Before “In the Beginning”: The Creation Myths That Shaped Genesis

By Megan Lewis

Where did the ideas in Genesis come from? Why do its creation stories sound strangely familiar—and familiar to what? In this lecture, Megan Lewis explores ancient Mesopotamian creation myths and places Genesis alongside stories like Atrahasis, Enuma Elish, and Epic of Gilgamesh. Rather than guessing at influence, she shows what these texts actually say, and why comparing them changes how we read Genesis.

For example, Megan’s case study is the biblical flood myth is going to resonate with the older Mesopotamian flood myths in terms of relative chronology; similarities in plot – cosmologically significant ark, two by two animals, and the sending out of birds at the end; sharing rare or unique words like kupru and kopher; substantial textual overlap; coherence (the story has been tweaked to fit a monotheistic context).  For instance, we would not expect to see a flood story occurring in a biblical region, but it fits in the Mesopotamian frequent flood context.   

Just as the Mesopotamians reworked an existing creation story to give their account authority, Genesis does the same in a monotheistic context, e.g.  YHWH doesn’t need the body of a sea monster to form the physical world.

APPLICATION

Lewis’ categories of Borrowed Features and Coherence outlined above are crucial to understand our present state of things, an example always ringing for me is how we’ve adopted Greek philosophical and semantic/syntactic/pragmatic language structures while failing to see what they are or even how out of place they are in today’s world. 

Analogously, probably the most widespread of this in today’s world is appropriating the Cartesian paradigm of truth as certainty (free from doubt) without realizing the genesis of this from Thomas to Luther because what had to be certain in the sense of free from doubt was the salvation of the soul.  Methodologically we just assume that what we are supposed to be doing is securing against doubt without asking why: like a robot blindly following a software program.  If we must follow truth, why certainty?  What of truth as mere correctness, or truth as genuineness like a true friend, or “own-most-ness” like the great truths of the human condition?  Have we even begun to interpret Parmenides poem on truth (Aletheia)? 

The Cartesian paradigm of securing against doubt as a way of life has caused havoc in the modern world.  A paradigm of radical, universal doubt—such as the method of Cartesian doubt (De omnibus dubitandum est) taken to an absolute extreme—leads to paralyzing confusion, intellectual paralysis, and despair rather than a secure foundation for truth.  And certainty is a psychological feeling, not a guarantee of correctness.  We have all been passionately certain, free from doubt about ideas we later changed our minds about.

Unfortunate individuals prompted to a terrifying anxiety because of this report things like holding a driver’s license up to a mirror to reassure them they are who they think they are or worrying they will forget how to drive and then suddenly losing reassurance about where to place the car in the lane on the road (like the uncertainty of what you were doing when first learning to drive).  Life is full of these figurative “training wheels” that have been removed and it doesn’t take much to become aware that they are missing.

That captures something essential about how radical doubt and anxiety can intersect.  When systematic or existential doubt takes hold, it doesn’t just question isolated beliefs; it can make the whole fabric of “taken-for-granted” existence feel provisional. The solid ground of ordinary competence and self-recognition thins out. What once ran on automatic pilot — the body knowing where the car belongs in the lane, the quiet certainty that the face in the mirror and the name on the license belong to the same continuous “me” — suddenly appears without its usual scaffolding. The training wheels really are gone, and anxiety makes that absence conspicuous and threatening.

In Heideggerian terms, this is close to the way anxiety withdraws the ready-to-hand character of the world and of one’s own everyday self. Skills and identities that normally recede into transparent coping become conspicuous, opaque, even alien. The “uncanny” (unheimlich) feeling is precisely that one is no longer at home in what used to be most familiar. The driver’s-license-in-the-mirror gesture is a desperate attempt to re-anchor the self in something external and documentary once the internal sense of continuity has loosened. The regression in driving is the sudden return of the beginner’s insecurity after years of absorbed expertise — the world of the lane, the vehicle, and one’s place in them no longer “shows up” with its former reliability.

