If you ever want to pull the nerves of a believing Jew, say that the Creation Story in Genesis is a polemic against Enuma Elish, the Babylonian Creation Epic—with which it shares key features and is “obviously” a response to it. Talk to a Christian about Jesus’ teachings being influenced by Hellenism, or to a Muslim about Muhammad being under the sway of Christianity (and also of Hellenism), and you will also get an uneasy response.
There are two key misconceptions concerning the cultural borrowings of religion on both the believers’ side and that of the non-believers. The believers, whom have indoctrinated me for better and for worse during my younger years, insist that the great truth of their religion not be shared by anyone else, and no other culture influenced said great truth.
The non-believers may say that clearly if religion by necessity changes with time, and truth is indeed absolute, then religion cannot be true—and clearly any belief system which has a complete identity shift—such as the Ancient Greek religion upon contact with Egypt or, as some believe, Judaism in becoming monotheistic from a polytheistic religion—cannot be true at all, and that people worship as is convenient or suitable for them.
If G-d is consistent and never faltering, why His rules seem to keep changing all the time? Are not the holy texts timeless and to be applied only so far as the texts extend? Or is G-d changing with us? But if G-d is changing, does it mean that He is not all-powerful?
And why on earth would G-d change when his worshippers encounter a new people whose ideas they like?
To answer the believers’ idea that G-d is not influenced by any other culture, in making a revelation, G-d, in embodying all of the world and all of humanity, speaks with the language of the time. There is nothing wrong with saying that the Hebrew Scriptures have a parallel in almost every regard to another literary work in Mesopotamia. G-d let His messages pass through the cultures of the time. If He did not do this, His words would be ignored entirely, because it would seem foreign to the believers and no connection would be made.
Even if one believes the Scriptures to have been extant since time eternity, there is a notion that what is perfect is given at the perfect time, and the two match up. As the first Christian Romans saw it, Jesus waited until the most perfect time in history—the Age of Augustus—to come upon earth as the manifestation of the Divine. Thus his words—as close as they are to the Hellenistic culture of the time—one could easily believe existed since before the world was created, since the times were meant to fit Jesus, and not the other way around.
A consistent notion of the Divine among many cultures is the idea that when you glimpse what is in the Heavens, you get something different each time. G-d, too, is subject to the changing cultures of humanity on earth. He changes the cultures in accordance with what He wants, hence Divine worship changes with the passing of time, so that He may express Himself differently in each Epoch according to His Will.