The Concept of "Myth" in Holy Scripture

The Concept of “Myth” in the Holy Scripture

Assignment: The Priestly Account of the Creation (Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a) has been referred to as a “mythical poem.” Define “myth” as this term is used in the study of religious literature. In what sense might the Priestly Account of the Creation be considered a “mythical poem”?

The term “myth” may be used in many ways. In popular, unscholarly use, the word may refer to something fictitious, a story with no basis in fact, a fable, a tale, a figment of the imagination (cf. the way it is used in I Timothy 1:4). The 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines “myth” this way:

A purely fictitious narrative, usually involving supernatural persons, actions, or events, and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena. Often used vaguely to include any narrative having fictitious elements. 

In a more technical sense philosophers and theologians speak of “myth” as a way of thinking, a method of interpreting ultimate truth. Myth is “a form of speculative thought that attempts to underpin the chaos of human experience so that it may reveal the features of a structure—order, coherence, and meaning.” 

Related to this is the sense in which Biblical interpreters use it: “myth” in religious studies and religious literature is basically a literary form that attempts to describe “other-worldly” matters by using “this-worldly” language and concepts. More specifically, a myth is a traditional story, usually focusing on the activities of gods or god-like heroes, often in explanation of natural phenomena, such as the origin of the sun, or the origin of the customs, institutions, or religious rites of a people.

This sense of myth as a literary form that describes other-worldly matters using this-worldly language and concepts would include any story that attempts to talk about God in human terms. In this sense, there is something “mythical” about the entire Bible. But two kinds of passages in the Bible especially have a mythical character. The first group includes the stories of the creation and primeval history or pre-history in Genesis 1-11, along with other scattered references to primeval events.

The second group includes those books and passages that deal with ideas about the end of history or the end of this present age and the “Day of the Lord.” These are primarily “apocalyptic” or “eschatological” passages in the prophetic books, and in the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible, II Esdras in the Apocrypha, and the Revelation in the New Testament.

Certain “pseudepigraphical” works that did not make it into the Jewish or Christian canons of Scripture also may be characterized as being heavily or entirely of a mythological character. Other parts of the Bible may occasionally use mythical language or ways of thinking but do not use myth as a full-blown literary form to the extent that it is found in the sections mentioned above.

Now any attempt to describe God, or ideas about God's activities and purposes, can be only partly successful. Human language simply is not capable of describing human relations with God and the supernatural. For example, religious people may refer to God as a “heavenly Father.” But if the word “Father” does tell us something about God, yet it can also be misleading. My father is the husband of my mother, but God is not.

Furthermore, most of us would probably feel that God has many characteristics that our fathers do not have. Some people, of course, have had fathers whose behavior has been the very opposite of what they consider Godly. Unfortunately, the very use of the term “Father” for God has led some persons to have a negative image of God for the very reason that God has been thought to be like some of those kinds of fathers!

So the word “Father” when used to characterize God, can say both too much and too little. It does not really describe God at all. At best it may give some of us a clue to some of the attributes of the God we might worship or in Whom we might believe. At worst it can be misleading. Thus, religious scholars would say that it is mythological to speak of God as a Father, because human, this-worldly concepts are being used to express something about the Divine and the other-worldly.

And if we then speak further of a “heavenly” Father, we are being even more mythological in our thinking. Just what does the word “heavenly” mean when a person speaks of God? When the first person in space, the Soviet Cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, came back from his trip into space indicating that he had seen neither God nor angels there, most Americans laughed at his naiveté, because we never really expected he would encounter the Divinity out there anyway.

In our modern world of space travel and knowledge of astronomy the myth has somehow lost a great deal of its meaning. The concept of a God located “up” there in “heaven” is seen to be a “mythological” idea, because we have become well aware that in outer space there is, in fact, no “up” or “down” at all. Those categories can only be used relative to one's location on earth. 

Originally this concept of a heavenly God simply was meant to say that God is not conceived of as a mortal, human being, a mere “earthling,” nor as a corpse whose body is buried beneath the ground in the place of the dead. Therefore, God must be “up” in heaven, beyond the skies, where He cannot be seen or controlled by mere mortals. And from there God can exercise some oversight over the world that He brought into being. So we begin to see that there is really a deeper, more profound meaning to the concept of a heavenly God than just a matter of geographic location.  And it is not difficult to get the point.

