Should We Take Creation Stories in Genesis Literally?
Finding multiple truths in biblical myths
What purpose did creation stories in Genesis serve? Were they Biblical myths? Pictured here is The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man (c. 1617) by Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder.
Were the creation stories in Genesis meant to be taken literally?
Maybe not, says biblical scholar Shawna Dolansky in her Biblical Views column “The Multiple Truths of Myths” in the January/February 2016 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.
Our world is very different from the world in which the Biblical authors lived over 2,000 years ago. The ancient world did not have Google, Wikipedia and smartphones—access to information on human history and scientific achievements developed over millennia at the touch of their fingertips.
Many scholars believe that the ancient Israelites had creation stories that were told and retold; these stories eventually reached the Biblical authors, who wrote them down in Genesis and other books of the Bible. Creation stories in Genesis were etiological, Shawna Dolansky and other Biblical scholars argue.1 That is, the creation stories in Genesis served to provide answers to why the world was the way it was, such as why people wear clothes and why women experience pain during childbirth.
FREE ebook: Exploring Genesis: The Bible’s Ancient Traditions in Context Mesopotamian creation myths, Joseph’s relationship with Egyptian temple practices and 3 tales of Ur, the birthplace of Abraham.
Creation stories in Genesis were among the many myths that were told in the ancient Near East. Today we may think of myths as beliefs that are not true, but as a literary genre, myths “are stories that convey and reinforce aspects of a culture’s worldview: many truths,” writes Dolansky. So to call something a myth—in this sense—does not necessarily imply that it is not true.
Scholars argue that Biblical myths arose within the context of other ancient Near Eastern myths that sought to explain the creation of the world. Alongside Biblical myths were Mesopotamian myths in which, depending on the account, the creator was Enlil, Mami or Marduk. In ancient Egyptian mythology, the creator of the world was Atum in one creation story and Ptah in another.
Shawna Dolansky
“Like other ancient peoples, the Israelites told multiple creation stories,” writes Shawna Dolansky in her Biblical Views column. “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.”
In what other ways do Biblical myths parallel ancient Near Eastern myths? What can we learn about the world in which the ancient Israelites lived through the creation stories in Genesis? Learn more by reading the full Biblical Views column “The Multiple Truths of Myths” by Shawna Dolansky in the January/February 2016 issue of BAR.
BAS Library Members: Read the full Biblical Views column “The Multiple Truths of Myths” by Shawna Dolansky in the January/February 2016 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.
Not a BAS Library or All-Access Member yet? Join today.
Notes
1. For example, see Ziony Zevit, “Was Eve Made from Adam’s Rib—or His Baculum?” BAR, September/October 2015; Mary Joan Winn Leith, “ReViews: Restoring Nudity,” BAR, May/June 2014.
Related reading in Bible History Daily
The Animals Went in Two by Two, According to Babylonian Ark Tablet
All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library
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This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on January 31, 2016.
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Well, reading literally Gen 1 does not speak of the creation of the world or of the universe. Ancient people thought that when the flood is over, the land is created, and when the clouds disappear, the skies are created etc. Genesis 1 is just fine when taken literally as a local chain of events. Much later it was interpreted metaphorically without understanding the original figure of speech, and now we have a problem.
genesis is maybe about light. God is light. Genesis has to only enter the 8th day. God is light. We are in the mili-second of the genesis week. A second could be 83,ooo years at least. our little story is less than a mili-second when we begin with the 1st adam. We have what 6000 years maybe. There is no contradiction if Adam was molded on the 7th day. A day is 83000 years time 60*60*14 assuming 15 billion years is the best we can squeeze out of time with time begiinning somewhere on the 4th day.
Jesus affirmed creation accounts, he affirmed the marriage of Adam and Eve, the garden of Eden, the lie of the serpent, Noah and the Ark, the destruction of sodom and gommorah, just to name a few. He created creation John 1,
Is Jesus Christ the truth?
If God came to, say, an evolutionary biologist, or, say, and astrophysicist, and provided a direct God-to-a-man data dump on the truth of God, the truth of God’s omnipotence, and the truth of God as the true Word, and the truth of God’s creation and God-the-creator, our scientist would, as did Moses and Abraham and the earliest Israelites who began to know and call on God, tell us as best he could about this truth.
In doings so, he’d try to explain, as best he could, how God went about creating his creation.
Moses used the mechanisms of his day to explain the details of creation: voids, sky, earth, days, water, floods, rains, darkness, light.
Our biologist would use the mechanisms of cell structure and mitochondria and DNA and carbon atoms and the like.
Our astrophysicist would use subatomic particles and heat and energy and time and space and quantum events and strings and the like.
Both would get it “wrong” in the details. In 100 years, our understanding of microbiology and our understanding of particle physics will make the explanations of our biologist and physicist sound silly, in the same way that modern principles of empirical science make the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2-3 and the flood sound silly.
