The Tablet Theory and Hints from the Text of Scripture

An additional observation. Now that the toledot statements are treated by a majority as primarily forward-looking (though, granted, serving as links in a series) rather than as colophons, there have been arguments about the lack of one in the Gen 1 creation account.

Does “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void” serve as one, summarising the whole account, or is it an introduction only? Certainly it doesn’t follow the usual “These are the generations of…”

Combine that debate with the disontinuities in content and style that led the critical scholars and sequentialists like me to regard chs 1 and 2 as separate traditions, and it seems to me that an updated tablet theory frees us from what seems to me the rather artifical, and certainly YEC-biased, idea that God dictated to Adam what he’d been up to the previous week.

Instead, we could treat Gen 2.4-11.1 as the tradition, perhaps as physical tablets, that Moses received from his forebears (the Old Testament of the Old Testament), and the creation account as his own inspired theological introduction to that proto-history for the new Israel, full of the tabernacle imagery that forms a Yahwist cosmology, but also giving a universal scope to what, in itself (as Alice Linsley points out, for example) is a local dynastic history.

In that way, concordance issues are avoided because, unlike the proto-history, the creation account is ahistorical; the narrative drama begins, as it seems to, with the conflict in the garden; and Moses, being aware of that, becomes a wise author rather than a bad editor.

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Yup. Tablet theory, reworked, and a sequential reading, combined with a “late” Adam as coming along well after the creation of mankind in God’s image, allows for whole new vistas of coherence while not undoing orthodoxy. Right with 'ya, @jongarvey !
I tend, however, to view the Genesis 1 account as part of the primeval tablet history Moses received as a recorded oral tradition; a “hymn of creation” possibly even taught by the Malak YHWH to Adam and Eve directly, as a matter of worldview formation.
I find no intractible problems with a soft concordist analysis of this material; rather, remarkable congruence. I am, after all, an only somewhat rogue RTB guy… : )

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Well, I wasn’t there either, so I won’t insist…

I hadn’t heard that the “majority” had flipped the script on the toledots representing the subsequent material rather than the preceding material. If so, add that to the list of things I am convinced they have wrong, at least for most of them. The rules change for understandable reasons over the thousands of years the tablets represent. The first account does have a toledot- it starts at 2:4.

Mark

Wenham argues for “introductions” on the grounds of giving full weight to the chiastic structure of 2:4 and the literary function of the other toledots. He cites in support Jacob, Cassutoo, Cross, Woudstra, Tengstrom, Childs.

Kidner agrees, responding negatively to Wiseman’s thesis from the analysis of the Genesis toledots - adding as an example of the necessity of pointing forwards the toledot phrasing of Ruth 4:18 (though he also argues against the likelihood of “journal” type tablets).

John Walton (NIV Application Commentary) discusses the toledots and concludes they are introductions meaning “developments that arise out of…”

C John Collins emphasises the bridging character of 2:4-7, but sees the toledot as introducing an expansion of the work of the 6th day in the creation of Adam.

Sailhamer believes they are introductions, citing other Pentateuchal examples like Numbers 3:1. His only caveta is that, in the final form of the Pentateuch, they are not the sole indicator of divisions.

Seth Postell mentions the preference of most critical scholars to the toledots as conclusions, but in a lengthy discussion comes to the conclusion that they are introductions, including some less-explored matters (as a Jew) like the occurrences of words - “eretz” occurs a significant 3X7 times in the creation account… but if 2:4 is included, that number is an non-significant 22 - throughout the Pentateuch one finds such careful compositional factors, so it’s not irrelevant. Postell cites Otto and Stordalen’s work in support.

Greg Beale, assuming they are introductions, compares 2:4 with Matthew 1:1 (the same Greek as Septuagint) to take the latter as a deliberate introduction to the New Creation in the New Adam.

Richard Middleton argues for introductions simply because they all work as that, whereas not all work as conclusions, and disagrees with von Rad that 2:4a is a sole exception to the rule.

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Well Jon @jongarvey that gives me a lot to dig my teeth into, assuming I can find the source material for the most promising on the list. I did notice in your list that S. Postell claimed that most critical scholars see them as conclusions, as did Wiseman.

Now I know you are a big fan of Middleton, and it seems like he is on the side of introductions on practical grounds- that is, they all “work” as introductions but not conclusions. So then I take it that if he could be shown another way that they would all “work” smoothly he would be amenable to considering it?

