I think one of the best ways to let ancient texts and cultures speak to us is to interpret them within their ancient contexts.  That is, in order to understand the unique contributions of a writer it is important to analyze his or her work within the environment in which that work arose.  Of course, each reader brings aspects of him or herself to the reading event; this is unavoidable and it is not even desirable to do away with this entirely.  However, we will grossly misread ancient texts if we merely read them in light of our own cultures and worldviews.

While I am a very strong proponent of studying ancient texts within their original setting, there are many times in which the distance to the ancient past is actually shorter than we might think.  A little while ago I wrote about medieval maps and their representations of the world and applied this study to the necessity of interpreting biblical texts in light of their proper genre.  But, we don’t need to go back to the medieval period to realize that often times maps, or descriptions of the world, are not meant to be interpreted literally.  In fact, there are many instances of symbolic presentations of the universe that derive from the modern period.

For instance, the Stockholm city hall, completed in 1923, contains a map of the world.

In this representation the lady in the center of the mosaic signifies the city of Stockholm and the figures on the left and right–which include the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, and elephants–represent the western and eastern nations giving homage to Stockholm, which is at the center of the world.  This modern, European mosaic is strikingly similar to one of the first maps ever discovered–the map of the world from Mesopotamia that is housed in the British Museum.

Like the Stockholm mosaic, the Mesopotamian map places Babylon at the center of the world.  Now, if you went to the city officials of Stockholm who commissioned the mosaic and asked them: “Do you really think that Stockholm is geographically the center of the world and that the city is literally a woman sitting on a throne?” they would promptly put you in a straight jacket and deposit you in a rubber room.  Rather, the point of the map is to show–from the perspective of the residents of Stockholm–that their city is incredibly fantastic and more beautiful, sophisticated, and important than all the other cities of the world.  It was never intended to be a literalistic telling of geography.  So, why would we think that the people who made the Mesopotamian map were doing anything different?

Furthermore, I think this same concept is also in play when we get to ancient cosmologies.  For instance, did ancient Egyptians really believe that the naked goddess Nut was splayed above the earth and that the sun-god was pulled across the sky in a boat as depicted here (for more on Egyptian cosmology see Leonard Lesko’s essay in Religion in Ancient Egypt starting on page 88 which you can view in Google Books)?:

I don’t think they did.  It seems to me that we would have to assume that ancient Egyptians were quite stupid to think that they viewed this depiction literalistically.  After all, you could easily look up to the sky and see that there was not a naked body up there and that the sun wasn’t sitting in boat.  However, we should not discount the fact that there probably were some ancient fundamentalists who claimed that in order to be true Egyptian religionists one had to accept these counterfactual claims.  However, I think that most people likely interpreted this Egyptian cosmological representation in the same manner as Swedes who visit the city hall of their capital and view the mosaic in the Golden Hall.

So, in like manner, when we get to biblical cosmologies I think that the ancient writers of these accounts would regard literalistic interpretations as profound misunderstandings.  So, depictions such as Michael Paukner‘s are interesting, beautiful, and represent the symbolic descriptions found in the Bible but I don’t think that most Israelites really, truly believed that this was how the earth was literally structured.

I don’t think that any of these cultures believed that they produced a scientifically accurate description of the universe.  This idea should be tautologically obvious since it is anachronistic to think that ancient cultures would view the world like modern people who take things like the Hubble telescope and quantum mechanics for granted.  How else would ancient people have approached a topic that was so beyond their technological capacities to understand?  Symbolic representations were the only things available to them.

We should respect this fact as as we read ancient texts and not force them into some hyper-scientific grid.  Instead, read them as they were intended and likely understood by the vast majority of ancient peoples themselves: as beautiful and accurate–in their own right–symbolic representations of the world from the perspectives of particular cultures.  It seems to me that if you interpret them otherwise you are admitting that the ancients were idiots.