Roxana Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Forgive me. I am a poor, ignorant literalist
> incapable of seeing esoteric symbolism everywhere.
> A terrible weakness I agree. Of course I'm not
> arguing the Red Sea actually parted, and Angel's
> didn't win the Battle of Mons either.
As we all know by now, Jim Lewandowski is quite a fan of the works of Alan F. Alford. Because Jim himself never provides much context for understanding Alford's point of view, I thought the following from Alford's
When the Gods Came Down: The Catastrophic Roots of Religion Revealed (2000) might help to account for Jim's insistence that the whole of the OT is a 'creation myth':
Alford writes:
"[...] Let's take a closer look at the Red Sea. In the original Hebrew language, the term translated 'Red Sea' is
Yam Suph, which literally means 'the Sea of Reeds'. Immediately our suspicions are alerted. Firstly, the name Sea of Reeds is evocative of the Egyptian belief in a heavens which could be crossed on '
reed floats', and which contained a mysterious 'Field of
Reeds' in the 'east'. Secondly, and perhaps even more significantly, the Red Sea which separates the Egyptian mainland from the Sinai peninsula is hardly the kind of marshy swamp implied by the name
Yam Suph. On the contrary, it is a very deep body of water - as was indeed required, so it would seem, to drown Pharaoh's army.
"So, might the Red Sea (
Yam Suph) be the
celestial sea? Indeed, if we turn to the book of Exodus, 15, we find that the waters of
Yam Suph were described as 'mighty' and 'deep'. Furthermore, the term used here for 'deep' -
tehomoth - is almost identical to the term
tehom, which was used in Genesis 1 to describe
the great watery Deep which covered the Earth at the moment of creation
[1]. The point was picked up by the eminent scholar Alexander Heidel, who commented as follows:
'Since the waters of the Red Sea are called 'mighty waters' and
tehomoth, there is no reason why they could not equally well be designated as
me thehom rabba, "the waters of the great Deep".'
"As we have seen from our Mesopotamian studies, these 'waters of the great Deep' (the Apsu) could refer to the watery Deep of Heaven, or to the watery Deep of the Earth, or indeed to the combination of the two - hence the biblical idea that the two Deeps needed to be divided.
"It thus takes little imagination to see that the Red Sea - 'the waters of the great Deep' per Heidel - would describe perfectly
the space between the upper and lower waters, ie. the path through which the planetary waters of Heaven had fallen, physically, and through which they had then been resurrected, metaphysically [...]" (pp. 260-261).
[1] The Hebrew word
tehom is widely recognised as alluding to Tiamat, the watery creature slain in battle by Marduk; see S.H. Hooke,
Middle Eastern Mythology, op.cit., p. 119.