It does sound that way, but ultimately, to me it seems that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are written as a backstory, a literary device to provide context and connection of the the story of Israel to the origins of the civilization and origins of creation, to give legitimacy. In the process, it teaches theologic truths, though not necessarily scientific or historical truths.
That is problematic in some aspects, I realize, but so are some of the contentions of those chapters like the origin of iron making and such in the first generations of mankind.
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But that is imposing a modern category on the text. When the first eleven chapters of Genesis were written there was no such thing as historical narrative.
Appearances can be deceiving, especially when your only categories are those from your own culture. The first Genesis Creation account bears marks of two different kinds of literature at the same time, marks that the original audience would have recognized but we don’t because we don’t have those types of literature. We don’t have anything resembling either the “royal chronicle” or “temple inauguration” literary genres so we don’t catch the signs.
It occurs to me that perhaps the closest thing we have to what I learned to call “royal chronicle” is a PR release announcing the completion of a great project and summarizing the salient points. But there’s a big difference in that no PR form today would use days as an organizing concept, but the reason for that is that we expect a PR release to at least use time referents literally whereas to ancient writers time referents were no less liable to be used as an organizing theme as location or anything else.
On the other hand for building construction projects a press release might talk about how first the rebar was all set up and then concrete was poured, followed by making the walls, then windows, and so on when in reality only one floor at a time was built with the rebar and concrete and the rest followed so that the steps described actually weren’t so orderly and got repeated over and over. The brief description then wouldn’t be literal but thematic – and that’s not too far off what the first Creation account does.
But another difference – perhaps the hardest for a modern reader to wrap their head around – is that for the purpose of understanding this great accomplishment of a mighty king the details can be treated as literal, but they can’t be taken that way on their own. To us all the details should either be literal or not, but that’s the result of our heritage of a scientific worldview.
And that leads to another difference, one that is critical to understanding ancient literature: to us an account is authoritative because it gets the scientific and historical details correct, but to the ancients an account was authoritative because of its source. So the opening Creation account in Genesis was authoritative to the Hebrews because it came from God; whether it was actual history (in our sense) wasn’t relevant in the least – and the same holds true right through the first eleven chapters. The modern idea that the account has to be 100% scientifically and historically accurate in order to be true is one that is first of all alien to that culture and second of all not derived from the scriptures at all but from the worldview of scientific materialism.
It appears that way unless you know how to recognize the signs of ancient literary genres that are alien to us. One aspect in the first Creation account that horrifies many Christians to the point that they refuse to believe it is that the outline of events is lifted straight from the Egyptian creation story, but that makes a great deal of sense especially if one accepts Mosaic authorship: the Egyptian account would have been known to people who had lived in Egypt and had no broad authoritative mythology of their own. So the Genesis writer – I see no reason to believe it wasn’t Moses at least in the earliest written form – took the Egyptian account and “corrected” it: instead of the sky as a goddess and the sun a god and the moon a goddess and so on, he explains that these are just things that YHWH-Elohim created for His puroses, i.e. rather than divine they are just tools. The ultimate slam in this polemic purpose is with the sun and the moon, two of the greatest gods all through the Fertile Crescent: not only does the writer not treat them as divine, he doesn’t even name them!
To a large degree that’s so because those three categories aren’t from the right set of literary types. The ancient near east didn’t have narrative prose as a type of literature, and while they did have poetry they also had what has been called “poetic prose”; they also had royal chronicle, temple inauguration, mythologized history, something very much like medieval morality plays, and more. Unless one is familiar with that set of literature types but only has the modern set, it’s inevitable that various pieces will be read incorrectly.
It’s interesting that you didn’t mention allegory; we have a member here who seems to think that there is only historical narrative or allegory, but that too is an error because it’s also not a category from the ancient set – although treating the first Creation account as allegory is rather closer to correct than treating it as historical prose. But it isn’t allegory, so treating it that way also misses the mark.
