Historical Genesis: History versus Mythology (S07, E01)

Greetings and welcome to the Faith Chapel Podcast. My name is Jason,

and I am the pastor of Faith Chapel.

In the podcast, our seventh season starts today.

In this season, we will look at whether or not Genesis should be taken as historical.

There are fantastic stories in Genesis, stories of an epic flood,

long lives, and the creation of the world.

With scientific advancements over the years, it may be hard to imagine how Genesis

can be considered an historic account.

But what is the overall evidence?

Should we take Genesis as history or mainly as fiction?

In this season, we will look at different aspects of what is known as primeval

history and discover if the Bible's account of the origins of the human race can be trusted.

Today, we start by discovering what Genesis is and what it teaches.

Thanks for joining us today.

I'm going to start out by helping us to put a framework around what Genesis is.

What can we glean from Genesis because of its literature, how it's written,

and what it is in general.

And sometimes I think it's helpful to start off by telling us what it is not

or telling us what it does not proclaim to be.

And the first thing is that Genesis does not proclaim to be a scientifically.

It is not telling us about the processes of the world so that we can study them.

It is telling us about what God did, not necessarily the processes that he put

in place like gravity, but mainly what God did and accomplished.

It is not a study of the natural world, even though there are animals,

there are humans, there are trees, fruits, etc.

There are natural things in there, but it's not a study of those things.

So it is not a scientific textbook.

And all of the sources that I am going to use, trying to use both sides of the

spectrum to help us to get a firmer grasp of the full picture of what it is,

but every source that I am using here tonight says the same thing.

So the Harper Collins Study Bible says Genesis is not a scientific textbook in the modern sense,

and the ESV Study Bible confirms and agrees with that statement by saying the

text says nothing about the process by which the earth brought forth vegetation,

or it doesn't tell us which various kinds of animals appeared.

It doesn't tell us the species. It doesn't tell us anything like that.

It simply just says, this is what God did.

God brought these things forth. It's not studying the grass and how it comes

to being, but it does tell us what God did.

The other thing I wanted to bring to our attention in a negative is that Genesis is not...

Answering all of our questions. Genesis is not omniscient.

It is not all-knowing. And what we need to understand is that there are going

to be some questions that Genesis leaves for us to just ponder.

Jewish literature is a meditation literature in that it invites us into muttering

what we know, what God did, what we learned in Genesis.

And to ponder these things.

One of the things that I bring up is that Genesis does not tell us that polygamy is wrong.

It shows us polygamy does not work.

You can look at Jacob and his four wives and the dissension between the wives

and the dissension between the 12 sons and how that helps us to see that that's

not the way that God intended us to be.

And so it does not answer every question, but it invites us into a story to

help us to ponder and think about these things.

So the ESV study Bible puts it this way.

Interpreting Genesis is further complicated by the fact that it is also the inspired word of God.

This leads some readers to suppose

that this infallible text will be omniscient like its divine author.

They then look for answers to questions that Genesis is not trying to answer.

Yet, like any other part of the Bible, Genesis is limited and selective in the

information that it conveys.

It does not tell readers everything that they could possibly want to know.

Frequently, readers may ask questions legitimate in themselves that are not answered by the text.

Genesis does not tell, for instance, how the serpent came to be God's enemy

or where Cain found a wife.

Such questions could be multiplied many times.

Consequently, one's natural curiosity must be correctly channeled,

for the inspired author of Genesis intentionally communicates only certain things.

Yet the text does not cease to be the word of God simply because it is limited

in what it tells the reader.

It need not be exhaustive in order to be true.

I think it's positive, as I said about the meditation literature of the Torah

in particular, to be thinking and wondering these things.

I love questions. And when we are thinking, when we are studying,

when we are growing in knowing what God's word says, it will raise questions.

I remember when I was a person that had just accepted Jesus.

I had so many different questions.

And I don't want to discourage questions, but sometimes the text just doesn't

give us every answer we want.

And we have to be okay with that ambiguity.

The importance is about revealing characteristics of God and putting ourselves

in their position to shine a light in our lives so that we can respond.

Whenever we encounter struggles, whenever we encounter persecution like Joseph did with his brothers,

we need to be able to see how they reacted so that we, when we encounter those situations,

we know how to react.

And this leads us to our first positive affirmation of what the Bible is.

The Bible is an epic narrative.

It begins in the beginning.

It is a story. It is inviting us into this story.

Presview is putting on the play Shrek.

And when you think about Shrek or any of the other fables, like it has a line

similar to in the beginning to pull us into that story.

