← Defenders Podcast
Defenders Podcast
Defenders 3: Excursus on Creation of Life and Biological Diversity (Part 19): The Plasticity and Flexibility of ANE Myths
Loading summary
Transcript40 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig Today the Creation of Life and Biological Diversity, Part 19.
- [00:11]
B
For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org We've been thinking about the question are myths to be understood literally, to be true? And in our examination of anthropological data, we saw that there are three factors or properties of myth that contribute to the view that they are not to be interpreted literalistically. One was their metaphoricalness, another was their plasticity, and a third factor was their flexibility. Their metaphoricalness refers to the figurative nature of the language of myth. The plasticity of myth refers to the different versions of a myth that might be told simultaneously in a culture that differ from one another, though they teach the same central truth. And the flexibility of myth is its ability to adapt and change over time in response to new pressures and situations. And when we began to look at the literary evidence of ancient Near Eastern myths of Israel's neighbors, Mesopotamia, that is to say Babylon and Sumer, and then also Egypt, we found that they are characterized by this same metaphorical language that the anthropological data suggests. Now, not only does the metaphorical and figurative language of ancient Near Eastern myths support a non literal reading of such myths, but these myths also exhibit the same sort of plasticity and flexibility that we found in the anthropological data. In Mesopotamia we have alternative accounts of of Marduk's creation of the world, which are significantly different. Now, I've already mentioned the creation narrative in the Enuma Elish, in which Marduk creates the world, or fashions the world rather out of the corpse of the dragoness Tiamat. But in a different work, the bilingual Sumero Babylonian creation story, there is no such contest. Rather, in this account we read that when all was once sea, and I quote, Marduk constructed a raft on the surface of the waters, and he made earth and heaped it up on the raft that the gods should be settled in a dwelling of their pleasure. He created mankind. Now, although this version of the myth also features primordial water and Marduk as the principal creator of the world, this serene creation story is vastly different from the warlike account that is found in the Enuma Elisheva. We also have varying accounts in Mesopotamia of the creation of humanity out of the blood of slain gods in order to provide workers for the gods. For example, in the Enuma Elish, the God Kingu is executed for inciting Tiamat's rebellion. And I quote from his blood Ea, one of the other gods created mankind, on whom he imposed the service of the gods. And set the gods free, end quote. In the story of creation, in another cuneiform text abbreviated K A R number four, two gods Elah and Allah are slaughtered in order, quote, to grow humanity with their blood. Let the labor of the gods become its, that is to say, humanity's work assignment. And then in the Atrahazis epic, we read that another God named Weila was killed and quote from his flesh and blood into mixed clay to fashion man to relieve the gods of their labor. And I quote again, I have removed your heavy work. I have imposed your toil upon man. So in these different versions of the myth of humanity's creation, we find the central truths affirmed, that there is a divine constitutive element in man and that the reason for mankind's creation was basically to make slave labor for the gods. So we have different versions that illustrate the same central truths. It's in Egypt, however, that one finds the greatest plasticity and flexibility of of its myth. Egypt has become famous for the variation and flexibility of its myths. John Wilson, who is an Egyptologist, nicely epitomizes Egyptian mythology with this sentence. The Egyptian accepted various myths and discarded none of them. The Egyptian accepted various myths and discarded none of them. Over the course of 2,300 years, there emerged four major versions of the fundamental myth of origins. And each of these was associated with a cult center in an Egyptian city. Hermopolis, Heliopolis, Thebes and Memphis. These Egyptian cities were the cult centers for the worship of various deities featured in these versions of the creation myth. And yet, over these 2,300 years, in Egyptologist John Allen's work words, this same story remained remarkably consistent throughout its history. According to that myth, as we've seen, reality is the unfolding of an undifferentiated, primordial monistic state which was represented by water. Out of these waters emerged a little hill which is identified or associated with the God Atum. Atum is regarded as self created. He brought himself into existence. Atum in turn creates the other gods by acts of alternatively sneezing or spitting or masturbating. The peak of this creation sequence is the sun God Re or Amun Re, variously called. His manifestation is the sun. And every day this creation cycle is repeated. As the sun sets in the evening and then is reborn at dawn, wide variations of this fundamental story developed. The Egyptologist