RE: [asa] The Bible does not require a Neolithic Adam!

Phil, I feel insulted by your post. You didn't even bother to pay any
attention to what I was saying. If you were actually engaging my argument
and telling me why the factual data doesn't support my position, I would
feel great. To have my arguments ignored feels awful. Maybe I simply don't
have the patience or maybe the time left to simply be ignored.
 
you wrote:
 
>>>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.<<<<
 
The thing I find so funny is that everyone has different ideas of where the
literary devices are. I don't think it is quite as easy a task as you seem
to. To me, if one can make it historical, why not do it? To me, the
approach I see taken is that everything is a literary device, nothing is to
be taken as historical period. The problem is, few really want to
acknowledge that that is really the approach.
 
 
>>>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." <<<
 
Well, what you doubt isn't actually evidence. 1 Sam 4:21 a kid was named
Ichabod. It means, 'no glory'.
In Ruth 1:2 "And the name of the man was Elimelech, and the name of his wife
Naomi, and the name of his two sons Mahlon and Chilion,"
 
Mahlon means 'sick' and Chilion means 'destruction' Maybe you haven't
actually looked at the names in the Bible.
 
And don't forget that the name could be a nickname earned by Tubal-cain's
life--Oh now, that can't be, that would be taking the account as history and
we can't do that. THat would be bad, bad bad. Shame on me for suggesting it.
:-)
 
>>>More likely, the author of Genesis created the Cain account as a literary
device intended to be parallel with Seth's geneology. <<<
 
And exactly where do you get this information? Is there a book which
identifies what parts of the scripture are literary devices and which ones
are to be taken as history? Can someone point me to this book? Frankly, it
just seems an easy cop out to claim any and all is literary devices and not
to be taken seriously and then claim to have solved the mis-match of
science, history and the Scripture. It is a cop out.
 
And of course, no one here will see the need of taking the Bible as if it
actually says anything of historical merit and once again I will argue alone
for this position. I had my 2 year old grand-daughter here this weekend.
Saturday she asked me what I was doing. I told her I was writing. I write
things that no one likes. This morning before going back to her parents, I
made a comment that I was going to go do some writing. She added, 'write
things no one likes'. I think she has it down.
 
>>> 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! , <<<
 
Please tell me the methodology you used to determine this? I hear these
claims all the time, but no one actually says how they determine what is and
isn't a literary device. Given that I have just shown that it is not
necessary to have a mesopotamian, much less a neolithic/sumarian Adam, you
simply claim that the account is precisely that.
 
>>>metallurgy, and travelling musicians. <<<
 
You claim it is an account of metalurgy, which means you didn't even read
what I wrote. Please tell me why Jer. 6:28 doesn't have any LITERARY
implications to the interpretation of the phrase 'BRASS AND IRON' in Genesis
4:22! You want literary devices except when I give them to you. This looks
like a heads I lose, tails you win kind of position. I don't think you have
really paid attention to what I wrote and that is truly the most
frustrating thing of living a life in which I write things no one likes. If
you actually engaged in the argument and told me why I was wrong, rather
than SIMPLY IGNORING MY ENTIRE POST AS IF IT HAD NO EFFECT OR DIDN"T EXIST,
I would feel much better. To write what you did confirms in my mind my
reticence in returning here to this list where people simply state
positions, but don't provide new or novel argumentation. At least, I thought
I was offering something new and novel, something far too often lacking
among Christian writers.
 
Below, you say that the brass and iron phrase is not a literary device. Why
isn't it? What evidence can you present other than your belief that it
isn't? What you have don't above is nothing more profound that what kids do
when someone says the sun is yellow and some other kid says 'tis not'.
 
 
>>>
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.<<<
 
Given that you didn't even engage the argument and immediately claimed that
the passage was about metalurgy, I don't see how you can even claim that you
know what my argument is. If you just want to say you don't believe my
argument, then say it, but here you haven't explained why a literary
parallelism even rules out my interpretation of that verse. Your argument
is a total non-sequiture. A parallel lineage does not mean that Genesis
4:22 is about metalurgy. Nor does it mean 4:22 isn't about metalurgy. your
point is totally irrelevant.
 
