Maybe Max was just questioning the use of “an” with “help” rather than “a” 
Actually, there is, which is how we Orthodox Jews understand it. And that is that the statements of creation of plants and animals in chapter 2 mean “G-d had formed…” Chapter 2 is focused on the story of man, so the other creations (which occurred beforehand, per the more universe-focused chapter 1) are mentioned as they are relevant to the story of man.
That is some weak sauce. Chapter 1 completes all of creation in six days, while chapter 2 begins with the creator kicking up its heels on day 7, then commencing to create everything all over again (plants, animals, people) after its day off. Clearly two sources and a stoned editor.
Note Chapter 2, verse 4: “These are the generations of heaven and earth when they were created, on the day that G-d created earth and heaven.” It is stating that the detailed story that follows takes place during the time of creation, i.e., the period which was outlined in the prior chapter.
(Also, don’t make too much of the chapter divisions; the first three verses of Chapter 2 are really the conclusion of the narrative of Chapter 1.)
IIRC, the common human/chimp ancestor had 24 pairs of chromosomes, and the “divisive” mutation was a fusing of the chimpanzee chromosomes 2a and 2b into human chromosome 2.
When this kind of fusing happens, there might not be any immediate change in physical characteristics, as long as all the genes are present. A gene does what it does, no matter what chromosome it’s located on. This is called a balanced translocation - there are also unbalanced translocations in which some genes are missing, and that can cause birth defects. My grandnephew has a balanced translocation and he’s perfectly normal. However, he may have trouble conceiving healthy children. His mother has the same translocation, although she did not know this until after he was born.
Mutations aren’t always, or even usually, completely random. Some genes and chromosomes have structural weaknesses or vulnerabilities that make them subject to mutation - for example, long repeating sequences are more vulnerable to misalignment during replication than more varied sequences. So the same mutation might - and frequently does -occur many times within a population. The mutation my grandnephew has an occurrence rate of 1 in a 1000. In most people that have it, the genes are broken and fused at exactly the same point. It’s not random, there is a vulnerability. So it’s not just going to be one individual that was at the root of the mutation.
Mitochondrial DNA mutates slowly, and at a very predictable rate. These mutations are so predictable that they have been used to track the migration patterns of our distant ancestors, and their is a system for grouping and cataloging this. The info I got from 23 and Me includes this analysis of my mitochondrial DNA.
Please note that this is all from memory and I am not a scientist. If I got it horribly wrong, please call me out but be kind.
I would say (at least) two sources, but not necessarily (a) stoned editor(s). More likely that whoever was editing wasn’t doing so with a modern sensibility, and didn’t think those contradictions interfered with what they were trying to accomplish.
(I don’t mean to contradict the scholars who say two sources – I’m not a biblical scholar! – only to say that I don’t suppose we’ve got any way to tell how many influences came together to produce those two stories, even if in the form in which they were written down there’s only two peoples’ phrasing.)
God is Cockney.
all i know is in a room full of naked humans, you could pick those two out real easy…
The line of argument you responded to deals with theology (Little_Nemo was pointing out a contradiction within the text itself), so no.
~Max
The nearest “humanzee” who tickled their fancy, presumably. According to current theories of human-chimp divergence, there was a period of millions of years during which both types could and did interbreed and bring forth fertile offspring.
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Expanding on this, I’ve been wondering if it’s even necessary to assume that the people who first conceived the stories actually believed them, since their didactic quality is so glaringly obvious. Take the Fall Of Man, for example. God tells them not to eat the fruit of a particular tree, they do it anyway, and there’s your original sin. But the actual act of eating the fruit (nowhere is it actually said to be an apple) seems so insignificant. It’s nothing like when Cain actually killed his brother in a fit of jealousy. The way I see it is that the creators of the story deliberately conceived the most inconsequential act they could imagine. It wasn’t the deed itself that was important, but the disobedience that mattered. The deed itself is basically a nothingburger. In terms of object oriented design, we could say that it was merely an abstraction of sin.
Its my (possibly ill-informed) understanding that this is the view generally held by biblical scholars. The notion of story telling as a means of conveying historical fact is a relatively modern western attitude. It isn’t really important whether Adam and even actually existed any more than whether there was ever a race between a tortoise and a hare that the tortoise won.
What’s important is that
- God created everything
- God gave it all to man
- All of the suffering in the world is caused by disobeying God, and it was a woman’s fault for being so tempting to man.
- Its the knowledge of morality that separates us from the animals, and so therefore curses us for the evil we do since we should know better.
- God (or really the priests) loves meat and don’t think about pawning off any second rate stuff on Him (them).
etc.
Getting into the heads of the first guys who thunk it up is going to remain speculation forever–for all we know, it might have derived from a hundred different stories from a thousand different tribes over centuries, and this is just how it came down to us. But the fault lies, not in their belief or non-belief in its literal truth, but rather the vehemence with which they SOLD that literal truth to the folks they told it to. All you have to do to accept this is to realize how it got sold to you: when I got scared out of my wits by the power of the Lord, there was no disclaimer offered: “…but of course none of this actually happened–it’s just a story, that we tell little kids like you to make them obey authority.” No, no, no, I was terrorized into accepting this ridiculous cock-and-bull story as being absolutely the truest story ever told, and I suspect that was how 99.9999% of the unsophisticated people who heard it over the millennia were encouraged strongly to think of it.
What I got from Hebrew School was that these stories were Just So stories. Why do we die? Why do we have to work? Why is childbirth painful. Answer - your fault.
And the most significant result back then was the reason for the Sabbath.
So it was an answer, and if anyone objected the priest could just say “Vas you dere, Charlie?”
That is not quite accurate, though. The big guy tells them “`Of every tree of the garden eating thou dost eat; and of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou dost not eat of it, for in the day of thine eating of it – dying thou dost die.'”
It is not an injuction so much as a bit of advice: that shit will kill you. Because, an injunction requires knowedge of good and evil, with which Adam and Eve were not built from the outset. They could not know that it was wrong, because they lacked that capacity until after having eaten it. Hence, as has been said upthread, “original sin” was grafted on by the christians in order to necessitate the concept of salvation through the sacrifice of the jesus guy.
And of course, Genesis contains one of the earliest dirty jokes: Eve was convinced by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit – that phallic critter was just too tempting for her to resist. Clearly the female attraction to thingies was the cause of the downfall. Therefore, women should be relegated to a lesser role as their horniness is what got us booted out of paradise.
How you doin’? [flings poo]