What's Best Reconciliation of Gen 1 and 2 You've Heard?

not sure if it counts as an explanation in the terms you're looking for, but the best historical reason is that the original torah was lost when the hebrews went into babylonian captivity. during or after that time, the head rabbis in a last ditch effort to save their religion from beign swallowed by the babylonian culture actually reconstructed the missing portions from memory.this explains a good deal of the inconsistencies, babylonian influence (noah?) and major problems. most of all, it does explain the conflicting accounts commonly found right next to each other. maybe one rabbi remember the story in genesis 1, and another the one in 2, and both were put in.

i don't think this view holds any water. clearly, they were written by two different, and both cover about the same subjects -- though i will admit to different foci. genesis 1-2:4 seems to be abotu the world as a whole, and genesis 2:4 through the end of the third chapter seems to be about israel's patriarch, and the pastoral society.genesis 2 describes domesticated animals, genesis 1 describes wild. same with the plants.but it's not to say they're compatible. they are clearly separate accounts with separate origins. in ancient cultures, many worshipped a sun-god. this seems to be a re-wording of the same basic idea.

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אָרַח

slight correction. genesis 1 actually ends at 2:4 also. the split is right down the middle of the verse:

quote:

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Genesis 2:3-5 (JPS)

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³And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all work of the creation that He had done. ⁴Such is the story of the heaven and earth when they were created.

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When the LORD God made earth and heaven -- ⁵when no shrub of the field was yet on the earth and no grasses of the field had yet sprouted, because the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the soil, ...

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the first bit is the elohist {e}. the second is the yahwist {j}. the shift from "god" to "lord god" is pretty evident here, as is the change in focus. the yahwist is largely concerned with personal and specific creation, and where the jews come from (and thus is probably from judah like you said, iirc). the elohist is concerned with universal creation (and thus is probably later, and maybe from israel. maybe.)

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Genesis 5:1-2 (Old JPS)

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¹This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made He him; ² male and female created He them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.

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{p} seems to be looking at {e} in some places, so they get easily confused. {p} seems mostly concerned with who fathered whom. also seems to be a later tradition. this is certainly true. but people do reconcile precisely because they are about different things. this is probably also the reason all three were included -- they were important for different reasons. and contained different "truths."

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אָרַח

in some respects gen 1 is an overview. it presents a broader scope for the story. it's not so much more or less detail, but a different focus. gen 1 is concerned with the universe (in the limit hebrew sense) and gen 2 is concerned with humanity (or, at least the father of the hebrews).

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אָרַח

possibly. it's very book-end-ish.

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אָרַח

quote:

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24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.

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yes -- marriage. and gen 3 is full of etiologies. why snakes have no legs, why the hebrews live in a desert (and the origin of agriculture), why childbirth hurts, why men run society, etc.

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אָרַח

ok, but what?

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אָרַח

as far as i know, genesis 5 is generally considered a priestly work, as are all genealogical listings in the torah. i mean, i could be wrong -- the contention is tha the priests who wrote that source had a je document, into which they worked their own text. in some respects, p is also part of r. i saw a bible once with the different sources highlighted. i couldn't remember what it is -- turns out it's one of friedman's books. so, i guess i can't use that to support this particular idea lol.

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אָרַח

literalness (in the literal sense of the word) is a good thing, but so is the context and intention of the author. what it's actually saying is sometimes not what it means. what do we do in the case of idioms or metaphor? did ruth really uncover boaz's feet, or did she do something else?it actually says she did something with his feet. but the author wanted use to think of something else.rather, what we should not do is start with the idea of what we want it to say, or what we want to think, and try to defend that position based on ignoring or accepting evidence based on how well it agrees.

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אָרַח

sounds like a good read. i think it's time i had another class...

that is highly traditional. what does he base the claim on?

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אָרַח

i've heard that it was lost, circa exile, and restored from memory. i wasn't aware of the source of the claim... this could be where it came from.that argument does sound somewhat reasonable. i'll have to look at it some more and maybe read a few books of ezra... think i might go check out one of friedman's books from the library.

