Gospel & Universe ♒️ The Currents of Sumer

Zero & Positive Sums

In This Distant and Utterly Foreign World - A Numbers Game - Positive Sum Cosmogony

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In This Distant and Utterly Foreign World

In his opening discussion of the Bible, Enns uses the word ancient to describe a biblical quality often overlooked by Christian readers and scholars. To many readers the word ancient simply means very old, and many conflate it with Classical. This is understandable since in discussing the first great Western civilization, Greece, the categories can become confusing — Ancient (12th-6th century BC), Archaic (8th-6th), Classical (5th-4th) — and trying to come up with categories that work to the east of Greece becomes even more challenging.

Yet still, for many historians the word ancient suggests the earliest stages of civilization. I follow others in seeing 1000 BC as a good rough, round date for distinguishing between the dim ancestors of the Ancient World (4000 BC-1000 BC) and the enduring, more clearly understood ancestors of the Classical Age (1000 BC - 750 AD). The term Classical comes from Latin meaning of the highest Roman class, and later means of Greek and Roman civilization. This is fitting since we consider the Greek and Roman civilizations as foundational in a clear sense, rather than in a more hidden, anthropological or archaeological sense. Compare this with the more murky realm of the Mesopotamians (c. late 4th millennium - mid-1st millennium BC), where the cuneiform script they used was hidden for about two thousand years, and to the even murkier realms of the Minoans in Crete (c. 3100-1100 BC) and the Indus Valley Civilization in the Indian subcontinent (c. 3300-1300 BC), both of whose scripts we still can’t read.

According to this point of view, Classical refers to what is foundational, or what is a classic. This definition and this 1000 BC - 750 AD timeline work globally, for within it we see 1. the distinction between Ancient Vedic India and Classical Hindu India, the latter including the Mauryan & Gupta Empires, Mahabharata & Ramayana, Upanishads & Bhagavad-Gita, Patanjali & Shankara, the rise of Buddhism, Jainism, & subcontinental Islam; 2. the Zhou & Han Dynasties in China, along with the development and fusion of Confucianism, Daoism, & Buddhism; 3. the spread of Chinese and Indian culture in South-East Asia; 4. the height of Mayan civilization; and 5. the development and rise of Judaism, Christianity, & Islam. All of this to say that to many readers, Enns’ use of the word ancient might seem like an invitation to dig into the ancientness of the Ancient World rather than the Classical World.

In his opening discussion of the Bible’s ancientness, Enns writes the following:

We can open the Bible almost at random and begin reading, and it won't take long before we see how deeply embedded the Bible is in this distant and utterly foreign world. In fact, any decent study Bible (a Bible that comes with explanatory footnotes) will point that out by the time we get through the first two sentences of the Bible (Gen. 1:1-2). The ancient writer describes the "beginning" not as a "nothing" or a "singularity," as cosmologists call the pre-big bang state, but as a dark primordial chaos, called the deep, which is something like a threatening vast cosmic ocean that God has to tame.

And that sounds weird — which is my point.

If we're paying attention, turning a blind eye to the Bible's ancientness cannot be sustained for long; the distance between now and then needs to be respected as a key character trait of the Bible we have.

After these provocative words, Enns doesn’t go into the Ancient context. He sees the “dark primordial chaos” as a weirdness, and then goes on to investigate the relation of today’s thinking to this strange old world of the Bible. This is a valuable investigation, yet it breezes by a philological opportunity: to mention the more complex ancientness that 1. shifts ideas from Mesopotamia to Israel, 2. shifts from Mesopotamian polytheism to a version of monotheism, 3. considers the triumph of Marduk over primordial chaos, 4. considers the development of Marduk as the one true God, and 5. contains gods such as Shamash and Ea, who manifest the type of justice and compassion we might associate with God and Jesus. Such a philological consideration would multiply the diversity of the Bible and highlight some very thorny ambiguities, thus adding another dimension to his notion that the Bible is 1. ancient, 2. ambiguous, and 3. diverse.

In another book, Genesis for Normal People: A Guide to the Most Controversial, Misunderstood, and Abused Book of the Bible (2019), Enns goes part-way into the Ancient context, yet he doesn’t go into the full scope of Ancient Mesopotamian religion according to its own development and diversity. Instead, he generally stays within the traditional parameters of a good Jewish monotheism challenging a bad Mesopotamian polytheism.

