eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781481756501 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 06/24/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 205 KB |
Read an Excerpt
MYTHS in the BIBLE
By HENRY A. BUCHANAN
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2013 Henry A. BuchananAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4817-5649-5
CHAPTER 1
THE OLD TESTAMENT
THE CREATION
The creation myth is that God created everything, one day at a time, saving the best—that's us—for last, using one of Adam's ribs to make woman. And He was satisfied with His work, but not for long. As soon as Adam and Eve began to wonder about things they began to make trouble in the perfect creation. They disobeyed orders and this has been considered man's sin ever since.
The creation is what we know the least about and argue the most about. The argument is vociferous even today, with the Biblicists contending that it happened exactly the way it is told in the Bible, six days with everything in place until Adam and Eve eat the fated fruit of the forbidden tree. Man is created full grown, speaking God's language and responsible for the whole world.
On the other side: the Darwinians, the scientists, the theorists who speak of a planet billions of years old, orbiting the Sun, going through cosmic changes, a speck of life appearing, and eventually, a man. Man today, Bible in hand, ready to fight over what he believes, and nobody knows. The scientist, equally pugilistic about what he believes happened, but ever searching for evidence, ever seeking that first sign of life which the Biblicist, the creationist claims to hold in his hand, a record written by the hand of God, to be accepted by faith and defended as all matters of faith are defended, blindly, for the creation story explains man's sin, what went wrong at the beginning, where man disobeyed the command of the creator God who had handed him a perfect world, complete and waiting only to be mastered by an obedient man who listens to the voice of God.
As I read I found two stories. In one of them God got the whole creation ready for comfortable habitation, then made a man and set him right in the midst of this garden. Next I was told God made man in His own image and then created animals and other forms of life; He let Man/Adam name all these animals and newly minted creatures. This way the need for a helper arose and God made a woman and Adam named her Eve and a snake got into the story and Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and they were in trouble because everything changed. God threw them out of this perfect Garden of Eden. Outside was tough. Man had to work and the ground where he had to raise his own food was hard scrabble, and Eve found out that having babies was painful.
I was learning what a myth is just by reading the creation myth and what a fun way to learn things I had always wondered about and nobody could prove was true or false but surely the truth was coming through, for everything I read was true to life and I could even see that when those two children in Eden ate the apple, well it wasn't really an apple but it tasted good, they grew up fast and realized that some things are good and some are bad and it's bad to be caught naked when God comes for a visit.
A myth is a special kind of storytelling, a literary wonder that enables a man to walk through creation with God and come out knowing something about himself, maybe even a little about God, that he never knew before, but he wouldn't expect it to be in bold headlines in the newspaper: God creates a world with a man and a woman in it! no, this won't do for the six o'clock news. Or in a scientific journal; maybe in a Baptist journal, but something new and true!
A legend is not a lie, but it does stretch the truth. At first, just a little bit, but with telling and retelling especially if the telling elicits pleasure and praise, it grows in size and detail, sometimes even quality. For instance, King Solomon strengthened his hold on power by marrying the daughters of the royal houses adjacent to Israel, but it's unlikely that there were a thousand neighbors with which he needed to seal a marriage-based friendship.
Now here's the story about how God did it. First thing He said "I need light on the situation, I'm not going to work in darkness. A little darkness is all right because everything needs to sleep and rest, but light is what's needed to get things going." So God made day and night. That was Day one.
Now that He had got light on the subject He saw that things had to be organized. "Water water everywhere. Let's get the water in its place and make room for some land to stand on." Day Two.
The water was still a problem though, and He gathered all the water into one place, and dry land appeared. "Now then, let's have some action. Get some grass and trees. Fruit trees. Now we have something for a man to eat when I'm ready to make a man." Because that's what God had in His Mind all the time. He was getting the place lighted up and some place to stand on. Day Three.
But there was still confusion about the lights and the darkness "Let's have some order here. Sun for daylight and the moon and the stars to relieve the darkness of the night." On Day Four He got all of this straightened out.
Now He was ready for action and He put all that water to work producing fishes and whales. The time would come when He would need a fish as big as a whale. So Day Five passed.
