If Genesis is Metaphorical, what's the metaphor?

i believe just about everyone i've ever heard talk about it, talks about as (a history of) fictionalized tradition, much like genesis.

think i've heard of it. and i see your point.i'll give it some thought and research.

yes, but does it include works of fiction, designed to be works of fiction? is "jurassic park" history? "the da vinci code?" "catcher in the rye?"art in general (and literature is art) has a very loose definition, sure. but the genres of it usually have qualify factors, even if the line is a little fuzzy. while i might group a kandinsky with a pollack, i probably wouldn't group either with a giger or a mucha. nor would i group any of those with ansel adams, or a sculpture by michaelangelo. or a song by the beatles.you can usually tell what KIND of style something is. and genesis is written like fiction.

please define the other factors. because brian has already ruled out factuality. so what if your rhyme happens to be true, in some respect? i'm not convinced they're different.

i see not imitation. i see several references to real places and events. but that's a different matter. and since genesis was written several hundred years after those events, i think your question has been answered. i am utterly convinced that god has nothing to do with the bible. however, i am unable to rule out satan's role, as the key test of MY faith has been understanding the bible.

ok. let's take american pie.clearly a song, not trying to be history. now suppose it was really written about wolfgang amadeus mozart. not only would it be 400 years out of date, but it would be completely anachronistic. there wasn't even an america then, for it to be called american pie, and mozart was from the wrong country.this is the problem we have with genesis. it's at least 600 years out of date, full of anachronisms, and generally records the events with improper national origins. yes, but if they were drawn by 18th century frenchmen playing a joke, what would we learn from that?of course, we can learn something fro, anything. and just about anything can have historical value to it. but that does not make it a history. and being a history does not make it history. ask a high school history teacher ifyou really have to remember the dates for the test.the historical style for the period and region generally has to do with the reigns of kings:

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1Ki 14:25 And it came to pass in the fifth year of king Rehoboam, [that] Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem:

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that's a date marker. it's not as good as a definitive calendar, and it sometimes takes a little while to figure when something occured, but that is how almost every culture in the region wrote their histories at the time.is there any such verse in genesis?order does not dictate history. every story has order. no, but being filled with mistakes, and more importantly contradictions, is a good indication that historical accuracy was not the primary goal.for instance, in the recent movie "king arthur" which was billed as striving for historical accuracy, it showed arthur and his knights riding into battle on horses. they could do this because they had stirrups. stirrups were not invented until several hundred years after the life of the real arthur, and so high ranking roman soldiers would ride to the battle on their horses, but get off to fight. this was actually THE deciding factor at the battle of hastings in 1066. had the anglo-saxons had knowledge of stirrups, they might not have lost to the norman invaders. (this is actually the origin of tolkien's rohirim, btw)minor faux pas. but that's ok. they wanted to make a good movie, and nobody really cared. but my mother, with a masters in classic roman and greek literature, caught it, even if no one else did.now compare that to le morte d'arthur and other "knight in shining armor" stories of arthur. how historical do you think those are? written after the fact, with absolutely no basis in the real history?now, what about genesis, and camels? it tells us a lot about the society that collected it and wrote it, but very very little about the time it's set in.

we so failed that exam. lol.and yes, that's what my mom's degree is in. classics. and yes, she is a pain to have around. but that's not really related to having a masters in classics.

the differences in the bible go a little beyond spelling. you know that, you were in the class with me.and besides, there is debate as to the authorship of shakespeare.

yes, i'm well aware of what "american pie" is really about. here's another tidbit to ponder:one the night kurt cobain shot himself, tori amos was playing a concert. when she was informed of the news, she played two songs: american pie by "don mcclean," and "smells like teen spirit" by nirvana.she didn't change the words to american pie. but here it's clearly a tribute to a completely different musician. tell me, is it still historical of the life and untimely death of buddy holly? if it can be about something totally different, because it really has not technical details, is it really historical at all?similar argument with elton john and "candel in the wind." no. i do not. if the primary intention of the work is to entertain an audience, then treating it as a factual history will give you entirely the wrong impression. true, but genesis does NOT tell us anything about the people in the story, only the people who wrote it. it does convey history in that aspect. but it is incorrect to think of it as historically accurate. and *I* am saying that it doesn't matter at all, because aspects of the writing indicate that recording historical events was not the goal of genesis AT ALL. rather, it was to record the history traditions of the people. reading it as some window on what really happened with abraham and isaac is silly.invalid? heck, i don't know. but that's NOT THE POINT.

