John,

On your a,b and c assumptions about the kind of exegesis that we’d probably do here, I myself don’t think I could necessarily agree with b and c, either. And as for a, while I accept “literal” as a tag, by that I would mean trying to hear the text as it was meant to be heard in it’s orginal context. This gets into the issues of authorship and dating, but also the context of the original hearers (here comes Sitz im leben around the corner again). Words that we might consider weighted could have various implications for various audiences and periods of time. But I certainly would not in the initial phase to try to make the text consistent with the rest of the Bible. That in itself calls for a huge a priori assumption about what that consistency would entail; I for one only want to deal with that after we look at Genesis “as is” within the setting of the Pentateuch. I’m not saying that the relationship of Genesis to the rest of the text of the bible is not important, but only that it’s secondary to me. That’s the point at which I see the concept of “true myth” possibly peeking around the corner again, as one of the hermeneutical devices to transport the story into other times and settings.

In a previous post about the redaction of the text you wrote this:

Let’s assume that the redactors of the Pentateuch had access to archaic narrative fragments in either oral or written form. Let’s assume further that the redactors exercised restraint in modifying these ancient narratives while consciously integrating them into a coherent whole.

This would in my view be true regardless of the dating of any redaction. As far as I understand it, even Moses would have been a redactor as regards the creation narratives (Calvin, as you pointed out, certainly seemed to think so). What greatly interests me is the stylistic difference between the first and second creation accounts in Genesis. Granted, the second account is actually an account of the creation of man. But Genesis 1:1-2:3 seem lyrical and poetic to me. The lines, even as I read them in English (only begun to grind to through the Hebrew…) are measured. The story is structured it wat strikes me as a mimetic fashion. It may be redaction, but it is a beautiful piece of redaction. It makes me wonder if this is not a fairly solid pericope of oral tradition that was passed down. If that’s the case, then what we probably have in Genesis is nothing “new” for the audience of Genesis, but rather the formalization/condensation of the community’s beliefs about how the world came to be, and what this has to say about man, his place and ultimately, the community’s place in the world. This is how I would make sense of your statement that “a truly ancient creation narrative would have charted the course toward the future, would have set the trajectory for long strands of meaning, would have imbued certain words and phrases with primal potency.”

As of yet I have no set opinion as to who wrote Genesis, or when. When you mention the redactional process, when do you see this happening? How does the time period affect the impact of Genesis and the Pentateuch for the original audience? Why was the text produced when it was, and how was it important for the people at that time?