What's with the seas in the Bible? From Chapter 1 to end of The Book of Revelation - what is with this obsesssion?
Let's go back a step.
In Ancient Mesopotamia Tiamat was the gooddess of salt water and is associated with primordial chaos. In order for land to appear she had to be defeated by either by Anu or Marduk depending on the story.
In Egypt the chaos monster was Apep / Apophis who would fight the sun god each day. But they also had the story of the early mountains /land rising out of the seas.
Here we can see a 'lake' outside of the Temple of Karnak / Luxor.
In the Biblical narrative mountains Yahweh just commands the land to appear - no conflict - no chaos and the seas are good!
Aah but you might say that was before the FALL. Well what Christians today think of the Fall is not really a category in ancient Israel. Indeed, inside Solomon's Temple there was the Bronze Sea.
It is valuable to remeber that "perfection" as we tend to think about is a Greek idea, for the Bible - good means functional.
I think if you let all this sit with you you will begin to ponder what a world that is problematic means for life. Technology then is just a part of wrestling with a world that is open to be what it wants to be.
Perhaps, unhelpfully, the Bible changes its metaphor from Daniel onwards. From there on seas is a stand in for Human Empires and evil not chaos gods. Its almost the inversion of the original concept.
No comments:
Post a Comment