:Shrug: Take your pick. Either God “lies” in Genesis or He lies in the geologic record. You asked how Christians who aren’t Young Earth Creationists account for the genealogic record in Genesis and I told you how I do. At least my way of accounting for it doesn’t require God to be lying, since an explanation of plate tectonics would have made no sense to the people who wrote Genesis. In fact, the notion that land could pack up and move, however slowly, might have proven terrifying.
By the way, Antinor01’s right about there being geneaologies which trace the lineage of the Emperor of Japan back to the goddess Amaterasu, and that lineage is every bit as sacred and documented to followers of Shinto as the geneaologies in Genesis are to Christians. If we leave religions completely out of it, how do we know which one’s right. “We’re right because we’re Christians” is not something I consider an acceptable answer to this question.
Now that is a true statement. But, if one wants to discover the truthiness of a particular account, because, say, someone says his immortal soul depends on it, how should we do so without examining the accounts we have? We have to recognize that we can only approach the underlying truth this way, of course.
I suppose the alternative is believing in something that feels right, but it would be one hell of a deity who would penalize people for following their feelings to an incorrect conclusion - and some people believe in that kind of a god.
To the OP:
Welcome to the Dope, and I’m glad that some people finally addressed your question. I thought it was pretty clear, even if it seemed not be understood by the first several respondents.
I’m with you, gentlemen. While I firmly believe the Bible does contain Truth, to me, Adam and Eve, the genealogies, and Noah’s Ark are tales told around the fire telling us who we are and where we came from. In those days, when fire was pretty much all we had when it came to artificial light and warmth, we needed those tales and the connection they provided. Maybe we still do. Maybe that even accounts for the growing interest in genealogy. But whatever sense of connection they may provide, however badly needed, I cannot bring myself to consider them scientfically or historically accurate.
Doesn’t adam mean “earth-creature” in hebrew? I’m trying to recall something from a religious studies class back in high school. So we don’t know if man or woman was created first, because the word adam (pronounced ah-DAHM) doesn’t indicate sex.
To address the OP, it seems to me that if we’re to address this from the viewpoint of the bible, isn’t it pretty revolutionary? Doesn’t this crap on the whole theory that the world is only 4000 years old? It has to be at least older than the time from Noah to Adam, right?
Of course, this doesn’t explain the fact that the earth is orders of magnitude older than that, but it seems to at least supplant the “young young earth” theory with the “only kinda young, but more like a surly earthy teenager” theory.
Obviously, I don’t know you, so there’s no way I can test this - but it’s been my experience that lots of people claim they live by the whole Bible, with nothing added or removed - however, it usually seems to turn out that they’re merely oblivious to their own picking and choosing.
Do you consider your own understanding of the Bible an interpretation, or something else?
Geneology is relevant to the mythology of Judaism, not to the theology of the Bible.
Unfortunately, we have some clutter in the old Testament. What do Judges or Chronicles offer in the way of religious instruction? Apocryphal fable-like instruction only, and that is not divine message, but interpretation of divine message.
And such mythical lineage can appear quite quickly. For instance, the first Inca emperors are completely mythical (even though there might have real rulers going by the same names) and there has been only something like 14 or 15 Incas (so, maybe 300 years at most to create a mythical ancestry). Even some quite late Incas had very weird stuff being told about them.
In this case, it is AFAIK generally thought that the mythical stories have been very intentionnally and very cleverly crafted (rather than being just the result of a random and spontaneous evolution of oral stories) to support the religious and social legitimacy of the Incas, but it might very well have been the case too for the Japanese or biblical genealogies.
Even if one believes the Bible is literally true, does that necessarilly mean that it is all encompassing?
The Bible says little about the Egyptians after the Jews left Egypt. Does that mean the Egyptians simply ceased to exist? The Gospels clearly put the birth of Jesus during the reign of Augustus, but say nothing of the emperors before him? Do we infer that there was no Roman Empire before Augustus?
There may be massive gaps in the history as presented by the Bible simply because God did not consider it necessary to reveal them to the authors. And why would God do that? Because those details were not relevant to the message, not because those details didn’t happen.
My wife wants them to tell her when they’ve stopped using their toilets and start going to the backyard with a shovel and a handful of salt. Her goal was to find a church that was “whole Bible but not crazy about it.”
Learning the meanings of names was one of the most interesting parts of my biblical hebrew class. In this case, your definition is pretty close - but there is also an association with blood in the hebrew root. These folks say it better than me:
Former Christian here, so not technically what the OP requests for respondents. OTOH, as an atheist, I have to say I’ve never considered this objection to the Bible to have much merit. Genesis is simply backstory, a society’s collective memory of whence it came. IIRC, the story was set down in writing somewhere around the 8th century BCE, at which time it was already something like five centuries old. Because ancient history is always compressed in presentation, we sometimes forget how tremendously long a period of time that is. Moreover, in the context created, preserved and set down, it had almost no theological content (except insofar as it would later be hijacked by some Christian theologians). So, to observe that it isn’t (indeed, can’t be) literal history, while true, signifies nothing meaningful. That’s what I though when I was a Christian and it’s what I think now.
The world of the past 500 years is far better documented obviously than the world of thousands of years ago. Researching my own genealogy and that of others using a high power computer in a culture that has all manner of legal records and where surnames are routine, it is a major achievement to get back to the 16th century. Many lineages, even those where the surname is unusual, often hit roadblocks before you get to 1800 even, just 200 years ago, and again that’ searching electronically in a well documented nation.
Does anybody really think it’s possible that people remembered the names of their ancestors, even the Y-Line ancestors only, for literally thousands of years in a time before writing? Even when I was a kid and fairly religious (though neither I nor my family were ever fundamentalist when I was a kid) I always assumed that Adam was perhaps a name that was the last known ancestor, or that “we came from dirt” caused a "well speaking of dirt [adam in the dialect of the time], here’s a story about that…
Also, there are several oddly repetetive parts of the genealogies where the names are almost but not quite the same in two separate lines for generations. There’s also the fact that Cain’s sons are identified of the ancestors of those who played the harp and those who lived in tents, and yet the entire human race was wiped out in the Flood, leading to a “well, wouldn’t Noah be the much more recent father of everybody? And Noah was not a descendant of Cain at all…” issue.
It’s extremely clear that they’re not meant to be taken too seriously. (Amazing to me how many people who read the Bible literally never noticed that Methusaleh died in the year of the Flood until I mentioned it to them, and I was a kid!)
One explanation I heard for the absurd lifespans is that if you look at the timeline you’ll see Noah’s son Shem lived until the birth of his (however many great-greats) grandson Abraham, and thus connected the great patriarch to the Flood and would theoretically have met with him and told him about it (ala Utnapishtim and Gilgamesh). There’s probably a connection.
But, if one wants to discover the truthiness of a particular account, because, say, someone says his immortal soul depends on it, how should we do so without examining the accounts we have? We have to recognize that we can only approach the underlying truth this way, of course.