Month: September 2020

There was a lot of repetitive wording and interesting wording within the creations stories.  A lot has already been said on it, however I would like to reiterate how interesting I found the repetition in phrases such as “and God said”, “God saw that and it was good”, and even the use of “evening” and “morning” when those are typically not the only words we would use to describe the times of day.

There is also a lot of parallelism used throughout the creation – the first three days and the second three days have some glaring parallels.  In the first three days, I think that God is sort of creating an outline or a mold for the world.  On day 1, light and darkness are created, on day 2, the firmaments and the sky/sea are created, and on day 3 vegetation and dry land are created.  Then on the next three days, I believe gods is filling in the outlines he’s made and adding to the mold he created.  On day 4, the sun, moon, and stars are created.  On day 5, the fish and the birds are created, the first inhabitants!  And then finally, on day 6, more animals and people are created.  And the first three days even align with each other.  Day 1 and Day 4 both have to do with light, as the sun/moon/stars emit light.  Day 2 and Day 5 both have to do with the land and sky – one creates the habitat, and the other fills in the habitats with inhabitants.  Then finally, Day 3 and Day 6 put ground and vegetation and inhabitants for that ground/vegetation.  The days are parallel, God goes from creating the outline to filling it in.

I found Christine Hayes’ lecture on Doublets and Contradictions to be intriguing. I understood and saw the similarities to Adam and Eve. It’s interesting to see how sex makes him godlike and how it was always apart of the plan or seems to be so. This makes me take a step back and look at ourselves as human beings. It’s also interesting that Adam and Eve were only ashamed of their nakedness after defiance. I wonder why this is so? It seems odd to embrace nakedness, and then do a 180 only after getting in trouble. Lastly, an interesting point Hayes made was how god was in control of the flood and not threatened by it. I had never stopped and thought about this part of the story.

Reading Subversive Sequels was also interesting. I learned about the connections between the Tower of Babel and the midwives of Isreal. In a short summary, they are both oppressive stories surrounding the building of a city and how it is done. It is interesting to see that it is necessary for characters to break rhythm in order to allow new stories.

The class discussion brought me new insights. I had already noticed the repetitions of Genesis, but never the connections between the days. It was cool to see how the first 3 days were God forming, and the last 3 days were God filling what God had previously formed. This made it make much more sense, and honestly cooler.

Lastly, a couple cool, random things that were pointed in the discussion are how evil is a byproduct in Babylonian, how genesis truly reflects an ancient view of things, and that the idea of Sabbath was unknown to ancient people. These are all new things to me.

Something that stuck with me from our class meeting today was that the story of Enuma Elish and Genesis in the Bible. Both stories have a similar pattern to how Earth was created but have a different explanation to how the universe was created. In Genesis, God solely creates the universe as we know it, but in the Enuma Elish story the world is created by the battling gods.

In the video with Christine Hayes (Lecture 4, Doublets and Contradictions, Seams and Sources) she talked about the ideological similarities between the Genesis stories and the tale of Gilgamesh. What was interesting to me was that Christine’s interpretation of the Genesis stories; she proposed the idea that the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge granted Adam and Eve (and the rest of the human race) self-awareness and death. Her interpretation was that God did not want a human who was self-aware and immortal, causing God to close off the Tree of Life from the world. In the story of Gilgamesh, Enkidu’s death causes Gilgamesh to fear his own mortality, and thus he journeys to find immortality. Christine explains in the video that Gilgamesh does find the fruit of immortality, but a snake steals the fruit from him. She elaborates on the importance of snakes in the culture of ancient Arabic cultures that snakes were a symbol of beauty because they shed their skin (seeming to be eternally young). The two stories are connected in that humans are mortal and that our mortality is inescapable.

What helped me the most from the reading was comparing the Enuma Elish to the creation story in Genesis and finding similarities and differences and then getting to talk about these in class. There are a ton of characters in the Enuma Elish who all play a role in the creation story. The main two characters are Marduk, the greatest god and avenger, and Tiamat. Tiamat is an evil, seven-headed dragon who is meant to represent water in the Enuma Elish. Marduk defeats Tiamat and splits her body in half to form the sky and the sea. This relates to the Genesis creation story as God also creates the sky and sea from the water on the second day. However,  the story in Genesis is far less exciting and contains less battle.

In class on the first day we talked about creation, we compared two translations of the Bible and their similarities and differences in the creation story. While the main points stayed the same there were some strange wording differences that altered parts of the creation story. Using words like “dome” to represent the sky really changed the way I read Genesis 1, which I found surprising.

