fanucon

Do you beleive the earth was created in 6 days?

if No
then why cant you beleive in the possibility that God breathing the "Breath of Life" IE Soul into Adam could be the point at which Evolution took a different turn?

if Yes.
Nice, i dont beleive in dinosaurs or ancient civilizations either

John Kesler

You answered your own question, because one piece of evidence that this pericope is out of place is the fact that, as you say, a "sizeable group" is presumed to already exist, even though the current context indicates that Cain should have no one to fear.

Oh yes, the two-creations theory. You may want to read this thread, in which I discuss the problems with this idea.

I don't know what type of "independent evidence" you are looking for, but I think that the contextual evidence already exists.

Cege

I know the fundamentalist answer to identify the "whoever". Adam and Eve had children not named by the bible, but mentioned in "he had other sons and daughters." Adam is recorded as living 800 years, and would probably have had children over half his lifetime, making nearly 400 children a possibility.

Cain therefore would have siblings close to his same age who could have migrated to Nod along with him, or shortly afterward. Cain would have married either a sister or a niece and began having children of his own. Cain's sibling brothers, marrying sisters and nieces, would also be having children for half their own lifetimes.

In a few years time, there'd be enough people to build a city in Nod.

Those people wouldn't bother Cain for having killed Abel, because God had set a mark on Cain to protect him from anyone seeking revenge for Abel.

So the answer to "whoever" is Cain's unnamed brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, and eventually his own children and grandchildren.

Ray Moscow

Cege, this explanation (as you no doubt know) would put the events in Gen 4:25ff earlier than those in Gen 4:8-17. It violates the flow of the narrative.

Ray

Clouseau

One can take 'anyone' in a literal sense, if one wishes, but one then wonders, as the OP does, who could be referred to by 'anyone'. One option is to take the creation stories and the Cain and Abel story as of limited literal meaning, Adam and Eve being notional first people 'created' after the literal creation. However, one runs into difficulties with the talking snake, sin entering the world through a fruit, Cain marrying and enormous longevities, as well as the one posed in the OP. Scholarship takes Ge 1-11 as allegory, being adaptations of existing story myths, with only traces of historicity. The true chronicle is taken to begin with Abram, with possible traces of myth that soon disappear.

gstafleu

Yes, and this particular one reflects the competition between shepherds (the Hebrews) and farmers (the others). Note in Gen 4:2: "Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground." So the bad farmer kills the good shepherd, oh dear. Of course the bad farmer gets punished for this and is forced to go and settle somewhere conveniently far away.

This rivalry between shepherds and farmers is an old one, in Mesopotamia we already find (Inanna is talking to her brother Utu who is trying to find her a hubby):
Inanna does end up marrying Dumuzi, but after she returns from the underworld she sends Dumizi down there for half a year so that the crops will grow. Dumizi, originally a shepherd, thus ends up being the god of the vegetation cycle, talk about driving a point home! (Be it the opposite point from Gen 4)

Gerard Stafleu

-Jay-

OK. Let me clarify, Fauncon.

No, I absolutely do not believe the Earth was created in 6 days, nor do I believe that the Patriarchal stories, including the Exodus and the Flood were actual historical events. I also have no problem whatsoever with accepting as a fact that I am descended from a long lineage of apes.

As to whether God could breathe a soul into Adam: I'm a Catholic, so that's pretty much what I'm supposed to believe, but in point of fact I'm fairly agnostic on it. It's not the sort of question we can empirically answer, and it's not the sort of question that impacts on my daily life in any meaningful way.

Now, you may have misunderstood my post to mean that I was arguing that I believe God and Cain literally had a chat. I don't. I should have been clearer. I think the passage says exactly what the author intended it to say. In other words, I was attempting to make the point that rather than intending the story to be allegorical, as Clouseau suggested, the story was intended by the author to be a literal account of an event.

Whether modern scholarship considers the story to be Hebrew foundational mythology and/or allegorical is a separate issue from whether those who wrote the stories down thought of them as foundational myths and/or allegories.

In this case, I believe that the J author intended "whoever" to mean "those guys over the next hill".

regards,

NinJay

-Jay-

Wow. I really needed to have that extra cup of coffee before I started posting this morning. :redface:

Clouseau, I generally agree with your comments here, though I think that the mythological aspects persist much later into the Pentateuch, with it only becoming strongly historical around the time the P source was written (with much of that historicity being very biased).

The "guidelines" I was referring to are a set of "how to interpret the Bible" instructions that float around in various conservative Christian circles. If you aren't familiar with them, they spend a fair amount of time trying to advise when to take scripture literally and when to take it metaphorically. The guidelines really come down to "take it literally if it can possibly be taken literally", and "take it metaphorically if it obviously can't". They're spectacularly non-specific, and pretty much allow one to take any passage any way one wants.

The problem with this set of passages is that if one takes them literally, one has to address these other contemporary people that appear out of nowhere within the narrative (among other issues). But, to take these passages metaphorically undercuts their significance in the minds of many, so that approach is problematic, too.

The solution among many conservative groups has been to contrive explanations involving Adam's other children, anachronistic references to the Triune Godhead, cryptic prophetic meanings, and other creative approaches in order to avoid the problems with either a purely literal or purely metaphorical interpretation.

Unfortunately, all these solutions do is bury the problem under a pile of speculative whimsy.

The obvious and parsimonious answer remains: The author intended a literal interpretation, acknowledged the existence of othe regional deities, and assumed other human populations in the area.


regards,

NinJay

Fortuna

No that's not what I meant. What I meant was that Ha Adam and famil were the creations of this particlar god. Other gods created other groups of people. After all, gods were regional entities in those days.


Simple really. I mean something else, some other evidence that indicates that this verse might be an add-in. Remeber you suggested that

and as I've shown you in the verses that immediately follow, you've got more than v14 to deal with.

Thus I believe that your case for this is weak the basis of the contextual evidence alone. Show me some other indication that makes you think this is the case.

Otherwise, I think the better hypothesis is that the entire story was a tack-on. As previously suggested it's the simpler hypothesis.

Koyaanisqatsi

Except that, this poses an even more serious problem in the New Testament, since Jesus does not die "allegorically" for the sin of Adam; he actually (allegedly) dies for the sin of Adam. If that's the case, then Jesus literally died for an allegory or myth.

:huh: