Genesis not being literal

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Modern Jews are divided into various groups. some are religious and some are not at all. I recently visited a website for templeakiba.net, a website for a Reformed synagogue in the Los Angeles area. A few minutes there will show the vast range of beliefs of their members.

The point for saying that is that there is a parallel set of opinions about Genesis, for example. In fact, the Reformed do not accept the inspiration of any of the OT books. Instead they rely on God’s revelation to them TODAY for the issues that concern them.

The commentaries of the Jewish Publication Society are written, as far as I can tell, from the Conservative Jewish point of view. They accept the text “as received” but they seem to keep an open mind about the relationship of the text to science, and perhaps somewhat like Catholics, look for harmonization as much as can be determined.

However, they see in Genesis an establishment of monotheism, first of all, and following quickly behind, a repudiation of any idols or gods that were actually creatures or created things, like the Sun or Moon. So, Genesis is a statement of faith. It’s a written and “redacted” or edited statement based on an oral tradition. As an example, When the cherubim is mentioned after Adam and Eve are expelled, there is no explanation of what a cherubim is, because it was not necessary for the intended audience.
 
One question that pops up in the lunch room where I volunteer is if Adam and eve had 2 sons caine and abel, and then caine killed abel who did caine have children with…
I volunteer at a catholic organization 5 days a week
My answer has always been Adam and eve had more kids and cain had children with his sister… this always gets some strange looks from the old ladies. One of them asked a nun this and the nun told them that later on in the bible it says God created the nomads however I cannot find this anywhere in the bible… believe me I’ve gone looking
 
I’ve gotten mixed messages on this, but for those who allow for a non-literal Genesis do you still believe humans were created by God not to die?

Also if it’s not eating a fruit from a forbidden tree, what specifically was the act that somehow derailed God’s plan for humanity? Was it something avoidable or was it inevitable?
 
You are welcome! In the past, I had the same frustrations you had.

Peace,

Dorothy
 
The traditional teaching seems to be that mankind is mortal by nature and immortal by grace. So did Adam and Eve, once singled out by God within their primordial hominid community, have the supernatural gift of immortality prior to their rebellion? Possibly. But it wouldn’t have been anything to do with the natural process of evolution…
 
Brendea said:
One question that pops up in the lunch room where I volunteer is if Adam and eve had 2 sons caine and abel, and then caine killed abel who did caine have children with…
I volunteer at a catholic organization 5 days a week
My answer has always been Adam and eve had more kids and cain had children with his sister… this always gets some strange looks from the old ladies. One of them asked a nun this and the nun told them that later on in the bible it says God created the nomads however I cannot find this anywhere in the bible… believe me I’ve gone looking
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Just a comment on other children of Adam and Eve besides Cain and Abel, Genesis 5:4 says “The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years; and he had other sons and daughters.” I agree that Cain had children with his sister/wife, a daughter of Adam and Eve.
 
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When human beings began to grow numerous on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of human beings were, and so they took for their wives whomever they pleased. Then the LORD said: My spirit shall not remain in human beings forever, because they are only flesh. Their days shall comprise one hundred and twenty years.

The Nephilim appeared on earth in those days, as well as later, after the sons of God had intercourse with the daughters of human beings, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
Genesis 6:1-4
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This is one of the early attempts to answer the question “who did the children of Adam marry?”
 
Dovekin said:
When human beings began to grow numerous on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of human beings were, and so they took for their wives whomever they pleased. Then the LORD said: My spirit shall not remain in human beings forever, because they are only flesh. Their days shall comprise one hundred and twenty years.

The Nephilim appeared on earth in those days, as well as later, after the sons of God had intercourse with the daughters of human beings, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown.
Genesis 6:1-4
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One of those passages in scripture I will never understand this side of the veil…
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It has been argued by some theologians since the late 1800’s that evolution from a common ancestor can be reconciled with the Church’s teaching on creation. If that were true, would that not mean that the definition of Creation in Lateran IV [AD 1215] is incorrect?

It states:

God…creator of all visible and invisible things, of the spiritual and of the corporal; who by His own omnipotent power at once from the beginning of time created each creature from nothing, spiritual and corporal, namely, angelic and mundane, and finally the human, constituted as it were, alike of the spirit and the body (D.428).
 
BlueMaxx said:
One of those passages in scripture I will never understand this side of the veil…
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Yes, it was an attempt to answer, not entirely successful.
buffalo said:
by His own omnipotent power at once from the beginning of time created each creature from nothing
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How would that contradict evolution? God does everything “at once from the beginning of time.” God is eternal, beyond time, and every moment is present at once.
 
I don’t believe Genesis 6: 1-4 is attempting to answer the question concerning the immediate spouses of the children of Adam and Eve. I think the narrative is addressing a ‘time’ sometime after the beginnings of the human race “When human beings [men] began to grow numerous on the earth and daughters were born to them” (v.1). Gen. 6: 1-4 is a prelude to the Flood and like a reason as it were for the Flood, namely, the wickedness of mankind (see paragraph below). The Bible appears to be pretty clear according to the traditional interpretation and ‘literal’ reading of it about the human race descending from a single first couple, namely, Adam and Eve, the first man and woman of the human race created by God. In this perspective, the sacred writer/s doesn’t need to go into details about who the immediate children of Adam and Eve married. Using common sense, they would have married each other, i.e., brother and sister. I think the translation you are using for Genesis 6: 1-4 is also questionable, i.e, not an exact literal rendering of the hebrew Old Testament which might lead to an interpretation of the passage unintended by the sacred writer. For example, the translation of ‘human beings’ for the hebrew word that is usually translated ‘men’ such as in verse 2.

St Augustine and a few other fathers of the Church interpreted the ‘sons of God’ to refer to Seth’s (the son of Adam) line of descent and the ‘daughters of men’ (v.2) to refer to Cain’s line of descent. In this interpretation, the daughters of Cain corrupted the ‘sons of god’ (Seth’s line) which brought about the Flood.
 
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Richca said:
the translation of ‘human beings’ for the hebrew word that is usually translated ‘men’ such as in verse 2.
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Except the word usually translated as “men” is adam, and the phrase “children of adam” is how Hebrew says “human beings.” So the term here that means “girls of adam” is better rendered as “daughters of human beings” rather than “daughters of men.”

Or you could just consider the contrast of sons of God with children of adam, which is more important than the contrast of man with human.

My Hebrew is almost rusted shut, so I could be wrong.

I took the context of this post was that Genesis is not literal, so that I would not make the fine distinction between the “immediate children of Adam” and Genesis 6.
 
twf said:
Here at very conservative American CAF, where there is a bizarrely inflated contingent of “the earth is only 6000 years old” folks
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Please, except for Buffalo, nobody else has advocated for such yet.
 
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They’re gone now so it’s not like they are
relevant.
 
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