Shangri-La

A few years ago, Bill Arnold–an OT prof. at Asbury seminary–published a commentary on Genesis. I had a question for him, which led to the ensuring exchange:

Dear Dr. Arnold,

In your commentary on Genesis you said “The ‘mountains of Ararat’ of 8:4 most likely refers to the foothills where the Mesopotamian plains in the north yield to the highlands near the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers” (105).

What would you say is the elevation of the foothills in question?

Hi Steve.

I have no idea about the altitude of those foothills. The Zagros Mountains, which are spread along the eastern & northeastern border of the Mesopotamian plains, vary in altitude considerably.

Does it matter?

I appreciate his taking the time to answer my question, but his answer highlights a problem with some commentators on Genesis.

Commentators like Arnold treat Genesis as a literary construct rather than a historical record. So even though Genesis is given a real-world setting, it is irrelevant to them what the world in which the account took place was really like. For commentators like Arnold, my question makes no more sense than posing geographical questions about Shangri-La.

When a modern reader turns to Genesis, it takes an effort to project himself into the world of Genesis. For one thing, most of us don’t live any where near where the events took place. So we don’t naturally visualize that setting.

Moreover, our lifestyle is completely different. Most of us don’t live off the land. It’s just an abstraction for you and me.

But for inhabitants of the ancient Near East, this is a real mountain range, with real rivers and foothills. And when the flood account refers to hills and mountains, it’s presumably referring to foothills and highlands like we find in Northern Mesopotamia. That’s the author’s frame of reference. Somewhere in there was the high-water mark, delimiting the flood.

Which brings me to another point. I don’t think scholars like John Walton or Bill Arnold necessarily understand ANE texts. They fail to take into account what ancient Near Easterners could know about their world through direct observation, in distinction to fabulous descriptions of “places” (e.g. the Netherworld) which no man ever saw, ever discovered, ever explored. How much of this is consciously imaginary on the part of ancient storytellers?

Finally, although they may not say so, commentators like Arnold approach the Genesis narrative naturalistically (i.e. methodological naturalism). The supernatural dimension (e.g. angels) is simply part of the mythological outlook which the narrator took over from his sources. They tacitly empty the world of supernatural entities. Those encounters never actually took place.

If, however, angels really exist, then many incidents we reflexively relegate to pious fiction or ancient mythology suddenly become realistic.