{"id":32626,"date":"2015-01-24T21:32:27","date_gmt":"2015-01-25T02:32:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=32626"},"modified":"2016-03-14T14:48:15","modified_gmt":"2016-03-14T19:48:15","slug":"genesis-various-thoughts-and-notes-on-a-saturday-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2015\/01\/genesis-various-thoughts-and-notes-on-a-saturday-night\/","title":{"rendered":"Genesis- Various thoughts and notes on a Saturday night."},"content":{"rendered":"

The new Seminary manual<\/a>\u00a0on the Old Testament approaches the authorship of Genesis in a reductive and simplistic way. (HT: David Tayman<\/a>, who also did the Israelite cosmology art below.)<\/p>\n

Ask students if they know who wrote the first book in the Bible. After they respond, invite them to turn to Genesis 1 and look in the title to see who wrote the book of Genesis. (You may want to explain that in addition to writing Genesis, Moses wrote Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price also contains Moses\u2019s writings.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, this is certainly traditional. But I think the manual’s reinforcement of the simplicity of the tradition creates problems, as per Julie’s excellent post on The Next Generation’s Faith Crisis<\/a>. Moreover, it’s a tradition that we have not examined closely or often, with rare\u00a0exceptions<\/a>. It’s a tradition we have often shared with conservative Protestants and Jews, although with a difference.<\/p>\n

I’ve been through a number of conservative scholars on Genesis recently in the process of working on my book<\/a>, and those who assert Mosaic authorship greatly nuance that claim to the point that it’s mostly a conservative dog whistle. For example, Tremper Longman (How to Read Genesis<\/a><\/em>) asserts Mosaic authorship, but explains that\u00a0Moses adapted preexisting oral and written sources; that there is \u201c[e]vidence of significant post-Mosaic redactional activity;<\/em>” that \u201c[i]t is not possible or useful to definitively and completely divide the pre-Mosaic, Mosaic, and post-Mosaic materials from each other<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asserting Mosaic authorship in that Protestant context, then, is less a scholarly argument about the\u00a0actual authorship of the text as it exists today\u00a0and more about declaring one’s\u00a0allegiance of sorts to a certain school of thought, marking him as a faithful insider. I’ve found\u00a0half a dozen others making similar declarations: Moses wrote it, but he adapted preexisting (Mesopotamian?) sources, and it’s been (heavily?) edited since he wrote. Heck, the LDS Bible Dictionary<\/em><\/a> says as much.<\/p>\n

The Pentateuch was written by Moses, although it is evident that he used several documentary sources from which he compiled the book of Genesis, besides a divine revelation to him. It is also evident that scribes and copyists have left their traces upon the Pentateuch as we have it today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

All of those nuances, I think, are improvements over the unnecessarily simplistic assertion of the new manual, which fails to account for or prepare students for the complexity of scripture. The manual could have said something like<\/p>\n

“while Christian and Jewish tradition attributes the books of Genesis through Deuteronomy to Moses, different kinds of clues in the text strongly suggest that multiple authors and editors at different times contributed to these books as we know them today. Mormonism is not committed either to strictly\u00a0Mosaic authorship nor to other views. As the First Presidency said in 1910, it is not ultimately authorship that\u00a0matters, but whether the doctrine is correct.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In speaking of LDS history, B.H. Roberts took some fire. His response applies a bit to my critique here.<\/p>\n

After BH Roberts edited The Comprehensive History of the Church<\/em>, he received some criticism for omitting what were called the \u201cMartyrdom Miracles\u201d, such as \u201cattempted beheading of Joseph Smith at Carthage and a shaft of lightning preventing it.”<\/p>\n

Roberts responded to one critique as follows.<\/p>\n

“Suppose your youth receive their impressions of church history from ‘pictures and stories’ and build their faith upon these alleged miracles [and] shall someday come face to face with the fact that their belief rests on falsehoods, what then will be the result? Will they not say that since these things are myth and our Church has permitted them to be perpetuated\u2026 might not the other fundamentals to the actual story of the Church, the things in which it had its origin, might they not all be lies and nothing but lies?<\/p>\n

