I did not have a Christian upbringing, and outside of a few verses here and there I had really never read the Book of Genesis and could not have described it accurately to anyone. Having initially read R. Crumb's Book of Genesis Illustrated, I was baffled more than anything. This was really my first introduction to ancient writing, so a lot of things which are expected for ancient writing were very, very confusing for me.
The story made no sense. It's not so much that I disagreed with the story, but rather I could not have told you what a reader was supposed to get from the story. If I had read and disliked (as a real example) "The Scarlet Letter" I could have easily conveyed the themes of the book and the intent of the author, at least at a level of moderate competence. But what the hell was going on in the Book of Genesis? I had no idea. Why were all the best stories just a few sentences long? The Tower of Babel is an amazing visual and allegory in a conceptual sense ... but the actual story in Genesis is a mere 8 sentences. And what does it have to do with the rest of the story? It's not coherent at all. And why did people live really long previously? Why was Adam some 800-900 years old? Why is this never explained? If Adam could live to 900 years, but you'd never met anyone who lived past 80, wouldn't you want some explanation for this behavior, if even it was just something hand-wavy such as "we lived longer before the fall?" etc ..
Now, there are answers to a lot of the these questions. Most of the answers (if you ignore the ridiculousness of the apologetics) is simply that the Bible is not one book, but a huge collection of stories with different authors, telling stories for different reasons, for different audiences, and at different times. Genesis in particular is almost certainly an adaption and conglomeration of many previous myths, and many of these would have been familiar to the audience of the time. As a rough example, if you wanted to write a vampire movie in 2026, you would not need to explain to the audience what a vampire is. The audience already knows and you waste words and waste realism by explaining it.
Ultimately, these questions led me to want to read more on the topic. To me, it was impossible to understand how the Book of Genesis could possibly form the foundation of the three major Abrahamic religions, and captivate much of the population of the entire world, for much of recorded history. And again, I don't mean in some sanctimonious fedora-tipping sort of way. I just couldn't make sense of the stories whatever. They were deeply confusing to me.
Ultimately, this sort of sat around in my mind until I bumped into the inscriptions from Kuntillet Arjud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuntillet_Ajrud_inscriptions) of Yaheh and his Asherah. The visual, of a weird iron-age deity with a weird iron-age consort reignited my interest. From there, I read Mark S. Smith, Thomas Romer, and more.
I think my curiosity has been roughly satisfied, even though there are a lot of unanswered (and potentially unanswerable) questions: for instance, is the Kennite hypothesis correct? What I found is in hindsight what anyone should have expected: the Israelite religion changed significantly over time, is full of its own myth-making and navel-gazing, and of course, was heavily influenced by the local cultures and religions it coexisted and intermixed with.
"impossible to understand how the Book of Genesis could possibly form the foundation of the three major Abrahamic religions"
Maybe because it is the thing introduces Abraham? lol
Compare this to something like a Stephen King novel. A reader can pick it up, read it without any prep or study, and understand it readily.
I'm not saying that the Bible has no cohesion or anything like that -- but that a totally unprepared modern reader probably cannot make sense of the text. And also that until recently, most Americans would have been prepared with quite a bit of cultural context for the Bible via church and other things which laid out the colloquial interpretations of the text for people from an early age.
We don't actually place that much emphasis on Genesis or the Bible in general. A lot of Catholic traditions are outside of the books: the sacraments, the assumption of Mary, the Apostles and their connection to the Bishops (and Bishop of Rome/The Pope), etc. etc.
Some Christians overemphasize the written word of the Bible. But just gonna toss this out: Biblical Literalism is not part of the Catholic tradition. It simply cannot be, as many important traditions were never written down at that time.
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The importance of the Torah is that Jesus was born as a Hebrew, so understanding his religion helps us understand the life he lived. As well as the prophesies he fulfilled.
But in terms of story? It's all an allegory or metaphor. Catholics are generally comfortable with saying that, ex evolution exists, even if it's not part of the book of Genesis.
andsoitis•1h ago
a) Atenism in Egypt (c. 1350 BCE)
b) Israelite / Hebrew
c) Zoroastrianism in Persia
While some scholars (like Freud) have proposed a link between (a) and (b), it remains contested and unproven.
What is, however, likely, is a link between (c) and (b), specifically that Zoroastrianism likely influenced Second Temple Judaism during the period of Persian rule over Judea, particularly ideas about cosmic dualism, angels, demons, and eschatology.
trikko•1h ago
On Persian influence: Demons are probably more directly Babylonian than Persian. Judah got that exposure during the Exile itself, not under Persian rule. Lilith (Isaiah 34:14) is the Mesopotamian Lilitu, and Babylonian demonology (Lamashtu, Pazuzu, the utukku) was already rich on its own. Where Zoroastrian influence is a stronger case is angels as named individuals with defined roles (Michael, Gabriel, hierarchies), which show up for the first time in post-exilic texts like Daniel, plausibly modeled on the Amesha Spentas and Yazatas after contact with Achaemenid Persia. Same goes for full cosmic dualism, a Satan as an independent adversarial being rather than a role in the divine court (as in Job or Zechariah, where "satan" is a title, not a name).
It's a big topic on its own, deserving separate treatment. I deliberately scoped this piece to the older, pre-exilic layer (the El/YHWH merger through Josiah's reform).
For what it's worth, the piece isn't arguing for a single external source anyway: Canaanite (El, Baal, Asherah), Mesopotamian (the Flood mirrors Atrahasis/Gilgamesh, the creation account echoes the Enuma Elish, plus the exile-era demonology above), Egyptian, and later Persian and Hellenistic layers all leave fingerprints at different points. Judaism's formation looks less like one merger and more like several centuries of absorbing and reworking whatever was around.
dekervin•34m ago
In reality many human societies throughout the ages have been monotheists.
everdrive•30m ago
everdrive•29m ago
mcphage•17m ago