Eddie, I think what this discussion about what the ancient writers intended, misses out on the idea that God inspired the writing. You seem to argue that the story simply bears no resemblance to causal sequence, or to historical truth, but is merely a kind of âmethodâ.
The problem is that if scripture is not causal or sequential, then the aims and methods are virtually impossible to detect with any accuracy. To detect deception or manipulation or to detect Godâs actual interaction with his people and with his creation. To detect thru this morass the actual aims of the writers?
The main issues continue to be whether God gets blamed for manâs rebellion, because that is the way man was created⌠or whether man was given a fair chance to obey, but chose not to. Genesis says man is to blame. Evolution says God is to blame. If Genesis is merely an illustration, it is countered by the very fact that it is not accurate on this detail.
Of course, it is possibly possible, that just like âwindows of heavenâ, the tree of knowledge of good and evil is metaphorical, and perhaps the serpent is metaphorical. In one sense, If the tree represented merely the actual experience of evil, and thus results in the experiential knowledge of the contrast, the story would have a similar result. If the serpent was merely symbolic, and Satan is now forced to crawl rather than walk, slithering around and doing his damage without the benefit of the full array of his former angelic potential, the story could make some sense. But there is no real reason to doubt that a serpent talked in this case as an instrument of satan. Nor is there a real reason to doubt that the real disobedience and knowledge of good and evil were encapsulated in the interraction of man with a physical object (tree) which God had placed there for this purpose, and a snake which satan had impersonated.
Thanks for taking a shot at the second question. If I am reading you correctly, you state that both accounts (or threeâtwo of creation and one of a worldwide flood) are meant to be literal-historical, and the phase âwindows of heavenâ is a mere metaphor in the flood account
You then argue for the literal-historical method:
In the ancient Near East, the material is not extraneous at all. Under Godâs inspiration, the authors of Genesis might well have been launching an assault on the pantheism of their neighbors:
âHey, Egyptians! You think the sun is a god? No way! The one true God created light and darkness long before the sun. The sun is not the source of our light; God is!â
âHey, Assyrians! You think the waters of chaos got split into two as the result of a clash between Marduk and Tiamat? Wrong, wrong, wrong! The Lord God of Israel created them by speaking the dome of heaven into existence, and it split the waters of chaos into two!â
And so forth in the early chapters of Genesis.
Likewise, the details of the Genesis flood account are very similar to the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh. However, it also differs in key details in a way that would make it a diatribe against Mesopotamian paganism. Gilgamesh ends up in a pickle (figuratively!) because of the insouciance of the gods; by contrast, the Lord God of Israel is in control of the flood from the start to the finish, and He cares deeply about establishing a relationship with the family He preserved.
I have the impression, John, that you havenât really tried to set aside your 21st-century, Western goggles as you read the sacred text of Genesis. It would take some work, but it would be well worth it. You should try it some time.
You keep talking about how figures of speech can be embedded in a literal-historical account. Of course they can. The critical question for exegesis is: how do I as a reader of the Scripture know which is which? Which details are literal-historical, and which are figurative? And that is the question that you have never answered. So I will ask this question again:
I have been contending that throughout that the interpretation of the windows must be based on the cosmology of the Hebrew audience. Your reply throughout has been, so far as I can tell: it is possible that the windows are metaphorical, therefore they must be metaphorical .
If that is not what you are saying, please tell me on what basis you would single out that one detail from the flood account as being figurative, while all the rest are literal-historical. All the arguments about what is possible in a passage, and what may be true in a gospel passage written many centuries later, do not help us distinguish which details are figurative vs. literal-historical in this passage. Can I say for example that the ark itself is not literal-historical, itâs just a way of demonstrating how God saves His people from destruction? Why would I not be free to claim that when you feel so free to claim that the windows are not literal-historical?
If the book of Genesis had appeared for the first time in the past century, I would actually agree with you, John. The original readers would have, by and large, understood that the phrase âwindows of heavenâ are figurative because the modern understanding of geophysics would preclude a literal-historical interpretation.
But Genesis is not a twentieth-century document.
The fact that a faithful interpretation of the Scripture may be attended by theological difficulties makes our situation no different than that of Job, Qoholeth (i.e., the writer of Ecclesiastes) or even Paul in I Corinthians 13 (ânow we see in a mirror dimlyâ). In addition, throwing out much of modern science (evolution, astronomy, geophysics) based on a particular interpretation of Genesis is not without its own difficulties.
