In 1907, Ira M. Price, a member of the original faculty of the University of Chicago and professor of ancient languages and literatures from 1892-1925, concluded a discussion of the parallels between Genesis and other ANE documents with this observation (The Monuments and the Old Testament):
“How . . . is the similarity between Genesis and the inscriptions to be explained? There are four answers given to this question: (1) The Genesis account is drawn from these traditions; (2) Genesis is the source of these traditions; (3) Their likeness is attributable to like ways of thinking – similar traditions having spontaneously arisen in different parts of the earth because of ‘the natural tendencies of the human mind in its evolution from a savage state’ (Nadaillac); (4) ‘Their likeness is due to a common inheritance, each handing on from age to age records concerning the early history of the race” (95).
Price favored the fourth option: “Early races of men, wherever they wandered, took with them those primeval traditions, and with the varying latitudes and climes, their habits and modes of life, have carried these, and present them to us to-day in their different dresses. Once ancient religion did not borrow these universal traditions from another, but each possessed primitively these traditions in their original form” (95-6). A Baptist, Price added that Genesis provides “the purest” account of these traditions.
When Alexander Heidel, another Chicago faculty member, write his Babylonian Genesis in 1942, this was still a live option. Citing Price, he suggested that both Genesis and the Enuma elish “may have sprung from a common source of some kind” (139). Heidel considered the question of whether there are Babylonian influences on Genesis 1-2 an open one, with “no incontrovertible evidence . . . for either side” (139).
Many today opt for Price’s option #3: The similarities spring from a common ANE worldview. Option #4 has been eclipsed (on the other hand, see Jeffry Niehaus, Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology). Is the eclipse of option #4 the result of new evidence? Or is there another explanation?
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
Lift My Chin, Lord
Lift my chin, Lord,Say to me,“You are not whoYou feared to be,Not Hecate, quite,With howling sound,Torch held…
Letters
Two delightful essays in the March issue, by Nikolas Prassas (“Large Language Poetry,” March 2025) and Gary…
Spring Twilight After Penance
Let’s say you’ve just comeFrom confession. Late sunPours through the budding treesThat mark the brown creek washing Itself…
