0116 What are some of the implications of the previous figure?
Allow me to add two nuances
Genesis 1-111a is the Word of God1a.
The hypothesis of the first singularity1c belongs to scientific knowing2c.
0117 It’s a little busy. It recalls the controversy mentioned at the start of this blog. It implies that Gen 1-111a is a gift from God that allows us to ideate a perspective that we otherwise never would discern1c.
0118 Sparks identifies three stage managers… er… authors to Gen 1-11. These “authors” may represent intergenerational traditions. They also may be individuals at the time when the Pentateuch is formally assembled.
The first is the Antiquarian Theologian, who is responsible for the genealogies in chapters four and eleven.
The second is the Ethnic Apologist, who constructs the genealogies in chapters five and ten.
0119 What do these authors add up to?
The segmented genealogies in the primeval history account for the cultural origins of Israel.
The linear genealogies distinguish the identity of Adam’s tradition from other traditions in southern Mesopotamia.
0120 Can that be all?
Surely, this contributes to the histriography of Gen 1-11.
But, says nothing about the historiography of southern Mesopotamia.
0121 The literature of the ancient Near East anchors the histriography of Gen 1-11 to the historiography of southern Mesopotamia.
One of the characters in An Archaeology of the Fall offers a resolution. Gen 1-11 associates to a family tradition within the temple tradition of the developing Sumerian civilization.
Seth’s family is capable of maintaining its own traditions, related to, yet, at times, critical of the work of the temple.
0122 For example, Sparks compares the story of Adam in Eden with a tale of the early Mesopotamian sage, Adapa. Both Adam and Adapa reject an offer from a divine being, thereby ruining their opportunities for an immortal destiny.
0123 Sparks pictures the Biblical authors working during and after the Babylonian Exile. They weave oral and written traditions into one text. The creation myth in Genesis 2-3 is put together by the Antiquarian. The Genesis 1 Creation Story is scripted by the Apologist.
Neither is aware of Adapa’s encounter with Ea. Neither is aware that a tale of the earliest Mesopotamian sage is buried in some hill out there, in the desert. Why? The Antiquarian and Apologist labor for living traditions. What do they know about traditions dead for thousands of years?
0124 Indeed, the same character in An Archaeology of the Fall, articulates the implications.
Adapa belongs to a long-forgotten civilization, rejected by Abraham, when he turned away from his own family’s elite tradition, and set off on his own.
0125 Talk about histriography.
Abraham walks away from a dying Sumerian civilization, the civilization that enveloped his family tradition, without destroying it, all the way back to the beginning.
0126 Talk about historiography.
The Sumerian language is unrelated to any family of languages. Why? It is a creole. It is the first language practicing speech-alone talk. The Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia develops increasing labor and social specializations and blossoms, after thousands of years, into the Sumerian Dynastic. Here is the first beautiful, wonderful, inspiring, corrupt, monstrous and loathsome civilization to flower in our current Lebenswelt.
0127 Gen 1-11 is absolutely incredible.
So is the hypothesis of the first singularity.
0128 Kenton Sparks adds one more actor responsible for putting the Pentateuch into final form. The editor does not care whether the diverse genres mesh together smoothly. Why? The jumble of genres is intrinsic to the authentic unfolding of God’s covenant.
Sparks calls this editor, “an Ethnic Anthologist”.
0129 Does that make the genre of the Pentateuch an ethnic anthology?
If so, then we have an answer to why Paul calls Jesus, “the New Adam”.
0130 Paul funnels the entire Jewish tradition back through David, Moses, Abraham and Noah. Paul goes all the way back to Adam.
He does not know that Adam associates to the first singularity.
He does not know that the first singularity defines our current Lebenswelt.
Yet, he intuitively knows that Adam connects the Jewish witness to all humanity.
0131 The book concludes with a short chapter titled, “We Disagree. Now What?
0132 What is the nature of Gen 1-11?
In this examination, I suggest that genres may correspond to cycles of history.
For example, the last four hundred years of the Latin Age discusses the world in the genre of Aristotle (and Aquinas). The four hundred years of the Age of Ideas works in the genre of empirio-schematics. The upcoming Age of Triadic Relationswill discourse using diagrams of triadic relations, such as signs, category-based nested forms, judgments and so on.
Roughly, a genre and a cycle lasts for four hundred years, consisting in four turnings of four generations.
0133 Nine cycles pass between the start of the Ubaid (associated with Adam) and the end of Ur III (associated to Abraham).
Gen 1-11 does not neatly designate nine genres. But, it offers an image of spiraling developments, culminating in two great disasters: Noah’s flood and the confounding of the language with the Tower of Babel. The first associates to the Uruk period. The latter associates to the end of Ur III, when Sumerian becomes a dead language.
0134 Professor James Hoffmeier sees Gen 1-11 as history and theology.
Gordon Wenham views Gen 1-11 as protohistory.
Kenton Sparks envisions Gen 1-11 as ancient historiography, which electrically jumps to a humorous sound-alike, histriography.
