Walking the Bible Read Online Free PDF Page A

create, in succession, light, the firmament, dry land, heavenly lights, animals, and man. Afterward he rests and celebrates.
    “So you see,” Avner said, “in both stories, water precedes everything, a struggle ensues, and everything else emerges from that.”
    “But when Westerners imagine God creating the world,” I said, “they don’t imagine a struggle.”
    “Yes, but the struggle is still there,” he said. “The Bible states very clearly, ‘And God says, “Let there be light.” And there was light. And God saw the light: that it was good.’ Here you have the start of good things and bad things. On the third day God says twice that something is good. There is clearly an echo of struggle here, getting rid of evil.”
    “So how did that echo get there?” I asked. “The biblical story was written down in the first millennium B.C.E. These stories come from the third millennium.”
    “Ah. That’s the story of the Bible. Though it was written down later, large parts of it consist of oral traditions that were passed down for hundreds of years, many with the same words. The Bible, like The Iliad, combines large amounts of ancient texts.”
    In the story of Adam and Eve, for example, ideas like the tree of life, the snake, and man being made from clay were well known in Mesopotamia. The name Eve is derived from a Sumerian pun on the word for rib. Even the Garden of Eden has ancient roots. In one prototype, the god Enki summons water from the ground to create a garden, which the mother-goddess fills with plants. When Enki eats these plants without permission he is ostracized and cursed to die. In the story, the garden is located “east of Sumer.”
    Genesis also places its garden “eastward, in Eden” and begins with a watering:“There went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground.” The Bible seems to place Eden near Sumer specifically, saying the garden is located at the junction of four rivers. One of those rivers is the Euphrates, another the Tigris. Though we are only in the second chapter, and clearly in the realm of allegory, already the Bible is rooting itself firmly in the ground, in actual places, in geography. Thestories seem to be reaching out, saying:These are not mere tales—this is not recreation—these words are as indispensable to you as the landscape, the soil, even water itself. Stories, like rivers, give life.
    “All of which raises a question,” I suggested. The light was mostly gone by now and a green haze had settled over the bank. The cows had wandered away, leaving only a stir of mosquitoes. “If these stories draw so heavily from Mesopotamia, how are they different?”
    Avner removed his glasses and smiled, as if he had been waiting for this. “The difference is God,” he said. “He’s much more abstract. There’s no biography, no mythology. He just appears and begins to create the world, using only words as tools. Yet from the beginning, he’s solely in control—at least of nature. His ability to control man is much less complete.”
    The next morning we headed out early for a two-day drive into the highlands. Quickly the terrain began to change. The congestion of Diyarbakir faded, giving way to pastoral surroundings that seemed to grow more antiquated as we climbed higher. The roads deteriorated and mud houses appeared, with sheaths of tan-colored sesame on the roof. Turkeys scurried in the yards, where men on stools played backgammon. Women with black veils, balancing baskets of zucchini on their heads, dotted the roadside.
    Eventually our conversation turned as well. With so much focus on rivers, it was only natural that ancient storytellers fixate on one notable side effect: floods. The Bible gets to this almost immediately, in the sixth chapter of Genesis. After telling the story of the Garden of Eden, the text outlines the successive generations that lead from Adam and Eve to all humanity. Eight generations into this line, Lamech gives