Adam And Eve, Noah And The Origion Of Man

[kiobe]

Before we begin, any posts should be directly related to the thread title. Please be respectful.

Adam and Eve, Noah and the origion of man.

The catholic bible states that Adam and Eve were created aprox. 6,000 years ago in the garden of eden. Mid eastern religious texts place the Garden of Eden in Messopotamia. After the great flood, all that were left on earth were Noah and his family and theologins place the final resting place of the arc, and therefore Noah and his family in the area of what is known today as Turkey. Today, scientists have shown through DNA mapping that humanity seems to have begun in eastern Africa about 50,000 years ago. My question is, are the Old Testiment stories a kind of fable or fact and just where did we origionate from?

[Scheherazade]

The catholic bible states that Adam and Eve were created aprox. 6,00 years ago in the garden of eden.

Who is your fact-checker?

[kiobe]

Who is your fact-checker?

LOL, I'm making lotsa mistakes...my wife is stranded about 50 mi from home and I am on and off the phone trying to get her home.

[Redzeppelin]

Before we begin, any posts should be directly related to the thread title. Please be respectful.

Adam and Eve, Noah and the origion of man.

The catholic bible states that Adam and Eve were created aprox. 6,000 years ago in the garden of eden. Mid eastern religious texts place the Garden of Eden in Messopotamia. After the great flood, all that were left on earth were Noah and his family and theologins place the final resting place of the arc, and therefore Noah and his family in the area of what is known today as Turkey. Today, scientists have shown through DNA mapping that humanity seems to have begun in eastern Africa about 50,000 years ago. My question is, are the Old Testiment stories a kind of fable or fact and just where did we origionate from?

Fable or fact depends upon what the basis of your belief is - how you decide what is real or true. Non-believers will insist this is fable, believer will insist it's fact - because each of us are appealing to a different standard of "reality." I struggle with "tweaking" the biblical numbers so that they coincide with science's claims. For the record (in case this isn't obvious), I think the stories are factual. If the time is wrong (and I am generally suspicious of science's claims in terms of time), that wouldn't change the fact that these people existed. C.S. Lewis once astutely said that the Bible wouldn't pass muster as mythology - it lacks all the proper components of good myth. As well, its "heroes" are all too human to be the characters of fable - most fables contain one/two dimensional characters - the Bible's characters are very, very human.

[PrinceMyshkin]

Before we begin, any posts should be directly related to the thread title. Please be respectful.

Adam and Eve, Noah and the origion of man.

The catholic bible states that Adam and Eve were created aprox. 6,000 years ago in the garden of eden. Mid eastern religious texts place the Garden of Eden in Messopotamia. After the great flood, all that were left on earth were Noah and his family and theologins place the final resting place of the arc, and therefore Noah and his family in the area of what is known today as Turkey. Today, scientists have shown through DNA mapping that humanity seems to have begun in eastern Africa about 50,000 years ago. My question is, are the Old Testiment stories a kind of fable or fact and just where did we origionate from?

Since the Bible itself presents two slightly different accounts of the creation of the world (Genesis 1:25-17 vs Genesis 2:18-22), why would anyone take it as anything other than fable, narrated by a fallible human author?

[Redzeppelin]

Since the Bible itself presents two slightly different accounts of the creation of the world (Genesis 1:25-17 vs Genesis 2:18-22), why would anyone take it as anything other than fable, narrated by a fallible human author?

You're kidding, right? What in the two accounts contradicts each other in a way that reduces their credibility? Come on - two different war correspondents on different sides of a battle field may give two different accounts of the battle - are they both lying if their accounts don't agree? Chapter one of Genesis gives the chronological narrative of creation; chapter two gives a more thematic narrative. Its the same narrative told in two different ways.

[PrinceMyshkin]

You're kidding, right? What in the two accounts contradicts each other in a way that reduces their credibility? Come on - two different war correspondents on different sides of a battle field may give two different accounts of the battle - are they both lying if their accounts don't agree? Chapter one of Genesis gives the chronological narrative of creation; chapter two gives a more thematic narrative. Its the same narrative told in two different ways.

One would expect more from God than from a war corresspondent. And the FACTS differ in the two accounts, the chronology.

[Redzeppelin]

One would expect more from God than from a war corresspondent. And the FACTS differ in the two accounts, the chronology.

But you still got the point, right?

There is no chronology contradiction. If you're talking about the apparent contradiction between when plants and humans were created, chapter two deals with the creation of the Garden of Eden - not of all vegetation on the earth. The accounts agree with each other.

[PrinceMyshkin]

But you still got the point, right?

There is no chronology contradiction. If you're talking about the apparent contradiction between when plants and humans were created, chapter two deals with the creation of the Garden of Eden - not of all vegetation on the earth. The accounts agree with each other.

Genesis 1: 24 "And God said, Let the earth bring forth..." That would be THE earth, inclusive of Eden.

Genesis 1: 25 "And God made...every thing that creepeth upon the earth"

Genesis 2: 19 "And out of the ground the LORD God formed..." As Eden was part of the earth and God had already created "every thing that creepeth upon the earth," this would appear to be redundant.

And, again, the chronology differs.

[MaryLupin]

I am working from the 3rd edition of The New Oxford Annotated Bible (published by Oxford University Press) and the TaNaKh: A New Translation of The Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (published by The Jewish Publication Society).

I also have a series of other texts (from a variety of cultural backgrounds) that tell the flood story, but I also know a site TalkOrigins that gives links to many of these stories. I thought that would be easier, since I assume many of you don’t have Mesopotamian and Hopi texts to hand.

(In the Torah Noah’s story begins at 6:9. The Christian version begins in the same place.)

