Is Genesis "mytho-history"?

After completing his research program on penal substitution, Craig moved on to his next research program regarding the historical status of Genesis. This seems to be an interim report, but I'm guessing it's a forecast of his final views:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC9zwO0Gw40&t=165s

No one was expecting Craig to emerge from his studies a young-earth creationist. I wonder if he even bothered to read the best of the young-earth creationists. The question was whether he'd land on the side of old-earth creationists like Vern Poythress and John Collins or the BioLogos crowd. Now we know.

Myths are not always best interpreted literalistically…Now we want to make application of these insights to Gen 1-11...A non-literal interpretation of these narratives (Gen 1-3) is very plausible. First and foremost is the creation of the world in 6 consecutive 24-hour days. A description that doesn't require a knowledge of modern science to recognize as metaphorical. 

i) An equivocation or category error that runs through his analysis is failure to distinguish between symbol and metaphor. While a metaphor is symbolic, it doesn't follow that a symbol is metaphorical. A metaphor is a literary device. By contrast, a symbolic be an object in the real world. For instance, the tabernacle and the temple were loaded with symbolism, but they weren't metaphors. 

ii) I'm inclined to agree with him that Gen 1 isn't strictly chronological. The major impediment to that interpretation is the relationship between day one and day four. The diurnal cycle is already operative on day one. Sunrise and sunset are what constitute morning and evening, dawn and dusk. So days 1-3 appear to be solar days.

iii) That said, nonlinear narration doesn't imply a metaphorical story. Take documentaries with flashbacks. That's nonlinear narration. But that doesn't make a documentary metaphorical. So Craig's inference is illogical. In fairness, maybe he's provided a stronger argument in one of the precedent episodes in the series.

Next is the humanoid deity which appears in chapters 2-3–in contrast to the transcendent Creator of the heavens and the earth in chapter 1. 

That's such a wormy chestnut. Naturally God is more "transcendent" in Gen 1. It's an account of creation in general. Inorganic, inanimate, and subhuman creation. By contrast, God is interacting with humans in Gen 2-3, so God is inevitably more down-to-earth in that context. God doesn't relate to human beings the same way he relates to rocks and trees and stars.  

The anthropomorphic nature of God, which is merely hinted at in chap. 2, becomes inescapable in chap 3, where God is described as walking in the garden in the cool of the day, calling audibly to Adam, who is hiding from him…Read in light of Gen 3, God's creation of Adam in Gen 2 takes on an anthropomorphic character as well. Here God is portrayed like the Mesopotamian goddess…shaping bits of clay into a human being, or the Egyptian god…sitting at his potter's wheel, forming man–as fashioning man out of the dust of the ground and then breathing into his nostrils the breath of life so that the earthen figure comes to life. 

We're not told whether God similarly formed the animals when–I quote–out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and bird of the air (2:19). But we can't help but wonder if they weren't formed in the same way as man. 

When God takes one of the sleeping Adam's ribs, closes up the flesh and builds a woman out of it, the story sounds like a physical surgery which God performs on Adam, followed by building a woman out of the extracted body part. 

Similarly, given God's bodily presence in the garden, the conversations between God and the protagonists in the story of the fall–namely Adam, Eve, and the serpent, read like a dialogue between persons who are physically present to one another. God's making garments for Adam and Even out of animal skins and driving them out of the garden sound like physical acts by the humanoid god. 

Given the exalted, transcendent nature of God described in the creation story, the Pentateuchal author could not possibly have intended these anthropomorphic descriptions to be taken literally. They are the figurative language of myth. 

i) The general problem with this objection is that he fails to take Pentateuchal angelology into consideration, including the theophanic angel (Angel of the Lord). Paradigm examples include Gen 18, Exod 3 & Exod 33. In fact, Craig fields a question about that. His response is that God isn't identified as the Angel of the Lord in Gen 2-3. But that's shortsighted. Readers would be expected to understand Gen 2-3 against the background (or foreground) of the Pentateuch generally. Everything isn't stated all at once. Details are filled in over the course of the Pentateuchal storyline. Certain characters are introduced with minimal exposition. You learn more about them as the plot progresses. 

ii) He reads more into the creation of Adam than is actually stated. The description is sketchy and impressionistic. While it triggers associations with a potter (which is no doubt intentional), it doesn't detail that comparison. So the intention is probably that the creation of Adam is analogous to pottery, but not the same process.  

iii) God poses rhetorical questions to elicit a confession. 

