What did the ancient Jews thought about the snake in the garden?
Interesting article, thanks for the link!
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Taking this story literally doesn’t conflict with evolution. Adam and Eve are a special creation, created by God in the midst of all the men and women who were already there.
Am I missing some reason as to why this can’t be taken literally as a supernatural event?
Wouldn’t that take massive deception on God’s part? For just one example, look at human chromosome #2-- did God make it look like a fusion of two chromosomes took place in the past?
I don’t understand what you mean, could you explain this a bit please? I understand the chromosome’s history I just don’t see how it relates or causes a problem with my statement.
If I’m understanding the suggestion properly, it would be akin to the special creation of all those loaves and fishes—they were modeled identically (presumably) to the loaves and fishes that existed before the miracle, but the point was God created them miraculously.
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Oh are you thinking that I’m teaching every human came from only Adam and Eve?
Adam and Eve were the parents of only one family not of all humanity. I’m saying they could have been a special creation placed in the garden while at the same time there were many other early humans that had arrived through evolution. Adam’s kids married among these other humans.
What a great example!
Picture the world full of early humans just as science explains it. Then God creates Adam and Eve supernaturally and places them in the garden. Their kids then join the regular population to reproduce among them.
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What is the point?
Did I do something to upset you?
Well I answered myself by looking at a bunch of Jewish websites, and it seems that Jews have a variety of interpretations. Does Judaism always have so many interpretations?
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I’ll try to answer this another way. Did Adam and Even have belly buttons?
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OK I’ll bite: it doesn’t matter because their kids married humans who did.
Doesn’t this view leave open the idea that certain segments of the human population never interbred with Adam’s descendants? How does that work with the idea that the image of God was imparted to Adam and Eve, or the idea that the sinful nature affects Adam’s descendants. Couldn’t this idea be used to support all kinds of racist ideas?
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I find it doubtful that two adults who are suddenly poofed into existence (no parents, culture, language, etc.) would have the ability to successfully raise children.
Wait, you didn’t read how they were terrible parents?
Adam and Eve literally raised Cain.
Goodnight everybody! Tip your waitresses!
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I’m game. I will say no—because people who have taken on special roles as symbols in a parable don’t have lots of “detail”. It is like asking if Uncle Sam (a symbolic character in American political cartoons) has blue eyes and a Scots-Irish ethnic background which brought his ancestors to America.
I didn’t say that Adam and Eve were “fictional”—just as there are various explanations of “Uncle Sam” which identifies the symbol as possibly based upon a real person who was amplified into a symbolic role. There are many examples of real people who take on parabolic roles. For example, George Washington was the first President of the United States but parables utilizing him as a “mythological” character were once very popular, and we still remember one of those parables which never ACTUALLY happened: the story of a young G. Washington chopping down the cherry tree but he couldn’t tell a lie.
I won’t try to summarize all of the various hypotheses about how Adam and Eve could have been the first Imago Dei creatures (whether in actual chronological first or as symbolic of same, as in the Federal Head view of Adam.) But we surely have to start with the possibility that Genesis 2 & 3 is a type of genre familiar with the ancients but foreign to us.
One thing I have learned to keep telling myself in the years since I was a Young Earth Creationist is that an ancient text being true and an ancient text being historical narrative of events which happened exactly as told are not the same thing. Now that seems obvious to me but it wasn’t obvious to mean when I was a Young Earth Creationist.
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If God magically poofed two people into existence as adults they wouldn’t have been able to speak normally. And there was no language for them to speak anyway. So we have to invoke more magic here.
I am not a fan of poof ing. The many other people around who had already made wheels, ox carts, language, knives, a social rules, and domesticated animals. …God goes poof over their heads? Maybe it’s cool for Adam. But seems like knowledge of good and evil was a struggle then, and seems like not total agreement now. The point is the inventors of the story had divine inspiration, but then as now,not clear on what is THE relationship between man and woman. A good story but a lot of details don’t survive scrutiny. And those details don’t change how you should behave. Mostly.
A human can’t learn a language properly, either spoken or signed, unless he learns it by age 7 or so.