0135 All these conclusions are drawn without awareness of a scientific hypothesis that changes the grounds of inquiry: the first singularity.
0136 The historicity of Gen 1-11 is hotly contested, despite that fact that the literature of the ancient Near East offers similar narratives.
Gen 1-11 is a special example of the literature of the ancient Near East.
Why?
It survives within a living tradition.
0137 Today, in the twilight of the Age of Ideas, the hypothesis of the first singularity adds a new wrinkle to the proceedings.
Okay, it pulls the rug out from under the contest.
Why?
Gen 1-11 offers an insider’s view to the start of our current Lebenswelt, our simultaneously uplifting and falling world of unconstrained social complexity.
0138 God’s Word2a, the stuff of grace, percolates upwards, through the sensible classification of genre2b, and enters into the stuff of nature, a scientific hypothesis concerning the evolutionarily-recent potentiation of unconstrained social complexity2c.
0139 This hypothesis touches base with Saint Paul’s intuition. Adam connects to the entire civilized world, our current Lebenswelt, the world of unconstrained social complexity and the world of speech-alone talk. Today, no culture is untouched by the wealth and power of civilizations.
0140 Perhaps, the North American Plains Indians and the Australian Aborigines are the last viable cultures to lose the hand component of their hand-speech talk.
Is it a coincidence that the first singularity completes at the same time that our awareness of the first singularity begins?
Our theodrama begins with Adam.
0001 Biblical scholars James Hoffmeier, Gordon Wenham and Kenton Sparks contribute to a little book, titled Genesis: History, Fiction or Neither?, edited by Charles Halton and published by Counterpoint Press (affiliated with Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan).
0002 The format is straightforward. Each contributor offers an essay and responds to the other two essays.
0003 These essays and responses are written shortly after the e-publication of An Archaeology of the Fall, by Razie Mah, which dramatizes a scientific hypothesis about the potentiation of civilization (and how the Genesis stories can be re-imagined in light of the hypothesis).
Why is this significant?
The contributors to Genesis: History, Fiction or Neither?: Three Views on The Bible’s Earliest Chapters, are not aware of the hypothesis of the first singularity.
Their arguments may be examined a point of view that is aware of the hypothesis.
Finally, their innocence of the hypothesis may illuminate the origins of our current Lebenswelt, from within.
0004 What is the first singularity?
The series, Crystallizations of the Fall, at the smashwords website, offers a succinct introduction. This series contains two works.
The First Singularity and its Fairy Tale Trace offers a brief scientific account for the potentiation of unconstrained social complexity.
Comments on Original Sin and Original Death: Romans 5:12-19 offers a reading of Paul consistent with the consequences of the first singularity.
0005 Charles Halton, editor, pens the introduction.
Galileo serves as an example of the religion versus science debate.
Galileo’s interpretation of the Bible clashes with long-held, cherished interpretations. His reputation is sullied by name-calling and legal wrangling. A century later, Galileo is honored as one of the pioneers of science. Three centuries later, the Catholic Church apologizes.
0006 If one interprets according to genre, then I propose that Galileo works according to the genre of science, while the seventeenth century Church operates in the genre of Thomist (or Aristotelian) metaphysics.
The dispute also may be described in terms of genre. Galileo says that the propositions of the Bible are addressed to common folk. That is a genre. The ecclesial establishment says that Biblical propositions are uttered by the Holy Ghost. That is a genre, as well.
Both sides may be correct, but that does not dampen the controversy.
0007 Why?
Both parties agree on the same principle. Nature and grace are distinctly different. They are not the same. So, mechanical inquiry into what is does not necessarily cohere to theological inquiry into what ought to be, and visa versa.
0008 I now frame the controversy between Galileo and Catholic Church.
A judgment is a triadic relation with three elements: relation, what is and what ought to be. When each element is assigned to one of Peirce’s three categories, the judgment becomes actionable.
The three categories are thirdness, the triadic realm of normal contexts; secondness, the dyadic realm of actuality; and firstness, the monadic realm of possibilities.
Thirdness brings secondness, the dyadic realm of actuality, into relation with firstness, the monadic realm of possibilities.
0009 Here is a picture.
0010 This diagram of the triadic structure of judgment shows that a controversy can occur when both parties agree on a key relational principle. Here, both parties agree that nature and grace are distinct and separate.
This agreement serves as the relation that brings together what is and what ought to be.
The relation belongs to the category of thirdness, the realm of normal contexts, mediations, signs and so on.
0011 In the next blog, I will consider category-assignments to what ought to be and what is.
0012 Here is a picture of the infamous Galileo controversy.
0013 If the relation belongs to thirdness (the realm of normal contexts), then there are two configurations for assigning categories to the other elements of judgment.
If the Book of Nature belongs to secondness (the realm of actuality), then the Revealed Book of God belongs to firstness (the realm of possibility). Nature is real and the Bible is fiction (that is, not real).
If the Revealed Book of God belongs to secondness (the realm of actuality), then the Book of Nature belongs to firstness (the realm of possibility). The Bible is real and natural inquiry in not relevant.
0014 So, which is more real, nature or grace?
