God's African Ancestors

Shown at right: Statue of Nehesi in Nubia/Kush. Kush was also called Ta-Nuhusi.


Alice C. Linsley

Religious belief is conditioned by the faith tradition which we receive from our parents, grandparents and, if we are to believe Jung’s theory of the collective consciousness, from our ancient ancestors. The Bible articulates this notion in this phrase: “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” And the expectation of the coming Christ was preserved through a long line of priests who were kin to Abraham, the "father of faith."

The ancestry of Jesus Christ our God is not a matter of private revelation. His coming was foretold from the beginning of time. Those to whom God declared that He should be born of their bloodline, lived in expectation of His coming for many millennia. His appearance on earth was announced by the unique conjunction of the king planet (Jupiter) and the king star (Regulus). Indeed all of the created order speaks of the God-Man Jesus Christ, so we should not be surprised when we find signs pointing to Christ in God’s handiwork. St. Paul recognized that all creation makes God’s nature known to us so that all are without excuse when they deny or ignore Him.

An anthropological study of the ancestors of Christ our God reveals that great attention has been paid to the matter of His coming. Most people have not attempted to deny or ignore Him. Almost universally, people have yearned for the benefits of His Incarnation and his shed blood.

It is fitting that attention should be paid to Christ's ancestors and to the evidence that His ancestors included Africans. It is interesting how consistently Africa is ignored when investigating the etiology of biblical practices such as circumcision and the linguistic connections between biblical words and the African languages.

Consider the names Nim and Lot, both Egyptian names, yet neither has been identified as such by biblical scholars. Rulers in Egypt with the name Lot include Iuwelot, Nimlot and Takelot. Egypt is the origin of the biblical names Nim-rod and Lot. Nimlot C was the High Priest of Amun at Thebes during the latter part of the reign of his father Osorkon II. He died before the end of his father's reign since his son Takelot F (king Takelot II) succeeded him as High Priest of Amun towards the end of Osorkon II's reign. This secession is established from the reliefs of Temple J at Karnak which depicts Takelot F as the priest-dedicant at a ceremony and mentions the ruling pharaoh as Osorkon II. Temple J has been dated to the final years of Osorkon II's reign in Tanis (which ended in 837 BC).

The Egyptian word nakh means "the powerful." Ha-Noch, the name of Reuben's first-born son is more a title than a proper name. It should be rendered something like "the Chief." Likewise, the Egyptian anoch can be rendered both Ha-Noch and Enoch. Nakh can also be rendered simply as Nok.

The biblical names Seth and Noah are equivalent to the Egyptian names Set and Nu and there are Egyptian stories in which the principal characters have these names.

Jesus Christ's ancestors were Afro-Asiatics. They spoke Afro-Asiatic languages which include Akkadian, Amharic, ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Aramaic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Berber, Chadic, Ethiopic, Hahm, Hausa, Hebrew, Kushitic, Meroitic, Omotic, Phoenician, and Ugaritic. Twelve of these language groups are spoken by populations in Africa. Christ our God spoke Aramaic, a language that shares many roots with the African languages Tigrina, Tigre, Amharic and the older Ge’ez.

Places associated with clans and rulers in Genesis are found only in Africa - Nok (Enoch), Kano (Cain), Ham, Bor' nu (Land of Noah), Terah, and the Jebu tribe (biblical Jebusites). Elephantine, at the border between Egypt and Sudan, was known to the ancient Egyptians as Yebu, the linguistic equivalent of Jebu. Some of these names appear also in Canaan: Terah, Jebu, Sheba, and Hor are among them. Jerusalem was a Jebusite city in the time of Abraham and Abraham paid tribute to that city’s ruler-priest, Melchizedek. Abraham’s Horite people apparently had kin-based alliances with the Jebusites. Both Horites and Jebusites were closely allied with the ancient Egyptians. Abdi-hepa ruled Jerusalem three centuries before its conquest by David. His name is Egyptian. (Hepa, Hap, or Hapi was a predynastic name for the Nile.) The first mention of Jerusalem, not surprisingly, is found in ancient Egyptian texts.

