From the readings, I learned that the Bible has multiple different genres and different ways to interpret different texts. If you are reading Psalms, which is a book in the Bible of poems, you cannot read it like a historical text. There are many other places in the Bible where there is a certain genre one should interpret it in, but this is just an example.
I also learned from Phyllis Trible’s “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation” that the Bible should not be interpreted as a book of masculinity because of many reasons. I have always had the mindset of viewing God as a man, where in reality God is not bound by gender. Trible also explains that, even though the popular view of the Bible is that puts men superior to women, it really describes them as equal. This is interesting to me and helps me understand better how the Bible truly does not show favoritism to one gender over the other.
When I was reading “Enuma Elish,” it was very hard to understand, so it was very helpful to listen to Christine Hayes’ lecture and listen to her compare it to Genesis 1-3 and how the two creation stories differ. I learned about the creation stories in my Faith, Doubt, and Reason FYS last year, so I am quite familiar with the differences the two different viewpoints have. The most interesting difference I found between Genesis and Enuma Elish was how each creation story’s gods viewed human beings. In Enuma Elish, the gods viewed them almost as an equivalent to slaves, and they gave humans the ultimate role to serve them and please them. In Genesis, we almost see the opposite. The one God in Genesis shows that God deeply cares about humans and creates the rest of the world so they can rule over it. Another difference is how the God in Genesis is fully good with no evil, where the gods in Enuma Elish are both good and evil. As a Christian, it’s very interesting to compare the God that I believe in compared to the gods in Enuma Elish.