I am insisting that you canât adopt an exegetical stance out of convenience. It is inappropriate to regard an account 100% literal-historical in every detail save one, especially when that one detail has tremendous explanatory power when taken literally.
You are also asking, if I understand you, how it is that I can claim that Hebrew readers would have understood the windows of heaven as literal-historical, but I do not personally understand the account as literal-historical. A one sentence summary would be that God addresses the important issues through His revelation, and does not try to dissuade His people about lesser mistakes that they will later figure out through careful study of the universe He created. Addressing the lesser issues prematurely would have caused many to stumble unnecessarily.
Iâm not so sure they did. Is there any evidence they knew the connection? Or did they think of the plants as growing because, simply, God made them to grow?
Yes, I jumped in in the middle. I will back out with an apology. And yes, (I stand with John Z here and) take a historical-grammatical approach to the Bible - which of course does not mean that we have to interpret every single instance of metaphor and figurative language as if it is literal. I often hear that criticism and it is of course pure balderdash.
I certainly do believe in a literal and global flood just as Genesis 6-9 presents and as other biblical writers understood.
But the assault against pantheism only succeeds if it is true. Iâm not sure what it has to do with deciding on reality vs mere illustration or argument. By saying that they were launching an assault are you implying they merely made up the story? or that they were revealing truth and reality? Besides, what I am saying is extraneous is the various days used, or the sequence, or even the garden of eden, or the ancestors, or their given ages and names, or the murder by Cain, or the age of Noah, or the length of the flood, etc. [quote=âChris_Falter, post:86, topic:4558â]
Does a literal-historical interpretation of the windows of heaven have any explanatory power for an ancient Hebrew reader who believed in an ancient Near East cosmology?
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First, it is really a grammatical-historical method (literal-historical is too open to misunderstanding). If windows of heaven have explanatory power (false explanation and false understanding), then it still does not and would not have had any more explanatory power than if taken figuratively (as Eddie has already explained previously).
From the perspective of a word of God that was revealed by Jesus to Moses, and that would have enduring explanatory power and perspecuity, we can make the assumption that everything in scripture is not merely oriented towards only an ancient Hebrew document, so I disagree that Genesis is not a twentieth century document. It certainly is. And has been for every century past and every century future.
This type of thinking is what makes me suspect analysis of ancient peopleâs understanding. What do you think they themselves would actually observe? That plants grew as well in a cave as outside of it? They knew plants needed rain⌠why would their need for sun be so difficult to see? They could observe differences of plants growing in good soil vs poor soil. Plants growing in shade vs full sun would exhibit all kinds of differences, and I doubt this would be ignored or unseen.
I affirm that it is true. However, I do not believe that modernism has an exclusive claim to the definition of truth.
I could not understand what you were trying to say in this sentence. If you could restate it, I would be happy to think it over.
I do not understand the parenthetical comment hereâŚ
Eddie offered some ideas (thanks, Eddie!), but I didnât see any careful parsing of the Hebrew, or comparison with other artifacts of Hebrew or ancient Near East literatureâŚ
Given an enormous body of water over a solid dome of heaven (i.e., ancient Near East cosmology which is found in Genesis), and an unparalleled flood, and the obvious attribution of the worldwide flood to the opening of the windows of heavenâall of which you are interpreting as literalâthen a literal explanation of windows has far more explanatory power than a figurative one.
You are willing to aver the scientific accuracy of Genesis 6 - 8 taken literally, in spite of the massive, unbridgeable gap between it and well-established science in the fields of geology, physics, biology, and paleontology. (According to the testimony of the overwhelming majority of geologist, physicists, biologists, and paleontologists, at any rate.)
Yet there seems to be a limit to your willingness to accept Genesis over and above modern science, since you and Eddie are quite resolute in preferring the modern scientific view of the upper atmosphere over the Genesis view. It seems quite inconsistent to me.
I donât think we are going to make any more progress on this particular point, so I will leave the last statement on this issue to you, if you wish to say anything.
This type of reasoning makes me wonder whether my conversation partner has any understanding of prescientific cultures.
