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

26 101 Myths of the Bible
scholars have assumed that the word for clay became a metaphor for man. In fact, there
are a couple of non-biblical references to indicate that such might be the case but this
is limited to a handful of personal names found in texts in the library of ancient Ugarit
and dating to about the fourteenth century B.C. We have no general evidence of any
widespread use in Semitic tongues for the use of adam to mean“man.”
The problem here is that the Hebrew scribes adopted this idea that man was
formed in the image of God from Egyptian traditions. That belief remained with the
Israelites throughout their history but, because they didn’t believe in any form of
physical representation of deity, by the time that Genesis assumed its final written
form, the concept of an “image of god” no longer had a specific meaning.
To trace the concept back to its roots, look at the Egyptians’ view. The Egyptians
believed both that humanity was created in the image of the Creator and that the Creator
had both male and female characteristics. A passage from an ancient text known
as The Instruction Book for Merikare, illustrates the first principle.
Well tended is mankind—god’s cattle.
He made sky and earth for their sake
He subdued the water monster,
He made breath for their noses to live.
They are his images, who came from his body.
Note the parallel here to the biblical passage, where it talks not only about
humanity being in the image of god, but also incorporates both male and female
within the image.
This text apparently had wide circulation in Egypt. It dates originally to the
twenty-first century B.C. and the present form of the text cited here comes from a
papyrus written during the New Kingdom period, several centuries later. Hebrew
scribes in Egypt almost certainly would have been familiar with the ideas expressed.
While Egyptians had several ideas about how humans were created, this particular
version indicates that men and women were parts of the body of the Creator and it
is in this sense that humanity had the image of a god. Several texts also show that the
Creator incorporated both male and female characteristics, explaining how both male
and female forms could come from the same source.