An Attempt to Harmonize the Creation Accounts ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/zzbymXB4GDY/maxresdefault.jpg) Hey everybody, I stumbled across a video on YouTube this week that was published about a month ago by an apologetic content creator who goes by the word room. And this is about a 55minute video that is a response to some comments of mine that were made on Twitter. And this content creator is trying to defend the unity of the creation accounts of Genesis 1 and 2 and is criticizing not only my response on Twitter, but some videos of mine where I go into a bit more detail. And I just wanted to review part of this. I can't go through the entire 55minute video. I'm probably going to go through about the first half of it and maybe get to the other half another time. But let's take a look. A scholar who I think is more of an activist than an exeet or a careful reader just called me out on one of my takes on Genesis 1 and 2. Does Dan Mlen's response to me hold water? Let's see. >> All right, let's see it. >> Now, this all started on X or Twitter. Dan had actually retweeted something from Answers in Genesis and then the conversation flowed from there. So, I'm going to pull up the conversation. I'm going to show it here on screen and we'll talk about what Dan said, what he called me out on and we're going to dig in to see if he's actually correct. Now, here's the conversation. Dan retweeted answers in Genesis where they said, "If a claim contradicts the Bible, it is a false claim." And Dan said, "That puts us in a bit of a pickle because the Bible contradicts the Bible." numerous times. Now, I responded with a simple, "No, it doesn't." And someone else responded, "It doesn't make it past the first two chapters, Genesis 1 and 2, before it contradicts itself, citizen." And that's where the conversation really dived into Genesis. So, the next almost five minutes of this video is actually just reviewing things that this content creator said to another person on Twitter. So, I'm going to skip ahead to a part where they make the meat of their initial claim before we get to the responses to my videos. First, you need to understand the Bible wasn't written in English. So, depending on the translation you use when you read Genesis 2:5, it's going to say that no plant or herb of the field has grown on the earth. But when it uses the word earth, it's not using the word earth the way we use it in English. We read the word earth and we think of the planet. But when that Hebrew word is used, it just means land or ground. And it doesn't mean the entire planet. So Genesis 2 tells us that no plant or herb of the field had grown in the land. What land? Well, if you pay attention to the context of the story in Genesis 2 and what it's talking about, we see that Genesis 2 is narrowing in on the land of Eden and specifically focuses on that land. And so then I said, and then when you actually look at the wording here, it doesn't just say no plant or herb, but says specifically no plant or herb of the field. The phrase of the field is a Hebrew phrase that can speak of cultivated crops. And then when you dig deeper, it goes on to say, "For there was no man to work the ground." So this is a pretty standard apologetic approach to trying to unify the two different creation accounts of Genesis 1 and 2. And the idea is to suggest that the creation account in Genesis 2 is either temporally focusing in on day six or spatially focusing in on the Garden of Eden. And this doesn't work for a number of reasons, but this response really only engages with one part of it. And it asserts something that is just not true. And particularly this paragraph here, we read the word earth and we think of the planet. But when that Hebrew word is used, it just means land or ground and it doesn't mean the entire planet. This is only half true. The word can mean land or ground or territory or region or property or something like that. But it can also mean the entire planet as it does from Genesis 1:1 all the way through to Genesis 2:4 as pretty much all scholars agree. In fact, we can look at the ESV, and you're not going to be able to make out too much from this image, but on the left, we have every verse of Hebrew between Genesis 1:1 and 25 that has the Hebrew word eritz, earth. And then on the right, we have the ESV. And every red box is going around a place where the ESV rendered er as Earth in reference to the entire planet Earth. And then at the bottom, you see two purple boxes. And that's where suddenly they change the rendering to land. Now, there's nothing in the immediate context that suggests or demands we suddenly alter our understanding of the particular use of the Hebrew word er. The reason that the ESV and this content creator want you to understand suddenly for er to be meaning something else is because it creates a contradiction if it doesn't because we're suddenly starting the creation account all over again from the beginning and that isn't allowed. So we have to reinterpret to mean land or territory or property or region or something like that. Now when the word er is meaning that usually there are close contextual clues like it might have a pronoun like this er or our er or it might be in construct with the name of a region or a people the er of habila the er of kush or something like that those are where it's clearly in reference to a land or a region or a territory or property but when we have just the absolute use of er and nothing in the context indicates it is focusing in on a