Reddit reviews From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends

The original authors (and later editors and redactors) weren't children of the Enlightenment like us. There's nothing to suggest they would have seen these as “plot holes” the way we do.

One scholarly perspective is that the authors intended to demythologize already familiar Sumerian myths in order to generate Yahweh-centric backstories for themselves—consistency be damned. See: From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends.

That's why questions such as “Where did Cain get his wife?” make little sense. That type of world-building isn't found in the original Farmer vs Shepherd myths (e.g. Dumuzid and Enkimdu) and isn't a concern for the Genesis authors either. By the way, the answer is that Cain got his wife from the same place all unjustified plot devices come from: Out of the writer's own ass. In modern times we call this sloppy storytelling and that's okay because this isn’t modern literature.

According to Assyriologist Samuel Kramer, this Sumerian baggage is most apparent when examining Eve in light of Ninti, goddess of childbirth, as found in the story Enki and Ninhursanga which presents many themes later incorporated into Genesis: a utopian garden, forbidden plants, and the creation of entities from various body parts.

At the end of Enki and Ninhursanga is a pun-filled section where eight deities are extracted from eight body parts—each body part sharing a core syllable with the deity's name. Ninti (whose name means Giver of Life) comes from Enki's rib because ti is also the word for rib.

This pun is completely lost in Hebrew which is why Eve's creation is such a head-scratcher for those who don't read Sumerian literature. The mystery disappears when you understand Eve as a demythologized Hebrew Ninti.

The following quote is from Janet Smith's Dust or Dew: Immortality in the Ancient Near East and in Psalm 49:

> “Eve has subsumed Ninti's identity as the Mother of all the Living [but] it would be an error to think that a simple borrowing has occurred here. The borrowing is polemical which deliberately modifies the old tradition in order to establish a new paradigm. It is unique to Israelite theology that Eve is a human, representing Yahweh and is no goddess.”

These traditions may represent some of the narrative commitments that the authors of Genesis were saddled with when crafting the Adam and Eve story.

You wanted to be part of the intelligentsia, but throughout your philosophical journey, you always based your convictions only on authority and tradition instead of on evidence and arguments. Don't you realize that this is the epitome of anti – intellectualism?

It is correct that the New Atheists aren't the pinnacle of atheistic thought and didn't contribute many new ideas to the academic debate of atheism vs. theism or religion. But this was never their goal, and it is also unnecessary, since the academic debate is already over for many decades. If you want to know why the arguments for theism are all complete nonsense and not taken seriously anymore, why Christianity is wrong just about everything and why apologists like Craig are dishonest charlatans who make a living out of fooling people, your reading list shouldn't be New Atheists, but rather something like this:

Colin Howson – Objecting to God

George H. Smith – Atheism: The Case Against God

Graham Oppy – Arguing about Gods

Graham Oppy – The Best Argument Against God

Herman Philipse – God in the Age of Science

J. L. Mackie – The Miracle of Theism

J. L. Schellenberg – The Wisdom to Doubt

Jordan Sobel – Logic and Theism

Nicholas Everitt – The Non-Existence of God

Richard Gale – On the Nature and Existence of God

Robin Le Poidevin – Arguing for Atheism

Stewart Elliott Guthrie – Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion

Theodore Drange – Nonbelief & Evil



[Avigor Shinan – From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends] (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0827609086)

Bart Ehrman – The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings

Bart Ehrman – Jesus, Interrupted

Bart Ehrman – Misquoting Jesus

Burton L. Mack – Who Wrote the New Testament?

Helmut Koester – Ancient Christian Gospels

John Barton, John Muddiman – The Oxford Bible Commentary

John Dominic Crossan – Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography

Karen Armstrong – A History of God

Mark Smith – The Early History of God

Randel McCraw Helms – Who Wrote the Gospels?

Richard Elliott Friedman – Who Wrote the Bible?

