Michael Kruse

(Mike now clutching at his socks. 🙂 )

Thanks Cheryl. I am enjoying the conversation (for the most part) and I do feel you and I are having a conversation. I don’t spend this much time in conversation with people I don’t care about.

I am sleepless so I have been surfing the net a little on the perfect/pluperfect aspects of 2:19. I found two online resources of interest. One is from the Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne. Dr. Douglas McC. L. Judisch writes in EXEGETICAL NOTES ON GENESIS 2: 18-24:

“19. For the LORD God had formed from the ground every living thing of the field and every bird of the heavens, and now He brought [each] to the man to see what he would call each; and, indeed, everything which the man would call each living being that was its name.

The initial word in the translation of this verse represents the strong waw being used to indicate positive logical consequence, since temporal consequence is excluded by the chronology of the creation clearly enunciated in Genesis 1. In this verse, indeed, the waw of logical consequence introduces not, as more commonly, a conception which logically proceeds from the preceding conception (as does the strong waw translated “and so” beginning the ensuing verse), but rather a conception which is required as the logical basis of the preceding conception (listed as IV.D. 2.e.(1.) in CHEL). Such a usage of the conjunction often implies a pluperfect understanding of the verbal form which it precedes, as is reflected here in the rendering “had formed” of the breviate aspect of ytzr (BDB, 427b- 428a).â€

The other website is called tektonics. It is more polemic but goes into much more detail about the “waw consecutive.†I found other sites with seemingly scholarly hosts linking this site as their argument for the pluperfect.

I stumbled on another site where Josh McDowell advocated the pluperfect tense without giving strong details.

Finally, one other observation. As I looked through the sites there were two types of sites that most adamantly subscribed to the perfect tense: Atheists and YECs. It appears to me that the first do so because atheists wish to discredit Christianity by showing “errors†in the bible and the second to discredit science. I have yet to find one resource that argues for the perfect before the late 20th Century. I am not leveling this charge at you but I am wondering about the sources you may be using. If I stop by the seminary later in the week I will do a little more digging.