Curious what theologians throughout history made of Genesis 4

I know. I got sucked into another area of interest. But I am still very much interested in the original question. I anticipated a relatively quick and poignant response assuming there must be some clear reconciliation that I had just never run across.

As you said, “the theologian’s main interested in studying revealed literature is determining the meaning of the literature in the final form in which it has come down to us”.

Because the seeming contradiction here is in the text itself, which is why I’m inquiring as to the theologian’s explanation. Without any of the rest of this discussion, focusing specifically on what’s given in the text, how is the contradiction resolved while maintaining the overall belief in a global flood?

@Jeremy_Christian

We are not looking for a way to keep Adam’s heritage separate from all the other humans.

We want Adam’s offspring to thoroughly mingle with the evolve population…

And like I said long ago… the earlier pre-Adamite population is to be virtually indistinguishable from Adan and Eve…

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I do value the bible, but I don’t hold it up against the impossible standard of being an infallible word of God, but I do see it as a collection of written/recorded history from a time when the God of this universe interacted with humanity.

It’s a collection of writings that has remained relevant in an ever-changing world for centuries, and that in my mind is not to be dismissed.

I wasn’t talking about a global flood at all. Your original question was why the Biblical writer(s) spent so much time discussing Cain and his line in Genesis 4. I answered that one of the reasons (not the only one, I believe) was to invite us to compare and contrast the lines of Cain and Seth. In other words, Genesis 4 and 5 are presented to us in their current form (whatever oral or literary prehistory they may have had) partly to get us to think about the differences between the Cainites and the Sethites.

The scholar I mentioned, Sacks, approaches the text much as a traditional theologian would approach it, i.e., with a view to ascertaining its meaning, as opposed to dismembering it into hypothetical sources (which even if they existed do not necessarily get us to the meaning of the text as we have it now).

I don’t see any “contradiction” between the Cainite and Sethite genealogies. One can see similarities and differences between them without invoking any historical hypotheses about how those chapters found their way into Genesis.

I don’t know what “infallible” means to you, but the traditional theologian will say that the Bible is inspired, and reliable in all that it teaches. That doesn’t rule out the use of metaphorical language, non-scientific ways of describing nature, writing in a style which isn’t “history” as we know it in academia, and so on.

I don’t know whether by this you mean that God has since ceased interacting with humanity. Are you a cessationist? But in any case, your wording seems to suggest that you believe that God did in fact interact with mankind in the past. Is that correct? If so, if God interacted with Abraham, and interacted to bring Israel out of Egypt, etc., God could also have acted in such a way as to make sure that a book (the Bible) contained reliable truth. In other words, the presence of “sources” in the Genesis text doesn’t rule out the possibility that God guided the blending of the sources so that it revealed all that he wanted to teach. A God who could create a universe out of nothing, part the Red Sea, scatter all the foes of Israel and give Israel the land of Canaan, etc., could surely influence a few scribes to write about him in the way he wished, and could surely ensure that the Biblical text was transmitted (in essentials) faithfully. So if you believe that God did all those other things, it shouldn’t be any stretch for you to believe that he guided the compilation of Genesis so that its meaning would be coherent in essentials, to the patient theologian.

As for questions about the Flood (global or local, etc.), and questions about the identification of the Eastern cities named in the Bible, all of those are interesting questions, but weren’t the questions I was addressing. There is nothing wrong with such historical investigations, but in studying Genesis in graduate school (at a secular university), I was struck by how much of the text makes sense in its own terms, without recourse to complex theories about its origin. I don’t mean that historical questions have no value, but that often they are introduced to solve difficulties that are only imaginary. The repeated wife-sister stories are a case in point. There are perfectly sensible literary and theological explanations for the repetitions and variations that don’t require hypotheses about errors or clumsy editing. I don’t have time to present an essay on those particular stories here, but speaking more generally, this is the sort of thing that the “narratological” school of exegesis does very well, and that the “historical-critical” school doesn’t do very well.

That’s very much consistent with what I’m saying. What humanity became is because of a thorough intermingling.

The separation is only in relation to the bloodline specific to the breeding of Jesus.

Why’s that? If they’re indistinguishable, then what’s the relevance or significance of Adam and Eve?

I didn’t know there was a term for it, but I suppose I am. The way I read it, God interacted with humanity in the effort of creating Jesus, working with a free willed human element not under his control.

Once Jesus was accomplished, it is then established as a belief-based system. So God stepped back. Faith is a choice to believe. If God’s active in the lives of humans, there’s no choice. No need for faith, or belief. They then don’t choose God.

That’s part of the problem. If that’s the purpose, what is there to learn? With the exception of Noah, Genesis tells us nothing at all about Seth’s line, yet spends half a chapter on the line that is later eradicated by the flood.

When you begin to attribute anything and everything to God being capable of it, where does it end? Where do you draw a line? When the limit of your imagination is the only limit.

Besides, for every word to be the word of God goes against my view that we each have a will of our own. Unless God sat down and wrote it all out himself it is the product of the will of the writer. And unless that writer was Jesus himself, it cannot be wholly consistent with God’s will.

I do think the bible could have been created in the same way Jesus was created. A product of God created through interactions with humanity. And I do think the bible as it exists today does accomplish what it’s meant to accomplish.

But for it to be demonstrably infallible would make it proof of God’s existence, therefore undermining the whole faith element of the arrangement.

@Jeremy_Christian

Your explanation that God would have Noah build a boat for a regional flood (instead of just herding Noah’s animals to the high-ground) was that God was keeping Noah separate from the others. I have no idea how you link this to keeping the offspring separate all the way to Jesus. And besides, sending Noah to an isolated high ground is not inconsistent with any of what you describe.

We’ve gone over all of this before. Genesis 1 says our Pre-Adamites has the image of God.
And Genesis 9, retroactively applies to Genesis 2 with Adam & Eve having the image of God.

Genesis 9:6-7 - “Whoever sheds human blood,
by humans shall their blood be shed;
for in the image of God
has God made mankind.

7 As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.

“As for you…”. Before that “mankind” has been made in god’s image. Then, “as for you…”.

What else could God’s image be than a people lacking a free will? They would then indeed be the “image of God”. An accurate representation and embodiment of God’s will manifested.

But those from Adam’s line, they have the ability to differ from God’s image. Behave according to their own image.

Am I wrong?

@Jeremy_Christian

Yes, you are wrong. What is inherently wrong with killing someone with Free Will? There is no connection.

On the face of it, intelligence is much more shocking to destroy than someone who has free will.
And if you are Lutheran or Calvinist, you might even question whether it is possible or humans to have Free Will.

Dominance or Earthly Hegemony is also more valuable than Free Will… because it has to do with “rank”… God has given humans near God-like rank.

I really don’t understand why you think your scenario fits everybody’s viewpoint… I don’t think it fits anyone’s viewpoint.

How many people have you lined up in the past 10 years who endorse your view? Would I be close if I said one other person? Read the writing on the wall, and overhaul your unpersuasive premises.

Genesis 6 begins with “When human beings began to increase in number on the earth…”

Where would this isolated high ground be, exactly?

Keeping offspring separate from other bloodlines in the land among them is directly laid out in God’s commandments to the Isarelites during their time in the wild. First, here in Genesis 9, God tells Noah and his family to “increase in number; multiply on the earth…”. He then told Abraham he’d make his descendants many. And He keeps that promise with the Israelites. Keeps them isolated and lays out exactly how they’re to breed and who with.

That’s how I link it.

@Jeremy_Christian

Yes, yes, yes … and none of your reasoning has anything to do with keeping Noah separate on an abandoned high spot… instead of making a boat in response to a regional flood.

