A Different Genre for Genesis 1

Faith & Science Conversation
41

FYI -

The Hebrew Bible was also divided into some larger sections. In Israel the Torah (its first five books) were divided into 154 sections so that they could be read through aloud in weekly worship over the course of three years. In Babylonia it was divided into 53 or 54 sections (Parashat ha-Shavua) so it could be read through in one year.

[See below for section on New Testament]

Since at least 916 [C.E.] the Tanakh has contained an extensive system of multiple levels of section, paragraph, and phrasal divisions that were indicated in Masoretic vocalization and cantillation markings. One of the most frequent of these was a special type of punctuation, the sof passuq, symbol for a full stop or sentence break, resembling the colon (:slight_smile: of English and Latin orthography.

With the advent of the printing press and the translation of the Bible into English, Old Testament versifications were made that correspond predominantly with the existing Hebrew full stops, with a few isolated exceptions. Most attribute these to Rabbi Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus’s work for the first Hebrew Bible concordance around 1440. [Footnote 6]

[Footnote 6: "Moore, G.F. The Vulgate Chapters and Numbered Verses in the Hebrew Bible, pages 73–78 at JSTOR. page 75.]

URL link to the Vulgate:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3259119?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

[New Testament Discussion]
The New Testament was divided into topical sections known as kephalaia by the fourth century. Eusebius of Caesarea divided the gospels into parts that he listed in tables or canons. Neither of these systems corresponds with modern chapter divisions.

Chapter divisions, with titles, are also found in the 9th century Tours manuscript, Paris Bibliothèque Nationale MS Lat. 3, the so-called Bible of Rorigo. Archbishop Stephen Langton and Cardinal Hugo de Sancto Caro developed different schemas for systematic division of the Bible in the early 13th century. It is the system of Archbishop Langton on which the modern chapter divisions are based.

While chapter divisions have become nearly universal, editions of the Bible have sometimes been published without them. Such editions, which typically use thematic or literary criteria to divide the biblical books instead, include

John Locke’s Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (1707),
Alexander Campbell’s The Sacred Writings (1826),
Richard Moulton’s The Modern Reader’s Bible (1907),
Ernest Sutherland Bates’ The Bible Designed to Be Read as Living Literature (1936),
The Books of the Bible (2007) from the International Bible Society (Biblica),
and the ESV Reader’s Bible from Crossway Books.

42

The division is not related to the chapter divisions, it is based on structure, vocabulary (like the word for God), and other textual criticism considerations. I’m not a Hebrew scholar either, but I think the toledot phrase is always an introduction of a new section.

1 Like
43

You are correct about the toledot. Some commentators note that Genesis 1 does not have one, and so they conclude that verse 1 sort of functions like one anyway. That, however, depends on how you translate verses 1-3:

“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth [full stop]. And the earth was without form, etc. [full stop]. And God said, ‘Let there be…’”

or

“When God began to create the heavens and the earth [comma], the earth was without form and void, etc. [full stop]. Then God said, ‘Let there be…’” The second option makes 1:1 look less like a summary statement and more like an introductory clause. Plus, “toledot” is nowhere to be found in verse one. :slight_smile:

Oh, grammar. Such fun.

44

I recall Henry Morris arguing that in fact the toledots did function as post-scripts rather than introductions. That was an interesting idea, but I don’t think it holds much weight when you look at it more closely.

45

I’m not sure how you get from:

…to a different creation. Again, they are two different stories. In Genesis 2, it tells the story of the ERETZ where God planted a garden. Seeing how the ERETZ where the garden was planted was in the Eden region, that is, the EDEN ERETZ, you could say it was the story of “The Story of Man in Eden Land.”

As many scholars have pointed out for as long as the Hebrew text of Genesis has existed, the word ERETZ means land, country, nation, region, wilderness (in the KJV Bible), and in some contexts dirt, soil, or even “the ground”. To say it means “planet earth” is to anachronistically plant modern day notions into the Hebrew text–and even to plant them into the 1611 KJV were “earth” in the English language of the time more often meant dirt and “the ground” than “planet earth”. (Much like in Hebrew, “earth” at that time USUALLY meant soil as in “a tiller of the earth” and the opposite of the heavens, as in “falling to the ground.”) ERETZ YISRAEL in ancient Israel meant “Land of Israel” or “Nation of Israel” just as it does today in modern Israel. Nobody has ever assumed ERETZ YISRAEL means “planet Israel”. So it always frustrates me when people see ERETZ in Genesis and assume “planet earth”. Yes, it is a popular tradition dating back to the KJV itself, and most modern translations have to retain the word “earth” despite the confusion it spawns—but in the footnotes at the bottom of the page, they show the better translation for ERETZ: “or land, country.”

