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Credit: Pixabay / Jeff Jacobs |
I should pull in the reigns for a moment and let you know a view that I accept, but is not dealt with in the article linked below. Like other biblical creationists, I believe that Moses did not sit down and write the first five books all by his lonesome. Don't get me wrong. Scripture is God-breathed (2 Tim 3:16-17 NIV), and Moses was not excluded from divine inspiration. Because of the structure of the early parts of Genesis, it is very possible that other authors were involved, including Adam, and Moses was the final editor. Do you follow that? Also, the narratives are often in present tense, and you will find the comment "...to this day", from the perspective of the authors.
Some of the references to locations in and around Eden were somewhat less specific, however. The historical references are called deixis, and require some explanation.
The debate about Genesis’s genre is influenced by the perceived historicity of Eden in Genesis 2. A method for examining the genre of the early chapters of Genesis is to identify the relative frequency of deixis indicators, in particular the author’s use of places. The distribution and type of place references suggests that the author intended an historical genre for Genesis 1–11, but that there is a discontinuity between old and new worlds as a result of the Flood. The use of place names associated with Eden is thought to be for etiological purposes.To read the entire article, click on "Reading ‘places’ in Genesis 1–11".