You will have to clarify. Why does free will result in all the bad stuff you claim? Why does free will first arise in the Fall? You may not be confused, but everything you say is not interpretable as a coherent statement.
No it isn’t. First, I’m John_Harshman. Second, I saw no backing off and no new explanation.
Everything up until Adam and Eve worked according to God’s will, which is why at the end of creation God deemed it all “good”. Starting with Adam and Eve there were two wills in existence who behaved not according to God’s will, but according to their own.
Without free will there is no fall.
Oh yeah, haha, it was you. Anyway, here it is again …
So they had free will before the fall. Thus the fall is not the cause of free will, and in fact free will was produced by God’s will. So why is it bad? Why does it produce, according to you, solely evil results?
Further, what makes you think that humans before A&E lacked free will?
I’m sorry, but that was incomprehensible. I can’t figure out what you’re trying to say from what you quote.
Free will isn’t bad. It’s a gift. All the greatest things humanity is capable of is also made possible through free will. But so is the potential of evil. Once you’re free to behave outside of God’s will, evil is possible. But it’s not all evil.
Humans before free will lived for hundreds of thousands of years without changing their ways of behavior. Much like many other species in the animal kingdom, they consistently stayed the same.
Then came free will, then came civilization, writing, slavery, art, modern humanity.
Yeah, sorry, I’m mixing the story of Cain with the story of the Sumerians. Without properly setting all of that up it can definitely be hard to follow. Basically I’m laying out how the god Enki in the Sumerian stories could actually be Cain. To mortal humans, a man who lives for centuries would seem god-like.
So in this context, the annunaki, the gods of Sumerian mythology, are the patriarchs of Genesis.
I’m using this example to show how the perpetuation of free will didn’t actually have to transform the entirety of the population. That a few beings with free will could have just as much of an impact.
Not true. Humans changed their behavior considerably over hundreds of thousands of years. And the things you mention didn’t happen all at once or at the same time. Art in particular stands out as preceding cities by 30,000 years or more.
And you still have the problem of how free will is transmitted. Do all people these days have free will? How would you tell?
Who says Cain lived for centuries? There is nothing to link Cain to Enki. There is nothing to link the Sumerian gods to biblical patriarchs.
Oh yeah? Can you give me some examples of what you’re talking about?
Basically it’s the difference between modern humans of “civilized cultures” compared to indigenous tribal people. You know how our history is the same story over and over again about advanced cultures wiping out indigenous people and claiming their land? That’s the two lines. That’s the difference.
Seth, Cain’s brother, and all of his descendants are said to have lived for centuries. Why would that be different for Cain and his descendants?
All the polytheistic ancient cultures (Sumer, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Indus Valley, etc) were all situated around the same rather small region of the world. Genesis says a small family of long living beings were created right in the middle of that region. These civilizations sprang up not long after, some of them directly attributing their civilization building ways to their gods.
Right after showing all of Seth’s descendants lived incredibly long lives, Genesis 6 says “daughters of humans” were mortal and only lived 120 years.
If that’s true then it potentially explains why all of these cultures independently came up with stories about human in form gods, male and female, who lived among them.
Already did. Art, for example, already mentioned. The development of the Aurignacian tool kit, before that the Mousterian, before that the Acheulian. Of course, many changes would be invisible to us because they aren’t preserved in durable artifacts.
You’re saying that indigenous tribal people don’t have free will? What is your evidence for such an odd claim?
As I said, you have no evidence for that claim.
Well, they are if you ignore all the others that weren’t. The rest of the world also had polytheistic ancient cultures. China, Japan, India, Mesoamerica, Australia, you name it.
You’re cherrypicking.
Genesis says Cain left the garden, went out and built a city. The Sumerians, who populated that same region, said a god showed up and built a city. Both timeframe and location match up.
Then there’s several notable similarities between stories in Genesis and stories in Sumerian texts like a great flood story complete with a “flood hero” that knew ahead of time and built a boat and a once universal language confused into many.
I wouldn’t say there’s nothing.
Agreed. You wouldn’t. But what do you have? A city, possibly in the Near East somewhere, at some unknown time, unless you have a date for Cain. And some similarities in stories unrelated to Cain in any way. Von Daniken would laugh you out of the room.
I have a timeline constructed from the lineages of Genesis that lays out a series of events over a 2000 year time frame that lines up with events that fit along that same time span in the same geographic location specifically given in Genesis.
I’ve got quite a lot, actually.
Certainly. It’s edited in right between Seth and Noah. It’s purpose is to explain who Noah is. And it does that.
Go ahead. Show us the timeline. I’m going to bet it’s heavily fudged and cherry-picked, which sounds great for ice cream but not so much for history.
Yes, it does that. But you asked about the Cain story – why it was so long and detailed. One of the reasons is so that we can contrast the genealogies – in light of what we know about Cain’s character, and of the character of his descendants. It is unlikely that the similarity of names in the two genealogies is accidental.
Have you shown your studies to any Biblical scholars, to get some input from them?
The current documentary hypothesis was not formulated in the nineteenth century, and is not referred to as “the old JEDP theory”. The people who refer to the documentary hypothesis as “the old JEDP theory” are typically fundamentalists who want to make it sound out of date and no longer current in mainstream scholarship.
When someone identifies two sources in the flood account, responding with the claim that they are “following the old JEDP theory” is not only a non sequitur but also makes it sound like the view of multiple sources in the flood account is out of date and obsolete.
It’s the same kind of strategy used by people who refer to “Darwinian evolution”, despite the fact that the modern evolutionary synthesis left Darwin behind a long time ago, and even left neo-Darwinism behind a long time ago.
You seem completely unaware of the status quaestionis, such as the general rejection and/or diffusion of the Elohist, the controversy over the Yahwist (typically no longer referred to as J), and the split between American commentary and European commentary.
I was addressing Jeremy, who seemed to be talking about the older formulation, about current revisions. So your diatribe is out of place.
We spent a great deal of time in graduate school on method in Hebrew Bible scholarship, and had numerous professors and graduate students extremely well-versed in historical-critical theory. They were also well-versed in modern literary theory and in the newer narratological approaches to the Bible, which, based on everything you’ve ever posted, you’re completely unaware of. It’s from that perspective that I was making my suggestions to Jeremy.
I already headed off that attempt at a dodge.
He said nothing whatsoever to indicate that he was “talking about the older formulation”.
So why do you consistently show a lack of knowledge on these subjects? Why don’t you actually use these methods yourself? Instead you rail against the historical critical method (which is not a “theory”).
What nonsense, I’m not unaware of them at all. I’ve used them in my own work.
As I pointed out, modern scholars don’t refer to the documentary hypothesis as “the old JEDP theory”. Fundamentalists who don’t like historical criticism, do. That’s you.
Where did I “rail” against anything? All I did was suggest to Jeremy that perhaps the conclusions of some scholars regarding the composition of Genesis were not inviolate. I wasn’t foaming at the mouth. I wrote calmly.
I have used them often, in my published work.
The only work on the Old Testament you ever showed me, on BioLogos, did not use them. Maybe some other work does. But then, if you are referring to published work (in academic journals), you only have one such work, so let us know where we can read it, and I’ll try to see how much the new narratological approach informs it.