Richard, let me preface this by saying that any of the emotional frustration you may detect is not directed at you. I have great respect (not lip-service, it is sincere) for your desire to please the Lord (even when you hold a minority position), and myself agree with may of your distinctives. That being said, I think you are very wrong here, but we are all wrong on some things, and I trust that your Lord will give you light when and how He chooses; and that holds true for all of us. Anyhow.

For my part, I find it tedious when people begin referring to ANE cosmologies and cosmogonies, polemics, etc. A few years ago I listened to Glenn Beck quite a bit; I always found it to be highly funny when he would pull the duct tape and talk about taping up his head to hold it together. That is my reaction to most of these discussions (in general), and to the polemical language (to be specific).

If I had the I.Q., time, and resources, I would like to comb through older commentaries on Genesis and Exodus and see how many times it mentioned "polemics" against the pagan gods of other cultures. I could be woefully mistaken, but I wager that the references were few and far between, if, indeed, there are any at all. My hunch (and someone feel free to correct me) is that this stuff started out in the liberal tradition, and was later picked up by conservative scholars for some reason or another.

To shift gears: In my mind, discussions on cosmology and cosmogony are really quite chicken-and-the-egg, when all is said and done. Since some, if not many, divines argued that Hebrew was the Edenic tongue, who is to say that Tiamat was not a garbled recollection of an oral tradition concerning the tehom? Does the fact that clay tablets existed north of Israel prior to the written records of the Old Testament really, in any way whatsoever, prove or establish that there were not oral and or written traditions in Israel of the true event, and that the Sumerian-Assyrian-Babylonian stories weren't the garbled ones? The Enuma Elish seems to be the garbled version, and not the Old Testament.

Furthermore, in my mind these discussions usually assume, tacitly, an evolutionary view of history. Somehow all of these things that actually function to prove the Deluge, and a common descent from Noah are flipped around on their head, and used to argue against the Divine origin or authority of the Oracles of God. When I read the Enuma Elish, I think, "Ya' know, this is exactly the kind of stuff that one would expect to find in the world's most ancient civilization, that, Biblically, must have had some cultural memory of Noah and the Deluge."

Also, the "cosmogonic" similarities are extensive, so why confine it to the ANE? Read the Poetic Edda. Ymir's skull becomes the Dome of the Sky. The Iroquois seem to say that the earth was all watery chaos, until mud was brought up from the bottom to form the earth. The Poetic Edda also speaks of the Earth rising out of the sea. The Japanese myths, if I remember, speak of a watery world in the beginning, as do many others. So if these watery legends are actually global, and not just local, then a: Why bother seeking an origin in the ANE, and b: you would think it would fill the Christian with some confidence, seeing as how the Biblical records trace all the rivulets of red, yellow, black, and white, back to the Fount of Noah, from whom they could have learned about creation and the Deluge.

Anyhow, one thing that is very telling to me (and this is a point that is rarely made on the PB, I think), is that attitude and approach taken by all of the respective positions towards the rest of Genesis 1-11.

This might be a rather broad stroke, but for my part, YEC people are more willing to take the rest of Genesis very literally, i.e., "If there was a global flood, shouldn't we find evidence thereof?" "If the Bible is God's inspired word, and the genealogies in Genesis do not allow for chronological gaps, then doesn't Genesis more or less tell us how long human beings have been around, when the Flood took place, etc., and shouldn't we adjust world history, be it from Manetho or from Yale, accordingly?"

Very few of those who take a Framework or Day-Age view ever seek to lay out a philosophy of history and historical analysis that makes sense of both the apparent data of history and science and the Biblical record. For my part, and I might be wrong, I think that most Frameworkers and Day-Agers are implicitly and subconsciously embarrassed by all of the talk about Cain, Genesis genealogies, Nimrod, Shinar, Babel, etc. That's why they never really emphasize defending the Biblical accounts.

When one position tends to lead to a wholesale defense of Biblical veracity and history in general, and the other position tends to lead to a "We won't talk about if you don't talk about it; it's true, but let's not actually try to reconcile Gen. 1-11 with world history, at least not in print and public...", then that gives me a clear indication of which side is standing in the right, and which side is standing in the fog.

__________________
Joshua Wiseman
Riverview PCA
Charleston, WV

"Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings."
- Psalm 17:8