Eric Hornung, In his book on the gods of Egypt, comments and I quote. The Egyptians placed the tensions and contradictions of the world and beside one another and then live with them. End quote Egyptian Iconography. And iconography infers to the pictures, for example, that you find in Egyptian tombs on the walls and the ceilings, portraying various gods and natural phenomena. He says Egyptian iconography permitted and I quote, an astonishingly rich variety of. Of possibilities in the representation of a deity. For example, the goddess Hathor is variously represented as a woman, as a cow, as a woman with a cow's head, and as a cow's head with a human face. In addition, she's also represented as a lioness, a snake, a hippopotamus, and a tree nymph. Moreover, Hornung says we are not observing a historical development in which one form replaced another. At all periods, different ways of depicting the goddess simply existed side by side. He says we should not infer that Egyptians thought that Hathor actually had, for example, a human body and a cow's head. Rather, he says, the varying images were meant to express different facets of her character. For example, the maternal tenderness of a cow or the wildness of a lion, the unpredictability of. Of a snake, and so forth. Such images are not to be taken literally. They are visual metaphors. Visual metaphors. Now, I've already alluded to a similar variability in Egyptian representations of the sun and the sky. The sun might be depicted as a boat, or as a beetle, or as an old man declining in the west, or as a falcon. Hong says these concepts were felt to be complementary, not conflicting. End quote. Similarly, the sky was variously depicted. John Wilson comments, and I quote, we should want to know in our picture whether the sky was supported on posts or upheld by a God. The Egyptian would answer, yes, it is supported by posts or held up by a God, or it rests on walls, or it is a cow, or it is a goddess whose arms and feet touch the earth. Any one of these pictures, says Wilson, would be satisfactory to him. And in a single picture, he might show two different supports for the sky. The goddess whose arms and feet touch the earth, and the God who holds up the sky goddess. End quote. The plasticity which allowed contradictory depictions of the sun and the sky is a sure indication, I think, of the non literality of such representations. Interpreted literalistically, Egyptian mythology is a mare's nest of logical contradictions and metaphysical absurdities. But the problems that belong to a literal interpretation of Egyptian mythology shouldn't lead us to think that the Egyptians were, in general, irrational. Hornung says the fact that in Egyptian thought, myth is not considered to be contradictory is not sufficient cause for us to term the thought as a whole mythical or mythopoeic. Myth is one mode of discourse among many, end quote. I think that's exactly right. And given its metaphorical and representational imagery, myth is a special case. Hornung concludes, and I quote, I maintain in opposition to the widespread prejudice against metaphorical and representational images in modern scientific research, that images are among the legitimate systems of signs with which we are provided in order to describe the world. For the Egyptians, the gods are powers that explain the world, but do not themselves need any elucidation because they convey information in a language which can be understood directly, that of myth. The language of myth is figurative and therefore need not be taken literalistically. Unfortunately, many Old Testament scholars today, even those emphasizing the importance of ancient Near Eastern studies as an interpretive backdrop to the Book of Genesis, have been seriously misled by a wooden literalism with respect to the Mesopotamian and Egyptian myths. Perhaps one of the most egregious examples, I think, is the claim that the so called cosmic geography of the ancient near east included the idea of the sky or the heavens as a solid dome over the earth touching its horizon in which the stars are engraved. This is demonstrably wrong, as Babylonian astronomical texts reveal. The ancient Babylonian astrologers and charted meticulously the motions of the stars across the heavens and the motion of the planets with respect to the fixed stars, and therefore could not possibly have thought of these as engraved in a solid dome that is touching the earth. Othmar Kiel and Sylvia Schlurg, in their book on ancient Near Eastern thought, conclude that contemporary scholars who construe the ancient's cosmic geography literalistically have just failed to understand them. This is what they write, and I quote. People in the ancient near east did not conceive of the earth as a disk floating on water with the firmament inverted over it like a bell jar with the stars hanging from it. They knew from observation and experience with handicrafts that the lifting capacity of water is limited and the gigantic vaults generate gigantic problems in terms of their ability to carry dead weight. The textbook images that keep being reprinted of the quote unquote ancient Near Eastern world picture, end quote, are based on typical modern misunderstandings that fail to take into account the religious components of ancient Near Eastern conceptions and