The Bible's Creation Myth in Genesis is Plagiarized From Babylon

One of the things I learned as a religious studies major was that the Bible's creation myth is NOT unique.

In my Religious Studies program, we analyzed creation myths side-by-side, rightfully studying the Creation narratives from Christianity alongside native American stories as well as those from India, and all over the world. We had about 10 Christians walk out of my Creation Myths class the day we learned that the authors of Genesis had plagiarized a good chunk of their creation story from the Mesopotamians.

The average bible-believing Xian has no idea what’s actually in the bible, much less where it came from or how it was written.

An incident like this results in either honest people or liars. The honest person will re-evaluate their beliefs in light of this new information. The liar will use “faith” to disregard the problem and perpetuate belief.

In a journey across cultures the mysteries of world mythologies and legends showcase shared wonders that make us ponder the fascinating similarities.

Whether it's the biblical 'Let there be light,' the primordial Pangu crafting the universe, or the surreal Dreamtime of Australian Aboriginal mythology, they all include common themes that transcend time and space, challenging the laws of physics and reality.

What was behind the creation of the first man and woman in myths like Adam and Eve, Fu Xi and Nu Wa, and Manu and Shatarupa? The unique link these first couples had with deities, capable of communicating in a world where the laws of science were more fluid, allowed for surreal occurrences like talking snakes and apples of knowledge.

The flood myths that transcend cultures, from Noah's Ark to Manu's tale in Hindu mythology. Tell of great resets and reboots that act as a cleansing force after human failures.

The fascinating world where cultures, despite limited contact, unveil astonishing similarities, spark wonder at the universal allure of angels, goblins, and ethereal beings.

"And Tanith descended through the storm as a bright and shining star, and all around him the roiling clouds calmed and parted, and for the first time the light of the heavens shone upon the waves below.”

Experiment with a sketchbook scribble, while working on some of the mythology of my story-world of Genesis.

This story is a myth about a man created to tend the garden of a divine being, [and] a woman created to be the man’s companion, and a talking snake who tempts the woman to eat fruit from a magical Tree of Knowledge […] This is a story about a woman disobeying her creator for the purpose of gaining wisdom […] At her instigation, and with the guidance of a serpent, the humans trade a life of ignorance (and potentially immortality) as God’s gardeners, for a taste of divine knowledge […]

The story of Eden does not [actually] receive much comment or interest in any extant sources until sometime in the late 3rd century BCE, when Jewish writers […] began to look at it to try to understand what the humans had done wrong and who was to blame [… at which point] Rabbinic tradition provides a number of avenues of interpretation, [all of] which take the text in very different directions.

From 'The Immortal Myth of Adam and Eve’; Professor Shawna Dolansky via The Torah (My Ko-Fi Here)

The Indo-European Origins of Genesis by Jonathan Fielder-White

The Indo-European Origins of Genesis by Jonathan Fielder-White

I have been deep in research of late, you might have noticed. While I am waiting on some references, I have been binge watching the topic on “the youtube” with some of my favorite historians. I want to introduce you to Jonathan Fielder-White and his program, Crecganford, named after his hometown or something like that. I am super excited because my new best friend and long time YouTube teacher,…

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What I did this morning before my doctors appointment was open a million webpages about Proto-Indo-European society and mythology and also mythological themes that pop up a lot of times and started kind of making a conculture for no fucking reason other than it made the brain do the good

The Creation of Man as the Generation of Souls that Inhabit Many Animal Bodies

My preferred theological interpretation of the "creation" of humanity in Genesis 1 is that it is a generation of souls.

I prefer it because the most consistent ethical way I can see the command to have "dominion" over the "animals" is as a soul has "dominion" over bodies.

The "soul" is fundamentally "human", defined as the "image" of the many deities, who are also immaterial and intellectual. This means that each soul is fundamentally the same substance. The soul that lives in a dog or goat is the same that animates a human body.

The command is a command to incarnate to these bodies, including the hominid body.

THE RADICAL LIBERAL

My reading of the Creation story in Genesis suggests that God never left the Garden that day; he never let the gate open by accident. No, God never left the Garden at all! The evil side of his personality showed up instead.

