Defending History: Temporal Reasoning in Genesis 2:7–3:8

The two groups assaulting the historicity of Genesis 2–3, whose attacks against the reality of the creation and fall of Adam and Eve have chiefly come in two guises, 1) that the text is poetry, not meant to be read historically; and 2) that it is prose meant to be read as an accurate historical record, but that it is contradictory and incoherent, are repelled by statistical, literary, and linguistic arguments. The first assault is addressed by a logistic regression model based upon relative frequency of wayyiqtols among finite verbs. Application of which shows it is statistically indefensible to argue that Genesis 2–3 is not prose; therefore, it is a factual record. The second attack, that the text is contradictory, is repulsed, because the theory upon which it is exclusively based, the iconic wayyiqtol sequence theory (deriving from the perspectival aspect theory of the biblical Hebrew verbal system), is exploded by multiple counterexamples taken from a much larger population. An alternative model of three semantic levels (within verbs, between verbs, and within a discourse as a whole) is overviewed, then applied to Genesis 2–3 to empirically demonstrate that the text is coherent; thereby throwing back the third attack. Thus neither is this text poetry (though there is poetry in it), contradictory, nor incoherent; but rather Genesis 2–3 is a coherent, non-contradictory historical account.