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אָרַח

i'll be honest here. it's never going to happen. two reasons. the first is the somewhat obvious one: most people who are buying bibles don't want to have to try to figure out what it means on the surface level (let alone the deeper levels). the second is the more subtle point you had to figure i was going to get at: hebrew is not english. modern hebrew tends to share some grammatical structure with english: word order is generally the same. but biblical hebrew is completely different. verbs come before subjects. there are possesive endings on nearly everything -- everything is conjugated, like in latin.now, some of the things are relatively simple. enough so that i can puzzle out their meanings. but by and large most of the verses i look at, i haven't the first clue what they're saying. i've been somewhat lucky here. most of the verse that have come under debate that required some closer examination have been worded in such a way that a third grader could understand them. (that's about my comprehension level on a good day, if not far, far worse)but you'll notice in the ones that i have puzzled out on this board, i do it in four steps. first i post the hebrew, then the transliterated latin-alphabet hebrew. then i take that, and turn it into a word-for-word literal rendering. things end up out of order, hyphenated, etc. then i take that and turn it into something that makes sense in english. the idea here is that you can see my process.the "cosmetic" changes berlinerblau is talking about is what happens between steps 3 and 4 -- the process of turning it into something that makes sense in english. if you had a bible in the raw, literal form i post for step 3, it wouldn't neccessarily make any sense to an english audience. it'd make LESS sense than the hebrew does to a hebrew audience because it's been removed from its linguistic context. it'd just be english with atrociously wrong grammar. i'll give you an example, for the purposes of discussion. i posted this at the end of serpent thread:

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, , — , —

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v'ha-nachash, hayah arom, m'kol chayat ha-sadeh, asher asah yahueh elohim;

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and-the-serpent, was crafty, from-all animals the-field, that made [the lord] god.

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and the serpent was the craftiest of all the wild animals that the lord god made

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now, you can see that i've come to a different conclusion than the standard translation. this is based partially on the grammatical rendering of step three, but mostly on my own contextual understanding of that relates to and a concept in the english. i've also chosen to render the idea of the "of the field" idiom with the appropriate english meaning, instead maintaining it's literal wording. this is purely a translational choice -- it's based on my knowledge of the context and is of course extremely questionable. translations like the jps tend to render things idiomatically like this -- others don't.now, the standard rendering is that the serpent was "more subtle than the beasts of the field." the idea of posting this, originally, was to demonstrate that the serpent was, in fact, also a beast of the field, not something else. this particular concept is lost in the english, unless worded very carefully. the standard rendering, however, maintains the idea that the serpent was more subtle than any (other) beast of the field.making an optimal english translation is HARD. 9 times out of 10, something is lost in translation. often, even just changing the linguistic context, and the way the grammar works, changes the text. i'm not saying that the only way to read the bible is to learn hebrew -- but it sure helps, if only to provide some of that context and grammatical understanding. without that, even the most literal translation will never contain the clarity you're looking for.so at best, most are stuck with reading how someone else interprets the text. and even the most literal translation (which, btw, imo is probably the kjv) is subject to this. and some of that bit happens even at the most basic level, just reading the "original" hebrew. there's no promise that every native hebrew speaker will read the same meaning from something. how often do we find ourselves in semantic arguments, and misunderstandings in english? and there's some stuff that even the best translators have to guess at. i don't think most translators are trying to hoax people. (granted, some...) but i promise you that the original authors knew what they were writing, and it wasn't gibberish. the original sources MUST have been coherent. the coherency comes, in part, from the compilation of the texts, and the contradictions that brings. but most of it probably comes from the expectations people have. they expect it to agree with itself, and make sense to someone today. mostly, they expect that their translations are, in effect, the word of god, and not subject to question. nevermind that in instances such as the above, maybe no one really knows what it means.in these cases, the translator often takes his best (informed) guess. but the translator should not be assumed to be infallible, especially when almost every translation has footnotes that say "meaning of hebrew uncertain." their guess might be wrong -- but it's no more of a hoax than a failed hypothesis in science.

