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

42 101 Myths of the Bible
As the rest of the passage states, the stories about the heavens and the earth occur
“in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens” and before the
appearance of vegetation. In our discussion of Myth #14, after reconstructing the original
sequence of Creation, we learned that the heavens and earth were created on the
second day and vegetation on the third. The day that god made heaven and earth corresponds
to the second day of Creation.
This establishes a link between the first and second Creation stories in Genesis. In
the first Creation story, the events on the second day of Creation were based on the
Heliopolitan Creation myth, the rising of Atum as a firmament in the waters, the separation
of heaven and earth and the gathering of the waters. In that account, the Genesis
editor stripped off the personas of the Egyptian deities and left us only with the
natural phenomena that they represented. Something else happened in the second
Creation story. As we will see in the discussion of some of the next few myths, the biblical
editor preserved the personas of the Egyptian deities but depicted them as
humans and removed their identifications with natural phenomena. But on occasion,
they slipped up and failed to recognize all the earlier associations, as in this case where
they left in a reference to“the generations of heaven and earth.”