A quick follow-up to my previous post:
This illustrates a limitation or weakness of many OT scholars. Most of them are trained in the literature and languages of the ancient Near East. As a result, they interpret passages like Gen 2-3 or 6-9 in abstraction from the physical would outside the text, which the narrator and his audience inhabited. This can lead to overly literary and generic interpretations that are cut off from the concrete world to which the text refers. They view the text as a mural rather than a window.
Despite his secular outlook, Montgomery has a realistic eye for the world of Gen 6-9 that's ironically missing in many commentaries on Genesis. That's clearly a problem for liberal scholars, but it can also be a problem for conservative scholars.
We're scolded by scholars (e.g. Peter Enns, Paul Seeley, John Walton) on how we ought to construe Genesis in light of its ancient Near Eastern setting. That's an undeniably valid principle, yet they themselves suffer from a blinkered view of what it means, due to the tunnel vision of their training and interests. They fail to take their own principle as seriously as they should.
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