More On The Tales of Genesis That Atheists Love To Embarrass Literalists With But Not Me - Hate Mail

THE JEWISH STUDY BIBLE says this about the similarities found in Genesis with some articles of Mesopotamian literature that so many like to claim the Jews stole from those poor, put upon pagans who repeatedly overran Israel and Judea.

Largely because of its focus on creation, the primeval history exhibits a number of contacts with Mesopotamian mythology.  The account of creation with which Genesis opens (1.1-2.3), for example, has affinities with Enuma elish, a Babylonian epic, which tells how one god, Marduk, attained supremacy over the others and created the world by splitting his aquatic enemy in half.  The story of Adam and Eve's sin in the garden of Eden (2.25-3.24) displays similarities with Gilgamesh, an epic poem that tells how its hero lost the opportunity for immortality and came to terms with his humanity.  And the story of Noah (6.5-9.17) Has close connections with Atrahasis, a Mesopotamian story in which the gods send a flood to wipe out the human race with the exception of one man from whom mankind begins afresh (the story was eventually incorporated into Gilgamesh as well).  In each case, the biblical narrator has adapted the Mesopotamian forerunner to Israelite theology.  The primeval history thus evidences both the deep continuities and the striking points of discontinuity of biblical Israel with its Mesopotamian antecedents and contemporaries.

I have no problem accepting this because I would have no problem with them using local folklore to make theological points or to assert the Hebrew ideas of morality.  Vatican II had what I think is a very honest teaching that the Scriptures contain what is needed for salvation, they are not history books or science books or even accurate in terms of those intellectual categories.   I can accept it on those terms and might be prepared to believe those were borrowings if we had a solid basis to make that assumption on, so far as I can see, we don't have that.

I do wonder why it never seems to occur to people that as with the variant texts of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, the Masoretic text, those of the Samaritans, etc. it is impossible to know what version is "original," assuming we have "the original," when they set the text of Genesis against the recovered texts of these related stories.  

The physical objects, encoded in clay might be older than the surviving fragments of the Hebrew Bible but that, in itself, doesn't guarantee that the non-Hebrew texts have a prior, independent existence from what we have now.  It never seems to be asked if the earlier versions of what appears in the Hebrew Bible may not have been copied by the source we have Gilgamesh, etc, from.  I think that the "older" versions of the story might seem to us older because the clay tablets used to write them down were more durable than either oral transmission or a language commonly written on far less durable paper or parchment.  I wonder if the reason there is so much cuneiform around is because it was a lot cheaper than paper or parchment would have been, its material substrate is literally as common as dirt and, given a pure enough source, is far easier to produce. And it never seems to be asked what the Gilgamesh, etc. came from, how the telling of it might have differed from an "original" form, altered to fit the local culture, heavily influenced by their theology and, almost certainly, their politics.  I wonder how much textual criticism of those has been done.

Or it is possible that the different versions grew from an earlier oral tradition that both of them knew and adapted but which we don't know.  The fact is, we simply don't know and likely never will know.  We know which tradition persisted, even with that less durable, more easily lost medium of its preservation which forces a reliance on the human choice to take it seriously enough to preserve it.  And that is the tradition that had such a radical, egalitarian content, a moral foundation of universal justice to it to make it worth preserving even in the more ephemeral, difficult to produce medium of writing on paper or parchment.

The fact is, like with my critique of much of, perhaps most of the alleged science done about biological evolution, the evidence to make any kind of reliable conclusions about that is not available.  Though it is possible that, unlike with so much of the stuff of evolution which covers millions and billions instead of thousands of years, is certainly lost for all time and comes with the inconvenience of not being as articulate or safely interpreted as written text.  There might be a better chance of something earlier coming up in this much narrower area of research, though I doubt it will be written on paper or parchment. It is unfortunate that the earliest Hebrew tradition that we know doesn't seem to have often used a more durable medium for writing, though it must have been a lot easier to lug around some scrolls than a bunch of heavy clay tablets, Genesis and Exodus show them to have been people on the go.  The fact is, unless we have readable texts that we can understand, earlier human culture is nothing but a product of rank conjecture and story telling, the modern versions of that lacking the basis in knowledge that those who produced the earliest available texts may have had access to.  In the modern pop version of that, the stuff of internet babble and "journalism" and in a good deal of the modern academic babble about it, there is an obvious anti-religious, anti-Jewish and, so, anti-Christian bias assumed from the start.  Even many Christians and Jews, wanting to be good and, more so, respectable academics go along uncritically to get along with that.  I think a lot of them give up too much way too easily when a MORE CRITICAL look at the evidence would not necessarily lead to the modern debunking of the texts.

