18 
ANNUAL ADDRESS. 
account of creation given in the Babylonian poem and that 
given in Genesis, is of the slightest. Any account of creation, 
mythical or otherwise, must necessarily notice the chief classes 
of natural objects, and to that extent any one account must 
resemble any other. Beyond that the only point in common 
between the two narratives lies in the resemblance between 
the Hebrew word for “ deep,” ( Whom ), and the Babylonian name, 
( Tiamat ), given to the she-dragon of Chaos. If this resemblance 
is sufficient to show a connection, then it is indisputable that the 
Babylonian myth must he a distortion of the narrative in Genesis,, 
since the natural object itself, which gives us the Hebrew word, 
must necessarily have preceded the mythological personifica- 
tion of it, which gives us the Babylonian. Besides, as we have 
seen, the astronomy of the Genesis narrative is primitive, the 
earliest possible. The Babylonian epic, on the other hand 
refers to the equal division of the zodiac, and hence the epic 
must be of later date than 700 b.c., since that is the earliest' 
date at which such division can have taken place. 
Throughout the Holy Scriptures there is but one astronomical 
reference that may be fairly termed mythical. When Job cursed 
the day on which he was born he said — 
“ Let them curse it who curse the day, 
Who are skilful to rouse up leviathan 
Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark : 
Let it look for light, but have none ; 
Neither let it behold the eyelids of the morning.” 
Here leviathan is the mythical dragon of eclipse derived, 
from one of the stellar dragons; either Draco who curled in 
a figure of eight round the poles of the then equator and 
ecliptic, or Hydra who then stretched almost from one node 
to another along the equator. The symbol of a coiled snake 
is used in astronomy to this day as the ideogram of a “ node,” 
and since the moon must be at one of the nodes of her orbit 
for an eclipse to take place, with its consequent darkness, 
the myth early arose (again an instance of knowledge lost), 
that the eclipse was due to a dragon devouring the sun or the 
moon. But in referring to leviathan, this dragon of eclipse, 
Job was no more necessarily giving his assent to the myth than 
we are, when we speak of a “ draconic month,” meaning the 
period that the moon takes from one passage through her node 
until her next passage through the same node. 
Poetry, allegory, fable, all presuppose purpose, knowledge, 
clearness of perception in the originator. Human words and 
