Interesting. I really loved Enns’ book. But you are right, I think, that there is no satisfying “synthesis.” I wonder, though, if it is unrealistic to expect such a synthesis?

I’d suggest that framing this discussion in terms of “acting as though the text were not inerrant” is a mistake. Immediately, that drives us into competing categories of “truth” and “error,” and we’re forced to put the text into one of those boxes.

Maybe a better question is, “what literary genre is this text?” If the text is not intended to be a simple factual narrative genre, then it is not in “error” if it omits some details or recasts some events using symbolic language or figures.

Within the text itself, there are some good reasons to ask questions about genre. For example, the sun appears well after the first “day”; the days seem to have a parallel structure (see Henri Blocher’s commentary on this “framework” approach); then there is the garden with teh magical trees and talking snake. The text also bears similarities to, but also important differences with, earlier Mesopotamian creation myths, suggesting that it has a polemical purpose rather than merely being reportage. And other parts of the text that we don’t often focus on assume a typical ancient near eastern cosmology in which the earth is the center of the universe and the sky is a solid tent supported by pillars (See John Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament).

OTOH, starting with Gen. 2, notwithstanding the mystical elements, the text seems to take on something of a more concrete form, suggesting that it is not entirely fictional or allegorical. It seems to me, then, to be a mixed genre that might not even be entirely familiar to us today.

A very interesting study on the genre of these narratives is an older book, Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Creation. I’m not sure I agree with Hyers because he views these narratives as essentially non-historical. However, Hyers illustrates very well how the text is primarily a polemic against the Babylonian creation myths.

One of the reasons, then, that there is no satisfying “synthesis” of these texts and modern science is that the texts serve entirely different purposes than those that interest modern science. They are not simple “scientific” or even simple “historical” documents. I maintain that they are historical narratives of a sort, but the genre is a very unique and one that selectively reports certain information for polemical purposes within an ancient near eastern cosmological and mythic framework. This isn’t “error” — it’s exactly what the text is meant to do.