Robert Bellah – Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

Robert Walter Funk – The Gospel of Jesus

Not necessarily with heroes conceived of as human, but as humanized versions of mythic tropes about gods. Elijah, for example, seems to have some parallels to sun god tropes (Ignaz Goldzhier, Mythology among the Hebrews and its historical development). Also try From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends by Avigdor Shinan and Yair Zakovitch

Mark S Smith - The Early History of God
(warning - a bit more scholarly than the other more populist books below)

https://www.amazon.com/Early-History-God-Biblical-Resource/dp/080283972X

Avigdor Shinan - From Gods to God

https://www.amazon.com/Gods-God-Debunked-Suppressed-Changed/dp/0827609086

The Bible Unearthed - Israel Finkelstein

https://www.amazon.com/Bible-Unearthed-Archaeologys-Vision-Ancient/dp/0684869136

Who Wrote the Bible, and The Exodus - Richard Friedman

https://www.amazon.com/Wrote-Bible-Richard-Elliott-Friedman/dp/0060630353

https://www.amazon.com/Exodus-Richard-Elliott-Friedman/dp/0062565249

From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends

ME

Hey! Funny, I had tacos for dinner last night. Now that I'm not working in [city], it's a lot harder to get out there for taco tuesday, but you're right, we do need to meet up, and doing so with tacos would be great! I just looked at my calendar...I don't have an open tuesday until freaking NOVEMBER. We'll have to plan something different....how do your weekends usually look? Maybe we can meet up for a Saturday morning breakfast or something.

>How about this, how can the solution to so many problems that people have and have had for years not be real?

Are there not a countless number of other solutions that people have attempted and been successful at? Are there not mental tricks that work in pulling people out of personal slumps? Is the placebo effect not real? Is the "God" solution really that special of a solution?

>I know you say you haven't had much personal experience with God working in your life but I know I have and I know rooms full of people who share their experiences and testimonies reversing the course of their lives through God when nothing else worked.

Have you looked into testimonials or experiences of people who have made significant changes without God? If not, then this is simply confirmation bias. If you continually go to rooms full of Christians claiming God changed their life and you don't go to the rooms where the Buddhist says Buddha changed his life, then OF COURSE all you're going to see is God changing lives.

>I really feel the evidence is in the transformation of these people's lives and my own and comes through the spiritual plane that you referenced. I know you would say it's a combination of chemical factors in brain activity but it still took introducing God into the equation that triggered those reactions changes that are very real.

Is the feeling that something is evidence good enough to lead to there actually being evidence? Again, people have had transformations for plenty of reasons, God being one of them, but it's not the only reason. What if I had a life changing transformation because I chose to accept that Krishna was the ultimate creator? If I accept that sure, my life sucks now, but if I strive to be good, ultimately I'll be reincarnated into a better situation? Say I've sat in rooms full of people talking about how they've been reincarnated into better people, or people describing how their life changed once they accepted that they will be reincarnated, and I feel that those transformations are the evidence for that being true, does that make it actually true? Furthermore, now that I've witnessed transformation accounts from the Christian, the Hindu, and the Buddhist, how do I make a determination on which one is actually true? Are they all true? Is one of them true? Maybe none are true? How would I know? Because they all access this "spiritual plane" as their source of divine improvement...obviously, they can't all be right, but how do we figure out which one is?

>The second thought I had was what about prophecy? I know you have talked about the history of the Bible being unreliable in some ways but like how do you reconcile Daniel and his interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream and then Alexander the Great coming in dividing that Kingdom and then it being divided again into the four kingdoms Daniel spoke about. Obviously that's one example of hundreds but has been historically proven.

This is actually a very interesting topic to look into. So, what ABOUT prophecy? With Daniel, there is more literary evidence leading us to believe that it was written much, much later than the events being written about than there is evidence for it being actually prophetic in nature. The Wikipedia article on Daniel does a decently thorough job of summarizing the scholarly consensus and the reasons why it's a literary construct of a much later time. There is a ton devoted to Daniel within Biblical scholarship, so if you want some reading recommendations beyond the wiki page, I can pull together some material for you. On prophecies in general, there is an entire RationalWiki page dedicated to that as well. I personally went through the Matthean prophecies of the birth account and cited OT sources with my own commentary on why they don't hold. This was a project I started probably a year or two ago, which ultimately died as I got pulled into other interests, but if you'd like that spreadsheet I can dig it up as well. As far as prophecies being "historically proven"...you might want to dig a bit deeper into that statement. For every christian source describing the fulfillment of a prophecy, look up the scholarly commentary as well and compare the two. I guarantee that as you do that, each prophecy will look more and more suspicious.

