Considering that Abram, later Abraham, was from the Sumerian city of Ur, there’s little doubt that he knew these stories and passed them along to his heirs, and they passed them on to theirs.
I don’t believe that the stories that were passed down orally at camp fires from one generation to the other were ever meant to be taken literally. They were sagas, meant to commemorate their leaders, to transform them into heroes whose deeds were bigger than life.
Clearly, the first hearers knew the contrivance, understood it as such, and thought nothing of this. It went with their appreciation of the genre, which was never about recording things as they happened, with all the specificities of inerrancy that seemed to evolve in some sects of our times. And of course, anyone who would question the literal truth of these stories and treat them as anything but fact is branded a heretic.
This approach has proven Voltaire right, time and time again— and indeed, we are witnessing this maxim in our own times: Who has the power to make people believe absurdities, also has the power to make them commit atrocities.
I couldn't agree more. Those first audiences knew a saga when they heard one, and the demand for literal inerrancy came much later, asking the stories to do a job they were never built for.
The Egyptian derived chapters of Proverbs is in the section entitled "Sayings of the Wise". The original author seems to have been collecting other aphorisms from outside of Israel, and ancient Egyptian wisdom literature tends to take the form of such proverbs as well. Only later when the book was determined to be entirely divinely inspired did people overlook what was essentially someone collecting local wisdom.
Considering that Abram, later Abraham, was from the Sumerian city of Ur, there’s little doubt that he knew these stories and passed them along to his heirs, and they passed them on to theirs.
I don’t believe that the stories that were passed down orally at camp fires from one generation to the other were ever meant to be taken literally. They were sagas, meant to commemorate their leaders, to transform them into heroes whose deeds were bigger than life.
Clearly, the first hearers knew the contrivance, understood it as such, and thought nothing of this. It went with their appreciation of the genre, which was never about recording things as they happened, with all the specificities of inerrancy that seemed to evolve in some sects of our times. And of course, anyone who would question the literal truth of these stories and treat them as anything but fact is branded a heretic.
This approach has proven Voltaire right, time and time again— and indeed, we are witnessing this maxim in our own times: Who has the power to make people believe absurdities, also has the power to make them commit atrocities.
I couldn't agree more. Those first audiences knew a saga when they heard one, and the demand for literal inerrancy came much later, asking the stories to do a job they were never built for.
The Egyptian derived chapters of Proverbs is in the section entitled "Sayings of the Wise". The original author seems to have been collecting other aphorisms from outside of Israel, and ancient Egyptian wisdom literature tends to take the form of such proverbs as well. Only later when the book was determined to be entirely divinely inspired did people overlook what was essentially someone collecting local wisdom.