are you familiar with the concept of the '2 stories of creation in Genesis

written by different people at different times, woven into the Creation story in Genesis? Yeah. What's your point?

the first (which is the most recent) where humanity is created last on the sixth day and in the image of God...and the second story (which is much older) where Adam is created first, then the animals and then Adam is split so he has a companion ...

the two different accounts are quite plain, not hidden. I never have gotten an answer on what the fundamentalists make of the conflicting accounts of creation. It's a nice little proof of why the Bible is not a science text.

before all the beasts and names them as God creates them; in the other, the beasts are created first and man is created on the sixth day.

Basic Bible 101 stuff.

woman is created eluded you, as it does most men. In one story Adam and Eve are created at the same time, while in the other, Eve is made from one of Adam's ribs. In Protestant Sunday schools, guess which version is always told to little girls? If you surveyed Americans, a very large percentage of them would believe that women have more ribs than men "because Adam gave one to Eve."

We are all pretty much people, aren't we?

I first realized that when I worked in a grocery store in highschool. However it came up the adult workers I was talking to absolutely believed women had one more rib. Two were butchers, seemed like they should get anatomy some. I suggested they count their own and their wife's ribs!
One actually did that and then decided it could be just Adam missing a rib.

Genesis always makes me think of sports. One of my kids favorite jokes was "When is baseball first mentioned in the bible?" Genesis 1:1 In the big inning

There's also a US state mentioned in the Bible:

"Noah looked out of the Ark-an'-saw..."

A survey by the University of Michigan's excellent polling group with a survey by Andrew Greeley found that this *isn't* the case. That little Protestant legend is almost dead, thank goodness

in the bible, if it's read correctly. "Adam" was a person -- he didn't become a man until "Eve" was created.

Very familiar with the two versions. The hypothesis is that there were at least two story traditions in the Semitic tribes which melded into the Isrealite tribe. Probably there were many more. The significance is nil, however, if you have actually read the bible. It is clearly the work of many hands, from many perspectives, over a long period of time.

... sigh ...

mythical explanations of origins...

the enuma elish is generally placed at the beginning of the first millenium b.c., or not earlier than 1200 b.c. At that time, Moses was long dead, the tribes were in Canaan carving out a niche in the highlands. It is unlikely they were not in possession of a creation story or two, and the Babylonian captivity (where they were certainly exposed to the Enuma Elish) was still far in the future.

Some really good research has been done over the last decade or so by Dr. David Noel Freedman and Dr. Wiegl that the two stories were purposeful grafts redacted during and after the Babylonian Exile to show the core theological *differences* between Judaism and the surrounding religions. The strong paralles between the creations stories, flood narrative (also two different stories edited together) and the birth of Moses are written in such a way to illustrate both very sophisticated theological concepts AND how those concepts differ from everyone else of the day.

Fascinating stuff, and it makes the bible *much* more interesting. Far from a generation accretion of myths, it is a carefully edited series of works with specific goals made by writers and editors with a complex and sophisticated understanding of their world, literature, and comparative literature.

The point is several lessons, including God is the Creator; humanity is created in God's image in that we are self-aware and capable of making moral judgments; and humanity has a free will apart from that of God (we are not mere puppets in God's hands, but free agents).

Gen 1 and Gen 2.

Seems like Gen 1 was a beta version so Gen 2 came along with a patch/missing rib/mate

ON Edit:
I have other thoughts but the above is not a serious one. Not meant to offend. Never made good sense to me though.. Not as a literalist anyway, but of course I am not a literalist.

Genesis itself is a compromise or a pact between those who called God
"Yaweh" and those who called God "Elohim". Both versions of creation are in the text, back to back.

By the way A is the well known

In the begining God created the heaven and the earth....

B changes many of hte orders of creation and other cute things... and it is always useful to confuse your neighborhood freeper.

;-)

Oh and bad me, the best part is

A... adn God created man in his image

B... and the GODS created man in THEIR image.

Trust me when you go into detail with your neighborhood freep it CAN BE a riot

Or at least that's what happened when I brought it up there once, hee hee hee.

I always enjoy watching the metnal gymnastics required to reconcile it.

;-)

the rest of the first 5 books of the bible (a/k/a "The Book of Moses" or "The Penteteuch" or "The Torah") which were not completed until about 430 bc, when Ezra brought them back from Iran after the Babylonian Captivity. (On edit - maybe "ALL" is too strong a word. Let's say "nearly all.")

By 970 BC when the first version was written down, the twelve tribes--reputed progeny of Jacob, a/k/a "Israel" had settled into two semi-hostile camps.

One extended from about the northern tip of the Dead Sea southward and westward. It was known as Judea and comprised just two tribes: Judah and Benjamin. From it we get the term "Jew."

