09 - What Does the Terseness...

What Does the Terseness of the pre-Abrahamic Narratives in the Book of Genesis Signify?

If the story of the fall of Adam and Eve and the history of Noah and the flood are set aside, the brevity of the narratives of the first chapters of the book of Genesis attracts our attention. Subtracting the period of 2000 years from Abraham to the New Testament from the conventional Old Testament chronology which determines the period from the creation of the first man to the birth of Christ to be 5508 years, we are left with a peri­od of 3500 years, which is dealt with in eleven chapters of the Bible; and if we bypass the chapters which contain the accounts of the fall and Noah and the flood, we have only seven chapters. Three and a half thousand years in seven chapters which contain little more than genealogical tables and the story of the construction of the Tower of Babel and the dispersion of the nations. This is the sort of caution, the sort of strictness in selecting sources for the narrative that we observe in the compiler. Would it be the same if he had taken to including current popular legends, heroic epic and popular, oral or recorded religious myths? We do not have the facts to judge how the names of the ancient patriarchs could have been preserved in Mesopotamia, escaping oblivion in the days of the flood, and how far we can today construct a chronology of the antediluvian era according to them; but undoubtedly these names acquired a fixed form somewhere in one way or another (perhaps they were not as difficult to assimilate orally as they are for us; perhaps they were recorded at burial sites; perhaps their preservation was, as it were, a religious responsibility of the heads of fam­ilies - the patriarchs themselves; these are complex and independent questions which belong to the domain of archaeology). But these Chaldean genealogical records were available for the early inclusion in the first pages of Hebrew literature. The other accounts of the first chapters of Genesis are of similar origin, of course, but through the illumination of the Holy Spirit in the consciousness of the sacred writer they were cleansed of the dross of polytheism which constitutes the essence of myths. And we have no right to speak of myths in the Bible; we have full license to speak only of demythologization, of a return of the myth’s content to the origi­nal, monotheistic, holy traditions. The divine inspiration of the sacred author, the God-seer Moses, worthy of a series of direct revelations from God, lies in this very selection, purification, examination of oral material and material written in cuneiform; in this labor carried out in the fear of God, with the constant elevation of thought to God, with the immediate awareness of the Providence of God which is unceasingly active in the world. Could the compilers of the legends, songs and laws of the people in the period around 800 or 1000 years after Moses have carried out such a task and, moreover, nearly simultaneously in two kingdoms? Why would the compilers who, as the critics insist, belonged to the class of priests and prophets, even begin to include in the book of Genesis elements of Jewish traditions which in their time would already appear to be temptations, if the reason for this work was for them the moral elevation of the people? Concerning the understanding of “myth,” let us make use of the words of the outstanding French Roman Catholic exegete, F. Vigourue. He writes: “The meaning of myth has been contrived by rationalists to deny miracles and to deface the true character of revelation. The word “myth,” contrary to actual history, is a type of fictional and imaginary his­tory, a sort of fable that is used as a cloak to cover the expression of reli­gious and metaphysical ideas and theories, or even physical phenomena. Nothing is as contrary to myth as Holy Scripture. One of the immediate goals of the Old Testament was the establishment of a barrier against a mythical trend which drew all of the peoples of antiquity to polytheism and its fables. As for the New Testament, the tendency towards mythicism, after the age of Augustus, when these books were written, came to an end among all pagan peoples of the civilized world, not to mention the Jews” (Instructions for Reading the Bible, vol. I, F. Vigourue, [Trans. from the 9th French ed., Moscow, 1897], pp. 176-177) Unfortunately, those French exegetes who collaborated in the Catholic Encyclopedia of the Twentieth Century have departed far from the position of their authoritative compa­triot, F. Vigourue, one of the oldest laborers in the scientific study of Holy Scripture. “De-mythologization” means that the revelation of God, drawn from mankind’s common tradition but already dimmed by political additions, was re-established in its original purity of monotheistic truth; however, in verbal expression the truth continues to remain represented figuratively, the actions of God being depicted as human actions. All of this is because of the paucity of words in primitive language, which correspond to ele­vated and abstract concepts. Even in contemporary, highly developed lan­guages we observe a similar insufficiency of words.