And Genesis wants us to engage with it, that wants to pull us into it.

And so it is an epic narrative. It is telling us a story.

The ESV study Bible says it this way.

The story is of a good world made by a good God and a man's role in that world.

The story of how the stain of sin affects everything, the story of how God intends

to reverse those effects.

And we can see that as we're studying through Noah, the world,

God says in Genesis 6, that every inclination of man's heart was toward evil,

towards disobeying what God would want us to do.

And that is how sin affects us.

And then when we get to the story of Abraham, what redemption looks like and

how God intends to reverse what sin has done.

It is all a part of the epic narrative that is Genesis.

The New Interpreter's Bible says it this way, They are typical or archetypical stories.

That is, they explain aspects of human life in every age, including inter-human.

Human-non-human, and creature-creator relationships.

So it talks about how the animals were brought to Adam, and Adam named them,

and what that relationship kind of looked like.

It tells us about how Adam and Eve corresponded with each other and with God,

and so it is telling us these stories to give us insight onto how God wants us to live.

The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bibles says this, Genesis contains cosmogony

texts, which means texts that deal with the origins of key aspects of the cosmos, the universe.

It also contains genealogies, founders or ancestors' narratives.

Destiny proclamations like formal blessings and or curses from father to son,

conflict tales, battle accounts, and narratives about the rise of a courtier

from humble beginnings to a position of power.

And it specifically puts there the story of Joseph. And so it has lots of different

ways of telling the story.

Conflict between Joseph and his brothers, conflict that put Joseph in prison,

conflict between Abraham and Sarah when Hagar comes on the scene.

They are relaying these stories to us, and they're not telling us do this and don't do this.

They are showing us what they did so we can learn from them.

So it is an epic narrative, but Genesis is also theological in nature because

it reveals God to us and aids us in studying who he is.

The ESV Study Bible puts it this way, the modern reader receives Genesis best

when he or she cooperates with Moses' own purpose in writing the book.

It is the front end of the grand narrative of creation, fall,

and redemption, a narrative that has reached a glorious point in the resurrection of Jesus,

the down payment of its even more glorious consummation.

Thus, the life that one lives in the body, one's connection to all mankind,

one's connection to and responsibility for the created world,

one's dependence on God's grace, are all founded on the story that begins in Genesis.

The key component there is that all of these things relate to what we believe about God.

What is our responsibility for the created world? What is our dependence upon God's grace?

All of these will be worked out, not just in Genesis, but throughout the rest

of the Bible, to help us to understand what our role is and how we can relate to God.

So Genesis is theological in nature.

The HarperCollins Study Bible adds this,

As a book of origins, Genesis partakes in the sacredness and authority of this

era and has served as a foundation for thought, belief, and actions for millennia.

So here we see that it is a foundation story.

It's a foundation of what Israel thinks about God at the very least.

And that's what the more liberal aspects of the scholarly work will tell us,

that it is helping them to understand the world that's around them and to provide

these religious frameworks to live in accordance with what they see the world as.

And so these are all agreed upon in the scholarly work, whether they are conservative or liberal.

These things are what everyone agrees on, that Genesis is theological in nature,

that it is a grand epic narrative, that it is not a scientific textbook,

and that it is not designed to answer every question that we have.

And where the disagreement starts on what Genesis is, is on the aspect of, is Genesis history?

So, to answer that question, the ESV Study Bible is going to first define what history means.

It says, In order to address this issue, it is crucial to have a good,

clear, and precise definition of history.

In ordinary language, the word simply refers to an account of an event that

the author believes to have happened.

In and of itself, the label history makes no comment about whether the account

is complete, unbiased, free from divine activity.

In strict chronological sequence, or with or without figurative and imaginative,

sometimes called mythological, elements.

So the term history does not eliminate some of the aspects of what we're going

to get into later on of the stories of the flood that the Bible describes as

the flood of Noah's time.

Like there are differing stories that are out there in different religious spheres

about a flood that seemed to be on a cosmic or a worldwide scale.

And so some of those are based on very mythological creatures and deities that are clearly made up.

And so it doesn't, in the opinion of the ESV study Bible and its commentators,

it does not necessarily mean that it cannot include any of those elements.

So when we think about history, we're thinking about the history of the United States.

And all right, these are the founding fathers, the people who signed the Declaration of Independence.

We can go there and we can look at all those names to see who signed that document.

And then we can call that history.

But there's also history that is where there's a description of George Washington.