We also have the evidence of the four rivers mentioned as being at the heart of the Afro-Asiatic Dominion: the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Pishon and the Gihon. The last two are in Africa. Clearly there are two distinct traditions concerning the location of the garden, one African and the other Asiatic. The view that Eden was at the western border of Iran is based on the location of the Tigris and Euphrates. Yet we are explicitly told in Genesis 2:10-14 that the Gihon flowed through all the land of Ethiopia and the Pishon "skirts the whole land of Havilah". Havilah was a son of Kush (Gen. 10:7) and the "Kushites" lived in the upper Nile region and Sudan. So two rivers are in Mesopotamia and represent the Asiatic tradition while the other two rivers are in Africa and represent the African tradition. Both traditions are preserved in Genesis, but obviously the garden can't have been in both places. So where was it? If we accept that God drove the man out of the garden toward the east and the garden was west of Noah's homeland near Lake Chad, we must consider Nigeria as the likely location of the garden. So, we may speculate that some of Christ's ancestors came out of Nigeria.

Institutions and practices that characterize Abraham’s people are also distinctively African. These include the practice of circumcision (both male and female). To understand the cultural context of male and female circumcision we must recognize that Africans assign firm structure to males and softness and fluidity to females. It is important that women be less like men and men less like women (one reason that homosex is abhorred in traditional African societies.) In Africa, a family's honor is vested in the conduct of its women. Femininity is stressed and Pharaonic circumcision is seen as an enhancement of the woman’s femininity, potential fertility and purity. Likewise male circumcision was seen as an enhancement of maleness, potency and purity. The complement to the circumcised male is a circumcised female. The practice of female circumcision is not specifically mentioned in the Bible, but that may be because the female aspect is often hidden.

The African view is different from the binary exhibit of Hinduism in which both the lingam (male organ) and the yoni (female organ) are displayed. In the African tradition, phallic pillars (show right) are never displayed with the female organ. The female organ is always covered or hidden, pointing to the biblical distinction between revealed and hidden.

The institution of priest is distinctively African also. Sheba-qo’s son Hori-makhet, was high priest in Thebes. Hori is related to the Egyptian word harwa (priest) and is the linguistic equivalent of Horus and Horite. The term Horite can't be taken anachronistically when speaking of Abraham's ancestors, who were devotees of Horus, who they regarded as the “Son of God.” In African caste systems priests are always in the higher caste. Among the Mande of western Africa the highest caste are called the Horon, although few in this caste are priests. Most are warriors, farmers, animal breeders and fishermen.

As is evident today in traditional African religion, there are orders of priests, each assigned specific duties at the shrines. The Khar (Egyptian word for Horite) order of priests was responsible for providing fuel for the burnt offerings/sacrifices. Joseph's family lived in Nazareth which was the home of the eighteenth division of priests, that of Happizzez (1 Chronicles 24:15). The idea that only the Levites were priests simply isn't supported by the evidence of Scripture.

Rulers married the daughters of priests who served them. Joseph, Jacob's first-born son by Rachel, married Asenath, daughter of a priest of the Egyptian shrine at Heliopolis. Likewise, Moses married the daughter of a priest of Midian and his second wife was likely the daughter of a Kushite priest. Kush was known by many names, including Ta-Kash, Ta-Seti, Ta-Nuhusi and Ta-Kensat. In 747 B.C., a ruler named Kash united Lower Nubia as far as the Egyptian border at Aswan.

There were twenty-four priestly divisions after the construction of the Second Temple. Nineteen of these divisions are listed in Nehemiah 12:10-22. In the Nehemiah list we find these names of particular interest: Joachim, Joseph, and Mattenai. These are the names of priests who married the daughters of priests and from these lines came John the Baptist, Joseph, Mary and Jesus, the Incarnate Son of God.

Joachim is the name of Mary’s father, which is one reason that scholars believe that Mary was the virgin daughter of a priest. Hippolytus writing in the early third century, records that Mary’s mother was a daughter of a priest named Matthan. This means that Mary was of a priestly line. According to the custom of her noble African ancestors, Mary married into a priestly line when she became Joseph’s wife. Joseph was the grandson of the priest Mattenai (Matthew 1:16).

Genesis Through the Lens of Anthropology

Alice C. Linsley

Biblical anthropology, like biblical archaeology, uses the Bible as a resource in advancing knowledge of the Ancient Near Eastern and Ancient African peoples and cultures. There is nothing extraordinary about this venture, except that it requires reading the Bible differently than would a preacher or a theologian.