Moreover, many features of these stories are fantastic. That is to say, they are palpably false if taken literally. And here I'm talking about features of the narrative that the author himself would have plausibly thought fantastic...For example, chap 2 begins by saying that when God created man, it had never rained upon the earth. Now this seems fantastic. Ancient Israelites understood the water cycle, as is abundantly attested throughout the OT. In light of chap. 1's affirmation that God had separated the waters above from the waters below, it's hard to believe that the author thought that there was ever a time in the earth's history when the earth was utterly devoid of rain. 

It never dawns on Craig that Gen 2 describes the land of Eden, not the earth in general. The garden was situated somewhere in Mesopotamia. It's watered by one of the rivers. The reader should envision something like a riparian zone or a fluvial island. 

Then there is the description of the garden of Eden, with its tree of life and tree of the knowledge of good and evil. These are plausibly symbolic. The idea of an arboretum containing trees bearing fruit, which if eaten would confer immortality or yield sudden moral knowledge of good and evil, must have seemed fantastic to the Pentateuchal author. Keep in mind here that we are not dealing with miraculous fruit–as if God would on the occasion of eating impose immortality or supernatural knowledge of good and evil on the eater, for these were against his will. The fruit is said to have their effect even contrary to God's will. 

i) The tree of life wasn't forbidden.  

ii) Although Craig thinks it's "fantastic" that the God would on the occasion of eating confer supernatural knowledge of good and evil on the eater, contrary to his prohibition, what's the exegetical evidence that the narrator shared Craig's scruples? Indeed, it turns out that eating the forbidden fruit is punitive in itself. They expect one thing but what they experience is not what they hoped for. A rude surprise. A shocking revelation.

To take a comparison: suppose you're told not to eat berries from a particular bush. But you disregard the warning. Turns out the berries are poisonous. That in itself is a punishment for flouting the admonition. You ate the berries because they look delicious. Maybe they are delicious. But the pleasure is short-lived. 

They don't know in advance what the tree of knowledge represents. They only know what the Tempter told them it stands for. They take his word for it. Then they found out the hard way it's not what they were counting on. 

The garden of Eden may have described an actual existing geographical location–plausibly the Persian Gulf oasis, but like Mt. Olympus in Greek mythology, that site may have been employed to tell a mythological story about what happened at that site. 

Does he apply the same reasoning to the patriarchal narratives, or the Exodus, or the Gospels? 

Then there is the notorious walking and talking snake in the garden. Now he makes for a great character in the story: conniving, sinister, opposed to God. Perhaps a symbol of evil. But not plausibly a literal reptile such as you might encounter in your own garden. For the Pentateuchal author knew that snakes neither talk nor are intelligent agents. Again, the snake's personality and speech cannot, like Balaam's ass, be attributed to miraculous activity on the part of God lest God become the author of the Fall. The snake is not identified as an incarnation of Satan. Rather, he is described simply as the craftiest of the beasts of the field which the Lord God had made–a description which is incompatible with his being Satan. 

i) Craig is evidently unaware of the fact that Hebrew syntax is ambiguous. Does it include the Tempter in the animal kingdom (comparative construction), or exclude the Tempter from the animal kingdom (partitive construction)? The context must decide.

ii) God has created a causal order in which things have an effect even when misused or abused. Even when we break God's law. If you commit fornication or adultery, God isn't going to suspend the possibility of pregnancy. The reproductive system will still perform it's God-given design, even though you act contrary to his commands and prohibitions. Whether the effect is natural or supernatural has no bearing on theodicy.

