Myth Busters
A lot of very smart Christians believe that the Creation account was written as a foil for Ancient Near Eastern creation myths. It was written by Moses to rally Israel culturally, to set a boundary between the Hebrew identity and that of the nations.
Nigel Pegram writes:
Why start the Bible with an account of creation? To our western, scientific mind it might seem the best place to start, you know, at the beginning. Yet, for the ancient Hebrews, I doubt that this was the reason. For them, the Scriptures explained who they were as a people and who the God was they worshipped. They started with these creation accounts because they defined in very clear terms who their God was and who they were as human beings.
COPYCATS
It is no accident that the stories of Genesis chapters 1–11 are written so that they are very similar to other ancient near eastern (ANE) creation and flood stories. The ancient Hebrews chose to model their stories after those of their neighbours. Why? Well, whenever we want to get a point across, we use terms and ways of speaking that will communicate most effectively with our audience (I’m sure we’ve all listened to sermons, read books or seen TV programs which were a little less than “effective” in communication). [1]
This boils down to Moses grabbing Enuma Elish and forging Yahweh’s name into it, then changing a few of the facts around to make it look like an original. I guess it’s easy for evangelicals to believe because they spend their time aping the culture around them as well.
The point of Genesis 1-3 does actually move beyond 1:1. It conveys far more than the identity of the Creator. The process of Creation was a worship service, and it laid down patterns that govern every human day, every human life, the Tabernacle, the Temple, the speeches and Laws of God, and the rise and fall every human culture. That’s what it says on the back cover of Bible Matrix. It’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Every detail in Genesis 1 is played out typologically in the Bible over and over again, from beginning to end.
So, what I want to know is this: How do these “unimportant” details in Genesis 1-3 actually defy Babylonian myth? And if that was their purpose, why do these patterns run right through the whole Bible. Jesus’ sermon on the mount and His condemnation of the Pharisees follow the same pattern. The Last Supper follows the pattern (at two levels). The pattern is laced through the books of Acts and the epistles. In Revelation the 7 point pattern is often working at 3 or 4 levels simultaneously. Israel’s feasts you might be able to deal with, but the entire New Testament also follows the pattern. Please explain how the New Testament was written to defy Ancient Near Eastern myth. If you’ve read Bible Matrix you’ll have some idea how deep this goes. If you’ve read (or even just flipped through) Totus Christus you’ll really appreciate how deep it goes.
Or did all the Bible authors, and God, knowingly structure their history and literature on a dodgy forgery scrawled out by Moses for a speech at a political rally, hoping no one in the crowd would notice the plagiarism. It’s almost Pythonesque.
The answer is obvious. This is rank unbelief. This is a literary and scholarly FAIL. And this evangelical urban myth is busted. [2]
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[1] Nigel Pegram (EO, National Council of Churches of Christ Australia), What do the Creation Stories Tell Us?
[2] See also, Dodging the Silver Bullet, The Christ Event, How Not to Read Genesis, and I just discovered James Jordan wrote a (relatively) new article called Apologia on Reading the Bible which relates to this somewhat.
