by O.Grimstad

Created on: February 05, 2009   Last Updated: February 24, 2010

We need to keep in mind that most people couldn't read and only the educated elite could write during Biblical times. Religious traditions were transferred through time orally until written down. Even after that the scriptures needed to be modified according to new challenges and circumstances. The focus was more on seeing a powerful deity and its earthly representatives behind the community than recovering historical facts and details in our sense today.

Grounding the community into the divine authority of the ancestors, by assimilating their stories and legends, seems to be a major part of the Bible. Let me use the story about Noah as an example: In the older Gilgamesh Epic the gods decided to send humanity a flood, and gave Utnapishtim the task of building a boat in order to bring the seeds of all life with him. He built it and brought his family, servants and animals with him. After seven days of rain the weather calmed down. All life outside the boat had drowned and all Utnapishtim could see was water. His boat eventually stranded on the mountain Nisir, where Utnapishtim sent out a dove. It came back after not being able to find dry land. The next day he sent a swallow, with the same outcome. The third time he sent a raven, which did not come back. Then he knew it had found dry land and released all the animals. The author of the Biblical story about Noah changed the order of the birds, sending the raven first, which had to keep flying around until the water had dried down. The story then jumps back in time to send the second bird, which was a dove that returned after not finding dry land. After that Noah sent the same dove again that finally returned with a fresh leaf. The Biblical author obviously saw the returning dove with a leaf as a better end of the search despite the inconsistency of keeping the role of the raven. Such inconsistencies are easy to for our critical way of thinking today, making it easy to see that it’s mythology based on older sources.  We have to keep in mind that they didn’t think about the world in our terms, though. The focus was on the underlying message, and what we consider myths today was as science relative to their world view.

The same kinds of literal assimilation seem to have been in work for the creation story, the Garden of Eden, Babel's tower etc. Those stories were probably already well known and had to be understood in the context of the Biblical communities, with their own land and heroes in the

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