Kierkegaard’s “dizziness of freedom” points in a related direction: once possibility and contingency are felt too strongly, even the simplest actions can lose their necessity. Descartes’ methodic doubt was an intentional, controlled version of this stripping-away, undertaken in the hope of reaching an unshakeable foundation. When the same stripping occurs without that methodological containment — or when the hoped-for foundation fails to feel secure — the result can be precisely the kind of free-floating uncertainty I describe, in which the ordinary world and the ordinary self no longer hold firm.

These experiences are extreme versions of a more general human vulnerability: that much of what feels solid is held in place by habit, social confirmation, and practical absorption rather than by some absolute metaphysical guarantee. Anxiety can make that contingent character painfully vivid. The “training wheels” metaphor is apt — competence and identity often depend on structures that, once internalized, become invisible until something (doubt, crisis, or the mood of anxiety itself) renders them visible by their absence.

It’s a heavy recognition, but also one that many philosophical and clinical traditions try to work with rather than simply suppress: learning, in some measure, to dwell with the unsolidness without being wholly undone by it.

Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety (Angst) in Being and Time (§40) and related texts (such as “What Is Metaphysics?”) presents it as a fundamental mood (Grundstimmung) that discloses the nothing, the world as world, and Dasein’s uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit—not-being-at-home). In anxiety, everyday significance withdraws; entities lose their familiar readiness-to-hand or presence-at-hand character; and Dasein is individualized before its ownmost possibility-for-Being (including Being-toward-death). This reveals a kind of groundlessness: the world is not secured by any ultimate innerworldly foundation, the “they” (das Man), or theoretical certainty. Anxiety is thus ontologically prior to fear and to ordinary uncertainty; it is an existentiale of Dasein rather than a contingent psychological reaction.

Heidegger’s sustained critique of Descartes provides the relevant link. He repeatedly argues that Cartesian systematic doubt and the cogito seek (and claim to achieve) an absolute, unshakeable foundation (fundamentum absolutum inconcussum veritatis) via mathematical/clear-and-distinct standards of certainty. This prioritizes the subject as subiectum, reduces truth to certainty, treats Being primarily in terms of presence/representation, and leaves the Being of the sum (and of Dasein) undetermined or covered over. In Heidegger’s reading, this is not neutral method but a decisive step in the modern metaphysical trajectory: the rise of the self-certain subject, the objectification of the world, and the forgetting of a more primordial disclosure of Being. Cartesian doubt aims to overcome uncertainty by establishing secure grounds; for Heidegger, this both conceals Dasein’s factical, thrown, finite Being and contributes to the modern condition in which such secure foundations become both urgently demanded and ultimately unavailable. It’s like dieting actually being counterproductive and resulting in overeating because you are thinking about food all the time.

In that broader frame (Heidegger’s history of Being and critique of modernity/nihilism), the cultural and intellectual popularity of Cartesian methodic doubt—and the subject-object dualism, representationalism, and quest for certainty it helped normalize—can be seen as intensifying or making more historically salient the experience of foundationalessness and figurative homelessness that anxiety discloses. Everyday absorption in the “they” and theoretical flight into certainty both function as ways of fleeing the uncanny groundlessness that anxiety brings into view. Related notions such as “Cartesian anxiety” (the dilemma of absolute foundations versus chaos/nihilism) capture a similar dynamic, even if not identical to Heidegger’s terminology.

But what about truth as certainty vs other understandings of truth mentioned earlier?

Heidegger notes the ancient Greek word for correctness is ὀρθότης (orthótēs, genitive ὀρθότητος), which means “rightness,” “correctness,” “straightness,” or “uprightness.”

It is the abstract noun derived from the adjective ὀρθός (orthós), which primarily means “straight,” “upright,” or “erect,” and by extension “right,” “correct,” “true,” or “proper.” The adverb is ὀρθῶς (orthôs, “correctly”).

