Episode 3 - The Biblical Creation Narrative

<p>Episode 3 draft</p><p><br></p><p>Episode 3 -  The Biblical Creation narrative. </p><p><br></p><p>[intro music]</p><p><br> Hi, my name is Clayton Mills.  Welcome to ‘A Short Walk through our Long History’ - a podcast where we look at the events of history, and try to see how those events shaped our modern world. Welcome to Episode 3 - The Biblical creation narrative.  Today we’re going to take a closer look at the creation story that’s found in the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible.  The story in Genesis is very different from the other creation narratives of the ancient world, in tone, content, and scope. </p><p><br></p><p>Every ancient culture had creation narratives, but not all of them survived.  Some of them we have good chunks of, and others mere fragments.  </p><p>  </p><p><br></p><p>The biblical narrative of creation, in Genesis, may only be part of a larger oral Hebrew creation story. </p><p><br></p><p> N   We might see some other fragments of this story in Job, and perhaps also in the Psalms.  There’s even some additional parts of the story that are told in the Talmud and the Mishnah.  The Talmud and Mishnah are very old Hebrew commentaries on the biblical text, plus comments on comments on what the earlier commentators were saying.  The Talmud and Mishna may also preserve an older oral tradition, outside of what was written in the Bible.  But the core of the creation story is told in Genesis.</p><p><br></p><p>As I mentioned last episode, it is really, really difficult to fix a date to the really ancient events that we have a record of, because the records that have survived don’t line up very well.  We don’t have all the records that were written down, because many of them didn’t survive.  They crumbled into dust over time, and were lost.  But copies were apparently preserved, and the copies we do have are copied very carefully, so we don’t see a lot of changes from the oldest copies to the most recent.  </p><p><br></p><p>Even the Bible has this issue -  we don’t have really ancie