>I know nothing about it. But, I did recognize pieces of an extremely
>poor version of the Eygptian myth of creation in it. The eygptian
>elements are something like the aristotlian division earth, water,
>air, fire, except the Eygptians started with a watery formless and
>dark chaos, a flow, in which something formed, and from which emerged
>a primodial mound. After the division of wet and dry, comes the
>division of light and dark. So the Eygptians have to be source for the
>water story. The garden story would then default to the Babylonians,
>some form of oasis, Eden.
Errr... I'm pretty sure the Eden story isn't Babylonian... perhaps the Babylonians swiped it from the Egyptians... as I recall, much of the story runs the same almost line by line... The Eden story is attributed to the source 'J' - which seems to have been a nomadic community and rather difficult to document. There was a best seller many years ago called "J" (I think)... the author argued that the author of J was a woman. From a scholastic perspective this is sheer nonsense...
>Just a couple of things that stuck me. Noah is a strange character,
>very strange. And there is a lot of wondering around, between the
>begettings. There is no definite place---which is an odd contrast
>to say some of the southwest native american creation myths that
>usually define a place, a hole in the earth, a canyon, etc. The other
>thing that struck me, was when God comes to visit and addresses
>people, Adam, or Noah for example they respond, Here I am---odd as if
>God wouldn't know them unless they pointed themselves out. Funny. So
>that response seems like a formality in another language or another
>tradition. And then a last thing that seems odd. The first characters
>and first parts are short, a few sentences and then we're done, and
>move on. Toward the end of Genesis, starting about with Abraham, it
>gets longer and more developed, Jacob takes up several pages, and
>Joseph a whole complete story. Notice the Egyptians are already
>there. Where did they come from? Or some of the others, all those
>cities of the plain, when and how did they get started?
Jericho is considered the oldest city of the region, about 8,000 BCE (I could be a eight thousand years off on that, maybe it was 800 BCE). Sigh. Egypt was already around prior to the articulation of the Moses narratives... I wish I could remember the dates. As for the 'here I am' - the 'religiosity' of the time was sacrificial, basically you wanted to keep the supernatural at a distance... and would use sacrifices to sway the heavens from getting too close. Proximity to the divine, in whatever shape, usually meant trouble for someone. But it signifies something special. The idea of omnipotence is probably hundreds and hundreds of years off.... it is actually a relatively new idea. Deities were just really powerful creatures who could fight well, to be feared and respected by the mortals. So, it would make sense to formally introduce yourself to someone really powerful, especially if you were worried about being smitten by accident.
The stories get longer and more detailed primarily because they've been redacted and added onto. At first there were likely snippets. But since 'text' is holy or sacred, you don't erase it, you add to it... that would explain the 'additions' along the way and why things get more details.
>But, yes, it certainly has a chunky, amalgamated quality to it, sort
>of patched together piecemeal. Anyway, off to work.
>
>Chuck Grimes
Yep. The translations usually work to smooth this over.
ken