Re: The wrong horse in evolution education

Hello, Dick.

thanks for the interesting discussion. My response is intermingled below.

In a message dated 4/15/2006 5:40:53 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
dickfischer@verizon.net writes:
From all the evidence I would conclude that Dumuzi was a real person who led
a fabled life - a real Arnold Schwarzenegger type of guy who had a brief
encounter with Adapa who could be Adam. Gilgamesh gets no biblical mention, but
also had an interesting life touching on one of our biblical characters, Noah.
No one looks for ways to drive Dumuzi and Gilgamesh into antiquity because no
one cares. We don’t have any preconceptions about them. They aren’t wrapped
up in Bible doctrine. But because Adam has been reputed to be the ultimate
ancestor, Hugh Ross and others conjure up ways to get him back to within a
believable time frame.
But you know that in the process of transforming real people into myths, the
myths get reworked so many times that it is difficult-to-impossible to discern
what the original truth was. I wouldn't doubt that Dumuzi was a real person,
but the idea that he met Adapa comes from a second myth that has Adapa
entering heaven. In order to fill out the Adapa story, all the right characters in
heaven had to appear in the story, and so the mythological version of Dumuzi
would necessarily be incorporated into that tale. This appearance provides
absolutely no basis to think that the real Adapa ever met the real Dumuzi. While
they were probably both real, this myth referencing another myth is at least
two or three orders of magnitude removed from reality, and so you just can't
conclude that they ever knew each other. I think this is a useful illustration
of the limits of inferring truth from mythologies. Inferring across one order
of magnitude may provide some benefit, but two orders of magnitude is just
too large a leap.
 
 In Egypt, the pyramids of kings Mer-ne-Re and Nefer-ka-Re were inscribed
with a dedication dating to about 2400 BC, centuries before Abraham, and many
centuries before Moses. The text speaks of a first creation and a deified "Atum"
who was on a primeval hill arising "out of the waters of chaos." Among those
"whom Atum begot," according to the inscription, is one named "Seth."
Dick, this is very interesting! I'd like to know more about it.
I don't see that it distinguishes between your versus my view of Adam. I
agree with you that Abraham wasn't the first person to believe in the biblical
creation account. I'm sure there were people from the time of Seth or Enosh on
down who called on the name of Yahweh (Gen.4:26) and that somewhere along the
way the account of the garden of Eden became the early "canon" for these
peoples. That it could find its way to Egypt wouldn't surprise me.
That doesn't mean that I am convinced it really did find its way to Egypt,
however. First I have a question. I don't understand how we can tell the
pronunciation of names from an Egyptian inscription dated to 2400 BC, since
phonetic alphabets weren't invented for another 1000 years. As you know, they used
heiroglyphs at that time. How can we tell that a particular heiroglyph means
"Seth"??? I can understand that key figures like this Atum may show up again
in later inscriptions and allow us to compare the name to a phonetic form. Is
that how we know the heiroglyph means "Seth"? Was it translated for us into
phonetic form by later Egytians (more than 1000 years later), or does it come
to us by some other route?
Also, there is reason to believe that Moses wrote an account in Genesis 1
that had Egyptian influence, not just Mesopotamian influence. Some of what we
find in Genesis may have been crafted (by God and Moses) as polemic against
Egyptian polytheism, and what we find on these early inscriptions might be the
origin of some of that.
But in any case, the main point is that this Egyptian story doesn't
distinguish between your or my view of Adam. We both agree that early descendants of
Seth knew about the Garden of Eden account.
 Plus, what can you do with this verse to avoid a strictly father-son
relationship between Adam and Seth? Genesis 4:25: “And Adam knew his wife again; and
she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed
me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.”
I would read it as normal literary technique for that day in a very
compressed creation account. It tells us the good news that the descendants of Adam
were not limited to the failing line of Cain. There eventually came out from
Adam (from mankind, descended from Adam) a person named Seth. The momentousness
of this occaision called for its emphasis in the text using standard literary
techniques of that day.

Note that the next verse tells us that only when Seth's son Enosh was born
that men began calling on the name of the LORD. This is such a momentous
occaision in human history, that Eve is personified to point out how Seth at long
last replaces the last previous godly person who lived on the earth, Abel. Note
that the Bible doesn't actually say that Eve said this. "She said" was added
by the translators. Without the "she said" it could more easily be a poetic
personification as literary technique.

