From: lip@amid..ARPA (Loren I. Petrich)
Subject: More on the Two Biblical Creation Stories

	I have received the response to my article on the two creation
stories in the Bible that one can somehow fit the Adam-and-Eve story
into the Sixth Day of the first story. But I believe that this fit
cannot be made. Why? Look again at the orders of creation:

	The Six-Day Story:

Day 3: Plants
Day 5: Sea animals and flying animals
Day 6: Land animals, then humanity (both sexes)

	The Adam-and-Eve Story:

The first man (Adam)
Plants
Animals (both land and air)
The first woman (Eve)

	The contradiction between the orders of creation between the
two stories is rather glaring. There are other contradictions. As I
mentioned earlier, in the first story, God creates according to a
carefully laid-out plan, one set of entities at a time. He says after
each episode of creation that "it was good," indicating that he is
very satisfied with what he has done. On the seventh day, he rests
from his labors (though we are not told why an omnipotent being might
need to rest). In the second story, he seems to be fixing up as he
goes, only to see the principal objects of his attention commit a
grave no-no. Here goes: I create the first man, but he's all lonely. I
create some plants for him. He's still lonely. I create lots of
animals for him. He's still lonely. I create a woman for him, and he
seems satisfied. I tell those two not to eat any fruit from that Tree
of Knowledge, but that pesky snake talks them into eating some of its
fruit anyway. I kick those two out of that garden, and I order that
snake to crawl on its belly. Creating a Universe seems more trouble
than it's worth!

	Methods of creation differ; in the first story, God "says"
"Let X be!" and X comes into existence; while in the second story, God
uses a more physical approach, molding the first man out of dirt
(yecch!) and then breathing on it. And likewise for the first woman.
One doesn't have to know much chemistry to tell the difference between
human flesh and typical dirt. The level of anthropomorphism differs;
the second story features God "walking" in the Garden of Eden; while
the first story says that the first people, at least one of each sex,
were made "in his image" (nothing on which of the two sexes resembles
God more). I have always suspected that it is really the other way
around.

	I am not sure what the "traditional" answer to this conundrum
is (maybe it's simply "shut up and believe, you rotten infidel!"); but
whatever it is, I'm sure that this analysis will hold up despite of it.

	There are other curiosities. The Exodus of the Israelites from
Egypt is an event not mentioned in any Egyptian chronicle; they barely
mention Israel. There isn't even a "prettified" version like "Our
great Pharaoh went on an expedition to chase down those rotten
rebellious slaves and died a noble death in a big flood." It has been
suggested that some of the Exodus events are garbled memories of the
explosive volcanic eruption of Thera ~1400(?) BC (see Sagan on
Velikovsky).

	And the Joshua miracle (he told the Sun and the Moon to stand
still just so he could win one of his battles) -- it is not mentioned
in _any_ other contemporary chronicle. If it happened, it would have
took place in ~1200 BC. But Egyptians and Mesopotamians (in what is
now Iraq) had had written language for over two thousand years, and
their chroniclers would have written at length on this event, had it
have happened. But they say NOTHING about this alleged event. There is
the question of why the Earth's rotation and the Moon's motion were so
carefully restored afterwards. That is evident from the study of such
pre-Joshua monuments as the Great Pyramid of Egypt (check out _Science
and the Paranormal_, Abell and Singer, eds.). It was constructed
according to some precise astronomical alignments. The edges of this
pyramid were aligned on north-south and east-west directions, as
determined by post-Joshua surveying. And one tunnel is aligned to
point at the star Thuban in Draco, while another points at the
constellation Orion, as determined by extrapolating post-Joshua
measurements of precession. The Milankovitch climate cycles over the
last couple million years have a component due to precession; its rate
seems unchanged from its post-Joshua value. So, if this miracle
happened, the Earth must have started rotating again with exactly the
same position of spin axis, relative to itself and to the stars, and
at exactly the same period as before. The Moon must have started
orbiting at exactly the same distance as before. A simpler hypothesis:
this alleged event never happened.

	Immanuel Velikovsky certainly understood these problems with
these alleged Biblical events, which is why he proposed his
bouncing-planets hypothesis. He claimed that these catastrophes were
remembered not only in the Bible, but in a host of other ancient
legends. Carl Sagan has written a truly devastating criticism of his
theories (check out _Scientists Confront Velikovsky_ or _Broca's
Brain_ or _Science and the Paranormal_). I wonder, where is the
Velikovsky cult now? Have they been claiming that the recent flyby of
Neptune (and the not-so-recent one of Uranus) provide yet more
evidence for the correctness of Velikovsky's theories? That would be
in line with what they have claimed for _every_ other Solar System
discovery since Velikovsky published _Worlds in Collision_.
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