Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Bill Rea <bsr15 AT cantsl.it.canterbury.ac.nz>]

Vadim wrote:-

>I mean, Peter, I don't defend that translation 100%. But I don't believe
>that narrators of the Torah were so stupid as to insert two contradictory
>accounts of creation in two adjacent chapters. So I am inclinded to read
>Gen2:7 not as creation, but as sending the man forward to a task, and
>that task seems to be irrigation. With that exegetical need in mind, I
>try to read Gen2:5-7. Making a man ou of dust, breathing life into his
>nostrils, and putting two contradiction creations nearby seems to make no
>less tortured reading.

What if there is a third way? Instead of the writer(s) being intelligent
and creating a non-contradictory account of creation *OR* being stupid
and cutting and pasting in contradictory accounts from different sources
he/they could have been intelligent and still have put two accounts
together.

If you will bend your understanding of the texts to suit your
exegetical needs then you become the Hebrew Bible's teacher
not its student.

The documentary hypothesis often gets bad press among believers
because it appears to concentrate on finding the seams in the
text where the bits were joined. But if you assume the writer/redactor(s)
of Genesis had a purpose in joining these accounts, then the task is
to understand what they are telling us. As the old saying goes the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Bill Rea, IT Services, University of Canterbury \_
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