Honest Questions - #6

The previous couple of posts in this series dealt with some Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) documents related to Scripture's creation and flood narratives. We finished with three questions: How does this evidence influence our understanding of the historical nature of the biblical story? Are the creation and flood accounts in Genesis historical fact, or they simply hokey stories ripped from surrounding cultures to be dismissed by serious-minded people? What does all of this to do the belief that the Bible is the Word of God?

Peter Enns begins to tackle these problems by closely examining the perceived issues people have when confronted with this ANE evidence.

He first of all calls a general assumption into question, that assumption being that the more Genesis looks like the Akkadian texts the less inspired it must be. Is that something you assume? Is Enns right to question it?

The problem these ANE texts raise can be boiled down to the historicity of the Genesis accounts. How can we say that they are true when they look so much like these other ancient texts? The ANE stories have widely been branded as myth, and given that a text such as Enuma Elish has to do with divine family feuds, we're quite comfortable giving them this tag. However, as Enns points out,

Christians recoil form any suggestion that Genesis is in any way embedded in the mythologies of the ancient world.

We do, don't we? Christianity is intertwined with historical truth, and so we can't have it in bed with something so untrue and made-up as myth. But what if we simply misunderstand what "myth" actually is? Enns gives the following (generous) definition of myth:

An ancient, premodern, prescientific way of addressing questions of ultimate origins and meaning in the form of stories.

The people of the second millennium BC were not at liberty to talk about the universe in our modern, scientific terms. No doubt some of them looked up at the night sky as we do and wondered how it all came to be, but any answer they could contemplate would not be in the form of string theory. Their answers came -- as only they could -- in the form of stories. We do not know when tales about the gods arose, but as Enns muses,

I like to think that the imprint of God is so strong on His creation that, even apart from any knowledge of the true God, ancient peoples just knew that how and why they were here can be explained only by looking outside themselves.

However, all of this talk of myth and stories creates quite a big problem for Christians today. An honest question arises: If these ANE documents are categorised as myth (as defined above), and if we can safely say that the biblical stories are at least somewhat similar to these documents, does this mean that myth is the appropriate category for understanding Genesis?

The simple point Enns intends to make is that the Genesis accounts are also examples of ANE texts whether we like it or not, and so we should be careful about what standards we hold them to. After all,

Is it not likely that God would have allowed His word to come to ancient Israelites according to standards they understood, or are modern standards of truth and error so universal that we should expect premodern cultures to have understood them?

Enns argues for the former perspective, an argument we will get to in the next post or two.