The question being asked in this study, “How then shall we live?” is an inadvertent echo of Francis Schaeffer's "How Should We Then Live?" - the title of his 1976 book and associated film series, "How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture." The question emerged from the intellectual world surrounding Schaeffer's residential study center, L'Abri in Switzerland, and from his attempt to trace Western civilization through philosophy, art, religion, and culture toward what he regarded as the crisis of modern secular thought.More than half a century later, we have approached a similar question, but through a considerably longer human history - one extending beyond Western civilization, Christianity, Israel, and the biblical page into the evolutionary and prehistoric worlds from which human culture itself emerged. Our question therefore becomes not only how Christians might live within a modern pluralistic world, but how human beings, having inherited this immense evolutionary, cultural, religious, and narrative history, might live more responsibly and compassionately with one another, with the stranger, and with the living world of nature with which we share.
The Prehistory of the Bible essays will explore this largely forgotten world behind the Bible. Beginning with human evolution and the symbolic cultures of the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic periods, the study moves forward through the rise of agriculture, cities, civilizations, and the great narrative traditions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan, and the ancient Near East. Only then do we arrive at ancient Israel and discover that the Bible did not simply appear in an empty world with its own early events and beliefs. Rather, its stories participated in an already ancient human conversation about creation, climate events, mortality, catastrophe, justice, suffering, God, community, and the meaning of human existence.
This historical study is not intended to disprove God, diminish the Bible, or submit faith to a scientific test. The foundational companion essays clarify the philosophical and theological position from which the study proceeds. The principal historical excavation then brackets questions of revelation, inspiration, and inerrancy while reconstructing the evolutionary, archaeological, cultural, religious, and literary worlds behind the Bible. Those theological questions return in fuller form only after the historical work has been undertaken.
Its historical purpose remains fundamental: to give the Bible back its historical background. Its larger theological purpose is to ask how Christian faith may remain intellectually honest and spiritually alive after that background has been restored. When Scriptural understanding is integrated with the prehistory of civilization before it - the evolutionary, cultural, religious, and later literary worlds from which it arose - then familiar biblical texts may become unfamiliar again, and perhaps richer for the discussion.
The God of the universe, of the heavens and the earth, may be a question for some, but for many this God is ever a wonder and a mystery. As the earth and ancient life evolved, early humanity gradually became capable of asking ancient questions of God and life. Those questions, insights, beliefs, and stories became part of humanity’s enduring cultural inheritance that were remembered not only then but even now, in our modern, postmodern, and emerging metamodern societies as we search for meaning and meaningful living with one another.
That ancient search eventually returns the question to us. What have human beings learned across the immense journey from our earliest ancestors to the present? How might our inherited stories help us become more compassionate participants in the world we now inhabit? The journey into biblical prehistory therefore leads finally toward the present: toward care for one another, hospitality toward the stranger, compassion for suffering, responsibility toward Earth and its wild things, and the continuing question that has accompanied humanity from time immemorial: How then shall we live?
| Ancient source/tradition | Approx. surviving textual tradition | Biblical resonance |
|---|---|---|
| Enuma Elish | 2nd millennium BCE | Genesis 1; creation, primordial waters, cosmic ordering |
| Atrahasis Epic | c. 18th–17th c. BCE | Genesis 1–9; creation of humans, overpopulation, divine judgment, flood |
| Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI | roots in 2nd millennium BCE | Genesis 6–9; flood, boat, preservation of life, birds, sacrifice |
| Sumerian Flood / Ziusudra | early 2nd millennium BCE text | Noah tradition |
| Eridu Genesis traditions | Sumerian | creation → kingship → flood |
| Adapa | 2nd millennium BCE | mortality, divine knowledge, lost possibility of immortality |
| Enki and Ninhursag / Dilmun | Sumerian | paradisal land, water, fertility, human/divine existence |
| Enki and Ninmah | Sumerian | creation of humanity from clay |
| Egyptian creation traditions | 3rd–1st millennia BCE | primordial waters, creation by divine speech/order |
| Ugaritic Baal Cycle | c. 14th–13th c. BCE | Psalms, Job, prophetic imagery; storm deity, sea/chaos combat |
| Aqhat / Keret traditions | Ugaritic | kingship, blessing, fertility, covenantal/social themes |
| Mesopotamian law collections | 3rd–2nd millennia BCE | Exodus–Deuteronomy; covenant/law/social order |
| Egyptian wisdom literature | 3rd–1st millennia BCE | Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and wisdom traditions |
| Babylonian Theodicy / Ludlul | 2nd millennium BCE | Job; innocent suffering and divine justice |
1 - The flood relationship is particularly strong. Comparative scholarship treats Atrahasis, the Sumerian flood account, Gilgamesh, and later Berossus as genuine comparative material for Genesis 6–8, while also emphasizing that similarities must be weighed rather than merely counted.