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A Numbers Game

In Genesis for Normal People Enns compares Creation in Genesis and in the Enuma Elish (the Babylonian creation narrative), and he provides a helpful comparative chart as well. This is the type of Mesopotamian context that’s very helpful to those who want to see what came around and before the Bible. Yet unfortunately Enns seems to see the comparison as a zero-sum one, with the biblical narrative ending up with all the points. The Mesopotamian version, even though it’s the previous and original version, is made to look like a soap opera compared to the mighty epic of the Bible:

Another knock on the Babylonians and other religions was that Israel’s God works solo. In the Babylonian story Enuma Elish, which has a lot in common with the creation story in Genesis, we have a soap opera instead. The god Marduk has a longstanding grievance with his great-grandmother, Tiamat. Apparently, this dysfunctional divine family didn’t believe in counseling, so they settled their differences by Marduk cutting Tiamat in half (actually, filleting her top to bottom). With half her body, he makes the barrier to separate the waters (the ​“firmament”​ of Genesis). But Israel’s God is the great and mighty God. He created the cosmos solo and effortlessly, no debate and no battle, while the Babylonian creation story looks like a Jerry Springer episode.

We see a similar zero-sum vew in Jacobus de Bruyn’s take on the Book of Daniel, where specific Gods (Elohim/Yahweh and Marduk) are seen to be implied by sacred spaces and by geo-politics:

The smaller narrative of Dan 5 starts with no indications of any spatial markers embodying the God of Israel. Dan 5 thus starts in the same way as Dan 3, for the narrative of Dan 3 starts out with no spatial embodiments of the God of Israel either. Within the cognitive worldview of the ancient Near Eastern people, this would have been expected since the story is set deep within Marduk's god-space. […]

[…] Dan 1-5 forms a larger narrative that describes the war between two deities (i.e. Elohim and Marduk). In Dan 1 and 3 Elohim showed that He had the ability to overpower Marduk within the high-god's own god-space. In Dan 1, the God of Israel starts to invade Marduk's god-space. In Dan 3-4 it is shown that Marduk loses authority over his own territory (i.e. the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon) and his king. Cognitively the battle between Elohim and Marduk enters its final round in Dan 5. Marduk took up his defences in Belshazzar's banquet hall. All the other Babylonian gods are present as well. Ultimately Marduk's last defences are defeated. (“Daniel 5, Elohim and Marduk: the Final Battle,” 2013, Sci-FLO source here)

In How the Bible Actually Works Enns likewise gives an insightful analysis regarding the Nineveh of Nahum and Jonah, yet he also keeps his points within the framework of good monotheism and bad polytheism. He makes the valuable point that God’s mercy and cruelty toward Nineveh may seem contradictory, yet they have a historical context which makes them paradoxical instead. Enns thus illustrates that a close look at what appears to be contradiction — and even imperfection — can lead to an understanding of paradox and contextual meaning. Yet the reading remains in a Classical Jewish-centred world where Israel’s enemies (the hateful polytheists) are the focus of any examination of Mesopotamian religion. Or, to put it in Enns’ wryly humorous phrasing, we find out, once again, “what God thinks of Ninevites: he hates them.”

One objection to my point might be that Enns can’t avoid making the case for monotheism’s superiority, since this is what the Jewish text focuses on: a covenant with the highest and greatest Power in the universe. This is a fair point, yet even in the instances Enns uses to show the supposed Jewish superiority, we can see that the arguments are too easily challenged by Mesopotamian texts (I will go into the details of this in the next pages). This is of course where Botteró comes in: he provides scholarly details, as well as historical and religious context. These details and context illustrate, in a positive-sum way, that Mesopotamian religion is a rich parallel system rather than one that’s inferior, deeply flawed, even sinful — like the woman who wraps her arms around dragons that look vaguely similar to snakes slithering up the tree of a well-known Garden...

I believe Bottéro is the right person to bring into this debate: he’s a famous Assyriologist yet he’s also deeply versed in, and respectful of, the Bible and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In One God I look at his affinity for monotheism, which we can see briefly here in his notion that polytheism evolves into monotheism:

[…] Israël était prêt à penser qu'Il était en effet bien plus fort que les redoutables mais impuissantes divinités de Ninive : qu'Il était le dieu le plus puissant du monde et donc le Seul. Cette évolution vers le monothéisme était pratiquement accomplie au septième siecle.