>> 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. <<<
 
Once again, you haven't even read or understood enough of my argument to be
saying this. In the links I provided, I show that those 'inventions' took
place HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO. But of course, you didn't read it
but why bother knowing that, when one is merely going to make the
nonsequiturous claim: "Since the passage is a parallel lineage to Seth's
lineage, therefore the passage is about metalurgy." It doesn't follow Phil.
At least present an argument why a parallel lineage has any implication for
metalurgy.
 
Do you know that the oldest flute in the world is somewhere between 43 and
67,000 years old? That certainly is NOT someone who would be a
Sumerian--literary device or not. The oldest mouth blown instruments are
100,000 years old and are fox phalanges with a hole drilled in them. They
make shrill whistles. They aren't even from Mesopotamia.
 
If you had were actually engaging in the data I present, you would know that
tents go back at least 425,000 years with claims for some 1.6 million years
ago. But of course, we don't have to know the evidence if everything is
merely a literary device. What Sumerian doing metal work was living either
425,000 years ago, or even 1.6 million years ago? Of course, data isn't
important here any more than it is when one conjurs up hurricanes in
Mesopotamia to push an ark uphill (even though no one has ever seen such a
Meospotamian hurricane which can last a day, much less a week)
 
The problem with most concordism is that it doesn't concord with reality and
the problem with accommodationalism is that it allows any nonsense
whatsoever to be treated as profoundly true theology.
 
 
>>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. <<<
 
Alll my siblings have names starting in G--Gary, Glenn and Gloria. We are
not a literary device. We had a weird mother who liked G's. If I had been a
girl, I would have been Grant (don't ask me why). I know many black families
that have named their children rhyming names. They also are not literary
devices. George Foreman named all his sons, George. They are not literary
devices either. It is odd to me that you seem so sure of what people will
and won't name their children. You are sure that no one would name the child
destroyed by God. Another name to add to the list above, Achar in 1 Ch 2:7
means troublesome. Who would name a child that? Obviously, contra you,
someone did.
 
 
>> 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 t! he **archetypical** inventor of metallurgy, not the
literal inventor of it, since in reality there was no single inventor or
teacher of metallurgy.<<<
 
Once again, this is a non-sequitur. It is true that Cain can mean 'spear'
but that doesn't make it a metal spear. Are you under the misapprehension
that the only spears are metal? The oldest spear is from Schoningen,
Germany--it is wooden and balanced exactly like an olympic javelin.
 
Though the morphology of the Schoningen spears resembles to a high degree
that
of the current Olympian sportswoman's javelin (Rieder, 2000; Steguweit,
1999,
Aiello's (1998) line of reasoning indicates that males might have been the
more
common users of these weapons." Wil Roebroeks, "Hominid Behaviour and the
Earliest Occupation of Europe: an Exploration," Journal of Human Evolution,
41(2001):437-461, p. 449
 
These spears are 380,000 years old. So, Cain can clearly be a spear maker
without being a blacksmith in the modern terminology. And if you want to
claim that Tubal-cain is a blacksmith working metal because of the name,
then to be consistent, you need to claim the same was true of the original
Cain (who is not said to have invented metal working by anyone). Thus, your
argument that cain must mean 'smith' with Tubal cain, fails when it is
applied to the original Cain. Of course , that all might be a literary
device and need no reality whatsoever in order to be true.
 
Brown-Driver-Briggs says kenite = smith but it also says that kenite is
 
"the tribe from which the father-in-law of Moses was a member and which
lived in the area between southern Palestine and the mountains of Sinai
(noun proper gentilic)"
 
 
>>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.<<<<
 
Ah, I see, everything is a literary device EXCEPT the brass and iron thing
even when I can provide a clear case where that phrase is used in a literary
fashion for corruption. I think I have your approach down. If it fits your
theory, then it is a literary device, if it doesn't it isn't. Yeah, we
wouldn't want to pay attention to this verse very closely:
 
Jeremiah 6:28, They are all grievous revolters, walking with slanders: they
are brass and iron; they are all corrupters.

And we wouldn't want to pay attention to the fact that God said the earth
was corrupt in the passages on the flood.

