If Genesis is Metaphorical, what's the metaphor?

Hi, Burk, dunno about a metaphor, but I always thought Genesis was a result of the author thinking, 'If I get them to swallow this, I am home-and-hosed with the rest of the book'.

I was going to pop this in after message 92 but I thought you guys needed a rest.Have a rest, Arach. Hi, Brian, I think you are representing a view with too broad a brush. If billions of people believe Genesis, etc. to be literal history, then we`d better include modifiers to point the way to a closer approximation to the truth. Thus, recorded traditions might become ‘cultural’ history versus ‘what-really-happened’-- ‘defined’ history. On a scale of 1-100, cultural history might score in the low twenties as against defined history which might climb up the other end of the scale depending on the number and strength of alternative sources verifying the original claim.So we would have a possible knowledge of the culture and psychology of a particular group of people at some point in time, but no more till other sources verify any or all the concepts or characters. Did it happen? Possibly. Can we confirm it? Even if another source relates to it, is this really confirmation, or a dispersion of a folk tale? Can anything worthwhile be gleaned from a name? Not much. Can anything be gleaned from a folk history? Well, apart from possibly (if it hasn`t been redacted) recording a set of customs and beliefs from an author, which MAY be factual, what other weight can you add?Biblical archaeologists used to turn cartwheels if they found pottery with Abraham or other biblical names inscribed, using this as a justification that the Biblical Abraham (or other characters or events) really existed. To the exclusion of any other explanation. More dispassionate specialists now tend to be less definitive in their claims unless corroborated by extensive digs and a battery of scientific tests. I think we have to pull a much tighter noose around the concept of history when believers use ancient folk tales to justify their actions in the present century.