The stories earliest listed in “Genesis” are fables rather than myths and so disclose a higher level of consciousness than to be found with myths.

The creation story in “Genesis” is a far more modern thing than it is usually credited with being  It is a kind of philosophical presentation and so very different from mythology which, as Ovid, that great student of mythology, noted, there are always biological transformations of things even while the gods remain subject to the forces of nature and the raging of human passions. Narcissus may become his image only symbolically, and not all narcissists become their images, but these are still myths because of the element of biological transformation.. The stories that follow the creation story are best explained, on the other hand, as fables, which are stories that explain a set of circumstances that do not seem to be created but which somehow were at a point in time and have become part of nature. Tigers have stripes and the Red Man got baked right, neither too dark or too light.. Fables suggest that there is a history for what seems natural, a sometimes serious, sometimes fey attempt to make explicable what seems not to need explanation or else to make explicable something which seems paradoxical: how something could come into existence when it already had to be there. Good examples of fables that follow soon after the creation story are the tower of Babeel, which is an exaggeration of what people can build and what happens to them, which is to have multilingual peoples, or Noah’s ark, which is an exaggeration of a boat that could be built rather than transforming animals so they could swim.