And there were Native Americans that were fighting against the Americans who

were shooting. And the chief told the archers to shoot at George Washington.

And they put every guy on it. That was the task.

That was the mission that they were doing. Take out Washington. But nobody hit him.

And the chief then said, there's a supernatural being that's protecting you

because our best guys who don't miss could not hit you.

So that would be considered a historic story in terms that that is something

that could have happened in history.

There's not very many sources that do relate that story to us,

but that's one that could be considered history according to this definition

from the ESV study Bible.

The two opinions are obviously Genesis is mostly fictitious.

It is mostly a story that points to what Israel thought was the beginning.

And there's the aspect of the majority of what is shared in Genesis is what actually happened.

Again, according to their definition, it doesn't have to be everything.

There can be mythological elements or imaginative elements in it,

but those are the two views, that it is mostly non-historic or that it is mostly historic.

And those are the two that we're going to flesh out here now.

So Genesis as a mainly a story of beginnings, which with few historical elements in it.

So the New Interpreter's Bible, Volume 1, says this.

These texts tell a story of the past, more particularly a story of beginnings.

They speak not simply of the general human condition, but also of the beginnings of life.

This is not to say that the material is historic in any modern sense,

nor does it necessarily make any historical judgments. Rather,

these narratives offer Israel's own understandings.

The concept here on what I would call the liberal side is that it is a story

that helped Israel see its context where it is at.

They use these stories to understand how they got into the promised land.

They use these stories to understand what events could have possibly put them in slavery in Egypt.

It is, according to the liberal side, something that is not necessarily historical

judgments, but these narratives offer Israel's own understandings.

Then we have the HarperCollins Study Bible claiming this.

Commentators have long noted that several points in Genesis indicate the narrator

lived well after Moses at a time when the Canaanites had disappeared from the

promised land and when kings ruled over Israel.

Modern archaeological and historical discoveries confirm this general picture.

The constellation of peoples, places, and religious practices,

and the language of Genesis indicate that the book was primarily composed and

compiled during the centuries of monarchical rule,

and immediately thereafter.

Roughly from the 10th through the 6th century before Jesus.

So, what they are claiming is a theory about Genesis having four distinct authors

and a meshing together of these authors.

So if you look in the Genesis 1, the term for God is God.

It is the Hebrew word Elohim, which is what is translated as God.

But when you get to Genesis 2, the context is the personal name of God,

Yahweh. And so it's Lord in all capital letters in our Bible.

So the comment here is that, all right, these seem to be two different people.

Why would you write Elohim in

one and Yahweh in another, except that these were two different authors?

They add a third category, which were the priests during what they were saying

was the 10th through the 6th century before Jesus.

They added sections of the Torah as well.

And then there's a fourth section that they say are oral narratives that are

handed down from generation to generation about these things.

And they can point you to this section is what they would call Jeh,

which is for the Yahweh. This one is for E, for Elohim.

They have spent a lot of time looking at that and going through that section.

So this is, again, more of the liberal perspective of these things.

And they claim that stories or the aspect, there are certain aspects that Moses

could not have known and written down prior to him not being alive anymore,

including his death on top of Mount Nebo.

And so they point to things like that, that say Moses couldn't have written

that, that had to have been added sometime after his death and those sorts of things.

So this is the context for which they are looking at the book of Genesis as

mostly fictional, just a little historic.

So it says, continuing on, it says, the editor or editors who wove the literary

sources together created a text with an abundance of meaning,

combining the different theologies,

philosophical perspectives, and literary styles of the sources into a work of

great power and complexity.

And so they understand that Genesis has a really deep and powerful meaning,

but they say most of it is not historic.

So for an example, the flood, and this is how they look at it as a symbol of what's going on.

So they say, for example, the flood symbolizes the destruction of Jerusalem for its sinful ways.

And the dispersion in chapter 11, which is the Tower of Babel story.

Alludes to Israel's own diaspora, which is when they were taken captive by the Babylonians.

Yet while these texts may indeed mirror Israel's own reality,

the claims of the text are more extensive. The past and the present are not

simply collapsed into each other.

So they give the example of the ages in Genesis 5 of that genealogical record,

which is hundreds of years old.

And they say, the people in the 10th through the 6th century before Jesus,

that's not going to be something they're going to add, because that's not relative

to them. That doesn't happen in that time frame.

And so they're saying there are potentially some historical things that do not

correspond to one-for-one with what they are experiencing at this time.

It is a lot of weeds in this, but the aspect is they see these stories as helping

Israel to cope with the things that they are going through in that time.

