Chili

If you add to this that God "created" and Lord God "formed" it is easy to conclude that Lord God formed that which had been created by God. This idea spells "essence precedes existence" which allows for ex nihilo creation and lets the evolutionary process to form itself after the Intelligent Design that is built inside the species. In Gen.1 this designer is called God who himself is not as a material cause but remains the first cause of all creation.

spin

If you'd noticed I gave a rather literal translation in my last post. I don't really understand why you concocted the following...

It adds nothing to the discourse except confusion -- "choppiness" is a euphemism here.

You should know the answer. w is a conjunction which is usually translated as "and" but is also used in contrastive situations and therefore gets translated as "but". It doesn't make any difference in the Hebrew and I used "and" for the sake of the literalness of the translation.

But I already knew your position. You will happily ignore v2:4, as though it didn't exist, then forget the fact that the world in ch 2 is a dry world which needed that mist to kickstart events, yet ch 1 was a world formed out of water.

Geography seems to be an eminently ill-suited term here.

There isn't too much that you can get wrong in this simplicity. You leave out of course god's remaking of cattle birds and other animals, though of course you know that birds weren't created on day 6, but day 5. However, the second creation is simpler than the first so there are fewer elements in it. The order of creation is still different from what you would like it to be in your hypothetical expansion, because god creates man before the birds and the animals. It really doesn't give any indication of being an expansion, hence your claim is quite a stretch.

In fact, I would accuse you of deliberately manipulating the text to suit your purposes if I didn't think it was just your active religiously motivated preprocessor.

So the names combined means the sum of their singular usages...

This is more eisegesis.

As we are dealing with literary works, it would be difficult for me to use "historical" in this context or think it any way applicable.

In the sentence "Source criticism is notoriously tendentious", "is" is extremely tendentious on your part. Surely, "can be" is a safer probably more accurate verbal form for the clause. At the same time I'd say that for explanatory power nothing approaches the credibility of source criticism. My interest was in the manifestations noted and their implications, not where they came from.

Alter is not in a position to explain why for example there are three diverse narratives which tell the same story with the same figures in two and a different set of patriarches in the third with the pharaoh in one and the king of Gerar in the other two.


spin

CJD

Yes, your translation was okay, but it didn't point out what I wanted it to. Which was …

Most every translation does translate it as if it were a contrastive situation. Just curious, that's all.

I don't ignore the toledot; it is, after all, the signal marker for the beginning of each of the ten books of Genesis. This account pertains to what the cosmos has generated, not the generations of the cosmos. Key point, elementary even; you don't get it. What gives?

Not sure how this relates, when the toledot in 2:4 signifies what the cosmos has generated …


Land, plants, animals on the land that eat the plants. "Geography's" okay; not the best; but not promiscuous either.

But the literary structure of the days aren't employed by the implied author at this point in the narrative. Given that chap. 1 reflects a literary framework employed to accentuate Sabbatical theology, the "order" of creation is neither here nor there. Insist on imposing modern, cosmological notions to the text and it's no wonder you see the silliness you do.

How would you like me to respond? That you're a godless atheist hell-bent on satiating his desire to relegate any supernatural revelation whatsoever to the shelf to achieve some semblance of justification for your ungratefulness (reflected both in words and actions) to your creator?

No, I won't do that. I won't stoop to your level. Because I really don't believe what I wrote above.


No. The various names are used because they connote different things. Why is this even disputed? "The universal god created all; by the way, he goes by the name YHWH (covenant Lord) to us Israelites. And he alone is worthy of worship." That's the gist of the Deuteronomist's theology.

Good. Then you see my point?

Okay. But are you saying source critics typically share some kind of consensus on these issues today? Would that not lead us to say that given the ridiculous amount of differing theories about these matters that something more subjective, i.e., tendentious, is going on?

Again, as if it's a monolith.

And my explanation is no less credible than that of the plethora of explanations (most often contradictory) profferd by source critics. It's a start, at least. And it further gives the benefit of the doubt that the implied author was not an idiot, and enjoyed weaving (just as ancient audiences presumably did in reading it) repetitions, parallels, etc. into a unified whole. Just because we moderns have lost the art of storytelling does not mean the ancients never had it.

CJD

spin

Rubbish. You were not simply curious. You demonstrated you didn't understand, as also displayed by the "translation" you supplied.

When giving a literal translation, you must stay with the most common meanings of the words used in the original otherwise it is not literal, hence the use of the simple "and". You don't translate the verb to include a pronominal subject when the actual subject is included in the text. You don't translate the same word different ways, unless there is a specific necessity for doing so. This is exceptional in its twistedness: "man being not to serve the ground". Was it a software translation? I can't really understand otherwise how such a gratuitous piece of stunning translation could have occurred. "[C]hoppiness", as I said, was not the word.

