Biblical Tradition

At the core of the biblical tradition stands the Hebrew Bible — the Tanakh of Judaism, the Old Testament of Christianity — a collection of scrolls composed mainly in the first millennium BCE in the Levant. It tells of one God and his dealings with the world: a garden planted in the east for the first humans, a flood loosed on an earth filled with violence, the speech of tower-builders confounded on the plain of Shinar, a people chosen and bound by covenant. Around that spine moves a strange and vivid company: Leviathan armored in the deep, Behemoth in the reeds of the Jordan, six-winged seraphim, four-faced cherubim, and the archangels Michael and Gabriel carrying war and word between heaven and earth.

Among the mythologies of the ancient Near East this tradition has a temperament of its own: however vast its monsters, they remain creatures of the one God, and however terrible its angels, they serve at his command; no rival deity contests the stage. The weight of the stories falls on the dealings of God with human beings — a runaway prophet praying in a fish's belly, a shepherd boy walking out to meet a giant with a sling, one family listening to forty days of rain inside a wooden ark. Second Temple writings such as 1 Enoch added a darker margin of fallen Watchers and their giant offspring, and the Latin Vulgate, Dante, and Milton later forged the 'morning star' of Isaiah into Lucifer, the fallen angel.

This collection presents these figures and narratives as traditional accounts. They remain part of living faiths: the threefold Holy of the seraphim is still sung in synagogue and mass, and Islamic tradition honors Noah and Jonah as prophets and knows Gabriel as Jibril, bearer of the Quran. The entries respect that context, and hold to the texts and to documented tradition.