Another Try at a Sequential Reading of Genesis

I do think it helps my case. As I suppose you know, Galatians 3:16 throws that collective noun thing out the window and says that because it says “seed” instead of “seeds” in Genesis 22 that it is referring to Christ and not all the physical offspring of Abraham. And that’s fine too because we know that the true sons of Abraham are those who have the faith of Abraham- the body of Christ is a collective even if Christ is singular. The spiritual reality of what is happening goes to the edge of what human language is able to convey, and perhaps beyond it.

Genesis 3:15 helps my case too, for the same reasons. And as a bonus, it negates the claim that 3:20 is evidence against an adamic race before the man Adam. “Mother of all the living” is a strange thing to say about someone who had just gotten them both killed. But it makes sense if Yahweh-Elohim told them that the 2nd Adam would come, God’s only begotten son, through the seed of a woman and redeem mankind. All “in Christ” are the living. The Christ-centered model makes sense of what otherwise does not, either in context of the passage or bounced against the evidence from the natural world that there were people before the time period Adam must have lived in if the text is accurate.

So we do see a pattern here in Genesis where the ambiguity in nouns being collective or singular are later discovered to point to Christ and Christ is both singular as the man and collective as in the believers which comprise His body. This is of course like the idea of the person of a king standing in to represent his nation. So really 1:26-27 fits into the same pattern.

Have you a link? I’d like to read it, both for itself but especially to figure out if it says anything about the Christ-centered model.

Isn’t the real traditional reading the way that the Jewish rabbis would see it over thousands of years? I should think they would not have a problem with what I am saying about “the man” and the verbs and pronouns. They would be fine with the idea that “man” in 26 is a plural thinking ahead to the race as a concept while 27a and 27b were singular (Adam). That’s what they believed anyway. Of course where I take it from there is not something they would approve of, but I just mean structurally and what the words are saying. The “traditional” reading from 1611 to today may be different but I suspect if one goes before that it would not be. You are in a much better position to say than I of course.

No need to get side-tracked by these jewels hidden in the word here and it takes a long time to build the case where it all fits beautifully together, but I do think I have been shown the significance of these things and write about it in the book.