“…where do people go when, as you say, the resistance to myth is because modernism exposes a severing of the ties, and when the mystique of science begins to lose currency and people hunger for more than the narrative that science has brought…”“…How again can biblical myth take its rightful place as one of the foundations of our identity and worldview? We can clearly see that Genesis was a living mythic story for the authors of the NT, yet such is considered a part of primitive naivety and certainly not thought of as any sort of viable option for our present oh-so-sophisticatedly scientific selves….”I’ve been out of the running for a bit (down with the flu), and so am jumping into this in midstream as it were.First, a come clean. The two quotes above echo much of my own journey, in that behind my question of what Genesis meant for it’s original audience, is simply the desire to find out if it still can mean something to me, today.Genesis I know has an important place to play within the various hermeneutical contructs used within the Scriptures, with the apex perhaps in Paul. But I am out to discover if it has meaning for me. So I applaud Chris’s point about the mythic. It is certainly wonderful to have stories that feed us meaning and focus, and we certainly can use good stories.But as one who’s left / trying to leave, one old story that fell to pieces, I am hesitant to pick up a new story. That’s where the questioning, analysis and search for the literary nature of the Genesis accounts comes from. It’s not enough to have a story simply “say” something to me regardless of its origins; an intergral part of the “say” is what the story first was meant to mean (it’s historical significance, if not its historicity). In this sense the meaning of the myth today is connected to the story of the story itself.Example: If the creation narrative in Genesis was a doxology of resistance to the Jews in Babylon (an attractive idea, and applicable in a lesser way to Moses having just left Egypt, for those preferring a traditional dating), would we be justified in saying things like?:

Genesis teaches us that God, not man, made the earth. No man can finally the land from you (I see 17th century English Sectarians jumping for joy at this idea).

Since God makes the beginning, only He makes the end. Our destinties are bound up with that of creation, not simply that of one country.

No matter how much a man shines and makes a claim to power, he remains a created thing, and not God. He is therefore not to be feared or worshipped.

How would you translate the original myth to today?