What Do You Think about ANE (Ancient Near Eastern) Culture Comparisons to the Bible?
There is a fairly recent school of thought that seems to have been started by John Currid, Professor of Old Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary and Project Director of the Bethsaida Excavation Project in Israel, and was popularized in academia by professors like John Walton of Wheaton College and the late Dr. Michael Heiser. The premise is that the Hebrew Tanakh, and the Torah in particular, was written as a theological polemic to the creation myths of the surrounding Ancient Near Eastern cultures, highlighting the superiority of YHWH and His people; it was in no way intended to be a literal creation story. Due to the enormous influence of Dr. Heiser in particular, this topic has become an Internet fad to which critics of the Bible have now latched onto and run with as far as they can take it to discredit the historicity of Scripture.
As Judeo-Christians, we obviously would acknowledge a loose connection between the Bible’s superior account of history and Israel’s ANE neighbors; however, we would take an opposite approach. If we believe that the protocanon of the Bible is without mixture or error in the original languages, we would understand intrinsically that the Bible is telling the true story; we believe that Genesis 1-11 in particular is historical information, which was distorted by the surrounding cultures after the dispersion at the Tower of Babel. If this is true, one would see that the oldest cultures immediately surrounding Israel in the Middle East would have a very similar, but inverted, understanding of what happened; and the further away from the epicenter of Biblical history one goes, one would see more and more distortion as cultures were removed from the true historical narrative. This is exactly what we see in reality.
The problem with the ANE approach for Christian persons is that it places the ANE narrative as primary and the Bible as secondary. As Judeo-Christians, we trust the Bible as the primary source of information, Jewish tradition as secondary, and the ANE narratives as perhaps tertiary or quaternary in importance.
I do find it ironic that Dr. Heiser aligned himself with this school of thought, having understood that the Watchers and their disembodied Nephilim children were the evil spirit beings whom the ANE cultures worshiped. Did he not think that these beings, in their discourse with the early peoples they ruled over, would have twisted the story? The deuterocanonical book of Jubilees directly states that Israel received the true history both from the books handed down from Enoch and as dictated by the Angel on Mt. Sinai to Moses; we would agree. The demonic spirits over the nations would have us discredit the Bible as merely a children’s tale instead of being the historic foundation of the world which testifies to the theological truths that the Judeo-Christian worldview proclaims.
Without this foundation, we have no basis from which we can confidently assert anything.