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

20 101 Myths of the Bible
mounds of fertile black soil in its departure, the Egyptians imagined a first hill emerging
out of the floodwaters and the waters gathering together into a single stream.
An Egyptian Creation myth (preserved in a document known as Coffin Text 76)
describing the separation of heaven and earth tells of Shu (the sky), son of Atum (the
first light), gathering the waters together.“This god [Shu] is tying the land together for
my father Atum, and drawing together the Great flood for him.”
The drawing together of the flood refers to the creation of the Nile and the text
goes on to say that the event occurred on the same day that Atum appeared on the first
mountain. If we strip this myth of its polytheistic elements, as the Hebrew scribes
would have done, it provides a perfect parallel to the events transpiring across the second
and third day of Genesis Creation.
Shu, who signifies the sky, is the offspring of Atum, the first light whom Egyptians
associate with the emergence of the primeval mountain. Shu came into being on the
very day that Atum appeared, following the emergence of the mountain from Nun
(the Great flood). He (the sky) then separated Nut (heaven) from Geb (earth), tied
the land together, and gathered together the waters of the flood into one place, (which
created the Nile), the very same set of events as in Genesis.
The biblical Creation sequence, therefore, follows the Egyptian scheme. Shu’s
gathering of the waters describes the origin of the Nile and corresponds to the biblical
gathering of the waters in one place.
As with the description of heaven, one of the Hebrew scribes misunderstood the
initial description of the waters because he no longer understood events in an Egyptian
context. The final editing of the Bible occurred after the Hebrew elite were captured
and moved to Babylon, and Babylon, as a great center of learning, exercised a
powerful influence on the later biblical redactors. Since the Babylonian perspective
recognized several separate important bodies of water, the Hebrew scribes took what
was originally a description of the Nile, the waters gathered in a single place, and
appended to it a phrase indicating that the gathered waters constituted several large
bodies of water, again either ignoring or not recognizing the contradictory claim
that resulted.