No, Susan, that won't do. A witticism and a deflection are not a sufficient respose. You have repeatedly asserted that Genesis 1-2 are copied, plagiarized, cribbed from non-biblical sources. Besides your statements in #683, #686, and #687 cited in #797, back in #694 you asserted:
The entire book was edited from pre-existing documents and oral history, which is to say, myths and legends. As far as I know, Genesis contains no original material at all, not word one, unless one counts as 'original' a very few verses which, scholars agree, could not have come from any of the main sources.

essay, you have no support for those assertions, as stated. Perhaps you'd like to retreat to the "documentary hypothesis" but your statement went far beyond even that flawed premise. Not one word of original material, you say? Have you ever even looked at the Sumerian-Babylonian "source material" you believe Genesis 1-2 is copied from? Have you bothered to see if your "scholars" made sense? Yes, I gave you a link to it. Sounds like Revelation? According to your favorite sources, it should sound like Genesis 1-2. I didn't pull the Enuma Elish out of my hat, I pulled it out of the references in books that adhere to the "documentary hypothesis" and "historical-critical" menthodology (which is not historical, only critical). The EB does not give a list of Sumerian-Babylonian sources for Genesis 1-2. There is no list. The Interpreter's Bible Commentary (Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1952), a predecessor to the AB in the critical tradition, lists one Sumerian-Babylonian source in refence to Genesis 1-2. It is the Enuma Elish. Hard to swallow? It is absurd, but then the methodology is absurd. Check the New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967) which accepts the historical-critical approach to scripture that you vociferously promote. Regarding the Genesis creation account they say this of Sumerian-Babylonian myths in general, and the Enuma Elish specifically, "Direct literary borrowing either way seems unlikely from the nature of the sources." The Anchor Bible Dictionary (Doubleday, 1992), the newest entry in the AB family, with the same Editor in Chief, mentions by name only one Sumerian-Babylonian source as having some common elements with Genesis 1-2, the Enuma Elish.

The modest proposal on the table this time is indeed pretty simple, Susan. Support your statements, or admit they are not true, and drop it. Do you have a scholars' list of Sumerian-Babylonian texts, other than the Enuma Elish, from which Genesis 1-2 has been plagiarized, as you say? If you do, what are those primary sources? Who or what is your source, your support, for the repeated assertion that I find no support for, even by the scholarly school you claim to admire in Biblical interpretation? Is it just something you synthesized in your own head? Something you read in the AB Genesis commentary? Something you've paraphrased from imperfect memory?

As I have said before, here and elsewhere, the account in Gen 1 is really amazingly accurate if one substitutes 'billions of years' for 'days'. This shouldn't be hard to rationalize since 'days', as we now refer to them, are measured by the light of the sun, which wasn't created until the fourth creation 'day' - still, there are those who insist that they MUST have been 24 hour days. Since this is scientifically ridiculous, this is what I mean by 'them vs. us politics'.

Do you feel no intellectual strain when you make irrational leaps like this? To assert, as you have, that the creation account is just stolen from Bablyonian mythology, redacted and compiled, and then say it's amazingly accurate? Meaning what? Nothing at all. It is as helpful as believing the world is one million years old. No strain over the logical incongruity? As for "amazingly accurate," the Genesis account is in fact a very intelligent and succinct description of what really happened, and very accurate indeed, but it does not conform to uniformitarian evolutionary premises in any satisfactory way. Which came first, fruit trees or marine life? Birds or reptiles? Maybe it feels warm and fuzzy to dismiss the account as stolen mythology (without any ancient evidence in any form anywhere) and then say it seems kind of right, but this requires bizarre mental gymnastics, starting from a premise of stolen myths and ending with the mythology of evolution (do you know, if you search the electronic EB for "creation myths" the article on evolution is in the list? I appreciate that, though you have objected to me classifying it as a modern myth). You do not seem to believe in a day-age interpretation of Genesis, even though you mention it, but what a day is, is specifically stated in Genesis 1:5 and reaffirmed with the formation of the heavenly bodies in 1:16, in harmony with the repeated statement of "evening and morning" throughout the text. If you impose a day-age approach upon the text, and some people do, Genesis 1 is is still utterly at odds with the uniformitarian model of the sequence of life. One or the other has to be very wrong. But it sounds friendly to say, it's "really amazingly accurate IF..."

