EVOLUTION AND THE BIBLE 



he wishes to bring out. The very fact of placing the two 

 accounts of man's creation side by side is a subtle warning 

 that not every detail of the different descriptions is to be 

 regarded as an assertion of objective truth. 



The first chapter emphasizes God's transcendence and 

 sovereignty. The second stresses God's providence and care 

 for man; it does so by descending to details that mark the 

 limit beyond which an anthromorphic depiction of God cannot 

 well go without risking irreverence. However, once we recall 

 the exalted Israelite conception of the Deity, we perceive that 

 neither the author nor his readers could have taken these 

 anthropomorphisms in a crassly literal sense. 



Accordingly the seventh verse is not, in the mind of the 

 inspired writer, historical down to its minutest details. As was 

 quite natural in an age of ceramics, God's creative action is 

 presented as that of a potter. The same image occurs through- 

 out the literature of antiquity, among the Sumerians, the 

 Babylonians, and the Egyptians, as later among the Greeks 

 and Latins. Once the author had decided on this literary 

 device of picturing God as a potter, he had to introduce the 

 clay, the soft material on which potters work. His intention 

 is not to tell us exactly how God made the first man's body, 

 but to instruct us that the man, fragile dust of the earth, had 

 God for his maker. 



Also the second part of the verse is anthropomorphical. 

 Under the image of God who breathes into the clay statue, 

 the idea of the special creation of the man by God emerges. 

 That is the paramount truth. The picture of God breathing 

 into the nostrils of the thing that is to become man may not 

 refer directly and explicitly to the spiritual soul as animating 

 principle of the human body. In the sequel, however, the 

 author shows that the man is a rational being, and so we know 

 that he was endowed by God with a spiritual, rational soul. 



The central idea in the Yahwist account is that God, unique 

 and supreme Lord of all creation, acted directly in the produc- 

 tion of the being who was to be lord of the earth. The man's 

 body has a close affinity with the soil; but his life He receives 

 from God. Exactly how God acted, we cannot determine. 

 Certainly He did not make a figure of clay as a potter does; 

 most assuredly He did not breathe forth a material breath 



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