I was going to reply to Vincent (not entirely in disagreement), but deuteroKJ has said just about everything I would have wanted to say.
I agree especially with point 2, based on my own detailed work on the Hebrew text of Genesis 1, and point 3, about the slipperiness of the terms “history” and “historical.”
I would add, though it may already be implied in what deuteroKJ wrote, that even if one could distinguish “prose” from “poetry” in clear-cut way, by a set of formal characteristics, why would that establish that poetic texts can’t relate historical truths, or that prose texts must always be intended to convey historical truths? There’s no doubt at all that Crime and Punishment is “prose” (at least, in my English translation), but I don’t know anyone who thinks it is a “historical” account of events; and I don’t see why someone couldn’t write, say, a ballad, commemorating some historical event, and in the course of the ballad narrate the sequence of events pretty much as they happened, maybe even more accurately than, say, a bad newspaper report of the event. In short, merely formal determinations of prose vs. poetry don’t settle the question whether a given text is intended to be “historical.” Dealing with such questions requires much more than formal analysis. It requires a number of subtle judgments. The methods of statistics may help with formal analysis, but they don’t help with the subtle judgments.
It seems to me that the skills needed to interpret a text like Genesis (beyond the obvious ones, such as being able to read Hebrew, and ideally Greek as well, in order to take a peek at the Septuagint version) are the skills typically possessed by traditional professors of English literature, of comparative literature, of comparative religion, of Great Books, and so on. Learning to ask the most fruitful questions of a text is “more art than science”, one might say. DeuteroKJ’s comments indicate that he brings this broader set of sensibilities to his work in Biblical studies.
It can incorporate both. I would agree that Genesis One is not formally a poem or more particularly a psalm. As well, while Paradise Lost is a poem, the Genesis account of Eden which inspired that work is not, and the story of Noah’s flood still less. These read like historical narrative and present greater challenges to concordant interpretations.
Where I part company with a literalist narrative characterization of Genesis is that broader devices of poetic expression can be manifest in most any class of literature short of a DVD player manual. Hebrew poetry is full of metaphor and simile, and often develops a theme by having a particular image, for instance a spring of water, stand for the greater vision of God’s general providence. There is no rule which forbids such sensibilities from being exhibited in other prose. Genesis One is meant to set the stage of creation, not lay out the dimensions of the tabernacle. Boyd’s argument reduces to Genesis One is narrative, not poetry, therefore the days of creation must be literal. That is the entire point of the whole long winded exercise. But no matter how impressive the statistical analysis is thrown at the text, that simply is not an resolving tool and that conclusion is not binding.
I have always been struck by the unadorned simplicity and flow of Genesis One. There is a magisterial beauty to it, befitting the special care which might be devoted to a preface to the ages. It stands apart from other ancient creation stories involving fratricidal gods, vile acts, and just plain weird detail. To me it has always been more literate than literal.
I agree with @deuteroKJ in that there is parallelism in Genesis One, and in fact that it is pretty evident. It is just a more involved structure than the typical psalm couplet.
Thank you very much for your detailed comments, which cleared up a lot of issues. It’s good to hear from a Hebrew scholar. I found the distinctions you drew very helpful. Cheers.
Boyd’s statistical methods are just fine, but I question the importance of the finding. Normally when I see a classification model so highly accurate as this, the results aren’t really much of a surprise. It should have been obviously true even before applying a statistical model. Logistic regression is a good way to describe a known or suspected association, that is OK, but I would be very surprised if this is a novel finding.
What surprises me is that Genesis is strongly indicated as prose, given that I so often see it described as poetry. This is counterintuitive, and leads me to suspect this analysis could be leaving out some important information related to the poetic qualities of Genesis.
Could it be that the proxies he’s taken for “prose” have a more complex relationship with prose and poetry? This sort of analysis tends to be quite dependent on choosing good proxies.
Fiction vs. Non-fiction (history?) is an entirely orthogonal dimension to Poetry vs. Prose.
But this goes the other way too. There are many who argue that Genesis 1-2 is poetic and, therefore, we should regard its content as (fully or partially) non-historical. “Problem solved!”, we’re told. If the parable/allegory and historical narrative distinction is orthogonal to the poetry and prose distinction, however, then it just won’t suffice to argue that Genesis 1-2 employs a surfeit of poetic devices. More work will have to be done to resolve the problem of reconciliation.
That’s why I think it’s necessary for Christians to put forth defensible models to frame their view on the creation week, the story of Adam, and other elements in the Genesis discourse.
It’s not just that. If Steven Boyd hasn’t applied his methods to non-biblical works as a control measure, his conclusion that Genesis is a historical narrative may be a false positive.
Yes, exactly. I don’t have expertise in this area, but that is exactly the sort of questin
Yes, parallelism and ecclesiasticism along with scholasticism.
Exactly. Boyd had competent help with the analysis itself, but from his presentation I’d say he has no deep understanding of the methods and interpretation. It reads like an undergraduate research project, lots of enthusiasm for his subject but not understanding any weaknesses.
Something different. As I noted, I doubt the conclusion reached is unexpected.
Google Scholar finds a fair amount on this topic, but not much that is recent. All 14 citation to Boyd (2005) are from AiG, ICR, and the like, so it doesn’t appear this was a big hit with the linguists.
