I came across a short clip of a discussion between the late Michael Heiser and Joshua Swamidass. It is on the Genealogical Adam theory Josh and I developed, he in the mainly scientific Genealogical Adam and Eve, and I in the almost simultaneously published, and primarily theological, Generations of Heaven and Earth.
Here’s the clip:
As he says in the video, Mike is very much a “text” person, and indeed made his reputation from taking the biblical text wherever it leads, for example regarding the nature and activity of spiritual beings, rather than seeking to explain them away in terms more acceptable to modern ears.
It is interesting, then, how he appears not only to have been open towards the genealogical Adam and Eve, but to accept something like it as necessary for placing the biblical story into world history, and therefore entirely compatible with the truth of Hebrew Scripture.
Though I never interacted with Heiser myself, the integration of biblical theology with a theology of creation encompassing scientific findings was at the heart of my own book, and it led me to view the creation account of Genesis 1:1-2:4 as Moses’s “preface” to Genesis and, indeed, to the whole Bible. I therefore treated the “Adam” narrative as a sequel to chapter 1, commencing the story of the new creation that occupies the whole Bible, rather than as a restatement of the creation story from a different aspect.
So I regard Genesis 1 as presenting (a) a phenomenological view of the world the Israelites experienced daily, not some primitive flat-world science, and (b) as describing God’s creation as an analogy of the construction of the three-part tabernacle in Exodus, its seven days having ritual, rather than chronological, meaning. “Your world is God’s cosmic temple” is the message.
Hence, I argued in my book, the creation of mankind in Genesis 1 encompasses the entire human race, including those clever Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo erectus as well as “modern” humans “outside the garden,” from which stock the Lord either selected, or created, Adam and his wife. This enables us to embrace the basic historicity of a “recent” Adam and Eve, in the cultural setting described in Genesis, whilst leaving room for all the findings of palaeo-anthropology and archaeology.
However, this sequential treatment of Genesis 1 and 2 was a point at which I differed from discussion partners like Jack Collins, who for textual reasons regarded Genesis 1:26-29 as representing the creation of Adam and Eve. From the video, Heiser appears to agree with Collins (and, of course, many others), in that in reply to Joshua’s question on Neanderthals, he sees them as “humans, but of a different type, not in the image of God.” This, of course, would exclude them from the description of mankind in Genesis 1:27.
I must emphasise that his answer takes account of the detailed discussion in Josh’s book on the difficulty of pinning down the definition of “human,” whether in theological, scientific, or just colloquial terms.
It also treats the “image” of God in the same way as Josh, myself, and many OT scholars do, that is, as an appointment by God to a role, rather than as just a similarity of form, intelligence, spirituality or whatever. In this way, neither he nor I find any problem with discoveries of sophisticated culture, art or ritual amongst Neanderthals and other “pre-adamites.”
Now, there are certainly some strong arguments for treating Genesis 2 as a “zoomed-in” focus on Genesis 1. For example, Adam’s genealogy in Genesis 5 harks back to chapter 1. Then, in the Sabbath commandments of Exodus 20:8-11, restated in ch31, the six-day creation and the 7th day rest is presented as the grounds.
This understanding certainly doesn’t demolish genealogical Adam and Eve. But it seemed to me as I wrote my book that it leaves any explanation of the whole “pre-adamic” phenomenon unexplained and unreferenced in Scripture, apart from the tangential inferences of Cain’s wife and wandering (to which Heiser refers) and various other implications mentioned in my book. So unlike Heiser, I chose to see all of broadly-defined humanity as “in God’s image,” by their natural dominance over the created earth, and perhaps by an equally inborn religious sensibility.
Of course, it’s impossible to be sure of the total of what was implicit in Moses’s (and the Spirit’s) intentions as an author, nor how his first readers would have understood things. But as I grapple with the views of Mike Heiser or Jack Collins on the relationship between the two Genesis accounts, I see that I can integrate their understanding with my own without too much difficulty.
Remember, out of the many ways Moses might have described the creation of all things (incorporating Big Bang cosmology, or geological time, or the pre-history of human culture), he chose, or rather God led him, to just one. This emphasised, as I have already said, that the world Israelites experienced around them, of high heavens, sky, ground, and sea, with their abundant inhabitants, is no more or less than a sacred temple of Yehovah’s building. The world is like the tabernacle – or the tabernacle is modelled on the pattern of the cosmos shown to Moses on the high mountain.
So the sun, moon and stars of Genesis 1 are purely those that Israel sees – primitive James Webb galaxies are not relevant to the model. Likewise, the creatures of land, sea and air are those of their world – whether they had now-extinct antecedents either through fiat creation or some evolutionary process is simply irrelevant to the model.
On that understanding, the prehistory of mankind, even the status of distant islanders, or of non-adamites just a few millennia before, is equally irrelevant. What matters is that they, and everybody they would ever encounter at home or abroad, were descendants of Adam and Eve, created in the image of God to rule the cosmos in his name, yet fallen into ruin and death through sin.
If that is all they needed to know, then that is what the Bible teaches us, who will only ever encounter non-adamites in fossil beds or cave-art. I suppose that inquisitive minds are bound to wonder about Neanderthals’ status before God, given what we are learning about their astonishing similarities to us. But then, I also speculate on the Lord’s motives for creating such a wealth of living critters over geological time (but not others), or, like Stuart Burgess on why he chose to create the biggest, smallest, fastest and otherwise most extreme creatures possible on our universe’s laws. Perhaps for his pleasure, or perhaps to impress angels or mankind – or perhaps something entirely different.
And though we speculate reverently, and maybe even fruitfully, these things are ultimately none of our damned business!
So if Mike Heiser was right in excluding Neanderthals from Genesis 1, and therefore from being scripturally warranted to be in God’s image, then I’m untroubled. As Jesus said to Peter in John 21, “What is that to you? You must follow me.”
Agreed?
