My daughter told me the other day that she intended to read the Bible. I have read the vast majority of it and much if it many times and I have read a lot about how the Bible was written and why. So I thought I would share my thoughts a little at a time, just the bore the pants off the rest of you.
First, the concept of writing for historical purposes is less than 1,000 years old. Prior to that and throughout the Jewish traditions, stories were told to convey images and messages, and NOT as a recounting of historical fact. The entire Bible was written in this manner. Today, we have a hard time with this. We figure if they bothered to write down events, they must have been writing them down to preserve them through time for future generations so that they could learn from them. The latter is certainly true, but the former is not.
It is also important to note that nearly all, if not all, of the heroes and heroins in the Bible were illiterate. So what was written was written by third party authors; all of whom were certainly men and probably with a perspective of their own. Most of the Old Testament was written down during the time of Jewish exile in Babylon from oral traditions. (Some of the information on kings was noted as having been written contemporaneously and some of the prophets came later.) During this time the Jews were trying to keep their people together and away from the temptations of the Babylonians, so stories were elaborated upon to create greatness in the Jewish God over all others.
In the Beginning . . .
So the Bible opens with two separate creations stories that are internally inconsistent to the point of being impossible. That is OK! They were not intended to be literal recounts of what happened. After all no one was actually there.
The first story tells of God creating the heavens and the earth, the sun, and the next things, etc, then animals, etc, and finally humans, male and female at the same time, who then name all the animals and plants, etc. At the time, the religions of competing tribes worshipped elements of nature as their gods: the sun, the moon, the stars, rain, etc. In this story the Jewish people show the world that the Jewish God CREATED all of their gods and is therefore greater still then them. Pretty creative, huh?
The famous Adam & Eve story came much later. This is clearly NOT the creation of the world and of humans, because after Cain kills Abel he goes to Nod, an existing town filled with people, and finds a wife and settles down there. Theorists contemplate that this is the story of the birth of the ancestors of the Chosen people, specially and separate from the non-Chosen people. Yes they were "kicked out" of the Garden, but this happened because they had been gifted with the great and special knowledge of the Gods' Tree of Life. The serpent may not be as bad as advertised and perhaps they were not really kicked out, but born, which can be traumatic.
Note that in this story it is "Gods" not God, and they speak among themselves and use terms like "we" instead of "I". That is a hard one for Jews and others. Who were these other gods?
There is no "original sin" in the Jewish telling of this story. That is a Christian contemplation that came hundreds of years after the Bible was even compiled for the first time, which happened over 500 years after Christ's death. Eating the fruit just meant they could not stay in the Garden. It is not clearly a bad thing in many Jewish interpretations. Afterall, this is their story from their part of the book.
Side note: Based on analysis of satelites and the descriptions of the Garden in the Bible, including its location at the intersection of 4 great rivers, Eden was likely actually located under what is now the Persian Gulf, wiped out by the great flood, which we will get to in a next installment.
The other great thing about the Old Testament and in particular the part referred to as the Torah, is that it is argued about constantly by Jewish scholars and non-scholars alike. This, in their minds, was God's point in the creation of these stories for them, to generate individual thought and scholarly disagreement. Just as a great painter never tells her viewers what was intended by her abstract colors and angles, but leaves that to each person's own interpretation, so do the Jews believe that the stories of the Bible were created to force us to expand our minds - to use the gifts of the Tree of Life.
Note that the Chosen people are all descendants of the third son, Seth, who hardly anyone knows about, who also took wives from among women who already existed in the world, not a sister. The incredibly long lives listed next are the ages of the various tribes of the descendants of Seth headed by the named individual. Just as the descendants of Israel are called Israelites and the descendants of Judah, one of the 12 tribes of Israel, are now referred to as the Jews. The years are of course not important. They just refer to a long time and the relative importance of each clan. The longer a tribe was able to claim it had lasted, the more important it was in stature, whether it really lasted that long of not.
Take all of this with a grain of salt, except the part where you are to read the stories and debate what they mean until they mean something to you personally, for that was their purpose.
More next time, whenever that is.
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