Parker’s Reviews > Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton: A Religio-Historical Study of Genesis 1 and Revelation 12 (The Biblical Resource Series > Status Update

Finished with the OT portion of the study, and moving on to the NT -- the real reason I picked the book up in the first place!

Reading Gunkel's analyses of these texts, all prior to the discovery of the Ras Shamra texts, is a good reminder of the dangers of being overly sure of intertextual connections between ancient documents. So many of his connections to Enuma Eliš sound forced when the reader is familiar with the Baal Epic.

Chapter 1, "Genesis 1 is Not a Free Construction of the Author," may be one of the least convincing essays I've ever read. Nearly every argument can be boiled down to, "I don't understand how X element of the narrative fits into the whole, so it must be a holdover from an older myth where it made sense." This line of reasoning also assumes a 19th-century German understands the material better than the ancient editor.