TransverseWave

People I respect have read Genesis and come to the conclusion that its early chapters were not intended to be understood historically -- they are, it is held, myth and allegory. I may be biased by my early fundamentalist training, but I have yet to read them and find myself thinking that this is so. Am I wrong?

In isolation, if I merely read the story of Adam and Eve, I might read it as myth. But in Genesis 5 we read a genealogical table that gives us both lifespans and birthyears for the Antediluvian patriarchs -- a chapter which has no apparent moral or literary merit to my eyes, a chapter whose intent looks historical, as far as I can see.

I might read the Flood story as myth; but then there is, within it, an odd fixation on exact dimensions and counts of the days. If the intent of this is not historical, what's it for? And in Genesis 10 we have the Table of Nations; and again this reads to me as if the intent is historical, not mythical or allegorical.

Three caveats:
1. When I say that these read to me as if it were meant to be history, I don't mean that the ancient Hebrews regarded it as a history book per se; rather, I mean that I think they probably believed that the stories in Genesis really happened.

2. To say that the ancient Hebrews believed the events really happened by no means excludes mythical, moral, and allegorical intent from the stories. It's not as common today because the modern outlook is more naturalistic, but from ancient times well up into the Middle Ages it was routine for people to believe that God might arrange real events to make a point or a prophecy -- think of the near-sacrifice of Isaac on Mt. Moriah, for example. Indeed, many people today still interpret real events as if they are signs from God, and have a layer of meaning, rather than being mere happenings.

3. Note well that the word I used is 'historically' and not 'literally'. There is warrant in Hebrew for understanding the days of Creation metaphorically rather than literally, and at least one of the great medieval rabbinic commentators did so.

Not being able to figure out whether I read Genesis correctly or incorrectly, I have been seeking pre-modern Jewish commentary on it, to try to see if I can find any evidence that the ancient Hebrews themselves ever gave any sign of thinking that the story of Adam and Eve or the Flood didn't really happen. So far I have not found anything of this nature. The very closest approach it that I am so far aware of is in the commentary of Philo, a 1st century Hellenized Jew who may well not have read Hebrew, whose intent was to harmonize Judaism with Greek philosophy, and whose ideas apparently weren't widely adopted by the Jews; and he doesn't seem to have ended up saying 'this didn't happen' either, although his take on it decidedly odd.

Questions:
1. Does anyone know of a premodern Jewish commentary on Genesis where the early chapters are treated as if the events in them didn't take place?
2. Does anyone know, in the absence of the above, if there is an established Jewish tradition of interpretation of the Tanakh (Old Testament) that would have the same effect?

seebs

I would be very interested in finding out whether some of the numbers used were significant in some ways.

The first couple of chapters feel very mythological to me; maybe I'm just biased, but they don't have the same feel that some of the later works do. There's an emphasis on repetitions...

Furthermore, I have a very hard time imagining that Rabbis, who were generally not stupid, spent hundreds of years discussing this text without noticing that the first and second accounts of the Creation are flatly contradictory if taken as history!

However, I have nothing on this that goes back before the ECF, who are presumably in the process much too late to tell us about historical Jewish views. I've asked before, but none of the people I asked knew...

TransverseWave

I have never found the assertion that the accounts must be read as contradictions to be convincing.

Addition: I am remembering correctly that you're one of the people who criticizes fundamentalists for bringing assumptions to the text when they read it, but not admitting or even realizing that they do so, right? I don't believe you can make a case that the first and second chapters contradict each other if you don't start out assuming it. -- I grant that it is more likely that these are two separate accounts that don't mesh all that well, but there is nothing that positively prohibits a reconciliation. The rabbis didn't have to be stupid to read it as reconcileable, any more than medieval Christendom was stupid for reading it that way.

seebs

Well, they can be reconciled, but doing so seems (to me) to require admitting that the order of creation is not particularly stable. Maybe I'm just clueless.

I had always assumed that the account was internally consistent, merely wrong, until someone asked me a question about the order of creation that I couldn't provide an answer to from the text. Admittedly, when this happened, I didn't think it was literal...