Much of what I write in this field is not well received by preachers and theologians who generally conceive of Christianity as being established by Jesus (as Islam was established by Mohammed). They recognize that Jesus and his original followers were Jewish, but they are astonished and often angry when faced with anthropological evidence indicating that Jesus represents a very ancient religious tradition which held the key features of Christianity long before Jesus was born. As I have argued, Christianity is an organic religion, the origins of which are recognized before Abraham's time.

To give an example of how differently an anthropologist reads the Bible, consider the “begats” of Genesis 4 and 5. Most readers of the Bible skip over this list of first-born sons because they find the names difficult and the information boring. An anthropologist, on the other hand, will look here for clues as to the kinship pattern of these Afro-Asiatic rulers. This involves doing diagrams, which I execute following E.L. Schusky’s Manual for Kinship Analysis.

The Genesis genealogical information indicates that Abraham's ancestors came out of west central Africa. Verification of this comes from many related disciplines, but most recently from the archaeological studies of the ancient Sudanese rulers who became the black pharaohs of Egypt. These rulers' names have parallels in the Bible and their monuments and royal burial grounds are being studied rather extensively.Meroitic had an honorary suffix - qo - as in the names Sheba-qo and Shebit-qo. These are linguistically equivalent to the biblical name Sheba, an ancestor of Abraham and his cousin-wife Keturah. Sheba is one of the rulers listed in Genesis 10. He is a descendent of Ham and we know from the Genesis genealogical information that Ham's line intermarried with the descendents of Shem.

An anthropologist also pays attention to details such as sacred mountains and sacred trees and their locations. We note that the Oak of Moreh is called “the navel of the earth” in Judges 9:37. Moreh means oracle or prophet. Deborah is said to have ruled Israel from her palm half way “between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim.” This sheds light on the origins of the word Torah which means 'that which is thrown by the hand' of the Moreh. In Genesis 12:6, we read that upon his arrival in Canaan Abraham sought guidance from the oracle when he pitched his tent at the Oak of Moreh. The word "Torah", usually rendered guidance or instruction, is also associated with a prophet sitting under a tree.

An anthropologist is always seeking data. Without data there can be no hypotheses. Without hypotheses there can be no conclusions. Sometimes the data suggest a hypothesis which requires investigation in other disciplines such as linguistics. This often proves a fruitful avenue since the Afro-Asiatic languages share many common roots and these languages were spoken by people living from west central Africa to the Indus River Valley. Afro-Asiatic languages include Akkadian, Amharic, ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Aramaic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Berber, Chadic, Kushitic, Ethiopic, Hahm, Hausa, Hebrew, Omotic, Phoenician, and Ugaritic.

So an anthropologist will not be surprised to find that the word ‘Sakti’ = wine in Tantric use at the harvest moon celebration, is the linguistic equivalent of the Falasha word ‘Sarki’ = harvest moon festival. Sarki also means ruler among the people of Kano (Nigeria) who today are called the Kanuri (descendents of Cain). Sarki are also a people group who live in the Orissa Province of India. Sarki also live as ‘Haruwa’ in the Tarai region of Nepal. The word Haruwa is equivalent to the ancient Egyptian word ‘Harwa”, meaning priest.

Another word for priest is the Hebrew ‘Kohen’, equivalent to the Arabic ‘Khouri’ or ‘Kahin’ and the Persian ‘Kaahen’ or ‘Kaahenaat’ which is translated "timeless being". This word ‘Kahenat’ means priest in the Ethiopian Church. According to rabbinic tradition Moses had three brothers: Aaron, Hur and Korah. All three brothers were priests. And Moses married a Kushite bride, not unusual for Egyptian rulers of that time.

The Hebrew ‘yasuah’ = salvation, corresponds to the Sanskrit words ‘asvah’, ‘asuah’ or ‘yasuah’ = salvation. The Hebrew root ‘thr’ = to be pure, corresponds to the Hausa/Hahm ‘toro’ = clean, and to the Tamil ‘tiru’ = holy. All are related to the proto-Dravidian ‘tor’ = blood.

Maps are an extremely valuable tool for anthropologists, and for biblical anthropologists there are more available than one could imagine. These must be studied so that places associated with clans and rulers can be identified. Interestingly, most of the key names in Genesis do not turn up in Mesopotamia, but in Africa - Nok (Enoch), Kano (Cain), Ham, Bor'nu (Land of Noah), and the Jebu tribe (biblical Jebusites). Elephantine, at the border between Egypt and Sudan, was known to the ancient Egyptians as Yebu, the linguistic equivalent of Jebu according to THE DIPLOMATISTS HANDBOOK FOR AFRICA by Count Charles Kinsky.

