Change and Time in Genesis

I contend that ancient people, before the philosophers, did NOT imagine a time continuum, some underlying, invisible, measurable reality that flows. They used a water clock to divide a day into parts. However, this was not measuring time. It was simply dividing up the day into arbitrary parts. Egyptian stone water clocks have survived. They have a small hole in the bottom for dripping out the water. On the insides of the pot, we find columns of scribe marks. They used different amounts of water for different seasons. A daylight watch in summer used more water than a daylight watch in winter just like the Babylonian water clock table explains.

Monitoring nature changes (or dividing its changes into periods) is not like measuring time. The ancients had no concept of an underlying time continuum. Ancient languages had no words for time nor could they use verb tenses to describe events as happening “in time.” A contemporary of Solomon’s would not imagine Ecclesiastes 3 as a “time chapter.” He talks about how events cycle, not time cycles. He also explains why we can never understand Earth history. God made everything functional and beautiful in it event period. Yet he put olam in our minds so that we cannot understand all that God has done. We cannot understand Earth history because we naturally try to understand ancient eras with what we see today.

Change and time are diametrically opposite ways of understanding the same world. All ancient societies looked back on the early generations as those who lived for eons. Isaiah calls them the eon generations of long ago who saw the nearby planet break up.

Isaiah 51:9 Awake, awake put on strength, O arm of the LORD; Awake as in the days of old, the generations of long ago. Was it not You who cut rah’av in pieces, Who pierced the sea serpent.

The Canaanites used the imagery of a multi headed sea serpent for the shattered planet. Isaiah calls the shattered Rah’av a sea serpent. If a watery planet were shattered, each piece would be followed by a vapor tail, a coma. The shattered planet is not spelled the same as the woman Rahab in Hebrew (rakhav). All ancient societies told stories of a battle when a planet was shattered. The Bible mentions this event four times, twice in Job. Why is it so hard for Christians to accept this? Changing planet orbits does not fit our philosophical concept of linear “time”.

By the way, Dr Cuozzo made X-ray studies on Neanderthal child skulls. He has an excellent section in the appendix of his book on how our skulls thicken as we age. If we lived for geological eons, we would end up with Neanderthal features, just like Job describes in chapter 14.

Westerners find it difficult to to believe what Jacob said in Genesis 47:9 (that the days and years of the son are shorter and worse than the days and years of the fathers). What could cause days and years to continue to accelerate, while still keeping approximately the same ratios between days and years?

The Sun’s gravity has an aberration as experiments show during eclipses. Its effects propagate at light speed. This MUST pull more on the dawn than the sunset, accelerating days and years together throughout Earth history. This tangential effect of gravity also has another effect. It forces all orbits to propagate outwards into logarithmic spacings as we find in the solar system and in exoplanet systems. No wonder the optical parallax to the Sun has continued to decrease for over 2,000 years even in the last 50 years. You might answer that orbits are clock-like. Indeed, we see in the visible history of how the spiral galaxies formed that the clocks accelerate along with the accelerating orbits. Spiral galaxies have logarithmic spacings, just like planet orbits. Evidently gravity is what emerges as the atoms keep changing their clock rates.

You might think, we would freeze if our orbit opens outwards. The Egyptians painted the Sun red and the sky brown as they worked their fields without hats or shirts. Homer said the sky was bronze. No one seems to have noticed a blue sky until classical times.

Change and time are diametrically opposite worldviews. The Bible is about change, not time. A God who can manage all the changes (as he tells us in Job 38-40) is much greater that Augustine’s God who merely created time and sees the future. Change and time are diametrically opposite worldviews.

Victor, Changing Earth Creationist

Change and Time are not worldviews. Unless I’m a short-tailed opossum.

Is Dr Cuozzo an expert in the field? Can you point us to his research?

He was a dentists who studied under a prominent evolutionist, although he is a Christian. His professor gave him access to the Neanderthal skulls in European museums. He took special x-ray equipment with him to examine the skulls of the Neanderthals. He found that the child skulls were remarkably different from the skulls of the old Neanderthals. When someone found out he was a Christians, they evidently tried to get the data away form him. Why? They were displaying the child skulls deceptively, trying to make them look like the older Neanderthals.

See the book Buried Alive by Jack Cuozzo. The first part of the book is not remarkable. It is the data in the appendix that are of value to me. Our skulls are the only part of our skeleton that keep growing with age. If we lived for the vast geological ages Job describes as few days back in the dinosaur era, we also would grow thick Neanderthal brows before we died, just like Job.

Victor, Changing Earth Creationist (not the same as OEC or YEC)

Sorry, but that is false. Once we reach adulthood our skulls stop growing. (The only exception would be certain disease conditions in animals or people.) Your Jack doesn’t know jack squat about Neanderthals. Neanderthals are a separate species. We even have sequenced their DNA. Why not visit a natural history museum and check out the fossils?

What could we possibly call the pulse of changes in nature, marching continually onward? Time for a change?

