Tag: Mythology
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Matthew’s Debatable Verse
There are just two ‘nativity’ accounts, at the beginning of the Gospels called Matthew and Luke. Neither is referred to again in the New Testament, which nowhere else says anything about Jesus’ birth. The word “virgin” occurs only in Matthew, in a quote from Isaiah 7:14. Here’s a literal rendering of that verse from the…
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The Bible and Babylonian Myth (ii)
My previous post showed how the Hebrew Bible writers made use of the Babylonian myth ‘Enuma Elish’ in finalising their own great national epic, and how the conflict between the god Marduk and the goddess Tiamat, hinted at in Genesis 1:2, finds clear parallels in the books of the Psalms and Job. In the Babylonian…
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Garden, Snake and Tree
Dating from more than 2,000 years before the final version of the Garden of Eden story, we have this seal from the Sumerian civilisation in what is now southern Iraq (the same part of the world from which the ancestors of Abraham, the ‘father’ of Israel, are said to have come from). Beginning from the…
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A Credo and a Plea …
While contemplating my current series of posts on Genesis, I felt the need to remind myself, (and explain to any interested reader), where I’m coming from, and what is one key source to which I keep returning. Here’s an edited quote from the Prologue to Volume One of “The Masks of God” by Joseph Campbell.…
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Genesis One – Order over Chaos
Let’s focus on the first three verses of Genesis 1. There is here, no absolute beginning, no sudden appearance of something from nothing. There is rather the beginning of a story, in which someone called ‘God’ already exists, as does what you and I call “the earth”, although not as we currently know it. It…
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Rethinking ‘God’ (1) ‘Two Different Universes’
Some people don’t have a problem with ‘God’. I’m not writing for them, but for people who do .… The early chapters of the Bible are not about the creation of the Universe. Firstly, they’re not about ‘creation’, but a reshaping of what already existed. Secondly, what that reshaping resulted in, wasn’t so much a…
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‘Once Upon a Time’ (iv) El and Baal
As I noted in my 1st post on this theme, the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament contains many echoes of far older, interesting and amusing creation myths, flood stories and epic poems which, because used to train scribes, were widely spread in location and time across the ancient near east. The Hebrew writers/editors used a number of…
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‘Once Upon a Time’ (iii) Gilgamesh
As I noted in my 1st post on this theme, the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament contains many echoes of far older, interesting and amusing creation myths, flood stories and epic poems which, because used to train scribes, were widely spread in location and time across the ancient near east. The Hebrew writers/editors used a number of…
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