TransverseWave

There's only one thing in the two chapters that would pull me up short in any other book; the rest of the time 2 looks either to be telescoping 1, or expanding on it. The big thing that looks as if it's out of order in 2 is the creation of the animals. The way it's phrased in the KJV, if you didn't have 1, you'd naturally think that 2 was saying that the animals were created after man.

Thing is, even in English, there's nothing that makes it completely necessary to understand that the animals were created after man. View 2 as further explanation and commentary on 1, and there's no strong reason to think that writing all the events in 2 in chronological order was the point.

Also, Hebrew has far fewer tenses than English. There is no pluperfect. 'God made' and 'God had made' are conveyed in the same words; if it's essential to disambiguate them one has to reach for adverbs. Since practically anybody who'd read 1 could be expected to infer that if the animals had been created before man in 1, the writer couldn't possibly have meant that they were created afterward in 2, I can imagine that whoever wrote or assembled the accounts didn't think it was necessary or perhaps didn't even notice. Charitable reading prevents me from averring that there is contradiction here, though it does sound rather as if 1 and the early part of 2 are a different work, to which the rest of the 2, etc., has been appended.

I can point out another example of this sort of thing. You've heard most of my deconversion story, mostly scattered across several threads in GA, with a truncated piece in ~E~. There really is one consistent story underneath it, but if you had to figure out what happened when by assembling all those posts in the order they were written in, and then put the story itself together, it might take some effort. There are a number of places where I describe things in sequence, but others where I'm expanding on some philosophical or psychological point, and the flow of description isn't chronological but based on similarity of concept, or it's determined by reaction to particular comments, or it simply represents what I found easiest to get across first.

-- Caveat: OK, you're not a literalist, and this probably isn't critically important to you. And you probably know me well enough to realize that I am not going to tell you more than I know about the Hebrew. However, I regret to say that my study of Hebrew taught me that, a bit too often, it is unwise believe too readily claims made about the original languages by partisans in the debate. Anyone with a deep interest in the matter would be well advised to study the languages for themselves. I have not only heard woefully inaccurate things passed on in good faith by people who were unacquainted with the languages, but I have heard some bald untruths from sources that I would not have expected it of -- and not all on one side, either.

rob117

We have to remember that the ancient Hebrews did not have Rabbinic philosophers who attempted to reconcile the texts. "Theology" per se is a relatively late development. It is likely that before the age of the Rabbis and philosophers, the biblical texts were taken at face value. The two different creation accounts were not attempted to be reconciled by the Hebrews any more than the ancient Egyptians tried to reconcile conflicts in their own myths (in one myth Ra rises from the primordial waters; in another he is the son of the goddess Neith)- the Hebrews, like the Egyptians and other peoples of the time, probably just shrugged off the differences or even acknowledged that they represented two different traditions. The outlines of the stories were certainly believed to be true, but different versions of them had different details. The entire concept that every single word in the scriptures was inspired by God probably did not arise until the late Persian period, after the process of canonization was well-established. Reconciliation of contradictory details only became considered necessary after the scripture was declared to be the inerrant word of God.

TransverseWave

Any good sources to read up on this? My knowledge of Judaism has great gaping holes in it I'm attempting to remedy.

rob117

Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Friedman is a good place to start. The concept of canon probably began with Ezra, who probably redacted the Torah into its current form in the 5th century BC. Before that, the basic picture is that the Hebrews believed their myths, but did not have an "official" version of them, and so different tellings of them had different details, and nobody tried to "fix" it. The Documentary Hypothesis (which is detailed in Friedman's book) explains how different versions of the same stories were set back-to-back, or even intertwined, in the final redaction of the Torah. That the biblical editors had absolutely no problem editing the old source texts suggests that the concept of "Inerrant Word of God" was not something they were thinking.

TransverseWave

Thanks.

spin

The problem with the approach of our great medieval rabbinic commentator is by reading the days of creation metaphorically, we nullify one of the purposes of that creation: aetiology for the shabbat. Had the days not been intended literally then it would be meaningless to deal with the shabbat, as 2:2 clearly does.


spin