particular plot or portion of the earth. Why not just understand it as the earth? Again, the reason the ESV doesn't understand it that way, the reason this content creator doesn't want to understand it that way is not because the Hebrew doesn't mean that. It's because that creates the contradiction that they cannot tolerate. But let's consider another part of the Genesis 2 creation account that further complicates the notion that this is zeroing in on day six or zeroing in on the Garden of Eden. What gets created in Genesis 2:19? Adoni Elohim creates from the dust of the ground, every animal of the field, and every bird of the sky. Kol Hashimime. Now, this is problematic because when we're talking about every bird of the sky, this is not limited to a specific territory or subsection of the land. Even if we want erat to mean that, shamime clearly doesn't mean that. And if we understand this to be focusing in on day six or focusing in on specifically the land of Eden, saying that every bird of the sky was created after the creation of the human, the planting of the garden of Eden and the putting of the human into the garden of Eden creates a very clear contradiction because it is in Genesis 1 on day five that the birds of the sky o hashamim are created. So according to Genesis 2:19, every bird of the sky was not created until after the creation of the human, the planting of the Garden of Eden, and the placing of the human in the Garden of Eden. And this is where you have translations like the ESV, like the LSB, like the NIV that decide they're just going to arbitrarily change the wik tol at the beginning of Genesis 21:19 and understand it as a pl perfect and say now the Lord God had formed every animal of the field from the dust of the earth and every bird of the sky. That way the actual creation of those things is placed before all the events that are being narrated in Genesis 2. However, the wiktol is not how you form a pl perfect perfect. It only happens when close literary context demands it. And in Genesis 21:19, there is no such close literary context. The academic cases that have been made for reading it as a ploo perfect require you understand Genesis 1 to be the close literary context. In other words, it's pretty circular reasoning. you already have to imagine that Genesis 1 was written by the same authors as Genesis 2 in order for the argument to work and it just doesn't work. Genesis 21:19 is not beginning with a pl perfect perfect verb. But that's really the only other way to try to make sense of the fact that according to Genesis 2:19, every bird of the sky was created after the creation of the human, the planting of the Garden of Eden, the placement of the human in the Garden of Eden. It clearly contradicts. And so this notion that the Hebrew of Genesis 2 4 through whatever demands or indicates we have zeroed in on day six or specifically on the land of Eden doesn't work in light of the rest of the Hebrew. It's just an assertion. It's just something that people made up because they realized that conclusion was necessary to protect the presupposition of univocality. In the absence of the presupposition of univocality and in light of the full set of circumstances, the totality of the data, it's very clear that Genesis 2 is contradicting Genesis 1. But let's go on. So the idea here is not talking about all the plants in general, but specifically cultivated crops that require a person to work a field. And it was saying that in in that particular land of Eden, there was no one working the field. So there was no cultivated crops in the land. It is not retelling about the general plants of the whole earth from Genesis 1. So really I broke down three important details. Number one that it's talking about cultivated crops. Now I want to point something out. This content creator is going to acknowledge that my point was correct about the Hebrew because they argued that the phrase of the field makes clear this is a reference to cultivated crops and that's simply not true. and they're going to acknowledge that the Hebrew is on my side here, but only in passing. They're not actually going to say, "It turns out Dan was right. I didn't understand the Hebrew well enough." They're going to glide right on into another argument where they say that when it talks about rain, that always means covenant in the Hebrew Bible. And so, what is the rain that has to do with a covenant? Well, it's obviously going to have to do with the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve. And so therefore, this is a light motif that cues the hearer or the reader to the fact that this is only referring to rain that is relevant to the Garden of Eden. So it's localized and all this stuff. And as I've already pointed out, that doesn't really work in light of the totality of the circumstances. But I just want to play that portion where this content creator acknowledges that I was right, that the Hebrews on my side here, but then just pivots right into this other argument. And I want to go back to uh verse 5. No plant of the field was yet in the earth. The word there for plant is seak, which can mean a bush or a shrub, but is used to refer to wild vegetation. And no vegetation of the field had yet sprung up. This is ASV and and that refers to grass or plants. This is usually cultivated vegetation. So what we've got going on here is an explanation that on the whole earth there was neither wild nor cultivated vegetation. Why? Because there was no rain, which is how we get wild vegetation. And