Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [97]
Nor, as we shall see, is there any concept that can be remotely understood as “original sin.” These pregnant words, so important to Christian theology, do not appear in the text; rather, they have been supplied long after, by pious believers seeking to make sense of this simple and rather naive story. Meanwhile, the original subtle meanings of the text have been washed away by our larger conceptualizations.58
THE FIRST IS THE LAST
To arrive at an approximation of what the story meant to those who told it orally and shaped its composition means that we must try to dismiss from our minds the accretions with which we are so familiar and whose resonances are so unwanted in our minds.
We must, first of all, separate the creation story of Genesis 1 from the creation story that begins at Genesis 2:3. The first story, the beginning of the Bible, is chosen to be a “Prologue in Heaven” to the story of Israel, a grand opening for the account of the history of Israel’s beginnings in Mesopotamia and YHWH’S gracious gift of the land of Canaan. The Hebrew editor’s concern to eliminate polytheism is repeatedly seen in comparison with Babylonian creation myths. There is no mythological combat or conflict in Genesis’s creation story. The gods of sky, earth, and heavenly bodies are merely reduced to objects of YHWH’S creation.
Nevertheless, the first creation account in Genesis is trying to express the place of humanity within the world. That is why I call it “a mythological account” in Rebecca’s Children. 59 Mythology is a narrative which attempts to get at the underlying assumptions of a society. It is not synonymous with fiction; indeed, it is the opposite. Only narratives believed to be true can function as myth. That means that the Eden story, the first 11 chapters of Genesis, and the entire account of the patriarchal period to the arrival of the children of Israel in Canaan, functioned as myth for the children of Israel settled in the land, no matter how much of it turns out to have a kernel of historicity.
So let us attempt to read the mythical code in the first chapter of Genesis. First of all, compare this story to the now familiar creation stories in Egypt and Mesopotamia and note how the sun has been demoted. This is striking because the sun is almost always a deity in other cultures (often the most important one). The sun god or goddess is certainly the most important deity in understanding the concepts of the underworld because the sun seemingly goes underground every night, only to rise the next morning from the other side of the earth. All the ancient cultures viewed this as a journey through the underworld and made the sun an important carrier of messages to and from the next world.
The Biblical account of creation, on the other hand, portrays the sun as just another object in the heavens, not even a demigod. The sun is not the lord of the underworld; it is merely a creation of God. The same is true with the sea, the earth, and the whole content of the heavens. This not only contradicts the mythologies of the surrounding cultures; it also contradicts much of earlier Israelite thought in which the stars especially are seen as angels, messengers of God. The natural order is no longer filled with squabbling divinities; it is all one large kingdom with everything designed in perfect rule and subordinate to the God of all.60
Everything in Genesis is just as it appears in the normal, natural order. Indeed, that is the best clue for understanding the first creation story. What is created is the earth and heavens from our position as inhabitants of it. The whole story is told from the perspective