representations. Kiel and Schwer sum it up. The thought, pictorial representations and language of people of that time were generally symbolic, that is neither entirely concrete nor purely abstract. A cow that bears a calf or the sky woman who bears the sphere of the sun are not expressions of naive childlike fantasies regarding the origin of the world, but developments of thought that we're able to form and formulate more abstract notions like the coming into being of the world from concrete experiences like cattle birth and so forth. This kind of representation is not simple realism, but reflects an interest in the powers that operate and appear in the concrete world. End quote. It is sobering to reflect that so many Old Testament scholars claiming to inform us about what the ancients believed about cosmic geography should have so seriously misunderstood the relevant texts. So when it comes to the Genesis account of creation, I think little needs to be said with the modern misinterpretation of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian cosmo. Geography exposed the main prop for interpreting the so called firmament in Genesis chapter one. In Hebrew, this is called rakia, translated from the Latin as firmament. The main prop for interpreting the firmament of Genesis 1 as a literal solid dome falls away. Genesis 1 tells us virtually nothing about the nature of the rakia, nor whether the word is being used figuratively or literally. The key to the meaning of rakiya as used in Genesis 1 comes in verse 8, where it says God called the rakiya heaven Shamayim. Shamayim is the Hebrew word for the heavens or for the skies. And thus rakia denotes the sky, or expressing the notion of breadth, the skies. That's what rakiya denotes. The ancient Hebrews could not possibly have thought that the sky is a solid dome in which the sun, moon and stars are embedded. For these heavenly luminaries were observed to be in motion to move through the sky. And, and that's why Genesis 1 says they are useful to mark seasons and days and years. Birds fly. Genesis 1 says in verse 20, across the face of the rakia and in the skies. Deuteronomy 4:17. So Benjamin Smith, who sits among us this morning, there he is, has probably given, I think, the best characterization of the denotation of rakiya as, and I quote, the whole sky, all that can be seen above the earth from the surface. That's what the rakiya denotes, the whole sky, all that can be seen above the earth from the surface. And what that suggests is that the rakia is simply a phenomenal reality, something that you see, as John Walton very nicely puts it, there is a rakia and it is blue. It's just the sky. So I think that not only does the metaphorical and the figurative language of ancient Near Eastern myths support a non literal reading of such myths, but their plasticity and flexibility also indicate that that they are not best interpreted literalistically. Now is There any comment or discussion at that point before we talk about an application to Genesis 1 to 11? Yes.
- [21:07]
C
I wonder if you can comment on the fact that some of the. You're talking about Mesopotamia and the Egyptian gods and how they have bodies of animals and stuff like that, as opposed to the Greeks who really have a human appearance.
- [21:21]
B
Yes, that's right.
- [21:22]
C
And how that reflected what their sense of life was, how that contrasted with both. Because, you know, the Israelites came from Egypt, but most of the Old Testament is in Greek and that's how we understand it. Can you comment on how that meshed?
- [21:35]
B
Well, are you asking about the influence of ancient Near Eastern myths on the Greeks? Right, right.
- [21:43]
C
Or how they. How their different sense of life, how the sense of life and art or their.
- [21:49]
B
I think that although there may well have been an influence of ancient Near Eastern myths upon Greek mythology, this is still very poorly understood. The earliest attested myths in Greek are from Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey around 700 B.C. and from Hesiod, his theogony, which describes the origin of the myths. And these Greek gods and goddesses, as you indicate, are very humanoid in their description. They're like people and they often are associated with different forces or powers of nature like the sea and the wind and things of that sort of. They are not relevant to our study in terms of they're having an influence, I think, on biblical stories because they're later and they're further afield. So while they may be interesting in terms of comparative models, I think that Mesopotamia and Egypt are far more relevant to the biblical backgrounds. Does that answer the question. Okay,
- [23:12]
D
Quick question about this method of interpreting the ancient scriptures or not scriptures, but ancient writings. It's clear that, or at least I'm under the impression that some of the phenomena that were witnessed by the ancients were in fact described by a literal reading of their mythology, like earthquakes, for instance, turtle shifting or whoever's holding it on their shoulders has to move things like that. Would you. I mean, number one is that is earthquakes and things that they may have believe more of a literal genesis for. Is that addressed in the literature? And also if you know. Yeah, I'll just leave it.