You are rather prone to simply saying something and expecting someone to say “if you say so …”

Sacks’s commentary will tell you some of the things that are “there to learn.” The pattern of descendants shows an interesting 3 x 3 = 9 pattern, which he discusses at some length. Also, you might ask why no one with a personality anything like the Cain or Lamech of Genesis 4 is described in Genesis 5. Further, you might contrast the two “Lamechs” in Genesis 4 and 5. There is lots to think about, but the problem with modern readers is that they have been conditioned by scholars to rush away from the text into all kinds of speculations about the history of the text or research into Near Eastern parallels. There is nothing wrong with those other things, but they should be taken up only after the student has mastered the text, not before. It’s hard to find a teacher who forces one to slow down and master the text first. The first instinct of most modern teachers of Biblical studies is to impose a filter of historical and critical material in between the student and the text, often before the students have even read the text once. It’s bad pedagogy, but it’s unfortunately almost the universal pedagogy nowadays.

This seems to be contradicted by the Old Testament. The people of Israel see God’s actions, but still often wander away from his commands and teaching. They have a choice to obey or disobey. Faithfulness is a thing of the will.

I think you are interpreting “faith” in a modern Protestant evangelical way, rather than a Biblical way. In the Hebrew Bible (and we are talking about the interpretation of Genesis here) faith isn’t about believing in things not seen or demonstrated; it’s about steadfastness, loyalty, remembering what one has seen and heard, etc. Thus, it is still possible to depart from faith even if one has seen God’s miracles, if one has a fickle heart.

Why are those the only two options? What about a human writer who is inspired by God, and submits his will to God’s?

Why is it impossible for anyone other than Jesus to be wholly consistent with God’s will? Admittedly, probably no one has lived an entire life that way, but one might live a good part of one’s life that way. We know that Noah was righteous and whole before the Flood. We know that Abraham was capable of sacrificing his son at God’s command. Why could an inspired writer not submit his human ego entirely to God’s will, and let his words be shaped by what God wants?

I did not use the term “infallible”; I used the terms “inspired” and “reliable.” And remember, we were dealing with some specific claims, e.g., that the repeated sister/wife motif indicates “mistakes” or errors or clumsy editing. I see no reason why the repetition of a similar story, with variants arguably appropriate to differing contexts, indicates an editorial error of any kind. In fact, repetition with variation is a standard method of teaching in ancient texts around the world.

I was not arguing that the Bible was perfect; I was saying only that many of the “mistakes” that scholars think they have found are only “mistakes” because they are looking for the wrong kind of consistency. Teutonic pedants trained primarily in grammar (which describes many of the German scholars who gave us higher criticism; I doubt many of them were reading Jane Austen or Dickens or Ariosto or Shakespeare) are not necessarily sensitive to broader literary questions. That’s why the rise of narratological interpretation of the Bible (which came into Biblical studies via people from English departments!) is a helpful corrective to excessive speculation about “errors.”

@Jeremy_Christian

Are you really curious what theologians throughout history made of Genesis 4? If you are curious, I would conclude you only want to know so you can contradict them.

Was Yahweh Real?

[Title and selected sentences paraphrased by G. Brooks:> ]
Neil Carter delivers quite an introduction to the long history of academic Biblical studies!

MAY 5, 2019 BY NEIL CARTER

“Could you imagine being so self-assured that you’re an expert in everything that you would publicly deride trained professionals in that discipline for arriving at conclusions which are different from yours?”

“Once again without googling , would you be able to explain to me the difference between form criticism and source criticism? Would you know without asking what textual and redactional criticism seek to discover? These are tools of the historian of antiquity, particularly where oral traditions make up the bulk of the sources for the ancient texts still available to us today. Those who use these tools to analyze ancient texts and traditions spend years, decades even, applying them to their subject matter in order to try and figure out how these things came into being.”