It is clear that the idea of a God in heaven expresses the concept of the sovereignty and transcendence of God, that God is utterly different from human beings, both “above” and “beyond” mere humanity. For the Hebrews, as for people throughout the ancient Near East this sense of “beyond-ness” was expressed in terms of a vast distance upward from earth into space. In other words, this “other-worldly” essence of their concept of God was conceived of in a “this-worldly” spatial category.

Now when we interpret Biblical texts using these kinds of mythical concepts or language, some scholars suggest that the interpreter has two alternatives. Either the interpreter must give up speaking of God at all, or else he must attempt to re-interpret the Biblical statements about God in terms that are more meaningful in the terminology and concepts of today's culture.  This process has sometimes been called “de-mythologizing.” I prefer to just call it what it is: interpretation. Sometimes it is a difficult or even a painful process, but it is often a necessary one, and it can be an exciting process as well.

When we talk about myth not just as a way of thinking, but also as a literary form, as in the stories of Genesis 1-11, we see that myth is, first of all, a story—it tells of actions that are done by someone. But it is different from most stories, in that we are not necessarily supposed to think that the action happened at some place and at some time that is just like other places and times. The time and the place are usually somewhat mysterious.  Even if the place is named in the story, and is well-known, it will seem different, changed, and timeless.

This is because the myth speaks of things that have to do with God or the gods, and when events or people or things are touched by the Divine or the supernatural they become somehow “different,” timeless and mysterious. Therefore in a myth it is pointless to ask if the things “really happened” as they are described. When we say “really happened” we usually mean that phrase in an every-day sense that common things happen, and this is just not the case in a myth.

But myths are more than just bits of literature. They speak of the most important things that lie at the heart of a religion. They are not just stories about events long ago, even very mysterious events long ago.  They speak of the deepest things of life at any time.

For example, if the myth is about creation, the point is not simply that long ago something happened that caused the world to be here. The point is that the created world and all that exists stands in a particular relationship with the God or gods who created it, and that relationship is what is being described in the myth.

Thus, the myth says something that is true about the world now, as the story-teller or narrator understands it. And thus, we need to overcome the common idea we may have gotten that myths are just childish fables. They are, in fact, the deepest expressions of truth that a culture or a society or a people understands about itself, and these truths cannot be simply re-stated in everyday street language without losing something from their meaning. Myths describe how people saw their own lives and actions and relationships under the conditions of their existence in the world before the deities they worshipped.

Thus, in the case of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, we have to do essentially with great confessions of faith that account for the realities of human life and religious experience as the ancient Hebrew story-tellers understood them. Here the Hebrew story-tellers answer the great questions that have always stirred human beings with a resounding affirmation of faith in a personal Creator Who is both righteous and cares for His creation, and Who has made human beings for fellowship with God and with each other. Here are pictured our repeated human sin and folly and their consequences. With uncommon clarity the capricious acts of human life are exposed, along with the unvarying purpose of God to bring “blessing” through a “chosen people” to all human beings.

The late German novelist Thomas Mann, speaking of myth, once said, “It is, it always is, however much men may try to say, it was.” That is to say, when we are talking about the kinds of events that happen in mythical stories, we can say, “These things never were, but they always are!”

It is true that some of the stories in the early chapters of Genesis are in fact quite similar to other myths of the ancient Near East, especially those of Mesopotamia. Perhaps they are even ultimately drawn from them. It is clear, however, that these stories, in the mouths and hands of Israel’s story-tellers and recorders, have already undergone a kind of theological refinement.

To a considerable extent the stories of Genesis 1-11 have already been somewhat “demythologized” prior to their being placed in the Hebrew Bible in the form in which we now have them. But in this one regard they still retain a quality of “myth”—namely, that these stories exist, and are told and retold, recorded, read, and re-read, not for their “was-ness,” but for their “is-ness.” They tell of things that may never have happened historically, but their narrators understood that these things happen every day to people just like you and me.