Johndoyle,

I agree with most of the statements in your last post. I also question whether the original author/compiler of the text would have intended the story of creation as set out in Genesis 1 & 2 to be taken “mythically”. Do we have evidence that the Jewish nation (whether in the time of Moses or later) thought mythically? Did the Babylonians believe the story that Tiamat’s literal body was used to fashion heaven and earth? Do we have enough available data to make a fair judgement?

I’m not sure that I would want to set the idea of a polemic off against a “literal” retelling of the creation story, however. Why not both? It would seem to me that part of the grandeur of the creation story for the Jews was the fact that the one true God (seen as a separate entity) created everything. It would not seem odd to me to place tags in the text (such as the place of the sun and moon in the text), to reflect the largeness of this God. But I’m guessing here, not leaning on a detailed exegesis.

The question of P is certainly interesting. However, I think the way I would like to approach the text is not simply from the pericope level, but from the larger textual context. Somebody or somebodies, put the text together (no author is named), linking stories by similar formula’s and stretching certain catch phrases not only throughout Genesis, but throughout the Pentateuch. Regardless of the “original” intent of the pericope, I think we need to look at the intent of the compilation as a whole.

The Expositor’s Bible had a note that intrigued me (it’s about the only commentary I’ve got here…). The commentator (John Sailhamer) wrote about the fascination of the author with the eres, the land. He sees a link to the concept of inheriting the “land”, and thus with the inheritance of Abraham’s descendants, worked into the text as kind of typology (is that yet another mythological framework?). He further sees this linked with a kind of eschatology (“in the beginning” is a kind of primer to ask “what about the end?”). The story is literal, but packed with heavily weighted typological terminology. By the way, I’m not saying that I follow Sailhamer’s whole pitch, just that these points strike me as very possible indeed.

That kind of idea fits very well with Wright’s model, which sees the land and the end as major typological centerpieces in the continuing revelation of God to the Jews and later to the church. Genesis as an authentic history that helps, from the onset, to tell the story of God’s interactions with the humans to whom he entrusted the place.

Whether we are bound to take the story as factual (it is biblical history, and therefore must be factual history) is another question altogether. I for one would rather look for a hermeneutic that allows us to let the Genesis story stand on it’s own terms and hear it’s meaning for the original audience, while letting us not be bound to the specific pre-scientific worldview of ancient Israel.

Samlcarr’s question of whether Adam would have resembled us seems then to me more a question of our worldview being placed upon the text, than a question about the original intent of the text itself. Would the listener’s have thought of anything else than a human like themselves when they heard that God made “Adam” male and female? Did they think of earlier forms of homo sapiens (or homo erectus)? I am not discounting the point. I simply mean that this seems more a question of our hermeneutic, than a question of authorial intent. But I’m willing to hear evidence otherwise!