Most people here don’t believe God dictated Genesis, they believe it was composed by human authors, compiled from oral texts that were written down and redacted over time.
It isn’t a large enough category. You could tag it Biblical Interpretation, because that is what discussions of discourse markers in Hebrew falls under.
My impression is that most people who want to get in the weeds over the significance of the waw construction take a concordist approach to the text, and that simply isn’t the preferred approach for most people here. We accept it’s an ancient text with a liturgical function, not a blow-by-blow account of historical or scientific realities, so you just aren’t going to get to historical and scientific facts by analyzing the Hebrew grammar.
Yeah, the waw-construction is a discourse marker for narratives, so what? Genesis 1-11 is a theological narrative. It tells a story. No one debates that. Using a discourse marker that indicates “narrative” doesn’t magically make the narrative factual. The only people who insist it does have certain a prioris about what the Bible is and does as a text. They conflate factual and true.
I tried to have an intelligent conversation with Jonathan Sarfati once on Twitter. He’s a pompous jerk, and I decided I don’t really care what he says about anything, least of all Hebrew grammar.
Even literalist approaches to the Biblical text do not equate God inspired with God writing. Pretty much all the authorship of scripture have their distinctive quirks of expression, reflecting personality and the passing of time. Grammatical analysis has critical value, but does not indicate historicity any more than the use of declarative sentences in Coleridge’s "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” are intended to convey the epic poem as factual. This looks to me like someone very invested in a prior conclusion just hallucinating grammar to justify a category of ancient literature which may not at that time even exist.
There are two problems I can see with this question. First, it assumes God “wrote” Genesis, which is not a biblical position; second, it assumes that different narrative types had sufficiently different WCI counts than others.
The linked articles pretend that a WCI count points towards a certain kind of narrative, which I call BS since after six years of studying and reading Hebrew was never stated. It’s sheer invention.
I still am not sure what @WorldQuestioneer meant by “tag narrative” here. There are ‘tags’ to go with posts, and I see that indeed he attached some - so maybe I’m just dense and not up on features available to other corners of the forum world.
First off, you don’t take entire texts “literally” or “figuratively,” you interpret utterances within the text literally or figuratively. Literal is not a synonym for factual and figurative is not a synonym for fabricated/fictional. “Literal” simply means “not meant figuratively,” it has nothing to do with factuality. “I am starving” can be interpreted literally to mean I am dying of malnutrition or interpreted figuratively to mean I am really hungry, and that sentence could be used in a narrative text that is factual or totally made up or a mixture of fact and fiction. There is no magical key in the discourse markers of narratives or the words “I am starving” that would tell you whether to take it literally or figuratively, or whether it is a fact or a fiction. To make those decisions, you have to understand a lot more about the context and the author intent and your interpretation will always come down to defending your inferences. You can never “prove” meaning, you can just make a case about some inferences being preferable and more defensible than others.
No one other than creationist apologists takes a discourse marker for a narrative as evidence that the text is “factual.” The Hobbit and Gulliver’s Travels have English discourse markers that signal a narrative text, but that does not make the narratives in those books factual. “Narrative” is simply a text genre, it doesn’t tell you didly squat about whether or not you are narrating a factual history. You can make stuff up with narratives and hortatory and expository texts. And you can certainly say factual things with poetry or prophesy or recipes. It simply doesn’t follow logically to say “If it’s a narrative text, then it’s factual.” It also doesn’t make sense to assert that all sentences in a narrative text should be “interpreted literally.” Narratives are full of figurative uses of language because human communication in general is full of figurative uses of language, because we reason using metaphors.
The creationism apologists somehow got in their heads that “poetry” and “narrative” are mutually exclusive text genres (they aren’t, epic poems like The Odyssey are narrative poetry) and they also got it in their heads that “figurative” means “not true” and “literal” means “factual.” These are just wrong ideas. These guys have fundamentally misguided presuppositions about how texts and language work, so at some point, you just have to dismiss their arguments as non-sensical and full of category errors and unwarranted conflations. There isn’t really a need to offer counter-arguments when the arguments are so fundamentally flawed. They use incorrect definitions for terms, establish bad givens and their conclusions don’t even follow from them.
“we accept it as ancient text with a liturgical function, not a blow by blow account of historical or scientific realities” the problem with that statement is that God speaks in parables…a parabolic function has a point on the curve (The story) equal distance from the foci (moral) and equal distance to a point on a strait line (divine truth)…Jesus wasn’t so much a moral teacher…as he was speaking about himself (I am the truth)….and just because we can’t figure out the scientific realities…doesn’t mean the answer doesn’t exist. I could ask you the most complicated nuclear chemistry problem…and if you can’t solve it…does not mean there is no answer
What problem? Parables are neither historical or scientific.
Not to get pedantic, but every point on the curve is equidistant from the focus (parabolic curves only have one) and the directrix. And pardon the pun, but what is your point?
As the evolutionist astronomers Clark and Caswell say, ‘Why have the large number of expected remnants not been detected?’ and these authors refer to ‘The mystery of the missing remnants’.
It appears that with the above explanation there is no need to postulate values of E0/n differing greatly from those in the Galaxy, and the mystery of the missing remnants is also solved.
Sarfati has known that this ‘quote’ is misleading for more than 20 years,[1] but refuses to do anything about it - the quote-mine remains on creation.com - which tells everything that needs to be known about him and his colleagues’ untrustworthiness.
Davies/Sarfati also used to hold the record for worst creationist illustration for their use of one of the stars in Orion’s belt as an example of a supernova, but they were overtaken first by Harun Yahya’s gaff gaff, and then by AiG mistaking a stuffed toy in a tree for a real animal. ↩︎
The WCI argument rests on a real grammatical observation—but it draws an invalid conclusion from it.
Yes, the waw-consecutive is commonly used in Hebrew narrative. But that only tells us we’re reading a narrative, not whether that narrative is historical, symbolic, or theological. In fact, the same construction appears in clearly non-historical passages (e.g., parables and illustrative stories), and it can even be used non-sequentially. So the argument “Genesis has lots of waw-consecutives, therefore it must be historical” commits a basic logical error—affirming the consequent.
At most, the grammar shows that Genesis 1 is written as a narrative. It does not settle what kind of narrative it is.
if science is the observation (measurement) of nature’s phenomenon; then math is the explanation of that observation. Can’t separate the two. To expand on my point (pun intended), … the Bible is studied in Harvard…but as a course in Humanities. That course studies Christ sermons as moral teachings only (focus point). A Divine truth is not recognized; Jesus was a great moral teacher like Aesop…but in the study he wasn’t divine. But as a Christian…you must argue for a divine truth (directrix line) that defines a sermon (parabolic curve).
You need to brush up on your science education. Observations lead to a theory. Theory may be expressed as a mathematical model. The goal of science is to generate knowledge.
Well good for them.
The sayings of Jesus do have moral teachings.
Nor does it need to be if the point is the moral teaching. Do you have any proof that the purpose of this supposed course was to prove Jesus wasn’t divine?
Now that is a different kettle of fish.
You keep mixing up your metaphor. When did the curve become a sermon and not a parable?
God didn’t write the Bible. God inspired human authors to use human words in human cultural contexts in a particular place at a particular time to communicate ideas.
Some of the authors used parables to communicate some of the time. That doesn’t mean you can make statements like “God speaks in parables” as if it’s an objective truth claim.
Parable is a word and parabola is a word and those words label distinct concepts, not the same concept. What are you even talking about?