When you look at snakes in the ancient Near East, they are used as symbols for a wide range of things…they could be worshipped but they could also represent evil and sinister powers…so snakes could be regarded as wicked and so forth. 

True, but in that event the original audience might well be expected to recognize in the Tempter, not a reptile, but a malevolent numinous being. In that case, the designation of the Tempter is paronomastic. A code name or pun to play on the evil, sinister connotations of snake-gods. 

"…upon your belly you shall go"–this sounds like an etiological explanation of why snakes slither on the ground. 

i) As Walton explains in his commentary on Genesis, imprecations against venomous snakes were commonplace in the ancient Near East. The imagery involves a contrast between a snake poised to strike, and a snake facedown. For instance, a cobra, with its short, backset fangs, must raise itself to a vertical position to strike (unlike vipers). Facedown is not an attack position. 

ii) That interpretation also dovetails with the imagery of the next verse. Snakes usually bite the lower extremities. So the curse is not an etymology about why snakes slither, but continues the serpentine symbolism by treating the Tempter like a snake–thereby evoking a range of cultural associations with "snakes". 

iii) Keep in mind that in many cultures, humans adopt animal names, hoping to reflect whatever is impressive about the animal. Merely having an animal name carries no presumption that the individual is in fact an animal.  

When God finally drives the man and his wife out of the garden of Eden, he stations at its entrance "cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life" (Gen 3:24). What makes this detail fantastic is that the cherubim were not thought to be real beings but fantasies composed of a lion's body, a bird's wings, and a man's head. The Jewish commentator Nahum Sarna…observes that the motif of composite human/animal/bird figures was widespread in various forms throughout the ancient Near East, and he thinks that it is prominent in both art and religious symbolism and that the biblical cherubim seem to be connected with this artistic tradition. Cherubim filled multiple roles in the biblical tradition, such as symbolizing God's presence or God's sovereignty. Artistic representations of such creatures were to be found in the tabernacle and the temple, including in the holy of holies. Sarna points out that they are the only pictorial representation permitted in Judaism–an otherwise anti-iconic religion. They don't violate the prohibition against images because they are purely products of the human imagination and so do not represent any existing reality in heaven and earth. And thus images of them could be made in ancient Israel without breaking the second commandment prohibiting images of things in heaven or on earth, for the cherubim were not real. 

i) Are the cherubim in Ezekiel not real beings but artistic fantasies? Are the cherubim in Ezekiel mere figments of human imagination? To the contrary, the artistic cherubim in the tabernacle are modeled on real angels. A point of correspondence between heaven and earth. 

ii) The Mosaic code allows for pictorial representations of flora in the tabernacle.

iii) How does it follow that pictorial representations are permissible so long as they are purely products of human imagination rather than representing real things in heaven? Isn't the problem of idolatry nearly the opposite? The idolater misrepresents God by depicting deities that are figments of the human imagination. That don't correspond to what God is really like? Would an idol of Baal or Ishtar not violate the second commandment because Baal and Ishtar don't exist? 

And yet, here in Gen 3, they are posted as guards, at a time and place in history, along with a rotating, flashing sword to guard for an indetermine time the garden of Eden against man's reentry into the garden. Now since cherubim were regarded as creatures of fantasy and symbol, it's not as if the author thought what realism would require–that the cherubim remain at the entrance to the garden for years on end until it was either overgrown with weeds or swept away by the flood. 

i) Even if we grant how he frames the issue, it raises speculative questions about angelic psychology. Do angels get bored? Do angels get tired? How do angels ordinarily pass the time? Do they require external simulation? From what little Scripture reveals about angels, they seem to be telepathic. If so, they presumably have a group consciousness. They can tap into the minds of fellow angels. In that respect, their minds may roam far and wide even if they are "stuck" in one place.

ii) However, that's all unnecessary. Why assume the same cherubim guarded the garden round-the-clock? The text doesn't say that. Why not rotate? How about two-hour shifts? 

For that matter, why assume the garden requires sentinels on duty round the clock? The text doesn't say that. Why not leave it unguarded unless and until a human approaches, at which point cherubim resume their stations.