Doh! I feel like an idiot: the second Creation story is a very good match for Midian! so why didn’t I ever notice that before? 
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It’s been interesting learning about how orality functions and how much we assume about how texts function as people raised in literate societies where texts are authoritative and individual authors produce texts. In oral societies, it is the oral deliverer of the text who must hold authority and oral texts might not be not “owned” or “written” by an individual author as much as they are stewarded by a community of authoritative text-keepers and text-givers. The OT scrolls were back-up copies of oral texts for centuries. So any doctrine of inspiration that wants to fit with the cultural context that those texts were passed down in needs to account for the role of the Spirit guiding the whole community responsible for shaping the text’s oral form.
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I don’t see how the creation accounts or Gen 1-11 as a whole fit an Exodus situation. Modified to address Babylonian views? That would imply the core beliefs being addressed were Egyptian, and Babylonian mythology was a later addition, which doesn’t seem correct. As @knor just said,
And as I just said,
You asked for a source, and I provided it.
Of course God can inspire editors! I’m of the opinion that a single later editor stitched everything together, and he was a literary genius inspired by God and forgotten by history.* Or he could have been intentionally anonymous, as many authors of OT histories were. Who wrote Kings and Chronicles? The Gospels of Matthew and Mark are likewise anonymous.
*Note: I’m probably alone in this opinion. The scholars certainly disagree with me.
There’s zero evidence that “Moses” wrote anything attributed to him. If he was educated in Egypt, why aren’t Egyptian myths front and center in the creation accounts, rather than vice versa? Makes no sense.
Delete the scribe, and I’m okay with the list ending here.
Going back to Abram, who lived about the time of the invention of writing. He moved to Canaan, where there was no system of writing. When do you date Moses and the Exodus? 1500 BC? 1300 BC? At either date, cuneiform can be found in Israel, but no hieroglyphics, and certainly no alphabetic Hebrew. Either way, the stories in Genesis couldn’t have been set down in writing; they had to have been passed down by oral tradition.
True. See the above.
Well said.
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Honest question: What happens when a previously oral society begins to develop a written language? I assume the earliest written texts must fit the oral tradition, else everyone would object, but once an “acceptable” written version was accepted by the community, it seems to me custodianship would pass to the scribes. Am I wrong?
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Good point, but it seems some Egyptian cultural impact is seen later in the Exodus, as the Tabernacle looks a lot like Egyptian temples and mobile battle temples. and the cosmology of Genesis is the same tiered cosmology. perhaps a lot of that was also passed down to Babylon as well, as I really have not studied it. In any case, I think the case is strong that the final version was penned in or post Exile.
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And occasionally add to the text. A couple of well known examples come to mind
For a people going into exile keeping your origins would be important to keep your identity. Hence, Gen 1-11 are really the story of the origin of the Hebrew people, not the entire world.
So how do you feel about the scribal changes/additions?
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The first Creation account follows the generic Egyptian creation stories and reads as a polemic against them. The second one doesn’t match anything Babylonian well but does match the sort of pastoral structure expected from tribes in the Sinai and even in Goshen. The core is anti-Egyptian, the “frosting” is anti-Babylonian.
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It probably varies by culture and the degree to which the language becomes standardized and the percent of people who can read texts. You don’t tend to see the idea that authority resides in the text unless written texts are routinely produced and read by a significant number of people. Even as Judaism began to focus on the scrolls, it was still rabbis who had learned to orally recite them and who discussed and commented on the text who were the authorities. Maybe it’s not so different from today, because as much as people think they are dealing directly with what the text says, what they think it authoritatively means is usually what they have been taught by interpreters they consider authoritative, not what they have drawn out of the text on their own.
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Couldn’t agree more, Christy. We are Terry Pratchett’s Pan narrans, the story-telling monkey. Collectively and individually, for sure. That ultimate emergent layer is the essence of being human. And is even less obviously traceable to the underlying 4 ga evolved neurology than wallpaper isn’t to plaster. But the story of evolution bridges the gap. The bumps and flaws in the plaster show through.
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I believed that earlier but not anymore. I read many books about Egyptian stories, including translations of some texts, and I did not find more similarities than could be expected from any ANE culture.
