Jimmy Stephens on Steinmann

I recently posted a pro-YEC scholar, but here was Jimmy Stephens take on it:

https://watchmencouncil.com/2023/12/07/dr-andrew-steinmann-on-genesis/

This is good stuff. I found his comment about the framework hypothesis toward the beginning somewhat incomplete.

It’s true that people who hold an FH interpretation in competition with others suffers problems. The overlap thing – okay, sure.

However, one could take the FH to be an observation about the structure and mythological emphasis of the text, not some monolithic interpretation. Meaning, what the FH does show is that the author is more interested in the divine ordering of the cosmos than in some chronological description. Keyword: more, not only.

Steinman doesn’t address the issue that heavenly bodies responsible for day and night (viz. the sun) do not exist until after light does. What the FH can do is help account for that, since seven 24-hour days don’t well explain that. On FH, the reason would be that there’s a bunch of things God creates in the structure of a temple-throne, leaving aside the question of time, without being antagonistic to any temporal chronology in specifics.

I also don’t think FH works at all except as part of the larger interpretive paradigm of temple-text and polemical theology.

Otherwise, it’s just saying, “Ooh poetic device,” which is maybe the people he’s successfully critiquing.

What the temple and polemical concepts do is tell us why the poetic device is present. The FH sees a pattern. The polemical and temple paradigm then explains that pattern as a sort of top-down view of God building His temple, almost like stairs, to descend into the garden, and rule.

One problem here is that YEC’s use of textual evidence would perhaps be underdetermined or antagonistic to polemical readings. Why do the sun and moon proceed light and darkness, day and night?

You might say that the author interrupts himself to mock Egyptian cosmogony, and you might say that the author isn’t writing anything countering Egypt in major intent at all. If those are the only two options, the framework-temple-polemical reading is superior because there’s no interruption and it better accounts for the textual structure in combination with the historic setting.

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