And we wouldn't want to pay attention to the fact that Tubal-cain is the
last generation before the flood. No, there is no connection between
corruption, the flood and the phrase 'brass and iron' as a literary device.
Certainly not if it challenges our belief system.

>>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 keep asking people how they know what the author intended us to take as a
literary device. No one clearly lays it out. I have read many of the
medieval Jewish commentators and parts of the Talmud. They took it as
history, but they also beleived that history had symbolism and meaning. It
was almost a Hegelian view of history.. It was BOTH to the Jews, not just
one as it seems to be to you.
 
 
>> 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.<<
 
I don't see any theory you are advancing here.
 
 
>>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. <<<<
 
Then making it all a literary device means we can't do that. Science deals
with reality, not philosophy or even theology. If we are going to
'understand Genesis in the light of science by saying Genesis says nothing
scientific or even historical, then there is absolutely no reason to
understand Genesis in the light of science. It ain't science, it says
nothing that needs or even interacts with science in that case. To do what I
see you did in this post is to totally remove any possibility of
understanding Genesis in the light of science but then claim that we need to
understand Genesis in the light of science. One can't have it both ways.
Either we make it real, and therefore subject to the scrutiny of science, or
we remove it from science and it can never be wrong.
 
 
 
>> 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. <<
 
Faith is supposed to be real. If all it is is an inner warm fuzzy feeling,
it aint worth my time. Buddhists fool themselves into thinking slabbin yak
butter into candles will do them good; Muslims fool themselves into thinking
all infidels must die, Branch Davidians fool themselves into thinking they
must stay in a burning shack. One can't look out there without wondering if
WE are fooling ourselves. To say we can't fool ourselves is to actually fool
ourselves. Of course we can fool ourselves. The only way I see out of that
conundrum is to have REALITY in all capital letters in the Bible. We may
all be in this together, some seem to enjoy taking the easy out--the cop out
that all is a literary device which teachs nothing but good philosophy. If
we can't make the Bible have reality, then fooling ourselves becomes quite
easy to do.
 
I want an interpretation of the Bible that is fully historical but also
fully evolutionary. That is what I have, for better or worse, spent my life
attempting. Without that, one side offers fantasies and, well, so does the
other side.
 
I define a fantasy as anything which either can't be falsified, or is not
allowed to be falsified. A person who thinks he is Julius Caesar and is
shown evidence that he is not a Roman, does not live in 45 BC, is not the
emperor of Rome, doesn't live in Rome, but yet still believes in his
Caesarship, is living a fantasy. Evidence plays no role in his belief
system.
 
A YEC lives a fantasy because no matter what evidence one places before
them, they disbelieve it so long as it doesn't support their position.
 
The other side, plays the game whereby everything is a literary device and
thus there is no evidence to test. All is theology. In this fantasy, there
is no possible way to disprove any of the statements.
 
Only by risking falsification can we actually progress in this issue.
 
>>>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 this claim is about as good as the YEC claim that they are making
progress. Progress means that positions must change. What I see is static
positions all around. The YECs haven't hardly changed in the past 200 years.
Neither have those who don't see the Bible as history but make it out to be
good theology if factually flawed. There is no progress. Tell me precisely
what this progress is and what is NEW out there. The ideas you have
presented have been found in the literature for years. In what sense is that
progresss?
 
 
>>> 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 servic! e to Him in this particular era.<<<
 
I think I am wise enough to know that this isn't true. As long as people
don't want falsification of the parts of their belief system that are false,
we will all live in fantasy land.
 
 
 
 

glenn
They're Here: The Pathway Papers
Foundation, Fall, and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology

http://home.entouch.net/dmd/dmd.htm
  

-----Original Message-----
From: philtill@aol.com [mailto:philtill@aol.com]
Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2006 5:12 PM
To: glennmorton@entouch.net; asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: [asa] The Bible does not require a Neolithic Adam!

 
Glenn,
 
It's good to hear from you again, and I'm very sorry to hear about the
illness.
God bless,
Phil
 
  
  _____

 
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Received on Sun Oct 22 20:20:34 2006