the first is an attempt at recording something (beit events or traditions) and is obviously subject to error. the second implies events that actually happened.when people ask if genesis is history, that's what they mean. i'm trying to rectify the problem we've been having of colloquial uses here. take a college class. high school classes simply don't cover the neccessary material in ANY area. dates (or at least a way to keep track of time) is an integral part of the study of history.there are books similar to genesis that keep track of date, btw. jubilees is a good example. but the date-keeping is very obviously artificial. it's an attempt by later hebrew authors to make the events of genesis into a history. every lesson in history is dependent on dates, location, and culture/people involved. separate yourself from this idea that it's THE BIBLE for a second here. we have a collection of stories that involve things like talking snakes, god confusing people because they built a sky scraper, a big boat with two of EVERYTHING, and someone dying because they pulled out. is this a history? just read it and ask yourself objectively.are you sitting on the couch watching "troy" and thinking it's a history? do you read beowulf, and think it's a history? you wanna talk unsupportable, try supporting the logic that says these things are. what about it?it's not written to be accurate. it's not written to record events. it's written to record traditions. maybe these people really existed. maybe they didn't. who knows? no, that's not what i'm doing at all. i'm not looking at going "was there a tower of babel? yes, ok, moving on. was there a flood? no? ok, that rules the whole book out."i'm looking it and saying "this section contradicts this section. these were written by two different people. whoever put them together didn't care about which was right, because being right didn't matter."see the difference? genesis *IS* literal. it's just historically unsound. i believe the goal of this thread is to challenge the notion that genesis is anything BUT literal. if arthur was a real person, which he probably was, he lived about 400 ad. this is well before castles and suits of armor. the depiction of arthur in the movie "king arthur" is actually pretty close to everyone's best guess.sure, malory used some old stories. and sure they had some historical roots. but look at the words you used: legend. myth. not an accurate portrayal by any means. maybe some of the themes are even there, but in and of itself, le morte d'arthur is a work of LITERATURE and not SCHOLARSHIP. and this is the difference i'm trying to present with genesis.(btw: i am fully willing to admit the p sections of genesis should probably be considered a history, although the whole book is not) but we do know the sources that comprised genesis. know how? because whoever compiled genesis simply copied the sources. that's why there are contradictions. they mere obviously more concerned with the integrity of the source than the accuracy to real life.

j being a single person and j being a group of people makes no difference in my mind. personally, i think j probably was plural. i'm pretty certain p was. (if anything sounds like it was written by committee, it's p) no. you can't really. but what does that have to do with my point? maybe j really thought he was recording real events. but i suspect not. j and e in particular are told like folk tales, not history, even apart from the book as a whole. dunno. look to the surrounding people to find out the context. ugarit in particular. you won't find actual sources, but you'll get an idea. does j itself contain any historical material? no. e might, and p does. does it matter if the source j was reading thought it was telling actual events, if j did not? does it matter? isolate j, and tell me honestly what you think it's doing. j's the one with all the cool stuff like talking snakes and whatnot. the vastness of inconsistency is a good indicator that no effective changes were made. you'd think the first thing they'd do is rectify the name of god problem. however, keep in mind that texts treated as holy to the jews may not be altered in any fashion, even by a single letter. the only modifications to biblical texts in the last 2200 years have been the additions of vowels, and emmendations/footnotes. no change to the text, even where they believe it is in error.the most probably explanation for the inconsistencies in this light is that the source texts were regarded as holy, and thus not changed at all, or as minimaly as possible. that's nice. stock question: "according to the book of genesis, whic hwas made first, animals or man?" yes, but take this in light of the holiness point, and point that inconsistencies were not fixed. and think about it for a second. they had to have been copied wholesale into the book. a good model for genesis is actually the modern bible. follow my reasoning for a second.christians today treat the bible as a single book. but even cursory examination shows that it's more than one book. what do we know about the bible's sources? well, they're pretty much in there, aren't they? the source for psalms is a book called psalms, proverbs came from proverbs, etc. these sources came to thought of as holy, and were included, copied into the book, verbatim. inconsistencies between epistle and gospel and torah were not rectified because each book was holy individually.this is nothing new. i'm just arguing that this process started long before 200bc. psalms for instance is actually a collection of five books of psalms. and they overlap a little too. and these five books of the psalms are obviously collections within themselves. five separate redactors gathered them together, and then a later 6th redactor collected the collections. and then a 7th included that collection into the entire bible. or some variation on that order.genesis is a collection too, of at least three sources: j, e, and p. keep in mind that book headings and chapter headings and verse numbers are a new invention. they just rammed the entire text together in the old days. no spaces, no vowels, no breaks. just solid text. no little headings like "a psalm david" etc. those are all later additions.now why is it such a foriegn idea that genesis is just a collection of relatively complete sources, like everything else in the bible?

quite. i think that one deserves a nomination.

hardly a refutation of my scholarly analysis of genesis. it does not show the signs of being a history of events in judaic style of the time in it's finished form, or in more than once source.set in the past ≠ history.

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Conal Furay and Michael J. Salevouris define "historiography" as "the study of the way history has been and is written--the history of historical writing... When you study 'historiography' you do not study the events of the past directly, but the changing interpretations of those events in the works of individual historians." (The Methods and Skills of History: A Practical Guide, 1988, p. 223)

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genesis may well be a historiography. but it is not a history.

oh there's some really great themes in there that do have some universal truth.but to be honest, reading the story very literally now, i'm not totally sure the tree of knowledge is a hereditary trait. i like to think it is, because then i can talk about how it applies thematically to origin of conciousness and what not... but there's another way of reading it.

people do miss that too often. the tree CAN'T be original sin. it can't even be the FIRST sin.because without eating from it, they had no concept of right and wrong. they only had fear of death.