there was no human to work or till the earth, which is how we get cultivated vegetation. So Genesis 2 is actually somewhat of a merorism. It's describing vegetation that grows wild and vegetation that requires cultivation. And it says there was neither of either type on the entire earth. And that is widely agreed by the overwhelming majority of scholars to indicate there was no vegetation of any kind until after the human had been created. So suggesting that it's all reducible down to one concept of only cultivated vegetation not only entirely gets the Hebrew wrong and entirely ignores half of the description of what's going on here in this verse, but it also ignores the part of the video where I quite explicitly and clearly drew that distinction. All right, so Dan is right about basic lexical ranges. SAK does refer to wild shrubs or low vegetation and it's often associated with uncultivated or aid environments. As refers broadly to vegetation, grasses or plants used for food, whether cultivated or naturally occurring. Where Dan goes wrong is treating lexical range as determinative of referential scope. Lexicons tell you what a word can mean, not what it must mean in a given discourse unit. And this is one of Dan's biggest problems in a lot of his points on different topics. He isolates the point in the narrative scope, but ignores the larger narrative scope. You see, Genesis 2:5 does not just list two different plant types. It embeds them in a structured causal explanation that we need to look at. The verse limits the vegetation in view by two things. no rain from Yahweh God and no human to work the ground. Now, Dan does a couple things here. First, he treats the causal explanations or clauses here as global explanatory mechanisms, but the text does not require that. As a matter of fact, when we talk about rain, rain in the Hebrew Bible is not a global meteorological abstraction. It is covenantally and agriculturally local. So, this is where this content creator gets into this whole reign means covenant means the narrative is localized in scope to the land of Eden. But I bring this up to point out that this content creator has to acknowledge that the Hebrew here does refer to land that is arid, that is uncultivated, that is uninhabited, that is uninhabitable, that is deserted. it doesn't mean cultivated land because of the phrase of the field. Now, they just pivot right into saying, "But this ignores the broader context." And then we get the silly rain means covenant argument. But the comment that this content creator posted on Twitter was precisely that it is the phrase of the field that indicates this. Here's what they said. And then when you actually look at the wording here, it doesn't just say no plant or herb, but says specifically no plant or herb of the field. The phrase of the field is a Hebrew phrase that can speak of cultivated crops. And then when you dig deeper, it goes on to say that there was no man to work the ground. Now, this has already all been addressed and this content creator misrepresented what's going on in the Hebrew in this comment, which is precisely why I said you clearly don't know Hebrew and nothing in this video has indicated yet that this content creator has a competent grasp of Hebrew because all they've done here is acknowledge that the Hebrew agrees with me and then without acknowledging that they were wrong in their initial comment pivoted straight to but rain means covenant and Dan doesn't know this. So, we're not actually engaging my concerns, and we don't seem to be engaging in good faith either. >> These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. >> So, I'm going to pause here and point out that the ESV treats all of verse 4 as a single sentence. However, I and many other scholars think that the second half of verse 4 is its own sentence and that sentence runs through verses 5 and six and doesn't conclude until verse 7. It's a temporal clause. And what we have in verses 5, 6, and 7 are the rest of the temporal clause and the main clause of the sentence. The ESV doesn't like that. So, I just want to point out that what you're reading here is not exactly how most critical scholars are going to read what's going on in the Hebrew. So, Dan is correct that a lot of scholars read 24B, the second half of verse 4 all the way to verse 7 as a complex sentence with a temporal clause. What Dan doesn't really go into detail here is that this is related to a belief in what's called the documentary hypothesis. So the documentary hypothesis basically is just a hypothesis that the pentatuk the five books that we call the books of Moses the Torah that those five books are not the work of a single author but rather that it is a literary compilation of multiple sources. Specifically, most argue for four. Some have changed that to down to less than four, but the general hypothesis is that there are four sources and that a later editor came and over time they were stitched together as these multiple sources. So, this is not entirely accurate. And this is where this content creator betrays that they're not nearly as well informed about the critical scholarship as they would like their audience to believe. because the documentary hypothesis has certainly long been the dominant source critical theory of penetukal composition. However, it is not all source critical theories of penetukal composition. There are others and it's no longer the dominant position. And so just because a theory involves Jed D and P or maybe just DP and nonP or some