Interesting idea about Adam being a “higher” form of man. I’ve never heard it before. Where does it come from?

My reference to Babylonian mythology was only meant to ask the question of how groups interpreted their creation stories in the broad sweep of the OT framework. It’s probably too general a question to really be answered, now that I think about it again. But it does seem to me that the Genesis creation does exist in a kind of league of it’s own. It certainly isn’t surrounded by the pomp and wild goings on of the gods, as most other cosmologies of that area of the world (at least the ones I’ve read) are.

About the extraordinary meaning of words in Genesis. I would think - again I haven’t done the exegesis on this, so it’s only a thought - that different words have different kinds of weight. The reference to the “greater light” and the “lesser light” may indeed have been a polemic. Perhaps “beginning” and “land” were also key words. Certainly if the text was written/redacted from the viewpoint of the whole of Genesis and the Pentateuch, then certainly the framework for thinking about the eschatological importance of Israel and the role of the land would certainly be in place. I’m not sure if this extra weight makes the words in the history less historical, at least from the author’s point of view, but only that they are invested with another level of discourse. In my view this would not be a secret discourse, but exactly one chosen to make the original readers go “hey! That’s there already!” This, I would think, follows the kind of line that is often used for explaining eschatology on this site. Key words and images, typologies, add theological depth to the description of an event. In this case I don’t think the author had to use extraordinary terms, as was often done with eschatological prophecy, but rather that some everyday terms may have carried extra weight.

This doesn’t solve the problem of the order of creation in Genesis. I’m still trying to understand the order as it is given - is this straightforward description (handed down by generations), and if so, why this order? The order is easier to understand from a polemcial perspective, as John pointed out, but still leaves us with some difficulties. But I at least don’t (yet) want to ask what the text can “mean” for us today, until the “what it meant for them” is more clear. Unfortunately, this moves far away from (far behind) the original intent in this thread, which was to look at the options and meanings of Genesis as a “true mythology”.

Do we need to delve into some serious exegesis here? Or can you give some tips for sources?