"I would ask if you could imagine correcting professionals in the study of antiquity without having formally studied that field yourself, except I already know the answer. Many of you already have, and continue to do so in your social media spaces on an almost daily basis. [GB’s emphasis !!!]

"And you do this while blissfully unaware that, without any of the relevant credentials, you are challenging formal disciplines wherein conclusions are corroborated by decades of controlled, peer-reviewed studies and/or excavations in a number of fields including archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and even radiology."

“Because you have read a couple of books or watched some YouTube videos on the subject, you feel eminently qualified to declare not only that [Yahweh] may not have existed, but that He did not and maybe even could not have existed. You are so certain of this that you stand ready to tell anyone and everyone about the conclusions you have reached.”**

“I will argue in this post that you are out of your depths when you speak with such certainty, and that if you had formally studied the subjects you are discussing, you would at least temper your assertions with a little more epistemological humility even if you were to arrive at the same conclusions in the end. You would also know that you are contradicting the overwhelming consensus of an academic discipline made up of people from every point on the religious belief spectrum.”

I used the Greek transliteration (see LXX) because that is what most English speakers in this forum will recognize. If I had used the Old Kurdish or Classical Persian transliteration (probably UFRATU) for the word on which it was probably based—or even the Hebrew transliteration (F’RAT)—I doubt that many here would have recognized what word I was talking about.

Of course, Greek as well as the ancient Kurdish and Persian language were all Indo-European languages (sharing Proto-Indo-European roots) so I’m not sure why you appear to be objecting in any case.

Really? I hate to disappoint but none of this scholarship is original to me, nor is such an etymological study somehow rooted in Christian hermeneutics or even Biblical studies. I first learned about it long ago from a classicist who was also a renowned comparative linguist known of his work on PIE and Linear B, among other topics. (I understood him to be an agnostic but we never talked about religion or religious texts. I seriously doubt that he was trying to “fit” a particular story.)

I admit to having read your sentence several times and I’m still not sure exactly what you are saying—other than that you don’t like what are the generally accepted etymological theories concerning the ancient name behind Euphrates. Not sure why. But that’s fine. Probably nobody alive today knows the ancient history of the word for certain.

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Sorry. Sometimes I don’t notice who I’m talking to, and I thought you were still Jeremy making his case for Genesis history. Are you saying that the name for the Euphrates river in Semitic languages is an Indo-European loan word? If so, very interesting. Still, I see no relevance to the identity of the river out of Eden. Why would it be called “F’rat” if it were not intended to be the river that the reader would recognize by that name? What other river would it have really been?

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A transliteration of a very ancient word (which got passed down to the Hebrew through centuries of oral tradition, most likely from a more ancient culture with a different language) can indeed eventually become a loan word (if used regularly within the Hebrew culture.) I’ll try to explain with an example: the word Eden is thought by some to have an origin in the Ugaritic word for “a well-watered, verdant place”. So it probably has very ancient Semitic language family origins. Yet, because the Bible has had such a profound impact on English and many other languages, we now use words like “Eden” and “Edenic” to refer to an exceptionally fertile and pleasant landscape. So it has become a “loan word” by popular uses beyond its original application in Genesis.

I mentioned it because I wanted to emphasize that we can’t automatically assume that the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in the Genesis description of the Eden region’s rivers are necessarily the same rivers we assume today when we hear those names. This situation can be compared to a place name like Portland, which originally referred to a place in England but later got applied to a city in Maine and eventually to what became the largest city in Oregon.

To explain how a word can “evolve” from in its pronunciation in ancient Persian to a particular Hebrew transliteration to a particular Greek transliteration would involve a great many technical aspects of each of those languages (such as how prefixes and suffixes are applied, as well as the available phonemes of the language.) That said, I’m not sure how doing so—even if all of those ancient transformations could be explained— would be helpful.

