I attempted to edit my comment for clarity prior to posting it and in doing so inadvertently excised the most relevant portion. Ha! My apologies, let me try this again.
My reading of Genesis is literal in the context of the audience for whom it was written. Chapters one and two describe the evolution of the world and its inhabitants over the course of millions of years, but it is written in such a way that a Canaanite may comprehend. You can’t explain a concept like plate tectonics or cellular biology to someone that can’t even read or write their own name and expect them to understand. You can, however, successfully convey a summary illustrated by fantastical imagery which also conveniently lends itself well to oral propagation.
Adam is not a specific individual or even an archetype. He is representative of mankind’s early consciousness. This is made clear when Adam begins assigning names to everything he sees and thus begins the process of establishing dominion over his worldly environment. He stands apart from his hominid predecessors of 1:26 in that he is able to apprehend his world and thus reflect himself back upon it. To this I’ll add that I view Genesis chapters one and two in regards to mankind as a continuous narrative, and not two separate accounts of the same event. My reasoning is partially due to the fact that nowhere else is such recursive narration employed (as far as I can tell, anyway).
The six days creation is nothing more than a rhetorical device used to convey the importance of rest to such primitive people. God knows that mankind’s disobedience would plant the seeds of a growing irrationality in their primitive brains, so He needed to make explicit the importance of not working oneself to death. To do so, He offers a mirror to his audience and invites them to reflect upon their fallen state and reconcile it by observing the sabbath. The idea that God, the Alpha and the Omega, who was, is and forever shall be, needs a day of rest after working for six is kind of preposterous, though somewhat paradoxically it’s all the more reason to obey His command.
Suppose Adam and Eve were actually “old world monkeys” [such as Mandrills or Baboons], and were hardly the kind of Primata that would have been able to pass stories of their world down to anybody.
And suppose “Mosaic authorship of Genesis according to tradition” was as unlikely as monkeys naming all the animals in the world they lived in.
How literal do you suppose the folks who actually composed Genesis 1-11 would have been inclined to think their story was?
There’s εμπνέω, which IIRC was used in connection with (excellent) poetry and even theater, usually appearing in the participial form εμπνευσμένος. It’s built from the prefix for “in” plus the root for both “breathe” and "breath/spirit’. I think ἐππνέω was also used in an old dialect, formed from “upon” plus the same root as above, but I think it doesn’t show up in Koine (though on the other hand, the Greeks were much like Germans, throwing words together to make new words as they pleased).
That one doesn’t bother me. One interesting explanation is that the Israelites regarded all offspring of Abraham who weren’t from Isaac as Ishmaelites, but I don’t know of any actual textual support for that; I don’t know of any for another explanation that all traders got called Midianites, either; the Midianites were nomadic but what’s the evidence that they were such traders that the name stuck to any traders?
Not at all – parables can be found in the Prophets; in fact Jesus uses imagery from those to fill in meaning on some of His.
Concentrating on the details is how you understand a piece of writing – it’s taking the details out of their context that screws things up.
This reminded me of a visiting professor who asked that given the facts that Jesus would have had zits, gotten sunburned and dirty, and excreted like the rest of us why should we try to pretend that the scriptures are clinically clean? He suggested that the fact of the Incarnation should lead us to expect that human frailty should show up all over in scripture.
Especially since most of the scriptures were written before historical narrative was even a thing!
A rabbi I knew pointed us once to a writer who argued that ha’Adam was both male and female in essence and neither in physiology until the division into two. It struck me as really weird back then.
Another is that things made from dust are both mortal and unique; if you want two things that are of the same sort, you take the new one from the living old one. That makes sense of the exclamation that “This is flesh of my flesh!”
Given that the word can mean “heavenly being” that’s a good point: she knew and trusted this being because it was a member of God’s heavenly family.
Several scholars I’ve read make this point, and it’s implicit in both the literary genres of the first Creation story: you read the story as a unit within which it is read literally, but you do not export that literality outside the story.
