Reddit reviews Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament

Comparative studies. From my reading, they generally assume the author knew of the parallel source and wrote with it in mind. Then compare/contrast the similarities and differences and deduce theological meaning based off the differences, i.e. why did the author change this part of the story.

This is a good summary book if you are looking for direct examples. Also, John Walton has written on this extensively. K.A. Kitchen is has also written on this, specifically on Egypotology and Hittite vassal-suzerain treaties. He actually contends the Doc-Hypothesis is erroneous since he dates the Pentateuch based on its convenental structure and its similarities with known Hittite treaties -- but that's another whole ball of wax.

EDIT: spelling, grammar

>in the opinion of modern scholars

In the opinion of some modern scholars. The opinions to which you give voice are hardly universal and they're trending toward a minority among contemporary scholars. Such views were much more widely held at the beginning of the 20th Century, for instance, than they are today.

Among the scholars to which you can refer to good scholarship and a less Modernist point of view are N.T. Wright and Scott Hahn. Both are (as far as I know) well regarded scholars of the Bible. There are others but those are the two that spring to mind.

>the disciples didn't really believe Jesus was God (if he existed)

I think this is false on the face of it, and even Bart Ehrman concludes that it was their belief in the resurrection that convinced Jesus' disciples that Jesus was God in the years immediately following the crucifixion. See here for a radio interview with Ehrman about his book, How Jesus Became God.

Ehrman courted the disfavor of his atheist admirers in one of his other recent books, where he took aim at the Jesus mythicists, arguing that Jesus was definitely an historical character.

Again, I would refer you to N.T. Wright and his works on the historicity of the Bible.

> the Bible is a collage of stolen myths

Once again, this is just flatly false and is only believed by the most extreme "scholars" in the Jesus Mythicist camp (as far as I know).

>My second question: is there a term for someone who studies Biblical topics in general? As in one who studies ancient near-east cultures, comparative mythology, languages, Biblical source documents, Jewish literature, archaeology, and other "Biblical Humanities"? That's what I like.

I don't know about a "term", but check out Scott Hahn, the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, this book (if you can find it), and especially (for this question), I would recommend John Walton and his books, The Lost World of Genesis One and Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible.

John Walton is the best here. Check out his Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible

Not a panelist, but a masters student who has taken a course on the Bible's cultural context. Here are the books I found the most helpful:

• Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, by John H. Walton
  
• The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, by Henri Frankfort and others
  
• The Ancient Orient, by Wolfram von Soden

> Also, is it true to say that the God we're referring to here is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent?



I'll start with this point because it's a necessary assumption for this discussion. All three adjectives certainly apply here.



> Why did he create Adam and Eve with a desire to be independent of God?



God created man with free will, the ability to abide or reject him, and this seems to naturally lead to man choosing himself over God. I won't say that God wanted man to make that decision after creating him, but I believe He absolutely knew that man would make the decision. One thing I've always wondering about was if somehow Adam had refrained from sin, and his descendants were still living in that garden with the three, how long would it be until someone decided to take hold of the fruit and disobey? It seems inevitable in the long run; however, even taking the garden account as allegory, I think it illustrates something we all see in ourselves: even by our own internal scale of right and wrong, we still make bad decisions at times.



In God's omniscience, the sacrifice to be made by Jesus Christ that would atone for mankind's sin was known to Him before the creation of the world (cf. 2 Timothy 1:9, Revelation 13:8, and [1 Peter 1:20](http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Peter 1:20;&version=31;)). So this opens another question that I don't purport to have an answer for: if God knew before creation that mankind would sin and such atonement would be necessary, why bother moving forward with the plan?



I'm reading through a book entitled Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, and it's full of evidence that while other Mesopotamian cultures believed that the gods depended in some way on humans (either needing worship or the amenities provided in the temple and its offerings), the Israelites understood that God in no way depended on them. And yet, at the same time, OT writers were asking why God created man (cf. Psalm 8:3-6, Job 7:16-18, and commentary).



When asked to explain God's perfection, apologist Ravi Zacharias is credited as responding, "God is the only being in existence, the reason for whose existence lies within himself." I agree with the succinct response, and believe that God's lack of a cause, dependence or origin means that He would be the same with or without creation or mankind. While I don't believe God created man because he was lonely or wanted to exert control over some lesser beings, I do recognize that God desires that we fellowship with him (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:9). But I honestly don't believe I can comprehend His motivation for creating us in his omniscience.



