I still remember the panic welling up from somewhere deep inside me. I had lingered in the classroom after all the other students had left in hopes of getting some answers from my professor. No, “answers” is the wrong word. What I wanted was something more like assurance or even certainty. I wanted to be told that all the questions reverberating in my mind about the early chapters of the Bible and the comparative Ancient Near Eastern stories we had been studying were nothing to worry about. I had been raised to believe that the Bible was God’s inspired Word, after all. These other stories were fictional myths. My professor,…