Creation reports in the Ancient Near East (I)
F. C. Fensham was my teacher in Ancient Near
Eastern history and his friend was S. J. du Toit of Potchefstroom University.
Du Toit wrote extensively on the topic of the Creation Reports of the Ancient
Near East and their comparison to the Biblical account. Both are Calvinists.
Prof. Fensham was W. F. Albright's student. My Masters Degree was done under a
student of prof. Fensham but prof. Fensham was the examiner.
Both professors wants the listeners and readers
to understand that the literary kind of Genesis is of importance for the
understanding of the book. It is not about literary coloring in of descriptions
but about events. The stories have the underlined form of history. At the same
time, they wish readers to understand that the report did not mean to register
facts according to the nineteenth century understanding of objectivity. They
wish to see it as historical description in a pre-scientific way. The history
is revelation-history about issues far byond the horizons. No human being were
present at Creation. Seventh Day Adventists look at this slightly at variance
here than these Calvinists. What is reported in Genesis is indeed facts, albeit
excerpts of reality, thus incomplete as to the whole process involved. However,
the process itself was completely scientific although not always the way we
understand science or are able to understand science since God can defy current
principles of science because He is God. Science is not in contrast to the
events at Creation but support it and the polarization and contrast created
today by modern science is as a result of their epistemological adherence to
classical Darwinism or links thereto, called evolution. Revelation is a
rehearsal process like watching a video and God rehearse the process either to
Adam and Eve passed on to humanity orally and written form through the
centuries. Noah could have known Abraham since Abraham (born 2229 BCE) was 60
years old when Noah died in 2169 BCE. Passing on the correct detail of events
of Genesis is thus a reality until Moses was schooled by his mother between
1530-1518 BCE before he went to the palace of Hatshepsut for his palace years.
Killing the Egyptian in 1490 BCE and fleeing to Midian see the composition of
Genesis, at least around 1460 BCE. In the Karnak reports of the deeds of
Thutmosis III we are told by the scribe that he wrote on the walls what he saw
on the velums/papyri so that Moses could have had similar sources of Noahic and
Adamic accounts with him running away. Seventh Day Adventists treat the Genesis
account as Revelation but also as History and also as Science. There is no
contrast or conflict between any three of these aspects of the process of Creation.
The cosmology of the Ancient Near East is seen
by Frankfort as a "mulitplicity of approaches". The concept of world
image is foreign for the Ancient Near East, says Du Toit (Du Toit 1971: 75).
The origin of this is for Du Toit the possibility that they did not strive on
that total image but were satisfied with a composite of aspects. Du Toit has a
problem to understand the image of the World from the Old Testament and he
cannot see one unified understanding. The cosmogony and cosmology of the Ancient
Near East and Old Testament, in our understanding, should not be confused. The
Old Testament did not open a topic and dealt with cosmological understanding of
Israel. From texts here and there we have to make conclusions as to what their
cosmology concept was. Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible and also
the book of Job. In Job we have the words of Moses saying that God hanged the
world up on nothing. Moses' concept of the Pleiades constellation is also very
informed when he asked who can break the links of the Orion? The nebulae that
links the stars of the Pleiades can only be seen with a telescope. Moses then
did not cling to a cosmology of an earth on pillars as the Middle Ages
misinterpreted from the Old Testament. That concept of the Middle Ages was not
from the Bible but a grabbing of a text here and there and a self-construction
of a collage which then was sanctioned as the biblical picture. Far from it.
The earth is not a paper and square. It is a ball or an egg. Already in
Hellenistic times all three options were popular and that the Middle Ages
clinged only to the paper understanding is probably because the Scriptures were
taken out of public domain during those centuries.
When it comes to the comparison of Genesis with
the Ancient Near East, Du Toit pointed out that there are two approaches: a)
that Genesis 1 provides a complete new revelation (J. L. Koole, GTT 1963:
105-106). Du Toit feels that the comparisons with the Enuma Elish makes this
idea actually not possible. Seventh Day Adventists will differ on this aspect
with the Calvinists.
b) that Genesis 1 is a replica of what Babel
teaches on Creation. This was the view of the pan-babylonianists. Adventists
are very aware and sensitive of Pan-Babylonianism as a hermeneutical pathology.
Gerhard Hasel pointed this danger out a number of times in his books on
Hermeneutics.
Du Toit listed a number of scholars and their
suggestions as to the approach best favored:
Herman Ridderbos suggested that the Genesis prophet is a painter with colors and he
painted with stripes that he borrowed from the world as he knows it (Ridderbos,
Gereformeerde Weekblad 7/2 [1962]).
William Albright felt that much of the high culture of Mesopotamia was brought over from
Mesopotamia by the patriarchs no earlier than the 16th century BCE and that is
the reason there are correspondences in Genesis 1-11. In Genesis 1 then there
are elements from Babylon and Phoenicia which the inspired writer then
demithologized. Genesis 2 was seen by Albright as definitely from Mesopotamian
origin. The Hebrew ed comes from the Sumerian ID for river. The
aspect of a single cosmic source that broke up in four streams is also an
indication for Albright that Genesis 2 is Mesopotamian in character (Albright, Biblical
Archaeology, 102).
In contrast to these ideas of Ridderbos and
Albright, Du Toit listed other non-acceptable ideas:
A. Kuenen and A. Pierson who rejected the veracity of Genesis 1 and 2
and the Patriarchal history. They rejected angels, miracles and worked thus
with a hermeneutics of suspicion. There were even talks that there were a
falsification of facts (Babylonian Genesis, 3).