God turned His attention to the dry land which He had already called earth, and earth began to sprout all sorts of animals and all of them dependent on one another. Marvelous thinking. The problem of feeding everything was solved because the grass was already growing for the herbivores and the herbivores were there for the carnivores. I know these big words may confuse the simpleminded but by that time there would be a dictionary because God was already planning to make a man. So Day Five was full of making the world—that's earth—ready and God said "Let's make a man."
And He did. This was a bit more complicated but He hit on a perfect idea. He would make man in His own image. He would make man look just like Himself. He did it. Made man, male and female. And set man over the whole creation. Top creature. Day Six.
This took some doing. He made man out of the dust of the ground, and even took a part of the man to make a woman. God had it all set up, a veritable Garden for the enjoyment of the man and woman. He then took a day off to watch and see what man would do.
That was Day Seven with God resting and watching, just giving a little instruction to the man about how to run everything so that there would be plenty for all the animals and for man too. But with one restriction.
God had made one tree sprout in the Garden which was off limits for this newborn man who had no experience in running things. He said "That tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, you stay away from it because the day you eat of it, that's the end of things here for you. You'll die! Don't eat it."
Adam and Eve (Eve is what Adam decided to call the woman God had made to keep him company) started looking around and wondering about that special tree, and the more they looked and talked about it, the more attractive it became, and they said "Why not?" About that time the serpent showed up and said "Yes, why not? You are not going to die. You eat the fruit of that tree and it will make you like God Himself. Go ahead. Try it!" They did, and they experienced a big change in themselves. They didn't die, but they saw one another, and they realized they were different. They were naked and Adam saw Eve, Eve saw Adam, they saw what was different, and they were afraid God would notice it too, so they tried to hide and to cover their nakedness.
But it was no good. God saw right through their fig leaves and He said "It's time for you to go now. You're grownup. Adam, you go to work, and Eve you get ready to have a baby and mind you, it won't be fun. But get ready for the hard part. Outside the Garden."
So Adam and Eve grew up and found themselves faced with all sorts of adult responsibilities. One of them was parenthood. There were Cain and Abel, their two sons. They had a big quarrel and Cain killed Abel, and had to leave home, thinking that every man would want to kill him. So God had to put a mark on Cain to protect him. The mark was a sign that said "Don't kill this man!" But that only drew men's attention to him. "Why not kill you? What have you done to merit killing?" So things went from bad to worse.
CHAPTER 2
THE FLOOD
After the creation and after Adam and Eve had learned what their differences were for, the human population of the earth increased rapidly because everybody, with the exception of Abel, lived a long time and did a lot of begetting. But that is not what brought on the flood. It was the sons of God who were playing around with the daughters of men.
I didn't know there were any sons of God at that time and they were never mentioned by the professors at the theological seminary and never to this day have I heard them mentioned by a preacher in the pulpit. But there they were right in the sixth chapter of Genesis. The sons of God noticed that the daughters of men were attractive (fair is the word used in the King James Version) and they married them and produced a race of giants. And true to the nature of giants, they made trouble. I don't know exactly what the giants did, but it was bad, and God, the big creator God, didn't like what the giants were doing and He decided to flood the earth and drown them all. Except Noah and his family. Noah had a wife and three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. They met with God's approval and God decided to save them from the flood that was going to cover the earth. He gave Noah instructions about building a big boat which was to be called the Ark. It would be big enough for Noah and his family and a pair of every animal. Some of the animals God liked better than others, and of these he would save seven of each kind. I'm assuming that God liked sheep but goats were not on his preferential list.
Anyway, Noah set about building that big boat, the Ark, and gathering up all those animals. His neighbors the giants looked on and laughed at Noah building a big boat right there on dry ground, and they thought he had gone over the edge. But when Noah and the boys had the Ark ready and water tight the sky began to cloud up and Noah said to the boys "Let's get all these critters inside." That was a big job because not all animals like being housed up that way; some animals don't like some other animals being close to them; and some are just a lot of trouble. Take a pair of monkeys on a boat, for instance. At last they were all on board and just in time because it started raining, and after a few days the water began to rise and Noah and his family waved goodbye to the giants, and said something like "I hope you like a lot of water because you're going to get it big for forty days and forty nights."