With this additional information a biblical anthropologist can begin to construct a picture of the religious life and cosmology of Abraham’s people. There were orders of priests long before the Levitical priesthood. The khar (Egyptian word for Horite) order was responsible for providing the fuel used in burnt offerings. Priests were circumcised and clean shaven. There was great emphasis on their ritual purity which included bathing in cold water several times a day.

Rulers had multiple wives, both half-sisters and patrilineal cousins. These were regarded as the wives of the deity and received special honors. Most were the daughters of priests, as was the case with Joseph's wife Asenath.

Rulers were attended by their personal priests. So Moses was attended by a priest at his right and at his left while he oversaw the battle with the Amalekites. The priests were Aaron and Hur (named for Horus), Moses’ brothers.

This brief overview of what I do should explain what is meant by “Biblical Anthropology” and I hope it will encourage some younger readers to consider working in this field. It is truly wide open!

Kushite and Horite Rulers Linked

Alice C. Linsley

The Genesis genealogical information indicates that Abraham's ancestors came out of west central Africa. Verification of this comes from many related disciples, but most recently from the archaeological studies of the ancient Sudanese rulers who became the black pharaohs of Egypt. These rulers' names have parallels in the Bible and their monuments and royal burial grounds are being studied rather extensively.

Meroitic had an honorary suffix - qo - as in the names Sheba-qo and Shebit-qo. These are linguistically equivalent to the biblical name Sheba, an ancestor of Abraham and his cousin-wife Keturah.

Sheba is one of the rulers listed in Genesis 10. He is a descendent of Ham and we know from the Genesis genealogical information that Ham's line intermarried with the descendents of Shem.

The Sheba-qo Stone, while containing many gaps, reveals a belief in Memphis as the sacred center [1] and the Creator God's residence. Sheba-qo’s double crown is shown on the stone and parts of his Horus name. So once again we have evidence linking the House of Sheba and Abraham’s Horite people.

Sheba-qo was buried in his ancestral cemetery at el-Kurru which is in Sudan. The prevalent theory is that his Pharaonic burial represents the introduction of Egyptian culture to the Sudan, but is may well be that cultural influences came from Sudan to Thebes and Memphis after Piye united the separate kingdoms.

Piye of Nubia (Piankhy) defeated the armies of Tefnakht of Sais (Twenty-fourth Dynasty), captured Memphis, and subdued the princes of Lower Egypt, restoring the status quo to that area. Piye's Twenty-fifth Dynasty has been the subject of speculation among Egyptologists who do not agree on the timeline of this Kushite succession.

All recognize that Piye's successors were Sheba-qo [2], Shebit-qo, and Tahar-qo and they also agree that each ruled from a different shrine city. Why would they rule from different cities? This would not have impressed upon their subjects that their father had forged a single kingdom. Wouldn't the establishment of a single capital city symbolize that unity better than three capitals?

The theory that each succeeded to the throne upon the death of the former ruler gives us this timeline:

716 BC: Piye dies; Sheba-qo becomes ruler of Kush and Egypt
710 BC: Sheba-qo moves his capital from Napata to Thebes
702 BC: Sheba-qo dies; Shebit-qo becomes ruler of Kush and Egypt
701 BC: Shebit-qo forms alliance with kingdoms of Israel against Assyrian threat
690 BC: Shebit-qo dies; Tahar-qo becomes ruler of Kush and Egypt; moves capital to Memphis
684 BC: Tahar-qo begins building temple to Amon-Re at Kawa
680 BC: Tahar-qo builds temple to Mut at Gebel Barkal in Nubia
671 BC: Assyrians defeat Tahar-qo and capture Memphis [3]
664 BC: Tahar-qo withdraws to Napata, builds the Nuri pyramid, the first in one 1000 years
664 BC: Tahar-qo dies; buried in largest known pyramid in Sudan
(From here.)

Based on my kinship research in Genesis, I'd suggest a different scenario, one proposed by Robert Morkot who has written: "It is most likely that there was more than one family group involved in the development of the Kushite state, and that the process was one of mixed military and diplomatic actions cemented by marriage alliances."[4] This assessment is consistent with my findings of 3 ruling priestly clans who intermarry.

