Genesis 1-4 Analysis

Is the book of Genesis 1-4 an ancient or modern interpretation? To answer this, one might find it useful to know what was happening in the stories. Gen:1 explains how God created the heavens, the earth, and everything that lives. Gen:2 talks about how God created a man and he was lonely so he made a woman as his partner. Gen:3 tells the story of the snake deceiving the woman and how she ate from the tree of evil. God then sent Adam and Eve out of the garden. Gen:4 is about how Eve’s son made offerings to the Lord and Cain killed Abel so God sent him away. A helpful source one might want to obtain knowledge from is James Kugel. Kugel, a professor of Hebrew at Harvard University, wrote a book called “How to Read the Bible.” His book explains how you can look at the Bible rationally

A passage within excerpt B says, “If one is to be guided by the literal expressions of the scripture, were performed by a wise man; but if we look to the laws of allegory.” In this quote, the author is talking about himself. Kugel stated that there are four assumptions to being an ancient interpreter. Out of these assumptions, understanding that the Bible is a cryptic text is one of them. The passage states, “If one is to be guided by the literal expressions of the scripture, were performed by a wise man”. This means that the author of this phrase did not want the reader to take the phrase literally, but understand the deeper meaning. That falls under the cryptic text category of writing so therefore excerpt B has to be written from an ancient interpreter. With the given evidence within the excerpts, I believe excerpt A was written by a modern interpreter while excerpt B was written by an ancient interpreter. Excerpt A had past tense examples along with a shorter, more to the-point-writing style. Excerpt B was written in first person and knew that the text was a lesson and to not be taken