Creation/evolution3

[Tonus]

Ah, I see the problem. You think that the Chapter and verse denotations suggest a beginning and end in the Hebrew text.

I'm not going by that, but by the stories themselves. As I said in an earlier post, the first account is from 1:1 to 2:3 and the second is from 2:4 to 2:25. It's also pretty clear that the writer of the second account wrote chapter three, as it matches the style of the second creation account. I'm not so sure about chapter four, because we suddenly go from a writer who uses proper names sparingly to one who no longer uses "the man" or "the woman" to describe the characters.

So there could be at least three people's writings in those first few chapters, which means that Genesis may originally have read as a sort of anthology of legends and fantasy tales. Someone (or someones) tried to clean it up a bit at some point, or perhaps this is just the result of stories being told and re-told during a time when printing materials were crude and very scarce.