Jordan Peterson's contribution to Evolutionary Fall Theology

You need to read what I write more carefully, and you need to read your own sources more carefully. You also need to use better sources. With regard to one of my points, you say " I see no serious defense of the claim until it’s been vetted by a good scholar and is uncontroversial among academics", but you fail to apply this principle to most of your own arguments, which are typically simply your own personal opinion unsubstantiated by any academic citations at all.

Point one. You cite a Mesopotamian seal which you claim is “a clear ancient near eastern influence on the primeval story of Adam and Eve that’s not actually known from any single near eastern composition”. Do you know why we don’t have any Near Eastern composition which depicts this scene? Because it isn’t what you think. The temptation of Adam and Eve is de novo, and has no Mesopotamian parallel. This particular seal does not depict what you think. It has nothing to do with the temptation of Adam and Eve, and this has been known for decades.

  • It depicts a male god (at right), and a female worshiper or goddess (at left).
  • The tree is an ordinary date palm, not a “sacred tree”.
  • The god at right is not “reaching for its fruit to eat”.
  • There is only one serpent, not “snakes on either side” If you had understood what you were looking at you would have realised that this cylinder seal was rolled to create an impression on the clay, and that the image is repeated as often as the cylinder is revolved 360 degrees. There is only one serpent engraved on the cylinder. You have been misled by looking at a clay impression made by the cylinder, which shows the entire image on the cylinder, then shows part of it repeating. The serpent is only to the right of the god, it is not to the left of the woman (or goddess).

Now for some modern scholarly commentary, just to drive the point home.

“Note that there is a god (and probably a goddess) on the seal and that it certainly has nothing to do with the fall of man. There is no reason to assume that the date-palm between the two figures represents the Tree of Life. In short, there is no evidence that there was a Tree of Life in Mesopotamian myth and cult. The identification of different trees on Mesopotamian seals as a Tree of Life is a pure hypothesis, a product of pan-Babylonianism which wished to trace all Old Testament religious and mythological concepts back to Mesopotamia. As already noted, there is no Sumerian or Akkadian expression ‘Tree of Life’.”, Åke W. Sjöberg, “Eve and the Chameleon,” in In the Shelter of Elyon: Essays on Ancient Palestinian Life and Literature, ed. W. Boyd Barrick and John R. Spencer (A&C Black, 1984), 221.

You say “You have demonstrated a significant number of scholars consider it exilic/post-exilic, but this is not because they think it’s a later addition, your sources show that’s because they think P in general is exilic/post-exilic”. This doesn’t make sense. If they didn’t identify it as an addition they wouldn’t identify it as P at all. The whole reason why they conclude it is P is because they first conclude it’s an addition, and then later date the addition. They identify it as an addition on several grounds, including the swapping between first and third person in the chapter, the fact that the earlier explanation for the sabbath (in Deuteronomy), is completely different, and because there’s no evidence from Genesis 12 to the end of 2 Kings that anyone knows anything about the sabbath commemorating creation.

Modern study of the Decalogue starts with the fact that the Decalogue exists in two different forms, which provide evidence that one of the forms has been expanded by later additions.

“That they were called “ten words” and could be inscribed on two tablets has led most scholars to believe that originally they were ten short categorical phrases, whose form is best preserved in the sixth, seventh, and eighth. The expansions that take the form of motivation or threat (second and third), theological explanation (fourth), promise (fifth), or detail (tenth), are regarded as secondary additions. Support for this interpretation is that the Decalogue in Deuteronomy shows some variations in these secondary parts (in the fourth and tenth commandments) but not in the basic commandments themselves.”, C. J. H. Wright, “Ten Commandments,” ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Revised (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1979–1988), 786.


“Even after the decalogue had come into existence as a collection of ten laws, there was still further development, as a comparison between Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 clearly demonstrates.”, Raymond F. Collins, “Ten Commandments,” ed. David Noel Freedman, The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 384.

