Creation And Chaos In The Primeval Era And The Eschaton

Foreword by Peter Machinist Hermann Gunkel's groundbreaking Schöpfung und Chaos, originally published in German in 1895, is here translated in its entirety into English for the first time. Even though available only in German, this work by Gunkel has had a profound influence on modern biblical scholarship. Discovering a number of parallels between the biblical creation accounts and a Babylonian creation account, the Enuma Elish, Gunkel argues that ancient Babylonian traditions shaped the Hebrew people's perceptions both of God's creative activity at the beginning of time and of God's re-creative activity at the end of time. Including illuminating introductory pieces by eminent scholar Peter Machinist and by translator K. William Whitney, Gunkel's Creation and Chaos will appeal to serious students and scholars in the area of biblical studies.

Hermann Gunkel was a scholar in the generation of the origins of Assyriology, the spectacular discovery by George Smith of fragments of the “Chaldean Genesis,” and the Babel-Bibel debate. Gunkel’s thesis, inspired by materials supplied to him by the Assyriologist Heinrich Zimmern, was to take the Chaoskampf motif of Revelation as an event that would not only occur at the end of the world but had already happened at the beginning, before Creation. In other words, in this theory, one imagines God in Genesis 1 as first having battled Rahab, Leviathan, and Yam (the forces of Chaos) in a grand battle, and only then beginning to create. The problem with Gunkel’s theory is that it did not simply identify common elements in the mythologies of the ancient Near East but imposed upon them a structure dictating the relationships between the elements, a structure that was based on inadequate knowledge and a forced interpretation of his sources. On the other hand, one is not entitled to insist that there was no cultural conversation among peoples who spent the better part of several millennia trading with, fighting, and conquering one another. Creation and Chaos attempts to address some of these issues. The contributions are organized into five sections that address various aspects of the issues raised by Gunekl’s theories.

The main theme of the collected essays is expressed clearly in the following statement by Eugene Ulrich in the beginning of his article: What was the state of the Pentateuch during the Second Temple period? Was it basically complete and static at the time of Ezra, or was it still developing in substantial ways? To pursue this main theme, the International Workshop on the Study of the Pentateuch with special emphasis on textual transmission history in the Hellenistic and Roman period was held on August 28-31, 2007 in Tokyo. Fifteen papers were read and discussed enthusiastically in the workshop, and they were later revised based on the discussion for this volume. Those who are interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls will find the recent scholarly trend in this volume.

Every new archaeological discovery in the Middle East bears further witness to the stature of "one of the most remarkable Old Testament scholars of modern times," as Hurman Gunkel is characterized by W.F. Albright in the introduction to this book. Relying on a highly developed sense of religious and aesthetic values, and a broad knowledge of literary forms, Gunkel found in the Patriarchal legends accurate memories of past happenings. Gunkel recognized the influence of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Canaanite elements and their transformation and integration into Hebrew thinking. He stood up against Wellhausen's widely influential treatment of Genesis as a collection of primitive, unhistorical myths. He prepared the way for contributions from cultural anthropology to the understanding of the Biblical period." The parallels between the life of Genesis and the activities mentioned in contemporary extra-biblical sources are very far-reaching indeed," Albright declares, as he reminds us that "Abraham turns out to have been a caravan leader, and the very name 'Hebrew' refers to donkey caravaneering."

"I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the LORD, who does all these things." Isaiah 45:7 When God created the world, he brought perfect order out of what was "without form and void." But with human rebellion against God leading to God's curse, disorder was introduced into creation—disorder that we still see all around us today. Tracing the chaos to cosmos theme from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, pastor-scholar Sidney Greidanus reveals how God is restoring his creation through Jesus Christ, who has already begun to shine light into the darkness and will one day return to bring peace, order, and restoration once and for all. With discussion questions at the end of each chapter and a fourteen-session reading plan, this book is ideal for small groups as well as individual study.

The author claims that the gospel of Mark is a speech or sermon. To prove this he shows how Mark used many of the elements of Aristotle's rhetoric. Literary critics noticed these rhetorical features in Mark, but remained with a literary critical model of that gospel instead of a rhetorical view that the evidence called for. They continued to translate the first word of Mark, arche, as "beginning" to provide Mark's story of Jesus with a chronological beginning. The author translates Mark's first word as "guiding principle" to provide Mark's persuasive speech or sermon with a logical starting point.

Chaos is a perennial source of fear and fascination. The original "formless void" (tohu-wa-bohu) mentioned in the book of Genesis, chaos precedes the created world: a state of anarchy before the establishment of cosmic order. But chaos has frequently also been conceived of as a force that persists in the cosmos and in society and threatens to undo them both. From the cultures of the ancient Near East and the Old Testament to early modernity, notions of the divine have included the power to check and contain as well as to unleash chaos as a sanction for the violation of social and ethical norms. Yet chaos has also been construed as a necessary supplement to order, a region of pure potentiality at the base of reality that provides the raw material of creation or even constitutes a kind of alternative order itself. As such, it generates its own peculiar 'formations of the formless'. Focusing on the connection between the cosmic and the political, this volume traces the continuities and re-conceptualizations of chaos from the ancient Near East to early modern Europe across a variety of cultures, discourses and texts. One of the questions it poses is how these pre-modern 'chaos theories' have survived into and reverberate in our own time.

Playing with Leviathan explores the theological meaning of Leviathan and other monsters from the biblical world by studying their ancient Near Eastern background and their attestation in biblical texts, early and rabbinic Judaism, Christian theology, Early Modern art and film.