EVOLUTION AND THE BIBLE 



were compiled from previously existing sources. Until exegetes 

 have weighed all other alternatives and found them wanting, 

 they are unwilling to entertain the thought that an extra- 

 ordinary communication of knowledge from God has fulfilled 

 the function usually reserved for human testimony. 



Another solution combines primitive revelation with subse- 

 quent tradition. It proposes that the first couple received from 

 God a supernatural revelation about cosmic and human origins, 

 and then handed their knowledge on to their children, who 

 in turn transmitted in to their dispersing descendants, so that 

 it passed from generation to generation until it eventually 

 reached Abraham or Moses. This explanation, which found 

 favor in a former day, was not very good even when the 

 human race was thought to be hemmed in by a duration of a 

 few thousand years. No objection need be raised on the score 

 of a primitive revelation; but no such tradition could have 

 reached the Hebrews without corruption across an interval of 

 many thousands of generations and the hundreds of thousands 

 of years of prehistory. 



The most reasonable explanation finds its starting point in 

 the nineteenth or eighteenth century B.C., when Abraham, 

 with whom Israelite history begins, received from God a 

 revelation, a promise, and a vocation. Heedful of God's 

 summons, Abraham abandoned Mesopotamia and set out on 

 his journey to Canaan; and he took with him his memory of 

 Babylonian folklore about the origins of the world and of 

 man. But God had spoken to Abraham, as later to the other 

 patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets. Through these conversa- 

 tions of God with men of noble spirit, mankind came to know 

 something of the events that happened at the beginning so 

 far as they affect the foundations of religion. This teaching 

 was transmitted orally and in writing, and was probably 

 substantially completed in pre-Mosaic times, but was carried 

 on further until the day came when an anonymous inspired 

 author set the narratives down in the form that has become 

 familiar to us in the Book of Genesis. 



The presentation may have drawn on narratives popular 

 among peoples who were neighbors of Israel. Under the light 

 of inspiration, which guided his judgment in his selection of 

 materials, the sacred writer adapted pagan notions for his 



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