Re: Special Creation

There are traces in the OT of a myth of a garden of God which is identified with Eden. In Is.51:3 "Eden" is in parallel with "the garden of the LORD." In Ez.28:11-20 a myth of the primordial man in "Eden, the garden of God" is used to speak about the fate of the king of Tyre. Both of these are in the category of "broken myth," the use by the biblical writers of myths from other cultures to speak about the faith of Israel. The Ezekiel text in particular shouldn't be taken as providing historical details about the Eden story of Gen.2-3. (Note, in particular, that the sin spoken of in Ez.28:16 has to do with the "trade" and "violence" of the historical Tyre in the 7th & 6th centuries B.C.)

Brevard Childs' article on "Eden, Garden of" in the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible is a useful reference on this, though it's now > 40 years old.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Jim Armstrong
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Thursday, March 02, 2006 12:50 PM
  Subject: Re: Special Creation

  I don't have an answer to your question, but what better forum to pose such a proposition for comment!

  I really just wanted to broach a slightly different matter regarding Eden. Remember the old Dixie joke about living most of ones (Southern) life before discovering that "yankee" was a word all by itself?
  Well, I wonder if I'm the only one hereabouts who went most of my life without registering a possible alternate significance of the "of Eden" part of "the garden of Eden"!
  I basically thought that this was the name of a garden in a place called Eden, a place in itself.
  What I didn't tumble to is that it might alternatively describe a garden which is a part of a larger something called Eden.
  To give credit where credit is due, Dr. John Walton of Wheaton mentioned this notion in a recent lecture having to do with the ancients' way of understanding and describing the Creation.
  He went on to fill in a picture wherein Eden is the dwelling place of God, an adjunct of which is the garden (created and spoken of in Genesis).
  George, ...or others who might know more about this than I, ...Is this a picture common or uncommon in the understanding of OT scholars?
  It certainly portrays a more mythic or allegorical picture, but plausible as a more complete analogic image of the environs for the Creation.
  It is an appealing idea, revisiting the idea of Creation as a fecund place, a place of planting and development and ultimately pleasure for the One who brought it into being.
  JimA

  David Opderbeck wrote:

I'd like to ask a question that will probably sound completely wacky.
I hope I can be free to ask it without folks thinking I'm advocating
some kind of nutty view, or that I read too much science fiction
(which, BTW, I do). Ok, so here it is: is there any literature that
considers the possibility that the Fall and/or the Flood were
cross-dimensional events? I've read (or tried to read) Schroeder's
book about Genesis and time, but I'm thinking about something a bit
more.

What if something like the multiverse theory is true? Could the
Garden exist in a parallell universe, with Adam and Eve being expelled
across dimensions into a much older Earth? Adam and Eve are expelled
from the Garden and a cherubim and a "flaming sword" are placed there
to prevent them from accessing the tree of life (Gen. 3:24). The
"tree of life" appears again in the New Jerusalem in Rev. 22. Could
this suggest physical locations that are not currently accessible to
us in ordinary space?

And/or could Noah have experienced some kind of relative time aboard
the ark, such that the Flood was ~5MYA but Noah experienced it as a
year? Could the ark have been travelling through "Planck space"?

Please -- I really am a rational guy, and I find all these discussions
fascinating and troubling at the same time. No suggestion here that
there's any reason to believe anything like the above. But maybe it's
possible that the ongoing work in quantum physics and cosmology will
provide options that we're not even dreaming about now?

On 3/2/06, Michael Roberts <michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk> wrote:
  glen wrote

There is absolutely nothing in the Plio-pleistocene that even remotely matches a flood as described by the Bible. The latest is the infilling of the Med and that actually would begin to sound a bit like the Biblical flood. IMO, there is little reason to remain literal believing in Adam and Eve if one has no flood. One might as well go allegorical/accomodationalist all the way to Genesis 12.

That's your only solution Glenn, it is better than stretching genesis like an elastic band as Adam Sedwick said in 1858.
    

  
Received on Thu Mar 2 13:27:38 2006