Noah and his family set in to feeding all those animals and cleaning up behind them, and Mrs. Noah found that it was not like going on a pleasure cruise, but I can't tell you what she said to her husband about the bad odors and I can't tell you what Noah said about having to clean up behind all the animals after he had fed all of them. I suspect that tempers flared and one of them said "Well, we are the fortunate ones. Just think of all those drowning giants." So they settled in for forty days and forty nights of rain, and even when the rain stopped the world was still covered with water and they had to wait for the water to go down. Even then when they got back home, think of what a mess. It was enough to drive a man to drink and that's what Noah did. He planted some grapevines, made some wine and tied one on that got the attention of Mrs. Noah and the boys. Ham pointed his drunken father out to his brothers and when Noah woke up in a bad mood and with a flood-sized hangover, he laid a curse on the boy Ham and spent the next five hundred years or so getting over what the flood had done, and possibly doing some begetting because it seems that the world filled up again with the worst kind of sinners because people were not satisfied that the world had dried out and things would grow again. Somebody remembered that the story of the Garden of Eden was still floating around but nobody could get back in it because of the angels with flaming swords. They would have to find a different way to make themselves happy. That's when they decided to build the tower that would reach to heaven.
CHAPTER 3
THE TOWER
"Yeah! Let's build us a tower to heaven," one fellow said. "I don't want to wait until I die to get up there. I've heard it's nice up there. No hard work. No pain. No taxes. No problems. Maybe we could just take over the place and run it to suit ourselves. There's not much left to do down here. The flood washed everything away and the giants are all gone."
So a building committee was appointed, and they decided to build a tower that would reach heaven. They gathered materials, making bricks, mortar and studying about stress. They all understood the plan and work was going along well. The tower had reached about ninety feet into the air, pointed right toward heaven. God noticed what they were doing.
"Wait a minute. This can't be allowed. They want to come up here, walk in and take over. It has to stop. I'll fix them."
What God did to fix this situation was confuse their language. When they came to work the bricklayers were speaking Hebrew and the hod carriers were speaking Greek, or some other gibberish nobody could understand, and they all stood around yelling at one another until they just gave it up and went in different directions trying to find someone who could understand what they were saying, and after awhile the unfinished tower fell over and nobody has been able to find it.
Good going, God! That will teach them not to try to grab power and run things that don't concern them. In Greek mythology man was created round, male and female, all in one big round ball. Perfection. Zeus got nervous and said "That Androgenes could just roll right up the mountain and take over. But I'll put a stop to that before it gets started."
So Zeus raised his sword and whacked Androgenes, cutting Androgenes in half. One half then rolled to the right and the other to the left. Man and woman were eternally separated, and Zeus said "You can spend the rest of your time on earth trying to get back together. When you do you will find that you've already got heaven on earth."
At least that's the way the bards tell it and it's about as happy an ending for a myth as you will find because most of them end in death. But God, in either case, the tower or the Greek ball, had settled the matter of power, and He had to rethink the whole matter of creating a man like Himself, but a man who wouldn't try to seize power. His mind turned to a man called Abram.
So much for the trilogy of creation myths in which man is testing his power against the power of God, and God is experiencing disappointment with His creation and resorting to the 'destroy and start over' policy. Maybe things will work better with Abram. It's worth trying anyway.
CHAPTER 4
ABRAHAM AND ISAAC
Abram was the son of Terah, of the city of Ur in Chaldea. He was married to Sarai, a beautiful woman who was also his sister. Half sister. Abram and Sarai were childless and for them this was a serious problem because Abram's God called him out of ur—or the people of Ur urged him to go—and he went toward Canaan a land which Abram's God promised to him, but it seemed an empty promise because Abram and Sarai were growing old childless.
This double relationship of Abram to Sarai brought on more trouble, for when they went down to Egypt, Abram passed her off as his sister because Pharaoh wanted her, and when the deception was discovered the Pharaoh returned Sarai to Abram and drove him out of the land.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from MYTHS in the BIBLE by HENRY A. BUCHANAN. Copyright © 2013 Henry A. Buchanan. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.