2 - Ancient human questions were already asking about creation, flood, chaos, garden, mortality, divine-human relations, sacrifice, kingship, law, wisdom, suffering.
Before beginning our formal study of the prehistory of the Bible, I wish to begin here by providing a sampling of what to expect across the scientific, historical, interpretive, philosophical, and theological orientation of the study. For some time I have wanted to explore how a relational understanding of reality might correspond to contemporary accounts of world history, human becoming, religious belief, and the Christian faith. More particularly, I wish to ask whether it is possible - and perhaps even helpful - to retain God and Christian faith while allowing science, history, archaeology, biblical scholarship, and other contemporary disciplines to speak according to their own evidence.
These introductory essays therefore establish the standpoint from which the larger study will proceed. They do not present Generative Relational Realism, relational theology, or relational Christianity as completed systems. Each remains developing and open to further examination. Rather, these essays begin a conversation among what we are learning about reality, how relational philosophy might interpret that reality, how relational theology might understand God within it, and how a resulting relational Christianity might reconsider its beliefs and participation within the world.
The movement is consequently progressive:
Essay 1 - Establishes the method and introduces relational theology
Essay 2a - Recovers the evolutionary history of humanity
Essay 2b - Moves from human evolution towards relational faith
Essay 3 - Recovers the immense human world preceding written Scripture
Essay 4 - Explores myth, memory, symbolism, and the human interpretation of beginnings
Essay 5 - Confronts what contemporary scholarship may require inherited Christian faith to reconsider
Essay 6 - Reconceives Christian faith through a developing relational philosophy and relational theology
Hominins, Changing Climates, Migration, and Social BecomingBecoming Symbolic (3b)Language, Memory, Imagination, Death, and the Expanding Human WorldBefore There Were Gods (3c)Ritual, Spirit, Story, and the Ancient Worlds of Human Meaning
In summary, these essays do not replace the detailed historical, archaeological, literary, cultural, and biblical studies that follow. They establish the orientation from which those studies will proceed. Reality and evidence must first be allowed to speak; interpretation must remain distinguishable from observation; philosophy must remain accountable to reality; theology must remain open to philosophical and historical correction; and Christian faith must remain capable of reconsidering inherited interpretations when they no longer correspond adequately to what we have learned.
At the same time, neither scholarship nor philosophy determines Christian confession by itself. Christian faith brings its own questions, traditions, experiences, hopes, and claims into the conversation. The purpose of these essays is therefore not to reduce Christianity to science or history, nor to protect Christianity from them, but to allow each form of inquiry to contribute according to its appropriate role.
Contemporary Christianity requires a faith accountable to the sciences, informed by historical scholarship, examined through responsible interpretation, and reconsidered through a relational philosophy and theology capable of remaining in continuing conversation with reality. Such a faith need not fear an unfinished world. It may discover within that very unfinishedness the possibility of an embodied, embedded, responsible, and generative participation in what the world may yet become.
Where did the Bible come from? Our first journey moves backward. We begin with the biblical world familiar to contemporary Christians and progressively remove later historical layers. Each excavation raises the same question: What lies beneath this portion of history?
Before there was Genesis, humanity was already asking:But writing only takes us so far. We dig deeper.
- Where did everything come from?
- Why are we here?
- Why do humans die?
- Why is there suffering?
- Why does catastrophe occur?
- What makes something sacred?
- What do we owe one another?
- What do we owe the dead?
- What lies beyond the visible world?
- How should we live?
At some unknowable point, a human ancestor confronted death, birth, blood, animal, fire, lightning, moon, storm, darkness, or another human being and did something astonishing: s/he wondered what it meant. That moment left no text. Yet much of what followed may depend upon capacities such moments reveal.