The mechanics of God’s creative methods will never be understood by humans. But we are capable of understanding, either by direct contact (Moses, Abraham, our biologist, or physicist) or through faith in holy scripture, that it is the God of the Hebrew Bible who did the creation and God of the Hebrew Bible that owns and holds power over the earth and universe and man his offspring.
Is it really more accurate to say “God grabbed a pinch of raw energy and formed five carbon atoms, which he then twisted into a DNA helix,” than it is to say that “God grabbed a pinch of dirt from the ground, breathed on it, and out popped Adam?”
Is it really more accurate to say that “God applied heat energy through a vacuum of space-time, circling what became an induced boson, then multiplied this effect until gravitational forces collapsed time….” than it is to say that “God placed the stars in the sky and called them by name?”
The Bible’s explanation of creation of space and time and earth and man is sufficient. And it is not particularly relevant. The important things is that God did it. God created the universe. God created man. Man is different from the beasts. Man and woman are separate things. God owns everything. Man is given authority. Man is a sinner — seeking his own God-like authority. Man fell. Man therefore dies and is dead. There is however, a means to return to life. See this happen in Revelation 21 and 22. How? Read those four books the Christians call gospels. They are pretty short, and you get four tries to “get it.”
Science is very good at peeling back the layers of the onion. It is a very good human endeavor that we do so. But we will never prove or disprove the existence of God by peeling the onion, as science will never, ever, get to the center core of the onion. This is a little trick God is playing on us. The onion is infinite.
Read the actual Bible for yourself. Accept it. Reject it. But don’t live your entire life without reading the actual thing for yourself.
Creation stories were astrological. Adam (Leo) and Eve (Virgo) the serpent (Hydra-at foot of Leo) the tree and its fruit (Corvus/Crater) the flaming sword (Regulus). Creation stories were typically stories which centered around the summer solstice. In fact the fantastic stories of the OT (and NT) are astro-myths.
Surely the purpose of Genesis’ creation stories is to tell us WHO made everything. That is an unchallangeable and unchangeable truth beyond man’s knowledge and wisdom. It is only by direct divine revelation that we can know this. Which, after all, is the purpose of all of scripture. As such, this article is quite out of place in an evidence based journal; it only airs the author’s speculations.
“In the beginning, God created …”
I just subscribed to your magazine “Biblical” Archeology, but after reading this biaised, one-eyed denigrating article on the sacred text stating Genesis is full of myths, I regret doing that.
Interesting take on the creation account. My feeling is that the bible was never meant to be a science book. That bein said, I don’t think our contemporary society has the faintest of ideas as to how everything came about to be, and that the creation of everything is far more fantastic then we’ve been led to believe…
One must understand that Jesus’ references to the creation myths do not affirm their historical authenticity. He can just as easily be using them as originally intended, not as historical narrative but as story, myth with a purpose. His reference to them affirms not their use as history but their use as myth. If I make a reference to or allude to a Greek myth in a speech or piece of literature I do not affirm the historicity of the Greek myth. My listeners understand my meaning. The literal reading of these stories misses the point of them and bogs people down in endless self defeating controversies. This childish approach, (not child like) is what is destroying the current generation of evangelicals who go to college and in large part jettison belief as they find the literal interpretation of Genesis to be untenable with undeniable observable truth about the earth and it’s history. A literal view of genesis places the Noah flood solidly in the old kingdom of Egypt which of course would be impossible since Egypt has a continuous culture that would not have survived a flood as envisioned by fundamentalists. For any fundamentalist please read and become familiar with your own bible. In John Jesus dies on the preparation day for passover and in the synoptic gospels he dies on Passover. Such discrepancies are not at all an issue for story written for a purpose but they cannot be reconciled with the way fundamentalists read the bible.
Right on Mike.
Faith alone supports a literal belief in the Old Testament and the stories from Genesis. That is Faith is in the Lord,
who has spoken through the writings of those ancient Israelis or Hebrews, and if one chooses to believe in the
scriptures, that belief is firm and will always declare Genesis to be The Truth, every sentence.
But suppose that doesn’t matter? My belief may not be yours, but we both hold our understanding of Creation and all that followed to be true and those are the basis of our spiritual lives. Other versions of creation, the
findings of contemporary science, are equally valid, and if one believes in God, it might be that the Creator just
took a lot more time than those ancient writers could imagine. Or, if one has no spiritual basis of the way the
Universe was created, well, that’s their belief. So why argue about it all? Fact is, we are here by the hand
of the Lord, or of the infinite universe, and we still have a hell of a mess to deal with on our tiny speck of
earth, fire and water. Hold onto your beliefs, my friends, they are desperately needed in times of chaos.