Did the Bible copy some of its stories from other religious myths and legends?

The Akkadian-Sumerian and Assyrian-Babylonian "creation and flood myths" (for example the "Gilgamesh-Epic") have often been compared with the corresponding reports of the Bible, and are often considered to be their "template". But these human poetic writings, full of various "gods", are in great contrast to the simple, clear words of Holy Scripture. But they do show that these heathen peoples kept a small memory of the beginnings of the world which, in their imagination and under the influence of their idolatry, they wrote down in the form we have today. The worship of snakes, which was, and still is, spread in many idolatrous cultures in the whole world, is another example of how Satan succeeded in getting people to turn away from worshipping the one true God and draw them after himself (compare Genesis 3:1, Revelation 12:9).

It is a well-known fact that ancient nations such as the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hindus, possessed myths in which one can hear now and then a faint echo of a primeval revelation and knowledge, which must have been in possession of all mankind at one time. That such was the case Romans 1:21-23 fully confirms. All mankind knew God and was acquainted with the great facts of history, the events recorded in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. As they became vain, their foolish heart was darkened, they rushed into idolatry. Their traditions, however, here and there give glimpses of the truth they once knew. It is impossible to give here evidences of it as discovered in the Assyrian tablets, which have something to say of the creation and the deluge, known now as "the Chaldean Genesis." Other traces are found in ancient Phoenician sources as well as in India, among the Romans and the Greeks, Babylonians, Chinese and other nations. However, all these, including "the Chaldean Genesis" are miserable contortions.

There are a few resemblances and many more differences between the Biblical and especially the Babylonian accounts. It is claimed that Moses, or since Moses did not write according to this infidel theory, somebody else, made use of these myths in writing the opening chapters of Genesis. This farfetched invention has no foundation at all. The book of Genesis is not the offspring of Babylonian tradition. God gave to Moses the account of creation and the beginnings of history by direct revelation as the blessed foundation of all subsequent revelation in His holy Word. The man, who boasts of scholarship and brands the first eleven chapters of Genesis as myths, putting them alongside of the traditions of ignorant ancient nations, reveals his ignorance and blindness.

It is hardly necessary to say that one regards with horror what is said in p. 23, that "the tablets brought from the library of Asshur-banipal have disclosed to us the source of the material elements upon which the Biblical narratives of the Creation and the Deluge have been constructed." That the Gentiles had widely spread traditions about the earth's origin and man's, and of the deluge, is true and long known, but withal corrupted everywhere with their false gods to whom they were adapted. But that fabulous traditions, such as Asshur-banipal's tablets represent, disclose the source of the Biblical account is a slander of which infidelity is alone capable. The fact is that as far as I am aware not one Gentile first or last can be proved to have believed that "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." It is a truth which faith alone receives; and I fear that the new school no more believe it than Asshur-banipal did; for it is avowed that the doctrine of development goes along with the new literary method. It is an abuse of language for a Darwinian to speak of crediting creation, as it is for the new critic to say that he believes in inspiration. In both cases it is a growth, not God's work.

To begin with, the accounts of the creation of the world, other than that of the Bible, are clearly uninspired and the fruit of guess work. How could it be otherwise? There was no witness of the original creation. The tiny substratum of truth that may lurk in these stories comes from the original Bible story, which becomes distorted and disfigured almost out of all recognition as it is handed down from generation to generation.

We are told that the heathen religions of India, China, Japan, Mexico, etc. have much in common with the Bible as to details. We are told there were virgin births, sacrificial deaths, and the like, before ever the Bible story was known, that the heathen have stories about our first parents, about the flood, etc. We are not surprised at this. As to stories of our first parents and the flood, seeing those were events in the early history of the world, we should expect that the account of them would be handed down from earliest times. We should be surprised if it were not so. Nor are we surprised at the garbled way they come down to us, as they are only the traditions of men. The reason why they have come to us in the Bible so vividly, so full of detail in their verisimilitude, in so great contrast to the stories of the heathen, where fable is plainly mixed up with fact, is because the account the Bible gives is God-inspired. And as to the virgin births and sacrificial deaths before the Bible story came, we know that the devil is a great imitator, and doubtless originated these things so as to bring into discredit the gospel story. They were foretold in the Old Testament Scriptures, and Satan could anticipate them for his own evil ends.

Israel's law was thus a testimony to Jehovah, Israel's God; who is of course also the Creator, the God of all, but driven, as it were, by the unbelief of men, into this exceptional place. Thus it is that with Israel alone is found the pure record of creation itself; which we find in Assyria and Babylonia overlaid with the perversions of men turning from the truth, and given up to fables. Abundant evidence is there in the comparison of these, that in the beginning the account was one, and that thus the truth they had, which they had given up. "When they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened."

