I’m sorry, but I’m a bit confused as to the question you are trying to resolve by debate. I understand your proposal - God creating multiple humans ex nihilo to populate the Earth. But if we are not debating the consistency of that proposal with the book of Genesis, what are we debating?
You wrote,
I have to admit that one element in Genesis that I’ve been mocking actually holds up, unless someone wants to point out something I’m missing here.
Holds up to what?
~Max
How does that not add up? Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and three sisters makes seven. It doesn’t explicitly mention Adam and Eve, but that’s standard Rabbinic style; parchment wasn’t cheap, so they left out anything they thought their target audience could figure out for themselves.
Was going to make that reply but you beat me to it.
~Max
Reason.
Rashi, the closest thing Judaism has to an authoritative Torah commentator, goes with the explanation that Cain and Abel had three sisters who aren’t explicitly mentioned for some reason but whose existence can be inferred by minute analysis of some grammatical irregularities in the first two verses of Genesis 4.
How about chromosome count (which is often a distinguishing trait between closely-related species)? Modern humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Go back far enough, and our ancestors had a different number (22, I think?). And there would be one specific individual who was the first to have that number of chromosomes.
IIRC, 24. Two merged in humans.
I once saw a medieval painting of Adam and Eve. You know how artists will paint a nude, but with strategically placed items blocking one’s view of the genitalia? Well, this painting had the naughty bits on full display, but a leaf-covered branch reached out from the edge of the picture to block out their stomachs. The artist was ostentatiously not taking sides in the debate. 
There are many ways to reason about something. I reason that only Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden, thus any other humans created by God have nothing to do with the lineage of Noah & his descendants. I reason, your defense of Genesis is not in consistent with Genesis, and therefore not a defense.
The concept of creatio ex nihilo is also contrary to the basic assumption in science, ex nihilo nihil fit, or nothing comes from nothing; which manifests today in such principles as the conservation of energy or biogenesis. It is also something I cannot conceive of as falsifiable (see: Omphalos hypothesis). I reason, your defense of Genesis is not consistent with science, and therefore not a scientific defense.
~Max
That’s very convenient, isn’t it?
I’m trying not to comment on the contents but just take a metalook at the resulting discussion. The contents are an endless swamp.
That’s a fact that took so long to percolate into popular science that The Female Eunuch (1970) still gave humans 48, making us much closer to the apes than even Darwin thought.
I don’t disagree. I guess I’m not sure what point you are making. Genesis is a piece of literature. Call it a “book” or a section or a chapter or a “part” it makes no difference to whether the contents are in any way true.
I think that “gets historical” is a pretty big claim. I’m not sure that much in the OT rises above the level of historicity that we’d assign King Arthur or Robin Hood, if that.
One foundational tale is the slavery in Egypt and subsequent escape. That’s pretty important and yet there is no evidence that anything like it ever happened.
I’m trying not to comment on the contents but just take a metalook at the resulting discussion. The contents are an endless swamp.
I’m not sure what discussion or contents you are referring to, and I don’t know what a “metalook” is.
And what’s with the “convenient” crack? This is hardly some strained effort to reconcile an obvious contradiction. Do you really think that “this is one of thousands of examples of highly terse and concise Rabbinic writings” is a less plausible explanation than “second-century Rabbis actually couldn’t add one-digit numbers?”.
It was a joke referencing The Church Lady, just as the original comment was a joke.
Ah, sorry, whooshed.
Cecil missed some obvious ones; there’s the story about the king who was assassinated in his private chambers, and the contents of his guts spilled out, so the assassin got away because the king’s staff smelled the shit and assumed the king was “busy”. Boffo yocks.
Also, the whole Book of Esther is basically a comic novella, and the story of Balaam and the talking donkey (Numbers 22-24) is clearly played at least partially for laughs.
And I’ve always liked the complaining Israelites asking Moses “So you brought us out here to starve in the desert because there weren’t enough graves in Egypt?”.
But the classic setup/punchline structure isn’t really found in Biblical literature as far as I know.
Exodus is still very early on, and the events there are almost certainly legendary, perhaps based upon a much more local and limited event.
We know there was a King David but that is about it. 99% legendary. The whole United Kingdom is legendary.
But that is not even the first third of the OT. As we go on, more and more of the various Kings of Judah start to crop up in secondary sources and archaeological digs.
King Ahaz for example:
Another important source regarding the historicity of Ahaz comes from the Tiglath-Pileser III annals, mentioning tributes and payments he received from Ahaz, king of Judah and Menahem, king of Israel.[17][18] Furthermore, in 2015, Eilat Mazar discovered a royal bulla of the Judean king Hezekiah, biblical son of Ahaz, that reads “Belonging to Hezekiah [son of] Ahaz king of Judah”, and dates to between 727 and 698 BC.[19]
Or Omri:
The Moabite Mesha stele (on display in the Louvre) indicates that Omri expanded his holdings to include northern Moab east of the Jordan River. It makes reference to the oppression of Moab by “Omri King of Israel”. Israel would later become identified in sources as the “House of Omri” ( Bit-Humria ),[13] with the term “Israel” being used less and less as history progressed (the other defining term for “Israel” is “Samaria”, beginning in the reign of Joash)
Or Hezekiah:
Is any of that pure history as we think of it today? No, of course not. Almost nothing the ancients wrote is that kind of modern history. Most of it is heavily biased and full of boasting.
Heck, most of modern historical writing is heavily biased and full of boasting. Not the majority of the stuff that’s well-received by scholars, maybe, but there’s a lot of low-quality history work out there still.
As for jokes, the Old Testament is chock full of puns. Any line of “And she named her son ____, because ____”, for instance, is usually a pun, with the actual name having one clear meaning, and the purported reason having a completely different (but similarly-pronounced) meaning.
Yep. For example The Decline and Fall by Edward Gibbon is very biased and now outdated He is heavily anti Church , and falsely blames the Destruction of the Library of Alexandria on “the Christians” .
There was definitely debate about it; but the debate had nothing to do with evolution. Normal humans have bellybuttons. Adam and Eve didn’t need to have bellybuttons – but, if they didn’t, then they weren’t normal humans. Would God have made them with bellybuttons rather than make them, by some ideas of perfection, imperfect as humans? That’s what the debate was.
Some artists took one side, some the other; and some, as @mbh said, dodged the issue.
You could argue that the only children from such lineages who survived, by the time of Noah, were those from matings with descendents of Adam and Eve; so everybody was within a few hundred or even a few score years a descendent of Adam and Eve, even if they were also descendents of other people.
As near as I can tell, we don’t know how far back that is, other than that it’s after the split with chimps, and before the one with Neanderthals and Denisovans. What if it was soon after the split from the chimps? Ardipithecus and australopithecus and paranthropus were hominins, yes – but were they humans? and how many chromosomes did they have?
And whoever that person was who first had 23 and produced viable progeny: they must have done so, somehow, with somebody/ies who had 24. If we had those two (or more) here now alive: what sort of sense would it make to say that one of them was human, and the other(s) weren’t?
So it was a muslim caliph – is there a difference?
Is the talking snake that tricks Eve into committing original sin Adams’s penis?