half of Exodus, half of Numbers, nearly all of Leviticus, is
concerned with the Levite law.
332 Black, Jeremy, and Green, Anthony, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia (Austin:
University of Texas Press 1992).