Oh, it’s definitely more than that: the Egyptian creation story, which the Genesis story follows in terms of order of events, takes place in a single day or all at once. By dividing it all into six days the writer indicates that the whole of Creation is orderly, that all its spaces and all that fills those were intentional; and by tying the final day of the Creator’s work to the mundane day of human existence he declares that YHWH-Elohim is lord of time.
And in so doing He added to the point that He is lord of time.
Which is why the teachings of certain sects about the seventh day are silly. But they also miss the point that in the ancient near east if a deity was said to take up his/her/its rest, it meant that the deity regarded his/her-its realm as complete and was settling in to watch over it. By adding this rest to the end of the creation of everything the message was that YHWH-Elohim was ruling in His temple – a temple that comprised everything there was.
I can’t make my thoughts conform to such “what ifs”.
Mosaic authorship of the core of the Torah is not unreasonable, but there are marks of editing all over it – not to the point of the JEDP notion (which more and more scholars are abandoning; I was just reading last week how one scholar had decided that J & E were one writer while D and P were not a single editor but a “college” or “school” in the old sense. Others merge J, E, and D, and others just throw away the effort to try to make it all fit such a tidy scheme and argue that the evidence – especially if you consider the rest of the “historical” books – suggests numerous editors/redactors in different places at different times.
I don’t think the original writer or the original audience would have had any idea of what we meant by “literal” in the first place! Their categories were more like “records” (lists and catalogues of things), “boasting” (by kings and heroes of their deeds, or others speaking for them), and “divine” (bringing a lesson from ‘above’ in one form or another – and the difference between boasting and divine was tenuous.
One way to put it would be to say that in the ancient near east a story from ‘above’ was talking about reality because it came from deity; whether the story had "actually happened’ in the terms we think of wasn’t even a category difference for them – if a god spoke it, it was just as real as if that god created/made it.
This is actually a very important question to ask, but it is one for which there are no simple answers as it steps into the often foreboding realm of revealed religion. We’re aware that much of scripture is the work of inspired men, so perhaps an equally important question to ask is, “what did they see?”
Although I liked the thoughts there is one aspect it seems to miss: that people take details from the literal view and try and weave doctrines out of them, thereby concentrating on the wrong things…
Given the nature of this thread, it isn’t important. But … perhaps you’ve given this thread too much thought and exhausted your imagination?
Your opinion inspired me to google “Mosaic authorship” just to see if there was something in the term that would make me better informed. Much to my pleasure, I discovered that there is: there’s a pretty clear parallel between a person’s belief in “Mosaic authorship” of the Torah and a person’s belief in “Mohammad’s authorship” of the Qur’an.
“is the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were dictated by God to Moses.” [Source: Wikipedia introduction to the topic: Mosaic authorship.]
Obviously, at least to me, Mohammad’s authorship of the Qur’an had to be as divine as Moses’ authorship of the Torah and Jesus’ authorship of the Gospel. Also, I note, according to the Qur’an, the Torah, the Gospel, and the Qur’an were all “books” that Allah, Yahweh, and God “gave” Mohammad, Moses, and Jesus. Each religion claims divine authority for its text, in Islam’s opinion, in more or less the same way. Rejecting or denying that divine origin is equivalent to rejecting or denying the relevant Scripture’s authority; Fighting words to “the Ultra-orthodox of each religion”. At that point, argument is useless.
To be clear though, IMO, what is up for discussion in this thread is whether or not Genesis 1-11 was divinely revealed to Moses when he was between 80 and 120 years old. Anyone who does not agree is, bluntly, an unbeliever, and might want to run for cover.
Now I’m jealous. Ha! Where’d you get your post-High School education?
Do you realize that the OP’s author, a lay British Nonconformist has already declared elsewhere, that:
So, a lay, Nonconformist Nonbeliever-in-Mosaic-authorship opens a thread to challenge anybody and everybody who thinks God revealed the words of Genesis 1-11 to Moses personally, and you want to quibble with me over my question?