I would even say that there were less similarities than between Genesis and the other ANE cultures I have heard about. One reason for this is that the Egyptian creation stories are so strongly focusing on the creation of gods, especially so for the Heliopolitan and Hermeapolitan main types. The cosmogony of Memphis takes the creation further, which is natural as their patron god Ptah was the god of craftsmen. Ptah forms even the shapes of the statues that represent gods.
Also in the cosmogony of Memphis, much is about the creation of gods and their sphere.
The first god (in the Heliopolitan cosmogony an Ennead = trinity Atum-Kheprer-Ra) wills himself to existence from the creating potential of the chaos sea (Nun). Then the first god produces somehow the next gods, either by self-fertilisation/birthing or by guiding the forces of chaos (the Eight chaos gods in the Hermeapolitan cosmogony). Heaven (Nut) and earth (Geb) are gods born as grandchildren of the first god (at least in the Heliopolitan cosmogony). Heaven and earth are pictured as lovers and their father god Shu separates them and keeps them apart. Heaven is pictured as a female god and earth as a male god - not as a firmament and pure soil/earth. etc.
Genesis 1:2 have elements that might have some similarity to some Egyptian creation stories, especially the Heliopolitan cosmogony.
Otherwise, I did not see much similarities. Perhaps I did not find the correct creation story or did not read the correct parts of the stories but at least, those usually considered as the main types were quite different from the creation story in Genesis.
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I try not to draw super sharp lines. Faith is living and it grows and changes. I believe God uses more suggestion rather than coercion when inspiring humans to write Scripture. The idea of a one and done of writing a Biblical work really does not line up with the evidence to me. I think of it more as a process. Because humans are stubborn and fallen, we don’t always listen to those suggestions. For example, I have no issue with God inspiring four gospels (why four?) and then wanting the Church to include the woman caught in adultery and working towards that end. For me, I would focus on what I thought was the most common extant form of scripture when it was canonized as opposed to hypothetical originals we do not have. It is not inconceivable to me that God may have in one sense, started writing the primeval history in Genesis much earlier using the epic of Gilgamesh and so on that he knew would serve as the backdrop for very real human authors much later on. I don’t see inspiration as God sitting down at one time to write a text or keep its author completely free from error. I also think a big part of inspiration is how God chooses to use the text when we approach it in faith. Also, its purpose is what ultimately matters.
That is the final form it took after the Exile but the contents themselves come from much earlier.
Do we interpret the garden narrative as someone would when we think it was first written (maybe 900BC) before it was codified with other source material?
Do we interpet the garden narrative as someone would read it during the exile?
Do we interpret it in light of the whole canon and Romans 5?
Do we interpret it in light of Church tradition?
Are multiple interpretations legitimate at the same time?
Every single one of these options opens up a ton of scholarly debate. The Exile interpretation doesn’t hold a monopoly.
Vinnie
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True on the first part. But the “identity” portion of the origin of the Hebrew tribes starts with Abram, and that part of Genesis forward was likely based on oral traditions passed down and eventually set in writing hundreds of years before the Exile. What was missing was an origin story on the order of what ANE mythology claimed for its gods, and a theology of YHWH that showed he was the only God, despite the fact he had been “defeated” by the gods of Babylon.
I spoke too soon, of course. I was primarily thinking of scribal additions to the NT that worked their way into the text. The history of NT textual criticism for the last 100 years has been one of identifying scribal errors and additions and trying to get back to the “original” Greek text. (See the many editions of Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece.)
As for the Hebrew Bible? I’m sure there are scribal changes that we accept as “inspired” today without realizing they were later additions. I don’t have much of a problem with that.
I’ll come back for the rest. Happy New Year!
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The first creation account fits even better with the Babylonian myths, such as temple construction and the gods’ “rest” afterward. It also fits as a polemic against the king as the image of God.
The second creation matches well with a lot of Babylonian mythology and culture. For instance, the king was credited with the invention of agriculture and the maintenance of the aqueducts that kept crops growing along the Tigris and Euphrates. Genesis 2-3 gives that credit to ha’adam.
There are also Babylonian parallels to the layout of garden, temple and royal residence, and the Babylonian mîs-pî ritual, when an idol is taken to a riverside garden and its mouth is “opened,” also parallels Gen. 2:7, where God breathed the “breath of life” into ha’adam and he became a living soul. In effect, rather than a false god (a statue of the diety or the king), the true God placed a living representative, ha’adam, in the temple. It reminds me of Isaiah’s critique of paganism – they worship a dead thing without breath. I could go on.
