The roots of the creation story: An atheist’s take on the Bible [View all]

[cleanhippie]

Most religions provide some version of a creation myth. This is, after all, necessary to elevate the role of a god or gods in the history of the world—to establish a Supreme Being’s supremacy by making Him the ultimate source and creator of all things. So it is natural that the Bible begins with its creation myth.

The earliest parts of the Bible are the first five books. In the Jewish tradition, they are called by their Hebrew name: the Torah or “law.” In the Christian tradition, they are called by their Greek name: the Pentateuch or “five books.” Christianity spread through the Classical world, where Greek was the lingua franca, and early Christians used a third century BC Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint after the seventy learned scholars supposedly responsible for the translation. Since I’m going the whole distance, through both the Old and New Testaments, and since I’m focusing on the King James Bible, and especially because my primary interest is the influence of Christianity on the West, I will be using the Greek versions of all of these names.

In the Greek/Christian version, each book of the Bible is given a descriptive name. The name of the first book is “Genesis,” the Greek word for birth or coming into being. It is a story of the creation of the world and of man. But right away, we encounter an intriguing clue about the origins of this origin myth.

The first line of the Bible is: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (Follow along in your hymnal, or read the King James Bible online.) The Hebrew word for “God” in this verse is “Elohim.” Anyone with a knowledge of Hebrew knows that the –im suffix is plural. So this verse would seem to read, “In the beginning, the gods created the heaven and the earth.” But instead, Hebrew tradition requires that the plural be ignored and that “Elohim” be translated as “God.” Isaac Asimov—whose Guide to the Bible I am using as a fellow atheist’s reference source—notes that “It is possible that in the very earliest traditions on which the Bible is based, the creation was indeed the work of a plurality of gods. The firmly monotheistic Biblical writers would carefully have eliminated such polytheism, but could not perhaps do anything with the firmly ingrained term ‘Elohim.’” Bear in mind that the Bible was not definitively written down until the sixth century BC. Before that it was mostly memorized and passed down by oral tradition, much like the works of Homer (which were first written down at about the same time). So the initial verses would have been as firmly ingrained in the mind of the Hebrew public as “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles” was for the Greeks. It would be impossible to change. The solution was to simply agree, as a social convention, to give “Elohim” a singular meaning, referring to only one God.

http://life.nationalpost.com/2013/02/08/the-roots-of-the-creation-story-an-atheists-take-on-the-bible/

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