When I first heard that Sarah Palin believes creationism should be taught in the public schools right alongside evolution, I was horrified. It was bad enough to learn during the primaries that Mike Huckabee, a prominent candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, believes in creationism, but it was at least comforting that even the Republicans rejected his candidacy. However, we now have a prospective, and soon-to-be-confirmed, major party vice-presidential nominee who actually believes this ridiculous, superstitious nonsense, who wants school children's minds polluted with this tripe, and who may come to lurk one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency. Palin needs to be challenged on these dangerously wrong-headed beliefs, and so does McCain.
Nevertheless, I'm willing to let Sarah Palin teach creationism in the public schools if she's willing to let me teach the story of the creation of the Bible. It's a lot more interesting, and has solid science to back it up. More after the break:
Others with better scientific credentials than mine have thoroughly demolished creationism on its scientific merits, or lack of same, and I will not try to do that here. Instead, since it's Sunday, I'd like to take a moment to examine the Bible's two separate creation myths and discuss what the consensus of Biblical scholars, historians, and archaeologists has to say about where those myths came from and why they are both in the Book of Genesis. I argue that it is this creation story-- the story of the creation of the Bible-- that needs to be taught in the public schools.
Whenever I hear fundamentalist Christians demand that the Biblical creation myth be taught in the public schools, my first reaction is always "which one?" What most fundamentalists don't recognize-- partly because they only read the Bible in English and know little of the actual history of early Israel and Judah-- is that the Book of Genesis contains two separate, inconsistent creation myths, placed side-by-side at the beginning of the book. The first myth, contained in Genesis 1:1-31, is the familiar story of the six-day creation. The second myth, found immediately thereafter in Genesis 2:1-3:24, tells the story of the Garden of Eden.
The two myths, however, are contradictory in several ways. For example, in the six-day creation myth, God is referred to in the Hebrew original as "Elohim," whereas the Garden of Eden myth calls him "YHWH," the tetragrammaton usually translated as "Yahweh." In the first myth, plants are created on the third day, and fish and fowl are created on the fourth day, but humans are not created until the sixth day. In the Garden of Eden myth, humans are created first, after which Yahweh plants the Garden and causes trees and other plants to sprout up from the soil. Later Yahweh creates animals and brings them to the human to name them.
Why are there two contradictory myths at the very beginning of Genesis, and why do they use different names for God? The history and archaeology are complex, but the consensus of Biblical scholars and archaeologists is that the six-day version was the creation myth of the larger, wealthy, northern kingdom of Israel, whereas the Garden of Eden myth was the creation myth of the sparsely-settled, impoverished southern kingdom of Judah. Both myths began as oral traditions handed down over hundreds of years in these two separate kingdoms before the people of either kingdom were literate. The two nations also had a variety of other separate myths about founding patriarchal families and other matters.
However, in about 722 BCE, the Assyrians conquered Israel, expelled most of its population, and resettled the area with people from other parts of the Assyrian Empire. Most of the conquered, and now homeless, Israelites moved south into Judah, the population of which swelled.
At this time, both the Israelites and the Judahites were polytheistic. The Israelite primary god was Elohim, probably a descendant of the Canaanite god El or Baal-El, while the Judahite pantheon was headed by Yahweh, a god of uncertain origins, but who is thought to have originated as an Arabian desert wind or warrior god. Both the Israelites and the Judahites also worshiped Asherah or Asteroth as the female deity and consort of their main god, as did most Canaanites of the period. Tribes and families also worshiped a variety of lesser local or household gods.
However, around the time of the destruction of Israel, if not earlier, a group of priests in Jerusalem began promoting the cult of "Yahweh-alone," the monotheistic belief that only Yahweh should be worshiped and the other gods should be rejected. This cult struggled against long-established polytheistic religious beliefs for hundreds of years, and much of the Hebrew Bible relates their battle to eliminate the worship of other gods. Literacy also came to Judah in about the 8th Century, possibly as a partial result of the incursion of Israelites from the north, who appear to have been literate somewhat earlier than the Judahites, and it may be in this period that the first of the Bible stories began to be written down.
In the early 7th Century, the Assyrians were attacked on their eastern front by the Persians and withdrew from Israel, leaving the territory to the north of Judah largely undefended. Judahite King Josiah, his nation now larger and stronger due to the influx of Israelites, proposed to occupy this territory but needed the enthusiastic support of the more numerous Israelites in his kingdom. During his reign his scribes and priests purported to "discover" a book of the law, thought to have been the Book of Deuteronomy, in the walls of the Temple in Jerusalem, and expanded on it, crafting an elaborate Deuteronomistic history, spanning several books of the current Hebrew Bible, which sought to promote Josiah's aims by claiming (incorrectly) that Israel and Judah had once been united under Judahite kings David and Solomon and had worshiped the same god, Yahweh. As part of the effort to show that these two kingdoms had once been one, these scribes, and others after them, began weaving together earlier bits and pieces of oral and written stories from the northern kingdom and southern kingdoms into a single history, and thus the creation myths of the two kingdoms came to be placed side-by-side, as did a number of other conflicting stories about similar events. The destruction of Israel by the Assyrians was attributed to the fact that they had separated from Judah and come to worship false gods instead of Yahweh, and the implicit promise of the Deuteronomistic history was that if they united under Josiah, they could re-conquer their former kingdom and return home.
In short, the Hebrew Bible came about largely as a conscious effort at political propaganda to promote the claims of the Davidic line of Judahite kings by creating a false history of a united kingship in a golden age long past. Evidence supporting the foregoing consensus view is impressive, but too voluminous to be presented here. For an excellent archaeological and historical background, I commend the reader to such introductory books as The Bible Unearthed, by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, Who Were the Early Israelites, by William Dever, and Testament, by John Romer.
However, my answer to Sarah Palin and her fellow creationists is this: "Yes, let's teach the Biblical creation story in the public schools, but let's teach it as part of the history of the creation of the Bible-- as literature, as polemic, and as political propaganda, the way the scientific evidence shows it was written and intended to be read. Then if you'd like to come to biology class and argue that one of the two competing Biblical creation myths is the actual scientific truth, be my guest. Only it is incumbent upon you to explain which myth is the correct one and why, and which of these two gods is the actual creator."