What if the creation stories in Genesis were not intended to be taken literally?
Consider for a moment that we might not have been the audience Biblical writers had in mind more than 2,300 years ago.1 Theirs was a world in which children could be sold into debt slavery, hosts welcomed strangers into their homes by bathing their feet and the blood of sacrificial animals was daubed on the high priest’s earlobe and big toe. Ours is a world of Google books, YouTube, Ashley Madison, space flight and lactose-free soy-based ice cream. Among other things, this means that Biblical creation stories may not have functioned in the same way that modern creation stories do.
Today, one may subscribe to accounts of the Big Bang, Intelligent Design or Xenu and the Wall of Fire. Modern creation stories—whether based on belief in scientific evidence, the inerrancy of Scripture or the secret revelations of a mid-20th-century science fiction writer—assume an “either/or” approach. That is, either the Big Bang, or Intelligent Design or Xenu is responsible for the origin of the world. It is not conceivable that all three stories can peaceably coexist. This is not the case for stories arising within the ancient Near Eastern genre of mythology.
Culturally we use the word “myth” as a synonym for falsehood. Psychology Today lists 15 “Myths of Aging” to debunk common assumptions.2 But as a literary genre, myths are not tales defined by being untrue. Myths are stories that convey and reinforce important aspects of a culture’s worldview: many truths.
In the Mesopotamian myth Atrahasis, the god Ea instructs the goddess Mami on how to form humans from a mixture of clay and divine blood. In Enuma Elish, Marduk’s plan for the creation of humans is executed by Ea, and in the Creation of the Pickaxe, Enlil separates heaven and earth so that humans can sprout up like plants. In ancient Egypt, we find even more differences among creation stories. In one Atum creates by spitting (or alternatively, ejaculating). In another Ptah fashions or speaks the world into being and gives birth to it, and in yet another, Khnum forms everything on his potter’s wheel.
My students ask, which one is true? Which one did they actually believe happened? For the Mesopotamians, was Enlil the creator? Mami? Or Marduk? Which Egyptians believed that Ptah was the creator, which Khnum and which Atum? Culturally we find it very difficult to have a variety of equally valid explanations for creation—to have multiple truths instead of one Truth. We want to pick one and defend it, or we try to synthesize the versions available to show their underlying singularity.
Like other ancient peoples, the Israelites told multiple creation stories. The Bible gives us three (and who knows how many others were recounted but not preserved?). Genesis 1 differs from Genesis 2–3, and both diverge from a third version alluded to elsewhere in the Bible, a myth of the primordial battle between God and the forces of chaos known as Leviathan (e.g., Psalm 74), Rahab (Psalm 89) or the dragon (Isaiah 27, 51). This battle that preceded creation has the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish as its closest analogue. In Enuma Elish, the god Marduk defeats the chaotic waters in the form of the dragon Tiamat and recycles her corpse to create the earth.
What did they think happened in the beginning? I think they thought any of these was possible. Any—or all—of these stories could answer this question, depending on who was asking the question and for what reason.
The most famous version of Enuma Elish features the ascendancy of the god Marduk, a god virtually unknown from other ancient Near Eastern creation stories. But he happens to have been the chief god of Babylon. When Babylon became the center of a new empire in the seventh century B.C.E., they started to tell this version of the epic of creation that culminated in the ascendancy of Marduk over all of the other gods in heaven. We might call this political propaganda. Marduk’s pre-eminence becomes a central component of their creation myth, telling the audience that the rule of Babylon over the rest of the ancient world was reflecting events in heaven. But in the myth, the ascendancy of Marduk happens at creation. So they 060are collapsing the concept of time in order to understand their world in their present. And that’s what the genre of mythology does.
Biblical myths do the same thing. The Eden story seeks to answer “present” questions: why people wear clothes, why men have to work hard to produce food from the earth, and why women have pain in childbirth and are dominated by their husbands.a In Isaiah 27, God’s primordial slaying of the chaos monster is recast as a day of rebirth and renewal for Israel after their period of exile and expiation. Answers to present questions are retrojected back into the order established at creation, in the same way Enuma Elish explains the ascendancy of Babylon in the seventh century by retrojecting Marduk’s rise back into the order established at creation.
We tend to focus on the apparent contradiction of which god was creator instead of appreciating the variety and nuances provided in the versions: concepts of creation as an art (the potter) or as an extension of the divine body, the inevitability of strife in life, and the continued need to maintain order and keep chaos at bay. These are complex ideas, and different stories exist to emphasize different truths.
This means that reading the creation stories in the Bible is neither likely to answer the question of what happened at the beginning of time—nor to even answer the question of what ancient Israelites believed happened at the beginning of time. But the myths do give us rich sources of information about the kinds of fears, values and principles with which the authors grappled, espoused and reinforced to audiences in their own day. Rather than one Truth, ancient myths manifest many truths about the cultures that composed and disseminated them.
What if the creation stories in Genesis were not intended to be taken literally?
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Dating the texts of the Hebrew Bible is a controversial endeavor, but most Biblical scholars agree at least that all of the books of the Hebrew Bible (except Daniel) were complete and more or less in their present form by the third century B.C.E. Some of us argue for an earlier date for the majority of the books in their final form by two or more centuries, and there are good arguments based on language, content and archaeology for some Biblical texts as early as the tenth century B.C.E. (see, e.g., William Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002], especially chapter 4).
2.
Simon Tan, “Myths of Aging,” Psychology Today (blog), January 20, 2011 (psychologytoday.com/blog/wise/201101/myths-aging).
