Don

I am egal, not a hierarchicalist.  I just do not want to claim more than the text says.  If I claim the hierarchicalists do this (and they do, they add to the text), I do not want them to come back and say I do the same or similar.

The integration of the 3 origins stories in Gen 1-5 is non-trivial and open to alternatives, as they do not state everything we might wish they did.  That is, we have questions that the text does not answer, trying to force fit an answer in this case goes beyond the text.  Of course we can use all the inspired text and grammar and comparisons with pagan origins stories to help us do our best to try to see what it meant to the original reader.  As this discussion is a major tangent to the title of this thread, I will simply point out that there were 2 trees in the middle of the garden and mentioning a tree in the middle of the garden is true but ambiguous.