How To Read Our ANE Torah Jewishly

For decades, I’ve been teaching people how to read and listen to Torah. And it never ceases to amaze me how, here in the West, readers of the Torah insist upon treating these origin myths as isolated and categorized separate events, rather than as one very long-winded single story that defines our ethno-national identity as a people. Let me show you what I mean.

Though divided into five distinctly named scrolls, the Torah – our woven tapestry of ANE Jewish literatures – was never intended to be looked upon as being a set of books filled with individual stories, like what is experienced with the later written CE Gospels. The Torah was written and redacted to be read – and is *meant* to be read – as one continuous story without seperations from beginning to end. And this is most noticeable with the origin myths in the first two scrolls, Bereishit/Genesis through Sh’mot/Exodus, that are the basis for the founding myths justifying the kingdoms of Israel-Judea among ANE neighbors.

The Torah scrolls are an oratory experience, meant to be heard in its Hebrew poetic word-play, as a saga shared to the people throughout the year by a baal kore, an expert reader. With the first two creation myths and the akedah myth in Torah being the exception, every story in Torah is a woven tapestry of two to three different versions of the myth (this includes even laws) that is unapologetically presented as an often self-contradictory singular mythical expression. And, contrary to modern religious practice, the first two creation stories are supposed to be read as two distinct creation events, the macro creation followed by a micro creation, which is separated by the first shabbat (day of resting). From here, the blendings of different versions of the same story begins.

I’ll give you a common Western *mis-understanding* of what Torah shares with us to illustrate this vital point. To start with a question: Have you ever heard a “Bible” reader complain about ‘where did the people come from’ after the murder of Able, if it was just Adam, Eve, and their sons Cain and Able ‘in the beginning’? This question is just as often used to *disparage* “Bible” reading, as it is a legitimate question posed by Western Torah readers. This question arises because Torah readers in the West are taught to read the Six Days of Creation myth and the Gan Eyden creation myth as the same story repeated twice. This is *not* the correct way to read Torah! So, what follows Cain’s murder of Abel and subsequent banishment from YHWH’s land makes no sense to those reading Torah in this way. Let’s correct this view, shall we?

*At the beginning* of the deity’s creating, the earth exists in a dark abysmal unformed state, so says the Torah in Hebrew, and the deity is hovering upon it in a semi-unformed wind-like state. The deity’s very first creative act is to create light with no definable source to this light infused within this dark abysmal unformed state, then separate this created light from this darkness. Now, being that there is (day)light in which to see, the deity begins to create formed objects from the abysmal unformed state. You know the story, everything from the firmament separating the waters above from below, thus revealing dry land and air in which to breathe upon the land, to moon, sun, and stars placed into the firmament that is holding up the waters above, to all the living plants and creatures in the waters, the air, and upon the land, including the male and female humans (created together, at the same time) of the land (who will form nations as they multiply abundantly). Then, the deity takes a well deserved day of resting from “his” (“” – Torah grammatical *sic*) labors.

Then, on the eighth day, the deity creates a special genderless human from the humus (dirt, dust) to tend to the garden, gan eyden, that this deity has (next) created on his portion of the land. Then, as before, in macro and now in micro, the deity creates everything of the garden to have the human care for and to name. Note, the creatures outside gan eyden, got their names from the humans created before shabbat (for example, but not exclusively this, the Leviathans of the deep waters – for there are no deep waters, only rivers, in the garden!) Then, the deity splits the unhappy human with no helpmate into male and female, and the peoples that are indigenous to YHWH’s land, the Levant, can now be born. Hence how, when Cain gets marked and banished from YHWH’s land for his murder of his brother, he finds other humans to form a city-size legacy from, through intermarriage.

Then, comes the deity’s displeasure with his human creation, and he floods the land – saving only Noah and his entire family and (the contradictory) everything else that is in the Ark, which *either* the deity built for Noah *or* Noah built at the direction of the deity! This is where Jewish tradition, according to our Torah, posits the universal idea that everyone is created equal in the eyes of the deity. From Noah’s family comes everyone on the planet, regardless of skin color, location, and gender, as the children of Adam and Eve – according to our ethno-national myths.

