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gluadys -> RE: There where more than two creations (4/27/2008 3:36:41 PM)
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ORIGINAL: drmark
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It is. But if you think Gen. 1-11 is historical narrative prose, rather than mythical narrative prose, you must have some criteria for deciding when narrative prose is historical rather than mythical. What criteria do you use to decide that a prose narrative is historical rather than mythical, legendary or plain old fiction? I have no informed opinion because I am not a Hebrew scholar. Are you? However, I have read several Hebrew scholars who show convincingly that the literary genre of Genesis 1-11 is identical to that of Genesis 12-50 based on context, grammatical syntax, original intent and other methods of hermeneutics. Here is a statement from Prof Gerhard Hasel:
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With these limitations of the principle of analogy in mind, it is not sound to reject the creation account as non-historical and non-factual because we know of no analogy at present. Genesis 1 contains singularities that may be perceived to be just as real, historical and factual as the singularities of another kind in the present or the past.
There are good reasons for maintaining that Genesis 1 is a factual account of the origin of the livable world. This record is accurate, authentic and historical. Nothing said about mythology, is there.
I am not a Hebrew scholar, though I am working on that. But I do have a background in literature with some basic knowledge of linguistics.
As far as I know, there are no linguistic or grammatical signals that determine whether a prose narrative is historical or one of many varieties of fiction. Perhaps this is most clearly seen in fiction which deliberately imitates historical reportage. In the novel, Phantom of the Opera, for example, the narrator portrays the story as backed up by historical documentation. There are "newspaper clippings", maps, and other documents attached to the main narration.
If the bookstore placed it in the history section instead of in the fiction section, an unwary purchaser might well think it was historical. Certainly, if some archeologist of the future found part of the text, without a clear indication that it was fiction, it might be taken for history.
But while this is a deliberate imitation of modern-style historical reporting, any narration will be judged on its historicity on factors other than grammar and syntax. Grammar and syntax are so fundamental to communication that they are the least likely factors of a language to determine genre.
Going back to Phantom of the Opera, the similitude of history was not provided primarily by the story itself, but by the pseudo-documentation attached to it. And this gives us a clue as to how we judge the historical value of a text: by multiple attestation of its content from other sources. We grant the historicity of an event when we have physical evidence of it, when we have documentary evidence for it from more than one independent source, and especially when we have documentary evidence from a source that would be interested in suppressing this history.
These are stringent criteria, and 90% or more of the bible does not meet them. Of course, that doesn't mean that so much of the bible is not history. Many ancient texts have been lost. Physical evidence has been eroded, decayed, destroyed. The fact that we have only one text that speaks of Abraham binding his son for sacrifice does not mean the event never happened. It only means we can never verify the event as history. We sometimes have no sure way to determine whether some stories are history or fiction or a combination of both. So, we have to act on faith in many cases.
Nevertheless, we can use some criteria. For example, do references in the story reflect what we do know of the historical period? Take, for example, Sarah giving Hagar to Abraham to bear a child or Abraham mentioning that without a son, his servant Eliezer would be his heir. We know that these customs were part of the legal tradition of ancient Mesopotamia, so although they don't specifically confirm the existence of Abraham, they provide a context in which he could be a historical individual.
This is the sort of thing that does not apply to the earlier chapters. Here we have people without historical contexts, many symbolic objects and images, etiological explanations of experience ("and that's why snakes have no legs") and literary parallels that are clearly mythological in intent apparently used and reworked by the biblical authors in a creative way.
And, of course, it is not just the first chapters of Genesis. The blending of various genres occurs throughout the biblical text right to Revelation. What is clear is that even when the bible contains history, the history is incidental to the purposes of the writers. They were not primarily historians or any sort of objective reporters. They were proclaimers, prophets, poets, preachers, with a message from heaven. And they used whatever came to hand as the literary vehicle of that proclamation.
The point is that the proclamation is true; the revelation of God is true--whether revealed in history or law or poetry or proverb or fictional drama. God is creative. Why should we deny creativity as part and parcel of inspired literature?
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