Isaiah Langford - The Cosmos as Created Order - 1/22/2026

In Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology, John Walton describes the theory of being which permeated the cultures of the Ancient Near East. I thought his exploration of the idea of the “cosmos” made for an interesting connection to our in-class discussion about the primary and secondary worlds as described by Tolkien; the secondary world concerns the arc of narrative whereas the primary world is what we might call the “cosmos,” as it encapsulates the whole universe. Within the context of Ancient Near Eastern myth, the “cosmos” can be described as “created order”; in those stories of creation, things come into being by the bestowing of a name and a related purpose, whereas what has no purpose is that which came before, as it might be called, “chaos”. For the cultures of the Ancient Near East, the “cosmos” did encompass the whole world and everything in existence, but they made a distinction for those things that have no purpose, and in their conception therefore did not exist. Thus, even as we all have a primordial experience of the cosmos as the existent whole of reality, the interpretations a variety of cultures have provided for this experience leads to the vicarious living we do through story and myth. 

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