Do the two Genesis stories contradict each other?

Great Debates
41

First story: God creates vegetation(3rd day), then creates man(6th day).
Second story: God creates man, then creates vegetation.

Just go through the definitions of the word Yowm in your link and see if any one of those definitions clears up this apparent discrepancy. I’ll start.

-Day(as opposed to night)-This doesn’t clear up anything, they are still created in a different order in each of the stories.

-Day(24 hour period)-Still unclear, still a different order.

-A working day-still a different order.

-A day’s journey-still a different order.

-Days, lifetime(pl)-still a different order

-Time, period(general)-still a different order

How does changing the unit of time resolve this apparent discrepancy?

42

I really think the plants before the Sun kills the entire narrative.

Fellow Dopers, don’t you think all of these really smart guys (and they were) would have recognized the essential silliness of this.

And yet, beyond normalcy, here it remains, thousands of years later.

Do y’all think this was a mistranslated bit of text?
Maybe, the rabbi or priest who was Top Dog said, “Hey come on, let’s go to lunch. The plants came first you shmucks.!”
It honestly makes no sense and it has been bothering me since I was a little boy.
As a young man, I was completely OK saying, ‘The Bible’ is crap.

But as a linguist, I started wondering. I was in the shower one day and thinking, why would GOD write such contradictory crap. This is the author of the Universe, the REAL creator, right?
So, I decided it was all a gigantic enormous joke on all of us.

He is a huge Henny Youngman.

No?

Tell me otherwise.

These stories, they come off as baby tales.
Adam and Eve.
Noah and the Ark.
Abraham and Isaac

Things to read to your children to put them to sleep.

Maybe not the Isaac part, but if you rewrite it a bit, you have something less grim than… the Grimm’s stories.
My point is that these are middle-eastern myths that were woven into what we now consider to be a coherent narratives when I am almost certain they weren’t designed to be. This didn’t happen, y’all. Adam and Even are allegories. I hope we all know that. There isn’t any way in biology that there were TWO humans who proginated the entire species. Neither did Noah save everyone from some global flood.

If there had been a global flood some 6000 years ago, we’d see traces of it everywhere.
Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia and New Zealand, and yes… even Antarctica.
But do we?
No, we don’t.
So the tale is fictitious, or else some supernatural power has removed all of the evidence.
So, again I ask any creationists here to defend the scientific validity of the biblical story of creation.

Anyone here?

43

You’re assuming that they did change the tenses, in order to “brush this under the carpet.” I don’t think it’s necessary to draw that conclusion, though. If the translators believed that there was some ambiguity in the way the passage can be rendered, then the NIV translators most likely chose the one which they considered to be most harmonious. Different translators strive for different levels of word-for-word literal correspondence, after all.

44

You don’t think that implying the moon generating it’s own light does equal damage?

45

What baffles me is the attitude of “It’s obviously not a scientific account of how the world came into being, so the Bible is crap.”

Modern American evangelicals/fundamentalists aside, Genesis was never taken literally by Jewish or Christian scholars. It’s an important story in that it helps us understand our relationship to God and to the Earth, but trying to poke holes in it and demonstrating the inconsistancies misses the point. The Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, the Exodus, Jonah and the Whale – these are all myths that developed to help ancient Isreal understand their relationship to God. The historical accuracy of the stories was not important; its the value of the stories themselves as reminders or signposts.

Tossing out the whole OT because plants can’t grow without a sun is not enlightened; it’s ignorant.

46

There’s another thread recently started on comparing Creationism to Science. Can we keep this thread focused on a comparison between the two Genesis stories? I’m an atheist, so I’m not much interested in the debate about the validity of the story.

47

And here’s the Straight Dope Staff Report on “Who Wrote The Bible?” (which cites/recommends the book you linked to).

48

Anything done by humans is going to have faults. The Bible was written by (basically) uneducated peasants. Of course it’s wrong all over the place! These people thought the earth was flat and that the sun went across the sky! I’d be more surprised if the Bible were accurate.