other combination of sources doesn't make it the documentary hypothesis. There are other hypotheses out there. But apologists usually get pre-digested caricatures of critical scholarship fed to them along with the antidote, the way to undermine or criticize the critical scholarship. And so when apologists treat any source critical theories of penetukal composition as the documentary hypothesis, no matter the configuration of sources and their nature and all of that kind of stuff, that's usually a dead giveaway that they're not actually reading the critical scholarship. They're not directly exposing themselves to what's actually going on in the source criticism of the Penetuk. They are getting secondhand reports through other apologists. what's going on in a way that allows them to immediately try to undermine it. So, uh, that gives away that this content creator is not directly engaging the actual critical scholarship. The Hebrew word for generation is tooteote. And there's a phrase that appears consistently throughout the book of Genesis and is these are the generations of and we call this a toodote structure. these are the generations of and then it lists out the generations. It actually divides up the book of Genesis. >> Now, I'm going to skip over a lot of background information that is not relevant to the actual argument here. The only other time this word is used in Genesis that I haven't mentioned here is in Genesis 2:4 where it says the generations of the heavens and the earth or the generations of when they were made. So you have the heavens and the earth, specifically them being created, the days they were created or the day they were created. And we see here that it's using that same tool. Every other time in the book of Genesis when it's used, it tells us what comes next. But Dan wants us to believe and those who hold to the documentary hypothesis and split these up as two different accounts wants us to believe that the generations of in Genesis 2:4 is actually the end of the story and not telling us what comes next. So most of what this content creator is saying about the toladope formula is pretty accurate. However, in absolutely no sense whatsoever does it undermine the critical scholarly consensus about the priestly creation account being a later and different creation account from the earlier nonpcreation account. The tool formula doesn't complicate that at all. Nor does the kayazm which we're going to get into a little more detail about later. But I want to point out that there is one area of disagreement regarding how Genesis 2:4A as a toadote formula fits into the different compositions of these different creation accounts. When I say that uh Genesis 1:1 through 24A is the priestly account, I'm understanding Genesis 2:4A as a toadote formula written by the priestly author of the priestly creation account that is intended to provide a transition into what comes after the earlier creation account. It's part of the weaving of the two stories together. Now, there are a lot of other scholars who acknowledge that the priestly creation account is distinct from the non-priestly creation account who argue that Genesis 2:4A comes from a later separate redactional phase. In other words, the priestly creation account was written and then someone later on was like, we're going to stitch them together and we're going to use the priestly toadote formula to do it. And so came in and wrote Genesis 2:4A. I'm actually not mad at that theory. I think that theory makes sense as well. Neither of them is complicated by the observation that we have a toadote formula going on here. So let's take a look at five commentaries on the book of Genesis published over the last 6 years and see what critical scholars have been saying about this. You'll notice that this content creator doesn't seem aware of any of this at all. We're going to start with David Peterson's Old Testament Library Volume on Genesis, which I believe was published in either 2024 or 2025. It's the most recent of the five that I'm going to look at. And the reference to the tool formula here is pretty brief, but don't worry, we're going to get into a lot more detail later. So, we're in Genesis 2:4A. This half verse was introduced as a transition between the priestly and pre priestly accounts of creation and as an introduction to the latter. The so-called toadote formula toadote means descendants or successors appears 11 times in the book of Genesis, five times in the primeval history and five times in the family literature and once in the Joseph story. In all instances, the formula stands immediately before the material it introduces. For example, the descendants of Ishmael are listed immediately after the formula. These are the descendants of Ishmael. Hence, readers should construe 24A as an introduction to what follows, identifying those descendants as humanity. Humans are, in this editor's eyes, the progeny of the heavens and the earth. A claim that is not out of line with the pre priestly account of humanity's creation since humans are created out of earth. In other words, yes, this tool formula is added in order to introduce the pre priestly creation account, but it was added after the composition of the later priestly creation account, either by a later redactor or by somebody involved in the composition of that priestly account. I think Peterson would probably side with the later redactor argument. But then let's take a look at a 2024 commentary, Genesis 1-11 by Ron Hendel from the Anchor Yale Bible commentary