Scripture: When The Literal & Non-Literal Seamlessly Blend

Most Christians - at least in the circles I roll - do not think that Adam and Eve were real people. This is quite a rational viewpoint: human evolution has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, and given that any so-called speciation that would make proto-humans distinct from humans would have occurred at the population level not at the individual level, it is highly unlikely that there were two first humans.

What's interesting though is that when one holds this view, they are struck with a corollary question: how far should our belief of non-literal people extend in the Old Testament? What about Cain and Abel, Noah, Jacob, Joseph, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, Saul, Job, David and Solomon? Anyone who believes Adam and Eve are not literal people must then ask themselves something like this - "Which of these do you think are literal people, and if you think some are and some aren't, where is your conceptual cut-off point?"

If we read the Old Testament from Genesis to, say, to 2 Chronicles, then if taken all literally we can more or less map the genealogies from the Adam figure to the David figure. But in not taking it all literally we then find ourselves having to engage in some conceptual demarcation, and this involves getting right to the heart of that tapestry of conveyance and maybe sorting through various lenses of conception simultaneously.

When reading the Bible, do you have to assume a point at which symbolism becomes history? For example, if taken literally the genealogy of Adam can go all the way to Joseph, which includes Abraham and Isaac - the 'seed' that leads to Jesus. Also, you can read into the scripture that Moses is the 7th generation from Abraham. Some will say they believe it is literal from Abraham onwards, but what about Terah his father, and Nahor his father? One can't just cut it off at Abraham without considering the rest of the lineage that preceded him. It's easy to say we believe x is non-literal and y is literal, but if we take the Old Testament in book order we need to consider what it is we're doing.

So, how do we manage our reading of the Old Testament and conceptually demarcate our history from our non-history? I have a suggested answer - one that points to a few truths that are bound to seem utterly strange to a post-Enlightenment person steeped in the logic of the Greeks and the empiricism of Bacon, Locke, Berkeley and Hume.

Part of the understanding required is the understanding that in ancient traditions, particularly oral traditions, the narrative being conveyed is a blend of fact and fiction, where profound truths are disseminated in a way that requires interpretative qualities beyond the headlights of the kind of rigorous historical and scientific analysis we moderns are used to. Given that life itself is so richly analogical, metaphorical and narrative-laden it is no wonder that we are insistent that a deep understanding of the Bible won't come to anyone who trivialises its dynamic nature and is blind to its analogical, metaphorical and narrative-laden power.

Thus I would contend that Old Testament figures like Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Noah, Jacob, Joseph, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, Saul, Job, David and Solomon are such an agglomeration of history, myth, legend, analogy, metaphor and theological aetiology that we can't hope to pin them down to simple historical/non-historical analyses. That's not to treat them all the same, of course - there are evidently different extents to which the above applies to Adam than, say, David.

What's clear, though, is that while God 'breathed' His influence onto the writing of scripture over the many centuries of its composition, He allowed His word to be subjected to the limitations of creation, and the concomitant human fallibility that comes with it. The Bible is, of course, a created artefact, not to be seen as co-equal with God - and as such, the very notion of scripture being God's word is abstractly analogical to illustrate His power and influence over the written dispensation of Divine truths in language we can understand.