{I have deadlines today & don't have time to proofread this. I type fast but that usually leaves some missing word gaps. Perhaps I will be able to review it later today. But if anyone has questions about confusing parts of it, please ask---even if by private message. I will post my answers on the thread or on a new one perhaps.}
Woman was not created yet, who are you suggesting Adam reproduced with, a monkey?
Wow. Dad is even less informed than I thought:
1) Adam, the first divine-image-bearing creature, came on the scene FIRST----before Eve, the first divine-image-bearing female.
2) The Genesis text uses a Hebrew word that the KJV and other early English Bible translators rendered as "rib". But "inard" or even a more modern term like "tissue sample" or even "biopsy" would be more appropriate.
3) While I would never say that this interpretation I'm about to describe is DEMANDED by the Hebrew text, I will say that it is entirely COMPATIBLE with it: The text describes a scenario which sounds like Adam being put under anesthesia ("deep sleep") so that God removes a biopsy from Adam. Or perhaps it was even a male gamete, a spermatozoon. Or perhaps it was a somatic cell from which a nucleus was extracted. I don't claim to know. I'm just suggesting that it MIGHT refer to Adam's DNA.
And suppose God took Adam's DNA and used it to produce a "female clone" of Adam, whereby the XY chromosome had its Y component removed and the X component doubled. The resulting genetic code would be a female version of the human one.
[HADAM was not necessarily a first name as we think of it. HADAM is Hebrew for "the human one", or "the red-soiled person". In Genesis 2:7 it says that God formed HADAM from the dust of the HADAMAH." So "Adam" (HADAM stripped of the definite article "the") was a play on words so that he could have said truthfully "My name is dirt around here!" LOL. Adam was described by the very dirt he came from. The Bible says ALL of life comes from the soil. We are all made from non-living ingredients, the basic chemical elements of the earth's crust.]
Now if Eve was a female clone of Adam, it would have made sense that he would have looked at her as "Flesh of my flesh and bones of my bones!" He must have been startled that she looked so much like him! She could have had his facial shape and eyes, the same color of hair, and many other similarities----except she grew up and matured as a female with all of the hormone changes in body shape, jawline, vocal cords, and all. Yes, there is NOTHING in the Hebrew text to preclude the events described taking place over many years. (Indeed, this also solves the classic question of how Adam could have named all of the animals in a single YOM/day.) And of course, if Genesis 1 is the 3+3+1=7 poetic story structure which many scholars have pointed out, there's all the more reason to allow for the well known fact that YOM in Hebrew has many definitions besides "24 hour day."
So I don't how dad runs off the rails and thinks Adam reproduced with a monkey. The Bible clearly states that he KNEW Eve and just three of their many children are named in the Genesis text.
But remember: There is nothing in the Bible which states that there were no other hominids on the planet. But because Adam was somehow endowed by God with the IMAGO DEI, he knew that he could not find a suitable mate among the various NEPHESH animals in the garden God had planted as a special reserve for him in the region called Eden. And the Genesis text doesn't say how many and what kinds of species of animals from the "outside world" were allowed to come into the garden preserve. If other hominids of the time were larger and very dangerous (as paleontological evidence suggests), it would make sense for the garden reserve area of land to have an even more restricted selection of animals for Adam to observe. Whatever the case, Adam knew that nobody else was like him----EVEN IF others of his Homo sapien species were known to him. [And who knows, perhaps Adam was of the new Homo sapien sapien version of hominid.] Adam would naturally have wanted companionship with someone who possessed the IMAGO DEI and could related emotionally, spiritually, and in conversation with him on a sophisticated level---and join him in his communion with God his creator.
I could develop this interpretation/speculation far more fully and use it to make sense of the preface to the Noah account in Genesis 6, where it appears that "Noah was pure in all his generations". That is, perhaps Noah was the only descendent of the Adamic Imago-Dei-lineage at that time which had not mixed with other hominids so as to carry non-image-of-God "blood" in him. Perhaps the mixed hybrid Adamic+non-Adamic population was all the more violent and ruthless because of the great size and stature as well as rapacious tendencies of the non-Adamic hominids. (And the "giants in the land" and the "sons of God" and "daughters of men" produced "men of renown" because the hybrids had the high brain power of the Adamic line merged with the superior braun of the non-Adamic DNA!)
If this was the case, how would the writer of Genesis explain of this MIND-BLOWING information to the ancient Hebrews of Moses' day? Was it NECESSARY for God to explain all of the scientific/genetic details of the origins of Adam and Eve. Or would it make more sense to just cut-to-the-chase and say that HADAM was made from the non-living ingredients in the dust of the ground (soil.) And nobody had any reason for needing to know about the other hominids and how Adam differed from them. In fact, even today there are THREE principal interpretations of what being made in the image of God means! But Christians DO agree that Adam and Eve were UNIQUE among all creatures and the Image of God was the term the Bible uses.
