Comparision of Genesis with Other Creation Mythologies

Comparison of Genesis with Other Creation Mythologies

We all know that our mothers and fathers gave us birth, and grandmothers and grandfathers gave our parents birth. However, what about the beginning? What does the beginning look like? Who created the sky, the earth, the mountains and rivers, the plants, the animals, and the human beings? How was the world created? What happened to the creator? These questions have puzzled and are asked by every people. However, no one has yet found the answers, and I have heard people saying that the creation of life is as impossible as the natural creation of an airplane from a stack of waste. With the willingness of knowing the self, ancient people tried to create mythological stories about the creation. One of the most famous accounts of creation is presented by the Hebrews in the Book of Genesis. Besides Genesis, almost every culture has its own creation account. Some are remarkably similar and some are contrary, but all are attempts to answer the above questions.

Narrations of creation presented a variety of scenes before the beginning. Most accounts emphasis the nothingness, darkness, and chaos. Genesis describes that "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" (Genesis 53). It implies that God was the only "thing" present in the beginning and nothing else. Also, the first created earth was dark with only water. The nothingness in the beginning is also found in the Rig Veda of the Indians : "The even nothingness was not, nor existence. There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it. What covered it? Wher...

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...al stories. But, there is some confusion. Two similar, but somewhat different, creation stories are jammed into the Book of Genesis because people are not sure of how they are made. Rig Veda recorded that "But, after all, who know, and who can say whence it all came, and how creation happened?...Whence all creation had its origin, he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not, he, who surveys it all from highest heaven, he knows--or maybe even he does not know" (Genesis Project). Out of confusion, people created these stories about creation. Their focus are the same, what the beginning looks like, who created everything, and how.

Works Cited

Genesis. The Norton Anthology of World Literature: Expanded Edition. Ed. Maynard Mack. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Lin, Yang, and Mei Lu. Myth Stories. Hubei, China: Hubei Juvenile Pub, 1993.