This entry is from TalkOrigins.

The gods had decided to destroy mankind. The god Enlil warned the priest-king Ziusudra ("Long of Life") of the coming flood by speaking to a wall while Ziusudra listened at the side. He was instructed to build a great ship and carry beasts and birds upon it. Violent winds came, and a flood of rain covered the earth for seven days and nights. Then Ziusudra opened a window in the large boat, allowing sunlight to enter, and he prostrated himself before the sun-god Utu. After landing, he sacrificed a sheep and an ox and bowed before Anu and Enlil. For protecting the animals and the seed of mankind, he was granted eternal life and taken to the country of Dilmun, where the sun rises. [Hammerly-Dupuy, p. 56; Heidel, pp. 102-106]

Another site HistoryWiz provides a picture of the Sumerian tablet that carries this particular story. It also gives the summary of the story. It is remarkably like the Noah story in the Christian version of the Torah.

As you can see, flood stories are prevalent. It is a human wide story. One thing that interests me about the Sumerian version is that it is the oldest known version of the story. It is dated (see Encyclopedia Mythica Pantheon.org ) c.2000 BCE.

Textually this makes the flood story a recurring motif and as such it works exactly like a myth.

[Redzeppelin]

Genesis 1: 24 "And God said, Let the earth bring forth..." That would be THE earth, inclusive of Eden.

Genesis 1: 25 "And God made...every thing that creepeth upon the earth"

Genesis 2: 19 "And out of the ground the LORD God formed..." As Eden was part of the earth and God had already created "every thing that creepeth upon the earth," this would appear to be redundant.

And, again, the chronology differs.

Unconvincing.

If you've ever seen a garden, I assume you would admit that a garden appears different from the landscape surrounding it. Either way, the Bible makes it clear that ch. 2 is about the creation of Eden. As well, as I have already said, ch. 2 is not intended to be a chronological chapter - it tells many things out of order. The two chapters are not meant to be identical - they are complementary.

[MaryLupin]

Here is a neat little table to summarize the different accounts in creation.

"The first creation account is Genesis 1:1 - 2:3, and the second account is Genesis 2:4 - 2:25. If both accounts are interpreted literally, then the sequence of events are not synchronized."

First Genesis Account
Water
Vegetation
Sun, Moon, Stars
Birds and Fish
Animals and humans (male and female)

Second Genesis Account
No water (dry land)
Sun, Moon, Stars
Male
Animals and vegetation
Female

This is taken from LiteraryGenre

"The Creationists tend to interpret literally the first account and only the latter half of the second account. The real question is, why were there two separate creation accounts? Because there were two neighboring cutlural views regarding how everything came into being. Thus, the Hebrew people had been exposed to two cosmologies during their exile events."

The site goes on to talk about the neighboring creation accounts. It ends with this conclusion

"Conclusion - The Deeper Meaning
The deeper meaning of the Genesis creation accounts is this: the accounts served as a response to the idolatrous and polytheistic impersonal neighboring religions and cosmologies. The authors of these accounts were attempting to distinguish the personal monotheistic Hebrew religion by contrasting the infinite, omnibenevolent, loving God against the impersonal finite deities of the neighboring religions. All this was done with the power of allegory. Thus, the accounts were easy to remember so that they could be passed down through generations so that the Hebrew children would understand that while their neighboring cultures are bowing before statues, they are worshiping a true God who loves them."

I would classify this cultural interpretation. Interestingly, it does not once discuss the truth value of any of the mentioned beliefs.

[Niamh]

Who is your fact-checker?

For once i cant ask this question. I've also heard this before and i think its to Do with a cardinal in hte papal state who calculated how old the world was by going through the cronology of the old Testement. I think it was sometime during the middle ages but i dont know who it was either. When people started to do Archaeology and searching the world for antiquities during the 19th century many of their finding completely contradicted this "the world is only 6,000 years ago" theory of the church.
For example, Newgrange in Ireland, thousands of miles away from Mes- was built almost 6000 years ago around the time the bible believes the world began. The skulls and bones of paleolithic man found by the edges of where the great glaciars of the ice age halted were over 10,000 years old. not to mention the neanderthal. how can this be if the bible tells us otherwise?
For these things alone i believe that most of the old testement is the imaginations very talented people. But some of the old testement can be read as fact. The story of the exodus from Egypt is written in hiroglyphs on one of Ramses temples in Egypt.(with out the parting of seas and staffs turning into snakes stuff).

[Pendragon]

Bear with me, this is related to the subject. When God created the heavens and the Earth in Genesis, He divided water from land, what science calls Pangea The Supercontinent. Later, this landmass broke up into the world as we know it today, and that can be scientifically proven.

Given this, life begining in what we now know as Africa, and in what was called the Garden of Eden, need not clash. The land was all conected at one time. I think we can agree that the time frame of Genesis is not what it seems, and that there is a lot of time unaccounted for at all.

There is only one creation. The second one is where God makes bodies for the spirits He has created. "Made in His own image" "God is a Spirit". Not this flesh, made of the Earth, but the Spirit.

God Bless.

Pen

[JCamilo]

It is not a non-believer thing. The bible here in my house, sponsored by the catholic church states it is a allegorical myth.
I do not mind what C.S.Lewis said; A Myth is by definition the history of formation of a nation - The Genenis is exactly like this. There is considerable more humanity in Oedipus than in Abraham, Adam, Eve - Anyone would consider that the bible have texts that can be classificated as a myth.
And the reason of why the story is a myth is not even because they are contraditory - any kid know that there is no vegetation without sunlight, so first story can not be true. And the second story just leave man without food and since we know female and male are equal, with a bit of problem there.