What the Hebrews believed about creation predates written texts.
Because people thought thoughts before writing was invented.
What is the newest creation text?
Was it the Hebrew text or for some other culture?
Yeah, I would think what's meant there is "most recent"?
You're going to have... let me think about that.
Ultimately the Hebrew question is going to derive from when we think
a certain passage was written. But it's not that easy.
I mean, that's not easy. But it's even more complicated than that.
Let me try to give an illustration here.
Let's just say that Genesis 1 is the most recent of all these ancient texts.
I don't think it is, but let's just say it for the sake of illustration, okay.
Is creation talked about anywhere else in the Old Testament? Sure.
You get the Psalms, you get it in the prophets, you get it in all sorts of other books.
Well, let's say that one of them is in the first half of Isaiah,
okay, well, then that's older than Genesis.
Even if you take that really, really late view of Genesis, the first half of Isaiah, at least.
Psalms, let's say, Psalm 29, or Psalm, youknow, whatever, has some something in it
that sounds like creation language.
Ok, I just picked out Psalm 29, because there are things in Psalm 29
that are directly traceable to Canaanite texts that are quite a bit older than the VI century.
So what does the question mean?
You know what I mean? It's like we have more than just Genesis.
So probably the discussion shouldn't be oriented only to Genesis.
And here's another layer, it gets even wider than that.
We tend to think, when we think about ancient languages, and we think about text,
creation stories, you know what we're thinking about?
We're thinking about stuff that's written; tablet, scroll, whatever.
What the Hebrews believed about creation pre-dates written texts.
Because people thought thoughts before writing was invented.
Okay, the Hebrew language and Hebrew thoughts about God did not begin
the day somebody discovers an alphabet.
People are having conversations.
They're telling stories for hundreds, thousands of years prior to the invention of writing.
So when you think about that, it's like, well, good grief, how much do I want to hang
on the date of Genesis?
Like, you have to change the question.
You have to really change what you're looking for in the question.
When you start thinking about some of these broader things, but anyway.