I’ve often wondered why it’s so important to someone for the obvious foundation myths of a different society than theirs to be literally true. What is so wrong with accepting the stories as just that, stories? The stories do not need to be literally true to carry the authors’ intended message.
I wonder the same.
That is a deep rabbit hole for another thread I think.
I don’t believe, myself, that they were ever intended to be read as allegorical, or simply as “stories” intended to be read metaphorically. I think they were composed, and pasted together, without a moment of serious contemplation of the inherent contradictions and logical impossibilities, and were defended for ages by religious nuts who asked “How can you KNOW that ‘Genesis’ is wrong? Are you smarter than God, whose word it is? Blasphemer!! Count yourself lucky we don’t kill you!” And with the rise of science and textual scholarship, we have painfully shown the ludicrous nonsense for what it is, and now it’s all “Hey, it’s a metaphor, man, chill out.” If religious nuts had a shred of decency or humility, they would be apologizing nonstop for the generations of people who had to listen to and be oppressed by earlier religious nuts’ crazy shit.
Of course, The inability to interbreed is one of the key indicators of speciation but my comment was a response to someone claiming that there has to be a “first” of any species.
It is the first book of the bible is it not? And I’m not aware of any part of Genesis which comes up to the level of “history”.
Thanks for the correction and clarification. I note, also, that the sources of these data are very different. Y-Chromosome DNA is nuclear DNA, while mitochondrial DNA comes from the mitochondrion, which could easily have an entirely different rate of evolution compared to nuclear chromosomes, so it is no surprise that they show different chronologies. We could have inherited our mitochondria essentially unchanged from our hominin ancestors and that would make little difference to the emergence of our human characteristics.
This observation is the basis of the ‘Omphalos’ argument put forward by P. H. Gosse in 1857 (two years before On the Origin of Species where he argues that the belly buttons were included deliberately by God to make Creation more complete. Note that God also included all the fossils in the rocks and other geological and astronomical evidence of an Old Earth at the same time.
This ‘completeness’ could also have included any number of additional humans for Cain and Abel (and their siblings) to mate with. Apart from anything else, this might explain where Lilith came from (an alternative wife of Adam, admittedly not mentioned in Genesis).
and so it goes, it ends up being pointless trying have these conversations because rationale such as that above can be stated as a means to explain away every single objection, inaccuracy, ambiguity or conflict seen in holy writings.
Can Genesis be defended? of course and people do. But ultimately, like pretty much all theology, it is done by invoking the magical powers of a supernatural being. A being that can do anything and solve any problem.
So be it, but that makes it a terribly weak defense not a strong one. A solution that solves everything, practically solves nothing.
ex·e·ge·sis
/ˌeksəˈjēsis/
noun
- critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially of scripture.
“the task of biblical exegesis”
Yes, it is called a “book” but it is part of a larger work, the Pentateuch and the whole OT.
True, Genesis, taken on it’s own is myth and legend. As we get further on in the OT the writing get less mythical. then less legendary, then gets historical. Along the way we get poetry, prose and religious instruction.
If we’re talking about Genesis, there were no “original writers”. There were obviously people who first wrote them down in the form we now have, but the stories existed for centuries before that as oral folk tradition. This is why a lot of stuff seems contradictory, like the two creation stories; the redactors placed a higher value on including everyone’s perspective than on maintaining internal consistency.
Are you seriously of the opinion that this text probably existed and was regarded as holy writ for some long period of time before anyone noticed that it didn’t say where Cain’s wife comes from?
Of course people have always invented their own stories to fill in the holes in the text, and those stories have come to be accepted as more or less authoritative. Although you seem to intend it as an insult, I think your use of the term “fan fiction” is actually a quite apt description of how this process works.
Most believe that the first four “books” of the Bible were redacted at about the same time (meaning not “composed as original works” but “assembled from various oral traditions”), so the distinction between, say, Genesis and Exodus, is arguably more akin to a division between chapters than like one between two separate books. Deuteronomy was composed later, likely by a single person or small committee, who also spliced some of their work into the first four books.
So Genesis is “first” in the sense that the stories in it are probably the oldest, but not in the sense that there was ever a time at which Genesis as we have it today existed, but Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers hadn’t been written yet.
And with the rise of science and textual scholarship, we have painfully shown the ludicrous nonsense for what it is, and now it’s all “Hey, it’s a metaphor, man, chill out.” If religious nuts had a shred of decency or humility, they would be apologizing nonstop for the generations of people who had to listen to and be oppressed by earlier religious nuts’ crazy shit.
Likewise, I suppose you feel that doctors should be apologizing nonstop for all the people they killed with leeches, bloodletting, and not washing their hands before surgery. Car manufacturers should be abasing themselves for all those years they weren’t putting seat belts in, and physicists should be covered in disgrace because Newton didn’t work out general relativity.
