Scripture does not give us the whole story. It doesn’t intend to do so. Everyone goes beyond the text of Scripture to fill in the gaps in different ways. That isn’t wrong at all, unless we presume our way of filling in the gap is the teaching of Scripture. That would be wrong, substituting man’s word for God’s Word.
My grandmother would say to the GAE, “well, I guess the way I read Genesis was right after all! It just wasn’t the whole story, but we already knew that.”
You are unusual. I will give you that. You are different. I really wish you could be right because I do have a soft spot in my heart for you and am unable to stay mad at you (at anybody - I never learned how to hold a grudge).
You want me to join? Open up a completely separate division on PS for YEC science no matter how much you disagree with it or think it pseudoscience. There may be a way for a lot of us to join in after all.
I can give you a YEC science tag. In fact I will do that by day’s end. It won’t protect that science from being disputed and discussed, but you’ve always been welcome to post it for discussion.
I like you too.
I do, however, think you need to attend to this: Why Speir Distrusts Us - #20 by swamidass. I do not think you were fair to me here. Would you please clarify there in that thread why you do not trust me, or retract the claim that anything and everything I say you will receive as a lie.
I believe #2 is more likely. I don’t necessarily have a problem with #1 at this moment and I don’t think it has to conflict with original sin, as Adam was head over creation and his family. The consequences of sin passed on to all of creation, including animals. So it would have passed on to his living family as well. However, again, Adam’s age at death is mentioned in the Bible. And Adam and Eve fell into sin before their children did.
I hope @John_Harshman is not offended, but when I read his comments I get a picture of Satan, as he also knows scripture quite well, but he doesn’t want anyone to believe in it. I love how he corrects Christians if they misread the Bible so that he can prove his point that they should read it correctly and then disbelieve in it. @John_Harshman please point out where I have erred if that is not true of you. I will adjust my picture. No, I do not think you have horns.
I really can’t help what pictures you get. That’s about your head, not me. I do happen to believe that the intended reading of Genesis is clearer than many people make it, and also that it conflicts in many ways with the facts of the world. And I think it would be better if more people understood that too. I wouldn’t call that Satanic.
Hi. Neither of these statements overturn the proposal. Adam knew no age until he exited the Garden and no-one was counting genealogies until after the first post-curse child Cain was born. Passages in Ezekiel hint that rebellion was in the Garden in the form of nations and that those nations were kicked-out.
This silly idea entered my head 18 years ago and I swore I would never make it public. I was true to that oath until I saw that “people outside the Garden” were becoming an issue in theology. Truly, I am saddened about all of it.
Why are you saddened? Isn’t the conversation fun? Imagination and creativity is a virtue, not a vice. We are playing together, wondering together what could have been.
I agree with @John_Harshman on the earlier responses. I think the questioning thoughts are valid though and deserve further discussion…I’ll add some other thoughts as well.
I would argue that Adam had access to the tree of life and was in the garden for a very long time working on creation stuff…(541 million years to the Cambrian explosion right?). Eve came along after all the animals, so less than 200k years by discovery of homo sapiens, possible Eve entered the picture around the 4000 BC mark and time as we know it begins with her and the fall.
I agree with @John_Harshman , this was to the Gen 1 people created before Eve.
Do you have a verse?, I don’t see it…the Gen 25:23 verse is in regard to Isaac’s wife Rebekah
Adam named Eve after they had sinned, prior to that she was called woman. Reasonable to say they didn’t know each other well enough yet…LOL, thats a joke, but then again would it really be paradise with children running around? (another joke, easy)
16 To the woman He said:“I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception;
In pain you shall bring forth children; Your desire shall be [e]for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.”
I read this as her sorrow and conception will be increased (have lots of both), pain seems to be a news item as though she had not yet conceived, but certainly room for interpretation.
Gen 4:1 - Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore [a]Cain, and said, “I have acquired a man from the Lord.”
This seems to me to be their first time “knowing” each other, it wouldn’t be important to note if not…also, the importance later of the two sons displaying a sin nature from birth even though they know God personally seems important to the overall human nature story. A&E were 130 years old before Seth came along after Cain left and had taken a wife and had children in Nod, which had to be with “others”. Interesting to note that the “Family of Adam” in Gen 5 does not include (nor even mention) Cain, as Cain left the presence of God and his geneaology no longer mattered apart from God and the genaological path to Jesus through David.
