From Throw out your Bibles and free yourselves from the shackles of delusional superstition!
Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew.
She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world—and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals….
Here’s how you should look at the book of Genesis. Long, long ago, a tribe of desert nomads bumped up against the more cosmopolitan culture of Mesopotamia. They learned useful skills from the city people, like writing, but at the same time, the allure of those older, more sophisticated ideas was leading to the dissolution of tribal identity, and especially to a loss of respect for the austere and demanding desert god. Who wants to worship dry old El when slinky, sexy Innini is calling?
So in a move as old as religion, almost, the desert priests slyly adopted the popular culture of their neighbors, stealing all their myths, but rewrote them to put their one great god in charge of the whole story. Genesis is an exercise in syncretism, a wholesale theft of one tradition to be repackaged with a new set of symbols. It is not about the creation of the universe. It is about resolving a conflict between two human cultures.
interesting modern worded approach, throwing value of text out if you don’t agree. a very simplistic analysis is dressed up to appear valid. many evangelicals hold very similar views
No, there is much legitimate scholarship documenting that the two strands (i.e., J vs E) of “doubled stories” running through the Old Testament are the product of exactly such cultural conflict and syncretism, whether or not it was a rural vs. urban split. (The version I’ve previously seen was Northern Kingdom vs. Southern, so I’m not sure where Myers is coming from here, esp. since he doesn’t link to the source of his view. Maybe he’s thinking of displaced Israelis vs. settled Judeans, but why would that split as urban vs. rural?)
Or why do you think there are two versions of each of the stories of Creation, the Flood, etc.?
I welcome intelligent, constructive criticism on this site. What you have left here does not qualify as such—on the contrary, you have left a genuinely simplistic response to a complex issue which has only begun to untangled and understood over the past century+.
Don’t do it again.
I suggest you read Karen Armstrong’s A CAase for God – very intelligent analysis of the history of El/Jahwah/Jehovah/ and other religious concepts around the World and how that has evolved over time – quite brilliant
I admit to only glancing at your page here above, but I feel I get a gist. ARE you coming from a Jungian perspective where you see that any kind of spirits experiences are really ‘the unconscious’? I am very interested in exploring this myself!
I wanted to email you immediately but was disappointed to see we have to find you via myspace! For some odd reason, I never seem to be able to register there–dont ask me why. I just can ever seem to get in there—So how can I contact you?
I DID read sections of your Stripping the Gurus, especially Krinsch who for a while I got unknowlingly obsessed by UNTIL I accidentally’ picked up Sloss’s book in a library!
I am very interested in the seemingly opposing paradigm os ‘Physicalism’ and ‘Nonduality’/New Age which create a duality in the world stage
I also am critical of shamanism, especially when you de-romanticize it—and hear of Dark Shamans, and the seeming paranoia of shamanistic cultures
But I sense that nature IS minded. HAS soul. IS intelligent, and it is our need to be able to explore this. That is my passion anyhow