The “pastoral structure” is an anachronism that simply reflects what the people who produced it knew of life in general, not to mention agriculture. (See above.) No offense, but I think you’ve got it exactly backward. The core is anti-Babylonian at every step along the way. Again, there are virtually no heiroglyphics in ancient Israel, but there are thousands of clay shards of cuneiform writing that predate written Hebrew. Egypt was a long-distant memory by the time Jewish scribes were copying and memorizing Babylonian mythologies in scribal school, which was hundreds of years before they began writing in their own language.
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Wow. I learned a lot. Thanks.
Your description of ha’adam as a living representative in the temple is a lot like NTWright’s (which is fairly new to me). I don’t get out much, so probably everybody else already knows this stuff.
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Appreciate the answer.
You get out plenty. haha. I’m drawing mostly from Richard Middleton. NT Wright is too verbose for my taste (he takes two or three books to say what could be said in one), though it’s worth pointing out the two of them are friends. Middleton’s 2005 book The Liberating Image broke new ground on the meaning of the image of God, but it was focused on Genesis 1. His subsequent work builds upon that.
He still updates his blog from time to time. It’s worth checking out.
In particular, his “articles” tab has a lot of gold. Scan for what catches your attention, but these three are must reads. All are pdf’s.
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Thanks, Jay. I need to. In my own schoolyard. I’ve shirked “real theology” for no good reason. I’ve had no problem treading secular academic halls with men. I have no excuse to leave theology to the boys.
Thanks for the links to RM’s pieces. Wright does use many words. I have only read a few of his more popular works and some of us worked over his Gifford Lectures a while back. Lots of repetition. I will give him the benefit of the doubt that he sees it all as connencted and sees each of his works as an independent piece. I could very well be wrong. But I like him I’ll be generous.
I’ll dig into Middleton’s pieces soon. Thanks.
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And the Genesis 1 polemic tackles them – denying that they are anything but tools made by YHWH-Elohim for His purposes.
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Yes, that is true. The problem is that when the stories are quite different, such an approach becomes a general alternative, not polemic against a certain creation story or a line of creation stories.
The story in Genesis 1 might not be a polemic against a given story/tradition but rather, an alternative against the prevailing worldviews that saw everything around us as part of a world inhabited and influenced by many gods.
The ancient Egyptians had ‘more dimensions’ in their worldview than a modern person. For us, the ‘inner world’ is a subjective world inside our head. For ancient Egyptians, the ‘inner world’ was something general and objective, a reality surrounding us. The extra dimension from ‘outer[visible]’ to ‘inner’ made it possible to see simultaneously the material earth and Geb, the god that was the earth. What was visible was just an ‘extension’ of the ‘inner’ world, one end of the same ‘dimension’. Everything truly influential happened in the ‘inner’ world that would have been invisible to us. This worldview made Egyptians very religious - if the fate of the society and family depended on what happened in the ‘inner’ world and on the decisions of gods, it was rational to devote time, energy and wealth to trying to affect the decisions of the gods.
The greater focus on the ‘inner’ than ‘outer [visible]’ world affected also the focus of the creation stories. Generally, gods associated to sun always played a key role in the Egyptian belief system. Heliopolis (Yunu/Onnu) was the center of the sun worship. That made the Heliopolitan cosmogony perhaps the most influential one. The Heliopolitan creation story focuses on the creation of gods and the ‘First Time’ (time (or timeless period) before Earth was created). The general version of that cosmogony ends before the ‘First Time’ ended - it did not include the creation of Earth and humans as inhabitants of Earth.
Even when the Heliopolitan cosmogony describes the origin of the gods that are the sky, the earth and the atmosphere, at that point they were just cosmological entities, not the visible sky/earth/atmosphere we can observe now.
Some form of land was present from the first steps of the creation, like the first peaks of soil that emerge when the floods of Nile retreat, but that was not yet the Earth where we live.
There were probably several added stories to explain why we see what we see but if the core of the Heliopolitan creation story did not include the creation of ‘our’ Earth and us, there cannot be many common points with Genesis 1.
An interesting thread. Keep up the good work.
I think the Biblical Genealogies are a product of an origin in oral traditions. It is a group remembering its past and traditions.
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