John Doyle,

As a matter of fact I had not seen your post when I wrote that, I had Russ’s response in mind and was on an interestingly parallel route to the one that you took!

With what we know of human and humanoid fossils, ancient history etc. our tendency now is to try to fit our view of archaeology into the Genesis account, and I have seen some surprisingly good ‘fits’ so created. I don’t think that that really does justice though, to the original author(s) and is hardly likely to come close to what they had in mind. 

Prior to modernity, I think the universal view was that Adam was a ‘superior’ human being and that the fall has left us a lot lower than the angels. On a different tack, looking at the evidence that now exists, it can be read as a fall though that would give our paleontologists severe indigestion!

As Russ pointed out, the Babylonian and Canaanite mythologies probably do have something to contribute in helping to give us a picture of the worldview of those times, but just looking at our text it does seem to me that there is a significantly different story behind the writer(s) of Genesis and we just don’t have those sources to inform our explorations.

I think therefore that it is better to treat the Genesis account as sui generis and to keep our uncertainty uppermost when we are tempted to be most dogmatic about what Genesis does and does not mean for today.

Live to serve : Serve to live