Tradition has it that Moses compiled the book of Genesis from earlier histories either oral or written. There is one theory that says that the reason Genesis repeats the stories is that each one is from a different source.
Loris
Is the story of Adam and eve first introduced in the bible ..or BEFORE TH
by gumby 12 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Loris
AlanF wrote an interesting essay on the flood that you could apply to the Adam and Eve story also
http://www.geocities.com/osarsif/flood20.htm
THE DISCOVERY OF SOURCES
The only way to understand the cause of the inconsistencies is to recognize that we have before us an example of ancient composite literature. Two separate written sources have been conflated; that is, two sources, or extracts from two sources, have been interwoven into one account, without rewriting them to make their vocabulary, style, and ideas agree with each other. Conflation invariably produces contradictions and inconsistencies, and sometimes duplications. Ancient Near Eastern literature, including that of the Hebrews, often repeated ideas, however, so duplication of thought does not necessarily indicate several writers. On the other hand, duplication of an incident in a story is usually caused by conflation. Composite literature was very prevalent in the ancient world, and a major contribution of modern biblical scholarship is the recognition that much of both the Old Testament and the New Testament is composite.
The same two sources that are used in the Genesis Flood story run through the Pentateuch, where they are combined with other source material. The presence of written sources in the Creation accounts was first observed when H. B. Witter in 1711 recognized the significance of the different terms for God. Gradually biblical scholars discovered more and more evidence of earlier sources and later editing in the Pentateuch. The famous Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis assigned letters to the main sources: J, E, P, and D. Although the hypothesis has had to be revised and refined, it is basically sound. Orthodox Jews and Christians attack it because it upsets the traditional view that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, but the evidence for written sources is quite decisive. The contradictions, duplications, and linguistic inconsistencies cannot be sensibly explained as the composition of a single writer.[
273a ]272] Isaac Asimov, op cit.
[273] Howard M. Teeple, The Noah's Ark Nonsense, pp. 41-52, Religion and Ethics Institute, Inc., Evanston, Illinois, 1978.]
[273a] An interesting viewpoint on the J document is given in The Book of J, Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1990. The following quotations from this book give a taste of the authors' ideas, and also shed light on the reasons many Biblical scholars see several original sources interwoven in the five Bible books ascribed to Moses.
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drawcad_1
most of the stories have been handed down from earlier traditions. Notice the absence of satan until after the Jews returned from Babylon. No virgin birth stories until after Greek influence.