Talk:Genesis creation narrative/Archive 21

Archive 15

←

Archive 19

Archive 20

Archive 21

Archive 22

Archive 23

→

Archive 25

Problems with organizational structure, "argument", esp sections Judeo-Christian reinterpretations and Genre

Given the effort spent on this talk page generally leans more heavily towards the "heat" side of the equation than the "light" side, the article itself reads like it's randomly constructed from scattered bits scavenged from an assortment of dead libraries. That's because too often what ends up on the mainspace is deliberately sought out to serve as a so there! blow for or against some faction of backoffice turf warriors, ie we---we're making a mess of what should be a reasonably easy article to put together, given it's probably one of the most comprehensively examined topics - academically examined - of all time.

It's considerably improved from where it was when I initially came to it, but it's deteriorated - deteriorating - from superior versions between then and now. "Judeo-Christian reinterpretations"? That's US culture-war-creep speak, probably inspired on this talk page because it isn't in the sources cited. The sources speak of diverse streams of "reinterpretation" in Jewish and Christian from two thousand years ago. And what's starkly revealed as odd in the article by this labeling is our inexplicably overlooking of what we're referring to about "interpretation", Judeo, Christian or any other.

We plunge ahead in the Judeo-Christian reinterpretations whooey by pronouncing "Genesis 1 was not originally concerned with establishing God as creator of the world (that was taken as given)", seemingly oblivious we have, ourselves, asserted to readers in the intro that the account was a critique of the earlier Mesopotamian polytheistic versions of an otherwise like narrative. We then take readers by the hand straight into huh?land. "The opening words of Genesis 1 sum up the authors' view of how the cosmos originated: 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth'; Yahweh, the god of Israel, was solely responsible for creation and had no rivals.[71] Later Jewish thinkers, adopting ideas from Greek philosophy, concluded that God's Wisdom, Word and Spirit had shared in the creative act." Huh? Is "concluded" the right word here? Is "Yahweh, the god of Israel" the "concluded that God's Wisdom etc" god? What did Yahweh look like then prior to the Greek influence attributing to God Wisdom, Word, Spirit? Why is that conflated with ex nihilo? (One source, a casually airy toss to "central to Islam, Judaism, Christianity"?? srsly?) Then, without warning and largely without any identifiable explanation or context whatsoever we push readers noses into an obscure debate between two equally today alien and extinct conceptions of how the universe is put together.?

Genre.../deep breath/.  ?? . There are so many problems therein. I think if I were to attempt to best reduce it, it's the presumptive "right way" adopted by the "voice" in that section--that there's a "right/wrong" interpretation of Genesis and that genre is the gate to getting it "right". The voice in that section is not encyclopedic At All. It's too much sermon, at the expense of description. This is an encyclopedia, not a pulpit. And genre is significant when interpreting a text, but lots of other things are significant as well. The article impotently flails about in the "interpreting" territories because its structure results more from the emergent psychosis of these backpages than it otherwise should.

I know the article's a battlefield. But congratulations, combatants, while you're so busy tracking your own personal scores the article grows increasingly nonsensical to readers who come here to look stuff up for the best of reasons. Get over yourselves. Professor marginalia (talk) 10:02, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

The incisive analysis and improvements are most welcome and much appreciated, no doubt, but it is still somewhat unclear whether you have took a stand with respect to the title of the article. I don't mean to say that I find your position to be unclear given the foregoing comments you've made in this discussion, but the question of genre is important, and that does throw something of a monkey wrench into your previously staked out oppositions to sources, etc. :Maybe the investigative process of examining the material you appear to be engaged in has yet to arrive at a destination, but at some point, without trying to take sides in a factionalized content dispute, we need to definitively state our positions regarding something as fundamental to the organizational structure of an article as the title.--Ubikwit ^連絡 _{見学/迷惑} 11:01, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

The article title's cycled through about twenty different variations.[1][2] Two years ago I pulled together 3 megabytes of arguments posted in the perpetual battles over the title.p1p2 If brought current, there'd probably be another 3MB of futility to archive. I think it should follow WP:UCN-ngram tool but I harbor no illusions that my opinion will scooch this any closer to a resolution. I'm convinced it's a pointless exercise talking about it any more. Professor marginalia (talk) 22:18, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

I too some significant reliable-sourced support for "Genesis creation story" as the title. And there is some editor support for "story." But I think there are enough battleground editors on either side who will forever refuse to budge from "myth" and "narrative". First Light (talk) 01:38, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

@Professor marginalia, could you please try to say that again, but more clearly? I might also point out that the two sections are sourced almost on a sentence by sentence basis, so that what you're criticising is the opinions of professional biblical scholars, not of Wikipedia authors - if you think the sources are wrong, please explain why.PiCo (talk) 12:28, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

I will try to show what concerns me with detailed examples, but my time is short today. I attribute the problems to the pages back here because I recognize editors are so absorbed in securing their own pet notions prime real estate on the mainspace, many of them hotly battled over on these back pages, and it's become freakishly difficult to deal with even the simplest improvements needed so the article is coherent and useful to uninitiated readers. (Recent example: my accurate, constructive, unremarkable, 100% non-controversial gnome edits as reverted for opening a "can of worms".) Like, the article doesn't say that where it originated or what language it was written in; we seem to presume the readers will know or gather as much by reading between the lines. In one section, we say the story is a "critique" of the polytheistic Mesopotamian myths, affirming the one God and establishing his primacy over all of nature. In another, we say the Gen 1. authors were "not originally concerned with establishing God as creator of the world (that was taken as given)" and identify that idea as "the result of later interpretation". The claims contradict each other. We also imply that the first drafts of the story originated in the 7th-6th century BC in the lead, but later around 500 BC leaving the reader to guess why both are offered here.

