It is interesting to speculate about what people believed before the Jews came along and recorded their thoughts in what became the “Old” Testament.  From what I understand, before there was the written word, (Hebrew and Aramaic in the works produced by strangers traveling from the City of Ur), there was an “oral” history that was passed down from generation to generation. There was, of course “writing” in the form of cuneiform – marks on clay tablets – in the civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.  But the Jews created their Hebrew characters and finally wrote down on parchment all the stories from the creation of the world and the first people who produced the lineage from Abraham onwards to Moses, the founding fathers of a very argumentative people.

Over time, when their history and system of beliefs were canonized in the “Bible”, the story of the creation of the earth and its peoples became one of the best sellers of all time.  The notion that there was a ONE God and this God created Heaven and Earth, Light and Dark, and all the living things on the earth in six days captured for many a really good explanation.  That story has never been questioned for believers.  It is only education that explains the scientific findings showing how the world may have been created by a big Bang and over billions of year’s evolved simple life forms that eventually became the humans we know today.  Before us humans there were humanoids and other creatures many of which surpassed belief when their bones were scraped out of strata that predated the Bible story by millions and millions of years.

There should be no fight here between believers and non-believers of either explanation.  However, there is a political fight going on and it is all because of the Jews who came out of the desert, were enslaved in Egypt, escaped into the desert once again and then found a promised land. Their brief history, as compared to what science tells us is much, much older, is encapsulated in a book that has been studied religiously by Jews and non-Jews. This has given us the problem of a simple explanation that must have been one of many that existed before writing was invented and stories were crystallized into tomes that have become icons and, for many, may not be questioned.

So, what was the story before the Jews arrived?  We know there are many different stories of how different peoples appeared or were created but none has involved so much divisiveness as that story so many scribes devoted so many years of their time to put down on parchment.  It really doesn’t matter.  These are stories while science tells us the record of what really happened so very long ago.