101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

296 101 Myths of the Bible
The process of unraveling the skeins led to a number of interesting discoveries. P,
again, was mechanistic, setting forth a simple recital of flood events with no emphasis
on personality or human interaction. P was based on Egypt’s solar-lunar calendar, a
twenty-five-year cycle used to determine when religious festivals should be held.
Egypt’s religious festivals were conducted according to lunar cycles while the civil calendar
was based on the solar year. The solar-lunar calendar provided a method for
determining on what day of the solar-civil calendar a particular lunar-calculated religious
activity should take place.
J’s flood story was more complicated. On one level, it was about Egypt’s threeseason
agricultural solar calendar, but on another, it was an Egyptian Creation myth
based on the religious traditions of Hermopolis. In that city’s theology, Creation began
with four males and four females emerging out of a great flood. These eight deities,
known as the Ogdoad, were, bizarrely, both the parents of and the creation of the primary
Creator deity. Noah and his three sons and their four wives corresponded to the
four males and four females of the Egyptian myth.
As a Creation myth, the J flood story would have originally appeared ahead of the
story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but this sequence was altered when the
Hebrews came in contact with the Mesopotamian flood myth that placed the deluge in
the tenth generation of humanity. As with the J story of the heavens and the earth, the
J flood story intermingled with the Mesopotamian stories and the now-fused Egyptian-Mesopotamian
flood tale was later merged with the P flood story, altering the biblical
historical scenario by placing the biblical flood in the tenth generation of humanity.
If we restore the J flood tale to its original position as a Creation story that preceded
the Garden of Eden tales, we shed new light on the alleged inconsistency between the
J and P Creation myths and see that they were parallel constructions that followed the
Theban tradition. That theology began with the Hermopolitan flood account and followed
it with the Heliopolitan story about the emergence of the heavens and the earth
and their offspring.
By placing J’s Hermopolitan flood account at the beginning of the cycle, we see that
it follows the P story line. Both begin with the Hermopolitan flood, P stripping the
persona from the natural forces and J stripping the natural forces from the persona.