Creation Story Comparison

Creation Stories

To try and keep all opinions or preformed ideas about these readings out, instead of using the titles I will just named the source number. The first of the two sources that I looked at in detail is Source Three. Source three has a God who is said to begin to create. This God starts with nature and slowly moves on to animals. His accomplishments are measured in days and on the seventh day he blesses it and deems it a holy day. He wishes to make man in “our image, after our likeness”. God is convinced that they shall rule and just the same as he spoke to the animals he wants them to “be fertile and Increase”. The difference is that he wants man to fill the earth and master it. After man was created he was meant to till and tend all of the plants because these plants would feed him. I thought it was interesting that man in this creation story was a farmer, so a gatherer and not a hunter. As a side note I thought it very important that in this story man was made from dust of the earth.

            As for Source Five there was the Creator, the Maker, Tepeu, Gucumatz, and the Forefathers. They decided collectively that there needed to be a surface for the earth. It was made very clear however that there was nothing grand until human was created. As for Source Three, God never states that other creations are not valued as much as humans. The first creation in Source Five is the earth, followed by the animals but the initial life (Creators, Makers, if we can say that) was frustrated because the animals couldn’t speak like men and speak of the Creators and Makers. In both stories the creators were left upset at some point or another because in the first mentioned, the first man ate from the only tree he was told to avoid so he was cursed by god. In the second story, the Creators asked what they thought to be a small task of the animals, (to say their names) but they could not. In Source Five the Creators then tried to make a man out of mud but when that failed, the man was made out of wood. The wooden men multiplied as if their creator had told them to be fertile and increase. Eventually the man made of wood gave way to his lack of soul, and reverence for their Creator and Makers so they were no longer favored by them. At the end of the story it says, “Because these wooden men and women did not honor or worship their creator, they were destroyed in a flood. Their descendants, monkeys, lived in the forest and resembled humans. The few people who escaped the deluge did praise the gods and thus became true human beings”. It is my opinion that the men created in both stories lost sight of creation and unfortunately lacked the respect for the “bigger picture”.