Tag: Myths
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Voices in the Wilderness of Time and Space?
“Welcome to planet Earth – a place of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests and soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective it is poignantly beautiful and rare; but it is also, for the moment, unique. In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so…
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Jonah – A Good-Fun Read (iii)
We lost sight of Jonah when, on our hero’s uncompromising insistence, the good-hearted sailors very reluctantly tossed him into the sea. At once the inestimable power of Jonah’s God was demonstrated, in the immediate and complete calming of what had been an overwhelmingly tempestuous sea. No great surprise then, that in the New Testament, Jesus…
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Genesis One – Its ‘Beginnings’
The Book of Genesis is neither a science book, nor a history book. It’s a story book, containing some of the world’s most memorable tales. In its final form, involving the work of one or more editors, it’s a collection of traditional stories, originally shared by word of mouth, before being written down. These stories…
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Noah’s Flood (i) Two in One
In the ancient near east, where the Israelites lived, there were several versions of the story of the Great Flood. These were contained in the national epics of the Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian peoples. These texts, the earliest of which precede the Hebrew Bible by hundreds of years, were used in the training of scribes,…
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‘Once Upon a Time’ (ii) Enuma Elish
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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Thales and Water
It’s generally thought that Thales was the first Greek philosopher-cum-scientist. I like the story in which he’s walking along a path with an old lady, pointing up to, and telling her all about, the stars – when he trips and falls into the ditch. The old lady looks pityingly, but scornfully, down at him and…
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