I assume that when the Book of Genesis was written, the author(s) wanted a “preface” to the story of the creation of the Children of Israel, and the two best known origins stories were chosen to describe the backdrop, where the God of Israel is declared to be the creator of everything. This in no way detracts from divine inspiration. Indeed, probably all of the pericopes of Genesis 1 to 11 were popular oral stories known in that area of the world. And what could be more grand that opening the book with a HYMNIC TRIBUTE to ELOHIM, where the story of creation is told as a six stanza hymn with a repeating chorus which depicts God as the creator of all of the domains of the universe, in contrast to the neighboring cultures where each of those same domains was attributed to a different deity. Israel’s God is so powerful that he made everything in a single workweek. This is a perfectly sensible literary device and the structure of Genesis 1, with lots of chiasms, the use of sevens and threes, and so many other beautiful features of the genre underscore that this is not a science lesson on the origins of the universe. It is theology.

Of course, in the ERETZ EDEN story that follows in Genesis 2:4ff, none of those features are seen because it is a different literary work from a different source and a different purpose. Moses and Joshua and other likely editors weaved these stories into a beautiful whole to the glory of God. If that is jarring to those who were originally taught that Moses sat down each evening under the glow of the pillar of fire by night and wrote out the entire Torah as his original work–like it was jarring for me long ago–I can only recommend careful reflection that God’s ways are not our ways.

Of course, once one recognizes the separate components of the book of Genesis, there is nothing wrong with regarding the ERETZ EDEN story as a summary of various highlights of the original creation hymnic tribute in Genesis 1. The editors of Genesis probably regarded it that way.

Is there anything heretical about this view? Not that I can see. Does it mean that the authors of Genesis got the history wrong? No. We just have to understand history as ancient people understood it.

I once had a conversation with the man in an office next to mine when I took a job in the university’s computer center when I went back to graduate school in mid-life. He had a PhD in Physics from his native nation of India. One day he asked me questions about my Christian faith and academic background so I asked him about his. In a very tactful way I asked him how his Hindu view of our planet resting on the backs of four elephants fit into his understanding of science. He found my question perplexing because he thought that a Christian who “believed in Genesis” would be faced with the very same kind of situation. He did indeed consider the world to rest on four elephants, but it was very difficult to even discuss the idea of “literal meaning.” He would always say that “yes the world rests on four elephants”—but that statement didn’t mean the same thing to him as what non-Hindus would assume. I can’t say that I even understood him, but I think he understood that statement as a very PHILOSOPHICAL idea. He most certainly considered it true. But if you asked him how the universe was formed and how the earth related to the sun and other planets, you’d hear a conventional astronomy lesson that we would all accept. It just wasn’t a conflict for him.

I suppose when I say that I consider Genesis 1 to be true, most non-Christians would be just as perplexed that my scientific background would allow that. But I consider the word “literal” one of the most ambiguous and confusing words we could tap for these types of discussions. It is a word that creates more confusion than clarity. (I would even say that Genesis 1 uses the word YOM in a literal sense in that it is a hymnic genre where the days don’t stand for billions of years. I say that despite the fact that I affirm the billions of years of the history of the universe. I see Genesis 1 as using a single work-week to illustrate God’s power and dominion over the universe, not a science lesson. So the author used a work-week to teach us about God, not the origins of the world in a scientific sense.)

This is probably murky as mud, so let me know if it has communicated anything worthwhile.

2 Likes
46

I think of using a week to structure a poem about creation as similar to English poems I have read that use a year to structure a poem about a person’s life. (Where spring is youth and summer is the prime and fall is middle age and winter is old age; it is a common enough literary device). No one would argue that the life the poem describes had to have been lived out in the span of a literal year because the author used the words spring, summer, fall, and winter, and we all know those words indicate three month time spans.The fact that the seasons are an organizational device for the poem is clear.

3 Likes
47

@gbrooks9 Ask and ye shall receive! Thanks for all the info on chapter divisions, that’s way more than I had before!

1 Like
48

I haven’t done the legwork myself on this, obviously! But supposing Christy should prove to have the right of it, it brings me to the other Hebrew word I looked up, besides toledot, and (silly me) decided it would be unnecessary to bring up in my original post (25): Bereshith. Bereshith is the Hebrew word translated as Genesis, the first word of the Torah. It literally means “at/in [the] head” and may be translated as “In the beginning…”

Again, the usual translation is undoubtedly correct. But looking at secondary meanings can spark thoughts which might not have otherwise occurred to us. In this case, is it possible it’s placing God at the ‘head’ of a genealogy, if that’s what we’re looking at?

49

You added a decimal place, and Stump left one out. 2^30 = 10^9 = 1 billion (approximately). Neither 9 billion nor 100 million be!

