The bible has a weird beginning full of paradoxes.
In Genesis 1:2, we see “the Spirit of God hovering over the waters”, while the waters are only separated in Genesis 1:6-7. Daylight is created on Day 1, but the sun is created three days later, on Day 4.
The reason for this is that the biblical creation story is really a mixture of several other, much older creation stories. It is full of elements from (especially) Egyptian, Babylonian and Sumerian mythology.
Most scholars agree that Genesis was only written three or four centuries BC. That makes it one of the most recent ‘ancient’ religious books from the Middle East. Creation stories like ‘Enuma Elish’ or ‘The Instruction for Merikare’ are hundreds, even thousands of years older!
The creation story of Genesis was constructed much as you would make a car: out of off-the-shelf components that were already there.
Don’t worry there are no Da Vinci Code-style conspiracies involved. Whoever wrote Genesis was simply a product of his (or her) time. The author(s) used symbols, ideas and notions that were already widespread like the belief that the sky is really a steel ‘expanse’ with the sun, the moon and the stars dangling down from it.
To give you a taste of just how strikingly close the parallels are, we’ll give you two quick examples about the creation of Adam from clay, and Eve from Adam’s rib:
Genesis (300-400 BC): “the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (2:7) |
The Epic of Gilgamesh (Sumeria, 2100-2000 BC): The gods create Gilgamesh from a lump of clay. |
The Atrahasis Myth (Sumeria, 1700 BC): The Gods are bored with dirty work. So they take some clay, mix it with blood, and create the first humans |
The Instruction for Merikare (Egypt, 2100 BC): The first human is breathed to life through his nose:“He [the sun god Ra] gave the breath of life to their noses, for they are likenesses of Him which issued from His flesh” |
Genesis: “[The LORD] took one of [Adam’s] ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man” (2:21-22) |
Sumerian mythology: The goddess Ninhursag takes out one of the ribs of Enki, another god. Then she makes a woman out of the rib, ‘Ninti’ literally: ‘lady of the rib’. |
Not convinced yet? Let's give you an overview of some of the most well-known biblical creation elements - and their origins:
Genesis: |
Origin: |
|
In the beginning there was chaos and wind (Gen 1:1) |
Perhaps Greek |
Theogony (600-700 BC) |
God creates stuff by giving orders: “Let there be…” (Gen 1) |
Egyptian, Sumerian |
Enuma Elish (1100-1200 BC) |
Creation of day and night before the sun and the moon are created (1:3-5) |
Egyptian |
Creation mythology |
The sky is an expanse (1:6-8) |
Sumerian |
Enuma Elish |
Land and sky created by separating waters (1:6-10) |
Sumerian |
Enuma Elish |
Creation of plants before the sun is created (1:11-12) |
Egyptian |
Creation mythology |
Man created from clay (2:7) |
Babylonian |
Epic of Gilgamesh (2100-2000 BC), Atrahasis Myth (1700 BC) |
Man made alive by breathing air into the nostrils (2:7) |
Egyptian |
The Teaching for Merikare (2100 BC) |
Eve created from Adam’s rib (2:21-23) |
Sumerian |
Creation mythology |
Garden of Eden (2:8-9) |
Sumerian |
Enuma Elish, Epic of Gilgamesh |
Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge (2:9) |
Egyptian, Babylonian |
|
Evil snake in the garden (3:1-15) |
Sumerian, Greek |
Epic of Gilgamesh; in Greek mythology there’s a story of how a snake steals an immortality herb from humankind |
Despite all this, many devout Christians claim that we should take Genesis 1 literally.
Well: that makes no sense - not unless you’re willing to accept that the sky above is actually a hammered ‘expanse’ you can touch, as is written in Genesis 1:6-8.
What's more, the bible has got the sequence of events wrong. Birds and fish weren’t ‘created’ simultaneously, but many hundreds of millions of years apart.
And you won’t find any serious astronomer around who believes the earth was here earlier than the stars and the sun were. Nor will you find any biologists who will take for granted that plants arrived before the sun did.
But what did happen? Let’s give you an overview of what science thinks:
“Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3)
“He separated the light from the darkness” (Gen. 1:4)
“And there was evening, and there was morningthe first day” (Gen. 1:5)
"Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees” (Genesis 1:11)
“Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night” (Genesis 1:14)
“He also made the stars” (Genesis 1:15)
And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." (Gen. 1:20)
"Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds” (Gen. 1:24)
“Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness” (Gen 1:26)
On this website, we really try to be respectful to religion. But creationism is giving us a hard time. Creationism isn't respectful to any insight science has ever produced!
It just seems soooo stupid to believe that God created the world in six days and in the exact manner described in Genesis. Somewhere down the line, something has to fit in with some of the basic facts we know about the real world.
And the creation story doesn't. Not at all. It is belief at its very blindest.