The other comprised the remaining 10 tribes who occupied the area to the north and east of Judah. It was known as "Israel."

The separation was a result of the dictatorial harshness of Solomon, David and their successors--the original kings--of the tribe of Judah.

Genesis was written as a tribal "history," a summary of the tribal tales that had been handed down over the generations. The other books were not written until much later.

The first version of the creation myth was a Judean version. Almost 200 years later the Israelite version was written. There are two versions of many of the stories. They are similar but different enough to leave tracks which scholars have used to identify the various authors. (One brilliant scholar, Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman has written a book called "Who Wrote The Bible?" in which he is able to identify parts of sentences by their various authors!)

Unfortunately for the Israelites, shortly after their version was written down the Assyrians (from roughly today's Turkey) came along and conquered them in 722 bc, scattering the 10 tribes which became "lost" according to legend. Of course many of these people simply remained and intermarried with their conquerors. Others migrated south and were reabsorbed in Judea.

Two hundred years later, Judea was conquered by the Babylonians or Persians (who then and still call their land "Iran").

Genesis says that Jehovah was one of the Elohim -- just one of them.

So much for the "one God" claims of Chritianity. Their own book -- in chapter 1 -- makes hash of that claim.

You have to wonder what ever happend to all the other Elohim...

I find the history of the bible fascinating. Thanks for sharing.

is but one manifestation of the 'Documentary Tradition', a scholarly insight into the authorship and derivation of the biblical narrative ... this opposes the orthodox 'Mosaic Tradition', which portrays Moses as the author of the first five books ....

I was going to expound extemporously about these ideas .... but I found a website that does it so wonderfully and clearly .. I will post a few paragraphs from there, and you can read the rest at your leisure ...

To Wit:

-snip-

As time went on, however, scholars became increasingly skeptical of the idea of Moses as single author. Among their objections:

- Several stories are repeated, with different characters or different emphasis (called "doublets"). For instance, there are two creation stories (Gen 1 and Gen 2). There are three stories of a patriarch traveling among pagans and pretending his wife is his sister. There are two stories of Moses striking a rock to produce water. There are two versions of the Ten Commandments (one in Exodus, one that Moses recaps in Deuteronomy) with slightly different wording. There are, in fact, a lot of these doublets.

- There are internal inconsistencies. The number of days of the Flood story don't add up right. At one point, Noah takes two of each animal; at another point, he takes two of some, seven of others. Joseph is sold into slavery to Ishmaelites in one verse, to Midianites a few verses later. The Mountain of Revelation is sometimes called Sinai and sometimes Horeb. Moses' father-in-law is sometimes called Yitro and sometimes Ruel, and so on.

Scholars in late 18th century Germany noted that in most of the duplicated stories, one set described God using the Hebrew word Elohim (usually translated "God") while the other set tended to use God's four-lettered Name Y-H-W-H (usually translated "Lord," sometimes miscalled "Jehovah.") This gave rise to the theory that there were two different authors, one called E and one called J (German for Y), whose works were somehow combined to form a single text.

Later analysis of the grammar, vocabulary, and writing style provided evidence for two other authors--called P for the Priestly author (mostly Leviticus, and lots of the genealogy) and D for the Deuteronomist, since the book of Deuteronomy seemed different (grammatically and politically) from the earlier books. The multiple-author view has come to be called the "Documentary theory."

We interject at this point to say that traditionalists have answers to all the points raised by Documentary scholars. The E-word for God is used when God's justice is predominant; the J-name is used when God's mercy is predominate. The doublet stories are complementary, offering different interpretations and insights. For example, each of the creation stories has a different emphasis, one on the physical universe and one on the pre-eminence of mankind. Textual differences (such as in the different versions of the Ten Commandments) make a point by comparison. For example, "Remember the Sabbath" and "honor the Sabbath" means to do both.

Documentary theorists see a much more complicated story, with four different texts by four different authors (although some think "schools" of authors might be responsible for each text rather than a single author). These were later combined by an editor, called the Redactor. The Redactor sometimes put the different authors' stories one after the other (as with the creation stories) and sometimes interwove them (as with the two stories of Noah's Flood and of Joseph's mistreatment by his brothers). The Redactor also added comments like "Now it came to pass, after these things . . ." as a transition between sections.

Scholars differ on when the various authors wrote and when the Redaction occurred. No one today knows who the initial authors were--the predominant view is that many of the stories were handed down orally for generations before being written down. It's not clear which texts are older (although the Song at the Sea in Exodus 15:1-8 is usually acknowledged as among the oldest verses), or which author wrote which verses. Nor is there agreement on the gender of the authors. Some scholars believe the J-writer was a woman, as described in The Book of J by David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom (1990).

-snip-

This is a fascinating analysis, and a good exposition to the documentary thesis of biblical scholarship ...

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbible1.html

Enjoy ...