Before his death, Piye divided his vast kingdom between his 3 first-born sons, as did Abraham (Gen. 25:6). We know that Piye had more than one wife because they are mentioned in his victory stela. This means that he likely had multiple first-born sons. Each was given his own territory when he came of age and the three had overlapping reigns. This explains the separate capitals. Sheba-qo ruled in Thebes, Shebit-qo ruled in Napata, and Tahar-qo (shown above) ruled in Memphis.

Is there evidence that Kushite rulers divided their territories between first-born sons before their deaths? Yes. The provision of territories for first-born sons predates the Twenty-Fourth Dynasty by about 2000 years. The following statement is found on the Inscription of Pepinakht-Heqaib [5] who lived during the reign of Pepi II (c. 2800 BC): "Never did I judge two brothers in such a way that a son was deprived of his paternal possession."

The Pepinakht-Heqaib inscription appears on the 2 jambs of the facade of his tomb on Elephantine Island [6] near Aswan (ancient Swenet/Syene). From the inscription we surmise that this man judged inheritance disputes between brothers and refused to deprive a rightful heir of his paternal possession. (See the Theme of Two Sons, here.)


NOTES

1. The Oak of Moreh is called “the navel of the earth” in Judges 9:37.

2. Sheba-qo revived the office of high priest, which he awarded to his son Hori-makhet who was high priest in Thebes. Hori is the linguistic equivalent of Horus and Horite. This makes it clear that the term Horite can't be taken anachronistically when speaking of Abraham's ancestors.

3. The Assyrians captured Memphis on 11 July 671. Tahar-qo escaped, but his one of his brothers and his son were taken captive.

4. Robert Morkot, The Black Pharaohs, The Rubicon Press, p. 156.

5. Pepinakht was ennobled (saH) and sanctified a living god (nTr anx) 300 years after his death. As a deified human he was regarded as a mediator between people and the gods.

6. Elephantine stands at the border between Egypt and Nubia/Sudan. It was known to the ancient Egyptians as Yebu which is the linguistic equivalent of Jebu according to THE DIPLOMATISTS HANDBOOK FOR AFRICA by Count Charles Kinsky. This links Elephantine with the Jebusites who controlled the major water systems in what is today Nigeria.

Cain's Murder of Abel

Alice C. Linsley

Several mid-20th century commentaries on Genesis pose the murder of Abel as a sociological conflict between shepherds (represented by Abel) and farmers (represented by Cain). However, this approach ignores an important point. The name Kayin (Cain) means metal worker. Cain’s offering of the fruits of the earth does not mean that he was a farmer. His association with metal work is further indicated in Genesis 4:20-22 which tells us that Jabal was the ancestor of tent-dwelling herdsmen, Jubal the ancestor of pipers and flautists, and Tubal-Cain the ancestor of metalworkers.

Today the metalworking clans of west central Africa perform all these tasks. For example, the tent-dwelling Inadan [1] keep herds and are responsible for metal work, circumcision, and music at special events. Their chiefs maintain two wives in separate households on a north-south axis (as did Abraham and his forefathers). This suggests that the author’s identification of Jubal, Jabal and Tubal with trades is about the role of a group of clans within a larger society, not about the origin of technologies or a conflict between shepherds and farmers.

What does the murder of Abel have to do with these early clans? The story must be understood in the context of the relationship of the 3 clans. In Genesis 4:2, we are told that Cain is a tiller of the soil, but his name means metalworker. Seth’s trade is not mentioned but his name is that of the jealous son who kills his favored brother in ancient Egyptian mythology. Abel is a shepherd and according to the rabbis, his name (hevel) means vapor or breath. However, his name could also mean El (God) is father, which aligns with the deeper significance of the Cain and Abel story and with the Egyptian myth of Seth and Osiris.

Cain's murder of Abel has parallels to Set's killing of Osiris, the preferred son who the Lord of Creation chose to be Pharaoh. Seth was condemned by the Lord for the murder of his brother. Osiris rose from the dead, married and had a son, Horus, who is called the "son of God". The Horites were his devotees.

It is significant that in both stories there are 3 sons: Seth, Osiris, Horus, and Cain, Seth, Abel. Seth kills the chosen son who rises to life and Cain kills the chosen son, who is the son of the father (ab El) . Abel might also be rendered as ha Bel, meaning “the God”.

