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Biblical plothole? (Adam and Eve v. Good and Evil)
(self.atheism)
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this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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You want a better plot hole?
Ask yourself one, really easy, simple question:
"Which came first? People? Or animals?"
Then read Genesis 1. Think you have the answer? Then read Genesis 2. ;)
According to Dan McClellen, Genesis 2 is a retelling of Genesis 1 revised according to the sensibilities of a later century, according to scholarly consensus. Of course, also according to scholarly consensus (and revealed to students in seminary) the bible is not univocal, not divinely inspired and not inerrant, even though many denominations assert these by fiat. (Otherwise they wouldn't give ministries authority to tell their flock not to be gay.)
It's not though. Genesis 1 is the Elohist creation myth, Genesis 2 is the Jahwist creation myth. They both just got jammed together.
This is why Genesis 1 has animals created first, and man and woman created at the same time, while Genesis 2 has man created first, then animals, then woman.
Two different mythologies.
it's also important to note that Gen 1 was pretty much intended as propaganda. it was riffing off other mythologies; except trying to one up them. "OUR god is so STRONG that he created the world ALONE. In SIX DAYS. and he NAPPED on the SEVENTH!!!"
It gave justification for a few of the earlier genocides, because their god was stronger than the other peoples, so it's all cool.
Which is interesting, because the very first line... Gods is plural. That carried over into Latin, then was singularized after that.
Which makes sense if you consider the commandments:
Exodus 20:2-3
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me."
It's acknowledging the existence of other Gods, but I am YOUR God.
Oh. That’s another thing.
The exodus didn’t happen. Or, rather, the Israelites were always there. What most scholars think is that refugees came up from Egypt and their story was adopted as they assimilated into the broader culture .
Yup, yup. There's no evidence the Jews were enslaved in Egypt and the Sunday school stories about slave labor for the pyramids is equally nonsense.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/who-built-the-egyptian-pyramids-not-slaves
https://historum.com/t/egypt-knew-no-moses-evidence-on-why-exodus-never-happened.194987/
these days my favorite sunday school lessons include cute, featherless dinosaurs.
i know. I know. but who doesn't want to live in a world with cute featherless dinos?
https://youtu.be/uguXNL93fWg
to be fair, I did specific "featherless".
(also, that video now just made the rounds to all three other people working in my office.... Eh. it's friday. we mostly bullshit and wait for something to go wrong.)
I get it, but the idea of a pack of raptors singing "Let the bodies hit the floor" made me giggle.
Monotheism (as opposed to monolatrism) is a much more recent thing than the scripture itself, an invention of the middle ages at earliest.
Also, plants come before the sun in Genesis 1, which just sounds like bad planning on God's part.
Terms like Elohist are not used anymore by scholars. The documentary hypothesis collapsed in the 70s…
It stems from how God is referenced in Hebrew in the two chapters. Genesis 1 is Elohim. Genesis 2 is Yahweh.
I know that, but the idea that behind these different names of God are different authors/schools is not accepted by mainstream historians nowadays.
In this particular case, it seems evident that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 have different authors, but not the Elohist and the Jahvist, in that you can't necessarily link this two passages to others in the Bible which would use the same names for God.
I tend to see in Genesis 1, with the emphasis on the fact that the man and the woman are created as the same time (verse 27) an answer to Genesis 2, which in that case would have been older. In the Bible, a lot of texts are answers to other texts. It totally breaks the idea of inerrancy, but it makes the Bible a very interesting polyphony.
My favourite is when god says “let there be light” a couple of days before he creates the sun and stars.
Those are the Generation 3 stars. You know the big ones that made everything else. He got around to making Sol about 8 billion years later.
I'm pretty sure stars then were pinpricks in the firmament in the sky, so a huge lightbox.
While we have archeological data suggesting that the Hellenics and the Egyptians had strong models of the planets (they were both big into astrology, so there was a drive to develop enough math to predict where the planets would be next week or next year), there's also a difference between what the intelligentsia knew about nature and what the laity believed. Socrates' death sentence was for impiety, that is, challenging the temples. (See also Galileo)
But Egyptian history is deep, and I don't know how Egyptian cosmology intersects with Hebrew cosmology on the timeline. Nor Hellenic cosmology, for that matter. Also, depending on the time, esoteric knowledge might be disseminated or kept secret. Astrologists were far less likely to be burned for witchcraft if the high lords couldn't easily replace them. Sometimes the sun was a big orb that guided the motions of the planets, and sometimes it was a chariot driven by Helios or Apollo across the heavenly firmament resting on the shoulders of Atlas (or Hercules, for a day).
Curiously, circa 14th and 15th centuries, as the Islamic Golden Age was dusking, there was a surge of religious prosecutions and astronomers and algebraists were accused and executed for sorcery in Araby and Persia. (This golden age is why a lot of our night-sky stars have Arabic names, like Aldebaran, Deneb, Betelgeuse, Mizar, and Rigel -- List on Wikipedia ).
It tells us while our best cosmological model might have improved with time, the common notions of the size and shape of the universe fluctuated with social movements, sometimes looking more like Carl Sagan's model, and sometimes looking like a toddler's imagining of the night sky.