Blog post #5 on World's mythology vs. Christian mythology

There are many stories in the Bible that are related or have some similarities with stories from other religions, legends, and myths. I will examine two of the more prominent examples; did the Bible borrow its flood narrative from other myths and legends?

I would like to write about the account of the fall of mankind that was mentioned in the Genesis, and if I recall it right, there was a Greek legend, that of Pandora’s box, whose details differ so dramatically from the biblical account of the fall, that one might never suspect a relationship. However, people may actually connect it to the same historical event. Both stories tell how the very first woman unleashed sin, sickness, and suffering upon the world, which had been, up to that point, an “Edenic” paradise. Both stories end with the emergence of hope, hope in a promised Redeemer in the case of Genesis, and “hope” as a thing having been released from the box at the very end of the Pandora legend.

Like the world’s copious flood legends, Pandora's Box demonstrates how the Bible might parallel pagan myths at times simply because they all speak of a historical core truth that has over the years manifested itself in ancient histories, as in the case of the Bible, and in poetic allegories, as in the case of Pandora, whose story was told in many different ways by the Greeks but whose core truth remained fairly constant.

The similarities do not point to one account copying from the other, but to the fact that both stories point back to the same historical event.

Finally, there are cases of borrowing, but in these cases the Bible was the source, not the pagan myths, despite pseudo-academic claims to the contrary. Consider the case of Sargon’s birth. Legend has it that Sargon was placed in a reed basket and sent down the river by his mother. “Aqqi”, who then adopted him as his own son, and rescued him. That sounds a lot like the story of Moses in Exodus two. And Sargon lived about eight hundred years before Moses was born. So the Moses baby was sent down the river only to be rescued and adopted, so in my opinion, this story must have been borrowed from Sargon, right?

In poetic traditions, originality is not the most valuable thing; it is the symbolism that most matters. I will leave it up to the readers to decide what is to be believed.