Interesting that one explanation was left out, that the difference between P and J aren’t one of time but of place, that P came from Jerusalem and J from the countryside.
As for the dating, the first Genesis Creation account follows the ancient Egyptian creation story too closely for it to have been composed too far away in time. Given the Egyptian derivation, the “abstract, cosmological framework” isn’t surprising.
I agree with those who say that the oral source for the account goes back to the Exodus, but it was set down in more or less the time of Solomon and edited at the time of the Exile.
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That’s an inference from the difference in ch. 2, it is not inherent in the word.
The genitals are where we feel most vulnerable.
It connects to their response to God: hiding. The fig leaves are a way of hiding when feeling vulnerable.
“Dying you shall die” is used in the Torah as a pronouncement of judicial determination of a penalty. But two things should be noted: first, this death sentence is not necessarily immediately carried out; second, the judge may decide that a lesser penalty may be applied. So when God says they “will surely die”, that is an announcement of the appropriate sentence, but in the instance He commutes that sentence by intervening with sacrifice (the animals slain the provide skins for clothing) and decreeing exile in place of immediate death.
So while in English there appears to be a bald contradiction, with Hebrew analysis it become a question of why the sentence was commuted to something else where death arrived eventually anyway.
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The difference you point out is not only factual, but it supports my interpretation. The vocalization in chapter 2 is a pronunciation meaning innocent nakedness (like the nakedness of a 4 year old taking a bath). The vocalization in chapter 3 is erotic nakedness.
The authors of the Theological Word Book of the Old Testament (TWOT) agree and note that the chapter 3 occurrence of 'erummim is nakedness as evocative of eroticism. Here’s the quote from TWOT:
“As used of Adam and Eve (Gen 3:7, 10, 11), it indicates more than sex consciousness. It depicts an awareness of the openness of their guilt to God.”
Guilt and shame arise from having done what Yahweh warned them against doing. Covering their genitals is the author’s way of ensuring that the story’s audience understood that sexual activity was in view. This is an interpretation that is widely supported by such scholars as:
- Phyllis Trible: notes the strong sexual undercurrents in the Genesis 2–3 narrative and the motif of “knowing” and “seeing” as tied to sexual self-awareness.
- Umberto Cassuto: emphasizes that the phrase “knowledge of good and evil” often reflects a transition into maturity like puberty.
- Tikva Frymer-Kensky: suggests the Garden narrative involves themes of sexual awakening and the emergence of gendered experience.
Wellhausen, Sarna, Ibn Ezra, and a host of others support this interpretation. Now, I could be wrong, but I’m not aware of any scholar who supports your view as I understand it.
Your arguments are based on exegesis by assertion. None of your points are supported in the text of the Bible. You assert a bunch of stuff including the surprising interpretations that Yahweh commuted their sentence. And that the animals that Yahweh had killed for skins were, in some way, a sacrifice? What? Did God sacrifice the animals to himself? To the couple?
Another lesson: the phrase mut damut is a Hebrew expression called an “Infinitive Absolute” and in biblical Hebrew means certainty. In this case to call a sentence mut damut is to make the sentence ineligible for pardon or commutation.
I’m familiar with your interpretation. In fact, one of my favorite scholars holds to the spatial distinction but with a key difference. He (Richard E. Friedman) does not view the spatial or geographic characteristics as exclusive of the temporal nature. What seems to be emerging is an integrated view of the Documentary Hypothesis in which geography plays a much larger role that it has the past.
But to your point, neither Friedman and another scholar, Joel S. Baden argue for an exclusively spatial model, but do explore how different sources reflect different ideological and possibly geographical perspectives—such as centralization vs. local worship. Their view complements the idea that J and P didn’t just come from different times, but from different contexts—rural, priestly, political, and liturgical.
So these frameworks aren’t mutually exclusive. The older source-critical models may have focused too much on sequencing, while newer ones help us see the living social worlds that generated these texts. My observation is that most source-critical scholars have incorporated the spatial-sociological interpretations from scholars like Friedman and Baden. But none, to my knowledge, would place the Genesis 1 account as contemporary with the Genesis 2 account. Friedman and Baden do not so if you know of others that do, I would very much like to learn more.
This would be the same Julius Wellhausen who resigned from his job citing the following reason…
“I became a theologian because the scientific treatment of the Bible interested me; only gradually did I come to understand that a professor of theology also has the practical task of preparing the students for service in the Protestant Church, and that I am not adequate to this practical task, but that instead despite all caution on my own part I make my hearers unfit for their office. Since then my theological professorship has been weighing heavily on my conscience.”[
and now you use him as evidence for your claim there…you are joking right?
oh man…come on you are smarter than this.
honestly the crap you come out with sometimes, its hard to conclude that you were sober when you wrote it.
this cannot be supported, heres why:
if you agree the “Exodus” then you agree the Exodus exists. You do not agree the Exodus really took place as described in the Bible do you…because last I checked there is no direct scientific evidence of the Exodus or that Jews were even in Egypt at that time.
As i have already posted on this forum last night…mythical fairytales cannot be used as evidence for truth claims…so either the exodus is real or it isnt. Given you are linking it with a truth claim, you must therefore believe it really happened. As far as i am aware, you do not agree with the reality of the Exodus because in doing so, you would be forced to admit the very short biblical timeline and lineages from Moses back to Abraham.