49

Hold on a minute. You’re calling Jesus God, but Jesus is not god. Jesus is the son of God, according to Christian lore.

The New Testament wasn’t even written until 70 years after Jesus’ death! No one who wrote the New Testament had even met Jesus.

The Bible is a historical text at best, but certainly not of any real value to modern humans.

Hello?

50

Well, the highlighted parts are exactly why people attack these obvious contradiction and inaccuracies. Those evangelicals have a very large amount of power in certain parts of America and try very hard to get their literal interpretations incorporated into science education. If they would go along with “it’s just a good story about our place in nature” then nobody would complain.

As a secondary point, there is the fundamental problem of where to draw the line between myth and fact. Once you accept that certain parts of the Bible are purely mythological or illustrative, you then need to delineate those parts from the parts that are literally true. If the creation story is merely a myth, then why is the resurrection not also a myth? How do we know that the Holy Spirit is a real thing and not just a turn of phrase illustrating a metaphysical reality? Was Jesus really born when/where/how it is described? Did he really exist at all?

51

This one is easy. If, at any time, a part of the Bible is found to be factually incorrect and/or impossible, that part has always been considered myth by religious leaders. It doesn’t matter when the discrepancy is found out-automatically it was always known to be myth.

52

According to “Christian lore,” Jesus is “the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father” but also “God from God, light from light, true God from true God, of one being with the Father.” Jesus is both the son of God and God according to “lore.”

The second sentence is arguably true; the first is not. Much of the NT was written within 35 years of Jesus’ death, and some of that is based on even earlier writings. In fact almost all the NT was finished being written (but had not been compiled) within 70 years of his death.

You’re entitled to your opinion, but you might want to brush up on the facts.

53

I understand that. But dismissing the whole book because of some problems with chronology or scientific accuracy is as lazy as insisting the whole thing is inerrant and literally true.

Even the events in the bible that are literally true are myth (“myth” doesn’t mean “not true.”) I don’t why delineating which ones “really happened” is important.

54

I agree with that for some definitions of “dismiss”. If I treat it exactly the same as the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Upanishads, and Beowulf am I being dismissive?

Well, it seems to me that there are certain physically impossible statements in the Bible that pretty much all Christians believe. The resurrection of Jesus being the primary one. Evaluating the accuracy of that claim (or the more general claim that a human named Jesus existed and was in some way supernatural) is of paramount importance when evaluating the Bible as a source of knowledge.

55

Anything worth reading can stand up to critical reading. Especially anything supposedly inspired by a deity. I hope you read advertising copy and contracts with a bit more skepticism than you seem to read the Bible with.

I’m confused - do you or do you not agree each day in Genesis 1 is a 24 hour day (ignoring the problem of a morning before there is a sun.) I’ve read it in Hebrew - Tom is right, Genesis 1 is very beautiful as poetry, and quite simple, which is why we were ready for it in Hebrew School.
Oh, and nobody pretended it was anything but poetry. And we wrote it.

56

But wasn’t the Jewish real estate owned by women and their lineage run through matriachal lines?

57

The lineage certainly ran through the female line.
In fact, even now, you aren’t born Jewish unless your mother is Jewish.

Nice catch, sis.
:wink:

58

No in biblical times the only way women cold own land was to inherit land from their father and only if had had no sons.

Even then they were obligated to marry within their tribe, to keep the land in said tribe.

59

Lineage was, but most likely due to the inability to ensure paternity, where as it is quite clear who the mother is in most cases :slight_smile:

60

Indeed.

The difficulties faced by women without sons was highlighted by the often-misunderstood story of Onan.

Onan was zapped by God, not as is oft assumed for wanking, but for refusing to give his dead brother’s wife children to ensure the survival of the brother’s family line (and her survival), with (inherited) property (presumably because to do so would dilute his own inheritance - any kids they had would be legally considered the children of his dead brother and not his, so the property would come under her control and not his).

In short, God zaps Onan for being selfish, not doing his duty to support his sister-in-law. The subtext is that women, or at least daughters in law, do not inherit property. They manage it for their sons.