> If so, why didn't he just stop the snake from talking to them? Also, if God knew everything, then he knew that all this would happen, so why did he bother setting up this whole situation in the first place?



Could God have sheltered Adam and Eve from outside influences in the garden? Absolutely. Would this have, as I hypothesized in the first paragraph above, prevented man from sinning at all? I can't say. If God had removed every allowance for man to exercise his free will, effectively filtering out every situation where man was presented with a choice, I suppose we could ask if that would really be free will.



I allude to the second question in the preceding paragraphs and confess that, while I understand facets of the relationship between God and man, I can't answer "why" with certitude. Truthfully, I do wonder about the question, though, and even right now it brings to mind the question of why God allowed Satan to victimize Job in order to demonstrate the man's faithfulness.



This also seems to beg the question if it was man, the snake, or even God that was ultimately responsible. Yes, man sinned by taking the fruit, but the serpent is accredited with propositioning Eve, and if we go back further it was God himself who placed the tree there. To refer back to a verse cited in my original post, James 1:13-15 tells us that man is just as capable of tempting himself with his own desires. Meanwhile, the character and very definition of God excludes Him as a mechanism for temptation.



> Why didn't he just give them omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence so they could freely do whatever they wanted and not have to go through all this drama?



Forgive me if I'm jumping to conclusions, but this seems to ask why God would not just make man as He is, rather than in His image (sharing some qualities, but certainly not equal). Consulting varying definitions of omnipotence, I came across the omnipotence paradox which asks if any all-powerful being could do such a thing as to limit itself. Biblically, I think the omnipotence paradox is at least partially answered in the personhood of Christ, as Philippians 2:5-8 records him setting aside his Godly glory for the likeness of man on earth.



But your question seems to approach the paradox from the opposite direction and ask if an omnipotent being could create other, omnipotent beings. Scripture presents qualities of God that we might take to be limits (doing my best not to sound heretical here), the violations of which would likely mean that He is not God. For instance, God's holiness precludes him from fellowship with sin, setting in place the requirement for atonement, and he cannot lie (cf. Numbers 23:19). We logically think of these things as limits, but perhaps they are more appropriately considered as the very nature of God.



I think that God's establishment of other beings equal in his power would diminish his identity as God. Could multiple beings all be omnipotent concurrently? If God granted omnipotence to other beings, wouldn't that suggest that He had yielded Himself in some way? In pondering whether two beings could share omniscience, my mind began to run in circles with "are you thinking what i'm thinking about what you're thinking about...", so I'll leave that alone. Again borrowing a concept from the Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament book I was reading, the gods of Mesopotamia were organized in a pantheon, with each assigned various responsibilities, functions and authority. Each existed within the cosmos, whereas the Israelite God was attributed as birthing the cosmos and operated independent of it. To grant equivalent power, or knowledge to created beings would turn that relationship (between Creator and created) on its side. And as the writer of Philippians puts it, Jesus as man "did not consider equality with God something to be grasped."



I also wonder if man was effectively put in the role of God, as your question hypothesizes, if he could be trusted not to destroy everything. This is of course assuming that man possessed the same free will, but was more capable in executing the whims of his desires. Or would Godly omniscience prevent man from willing anything "bad", since he would absolutely understand the harmful repercussions of his actions before doing them? The philosophy of this is beyond me, but it's deep stuff to think about. I can only offer that as we are now, men not gods, Jesus says that man's very heart breeds evil ambition (cf. Mark 7:14-23), so I inclined to think that we're better off without such unlimited power.



Thanks for following up with your questions. It's given me quite a bit to think about and I enjoyed the research along the way.

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EDIT: fixed link formatting.

[All this assumes the scholarly standard JEDP source criticism. I applaud the Jewish poster who input the talmudic sources which corroborate this info, but work under vastly different assumptions]

It is widely understood by OT scholars to be addressing the heavenly council. Gen1 and Gen2 are two different creation stories. Gen1 was written at a later date (the P source), than Gen2, which was a much earlier source. The majority of Gen2-11 is attested to be whole blocks of earlier sources, interspersed with editorial changes/flourishes. Many scholars suggest that Gen1 was written in a typological fashion to describe Eden as a divinely ordered temple (the authors being priests). And in a temple there is never just one liturgical actor. The P source, being much later had a developed sense of other divine beings (the academic definition of "monotheism" being an ideal type, and a red herring -- there are almost zero actual "strict monotheists" societies ever recorded in the world) in the heavenly court.

