As a genealogist, you might be interested in the following asa article
that discusses the use of symbolic numbers in Genesis and especially in
the genealogies. I rather balk at trying to assign stories to truth or
myth categories as such a task would only make sense from a modernist
point of view. As was recently quoted by Iain, "in Jewish tradition,
the important question is not 'did it happen?', but 'what does it
mean?'" To try to fit any one story into "newspaper-factual" or
"mythical-symbolic" is to ignore the culture that didn't recognize such
distinctions.
(warning - PDF - 675 KB)
http://www.asa3.org/aSA/PSCF/2003/PSCF12-03Hill.pdf
Ken M.
>In pondering the other chapters of Genesis however, it
>seems to me that it cannot be wholly figurative or
>"mythic" though, because the details of the
>individuals, particular the genealogies given, appear
>rooted in a real history (I say this in part, because
>I am a genealogist and it strikes me as very odd that
>such details would be made up as part of a "parable").
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Received on Sun Jul 29 02:28:21 2007
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Sun Jul 29 2007 - 02:28:23 EDT