[…] Israel was ready to think that it was in effect very much sgtronger than the redoubtable but impotent divinities of Nineveh; the He was the most powerfuol God in the world and therefore the only God. This evolution toward monotheism was practically accomplished in the 7th century [BC].

Throughout Currents of Religion I push back against this notion that polytheism evolves into monotheism. I look at it in most detail in “Monotheism” — in One God, in the previous chapter, 🌎 Many Tribes. Yet it’s precisely because my agnostic position differs from that of Bottéro that he’s so valuable in contextualizing the biblical currents within the wider, earlier currents of Mesopotamia. For instance, in More Zero Sums I critique Enn's enthusiastic notion that Israel’s God is more powerful than the gods of Mesopotamia, yet Bottéro would be unlikely to make such a critique.

Deeply appreciative of his formation in the Catholic Church, Bottéro reluctantly left the Dominican order to delve more freely into both the Bible and religion. In the series of interviews which constitute Babylone et la Bible / Babylon and the Bible (1994), he says that he couldn’t lie to his students:

Il fallait bien leur ouvrir l'esprit, non seulement sur le fait qu'on ne peut pas tenir pour historique l'affaire d'Adam et Eve, mais sur une vision intelligente et authentique de la Bible et, à travers la Bible, de la religion même.

It was really necessary to open their minds, not only to the fact that one can’t take the story of Adam and Eve for history, but also to an intelligent and authentic vision of the Bible, and, through the Bible, of religion itself.

Bottéro’s final point is one I’d like to underscore as a basic concept much appreciated by agnostics: a deeper look at the biblical context may take us away from the Jewish context by providing an appreciation of a parallel context, yet this process expands our understanding of the universality of religion.

Agnostics see religion as a positive-sum game, in which at the very minimum Judaism 1 + Christianity 1 + Islam 1 + Hinduism 1 + Buddhism 1 + Daoism 1 = 6. The reason I say very minimum is that in good Mesopotamian mathematical tradition I would square 6, making it 36, each religion having at least six different branches (Hinduism is particularly accommodating here, with its six main schools of thought: Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Mimamsa and Vedanta). I also do this in honour of the base-60 Mesopotamian number system, which gave us 360 degrees in a circle, and may also be the origin of our 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour. My point is that even the numbers we use to describe ideas (like six major religions) come from the Mesopotamians, who were the first to create both a number system and a script system. And it wasn’t as if their systems were simplistic, as Mark Ronan points out in a 2020 article in History Today:

The 12 equal divisions for a year also applied for the day from sundown to sundown, divided into 12 beru. For example, in the Epic of Gilgamesh – written during the second millennium BC – our hero races the sun in Book IX and we are told how he progresses at each beru, eventually coming out just ahead. As with the ideal month, a beru was split into 30 equal sections called uš, giving 360 uš in a 24-hour period. Each was therefore four minutes in modern terms. Fractions of an uš were also used: for example in the astronomical diaries we find an instance where the first appearance of the moon was visible for 3 ¾ quarters of an uš (15 minutes).

An accurate recording of time was important for these diaries and so were the positions of the moon and planets. During the fifth century BC a scheme was developed that could be broken down into fine detail: the ecliptic was divided into 12 equal sections, each split into 30 finer divisions (also called uš), yielding 360 uš in total. For finer accuracy an uš was broken down into 60 divisions. Each of the 12 sections they labelled by a constellation of stars and, when the Greeks took on Babylonian results, they preserved these constellations, but gave them Greek names – Gemini, Cancer and Leo – most of which had the same meanings as in Babylonia.

As Greek geometry developed, it created the concept of an angle as a magnitude – for example, adding the angles of a triangle yields the same as two right-angles – but in Euclid’s Elements (c.300 BC) there is no unit of measurement apart from the right-angle. Then, in the second century BC, the Greek astronomer Hipparchos of Rhodes began applying geometry to Babylonian astronomy. He needed a method of measuring angles and naturally followed the Babylonian division of the ecliptic into 360 degrees, dividing the circle the same way. So, although angles come from the Greeks, the 360 degrees comes from Babylonian astronomy.

