Subjects:
wide variety of contributors who, in turn, have their individual influence
upon the final work. It is no surprise, then, that there exist certain
parallels between the Enuma Elish, the cosmogony of the Babylonians, and
the Book of Genesis, the first part of the Pentateuch section of the Bible.
In fact, arguments may be made that other Near Eastern texts, particularly
Sumerian, have had their influences in Biblical texts. The extent of this
'borrowing', as it were, is not limited to the Bible; the Enuma Elish has
its own roots in Sumerian mythology, predating the Enuma Elish by nearly a
thousand years. A superficial examination of this evidence would
erroneously lead one to believe that the Bible is somewhat a collection of
older mythology re-written specifically for the Semites. In fact, what
develops is that the writers have addressed each myth as a separate issue,
and what the writers say is that their God surpasses every other. Each
myth or text that has a counterpart in the Bible only serves to further an
important idea among the Hebrews: there is but one God, and He is
omnipotent, omniscient, and other-worldly; He is
. . .
body of water from the other. When written in Hebrew, only careful scrutiny
would distinguish the two. If we examine his world and its culture, we may find the
reasons behind certain references in Genesis, and the mythologies they
resemble. Typically, gods are represented as
something akin to humans on a grander scale; the Hebrew god is simply not
measured or scaled; He is an unknown quantity, set apart from the bounds of
human knowledge. The god that created the
world defeated another god, and formed the earth from the corpse; in
Genesis, God speaks and his words transform into actions. Notice the similarity in the next two passages:
"Half of her he set in place and formed the sky. But while we can
acknowledge these similarities, we must also acknowledge that the writers
of the Book of Genesis are making a radical departure from the norm: they
have created a monotheistic religion, and their god is all-powerful, beyond
the scope of human comprehension.
In fact, there was once a debate on the translation of a single verb in
the Bible, "bara", meaning "to create". The distinction is important, however, because
it changes the implications involved in creating. " 12
>From Genesis (1:31-2-1):
"Evening came and morning followed- the sixth day. All this as a function of one
verb16.
Essay's Topics
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