We have been reconstructing chronologically the world that eventually produced the Bible. The first phase asked: What lies beneath the Bible? The second asks: What happened across this immense span of human time? We now reconstruct the history in its natural chronological direction. The purpose is not to repeat the excavation. It is to see development, continuity, discontinuity, and transformation across time.
We began with Christians holding a Bible. We excavated backward until there was no Christianity. Then no Judaism. No Israel. No Bible. No writing. No city. No agriculture. Perhaps no identifiable religion. Only evolving human beings living together within an evolving world. Then we turned around and watched those human beings become symbolic, narrative, ritual, agricultural, urban, literary, and religious creatures. And eventually: there was a Bible which we might read again through the lens of prehistory.
We now turn back to the Bible to reread its pages having recovered its prehistory. Our final journey now asks: What does knowing all of this change within us, the people around us, and the societies around the world?
We have traveled backward from the Bible we inherited through Christianity, Judaism, ancient Israel, the civilizations of the ancient Near East, the prehistoric worlds of early humanity, and finally into the evolutionary history from which human beings emerged. We then turned around and followed humanity forward again - through sociality and care, communication and symbol, ritual and narrative, settlement and civilization, writing and religion - until we encountered the Bible once more. But having recovered its prehistory, we no longer encounter the Bible without a history. The Bible now has an address.
Phase 1 - The Excavation
Where did the Bible come from?
The Bible We Inherited → Christianity → Jesus and Second Temple Judaism → Ancient Israel and Judah → Canaan / Ugarit / Egypt / Mesopotamia → Neolithic and Mesolithic Humanity → Paleolithic Symbolic Worlds → Human Evolution
Phase 2 - The Long Human Journey
What happened across deep human time?
Human Evolution → Sociality and Care → Communication → Symbol → Ritual → Narrative → Myth → Settlement and Agriculture → Civilization → Writing → Ancient Cosmology and Religion → Israel → Biblical Literature
This is not a straight line of inevitable progress. It is a history of branching, inheritance, loss, innovation, adaptation, conflict, continuity, and becoming.
Phase 3 - The Return
What does knowing this change?
Biblical Narrative → Jewish Interpretation → Jesus and Christianity → Later Christian Interpretation → The Modern Bible → Historical Understanding → Our Own Narrative Worlds → Human Responsibility
Four Questions Govern the Study
The Historical Question
Where did the Bible come from?
The Human Question
How did evolutionary creatures become creatures capable of symbol, religion, story, and Scripture?
The Interpretive Question
What happens to the Bible when we return it to the immense human history from which it arose?
The Participatory Question
What shall we do with this inheritance now?
The Journey in One Movement
We begin with a Bible in our hands.
We excavate backward until the Bible disappears. We continue until civilization disappears, writing disappears, and agriculture disappears. Recognizable religion becomes increasingly difficult to identify. Eventually we encounter evolving human beings living together within an evolving world.
Then we turn around.
We watch humans care. We watch them communicate. We watch them remember. We watch them symbolize. We watch them bury their dead. We watch them paint. We watch them gather. We watch them settle. We watch them farm. We watch them build. We watch them tell stories. We watch stories become traditions. We watch traditions become civilizations. We watch civilizations write. We watch written stories become sacred stories.
And eventually we encounter the Bible again.
But now the Bible has an address.
And the question with which we began has become larger.
We began by asking:
Where did the Bible come from?
We end by asking:
What do we do with the humanity that created, inherited, preserved, interpreted, contested, loved, feared, and continues to live through its stories?
The Bible belongs within that immense human story. It did not introduce humanity to the great questions of existence. It inherited questions already ancient when its earliest traditions arose, gave them particular voices within the worlds of Israel and Judaism, and passed those voices onward into Christianity and beyond. To recover that history need not make the Bible smaller. It may instead make both the Bible and humanity's story considerably larger.
And perhaps that is where biblical prehistory finally returns us - not merely to questions about what ancient people believed, nor even to questions about what we should believe about their writings, but to the human beings who created, inherited, preserved, interpreted, and continually reinterpreted them. Their questions have become our questions because we belong to the same unfinished human story.
We still confront birth and death, love and loss, suffering and joy, violence and peace, belonging and exclusion, stranger and neighbor, Earth and one another. We still construct stories by which we understand ourselves and our world. And we still must decide what kinds of people those stories will help us become.
And beneath all these questions remains humanity's ancient question:
How then shall we live?
