So you read ancient Hebrew fluently, are thoroughly familiar with ancient Hebrew literary forms, both in the Bible and in contemporary extra-biblical Hebrew literature, and you can state categorically that there are no puns or other wordplay in Genesis. Right?
I've learned to access the ancient Hebrew through lexicons and dictionaries and did pretty extensive studies, expositional and exegetical. Even with that aside the clear meaning of the translated text indicates nothing resembling puns or figurative language, it doesn't take an exegetical expert to see that. Genesis does have literary features fairly unique to the Hebrew literature including parallelisms. This one is especially signficant since it indicates a repetition for the sake of emphasis, actually indicating the heart of the emphasis:
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. (Gen. 1:27)
The word for created is the strongest term for a miraculous creation, used only of God. God created the universe (Gen.1:1), life (Gen. 1:21) and man (Gen. 1:27). This kind of creation has been called; 'divine fiat', 'ex nihileo' and even miraculous interpolation. The KJV simply translates it 'created'.
Create ‘bara’ (H1254) - 'This verb has profound thological significance, since it has only God as it’s subject. Only God can create in the sense implied by bara. The verb expresses the idea of creation out of nothing...all other verbs for “creating” allow a much broader range of meaning. a carefull study of the passages where bara occurs shows that in the few nonpoetic uses, primarily in Genesis, the writer uses scientifically precise language to demonstrate that God brought the object or concept into being from previously nonexistant material. (Vine's Dictionary)
There is no way the ancient Hebrews were using puns and there is absolutely no indication of figurative language. There is another pattern in Genesis, the 'generations' (
Strong's H8435 - towlĕdah). Defined as an account of men and their descendants, that are foundational to Scripture, inextricably linked to Messianic prophecy:
These are the generations H8435 of the heavens and of the earth when they were created Gen 2:4
This is the book of the generations H8435 of Adam. In the day that God created man Gen 5:1
These are the generations H8435 of Noah: Gen 6:9
Now these are the generations H8435 of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth Gen 10:1
These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, H8435 in their nations Gen 10:32
These are the generations H8435 of Shem: Gen 11:10
Now these are the generations H8435 of Terah:Gen 11:27
Now these are the generations H8435 of Ishmael Gen 25:12
And these are the generations H8435 of Isaac Gen 25:19
Now these are the generations H8435 of Esau, who is Edom. Gen 36:1
These are the generations H8435 of Jacob Gen 37:2
You guys seem to be under the impression that all Bible believing Christians are incompetent to study their on Scriptures. Thats a gross misconception.
Who said the Garden story was a metaphor? I was always taught that it was an etiology, and it certainly has the characteristics of one.
I looked up etiology, found this definition for the nonmedical usage:
etiology: the investigation or attribution of the cause or reason for something, often expressed in terms of historical or mythical explanation.
That's exactly what it is, an historical cause of creation and the cause of original sin.
Good. Maybe you can explain the change of voicing in Ex 20:11 which in Hebrew (a language without quotation marks) would ordinarily indicate that the passage was a parenthetical insertion by the transcriber rather than the quoted words of God. None of your Fundy colleagues here are up to it.
For some reason modernists are obsessed with majoring in the minors. You can get this kind of convoluted semantics but try to drag an exposition out of them and you have your work cut out for you. None of the modernists sporting these fallacious arguments seem even vaguely interested in theology, doctrine or anything remotely expositional. Yet they like to throw in some obscure semantics like it's supposed to mean something
Have a nice day
Mark