[BillSPrestonEsq]

Originally Posted by Random:Dice

primitive does not mean STUPID, buy a dictionary.

They interacted with stories in a different way than we do. We are dense enough to think it is fact verses fiction...and fiction automagically becomes worthless. Well, primitive civilisations understood the mystery of creation and how mysterious God is. Apologetically defending a literal interpretation of Genesis in the same way you probably do is only 100-150 years old as I said earlier.

The creation narrative in beautiful and deep and I love it, very very much. But dont read it in a way its not meant to be read, as many people do today.

In regards to the names...I yield, you are obviously willing to nit pick over that.

Actually, I have read a fair amount of semitic and ANE literature.

I quite understand what primitive means.

Scripture was very clearly written as an explanation of cosmology. The polemic value only has value if it is true, and really happened.

The ancients interacted with texts as having truth value.

The way it is meant to be read is that The God of the Hebrews can do things that the gods of the nation could not dream of doing, by creating without magic, ceremony, or conquest. He does not struggle with the waters of chaos.

The ancients understood that if this were a lie, (A concept that is quite well attested) then the value of polemic fell apart. This is why Elijah mocks the prophets of Ba'al.

Frankly, you are dead wrong. Look at how scriptures refer to Yahweh as creator.

The idea of a literal creation is as old as Genesis. Not in the sense of some super-technical definiton of literal, but in the sense of actual truth, what really happened, is as old as Genesis. Jesus backs this up as well. Where it starts to go away is in the medieval period when classical science texts such as Aristotle were treated as perfectly true.

Primitive means early, unsophisticated, early or uncivilized. None of these apply to Biblical Hebrew which was already a very mature language that had lost it's tense endings by the time of the writing of Genesis. This indicates it was a mature language with a robust literary history.