Hi Mike, you wrote:
>Something you wrote got me thinking. You wrote: God points to the vast
>countryside with Adam at His side and says, "I give you ... every tree that
>has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food."
>
>It seems to me that you have just pointed out a couple of other reasons for
>us to believe that Gen. 1:26-30 is not describing the creation of Adam and
>Eve.
>
>For the words God spoke in Gen. 1:28-30 He spoke "to them." The "them" being
>both "male and female." (Gen. 1:27) However, in Gen. 2 God gave His dietary
>instructions to Adam, when he was alone in Eden before Eve's creation.
>
>Also in Gen. 1 God told the people He had just created that He was then
>giving them every plant "on then face of the whole earth" as their food. Of
>course, we know "on the face of the whole earth" may have only meant "in the
>whole land." But still, God placed Adam in the garden of Eden and He told him
>that he was "free to eat from any tree in the garden" except for one. The
>first set of dietary instructions, given in Gen. 1, certainly seems to have
>referred to people who were then living in a much larger geographical area
>than Adam and Eve were living in. For God spoke of "the whole earth" or at
>least "the whole land" when he spoke to the people He had created in Gen. 1.
>But God spoke only of "the garden" when he spoke to Adam.
I'm sorry, my copy of Genesis is so worn out I can scarcely read the pages.
Does anyone know if Abraham actually made it to Canaan after he left Sumer?
We can agree, I think, that the garden of Eden had a tree in it that Adam was
to avoid, and everything else was available for both to eat. Exactly when God
spoke with Adam, and when he spoke to both is an open question.
Also, we have reasons to believe that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 originated with
separate writers, and were placed together in one narrative. The editor was
Moses, I believe, but Wellhausen thinks differently. However, just
as the gospel
writers reported different events in the life of Christ, and different versions
of the same events, we have no reason to believe that they weren't all
giving testimony to the same Jesus Christ.
Your idea that God had a conversation with a couple as they departed Africa
100,000 years ago, or at some other time in the distant past, is
novel, I admit,
but I think if you sat down and thought about it for awhile, you'd
have to admit
that it's farfetched at best. And we have a record of that conversation?
Plus, early men were meat eaters. So if God was talking, they
weren't listening.
>So far as my being "consistent" regarding understanding the meaning of the
>Hebrew words for "all" and "every," I think I am consistent. I believe those
>Hebrew words in their broadest sense unless I have compelling evidence that
>the Bible was using them in a more limited sense. In this case I have no such
>compelling evidence.
The "compelling evidence" must meet your standards, of course.
Yours in Christ,
Dick Fischer - The Origins Solution - www.orisol.com
"The answer we should have known about 150 years ago"
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