Ancient Texts Archives - Go Deeper Bible Study

To properly interpret the Bible, we must try to understand it as the original audience would have understood it. Words and phrases would have a meaning to the culture in which they were written that we miss with our Western world mindset and experiences. Understanding where the stories of creation fit in the Ancient Near East is part of the conversation that we need to have when we look at the opening chapters in the Book of Genesis. I will explain some of the creation stories in the Ancient Near East. Then look at how the story of Genesis is like and unlike those accounts. Probably the most well known one is from Babylonia. It’s called Enuma Elish, which means “when on high.” Marduk attacks Tiamot in the Enuma Elish It starts with a watery abyss and talks us through the creation, first of the various gods of that society, but also then into the battle that leads to the creation of the world and humanity and so on. It’s got all sorts of different motifs in it. Some of them are similar to the Bible, like starting with a deep, dark, watery abyss, and others are very different. For example, in Genesis 1, there’s no battle going on there. But in the Enuma Elish, the world is created as the result of a war between the god Marduk and the sea god Tiamot. There are quite a number of stories from Babylonia from early on, long before the 7th century BC, way back into the third millennium BC. We have sources for creation and the creation not only of the gods, but also of humanity and of the world. There’s a Sumerian story as well that has both creation of man and the flood in the same story, much like we have in Genesis 1 through 11. And then also from Egypt we have quite a number of different stories from different temple contexts, therefore, from different perspective of different gods in terms of how creation was done. There we have various kinds of concepts that are very different from the Bible on the one hand. But then there are certain similarities, like one of them we do have a God speaking and the creation happens. But then you have all sorts of other kinds. Sometimes people are made out of the tears of the god or various things along that line. So there’s lots of different kinds of stories from the Ancient Near East. And then related stories, like from Ugaret in Northern Lebanon, which we have texts from there. And it talks about Baal and how he’s related to nature. All this affects how they would understand in the Ancient Near Eastern world how a world is put together and how it works. Some of the motifs associated with these mythologies come into background concepts that the ancient Israelites would have been familiar with because the ancient Israelites were Ancient Near Easterners too. These creation stories explain how mankind was created so that man could replace lower gods who were responsible for working and, therefore, feeding the gods. And so man was created so that the lower gods don’t have to work, because they were complaining about the hard work. We have the story of Adapa, of a particular primeval person. We have different kinds of things. We have Babylonian Noah-type stories with concepts of the flood and survival from the flood. And these early chapters of Genesis have a lot of different kinds of connections to things that were understood in the Ancient Near East. In the Bible, what God is doing is he’s connecting to the Israelites in their world, but also taking them places they've never gone before in their understanding of who God is and how the world came into being. Genesis 1-6 is not so much a historic account of HOW things were made, as a polemic against the other creation stories of the world the israelites lived in. It's not the "HOW" that is important. It is the WHO - the one self-existent creator God, and the WHY. This does not mean Genesis is not historic. The bible clearly teaches a literal six day creation, but the purpose of the first chapters is to reveal WHO God is as compared to the gods of the mytholgy of that time. The way in which Genesis tells the story would not be unfamiliar to someone if they were familiar with some of these other accounts that exist in Ancient Near East, at least in terms of some of the motifs. There would be a lot of things that’d be very similar. One of the things that would be very similar is how in the beginning with the watery deep. But there are also in the Ancient Near Eastern context, you have to have not only the creation of the world, but before that, the creation of the gods. So you have theogony, creation of the gods. And that is something that the Bible just stamps out completely from any kind of concept. "In the beginning, God created." Genesis 1:1 As opposed to all other Near-Eastern mythologies, the God of the Bible has no creation. He is self-existent. That is how God identified himself to Moses. He said, "Tell them I am sent you." "And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you." Exodus 3:14 The God of the Bible is unique in that he has no beginning and is the beginning of all things. We have the uncreated God as opposed to the creation of gods in the Ancient Near East mythologies. Now, sometimes it’s said that these accounts outside the Old Testament are dealing with explaining the origin of things. They are a certain kind of story that etiology, which explains why certain things happen. In those stories there is a lot of explaining of how did this come into being, how did that come into being. How was it arranged in such a way that the world actually works? Things along that line are very common in these stories. And in the Bible, a big part of what God’s concern is to explain to us our world. Who are we and where’d we come from? How do we fit into what’s all around us, and what place are we supposed to take in it as far as God is concerned? These stories frame the creation of humanity, explain where humanity fits in relationship to the gods, in relationship to the responsibilities that they have on earth. In other creation accounts, man is a low being, often crude, sometimes even evil. Man is made to serve the gods. In return the gods provide for man. One of the things that really stands out about the creation story in Genesis, in that regard, is that we’re created in the image and likeness of God, not just kings in our culture and not just the elite or anything, but all of humanity is created as God’s image and likeness and is meant to reflect who he is in the world and to handle the world in a way that’s pleasing to him. We’re put in