ABSTRACT: The Bible illuminates Kant’s distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves. The two biblical creation stories, in Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2, offer different ontological parsings, only the second of which, like Kant’s appearances, is relativized to the human case. But while Kant’s other region remains undercharacterized (it is either understood negatively, as differing from the realm of appearances, or else uninformatively, as the object of supra-human cognition), the Bible articulates quite fully the world as it is before the advent of men and women. The Bible treats this realm from the sub-human standpoint. This broadly anthropological approach to the idea of appearances clarifies transcendental idealism.