We say, "nor does the Eden story ever say that the serpent in the Garden is the Devil" which is extremely odd...the serpent doesn't figure anywhere else in the article, period! Pretend the reader doesn't know these Bible stories already. The serpent doesn't appear in the creation stories. It makes the same sense to that reader if we were to say, "Genesis never said the zombies couldn't eat of the tree". This may be a Big Deal to those engaging in a irl debate over interpretations about the Devil in theology; but there is no context for it provided anywhere in the article. That's it for now. I'll come back to this when I have more time. Professor marginalia (talk) 00:46, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

To answer your questions:

• Genesis 1 "affirm(s) the one God and establishing his primacy over all of nature". Yes, it establishes him as the creator of the world, but not in the modern sense - he's seen as the single supreme god without equals who gives order to primeval matter and makes it habitable, but he doesn't create matter itself (a controversial topic, by the way - this is the current majority view, but not without counter-arguments). So we can say that the authors of Genesis 1 were "not originally concerned with establishing God as creator of the world (that was taken as given)" - meaning that there are no arguments in Genesis 1 trying to establish YHWH as creator, it was simply a given. The two statements aren't contradictory, provided you understand that our concept of creation wasn't theirs.
• "We imply that the first drafts of the story originated in the 7th-6th century BC in the lead, but later around 500 BC leaving the reader to guess why both are offered here." No, that's not what's said - first drafts around 7th/6th centuries, final form around 500 BCE. Actually I think the article is pretty clear on that.
• "nor does the Eden story ever say that the serpent in the Garden is the Devil" which is extremely odd...the serpent doesn't figure anywhere else in the article". I think anyone reading that section of the article will understand what's being said. "Pretend the reader doesn't know these Bible stories already." That's a very big assumption - maybe in the deepest valleys of the Himalayas, or deep in the Amazon rainforest, you might find such a person, but not in our world. PiCo (talk) 04:43, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Finding someone who doesn't know the Adam and Eve myth already isn't as hard as you think. There's one born every minute. ~ Röbin Liönheart (talk) 07:32, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

PiCo, have you been to India or China recently? You comment about the Himalayas is apt. Very few Christians or Jews anywhere near there. HiLo48 (talk) 07:53, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

@Pico, obviously my comments got your back up and AFAIC you're exempt from my missive. It's my fault that my concerns about the text (which are valid, imo, but I don't mean to overstate the problems) were confusingly entangled with my concern about how they persist and worsen as they do despite the hyper-vigilance to the article evident on the talk page (a serious problem, imo). In fact I credit you for most, if not all, the good content and the clarity there now, a monumental task given the editing climate was such it was virtually impossible to make any progress on the cleanup. And your time is spent improving content, not "scoring points for the team" on the backpage. The culture wargame atmosphere creates an environment where even basic, common sense editing concerns become factionalized and this toxic subtext gets imparted to everything, not just the "hot button" bits. Again, the uneasiness towards my repairing missing/broken references was the direct result of all the heat generated back here on the completely unrelated battle over renaming the article.

So to return to the issues I raised. I'm not asking for a defense of the claims themselves. I'm asking we consider we're supposed to remember the reader's perspective. Compositionally, the connective tissue isn't there! The claims in the article have to cohere. The article should be written such that the arguments, or purpose, for making the claims are made evident in narrative, without the expectation the reader must "understand" or share in a given, veiled, back story. The text is not that clear as a standalone. These points aren't that clear in the text itself. Look again at my point about the Devil/Serpent. I don't think your "everybody knows" it is a good defense of it. The same "everybody knows" probably would know the creation stories too, yet we don't assume they do here--we assume it's our task to describe them. We don't give the reader any reason why we're talking about the Devil/Serpent in this article - the context is invisible (and arguably more relevant than is the value of its brief mention as an example of reinterpretation.) Take the whole clause there: "nor does the Eden story ever say that the serpent in the Garden is the Devil, or that Eden is a heavenly garden where the righteous will live eternally, or even that this is the story of the Fall of man." This is a debate rebuttal in an article that's so far omitted the affirmative! Letting the unsaid "youknowIknowyouknowIknow" serve as substrata is valid to eliminate pedantry when writing to an audience of "insiders", but that's not our audience. Our audience is not our talk page "contestants" either. Professor marginalia (talk) 21:00, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

I think I have to give up ownership of this article. The nature of Wikipedia is that articles get revised and re-revised ad infinitum. Thanks for the kind words though. :) PiCo (talk) 08:03, 8 January 2014 (UTC)

Ownership? Is that meant to be a joke? HiLo48 (talk) 03:33, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

Ownership is an attitude - "as if I owned". That's what I need to give up. PiCo (talk) 11:57, 14 January 2014 (UTC)