At the same time as we have been discussing Genesis on a.r.c there has been a debate on teh Sydney Morning Herald Webdiary on the topic “Did the universe and life evolve, or was it specially created in 6 days?”

You can read the opening statements from both sides, with brief biographies of the participants, on http://webdiary.smh.com/archives/phil_uebergang/001149.html

The second statements are on http://webdiary.smh.com/archives/phil_uebergang/001165.html

As well as reading these, you might like to browse through some of the comments by people not involved in the actual debate. There are hundreds of these, accessible by links, and the overwhelming majority are against the “specially created in 6 days” position.

I am responding here to part of the second statement from the creationist side. The relevant bit is under the heading “Genesis creation” and reads, with the usual > indicating a quotation:

~~~

Genesis creation

Our opponents have raised the discredited old canard that Genesis 1 and 2 contradict each other. Clearly Jesus didn’t see it that way; He quoted both Gen. 1:27 and 2:24 in Matt. 19:3-6, referring to the same man and woman. While this won’t influence open atheists like Willis, Ritchie and Bowditch, one would think this would count for a professing Christian like Smith.

Of course, Jesus knew that Gen. 1:1-2:4a was a summary outline of all creation, while Gen. 2:4b ff. elaborated on the events in Day 6, unlike modern Skeptics, who disregard ancient near-eastern literature patterns. Oriental scholar Kenneth Kitchen pointed out that failure to recognize such distinctions `borders on obscurantism.’

And the correct translation of the waw consecutive wayyitser in Genesis 2:19, taking into account the context of Genesis 1, is the pluperfect, i.e. God `had formed’ the animals which He now brings to Adam to name. Hebrew scholar H.C. Leupold said that `the insistence of the critics upon a plain past [tense] is partly the result of the attempt to make chapters one and two clash at as many points as possible.’

~~~

Ken:

Whoever was responsible for this part of the post omitted the context. It is a response by Jesus to the question about divorce. It is stretching things quite a lot to say that because Jesus cited these two verses, when he was condemning the practice of easy divorce, that he took the whole of the rest of Genesis 1 and 2 as literal, scientific descriptions of “Genesis creation” as the heading claims.

It is interesting that in the second paragraph creationists refer, with approval, to “ancient near-eastern literature patterns.” This is precisely the point: we should read this as literature, not history with all the cultural baggage the word “history” carries with it in the 21st century.

But my major disagreement is with the third paragraph about the correct translation of Genesis 2:19. To be a bit more pedantic, the verbal form of wayyitser is Qal imperfect 3rd person masculine singular waw consecutive. The root verb is yatsar, and verbs beginning with yodh have a somewhat different conjugation to regular verbs. Lambdin in his “Introduction to Biblical Hebrew” even mentions that this particular form is somewhat irregular.

Before attempting to translate an unusual verbal form the occurrences of it should be checked. This is easy to do with a Hebrew concordance, and it turns out that this particular form (Qal imp. 3ms for short) occurs only twice in the whole of the Hebrew scriptures. Genesis 2:19 for the formation of animals, and Genesis 2:7 for the formation of mankind, both from the earth.

The verb should be translated in the context of Genesis 2, and not under the assumption that Genesis 1 gives a chronological account, and that Genesis 2 must agree with this assumed chronology.

This is quite clear if various translations are consulted. I have looked at King James (1611), the Revised Version (1885), the American Standard Version (12901), the Revised Standard Version (1952), and a whole string of modern translations (identified by initials only: if anyone wants these decoded ask me) JB, JPS, NEB, GNB, NIV, NRSV, NJB, REB, NAB. All of these, with one exception, used the same English verbal form in Gen. 2:7 and Gen. 2:19.

The one exception is the NIV. And this version is also different in translating lemino, leminah, leminehu in Genesis 1 by “after their kinds” while the others mostly have something like “different kinds of …”

Rather than `the insistence of the critics upon a plain past [tense] is partly the result of the attempt to make chapters one and two clash at as many points as possible.’ most scholars would insist that it is the task of translators to render the Hebrew using standard grammatical usages in the best way they can, given the differences between the grammatical structures of Hebrew and English, and then leave it up to commentators and expositors to make what they can of the resulting text. In this case, it is not the job of the translator, it is the job of the commentator/expositor to explain how Genesis 2 relates to Genesis 1. Theological concerns should be excluded from the translation process as much as possible, just as they are excluded from translation of other ancient documents.

I’m putting together something about the translation problems encountered in Genesis 1, and the literary structure of this chapter. I’ll post this, and a short item on Genesis 1 as history, written by Professor Francis Andersen, sometime next week.

I’ll also post a comment made by one of the participants to the SMH Webdiary debate as soon as I get permission to do that.

Salaam Ken Smith