John R. Salverda writes to Robert ‘Bowie’ Johnson Jr.:
....
Zeus took over from his father Kronos, who was a
previous Adam figure (destroying his offspring with an act of
"eating"). Kronos had himself, taken the place of his father Ouranos,
the god of Heaven, an even earlier depiction of Adam (the husband of Gaea, an
original mother figure). Eventually Herakles, the son of Zeus by a mortal
woman, would sacrifice himself and be found worthy to wed Hebe (another Eve).
Hesiod informs us, that before marrying Hera (the
queen of heaven) Zeus had several other paramours, including the goddesses
Metis, Themis, Eurynome, Demeter, Mnemosyne, and Leto; "Lastly, he made
Hera his blooming wife : and she was joined in love with the king of gods and
men, and brought forth Hebe and Ares and Eileithyia." (Hesiod, Theogony
921 ff.). Noteworthy in Hesiod's list of Zeus' pre-Hera lovers, as we attempt
to connect him with Adam, is the Goddess called "Metis." She is a
kind of female personification of the clever serpent; "Now the serpent was
more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made."
(Genesis 3:1 KJV) "Now Zeus, king of the gods, made Metis his wife first,
and she was wisest among gods and mortal men. … But Zeus put her into his own
belly first, that the goddess might devise for him both good and evil."
(Hesiod, Theogony 886-900 ff.) thus Zeus eats to acquire his knowledge of good
and evil. "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes
shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." (Genesis
3:5 KJV). It is almost as though motifs from the story of Adam had been
incorporated by design into the biography of Zeus in order to make him more
acceptable to an Israelite constituency.
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