Key distinctions and usage

• ἀλήθεια (alḗtheia) is the main classical term for “truth” (etymologically linked to “unconcealment” or “not being hidden/forgotten,” from ἀ- + λήθη). It covers reality, veracity, and disclosedness, and is broader/ontological in philosophical contexts (e.g., Parmenides, Plato, later Heideggerian readings).
• ὀρθότης focuses more on correctness, accuracy, rightness, or conformity to a standard (e.g., of names, calculations, speech, music, or posture). It appears in Plato (e.g., Cratylus on orthótēs onomátōn = “correctness of names”; Timaeus on correctness of calculations; Laws on music), Aristophanes, and elsewhere.

Related terms include:

• ὀρθός λόγος (orthós lógos) — right/correct reason or rational account.
• Other words sometimes overlapping with aspects of “truth/correctness” include ἀκρίβεια (akríbeia, exactness/precision), ἔτυμος (étymos, true/real/genuine), and ἀτρεκής (atrekḗs, exact/unswerving), but orthótēs is the closest match for “correctness” as distinct from aletheia.

This distinction (truth as unconcealment vs. correctness as rightness/correspondence) is often noted in philosophical discussions of Greek epistemology and language:

Sense	English example	Greek near-equivalent	German near-equivalent
Correctness / correspondence	“true statement”	ὀρθότης (orthótēs)	Richtigkeit
Unconcealment / disclosure	“truth of Being”	ἀλήθεια (alḗtheia)	Unverborgenheit / Wahrheit
Genuine + exemplary / paradigmatic	“true friend,” “true art” (a van Gogh)	ἔτυμος / ἀληθινός (+ παράδειγμα)	echt / wahrhaft / vorbildlich / beispielhaft
Ownmost / most proper	“truths of the human condition”	(often deeper ἀλήθεια)	eigen / eigentlich / das Eigenste
Foundational concepts	“basic concepts”	—	Grundbegriffe

Ancient Greek lacks a single neat technical term that maps exactly onto the modern/German philosophical sense of “basic concepts,” but the closest functional equivalents are:

Greek term	Transliteration	Primary sense	Relation to Grundbegriffe
ἀρχαί	archai	beginnings, principles, first principles	Strongest match — the foundational starting-points of a science or domain
στοιχεῖα	stoicheia	elements, rudiments	Basic building-blocks or elementary notions
τὰ πρῶτα / πρῶται ἀρχαί	ta prōta / prōtai archai	the first things / first principles	Explicitly foundational
γένη / κατηγορίαι	genē / katēgoriai	genera / categories	Highest classificatory concepts (esp. Aristotle)
ὅροι / ὁρισμοί	horoi / horismoi	definitions, boundaries	Conceptual delimitations

Heidegger’s own lecture course Die Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie (“Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy”) works through precisely these sorts of Greek terms (archē, alētheia, ousia, logos, etc.) as the fundamental concepts that structured ancient thought.  The nearest Greek counterparts remain archai and related terms for principles or first notions.

The movement we describe—from ordinary correctness to “true friend / true painting” to the primordial “truths” of the human condition—is exactly the kind of shift Heidegger tracks when he moves from everyday correctness to the more originary aletheia and then to the Eigentlichkeit of Dasein. The Grundbegriffe are the conceptual instruments that try to keep that deeper level in view.

REFLECTIONS:

I always talk about Being for the Greeks as appearing out of hiddenness and receding into hiddenness.  So, the mansion may temporarily appear as / feel like houseness incarnate (Now that’s a house), houseness merely present in the average house and deficient in the dilapidated shack.  For example, with “dilapidated,” Penia (Πενία) is the Greek personification (daimona) of poverty, need, and deficiency (penury).  Of course, the next person might find the mansion Gawdy or the shack quaint/rustic.  When I say of my middle-class house “this is a house,” I also intend this is an “average” or mere “house.”  Such describing always implies either true-genuine Being (mansion, a true friend, etc.), mere Being (the average house) or deficient Being (the dilapidated shack). 

