Think of a biography of Abraham Lincoln. First, we can ask questions about things that are left out. If his paternal grandmother's name is not mentioned, for instance then we are within our rights to ask. Even if the answer had to be "no one knows," we would still assume that the question has an answer in the sense that Lincoln's father had a mother and she had a name. Even if her name is known but is judged by the biographer to be unimportant to the task of telling of Lincoln's life, still she existed and she had a name. Second, we can increase our knowledge of Lincoln by visiting places he lived and by reading biographies of other people of the time. Kentucky and Illinois are still there, and there are biographies of, for instance, Robert E. Lee. Third, the connections we can draw between Lincoln's life and our own can be quite definite. One could, for instance, include in a biography of Lincoln a history of the fortunes and misfortunes of the former slaves and their descendants down to and including our own time. All the complex bits of the emancipation experience have a part in our world of today.
Think now
about Adam and Eve. The story about them in the Bible has a very specific
didactic purpose. We're off the mark if we ask questions that are not answered
in the story, not because no one knows, but because there is in a deeper sense
no answer. What color was Adam and Eve's skin? In America race can be an
important question, but to give Adam and Eve a particular skin tone would not
suit why their story is told. There are innumerable other questions we could
imagine about Adam and Eve, say, for instance, whether they cooked their
vegetables or ate them raw, but their story is a closed set in the sense that
nothing matters that is not there, and if it is not there, imagination does not
serve us well to ask.Second, to seek connections of the story of Adam and Eve to contemporaneous history cannot lead anywhere. There were no other people, which itself points to the point of the story: they were all of humanity. Knowing about what else was going on will not help us. Again, their story is closed. Everything there serves the story's purpose, and anything more would not.
Third, the connections of the story of Adam and Eve to us are on a much broader level than anything that happened in the time of Lincoln. Again, Adam and Eve are all humanity. Their story brings all humans together in one category and accounts for our existence and for our problems.
So that is how we are meant to read their story: for what it says about us. That does not mean that we can denarrativize ("demythologize") it and still fully get the lesson. It is as a story that it carries out its purposes. But neither do we gain anything by trying to think of their story as history. History has connections. When Lincoln was president, other things were happening in China. The story of Adam and Eve works by being the story of all humanity, by being in that way the only story. There was no one else anywhere to be doing anything.
We can apply the resulting hermeneutic to all of Genesis until the connections with the present get narrower. There are reminders that what is said is about all humankind--in the creation accounts (1:26-28; "the man" in 2:5, 7, 15-17), in later echoes of the creation accounts (8:17; 9:1f., 7), and in other places (5:1f.; 6:3, 5-7, 13; 7:23; 9:19). "All humanity" is still together as people begin to build the tower of Babel (11:1), but they are worried about losing their unity and being scattered (vs. 4). They are right, though their solution did not work: when they are scattered (vs. 9), that is, in fact, the end of "all humanity" as something that can, as a unit, take part in the narrative and as a central concern of the narrative (the scattering is implied in ch. 10 as well). Then Abram emerges as the focus (12:1).