Robert Sungenis gets us wrong on Genesis and the Flood

Amaic

 

We read at:

http://bellarmineforum.xanga.com/702647181/question-140—is-wisemans-theory-of-genesis-correct/#

Saturday, 23 May 2009

• Question 140 – Is Wiseman’s Theory of Genesis Correct?

Question 140 – Is Wiseman’s Theory of Genesis Correct?

 

Dear Dr. Sungenis,

Are you familiar wth the “colophon” theory of Genesis 1, developed by the British soldier Percy Wiseman 60-70 years ago as a result of his study of ancient Babylonian clay tablets in Iraq before and after WWII? It has been going around in conservative Catholic circles lately as the supposed ‘final’ answer to most of the traditional difficulties in interpreting Gen. 1, as well as a way of reconciling Scripture with long-ages chronology.

According to Wiseman and his followers, the mention of the first, second, third, etc., days in Gen. 1 are “colophons”, or ‘titles’ and editorial notes placed at the bottom of each of a series of clay tablets with an ongoing message, to indicate the correct order, i.e., which is the next tablet to be read. It is claimed that the six days are indeed of 24 hours each, but are not days of Creation at all, but six consecutive days when God showed Adam in visions (or maybe audible narratives) all the things he had created at the beginning. So the “evening” and “morning” repeatedly mentioned are supposedly just referring to Adam going to sleep and waking up again next morning for another day-long supernatural audio-visual session of what Creation had been like. So if this is true, Genesis 1 tells us absolutely nothing about how long Creation itself actually took. I am no expert on these things, but my spontaneous reaction is highly skeptical.

After all, there is nothing in the actual words of the text itself that states, or even remotely suggests, that God was giving Adam a series of visions day after day. And how come Moses and all the ancient Israelites and Fathers of the Church got it wrong and lost all knowledge of this supposed series of day-long visions or locutions? – a loss that threw believers for thousands of years into an error that would eventually produce a totally unnecessary conflict with “scientific” geology? Most of all, doesn’t this theory contradict inspired Scripture itself? For in the Decalogue itself, the most solemn and central part of OT revelation, we read very plainly in [Exodus] 20: 11 that “In six days God made the heavens and the earth”, not that in six days God “revealed to Adam how he had made heaven and earth”.

 

Have you given any thought and evaluation to Wiseman’s theory? Since it is not generally accepted – or even very widely known – after more than 60 years – it would seem that some competent scholars must have seen some big problems with the theory. If you know of any critiques of it, could you give me a reference or web link?

 

John D.

 

R. Sungenis: John, yes, I’m very familiar with Wiseman’s theory. I used to hold to it, at least until I found out the implications of it (i.e., that it was merely suggesting a literary framework to Genesis 1 and that the days should not be taken literally and sequentially).

Even if there is a “literary framework” to Genesis 1 (e.g., the first three days are fulfilled by the second three days, especially in areas of locomotion), it doesn’t mean that Genesis 1 is not also intending to have the six days in chronological sequence. Both can be true without diminishing either. This was the very reason I didn’t add Wiseman’s theory into my Genesis commentary, but I should have done a critique on it instead of ignoring it. His view is called the “Framework Hypothesis.”

As such, although Wiseman’s theory is certainly a major step above and away from the highly erroneous JEPD theory, it simply does not do enough justice to the Genesis account as a verbatim literal event of history.

 

Damien Mackey touts Wiseman’s theory, but Damien has concluded that the events in Genesis are not entirely literal, or they are only literal to a certain degree (e.g., there was no universal flood, the days of Genesis are not chronological, only topical). I assume this “semi-literal” imposition on Genesis is for the purpose of accommodating long ages and evolution, although I’m not sure in Damien’s case.

 

One problem Wiseman runs into is that, if Adam is the writer of the 2nd Toledoth, then why is he naming countries and rivers before the flood (Gen 2:1-5:1)? His solution is that Moses is editing the 2nd Toledoth. But this implies that the 2nd Toletoth is not giving us accurate history. I’ve sparred with Damien on this. He believes that the rivers of Paradise mentioned in Genesis 2 didn’t exist in Paradise, since the Flood would have taken any trace of them away, and Moses wouldn’t have know about them; and Adam also could not know about them because they existed in Moses’ time, not Adam’s. I’ve argued that the rivers existed before and after the flood and that there are geological reasons why the rivers could remain intact.

As for the idea that God was merely showing a movie to Adam, whoever is touting that appendage is adding something to Wiseman’s theory that Wiseman didn’t countenance, at least not that I’m aware of.

 

But let’s just accept their argument. In that case, even if God was showing a movie to Adam, the fact remains that the movie holds the days of Genesis as literal 24-hour events in chronological sequence. So, if long ages are true, then God is lying to Adam by showing him a movie depicting literal 24-hour days.

[End of quotes]

 

Damien Mackey’s Response:

 

Aaron, the priest-brother of Moses, unwittingly delivered one of the funniest lines in the whole of Scripture; though the context of it was not amusing, but tragic. When his usually mild brother, Moses, descended upon him in hot anger from his converse with God on the holy mountain, Sinai, demanding to know: ‘What did this people do to you that you have brought so great a sin upon them?’, Aaron concluded his nervous reply with: ‘…. So I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold take it off’; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!’. (Exodus 32:21, 24). Almost as if the silly thing had magically acquired form from bits and pieces in the fire, with Aaron largely detached from it all. “Big Bang” theorists could identify with this!

Now as ‘Aaronic’ interpreters of the famous ‘Six Days’ sequence of Genesis 1 would have us believe – although the Holy Spirit actually ‘threw into the furnace’ of Sacred Scripture the makings of an ancient ‘book’ of revelation, as the Greek word Biblos so clearly tells us – ‘there came out this account of an extended act of creation’.

In the case of Genesis 1, God had probably done then what He was now in fact doing with Moses, on Mount Sinai, when the unfortunate Golden Calf incident had erupted. He was revealing something to Adam, Moses’s and our forefather – Adam being likewise (like Moses) a priest king. He was uttering those ‘Ten Words’ to Adam, “God said”. In the case of Moses, he would utter those Ten Laws (the Decalogue). What God had uttered on those two awesome occasions was then duly recorded.

In the presence of Moses, God had revealed and uttered a lot more than just his Laws. There is a whole Liturgy there as well, including instructions regarding priests and vestments and sacred vessels, plus festivals and anniversaries, and explicit guidelines for designing sacred objects, such as the Ark of the Covenant.

By analogy, we might assume that Adam was provided with similar instructions. Perhaps these were later edited out by Moses, as the whole Sinai Covenant had now superseded the ancient Adamic scenario.

Now John D. (above) generally, as we are going to find, represents the AMAIC’s interpretation of the ‘Six Days’ more accurately than does Robert. John is quite right, for instance, in saying: “So the “evening” and “morning” repeatedly mentioned are supposedly just referring to Adam going to sleep and waking up again next morning for another day-long supernatural audio-visual session of what Creation had been like”. Yes indeed. Similarly God would tell Moses to be ready by the morning, tablets in hand, to receive the Divine revelation (Exodus 34:2): ‘Be ready in the morning, and come up in the morning to Mount Sinai and present yourself there to Me, on the top of the mountain’. God had reasonably allowed Moses to rest in the camp overnight (the “evening”), so as to be fresh for his priestly task the next day. And so, too, I think, had He done in the case of Adam, millennia before.

Strikingly again (Exodus 31:28): “When God finished speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him two tablets of the covenant, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God”. Might I suggest that this was a virtual repetition of what God had formerly done with Adam: (Genesis 2:1): “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished …”. Presumably the writing down of the sequence followed on from the revelation of it. But it was, as in the case of Moses, a Book (Biblos); an ancient book, as shown by Wiseman with its title “[The Book of] the Heavens and the Earth” linked to its colophon ending, “the heavens and the earth” (2:1); and its parallelisms, indicating the typical structure used by the ancient scribes for tablets; and the presence of repetitious catch-lines, to link (for practical purposes) the one tablet to the next. We find that John has well noted some of these literary devices in Question 140 above.

The Pope, in the same address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences already quoted, has also argued in terms of “nature as a book”:

 

To “evolve” literally means “to unroll a scroll”, that is, to read a book. The imagery of nature as a book has its roots in Christianity and has been held dear by many scientists. Galileo saw nature as a book whose author is God in the same way that Scripture has God as its author. It is a book whose history … whose “writing” and meaning, we “read” according to the different approaches of the sciences, while all the time presupposing the foundational presence of the author who has wished to reveal himself therein. This image also helps us to understand that the world, far from originating out of chaos, resembles an ordered book; it is a cosmos. Notwithstanding elements of the irrational, chaotic and the destructive in the long processes of change in the cosmos, matter as such is “legible”. It has an inbuilt “mathematics”. The human mind therefore can engage not only in a “cosmography” studying measurable phenomena but also in a “cosmology” discerning the visible inner logic of the cosmos. We may not at first be able to see the harmony both of the whole and of the relations of the individual parts, or their relationship to the whole. Yet, there always remains a broad range of intelligible events, and the process is rational in that it reveals an order of evident correspondences and undeniable finalities: in the inorganic world, between microstructure and macrostructure; in the organic and animal world, between structure and function; and in the spiritual world, between knowledge of the truth and the aspiration to freedom. Experimental and philosophical inquiry gradually discovers these orders; it perceives them working to maintain themselves in being, defending themselves against imbalances, and overcoming obstacles. And thanks to the natural sciences we have greatly increased our understanding of the uniqueness of humanity’s place in the cosmos.

 

The distinction between a simple living being and a spiritual being that is capax Dei, points to the existence of the intellective soul of a free transcendent subject. Thus the Magisterium of the Church has constantly affirmed that “every spiritual soul is created immediately by God – it is not ‘produced’ by the parents – and also that it is immortal” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 366). This points to the distinctiveness of anthropology, and invites exploration of it by modern thought. ….

 

My point about the book (Biblos) in the Septuagint version of Genesis 1 – which is cognate with the albeit less succinct meaning of the corresponding phrase in the Hebrew version – is that readers have obviously missed the point in missing the ‘book’ aspect of Genesis 1. That is to be understood prior to our knowledge of ancient scribal methods becoming known through archaeology, when a superficial meaning of Genesis 1 would definitely give the impression that God was creating the entire heavens and earth. Although the allegorists, even in ancient times, definitely had enormous problems with such an interpretation, as indeed we have today. We are well familiar with these – such seeming absurdities as God’s needing six days to create; His supposed need to rest in the evenings; the emergence of light several days before the creation of the Sun, the created source of light; and so on.

According to the theory that we favour, and John has also accurately picked this up: “… Genesis 1 tells us absolutely nothing about how long Creation itself actually took”. This particular text should not therefore, I think, have been dragged into debates between proponents of an old earth and those of a young earth, since it has nothing to say about that. (Wiseman’s allowing for the possibility of the long Geological Ages is a side issue which shows that Genesis 1, because it does not rule on the age of the earth, leaves this as a matter open for scientists to discuss. I personally do not favour this long chronology, to clarify Robert’s query).

“Thomas observed that creation is neither a movement nor a mutation” (the Pope).

It is not true to say, as does John, that “all the ancient Israelites and Fathers of the Church got it wrong and lost all knowledge of this supposed series of day-long visions or locutions …”. St. Augustine, who was apparently the first (after the Israelites, I am presuming) to have arrived at the notion of Genesis 1 as a revelation of a creation already effected, was also chronologically ‘pre-archaeological’, as were Sts. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom thought that St. Augustine’s version of the Hexaëmeron, or ‘Six Days’, at least made a lot of sense, and that it was the best served to save the text from ridicule by infidels (today read atheistic scientists). One wonders if this great trio would have been more emphatic about the revelation theory had they at hand (and remember how scientific St. Albert was) the present day knowledge of scribal methods and the intricacies of ancient language, the better to explain the meaning of the words in the Genesis 1 text.

John D. does make a good point regarding Exodus 20. But Wiseman has answered this with an analysis of the key Hebrew verb used there, yasah.

So I hope that it is now quite apparent that I am intending to take Genesis 1 entirely literally, hence not as Sungenis says, “not entirely literal” or “literal to a degree”, by trying – despite limitations – to get into the mind of the ancient author and to interpret the language used to express it. It follows from this that I am saying that those who read Genesis 1 or any other biblical text (e.g. the Flood narrative) in a superficial manner, without any real accounting for what ancient scribes said and did, will likely end up with a similarly erroneous concept of a text as will a physicist end up with an erroneous cosmology, when superimposing preconceived mathematical laws and concepts upon nature instead of striving to discern what the Pope has called “the visible inner logic of the cosmos”. It is the distinction once again of the none-too-subtle activities of the butcher as opposed to the patient work of the anatomist.

“ …the days of Genesis are not chronological, only topical”, Sungenis also says.

But could anyone who has actually read my “The Book of Origins” article (http://genesis1.blog.com), holding to six, hard, sequential, chronological, literal 24-hour days, seriously come to that conclusion? John D. didn’t: “It is claimed that the six days are indeed of 24 hours each, but are not days of Creation at all, but six consecutive days …”. Exactly!

Basically it is the difference between an ‘armchair’ reading of the Bible, in one’s own modern language, the mind full of one’s probably ‘westernised’ concepts and logic, or, on the other hand, actually ‘putting on’ the mind of an ancient Middle Eastern or Near Eastern scribe, now with the aid and benefit of archaeological discoveries.

An Example: St. Thomas Aquinas did not have the benefit of these, so he, educated in the Greco-Roman and European tradition, the ‘Western Tradition’, had arrived at certain conclusions in his, albeit metaphysically marvellous, “Literal Exposition of Job”, that someone experienced in ancient Near Eastern lore would recognize as imprecise. Let us take the case of the land and sea monsters of Job 41, respectively:

 

Behemoth and Leviathan.

 

These, St. Thomas had identified with creatures of which he probably had some knowledge, respectively, the elephant and the whale. Because of superficial similarities between these two gargantuan creatures and those described in vivid detail by the author of Job, St. Thomas was able to pull off what most would readily accept as being a plausible match.

But St. Thomas’s conclusions on this would be rendered quite obsolete by the expertise of someone like the Rev. G. Knight, early C20th, a highly experienced antiquarian and Egyptologist, who – masterfully identifying an Egyptian factor throughout the Book of Job (and we recall that Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich had told of Job’s having dwelt in Egypt) – recognized in the name ‘Behemoth’, the ancient Egyptian word for hippopotamus (‘Leviathan’ being the crocodile). Let us take the relevant part of the Rev. Knight’s text (Nile and Jordan, 1921):

 

… the book [of Job] closes with an elaborate description of two animals, the hippopotamus and the crocodile, which are acknowledged by all to be Egyptian, and as to whose African habitat there can be no question.

 

Behemoth [Job 40:15-24] undoubtedly refers to the hippopotamus. The very name is seemingly Egyptian – p-ehe-mau, “ox of the water” …. All the description here of its habits suits the Nile. He lieth under the lotus trees, in the covert of the reed, and the fen: the lotus trees cover him with their shadow: the willows of the brook compass him about [Job 40:21, 22]. The allusion to the lotus, the favourite, beloved, and sacrosanct plant of the Egyptians, is peculiarly Nilotic …. A reference to the annual inundation of the Delta is seen in If the river overflow, he trembleth not; he is confident though a Jordan swell even to his mouth, that is, even if a stream as impetuous as the Jordan were to overtake him. The hippopotamus is of course unknown in the Jordan itself. In the Chapel of Senbi I … a nomarch of the time of [pharaoh] Amenemhat I (XIIth Dynasty), there is shown a fine group of hippopotami, who bellow and display their gleaming white tusks at the intruding sportsman as he skims over the water in his frail canoe. As the hippopotamus is an animal entirely confined to Africa, it is difficult to see how a dweller in Central Arabia, or in Babylonia (localities which have been advocated as the scene of the authorship of the book) could have given such an accurate and full description of its characteristics as we find here. But all is natural if the author was acquainted with the Nile Valley.

 

By the leviathan of the 41^st chapter the crocodile is unquestionably meant: and in the 34 verses devoted to the description of this vast saurian we have the testimony of an eye-witness who had often observed the habits of the animal in the Nile …. It is true that crocodiles are to be found elsewhere, particularly in the so-called Crocodile River in Palestine. Both Strabo and Pliny give this name to the small Zerka River which falls into the Mediterranean a little south of Caesarea. A 13^th century tract states that crocodiles were introduced here from Egypt by a rich man of Caesarea, in order that his brother might be devoured by them ….

But it has also been asserted … that an Egyptian colony transported crocodiles to the spot about B.C. 400 for purposes of worship …. During the succeeding centuries a few survivals have been seen, but only on the rarest occasions …. The extreme rarity of the animal in Palestine, imported in all probability from Egypt, could never have allowed its habits to be so well known to the residents in Canaan that the author of Job could have spoken of them as he did. It is in Egypt, where the crocodile was so thoroughly at home that one of the border lakes (on the line of the present Suez Canal) was actually called Lake Timsah, the “Crocodile Lake”, and where the city of Crocodilopolis in the Fayum was wholly given over to the worship of this creature, that we must look for the habitat of this huge saurian.

The whole details of the habits of the crocodile are so brilliantly depicted that we feel instinctively that the author was describing the animal from first-hand knowledge. He was acquainted with the fact that Egyptian conjurers were accustomed to play with the crocodile with immunity from danger by arts which were kept secret from the uninitiated: Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? Or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens [Job 41:5] When he says, His eyes are like the eyelids of the morning [Job 41:18], he is reminding us that the Egyptians employed the eye of the crocodile to denote the rising sun, inasmuch as it is the streaming red eyes of the amphibian which first become visible when the creature rises out of the water ….

 

[End of quotes]

 

This illustrates that, whilst St. Thomas’s choices of the elephant and the whale for, respectively, the Behemoth and Leviathan of the Book of Job, might be superficially convincing, they are not precisely aligned to the painstakingly presented biblical data.

And I suggest that the situation is the same for the supposedly literal interpretation of Genesis 1 as an account of God’s creating of “the heavens and the earth”, which is not so literal perhaps when subjected to the blowtorch of textual scrutiny.

For those interested in the Flood debate, refer to our http://genesisflood.blog.com But I must say here, again contrary to Robert, that I do accept a Flood, “universal” (in the dictionary sense of “affecting all”) to the extent that it killed off the entire human race (now that is pretty universal), excepting of course for Noah’s family, just as the Bible says. But I personally reject that this Flood was global in the sense that Noah, whose times I think that we can know archaeologically, had somehow to command a boat the size of a huge football playing field in waters surging above Mount Everest. Or something like that.

I was just astounded to read that Robert claimed I believe “that the rivers of Paradise mentioned in Genesis 2 didn’t exist in Paradise, since the Flood would have taken any trace of them away, and Moses wouldn’t have know about them”. To ‘spar’ properly one needs at least to end up at the right gymnasium. Robert has said the very opposite of what I actually hold on the subject, since I have written:

 

But there are other biblical-minded writers who, as I noted in “The Location of Paradise”, consider that Genesis 2 does indeed preserve a definite geographico-hydrological link between the pre- and post- Flood worlds. We saw that the four rivers referred to in the antediluvian Adamic toledôt are actually named by the postdiluvian Moses as real rivers, running alongside (or around) real geographical locations. Moreover, Moses uses the very same 3^rd person masculine singular Hebrew pronoun hu (comprising the Hebrew letters, he waw aleph), meaning ‘he’ or ‘himself’ (itself), in every one of the four cases, thereby directly connecting Adam’s four rivers with four known rivers of Moses’ time. Now, this hu is again the exact same Hebrew pronoun that editor Moses would use in his geographical modification of Abra[ha]m’s history, where, in that famous case of Genesis 14:3 he advises his people that the site that was in Abram’s day “the Valley of Siddim” had now become the Dead Sea. Thus Moses: “Valley of Siddim (that is, the Dead Sea)”; the Heb. pronoun hu here being translated quite appropriately into English as, “that is”. But even though the Bible seems to be interpreting itself for us here, I have found that ‘Creationists’, whilst willingly accepting the view that Moses was, in the case of Genesis 14:3, pointing to the very same geographical region that was intended in the Abra[ha]mic history (though now with considerable topographical alteration), will strenuously deny any geographical connection whatsoever in Genesis 2 between the pre-Flood hydrography and that later connected there by editor Moses with the pronoun hu.

[End of quote]