I should add that some of Enns’ points might also eventually lead readers beyond an exclusively Jewish context — as we see in the following passage about Jonah spending three days in the belly of a fish which descends to the depths of Sheol (later Hell) itself:

These strike me as the kinds of details a writer, including an ancient one, would put into a story to ensure that his readers knew they were dealing with something other than history. The book of Jonah isn't a history lesson. It's a parable to challenge its readers to reimagine a God bigger than the one they were familiar with.

This notions that we’re dealing here with story not history, and that we can reimagine God, crop up again and again in Enns’ book. Who knows, perhaps one day Western monotheists might rethink the idea of being antagonistic to Mesopotamian and other polytheistic Others…

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Positive Sum Cosmogony

I’d like to keep with this idea of monotheistic vs. polytheistic power, yet I’d also like to return to Enns’ point about the weirdness of “a dark primordial chaos, called the deep, which is something like a threatening vast cosmic ocean that God has to tame.” I think we can see more deeply into this weirdness by turning to Bottéro. In his Birth of God he shows that, despite the constant Jewish downgrading of Mesopotamian gods, Marduk operates very much like the God who says, “Let there be light.” Note that unlike in Enns’ account, Bottéro frames the comparison in a non-zero-sum or positive-sum way:

[I divide the paragraphs into smaller parts to make it easier to compare the original text with my free translation:]

Mais la Cosmologie supposée par la mise en ordre des aires de l'univers est, dans ses lignes essentielles, identique à celle qu'avaient élucubrée les sages de Mésopotamie, bien avant qu'Israël existât et se mît à penser et écrire. Et surtout, le premier acte de la Création du monde traduit exactement la mythologie des origines telle qu'on la trouve élaborée dans la célèbre « Epopée babylonienne de la création », l'Enûma elish.

But the [biblical] Cosmology that gives order to universal space is, in its essential lines, identical to that which was imagined by the sages of Mesopotamia, well before Israel existed and started to think and write. Above all, the first act of the Creation of the world [in the Bible] translates, with exactitude, the mythology of the origins that one finds elaborated in the celebrated ‘Babylonian Epic of the Creation,’ The Enûma Elish.

Comme elle, les textes bibliques post-exiliens, dûment rapprochés et analysés, font commencer la création par une gigantesque lutte entre le Dieu créateur (Marduk en Mésopotamie; Yahvé en Israël) et un immense Chaos aqueux, où se trouvent mêlées deux masses monstrueuses. En Mésopotamie, ce sont Tiamat, l'Océan cosmique ou la Mer, et Apsû, l'Océan terrestre ou la Nappe souterraine d'Eau douce.

Like [that epic], the post-exile biblical texts, duly compared and analyzed, have creation begin with an enormous struggle between the creator God (Marduk in Mesopotamia; Yahweh in Israel), and an immense watery Chaos, where we find two monstrous masses mixed together. In Mesopotamia, these are Tiamat, the cosmic Ocean or Sea, and Apsu, the earthly Ocean or the underground Layer of fresh Water.

En Israël, les vocables diffèrent et, du reste, varient suivant les traditions, comme nous l'avons vu ; la première des deux masses aqueuses porte plusieurs fois le nom d'« Abîme », traduction courante de l'hébreu Tehôm, lequel est peut-être un nom propre, en tout cas linguistiquement identique à Tiamat; et même le terme d'Apsû paraît représenté dans l'expression hébraïque Apbsey-Eref « les Confins de la terre » (Deutéronome, xxx, III, 17, etc.), laquelle marque les limites de la terre et désigne du même coup les rivages de cet Océan terrestre qui l'entoure.

In Israel, the terms differ and, moreover, vary according to the traditions, as we’ve seen; the first of the two watery masses are several times given the name of Abyss, a standard translation of the Hebrew Tehôm, which is perhaps a proper noun, in any case linguistically identical to Tiamat; and even the term Apsû seems represented in the Hebrew expression Apbsey-Eref, the Confines of the Earth (Deuteronomy xxx III, 17, etc.).

La séparation de la masse aqueuse en « Eaux supérieures » et « inférieures », selon le Document sacerdotal, rappelle la séparation du corps de Tiamat en deux parties, dont l'une devient le Ciel et l'autre la Terre. Et même le choix du verbe « fendre », dans Isaïe, 11,9 et Job, xxVI, 12, pour marquer l'acte par lequel le Dieu créateur l'emporte sur le Monstre cosmique, trahit une donnée concrète de l'Epopée babylonienne, où le « cadavre de Tiamat » (comp. le « cadavre de Rahab » dans le Psaume LxXXIX, 11) est « partagé en deux » par Marduk.

The separation of the watery mass into “Upper Waters” and “Lower [Waters],” according to the sacerdotal book, recalls the separation of the body of Tiamat in two parts, one of which becomes the Sky and the other the Earth. And even the choice of the verb “split,” in Isaiah 11,9 and Job, xx, VI, 12, to indicate the act by which the Creator God defeats the cosmic Monster betrays a concrete borrowing from the Babylonian Epic, where the “cadaver of Tiamat” (compare “the cadaver of Rahab” in Psalms LxXXIX, 11) is “divided in two” by Marduk.

[…] L'Épopée babylonienne, dont la mythologie cosmogonique, au moins dans ses traits essentiels, a servi de patron à celle du Document sacerdotal, d'Isaïe, de Job et des Psaumes cités, paraît avoir été composée au dernier quart du second millénaire avant notre ère. Tandis que les ouvrages bibliques ci-dessus énumérés sont tous postérieurs au grand Exil d'Israël en Mésopotamie. Il n'est donc pas difficile de fixer la direction de l'emprunt.

The Babylonian Epic — of which the cosmogonic mythology at least in its essential traits served as a pattern to that of the cited sacerdotal books of Isaiah and Psalms — seems to have been composed in the last quarter of the second millennium BC. Given that the biblical works noted above all come after the Exile in Mesopotamia, it isn’t difficult to locate the direction of the borrowing.

Celui-ci a-t-il été immédiat ? Ou bien les mythes mésopotamiens ne se sont-ils propagés de Babylone en Israël qu'à travers nombre de stations intermédiaires, se décantant ou se modifiant plus ou moins à chaque étape ? Il n'est pas aisé de répondre à cette question. La possibilité d'une connaissance directe des mythes mésopotamiens en Palestine ne saurait être mise en doute si l'on songe, par exemple, qu'en plein milieu du second millénaire, déjà, d'autres textes babyloniens, comme l'Épopée de Gilgamesh, ou des traités de divination et d'astrologie, étaient lus dans le texte cunéiforme, et certains traduits et adaptés dans la langue du pays, en Syrie, en Asie Mineure, en Egypte.

Was this immediate? Or did the Mesopotamian myths travel from Babylon to Israel in a number of intermediary stages, settling or modifying themselves more or less at each stage? It’s not easy to answer this question. The possibility of a direct understanding of Mesopotamian myths in Palestine wouldn’t be in doubt if one imagined, for example, that square in the middle of the second millennium, already, other Babylonian texts, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, or treatises on divination and astrology, were read in cuneiform text, and some of these translated and adapted in the language of the country in Syria, Asia Minor, and Egypt.

D'autre part, la possibilité d'une transmission indirecte ne peut pas être rejetée, non plus, a priori. On pense notamment à la Syrie et à la Phénicie, dont les mythes cosmogoniques, au peu que nous en savons, livrent encore des traits manifestement empruntés à la Mésopotamie et que l'on retrouve en la Bible : comme la lutte de Baal contre la mer, et vraisemblablement aussi la résidence du Dieu créateur « à la jonction des deux branches du Fleuve cosmique » […]

On the other hand the possibility of an indirect transmission can’t be rejected either, a priori. Notably, one can think of Syria and Phoenicia, whose cosmogonic myths, as far as we know, still show clearly borrowed traits from Mesopotamia — which we also find in the Bible, as in the struggle of Baal against the sea, and probably also the home of the creator God “at the junction of the two branches of the cosmic River” […]

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While Bottéro delves into the Mesopotamian and biblical contexts in an enthusiastic yet balanced way, Enns brings in some Mesopotamian context, yet he leaves a huge amount out, and he also slants what he does cover to make it look meagre, confused, even soap-operish. He thus follows a zero-sum pattern: 1 (Jewish) + -1 (Mesoptamian) = 0. This is perhaps not inconsistent with his aim, which isn’t to do an Assyriological reading, but to provoke critical thinking in everyday Christians, who aren’t looking for any sort of inter-religious encounter with Ancient polytheism! Yet Bottéro’s positive-sum approach gives us a positive look at both traditions and thus gives us a wider philological, historical, and religious perspective. It also leads to what I think Enns might find very interesting and perhaps very disturbing: an exploration of radical ancient ambiguities and diversities that even question the Bible’s unparalleled authority. Or, to put it another way, the philology that makes a parallel between the authority of the Bible and the authority of Mesopotamian texts adds one more challenge to the unparalleled authority of the Bible.

This may sound devilish to very traditional Christians, yet to agnostics it sounds angelic, opening up the upper layers of the atmosphere so that we can all breathe. Bottéro hints at something like this when he says that after launching himself into Assyriology at his biblical college, and after teaching that the story of Adam and Eve is a myth,

je me trouvais dans un climat moral lourd et défavorable. Je sentais bien qu’au fond on se disait: << Il a perdu la foi >> et qu’on me regardait de travers, tout en restant aimable.

I found myself in an unfavourable and heavy climate. I really felt that deep down they were saying He’s lost the faith, and that they were looking at me strangely, all the while remaining polite.

Asked whether or not he could discuss his point of view and defend himself, he says:

Avec qui, et comment, lorsque vous n'avez devant vous que des gens très courtois, mais ouvertement persuadés que ce qui vous paraît une évidence, un « deux et deux font quatre », n'est qu un entêtement orgueilleux ? Du reste, mon système général est qu'il ne faut pas courir derrière les gens ni les choses.

With who, and how, given that you have before you only very polite people, who are openly persuaded that what seems to you obvious, that two and two equal four, is merely a prideful obstinacy? In any case, my general philosophy is that you shouldn’t follow behind people or things.

As Bottéro demonstrates in books such as Birth of God, Babylone et la Bible, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, and Babylone. À l'aube de notre culture (Babylon: At the Dawn of Our Culture), there’s a very strong wider, deeper case to be made that 1. our earliest and most basic concepts of math, writing, war, and religion were developed in Mesopotamia, and 2. largely as a result of this, the ancientness of the Bible is deeply connected specifically to Mesopotamia. For instance, while Egypt figures prominently in many biblical stories — notably those of Abraham, Joseph, Jacob, Moses & the Exodus — the Mesopotamian civilizations give the Israelites their language, gods, laws, culture, mathematics, city-state politics and religion, as well as several key foundational narratives. 

Bottéro’s position is nuanced here, however, for he doesn’t think that this means that the Bible is born in Babylon, or that the Jewish theological break with Mesopotamian civilization isn’t fundamental, staggering, and crucial. In order to get at his position the way he articulates it, I’ll conclude with the final paragraph from Babylon and the Bible, “Chapter VI: Babylonian Polytheism and Monotheism in the Bible”:

Il y a une grande naïveté à penser que, si l'assyriologie a tant apporté à une connaissance plus complète, plus sentie, plus authentique et plus juste de la Bible, c'est en nous dévoilant le « berceau » de cette dernière : « La Bible est née à Babylone », phénoménale naïveté — ou sottise ! Non ! C'est en nous fournissant, dans une présentation plus ancienne et différente, des éléments ultérieurement passés, sous haute transformation, dans la Bible. L'assyriologie nous donne de la Bible une perception, non pas directe, mais oblique et « analogique » : elle nous présente dans un autre état, dans une autre formulation et une autre élaboration, des données que l'histoire d'Israël et les auteurs de la Bible avaient profondément ruminées et assimilées, après en avoir pris connaissance (nous ignorons comment !) et — peut-être portés par leur « mentalité sémitique » commune — les avoir jugées profitables, une fois adaptées à leur propre vision et sensibilité.

There’s a great naivety in thinking, if Assyriology has led to a more complete understanding — more deeply felt, more authentic and more true — of the Bible, it’s by having unveiled its ‘cradle.’ “The Bible was born in Babylon!” — phenomenal naivety! Or stupidity! No! [Rather,] it’s in furnishing us, in a more ancient and different aspect, with elements (later faded under great transformation) in the Bible. Assyriology gives us a perception of the Bible, not direct but oblique and analogical; it presents us, in a different state, in another formulation and in another elaboration, basic concepts [or givens] that the history of Israel and the authors of the Bible had profoundly thought through and assimilated, after having understood them (we don’t know how!) and — perhaps carried by their common ‘Semitic mentality’ — judged them profitable, once adapted to their own vision and sensibility.

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Next: More Zero Sums

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