charge. In Genesis, man is completely different. He is made in God's image. And God has need of nothing, so man is created not as a servant, but as a companion. There is an exalted role for all people in the way that creation works in the Old Testament. There are quite a number of accounts that talk about kings being the image of God, and so on. But the thing that stands out in the Bible is that people, just common people, are put here to be God’s representatives in the world, those who stand here for him. In a lot of the Ancient Near Eastern accounts creation happens by doing battle between the gods in various ways. It’s got a name for it, the chaos battle, or battle of chaos. So you can bring order out of this by doing battle with this god of chaos. There are reflections in the Bible of God being the one who can defeat all this chaos and so on, sometimes in relation to creation. But in Genesis, what we have is an account that makes it very clear that God doesn’t have to do any battle here at all. God speaks and it happens. Rather than creating through chaos, God brings order out of disorder. "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Genesis 1:2 The earth was void, but it was not chaos. There was 'the deep," the water, but there was no sea god, no battle. The Spirit of God merely moved across the water and brought forth land and life. This is an extreme contrast to the other creation stories of the area and what the israelites would have heard and believed before God revealed himself to them. And things like the sun and the moon and the stars that are gods in the Ancient Near Eastern world, they’re just called the Big Light and the Little Light. They’re even demoted. They don’t even have the name of Shamash or something like that, the name of the sun god. So it’s very clearly telling us these things that are so commonly thought of as gods are not, and there is no god that can stand against our God. We see the influence of the other mythologies in the culture of the time and how the Bible addresses things like the sea monster gods. We see references to the sea monster Leviathan, also called Rahab. Isaiah 27:1 So like in Isaiah 27:1, the little apocalypse of Isaiah, it looks forward to the great final defeat of this great Leviathan, this evil monster. Whereas in Psalm 74 and other places it refers to this Leviathan that's been defeated in the olden days. It’s a way of talking about how God is the one who defeats evil and stands against those forces in the world. The Introduction of Evil One of the problems that you run into in the early chapters of Genesis is understanding how evil is even present when we come to Genesis 3 and where it’s come from. And there is, in the unwinding of the Genesis story, no backdrop for where this has come from. It just comes in. What I think is happening in Genesis, in creation we don’t have a battle between God and the great monster, the chaos monster. What happens is in the Old Testament and in Genesis 1 through4, the battle doesn’t begin at creation. It begins with the fall. That is the battle of the ages that’s encountered there. The serpent attacks the image of God, us, and in so doing he attacks God. And so the battle that we’re in the middle of is this force of chaos coming into the world. Sin, disruption, and corruption are introduced and that is a big part of who we are and that we struggle with in the world. What happens in the early chapters of Genesis is that the Bible does something very different from what the Ancient Near Eastern world does. It takes this battle and puts it right in our laps, and it says the battle came through the temptation and the fall, and now the battle is the great battle of the ages. If you go through the Book of Revelation, Chapter 12, it talks about this woman who’s about to have a child, and it has all of this imagery from the Old Testament and how this great one is the dragon of old, this great evil one. And he gets defeated by this child who rules the nations with a rod of iron. In Jewish circles, it's called a Midrash, where it explains what’s going on in the ultimate day by talking about how that great evil that began back then and that great evil one, that’s all going to be destroyed, and we’re going to end up, eventually, in Revelation 21 and 22 with a new heaven and a new earth where that sort of corruption just does not exist. This spiritual battle is really something that runs through the entirety of Scripture from start to finish. We’re in the middle of a great, big cosmic fray. It’s a brawl and we’re the territory under dispute, you and I and everyone in this world. It’s us as people because we were created as God’s image. The attack was upon God because it was an attack upon the image of God. The battle starts in history in Genesis 3, and it will be consummated on the last day of history. The portrayal of the battle is a different kind of battle than the battle we’re seeing in the Ancient Near Eastern text, which is between the gods, themselves. Humanity is part of the battle because there might be one particular god who is the good god. For example, in Canaan, Baal was considered a good god. In the Old Testament, he’s evil. And he is. Baal is defeating the great evil monster, Leviathan, in the Ugaritic material. And what happens is that because he defeats Leviathan, there is fertility and, therefore, prosperity in the world of mankind. So mankind is involved in a relationship to the gods, but the battle is on the divine level. God was speaking into the world of the ancient Israelites in a way that really made sense, was true about what really happened and was put in such a way that they could really get the point. They could really see the power of this great evil, but the greater power of their great God. Genesis, and the entire Old Testament, reflected and built upon the ancient mythologies that the Israelites were exposed to. It is put in a context they could relate to. With the Leviathan figure, one wonders what kind of a beast is this? Is it a fish, since it is a sea monster? We have the image of Revelation of a dragon. What are we looking at when we talk about Leviathan? Do we know? Psalm 74 - Leviathan Actually have quite a few descriptions. He’s the great sea monster, and he has multiple heads according to Psalm 74. And these kinds of pictures come out in other literature of the Ancient Near East too. There’s a sense of this great evil power. People all over the world knew about evil; they knew about the corruption, and they faced it. All of us do every day in our