Some felt there was no harm in circulating such stories, since many people believed them. But Roberts sternly replied: “because one repudiates the false he stands in danger of weakening, perhaps losing the truth. I have no fear of such results. I find my own heart strengthened in the truth by getting rid of the untruth, the spectacular, the bizarre, as soon as I learn that it is based upon worthless testimony.”- Defender of the Faith: The B. H. Roberts Story<\/a>\"\", 363<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wish some of the things people need to unlearn hadn’t been learned from\u00a0our own manuals in the first place (self-inflicted wounds?), particularly when they are not strongly based in revelation or scripture, but tradition. (On which, see my paragraph towards the end of this post<\/a>, “What’s particularly infuriating”\u00a0and this whole post on\u00a0the role of tradition in interpretation<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

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One major issue confronting OT scholars, particularly in Genesis, is the relationship between the various creation accounts, flood account, and other often-similar ancient Near Eastern accounts. Hugh Nibley wrote about this in the New Era<\/em> in 1971, “Myths and the Scriptures” reprinted in\u00a0Old Testament and\u00a0Related Studies<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(now available online here<\/a>.) With a few quibbles on my part, he captures it well.<\/p>\n

A student confronted for the first time by classical and Oriental [read: ancient Near Eastern] myths that read like reruns of well-known Bible stories\u2014such as the garden of Eden episode and the Flood\u2014often goes into a sort of shock, emerging from which he announces to family and friends that he has just discovered a fact of life: the Bible is just a lot of mythology.<\/p>\n

Such a conclusion may be the result of a faulty approach to the Bible as well as to the myths. The first thing to do in such a case is to apply cold packs and calm the student down, pointing out to him that such deeply religious writers as Dante and Milton not only were aware of many parallels between Christian and pagan lore and imagery, but also freely mingled the two together in constructing their faith-promoting epics\u2026.<\/p>\n

The clergy, Christian and Jewish alike, have insisted before all else on the absolute originality and uniqueness of the teachings of Christ and Moses respectively, laboring under the strange illusion that if anything coming from any other source shows a close resemblance to those teachings, the claims of the founders to originality and hence to divinity are in serious jeopardy\u2026.<\/p>\n

Secular scholars, on the other hand, have been quick to take any resemblance between heathen traditions and the Bible as absolute proof that the scriptures are simply ordinary stuff. The classic example of this was the Babylonian flood story, discovered by Layard in the mid-nineteenth century. It resembled the biblical account closely enough to show without doubt that they were connected, but before any search for the source of either version was undertaken, it was joyfully announced that the biblical account was derived from the Babylonian and was, therefore, a fraud. The experts were wrong on both points\u2014the Assurbanipal version is really a late redaction….<\/p>\n

such study as has been done shows us that the old myths are by no means pure fiction, any more than they are all history. As the Muses told Hesiod, “We know both how to fib and how to tell the truth”; and, as Joseph Smith learned of the Apocrypha, “there are many things contained therein that are true, and there are many things contained therein that are not true” (see D&C 91)\u2014all of which means that we must be very careful in accepting and condemning.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Kenton Sparks<\/a> is a\u00a0scholar\u00a0I’ve recently discovered and read enthusiastically. I first saw his very important article “Enuma Eli\u0161 and Priestly Mimesis: Elite Emulation in Ancient Judaism” (Journal of Biblical Literature 126:4, 2007<\/a>). Sparks argues that the author of Genesis 1 knew Enuma Eli\u0161 intimately, and emulated, borrowed from, and argued against it. \u00a0Intrigued, I hunted down his\u00a0“The Problem of Myth in Ancient Historiography” in\u00a0Rethinking the Foundations: Historiography in the Ancient World and in the Bible : Essays in Honour of John Van Seters<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(You can tell it’s academic because they spell “honour” like a Brit, and it has a German sub-subtitle.) Also turns out to be quite relevant to my book.<\/p>\n

I went looking for his books.<\/p>\n