MYTH AND HISTORY 2 HOW DO OUR QUESTIONS CHANGE?

Let’s examine some stories and how our questions and perspectives change if we read them as myth or read them as history.  We will take a brief glance at creation, Joseph interpreting Pharoah’s dreams, the question of whether we were actually in Egypt and the wandering in the desert.

If we read them historically, here are some obvious questions and implications—all of which I have heard.  For creation, we get these crazy attempts to figure out how long a day is and the pretzel logic of accounting for dinosaurs who aren’t in the creation myth. We also get the horrible impact of the insistence of teaching creationism in schools as science equivalent to the theory of evolution.  For Joseph interpreting Pharoah’s dreams, we get an unquestioned justification of Pharoah’s land grab where he turns independent farmers into sharecroppers. We also get a justification of the importance of the court Jew and a sense of his superiority compared to Pharoah’s dream interpreters.  Being the court Jew has been a mixed blessing in our history.

Were we ever in Egypt?  If we attempt to read the exile in Egypt and then the deliverance from Egypt as history, we get the intellectual acrobatics of looking for scant pieces of evidence and attempting to justify the story as history. We also get the attempt to scientifically explain the plagues.  When we look at the desert history, we get serious attempts to explain how the people could have survived for 40 years in the desert, what manna might possibly actually be, and how to reconcile the census numbers with reality.

Now, if we read them mythically, we get a whole different series of questions. For creation, how do we relate to the day and to the night, both of which are affirmed as good? What’s our relationship with all of the other beings who, like us, have been created?  Looking at Joseph’s dreams, we can ask about how the experience of exile shapes us, the importance of dreams and dream interpretation.  How can we be a channel for the divine in interpreting dreams?  For the exodus, we can focus on where are the narrow places (the Hebrew for Egypt means “narrow place”) we need to escape and what kind of aid we need to escape them.  For the wandering in the desert, we can focus on the spiritual importance of wandering and the spiritual importance of the desert. We can also ask about how community comes together.

I am careful to distinguish between myth and history because I think this determination is highly influential in my approach to our sacred material.