Quotes about Origins

When our father Adam came into the garden of Eden, he came into it with a celestial body, and brought Eve, one of his wives, with him.

Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown all began as Christian institutions

The reproduction of mankind is a great marvel and mystery. Had God consulted me in the matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them out of clay.

A major part of our inquiry, then, must be to look at the emerging Christian movement and to ask: what caused it? Even if our eyewitnesses disagree in detail, something must have happened.

These people make one feel as if a stronger memory of our former innocence remains in them, as if they were a freak of nature, not entirely battered by the Fall. Perhaps they are messengers, like the servants who find a lost prince who's unaware of his origins, show him the robe that he

Pick up most books and articles on Washington from 1932 or earlier, and generally, with a few exceptions, you will read about George Washington the Christian. That began to change with the iconoclastic scholarship of the mid-twentieth century that sought to tear down the traditional understanding of our nation and its origins.

Seeing the similarities between these two stories should discourage us from expecting the Adam story to contribute to contemporary scientific debates about human origins (let alone guide those debates). Likewise, the similarities between Genesis and Atrahasis suggest that the biblical account cannot be labeled "historical," at least not in any conventional sense of the word.

These first seven books are Israel's stories of their deep past, or "origins stories" as they are sometimes called. They don't exist for entertainment or for idle curiosities about the past (and definitely not as fodder for children's Bible lessons). They explain how things came to be, why things are the way they are, and most important, how Israel got to be Israel—a kingdom with a land of its own.

Israel's beginnings are mysterious from an archaeological point of view, so we can't be dogmatic about explaining how and when Israel began. But it does seem that a nation eventually called "Israel" probably came on the scene gradually and relatively peacefully.

The point of all this is that the book of Exodus as we know it simply could not be as old as the thirteenth century BCE, and could not have been written by Moses.

These three were the sons of Noah, and from them the whole earth was populated.

Hadoram, Uzal, Diklah,