Originally posted by Nemesio
Right: Now the Lord God formed... The 'had' doesn't exist in the Hebrew;
that is, the verb form used in the Hebrew is not the pluperfect you
suggest here, but the simple past. The 'now' emphasizes the temporality
of the event relative to the preceding text.
After all, God does note that man is alone. How could he have been
alone with all of creation beforehand?
Nemesio
In his Exposition of Genesis, H.C. Leupold stated:
Without any emphasis on the sequence of acts the account here records the making of the various creatures and the bringing of them to man. That in reality they had been made prior to the creation of man is so entirely apparent from chapter one as not to require explanation. But the reminder that God had “molded” them makes obvious His power to bring them to man and so is quite appropriately mentioned here. It would not, in our estimation, be wrong to translate yatsar as a pluperfect in this instance: “He had molded.” The insistence of the critics upon a plain past is partly the result of the attempt to make chapters one and two clash at as many points as possible (1942, p. 130, emp. added).
Hebrew scholar Victor Hamilton agreed with Leupold’s assessment of Genesis 2:19 as he also recognized that “it is possible to translate formed as ‘had formed’ ” (1990, p. 176). Keil and Delitzsch stated in the first volume of their highly regarded Old Testament commentary that “our modern style for expressing the same thought [which the Holy Spirit, via Moses, intended to communicate—EL] would be simply this: ‘God brought to Adam the beasts which He had formed’ ” (1996, emp. added). Adding even more credence to this interpretation is the fact that the New International Version (NIV ) renders the verb in verse 19, not as simple past tense, but as a pluperfect: “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air” (emp. added). Although Genesis chapters one and two agree even when yatsar is translated simply “formed” (as we will notice in the remainder of this article), it is important to note that the four Hebrew scholars mentioned above and the translators of the NIV , all believe that it could (or should) be rendered “had formed.” And, as Leupold acknowledged, those who deny this possibility do so (at least partly) because of their insistence on making the two chapters disagree.
The main reason that skeptics do not see harmony in the events recorded in the first two chapters of the Bible is because they fail to realize that Genesis 1 and 2 serve different purposes. Chapter one (including 2:1-4) focuses on the order of the creation events; chapter two (actually 2:5-25) simply provides more detailed information about some of the events mentioned in chapter one. Chapter two never was meant to be a chronological regurgitation of chapter one, but instead serves its own unique purpose—i.e., to develop in detail the more important features of the creation account, especially the creation of man and his surroundings. As Kenneth Kitchen noted in his book, Ancient Orient and the Old Testament:
from...http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/513
25 Jul '07 00:56
Xians: Does anyone exist who has never sinned?
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