hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (01/02/90)
This is a response to Scott Gulland's posting. I'm not going to respond in detail to his analysis of the first creation story, since the expertise for evaluating his science is really in talk.origins, not here. But the original challenge was an exegetical one, not a scientific one, and I want to look at Scott's response to that. The challenge that he is responding to compared Gen 1 with Gen 2. In Gen 1 plants are created in the 3rd day, sea creatures and birds on the fifth day, and land animals on the sixth day, followed by humans. In Gen 2, Adam comes first, then plants, then the animals, and then Eve. specifically > Note that the first version specifically states that *every* winged fowl was > created before man, whereas the second version states that *every* fowl of > the air was created after man. The response to this is basically: - a lot of discussion about reducing atmospheres, none of which changes anything relevant to the discussion, since everyone agrees that Gen. 1 places the creation of winged fowls before men. (This does not imply that I accept everything Scott says about Gen 1 though. I find the suggestion that 1:14-19 describes a parting of the earth's cloud cover rather bizarre.) - an attempt to show that Gen. 2 does not say birds were created after man. The attempt to show that birds were not created after man hangs on comments about the Hebrew grammar of Gen 2:19. But it's not the verb endings that create the impression of sequence here; it's the overall logic of the passage. God says "I will make a fitting helper for him". He creates the birds and animals. They are found not to be fitting helpers. So God creates the woman. It seems clear in the passage that God creates the birds and animals as a result of his resolution to find a fitting helper for Adam, i.e. after Adam. The NIV attempts to be consistent with Scott's interpretation. In order to make Gen 2 consistent with Gen 1, we have to regard 2:8ff and 2:19-20 as parentheses, filling us in on past actions. (2:8ff involves the creation of plants, which in a staightforward reading also happen after Adam.) The NIV translates 2:8 "had planted" and 2:19 "had formed", presumably with this interpretation. However even with that translation, I still get the impression of sequence from the NIV. The force of the story is enough that changing one word here or there doesn't help. For better or worse, we do not have any way to establish an objective measure of how plausible an interpretation of a piece of text is. Clearly somebody who wants to interpret Gen 2 the way Scott does will succeed in doing so. But people without such preconceptions are unlikely to take his reading. Of course Scott will suspect the same about me. However I have no particular reason to want to see disagreements in the text. While I accept that minor errors occur in the Bible here and there, I see it as basically accurate.