The appearance of Abraham is where the writer shifts towards something much more like historical prose. Babel is theologically mythologized history; archaeologists have known for quite some time that what would have been the biggest ziggurat ever was abandoned unfinished and that its workforce became useless due to language problems – it’s at Eridu, a city going into decline and so had to recruit workers from across the region who spoke a variety of languages and then seemingly lost their translators so the workers essentially walked off the job. The genealogies that fill the rest of the chapter bear marks of what have been called “kings lists” and serves as a transition from attention to the broader world to just one man (Dr. Michael Heiser does a great job of explaining the theology here).
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I did a more thorough job above in my response to Bill_II who reminded me of the extended meaning.
If you don’t work from the meanings of the words you’re not interpreting in the first place.
That term also fails to convey the sense. When we think of an expanse, we’re thinking in terms of a volume, a space, whereas raqiya is an expanse like a surface as of a tent or the vault of a dome.
AIG is not a reliable source since they put their humanistic philosophy above the text of the scriptures and argue from false equivalencies, for example:
It only depended upon where one started: if one starts with the presumption of a solid sky, one will read into the text a solid sky. If one starts with a modern conception, the text, as we shall see, permits that as well.
That is totally false: the conclusion of a solid sky is not based on any “presumption” but on the root of the word raqiya’. They are arguing in essence that actually relying on the meanings of words is just a bias and therefor no better than their imposition of a modern worldview onto the text.
The article goes on to engage in the argument that working from the use of Hebrew words in the Old Testament is not a valid way to understand the scriptures, calling it “circular reasoning”. It further relies on the faulty assumption that the ancient writer was trying to write good science but suffered from a lack of vocabulary; there is no indication in the text that the writer cared about science at all.
They are malleable when beaten, which is what the root of the word refers to.
But that would be saying that God used a particular metal for the solid dome.
This is reading a modern scientific view into the text in order to set aside the root meaning of a word. While AiG may like that approach, it is not valid regardless of whichever ancient literature is in question.
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Those chapters are predominantly polemical. The first Creation account takes the Egyptian creation story and inverts it to declare that all those entities that the Fertile Crescent regarded as deities are just tools made by God; the second Creation account declares that humans weren’t made as slaves but as companions to God who had authority over Creation; the Fall story declares that the Adversary is not equal to God but is subject to His commands; the Flood story asserts that God didn’t wipe out humans because they were keeping Him awake at night but on moral grounds; the Tower story shows that service to other gods cannot expect to prosper.
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St. R,
I will try to answer some of your specific points later, but for now I wanted to make some general observations. Bear with me…
It seems there are at least three arguments going on here: one about what the text says given the context, another about the correct literary type or genre, and a third about the degree to which determining the right genre also determines the meaning of the text. For now I want to look at what the text appears to say apart from genre.
But first, considering all that potential for contention, I think we should stop and acknowledge (celebrate?) one important point of agreement, namely, that the text is not meant to accurately reflect the findings of modern science. Not too many creationists are with me on this, but I am happy to leave scientists to do their work and draw what conclusions they will from their research (though given the track record of scientific theories in history, I think they would be well-advised not to promote their theory as a fact that only an uneducated redneck would presume to question).
Now – Suppose for a moment that yours is the stronger argument here, and raqiya most likely means something solid (and malleable, but not elastic). Suppose further for argument’s sake that whatever genre best fits Genesis, the first chapters are not historical narrative. Can we at least agree, as you seemed to concede earlier, that whatever is meant by raqiya in context is not entirely clear? That would at least help explain, I think, why there have never been any serious battles over teaching children in public schools that our atmosphere is composed of gases rather than solids.
By contrast, most everyone agrees that the text of Genesis, regardless of genre, speaks rather clearly of various separately created “kinds” of biological organisms, such as birds and cattle, multiplying or reproducing “after their kind.” Arguments ensue over what exactly kind means, and how many kinds there might be in principle, but not over what the text states repeatedly about each kind – that it was created and reproduces separately from the other kinds. Evolutionary theory explicitly repudiates what the text says about kinds. That would explain why the creation-evolution controversy is so contentious on the particular point of universal common ancestry.
While the writer of Genesis went out of his way to emphasize that there were numerous separately created original kinds, evolutionary theorists go out of their way, on grounds of what lots of people consider cherry-picked data and tenuous arguments, to assert that there was only one originally created kind. To me the effort often comes across as an ideologically-driven determination to deny any point of creationism any basis in reality. I guess that’s the price we creationists have to pay for Kent Hovind’s annoying debate tactics…?
