Ancient Mythology, Creation, and Hermeneutics
by Matthew McAffee
What is ancient mythology, and why does it matter for biblical interpretation? This question has become an increasingly difficult one for evangelicalism in its attempts at interpreting the narratives of Genesis 1-11.
Many within the academy have largely abandoned the notion that the Biblical materials reflect actual historical events. Instead, they argue that these texts represent an Israelite version of the ancient Near Eastern mythologies, which provided mythological explanations for the world’s origins. As the argument goes, to understand these passages from an ancient Near Eastern context requires that we interpret them in light of their mythological counterparts. For example, we are told to read references to tehom “the deep” (Gen. 1:2) in light of the Mesopotamian goddess Tiamat, whom the Babylonian god Marduk defeats in battle and whose corpse he uses to create the world (Enuma Elish).[1] Genesis 1:1-2 reads:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep (tehom). The spirit of God was hovering upon the face of the waters.
We should be clear that these two terms are related etymologically, so the connection is not entirely off base. However, the real issue concerns to what degree (if any) the author intended to relate his work to the Mesopotamian tradition regarding Marduk and Tiamat.
In what follows, we will explore briefly the nature of ancient Near Eastern mythology and its relevance to the Biblical tradition. Doing so will also require us to touch on the matter of hermeneutics and their underlying presuppositions. How should we understand the Bible’s relationship to the ideas current in its own world and how does our view of Scripture inform that understanding
I. Ancient Near Eastern Mythology
Before probing the above parallel further, we should give a bit more attention to mythology and its function in the ancient world. Regarding the function of mythology for ancient Ugarit, Israel’s close neighbor,[2] David Schloen suggests that there are three levels of correspondence between the real and mythological worlds. These are the natural, political, and familial levels:[3]
Natural: On the natural level, the battling gods and goddesses correspond with the forces of nature (storm, sea, fertility, and death).
Political: The political level relates the struggle for supremacy among the gods to that of the great rulers of human society as they rise and fall in political power. This level allows for a certain amount of back and forth, since ancient theology and politics were one and the same. As gods rise in power, so do their devotees. Furthermore, the fate of earthly rulers is somehow tied to the status of their patron deities. Political weakness could be viewed as divine judgment on the one hand, or the waning powers of the patron deity on the other.
Familial: The last level of correspondence ties mythology to the context of the familial household. The realm of the gods is portrayed in terms of the ancient household: the divine father and his consort, sons and daughters, and household servants.
As we can see, the function of mythology for the ancients was rather complex in its perceived connections with the real world. In many ways, the invisible divide between the supernatural and natural worlds familiar to moderns did not exist.
II. Mythology and Creation
To what degree do the Biblical materials correspond to the mythological worldview of its neighbors?
One of the clearest areas of correspondence between them is that the divine realm cannot be separated from the natural realm. The Israelite way of thinking also believed that God works in this world. And yet, one might even say that the Biblical perspective presents an even stronger case for this level of correspondence, since Genesis 1-2 claims that God is solely responsible for its creation. We also see that the politics of kings and kingdoms are directly tied to the will of Israel’s covenant Lord. Yahweh raises up kings to prominence in one breath, and tears them down in another, all of which apparently relates to one’s demonstration (or lack) of loyalty to covenant.
But even as we look for similarities between the Israelite worldview and that of its ancient Near Eastern counterparts, stark contrasts emerge. Were the authors of Old Testament Scripture a product of their own times to some degree? Did they (as some have recently suggested) simply rehash ancient mythologies for their own political and theological agendas?[4]
As we return to the example of tehom “the deep” (Gen. 1:2) introduced above, how might we explain its etymological connection with the Mesopotamian Tiamat? At a most fundamental level, the fully-developed mythology of gods and goddesses attested in the ancient Near East is largely absent from the Biblical narratives. Should we conclude, then, that there is a mythology of Tiamat peering through the narrative cracks of Genesis 1? And has it been intentionally suppressed (demythologized) by late monotheistic Yahwistic redactors? That is certainly one interpretive vein defended by a number of scholars.[5]
Of course, another possibility is that Genesis’ author intentionally avoids mythologizing the elements of creation for theological reasons. And what would that reason have been? Could it be that Scripture’s authors were actually intending to challenge the predominant worldview of their neighbors? As such, were they claiming to present the authorized record of creation? This is certainly plausible, and may in fact be the most straightforward reading of the Biblical account of creation. The point of Genesis 1 is therefore to counter the claims of competing creation accounts (like Enuma Elish) by insisting that it was none other than the God of Israel Who created the heavens and the earth. Creation was not the result of a cosmic struggle between two deities, but was the sovereign act of God Who brought the natural world into existence by His own independent will. The tehom “the deep” is nothing more than the unformed substance God spoke into existence in Genesis 1:1, which was given form in the creation acts depicted in Genesis 1:3-2:3. God created and fashioned it all by His own will.[6]
But what about the mention of tehom in Proverbs 8? Here, the subject of creation comes up toward the end of a poem in which wisdom is personified as a woman.[7] The topic of creation spans verses 22-31. In particular, verse 24 reads:
When there were no depths (tehomot), I was brought forth,
When there were no springs abounding with water.
It is rather remarkable that this poem would offer such an extended treatment of lady wisdom, personified for rhetorical effect, and yet resist the personification of the natural elements, especially tehom “the deep” given its mythological background. Even here, a mythologized tehom is entirely absent.
