Glenn,
It's good to hear from you again, and I'm very sorry to hear about the illness.
I agree with you that Adam must be further back. Like you, I can't buy the idea that Adam was intended to be less than the original human. I think that does violence to the message of the text.
But unfortunately I don't think your new argument is a winning one. First, as a general critique, I think you and Dick both dive into the details of the passage seeking very particular concordance while tending to miss the author's use of literary devices. If we can stand back and appreciate the text as literature, first, then seek concordance only after we have explained all the parallelisms and literary devices of the text, then it will become (IMO) a much easier task to find a deeply satisfying concordance. That is because we will know where concordance **isn't** required. We only need to find concordance in the places where the text actually requires it, not in places where the author uses literary devices that he intends for us to take non-literally.
In particular, I think the entire Cain geneology is a literary construction intended to parallel the Seth geneology. Cain's line is archetypical while Seth's line is literal. I think the most telling evidence is that the names of Cain's line are all derivations of names taken from Seth's geneology. It's just too parallel to be coincidental, and any theory that fails to account for the parallelism is not a credible theory, IMO. For example, Seth's Mahalalel = "praise of God" while Cain's Mehujael = "destroyed of God." I doubt anybody really named their child "destroyed of God." More likely, the author of Genesis created the Cain account as a literary device intended to be parallel with Seth's geneology. It is a summary of some key points from human history beginning from hunter gatherers (Cain the wanderer), to the building cities (Enoch = mesopotamian "Uruk" and Irad = "city of witness"), and on down to pastoral nomadism, metallurgy, and travelling musicians. It gives
us a poignant theological message that, although humanity was making great cultural achievements, they still continued to be cursed and separated from God. In fact, the curse was growing worse despite mankind's greatest cultural achievements. This Cain geneology was intended to serve as a contrast to Seth's line, which is a literal history, where the people are walking with God and looking forward to the coming salvation in Noah, who prefigures Christ. Note that the literal line of Seth comes complete with birth and death dates, while these are absent from the purely archetypical line of Cain.
The JEDP people also note these parallels in the names, but then they have leaped to the most skeptical interpretation possible, saying that the two geneologies were derived originally from the same source material and included together through a process of textual evolution and error. I think it is much more satisfying intellectually to interpret the parallel in a way that credits the author for his great literary abilities, rather than impugning him with ignorance. I think we can have an inerrant view of the Bible that explains the Seth and Cain parallels better than what we find in this overly-skeptical part of the JEDP interpretation.
Anyhow, getting to the point, the message of this literary parallelism between Cain's line and Seth's line militates against your new argument, IMO. Note the similiarites between the three sons of Cain's Lamech. Next to Tubal-cain, the other two sons are inventors of some cultural achievement: pastoral nomadism and travelling musicians. And their names Jabal and Jubal are both rhyming (along with "Tubal") and happen to mean the very cultural achievement that they invented. So to do credit to this obviously intentional device, we would have to say that Tubal-Cain likewise invented something culturally important and that his invention is the same thing as the meaning of his name. Since "smith" is one of the allowable meanings of "cain" (in the idea of "spear-maker"), then with the reference to the metals it seems that metallurgy is the most probable interpretation. In my opinion, Tubal-cain was recorded here as the **archetypical** inventor of metallurgy, not the literal
inventor of it, since in reality there was no single inventor or teacher of metallurgy.
I have to think the idea of the mixture of metals being a reference to mixing good and evil is a bit too fanciful for this passage. If the author of Genesis was being more poetic in his use of language in this context, then perhaps it would have been clear that this was just a poetic allusion (as it is in the Jeremiah passage) and not a literal reference to metals.
As for keeping Adam early despite the reference to metallurgy, I think it is much easier to explain if we just accept that the literal Seth geneaology does not go back all the way to the first human. I think the most probable place to insert the huge gap is between Seth and Adam, or perhaps between two different "Adams". Maybe the "Adam" of Seth's geneology is a later Adam, the literal father of Seth, while the "Adam" of Genesis 1 is a literary reflection of Seth's father backwards into an origins account that precedes actual transmitted history. I think this insertion of a gap near the beginning of the account is in keeping with the pattern of other near-eastern origins accounts. They go back only so far in time -- only as far back as oral history actually takes them -- and then they make the leap all the way to cosmological beginnings. So I think an ancient reader would have expected this sort of handling of the origins account. Thus, I would read the
Seth geneology as literal all the way back to Seth and even to his literal father Adam, and then there is a cosmological leap back to "Adam"="Man" at the beginning in order to communicate the theological message of mankind's fall into sin.
This is not as literal as you prefer to take it, but I think it is consistent with an inerrantist view of Scripture since I am only taking things as literary devices where the author may have intended us to take them as literary devices. I am not impugning him with ignorance or error. The theory I outlined here still needs work, of course, but at this point I think it is a more satisfying and plausible theory than an overly literalistic concordism since it accounts for all the unusual parallelisms and unlikelihoods that we find in the text. I think it also successfully answers the errantist JEDP view that a late compiler accidentally included duplicate source material in the Cain and Seth geneologies. I think that the JEDP theory is highly unlikely on this particular point.
(There are some other arguments that I think are very compelling, which I have not included here, in regard to the literary construction of Cain's geneology contra the JEDP hypothesis.)
Final personal word to Glenn -- we're all in this struggle together. I think this need to understand Genesis in light of science is *the* theological issue facing the modern church, and it is no less important than the Reformation or other movements of prior ages. I know from reading your website that you have had a tremendous, personal struggle over this issue. So have I and many others! But let's keep the faith that it is resolvable and not let it eat our lunches. I don't think any of us has the whole answer, yet, but many of us have pieces of it and I think there is real progress being made. I think that in 20 to 50 years (if the Lord delays) the theologians will finally get it all put together correctly and it will be largely settled. I think I see many parts of the answer well enough that I know there is no real reason to question the faith; rather, this struggle is the one that God has ordained for us as our service to Him in this particular era.
God bless,
Phil
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Received on Sun Oct 22 18:12:31 2006
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