These poor kids were duped by a mentally-impaired maniac, hell-bent on getting his jollies on their suffering. He told Adam he would forever have to plow the fields to eat, and told Eve she would have great pain in childbirth — and submit to her husband.

Reading the Bible takes not only a lot of coffee (with a spoonful of pessimism), but it also requires a good sense of humor: the stories are simply outrageous nonsense. It is clear these stories were written by men who wanted to control others, including their wives, and they used these tall tales to try to explain the unexplainable.

In sum, the Bible might have been written by a couple of dudes sitting around smoking doobies all day. The story of the “Fall” was no doubt written by some dude whose wife didn’t want to put up the new bathroom tile the way he wanted, and so they had a fight, and she moved back in with her mother, and now he’s got to do his own damned laundry, and he hates her.

Ok, ok: the Bible is a diary for madmen. It’s called the Bible because it’s the handbook for how lunatics try to exert their crazy-assed way of life on others.

It the Cadillac of cult books.

Being in a cult, like any organized religion, requires:

The Leader to tell the followers who and what to fear

The Leader to tell the followers that he alone can save them, that he alone will fight for them, and that he alone can be trusted to protect them

The Leader closes off and shuts out any and all voices of dissent by telling followers “they lie to hurt you”

Those who have spent their lives following a religious Leader like God give their minds over to fear, false hope, and the believing of lies.

There’s another cult that has become popular with naïve followers, and they too are being told who to fear, who to trust, and that what others say is “fake news.”

The Cult of Trump.

“Creation myth opposite of genesis” “barbie is ace because she has no organs” “and Ken!”

Barbie movie is recreating the art of cinema

Okay I'm almost done with Fellowship, here's an incomplete list of shit I noticed and thought was buck fucking wild on my first ever read-thru: medieval edition.

In literally the second line of the book, Tolkien implies that Bilbo Baggins wrote a story which was preserved alongside the in-universe version of the Mabinogion (aka the best-known collection of Welsh myths; I promise this is batshit). This is because The Hobbit has been preserved, in Tolkien's AU version of our world, in a "selection of the Red Book of Westmarch" (Prologue, Concerning Hobbits). If you're a medievalist and you see something called "The Red Book of" or "The Black Book of" etc it's a Thing. In this case, a cheeky reference to the Red Book of Hergest (Llyfr Coch Hergest). There are a few Red Books, but only Hergest has stories).

not a medieval thing but i did not expect one common theory among hobbits for the death of Frodo's parents to be A RUMORED MURDER-SUICIDE.

At the beginning of the book a few hobbits report seeing a moving elm tree up on the moors, heading west (thru or past the Shire). I mentioned this in another post, but another rule: if you see an elm tree, that's a Girl Tree. In Norse creation myth, the first people were carved from driftwood by the gods. Their names were Askr (Ash, as in the tree), the first man, and Embla (debated, but likely elm tree), the first woman. A lot of ppl have I think guessed that that was an ent-wife, but like. Literally that was a GIRL. TREE.

Medieval thing: I used to read the runes on the covers of The Hobbit and LOTR for fun when I worked in a bookshop. There's a mix of Old Norse (viking) and Old English runes in use, but all the ones I've noticed so far are real and readable if you know runes.

Tom Bombadil makes perfect sense if you once spent months of your life researching the early medieval art of galdor, which was the use of poems or songs to do a form of word-magic, often incorporating gibberish. If you think maybe Tolkien did not base the entirety of Fellowship so far around learning and using galdor and thus the power of words and stories, that is fine I cannot force you. He did personally translate "galdor" in Beowulf as "spell" (spell, amusingly, used to mean "story"). And also he named an elf Galdor. Like he very much did name an elf Galdor.

Tom Bombadil in fact does galdor from the moment we meet him. He arrives and fights the evil galdor (song) of the willow tree ("old gray willow-man, he's a mighty singer"), which is singing the hobbits to sleep and possibly eating them, with a galdor (song) of his own. Then he wanders off still singing, incorporating gibberish. I think it was at this point that I started clawing my face.

