By “they”, are you referring to the author(s) of Genesis, or the traditional interpreters of Genesis? I would think that the traditional interpreters of Genesis (though there are doubtless exceptions in some ancient author or other, if one looks hard enough) held that all the land area of the earth was covered, and that would include whatever mountains existed, known or unknown.
As for what the author(s) intended, that’s a different question, but at least some statements in the Flood story sound as if that is what is meant. But even that doesn’t settle the matter, because, even supposing the author had in mind a complete inundation of even the highest mountains, we have to take into account the genre of the story. Is it meant as a historical account, a cautionary moral tale, a myth, or what?
The story of Jack and the Beanstalk really does describe a plant that rises all the way to the sky and a giant who lives up in the sky, but it doesn’t follow that the people who invented the story really thought beanstalks could grow that high or that giants existed in the sky. So there’s no need to argue that, since science tells us beanstalks don’t grow that high, only a “local” beanstalk was meant, i.e., one that grew only as high as the roof of Jack’s house (the story originating from a time when Jack used a beanstalk to climb up on his roof).
And by way of footnote, even if the Biblical authors didn’t know about the Himalayas, they knew about high mountains in Turkey and Armenia, so the problem remains: did they think the high Turkish and Armenian mountains were covered? If so, tossing in the Himalayas would have been no problem for them; they could just suppose that God made it rain a little harder.
Exactly my point. And on that reading of the story, only 8 Sethites survive. And if the Sethites up to the time of Noah had never married outside their group, then they would have been all pure Adamites; nothing of the population created in Genesis 1 would be in their genes. For all intents and purposes, then, for the post-flood world, the creation of man in Genesis 1 would have been irrelevant; the creation of Adam and Eve in Genesis 2 would have been sufficient.
On the other hand, if Noah’s family had some Cainite blood in it, and if Cain’s people had mixed with the Genesis 1 population before blending with the Sethites (or, alternately if the Sethites themselves had mixed with the Genesis 1 population directly), then something of the Genesis 1 creation would be still be part of the makeup of the race even after the flood.
But of course, the need to answer such questions only arises on the two-creation theory which underlies Genealogical Adam. Traditional exegesis tended to blur the Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 accounts together, and there are no “pre-Adamites.” (The few speculations about pre-Adamites before modern times were definitely a minority view.) Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 were traditionally taken as two different ways of the talking about the same event, not two different stories about two different events. So the premise underlying Genealogical Adam presumes that traditional exegesis of Genesis 1-3 is in error.
Actually, it’s surprising that the folks at BioLogos didn’t embrace Genealogical Adam completely, given that it fits with their common themes: (1) traditional exegesis of Genesis is wrong; (2) one should come up with a reading of Genesis that matches what modern science teaches about genetics. They should have been falling all over it with praise.
If by that you mean they were using normal human senses and reasoning rather than the refinements of science, I agree. The Bible isn’t a science book. But normal human perception tells us that when it rains a lot, the water level rises. So if it rained to an unprecedented degree, who can say how high the water level might rise? And God can make it rain for as long as he wants to, so in principle not even the Himalayas are a problem if he wants to cover the earth.
Sure, one can, speaking from a scientific point of view, say that even forty days of rain wouldn’t be long enough to top the highest mountains in the Near East, but I don’t take that number as a historical report; “forty” has symbolic resonance throughout the Old Testament. I don’t think the authors were thinking, "Well, we have to have enough water to cover the Caucasus mountains, so at three inches of rain per hour, how long would it have to rain? I think the number “forty” was chosen purely for conventional literary-religious reasons, not as the end product of a calculation.
I’m not disputing traditional exegesis and the GAE works even in Genesis 1 refers just to Adam and Eve. Not also that the floods purpose was to destroy all but a few of Adams lineage, not to destroy the whole earth. You are fixating on one approach rather than seeing the many ways it can be taken ahold of.
You don’t know that the wives were Sethites. The text doesn’t say. And you also don’t know if the Sethites ever married outside their group. Where did Seth get his wife? If you solve Cain’s problem one way, why solve Seth’s a different way?
I think there are multiple traditional exegeses. And what about Lilith?
Why is it that even when I try to agree with you, you try to drive a wedge between us? Are you just determined to register disagreement with me, no matter what?
In fact, I covered the possibility you mentioned with an “if” in the very next sentence:
Note that I did not say whether or not they married outside of their group. I simply said that if they didn’t, then everyone on the Ark would be a Sethite, and the future human race would all descend exclusively from Adam and Eve.
What way did I solve Cain’s problem? I asked Joshua if he conceived of Cain’s line as intermarrying with people whose creation was described in Genesis 1. He answered “Yes.” I did not say whether or not I agreed with that; I was merely trying to make sure I understand what his hypothesis implied regarding the existence of non-Adamites.
Certainly in the Midrashic literature – yes, there are varying interpretations of many parts of Genesis. I don’t know the Lilith material well enough to comment on it. You are welcome to tell us the basic storyline, if you know the material, and comment on its significance.
In the Christian literature, however, most interpreters until modern times didn’t buy the existence of pre-Adamites. And the Augustinian interpretation of Paul on Adam shaped the Catholic and Protestant traditions fairly firmly. That meant that Cain’s wife had to be a child of Adam and Eve. The usual justification of this is that incest was not forbidden in this early period, and therefore no law was broken.
That’s true on your reading, but not true on the traditional reading.
I don’t understand this comment:
If Genesis 1 refers just to Adam and Eve, then all human beings would be descendants of Adam and Eve (via their being fruitful and multiplying). Cain’s wife would then be a child (or maybe grandchild) of Adam and Eve. The only way Cain can marry someone who isn’t a blood relative is if there are two creations, one of Adam and Eve, and another of other people (e.g., the one given in Genesis 1).
