Mountains in the Book of Genesis

I am slowly combing through the world’s religious texts looking for references to mountains and hills. I’m interested in learning what these texts might say about mountains and hills — the symbolic associations, the cultural meanings, and the ways the texts connect mountain landscapes to human experience. I am publishing my notes and tagging them with mountain exegesis.

Today, I’m looking at the first book in the Torah and the Christian Bible: Genesis.

As we will see, mountains in Genesis take on a symbolic value as places of refuge and safety, and as wellsprings of life, abundance, and fertility. They also are associated with sites of worship, sacrifice, and revelation. Genesis thus serves as a foundational text for mountain symbolism in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The mountain ideas in Genesis are not original or unique to the Torah. Many of them can be traced back to earlier Mesopotamian texts and stories, some of which were familiar to early Jewish sources. Yet, because of the global reach of the Abrahamic traditions, the mountain ideas in Genesis have had a larger cultural impact in the global history of ideas.

An Overview of Genesis

Genesis is the first book in the Jewish Torah and in the Christian Bible. From a literary perspective, Genesis has two main sections. The first is the section historians call the primeval history. This is the section we commonly associate with Genesis. It includes the narratives of creation, humanity’s fall from paradise, the flood, and others. This first section runs through chapters 1 to 11. The second section is what scholars call the ancestral history. It centers on the genealogy of the “children of Israel.” The genealogy charted in Genesis runs through chapters 12 until 50, the end of Genesis. Exodus, the next book in the Bible, starts where Genesis ends and gives us the story of Moses.

The writing of Genesis took place over several centuries, between the 10th and 5th centuries BCE. While ancient, its composition occurred within a timeframe that is much more recent than the period in which Mesopotamian works of literature like the Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh were recorded.

The Primeval History

Creation

The creation narrative doesn’t explicitly mention mountains. But we can infer that god formed them on the third day of creation. After creating light and the sky on the first and second days, he created the oceans, dry land, and vegetation on day three.¹

Not everyone has assumed that god created mountains on the third day. In his attempt to reconcile science and faith, Thomas Burnet argued in his seventeenth-century book Sacred Theory of the Earth that mountains could not have existed until after the flood because there is not enough water in the world to cover them, as Genesis explicitly mentions in 7:19-20. Instead of being created on the third day, Burnet reasoned mountains were the result of the cataclysmic process of the flood itself.²

The Garden of Eden

As in the creation narrative, mountains are not explicitly mentioned in the Garden of Eden story, where Adam and Eve’s eating from the tree of knowledge cost them their innocence. However, when reading the story closely, we can infer that Eden must have had an elevated or a mountain-like position relative to the garden due to the description of a river flowing out of it. Genesis states, “A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches.”³ A footnote referencing this passage in the New Oxford Annotated Bible notes that it “may draw on the ancient tradition that a temple is built on a primal mountain of creation from which the waters of the earth flow.”⁴

The etymology of the word Eden complicates the matter. In Hebrew, the word Eden (עֵדֶן) is associated with luxury, pleasure, and delight. Yet in Sumerian, from which the Hebrew word may have derived, the word (𒂔) means “plain” or “steppe.”⁵ Because plains or steppes need not be low in altitude, Eden could have been conceptualized as mountainous or as high-altitude flatland.

The Garden of Eden story helps us understand the association between mountains and ideas of abundance and fertility, no less because of their association with god and paradise than because they often provide the waters that irrigate the land. Mountains are sometimes characterized as womb-like, nourishing, and life-giving. The mountain-abundance association is a trope that continues throughout the Bible and is one that we see crop up in the global history of ideas.

The Flood

The first mention of the word mountain in the Bible and in Genesis occurs during the flood story. The flood narrative is packed with mountain symbolism, including the notions that mountains are safe spaces, sites of divine revelation, and zones of abundance and prosperity.

The biblical flood story is born of god’s wrath. After seeing the wickedness of man, god sought to “blot out” and “destroy from under heaven all flesh” by summoning a flood.⁶ In his ark laden with animals, Noah and his family were spared from the catastrophic flood, whose “waters swelled so mightily on the earth that all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered.”⁷ The Bible even mentions how high the flood reached: “the waters swelled above the mountains, covering them 15 cubits deep.”⁸

When the flood receded, Noah’s ark “came to rest on the mountains of Ararat. The waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains appeared.”⁹ Thus the mountains act as a resting place. They are resting places in both senses of the term: the ark not only rests upon the mountains, but Noah and the ark’s passengers also get a sense of respite, relief, and rest from the flood while on them. This scene from the flood narrative also gives us insight into the modern verb to mount: to affix or to set something upon something else more stable and solid, as in mounting a horse or mounting a television to a wall.

The first explicit mention of mountains in the Bible thus elicits a connection between mountains and places of refuge. A mountain was humanity’s first refuge from catastrophe and a world of violence — whether created by the hands of man or god — in the Biblical narrative.¹⁰ This mountain-safety trope continues throughout the Bible and, indeed, throughout the history of ideas.

It is from the mountain that Noah and his family, and the creatures of the Earth, repopulated the world: “Then God said to Noah, ‘Go out of the area, you and your wife, and your sons and your sons’ wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing that is with you of all flesh—birds and animals and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth—so that they may abound on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.’”¹¹ This scene echoes the idea found in the Garden of Eden story that mountains are sites of abundance and fertility, for it is from them that life multiplies in a post-creation and postlapsarian world.