I did a topic on this point, Is Baraminology Even Scriptural?, where I take issue with what I regard as the YEC taxonomic scheme unjustifiably projected into the plain and simple Biblical notion of “kind”.
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That’s a contradiction in terms: without the genre, the text says either nothing or whatever you like.
No, it requires what the text says about kinds – it’s people who make up silly things and label them “evolution” who contradict it. If offspring are not the same kind as their parents, evolution is nonsense.
If you mean here young-earth creationism, then I deny it any basis in reality on the basis of the text. Young-earth creationism and atheism both almost without fail deny that the text is what it really is, ancient literature of kinds – the first Genesis Creation account is two at once – we have nothing like.
What annoys me most about Kent Hovind is that he shows not the least sign of ever having thought it necessary to actually study the Genesis Creation accounts – a fact that leaves him ignorant in both science and scripture.
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I would insert “in the vast, vast majority of cases” just after “parents”–there are a few specific mutations (like polyploidy) that can produce a new species within a single generation. In certain species of gastropods, sinistrality can produce a new species (ones where it is both rare and prohibits fertilization)–Busycon and Conasprella are examples where there are one or a few species that seem to have arisen through a few sinistral individuals meeting up with each other.
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True, and I should know better from botany. One of my botany professors had a species he got to name that wasn’t from field explorations, it came from a greenhouse.
Then there’s the modern garden strawberry, which as I recall is octoploid; it was a forced cross that I understand couldn’t have happened in nature and in fact required multiple crossings and back-crossing.
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No, typically the genre enhances understanding of a meaning already inherent in a text. Thus the only way to decide the genre in which a text best fits is to first read the text and find out what it says. What it says remains largely independent of its literary type. For example the phrase above, “contradiction in terms,” means essentially the same thing within a host of various literary forms – and I frankly couldn’t name the “genre” to which this discussion rightly belongs.
Consider likewise that the phrase “Then God said” appears not only in Genesis 1 (whatever we decide its genre may be), but many times throughout Genesis in a decidedly narrative context (e.g., “Then God said to Abraham…”), and indeed across multiple biblical genres. So there are many literary types of text that say the same thing. And its basic meaning is the same in all cases: God has spoken. But when we read Ezekiel say, “Then God said to me,…” we see an important difference in perspective between narrative and prophetic literature, and gain enhanced understanding of what it means for God to speak in a specific context.
Honestly I’m surprised you would disagree with this. I understand how important it might seem to put creationists like me firmly in their place, but it almost appears that you’re arguing for its own sake (maybe eristic should be a distinct genre?). So I will take it upon myself to agree with you: yes, recognizing that a text, once expanded to consider its context, usually shows the patterns and earmarks of a certain genre is an indispensable element of good interpretation (though obviously not a substitute for the core message of the text itself).
No, it requires what the text says about kinds – it’s people who make up silly things and label them “evolution” who contradict it. If offspring are not the same kind as their parents, evolution is nonsense.
So evolutionary theory requires what the text says about kinds, but people who label it “evolution” contradict what the text says about kinds? Again it appears you’re determined to disagree with me about basically everything, at the cost of sometimes slipping into incoherence.
Yes, all parties agree that offspring are the same kind as their parents. The question is whether all organisms, parents and their offspring alike, derive from one kind or a plurality of kinds. Pointing out that offspring are the same kind as their parents begs that question.
I originally intended to answer some of your other contentions, but I would rather avoid the sort of pitched polemical battle you seem to prefer. I do think your earlier point about Moses borrowing elements from Egyptian myth is well taken, though. I heard something along those lines many years ago and had forgotten all about it.
Strange how certain apologist sites are all literal, none poetic plain reading, this is the denotation of the word, when it comes to the "day"s of Genesis one, and then turn into mush balls of figurative poetic flourish when it comes to Biblical descriptions incorporating ancient cosmology.