That is the one aspect they diverge from the rest of scholarship and they say,

this is what we think happened.

There are four stories of Genesis that are meshed together, depending on what

form of God they use, Elohim or Yahweh.

The priests added things in that time frame and the oral traditions that were handed down.

This is who wrote Genesis and this is why it is not all historic.

Then we get to the category, which I would call conservative,

that says Genesis is history, or at least most of it is history.

So the ESV Study Bible says this, with this definition that we went through

earlier, it is easy to see that Genesis aims to record actual events rather than mythical events.

The book explains to its Jewish audience how their ancestors came to be in Egypt.

The genealogies connect Jacob and his children with the ancient generations

going back to Adam and Eve, the original pair of humans.

Further, the book is narrative prose, whose main function in the Bible is to recount history.

So if you look at the story of Saul or of David, Solomon, and the rest of the

narrative stories in the Bible, what you can glean is that they're actually telling us history.

So then we have the NIV Zondervan Study Bible, which says this.

But this does not mean it is possible to date specific times when these events took place.

As is true of all human history, the Bible selects those events and peoples

that serve its purposes in recounting the advance of God's kingdom and his work on earth.

It reports these accurately, but does not provide a complete record.

There are sections that are taken out, and we can see this in our history books today.

We don't really know much about some of the vice presidents of the United States.

They're just not very well publicized. We don't know a whole lot about them.

We select specific things, specific events, specific people,

and we are studying those people.

And so we have here the same thing, especially when you get into the concept

of where did Cain's wife come from? They didn't focus on that.

It is not something that they cared about. It is not something that pushed forward

the narrative of who God is and what our response to him should be.

And so it does not mean that we know exactly when these things happened,

and it does not mean that we know every detail that happened.

Like I have mentioned before, I would really like to know how long it took Noah to build the ark.

Did his sons help him build that ark? Was it all him?

How many trees did he have to cut down?

And what tools did he use to cut those trees down? It would be fascinating to

me to understand that, but that's not the point of the Bible, especially in Genesis.

So why should we believe that Genesis is a historical account where most of

it is true, where most of it is accurate to actual historical things that happened?

So in the NIV Zondervan Study Bible, it says this.

Modern journalism requires the testimony of independent sources to demonstrate

the historical reliability of a report.

We are not often blessed with multiple witnesses for Genesis.

Nevertheless evidence shows that

the figures and events of chapters 12 to

50 fit into the world of

the early second millennium before jesus and not a later time so worth this

is now 2 000 years before jesus the time of abraham and isaac and jacob also

the time of job he was probably alive during this time as well.

And what we can have here is the independent source of the Bible,

and we have other independent sources that help provide evidence for this.

So the evidence includes the aspect that there is more than one story of an ancient flood.

So the Zondervan Study Bible again says this, The occurrence of a divinely sent

flood with universal impact on the human race is preserved in some of the earliest

texts recounting the primeval times.

At times, the detailed agreement of these accounts suggests more than an independent

witness to an ancient event. It may imply borrowing from a common source.

So the idea there is that the Bible is one source.

There's a Sumerian text. There is a Babylonian text that all talk about a cosmic flood.

And these share some similarities and there are some differences between these

stories that help the scholarship here to understand that there is more than

one independent witness to this event.

Going by the journalistic standards of the day, that adds credence to that story.

Then we have the idea of what happened in the flood.

Again, in the Zondervan Study Bible, we read, When we examine the account of

the Sumerian king list from about 2000 BC, we find two important features that

Genesis 1 to 11 also shares.

A flood ended the cities named from earlier times, but survivors rebuilt cities after the flood.

And two, the kings who ruled before the flood reigned for unusually long periods

of time, often more than 10,000 years.

This may preserve a memory of the actual event recorded in Genesis 5 where those

in Seth's line each lived for hundreds of years.

And so understanding that, all right, we have a story here, more than just the

flood, but of the destruction of the cities of that time and the rebuilding of the cities,

which ultimately lead in Genesis to the city of Babylon, which is Babel.

Then we have also a long time of reigning for kings that are in other areas.

And again, the timeframes are different.

10,000 years compared to the oldest one in the Bible, I think, was 969 years.

There is a difference there, but it is another source that is adding credence

to the fact that people might have lived longer times before.

The last one from the Sondervan Study Bible says this, Examples such as these

demonstrate the historical value of the early chapters of Genesis.

They actually happened. They witnessed God's ongoing presence and work among

the people of the world, especially with the line of promise as traced through Seth and Shem.

