Shet (Set, Seth)

 שת


Genesis 4:25 names him as the third son of Adam and Chavah (Eve), usually known in English as Seth.

Numbers 24:17 gives Shet as a tribe living next to Mo-Av, probably the nomadic Sutu noted in Assyrian and Babylonian inscriptions.

Shat = "columns", from the root Shayit (שית); metaphorically used to mean "princes", "nobles" (cf Psalm 11:3), in the same sense that English talks about people who are "pillars of the community".

Also used for "buttock" (Isaiah 20:4 and 2 Samuel 10:4), which I take to be in some way similar to Shechem (שכם) = "shoulder": a portion. i.e the part that was eaten by the priests after the sacrifice.

Shet is the Yehudit pronunciation of Set, the Mitsri (Egyptian) god also known as Sutekh, who killed Osher (Osiris) and who, particularly in later Egypt, was associated with the donkey. You can follow the connection with Set and the donkey-cult in the David-Sha'ul story in my novel "City of Peace". You can follow the connection with Set as the red-haired god who provides an adversary to the Osiric "good-guy" in any one of several Biblical myths: Kayin and Havel, Yishma-El and Yitschak, Ya'akov and Esav...

The Hyksos god Typhon is also identified with Set. The Hyksos came from Armenia or beyond (probably Hittite at their earliest known source) via Cappadocia, Ashur and Kena'an (Canaan), around 1780 BCE (which should enable us to date the Yoseph stories). Their western capital was at Pelusium on the Canopic arm of the Nile delta in northern Egypt (effectively Goshen); their eastern capital at Avaris, which most definitely was in Goshen. They were likely allies to the Byblians of Phoenicia, who had a trading station at Pelusium. The god of Byblos was Adonis. The Egyptians called Byblos the Land of Negu, and imported trees and timber from there.

Before the arrival of the Hyksos, northern Egypt was settled by Pelasgians - who, as Robert Graves explains in detail in his "Greek Myths", had deep connections with the peoples of Kena'an. Their sacred oracle was on the island of Pharos, off what is now Alexandria. Proteus, the old man of the sea, was king of Pharos and lived in a cave; he had the power to transform himself exactly as the Druids and other sun-heroes did. Pharos thus equates to Avalon. The island is later linked to the Septuagint and the number 72 (for which see various Graves references). Graves wonders if the king of Pharos was the one who married Sarah in Genesis 12, and if as such it represented a confederacy between Av-Raham's tribe and the Peoples of the Sea; he offers no evidence to support this notion.

The Byblians worshipped their version of Set as a tempest-god (is Typhon then a pseudonym for Ba'al-Chadad?); later they brought him to Mitsrayim; disguised as a boar this god annually killed his brother Adonis, who was born under a fir tree. The Egyptians identified the boar-brother with Set, anciently god of the desert whose sacred beast was the wild ass and who annually destroyed his brother Osher (Osiris), the god of vegetation.

Set was the arch-enemy of Hor (Horus) and Osher. Hor perennially subdues Set but never destroys him, rather like God and Lucifer, Apollo and Dionysus - an aspect of Tanism, but more an aspect of Dualism. Their reconciliation = universal harmony.

The probability is that the authors of the Tanach needed to find some way of incorporating the massively popular Set worship into the national history, while simultaneously diminishing its status as far as possible; by making him the insignificant third son of Adam and Chavah, he has an important place, genealogically speaking, but is also absorbed and assimilated without detail, and therefore reduced.


"The Breath of Set" was the chamsin, the 50-day sirocco wind.

In southern Yehudah ass-eared Set was worshipped in the time of Alexander Jannaeus; the ass is also connected to Bil'am (Balaam) in Numbers 22 and Sha'ul (King Saul) in 1 Samuel 9, though in both cases the animal may get translated as a donkey rather than an ass (click here for why).

The ass' jawbone was used by Shimshon (Samson) against the Pelishtim (Philistines) in Judges 15.

Yishma-El is described as "a wild ass among men" in Genesis 16:12, reflecting Set-Typhon's role as the god of Chaos; Yisaschar receives a similar description in Genesis 49:14

Graves posits that Yishma-El was a confederacy of 13 goddess-worshipping desert tribes dedicated to Set; whence Hagar as a Mitsrit (Egyptian). 

Midas the Phyrgian had ass' ears: Midas was a son of the mother goddess and a devotee of Dionysus, thus completing the link of Adonis-Osher-Dionysus-Set.

Osher, the spirit of the waxing year, was jealous of Set, the spirit of the waning year, and vice-versa - this is the source of Graves' notion of Tanism, which many scholars do not accept, though clearly it has some plausibility. The problem with Omnideities like YHVH is that a god cannot be both sides of a conundrum or a paradox simultaneously, without the fundamental dualistic paradigm of the universe breaking down; a fact that explains why Christianity caught on, and why Christianity brought back Satan in the form of Lucifer to provide a tanist rivalry. Judaism resolved the problem by abandoning dualism.




Copyright © 2019 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press



No comments:

Post a Comment