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I have been thinking lately the role of ‘preliminary understanding’ in the interpretation of biblical scriptures - I don’t know the proper English term, therefore I use these words. ‘Preliminary understanding’ is the ‘color of our eyeglasses’; we interpret what we read through it. It is necessary in the sense that without it we would not understand anything about the text. The danger in it is that we ‘see’ in the text meanings that were not intended by the writer and miss meanings that the text intended to tell. Because of it, our interpretations are never ‘neutral’ or perfect. I guess those who have studied hermeneutics are well aware of this phenomenon.
The comments in this thread reveal nicely how our ‘preliminary understanding’ affects our interpretations about Genesis. We believe we see in the text ‘evident’ meanings that others do not seem to understand. Although our interpretations are never perfect, some interpretations are closer to truth than others.
Based on my own history and experience, I believe that widening our understanding by thinking the justifications for opposing claims and reading the results and conclusions in peer-reviewed research publications helps us to reach a more truthful interpretation of ‘difficult-to-understand’ texts. Stories written (or told - it is uncertain when the oral tradition was documented in written form) thousands of years ago in a very different kind of culture are among the ‘difficult-to-understand’ texts.
I started my journey by reading ‘pro-YEC’ books and interpreted Genesis through that kind of understanding. Interpretation of Genesis seemed to be quite straightforward, just read and accept what the text tells. Quite similar as reading a modern textbook telling what happened in the history. As my understanding widened, I started to see faults in that kind of interpretations - interpreting the text was not as straightforward as I had believed it was.
Today I read the same texts in Genesis 1 but my interpretation is different, simply because my ‘preliminary understanding’ has changed. I guess my current understanding is close to what @St.Roymond has been writing, although 40 years ago I would have supported the interpretations of @D.B.McIntosh or @adamjedgar .
Interpreting the biblical scriptures demands humility and acknowledging the fact that my interpretation may be wrong. Luckily, our fate and relationship with God has not been tied to correct knowledge about every part of biblical scriptures, it is tied to faith in God through Jesus Christ.
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Which … paradoxically … makes it more and more likely that you are getting meat from the pages instead of just milk - or worse yet: contaminants and toxins that got bundled in with our very own ‘preliminary understandings.’ But anyone of us can come into severe need even just for the milk again even as we fancy we should already be quite mature disciples. Which brings us to the beautiful humility of your concluding sentence:
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My preliminary understanding has also changed, though evidently not to the same degree as yours.
Interpreting the biblical scriptures demands humility and acknowledging the fact that my interpretation may be wrong.
I think that’s generally true. I have been corrected on various readings of various texts more times over the last forty years than I can count, by everyone from my wife to instructors in biblical studies.
But I think it also takes humility to acknowledge the fact that God has the authority to reveal certain truths of which the majority of renowned scientists and scholars, the “scribes and elders” of our day, do not approve. It’s not exactly gratifying to the ego to side with the crowd that all the leading intellectuals write off as ignorant and uncouth. That gets to the problem I have with an overly accommodationist reading of Genesis: it seems, at least, often driven less by sound principles of interpretation and more by a desire to appease the academy at large, which seems in turn committed not merely to the rationality of the scientific method but to the “settled” truth of evolutionary theory in particular.
Luckily, our fate and relationship with God has not been tied to correct knowledge about every part of biblical scriptures, it is tied to faith in God through Jesus Christ.
That certainly sounds reasonable at a glance. I don’t think one must interpret Genesis flawlessly in order to be orthodox, for example; also I do agree that our fate and relationship with God is tied to faith in God through Jesus Christ (thank God for that!). Yet the basis of my belief in the efficacy of faith is not a general longing to be humble, but rather a number of biblical texts involving soteriology, redemption, reconciliation, etc. – or if you prefer, “correct knowledge” or interpretation of those texts as factually/doctrinally informative (“indicative”) rather than, say, poetic or allegorical.
By contrast, given the assumption that one’s relationship with God is not tied to a correct interpretation of the scriptures, one would seem to have no grounds for believing that it is tied to faith in God through Jesus Christ.
