Creation According to Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso (43 B.C.–A.D. 18), better known as Ovid, was a Roman poet of extraordinary gifts, his greatest work being Metamorphoses, a work that goes “from the world’s beginning to our own days,”* that is, to the reign of Caesar Augustus.

Ovid’s spin on “the world’s beginning,” however, sounds familiar.

At first there was “a shapelessness,” “Chaos,” with “no sun” and “no moon.” Before long, God “separated Heaven from earth,” and “water from land.” Then, with “division, subdivision, he molded earth.”

What followed? 

“Behold, the stars, long hidden under darkness, broke through and shone.” And then, “shining fish were given the waves for dwelling, and beasts the earth, and birds the moving air.”

Next, as the crowing act, humanity appears, depicted like this: “So Man was born, it may be, in God’s image.”

Same event, two accounts, except one was a paganized rendition of the truth, and the other—the truth itself.

This early earth was quite sweet, with “rivers of milk, and rivers of honey, and gold nectar dripped from the dark-green oak trees.” Then, however, evil arose—“Men lived on plunder. Guest was not safe from host, nor brother from brother. A man would kill his wife, a wife her husband.”

On his throne, Jove saw “all this evil, and groaned.” Along with his brother, Neptune, he unleashed torrents of water, wiping out the world until “everything is ocean, An ocean with no shore-line.”

With the exception of Deucalion (“There was no better man than Deucalion”) and Pyrrha, his wife (“ . . . there was no woman more scrupulously reverent than Pyrrha”), who, alone surviving the flood, quickly offered prayer and worship to Themis: “Bring aid, most gentle goddess, to sunken circumstances.”

Now, if this poem had been written 1,500 years before Genesis, as opposed to 1,500 after, then, as sure as God made little green apples, the world’s greatest Bible scholars would have proclaimed that the author(s) of Genesis simply borrowed these pagan myths and retooled them to fit their Yahwist theology. In other words, we shouldn’t take too seriously, or literally, the biblical creation story, because, after all, it obviously borrowed from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

But Ovid’s Metamorphoses was written long after Genesis. What, then, explains the similarity? It’s easy. The Creation, the Fall, the Flood—happened. Over the long millennia, echoes of the true story were distorted, retreaded, and paganized by the ensuing cultures. The Lord then raised up the Hebrew nation, who, through Moses, recaptured, in Genesis, the true account of our origins, which remains with us today. 

That’s why, for instance—instead of King Neptune putting “down his trident,” and “wet-bearded, Triton, summoned from far down under, with his barnacle-strewn shoulders” being the ones who pushed back the waters after the Flood—Scripture says that “God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subsided” (Gen. 8:1).

Same event, two accounts, except one was a paganized rendition of the truth, and the other—the truth itself.

* All quotes are from Metamorphoses, Book One, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955), pp. 3-13.