In the book Genesis As Myth by Edmund Leach, he stated that everybody has different views on myths in Genesis. For example, a German theologian defined myth as the expression of unobservable realities in terms of observable phenomena.” This theologian related this to devout Christians, which indicates that all sanctimonious Christians believe that the Bible is strictly a myth. However, I disagree with this argument because Christians believe that the Bible is not a myth, and the events that happened in the Bible are true.
My reasoning for that remark is that most Christians were raised to believe that the Bible is true and we weren’t able to argue with its readings. We feel that the importance of the myth is less probable. This German theologian believed that communication plays an important role in myths throughout the Bible. I believe that all mythological systems that recur in stories occur in many different versions. He stated that man is created in Genesis, and then he is created all over again. And, as if two first men were not enough, we also have Noah in chapter eight.”
A quote from the Bible that states ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end,’ saith the Lord.” The German theologian says that “God is against the world and the world itself forever dividing into opposites on either side: male and female, living and dead, good and evil, first and last.” In a different example, Edmund Leach stated that “Solomon the wise, the great king, the builder of the temple, nevertheless is a sinner in that he loved many strange women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites.” Taken at face value, the text of the Old Testament represents the relation between the various tribal groups involved as one of “binary segmentation” of the most consistent kind. The view that history in the Old Testament has more in common with production than with history in an “ordinary academic sense” is not itself at all new.
Relatively orthodox Van Rad points out that Saul’s disasters seem to follow one upon another with the inevitability of Greek tragedy.” I think that Van Rad demonstrated the existence of a kind of patterning which was not previously suspected in the previous verses of the Bible. To illustrate another point, Edmund Leach expresses that the “so-called primitive ignorance of paternity is nothing else but a very imperfect knowledge that intercourse is a necessary though not sufficient condition of the woman being opened up.” Jesus is a legal status as a man and his essential nature as God. Joseph is the husband of Mary, and in this legal sense, he belongs to the “lineage” of David. The divine basis derives from the fact that the male fragment of his conception was the Holy Spirit which entered Mary’s body by an unnatural route.
Edmund Leach indicated that Mary was impregnated through the ear.” In conclusion, I feel that Edmund Leach was a very good author, and his logic was very influential in my understanding of why myths can misguide one’s judgment and beliefs. I’ve tried to see the connections between the facts and the myths as we know them. In this book of Genesis and Myths, I feel that it is hard to determine the myths from the facts, as we discussed in class earlier.
Although this book helped me look into things more deeply, it made me wonder what is actually true or if it is just a myth.
