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Ancient Stories Tell How to Think About History and Ourselves

The older the story, the more information it holds. That’s a good rule of thumb generally but one that works especially well for the scriptures. Stories that persist not just for generations or centuries but for millennia probably carry deeper and more resonant meanings, or they wouldn’t have lasted so long. Storytellers and their listeners would have given up on them long ago. And it’s not just that to survive, those rich, foundational, resonant accounts must prove their mettle across ages and eons. Those ages and eons also shape the stories, as storytellers learn the distracting details to omit, the sparks of deep meaning to preserve, and how to simplify, purify, and amplify the whole. The great stories are true not necessarily because they accurately represent history but because they reveal how to think about history and even how to think about ourselves.

And so, as ancient as it is, any account from Genesis is going to hold tons more meaning than at first meets the eye. That depth would be especially true of the earliest accounts in Genesis, say, those stories in God’s garden and in the few generations afterward up to Noah’s flood or Abraham’s later sojourn. Genesis’s account of God creating the cosmos has nuances that only another thousand years of reflection may reveal, while still leaving more. Likewise, Genesis’s account of God creating and interacting with Adam and Eve will be spilling out new treasures for centuries to come. Indeed, the earliest scripture stories, while so spare in their details, hold so much design that they inform every other more-recent scriptural account. And that’s a good way to read the scriptures, through the world-shattering lens of its oldest accounts. Know the scriptures’ oldest stories. They know you.