MYTH AND HISTORY
One of the most fascinating characteristics of the Hebrew Bible is that it presents myths as if they were history. What do I mean by this? Myths, in my use of the term following Mircea Eliade, a preeminent scholar of the history of religions, are stories about Gods, heroes or revered ancestors. These stories are beyond our human ability to replicate even while we seek to emulate the God, heroes or revered ancestors and thus draw closer to the sacred.
History, on the other hand, is an attempt to recount stories in factual ways to inform us about what happened. Writing history, contrary to our popular image, isn’t simply a recital of facts. Every historian chooses what s/he will include and exclude and tells their stories based on who they are and their own purposes in being an historian. Yet there has been general agreement that you can’t simply ignore inconvenient facts and pretend that they don’t exist (though this agreement is breaking down as we see in our politics). If you are writing about the American Civil War, even if you think Robert E. Lee is the greatest general ever to walk the face of the earth, you still discuss his decision to send Picket’s brigade straight up an open hill into the face of a well prepared, numerically stronger and dug in Union army that led to the destruction of Picket’s force.
But the writer of myth could ignore this inconvenient fact because his/her purpose is not to describe what happened using some kind of general consensus about what is a fact and what is not. No, the mythologist writes, or almost always speaks, to describe how the presence of the sacred unfolds in our profane world and how we imperfect humans might more closely align ourselves with the sacred.
Eliade writes somewhere that myth is truer than history. I take this to mean that myth speaks to us more deeply than history. It connects us to the realm of the sacred or to spirit in a way that mere history can never do. Evaluating a myth by asking how historically accurate it is e.g. was the world really created in six days, did the Red Sea really part and swallow Pharoah’s army, is completely missing the point. It is asking the wrong question. The right question is whether the myth draws us closer to the sacred.
