Hello, you can see similar motifs in Plato’s Symposium. He also gives a description of the creation of man in a legendary way (that man was originally unified as male and female and then separated, and so on). If with Plato it isn’t meant literally, then with Moses too it isn’t meant literally.

How do you know that with Plato it isn’t literal?

Read the book, it smells like myth. They’re speaking there in a poetic style.

https://www.knowingfaith.co.il/Torah and Science/The Beginning of Humanity: Adam and Homo sapiens an article on the subject from a faith-based perspective

Does anyone really believe that God took a lump of mud, went “poof,” and out came a human being?? It’s embarrassing…

Shai, apparently yes. Are you asking this about reality? As absurd as it may sound, most believers in the religion of Moses do in fact believe that the creation story happened the way you described so dismissively. Allow me to think that you too thought so until you “became enlightened”….

Avraham, as Manitou (Rabbi Leon Ashkenazi) said: “Rabbi Akiva at age 6 can’t compete with Kant at age 40.” There are people who remain at the level of belief they learned in kindergarten; that’s their problem.

I’m not talking about “most believers in the Torah of Moses,” but about me and you. People who don’t want to mature in their faith are welcome to suffer from “heretical thoughts.”

I just now noticed that already the second Rashi in the Torah points out that the creation story should not be understood literally:
Rashi on Genesis 1:1
“In the beginning God created” — This verse says nothing except ‘interpret me,’ as our rabbis expounded it: for the sake of the Torah, which is called “the beginning of His way” (Proverbs 8:22), and for the sake of Israel, who are called “the first of His produce” (Jeremiah 2:3). And if you come to explain it according to its plain meaning, explain it thus: At the beginning of the creation of heaven and earth, when the earth was astonishingly empty and darkness…, God said, “Let there be light.” The verse did not come to teach the order of creation, to say that these came first; for if it had come to teach this, it should have written: “At first He created the heavens,” etc. For whenever the word “beginning” appears in Scripture, it is connected to the word that follows it, as in “At the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim” (Jeremiah 26:1), “the beginning of his kingdom” (Genesis 10:10), “the first of your grain” (Deuteronomy 18:4). Here too you should say: “At the beginning of God’s creating…” similar to “At the beginning of the Lord’s speaking through Hosea” (Hosea 1:2), meaning: at the beginning of the Holy One, blessed be He, speaking to Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, etc. And if you say it came to teach that these were created first, and its meaning is that at the beginning of everything He created these — there are verses that abbreviate their language and omit one word, as in “For He did not shut the doors of my belly” (Job 3:10), where it does not specify who did the shutting; and similarly “He shall carry away the wealth of Damascus” (Isaiah 8:4), where it does not specify who shall carry it away; and similarly “Will one plow with cattle?” (Amos 6:12), where it does not specify whether a man will plow with cattle; and similarly “Declaring the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10), where it does not specify: declaring from the beginning the end of a matter. If so, be astonished at yourself, for the waters preceded, since it is written: “And the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters,” and the verse has not yet revealed when the creation of the waters took place. From this you learn that the waters preceded the earth. Moreover, the heavens were created from fire and water. Perforce, the verse did not teach anything at all about the order of what came earlier and later.”

I’d be very glad to hear, Shai Zilberman, what exactly your “matured level of faith” is — not about easy stories like a talking snake, but about an audiovisual event in which the power behind the existence of everything descends in fire onto a hill in the desert and, in polished biblical language, instructs ten rules of behavior. This puffed-up attitude, so common among myth-busters on the one hand, who continue believing in ideas no less bizarre on the other — has never been as unclear to me as it is right now. Come convince me what “smells like myth” in the story of the revelation at Mount Sinai; and if, in your opinion, it is not myth but real reality — then please tell me, by all means, what makes that story less “embarrassing” than the Garden of Eden story?? You base your entire religious existence on a fantastic event that you have no way of verifying, and certainly no way of containing. (I’m writing this from a place of complete faith, so the answer I’m asking for should be on the plane of faith as well, and I won’t elaborate.)
And I’ll add one more challenge for dessert. The Garden of Eden story is a parable. Why? Because it was written about the distant, mythical past. Are the stories of the Exodus from Egypt and Sinai not parables only because they were written at the time of the events by eyewitnesses? Don’t you see the common denominator of mythicness in all those stories? In what way is the Garden of Eden episode uglier than the whole book of Exodus? If you assumed that everything was written hundreds of years after the events — would you still maintain that the stories of Egypt and Sinai are literal, unlike the Garden of Eden? To sum up: to write about someone who believes the Garden of Eden story literally — an interpretation that should not be dismissed out of hand, nor off the doorpost either — that it is “embarrassing” is embarrassing. Because it is completely equivalent, for one who believes the revelation at Mount Sinai story literally. Either both are real, or neither is. And if you find a difference — even the deepest one you can give — that difference is complex, it is complicated, it is deep — and one should not go after someone who doesn’t know it with derogatory language. On the contrary, the shame is on one who has already reached the level where he doesn’t accept the Garden of Eden story literally, yet while sneering at everyone who has not reached that level, fails to notice that one who disqualifies others does so by his own defect.

Gil, what are you asking? There’s a sea of words here.

By the way, Gil, my religious existence is not based on the revelation at Mount Sinai — maybe my observance of Jewish law is. My faith (religion) is based mostly on reasoning (philosophy, in the foreign tongue).

What I meant to ask about was your observance of Jewish law. How do you base it on the revelation at Mount Sinai, which is no less legendary than the snake in the Garden of Eden? Because the assumption of a talking snake is exactly as implausible as that of a God who speaks (anthropomorphism, choosing only a tiny human minority, we’ve never found such a thing, etc.). And as someone who understands that the snake is myth (teaching exactly what? And what would the story lose without this ridiculous figure?), so I hope you also assume that the revelation at Mount Sinai is myth (because if not, what makes it different?) So I wanted to learn what the interpretation of that myth is. Indeed there are several questions here, but they are all tied together, and since I don’t know what your view is — yes myth, no myth; yes reality or not; proven or not — I asked all of that.

I claim that today, when according to modern science we picture to ourselves that we know more or less what processes (physical and biological) man went through, it is naïve to maintain that the creation account is literal. And I really don’t know what they experienced at the revelation at Mount Sinai, other than that God revealed Himself (whatever that means…).

Shai,
we don’t really “know” how the first living cell developed or came into being. And without it, evolution doesn’t even begin. But the reigning paradigm requires us to think that there is some sort of mechanistic causal explanation for it, even though it is not clear how such a thing is possible. Because paradigms, by their nature, are influenced more by trends that shape accepted patterns of thought than by an attempt to know what the independent facts of reality are.

Copenhagen, that’s why I wrote “we imagine that we know” — we know there was evolution and not sudden creation.

As for me, I don’t imagine that I know. If the first living cell required outside intervention, then it turns out there is no fundamental problem with the Intervener intervening, so why should there be any problem for Him to intervene in the creation of the first man?

The question was whether the creation account in the book of Genesis is literal. On that I claim that today, when science describes the world differently, it is reasonable that it is not.

Shai, what do you mean by “we know there was evolution”? Do you mean variation? (Different breeds of dogs, for example.) Or really one creature developing into another creature?