No. The Genesis text does not DEMAND this interpretation. But this interpretation is COMPATIBLE with it. And everything the Bible DOES carefully state about original sin, death coming to Adam's line, the end of the special, CLOSE relationship with God in that garden reserve----all of that could be understood by Bible readers down through the centuries without ANY knowledge of DNA, evolution, hominid species, and the many processes and billions of years between the first SOIL and the eventual evolution of HADAM. Obviously, the Genesis does demand that some sort of divine intervention (a miracle if you will) was involved if EVE was a gender-manipulated clone of HADAM. But the job of the Bible exegete/linguist ---- I got virtually all of this "theory" form the writings of VerySincere/Professor Tertius ---- is to determine what the Biblical text actually states and doesn't state. And also his job as commentator is to integrate what we know from BOTH of God's books of revelation: God's Book of Scripture and God's Book of Creation. And so the Bible exegete in the year 2013 has many advantages in the form of paleontological, genomic, and evolutionary biology information that theologians of the past did NOT have.
It has been a while since I read the original article of VerySincere, when I was a subscriber to his old Bible.and.Science.Forum email newsletter. The professor's exposition of Genesis 2:7, Genesis 7:20, and everything he wrote about Genesis 1 & 2 revitalized my Bible study and my relationship with God because I realized that I didn't have to look at the Bible as conflicting with the reality of the world around me. And I especially appreciated what he said was his change in his Bible study goals over the course of his life and scholarship. To paraphrase what he said (as best as I can):
As a traditional young earth creationist, my motivation was to always determine the EXACT, SINGULAR MEANING of each Bible passage, but always while adhering to the TRADITIONS of Bible translation and commentary in which I had worshiped and fellowshiped at my church for many years. But as Hebrew and Greek exegesis opened up my eyes to OTHER equally valid and equally LITERAL interpretations of those tradition-bound passages, I started to see that I should push the traditions aside long enough to allow the Biblical text to speak for itself. And sometimes it told a very different story! I realized that I should not just focus on CONFIRMING what I already thought I knew about the text; I wanted to open up the possibilities to other, equally valid and potentially the BEST interpretation of the passage. So now I ask, "What are the possibilities of what this text is saying?" To put it another way, where does the BIBLICAL EVIDENCE LEAD? And then when I retired from a lifetime of seminary/university teaching, publishing, and Bible translation, I had the time to dig deeper into the SCIENCES I wanted to understand, including evolutionary biology and geology. Sure enough, my study of the Bible had already blown apart my former faith in the incongruities of young earth creationism and a GLOBAL flood. But now I could see that a careful study of the evidence in God's creation CONFIRMED those very things that the Biblical evidence had convinced me! It was as if shackles fell off my feet. I realized that the Creator told the same story in his CREATION that he told me in his BIBLE. And instead of being my alleged enemies, the world's scientists became my tutors in helping me to understand the world that God had created. I no longer would tolerate the FALSE TEACHING of a false dichotomy taught by so many young earth creationist ministry entrepreneurs: "You can't believe both the Bible and the theory of evolution." They were wrong---and I would NOT let fear tactics pollute the church and push young people away from God and the Bible. No, I didn't have to leave my brain in the parking lot when I went to church. Isaac Newton and scores of other Christians who pioneered so many fields of modern science understood that the methodological naturalism of the scientific method was NOT the same thing as the philosophical naturalism of atheism. And not until the "creation science" movement infected the American Evangelical world in 1962 with the release of Morris & Whitcomb's THE GENESIS FLOOD did such a rabid, evolution-denying, 6,000 year old earth-demanding, and aberrational-interpretations taught-as-if-the-norms mindset enter the Church and deceive myself and so many other science-illiterate Christians. [At the time I would have said that I was extremely knowledgeable of science. After all, I was still a science professor at the time---but not in a field relevant to the billions-of-years and evolution debates!] No, every cult insists that it alone represents THE TRUTH OF THE EARLY CHURCH. But that doesn't make it true.
I've got to wrap this up and work on other things but I get excited about these topics and want other Christ-followers to experience what I did in having my eyes upon by the Bible. And I adopted one of the Professor's quotable-quotes for my CF signature (see below) and I encourage others to incorporate it into their study if not also into their CF testimony.
I used to be a "half-informed" Christian because I focused on God's Scripture (as his people should) but I was denigrating God's Book of Creation. By ignoring what scientific investigation can tell us about God's creation, we miss SO MANY OF GOD'S ANSWERS to our questions! Now I praise God for the wondrous evolutionary processes which adapt and diversify life on earth AND I can truly understand the vast scope of the billions of years of history of the universe and of the earth itself. God would have us remove our Pharisee blinders of tradition and appreciate his answers which are all around us. The Biblical evidence and the evidence from the world around us speak volumes. Literally!