John Day's Review of My Book in Oxford's JTS, or Another Liberal Hates My Book: Winning!

Whenever you write something that is original, you make it available for critique by people who cannot think differently than the way they have thought their whole lives. That is the nature of presenting something considered "new." A new way of thinking smacks against traditions and people struggle to reject it as a knee-jerk reaction to protecting their long held beliefs. It seems one must give a mountain of evidence in order to establish the new way of thinking, but in order to convince the masses to maintain the tradition, one does not need any evidence at all.

That's my assessment of modern scholars like John Day here, who have read and critiqued my book concerning the time references of the Primeval History in Genesis 1-11.

After assuming a false motive about why I argued the way I did (I don't care if modern origins views accord with Genesis or not--I came to my view through the study of ANE literature and the text itself), Day summarizes the chapters in the book, absent of the arguments given for them, and simply attempts to refute them by arguing that they are "unconvincing." No evidence is really offered other than Day's assumption that all of this is to be taken as literally as possible.

One example of this is that Day wants to counter my argument that the two seeds are represented in Genesis as Abel and Cain and then the subsequent lines of Cain and Seth, continuing on in the Bible to Abraham through Isaac and Jacob, i.e., Israel versus the nations. Instead, Day, in taking everything very literal and ignoring the obvious literary context, thinks this is about humans being at odds with literal snakes, a statement that would have no connection to anything else in Genesis, and would be merely an aetiology as to why humans don't like snakes. Of course, I'm not sure why this animal and not the human struggle against lions, wolves, or bears are explained, but this interpretation, as said before, simply ignores the immediate and larger literary argument being made throughout the book and the Hebrew Bible as a whole.

Day also argues that seeing the temple/sanctuaries in Genesis 1 and 2 is eisegesis, even though many scholars hold to this view. They simply are not reading these chapters correctly as Day does, who takes them as literally as possible.

What is lost on Day and other modern interpreters is that the ancients would be looking for the creation of sacred space/the temple in any creation account they read. They think in parallel terms of sacred space and created space, something that Day and his ilk simply miss by assuming the ancient reader is as literal as he is. Created/ordered space is sacred space, but because Day is ignorant of that fact, he assumes everyone who believes the cosmic temple view is simply eisegeting. And why are they eisegeting? Because Day doesn't assume the same things the ancient reader assumes, and therefore, unless it is explicitly stated, it isn't in the text. It may, in fact, be the problem with the Modernist's arrogance to assume that every ancient person read things as literally as he does in an effort to perpetuate the Enlightenment-oriented myth that the ancient scholar was stupid and the modern scholar a genius. He evidences this in his statement that the ancient author meant Genesis 1-11 to be read literally, but "we" can no longer do so.

Day offers very little argument, and instead, relies on his preconceived tradition of the literal reading of the text, as well as the assumption that he doesn't really need to make an argument, since most people already agree with him and read these texts literally.

Day's attempt to refute by incredulity, however, displays his inability to grapple with facts and refute them with evidence. That is why he simply ignores all of the evidence I provided to show that the ancient Near Eastern cognitive environment would not have understood these things the same way the modern reader would.

In the end, liberals and fundamentalists are largely two sides of the same coin. Neither liked this book for the same reasons. They think Genesis was intended by the ancient author to be read the way they have always read it. In other words, their understanding of the genre of Primeval History doesn't come from studying primeval histories and the ancient Near Eastern cognitive environment (Walton's term), but from assuming that everyone, including the ancient author, thinks like they do.