- [23:52]
B
Okay. Now if I understand your question correctly, you are raising an issue that is a huge interpretive question that has pitted some of the greatest assyriologists against each other. And I'm thinking here of Thorkild Jacobsen, for example, and Stanley Kramer. Jacobsen holds to the view that these ancient Near Eastern myths are basically allegorical, that they are really personifications of the powers and the entities of nature. So, for example, when the Enuma Elish says that Apsu and Tiamat mingled their waters to give birth to these other two gods. And he takes that as the mingling of salt water and fresh water, such as the Mesopotamians observed in the Persian Gulf, when the fresh water of the Tagus and Euphrates flowed into the salt water of the Gulf. And the two gods that are produced by Apsu and Tiamat, he thinks, are symbols of the silt then that is deposited in the Persian Gulf at the mouth of these two rivers. So on Yakosem's view, in a sense, gods don't really exist. They're just sort of literary personifications of forces and powers and things of nature. If you were to do an ontological inventory of everything that exists, you would not need to include, in addition to the physical things of nature, these gods as well, because they're mere personifications of those forces. Kramer, by contrast, really took Jacobson to the woodshed on this and said, this is a complete misrepresentation of the ancient Near Eastern thinking. He said that they believed that the gods were literal humanoid entities, invisible, mysterious, who were behind the forces of nature and manifested in nature, so that when you see the water, you're not looking at Tiamat, but Tiamat is the goddess who was behind the sea. And this view would explain why the Babylonians were so obsessed with divination. Divination was a huge and lucrative industry in ancient Babylon. Over half of the cuneiform texts that were discovered at Ashurbanipal's palace In the late 1800s are divinatory texts. And of them, most of those are astrological texts, though some of them also concern what is called ektispiecy, which is examining the liver and entrails of birds and animals to divine portents from the gods. And so the practice of divination seems to support the view that there really are gods behind these forces. And by reading these portents of nature, we can discern the will of the gods and perhaps what's going to happen in terms of good or bad fortune. Now, I, as a layperson, wouldn't presume that to try to adjudicate this debate. And when I've asked other Old Testament scholars about it, the reaction I get is a sort of blank stare. So I don't know which of these is correct, but what I would say is that on either view, the myths aren't to be taken literalistically. Clearly, on Jacobson's view, They're not literal because they're about natural phenomena. They're just Persona. Gods are personifications of the forces of nature. But even on Kramer's view, even though the gods really exist, we don't have a clue what they're like because they're invisible. And so these various images and descriptions and so forth, again, are just figurative language for describing these beings that control our destinies. So on either interpretation, I think it's very plausible to think that these stories were not necessarily taken to be literal. Now, having said that, as I mentioned to Bobby in conversation last week, of course some people probably did take them literally. No doubt many people believe them in a very literal sort of sense. But what I'm suggesting is that they don't need to be taken that way. It could very well be the case that these are metaphorical and figurative speech. And the metaphoricalness, the plasticity and flexibility, I think, support such a reading. Brad.
- [29:10]
A
Okay, I need a little GPS here of where we are. I am prepared to agree that the ancient Near East, Mesopotamian and Egyptian myths are not literal. I'm a little confused by the application to Hebrews and, you know, Hebrews one there were. And the idea of the firmament that they didn't. They would have seen.
- [29:38]
B
Let me ask you, Brad, what about that point? I've kind of already gotten ahead of myself on the rakia in saying, here's an application to Genesis, and it's clear that the Mesopotamians and Egyptians didn't take the sky to be a solid dome.
- [29:52]
A
Right?
- [29:52]
B
So why should we think the Hebrews took the rekiya to be solid? That would be an example of seeing in Genesis metaphorical or figurative speech. What's your reaction to that? My.
- [30:02]
A
My reaction to that is that it wasn't. It was God, that there was nobody around at that time. So it was God that provided some imagery of that. And if Hebrew scholars happened to take it as well, it was a solid dome then. And they were wrong.
- [30:20]
B
Okay.
- [30:20]
A
They were wrong. And I'm.
- [30:23]
B
Okay. By a Hebrew scholar, do you mean the author of Genesis?
- [30:26]
A
The author of Genesis is God.