93 The Gnostic systems evidently linked themselves up with all this — an effort of Satan to bring the old mythology spiritualized into Christianity. This I shall beg leave to call the devil's education of the world. The point of departure being an idea of one God, which man can hardly get rid of, he turned it by false human wisdom into idolatry, by deifying attributes, powers of nature, stars, and ancestors. All this was afloat in the world before Moses' account of things was written. There were traces of primeval history both of Adam, Noah, Babel, the giants, and the judgment of Babel, but all turned into idolatry. When this ripened, God gave a divine account, perfectly suited to the age, not science, which would have been unsuited to divine action, but rescuing the great facts in such a way that the divine actings — necessary for man to know morally, and as far therefore as they concerned man on the earth, with which he had to do — should be distinctly set out, and with the simplicity, dignity, and beneficence towards man, which bore the stamp of God. The whole world is witness that no man, neither the simplest nor the wisest, ever could have known, or ever did discover, such a thought as to creation as is given in Genesis. It stands not pre-eminent, but isolated and alone; short, simple, unscientific: no mental elaboration, no recognition of nature's powers (such as Jews fell into, not only in the gross way of idolatry, but in the refined Alexandrian system of Philo), no emanation or pantheism, no eternal matter, no deification of mythic ideas; no visible world counted for the Logos, as again Philo; every human thought is denied, but the fiat of God Himself brings the world into existence, and everything into order; and the relationships of God, the world, and man, are perfectly established. Had there been no cosmogonies, the value of this statement would not have been felt. The simplest mind would have known the truth, but the truth meets every error of every mind.

I have some doubt of this. Oral tradition may be vague, of course, but written accounts of this kind are not sober history but myths, and arranged by priests in connection with their false gods, ancestral worship and what ministers to their influence. Take the written accounts in Cory's Ancient Fragments, the Vedas and Puranas, or even G. Smith's account of the flood, one of the most striking of these legends, or Deucalion's, or the history of the Titans; and see whether written accounts secure accuracy. I shall be told that these are poetry and myths. All of them are not, save (which is the very point I insist on) that these ancient accounts always seek the marvellous. Accounts are handed down, and when by men left to themselves, they make myths of them in every country, whilst Scripture gives the divine account of events which in man's hands were made myths of.

Then is repeated the wholly fanciful notion of "two writers" in the opening chapters of Genesis, and the absurd assumption that "the Hebrews" thus pictured the beginning of the world and the early history of man: a task immeasurably above the Higher Critics or any that ever lived without God's inspiration most absolutely; and the shameless invention that, even as to this, "borrowing their materials in some cases from popular tradition or belief, in others, directly or indirectly, from the distant East, they had breathed into them a new spirit, and constructed with their aid narratives replete with noble and deep truths respecting God and man;" etc., etc. How any with the fear of God could thus speak is past comprehension if one did not bear in mind the blinding, defiling, and deadly influence of scepticism. No doubt the history of Israel is rife with their readiness to depart from Jehovah and to adopt the loathsome idolatries of the nations, which the true prophets resisted till there was no remedy. But that the Bible denounces any such importations as the worst sin against the One True God is as plain as words can speak from Genesis to Malachi. In pp. 44-46 is nothing but human fancy and indifference to God's majesty and truth in the O.T. Nor can one conceive less moral feeling than to impute to the inspired word His breathing a new spirit of holiness and truth on narratives drawn from the lying productions from wicked and rebellious heathens and the unclean spirits which misled them. Compare Deut. 4, 7, 8, 12, 13, 15, 17, 29.

The rest of the chapter shows us the triumphant progress of the people, with their victories (often alluded to in the law and the psalms) over Sihon king of the Amorites, and Og king of Bashan. Two references are made in the account of this — one to a book of that day, the book of the wars of Jehovah (verse 14); the other to certain proverbial sayings or legends then in vogue (verses 27-30). This does not, as the rationalists pretend, give the smallest support to the hypothesis that Moses composed the Pentateuch from a mass of previous material floating among the Israelites of his age and their Gentile neighbours. Written and oral, these foreign traditions are purposely cited with the exceptional end in view of proving from witnesses unimpeachable in the eyes of their most zealous adversaries that the land in debate, when Israel took it by conquest, did not belong to Ammon or Moab, but to the doomed races of Canaan and its vicinity. To the country of the former they had no just claim; that of the Amorite, etc., was given them up by God. The Amorite had taken it from Moab, and Israel from the Amorite, subsequently dwelling in all their cities, from Arnon to Jabbok, in Heshbon and all its villages. A Jewish record of its previous possessors and of their own victories might be disputed as interested by a foe; but a citation from their own current proverbial songs was conclusive; and the Spirit of God deigns to employ an extract to this end. In Judges 11 we see precisely this ground of recognised fact taken by Jephthah in refuting the claims of the then king of Ammon, and his pretensions proved baseless by the incontrovertible evidence that the Amorite had the disputed territory when Israel made himself master of it, spite of Balak king of Moab and all other rivals. On a somewhat similar principle the apostle does not hesitate to cite heathen testimonies in the New Testament, as no mean confession on their part for the matter in hand. (Acts 17:23, 28; 1 Cor. 15:33; Titus 1:22)