III. Hermeneutics and Inspiration
Our discussion raises an important hermeneutical question: to what degree is the Biblical text governed by its ancient context? To put it differently, are the perspectives of the Biblical authors bound by the viewpoints of their world? It should become readily apparent that one’s views regarding the inspiration of Scripture will govern his answer to these questions. If we are to think that the Scriptures are the result of God’s disclosure of Himself into our world, then we will also be willing to grant that the Biblical authors could exhibit some level of distinction from their cultural context.
On the other hand, if we believe that the Biblical texts are a product of human thinking, then there is no way that their authors could have spoken independently from their world. They could only speak from their own context, and therefore were just another voice alongside their Syrian, Hittite, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian counterparts. Obviously, a number of possibilities exist between these two extremes, some emphasizing the divine nature of the Scripture and others the human.
What we have therefore is a hermeneutic of theological independence versus one of dependence. Bernard Batto, for instance, is unwilling to accept the possibility of theological independence at all. He cautions, “Like all authors, however, they were children of their time, and their ideas were shaped in large measure by their cultures,” urging that “it would have been well nigh impossible for them to be impervious to its [ANE] influence” on their view of the world, just as “they were not impervious to the polytheism of the ancient Near East.”[8] However, in affirming that the Bible represents the in-breaking of God’s word to our world (2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1:20-21), we are willing to grant theological independence to the Biblical authors.
In the case of Genesis 1, it represents a polemic against the Babylonian worldview. At the same time, however, this does not deny all levels of cultural dependence. The Biblical authors were writing as ancient Near Easterners living within their own cultural context. They used their own language and expressions, and they thought in categories reflective of their world. This is why the study of their ancient Near Eastern context is important. But they were also critiquing that world from within it. And their critique originated from God.[9]
Summary
In summary, we find that ancient mythology and its relationship to the Bible is a difficult one with many complex questions to address. More fundamentally, however, it raises the matter of hermeneutics and one’s approach to interpreting the Scripture. We should exercise caution when reading the Biblical texts in light of their ancient Near Eastern contexts. To be sure, the Biblical authors were not isolated from their cultural context, but neither were they slaves to it.
We may speak of two approaches in understanding the use of ancient Near Eastern motifs in the Bible: accommodation versus subversion. Perhaps this is a rather subtle distinction, but it betrays two different underlying assumptions about scriptural revelation: one emphasizing Scripture more as human product (lesser independence from cultural context), the other emphasizing Scripture more as divine product (greater independence from cultural context).
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[1] For a translation of Enuma Elish, see The Context of Scripture, vol. 1 (ed. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, Jr.; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997), 390-402.
[2] Ugarit was an ancient city situated on the north Syrian coast. In the early twentieth century a rather modest cache of texts were discovered from this site (Ras Shamra) dating from the latter portion of the second millennium B.C. These texts provide an important parallel for investigating the cultural and linguistic context of the Old Testament. For an overview of these texts and their discovery, see Pierre Bordreuil and Dennis Pardee, A Manual of Ugaritic (Linguistic Studies in Ancient West Semitic 3; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2009), 1-7.
[3] David Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East (Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant 2; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2001), 355. See also Mark Smith, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 100-101.
[4] Or, as Peter Enns has suggested, did God accommodate Himself to the primitive understandings of the human authors of Scripture in adopting wholesale the genre of myth to communicate His truth? According to this perspective, later revelation inevitably corrects the earlier, more primitive revelation that was couched in ancient mythological categories. See Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 13-21
[5] As a challenge to this view, however, it is interesting to note that in Ugaritic, the genre of mythology is always poetic, while the material of Genesis is straightforward narrative prose. Pardee notes that unlike Ugaritic, in which “compositions of elevated literary quality” are exclusively poetic, Hebrew is predominantly “highly literary prose” (The Ugaritic Texts and the Origins of West Semitic Literary Composisiton [The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy 2007; Oxford, 2012], 79). At the very least, this factor suggests that the genres of Ugaritic mythology and Genesis 1-11 are not the same thing. Quite the contrary, Genesis 1-11 is rather unique in the ancient world for its presentation of creation in narrative prose. Perhaps Genesis is not so mythological after all!
[6] See the similar arguments put forth by John D. Currid in Against the Gods: The Polemical Theology of the Old Testament (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013), 44-46. As he concludes, “Genesis 1 sits in stark contrast to that dark mythological polytheism. The biblical account has as its chief purpose to glorify the one Creator God who is the sole God of all reality. The water at creation (1:2) is certainly no deity, and it is not God’s foe that needs to be vanquished. It is merely putty in the hands of the Creator” (46).
[7] The reason for her being personified as a woman is apparently due to the fact that the Hebrew word for wisdom (hokma) is markedly feminine.
[8] Bernard Batto, “The Combat Myth in Israelite Tradition Revisited,” in Creation and Chaos: A Reconsideration of Hermann Gunkel’s Chaoskampf Hypothesis (ed. Joann Scurlock and Richard H. Beal; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2013), 233, 227.
[9] Although it is beyond the confines of our discussion here, we should be clear in stating that neither complete independence nor complete dependence is an appropriate way of thinking about this issue. We believe that the greatest level of independence would have been in terms of ideas reflective of one’s worldview. On the surface level, there may have been very little noticeable difference between Israelites and their ANE neighbors. As it relates to beliefs about God and the practice of religion, however, distinction becomes more evident.
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