The Bible among the Myths Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?

198 Pages·2009·1.12 MB·English

by  John N. Oswalt

I asked the earth; and it answered, “I am not He,” and whatsoever are
therein made the same confession. I asked the sea and the deeps, and the
creeping things that lived, and they replied, “We are not thy God, seek
higher than we.” I asked the breezy air, and the universal air with its
inhabitants answered, “Anaximenes was deceived, I am not God.” I asked
the heavens, the sun, moon and stars. “Neither, say they, “are we the God
whom thou seekest.” And I answered unto all these things which stand
about the door of my flesh, “Ye have told me concerning my God, that ye
are not He; tell me something about Him.” And with a loud voice they
exclaimed, “He made us.” My questioning was my observing of them; and
their beauty was their reply…. I asked the vast bulk of the earth of my God,
and it answered me, “I am not He, but He made me.”

—ST. AUGUSTINE, CONFESSIONS 10.6.9
ZONDERVAN

The Bible among the Myths
Copyright © 2009 by John N. Oswalt
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ePub Edition August 2009 ISBN: 978-0-310-32242-9
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oswalt, John N.
The Bible among the myths: unique or just different? / John N. Oswalt.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-310-28509-0 (softcover)
1. Myth in the Old Testament. 2. Bible. O.T.—Historiography. 3. Bible.
O.T.—Evidences, authority, etc. I. Title.
BS1183.O85 2009
220.1—dc22
2008044722
Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, Today’s New International Version™.
TNIV®. Copyright © 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society. Used by
permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
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Interior design by Sherri L. Hoffman
This book is dedicated to
Dr. Dennis F. Kinlaw
Teacher, Mentor, Confessor, Friend
C
ONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Bible and Myth

1. The Bible in Its World

2. The Bible and Myth: A Problem of Definition

3. Continuity: The Basis of Mythical Thinking

4. Transcendence: Basis of Biblical Thinking

5. The Bible versus Myth

The Bible and History

6. The Bible and History: A Problem of Definition

7. Is the Bible Truly Historical? The Problem of History (1)

8. Does It Matter Whether the Bible Is Historical? The Problem of History
(2)

9. Origins of the Biblical Worldview: Alternatives

10. Conclusions

Notes

About the Publisher

Share Your Thoughts

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

A
long with my teachers, G. Herbert Livingston, Dennis F. Kinlaw, and Cyrus
H. Gordon, I also want to express my thanks to several hundred students who
have studied this material with me over the past thirty years. They have
continually forced me to sharpen and redefine my thinking on the subject.

More recently, I am grateful to colleagues G. Stephen Blakemore, Daniel
Block, Tremper Longman III, John Walton, and Joseph Wang, who have read
part or all of the manuscript and have made helpful comments. Of course, any
errors or inadequacies are my responsibility alone.

To this list I must also add the names of Stanley Gundry, Katya Covrett, and
Verlyn Verbrugge, publisher and editors at Zondervan, who have encouraged me
and helped to shape the present volume.

Finally, I can only say to Karen, my wife of more years than either of us can
believe, without you none of this would be.
I
NTRODUCTION

T
he ideas presented in this book have had a long period of maturation. I was
first introduced to the subject and the issues in a course entitled “The Literature
of the Ancient Near East,” taught by Dennis Kinlaw at Asbury Theological
Seminary in the 1960s. The seeds planted there began to germinate and grow
during my graduate study with Cyrus Gordon in the Mediterranean Studies
department at Brandeis University. They have reached their present level of
maturity (such as that is) as a result of thinking them through with students in
courses I have taught at Asbury Theological Seminary, Trinity Evangelical
Divinity School, and Wesley Biblical Seminary.

In the period of time since that first course at Asbury Theological Seminary,
thinking on the subject has undergone an almost complete change of direction.
By the late 1940s two world wars punctuated by a world-wide economic
depression had raised some serious questions about the evolutionary paradigm
inherent in the philosophy of Idealism. And since that paradigm was all but
inseparable from the standard higher critical views of the Old Testament that had
prevailed for the previous fifty years, there was cause for some rethinking about
the Old Testament and the religion it promulgated.

That rethinking was led by William F. Albright and his students, among
them G. Ernest Wright of the Harvard Divinity School. Speaking for much of the
scholarly community of the time, Wright argued that the differences between the
Israelite way of thinking about reality and the way in which Israel’s neighbors
approached that topic were so significant that no evolutionary explanations could
account for them.1 But now, nearly sixty years later, it is widely affirmed that
Israelite religion is simply one more of the complex of West Semitic religions,
and that its characteristic features can be fully explained on the basis of
evolutionary change.2

What has happened to cause such a dramatic change in thinking? Have some
new discoveries made Wright’s position untenable? No, they have not. The
literatures of the ancient Near East, including that of Ugarit, which are now cited
to prove the case against Wright, were already widely known at the time his
book was written. The Dead Sea Scrolls were just coming to light, but they have
not materially altered the picture of ancient Israel that was known in 1950. So
what is the explanation? I do not wish to belittle either the ability or the
motivation of current scholars. Their mastery of the field and their genuine
concern to ferret out “the real facts” are not in question. Nonetheless, I am
convinced that it is prior theological and philosophical convictions that account
for the change and not any change in the data.

In 1950, largely because of the work of Karl Barth, the scholarly world was
ready to entertain the idea of revelation in ways it had not been for at least a
couple of generations. Undoubtedly, the near destruction of European
civilization in the previous forty years contributed to that readiness. Revelation
assumes that this world is not self-explanatory and that some communication
from beyond it is necessary to explain it. Ready to believe in such a possibility,
Old Testament scholars in the 1950s saw evidence for it in the manifest
differences between the understandings found in the Old Testament and the
understandings of all the peoples around Israel. None of that data has changed.
The differences between Genesis and the Babylonian account of the origins of
the world, for example, are unmistakable to anyone who reads them side by side.

But the idea that this world is not self-explanatory and that revelation from
beyond it is necessary to understand it is profoundly distasteful to us humans. It
means that we are not in control of our own destiny or able to make our own
disposition of things for our own benefit. This thought, the thought that we
cannot supply our ultimate needs for ourselves, that we are dependent on
someone or something utterly beyond us, is deeply troublesome. This is
especially true in the light of the revolution in thinking that occurred in the
United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The turn away from outside authority of
all sorts to extreme individual autonomy was utterly inimical to the idea of
revelation. So, although the biblical and ancient Near Eastern data had not
changed at all, the possible way of explaining that data did change. Revelation
was no longer an option. But without revelation, how can the differences be
explained?

It is at this point that another feature of the Old Testament enters the
discussion: the undoubted similarities that exist between the literature and
culture of Israel and the literatures and cultures of Israel’s neighbors. Modern