It’s not an accusation, just a possible diagnosis.
You still haven’t established that Genesis 1:26-27 is unique to Adam and Eve’s lineage. Any inference of exclusivity to their lineage is a deviation from what the text actually says. It does not say that Adam and Eve are the first only to be in the Image of God.
The text doesn’t talk about any other lineages explicitly. The text only refers to “Adam” even on genesis 1:26,27. It needs to be proven that the “Adam” in genesis 1 can be understood in a more generic sense.
Well we know for a fact that it was understood archetypally. Do you know how the Septuagint translates Adam in Genesis 1? As anthropos, or “humanity”, not the proper name Adam that it uses I’m Genesis 2.
Yes… but this is a linguistic issue. The word Adam came to be associated with humanity because all humanity were considered to be descendants of Adam.
So obviously, genesis 1 would be translated as “anthropos”.
Even the Malayalam word of human (derived from Sanskrit) is based on genealogy. It’s Manushyan indicated descent from “Manu” the first human.
So I’m curious what you will think of the solutions I map out in my book.
I answered that in the first thread, but haven’t heard back from either you or A.J. yet. Curious to hear anyone else’s comments, as well. Conflating two things closely related in THEME doesn’t make them closely related in TIME.
The chiasm in the transition between the first two pericopes was deliberately inserted by Moses as editor of the compiled accounts, and was meant to keep us readers from the mistake of trying to conflate them into one account or to see them as conflicting accounts of the same events, in my view. Moses was well aware of the confusion it would cause were an interpreter to try to do so.
The writer of Genesis had no idea how old humanity was. But he did want to specify an Adam and Eve as a recent couple who led the way in contact with God.
Mind reading?
If we believe the word of God is inspired by God, then the ultimate author (i.e God) would be well aware as to when He created human beings.
How do you know that. There are no time scales explicitly mentioned. Any textual argument used by you for a 'recent" Adam/Eve can be used to bolster a “recent” creation of earth.
There are good reasons why a much earlier Adam/Eve makes sense. Atleast to me.
I think not. Otherwise, we would not have a piece of literature that describes it as Six Days.
That’s like saying that the scribe of Genesis could tell us how many miles are in an A.U.
(AU = Astronomical Unit), or that the stars could never “fall to earth”, without engulfing all the planets, the moon and Earth.
Did Jesus, in his human form, know the distance of the Moon from the Earth?
Did Jesus, in his human form, know about germ theory; judging from some of his miraculous cures (spitting into mud), it would appear he didn’t.
The fact there are no time scales explicitly mentioned is what made it possible to single out a specific couple as God’s “test case”, in the midst of an existing population.
When you say this: “There are good reasons why a much earlier Adam/Eve makes sense…” how do you mean that? Do you mean an Adam and Eve from 500,000 years ago? Or 40,000 years ago?
Or do you mean an Adam and Eve as first humans?
However God (or God’s scribe) intends to define humanit … it appears to be a definition based on “the Image of God”.
So… yes… where there are humans, there are souls with the image of God.
Which is good reason to see Adam and Eve as ancient.
I’m dying to read your explanation for that.
Frankly, I think it’s a good reason to see Adam and Eve as relatively recent.
We are already discussing this in the image thread… maybe we should stick to that one.
This exemplifies a problem for many of the different approaches all of us are bringing to this conversation.
It seems many (myself included) are ready to agree with your point, at least as a general principle (not necessarily excluding other principles). It is VERY interesting to me that many who are willing to accept this then immediately assume or choose to argue that Gen 1:26 still indicates an earlier account than Gen 2:4 ff. The only reason to claim or argue that, may appear to some as eisegesis from an EC/TE perspective.
This is an unfortunate addition to your thread as it inserts an unnecessarily limiting (literalistic) interpretation of the the text. It doesn’t seem worth dragging the thread off into that rabbit hole.
I was just trying to figure out exactly what you meant in the posting before… when you posted this one… which means 2 posts in a row that I don’t follow the sense of your meaning.
First: What is “this” in the sentence:
“… many who are willing to accept THIS then immediately assume or choose to argue that Gen 1:26 still indicates an earlier account than Gen 2:4…”
Once I am sure I know which “this” you mean, I will probably figure out the rest.