If the Adam of the Garden of Eden was calling on the name of the LORD, and if
he had been recently alive, then this verse makes no sense. The
momentousness of the occaision makes sense only if there was a long period of time had
elapsed when men **weren't** calling on the name of the Lord. This means there
must have been a very long gap between Adam and Enosh, perhaps between Adam and
Seth.

All through the Bible, the descendants of major patriarchs are spoken as if
they personify that patriarch. We find the Bible telling us what Jacob or Moab
or Esau has done, when really it means the descendants of those persons. We
even see this in the NT when the centurion came to Jesus and spoke with him,
but in another gospel it is his servants who came to Jesus and spoke with him.
Yet in the one gospel it sounds like a strict face-to-face meeting between
Jesus and the centurion, complete with first person dialog. This was just the
normative way of saying things to compress a story. It was clearly a part of
the early semitic mindset to treat peoples and groups this way. So it is not
too much of a stretch to think that Genesis 4:25 is likewise personifying Adam
and Eve through the events of "mankind" in general, long after Adam had died.

Plus, I hesitate to bring this up (and I hope it won't become a distraction),
but I suspect that Seth's actual father really may have been named Adam. I
suspect that this historical Adam, the father of Seth, was then reflected back
to become the figure representing the origin of all humanity. Since Adam was
a name that also meant "man", it would be natural to use this historical Adam
in this way. But after he was reflected back to represent the origin of
mankind, he was also attributed with many things that the historical father of Seth
didn't do. For example, Seth's literal father couldn't have sired Cain,
since the descendants of Cain eventually led to the invention of so many
remarkable achievements that came too early, like pastoral nomadism, which began in the
5th or 4th millenium BC among the steppe nomads. The way I see it, the
descendants of Seth were inspired by God to have this creation account that tells
the history of the world in brief, beginning with Cain -- cursed to be a
hunter-gatherer -- and leading to civilization. The history that they knew by oral
transmission then begins with Seth himself, which begins at the end of chapter
4 after the entire Cain line works out its accomplishments and curses in the
earlier part of chapter 4.
 All the principle characters are tied together in one verse. I could pile
on the legend of Adapa who has been suggested by writers other than me to be
Adam, but if Adam and Eve had Cain who built “Enoch,” Sumerian “Unug,” game
over.
I agree with you that Enoch was probably the same word as Unug, but I don't
believe that a single individual named Cain built it. I believe this is
another personification of the descendants, in the ordinary biblical fashion.
Cain's descendents -- the wanderers on the earth (hunter gatherers) eventually
invented civilization and build a city named Unug. It doesn't make any sense at
all to say that Adam's individual son did this. Cities don't get built in one
generation -- they develop slowly over hundreds of years, beginning with small
villages and enlarging to cities only after the infrastructure evolves to
support more people. How could Cain round up enough non-Adamites to live in his
city? Did he walk around through the hills and tell people that if they come
down to the arid but fertile plains to build irrigation ditches then they can
start to grow crops, and if they work fast enough then the crops will come in
before they starve in the first season? Did they all follow him down from the
hills and try it and discovered that it worked? That would be amazing for
anyone to accomplish such a feat; it would be far more amazing for a person who
had been cursed to wander and driven from the face of the earth so that he
could not practice agriculture. This whole scenario is crazy, because it makes
the curse on Cain completely null and void. If Cain was cursed to wander
because he couldn't do agriculture, then there is no way he could have personally
built Unug, a city that was completely dependent on irrigation and
high-intensity agriculture to support its people. Really, Dick, this is completely
implausible. You can't buy into this view that Cain as an individual built Unug
unless you just ignore the whole point of the biblical account. "Cain" simply
**must** have been a long line of people leading down from the earlier "Adam"
and leading to the founding of Unug.

This view does not disagree with anything else that you say in your book (as
I recall). It only separates Adam to an earlier age and leaves him undated.
Everything begining with Unug and Seth would still be actual history.
 Happy Easter!
 
Happy Easter to you to. He is risen!
Phil Metzger

 
Received on Sun, 16 Apr 2006 00:52:41 EDT