Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Joel Stucki" <joel AT stucki.ws>]

On 7/4/06, kenneth greifer <greifer AT hotmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe in the first creation story the animals were made for their own kind,
> but this time G-d was going to make a help-mate for Adam, so He made the
> animals again from the ground, and He wanted Adam to declare which will be
> for him.

That's a perfectly good explanation but you have to find a way to
reconcile it with 2:5 which, while not explicitly mentioning animals,
seems to indicate that there is no life on earth at the start of this
story.
> I am not saying that there were two creation stories stuck together like a
> lot of anti-Bible or anti-Torah critics say, but a second creation of the
> animals within the 6 days of creation for a specific purpose.
Please don't feel this way. There is room for a lot of opinions in the
matter. Saying that exploring a different opinion makes someone
anti-Bible or anti-Torah just divides people and fosters bad feeling.
Following that line of thought we will soon arrive at a set of
orthodox interpretations such that if anyone disagrees they are
castigated as anti. Where would be the point of scholarly inquiry
then?  Personally, I love the Tanakh and I accept that there are
multiple creation stories. Many commentators have noted the same thing
since very early times and developed a variety of explanations as to
why. If we accept the Torah as written by Moshe, it is not
inconceivable that in relating stories that where thousands of years
before his time he may have drawn on multiple familiar legends to tell
the story, editing each one to fit the principles he was trying to
teach but keeping in context of the tales his people were familiar
with.

The Bible is full of these multiple accounts and often the details are
different. Sometimes like the stories of Sarah's abduction by Pharoah
and Abimelek it is unclear if they may have originally been the same
story or if history repeats itself. Other times like the transfer of
the birthright from Esau to Jacob several completely different stories
are given to explain the same thing. And like many examples between
Kings and Chronicles or like the vision of Saul of Tarsus in the
Christian New Testament it is very clear that it is the same story
told multiple times but with different details.

It would have been easier if God had chosen one man to write the whole
story in a cross-refenced encyclopedic format and released it to the
world complete with a sans serif font, MD5 hash and a pdf format but
then what would we do for fun.

Joel Stucki