Adam’s and Eve’s descendants are told to multiply upon the entire land, like the humans created before the first shabbat were so told to do. The latter being the now extinct pre-flood humans who, interestingly, we have a bit of them in us, thanks to Cain’s family!(1) … Okay, is this pre-genetic remembrance that we used to be several species of humans on the planet, intimately comingling together, until there was only one human species left, Sapiens? Hmmm. … Honestly, I don’t believe that the ANE Jews who preserved these much older origin myths knew that DNA might be speaking through our imaginative human lore. But, the parallel is interesting, even if the planetary history shows the myths to be just myths of importance to humans alone.

Okay. I think that I’ve made my point. Time for you all, now, to pull out and read the Torah on *its* own terms, and truly *listen* to what it is saying to us, without modern religious exegesis!

(1) – Human Neanderthal migrated from Africa into the Middle East and Europe well before the evolution of human Sapiens, and settled there successfully. When human Sapiens evolved and migrated from Africa into the Middle East and Europe, those human Sapiens who left Africa cohabitated with human Neanderthals long enough to mate, before the Neanderthal went extinct as a human species. So, it is not surprising that Middle East myths pick up on this cohabitation between the human species in their origin myths (originally orally transmitted, and now written), and why the myths within Africa do not have such a double creation story that is followed by a grand extinction event story – at least that I’m aware of (correct me, if there is such a story in ANE African civilizations!)

It is only through a Greek Jewish mis-interpreted translation of the Hebrew into Koine Greek of the first sentence in Genesis (which is four verses long), that the West was given the wrongful idea that our ANE Jewish literature says the creator deity created everything from nothing (an impossibility, and is *not* said by Torah!) – only light was created, and rest was formed from the premordial shapeless ooze already in existence (that the breath of the deity hovered over) – and that there are two creation stories that are meant to be read as the same story repeated twice (a Christian theological influence forced upon the readings of our ancient Jewish texts in the West, for 1600 years now!).

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Here’s another example of how our modern religions distort the correct reading of our ANE Jewish literatures:

The Torah says bluntly, the human nefesh is of the dirt, just like all other mammalian nefesh of the land. The breath of life, “soul,” is breathed into individual us at birth, we humans live at best 120 years, the deity’s breath is taken away from us, and to the dust we (body and mind) return.

It is later Greek influenced Jews that introduced the Greek idea of non-corporeal individual souls, not the Torah. But, who that is a believer in Greek philosophy wants to read Torah on its own terms? I suspect, not many.

It always fascinates me that those that wish to glorify the importance of humans seek out the idea of resurrection in the Prophets. Like for example, quoting from Daniel or Ezekiel. Well, the Tanakh also says the following, based on empircal evidence, as well:

“For in respect of the fate of man and the fate of beast, they have one and the same fate: as the one dies so dies the other, and both have the same lifebreath; man has no superiority over beast, since both amount to nothing.” – Kohelet/Ecclesiastes 3:19 (Sefaria)

Verily, verily, I can show to you with written assurity that, in the Greco-Roman influenced 2nd Temple Judaism period, the budding idea of individual resurrection of the dead was:

One, that the dead here on earth will revive to life through YHWH’s breath/soul within them, so that they may live a second life here upon the land during the age of peace between humans upon the land, and

Two, that this physical based concept was not yet anywhere close to the Rabbinical idea of resurrection into a “world to come” – as in resurrected life in which to enter the deity’s heavenly abode, or live on a reborn planetary earth, or whatever fancies the modern imagination these days.(2)

The Torah, itself, stands in certain belief against both Hellenized ideas as the reality. Heaven is an evolutionary product of human written imagination only.

https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-valley-of-dry-bones-and-the-resurrection-of-the-dead

(2) – Heaven or temporary purgatory, which is a European Jewish capitulation to Gentile Christianity to avoid persecution by Jew-hating supremacist Christians, who developed fully the idea of the body is a vessel for the eternal non-corporeal soul that will be judged to heaven or hell after the body’s death – a Church control doctrine that is so *not* Jewish and *not* Torah! Pointing this out is not to disparge such non-Torah eschatological beliefs but, rather, to bring rational honesty to the discussions of such beliefs.