Really, to look into this more broadly, you'd want to look into the dating of the biblical books and why we think they're dated as such. You'll find yourself pulled into the Documentary Hypothesis, Dueternomistic History, etc. Actually, I was listening to a lecture series on Audible, "The World of Biblical Israel", which goes into some detail on why scholars on the whole believe the Bible didn't really begin it's composition until after the Israelites were captured by the Babylonians.

On somewhat of a related note, a book I just finished that I found very interesting/enlightening was Avigdor Shinan's "From gods to God". This book gives a very thorough scholarly treatment to a lot of the hmmmm moments of the OT, tying out passages to potential sources. If you're interested in reading it, send me your address and I'll buy you a copy :)

As usual, it's great talking with you. Let me know if you want to do a Saturday breakfast or something, I have a greater chance of getting that to happen than I do making Taco Tuesday happen.
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>[We met up for a Saturday breakfast and I passed off a book by John Loftus, "Why I Became an Atheist"
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ME

Thought I'd forward along where [preacher] and I are currently at. It's the same document as before, just longer now. It picks up on page 9 with his response. I'm left ultimately disappointed in his arguments, for various reasons I'm sure you'll pick up on. Anyways, how's the book?? (If you've cracked it yet, that is).
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FRIEND

Thanks Bud, honestly it's hard for me to read this stuff and not get a headache but I'm glad to have some insight into your brain working things out. As I said I'm not much of a reader but I am working to do a little more of it. Sorry that [preacher]'s answers aren't satisfying. Did you ever finish the video I sent you? I found another one that I've had to listen to a few times to wrap my head around and thought you might like it if you want I'll send it to you. Not sure what your schedule is looking like for October but we should try for breakfast again in the next 3 or 4 weeks. Hope you guys are in good health . Talk to you soon.

P.s what are your thoughts on subatomic particles? They're supposed to make up the entire universe but nobody's ever seen one so do they exist?
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ME

I will say: if my conversations with [preacher] make your head hurt...boy, you’re in for a treat with that book lol Listen, if there’s anything I’ve said that you want clarification on, please let me know. I don’t want you to come away thinking I said one thing when I meant something different, you know? Did it at least make sense WHY his arguments were unsatisfying?

As to finishing the video, are you talking about the Ravi Zacharius one? If so, yes, and I’ve watched a handful more of his talks as well. I will say that he is a very entertaining speaker and I get some enjoyment from listening to him, however his arguments are the same old ones simply rehashed and elongated to fit his speaking style. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before, which means it’s still unconvincing. When it comes to apologetics, there is never really any new way of saying anything, it’s simply said a different way in hopes that it may sneak by someone’s suspicions.

As far as meeting up, I’d love to at some point. Let me look at my schedule and get back to you.
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>[This is where the email exchange ends. We've exchanged a few messages via text and we've met up for another Saturday breakfast, but at that point he hadn't cracked the book yet. As of today, we haven't connected for about 6 months.

'From Gods to God...' ? Looks like it is on [Amazon](
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gods-God-Debunked-Suppressed-Changed/dp/0827609086/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1524133333&sr=8-1)

The book "From Gods to God" suggests something about the Babel narrative which - given the tone of the rest of the book - I suspect it is a bit of midrashy apologetics, so I'd like to hear what you have to say about it. The author's premise is that Jacob's visions of the ladder leading to heaven in Bethel is meant to parallel the story of Babel; as if to say you can only reach God from Canaan, not Babylon.

I'd only ever heard it was an etiological tale for the origins of the name 'Bethel', so I would be curious to find out if there is more to the story.

A lot of people have left some excellent suggestions here. I just want to point out that "From Gods to God" is just $21.46 for the paperback or $9.99 for the Kindle edition, on Amazon. But really, that book is more of an entertaining look at different biblical stories and what we can tell about how they developed, rather than a comprehensive overview like Mark Smith or Karen Armstrong give.

Wow, this is amazing, thank you for taking the time to put all this together.

Since you mentioned taking recommendations, I didn't see From Gods to God. It looks at the origins of the myths in the Hebrew Bible and shows how the authors appropriated them for their own purposes. Here's a PDF you can review.