The Ruins of Paradise: Studies in Early Mediterranean Poetics and Cosmology.

At Genesis 3:22, before God drives Adam and Eve from Eden, He addresses an unidentified heavenly audience: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.” (KJV) Thus the expulsion serves primarily as a solution to a theological crisis; the aspects of punishment are merely consequential to this solution. In my dissertation, I examine this and other examples of cosmological exigency from Ancient Greek, Hebrew, Anatolian, and Babylonian sources. In broad terms, I attempt to define the intellectual dimensions of these cosmic crises. For example, the fruit of knowledge endows Adam and Eve with a feature of the divine, from which he was made to be distinct; his deathlessness would thereby dissolve the opposition that gives structure and meaning to the cosmos. Other details in the Garden already suggest a problematic combination of mutually exclusive items: Adam’s working a garden that seems to provide automatically, for example. The details of Hesiod’s Golden race appear eerily similar to those in Genesis, and suggest subtle—perhaps mutual—engagement of the two myths. I turn from anthropogonies to Mediterranean myths wherein monstrous serpents attack the ruling Storm-god. While scholars have noted many similarities among these myths, I explore the shared central role of etymological and other linguistic play (formulaic and epithetic misapplication, metrical and phonetic play) in consummating the threat to the Storm-god and his cosmos. I argue that these units of the language and music most powerfully convey, even actualize, disorder; in other words, they function as pivots around which the narrative turns, from order to disorder to order reaffirmed. I argue that these shared features point to mechanism of cross-linguistic sharing of mythic data. Finally, I synthesize the results of these studies by examining Greek myths in which divinity itself is compromised by the parental solicitude that certain gods show for their mortal offspring. This mortal emotional experience both upsets cosmic structures and deeply undercuts notions of immortality.PHDClassical StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113650/1/mmnewman_1.pd