[Avodah] Do we Owe Respect to Old Bones?

[Arie Folger]

Thanks for bringing this to the Ovedim's attention. To a question
about how I reconcile the idea of talking about old bones with the
Account of Creation 5770 years ago, I wrote the following:

Well, that depends on how you want to generally deal with the seeming
contradiction between the literal Account of Creation and scientific
findings on fossils, astronomy, geology, etc.

If you are inclined to see the 5772 as totally literal, with the
universe being created in six of our present days, then you will
probably claim that the fossils were created old, in which case bones
demonstrably older than 6000 years should not have come from actual
humans and would not convey tum'a.

If, on the other hand, you are inclined to read the six days of
creations as six aeons, then the fossils did come from actual homo
sapiens sapiens, but I posit that even then, the account of creation
of man is halakhically meaningful, and bones coming from before adam
would not yet be endowed with tzelem E-lohim, which many Rishonim take
as relating to man's creative and, more importantly, moral faculties.
Thus, older bones would still not convey tum'a.

If you subscribe to Gerald Schroeders
both-Torah-and-science-are-literally-right-because-time-is-relative
interpretation of creation, then I would still point you to the above
reasoning, though it becomes difficult, because one suddenly needs to
define Adam - a person or a species - but I would tend to still
identify Adam as literally the first person endowed with Tzelem.

For these two latter interpretations, one would likely posit that the
creation of man was a second appearance of an existing primate
species, but this time around endowed with tzelem E-lohim, though for
the sake of full disclosure, I should point out that R' Walter
Würzburger once told me he saw no difficulty in considering pre-Adam
honinids (including home sapiens sapiens) every bit as much 'afar min
ha-adama (i.e. they could have been the dust G"d gathered to create
Adam).

Finally, if you subscribe to what I call the programmer's model of
creation, i.e. that the world is a virtual reality in G"d's "mind" and
that the individual creations of the Six Days of Creation are kind of
subroutines (works perfectly with Rashi who speaks of everything being
created before the first day, but put in place on its day, and it all
only coming into function on day six, when Adam was made to come
alive), then the first answer above would fit, too.

So I went through the different models and each and every time found
the creation of man 5770 years ago (5770, not 5772, because in the
latter figure we count the present year, and consider the six days of
creation like year 1) to be a halakhically meaningful and relevant to
old human bones, regardless of one's understanding of the Account of
Creation.

But I'd love to hear who might have written on the topic.

========== AD KAAN ==========

-- 
Arie Folger,
Recent blog posts on http://ariefolger.wordpress.com/
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