Who Wrote the Bible and When?

A god, yes; Yaweh, of course not. Gilgamesh was two-thirds divine, one-third human. The god Anu created a wild man to keep him occupied. On his journey to the forest, Gilgamesh prayed to Shamesh, who sent prophetic dreams. etc.

 

Since you brought up Gilgamesh, we might use that as a lead in to the obvious comparisons between Genesis and other Mesopotamian creation & flood stories. The Gilgamesh Epic was written down on clay tablets about 2,000 BCE. The close resemblance to the Noah story cannot be explained away as a coincidence or independent observations of the same event. The Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth, the earliest tablets also dating from around 2000 BCE, contains elements that are familiar in the Genesis story: (1) a flat earth surrounded by saltwater; (2) a dome or firmament stretching overhead, (3) creation by divine speech, (4) a creation sequence of light, firmament, dry land, luminaries, humans; (6) creation of humans in the sixth tablet (6th day/); (7) Marduk's exultation with his handiwork in the seventh tablet (7th day?). So what?

 

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me, yesterday

time is all an illusion. Either that or it caught on real quick.

 

The parallels between these accounts and Genesis have led some scholars to claim that Genesis borrowed some of its material from them. In the flood story in the Gilgamesh epic, the similarities are particularly close. They are not the sort of details that would result if independent observers were describing the same event, unless they happened to be passengers in the Ark. Christian apologetics emphasizes the differences, especially the moral purpose for eliminating humans, but the eleventh tablet (line 180) says: "lay upon the sinner his sin; lay upon the transgressor his transgression."

Other possible explanations: (1) the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babyonians got their flood story from Hebrew sources; since most scholars believe the Bible wasn't around at the time the Mesopotamian sources were written, that could only be true if most scholars are wrong (which is always a possibility), or the Hebrew version existed in oral form and was passed on to their neighbors; or (2) God revealed this knowledge separately to these other Mesopotamian peoples. (3)We may even be dealing with a Jungian archetype here. Aztec-Toltec creation myths have the gods creating and destroying the earth and humans several times in their effort to get it right.

Atheists invariably ask the question why is God (or the gods) taking it out on humans for something He (they) botched in creating them in the first place? We can get into free will as a handy explanation, or look at the story metaphorically as I prefer to do, and not get hung up on the details.

 

I am a proponent of psychic archetype, but I think the hierarchical model is a racial memory of cultural efforts. Destruction and rebuilding portraying the evidence of the ultimate failure of traditional systems. The word tradition coming from a root meaning to give away or betray. There may be a memory of cataclysm, but you don't need a pantheon of gods of varying consequence to explain that.

Truth has universal application and does not favor particular circumstance.

 

it was a rhetorical question...

i think the whole torah is pretty much a variety of oral traditions, both accidentally [telephone game] and intentionally [yahweh versus ???] distorted

the reason we think they're important is partially the very fact that they survived, and of course that our particular small piece of civilization is partly based on them

 

Given the fact that Abrahamic religions account for more than half of the world's population, I don't think our piece of civilization is all that small. I think the words in that book can save us or do us in, depending on how we understand them and what we do as a result.

Distorted? That's possible. The Hebrew scribes have been lauded for their accuracy and reliability, but humans are notorious for error. And it's also possible that scripture has been used to advance the interests of particular individuals and groups. Borg notices dueling traditions in the Bible: the legitimizers of the status quo and its ruling elite versus the challengers and champions of the oppressed. But let's look at specifics. What, if any, parts are distorted?

 

Often in these discussions on other threads, somebody will raise the question "Why would God write a book?" I think that question should be taken seriously. Why would the omnipotent, omniscient Creator of the universe be interested in communicating with humans? Why would (S)he use a book to do so, rather than program us all to know it, or make an appearance on the cable news networks? And why decide to do so only to obscure Jewish herders, leaving us to wonder whether Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, the Buddha, etc., were saved? And why couldn't God have been clearer, especially knowing in advance the violence and bloodshed that would result from disputes over what the words mean?

That's why I believe that the Bible was not written or even dictated by God, but reflects the human quest for God. But the product is so powerful, so beautiful, so profound that it speaks across the ages. I'm a Christian not because I used my brain to figure it all out, or deduced it all from contemplating nature, or am blindly doing what someone told me to do, but because of the words that speak to the depths of my heart and mind. I can't brush them off as something we think are important only because our particular civilization just happens to accept. But a lot of the words don't have that effect on me at all, and sometimes seem downright harmful. So this thread is an effort on my part to sort it out, with your help.

 

Let's do, where now?

 

in the whole run of the world's history? there's a whole lot of people who were born and died without ever having heard of a few hebrew nomads and their god

[i stand by my statement]

not so much the hebrew scribes as the passers-down of the tales unwritten

that's why i mentioned telephone, you know, you say a sentence to the person next to you, and so on, and by the time it's been passed on to the 20th person it's a different sentence

the 20th person writes it down, and it becomes genesis

of course if the original story was told by shamans or animists or polytheists or whatever, the 20th person, being hebrew, has to change a lot of it on his own initiative

i guess they didn't [or couldn't] change it quite enough, since all that 'leaving eden and going to cities' or 'other gods' material is still in it

 

But with a radically different theology. In Genesis, the celestial bodies are created to serve humans, and not the other way around (if I have my creation myths right).

Instead of humans being created from the blood of a slain evil God, they are created and take creation from merely good, to very good.

 

a bunch of sheeple herders wrote it and pretended it was the word of god and other special people who hung out with Jesus. Really they were all just greedy assholes who wanted everyone to be under one thumb.

 

Do you have any idea how strong and secure oral traditions really are. the Vedas, which are very complicated and long texts, went unchanged in Hinduism for thousands of years before being written down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_literature#Styles_of_Memorization

When something is important, rather than just idle news, it gets remembered when your only way of remembering is recitation and repetition.

 

I suspect that is why Jesus said remember me as opposed to write this down.
The problem with the modern bible is the process of codificaton, copyright, and a competition for authority over correct interpretation. Oral transmission does not face these problems. It does face the problem however, of not being amenable to mass distribution. We don't read a book to remember to feed our children.

 

maybe, maybe not, who knows--since the versions unwritten were, well, unwritten?

besides, they stayed within their culture and religion--who knows from who or where the genesis myths came?

 

From the human psyche.

 

Good points. The theology is certainly radically different between polytheist and monotheistic accounts, although there seems to have been a growing tendency, at least on the part of the priests, to equate all of the gods with Marduk and to treat them as aspects of Marduk.