1. Ancient Mesopotamian, Hebrew, and Greek myths involved ideas of creation from chaos, divine conflict establishing order, and floods punishing humanity. 2. The Genesis creation account and flood story find precedents in earlier Mesopotamian myths like Enuma Elish. Debate continues on dating of Genesis sources and their relationship to other ancient Near Eastern myths. 3. Early Greek philosophers like Anaxagoras and Empedocles proposed naturalistic origins for the cosmos and living things, rejecting divine creation yet still retaining supernatural elements. Democritus proposed an atomic theory of matter in constant motion.

1. ANCIENT IDEAS
Babylonian - Hebrew - Greek

2. MYTH
A fiction or half-truth, especially one that forms part of an
ideology.
A traditional, typically ancient story dealing with supernatural
beings, ancestors, or heroes that serves as a fundamental type
in the worldview of a people, by explaining aspects of the
natural world or delineating the psychology, customs, or ideals
of the society.

3. SOCIOLOGICAL FUNCTION
“The primary function of myth is to validate and existing social
order. Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising
tradition on a pedestal. … Because myth anchors the present
in the past, it is a sociological charter for a future society which
is an exact replica of the present one.” (Anne Oakley)

6. MESOPOTAMIA
Between Tigris & Euphrates Rivers –
the “Fertile Crescent’
6000 BCE - 4000 BCE -
Development of Sumerian cities
2330 BCE - Akkadian invasion from
Northern Mesopotamia
Clay Tablets (cuneiform script)

7. BABYLONIAN RELIGION
Polytheistic - a god for each
city
Priestly sect - literacy
Temples
No after-life

8. ENUMA ELISH
Creation from Chaos
Division
Establishment of a divine ruler
Divine conflict

9. BERESHIT / GENESIS

10. 1. The waters above the
firmament
2. Storage of snow
3. Storage of hail
4. Rooms for the winds
5. The firmament
6. Cataracts
7. The Pillars of Heaven
8. The Pillars of Earth
9. Fountains of the Abyss
10. Center of the Earth
11. Subterranean waters
12. Rivers of the
Underworld

11. A STATIONARY EARTH
• “The LORD is king, robed with majesty; the LORD is robed, girded with
might. The world will surely stand in place, never to be moved.” [Psalms 93:1]
• “The LORD is king. The world will surely stand fast, never to be
moved.” [Psalms 96: 10]
• “You fixed the earth on its foundation, never to be moved.” [Psalms 104: 5]
• “Tremble before him, all the earth; he has made the world firm, not to be
moved.” (1 Chronicles 16: 30]
• “So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down
about a whole day.” [Joshua 10:13]

13. AGE OF THE EARTH
James Ussher
Annals of the Old Covenant from
the First Origin of the World
(1650)
Creation on the evening
preceding Sunday, 23rd October
4004 BCE
6,014 year old versus
4,550,000,000 year old (±1%)

14. AGE OF THE EARTH
18th C - Buffon used cooling
to estimate 100,000 years
19th C - James Hutton
introduces “deep time”
19th C - Lord Kelvin
estimated 98,000,000 years
By 1900, no scientist
accepted a young earth.

15. WHO WROTE THE
PENTATEUCH?
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,
Deuteronomy
Nineteenth Century preoccupation
with authentication
Discovery of “doublets” based on
linguistic style and repetition. Then
triplets ...
Lead to the “Documentary Hypothesis”

16. THE DOCUMENTARY
HYPOTHESIS
J: ‘YHVH’ - Jehovah - JHWH; ~1000 BCE, southern kingdom of
Judah
E: ‘Elohim’; ~850 BCE, northern kingdom of Israel
P: Priestly (concerned with rites, duties and genealogy) –
between 550 and 450 BCE
D: Book of Deuteronomy - between 650 & 621 BCE
R: “Redactors”

19. GENESIS I:1-2
When G-d began to create heaven
and earth, and the earth then was
welter and waste and darkness
over the deep and G-d's breath
hovering over the waters, G-d said,
"Let there be light." And there was
light. And G-d saw the light, that it
was good, and G-d divided the light
from the darkness.And G-d called
the light Day, and the darkness He
called Night. And it was evening
and it was morning, first day.

20. GENESIS 1:1 - 2:4
• (heavens & earth) / light
• Heaven (separates waters)
• Dry land (Earth), seas, vegetation, trees,
fruit “according to their own kinds”
• Sun, moon and stars
• Sea monsters, aquatic animals, “winged
birds”
• “Cattle and creeping things and beasts
of the earth according to their kind” /
Man (Male and Female)

21. GENESIS 1:1 - 2:4
• P account dating from the Exile
in Babylon, 6th C BCE
• Creation of universe
• Order over chaos
• Lush environment
• Splitting of water
• Transcendent God

22. GENESIS 2:4 -
On the day the LORD G-d made earth
and heavens, no shrub of the field being
yet on the earth and no plant of the
field yet sprouted, for the LORD G-d
had not caused rain to fall on the earth
and there was no human to till the soil,
and wetness would well from the earth
to water all the surface of the soil, then
the LORD G-d fashioned the human,
and blew into his nostrils the breath of
life, and the human became a living
creature. And the LORD G-d planted a
garden in Eden, to the east, and He
placed there the human He had
fashioned.

