RE: The wrong horse in evolution education

Hi Dick, you wrote:

> It isn’t the case that ‘adam “must always refer to Adamites and ‘ish
> always refers to people not descended from Adam.” There are other rules
> that come into play. Man and woman or man and wife is always ‘ish and
> ‘ishah, whereas man in conjunction with animals is always ‘adam. I
> don’t know who made the rules but the Bible writers follow them.
>
> Furthermore, just as all Americans are human beings, not all human
> beings are Americans (thank goodness). I can just as easily say Randy
> Isaac is a righteous American as I can say he is a righteous man. (He
> would probably prefer to be called a forgiven man, however.) But the
> point is his status doesn’t change according to how I wish to describe
> him.

In this I agree.

> God calls Ezekial “bene ‘adam.” In this instance, “son of man” says no
> more about him than it would if the Genesis 6:4 “giants” were so called,
> or pharoh of Egypt. It means significantly more if we understand that
> he had a royal bloodline and God was calling attention to that.

Yes, I agree that God's calling Ezekiel "ben 'adam" means much more than just
calling him a human being. In fact, of the 97 occurrences BibleWorks found, 93
apply to Ezekiel and one to Daniel (used in a similar way). One applies to
Israel (the people, Ps. 80:17). But two more may be synonymous to "human" (Job
16:21; Ps. 146:3). In this count, I didn't include the 4 irrelevant "not" cases
in Jeremiah, cf. my last post.

> Beyond exegesis, however, I would consider it strange if you and I had
> greater awareness of Adam’s place in the world than did the Bible
> writers themselves. If Adam and his immediate family were surrounded
> and in contact with at least one different culture from the beginning
> they certainly must have been aware of it.

Of course, we wouldn't. But isn't it our part to find out, as much as is
possible, what the Adamites' situation was, as fully as possible taking into
account what they and the others wrote?

> And if they were aware of it wouldn’t the Scriptures reflect that?
> Could I be guilty of looking for confirmation where it doesn’t exist?
> Sure. But I would find it harder to believe that the Adamites, later
> Semites, also called Accadians, who had to know they weren’t alone in
> the world, left it out of the inspired text.
>
> In Accadian literature, frequent references are made to the
> "black-headed" people, as in this verse: "May his words endure, not to
> be forgotten, in the mouth of the black-headed, whom his hands have
> created."
>
> The "black-headed" refers to the polytheistic Sumerians. Here is an
> example from Accadian poetry: ...

Here, as well, I would agree with you - here you are the specialist among us. Of
course, I wouldn't place Accadian literature on the same level as Genesis, but
you wouldn't either.

>>"Thus, even if you insist on calling only (biological) descendents of
>>Adam 'real' humans created 'in the image of God', certainly all
>>presently living humans are included, and perhaps even all the way back
>>to a few hundred years after Adam."<<
>
> I think I addressed this earlier too, but let me restate it here to
> avoid confusion. Everybody who belongs to the family of Homo sapiens is
> a “real” human. We have a long history going back over a million years.
> The only question I have is whether or not it would be consistent with
> Genesis and the rest of the Bible to think that every person who
> breathed air for the last million years could be said to be “created in
> the image of God,” or is it a more exclusive term pertaining to those in
> the covenant line from Adam and now includes today the followers of
> Christ.

I don't think being "created in the image of God" (what I called "real" humans)
is synonymous with the paleontological terms "Homo" (going back over 2 million
years) or even "Homo sapiens" (going back either half a million or about 160,000
years, depending on the scholars). Perhaps it is closer to "H.sapiens sapiens",
arriving in Europe around 40,000 years ago, earlier in Israel.

> And it’s just a question. I’m not going to the mat over it.
> Especially, this close to Easter.

So I wish you a very happy Easter time! We newcomers will celebrate it with our
brothers and sisters in Christ among the African, Asian, Australian, and
American aborigines.

Peter

-- 
Dr. Peter Ruest, CH-3148 Lanzenhaeusern, Switzerland
<pruest@dplanet.ch> - Biochemistry - Creation and evolution
"..the work which God created to evolve it" (Genesis 2:3)