I could similarly explain the technicalities of how the Hebrew name YEHOSHU’A became IESOUS in Greek but in English we say either Joshua, (if we transliterate from the Hebrew source) or Jesus (if we transliterate from the Greek source.) Either way it is really the same name, linking back to the Old Testament hero, Joshua. Yet, even many Christians today don’t realize that Jesus was basically “named after” Moses’ successor, Joshua. Some people reading the Bible today think of Joshua when they see the name Jesus, and some do not. That comes with the many complications of words “evolving” as they pass through various languages. By the way, the Greek form IESOUS/Jesus had to lose the SH sound from the name Joshua because Greek has no such SH phoneme. For some readers, that will bring to mind the SHIBBOLETH/SIBBOLETH story from Judges 12.

To the ancient Hebrews, F’RAT would indeed be a name that they would recognize. Whether they unambiguously associated that river with a particular place is harder to determine. Some Americans today in the Pacific Northwest know of no other city by the name of Portland than the one on the Columbia River in Oregon. Yet, many of their neighbors are aware of a Portland in Maine, while even fewer know that there is a Portland in England on which both city names are based.

There are two major rivers in the USA called Red River. Nevertheless, millions of people around the world, including many English speakers unfamiliar with those American rivers of that name, immediately associate the Red River with a waterway which begins in China and flows through Vietnam to the Gulf of Tonkin. Place names are not always unique. That is one of my major points.

Many people groups of the world have used names like Big River for the largest stream in their area. (Another example would be Fast-Flowing River or Green River.) Some of those cultures have ancient stories referring to Big River which probably came from other cultures or even from their own ancestors who lived in some distant region before a major migration. When those cultures retell such oral traditions and mention Big River, some or all of the people may even misunderstand the geography. It is very possible that the same thing could have happened with references to the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in the Genesis account. We don’t know how ancient was the oral story of Eden’s garden that the Hebrews wrote down in their own language. We don’t know how many languages that oral story may have passed through on the way to the Hebrew compilers of Genesis. We don’t know if the ancient Hebrews always assumed that the Euphrates River of Genesis was in Mesoptamia or if some had also associated the name with other regions. History in general and historical linguistics for certain can be messy that way.

The fluidity of place names brings to mind what I discovered in studying the migrations of some German Brethren families I researched. Every few generations they moved on to new frontier areas of America, and each time they applied the name Goshen to their small village. The name had its original source in the Land of Goshen in ancient Egypt, a Hebrew place name where the children of Israel had once pleasantly resided. Other pioneer groups similarly applied Goshen to their New World communities. Today I think there’s over a dozen states with cities and towns named Goshen. The same thing happened in many other countries, such as Canada, South Africa, and Australia.

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Sorry for using the term “loan word”, which seems to have led you down a side alley. I merely ask if the name for the river in Semitic languages comes from an Indo-European word. If true, one might suspect that it come from the former Persian Empire’s longterm domination of the region. Or is it something earlier? What, in other words, is the history of this term, how did it get to be in a Hebrew document, and does this extend to other Semitic languages?

Why not? What other Euphrates and Tigris, analogous to Portland, ME, could be the real referents here? This analysis would logically cast doubt on every place name; why limit it to these? I suggest that the problems of reconciling geography with the description is that Eden doesn’t represent any real location at all. Hence the mention of what is apparently the Nile, unless of course Cush isn’t Cush either.

Another side alley. Not sure how you got into that one.

Very possibly earlier. In any case, I’m not well trained in that area of linguistics.

I’m no expert on this but oral traditions often get passed to surrounding cultures over time. How did Aesop’s Fables get passed down to elementary school reading books in the USA?

Yes. Other Semitic languages have also preserved such words.

Some have suggested that the four rivers of the Eden region were in areas pre-historic Nile delta which are now submerged by the Mediterranean Sea. Whether or not that is the best explanation, it is entirely feasible that the four rivers were in the area of Egypt rather than Mesopotamia

You appeared to be confused as to how words change as they get conveyed through various languages. You had asked, among other questions: