You have separate books here between Gen 1 and Gen 2:5. Putting Gen 2 inside Gen 1 is one way to try to put the pieces together, in this case by rendering erets as earth rather than land. How you render it is going to change how you place it, I render it as land.
without the context this statement was made I can only say my theory has no concern in how erets is rendered. I do however state the chapter and verse denotations are in error and use genesis 1:1 to 2:4 as an example that shows one narrative being wrongly divided. This is primarily to show there is no continuity/time line between chapters. That is my only effort here.
I'm still trying to figure it out, by combining science, Ancient Near Eastern culture, and the particulars of the text. I think there is a gap, but I'm not sure where to place it between the two I listed.[/quote] There is a traditional Hebrew story telling/historical teaching style at play here. one is to give a condensed out line of a happening or event from beginning to end, then then for a specific moment they will identify a time span in the original outline, and say this happened between here and here as to frame out sequentuially and to give greater detail.
Gen1:1- gen2:4 is said out line of all of creation of this world. Now moving forward Gen 2:5 to the end of the chapter is a specific telling of Adam the garden and everything in it.
The next division is gen 3. there isn't a time frame with in the creation narrative that this story/fall of man takes place in the larger creation outline.
I think the book for Gen 2 is drawing upon material already known.
agree that would be gen 1 verse 5 and 6 tells us everything that follows happens with in these two points of time. Dry land/earth and just before it rains. Meaning everything in gen 2 :6 and after to the end of the chapter starts after dry land/earth on day 2 and everything in gen 2 is completed by mid day 3 just before the rains came.
This is what happened when the Lord God made the earth and the sky. (day 2) This was before there were plants on the earth. Nothing was growing in the fields because the Lord God had not yet made it rain on the earth, and there was no one to care for the plants.(mid day 3)
So at the beginning of the chapter 2 narrative we have two book ends which places the content of chapter two between these two points in time of the larger 7 day creation.
The book begins it's new content at the point where God plants a Garden, and places man in it.
Got that. my point is when this happened.
You can see the text shift from a compression of events drawing on another text to the uncompressed part of the story at this juncture.
something I allude to in the OP but yes.
Because it's compressed we can't tell where this is in time.
If you are looking for a roman calendar date no... but if you can use the "day one when God creates light and dark, then yes you can. Everything in chapter 2 (aside from day seven's events) happen between day 2 and 3.
V5 seems to be a reference to agriculture which began around 10,000 BC and which appeared to be a a key component of the region success and history.
Again no. chapter two v5 say this all happens well before there were fields because there was no rain and there where no people to tend to the crop/before agriculture.
But we have skeletons that go back well over 200,000 years giving us a huge gap. So I see the placing of the man in the land of Eden being near 10,000 bc (Gen 2:8). The Sumerian king list seems to do the same when you convert their numerical system from 60 based to 10.
again what happens in the garden is apart from the 7 day narrative. everything in the garden was fast tracked to fit between day two and day three.
Regarding the toledot in Gen 2:4. It is clearly looking back at Gen 1, not Gen 2.
so says the OP
The pronoun "these" used in the toledot has to refer to Gen 1 as there is no preparation of Heaven and Earth in Gen 2. There are no chapter breaks here, these are books hemed together and we have to find the seams. Even though the traditional view places this forward, I think it's got to look backwards as a closing of Gen 1.
is this not what I have been saying from my first post?
What is it do you think My position here is?
This is a hard text in Hebrew, the "Easy to Read Version" ERV is not a good translation to work these things out in.
it is a tool, like any other it may not be a finishing tool but here's the thing that help even the pretentious. it's communicating in an active dialect. any questioning of the passage can always be looked up, but here again it forces the reader to take a live dialect look at the passage and this often times will uncloud mysteries interpretations of a dead dialect will often leave behind.
The easy to read if often considered a humble mans version as many pretenses have to be dropped or intentionally added to include denominationally specific material. This translations and many like it force a return to study, because often time passages will not have specific denominational slants we can often put on words and phrases used in a dead dialect version of scripture.
The point? the bible is useless to you and those in whom you try and help if it can only be view through denominationally specific lenses. You should be able to pick up and use any version of the HOLY BIBLE with a good lexicon and concordance to back it up.
As far as Eden not being on Earth. How could it be anywhere else with the Tigris, Euphrates in it, and given it has geographical references like Cush and Assyria?
At that time the tigris was not known by that name, the river was so named when the greeks took over the region.
Tigris - Wikipedia
The same is true with the euphraties river. it was also known by another name then.
Euphrates - Wikipedia
The
Ancient Greek form
Euphrátēs (
Ancient Greek: Εὐφράτης, as if from Greek εὖ "good" and ϕράζω "I announce or declare") was adapted from
Old Persian Ufrātu,
[1] itself from
Elamite ú-ip-ra-tu-iš. The Elamite name is ultimately derived from a name spelt in
cuneiform as , which read as
Sumerian language is "Buranuna" and read as
Akkadian language is "Purattu"; many cuneiform signs have a Sumerian pronunciation and an Akkadian pronunciation, taken from a Sumerian word and an Akkadian word that mean the same. In
Akkadian the river was called
Purattu,
[2] which has been perpetuated in
Semitic languages (cf.
Syriac P(ə)rāṯ,
Arabic al-Furāt) and in other nearby languages of the time (cf.
Hurrian Puranti,
Sabarian Uruttu). The Elamite, Akkadian, and possibly Sumerian forms are suggested to be from an unrecorded
substrate language.
[3] Tamaz V. Gamkrelidze and
Vyacheslav Ivanov suggest the Proto-Sumerian *burudu "copper" (Sumerian
urudu) as an origin, with an explanation that Euphrates was the river by which the copper ore was transported in rafts, since Mesopotamia was the center of copper metallurgy during the period.
[4]
The fact that the bible list two other unknown rivers would indicate that river system framed out the garden is else where