Extract from The Gods, All of them (Religion)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Tuesday, December 07, 2010, 03:15 (5101 days ago) @ David Turell


> As the non-practicing Jew on this site, I don't understand Tony's comments. I think he misinterpreted Matt's comments, which are absolutely right on. Genesis is what it is. Very competent scholars have made interpretations, of which I have copies. We don't know how much of the other religious writings the ancient Hebrews had knowledge, if any. As a desert nomadic folk, I doubt any at all. What is important is that the same stories and illusions appear throughout the ancient writings, suggesting Sheldrake's search for a human species consciousness has some validity. That is a conclusion worth studying.-
My point is that it does not matter in the slightest if Christ was read backwards into Genesis. Nor does it matter who wrote which book first. It was not really meant as an affront to the Jewish community, but the argument was presented to me as "Not a single practicing Jew believes..." Which, quite frankly, is not what this discussion was ever about. It was never about belief, it was about a statement that in the BOOK entitled The BIBLE there is a overreaching theme. However, we DO, in fact, know that the Genesis creation story was taken from someone else, and adapted to fit:->Walter Reinhold Warttig Mattfeld y de la Torre writes that one of his articles:
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>>"... is an attempt to briefly identify some of the Ancient Near Eastern Motifs and Myths from which the Hebrews apparently borrowed, adapted, and reworked in the Book of Genesis (more specifically Genesis 1-11).
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>>It is my understanding that Genesis' motifs and characters, God, Adam, Eve, the Serpent, and Noah, are adaptations and transformations of characters and events occurring in earlier Near Eastern Myths. In some cases several characters and motifs from different myths have been brought together and amalgamated into Genesis' stories. 2
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>He quotes W.G. Lambert:
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>"The authors of ancient cosmologies were essentially compilers. Their originality was expressed in new combinations of old themes, and in new twists to old ideas."
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>I believe Lambert's observation can be applied to the Hebrews who were combining old themes and putting "new twists" to old ideas. My research indicates that, at times, "reversals" are occurring in the Hebrew transformation and re-interpretation of the Mesopotamian myths. These "reversals," as I call them, can take the form of different characters, different locations for the settings of the stories, and different morals being drawn about the nature of God and Man's relationship.
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>De la Torre concludes that Genesis 1-11:
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>"... appears to be a reformatting of motifs and characters from four Mesopotamian myths:
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>	Adapa and the South Wind,
>	Atrahasis,
>	the Epic of Gilgamesh and
>	the Enuma Elish."
>Of these four sources, Enuma Elish has the closest parallels with the first creation story in Genesis.
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>Wikipedia comments that the ancient Hebrews did not simply adopt the Babylonian myths; they sometimes inverted them in order to fit into their worldview. Two examples are: 3
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>	In the Babylonian myth, the serpent, Ningishzida, is a friend to Adapa who helps him in his search for immortality.
>	In Genesis, the serpent is the enemy of Adam, trying to trick him out of the chance to understand good and evil by developing a moral sense and thus becoming fully human.
>	The gods of the Babylonians became the ancient Israelites' god.
>Also:
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>	The Mesopotamians had adopted a worldview in which the Earth had gradually improved since creation.
>	The ancient Hebrews adopted a worldview in which the universe was created perfect but degenerated to the point where God had to initiate the largest genocide in history -- killing every person from newborn to the elderly in the flood of Noah.
>-
With all that in mind, I found it a touch exhasperating for Matt to make the 'Jews did it first and Christians did it later..' bit. Which is why I responded the way I did. The truth is, some else did it first, the Jews rewrote it and added their own until it was to their liking, and the Christians read into that and added their own to it until it was to their liking.