teh story that Apocalypse of Yajnavalkya presents is that Adam was a selected student plucked from out of the northeast region to propagate agriculture to the hunter gatherers
my understanding of taoism and non-intervention kinda has some quibbles with the idea of the wise "picking out a student" story
but at some level all of this stuff has a concrete grounding in real events, my query is not about the fact of something happening and it having relevance to history so much as what exactly happened
for me the differences between the Jasher and Genesis versions of the "stealing of the blessing" story around Isaac/Rebecca/Jacob/Esau thing is super sniffy
like, am i supposed to admire any of these characters? seems like esau is a spoilt child and isaac is deluded (i forget just now upon which point made him vulnerable to this) and jacob was probably naturally shy and not aggressive and rebecca maybe she was just getting jacob to realise that his dad was being a bitch?
there's enough divergence of the interpretation in the text between the versions i've seen now that i'm almost certain there is a different factual history behind it than any of the versions, and then let's talk about the Abraham and Isaac sacrifice story?
I mean... really? you really have to stretch your definitions of a lot of things to accept any of this stuff as being either factual or virtuous
i'm much more ready to believe that adam and his whole storyline was more a case of a high tech civilisation that kept a strong boundary up and let a few in and this was the story of one of the clever hunters who got accepted to train how to raise plants and animals properly so he could spread this to raise up the rest of the tribes around him
and that The Lord was actually these same people who were actively following their students and mentoring them
this i can get into, i can't get into the literal version, the literal version is too much
for mei can neither believe that "God" who speaks or "The Lord" more frequently the text's depiction, was actually the Creator, nor can i believe that ... i mean, actually read genesis chapter 1 in light of knowledge of physics, the very concept of "Firmament" is extremely weird and vague, like is it the sky, is it the core of the planet?
it seems much more reasonable to me that this was just a mangled, short, kids version of Corpus Hermetika... and Vishnu Purana also has a similar beginning text as does Genesis 1 and the first part of Corpus Hermetika, and to be honest, Timeaus also has a lot in common in the way the text unfolds a story about the elaboration of a model of physical reality