God shows throughout Genesis that he doesn’t need mountains to communicate with humans. Yet Noah’s story is the first in the Bible where god, or one of god’s agents, directly communicates with humans on mountains and hills. Here, an angel commands Noah to procreate.

It should be noted here that it was on the mountain that Noah received one of the most enduring symbols of peace and tranquility: the dove and the olive branch. Genesis reports that a “dove came back to him in the evening, and there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the water had subsided from the earth.”¹²

The Ancestral History - The Genealogy of the Children of Israel

As in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, mountains don’t figure prominently in chapters 12 to 50. Yet there are some significant references to mountains in these chapters that serve as foundations for future biblical narratives. Namely, it is in these chapters of Genesis that the Abrahamic traditions link high places with sites of worship.

Abraham and Altars in High Places

The story of Abraham and Sarah begins in chapter 12. They entered the land of Canaan, which god promises to Abraham. From the town of Shechem, Abraham travels to the “hill country” between Bethel and Ai, where he “built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord.”¹³ This is the first biblical reference to temples, altars, or sites of worship on mountains or hills. That is if we do not consider the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9 to be a temple, to be set on a mountain, or to have a mountain-like appearance as a ziggurat might.

Sodom and Gomorrah

The mountain-safety association appears again in Genesis 19 with the story of Lot and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

In Sodom, Lot hosted two angels. The people of Sodom pressured Lot to bring out the two angels so that they may “know” (rape) them. Lot refused, offering his two virgin daughters instead. The two angels, after helping Lot stave off an advance from the Sodomites, advised Lot to “Flee for your life; do not look back or stop anywhere in the Plain; flee to the hills, or else you will be consumed.”¹⁴ As we saw in the story of Noah, hills and mountains are places of safety from the wrath of god. Still today, “head for the hills” is an expression to run for cover, to flee to safety, to get out of dodge.

Later, as god annihilated Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham caught a glimpse of the destruction from above: “Abraham went early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord; and he looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and toward all the land of the Plain and saw the smoke of the land going up like the smoke of a furnace.”¹⁵ Abraham “looks down” on the destruction from his elevated, safe position.

I should note here that Lot refuses to head to the hills, instead choosing to flee to a small town called Zoar. Lot’s fate is not sympathetic: his wife turns to a pillar of salt for looking back, and he — in a drunken stupor — impregnates his two daughters.

The Testing of Abraham

God tests Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son Isaac on a mountain. God commands Abraham to “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”¹⁶ Abraham doesn’t hesitate. He does as he is told and, after traveling to the mountain, builds an altar on it. A second before Abraham sinks a knife into his son, an angel stops him. A ram miraculously appears and Abraham sacrifices it instead, saying upon its slaughter: “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”¹⁷

The testing of Abraham is an important story regarding the cultural associations with mountains. It is another reference wherein an altar is constructed on a mountain, here with the specific function to conduct ritual sacrifice (human and animal).

Likewise, it is another reference wherein a god, or one of his agents in this case, actively communicates with humans on mountains and intervenes in human affairs. In the testing of Abraham, it is the “angel of the Lord” who communicates on behalf of god. While the name of the angel is not specifically mentioned, some scholars believe the angel that visits Abraham is Gabriel, given the latter’s tendency to visit individuals in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim texts.

What Abraham says after slaughtering the ram is often rendered differently among the various translations of the Bible. Another common translation is: “On the mount of the Lord he (or it) shall be seen.” The differing potential meanings of Abraham’s proclamation, as either seeing god on mountains or god providing on mountains, is no cause of concern. In both translations, mountains are associated with either sites of worship where humans see, know, and come into contact with god, and/or with the notion of abundance, given what Abraham says about god providing for him through god’s divine intervention. On the mountain, god “comes through” for Abraham by rewarding his loyalty with a substitute sacrifice. God “sees to it” that Abraham’s loyalty is rewarded.

Jacob’s Ladder

While the Jacob’s Ladder story doesn’t contain a reference to mountains or hills per se, it does interest me because of its references to stones. It also interests me because it, through the imagery of the ladder and the pillar, connects the concept of verticality to god and heaven. Jacob’s ladder, the stone pillar, and the site can be seen as an axis mundi.

Jacob, after deceiving his brother Esau and fleeing him, slept outside one night en route to Haran from Beersheba. Using a stone as a pillow, Jacob dreamt of a ladder to heaven. In his dream, Jacob sees angels going up and down the ladder. Then god appears to Jacob and promises the land to him and his offspring. Jacob woke up, set the stone as a pillar-altar, and named the place Bethel — literally the house (beth) of god (El) — and described it as the “gate of heaven.”¹⁸

A pillar comes up again a few chapters later in Genesis, this time alongside a man-made heap of stones in the “hill country of Gilead,” where Jacob makes a god-witnessed covenant with Laban after fleeing him.¹⁹

Jacob later returns to Bethel and sets up another pillar of stone, anoints it with oil, and pours an offering on it.²⁰

Jacob’s Last Words

The final reference to mountains in Genesis is found in Jacob’s last words to his sons. Jacob says,

The blessings of your father are stronger than the blessings of the eternal mountains, the bounties of the everlasting hills; may they be on the head of Joseph, on the brow of him who was set apart from his brothers.²¹

Though a relatively minor reference to mountains, Jacob’s last words further illustrate the connection between mountains as providers. Though, the blessings and bounty can be seen as both physical and spiritual. In echoing the story of Noah, Jacob’s words also reference mountains as stable, enduring forces within a moving, chaotic world.