Jordan Peterson's contribution to Evolutionary Fall Theology

gbrooks9 · November 24, 2017, 6:29am

I’m not sure you are the person we need to convince. There are always those content with the status quo explanations.

Jonathan’s full catalog of justifications is certainly quite extensive. And you have acknowledged the logic of some of his assertions. For other readers, I provide two paticularly good paragraphs:

Have you ever read Genesis 1? Probably not; have you ever seen this?

When we look closely at Scripture we find the people and events of Genesis 1-11 are cited rarely in the Old Testament, and virtually only by books dating to the Babylonian exile or later. Nowhere in the entire Law of Moses are Adam and Eve or the events of Eden ever referred to, despite the significant emphasis on sin, death, and sacrifice. Since the Law deals in considerable detail with the consequences of sin, the complete absence from Exodus to Deuteronomy of any reference to these people and events is extraordinary. Although genealogies in Genesis 4-5 start with Adam, all the genealogies from Genesis 12 through to the end of 2 Kings only extend as far back as Abraham.

Outside Genesis 1-11, Adam is first referred to in 1 Chronicles 1:1. The genealogy of 1 Chronicles 1 (written after the Babylonian exile), is the first genealogy after Genesis 5 to refer to Adam. In the Chronicles genealogy Adam is introduced without explanation, and the reader is expected to be familiar with him and his immediate descendants, suggesting they had already read a document introducing and explaining Adam and his family.

Jonathan and I differ on the Pentateuch. He says he thinks it is mostly pre-exilic, while I think the reverse. The “fabulous” nature of much of the Patriarchal material seems more in keeping with the Hellenistic (or even Persian) taste for the “fantastic”. The Wrestling with God story is about as dramatic as it gets, where the hero is certainly wrestling with a deity just minutes before he assumes his duty as the rising sun. At its heart, it is a pagan pre-exilic story, that gets a new dressing when the Persian-inspired scribes get to it.

Leviticus, part of the Pentateuch, has lots of Persian parallels in terms of “clean” and “unclean” practices. Exodus presents the Levite priests as wearing cut-off trousers as part of their elaborate priestly garb. Nobody in the ANE had anything like what the Levites wear - - except the long-legged trousers of the Magi.

The use of the Strong’s Hebrew #1270, barzel, for “iron” is also very convincing. Used at least 73 times in the Bible,

But more than 10% of them are in Deuteronomy… which is supposed to be even before the beginnings of the Iron Age most anywhere in the ANE. Deuteronomy 4:20 even says God refers to Egypt as an “iron furnace” of trouble to the Hebrew - - at that time a fairly unlikely use of that term for Egypt.

Leviticus and Numbers, have 3 unlikely uses of the word:
Leviticus 26:19 refers to a changed world, where the Earth is as brass and the Sky is as Iron.
Numbers 35:16 spells out the specifics of capital punishment if someone dies: “If he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a muderer…” I wonder what the fellow is if the man is smited with a brass tool? Clearly this text is written at a time when nobody even remembers using tools of brass, instead of the now common tools of iron.
This is easier to see than in the example of Numbers 31:22, where the list of things that will survive fire includes “the brass” and “the iron” things.

Genesis 4:22 is wildly out of place naming Tubalcain as an instructor “in brass and iron”. If he was the instructur in working iron, his students all quit doing so as soon as he died.