Point two. You try to inflate the number of ANE texts required for Genesis 1-11 by citing the Eridu Genesis, Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Enuma Elish, claiming a scribe would have needed to use them as well. You have clearly forgotten or perhaps simply not read (or not understood), what I told you before about the Atrahasis Epic. The Atrahasis Epic uses material from the Eridu Genesis and Enuma Elish, and the Epic of Gigalmesh uses material from the Atrahasis Epic. So the writer of Genesis 1-11 only needed to use the Atrahasis Epic, to be using material from the Eridu Genesis, Enuma Elish, and material unique to the Atrahasis Epic (the writer wouldn’t need anything from the Epic of Gilgamesh at all). As I also mentioned, the Sumerian King List only mentions the flood, and it borrows that from a previous flood text, so the Sumerian King List isn’t an independent source for the flood (it doesn’t even give any of the details of the flood, it just says it happened).

Additionally, as I have told you several times previously, this is not a case of a Hebrew copy/pasting from different Mesopotamian texts to make their own narrative. There is no copy/pasting at all. The Hebrew writer is writing the Hebrew theological understanding of the world, and polemicizing against the pagan universe being taught to them in Babylonian captivity, which is why it includes so much of the Babylonian universe and theology. The form of writing matches the Sumerian and Akkadian texts because the scribe who wrote them was using the forms of writing which they had been taught as a professional Babylonian scribe.

Point three. I find it ironic that you’re trying to tell me “how literary influence works”, given that you have cited no scholarly literature on the subject, you are ignoring the scholarly consensus on the subject, and you have presented no evidence for your claims of “hundreds” of texts with numerous versions of the various narratives in Genesis 1-11, nor have you presented any evidence that these narratives were all based on oral traditions which were known from Ur all the way to Egypt.

You say “You don’t find a single text in all ancient near eastern compositions, find one that provides a good parallel, and say “uh huh! this is the only one at work, and so we only need 7!””. Of course not. That’s not how professionals assess the literary connections between Genesis 1-11 and texts such as the Atrahasis Epic. They identify connections by noting features such as these.

  • Use of the same literary forms
  • Use of the same vocabulary and phraseology
  • Use of the same content and structure

Here’s an example of Genesis 6:14 using an Akkadian word for the sealing of the Ark, despite the fact that there was a perfectly good Hebrew word which could have been used instead (and is used, elsewhere in the Bible). Where else is that Akkadian word used? Yes that’s right, it’s used in the Atrahasis Epic, where the ship in the Atrahasis flood narrative is sealed just like the Ark.

“One small curious detail seems to confirm the Akkadian background of the Genesis story. In Gen 6:14 it is said that the ark should be covered inside and out with כפר , kōpēr. There is no root כפר in Hebrew that fits the context here. There is, however, a word in Akkadian that fits the context perfectly, kupru, “bitumen, pitch.” The word is used at exactly the same place in the Mesopotamian flood stories as in Genesis, in the building of the boat, in Atrahasis in III i, 33; ii, 13, 51 and in Gilgamesh XI, 55, 66. What the scribe actually has done here is to use a lexeme in Hebrew that is a hapax derived from an Akkadian word that occurred at this place in the Mesopotamian model.12 Moreover, the use of kupru/kōp̄er seems not to have been necessary since the scribe had a good Hebrew word available for the same concept, חמר , hẹ̄mār, “bitumen, pitch.” The word is among other places used in the building of the tower of Babel (Gen 11:3). More significantly, however, the word is used with respect to the “basket” in which Moses was placed by his mother (Ex 2:3). The word commonly translated with “basket” here is תבה , tēbā̠h. The only places this word is used are in reference to the ark of Noah and this “basket” of Moses (Ex 2:3, 5). Thus the ḥēmār was used to plaster the tēb̠āh in Ex 2:3, while the Akkadian kupru/kōp̄er was used for the same purpose with the tēb̠āh in the flood story, indicating the Akkadian influence.”, Helge S Kvanvig, Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic : An Intertextual Reading (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011), 226-227.

