Allegories often work like that, like Piers the Ploughman

They try to convey their point through a quasi-historical history. It was a very cmomon literary device of the time.

The creation account in Genesis was written by the Jews while in exile in Babylon. Held there, they encountered the Babylonian world view, which was that the world seemed cruel and harsh and unjust because the gods who had created it were cruel and harsh and unjust. That was totally at odds with everything that the Jews thought that they knew about their God. The creation account was written to convey what they believed about the nature of their God, as a counterpoint to the Bablyonian view. God was one; God was loving and kind; the world was not as he had wanted it to be; that was because he had given free will to all creation, including spiritual creation, and that free will had been exercised against him.

It wasn't written as history. Everyone at the time knew that the authors had not been around at the creation of the world.

Posted By: Old Git on May 16th 2007 at 13:27:06

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