18: Ancient Creation Mythologies

The Bible opens with two creation stories describing how God created the world, to which we dedicated the previous two episodes (16 and 17).

The first tells how God created the world over six days, and how He sanctified the seventh day as a day of rest. The second story focuses on the act that led to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

This episode is a bonus episode to the two creation stories in the Bible, with two main purposes.

The first is to show that these stories were not written in a vacuum and that they contain literary motifs that appear dozens of times in the mythologies told by ancient peoples.

For example, many people told that before creation, the universe was flooded with water, and that creation began from the waters, as told in the book of Genesis.

According to the story in Chapter 2 of Genesis, God created the first man and all the animals from dust. The motif that the gods created the first humans from earth, mud, or clay is also repeated in many ancient mythologies.

The serpent is one of the great heroes that recur in countless myths.  In all of them, as in the Bible, it is considered the most cunning of all animals and the eternal enemy of man. The serpent symbolizes the power to kill and the power to revive. And because it sheds its skin, the ancients believed it lived forever.

The second goal we had in our bonus episode was to show that the ancients were intensively engaged in the same questions that occupy researchers today.

Like the best researchers at the world's top universities, they too sought to know how the world was created, and why humans are endowed with abilities that no other animal possesses. And of course, they too feared death and sought to live eternal lives.

But while scientists living today are committed to explaining their research according to a rigid academic methodology, and with the aid of sophisticated technological means, in practice they are revisiting the same questions that were asked about 5,000 years ago.