Has Francis Collins, an evangelical, and his Organization Biologos Influenced the Southern Baptist Position on Evolution?

[Jay313 (Jay Johnson)]

@Christy

I think this is a good example of how sometimes in translation you can’t use the same translation for all occurrences and communication/inferred meaning should overrride concerns about consistency in key terms.

Well said.

@Mervin_Bitikofer

So Genesis 1 starts off with “Adam” (ha’adam)

No. Genesis 1:26-27 use adam without the definite article (“the adam”) as it appears in Gen. 2-3. I would never call you “the Mervin” as a name. Hebrew is like English in this instance. Adam used by itself can refer to humanity (a collective noun) or an individual named Adam (a proper noun). The context dictates which translation is most accurate.

[Christy (Christy Hemphill)]

@Jay313

Hebrew is like English in this instance. Adam used by itself can refer to humanity (a collective noun) or an individual named Adam (a proper noun). The context dictates which translation is most accurate.

With the definite article, it can be a count noun, “the human,” that’s the tricky part in this discussion. When do we gender it and when do we not, because individual humans do have genders (typically, in English).

[Marshall (Janzen)]

@Jay313

“The woman” is the most accurate translation.

Agreed.

@Jay313

No, because the Hebrew doesn’t include the definite article, so the translational choice in 1:26-27 is between the collective “humanity” or the individual name “Adam.”

It first doesn’t include the article (1:26) and then includes it (1:27).

@Jay313

In 5:1-2, there again is no definite article, so the choice is the same – humanity or Adam? The context makes it clear – adam is all of humanity. But in the very next verse, we learn that adam has a son when he’s 130 yrs old. All of humanity or an individual named Adam? Again, the context makes it clear.

This takes the repetition of the same name as having two different referents. The passage starts by saying it’s going to tell us what became of Adam (5:1a). Then Adam is a name God gives to humanity (5:2). Then Adam is a name for Seth’s father (5:3). But the point of the passage is that this is all the same Adam. The collective and individual dimensions are fused together. There is only one capital-A Adam in this passage.

@Jay313

The human is a legitimate translation. But if you choose to go that way, you’ll definitely need some exposition to explain why “the woman” isn’t less of a human.

Yes, I know. I hope I’ve done so.

@Jay313

@Marshall

Both of them remember their life before the split, but they remember it in line with their present.

This just mystifies me.

For me, when I first read this interpretation (in Phyllis Trible’s God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality) it was a lightbulb moment. What’s helped is keeping in mind how ancient perspectives thought we thought with our guts (heart, kidneys, etc.). So when a living being is divided in two, one side becoming a woman and the other a man, an ancient audience sees that body and mind are split.

I know that from a modern perspective, it just sounds like cloning and leads to issues of how they could be different sexes and obviously they wouldn’t retain memories. But that’s reducing the story to modern science rather than allowing it speak in its own voice. The theme of one becoming two and two becoming one is central to the first half of the narrative.

Other readings of the Eden story end up with God telling the man what he shouldn’t do while the rest of the story depends on the woman knowing it. There are even claims that the woman was the first to add to God’s word, yet if we don’t add to Genesis, the woman never hears this command and it only applies to the man! Unless, of course, she and he both heard because the command was given before the one became two.

[Apistos]

What, maybe the man Adam dreamt that God put him in a garden and paraded all the animals passed him to name. Before he had his first ever awakening?

Er… do you mean that?