series. Here's what Hendle had to say. So, notes to four. This is the genealogy of heaven and earth when they were created. This half verse is a literary bridge contributed by R that would be redactor who combined the J and P sources. The problem R faced was how to combine the precation account of 1 through 23 with the J crereation account that begins at 24B. The solution was to link them by a genealogical formula derived from 51. This is the book of Adam's genealogy. The formula, this is the genealogy of X, serves as a structuring principle in P's work. In this verse, R extends the genealological idiom to include the genealogy in an abstract sense of the creation of heaven and earth in 1 through 23. It looks backward at the totality of creation and forward with its temporal formula to what happens next. By this strategy, the differences between the two creation stories are somewhat bridged, and the second story is made subordinate to the first. The listing of heaven and earth as if they were cosmic parents may be derived from cosmogonic language in which heaven and earth did have offspring but here is adapted to the context. This connective bridge shows how the social idiom of genealological descent was used to conceptualize the past. The noun tolot descendants genealogy spelled here plain a tolot found only in the plural is derived from the verb holid to beget to father. By the rule of patrineal descent, all of a man's descendants are his offspring like the children of Jacob. So toadote can denote one or many generations of descendants. The usage here is more abstract as if history descends from the creation of heaven and earth. Then we've got a 2023 commentary on Genesis 1-11 by Yan Christian Gertz from the historical commentary on the Old Testament series published by I'm pretty sure Peters. Uh this is pretty brief. The connection of the priestly creation account with the scholarly narrator's garden narrative, that's uh Gitz's way to refer to what other people refer to as the J account, occurred through the redactional tool formula in Genesis 24A, taking up the most important structural feature of the priestly writing and transferring it into the present text. Other formulations reminiscent of the priestly creation account likely come from the same redaction or later harmonizing efforts. These include the expansion of the tetetrogrammaton to Adonai Goddard and presumably the two-part addition to include all the livestock and lol or mik haba in Genesis 2:20 3:14. Then let's take a look at David Carr's international exegetical commentary on the Old Testament of Genesis 1-11 and I believe this comes from 2021 uh published by Cole Hammer. This is going to be the longest and the most detailed. We've got uh the start at the bottom of this page, Genesis 2:4A, as a conflational superscription. The unit covered here, Genesis 24b through 3:24 represents a superscription, Genesis 2:4A, and first major narrative complex, Genesis 24b through 3:24, of a section focused on the generations of heaven and earth when they were created. Though there has been a recent trend to read Genesis 2:4 as a whole, as a superscription, it features an overall doubling 2 4a and 24b that is unusual for a biblical superscription. And the verse features a move from determined heaven and earth and 24A. That means they have the definite article to undetermined heaven and earth in 24b. That would be unusual in a single textual unit. In addition, if Genesis 2:4 as a whole were a superscription, the text that it would introduce happens to begin with a conjunction and all the shrubs. Genesis 2:5. Most biblical superscriptions, including all such superscriptions in Genesis 51, 69, 101, 372, are followed asetically by a clause without a conjunction. These indicators suggest that 24A is the actual superscription within the present form of the text. While 24B, the asyetic follow-up to 24A, is the beginning of the material introduced by that superscription. To be sure, the superscription in 24A is bound to the material it introduces in 24B by inverse parallels after its introduction, ele 4a. And so this is the kayazm thing that this content creator is going to refer to a little later down the road. But as they've pointed out, the fact that it is uh ha shamim vaha in 24a, but is just eritz vamime and 24b would be unusual for a single sense unit. The fact that it's going from determined to undetermined and it's also switching the order and it's also using different verbs for create. There are a bunch of reasons that 24A and 24B don't fit comfortably together as a single sense unit composed by a single author. So the kayazm thing really just indicates the toladope formula is intentionally being stitched into Genesis 24b rather than indicative of a single unified composition. That is actually not very likely at all. In this way, the superscription in Genesis 2 4a connects to the beginning of the narrative in 24B with an A B C prime B prime A prime pattern. This makes 24A introduce the following narrative in Genesis 2 through 3 rather than functioning as a superscription summarizing Genesis 1:1 through 23. We see a system of similar priestly toadote descendants superscriptions introducing the other major sections of the book of Genesis. Genesis 51, 69, 10:1, 11:10, etc. And this one seems to serve an analogous function. Those other superscriptions frame the sections that follow them as focusing on the descendants toadote of a given figure starting with Adam in Genesis 5:1 and then continuing with the descendants of Noah, Noah's sons, and so on. The reference back to heaven and earth when they were created helps Genesis 2:4A connect what went before Genesis 1:1 through 2:3 to what follows 2 4B and following. More specifically, Genesis 2:4A frames the following narratives about the first humans as about something like the generations to do understood more broadly of the heaven and earth that were so prominently featured in Genesis 1:1 through 2:3. At the same time, the fact that one must adapt the translation of toodote in 24A away from its typical more straightforward designation of the descendants of a human figure is an important indicator that Genesis 24A is not itself part of the priestly system of toodote superscriptions. Instead, Genesis 24A is a post-p priestly superscription that extends that system backward in order to pose the non- priestly materials of Genesis 24B and following as a continuation of the priestly creation account in Genesis 1:1-23. The author of Genesis 24A did this by presenting the following story about the first humans created from the ground and animated by divine breath as somehow constituting the descendants broadly construed eg generations of God's 7-day creation of the cosmos in Genesis 1:1-23. The resulting implication that heaven and earth functioned as ancestor-like figures to the first plants, animals, and humans is a linguistic turn that recognizes the role attributed to earth in bringing forth life. Genesis 11-12 24 also Genesis 2:7 and 19 while also insisting on the idea that these two entities are themselves created. And then we have the use of the verbal root bar in 24A when they were created. And then we can go to Bill Arnold's 2020 New Cambridge Bible commentary volume on Genesis. Starts at the bottom here. The expression in 24A, these are the generations of toladote, the heavens and the earth is the first of the todote clauses of Genesis and is the only one introducing the generations of an object heavens and earth rather than a personal name. Thus, verse 4A introduces the epic narrative of the Garden of Eden and binds it to the creation story of Genesis 1, creating a layered and complex perception of creation. As summarized in the introduction, we have reason to believe the toadote of 24 was created new by the author of 1-23 based on the older model of 51, which probably preserves the original use of generations. The purpose for 24A was to tie the new priestly account of creation to the older account of 24b through 324, which presumably by that time wielded impressive authority. Thus, the older authoritative epic account of human origins has been absorbed and supplemented by the more comprehensive priestly account of Genesis 1. It has occasionally been assumed that the toladote clause on 24A is a summary of the acts of creation in 1-23 and was an original part of a priestly document. If so, the verse and chapter divisions are better fixed at 1 through 24A. However, there is good reason to believe the toodote clauses were independent of the priestly document as I have explained in the introduction and that 24 introduces the next block of material so that the unit division used here is to be preferred. This approach is also instructive for our understanding of how these two creation accounts are functioning together. While some earlier source approaches tended to dissect and atomize the texts, an understanding of 24A as an intentional link between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2:3 teaches us how these accounts of creation were intended to sound together. The editor of the final text has produced a continuity between them, adapting and adopting the authority of the older document and creating a new text that is greater than the sum of its parts. They may have come from different authors originally, but Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 through3 have been edited together in such an intentional way as to produce a binocular or synoptic view of creation. Genesis 2 through3 now takes a second look. So these are five of the leading commentaries of Genesis that have been published not just in the last six years. I'm not aware of a similar commentary on Genesis being published in like the last 10 or 15 years, but they all agree that the priestly account of creation is a secondary later independent account that was tied to the earlier non-priestly account of Genesis 24b through to the end of Genesis 3 through the toadote formula of Genesis 2 4a. content creator is not engaging any of that. They're engaging the conclusion that the toadote formula of 24A was simply the way that the uh author of the priestly account tied off their creation account without concern for its integration into what followed. And while that is a theory that some of these authors have said was out there, that's really not where the consensus is these days. The consensus is a little more towards understanding 24A as a later redactional stitch that brings the priestly creation account together with the earlier non-priestly creation account. Either way, they're still two separate accounts according to the majority of scholars, according to the most authoritative and most recent scholarly literature that addresses the question. This content creator is not aware of any of that because I don't get the sense that they're actually directly exposed to critical scholarship. It seems to me they're being exposed to apologetic predigestions of the critical scholarship which overwhelmingly misunderstand andor misrepresent it. But there's another