So the Atrahasis “ark” is sealed with bitumen, using a particular Akkadian word for bitumen, and the Genesis Ark is sealed with bitumen, using the same Akkadian word for bitumen. This is evidence for a literary connection between the two texts.

Further evidence for a literary connection is found in the content and literary form of Genesis 1-11 and Atrahasis, including the “double creation” narrative.

"I. M. Kikawada has called attention to the interesting structural similarities between the creation stories in Genesis and the creation of humans in Atrahasis.3 After the creation of the first human being is recorded in the first part of the poem, the second part opens with the creation of humans one more time, described as a divine birth (I v, 249–vi, 305). Seemingly this creation scene deals with events that come after the creation of humans in the section before. But looking closer into the section, we notice that it records the creation of human beings once more, quite independently of what has happened before.

The narrative sequence does not simply relate the order of events. The same event, the creation of human beings, is rather narrated twice, under two different perspectives. The first creation act is closely woven into the first plot; it functions as a solution to the crisis developed in this plot. The next creation act prepares for the next plot: the decision of the gods to wipe out the human beings they had created. We have already noticed that according to the introduction in 2:4b, the following story about the creation of the first humans functions in the same way. What comes after 2:4b is not a new step in the line of events coming after Gen 1:1–2:3, it is rather something that took place in the context of the events reported there.

The next story forms a narrative parallel to the first creation story, in the same manner as we can observe in Atrahasis. The function of the two stories of creation of humans is the same as in Atrahasis as well. The first story (1:26–30) refers back to what is already told: the human being multiplying to fill the “formless void” of Gen 1:2, and to rule over what God has already created. The second creation story, Gen 2, points forward to the crisis developing in Gen 3. There is also a similarity in the way creation is described in both places. In the first creation the human being is created as such: it is awīlu and ʾād̠ām; the second creation is more graphic, describing concretely both the creation of male and female and their ability to procreate.", Helge S Kvanvig, Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic : An Intertextual Reading (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011), 237.

The literary connections between Atrahasis and Genesis 1-11 are of the kind which indicate the writer of at least the P material in Genesis 1-11 had actually read Atrahasis.

Point four. You previously claimed there were “hundreds” of Adam and Eve stories, “hundreds” of flood stories, “hundreds” of Tower of Babel stories, etc. You’ve backed away from that, but you are still “adamant that I’d be able to find tens that mentions at least one of those five elements”. That’s fine. As I’ve said before, please show me just five texts for each of these elements.

You’ve quoted a text which you claim is an independent source of the Tower of Babel narrative. As I have previously told you, this text is not about the confusion of languages at all, and the nineteenth century translation you are using is not only biased by the translator’s preconceptions but is woefully misleading as a result. The translation “confounded their speech” is particularly suspect. How do we know that the translation is biased by the translator’s preconceptions? Because he told us. George Smith added this footnote to his translation of this text.

In the case of the 6th and 8th lines of the first fragment I have translated the word “speech” with a prejudice; I have never seen the Assyrian word with this meaning.

So Smith is telling us frankly that his own translation is biased and unsupported by lexical evidence, because he simply assumed this text is another version of the Tower of Babel story. Modern scholarship has long since abandoned this idea.

Point five. No, the conclusion that raqia is an exilic word is not simply based on an argument from silence. As I have told you previously, it is based on these facts.

  • Pre-exilic words do not use raqia, but instead use different words for the same concept, and this happens for 500 years
  • Genesis 1 uses both raqia and the previously used words for the raqia, suggesting a stage of lexical transition
  • Post-exilic words only use raqia for this concept

This is the kind of evidence which scholars use to date the origin of words. This is the same kind of evidence which leads scholars to conclude that the Pentateuch consists of texts written at different dates.This is not an argument from silence.

