Creation Moment 5/16/2021 - > 0.98 (i) [Starting in Gen.2:4]

 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. Genesis 2:4

 

"Old-earth evangelicals contend that Genesis 2:4–3:24 is not meant

to be read historically; but rather, that it is myth which communicates timeless truths. 

To support this notion, they argue perforce that these passages are not prose, but rather, poetry. 

 

--But, the voice of statistics loudly cries out against their suggestion, not only forbidding it, but protesting it cannot be so. 

 

*...2005... published the findings for quantitatively discerning the genre of a Biblical Hebrew (BH) text. .... model and statistical tests employed at that time to statistically prove that Genesis 1:1–2:3 is prose/narrative. ....used a logistic regression model based upon the distribution of the main narratival verb form, the wayyiqtol (called the preterite in that study).....determined the relative frequency of wayyiqtols to all finite verbs for each passage within a stratified joint random sample of 48 prose/narrative texts and 49 poetic texts to ascertain the probability that a BH text is prose/narrative. 

 

This methodology is readily applied to the passage at hand. Genesis 2:4–3:24 has 55 wayyiqtols out of 124 finite verbs, resulting in a 0.443548 relative frequency of wayyiqtols. This yields the following: the probability that the Creation and Fall of man text is a narrative is

> 0.98 (i)

at a 99.5% confidence level.

In other words, it is statistically indefensible to argue that this text is poetry and not prose/narrative. Furthermore,...RATE study that if a BH text is prose/narrative, it is necessarily history....adduced the following fifteen categories of evidence that Biblical authors of narratives meant their material to look historical, and in addition believed that they were recounting real events:

1. God’s people are defined in terms of their past
2. God’s people are commanded to keep the memory of their past alive
3. God’s people engage in retrospection on their past
4. The remembrance of the past devolves on the present and determines the future
5. Customs are elucidated
6. Ancient names and current sayings are traced back to their origins
7. Monuments and pronouncements are assigned a concrete reason as well as a slot in history
8. Historical footnotes are sprinkled throughout the text
9. Written records used as sources are cited
10. Precise chronological reference points are supplied
11. Genealogies are given
12. Observations of cultic days and seasons are called acts of commemoration
13. Prophetic utterances are recalled and related to events in the narrative
14. “Time” words challenge ancient readers to validate historical claims made in the text
15. Historical “trajectories” link different portions of the text and widely separate historical periods.

There are numerous examples of each of these categories. An expansion on two of these will suffice. Historical reviews in Psalms 78; 105; 106; Ezekiel 20; Nehemiah 9; numerous times in Christ’s teachings and discourses; Acts 7; Acts 13, and many other places, mention specific people and events, which are treated as real events and real people. 

And even more striking are the many times when Biblical authors break frame (i.e. depart from relating their account to speak directly to the reader) in order to challenge readers to prove the truthfulness of what they have just said. 

This is commonly done by the phrase “[it is there] until this day.” The report in Joshua 7:26: that Achan and his family are buried under a pile of stones; and the footnote in 2 Samuel 18:18 concerning the monument Absalom set up for himself, are prime examples of this. 

 

Thus the weight of evidence is so overwhelming that we must acknowledge that Biblical authors believed that they were recounting real events. We must therefore call their work history, knowing that they believed the truth. We would be deniers of the essence of inspiration if we did not. We cannot assert that the text is other than factually true. As Meir Sternberg forcefully argues:

Were the narrative written or read as fiction, then God would turn from the lord of history into a creature of the imagination, with the most disastrous results . . . . Hence, the Bible’s determination to sanctify and compel literal belief in the

past. It claims not just the status of history but . . . of the [author’s italics] history, the one and only truth that, like God himself, brooks no rival . . . . if as seekers for the truth, professional or amateur, we can take or leave the truth claim of inspiration, then as readers we must simply take it—just like any other biblical premise or convention, from the existence of God to the sense borne by specific words—or else invent our own text. (Sternberg 1985, p. 34;)

Thus, to conclude discussing the first assault, no one can successfully argue that this text is poetic myth and not a narrative. It is a narrative, and if a narrative, then historical." StephenW.Boyd/AIG