- [30:29]
B
I mean the human one who wrote it down. Is he the Hebrew scholar you're talking about, or are you talking about later people? I'm talking about later people. Okay, that's good to understand.
- [30:39]
A
Yes, yes, yes.
- [30:40]
B
Because I wouldn't want to go so far as what you said at first if we think that Hebrew scholars include the author.
- [30:46]
A
Oh, no, no, no, no. Remember, that chapter could not be written by anyone because they weren't around. It had to be revelation from God that said this is what it was.
- [30:58]
B
So the question is, did God use imagery that didn't need to be taken literally in providing this revelation to the Hebrews?
- [31:11]
A
I don't know. I think the imagery is fine if it's, as you said last week, which I really liked. If it is clearly not true. If it is clearly.
- [31:23]
B
Okay, now wait, let's be careful. Brad, I didn't say not true. I've tried to be very careful about this, to distinguish between literal truth and figurative truth.
- [31:31]
A
I mean, if you mean not literally true. Metaphorical.
- [31:35]
B
Yes.
- [31:36]
A
Then we take it as metaphorical. And I really love that test. Yes, let's. Let's look at it and say, is it clearly metaphorical or is it. Could this be true? Could this be something that.
- [31:48]
B
Again, literally.
- [31:49]
A
Literally, I'm sorry, could this be something that's literal? And I get mixed up with calling things like myths and applying it to Hebrew, but.
- [32:00]
B
Well, at least you're open so far to the possibility of thinking that the so called firmament or the rakia is not a solid dome in which the stars are engraved.
- [32:12]
A
Absolutely. I think that our interpretation with that firmament being a solid dome could be a misinterpretation of that word. Yes.
- [32:23]
B
Yes. Okay, good, good. Thanks for that feedback. Okay, anybody else?
- [32:29]
A
I'm trying to convince you.
- [32:35]
D
Concerning the question. Did God have to use metaphorical language to talk to us, to give us understanding and truth? I would say definitely yes, because you're right. Now, could God give the ultimate reality of our future being in his very presence, the unapproachable light? To do so literally may put us there and we're not ready. And so he must deal metaphorically to accept the truth we can possess.
- [33:04]
B
Okay, now, I have not taken so strong a position as Steve did notice. His position was it must be. Be that way. Because after all, Genesis is not intended to be just for modern people, but for shepherds and herdsmen and illiterate peoples and so forth. Who wouldn't understand that if God were to give it a manual on general theory of relativity and the expansion of the universe? So of course, this is revealed in figurative and pictorial ways. And I, I find that persuasive. Steve. I think that we want this to be a narrative that ministers to people of all times and ages and cultures and education. I remember in my debate with Lawrence Krauss in Australia, one of the objections he opposed or proposed to Christianity was why didn't God reveal calculus to Moses? And I thought, what is the matter with this man? It's so stupid to even think that that's a good objection. God was revealing to Moses what they needed to know to do his will and to find salvation. And giving them the calculus would have been next to worthless. Okay, one more question, Bruce.
- [34:20]
D
Just a comment. I think need to make a distinction between something that's symbolic and. And something that's general in nature. Because Genesis was intended to be accurate for all ages and, excuse me, times and scientific sophistications. It's. The nature of it is general. And so I think that's more the issue than it being symbolic. Some cases.
- [34:53]
B
All right, I'll let you have the last word on that. Let me just say I'm not necessarily saying that these narratives are symbolic or allegorical where you have a kind of one to one correspondence between a symbol and what it represents. But I'm saying it's figurative, it's metaphorical, and that's not necessarily symbolic in the sense of allegory. All right, well, what we'll do next time then is to make this all important transition that Brad has been pushing me toward of trying to apply this generic analysis to Genesis. So let's close with a word of prayer. Father, again we thank youk that we have the leisure and the wherewithal to meet together in this way and to discuss these important issues and questions together. And we pray now, as we go out into the week, that yout would guide us and lead us by youy Holy Spirit. Help. Help us to walk in your path, in the path of true light, not straying to the left or to the right, and to keep our feet from darkness. And we trust you to lead us in that way through Christ our Lord. Amen.
- [36:02]
A
The copyright for the preceding material is held by Dr. William Lane Craig. For more go to reasonablefaith.org.