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 historical study of biblical prehistory, these eight introductory essays establish the scientific, philosophical, historical, interpretive, and theological orientation of the project. They examine humanity's evolutionary and religious ancestry before asking whether Christian faith can remain intellectually responsible within an open and developing world. Relational philosophy remains independent of Christian theology, while theological interpretations remain open to historical and philosophical criticism.
Hominins, Changing Climates, Migration, and Social BecomingEncountering the Symbolic World of the Paleolithic (3b)Language, Memory, Imagination, Death, and the Expanding Human WorldRitual, Spirit, Story, and the Ancient Worlds of Human Meaning
Essay 4A - Sections I–IV
From Prehistoric Religion to the Institutional Development of Religion.
From Named Gods to the Ancient Near Eastern Conversation.
From Common Human Questions to Sacred Scripture, followed by the Conclusion and supporting materials.
From Religious Inheritance to Living Belief. Examining how inherited narratives, rituals, memories, and religious experiences develop into shared understandings of sacred reality.
From Living Belief to Religious Authority. Exploring how religious traditions become institutionalized, transmitted, interpreted, and invested with sacred authority across generations.
From Historical Explanation to the Question of Divine Reality. Distinguishing the historical development of religious belief from theological claims concerning God, revelation, and the possibility of continuing Christian faith.
Reality → Ontology → Metaphysics → Interpretation → Theology → Ethics → Participation
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.
Having excavated backward through the historical layers beneath the Bible, we now reconstruct humanity's development in its chronological direction, from evolutionary origins toward the emergence of biblical literature. 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.
Paleolithic symbolic consciousness → animal / death / ancestor / landscape worlds → Mesolithic ritual and social worlds → Neolithic communal cosmologies → agricultural and settled societies → urban temple cosmologies → Sumerian literary traditions → Akkadian and Babylonian traditions → Canaanite / Egyptian / Near Eastern narrative worlds → Israelite interpretation → Torah / Prophets / Wisdom → Jewish and Christian interpretation.
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?
The religious ideas eventually associated with biblical faith and Christianity did not originate as a single, fully developed theological system. They emerged through a long history of human religious interpretation extending from the ancient Near Eastern civilizations through Israelite religion, Second Temple Judaism, the early Jesus movements, and the developing Christian churches.
This essay reconstructs that genealogy by tracing the inheritance, transformation, rejection, and recombination of major religious ideas: divine identity, creation, cosmic order, sacred kingship, covenant, sacrifice, prophecy, wisdom, mortality, resurrection, messianic expectation, divine mediation, and the developing status of Jesus as Messiah, Lord, Son of God, and divine Logos.
Rather than presenting Christianity as the inevitable culmination of earlier religious developments, it examines Christianity as a historically particular movement arising within Judaism and subsequently developing through interaction with wider Greco-Roman cultures. Judaism continues its own historical development, while Christianity inherits and reinterprets Jewish traditions through its understanding of Jesus.
The purpose is to distinguish historical ancestry from theological truth. Demonstrating how religious beliefs developed does not establish either the existence or nonexistence of the divine realities to which those beliefs refer. It does reveal that religious understanding has always been mediated through human language, cultural memory, historical experience, social institutions, and changing interpretations of reality.
The central question is therefore not simply where Christian beliefs originated, but how earlier religious understandings became reorganized into the distinctive theological claims of Judaism and Christianity, and what this historical genealogy means for interpreting those claims today.
I. Religion Has a History
Why religious concepts possess genealogies rather than timeless, unchanging forms
II. The Ancient Inheritance
Divine councils, cosmic order, sacred kingship, temples, sacrifice, and mortality
III. Israel's Transformations
YHWH, El traditions, covenant, prophecy, justice, and emerging monotheism
IV. Judaism's Continuing Development
Torah, wisdom, apocalypticism, resurrection, messianic expectation, angels, and divine mediation
V. Christianity's Reinterpretation
Jesus, Messiah, Lord, Son of God, resurrection, Logos, developing Christology
VI. Inheritance, Innovation, and Consolidation
How earlier religious concepts became reorganized within emerging Christian theology
Conclusion
Historical ancestry and the continuing question of divine reality
Essay 61 must distinguish three kinds of genealogy:
Kind | Central question |
|---|---|
Historical genealogy | When, where, and through which communities did particular religious ideas develop? |
Conceptual genealogy | How did the meanings of inherited ideas change as they entered new relationships? |
Theological interpretation | What, if anything, might these changing understandings disclose about divine reality? |
The first two properly belong to Essay 61. The third may be introduced as an open question but should receive its fuller treatment in Essays 69–71, especially God After Deep Time and Jesus After Historical Understanding. That distinction will keep the new essay consistent with the method established at the beginning of the series.
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?
