{"id":8427,"date":"2024-12-28T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-28T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.raziemah.com\/blog\/?p=8427"},"modified":"2024-06-30T15:21:14","modified_gmt":"2024-06-30T15:21:14","slug":"looking-at-bill-arnolds-article-2020-genesis-and-the-challenges-of-the-21st-century-part-3-of-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.raziemah.com\/blog\/?p=8427","title":{"rendered":"Looking at Bill Arnold’s Article (2020) “Genesis and the Challenges of the 21st Century” (Part 3 of 5)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

0015 Our current Lebenswelt<\/em> starts with the Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do the stories of Adam and Eve (Genesis 2.4 on) associate to the events early in the “history” of the Ubaid?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“History”?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The term, “history”, typically refers to written documentation that serves as evidence of trends and events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps, I can qualify stories about<\/em> trends and events of times before the invention of writing in the Uruk period of southern Mesopotamia<\/em> as “pre-history”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0016 Arnold prefers the term, “mytho-history”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0017 Yet, even here, science adds to the picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one in the world would know about the mythic origin stories of the ancient Near East<\/em> were it not for intrepid archaeologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries<\/em> (who, ironically, were funded by wealthy people interested in the origins of civilization, of the Bible, of the Iliad and Odyssey, and so on).  One could say that our knowledge of these origin stories is “fragmentary”, because it is read off of fragments of cuneiform-bearing clay tablets that were fired into bricks when royal libraries burned, thousands of years before the modern age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some tablets date over two-thousand years before Socrates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, the start of our current Lebenswelt<\/em> is nominally set at 7824 years ago at 0 U0′ (Ubaid Zero-Prime).  The Uruk invented writing around 1800 U0′.  The Sumerian civilization officially starts around 2800 U0′.  Christ lives around 5800 U0′.  Our year is nominally 7824 U0′, but maybe astrologers who hear about the hypothesis of the first singularity<\/em> can cast for an appropriate celestial inauguration marking the start of the Ubaid, the first culture to practice speech-alone talk<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0018 The list of mythic origin stories of the ancient Near East and Egypt,<\/em> is not long.  Arnold goes through the trouble of naming them and identifying them with Sumerian, Akkadian and Egyptian sources.  As it turns out, both the Creation Story and the Primeval History share the same genre of this “literature of the ancient Near East”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is a picture of reflections in the mirrors of science and theology<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Remember that the theologian<\/em> sees what science projects into<\/em> the mirror of theology<\/em> and the scientist<\/em> sees what theology projects into<\/em> the mirror of science<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do I have that correctly?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does the mirror of theology<\/em> stand in the domain of theology?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does science <\/em>project into the mirror of theology?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does the mirror of science <\/em>stand in the domain of science?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does theology<\/em> project into the mirror of science?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, that sounds about right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, where was I?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0019 During the past two centuries, the early stories of Genesis<\/em> are liberated from a literal reading.  These tales do not explicitly reveal a beginning.  Rather, they portray the beginning of some sort of revelation.  If the Creation Story and Primeval History exhibit not only the style, but some of the content, of the excavated written origin stories of the ancient Near East,<\/em> then some conclude that the Genesis text derives from these even more ancient written sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, that is not the case.  One cannot confidently claim that the living oral traditions <\/em>that give rise to the written Genesis text in, say 5200 U0′, are derived from a literary tradition among elites<\/em> that was written, say as early as 2800 U0′.  No, the style and material are so entangled, that the family oral tradition<\/em> and the elite written traditions,<\/em> must have been already established by the time of Ur III.  Ur III is the last flowering of the Sumerian civilization.  After that, the Sumerian language is dead.  It is no longer a living language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Terah leaves Ur of the Chaldeans.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Abram leaves his father, Terah, in the land that his kin lived in for so many generations<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

0020 A daring exposition of the implications of these two reflections<\/em> is found in chapter 13C of An Archaeology of the Fall<\/em> (by Razie Mah, available at smashwords and other e-book venues).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is another example of the strange double-reflection between the hypothesis of the first singularity<\/em> and the stories of Adam and Eve<\/em>.  The infilling of the Persian Gulf occurs during the Wet Neolithic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

0015 Our current Lebenswelt starts with the Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia. Do the stories of Adam and Eve (Genesis 2.4 on) associate to the events early in the “history” of the Ubaid? “History”? The term, “history”, typically refers to written documentation that serves as evidence of trends and events. Perhaps, I can qualify stories about trends and events of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[418],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-review"],"yoast_head":"\nLooking at Bill Arnold's Article (2020) "Genesis and the Challenges of the 21st Century" (Part 3 of 5) - An Archaeology of the Fall<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.raziemah.com\/blog\/?p=8427\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Looking at Bill Arnold's Article (2020) "Genesis and the Challenges of the 21st Century" (Part 3 of 5) - An Archaeology of the Fall\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"0015 Our current Lebenswelt starts with the Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia. 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