"Your initial premise assumes that saga is perforce 'non-historical.' This is
the either/or error I pointed out to Glenn some time ago."
and
"The ancient Hebrews were not either/or thinkers."
There are a couple of points you are missing here,Jim. Recent history has
shown that about 99% of the time when someone raises the mytho-poetry issue,
they then go on to use it to remove history from the scripture. This
correlation makes some like me suspicious of such efforts. If by mytho-poetry
you mean a true, historical event conveyed by means of poetry, I have no
problem with your view. If, OTOH you then use that poetry concept to attempt
to get out of the problems in Genesis 1, or to make the days into long ages,
then I have difficulty. (I know lots of people here interpret
the days as long periods, but that is not the way the passage was interpreted
by most throughout the ages. Yes I know that there were some who did.)
The second thing that I think you are missing is that regardless of the
culture, somethings ARE an either/or situation. The sun either shone in a
clear sky or it didn't. Today it either rained or it didn't. Yesterday your
child was born or he wasn't. Two years ago Hezekiah was king or he wasn't.
Genesis either happened as descibed or it didn't. Aristotle did not invent
logic, he merely cannonized what is already there.
Regardless of how the Hebrews viewed the Scripture, God, being able to foresee
the future world culture, in which Aristote's logic would become
predominant could have easily planned for this. That is, unless you think
that the Hebrew writer,because of his non-either/or thinking,could have
thwarted God in His feeble attempt to transmit data not just to the Hebrews,
but to all mankind in all cultures and all times.
Glenn