That there are 3 sons is important since in Genesis one of the 3 sons - usually the hidden or cut off son - represents the Son of God. Abel is a type or shadow of Jesus Christ [2], the one who offers blood sacrifice and whose blood cries to the Father for justice. We note that the Father's punishment of Cain is mixed with mercy just as Jesus prayed that the Father would show mercy to those who put Him on the Cross. Abel is killed by his own brother outside the camp just as Jesus was killed by his own brethren outside the city.

When people hear the names Cain and Abel, they rarely consider the other brother, Seth, yet Seth's descendents intermarried with Cain's descendents. Abel is the son who was cut off from the earth. Likewise, when people think of Abraham and Nahor, they rarely remember that there was a third brother, Haran, who was cut off from the earth. Typically where two sons [3] are named, there is a hidden or cut-off third son. Cain's punishment of being cut off from his land reflects his crime of cutting off Abel from the earth.

NOTES

1. The Inadan (blacksmith) are a sub-caste of the Taureg of the Sudan and Niger. The men and boys from the Inadan are the only persons permitted to work with fire and metals. The Inadan claim to be kin to King David. Read more here: National Geographic, Aug. 1979, p. 389.

2. For more on the theme of Christ in Genesis, go here.

3. To read more on the theme of 2 sons in Genesis, go here.

Claude Lévi-Strauss RIP

One of the greatest anthropologist has died. His influence on my research has been profound. He and another Jew, the Arabic-speaking Jacques Derrida, also influenced by Lévi-Strauss, have left vast evidence both ethnographically and intellectually for the binary distinctions that frame Reality and enable us to avoid heresy. The reader will note that Edward Rothstein incorrectly states below that Jacques Derrida rejected the possibility of any "timeless universals". He apparently has not read Derrida's series of lectures given at Villanova University in which Derrida recognizes that there is something at the ontological center (more here).

November 4, 2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologist, Dies at 100

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.

His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.

“He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest.”

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France.

And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” Philippe Descola, the chairman of the anthropology department at the Collège de France, said last November in an interview with The New York Times on the centenary of Mr. Levi-Strauss’s birth. Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so revered that at least 25 countries celebrated his 100th birthday.

A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was a quintessential French intellectual, as comfortable in the public sphere as in the academy. He taught at universities in Paris, New York and São Paulo and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.

His legacy is imposing. “Mythologiques,” his four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions.

The volumes — “The Raw and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table Manners” and “The Naked Man,” published from 1964 to 1971 — challenge the reader with their complex interweaving of theme and detail.

In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.

Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geometry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-white photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during his field work.

His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930s — an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.

The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.

His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage” (1962).

“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing, he wrote. From 1900 to 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. This was another of his recurring themes. He worried about the growth of a “mass civilization,” of a modern “monoculture.” He sometimes expressed exasperated self-disgust with the West and its “own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.”

In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of Western modernity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism, inspired by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Mr. Lévi-Strauss revered. It was a view that helped build Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s public reputation in the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960s and ’70s.

But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas. For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “closer to nature.” Mr. Lévi-Strauss was withering, for example, when describing the Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature — and thus doomed — that it even shunned procreation, choosing to “reproduce” by abducting children from enemy tribes.

His descriptions of American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentimental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace. Mr. Lévi-Strauss also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern, focusing on the development of writing and historical awareness. It was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the West. But he worried about the fate of the West. It was, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, “allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage.”

With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.

This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.

For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.

This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s “structural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began “Tristes Tropiques” with the statement “I hate traveling and explorers.”)

To his mind, as he wrote in “The Raw and the Cooked,” translated from “Le Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken “ethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic, and philosophy.”

In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published as “Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture”), Mr. Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?

Mr. Lévi-Strauss cited a series of North American myths that associate twins with opposing natural forces: threat and promise, danger and expectation. One myth, for example, includes a magical hare, a rabbit, whose nose is split in a fight, resulting, literally, in a harelip, suggesting an incipient twinness. With his injunctions, the Peruvian priest seemed aware of associations between cosmic disorder and the latent powers of twins.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.

In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote of Mr. Lévi-Strauss: “Even now, despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples.”

