Genesis

Reading the beginning of Genesis made me think back to “Epic of Creation”, and I found it interesting to see how these two different accounts of creation related to each other. An important idea in both of these texts is the purpose and nature of humans. In the “Epic of Creation”, humans are meant to work from the moment they are created. They are created so they can “bear the gods’ burden that those may rest” (39). In Genesis, God creates humans but does not say anything about what they have to do (1:26). Only later, when they eat from the tree of knowledge, are they cursed to toil for their food (3:17). This account is different in that humans brought this on themselves as punishment instead of being created originally for the purpose of working. Still, “Epic of Creation” and Genesis are similar because they both contain the idea that humans are bad or unclean. In Genesis, it is obvious that they are considered sinful because they ate fruit from a tree, which was forbidden to them. In Epic of Creation, humans seem unclean even though they did not directly do anything bad because of the way they are created. When Ea creates humans, he asks for the “guilty one” (38) out of the gods so he can be slaughtered and used as the starting material. Since humans are made from the flesh of a guilty god, the guilt seems to be an intrinsic part of them.

Before I read Who Wrote the Bible?, I never thought about whether there were inconsistencies in the Bible and if so, why they appear. After I read it though, I noticed that there are indeed apparent contradictions. One that I noticed is how there came to be many people. One part says, “male and female he [God] created them” (1:27) which implies that God created a lot of people at once. In the story of Adam and Eve, however, it seems that the first man was Adam and all other people are descendants of him and Eve. It seems plausible to me that the Bible could be a compilation of several different texts. I think it could be similar to how the Mesopotamian myths we read gave slightly different versions of events. If texts like that were compiled into one book, that would explain why there are inconsistencies.