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I’m not sure I even know what my preliminary understanding of the Creation stories was. I regarded them as stories, but didn’t really categorize them any further than that. I had no way to distinguish them from stories like something from Kipling’s The Jungle Book or from the collection of stories about American heroes that we had in our house when I was growing up or from the archive at the local museum filled with eye-witness accounts of one of the great disasters that have happened nearby. I don’t think I started slotting them into any category until I was taking upper-level college literature courses where we learned the importance of understanding the historical and cultural setting of stories from centuries ago, and that only raised questions because I didn’t know anything about the world that far back. So I started buying and plowing through books about the ancient world of the Fertile Crescent – the first book about Genesis I remember at this point was Henri Blocher’s In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis, but I know there were others before that. And whenever I heard about a speaker or seminar or anything I could attend to learn more I made a big effort to be there; I recall driving almost four hours with a couple of friends once to get to one.
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It appears that in the YEC community there is a perception that academics subscribe to evolution in order to conform to peer pressure, because surely evolution could not be compelling on its own merits. That is not my own experience, and I expect that is not a significant driver in general.
My own persuasion to mainstream science was not due to any single influence, but first year biology was part of it. Evolution was barely discussed in lectures; most of the time went to plant and animal physiology, and biochemical pathways. In lab however, we dissected a rat to identify the innards. By the time I was done with the critter, despite years of creationist reading, common descent was the only thing that made sense of what I was looking at.
The coherence of the evolutionary framework was the pull, the push was that I just could not make a recent global flood work. I tried. For six weeks, I fixated on the question, to the point of near mental breakdown. Since emerging from that internal debate decades ago, it has been increasingly clear to me that it is flood geology that is defined by contrivance, duplicity, and patched with rescue devices, and that the YEC critique of conventional science is projection.
In all of this, I had neither any desire to fit in with secular peers, nor practical advantage to be gained.
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“Accomodationist” theologically is the opposite of that: it means that God accommodated His revelation to the writers He chose and their audience. I had no problem with that idea when I first encountered it because it just sounded like an extension of Paul’s point about speaking in language people will understand. It actually helped strengthen me against the wild excesses of the extremely critical schools of thought because they were plainly not asking that question but were imposing modern worldviews on the Bible’s stories.
As a pastor I knew noted, if correct interpretation is not required at all then there wouldn’t need to be seminaries.
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My astronomy professor once talked about peer pressure in academia. He said that until tenure was achieved you either bowed to peer pressure or had to be so plainly brilliant that people listened anyway. But once tenure had been achieved bowing to peer pressure was actually detrimental because those who just “follow the herd” get no real recognition. My first geology professor echoed that, so I presume it applies across all the sciences. In fact from what my glaciology professor said if you wanted to get published you had to resist peer pressure because papers that were just “more of the same” went right into the trash; journals wanted material that turned new ground.
I never thought about it before, but now thinking back it strikes me that the biology students in our informal intelligent design club were nearly all juniors and seniors.
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Or, a third option that I’m aware of–work in a field with so few researchers that the rest of them are just glad to have someone else doing some of the research that they can’t afford the time to do; and be at least good enough that you don’t have most citations of your papers being about how bad they are.
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I have not seen any widespread attempt to ‘appease the academy’ during my career. There has often been an attempt to select the words carefully to avoid being misunderstood but that is not the same thing. The experience is rather the opposite - my successful colleaques have often been eager to promote their more or less controversial new ideas and interpretations because novel and controversial ideas give more citations, fame and funding. If someone could have shown that some part of the evolutionary theory is wrong, they would have eagerly published that result - a sure way to get much attention and fame.
Biblical scriptures have preserved to our generation the core teachings about God and His will. In this sense, what is written is very important and understanding it correctly is important. Yet, scriptures themselves are not the focus of our faith, rather these point towards the God behind the scriptures - I believe in God, not the Bible.
The core teachings are repeated in many parts of the scriptures, which helps us to interpret the core teachings correctly. Less central teachings may be mentioned only once or twice in the scriptures, so these may be more easily misunderstood. Genesis 1 includes valuable teachings about our Creator and His world but it is not so crucial that misunderstanding it would destroy our future and relationship with God.
Faith in God through Jesus is a core topic in the NT, something that can be read and understood from many parts of the NT. If a particular passage is misunderstood, it does not change the core teaching. Naturally, if this core teaching is not understood correctly, that puts our life on shaky ground.
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