Point six. You claim I didn’t provide any evidence that Friedman dates the creation rationale in Exodus 20:11 to the exile, saying “I have not seen this produced”. I will remind you that I already gave it to you. Here it is again.

“The text of the Ten Commandments here does not appear to belong to any of the major sources. It is likely to be an independent document, which was Inserted here by the Redactor.”, Richard Elliott Friedman, The Bible with Sources Revealed: A New View into the Five Books of Moses (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 153.

That’s Friedman saying that the text of the Decalogue here in Exodus 20 does not belong to J, E, P, Dtr1 (pre-exilic), or Dtr2 (exilic), but was “inserted here by the Redactor”. If you read Friedman’s work, you will see that Friedman dates the Redactor to the exilic era.

Point seven. No, I did not say that Friedman understands the Song of Moses to be exilic. I told you very clearly that he believes it was an independent text which was inserted by an exilic writer. In other words, it was not original to Deuteronomy.

Your understanding of the dating of J is way out of date. The non-P material in Genesis 1-11 is now being treated differently, no longer simply assigned to J.

"The non-P material in Genesis up to the patriarchal history is commonly assigned to the following texts:

2:4*–3:24: the Eden Story
4:1–16: the Cain and Abel Story
4:17–24: the Descendants of Cain
4:25–26: the Descendants of Seth
6:1–4: the sons of the Gods
6:5–8:22*: the Flood Story
9:18–28: Noah and his Sons
10*: the Descendants of Noah’s sons (Table of Nations)
11:1–9: the Tower of Babel Story

Traditionally these texts as a whole or in part were regarded as the J source. Today there is no scholarly consensus whether the texts belong together in one source, or are a redactional collocation from different sources, or an ongoing commentary activity to P.", Helge S. Kvanvig, “Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic. An Intertextual Reading” (2011), 265.

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Yeah sorry I didn’t realize I’d linked to your post instead of his.

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I don’t think my comments were as vague as you guys put them. Maybe they were. I accepted Jonathan’s claim about the logograms. Hopefully that clears that up.

I find your logic and Thorkild’s logic vexatious. The term “borrowing” is clear enough that most any objective observor can see that “borrowing” of ANE legends and/or myths has occurred.

It looks like you’re getting confused over Thorkild’s use of the term ‘borrowing’. Thorkild is an objective observer, that’s not in doubt, and you simply have misunderstood how he uses the terms. When he says ‘borrowing’, he doesn’t mean that these stories merely influenced Genesis in their ways, Thorokild notes they obviously did, he is simply stating that the author of Genesis 1-11 did not directly take or borrow from specific Sumerian texts while he was composing his work. That is to say, he is not directly borrowing, of course the author is “borrowing” in the sense that he’s implementing pre-existing near eastern stories in the text. That’s something Thorkild confirms in his paper.

To say there was no borrowing would be to literally say that whoever wrote Genesis (let’s say it was Moses) had never heard of the Sumerian, Akkadian or Babylonian versions of this story before writing Genesis.

It’s uncertain whether or not the author of Genesis 1-11, when he was using these stories and works to model his narrative, knew in his mind “yes, this part comes from Gilgamesh, this comes from Enuma Elish”, etc. He obviously knew, without a doubt, that he was incorporating pre-existing works and cultural stories in his texts that had been earlier expressed in written texts. That’s all that matters here, whether or not Genesis knew of the exact traditions is unknowable and irrelevant to the fact that he was aware of them.

Is that your position, Korvexius? Do you think Genesis was written without any outside knowledge of these other similar stories…

If you read any one of my past thirty comments, you would realize that is not my position. As for your points 1 and 2, 1 is obviously wrong, but 2 isn’t exactly the way I would phrase it for pedantic reasons.

@ManiacalVesalius,

Ha. No sir. Borrowing doesn’t have to be intentional, but it certainly has to be based on prior knowledge.