I’d go even further: Mosaic authorship of the entire Torah is reasonable. And I accept God’s Spirit working through all the writers and editors who contributed to that mosaic.
Before I make any assumptions in my reply, how do you define “literally” in this context? Do you mean “what the author(s) intended the text to convey”?
And could you also elaborate on this question please?
Do you mean like, “if you reject the obvious interpretation, do you realise you have no basis for your belief system?” or something else?
Hmm, that is not what I said. I never mentioned the authorship, or challenged the validity of Genesis 1-11. My only interest is in how people understand it.
Whether the text was dictated or not, it stands or falls by how it is understood.
Taken at face value. and assumed to be actual history. 6 days = Monday-saturday, with the seventh being the sabbath.
Eden is/was a place on earth.with talking serpent and trees that imbue knowledge or eternal life , Worldwide flood, etc, etc
If , for instance you reject a 6 day creation as written, or take the Eden stroy as allegory, or the flood as local. Therefore have rejected the basic literal interpretation
So there are people her who vehemently oppose YEC and a literal view of Genesis 1 but take the Garden as reality.
I am not claiming that you must believe anything. I am just asking how people reconcile an acceptance of the Garden as written, when they have rejected Genesis 1 as literal. (Or. why I am so wrong not to accept the Garden as any sort of reality.)
It seems that most, if not all the doctrines on sin rely on Adam being a real historic person.
I have yet to hear a legitimate means for diverse humanity to derive from a gene pool of one person (Eve is taken as a clone of Adam) By legitimate I mean excluding Nephalim as a viable infusion of DNA. If you are going to take the Garden as true then all the claims of heredity are included in that interpretation. The moment you diverge, you are picking and choosing what is real and what is not.ie all or nothing.
In relation to what? I can’t think of anyplace where what the writer saw makes a difference; what counts is what he wrote – and most often there isn’t anything that was seen in the first place.
Well, Wikipedia screwed up big time on that! That’s a minority view – from a very small minority at that.
Holding to Mosaic authorship extends to maintaining that Moses wrote the core of it ; it doesn’t exclude sources, assistants, editors, or redactors. There’s some very obvious places where Moses couldn’t have been the writer, definite evidence of editing, and fair evidence for redaction.
That just shows that the Qur’an was written by someone who didn’t know what he was talking about.
That’s a narrow view of inspiration that is motivated by wanting as little human input as possible. Even people who maintain total Mosaic authorship don’t necessarily believe that any of it was divinely revealed.
Indeed the opening Creation story practically screams that it wasn’t divinely revealed, unless you want to maintain that God purposely copied the Egyptian creation story for the framework of His account. That would only work if you maintain that God revealed the basic outline to the Egyptians.
None of it should be taken “literally” in the sense in which we understand the word. The ancients (writing literally millions of years after the “event”) didn’t even have the same concept of “history” as we have. They were writing a story, trying to explain the world as they saw it. That does NOT mean it has no place in scripture.
And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in Moab, as the Lord had said. 6He buried him a in Moab, in the valley opposite Beth Peor, but to this day no one knows where his grave is. 7Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died, yet his eyes were not weak nor his strength gone. 8The Israelites grieved for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days, until the time of weeping and mourning was over
Are you under the illusion that I personally believe that Moses himself wrote Genesis, Exodus, Leviiticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy? Because if you are, I assure you, I don’t and haven’t since my pre-teen years.
Focus, Bro. what’s this thread’s topic aboutI? I was just trying to get a handle on the thread topic.Riichard says it’s not about who wrote Genesis 1-11. Here it is again, in case you missed it the first time:
Get invited to a lot of ecumenical “community building” conferences, do you?
Do tell. I don’t expect this to impress you, but I just found out that the Wikipedia “definition” of Mosaic authority is an important conviction over at Answers in Genesis and has been since September 2021. Evidence for Mosaic Authorship of the Torah]