Pan-Babylonianism at the beginning of the Twentieth Century were very exited about
correspondences between the Creation report of Genesis and the Babel reports of
the Enuma Elish. Du Toit pointed out that the trend of these pan-babylonianist
scholars was to see everything in the Bible from Babel and that the Biblical
report was an imitation of the Babylonian Creation report. The scholar Hugo
Winckler thought that the Creation concepts of Babylonia spread over the
Ancient world of that time and he used the words: heavenly image = world image,
macro-cosmos = micro-cosmos (Du Toit 1971: 77).
Jensen tried to see the Gilgamesh Epic in the Old Testament. Friedrich
Delitzsch delivered papers in 1902 in which he tried to say that the Old
Testament is fully dependent upon Babel. Beek reacted against this and said
that a careful scientific investigation showed that pan-babylonianism is not
possible. Whereas Pan-Babylonian scholars tried to see the correlation with the
Bible with Babel, S. Yahuda tried to show that the Creation report of
the Bible compare strongly with Egyptian examples.
Adventists will react here by saying that the
Gilgamesh epic originated in Niniveh of Ashurbanipal and that Jewish scribes
were deported there since 723 BCE and that correlations or assimilation of
Mosaic concepts of Genesis and Babylonian material hinting to the same passed
event, will then be "aligned" stronger, by the Jewish scribes or
copyists of Babylonian traditions. Yahuda's Egyptian investigations are not out
of place, since Moses spent in the palace with Hatshepsut and young Thutmosis III
at least from 1518-1490 BCE, a period when he had his highschool and university
training learning Egyptian and Babylonian languages fluently. Without these
languages, the book of Job cannot be properly understood. Certain words in the
Creation report cannot be understood without a proper use and comparison with
Middle Egyptian, the language that Moses knew so well. The test for scholars is
this: they should not only compare Gilgamesh or Enuma Elish with the
Creation and Flood reports. They should compare the Gilgamesh report of
the Flood with earlier reports to see if the tradition of the earlier reports
also contain similar detail. If not, if there was additions later towards what
one can see in the book of Genesis, then indeed, Jewish scribes were involved.
This comparison was already done by this researcher in 1996, and whereas with
the Flood story, the Sumerian boat was built in 1750 BCE with reeds, the Gilgamesh
epic of the boat in 650 BCE when Israel was in Niniveh as scribes describes
a Titannic of similar proportions as the Bible. Du Toit disagree on this point
and actually stated that investigations showed that the Babylon connection of
the Old Testament is stronger than the Egyptian one (Du Toit 1971: 77). This is
actually not true and many of the hapax legomena in the book of Job and
elsewhere are still today not clear simply because people did not consider a
comparison with forms similar in Middle Egyptian. This researcher has done a
number of such comparisons with surprising results.
People like Rudolph Bultmann spoke of
myths in the Bible. A myth is a mixture of reality with what is not real. For
scholars of the hermeneutics of suspicion it does not make a difference
whether the patriarchs existed or not. They are not interested in the truth of
the Bible, only the tendense or pointe (Du Toit 1971: 77).
The Tradition-Geschichtliche school of
the Scandinavian scholars spoke of legends. Especially G. von Rad
worked on this and decided nearly all are myths. Von Rad also considered myth
as history. He felt it was the way in which a nation experienced its history
and imagined it and that this imagination is sometimes more important than
exact descriptions. He felt that the myths of Genesis were cult legends of
heathen origin that was transformed through the specific Israelite faith in
God. The faith concentration then supplied form to the Genesis report of
Creation. This is theological historiography. The salvation history
of Israel was then formed by the faith of Israel and not the other way around.
Du Toit says that when Von Rad is asked the question: "From where the
faith?" Von Rad does not have any answer (Du Toit 1971: 77).
Du Toit felt against Von Rad that many scholars
realized in 1971 that the "Eigenbegrifflichkeit" (the own nature) of
the Babel and Israel reports is more important, namely, to demonstrate
differences rather than correspondences (Du Toit 1971: 78).
Adventist students need to realize that many of
these aspects have been addressed by Adventist scholars in the past.
1. The books of Gerhard Hasel on Interpretation
and Hermeneutics or Old Testament Theology or Basic Issues in Old Testament
Theology, all dealt with these issues. Michael Hasel, his son, wrote a complete
bibliography of his father, and it will pay well to look into that bibliography
for his views on these matters.
2. This researcher has also spent time on many
of these matters:
http://www.egw.org at VAN WYK NOTES
66 Usher, Ellen White and Darwin on the Age of
the Earth
376 (Old Series) Gilgamesh Epic did not have a
long tradition (a critical view)
3 (Old Series) Israelite Midrash at Niniveh
cuneiform tablets citing and reworking from Isaiah
671 (Old Series) Index to Assyriology compiled
from Weidner 1914-1922. Under the heading "creation" there are a
number of articles in this period (1914-1922) dealing with the Sumerian and
Akkadian concepts of creation.
682 (Old Series) Moses' Egyptian Dictionary:
Egyptian influences on Moses' Hebrew of Job (A)
467 (Old Series) Psalm 104, Creation theology,
Aton Hymn and Mosaic origin
3. The book by Lloyd A. Willis, Archaeology
in Adventist Literature 1937-1980 (AUSDDS vol. 7) is full of valuable
information on Adventist articles and positions on aspects above with scholars
like L. Wood, S. Horn, E. Thiele, W. Shea et al.
4. The book of S. du Toit, Ou Testament en Ou
Ooste (Potchefstroom: Pro Rege-Pers Beperk, 1971) is valuable in chapter 4
dealing with Creation and concepts of the Ancient Near East.