The Counterarguments to reading Genesis 1 and 2 as Recapitulatory

Would you say that the creation of the animals in between the creation of Adam and the creation of Eve situates the second story within a wider unfolding narrative?

I would agree, but perhaps we mean different things. I’d say that there are three different stories, and that the Cain/Abel story is separate from the Adam/Eve story.

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@John_Harshman

I think the fact Genesis 1 makes no mention of the Tree of Evil… while Genesis 2 does is the MORE convincing indication of a wider narrative of different people having different circumstances.

@John_Harshman

I can agree to that as well! Cain appears to be the ORIGINAL good guy… with the original mark of protection…

… redactors turned him into a murderer as a way to re-contextualize the mark of protection… and then they stole his family tree story…

You refer to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? I think it’s obvious from most every point that the two stories are unconnected to each other and are independent creation myths stuffed by the compilers of Genesis into one book. I would venture a guess (uninformed by any actual knowledge) that Genesis 2 is the earlier of the two stories, just because it seems theologically more primitive.

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That also solves the problem of where Cain got his wife. Cain would not originally have been attached to the first couple or to a world in which all people were descendants of that couple.

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It would seem that you both might have trouble letting the text speak on its own terms.
No animals were newly “created” in the second story (“bara” is nowhere to be found there); they were only brought to Adam, having been “formed from the ground.” Hardly a description for newly miraculous acts!
"Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name. - Genesis 2:19 NASB
This particular part of the story is elucidating the growing need in Adam for a companion; see verse 20.
Cain is definitely NOT presented as the original good guy.

@John_Harshman

You can swing a bat at whatever you like… but Genesis 1 is clearly more closely connected to the very beginnings of the Cosmos.

Genesis 2 is more specially connected to a more moral phase of cosmic evolution.

@John_Harshman

Just remember that identifying the literary seams for how different stories were sutured together does not change the importance of how the different stories created meaning to existence.

@Guy_Coe

I think i was clumsy in my description. My point about Cain as “good guy” is made in reference to the hypothesis that the fragment of the Cain story that survives in the Bible probably comes from etmological legends of the Canaanites…

Inverted for the Bible to more favorably honor a non-canaanite heritage.

Well, I’ve never been clummzy in my whole life, but I’ll try to relate without tripping over my own rhetoric. : )

Remove Genesis 1, and I contend you don’t really have a creation story at all. You have the story of a particular population (of 2) in a very particular place - and moreover, unlike city-based creation myths like Enuma elish, a place that disappears from the narrative (but whose loss sets the trajectory of the whole ensuing account).

So it is not a typical story of the founding of a state-cult, but everything focuses on it: Adam is formed elsewhere and brought to it; the animals formed (or already formed are brought here for Adam’s naming), the drama revolves around the gaining of (perverted) wisdom in despite of Yahweh’s intentions, and the loss of eternal life thereby.

I’d disagree that Cain’s story can be separated - we have a tightly knit narrative from 2:4 to the call of Abram. But the creation story has its own agenda and its own genre and, as I’ve written extensively before, acts as a stand-alone introduction of the good world God has created, humanity and all, in which dramatic things begin to happen as God begins something new.

That something (in the light of the Bible’s overarching narrative) could be described in terms of a new creation - a creation based on intimacy with Yahweh in covenant, on co-regency (which is not inappropriately decribed by Heiser as membership of the divine council), and of eternal life, something entirely distinct from the natural outcomes of Gen 1.

And so Adam is a man, as in Gen 1, but in some sense a new kind of man, for whose origin and life-events “mytho-poetic” language would be considered most appropriate. Think in terms of two stages of creation - or even two creations - within one developing “salvation narrative”, and the place of the stories in the sequence becoems obvious.

The Victorian preoccupation with isolating sources is of limited use (and thankfully fading as people rediscover that we have a book by an author to understand). Personally, my feeling is that ch2-11 embody a single set of traditions (explaining, do a degree, the paralells with other ANE literature), shaped into the narrative of Israel, to which the author added a unique and sophisticated monotheistic creation narrative as the setting.

In case any are unfamiliar with this, that Gen 1 narrative is neatly explained by its clear parallels to the building of the Tabernacle in Exodus - there is a rich cross-correlation between Yahweh’s cosmos and Yahweh’s covenant sanctuary - and crucial parallels AND differences between those and the garrden sanctuary of ch2.

Loosely speaking, the call of Israel (the theme of the Pentateuch) follows from the Adam narrative - whereas the world to which they are called to minister follows from ch1.

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Is it, perhaps, the other way 'round, that the parallels, canons and conventions of building the temple in Exodus are the result of the revelatory oracles in early Genesis? There’s good reason to think that chapter one is really that ancient, predating the Genesis 2 and ff. narrative.

