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Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1999 21:05:49 -0500 (EST)
From: Russell Hendel <  rhendel@mcs.drexel.edu>
Subject: Re: Creation

Just a quick analogy to the comments made by Yehoshua Kahn and Kenneth
Goldman about the 2 creation stories. The suggested and classical
explanation is that Gen 1 deals with the whole creation and Gen 2 gives
more details about the creation of man.

The analogy would be an HTML screen on the net. Gen 1 would correspond to
the main screen and contain info on the 6 days of creation. If you click
the 6th day you get a second screen which is Gen 2 which contains
information on the creation of adam.

The point of the above analogy is NOT to be cute and NOT to be modern.
Rather the HTML analogy illustrates a fundamental organizational principle
of databases and newspaper writing which in Halachic lingo is called the
principle of GENERAL and PARTICULAR. The principle simply states that if
you have a lot of information then an efficient way of organizing it is to
give a list of keywords or indexes first and then let the reader branch out
if they want to.  Malbim used this double repetition vehicle to show that
large numbers of midrashim can be snuck into the double repetition by
varying certain words in each version.

Russell Jay Hendel; Phd ASA
RHendel @ mcs drexel edu