THEN Tom Bombadil makes perfect sense if you've read the description of the scop's songs in Beowulf (Beowulf again, but hey, Tolkien did famously a. translate it b. write a fanfiction about it called Sellic Spell where he gave Beowulf an arguably homoerotic Best Friend). The scop (pronounched shop) is a poet who sings about deeds on earth, but also by profession must know how to sing the song or tell the story of how the cosmos itself came to be. The wise-singer who knows the deep lore of the early universe is a standard trope in Old English literature, not just Beowulf! Anyway Tom Bombadil takes everyone home and tells them THE ENTIRE STORY OF ALL THE AGES OF THE EARTH BACKWARDS UNTIL JUST BEFORE THE MOMENT OF CREATION, THE BIG BANG ITSELF and then Frodo Baggins falls asleep.

Tom Bombadil knows about plate tectonics

This is sort of a lie, Tom Bombadil describes the oceans of old being in a different place, which works as a standard visual of Old English creation, which being Christian followed vaguely Genesis lines, and vaguely Christian Genesis involves a lot of water. TOLKIEN knew about plate tectonics though.

Actually I just checked whether Tolkien knew about plate tectonics because I know the advent of plate tectonics theory took forever bc people HATED it and Alfred Wegener suffered for like 50 years. So! actually while Tolkien was writing LOTR, the scientific community was literally still not sure plate tectonics existed. Tom Bombadil knew tho.

Remember that next time you (a geologist) are forced to look at the Middle Earth map.

I'm not even done with Tom Bombadil but I'm stopping here tonight. Plate tectonics got me. There's a great early (but almost high!) medieval treatise on cosmology and also volcanoes and i wonder if tolkien read it. oh my god. i'm going to bed.

edit: part II

Out of Eden, Collage, 2022 © Fern with Goof Art Collective

“The Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders...

It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.”

-- Richard Dawkins

Our Borrowed Stories (i.e., The Bible)

Our Borrowed Stories (i.e., The Bible)

This post showed up in my stream: Bible Creation Myth “Borrowed” My thoughts: Loved my religious studies classes at Loyola Marymount University in LA. I did end up at a much more conservative university (Biola) studying biblical studies. I think “plagiarized” is a polarizing word in that all cultures “borrow” from each other and it’s only the fundamentalists who claim unsupported authorship.…

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Christian interpretations [of Adam and Eve's actions in the Garden of Eden] have had much more far-reaching consequences in Western history, and continue to be dominant in secular notions of Eden today.

From 'The Immortal Myth of Adam and Eve’; Professor Shawna Dolansky via The Torah (My Ko-Fi Here)

While I understand that religions rely on faith, I still get annoyed by how absolutely unquestioning my religious family is. For example, if you ask any adult in my family, they will tell you a male skeleton has fewer ribs than a female skeleton. This is because my church taught this due to the creation myth. It takes all of 5 seconds to disprove, but none of them can be bothered. Internet access and search engines were still uncommon when I was a kid, but even now, in the age of easily accessible Google searches and smart phones, I will catch an aunt or cousin parroting this "fun fact" to children. Of course, since most of my family believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, thinking rib count is a sexually dimorphic feature of humans is among the least egregious of their misconceptions.

Stuff like this was a big part of why I gave up on the church I was raised in. I had many, many reasons for that, but when someone told me the rib thing, I looked it up at school, realized it was wrong, and realized that the adults in church were either intentionally lying to me or too naive to fact check. Neither of those inspired trust.

"Why do so many Americans believe genocide can be justified as self-defense?"

When they were made to believe that melting the flesh of thousands of Japanese babies and letting them suffer horrifically before dying was politically necessary and strategically good.

America became a superpower after the atomic bomb (this is the true motivation behind the use of the bombs). The atomic bomb is the true genesis story of the American Empire.

If you believe American propaganda about the atomic bomb, if you believe in the myth of the Empire's creation, then America can brainwash you into believing ANYTHING, including the lie that genocide is self-defense.

If you are pro Palestine yet you believe that melting the flesh of thousands of Japanese babies was simply an unneeded military action and you don't view it as the great atrocity that it is, then I guarantee you'll end up viewing the images of slaughtered Palestinian babies with the same moral neutrality.