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

10 101 Myths of the Bible
earlier Egyptian roots without the benefit of the larger context into which the stories
have been placed. Even locales changed. Where Eden once lay along the banks of the
Nile, biblical redactors clumsily removed it to Mesopotamia, confusing it with the
Sumerian paradise of Dilmun.
While the J source fills its account with several stories of human interest (flowing
from Creation and the events in the Garden of Eden to the expulsion from the Garden
and the story of Cain and Abel) before it gets to the J flood account, P jumps from
Creation to the flood with no stories of a personal nature, stopping only to insert a
genealogical chain from Adam to Noah. Unlike the Creation stories, though, where
the two versions appear one after the other, the two flood stories are tightly woven
together, sometimes beginning a sentence with one version and completing it with
the other.
We have already noted above that both the J and P flood stories were originally
based on the Hermopolitan Creation myth and that after they were integrated, the
text was further modified to reflect Babylonian traditions about a flood in the tenth
generation of humanity. Despite the common roots of the two Egyptian strands, they
still stem from different sources and traditions. Both J and P contain chronological
strands in the flood accounts. The J source revolves around the seasonal structure of
the solar calendar, reflecting an agriculture-based origin for the story, which is in line
with the agricultural foundations of the Adam and Eve story. P, on the other hand,
revolves about the Egyptian solar-lunar calendar, a twenty-five-year cycle used for religious
celebrations, reflecting the priestly religious nature of the source.
After the flood, Genesis tells of the repopulation of the earth and the origins of
nations. These genealogical histories actually reflect political events of the early to middle
first millenium B.C., showing the artificial and late origin of these stories. They date
to a time after Israel arrived in Canaan, and again demonstrate the literary genius of
the biblical redactors, who can take myths and legends from a variety of sources and
different time frames and integrate them, almost flawlessly, into a long continuous narrative.
But the task was difficult and contradictions seeped in. Occasionally, we even
find the equivalent of typos in the textual transmission.