Every other human endeavor has improved itself greatly with the aid of science and scholarship, why shouldn’t religion be entitled to do the same?
Well, for the Jews the answer is “it depends”. An Orthodox rabbi would view the Torah as absolutely, literally true. Midrashic commentary, such as explanations of where Cain’s wife came from, might also be regarded as authoritative, but questioning them or proposing alternative explanations wouldn’t be seen as inherently blasphemous in the same way that denying the Torah itself would be.
Of course, for more liberal rabbis who don’t believe that the Torah is literally true, it’s not as much of an issue.
Of course the redactors set down and pasted together various oral traditions. The question that serious biblical study looks at in modern days is why these stories and what were the readers supposed to take away from them. About the only aspect of that we can be sure about is that the readers were not supposed to care about what was not there. Were Greek readers supposed to care about the inconsistencies in Aesop? The morals that they conveyed were the entire point. Genesis is a series of moral fables. You heard them spoken or read to you and walked away nodding, improved, with guidance to the do’s and don’ts of your society.
What came with time was the commentary. The Mishnah wasn’t redacted until a millennium after Genesis. The society that surrounded the original tales vanished long before. The texts therefore had to be surrounded with an apparatus that connected the past with the present and made them acceptable to populations so removed from the older conditions that doubts about what was then considered axiomatic crept in. I see a parallel to the way we look at the Constitution today. Every article has built into it a set of assumptions about society that are at the very least questioned today if not utterly rejected.
You’re wrong about my using the parallel of fan fiction as an insult. Fan fiction exists for a number of reasons, some nearly universal, some specific to small groups. It extends the pleasures of reading/seeing/experiencing the original; it fills in gaps and explains contradictions to make the world smoother and more enjoyable; it corrects what current audiences see as mistakes in older conceptions; it connects characters in ways the original never envisioned; it violates and vandalizes the original for laughs or to make points; it builds loyalty to the shared world and those who inhabit it. Some people take their contributions very seriously. Some take other peoples’ contributions as canon: Fifty Shades of Gray started as Twilight fan fiction and became a sect to itself. You yourself see the parallels to biblical commentary and to the creation of the original books of the Bible themselves, so I don’t understand why you think I’m diminishing it. I’m using a term that modern readers understand.
Stories are stories. If we want to understand humanity we need to understand stories, how they are told, why they are told, and what values get put on them. Religious convictions often get in the way of this understanding because modern culture has tended to place stories in a side pocket marked “entertainment: not to be taken seriously”. This is gigantically wrong.
Remember Lot offered his daughters to the mob, so maybe afterwards one said “fuck him” and other took it literally.
Novelty_Bobble gave the real answer, but the analogy I like is who was the first person who spoke French and who did he or she speak to? Just as French slowly evolved from Latin so that it might be impossible to non-arbitrarily identify the first French speaker, so did humans evolve - and every other species.
Well, yes, now that you mention it, I think doctors need to bear in mind, with a huge dose of humility and castor oil, even those more recent MDs who pushed confidently all the BS treatments (like castor oil) on their trusting patients, who were powerless to dissent from their authority and who did themselves more harm than good in undergoing barbarous and ineffective treatments. What a good suggestion, for all these noxious assholes to reconsider “Wait! Maybe I ought to shut my stupid mouth and consider that maybe I don’t know everything and I’m just abusing my authority to shove bullshit down people’s throats, though it is satisfying to my ego.” Of course, you may think that all false authorities should get away with telling people horsecrap any time they can get away with it, and have their reputations unsullied after it’s discovered that they really didn’t know a thing while pretending they knew everything.
Well, based on your last couple paragraphs it seems we agree much more than I thought we did. I apologize for misinterpreting your tone.
I do feel, though, that you’re somewhat mischaracterizing Genesis. I think the redactors felt a sense of obligation to include all the stories that were sufficiently well entrenched in the oral tradition. Many of the Genesis stories don’t convey any obvious moral point, though of course various interpretations can be grafted on. For instance, I doubt the story of Judah and Tamar is in there because the redactors felt it crucial to specifically teach that “sleeping with your daughter-in-law and then trying to have her executed for adultery is bad, mmkay?”.
I’m imagining that Aesop’s fables as we have them today might well be comparable to Disney, as opposed to Grimm’s, fairy tales; sanitized and morally uplifting versions of folk stories that originally were bloodier and carried no particular message.
In Genesis, I think we see that process frozen at an earlier stage; the text is just too all over the place for it to be plausible IMO that the redactor’s main priority was to present tidy moral lessons in accordance with some coherent ideological worldview.
Is the question for debate, “According to Genesis, was Adam (and by extension Eve) the only person God created ex nihilo?”
~Max
Well, no, I think Genesis is quite implicitly clear on that point. It makes more sense if the implicit answer (“no”) is incorrect, and we may infer that he was creating other humans like Carter makes Little Liver Pills, but that’s for us to decide.