‘In
the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’
Thus
The Bible begins. The Christian God, originally the God of the Israelites,
designed and created all of existence. Though I assume the term heaven really
just means the sky, limiting creation to the Earth alone, but I could be wrong
in my assumption.
When
God created the universe he also created Time, or so modern day Christians
believe. Before creation, they explain, there was no such concept as Time, it
simply did not exist. God of course exists outside of Time, being far more
ancient than the universe he created.
Where
did God originate?
According
to the people who believe in his existence God was not created, he has always
been, he will always be. He’s an eternal entity with no origin.
Now,
modern day Biblical scholars believe that Genesis was composed around the 7th
or 6th centuries B.C.E. it’s a well known fact, amongst the learned,
that the Biblical creation story is heavily influenced by the earlier
Babylonian Enuma Elish. The Babylonians believed in a pantheon of Gods and
Goddesses, but so did some Israelites, in ancient days there were opposing
views amongst the Israelites, the one we are all aware of is the monotheistic
belief , a singular God, Yahweh, who created everything. The less well known
view is that some Israelites followed a polytheistic belief, just like the
Babylonians, these Israelites had a pantheon of Gods and Goddesses. A Divine
Council, this was not unique to the Israelites nor the Babylonians, the
Sumerians, Akkadians, Egyptians, Celt, Greeks, Romans and Nordic folk had a
belief in a vast Divine Council.
The
Israelite Divine Council owed much to the Babylonians, but also the Canaanites.
In a Ugarit text it states that El and Ba’al resided over a council of the
Divine. El was adopted by the Israelites as a name form of Yahweh. Ba’al in
later Christian times was relegated to merely being a demon residing in Hell.
In
Christian belief they interpret these discrepancies in The Bible when it
appears a singular God is conversing with others as being his conversation with
an hierarchy of Archangels. They neglect the obvious, that the Israelites
worshipped many Gods, including the wife of Yahweh, Asherah, a Semitic Mother
Goddess, her history can be traced back to the Sumerian civilization,
apparently the world’s first civilization, in their pantheon of Gods and
Goddesses, Asherah was the wife of Anu, an influence on the Israelite Yahweh.
There
have been many other creation myths, independent of The Bible. The Ancient
Greeks believed that in the beginning there was Chaos. From Chaos was birthed
the Earth, Gaia, she produced Uranus, the sky, and he fathered upon Gaia many
children including The Titans, the Cyclopes and the Giants.
In
the Rig Veda creation myth Tvastr, the creator, created the Earth and the Sky,
which later produced an entire pantheon of Gods and Goddesses.
In
Chinese myth, there was the Cosmic Egg, which when it broke apart became the
Heavens and the Earth.
In
Babylonian myth, in the beginning there was Apsu and Tiamat, their reproduction
gave birth to the Gods and Goddesses. These Gods killed Apsu, Tiamat seeking
revenge was killed by the God Marduk, who divided Tiamat into the Heavens and
the Earth
Early
peoples, from all over the world, were interested in the question of their
origins, they had many imaginative stories, all fictional, but just as valid as
Genesis.
