Let's start things off right. What word is used for God during this 6 day creation? Perhaps one should first learn the terms used and then re-think what is really going on here. There are multiple Hebrew words used for God throughout the Bible. Why?

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What we now call the Old Testament has thousands of years of oral history behind it. The coherence you’re looking for doesn’t exist, it never existed, and to pretend it exists devalues the actual process by which these accounts were created and settled upon, the process called canonization.

The right way to go about it is to just refer to the stories using current understanding, using current words and current definitions. We are the ones getting meaning from them, in order to apply them to our lives, we need to interpret them to fit the same concepts we use to consider our lives and problems and moral frames.

The exact way that the ancient Hebrews thought about God is a historical question, not a spiritual one. Very much worth knowing, but it requires a very different set of logical tools.

The people that canonized Genesis were not as learned and did not have modern methods of historical and philosophical analysis that we have available now. Their aim was to be as faithful to the old stories as they could have been without sacrificing clarity. They didn’t have a time machine available to go back and interview the oral storytellers from 500 years ago to see what could have changed and why.

They were not, however, stupid. They were the best scholars that the Hebrew people could come up with. This was their job, their life’s work. And they were carrying on a tradition that had been continuously pursued for thousands of years. Keeping a finger on the culture, pulse, and spirituality of an entire region with many kingdoms all bound by a common ethnic identity.

The Bible doesn’t just contain stories that today’s faithful insist on being absolutely true. It has poems, novels that didn’t even pretend to be true, letters that one Hebrew wrote to another Hebrew, and verse intended to be sung. It was the matter of the people of Israel, the very stuff their societies were based on.

Does it really matter whether God spoke Adam into existence or molded him out of clay? Come on now, use your brain.