You write: “It’s uncertain whether or not the author of Genesis 1-11, when he was using these stories and works to model his narrative, knew in his mind “yes, this part comes from Gilgamesh, this comes from Enuma Elish”…”
I suppose it is always hard to know what is in the mind of another. But it’s hardly relevant to the point being explored. The Jewish scribe is successfully “stealing the thunder” of a pagan tradition - - thereby bolstering the Jewish religion and culture. He doesn’t need citations to accomplish this; and in fact, citations would be counter-productive to the goal.

You and Thorkild are doing your best to play word games. It would seem, for example, that he thinks “borrowing” only occurs when he quotes exactly. But we have a term for that: it’s called plagiarism!

If you borrow a template, you are still borrowing. It’s plain and simple.

borrowing
o] the process by which something, as a word or custom, is adopted or absorbed.
o] the result of such a process; something borrowed, as a foreign word or phrase or a custom.

verb (used with object)
o] to use, appropriate, or introduce from another source or from a foreign source:
o] to borrow an idea from the opposition; to borrow a word from French.

I am agreeing. I also accepted in my previous comments that the phrase “breath of life” is in all these texts, and yes, the English renderings did throw me off at first.

Firstly, as I have already shown you, Job doesn’t use the phrase at all; Job even uses completely different Hebrew words. The Hebrew phrase for “breath of life” never occurs in Job.

As seen earlier, you did not demonstrate that the motif of the breath of life is not in Job, you only showed, which I already knew, that the flat out phrase itself “breath of life” was used in Job and that he didn’t use the particular words Genesis uses. However, the motif is clearly in Job. When Job says “The spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life”, to deny he is drawing on the motif would just be ridiculous. In every single use of the breath of life, ever, it is the breath of deities gives life. That’s what the motif means. Job says that the breath of the deity that gives him life. This is undeniably drawing on the motif.

Secondly, if this concept and phrase was so widespread and widely used, as you claim, why is it that we have 500 years of Hebrew literature (the vast majority of the Old Testament), which never uses it? Leaving Genesis 1-11 aside, why is this phrase only found elsewhere in exilic Hebrew texts?

I never said it was “so widespread” (and if I did accidently say that, I renounce it, but I’ve no memory of saying it). What I did say, on the other hand, is that the breath of life is a motif that existed in ancient near eastern literature, as we’ve seen from numerous examples, including pre-exilic Job, Lamentations, Revelation, the many times it occurs in Genesis, Eridu Genesis, Enki and Ninhursanga, and another text I referenced. By the way, you seem to have misunderstood my citations of Lamentations and Revelation. I simply cited them to show that they, too, were more texts that were aware of the motif of the breath of life. My citations of them were to demonstrate that this was a near eastern motif. I’ve now cited close to 10 different texts that draw on this same phrase. The fact that it was a common motif before and after the exile outside and inside of Israel/Judah demonstrates there is precisely a non-existent literary parallel that can be derived between Genesis 1-11 and Eridu Genesis from the use of the common use of this phrase. I could argue, with the exact same strength, that Genesis was actually citing the story of Enki and Ninhursanga rather than Eridu Genesis when using this phrase, and the fact that I can do precisely that shows that the use of this phrase proves exactly nothing.

No he wasn’t. I keep telling you this.

You’re going to have to do much more than simply tell me he wasn’t. We’ve already identified numerous texts that J and P used in Genesis 1-11 alone. As I’ll show later, these two authors, as well as the other Pentateuchal authors, used many more texts as well common to the ancient near eastern milieu, and in fact the Pentateuch collectively uses information from so many different precedent texts that maintaining any direct literary relationship between any single one text is impossible to defend. It makes vastly more send to understand that the Pentateuch was drawing on many, many traditions in the ancient near east milieu it shared with Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, Ugarit, Hatti, etc in its overall composition.