lives. They had this picture of this great evil serpent. In fact, we have actually pictures of this great serpent with seven heads. And there’s a battle going on. This is actually in Ancient Near Eastern picture material, iconography. And in this material, they will have, like, seven heads on this serpent. And maybe three of them are hanging down dead and four of them are still striking out. And, yes, they have pictures of this sort of thing. Leviathan with seven heads The opening of Genesis is much more tranquil, in comparison to the chaos of the battle that is a part of the creation in these other stories. We’re starting in a slightly different place. One thing that’s very clear from Genesis is that there’s only one God in the beginning. Then there’s a deep, dark watery abyss, but he doesn’t have to do any battle. He reshapes it by speaking and there is no battle that takes place. It’s very tranquil. The Spirit of God is hovering over the waters, kind of as ready to do creative work. Is there a conflict between Genesis Chapter One and Genesis Chapter Two? One thing that you hear about that often comes up is the claim that the story in Genesis1 and the story in Genesis 2 are two very different stories of creation, that they don’t connect. And, in fact, some people will say that they’re even written by different authors. There is an important shift between Genesis 1:1 through chapter 2, verse 3. And then there’s a particular expression: "these are the generations of the heavens and the earth" which is often translated "these are the accounts of the heavens and the earth." And it refers to what comes out of, what generates from what’s already going before it. Genesis 2:4 We have tes whole cosmos, the whole universe in Genesis 1:1 through 2:3. And then Genesis 2:4 goes on and really zeros down into the work of humanity. There’s an interesting thing that happens. In the first chapter, the name for God is Elohim. It’s the broad name for the great God. Then what happens in Chapter 2 is there’s a shift. We still use the name, Elohim, but along with it the name, Lord. What happens is in Genesis 2:4, going from Elohim in the Chapter 1 story, it moves to Yahweh Elohim, and uses Yahweh Elohim throughout the account in Chapter 2. The writer, and I do take it to be Moses, is actually telling the people of Israel, who are the recipients of this material, this story of this account. He’s telling them the Yahweh who is the God delivering you from Egypt is the same God who created all that we have, all that we’re in the midst of here in this universe. It is tying the history of Israel and the importance of Yahweh as the covenant God of Israel into who he really is. And he is the great Creator God. In the context of the Ancient Near East, that’s a very important statement. In Chapter 2 when we go to Yahweh Elohim, we’re dealing with the personal covenant God who has relationship. This explains, in part, the shift between the grand creation in seven days that we get in Genesis 1, and the more personalized focus on the creation of Adam and Eve as a development of being created in the image of God, but in very personal and in very direct relationship with God. There are other things too that really distinguish Chapter 2:4 and following from Chapter 1. The Chapter 2 account is really a much fuller, down to right in the soil kind of development of day six in Chapter 1. An important feature of Chapter 1 is the seven-day element. One of the things that’s happening in Genesis 1 and we're talking about etiology again, is explaining the creation and how the Sabbath is a mirror of what happened in the creation. How did Jewish theology think about that in reading Genesis? The fact that we have evening and morning suggests that we’re talking about the regular day, evening and morning at the end of the day and so on. One of the things that stands out is that there is good reason to believe that these are actual literal days. But, on the other hand, there’s also this pattern in Scripture, this six-seven pattern where they use a lot of sixes with seven or seven patterns. Like even in Proverbs Chapter 6, there’s six things the Lord hates, yes, seven. There’s these various kinds of combinations of six and seven patterns. And we have them not only in the Bible, but also in the Ancient Near Eastern world in a number of texts that we have. The ancient Israelites would have been familiar with this pattern of sevens and six sevens. One of the questions we have to ask is whether they would have understood this to be a literal six days and then the seventh day, or whether they were saying, “Oh, wow. This is the regular six-seven pattern and it’s a literary way of shaping the story." It’s kind of like you can tell the same story in different ways, so like we have the four different Gospels in the New Testament and they’re not all arranged the same. They tell the truth, each one. But they tell it and they shape it in such a way that makes particular points, too, in a certain way. And we have the same thing in the Old Testament in other places, as well as in this place. We even have Psalm 104, another account of God’s creation that does the similar kinds of differences, but with a lot of parallels. So the question becomes then, do we take these days as literal days, or do we take these as literary days? When I read Exodus 20, I see a literal week. For this reason I believe that although the seven day creation week has literary significance, it is still a literal seven day week. Exodus 20:8-11 "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it." We also see that on the seventh day, God rested. This is not because he was tired. For God to rest means he has accomplished bringing order from disorder and now he takes his place on the htrone, ruling over his creation. And what did God do on the eighth day? He rested. But with the fall of man, disorder came back into the universe. The Bible is the story of how God created order, not from chaos, butfor he is not the God of chaos, but from disorder. It is the story of how disorder came into this world and how God will restore perfect order once more. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus is the first big step in that restoration, as God has restored fellowship between himself and man. The church, as God's ambassadors are part of the continuing work of restoration and Christ's return at the end of history will make the completion of God restoring order. Neo-Assyrian cylinder seal impression possibly depicting Tiamat as the serpent. Source: Wikimedia Commons