[asa] Seely's Response to Hill re: Accommodation in PSCF; ANE Motifs

The ongoing correspondence in PSCF among Hugh Ross, Paul Seely and Carol
Hill in PSCF is very interesting. Seely's most recent communication in the
March 2008 issue (sorry I can't link to it because of our ASA Neolithic
Internet publication policy -- you can only read it if you have the original
stone tablets) is well done but I get the sense Paul and Carol are talking
about almost the same thing with somewhat different words and emphasis.

Here is something I think Paul is missing in his most recent piece: he
seems to suggest that because the Israelite creation and flood stories adopt
motifs from surrounding ANE literature, we should consider them factually
accommodated to that ANE background in the sense that they are making some
wrong factual assertions about what actually, literally happened in the
creation and flood, based on straightforward readings of the surrounding
Mesopotamian literature.

But why should we assume that the surrounding Mesopotamian myths always
functioned as actual, literal accounts within their own cultural, religious,
and literary contexts?

I claim no expertise in ancient Mesopotamia, but from the bits I've read,
I'd be very surprised if the political and knowledge classes in those
societies would have understood the Enuma Elish, Gilgamesh, the King List,
etc. as unadorned descriptive accounts of simple history. These were
sophisticated people, the elites of their time, not illiterate farmers.
I've no doubt that they considered this literature "true" -- certainly they
didn't have our modern scientific worldview -- but it seems to me that we're
projecting our Western, enlightenment way of telling and reading
"historical" stories not only on scripture, but also on the literature that
forms the backdrop of scripture. In fact, if anything, I would think they
would have been far more open to writing "cosmic" history that isn't
supposed to be "literal" in a simple sense.

So, for example, the Babylonian astrologers may have believed the sky
literally was a solid dome -- but did they really believe the earth
"literally" was Tiamat's corpse and people were "literally" fashioned from
Marduk's blood and bone? I suspect they were sophisticated enough to be
using Tiamat's corpse and Marduk's blood in a non-literal sense -- which to
me is even more interesting and compelling when we try to understand the
meaning of something like the creation of life from the "dust of the earth"
in scripture.

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Received on Tue Feb 26 20:47:34 2008