23. GENESIS 2:4 -
• Man not heavens important
• Barren earth (no water / no
tiller)
• Order different
• Man, plants, animals, woman

24. GENESIS 3 -4
• Fall of Man [3]
• First sin / Origin of childbirth [3:16]
• Lower status of women [3:16]
• Who/what is the Serpent?
• Good or evil?
• Why expulsion? [3:22]
• Cain & Abel [4]
• Agriculture / Murder

25. GENESIS 2:4 -
• J account, dating from the
Reign of King Solomon. ~1000
BCE
• Imagery of wandering
shepherds
• Water / barren earth
• Concerned with man
• Anthropomorphic God

26. NOACHIAN FLOOD
600 year old Noah warned
by God, builds ark for family
and pair of each animal,
flood lasts 40 days / 40
nights, comes to rest at
Mountains of Arrarat.

27. IMPORTANCE OF THE FLOOD
Creation event itself cannot be studied
scientifically (as admitted by Morris, Gish
etc) ...
but a Global Deluge can.
Inference that the geological record shows
the marks of a global flood
Therefore, the Genesis flood account is
validated
Therefore, the totality of the Genesis
account is validated

28. “Billions of dead things
Buried in rock layers
Laid down by water
All over the earth.”

29. MESOPOTAMIAN FLOOD
• Tale
of Atrahasis (~ 2000
BCE)
• God Enki warns Atrahasis
• Ark / animals / family
• Known to Canaanites
• Source
of Hebrew account
or common source with it?

30. TOWER OF BABEL
God punishes people of “one
language and one speech” for
attempting to reach heaven
and defy his order to “multiply
and fill the earth”
Creation of languages &
races, dispersion of
humankind.

31. HENRY MORRIS
The Tower of Babel was “a true event
of history”
“the original mother of spiritual
harlotry and idolatrous abominations”
“ancient universal world-religion of
evolutionary pantheism”
“Satan himself is the originator of
evolution”
Enuma Elish is a Satanic corruption.

34. HISTORICAL FLOOD?
• 5 my BCE - Dry Mediterranean
• 18,000 BCE - End of Ice Age
• 10,000 BCE - New Euxine Lake becomes land-locked;
Beginning of concentration of tribes around the lake
• 5600 - Flooding of lake by Mediterranean and dispersal of
tribes

35. HISTORICAL FLOOD?
•2300 - Invasion of Akkadians from North into Babylonia
•2000 - Enuma Elish and Epic of Gilgamesh
•1000 - Genesis (J – Kingdom of Solomon)
•550 - Genesis (P – Exile in Babylon)

36. A FLOOD TO REMEMBER
• The Mediterranean was ~425 feet above the lake
• Expansion of the freshwater lake (now the saltwater Black Sea) north and east
• The flow would reach 10 cubic miles of water per day - 200 times the flow of
the present Niagara Falls.
• Its velocity would have reached 50 miles per hour (over 80 km/hour)
• Its noise would have been audible 120 miles (200 km) away.
• The lake level would have risen about six inches a day.
• The shoreline would have expanded up to a mile each day in some areas.

37. DISPERSAL

38. GREEK FLOOD MYTH
• Deucalion, son of Prometheus
• Zeus decides to destroy humanity
with a 9-day flood.
• Deucalion & Pyrrha survive, thanks
to a warning by Prometheus and a
boat which came to rest on the
top of Mt. Parnassus.
• The “bones of your mother” (Gaia
- Earth, i.e. stones) form humans.

39. HESIOD - THEOGONY

41. ANAXAGORAS
~500 - 428 BCE
A chaotic mix of matter (in
the form of miniature
spermata) was organized by
an independent Mind (Nous)
possessing all knowledge and
power.

42. ANAXAGORAS

43. EMPEDOCLES
490 – 430 BCE
Four eternal elements (fire,
air, water & earth) are
organized by Love and Strife,
with the latter gaining
increasing predominance.
Parts came together and only
those that were adapted
stayed together and survived.

44. DEMOCRITUS
~460 - 370 BCE
Everything is composed of
eternal, indestructible, indivisible
atoms that are in constant
motion; between atoms lies
empty space; there are an infinite
number & kinds of atoms, which
differ in shape, and size.
Creator? Designer?

45. Epicurus Lucretius

46. Plato Aristotle