How else does one arrive at a real Adam and Eve and ask a question about the type of death referenced in the garden without a concordist interpretation of scripture? You are taking details of a mythological narrative with clear parallels and similarities to other ANE stories and concordantly plucking out historical details while rejecting others. I mean:
Did God create the earth before the sun? Do you believe that? Did he create everything on 6 days? Did he literally do as specifically narrated, the things that Genesis one records him as? Or is it about form and function? Do you think Adam was able to pet lions? And others after him before the flood changed things?
Why does one get to simply pluck out history wherever they deem appropriate? What is your hermeneutic for distinguishing between story and history in the primeval section of Genesis?
The Bible leaves certain things wide open to interpretation,
That is just your opinion. For countless people, tens of millions of Christians who currently live, if not hundreds of millions, and the majority of now dead Christians thoughout Church history, the flood was clearly narrated as global and universal. Slavery was CLEARLY Biblical according to some. That God created the earth in 6 days was clearly not open to interpretation for hundreds of millions if not billions of Christians throughout history. That the earth was immutable and did not move clearly was correct and the new astronomy was false. The only thing that is clear is that Christians can’t agree on what is clearly taught in scripture. This is not due to a few fringe groups but huge populations of Christians past and present.
Once we accept accommodation we need to realize that ALL scripture is accommodated. Even when later scripture interprets past scripture after thousands of years of beliefs that were influenced by it, it’s all written though an accommodated lens.
So give me a plausible reason for thinking Adam and Eve are real people when the vast majority of the details they are surrounded by are rejected as having occurred in the fashion they did? Paul? No. Paul expressed an accommodated understanding of his sacred scripture. That he may have thought the details of Genesis were historical in some ancient sense does not imply they are anymore than a statement calling the earth immutable means it doesn’t actually move. I suspect the real reason is Augustine’s mistranslation that led to the doctrine of original sin. Even if original sin is being rejected by some, it’s clearly still has the church firmly in its clutches.
Accommodation applies to everything, including Biblical genealogies whose authors had no idea of how humanity actually started. Asking what is meant by death in early Genesis is the wrong question. It is, as I noted before, akin to asking what type of glass Cinderella’s slipper was made of? We can try to understand the point the story is narrating but it’s not expressing some magical change in the external world that happened at some point in the past.
Calling it a pure spiritual death also seems anachronistic. Can we better look at what it would have meant 3,000 years ago, not to us with highly developed conceptions of a soul? Not to mention Adam and Eve actually seem to “come of age” in some regard in the narrative. There are different ways of looking at the account t.
At any rate, I reject concordism fully. You are correct on that. I can certainly explain why if necessary. See Genesis 1-2 and compare what it says to modern science. See all of the incorrect scientific statements in the Bible. That is not my chief point here. I am commenting on the cherry-plucking, the artificial weaving between history and ancient myth, between factual detail and form and function. How does one pluck historical details out of these narratives in a way that is not artificial or assume a concordant reading of it which science tells us is inconsistent with scripture and it’s cosmogony? The primeval history in Genesis is interested in rearranging Mesopotamian mythological furniture to make theological points, not in narrating history.