point here. I said it wasn't just the toadote. It was also the kayazm. So what is a kayazm? A kayazm is a literary device that involves repeating grammatical structures or phrases in reverse order. It's also known as inverted parallelism or some people call it an abba structure. And we have this pattern in verse 4. Let's look at that again. It says, "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens." So you have your toadote. These are the generations of and then you have the kayazm the heavens and the earth. That's A. When they were created, that's B. In the day the Lord God made. That's B. Again, it's talking about being created, right? So you have A, heavens and earth. When they were created in the day God made them, talking about being created, the earth and the heavens, heavens and earth. The A parallels the last statement which is also mirroring the A. Earth and the heavens. And the middle two phrases parallel each other, the B and the B. The middle phrase, the first middle phrase, when they were created. The second one, in the day the Lord God made. So you have this parallel of heavens and earth created made earth and heavens. That is a clear kayastic structure. These are intended to go together. It was intentionally put together in a structure that creates the parallelism. Now, is it possible that these are two different lines from unrelated contradicting sources and the editor to just put them together to make the pattern? Technically, yes, that's possible. But what is more likely? Was it more likely that this with that toadote structure was intentionally written together to form the pattern? or an editor just found these two sources that happen to have two different lines that perfectly mirrored each other to the point that there's even a strange way of saying heavens and the earth because the first part of verse four says heavens and earth while the second part reverses it and says earth and heavens and that's not usually the way that heavens and earth are spoken of. >> Uh not usually but it does occur elsewhere. I think it occurs once in a psalm. But what this content creator is overlooking is the fact that those aren't the only two options. It's not either Genesis 24A and 24B were composed at one time by one author or they both pre-existed and an editor just went jackpot and stuck them together. As we've shown with those five recent commentaries on Genesis, the overwhelming majority of scholars agree that Genesis 24A was composed with Genesis 24B in mind and in an effort to stitch the priestly creation account to the earlier non- priestly creation account. Now whether that was by the author of the priestly creation account or by a later redactor who is not part of the same school, that's what's up in the air. And again, I still kind of like the idea that it was the author of the priestly creation account, but I'm very much open to the other conclusion as well. So, this content creator is not addressing that. But additionally, when they bring up the whole kayazm argument, they've not addressed the fact that uh the hashamime is also using the definite articles just as Genesis 1:1 through Genesis 2:3 does. Whereas eritzvime doesn't use the definite article. And again, the verbal roots that are used between the two are different. And the names for God that are used are different. And so Genesis 2 4a and Genesis 24B are very, very different. It's not just oo look kayazm. It's also the literary qualities of one are entirely distinct from the literary qualities of the other. and the literary qualities of the other are consistent with the rest of the creation account that runs from Genesis 2:5 through to the end of Genesis 3. And again, Genesis 25:5 would have to begin with the Cole Seak, which is not how the tool formula introduces the narrative. Genesis 2:5 is definitely carrying on a sentence that was begun in Genesis 24b. So when you consider the Hebrew and the critical scholarship, this content creator is not really addressing the issue and is not making a compelling case that the critical scholarship is up in the night and doesn't really know what it's talking about. What this content creator is demonstrating is that they're not actually directly engaging or even directly aware of what's going on in the critical scholarship. They are aware of again a pre-digested apologetic caricature of the critical scholarship. That's what they're engaging. And it just doesn't work when you take everything into consideration. Now, whether or not this content creator makes another video where they go into the problem of every bird of the skies or not, uh, I don't get the sense that they're going to engage in good faith. I don't get the sense that they're going to directly engage the concerns, much less directly engage the critical scholarship. I get the sense that they're going to parry and deflect and evade, which is kind of what they've done in this video to some degree. uh but more than anything have just exposed their lack of awareness of what's actually going on in the critical scholarship. So I don't anticipate having to respond again to this content creator unless they actually do figure out what's going on in the critical scholarship and competently engage the arguments that I've presented from those five commentaries and the other arguments that I've presented in those previous videos as well as in this video. So we shall see. And the fit for this video has been Wolverine., An Attempt to Harmonize the Creation Accounts, YouTube, 01kmdpq7dq94wk28v15x6eqr6w.