Genesis Timeline

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FightingFat

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Simple genealogical math gives us a total of less than 6,000 years since God created Adam and Eve as described in Genesis, yet Science tells us the fossil records go back 3.6 billion years? How do we reconcile this paradox?
 
Also, the Hebrew Adamah means both the name “Adam”, but is also the generic for “Man” as in mankind. I have also heard it translated as ‘earth’.The ‘man’ translation comes from the Sumerian “Adapa” which means the same thing. This phenomenon is of great interest and is prevalent throughout the OT of the bible. Many of the names of people are actually hebrew generic terms such as Abraham, meaning patriarch, or father. Why so many generic terms applied to people and so many figures generalized by this phenomenon? And why were the names changed from the older more detailed versions? Perhaps it isn’t meant to be taken literally and is all allegory…?

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Hi, FF.

The Adam and Eve story is allegory, not historical. The internal evidence is great. It’s not just the names, it’s also the jokes built into the text. For example, when Adam calls Eve a “woman” in Genesis 2:23 because she was taken out of “her man,” you are looking at ancient Hebrew humor. Adam was calling Eve an “ishsha” because she was taken out of “ishah.” I.e., he was calling Eve a “herman” because she was taken out of “herman”! This was after Eve, “mother of all the living,” Genesis 3:20, was made out of Adam’s “rib” – a Sumerian language joke. After the audience hears the narrator describe how Eve became “the lady of the rib,” Nin-ti, by being made out of a rib, at Genesis 3:20 when Adam gives her a rib-associated name in Sumerian, Nin-ti, they expected the narrator to remind them of the rib – but instead he explains that she was “Nin-ti,” “lady of the living,” a perfect Sumerian homonym, a reversal which would have caused chuckles, like calling Eve a “herman.”

The names in the Cain and Abel story are not just allegory, but jokes. When the author says that Eve called Cain “Cain” because she said “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord,” for instance, he has Eve giving the wrong name on purpose. “Cain” means “smith,” as in “metal-smith.” (That’s why, in Genesis 4:22, “Tubalcain” is the “ancestor of all who forge instruments of bronze and iron.”) The audience knows that the narrator is putting into Eve’s mouth a silly reason for calling Cain “Cain” – because it sounds like the Hebrew term for “I have produced,” “qayin.” This, too, would have generated chuckles.

Do you see what is going on? This is not history. It is a “Dr. Seuss-level” allegory – a “typological word picture.”

But here’s the real question, FF: What is it an allegory for?
 
God the creator and the lover- the man and the woman of one flesh, brought into being by the creator’s love? Like a marriage?

Ties in nicely with the prologue of John as well.

So the timeline issue is irrelevant? Why is it in there?
 
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FightingFat:
Simple genealogical math gives us a total of less than 6,000 years since God created Adam and Eve as described in Genesis, yet Science tells us the fossil records go back 3.6 billion years? How do we reconcile this paradox?
Click to expand...
There is no paradox
Genesis tells us that God created the universe the details are really unimportant to that point of the story
Science tells us how He did it.

There are also some allegorical tales in there as well describing the struggles between the sexes, the generations, and the nations
 
Actually it’s an allegory for the basic structure of reality and God’s responsive salvation process.

Eve is us. Adam is Christ. Eve is taken out of Adam’s side is show that Christ/God would come in our form, a form equal to us, and even let us trample all over Him. When in John’s gospel the waters of salvation, activated by the accompanying blood of Christ’s sacrifice, come rushing out of Christ’s side, on the cross, that is salvation following created mankind out of Adam’s side (thus, Paul calls Christ the “new Adam”). Eve sins easily because that is a picture of the wickedness of mankind – in the absence of grace, we’ll sin every time, because that’s what we are – pigs. Adam sins like a complete moron, because Adam sinning is a picture of Christ “becoming sin” – becoming “Him-Who-did-not-kbnow-sin-Who-was-made-to-be-sin,” 2 Corinthians 5:21 – in the sense that Christ, though sinless, by volunteering to atone for our sins by paying the price due our sins to satisfy the brutal demands of God’s justice, became “like sin” because He ended up being treated as though He were sin, itself. Get it?