That is hugely problematic because of the very close timeline from Abraham to Shem and given Shem knew Methuselah and Methuselah knew Adam…that is a massive problem for you there. A story becomes very credible when only a few individuals are in the timeline vs one with thousands of descendants who did not know each other…so the closer we get to Abraham, the easier it is for Christians to support the literal historical narrative of the Bible about the Flood and Creation.
Ah, the ad hominem fallacy again.
im not going to allow you to ignore and skirt around the facts…so ill post the same again.
BTW. You may not have much IT experience, like a very large number of other individuals here. However, unfortunately for you, i spent 10 years running a small business internet web server as an administrator. What i can tell you about that experience is this… the more times i post my criticism as shown below, the more times it will rank in google searches…so id suggest you address the quote directly and appropriately…because the more times i have to repeat the post…the worse it looks when you respond to it with a statement that doesn’t correlate with the posts i made. I can explain this in more detail if you like…ill keep it short…
Someone does a google search for a topic of reference, in this case your cited reference Julius Wellhausen…my response on the forums is more relevant to that google search than your blanket statement above. Therefore, google gives more credibility to my post than yours and mine is therefore more likely to pop up on a search as a consequence.
My hope is that individuals on these forums might now start to realize why its important that they actually reference and carefully write down their views in a manner that is likely to rank well in google searches and start defending their ideas in better way!
So again, quoting Julius Wellhausen is a poor reference, the man quit his job citing his inability to train theologians under the circumstances and that he had a problem of conscience. He fully admits that his efforts made his own students unfit for the calling to the ministry.
Therefore, citing him is a terrible evidence for your claim there because the man himself admits an insurmountable dilemma between theology and science and because of that, he gave up theology…not science!
There are at least two ways of looking at this, both having similar results (Adam and Eve being naked).
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Were either of them unable to (for unknown reasons) see the fact that they were naked? Looking at it from the YEC viewpoint for the moment, and just to illustrate something. That would not be likely, if you are willing to agree to the YEC presupposition that the two of them before The Fall were “perfect”.
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They knew that they were naked, but being in an elevated state before The Fall, they did not think that their nakedness was important or different at all, or even a problem.
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No, they’re based on reading every use of the word in the Torah – in Hebrew.
Nor are your claims about sexual content. I know, you’ll go back to TWOT, but the authors have a known bias and I’m not inclined to buy their view since it does not accord with other sources. Since I can’t access my TDOT I must reserve final judgment, but based on the sources I have accessed and mentioned I must rule out the opinions of TWOT.
?? "mut damut renders into English
as “he killed he resembles”, which is nonsense. It isn’t even relevant to the passage!
That’s over-simplistic. It’s called an “absolute” not because of certainty but because it is a stand-alone form not altered by connection with anything else, whether verb or noun. It expresses primarily intensity and can indicate certainty. Earlier in the chapter, “eating you may eat” does not mean “you shall surely eat”, so “dying you shall die” should not be taken as “you shall surely die”, i.e. not as an immediate result; just as eating is a process, so also dying may be a process.
[FWIW, biologically we are dying once we reach maturity after puberty; if Adam and Eve were created mature, then once they disregarded the warning and ate, they were dying as of that moment.]
Nope – the construction does not require irreversibility.
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I’m reminded of a professor who said that P was obviously written in Jerusalem by a Levite while J was plainly the product of some peasant in Galilee – but obviously not Nazareth. (He was know for such off-the-cuff semi-irreverent remarks – he once claimed that perhaps Jesus owned a telescope since He saw Nathaniel under the fig tree; both remarks seemed to aim at “don’t assume you already know what’s going on”.)
One of my grad school professors referenced this when he told the class that just because they could read and expound on ANE languages didn’t make them qualified to be pastors: while a pastor must be a theologian, not all theologians have the practical aptitude to be a pastor (interestingly, the ancient church recognized this, dividing the priestly office between teacher-theologians, liturgists, preachers, and visitors . . . unlike today when we expect a pastor to be everything).
Wellhausen’s comment didn’t mean he thought he wasn’t a good theologian, only that he didn’t have the aptitude to be a pastor and thus wasn’t capable of preparing anyone to be a pastor – and that thus he ill-prepared anyone to the point of making things worse. Having read from Wellhausen, and having had professors who were similarly “ivory tower theologians”, I don’t find the admission to be surprising.
There are so many problems here . . .
- Myth isn’t “fairytales”.
- Scriptural myth is mythologized history.
- The occurrence of the Exodus is not a black-or-white matter of it was just like what scripture tells or it didn’t happen.
So you’ve got category errors and a false dichotomy!
Another category error: agreeing that the Exodus occurred does not require misinterpreting ancient literature, i.e. it doesn’t require imposing a modern Mormon view of lineages onto ancient Hebrew writing.
And another.
You start with the assumption that the Torah was written in a modern literary genre of objective reporting. That assumption is false. Moses didn’t write as a twentieth-century news reporter, he wrote as an ancient Israelite theologian.
What on God’s green Earth does a google search have to do with anything?
Conspiracy theories get more results than anything on Google – that doesn’t make them credible. Google’s algorithms don’t care about truth, they care about clicks, and thus rely heavily on click-bait.
Writing things down carefully is unlikely to enhance their standing in a Google search – if you want to get good Google search standing, write sensationally and emotionally!
Nothing in what he said indicates that he was a poor theologian.
He didn’t say any such thing, and he didn’t give up theology.
Please learn to read for what is said, not to quote-mine!
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