@Alice_Linsley what does your work in anthropology say about Cain’s wife?

I had this discussion with the Director of Tyndale House! It seems to me a two way street, in which all one can really say is that the cosmos is described as sacred space in the same terms as the tabernacle is. Which came first appears to me to be of minor importance.

The cosmos corresponds to the tabernacle, and the tabernacle to the cosmos. And the revelation of both, as we have it, is in the same body of literature. One way or another, Israel discovers that as they worship in the tabernacle, they are worshipping the God of the whole cosmos. And as they live in the world, they are in the courtyard of God’s true tabernacle.

Plus, of course, the lessons are echoed at an intermediate level in which Israel itself is the sanctuary of the world, and the tabernacle its Holy of holies.

That “representation” has its spiritual parallels throughout salvation history, for the locus of worship is now the body of Christ, the “true temple”, and that in turn is represented in the Eucharist.

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When I say “earlier” I don’t mean in the time scale of the stories; I refer to the historical origins of the stories. And I refer to the conceptions of God in the stories. The Genesis 2 God is much more anthropomorphic and, frankly, bumbling. He walks in the garden. He can’t create from nothing but acts more like a potter. He can’t figure out that Adam’s proper companion is a female human until he tries out all the animals. He gives Adam an impossible task (not eating a particular fruit). He doesn’t know where the humans are when they hide from him. He doesn’t seem to realize that the snake is acting against him until after the fact. And his concern is that Adam will eat from the other tree and live forever, which for some reason he had not done previously.

Contrast with Genesis 1 in which a powerful deity makes everything using only his will as expressed in a voice. That seems much more like the modern conception of God.

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15 posts were split to a new topic: Considering Cain, Marriage Customs, and Borrowed Myth

I’m generally in agreement with you that the argument against a sequential reading is not definitive. I wonder if it the current attachment to a recapitulatory reading is partly a reaction against the documentary hypothesis. Post Sailhammer’s compositional approach, I’m not sure if we should be defensively reading Genesis with a rebuttal of the documentary hypothesis in mind.

That being said, even though I’m personally drawn to the sequential reading, it is not a hill I’m going to die on. I am not sure precisely why it is so important to everyone either way. I’m writing the book to acknowledge several ways, all of which are consistent with the Genealogical Adam.

So, in the end, I’m not sure if I really have a dog in this fight. I suppose you can fight it out with them, and I’ll just be a big tent.

Perhaps @Andrew_Loke might join in too. He has a book coming out very soon on the Genealogical Adam, and we are doing the an event together in Hong Kong in October.

@Andrew_Loke, minus the sharpness in this segment, it is exactly what I have wondered. I’m not sure how Jesus’ words somehow foreclose on a sequential reading. That does not appear to be what the passage is saying. How would you respond to this critique?

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My concern is, first and foremost, to interpret and exegete well, and to find the Bible’s grounding in the midst of popular or populist notions which undermine it, instead.
Of second importance, but still vital, is the biblical grounding for the notion of humanity’s universal identity as “made in God’s image,” with a monogenetic origin, rather than simply asserting that only Adam’s lineage are truly human.
That error has been a seedbed for racism, historically, and the concomitant dangers of elitist ethnic notions are not benign.
The sharpness was intended!

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My thoughts are as follows:

Matthew 19:4-6 portrays Jesus as saying ‘Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’

This passage portrays Jesus to be speaking about a particular beginning when he says ‘at the beginning’, and he identifies both ’made them male and female’ (Gen 1:27) and ‘for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’ (Gen 2:24) with this one and the same beginning in response to the Jews. If Genesis 2:4-25 refers to a couple which existed a long time after the creation of God’s-Image-Bearers in Genesis 1:1-2:3 and is understood as such by the Matthean Jesus, he would not have formulated an argument against divorce by basing it on the situation ‘at the beginning’. Thus Matthew’s passage implies the view that Genesis 2:4-25 retells part of the same story of beginning in Genesis 1:1-2:3.

Moreover, Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 11:8 ‘man was not made from woman, but woman from man’ would be void if there were already God’s-Image-Bearing females existing in Genesis 1:1-2:3 before the creation of Adam as well as Eve’s creation from Adam in Genesis 2:4-25.

Van Kuiken notes that other Second Temple Jewish texts also understood Adam to be the ‘first-formed’ human and the progenitor of all others (Wis 7:1; 10:1; Tob 8:6). ‘Since Paul concludes by speaking of all people’s judgment by one man, Christ (Acts 17:31), taking ‘one ancestor’ as referring to Adam fits Paul’s usual Adam-Christ correlation. Nowhere else does Paul mention Noah’ (2015, p. 686). Additionally, the interpretation that Adam is not the ancestor of every human being cannot be found in the earliest commentaries of the relevant texts.

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