Why Should God Care Less? part 8

This carries on from the post below:

Can I suggest what’s going on here? This is not straight narrative, but neither is it straight poetry. We have examples of ancient Hebrew poetry: Exodus 15, Numbers 13, 14, Judges 5, there’s a number of them. Very old Hebrew texts and they’re poetry and Genesis 1 is not poetry. Not on those parameters. But it’s clearly not straight narrative. Something else is going on. And what I think is happening is this: given the repetition, given the architectonic structure we have here a liturgical text. The point of it is to build this crescendo which we saw so brilliantly this morning. What you guys did really got into Genesis 1. It just begins to build. Did you feel that as you work through? That’s what Genesis 1 is doing. That’s what the literary structure is on about. That’s why there’s repetition. That’s why it’s so architectonic. It’s designed to finally have people go YES!! The LORD is KING! That’s what they meant to say at the end. And if you didn’t feel like doing that after the presentation earlier this morning, goodness. That’s to exalt the name of God. That’s partly what’s going on here.

Now, of course Genesis 1 wasn’t written in a vacuum. It belongs to a culture. And in order to understand something about a cultural artefact you need to know something about the culture. I’m still trying to learn about ice hockey. Ah, it’s all these guys skating around on this kind of thing [laughter]. And they’re wearing all this body armour kind of stuff. What is that? Ah? Come on, be real men. Watch Australian rules. No protection. Well you can tell I know nothing about ice hockey, right? Obviously. So what’s going on culturally? How do we make sense of this kind of thing?

Let’s look at some of the background – this is ancient Sumer [Rikk is now making us of overhead visuals behind him]. They also told themselves creation narratives. And look at some of the things they’re concerned with. So, what we’re doing here is simply trying to get a feel for – when ancient people talked about creation, what were the kinds of things they discussed? We’re simply doing cross-cultural contextualization. We’re doing this for reading Genesis now. Not so much evangelism, but just for listening rather than speaking. Notice they had this idea of first heaven and earth being separated and you’ve got a watery goddess who is the antecedent of heaven and earth. That means that someone reading Genesis isn’t going to be completely thrown. They understand this language of first of all water and then some kind of heaven and earth stuff. This is not unfamiliar language. Notice there’s an increase in order. I’d put the text up for you but it’d be too technical, but you start with this amorphous water and then slowly more order comes. Human beings begin as animals and end up being a special creature. They see this increasing complexity. People were aware of these kinds of things. Then there’s the Babylonian stories. I put them in inverted columns because, technically speaking, in the second millennium BC, Babylon suffered from several incursions from Amorites and also from some other Semites, so we’re not entirely sure just how Babylonian these stories are. And by this I mean the early Babylon, not Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. So, in their stories, what do we have? Well this is the Atraharsis myth on a tablet that was dug up. We start off with Tiamet, who’s salt water and Apsu, the fresh ground water. That shouldn’t be Tiamet ... that’s mis-typed. The point though is Marduk defeats Tiamet and creates heaven and earth from her body. So you notice we start with water, then the separation – heaven and earth. And then humans are created from the blood of a rebel god, to serve the gods. Just imagine what your society will look like if that’s your creation narrative. Human beings, created from the blood of a rebel to do the dirty work of the gods. Guess what your political structures will look like. Hm? Worth thinking about. People who say that Christianity has nothing to do with politics understand neither.