Genesis 2 Geography without the Toledoth Hypothesis?

TryingToLearn

TryingToLearn

Puritan Board Freshman
My understanding of Genesis 2...:

A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. 11 The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. 13 The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. 14 And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

...Was always that the geography is talked about in the present tense ("there is gold", etc.) and doesn't line up with modern geography is because the passage was written by an antediluvian before the global flood completely changed the earth's geography and then the names of the places were re-used. However, I read a recent thread on here saying that the toledoth hypothesis (the idea Genesis was written by multiple authors being introduced by the phrase, "these are the generations of" is not well-supported, so I was wondering what the alternate explanation of this would be? Is Adamic (or at least antediluvian) authorship not widely supported by Christian scholars? If not, I fail to see what else the explanation could be here.

Thanks!
 
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Most conservative scholars believe in Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. That doesn't preclude him using sources (in fact in some places, he clearly alludes to those sources, while in others they must be inferred). Sources may have been both oral and written, and could have taken a variety of forms. But the sources (whatever they were) are not Scripture: what we have is what the Holy Spirit inspired, and so there is little value in seeking to reconstruct earlier forms as if they would have a greater stamp of authority. Even if we discovered an "Adamic" document, it would still be extra-Biblical.

Almost all scholars believe that the phrase "These are the generations of..." introduces new sections of the story (rather than ending the previous section), but this has little to do with authorship. A single author might use a stock phrase to delineate sections (the prophets do this all the time).

The geography of Eden is a complex question: two of the rivers are easily identifiable in the Biblical context (the Tigris and Euphrates), while the other two are generally thought to be unknown. Complicating matters is the fact that there is more than one Cush in the Bible. Havilah is an identifiable location in Arabia, and is associated with Ophir in Genesis 10:29, also famous for its gold. But as you say, the flood may well have greatly altered geography, and it is doubtful that Moses thought Eden was easily locatable in the post-deluvian world.
 
iainduguid said:
Most conservative scholars believe in Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. That doesn't preclude him using sources (in fact in some places, he clearly alludes to those sources, while in others they must be inferred). Sources may have been both oral and written, and could have taken a variety of forms. But the sources (whatever they were) are not Scripture: what we have is what the Holy Spirit inspired, and so there is little value in seeking to reconstruct earlier forms as if they would have a greater stamp of authority. Even if we discovered an "Adamic" document, it would still be extra-Biblical.

Almost all scholars believe that the phrase "These are the generations of..." introduces new sections of the story (rather than ending the previous section), but this has little to do with authorship. A single author might use a stock phrase to delineate sections (the prophets do this all the time).

The geography of Eden is a complex question: two of the rivers are easily identifiable in the Biblical context (the Tigris and Euphrates), while the other two are generally thought to be unknown. Complicating matters is the fact that there is more than one Cush in the Bible. Havilah is an identifiable location in Arabia, and is associated with Ophir in Genesis 10:29, also famous for its gold. But as you say, the flood may well have greatly altered geography, and it is doubtful that Moses thought Eden was easily locatable in the post-deluvian world.
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Thanks professor. So, would you agree that Genesis 2 was most likely written by an antediluvian even while rejecting the Toledoth hypothesis? It doesn't seem possible to me that the geography could have stayed the same after the flood, which buried layers upon layers of sediment all across the Earth and rearranged entire continents. It would then seem most likely that Genesis 2 was written by an antediluvian, as that's the period it's describing.
 
iainduguid said:
But as you say, the flood may well have greatly altered geography, and it is doubtful that Moses thought Eden was easily locatable in the post-deluvian world.
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Indeed, this might be one reason God brought the Flood, to obscure the original geography of the Middle East so that we won't go looking for where Eden was and turn it into an idol (a reason also given as to why we don't possess any of the original manuscripts of the books of Scripture).
 
TryingToLearn said:
Thanks professor. So, would you agree that Genesis 2 was most likely written by an antediluvian even while rejecting the Toledoth hypothesis? It doesn't seem possible to me that the geography could have stayed the same after the flood, which buried layers upon layers of sediment all across the Earth and rearranged entire continents. It would then seem most likely that Genesis 2 was written by an antediluvian, as that's the period it's describing.
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As I said, I think Genesis 2 was written by Moses. I don't know what sources he had, oral and written, and I don't think anyone else knows either. I do know the Spirit of God directed his writing inerrantly; the rest is speculation. That doesn't make it wrong, but in my experience speculation about the things that God has not revealed sometimes draws our attention away from more profitable study of what God has revealed. It's not as if Genesis would be more reliable if based on the testimony of Adam, Noah, et al, than if based on the direct testimony of the Holy Spirit. Clearly, the events of much of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are not based on human testimony, since they describe events that occurred before the creation of Adam and Eve, but we nonetheless believe that they are an accurate record of creation. Why couldn't we believe the same for the rest of the opening chapters? Does it make any difference in how we receive them?

I don't think Moses is concerned to give us an exact geographical location for the Garden in Eden. I think there are other more important things going on in the passage, as most commentaries explain.
 
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