With appearing average, averageness, mundane or mediocrity were not directly personified in the Greek pantheon because appearing was conspicuous by definition.  There was no ancient Greek or Roman god specifically of mediocrity, dullness, or averageness.  But it was thought of as being in contrast to exemplary middleness:  Sophrosyne (moderation, self-control, and temperance—the positive “golden mean” between extremes, later called aurea mediocritas by Horace) in a philosophical/ethical sense, was clearly not a deity of dullness, the contrast with averageness is clear.  Similarly, in terms of the boredom or tedium that goes along with the average and familiar, while Greeks and Romans had spirits for idleness and related discomforts, boredom itself was not elevated to divine status.  This is because, as Aristotle notes, gods and beasts can be at home in solitude, like philosophers, and unlike most regular people.  Again, this makes sense because the gods were thought in terms of concealment and radiant (argos) appearing, not dullness.  We have a whole history of linguistic and cultural ambiguity because the meaning of Being (e.g., the copula in “The dog is brown”) has been forgotten (“Taking the dog as brown”).  As I said last time, we have a linguistic and conceptual structure that is consequences of Greek theological ideas about concealment and appearing of the gods even though we no longer believe in Zeus! 

We also conceptually inherited their linguistic nuances, such as the act of predication implicating the speaker.  For example, in the history of English, the definite article “the” developed from an older demonstrative system (Old English se/seo/þæt, later þe). “The” dog is more primordially “this” dog at hand. Those forms originally pointed something out more like “that one,” and over time their pointing force weakened until they became the neutral marker of definiteness we use today as “the.”  In linguistics (especially grammar), a demonstrative is a word that points to or singles out a specific person, thing, or idea—essentially “demonstrating” or showing which one is meant.  So, Heidegger points out in the simple construction “The roof is brown,” if it is in dispute as to the color of the roof, we resolve the dispute by appealing to the roof “at hand.”  In a previous post we saw that the gaudiness of the mansion vs the majesty of the mansion is decided by which one speaks to the viewer.

Talking about something and saying something about it, the simple subject-predicate relation, is in its basic sense apophantic: taking something as something else: I take the dog to be brown, which is what “the dog is brown” means.   For instance, if I hear a living thing at my feet in the forest only to look down and see I “mis-took” rustling dead leaves in the wind as a living thing, this shows our basic disposition toward the world is taking-as.  And, whenever I encounter something there is an even more basic “taking-as” that goes beyond the mere entity at hand, such as einai Being, choris separate from, ton allown the others, and kath auto in itself:  We encounter the chair as something rather than nothing; as not me; as more primarily constituted by its ownmost predicates rather than relative ones; not the cup; etc.  Difference is not excluded from Being, “not nothing” and “not me” belong essentially to the chair I encounter, the chair as a chair.

At one of its most fundamental levels our understanding of Being is the separation and fusion with the as.  ‘Is’ does not belong to the thing itself, but to thinking, and is at once a combination (prossemainei sunthesin tina) sunthesis, and a separation, diaresis.  Only if the human being is a shepherd of the logos and this identity/difference does it make sense to speak of the table “in itself,” taking the table as such.  To ask after what the table “really is” means we already see it in the light of its true Being. Aristotle repeatedly distinguishes humans by possession of logos (λόγος), which means both speech/language and reason/account/rational principle. Later tradition (especially Latin Scholasticism) rendered this as animal rationale (“rational animal”).  For there to be affirmation (kataphasis) and denial (apophasis), and in fact error like the mis-taking we talked about above, there must be “taking as” because a mere showing (phasis) can’t be false.  This was a major discussion in Plato’s Sophist and Aristotle’s Topics A, chapter 11 against the philosophy of Antisthenes and others.

This is Being through the lens of time as what is “always already” in view through the mind’s eye that makes possible taking something as something else.  We mean this lens when we say I always already have in view grapeness with my mind’s eye which allows my trip to the grocery store to be successful.  For the Greeks math was also this way, for instance we do not generalize threeness off the random things but already vaguely encounter them as a family or group that is then clarified as threeness.