I thought that the GAE hypothesis presumed that human beings arose as a population by evolution from lower species, and then postulated that in addition to this “general” origin of mankind, there was an additional special creation of Adam and Eve, two people not connected by descent with the rest of the human beings on the planet. If you are saying that GAE can work if there is no evolution of man from lower animals, but only a special creation of Adam and Eve, then I’m not understanding something about GAE.
Is that a happy “Oh my goodness” or a vexed “Oh my goodness”?
Either way this is true with the textual definition. Whether you read Genesis 1 and 2 recapitulatory or sequential ultimately does not make a difference.
@Jordan, I get your question. But I don’t think that qualification makes much of a difference.
When an Old Earth Creationist reads the Genesis 1 discussion of the firmament, and doesn’t think the Firmament was never actually there, he doesn’t say: “… speaking from a purely literary point of view.” He says something like: “… in the scribe’s erroneous view, there was a firmament.”
When a Young Earth Creationist reads the Genesis 1 discussion of the firmament, and thinks the Firmament is a reference to the airy sky (and not to anything firm), he doesn’t say: “speaking from a purely literary point of view.” He says something like: “… the scribe’s interpretation of the airy expanse of the sky was expressed as a Firmament.”
I don’t think there is one thing @Eddie disagrees with that is expressed in a “literary point of view”. I do, however, think there are things that Eddie qualifies as “figurative” when he doesn’t agree with the plain wording of the text: Jesus is not really a door. Jesus is not really a vine.
And if Eddie didn’t agree with a global flood as a literal expression (or a literal story), he would say something about it being figurative.
My own version of such a qualification frequently goes go right to the meaty section: this is either figurative or a garbled story.
Eddie - just one comment. From the literary point of view, we necessarily make assumptions about the thought-world of the author(s) of Genesis. I have tried to take some of that into account in my own book on GA (too detailed to say much about here).
But, for one example, if as a number of recent scholars have pointed out, the concern of the author was Adam as the progenitor of Israel, rather than as the progenitor of the human race in entirety, than problems like Cain’s wife cease to be problems, or at least become questions about marrying outside the tribe rather than questions of textual inconsistency.
A number of considerations, from surrounding ANE literature, historical/archaeological data, other examples of tribal self-identity, the biblical nature of genealogies and so on, lead me to understand the writers as being so aware of other lines than Adam’s that they see no need to mention them.
If I’m right, Genealogical Adam is more about recovering ancient assumptions about the world than accomodating modern science to an ancient text.
Yes, a Biblical case can be mounted for reading Adam as the head of a “local” part of humanity, rather than of the whole human race. And it seems to me that the Genealogical Adam notion fits in very well with that.
My remarks were meant not to rule out such an interpretation, but only to indicate that there is Biblical evidence for the traditional interpretation as well. As is so often the case in reading the Bible (or any ancient book, for that matter, or any work of literature, for that matter), the text is complex enough in its contents to allow for more than one interpretation, and reasonable people can disagree.
It would take a long digression, not appropriate for a venue like this, for me to set forth my reservations about the project of recovering “the thought-world of the authors of Genesis.” I have less confidence than most Biblical scholars that this can be achieved in a decisive way by resorting to ANE parallels, archaeology, etc. We can of course potentially learn something of what might have been going on in the writers’ mind from such studies of external context, but I think that the use of alleged “background” material can also mislead as well as illuminate. The most important source for the reconstructing the thought-world of the Hebrew writers remains, for me, the Hebrew Bible itself. (And I’m not sure you actually disagree with that.)
In your own case, you check what you learn from the external materials against your own careful reading of the text, and I appreciate that. I have not found that this is always the case in scholarly writing; sometimes the consideration of background material overwhelms the text that is being studied. One can see this in commentaries on Genesis by the likes of Speiser. But I have nothing in principle against anyone making the case you are making.
Naturally, when your book comes out, I will read it with interest.
The word “figurative” has special uses which I’m not calling upon in my general remarks, so I haven’t employed it.
My point is merely that the narrative can be read (without too much strain, in my view) as depicting a global flood. The key word is “depicting”. What the writer’s attitude is toward that which he is depicting – that is another matter entirely.
Some people here seem to be taking it for granted that the narrative is depicting only a local flood, but that is far from obvious. Too much weight is put on the suggestion that “earth” means only a local “land”. It can of course mean that in Hebrew, but it doesn’t have to mean that in Hebrew. This question has been discussed before, in the hearing of several of the participants here, on BioLogos. And aside from the meaning of specific words, certain broad features of the narrative from Genesis 1-9 (e.g., the creation-decreation-recreation scheme) make more sense if “earth” is interpreted in the traditional way.
I am not claiming to be able to “prove” that the Biblical authors were thinking of a global flood – in interpreting texts one never “proves” anything; one makes only a more or less compelling case for an interpretation. Exegesis is not Euclidean geometry. I’m just indicating what I consider to be the more probable view.
You mentioned the view of Old Earth creationists. As far as I know OEC writing on the Bible, their general approach to Bible reading is “concordist” – and I’m not a concordist. I’m not trying to match up Biblical teachings, item by item, with what modern science or modern academic history has to say. If modern geology says a global flood is impossible, and the Bible depicts a global flood, that is not a problem for me, because I am not trying to harmonize the depiction of ancient texts with modern knowledge. You seem to be worried that in saying the portrait is of a global flood, I am endorsing the historical reality of a global flood. But that is not what I’m doing.
Genealogical simulations are a lot different from actually happening in the real world under real world conditions such as geography, natural barriers, cultures, and nation states. I would like to see a real world Genealogical simulation that takes into account the known geo-political situation at a particular time in history and shows the likelihood of universal ancestral pair in 2000 years or less.