Adam and Eve retreating to the trees to hide from God when God shows-up after the sin is a picture of the Agony in the Garden and Christ and the Apostles going to the Garden and Christ “hiding” from God’s wrath, there. When God tells the Satan serpent that the offspring of the woman would “strike at his head,” that is a prediction of the cross piercing the dust at SKULL Place – get it? When God tells the Satan serpent that he would at the same time “strike at his heel,” that is a picture of the nails going through Christ’s feet at the same time.

The list goes on and on.
 
Hi FF,

When the Bible and science seem to contradict each other, then either we don’t understand the Bible or we don’t understand the science… or the science is wrong.

Since, in this case, the science seems sure, then we don’t understand the Bible when we reckon up 6000 years. We have to look for an explanation of how the ancients reckoned time and how genealogies were built up. I can’t help you in this. If the answer is not yet available then, hopefully, it will one day become evident.

Verbum
 
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BibleReader:
Hi, FF.

The Adam and Eve story is allegory, not historical. The internal evidence is great. It’s not just the names, it’s also the jokes built into the text. For example, when Adam calls Eve a “woman” in Genesis 2:23 because she was taken out of “her man,” you are looking at ancient Hebrew humor. Adam was calling Eve an “ishsha” because she was taken out of “ishah.” I.e., he was calling Eve a “herman” because she was taken out of “herman”! This was after Eve, “mother of all the living,” Genesis 3:20, was made out of Adam’s “rib” – a Sumerian language joke. After the audience hears the narrator describe how Eve became “the lady of the rib,” Nin-ti, by being made out of a rib, at Genesis 3:20 when Adam gives her a rib-associated name in Sumerian, Nin-ti, they expected the narrator to remind them of the rib – but instead he explains that she was “Nin-ti,” “lady of the living,” a perfect Sumerian homonym, a reversal which would have caused chuckles, like calling Eve a “herman.”

The names in the Cain and Abel story are not just allegory, but jokes. When the author says that Eve called Cain “Cain” because she said “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord,” for instance, he has Eve giving the wrong name on purpose. “Cain” means “smith,” as in “metal-smith.” (That’s why, in Genesis 4:22, “Tubalcain” is the “ancestor of all who forge instruments of bronze and iron.”) The audience knows that the narrator is putting into Eve’s mouth a silly reason for calling Cain “Cain” – because it sounds like the Hebrew term for “I have produced,” “qayin.” This, too, would have generated chuckles.

Do you see what is going on? This is not history. It is a “Dr. Seuss-level” allegory – a “typological word picture.”

But here’s the real question, FF: What is it an allegory for?
Click to expand...
How to read the Cathechism

The senses of Scripture

**115 **According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two *senses *of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.

**116 **The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: "All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal."83

**117 **The spiritual sense. Thanks to the unity of God’s plan, not only the text of Scripture but also the realities and events about which it speaks can be signs.
  1. The allegorical sense. We can acquire a more profound understanding of events by recognizing their significance in Christ; thus the crossing of the Red Sea is a sign or type of Christ’s victory and also of Christian Baptism.84
  2. The moral sense. The events reported in Scripture ought to lead us to act justly. As St. Paul says, they were written “for our instruction”.85
  3. The anagogical sense (Greek: anagoge, “leading”). We can view realities and events in terms of their eternal significance, leading us toward our true homeland: thus the Church on earth is a sign of the heavenly Jerusalem.86 **118 **A medieval couplet summarizes the significance of the four senses:
The Letter speaks of deeds; Allegory to faith;
The Moral how to act; Anagogy our destiny.87 **119 **"It is the task of exegetes to work, according to these rules, towards a better understanding and explanation of the meaning of Sacred Scripture in order that their research may help the Church to form a firmer judgement. For, of course, all that has been said about the manner of interpreting Scripture is ultimately subject to the judgement of the Church which exercises the divinely conferred commission and ministry of watching over and interpreting the Word of God."88

But I would not believe in the Gospel, had not the authority of the Catholic Church already moved me.89

** How to read the account of the fall**

[390](javascript:openWindow(‘cr/390.htm’)😉 The account of the fall in *Genesis *3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man.264 Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.265
 
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