continued…
There are two different dialogues at work here.
First, the scriptural dialogue. While I agree that Genesis as a mere reworking of Near Eastern mythologies is a crudely base understanding of the book, none the less some of the connections cannot be easily denied. See N. Sarna I believe for a discussion of the story of the flood. Further, while indeed this book is the Word of God, it is not the Quran. This is the Word of God as told by very human people. The book of Genesis in specific seems to have been written by two people or two groups of people. Back to the point however, the creation story can clearly been seen to have remarkable overlap with other creation myths circulating at the time. However to posit as a mere reworked myth is, as you say, a flawed interpretation. The entirety of early Genesis, the creation story being an example here, is written specifically towards turning the Hebrews away from the pagan cultures around them. In the creation story, the Hebrew word used for the firmament is ‘ceiling’ and for the lights in the firmament ‘lamps’. Clearly the author is leading us away from the understanding that the sky or the sun should be divinized in any sense. The use of the structural similarities of the creation mythologies at the time is reworked to bring a closer understanding of Judaic monotheism. Now with our story of the Son’s of God, in my opinion the most basic understanding that we should emerge from this story with is that, using again a typical familiar mythological idea at the time, that this idea is wrong. Here the authors of Genesis deliberately use another familiar Near Eastern myth to convey an important theological position, that human and divine interbreeding is wrong. Ultimately the position of this inserted story directly prior to the flood makes this point that much more solid. This to me seems the best understanding of the text as Word of God as well as undeniably written by a human hand. Given the use of the same terminology as applied to angelic beings, e.g. Job 1:6, it seems like this is the most likely and solid understanding of the passage.
A further discussion of interpretation within this same dialogue is the discussions involving family lineages as perhaps being an explanation for the ‘who’ of the Son’s of God.
The second dialogue here is whether or not this could actually have happened in reality. Here we bring in the various philosophical positions regarding God, the human person, and the angelic being. Given the placement of this story in the ‘prehistorically portion of Genesis, the reality of such events (angelic-human copulation) is mostly an academic philosophical affair at most. The most developed understandings of which are found in Theistic angelology as well as Pseudo-Dionysius angelology.
The bit about the 4th century turning point is only with regard to the common opinion of the church father’s understanding at the time. I believe a plethora of positions would be held at any given moment.
As to the Tobit quotation, I don’t believe the meanings are vastly different, the understanding remains the same that the assumption of a body is not an actual merger of angelic form with matter but something entirely different. The translation I used was taken from Aquinas who was probably using the Latin translation of the Greek translation of the Hebrew.
Still, the bottom line remains unclear.
Posted by Theophilus |
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