: In any case, since the Enuma Elish dates to the 12th century BC and Genesis to 700-800BC, there is no conflict of dates here. But I don't think it was a major source for EITHER creation story in Genesis, tho' there are certainly some similarities.

Again, the sources, older and newer, that present the scholarship you say you accept, cited above, list the Enuma Elish as the one named source for Genesis 1-2, or name no sources at all. Either give me others to consider, or stop asserting that they exist.

Now, it is funny, that the oldest fragments of the Enuma Elish that have been found have been dated by the archaeologists to about 900 B.C. Yet the story is believed to be from the 12th century B.C. Isn't that odd? You think the book of Genesis is from the 8th-9th century B.C., at least in this most recent post. The Anchor Bible Dictionary, stating the latest on the documentary hypothesis (latest 10 years ago anyway), argues that "P" is "not later than 750 B.C.", "J" is at least 10th century B.C. and "E" is 9th to 11th century B.C.

Funny, indeed, "P" used to be considered "exilic" (6th-5th century B.C.), and all of these supposed documentary sources have been moving backward in time, by centuries. That is because the presumptions of the historical-critical school have been wrong, repeatedly wrong, and proven wrong by irrefutable evidence. Pesky things like finding the "mythical" Hittite civilization, the "mythical" city of Ninevah, the "mythical" city of Ur, "P" verses on silver scrolls from the 7th century B.C., and so forth.

There are two fundamental premises of the historical-critical school and the documentary hypothesis. One of them is philosophical, that the Hegelian dialect (you know, thesis-antithesis-synthesis) is how everything moves FORWARD (and this is a core philosophy of evolution as well, both spring from the same 19th century mindset). Hegel the philosopher had a student named Graf, a theologian, who had a student named Wellhausen, another theologian. Wellhausen is the father of the documentary hypothesis, predicated on the Hegelian idea of progress. That subjective premise, that everything moves forward through a process of conflict and resolution, is at the core of the documentary hypothesis, and there is not any objective evidence of any sort whatsoever to support it.

The other premise behind the documentary hypothesis was philosophical too, but of a slightly different order, it is an error that has been pointed out on this board several times in regard to an innate prejudice against the abilities and accomplishments of the ancients. The rationalization that lent credence to the documentary hypothesis, and 19th century rejection of Mosaic authorship in the first place, was the premise, totally wrong, that writing wasn't invented until about 1000 B.C. Wellhausen and collegues did not believe Moses could have written down the stories and laws in the Pentateuch, because they didn't believe writing had even been invented in his time, the 15th century B.C. Today, writing is thought to have been developed in Sumer before the time of Abraham. A more standard date now cited is about 3200 B.C. Archaeology has produced written documents and correspondence from Canaan itself confidently dated to the time frame of the judges, or earlier. Isn't it odd, when the basic premises behind a subjective analysis prove faulty, but the belief system stubbornly persists? The documentary hypothesis was built on sand, the sand has washed away, the beliefs of the authors have been demonstrated to have been incorrect again and again, but the methodology lingers on.

Susan, regarding supposed Sumerian-Babylonian myths as sources for Genesis 1-2, let me say again, with no hostility but in a very direct way, support it, or drop it. No evasion, no sidestepping. If you have a list, not of parallels or nuances or "some similarities," but of "cribbed" and "plagiarized" sources, let's see it. Otherwise, either acknowledge a (repeated) misstatement, or don't bother.

: I will wait patiently, caf, for your attempt to amalgamate Gen 1 and 2. I know you are busy. (On this subject, see my post to 'thesis' on this date).

Amalgamate? I think not. There are not two substances to be unified. As far as my discussing the consistency of the sequence of God's creative action in 1, and the focus on man's perspective in 2, not right now. I referred you to the Keil and Delitsch commentary on Genesis, and stated reasons why in #759. The English translation is in my library. It is originally in German and should be available in your public library. If it is not, I will post excerpts here. For now, let's hear about those original sources, shall we?