Monday, January 01, 2007

Theory of Devolution -The Written Record

The earliest humans had this strange passion to record things. Very soon, in terms of years, not even generations, they would have noticed the cycles of the seasons and related them to the cycles of the moon. Some bright spark would have marked off the cycles on a rock or tree and writing would have been born. Others would draw pictures, some on the walls of caves and maybe elsewhere, but only the pictures in the protection of the caves remained.

Then there were the early Mesopotamians who wrote on stones. Perhaps we should say rather they scratched, chipped and chiselled on stone. This had a huge advantage of being rather more permanent. It shouldn't come as a great surprise that their story of creation, where the creators spoke the world into being, was the central theme for other people of the region's records of creation. While the stories may be similar, the principles behind the creation stories differ. The Bible story indicates a single deity speaking the creation into being. Others see multiple deities involved and sometimes even becoming part of the creation.

Abram the Hebrew came from Ur in Sumer, a region of Mesopotamia. The Sumerians were a highly developed and cultured people. There early ancestors wrote with a reed, on soft red clay, using wedge shaped symbols, called cuneiform. Abram would have known their stories of creation and the flood and believed in a multitude of gods and demons, but then God revealed himself to him as the single true God. Certainly, his newfound faith modified his understanding of creation. If God asked him, he would even have changed it completely. Later God changed his name to Abraham, the great patriarch of the Hebrews. God blest Abraham with great wealth and even if he could not write, he would have had scribes in his employ. Since he travelled, the writings would no doubt have been on scrolls. The Bible as we know it probably had its beginning then. Later of course, Moses would have collected and edited the stories into the Torah. Moses too had long conversations with God and these would have influenced the writings.

While there are common elements in the creation stories of Egypt and Mesopotamia the story of Eden is unique to the Torah and thus to the Bible, but it seems well integrated into the ancestry of Abraham and it is safe to assume it was part of some written record prior to the work of Moses. Since the names of Adam and Eve have Hebrew connotations it can be assumed it was very much part of Abraham's tradition and literature.