I ask because the view I lay out in Early Genesis is that they start as conclusions, but when two-sided tablets come along the narrative is put on one side and the genealogy is put on the other, with the colophon on the edge of the tablet placed in the middle. This format aligns well with the structure of Ruth though the genealogy there is very short. Later on, something else happens to make a soup of too-rigid an application of the Wiseman Hypothesis as described here…

Agreed, Mark. The placement of the toledots is a signal which arises more from physical aspects of the tablets than as an inviolable literary convention. Why can’t they vary between being introductory and /or conclusory?

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Obviously I summarised all the sources to give a hint at their arguments. And I guess the way to judge how persuasible people are is to interact with them, rather than ask their readers! You can find his passage in The Liberating Image, and he uses s:4a as an introduction as a significant plank in his whole case for the message of Genesis, leading (like me, before I read his book) to the conclusion that 1:1-2:3 falls outside the toledot structure, as a prologue for the rest of Genesis and the whole Bible (for which view he cites Walter Brueggemann and Francis Watson).

So his interest here is mainly the relationship (which he dubs “transcendental”) between the creation account and what follows, and I don’t think he’d see any particular mileage in being persuaded otherwise.

What I find amazing is how scholars can reject the entire perspective of tablet theory just because they can’t settle this one question. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

Ahh, much like the rest of us then.

I think the problem is generally over-stated in both directions:

The Tablet Theory doesn’t bring any more corroboration to the table…

But it does flesh out with specifics exactly how an “old narrative passed to the Biblical narrative” scenario could be mechanically executed by humans (presumably with all of God’s grace and inspiration usually associated with such ideas).

Actually, tablet theory identifies the likely sources, the literary antiquity of those sources, an explanation for how they got so much of ancient and patriarchal culture right, despite their historical remoteness from Moses, and suggests ways the oral stories underlying them may have been originally shaped --establishing a larger context in which to seek to know their meaning.
So vital is this underpinning, that I am completely stumped as to why the esteemed Dr. Jack Collins @jack.collins doesn’t seem to wish to weigh in on it. I hope he does, when the onus of his work on the Psalms commentary lightens up. Certainly, the current text contains anachronistic insertions, identifiable Egyptianisms, and other features which attest to a lively literary history, but at their core there is undeniable history and veracity.

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The Tablet Theory does not Marshall ant additional proofs. It is merely very explicit in fleshing out the school of divine inspiration.

Tablet theory explains the internal organization and features of the text, even to the point of implying sources. It would seem as though you have a whole lot more reading to do on it before trying to make cogent comments about it, @gbrooks9 . Honestly, your comment betrays a basic ignorance of it, AFAICT.

It offers cogent explanations as to why some parts of the text seem to come from different source material and use different language or styles of writing. And while it surely is to be cheered by the school of divine inspiration the bare fact that Moses possessed tablets written by his ancestors does not on its face prove they were Divinely inspired.

I believe this was my point.

It is a fleshing out. It is a further explication. But it doesn’t provide additional proof. Just additional specifics. It is because I would be concerned of misunderstanding my comments (Guy?), that I don’t spend time with the tablet theory.

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Additional proof of what, exactly? It certainly adds additional cogency for these narratives to have been able to be written by the characters themselves, or at least recorded by their near term relatives. The uncanny accuracy of the cultural information from, say, the patriarchal era, unavailable otherwise to Moses writing hundreds of years later, is explicated by this view, for example. It’s a trivialization to make this a matter of risking being misunderstood. Stand and deliver. What studying have you done in this subject?



Just a small contribution by one rather eccentric scholar, e.g.

@Guy_Coe

Because of the fuzzy spin you put on the Tablet Theory, potential supporters are probably hesitant to have their support misinterpreted.

I certainly agree that the specifics of the Tablet Theory make for a more vivid understanding of divine inspiration.

I don’t need any more comprehension of the elements to make these statements. It is a point of logic… it has to be… because describing a method is not the same as producing EVIDENCE of the method.

The evidence for this reconstruction of method is in the text itself. Toledots are used throughout Genesis as an indication of source, literary, and organizational components --in much the same way we have come to expect footnotes, chapter titles, and other features to assist with our understanding of a text. Not fuzzy at all, once you’ve actually studied how it all coheres.

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Look for the words, “these are the generations of” or similar in the modern translations, then a Hebrew interlinear will confirm whether the word is “toledot” or not. Now you can begin to look at the literary evidence within the text for how they function and what they mean. They are NOT invariably introductory to geneaologies.

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