Mr. Leach himself doubted whether Mr. Lévi-Strauss, during his fieldwork in Brazil, could have conversed with “any of his native informants in their native language” or stayed long enough to confirm his first impressions. Some of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical arguments, including his explanation of cannibals and their tastes, have been challenged by empirical research.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss conceded that his strength was in his interpretations of what he discovered and thought that his critics did not sufficiently credit the cumulative impact of those speculations. “Why not admit it?” he once said to an interviewer, Didier Eribon, in “Conversations with Lévi-Strauss” (1988). “I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Belgium to Raymond Lévi-Strauss and the former Emma Levy. He grew up in France, near Versailles, where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a portrait painter. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss was a Strasbourg violinist mentioned by Berlioz in his memoirs. As a child, he loved to collect disparate objects and juxtapose them. “I had a passion for exotic curios,” he says in “Conversations.” “My small savings all went to the secondhand shops.” A large collection of Jewish antiquities from his family’s collection, he said, was displayed in the Musée de Cluny; others were looted after France fell to the Nazis in 1940.

From 1927 to 1932, Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He later became a professor of sociology at the French-influenced University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Determined to become an anthropologist, he began making trips into the country’s interior, accompanied by his wife, Dina Dreyfus, whom he married in 1932. “I was envisaging a way of reconciling my professional education with my taste for adventure,” he said in “Conversations,” adding: “I felt I was reliving the adventures of the first 16th-century explorers.”

His marriage to Ms. Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage, in 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had a son, Laurent. In 1954 he married Monique Roman, and they, too, had a son, Matthieu. Besides Laurent, Mr. Lévi-Strauss is survived by his wife and Matthieu as well as Matthieu’s two sons.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss left teaching in 1937 and devoted himself to fieldwork, returning to France in 1939 for further study. But on the eve of war, he was drafted into the French Army to serve as a liaison with British troops. In “Tristes Tropiques,” he writes of his “disorderly retreat” from the Maginot Line after Hitler’s invasion of France, fleeing in cattle trucks, sleeping in “sheep folds.”

In 1941, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was invited to become a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, with help from the Rockefeller Foundation. He called it “the most fruitful period of my life,” spending time in the reading room of the New York Public Library and befriending the distinguished American anthropologist Franz Boas.

He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists, including Max Ernst, André Breton and Sartre’s future mistress, Dolorès Vanetti. Ms. Vanetti, who shared his “passion for objects,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in “Conversations,” regularly visited an antique shop on Third Avenue in Manhattan that sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest, leaving Mr. Lévi-Strauss with the “impression that all the essentials of humanity’s artistic treasures could be found in New York."

After the war, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so intent on pursuing his studies in New York that he was given the position of cultural attaché by the French government until 1947. On his return to France, he earned a doctorate in letters from the University of Paris in 1948 and was associate curator at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1948 and 1949. His first major book, “The Elementary Structures of Kinship,” was published in 1949. (Several years later, the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques,” his hybrid of memoir and anthropological travelogue, had it been fiction.)

After the Rockefeller Foundation gave the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris a grant to create a department of social and economic sciences, Mr. Lévi-Strauss became the director of studies at the school, remaining in the post from 1950 to 1974.

Other positions followed. From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary general of the International Social Science Council at Unesco. In 1959, he was appointed professor at the Collège de France. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973. By 1960, Mr. Lévi-Strauss had founded L’Homme, a journal modeled on The American Anthropologist.

By the 1980s, structuralism as imagined by Mr. Lévi-Strauss had been displaced by French thinkers who became known as poststructuralists: writers like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They rejected the idea of timeless universals and argued that history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss responded.

“Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.”

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-structuralism, just as he survived most of its avatars. His monumental four-volume work, “Mythologiques,” may ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator.

The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality.

Walton's 'Lost World of Genesis One'

Alice C. Linsley

John H. Walton has written an excellent book titled The Lost World of Genesis One which I recommend. In this book Dr. Walton presents Genesis 1 as ancient cosmology and thereby sheds light on the origins debate. He argues that Genesis 1 is about function as understood by the ancient Semites, not about origins. He states, "The truest meaning of a text is found in what the author and hearers would have thought." (p. 43)

He later states, "Believing in the Bible does not require us to reject the findings of biological evolution, though neither does it give us reason to promote biological evolution. Biological evolution is not the enemy of the Bible and theology; it is superfluous to the Bible and theology." (p. 166)

Amen to that! From beginning to end, the Bible is about God with us, a reality which took human flesh in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He is the new temple, as John explains: "He was speaking of the temple that was His body, and when Jesus rose from the dead, his disciples remembered that He had said this and they believed..." (John 2:21)

Drawing on his knowledge of Hebrew and the ancient Near East, Walton interprets the creation of the cosmos as the inauguration of God's Temple with 7 tiers. Genesis 1:1 tells us: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 'Heavens' is the accurate rendering of the Hebrew 'shamayim' which is a plural form, suggesting a multi-layered or tiered cosmos. When the Apostle Paul speaks of being mystically transported to the third heaven (2 Cor. 12:2), he is interpreting his experience in the context of this ancient worldview. Temples in the ancient Near East were constructed with 7 tiers and where we find the number 7 in Genesis we encounter the thumbprint of temple priests.

