Accessing Ancient Thoughts and Ancient Thinking

Thoughts on biblical literalism and the Hebrews believing these stories to be “real” or “historically” and “scientifically” accurate/valid.

First: It’s impossible to even use these terms in a meaningful context when referring to ancient beliefs in relation to our own, as concepts like “science”, as we conceive of them, would not exist for 3-4,000 years after ancient people lived.  For example, until Isaac Newton’s treatises on physics, no one had ever conceived of the heavens – the sun, the stars, the moon, other planets – as having mass.  Think about that for a minute.  Second, because of this, no one had ever conceived of those objects as objects, and thus it was impossible to conceive of those “objects” being guided or rules by “natural laws” that govern objects here, on earth: such as gravity.  Even the much more advanced Classical Greeks were 2,000 years away from conceiving of gravity, as we understand it.

If the Hebrews believed Noah could stuff every single living organism into a boat the size of the Kibbie dome, this is largely for a couple reasons you and I can no longer even accurately imagine:

a) You probably could stuff every organism these people had ever seen into a space that size, because they had never ventured out of a very limited (and mostly desert) geographical area (in other words, they could have no way of knowing how many animals there really were out there in the world, and there weren't really all that many animals in their own region).

b) It would be Aristotle, separated by a thousand years and a thousand miles, who would first come up with the idea of actually carefully cataloging (studying, analyzing, listing) living creatures, and his ideas didn’t exactly spread like wildfire.  Ancient peoples could not even begin to think of what “all living creatures” meant.

So when we struggle to understand the ancient people who wrote these ancient Sumerian, Hebrew and Greek texts, realize that their beliefs were, even if “correct” or “accurate”, formed in an entirely different manner than we approach them today.  If, for example, you choose to believe Noah could live to be 600, or that the earth could be formed in six days, you are making a choice between competing ways of seeing the natural world:  that choice is between what we now call scientific thinking vs. religious thinking, or scientific knowledge vs. revelation.  The ancients did not have this choice;  there was no scientific way of conceiving of nature. Period.   At all.  The belief that all things could be stuffed onto an ark was the “scientific” belief of that time.

Second: Keep in mind the fact that all ancient peoples thought about what we now call the "natural" or physical world this way, not just the Hebrews.  That is to say, there was no "natural" or physical world in the ancient mind, at all: there was no germ theory, no concept of what volcano is or how and why it works, no concept, for that matter, of what a cloud was, or why water falls from the sky, no concept that the sun was not a living being....

Third:  All ancient peoples in all ancient times took their gods seriously and literally.  Certainly the Greeks and Romans worshipped their gods as “True” in exactly the same way the Hebrews did; when Sumerians, Greeks, Roman or Hebrews sacrificed animals at the alters of their lords, they all believed that literally, truly, such sacrifices would determine the outcome of what we now call "natural" events, as well as the course of human history.

Yet, given how differently we now see the "natural" world,  we can still approach and find meaningful the stories of, say, Bronze-age Greek people, regardless of whether or not we believe Athena was a true God, one who’s existence was every bit as “real” as the God of the Hebrews, or Christ.  We don’t need to believe that Odysseus or Sir Gawain or Hamlet was real to learn from his experience.  That is the beauty of literature.

So: recall once again that we do not care, in this class, whether the Hebrew scriptures or the New Testament are accurate or reflect real, ontological truths about the nature of the universe.  Those questions are ones to be worked out in churches or laboratories.  And we are neither.