Even if you make the stupendous mistake of mistaking Genesis for history as written by modern scholars, what makes Fundamentalism, in spite of itself a product of modernism, the fact is that the literary and editorial practice of including two versions of the same story in the text makes that far less credible than, as Brueggmann advocates, taking it seriously but "holding it loosely."  Following that advice, I take it seriously but never hold on to any ideas I might have about this or that passage of most of it as being certain knowledge.  That is especially true of the Gospels and the Prophets which contain passages that surpass that kind of knowing.

Of course I don't believe in the literal truth of the creation of the human species in Genesis (which one of the two accounts?).  While I respect his brilliance, his responsibility in formal intellectual discourse and his incredible work ethic which makes him such an effective debater with scientistic atheists, I think William Lane Craig's attempt to locate a biological Adam and Eve isn't his best work.  His evangelical orientation leads him to hold onto some things too hard, a criticism I can make of another current and very effective apologist, the Oxford mathematician, John Lennox.  If there's one thing we know about the literary cultures  that gave us Genesis and the other Books of the Bible (and there was considerable cultural change all during the period when those were written), they used exaggeration as a method of giving emphasis and to make things more noticeable.  I would guess that a Sarah might have been in her late 40s or early 50s, that a Moses would have had a considerably narrower number of years in which to do what is attributed to him. But that's my conjecture.  The record in Scripture is the only record we've got.  

Of course I don't believe that the flood in the story of Noah was a weather report on the most catastrophic rain storm in history - though the 1990s or so conjecture that it might have been a vaguely remembered cultural report on the flooding of the Black Sea basin thousands of years earlier had some appeal for me.  If I'd lived through it I might wonder what we'd done to make God do that to us.  And stories about it may well have persisted in oral literary culture for a very long time.   Though the scientific basis for such an origin is certainly in hot dispute with some evidence that it was horse feathers.

I think the Tower of Babel might have been a satirical (though not necessarily unreliable) report on a Trumpian building project that collapsed in arrogance, rich-guy insistence on their builders doing the impossible.  I predict "Neom" will turn out be one going on right now.  Maybe their architects were as incompetent about materials and physics as so many modern celebrity ones are in our "enlightened" culture.*  

Or through  misplaced confidence in unproved building technology.  And then there is the injustice that allowed the ruling class to waste resources on self-aggrandizement which could have gone to improve the conditions of the least among them.  I'll bet the poor people of knew they were getting the shaft so they could build the thing, like some realize that when the grifting Mayor and Council try to build a new football stadium or they put in a bid with the gangsters of the International Olympics Committee. Slave labor would almost certainly have been involved at some level.

In that there is certainly a parallel in the Pharaonic regime and its pyramids and other useless self-aggrandizing extravagances.  I'm more convinced that the cultural memory of that kind of thing might have something to do with the reluctance of the Jewish tradition to mention the afterlife except only very occasionally and generally somewhat askance. I'll bet that's part of what they thought of when they remembered that they were slaves in Egypt.

* And, or so my carpenter brother told me, even many non-celeb architects who run up huge costs doing the same.  He's worked on two hospitals that wasted enormous amounts on cost-overruns for totally useless architectural ornamentation such as an ornamental tower that didn't even contain a radio antenna, even more so on a very large indoor waterfall that carried such an obvious danger of becoming infectious that you have to wonder at the absolute stupidity of having such things IN A FRIGGIN' HOSPITAL approved by idiots who should never have been in a position to do that. I don't know if they still have it going but when I went in there the lobby stank of chlorine, so much so I had a hard time standing it for a few minutes.  Our hospitals are run by idiots and gangsters, the medical industry in the United States is a moral cesspool.  Obamacare was a huge advance over what was but it doesn't come close to fixing the basic problem of for-profit medicine, which should never have been allowed to become for-profit.