That quotation from Thorkild is what I have been telling you repeatedly. If you have now decided to agree with me, that’s great news. By the way, you need to read Thorkild with care. He believes that P had access to written Mesopotamian records, and used some of their concept and form, rather than your idea that P just happened to write things which were similar to Mesopotamian records because P knew the same oral traditions and ideas as the Mesopotamians. As I have told you repeatedly, this is not a matter of copy/pasting, but using the same content and form, primarily for polemic purposes. This kind of literary connection between Genesis 1-11 and the Mesopotamian texts, is well recognized across the scholarship of this field.

I’ve affirmed from the first comment I wrote that J, P, and the authors were modeling their texts based off of Mesopotamian traditions. That’s even in the passage from Thorkild I quoted. What I deny is direct literary borrowing that is rejected by Thorkild himself and a range of other scholars. One doesn’t need to maintain that the authors of these texts had no access to these works, they simply didn’t directly borrow from them rather than the fact that they shaped their workk in the general model of Mesopotamian tradition. You go on to provide a quote for these texts being “models” for Genesis, which of course was preceded by my own quote from Thorkild.

With regard to one of my points, you say " I see no serious defense of the claim until it’s been vetted by a good scholar and is uncontroversial among academics", but you fail to apply this principle to most of your own arguments, which are typically simply your own personal opinion unsubstantiated by any academic citations at all.

I’ve cited a number of scholars at this point, admittedly less than you have. I must refer back to Thorkild, who I share the same position with – Eridu Genesis and other texts served as an overarching model for Genesis, but was not directly borrowed from. Anyhow, I’ll also concede your point about that seal.

Point two. You try to inflate the number of ANE texts required for Genesis 1-11 by citing the Eridu Genesis, Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Enuma Elish, claiming a scribe would have needed to use them as well. You have clearly forgotten or perhaps simply not read (or not understood), what I told you before about the Atrahasis Epic. The Atrahasis Epic uses material from the Eridu Genesis and Enuma Elish, and the Epic of Gigalmesh uses material from the Atrahasis Epic. So the writer of Genesis 1-11 only needed to use the Atrahasis Epic, to be using material from the Eridu Genesis, Enuma Elish, and material unique to the Atrahasis Epic (the writer wouldn’t need anything from the Epic of Gilgamesh at all). As I also mentioned, the Sumerian King List only mentions the flood, and it borrows that from a previous flood text, so the Sumerian King List isn’t an independent source for the flood (it doesn’t even give any of the details of the flood, it just says it happened).

I’ve not said these are all independent texts that make no use of earlier texts, I simply said that each of the texts I mention contain specific details/traditions that the others don’t have that are in Genesis anyways (I also admit now upon further research that Gilgamesh wasn’t included). For example, the Enuma Elish has influenced the first few verses of Genesis, see 0:00 - 12:44 here in Christine Hayes lecture, as Enuma Elish contains elements in Genesis that don’t exist in Atrahasis or other texts.

You continue to write that the author of Genesis 1-11 only needed Atrahasis to get his material of Eridu Genesis, but of course, the phrase “breath of life” is nowhere in Atrahasis, and you believe that Genesis was drawing from exactly this phrase. You were the one who clearly enlisted Eridu Genesis as one of these sources, not myself. I do not know now whether or not you agree with me that the phrase “breath of life” was simply a common motif at the time.

Additionally, as I have told you several times previously, this is not a case of a Hebrew copy/pasting from different Mesopotamian texts to make their own narrative. There is no copy/pasting at all.

This is what I got from your comments earlier. When I noted many, many times that the author of Genesis 1-11 was drawing from the common ancient near eastern culture, stories at the time, and in fact modeling after them, you seem to have argued against it significantly, but in this comment of yours you are suddenly clearly saying that the authors did in fact only model after these texts, and in no point directly ‘quoted’/borrowed from them.

Anyways, you’ve also convinced me that the author of that book failed to properly translate the supposed Assyrian confusion of the languages and drew from his own panbabylonism (panbabylonianism?) in that translation. That is a striking point that I did not consider the author would do. I have now discarded that book from further use, since it’s clear 1) it is unreliable in its translations, and more importantly, 2) there is much more up-to-date and recent scholarly literature that can explain these points in the same way if not better than could the book I noted. I have to thank you for showing me this.

Back to raqia – I noted earlier in some length that raqia only appears in the P material, which scholars usually date to the exilic/post-exilic period anyways. And so, I have no particular problem here, since the phrase never appears in J which is in fact dated to before the exile. I also understand that there is zero consensus on much of anything nowadays when it comes to the non-P material in the primeval history, or perhaps in general, there is no consensus on almost anything that has to do with all these sources. I’m simply following Friedman here who divides the primeval history to J and P, which according to him at least, is according to the best and most recent scholarship. By the way, I checked the appendix in my copy of Friedman’s volume, you were also correct to note that he considers the Song of

No, I did not say that Friedman understands the Song of Moses to be exilic. I told you very clearly that he believes it was an independent text which was inserted by an exilic writer. In other words, it was not original to Deuteronomy.

You weren’t very clear about that. It’s good to see a clarification. However, as I note earlier, Friedman does think that the Song of Moses is of pre-exilic composition, which is what is relevant. The Song of Moses itself is what is alluding to either Genesis 10:32 (less likely) or Genesis 11:8-9 (more likely). I have already cited a number of sources that show that this is clearly talking about the context of the spreading of the nations that we know from the Genesis texts, at best you took issue with a few of them, but hardly the more recent ones, and in fact all commentaries do affiliate Deut. 32:8 with this spreading of the nations in ch. 10-11. Again, this is a verse part of a passage that is recounting Yahweh’s acts, what else on Earth does Yahweh do in the entire OT mentioned that is reminiscent of Deut. 32:8 that isn’t in the primeval history? Of course the passages don’t use the exact same Hebrew words as you noted, but that is hardly relevant, it’s an allusion, not a quotation. Again, do you have anything else that this verse could be referring to?

No, that’s not called “plagiarism”, that’s called “borrowing”. Plagiarism is a much more modern thing to stop others from stealing your work and benefiting off of it, but there was no such thing in ancient times.

Thorkild and I aren’t playing word games, you’re simply misunderstanding how the term ‘borrowed’ is used. You seem to agree with me and Thorkild that these texts never directly drew from what was written in these texts, your only apparent problem appears to be the terminology used to understand it. But this is a very irrelevant point. To note, you go on providing the definitions of borrow, of which one of them is the way Thorkild uses the word. I honestly see no point about quibbling about the terminology if we agree on the actual facts.

@ManiacalVesalius,

You are kidding, yes? Let’s repeat your sentence to get a real taste for the absurd:

You say that I “seem to agree with you that these texts never directly drew from what was written in these texts.”

Your description makes no sense to me. There is lots of borrowing. If there wasn’t we would not be having this discussion.

Using common words in a way that is not only ultra specific but also not intuitively sensible just wastes everybody’s time.

Take me off your pen-pal list. I really don’t have time to work with someone who is constantly using English in strange ways.

Let’s rephrase it. Genesis 1-11, in many ways, was modeled off of earlier Mesopotamian stories, but the author of Genesis 1-11 wasn’t reading the earlier epics and plucking out details from them, rather he was modeling his narrative over their larger framework. Fair? Or …?

@ManiacalVesalius

If you are going to do an intelligent job co-opting some famous pagan story … you can’t just wing it. You make selective borrowings, gently nudging here and pullling there, and voila - - you have a timeless writing that within a generation or two will be considered the more legitimate version of the old story (or stories).

All you are doing is offering apologia for why someone would never touch a pagan story. I’m quite certain they did… and to good effect.

Looks like you failed to understand my point considering you said this, and of course, I never claimed as you earlier accused that I’m claiming someone “winged co-opting a pagan story”. On the point of this discussion, I think we’ve both exchanged as much as we could.

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