On the second day of lecture when we focused on the creation, we focused on Genesis 1-3. The wording in Genesis 1 is highly repetitive. Phrases like “and there was evening and there was morning” and “and God said” were repeated throughout the passage. These repetitive phrases call into question the genre of Genesis as talked about in previous lectures. Very often repetitive language like this is used in poetry more than in prose.

Also, very often in Hebrew writing uses parallelism as opposed to word rhyming to focus on ideas. An example within the Genesis creation story is the way the days of creation are laid out. The first three days, God formed things (like the day and night, the sky, and the dry land) and then He filled the things that were formed in the last three days. This is an interesting parallel that we talked about in class that I remember learning about at my Lutheran high school, but it was fun to revisit.

From this class discussion, I learned that there are many different genres in the Bible which will impact the way the text is read. For example, some of the text in the Bible is historical, whereas books like Psalms and Proverbs are not historical but more closely resemble poetry. If someone tries to read these books as historical they will be largely confused and miss the point of the story. Another thing to consider about the Bible is that the text we are reading is not the original text the way it was written. The Bible has been translated from the original Hebrew and there is a potential that some of the original writings have been lost in translation.

In The Backdoor Introduction to the Bible, Kaltner and Mckenzie support both of these points we talked about in class. They have a section in the article where they focus on determining the genre of the Bible. Overall they decide that the Bible is entirely varied in genre and cannot be put into one box. One thing that is important to remember is that “the Bible is really a collection of different works of literature rather than a single book” (9). This accentuates the point that in order to read the Bible you must determine the genre of the book you are reading.  Also, the authors focus on the fact that the Bible was written for ancient audiences using their languages. So, biblical scholars have produced resources such as user guides and reader’s notes for reading the Bible to ensure that you can comprehend as close to the original text as possible.

Michael W. Holmes is a reliable source in his writing the book, The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies. He has received a BA, MA, and Ph.D. in theological studies and currently works as a professor of Biblical Studies at Bethel University. It was very easy to find out who he was and see all of his published works with a simple google search of his name. This makes me trust that he is a reliable source as he has the academic background and necessary exposure to write on the subject of ‘The Biblical Canon’. Just because Dr. Holmes is experienced in theological studies does not mean he had no biases on the matter. Especially with his current job at Bethel University, a Christian college, he may have opinions on the Bible that other doctors in theological studies do not agree with.

This book was published by Oxford University Press in 2008. This gives me more confidence in the book, as it has a reputable publisher which makes me trust in the sanctity of the information. According to the Oxford University Press website, authors must develop high-quality work and go through rigorous proposals before having their work accepted for publishing. This again proves that the work we are dealing with for class is reputable.

During this lesson, I learned a lot about reliable sources and how to tell if something is unreliable. This will be helpful both finding sources for this class, but in all my other classes as well. I learned that just because someone is a professor, or because they have received their Ph.D. does not mean they are a reliable source of information. In order to use reliable sources, I must be willing to put in the work by researching the authors I am using in my sources in order to determine what their biases might be and if their opinions are extremely against the norm. I have learned to become a more critical information gatherer in order to use the best sources possible from the most informed authors on specific subjects.

There are some major differences in the Babylonian Epic of Creation and Genesis. Enuma elish has more of a story aspect to it since there are so many characters involved. There are multiple gods in this story. There is also an evil villain, Tiamut, who is killed and the remains of Tiamut are turned into the sky and sea. This is a similarity to Genesis since in Genesis the sky and the sea are one thing split into two. Genesis is a much easier story to follow since there is really only one character, God. It makes sense to me why more people are familiar with Genesis than with the Babylonian Epic of Creation since Genesis makes more sense and is easier to understand.

From the lecture, the biggest thing I took away were how there are differences and contradictions in the two creation stories and contradicting facts in the flood stories. In the first creation story, it is very structured and has a pretty distinct timeline, where the second creation story is not as structured. This is evidence that these two stories were most likely not written by the same author, and the importance in that is how, even as these two different stories are within the same couple chapters of the same book and the flood story is woven all into one, there still are multiple authors within the stories and different ways that the stories have been interpreted.

Something I took away from the reading is how human’s individuality brings us closer to God and how that is portrayed in different stories of the Bible, like the tower of Babel and the story of the midwives. When the people are trying to get closer to God by working as a unit, this upsets God and splits them farther apart by confusing everyone’s languages. By doing this, not only does it show how they should not attempt to reign at the same level of God, but it also shows how they need to grow closer to God by embracing individuality and choosing to fear like the midwives did when they disobeyed the Pharaoh. This shows individuality because they individually chose to save the baby boys because it was God’s will. Although our individuality has the potential to push people farther from God by rebelling, it also gives us the ability to choose God instead of corruption or rebellion.