The reason I mentioned the “days” issue comes from the idea of just how much we think the scribe(s) of Genesis knew.
Do you think the scribe knew the Universe was 13+ billion years, and knew that God created Earth and humanity in six days? Please advise.
“this” =
I don’t agree with this.
The fact Genesis comes earlier and is archetypal, and a deep history of interpretation that precedes TE are all independent reasons for taking this view. I’m not “eager” to do anything but read scripture on its own terms.
Of course, it is easy to see why the “big picture” creation description of Genesis 1, where an entire world is created, could have been viewed by the compiler of Genesis as a suitable preface to what God did in a particular land using those already-created materials. And the TOLDOT (“these are the generations”) of Gen. 2:4 introduces the first of the series of such major TOLDOT divisions of the Genesis scroll.
I consider Genesis 1-2:3 a grand creation hymn which introduces the BARASHIT scroll in a beautiful way. Then each TOLDOT section of Genesis serves as a chapter division of a sort in structuring the “beginnings stories” of the Children of Israel. As I stated previously, this could be compared to an appropriate poem appearing before the chapters of a modern day book. Accordingly, in such a modern day book, there probably wouldn’t be many readers insistent on creating a rigorous chronological timeline that tries to integrate that introductory poem (comparable to Genesis 1) into the chapter 1 (comparable to Genesis 2:4ff) which follows it. Yes, I consider Genesis 1-2:3 to be a hymnic/poetic “preface” to the Genesis scroll while Genesis 2:4ff is where the author/compiler really gets down to business with “Episode 1”. [Even so, I’m not going to be adamant about whether or not that definitively settles all chronology issues, as I will explain further. And as I’ve stated before, I don’t think the ancient Hebrews were nearly so concerned about chronology and timelines as we are. I even doubt that Patriarch genealogies with total years and years till some descendant’s birth were all that concerned with chronology. I think there were numerological and symbolic issues at work instead—and that that explains why the final digits of the numbers in such genealogies are statistically skewed in unlikely ways, and why some of the numbers don’t make much sense. Yet that is a topic we’ve pursued on other threads and I don’t want to get into that tangent here.]
Whether or not one considers Moses to be the compiler of previously existing oral traditions (and/or from texts written down by others long before him) and incorporated into his Genesis scroll, here are the “These are the generations” divisions of Genesis:
Gen 2:4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth
Gen 6:9 These are the generations of Noah (cf. Gen 10:1)
Gen 11:10 These are the generations of Shem
Gen 11:27 Now these are the generations of Terah
Gen 25:12 Now these are the generations of Ishmael
Gen 25:19 And these are the generations of Isaac
Gen 36:1 Now these are the generations of Esau (cf. Gen 36:9)
Gen 37:2 These are the generations of Jacob
No doubt some may blame such on “eisegesis from an EC/TE perspective”—but I recall one of my rabbinical literature professors mentioning that some of his ancient predecessors [He was an rabbi himself] were reading Genesis 1:26 as prior to Genesis 2:4ff centuries long before Darwin and evolutionary biology. My memories are now fuzzy but the topic arose in lectures dealing with ancient literature describing other non-Adamic humans contemporaneous to HAADAM. Of course, the Hebrew word for man/human can be applied to both genders and humanity in general as well as to “the red-soil dirt man” or “the human one” of Genesis 2. Later on the Bible uses that description as a proper name. [I’ve sometimes used this trivia question in Sunday School classes: *What did Eve call Adam when dinner was ready?* Nobody knows for sure.] So if Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are from two independent oral traditions, it is quite possible that the word ADAM is applied differently in each.
For this and other reasons, I can imagine with some confidence that there are people today who place Genesis 1:26 chronologically before Genesis 2:4ff without necessarily being influenced by EC/TE considerations, especially if they have exposure to ancient extra-biblical literature and many centuries of commentary relevant to Genesis 1-2 topics. Nevertheless, I will certainly defer to any scholars on this forum who specialized in ANE studies and the copious rabbinical literature of which I only dabbled on the way to other degrees.