As an example "the serpent" is not "the devil" or even "the Satan". The serpent is merely a member of the divine court, punished for its actions. "The Satan" doesn't make an appearance until Job (which is actually written very very early, around the times of many of the original Genesis sources [chp2-11]) and is not "the devil" but merely another divine court actor -- the narrative explicitly tells us that Satan has an audience at the court with God.

All this is scholarly work of understanding who, when, and with what material the original authors were working with. This is not an act of Christian (or Jewish, as the Talmud self-attests as) interpretation. That said, any Christian attempt at interpreting this as emphatically, or foreshadowing the Trinity has their work cut out for them hermeneutically. Orthodox and Catholic traditions generally lean on metaphysical interpretations that can point to a Trinity, but such a move is merely indirect. Mainline protestant traditions don't attempt that interpretation and for the most part have left behind metaphysics (as they're mostly American, or heavily influenced by American pragmatism or liberal protestantism). Evangelicals are really the only group who attempt such an interpretation.

I would recommend "Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible" for the task

Edit: link -- http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Near-Eastern-Thought-Testament/dp/0801027500/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1342141393&sr=8-2&keywords=john+walton

I've found the OT background commentary to be a helpful place to begin. The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament https://www.amazon.com/dp/0830814191

You could then move to Walton's Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament: Introducing the Conceptual World of the Hebrew Bible https://www.amazon.com/dp/0801027500

This is much more in depth, but could be another good place to go if you end up looking for more. The World around the Old Testament: The People and Places of the Ancient Near East https://www.amazon.com/dp/0801039185/

Let's stick to the firmament for a bit. Your authors are quite wrong on a number of counts.

Here's the definition of the Hebrew word from my condensed copy of BDB, considered the definitive Hebrew lexicon:

רָקִיעַ n.m. extended surface, (solid) expanse (as if beaten out) — firmamentum

1. (flat) expanse (as if of ice), as base, support.
   
2. the vault of heaven, or ‘firmament,’ regarded by Hebrews as solid, and supporting ‘waters’ above it.
   
   First, there's a few places in the Bible where the firmament is shown as clearly solid:
   
   http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=job%2037:18;%20Job%2022:14&version=HCSB
   
   (Note the verb translated "spread out" is the verb form of the word translated as firmament. In every use in the OT it means to beat out a solid thing. Here's two other uses of the verb form.)
   
   A bunch of guys got to go up there and see God on top of the firmament:
   http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ex%2024:9-10&version=HCSB
   
   Also Ezekiel's vision clearly shows his views of the solid dome God lives above:
   http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel%201:22-25;%2010:1-2&version=HCSB
   
   At minimum this makes the claim that they didn't know of this cosmology seem silly. The same is true of the claim that it wasn't a common cosmology. We have good evidence for the summerian and canaanite and other groups.
   
   One of your other sources claims the Bible has birds fly in the firmament. That's not true, and it doesn't read that way in any modern translation, only those derived from the KJV. The verse in Genesis literally says "flies in front of the face of the firmament of the heavens". The word face is also used for the surface of the earth and other solid things, and a better translation is really "flies in front of the surface of the firmament of the heavens."
   
   
   Consider also where the fire comes from to burn up Elijah's offering, where the chariot of fire goes up to, Jacob's ladder, etc.
   
   There's tons more evidence, and if you want a book by a conservative Christian scholar on the issue, check out this one.
   
   He also wrote The Lost World of Genesis One where he deals with how he thinks this information should be used to change our understanding of the goal of the writers of Genesis. An essay version of the main points of his book is here.

2. I'll recommend a book by John Walton
   http://www.amazon.ca/Ancient-Near-Eastern-Thought-Testament/dp/0801027500

I've read it multiple sources, here is one: http://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Near-Eastern-Thought-Testament/dp/0801027500/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322142785&sr=1-3

I don't have the book here with me so I can't point you to a certain chapter/page.

You are welcome!

I think I first came across it in this book which is definitely on the academic side of things but is approachable – I had no background in OT studies. It compares and contrasts Jewish thought to what we see in the cultures around it, to glean understanding both from what they had in common (eg, the divine council) and how they differed (eg, no images in the temple). Super interesting.

The author teaches at Wheaton.