Please note that I am using the term âprescientificâ in a technical way and mean nothing pejorative by it. âScientificâ cultures donât always practice science very well or consistently, and can apply the increased powers of technology in very bad ways. So itâs not the prescientific vs. scientific is bad or good; rather, itâs a way of discussing the methods a culture uses to determine the nature of the visible world. Do they think in terms of equations, or stories? Do they look for innovative ways to test and falsify hypotheses, or do they rely on tradition and thought experiments?
I spent five years in a West African culture which was in transition from prescientific to scientific culture. Most adult women, especially among the poor, were illiterate, so our humanitarian organization often had to struggle to teach health and hygiene practices. One particularly distressing prescientific practice was the deprivation of liquids to infants who had diarrhea. The mothers believed depriving the sick child of liquids would heal the diarrhea and return the child to health. But very, very frequently, the child would die of dehydration instead. In spite of the extremely high mortality rate, the mothers continued the practice. It didnât make the least bit of sense to us Americans. It seemed completely obvious to us that depriving a sick child of fluids was extremely dangerous.
In a scientific culture, someone would test alternative treatments to see which one resulted in a better outcome. But that scientific way of proceeding was completely foreign to the mothers. I could spend another couple paragraphs describing how we convinced many of them to hydrate their sick kids, but thatâs another conversation. When I consider how long it took for European doctors to stop treating fevers with leeches, though, I cannot think ill of our West African friends.
Paul Seely has documented how the following modern, prescientific peoples were discovered by anthropologists to believe in a flat earth and solid dome of heaven:
Yakuts
Dayaks of Borneo
the Bavenda
the Bathonga
Australian aborigines
South American Yanonamo
Seely also discusses views of a flat earth and bowl-shaped sky/heaven that prevailed in the literature of ancient China, ancient India, ancient Egypt, ancient Sumer, and ancient Babylon. Until the fifth century BC, even ancient Greeks believed in a flat earth and bowl-shaped sky/heaven.
Thus it is completely unsurprising to me that when the Lord speak to ancient Hebrews, he did not attempt to dissuade them of the universally held cosmology of the time. Instead, the key cosmology issues addressed by Genesis are: who had created the cosmos? Who ruled over all the forces in the cosmos? Who established the order we observe in the world? The answer is the Lord God of Israel, in every case. That is what the book of Genesis affirms with respect to cosmology, and I believe it 100%.
Thanks for clarifying your approach to Genesis, Eddie. I agree with everything you stated in this last post, and it seems your hermeneutical approach is significantly different from @johnZâs.
EDIT: Please accept my apologies for misconstruing your understanding of the relationship between Biblical and modern understandings of the cosmos.
Eddies approach is somewhat different from mine, although part of that is due to semantics also.
A figure of speech is a scientific error when taken not as a figure of speech. So if a statement is a figure of speech, whether it is âwindows of heavenâ or âseven days of creationâ or âcreated all things goodâ or âcreated out of dustâ, then it is not a scientific error. But if scripture said that the world was a cube with a dome around it, and said this not as a figure of speech, it would be an error of fact. Calling it a scientific error would be like saying that Judas hanged himself was a scientific fact, or that the destruction of Jerusalem by Assyrians was a scientific fact.
So I am bothered by scientific errors as I would be by historical errors or any other errors of fact. Not to say that one or two errors would destroy the credibility of scripture, but certainly it bothers me. And I suspect it bothers most christians, which is why it is so important to many, to recognize figures of speech, and the supposed historical approach to story telling, etc.
The idea that scripture is somehow a victim of an incorrect pagan cosmology, as if God did not have the ability to correct that or to reveal the truth, or as if people were so incredibly stupid that they could not recognize a simple explanation of common descent (if it were true), is quite reprehensible and disgusting. The whole point of scripture is not that Godâs people were like all the others, but rather, that they were different. The whole point was that they would distinguish themselves because of their relationship to God, so they would not make idols, nor worship many gods, nor offer child sacrifices, etc., etc. From that perspective, any supposition that they merely adopted ancient cosmology, even though it was completely inaccurate, and made it the foundation of their relationship with a God who told them what happened (but withheld some simple but pertinent concepts), makes no sense whatsoever.
Hi @johnZ - when I boil your paragraphs down to the essentials, it seems that you are stating that you prefer a figurative interpretation of the windows of heaven because the alternative, a literal interpretation, would bother you.
