Creation and Chaos

Before God made the world, did he first have to defeat it? A little over a century ago, the German scholar Hermann Gunkel argued just that: that Genesis 1 quietly assumes a battle with Rahab, Leviathan and Yam, the forces of chaos, with the end-of-days combat of Revelation mirrored at the very beginning. He drew on Babylonian material newly recovered in the early years of Assyriology, when George Smith's fragments of a Chaldean Genesis set scholars arguing over Babel and Bible.

These collected essays, arranged in five sections, test Gunkel's thesis against far fuller evidence, questioning the tidy structure he imposed on ancient Near Eastern myth while taking seriously the long cultural conversation between peoples who traded, fought and conquered one another for millennia. A rewarding, scholarly read for anyone curious about where the Bible's creation stories came from.