This research will examine degrees of difference among selected biblical sources within the Old and New Testaments. What must be appreciated at the outset about all biblical sources is that their impetus plainly comes from a serious moral purpose. Whatever distinguishes them from one another, they all share one feature: a moral agenda that is meant to affect the manner in which people lead their lives. This moral purpose comes down to an articulation of the role of God in human life, or a sense of the finitude of human existence and an acknowledgment of a power that exerts moral force on and lends meaning to human experience. The various ways in which this articulation emerges in the books of the Bible constitute their differences.
Beginning with the text of Genesis, degrees of textual difference can be discerned. Consider the fact that, as Gochberg notes (545), Genesis contains two separate creation stories. The first story deals with the day-by-day creation of the physical universe, culminating in the creation of male and female mankind, which would have dominion over the earth (Gen. 1:27). The second story collapses the creation of the physical universe into the image of Eden, to be inhabited by man, out of whose rib woman is created, along with the concept of the conjoining of man and woman as sentient beings capable of a degree of creation on their own (Gen 2.22-25). What these two creation stories share is the lending of moral weight to the principle of the Creation, or the persistent impulse toward life. The tree-of-knowledge fall sights the limits of that impulse because it introduces knowledge of evil and contingency into human experience, at the same time asserting the permanent significance of God in human consciousness.
Such narratives as that of Cain and Abel and the flood, while different in specific detail, are not qualitatively different from the pattern set in the narrative of the fall and expulsion from the gard...