Adult Neanderthals had massive brain buckets. Their brows thickened as they aged. We can use micro-x-rays to compare our brows as they change over the decades. If we lived for geological ages, our faces would become Neanderthal. Look up the Gibraltar child and compare his face to a modern face. Yet he was a Neanderthal, buried in the same area as the old man with the thick brows.

Neanderthals had purer genes than we do. They lived for geological ages. DNA fragments, especially at the ends. It also gets corrupted by exposure to many things. Despite this inherent corruption in the fossils, they are humans as the DNA shows. Of course those who believe that humans gradually improved their genetics over the ages, cannot accept the evidence and always tell the story as though Neanderthals were subhuman.

Job, who lived in the dinosaur era, explains (1) how they lived for geological ages (2) that their faces intensely changed in unbroken continuity before they died.

Everything changing is the opposite of the metaphysics of the Western metaphysician (Thomas Aquinas) who imagined that matter is not changing itself as it ages.

Consider this. The Bible says the Earth spreads out in unbroken continuity. Indeed, the continents fit together on a minuscule globe without the modern, younger oceans. It is difficult for Westerners to accept such biblical statements literally. We were trained since childhood using Friar Thomas’ metaphysics that matter does not change itself.

Yet we can see the past. No ancient galaxies clocks the frequencies of modern atoms. Indeed, the Earliest galaxies we have analyzed to date, clock much less than 10% of the frequencies of modern atoms. Change and science are opposite worldviews. The Bible was written by people who had a worldview about change. We live in an age with the opposite faith.

Victor, Changing Earth Creationist

Hi Victor,

I think everybody on the Forum has noticed by now that you self-identify as being a Changing Earth Creationist. So I don’t think it’s necessary to end your messages in that way every single time… Some change would be appreciated there!

In fact, you have hit the jackpot here. All of us believe that the earth is changing! We also believe that God created this changing earth. That must mean that we’re all a bunch of Changing Earth Creationists. So… Welcome home.

On a more serious note, I think you’re unfairly framing the Bible versus science. Besides change, there is also a theme of lawfulness in the Bible. See for example Jeremiah 33:25-26:

25 This is what the Lord says: ‘If I have not made my covenant with day and night and established the laws of heaven and earth, 26 then I will reject the descendants of Jacob and David my servant and will not choose one of his sons to rule over the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. For I will restore their fortunes and have compassion on them.’”

God established the laws of heaven and earth… In this passage, these laws are used as an image of the faithfulness of God to the people of His covenant. An important aspect of God is that “He does not change like shifting shadows”. If the lawfulness in nature can even serve as an image of God’s faithfulness, that means that the scientific study of lawfulness in the natural world is not against the Bible at all.

Your excessive focus on the concept of “change”, at the expense of the concept of “lawfulness”… I hope you’ll change that attitude some day.

Peace,
Casper

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What used to be called the waw consecutive with imperfect (which looks like an imperfect verb with “and” attached to the front of it) is currently viewed by Hebrew linguists (by studying the history and changes in cognate Semitic languages) as not an imperfect at all; it simply now looks like an imperfect. It is a different form of verb entirely, which is definitely past tense (some now call it the preterite); it is used primarily in Hebrew narrative to described what happened next. So the use of this verb form throughout Genesis 1 is clearly a sequence marker.

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I am very glad I didn’t miss this part of Victor’s posting …I’ve always wanted to know who in the Bible lived during the time of the dinosaurs…

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Fred and Wilma Flintstone

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I recommend the little book, “Time and Process in Ancient Judaism” by Sacha Stern. “A worldview based on process and without the general concept of time gives rise to a radically different description of reality, but without excluding or ignoring any aspect of the universal empirical experience.” Another excellent book from a different perspective is “Hebrew thought compared to Greek” by Thorleif Boman. Henri Bergson thought that the static concept of Western time is a defense against what is real: which is change.

Hebrew had no words for time, only timing events or durations marked by event. For example, the Qumran scrolls never mention time as an entity in itself. They do mention punctual events such as festivals. In their worldview calendars and clocks do not measure time.

Lets go back to creation.

52 % of the verbs in the Genesis Creation account are imperfect, showing continuing or repeating commands and actions.

14% show actions that continue in unbroken continuity.

Only 11 verbs show completion, such as when God completed naming the dark as night. The naming of the light as day is imperfect. This suggest that the light continues to change, whereas the dark is an absence of activity and therefore uses the perfect.

17% of the verbs are imperatives or infinitives.

The waw consecutive imperfect may introduce what happens next and continues to happen. For example, Jeroboam the son of Nebat breaks away from Judah and his sins continue throughout the history of Israel.

My claim is this. The problem that Western Christians struggle with over the age of the universe in only 4,000 Old Testament years comes from our concept of time. To an ancient person who had no concept of an actual time dimension, only accepting what is changing is real. If you see change instead of synthetic ideas about time, then the changes the Bible mentions on day four are the most powerful evidence for Creation possible, since we see the creation era with telescopes.

Just a thought.

Victor

Eddie, To clarify: I was indeed criticizing Victor’s point as not being in harmony with what Hebrew linguistics currently says. I am not a linguist, but simply reporting on what I understand from reading the latest Hebrew grammars on this. The reason the preterite looks like an imperfect has to do with the evolution of the form over time. It used to look different, but now happens to resemble an imperfect.

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Thank you for your excellent comments. Ephesians 5:13 tells tells us that light reveals the truth and exposes error because everything that is visible phos estin, is light. Genesis tells us and the Earth was dark and tohu wa bohu. God’s wind dithered in unbroken continuity over the dark waters. God continues to command the light. This is very interesting, because light is what gives matter its form and other external properties as it never stops dithering around with atoms (QED theory). Matter really is light, as Paul wrote. This is why evidence based on light (rather than mathematics) is so important.

We can see back to the creation era with telescopes. The earliest atoms clocked much less than 10% of the frequencies emitted by modern atoms. We also observe (at many ranges) how galaxies keep changing their shapes and colors throughout cosmic history. What we see ONLY fits the literal text for day four. It does not fit a big bang or the accretion of stars from dust. What we see is that tiny cores of primordial matter shoot out globs packed with stars. The star globs are often arranged in equally spaced strings, like beads on a necklace. The globs accelerate out from point like sources and spread out. This is like we read of in Hebrews 11:3 where God commands the plural eons to passively form as things appear out from what is not apparent. The cosmos is the only history that we observe as it happened to the creation era. God continues to command luminaries in the plural heavens. The luminaries are to be for signs for years, and days. God continues to place the luminaries as spreading things (raqiya) in the plural heavens (shamayim). He continues to call the stars to come out, according to Isaiah. There are probably at least 5 trillion galaxies and the earliest ones are remarkably different from the local ones. Trillions upon trillions of star streams spread out, accelerate out, become dusty, often growing into local, growth spirals. What is visible violates every definition and law of modern physics. Anyone with a computer can examine the deep vistas of the universe and look at the spectra of each galaxy. The James Webb space telescope is due to launch in 2 years. If it properly unfolds its giant mirrors and its helium refrigeration system works, we will get even greater proofs for the Hebrew grammar for day four.

Meanwhile the scientific universe is crammed full of undetectable magic, like vastly more invisible matter than the natural kind, vacuums that adjust the frequencies of passing light and impossible accretion that violates the visible history of the universe.

The universe does have laws. The same laws do function in the universe as on Earth (Job 38:33). However, the laws regulate how matter keeps changing in an orderly together manner (Romans 8:19-22). Friar Thomas, the metaphysician of the West, was wrong. Western science was founded on his notion that the essence of substance is changeless. The structure of Western science was built on the notion that "all things remain the same (2 Peter 3:3-6). Indeed scientists obfuscate both Earth’s geology and the history of the plural heavens (as Peter predicted they would) because they have a first law (arch ktisis) that all things remain the same.

My contention is that only the literal creation text is confirmed in the visible history of the universe. However, we Westerners have a strong cultural notion of changelessness and time. The authors of the Bible had no such culture. The Bible is going to completely vanquish Western science, for the creators great glory.

Victor

Another book that someone gave me ($150) is “Word Order and Time in Biblical Hebrew Narrative” by Tal Goldfajn. She teaches biblical Hebrew in a university in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I read the book but must confess I do not understand all of her arguments, although she has her own theory of waw consecutive etc.

I have lot of books on time, almost all based on Western theories of time, such as relativity etc. It was not, however, until I began a study of biblical Creation and Earth history that God (I believe) opened my eyes to seeing things from the perspective of how ancient people thought and lived without a philsophy of time.

It is my contention, that if we approach the biblical narrative on creation and earth history with their worldview and their grammar (hermeneutically) we have the most powerful evidence possible for a biblical Creation. It does not involve a big bang, billions of years or a young earth.

It involves change, not time. This is not speculation, since we confirm that everything changes with telescopes. The atomic clocks and the orbits visibly accelerate throughout cosmic history. Science and change are opposite worldview. God will someday reduce the wise of this age to moros, as he promised. Why would he do this? Because man cannot come to know him (have true faith) through philosophy. Yet any sinner who trusts him (which is as a result of his special grace) becomes his child. He is taking the wise with their skills, 2 Cor 3:20.

Victor

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I have enjoyed following these posts. I have no clue what God did, but I know that He did all of this!
I was pretty closed minded to any view, but YEC, at one time, and it was He who focused my thoughts on Genesis 1-2 and gave me a desire to research evolution and old earth views. I read books, and learned the possibilities.
An open mind, best way.
Anything is possible,
He is the creator, and I am nothing.
Thank-you for this.
God Bless

@godsriddle

You are proposing that Word Order found in an ancient and pre-scientific document somehow trumps our own living witness of what dozens of different scientific disciplines show us:

Earth is billions of years old.

Most of us ALREADY agree that the early Bible writers believed many things about Creation that are in error. Paying $150 in order to be even more convinced of this doesn’t seem to be a good investment.

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