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to further complicate my point, i'm going to contradict that slightly. that example i used was a very easy verse, and a very modern one. most of the bible is not that easy, or modern. however, in my studies i have found that the bible is suprisingly more modern than i thought when i started. we tend to think of it as an ancient book, written by backwards and often silly people who lived out in fields with sheep. nothing could be further from the truth -- most of the book was put together by people living in a rather advanced society, living in a city at the center of the middle eastern world. it was the meeting point between the greek world, the egyptian world, and the babylonian/assyrian/persian empires.the problem is that it is possible to render the bible in such a way that the clarity disappears and the text becomes very backwards and ancient in our minds. this is an artifact of the fact that we don't connect to it, or understand the social context and how the language works. the ancient and backwards quality is the result of something that has been lost in translation. that's why translations, such as the jps, try to work out the contextual and idiomatic readings; to regain the qualities that are present in the original text that have been lost due to social and linguistic changes. well, as faith says, believing is not proving. but i think she'd differ here, and agree with me on this point: the bible is certainly not meaningless, and one needs only look to all the people who see meanining in it to demonstrate that fact. now, parts of the bible HAVE become confusing. and he is right about why. but much of the meaning still remains. it just might take a little work to figure it out. but that goes for anything. in the case of genesis 1 and 2, it helps to know that they are two different stories. in my opinion, the multiple source idea explains the contradictions quite well. like i said, part of the problem is the belief people approach the bible with, not the bible itself. i have a three volumne set of the norton anthology of world literature on my shelf. it contains selections from almost every important ancient text there is. how do i explain the contradictions i find between the stories there? ...i don't, because i don't expect them to agree. the problem is that the bible is not one book, by one author. it's a library, and many of the books in it are anthologies. well, that's exactly it. it's the people who are reading it, and taught not to doubt, or question it. personally, the questioning of translation was the start of my journey down the questioning road. it led me to question the composition and authorship, and very many other things. and a lot of people view this as bad, unchristian.but i will tell you, the more i learn and study, the more i find that generally the translators know what they're doing. very rarely do i find something that's just been translated wrong. sometimes i find things that could be worded better (like the example above) but that might just be my own error based my limited knowledge. there is a lot of debate over some words, and phrases, and verses, yes. but by and large, it's not a giant questionmark.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 04-02-2006 09:54 PM

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this is a bit off topic, but ah well. maybe someone will post a new thread about it, if people wanna discuss kjv-only-ism. i think this is a misinterpretation of the kind of point made above. granted, there are features of early modern english that are NOT present in late modern english. for instance, in modern english the plural personal pronoun "you" has taken over the job of the singular "thou." there is no distinction now of number with the word "you." in elizabethan english, there is. this doesn't make the kjv better; in actuality it makes it worse. we don't commonly use words like "thou" and people end up finding the language confusing. it would be better only is we spoke elizabethan english.the other issue is that, at best, it replicates the hebrew in number. in hebrew, we'd say "atah" for "thou" and "atem" for "you." at worst, it lacks the gender of hebrew. this has caused some problems, because hebrew speakers understand gender (and neutral male cases) better. a group of all men are describe -im, male. a group of all women is describe -ot, female. but mixed company is also -im, male.for instance, in the famous story of sodom, the "men" of the village are probably not all male. neither word used (for the men of the village, nor the visitors) is neccessarily male. but when we translate it into english, it just says "men" which we now associate only one gender with. in reality "people" would be a better contextual understanding -- the gender has been mistranslated because it remains literal.but i really think it's quite disengenous to say that biblical hebrew had "communicative limitations." i assure you, it communicated what it wanted to its audience quite effective. it's US that are limited in understand its communication, not vice-versa. close! the last books of the bible were written (at least partially) in aramaic, which is a different semetic language. classical hebrew (including the masoretic text) derives its alef-bet from a modification of the aramaic letters.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 04-03-2006 01:30 AM

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