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To: Vicomte13
To return to your point about decendants of Adam, the traditional view would require Cain's wife to be his sister, or perhaps niece, grand-niece, et al.

I know I'm not giving you the traditional view. When Genesis is translated, "adam" (lowercase) is translated "man" in Genesis 1, yet in Genesis 2 we find "Adam" (uppercase) as a given name.

Cain was forced away from God's face by his actions. He killed his brother before the laws were given, proving he "knew" evil, yet it wasn't a sin. Wouldn't a sister, niece or grand-niece also have to have committed some kind of evil to also be sent out? Why is it easy to impute relatives, but impossible to impute people who weren't relatives?

803 posted on 02/01/2007 1:30:07 PM PST by GoLightly
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To: GoLightly

"When Genesis is translated, "adam" (lowercase) is translated "man" in Genesis 1, yet in Genesis 2 we find "Adam" (uppercase) as a given name."

You have spoken truly when you have said "When Genesis is translated". Because, of course, in ancient Hebrew there are no upper or lower case letters, just letters (there aren't any punctuation marks, including quotations marks, either). So, any time that a capitalization of a word makes a difference in understanding, or a punctuation mark, it's a gloss, a translator's choice as to meaning. I personally think the best translation from the Hebrew, in the sense of being the most exact and literal account from the Hebrew into English, is the Jewish Publication Society's translation of the TaNaKh, the Hebrew Bible, from the Masoretic Text. (I don't think this is the most authoritative translation, of course, because I think the Catholic Church is inspired in what it does by the Holy Ghost, so I think that the Catholics' translations into English from a recension made from both the Masoretic Text and the most ancient manuscripts of the Greek Septuagint is, in fact, the most accurate and authoritative transmission of God's word into English, but that is a separate issue, based upon the question of authority which always lies at the heart of any religious discussion.)

I don't really think the ancient Jews who wrote down the various traditions and synthesized them into Genesis had any intention of making a difference between the Adam of Genesis 1 and the Adam of Genesis 2. Certainly there's no distinction possible with the Hebrew letters of the Masoretic Text or the Greek of the Septuagint.

So, as you might expect, I think that the capitalization/decapitalization business is simply a decision imposed on the text by modern translators trying to meet the demands of modern theology. The NIV's purposeful assertion of "had" into the crucial text in Genesus 2 is - it is clear to me - an effort to make the text fit with Genesis 1, to MAKE it more accurate and exacting, in English, than it really IS, in Hebrew, because of the theological obsessions of the folks who translated it.

But then you know that I think the creation story in Genesis is a recounting of Jewish myth, whose theological purpose is to describe the origin of mankind and the world in the will of God.

I definitely agree with Jews that a key point of the genealogies of the Noahide descendants was to show that all of mankind descended from one common parent: Noah, and that all mankind, therefore, are directly (if distantly) related, by "blood".

In the Biblical story, the only survivors of the flood were Noah, his wife, and Noah's sons and their wives.

Now, his wife was not of Noah's blood, but any further children she may have had would have been. His sons were his direct descendants, and given that every male on earth was either Noah or a descendant of Noah, then every human being after the flood is a direct descendant of Noah. Which means that Jesus is our cousin by blood, because Mary is our cousin by blood, inescapably so.

If one actually takes the Noahide story literally.
Of course I don't.
I think that most of the Old Testament is Jewish tradition.
The divine inspiration in there is "Love your neighbor as yourself, and love God above all", what Jesus said it was about.

I think that the Earth was formed, not from a bubble in the abyssal waters, but from the congealing by gravity of masses of hot gasses, not over 6 days but over billions of years. I think the universe was around several billions of years before that, and had its origins in the "Big Bang", which was God's moment of creation of the universe, not at all in the sequence of Genesis. I think that most of the stars long preceded the earth, and weren't made and fixed in the firmament as lights for men. I don't think there are floodgates in the firmament through which water once came to flood the world, nor could come, because I don't think there is any water out there beyond space. I think that mankind descended from primates over the course of long periods of time and settled out to people the world.

I think this because the physical and fossil record, although imperfect, are reasonably good, and because I make the uniformitarian assumption. If I reject the uniformitarian assumption, then I certainly could have God make the world in 6 days, and make man whole, but I still find deep contradictions in the text of Genesis which still make the test fail for me as LITERAL history.

As far as Cain's wife goes, remember that these people lived for hundreds of years and were very fertile. In hundreds of years, a woman can have hundreds of children, and those hundreds of children can themselves have hundreds of children. With no rival humans to fight, human settlement could go swiftly, and in time Cain could find himself near to a far edge of settlement and ensnare a girl for his wife...or just capture one and take her as a slave. OT morality is indifferent to the sexual rape of subordinate women for the most part (nobody asks Hagar if she wants to sleep with Abraham. She is handed over to Abraham for sex, because she's a slave. Then she's tossed out with her kid to die, later, again by Sarah. Pretty base treatment really.) There's no reason to believe that an aggressive man like Cain wouldn't simply grab a girl by the hair and take her as his wife.



Cain was forced away from God's face by his actions. He killed his brother before the laws were given, proving he "knew" evil, yet it wasn't a sin. Wouldn't a sister, niece or grand-niece also have to have committed some kind of evil to also be sent out? Why is it easy to impute relatives, but impossible to impute people who weren't relatives?


805 posted on 02/01/2007 2:03:16 PM PST by Vicomte13 (Et alors?)
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