1 Like
50

Thanks for the help! I thought sure that my answer didn’t quite sound right. That will teach me not to try to estimate in my head.

51

Exactly! I was trying to think of the name of such a poem but couldn’t. The closest I came was the lyrics of that song from The Fantastiks but I couldn’t remember enough of it to recall if that is how it worked. I think the title is “Try To Remember”. It has lines something like “Try to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh so mellow.”

I also think of Carl Sagan’s “cosmic calendar”, was it? I may have the name wrong. It uses a calendar year to explain the timeline of the earth’s 4.5 billion years. I can’t remember much of it except no life appears until bacteria in September, was it? And man appears at almost midnight on December 31. Of course, when Sagan refers to a given “day” on the calendar, it is indeed a “literal 24-hour day” but that literal day is being used as an analogy, obviously.

52

Try to remember the kind of September, when life was slow and oh, so mellow…

I first heard that song watching The Muppet Show. Sandy Duncan sang it. Good memories.

53

On second thought, it turns out that all of us were wrong. We all made the mistake of estimating a probability based on one particular combination, rather than all the combinations that satisfy a particular constraint. In this case, the constraint is that the last digit of an age be in a set of just 5 out of the 10 possible digits. There are 252 combinations of 5 digits (10 choose 5). Each of the combinations has an approximately 1 in 10^9 probability (as I already mentioned). Since there are 252 such combinations, the probability that we will randomly see the last digit of 30 ages all being in a set of just 5 digits is therefore 252 in 10^9, or 1 in 4,000,000.

That’s still an infinitesimal probability, of course.

The interesting thing is that our mistake is similar to the mistake Axe and Behe make when they estimate the probability that random mutations can yield a functional protein. They assume that just the one protein that biologists observe is the universe of functionality under analysis, just as we were considering only the set {0,2,5,7,9}. The approach is quite wrongheaded; you have to consider all the possible functional proteins that might be created out of a certain number of mutations, rather than a single protein. Just as we had to consider all 252 combinations of 5 digits, rather than just one.

That was fun!

Chris

EDIT: For completeness, we should probably analyze the probability that the final digits would be drawn from a set of 5 or fewer members. So we would have to include the combinations of 5 digits, 4 digits, 3 digits, 2 digits, and 1 digit.

However, the probability of drawing only from a particular set of 4 digits is about 10^3 times lower than the probability of drawing from a particular set of 5 digits. And the probability of drawing from a set of 3 digits, or 2, or 1 is orders of magnitude smaller still. So including “or fewer” in the analysis scarcely introduces a rounding error.

1 Like
54

Luke 3:23-38
23 Now Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli, … 38 the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.

1 Like
55

It certainly is fun. Unfortunately, my mathematics skills are so depleted from decades of disuse. Yet, your analysis sounds very reasonable. As you said, the bottom line is that the 30 numbers are not randomly distributed, so it is doubtful that they represented the actual ages of the Patriarchs.

And I think Christy is probably correct: When I posted my summary of this mathematical evidence against basing the age of the earth on the Genesis genealogies, AIG banned me from further posting and marked all of my posts as HIDDEN, so I could see them but nobody else could.

Surely the need to “protect” their readers from contrary arguments and information indicates just how much they fear evidence and exposing their followers to other interpretations of the Bible. That sounds to me like a cult mentality.

I really appreciate the feedback on my post on this ages of the Patriarchs topic and I thank @Chris_Falter for all of his extra, extra help. I’m thankful for this forum where I can benefit from the individual talents and gifts of other believers.

56

That doesn’t sound quite right to me, since life appeared surprisingly ‘soon’ after the earth formed. It’s been a while since I’ve seen that, too, but I think it may have started with the formation of the universe (13.8 billion years ago) rather than of the earth.

57

@Lynn_Munter, you are correct. I don’t know why I mixed that up. I called it a “cosmic calendar” because (if I recall correctly) it uses a conventional year to illustrate events in the history of the entire universe, and that is why I was guessing that bacteria appear late in the year.

I strongly recommend NOT getting old. I find myself falling into these kinds of brain-lapses on a regular basis.

1 Like
58

That strikes me as kind of interesting–because you would have had to interpret the song devoid of its original context. You didn’t say how old you were at the time, but I wonder how you interpreted it. (I have no idea how a bunch of muppets did the “set up” for such a song, but I doubt that they did much to contextualize the original intent of the lyrics and the playwrights overall vision for The Fantastiks)

59

It was a pretty minor quibble, all things considered! I’m afraid the alternative to getting old doesn’t sound any more fun…

60

I was probably in my early teens. We have the DVD set of season one. I’m only 18 right now, so I was not alive to watch it air for the first time. :slight_smile: