On the Originality of the Bible

     Well, it seems that the God of the Bible is the all creating, all knowing, original lawmaker. Or is He? Most modern Christians would agree that modern law is based on the 10 commandments, that is not accurate in and of itself, but what if there was something else predating the 10 commandments? Surely such a thing would not exist, especially not in Babylon, the land of immorality and everything Yahweh stands against. Guess again! Hammurabi's Code predates the Mosaic Law by a few centuries, in fact, most of the Laws proposed and imposed by Moses were flat out copies of Hammurabi's with a Judaic twist. So how original is the God of the Bible? Does He bring any original ideas? Let's see!

   Original sin is a novel idea and concept in the Bible, and according to most Christians.is the reason for the coming of Jesus Christ, according to most scholars, the story of Genesis was written around the 7th Century BCE, whereas the story of Pandora ( a woman bringing about all the evils in the world) came around the same time. It is interesting to see who or what came first, but in both cases it was a woman who brought on a curse to mankind. Original? that's debatable.

     Then there is the story of the flood, being a blatant copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the hero saves all the animals surrounding the area from a Great Flood, by putting them in his boat, the tale was later greatly exaggerated by the accounts in Genesis. Again, borrowing elements of salvation from another myth. Tsk Tsk Yahweh.

   Lastly, the immaculate conception, the Greeks already had such a  story of a man Hero, son of Zeus through no natural means (a gold shower?), Heracles was born of a young woman, and saved many lives because of his superhuman strength/powers. Heracles went as far as to go to the Underworld in order to save Theseus, which is later reproduced by Jesus supposedly dying on the cross and spending 3 days in hell in order to save lost souls who were not given the opportunity to be saved prior to their death (according to common christian extrapolation of NT verses).

   So... Yea, a creative deity indeed. Or, like Loki, a trickster god trying to gain a following through misappropriation of myths, or even better and more plausible, a story meant to simply protect people from a hard cold reality which they were not ready to face due to lack of knowledge regarding their surroundings.