What does “ends of the Earth” even mean? Previously such formulations have been interpreted by you to refer only to a region.
But aren’t orangutans subject to physical death too? I thought the point of Adam’s descent spreading to everyone was so that the gospel could also be spread to them. That implies that the gospel would not be spread to non-descendants. If there were a truly isolated tribe, they wouldn’t be on the list. And wasn’t Adam’s original purpose to tend the garden? How do you get any other purpose from the text?
The Hebrew terms for “tending” and “keeping” the garden are also used of service in the Temple later. They were closely discipled by the “Angel of the LORD” (the preincarnate Christ) himself, to spread the wisdom and knowledge He communicated to the rest of a waiting world, as the first “priests” with reliable special revelation. All of which requires not only the ability to process human language, but also to contemplate a spiritual nature, beyond the “merely” physical. This is the theological backdrop in answer to your question.
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Excuse the multiple posts, but something led me down a rabbit hole, and I have questions. Does your genealogical model incorporate a bottleneck of 6 in Adam’s descendants after the flood, and does it suppose that all Adam’s descendants were gathered at Babel during the building of the tower?
And I’m assuming that when a decree goes out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed, that’s not intended literally as all the world, but how do we know when biblical language changes from the regional and some human groups to the global and all human groups? (Using varying definitions of “human”.)
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A post was split to a new topic: What is Effective Population Size
This is critical. Humanity is not just the descendants of Adam. Humanity bears the image of God.
If there is no qualitative difference between Adam and Eve and those outside(atleast in a spiritual sense). Then what exactly does bearing the image of God mean?
The second issue is that the “textual definition” of “human” is connected to salvation. The humanity that can get saved is the humanity that Jesus was a part of/bore.
@swamidass.
But isn’t it exactly those outside the garden (in this scenario the people created in Genesis 1) who bear the image of God? Adam, as far as I know, is never explicitly said to bear God’s image.
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Depends on how you define the “image of God”… and if those outside bear the image of God, then question arises as to when that happened.
We come back to definitions of being human.
Really all of these questions are addressed in my book. It is 80,000 words long. I gave you a taste of it, but it’s best if we pick this up when it comes out in November.
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No, it doesn’t. It depends on whether you read Genesis 1 where it says “Let us make man in our image”, etc. That’s where “image of God” comes from, and it applies to the people created in Genesis 1. The question would be whether Genesis 1 is talking about the people outside the garden and/or Adam and Eve. The assumption of GAE is that it’s talking about the outside folks, as I understand it.
Genesis 1 says the humans at that time [which we are interpreting as a pre-Adamite population] bear the image of God.
Adam and Eve were custom-made by God and can be presumed to have the image of God too; this is confirmed in Genesis 9 when God explains to Noah why murder will now always be wrong.
The difference between Adam/Eve and the pre-Adamite humans will only be experiential… they experienced God first-hand… they learned from God… and they disobeyed God directly.
This experience and the psychological evolution from these experiences were then passed on to humanity - - and if you affirm Original Sin, Adam & Eve passed that on to.
If you are a Creationist who rejects Original Sin… then, naturally, there is no concern regarding its perpetuation.
However, for most of the Creationist population… Adam & Eve do become the point of entry for Original Sin into the pre-Adamite human population (by whatever means Creationists want to surmize).
But Genesis 9:6 is where we get the “last word” on whether the offspring of Adam have the Image as well:
Gen 9:6
Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.
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It is for these reasons I think most Creationists who favor one or more of the Genealogical Adam scenarios will settle for a time frame of somewhere between 6000 and 8000 ya for dating the de novo creation of Adam and Eve.
The further back they attempt to place de novo creation of this pair, the more questions they have to resolve on their own about how to define what a human is.
Please explain. Why would there be more questions, and what would they be?
Can you explain yourself… I thought it was the other way around…
So would the humans who existed 10000 years ago be created in God’s image according to these models?
Science will have its own definition of “human” and its own scientific criteria.
But Biblically-Speaking, and as a Theological or Metaphysical stance, only God knows exactly when the evolved population qualifies as “human”.
Perhaps God, because of his very granular form of perception and intelligence, doesn’t even bother with a population-wide definition. He can literally count off the number of “humans” there were in the evolving population day-by-day.
At some point, 51% of the population qualified. Then 66%. Eventually, the day came when 100% of all the population qualified as human.
I would hazard the guess that this Theological Definition (which only God knows) probably agrees with the Scientific assessment (but for different reasons) significantly past 40,000 years ago. How much more? I don’t know.
But I think going past 40,000 years, despite @Agauger’s sense of zeal for the matter, is rather irrelevant to the usual Creationists … because agriculture doesn’t appear to be dramatically older than 7000 to 10,000 years ago.
Here I am referring to all the silly questions people imagine about these other hominid species (in addition to the Neanderthal)… and how it will, or might, affect interpretations of Genesis.
I don’t think any of that will have much traction on the interpretation of Genesis. Fortunately, it is the Creationist bias that is being engaged (from a theological viewpoint). So… it will be interesting to see whether they WANT to engage it… or if they continue to want to ignore it.
I don’t think anyone here is talking about that. Or were you introducing a new subject?
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Which is why I didn’t spend much time in my posting on these other hominid groups.
I answered your question … which includes the fact I have practically no interest in these other hominid groups when it comes to the Genealogical Adam Scenarios.
Only the weirdest Creationists are going to try to play in those waters…
I’m puzzled why you would introduce a subject only for the purpose of saying you have no interest in it.