Walton insists that there is danger in forcing Genesis 1 into the concordist view of writers such as Hugh Ross. Concordists insist on reconciling Genesis 1 with modern cosmology. Walton makes it clear that this is both unnecessary and dangerous. He writes, "If we accept Genesis 1 as ancient cosmology, then we need to interpret it as ancient cosmology rather than translate it into modern cosmology. If we try to turn it into modern cosmology, we are making the text say something that it never said. It is not just a case of adding meaning (as more information has become available) it is a case of changing meaning. Since we view the text as authoritative, it is a dangerous thing to change the meaning of the text into something it never intended to say." (Read more here.)

I find Walton's research compelling and believe he is correct. He received his Ph.D from Hebrew Union College and is professor of Old Testament at Wheaton College. His background orients him toward the ancient Near East and he does an admirable job of highlighting the parallels between Genesis 1 and the creation narratives of the eastern Afro-Asiatics. In pointing out the parallels with ancient Egyptian cosmology Dr. Walton demonstrates the uniformity of cosmological thought from Africa to Babylon, further evidence for the Afro-Asiatic Dominion.

As an educator I appreciate the final chapter of Walton's book which calls for neutrality in public education on the subject of origins. Bible-believers should not insist that young-earth creationism or Intelligent Design be taught, but we should insist on what Walton calls "metaphysical naturalism" (p. 165). Restoring metaphysics to education would reintroduce the catalyst for the integration of learning, as Dorothy Sayers astutely recognized in her Lost Tools of Learning.

Finally, a word that spoke to my heart in a personal way. Walton wrote, "...we are presumptuous if we consider our interpretations of Scripture to have the same authority as Scripture itself." Lord, never allow me to forget this!

The Curse of Ham

Alice C. Linsley

Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard. When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father's nakedness and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father's nakedness. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father's nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, he said, "Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers." He also said, "Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem! May Canaan be the slave of Shem. May God extend the territory of Japheth; may Japheth live in the tents of Shem, and may Canaan be his slave. (Gen. 9:20-27)

Noah’s cursing and blessing of his three sons parallels Jacob’s cursing and blessing of his twelve sons at the end of Genesis. The two accounts highlight the reality that fathers are often displeased by the actions of their sons. In both narratives there may also be an element of self-loathing.

There are other interesting similarities as well. Noah was angry because his son Ham had looked upon his nakedness. Jacob was angry because his son Reuben has slept with his concubine. In both cases we find the idea of exposing the father's nakedness. Noah’s curse falls on Canaan, Ham’s son, which is a deflection of guilt. Jacob’s blessing of Joseph’s sons falls on the youngest, a deflection of blessing. The excuse given for Jacob’s behavior is that he was blind. The excuse given for Noah’s behavior is that he was drunk. (The theme of drunken fathers in Genesis is taken up here.)

Another parallel exists between the curse of Canaan and the curse of Cain (Gen. 4:11). Cain’s curse involves his being expelled from his homeland. The curse of Canaan is clearly intended to justify Israel’s conquest of the land of Canaan by the driving out of the inhabitants know as the Canaanites. Although it is clear that some Israelites married Canaanites. Rahab’s marriage to Salmon, of the tribe of Judah, is but one example. More importantly, the Genesis genealogical information makes it clear that the descendents of Ham regularly intermarried with the descendents of Shem.

Since the rulers of the lines of Ham and Shem intermarried, the curse of Ham falls on the descendents of Shem as well. In this sense Noah’s curse falls upon both his Hamitic and Semitic descendents, which is what happens when a father acts out of self-loathing.

The fact that we can’t racially separate the Hamites from the Semites in Genesis underscores the stupidity of claiming the curse involves only people of black or dark-skin. There is no justification of racism in the book of Genesis.