Wednesday, January 19, 2022

Eric Ortlund on "Myth" and the Bible

  

. . . myth, in the best and most subtle meaning of the word, refers to symbolic narratives that address cosmic realities of chaos and order. In the ancient world, myth has to do with those deep, foundational realities and archetypal relations between heaven and earth that order human existence but are difficult to state directly and so are usually invoked in symbols. . . . Any division between ‘myth’ and ‘history’ is a modern idea that would have been foreign to ancient writers – but just such a division used to be common in biblical studies, such that the literature of the ANE was placed firmly in the category of myth and the Old Testament described in contrast as history.  There are, however, so many examples from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt of historical events being described in mythic ways that this distinction is untenable and has largely been abandoned. Ancient Semites simply do not think of myth and history in dichotomous ways. Furthermore, there are enough connections between the Old Testament and the literature of the surrounding cultures that it is reasonable to assume that biblical authors would not have made a strong disjunction between what we might dismiss as ‘mythic’ and what is real – ‘mythic’ here referring to cosmic action on God’s part to establish order and beat back chaos and darkness, uncleanness and death.

 

All of this is to say that scholarly literature on myth uses the word in a very different sense from its meaning in colloquial English. . . . To register these nuances about the term ‘myth’ is in no way to reduce the Bible to one more human religious production from the ANE or to imply it is no different from ancient pagan myths or idolatrous texts. In fact, study of the literature of the ANE reveals as many differences between it and the Old Testament as it does similarities. For example, although YHWH thunders in the heavens (Ps. 18:13) and makes the storm clouds his chariot (Ps. 104:3) just as Baal does, he also far transcends Baa’s limitations, even defeating death (Isa. 25:6-9) – something Baal never accomplished. (Eric Ortlund, Piercing Leviathan: God’s Defeat of Evil in the Book of Job [New Studies in Biblical Theology 56; Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2021], 7-8)