Multiple attestations, multiple sources lead to a higher probability of it being

a historical event Then in the NIV Study Bible,

we have more evidence to trust in the historicity of Genesis So two other important

sets of documents demonstrate the reflection of Mesopotamia in the first 38

chapters of Genesis From the Mari letters dating from the patriarchal period,

again, about 2,000 years before Jesus,

we learn that the names of the patriarchs, including Abram, Jacob,

and Job, were typical of that time.

When I went through school, I rode the bus and went to church with another Jason.

I was in band with a third Jason.

It was a very common name in 1982 when I was born. And so, like,

that sets me in that appropriate time frame.

Names add in flow, and when we trace these part, in particular,

three names, it is stating, like, that was a very common name back then.

So it fits in that narrative.

These Mari letters also illustrate the freedom of travel that was possible between

various parts of the Amorite world.

In which the patriarchs lived. So again,

we're told that Abram left from the Ur of the Chaldeans, went up to Haran,

then he came down to what is the promised

land, and all of that travel is corresponded to in these other texts.

It was something that was frequently done then. It fits that time frame.

So then we have the Nuzi tablets, and even though they're a few centuries after

the patriarchal period, they do shed light on these patriarchal customs which

tended to survive virtually intact for many centuries.

The inheritance right of an adopted household member of slave,

the obligation of a barren wife to furnish her husband with sons through a servant girl,

strictures against expelling such a servant girl and her son the authority of

oral statements in ancient Near Eastern law, such as deathbed bequests,

these and other legal customs,

social contracts, and provisions are graphically illustrated in these documents.

And again, it's just saying what we know from around this time frame is that

how Abraham and Sarah treated Hagar,

sending her away and then welcoming her back in, that was a custom in this time.

When we have Sarah providing Hagar to Abram to provide offspring,

that was something that was there.

When we have Abraham telling God that a slave was the inheritor of his fortune,

we have that as something that is attested to outside of Scripture.

And so these are all evidences that point to the Bible presenting these in a

certain time frame and other documents adding that up.

If we were to write historical fiction about the 1600s, we would more than likely

use names that we didn't research were common back then.

And that's the concept we have here, that even though that if these stories

were written between 1000 BC and 600 BC in that 400 year time frame,

and they were guessing at names from almost a thousand years ago or even more

than a thousand years ago,

they would have probably not gotten them correct.

And so these are all evidences of that concept of Genesis in particular should

be considered a historical document.

Then we have in chapters 1 through 38 of Genesis.

This is from the NIV Study Bible, they reflect a great deal of what we know

from other sources about ancient Mesopotamian life and culture,

creation, genealogies, destructive floods, geography and mapmaking,

construction techniques,

Migrations of people, sale and purchase of land, legal customs and procedures.

Shepherding and cattle raising, all of these subjects and many more were matters

of vital concern to the people of Mesopotamia at this time.

And then when we move on to the last part of Genesis, which is chapters 39 through

Isaiah 39 · chapter mention

50, they reflect Egyptian influence when the story shifts to Egypt.

And these are the things that we will see in those stories.

Egyptian grape cultivation, which is found in Genesis 40.

The riverside scene in chapter 41.

Egypt as Canaan's breadbasket in 42. Canaan as a source of numerous products

for Egyptian consumption in 43.

How the Egyptians had religious and social customs and their administrative

procedures and funerary practices.

These are the things that we would expect because they had moved down to Egypt.

So in the first 38 chapters, it was very close to what was happening in Mesopotamia,

which is where they were supposed to be.

And now in Egypt, it corresponds names and Egyptian words and all those other

things that I mentioned correspond to the time in Egypt.

And so it matches historically what we know about those time frames.

From my perspective, I think it's important to understand Genesis as a historical document.

It is something that is an epic narrative. It's relaying this accurate information

to us in a way that if it was written 1,000 or 1,500 years later,

we would not expect it to be this long.

And so from my perspective, I think that Genesis should be considered as a historical,

mostly, almost everything in it being a factual event that happened in human history.

Thank you again for joining us in our discussion of what Genesis is and isn't,

how different people take the stories of Genesis,

and what the extra biblical evidence show us about the historical validity of Genesis.

If you would like more information about Faith Chapel and its ministries,

please visit the website gofaithchapel.org.

Next week we will look at the beginning of creation and discover what Christians

have thought of the reliability of the creation accounts found in Genesis 1

and 2 and what the old earth and young earth perspectives are.

Have a great week.