The text says nothing about the cosmos. But toledoths appear at the beginning of the sections they apply to. What gives with you?

Why use a Greek term, which is not particularly relevant??

And you do realise the function of the toledoth as a unifying formula imposed on disparate sources. This makes the toledoth not part of the text being unified with the whole.

(The first creation account, while claiming to deal with the creation of the heavens as well as the earth, says nothing about the creation of the planets, meteors, comets, other moons, dust clouds galaxies, nebulae, black holes, double stars. It doesn't supply the origin of germs, viruses or funghi. Does all this detract from it being a general creation? I must admit that there is no toledoth for the first creation.)

You're sliding here. Backing out of your basic rationale about days. Then turn to simple ad hominem. You demonstrate that the "second creation" (as I call it) doesn't fit the format you implied, now you are becoming simply arbitrary in your application of ideas.

You also work on the notion that a seven day format is the overriding one, as though, like Gerald Ford, the writer couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time.

As the common mistake is, you bandy the term "atheist" where it literally is not appropriate. But it is only predictable.

There is another difference between us.

Because it is your eisegesis.

And there aren't any real Israelites these days. There are Israelis, Jews, (neither of which have any direct connection with the term) and various other human categories, but those people referred to by the term "Israelite" were separated from their land and/or absorbed 2700 years ago.

Please run it by me again. Points have seemed particularly obscure in your comments so far.

Yes, there is a certain consensus shared by source critics. It is the basic methodology. That every man and his dog might do it differently doesn't change the shared methodological approach.

That there is agreement in details doesn't change the functionality of the method.

This does not follow.

This is called missing the forest for the trees. There is a plethora of different flavours of your religion, but I'm sure you won't reject all but your own. Eeek, you just might.

The apparent start of yours doesn't seem to deal with the problems at hand.

A division such as "knows what he is doing according to your perception" as against "idiot" is not a particularly well thought out dilemma. A text which is composite doesn't require such a dilemma. It requires the desire of redactors to preserve materials from the past, redactors who often relate those materials, by placing them together or by combining them. This requires no unsupportable judgments on the writer(s) responsible for the latter form of the text.


spin

CJD

You misunderstand my intent, I gather. The woodness of the text I supplied was only brought out to question why most other translations agree with the "but" — in the constrastive sense (as opposed to the "and"). If I were translating the text, rest assured I would follow protocol. I really was just curious what you thought about it. You're so mean.


Okay, "heavens and earth" then.

I can't imagine they were just slapped on there.

(Most of your replies sound to me like "I, spin, don't like what you have to say." I'm not sure how to proceed.)

How is it that you avoid eisegesis every time you open your mouth regarding this text? Can you teach me? Must I renounce my religion so to do?

I'll buy that. But damn those literary demons. They keep jumping out at me when I read the text.

One more thing (though I'm just dying to know what that other difference is between us): the implied author could arrange the form of the text and still convey notions of how the "heavens and the earth" were created. There is no reason to bifurcate; I simply don't see, however, the nature of the universe being discussed (i.e., 'reality' over 'myth'). I think the ancients understood, better than we, mythical elements in their stories.

CJD

Johnny Skeptic

Message to CJD: What do you think of James Holding? Who are your favorite Christian authors?

spin

This is called prevarication.

But you can imagine that there is no necessary close relation between the title given and the text titled.

The best way, is to make your case based on clarity and evidence, not hedging and subterfuge.

The text comes first, not the theologically determined ideas. Raw data needs to manipulator to be able to change their position based on it, not what is used to constrain it.

Naturally this statement, which doesn't help elucidate anything, is clearly not transparent.

When you say "author", is this person from whom the original text springs or a redactor who brings texts together? Is it the writer who prefixes texts with toledoths? A redactor may simply be a compiler of texts, who gives passages titles, not reworks them. In fact reworking seems to be the road less traveled in the construction of these texts. One more often finds variations in sequence or threaded, not reworked.

2:4b talks of what happened on the day that YHWH elohim made the earth and the heavens, though what follows doesn't elucidate the making of the heavens. It would be sufficient to find 2:4b for a later redactor to add such a toledoth.


spin

CJD

By "author" I mean a plurality, but especially those who edited the text into its final form.

This is my understanding of 2:4: "This is what the universe generated when they were created, in the day YHWH elohim fashioned the heavens and earth."

The emphasis is not on the actual creation of the "heavens and earth" but what was generated from that creation. I'm sure this doesn't suffer too much from my "active religiously-motivated preprocessor." I just don't see a disparity between 2:4a and 2:4b. Maybe you're reading too much into 2:4b?

CJD

Atticus_Finch

Not to discount the value of the exchanges between Spin and CJD, I am very curious as to whether any of the other knowledgeable persons on the forum have an opinion on this issue.

Regards,

Finch

Anat

CJD, in light of your translations of Genesis 2:4, how would you translate Genesis 5:1?