No, that would be the start of the Cambrian. The explosion, or at least its main evidence, would be 20-25 million years later, though that may be an artifact of preservation. In fact it isn’t clear just when the explosion started or just how explosive it was.
Also, while Adam had access to the tree of life, he didn’t take advantage of it. It appears that one dose would have been sufficient, with no periodic renewal needed. That’s why God was so anxious to expel him before he had a chance to eat some.
I will also point out that humans were created after the animals (Genesis 1) or Adam before and Eve after (Genesis 2).
Oh, yes. Many. None of them actually work. You have to distort both the science and the scripture. Don’t forget, though, that the timeline of Genesis 2 conflicts with the timeline of Genesis 1, unless you interpret them with a lot of wiggle room.
If you are referencing the days of creation mapping to geological epochs, have a look at Genesis one for yourself and consider the difficulties if taken as non-overlapping periods. Vegetation comes before the sun, birds arrive before land animals. I see a general progression, but not in a line item way, more literary than literal.
To restate the obvious, nobody actually uses a truly-literal-reading of “mother of all living”, because it would presume that Eve was the mother of all animal life. (That is, of everything which had a mother, she was the mother.)
Also, “the mother of all _____” is a popular idiom, even in modern languages of our day. For example, Saddam Hussein warned America that the coming battle for Iraq would be “the mother of all battles.” A literal reading of his statement would make no sense. After all, he wasn’t claiming that all of the battles in the history of the world—or even all battles which would follow the battle for Iraq—were derived from that battle. “The mother of all _____” is often used as an idiom in Near Eastern cultures. It means “the most important in category ______” or “the biggest _______ of all.” It is a superlative.
Thus, the Genesis description of Eve as the mother of all life is simply saying that Eve is the superlative maternal one or the most significant member of the set of all mothers.
I’ve never undertaken a rigid concordance of the idiom in ancient languages but I can remember a few examples. Sophia, the goddess of wisdom, was called “the mother of all virtues.” That title doesn’t mean that she gave birth to all of the other virtues. It means that Sophia was the GREATEST of all virtues (as part of her role as the personification of wisdom.) I think that same idiom was thereby applied as description of the ranking of virtues: “Of all of the virtues, wisdom is the mother of them all.” In other words, wisdom is the grandest of all virtues.
Much has also been written about the Canaanite goddess Asherah being known by the very same title as Eve: “the mother of all living.” According to Ugaritic myths she bore seventy sons to El. However, even that instance is not a “hyper-literal” usage of the phrase because she wasn’t considered the mother of Baal----so she couldn’t have been the mother of all of the gods of that pantheon.
Of course, even if we couldn’t find any instances of the idiom in the ancient world, we would still have to leave open the possibility—especially in the light of later use. Saddam Hussein’s reference to “the mother of all battles” is no doubt based on the idiom’s use in the Quran (circa 610 CE), where we find examples such as Mecca being called “the mother of all cities.” Obviously, that descriptor simply means that Mecca is the most important city to the history of Islam. Mecca is to Islam what Jerusalem is to Judaism.
I well remember America answering Hussein with a a massive air blast ordinance which was dubbed, “the mother of all bombs.”
I also remember one of the linguistics societies at that time choosing “the mother of all _____” idiom as their language construction of the year. Or something like that. I vaguely recall them including a brief description of the long history of that construction. I would say that the more general usage is probably at least 2000 years old, and probably much older. But I can’t say that I have the evidence at hand to take a shot at a peer-reviewed defense of that claim.
In exploring linguistic possibilities, one should also keep in mind other non-literal phrases of our own culture. For example, there is the modern day practice of giving Mom on Mother’s Day “The World’s Greatest Mom” trophy or plaque. Nobody assumes that there was an actual worldwide competition.
It is also worth mentioning that various ancient “mother goddesses”, such as Hebat of the Hurrians (probably mentioned in the Amarna Letters), were given that title NOT because they literally gave birth to “all living” but because they personified (as a kind of Platonic ideal) the concept of motherhood itself.
So by this way of thinking, Eve could have been considered “the mother of all living” in much the same way—even if in addition to being the mother of the entire “Adamic dynasty”.
[As usual in my posts, I’m not necessarily expositing my own personal position on the matter at hand. I’m explaining a variety of interpretations which can be found in the academic literature. These are possible explanations which readers may want to know, not necessarily the one definitive conclusion.]
I love how he corrects Christians if they misread the Bible so that he can prove his point that they should read it correctly and then disbelieve in it. 