Change and Time in Genesis

Faith & Science Conversation
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Hi Victor,

There are certainly differences between tense-based languages, aspect-based languages, and mood-based languages (where the basic distinction is realis vs. irrealis). It is important for us speakers of Standard Average European languages to get our minds around this important difference when we learn languages like Hebrew that differ in this regard. I agree with you there.

That said, most researchers take issue with the strong Whorfian hypothesis that people speaking aspectual languages “have no notion of time.” Speakers of these languages sense sequences of events and are able to write histories with dates and things, as the Bible itself amply demonstrates. Things are not so black and white as you suggest. Just as tense-based languages often have ways of encoding aspect (as in English progressive verb forms like “he was doing”), aspect-based languages may also have function words and grammatical forms that indicate tense. (This may or may not be true of Hebrew; I’m just trying to nuance the discussion here, not dive into the details of Hebrew per se.) The question in these aspect-based languages is what is grammatically basic, i.e., what sorts of distinctions the language forces its speakers to clarify. The question is not whether speakers actually perceive time or not. They clearly do. (Cf. the Hopi time controversy.)

And by the way, there are at least 2,000 languages in Africa (and still counting as more research is done), and there are plenty of tense-based languages there in all that diversity. It’s a sort of exoticist fallacy to think that only modern and/or Western languages share our concept of time.

(Did I cover the bases here, @Christy?)

All the best,
AMWolfe

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Ancient people understood durations, that a day passed between sunrise and sunset. However, they understood that as nature changing, not time. What Western people imagine as time, the ancient saw as never ending changes.

An example: our month names come from the Latin calendar. The first Roman calendar only had 10 named months. The Babylonians had 12 named months, plus an occasional intercalary (double) month. The Roman months were numbered or named for a nature event (April for flowers) or a cult festival. The last months were numbered: September 7; October 8; November 9; December 10. The months Januarius and Februarius were not named until the days of the mystical king Numa. According to Plutarch and Livy, early Roman months could have 20 or 35 days. Evidently if you did not see the new moon (it was raining) that month would have more days. The next month (clear) could have fewer days. They tracked nature’s changes (new moons) not time. They adjusted life, their calendars, clocks and told their Earth history stories by referring to what changes, not to time. Change and time are opposite worldviews.

Job is doubtless the oldest biblical book. (Genesis contains older records, but Job has graphical references to nature and life before the nation of Israel). Job 14 is the best biblical reference to understanding durations using what changes, instead of time.

Job says man who is born of woman is of few days. Cut down a tree, but it can sprout again at the scent of water. But man, when he dies does not rise until the heavens are no more. Yet he believes in resurrection. I will wait until my change comes. Then he explains what those few days were like, during the dinosaur era. He mentions the Mediterranean (Hebrew west) drying, as one of his markers for a lifetime. In 1970, a drill ship took cores from the deep Med. They found that it dried repeatedly, evidenced by thick layers of deep sea oozes sandwiched between salt and gypsum. He mentions mountains crumbling away. He mentions water wearing away stones and washing away the dust of the Earth. The USSR built the Aswan high dam in Egypt. The Russian engineer, Chumakov, drilled the river bed in order to build the dam. The old river bed, 1200 kilometers from the Mediterranean was 300 meters deeper than the modern level of the sea. The bottom of the old canyon had salt water fossils. That canyon refilled with sediments when the Med refilled (evidently through Gibraltar). Drill cores from Cairo, found a canyon 2500 meters deep incised into granite. This is deeper than the Grand Canyon. A great delta formed and filled the canyon with sediments after the ocean refilled. Job (who lived nearby) compared the length of life to water washing away the dust of the Earth. The Frenchman, Bourcart, found pebble beds in many old Mediterranean submarine canyons (ancient river beds). These pebble beds are now hundreds of meters under the modern surface. Clearly the geological changes Job compares to a lifetime did happen. Job ended his poem on the brevity of life during the dinosaur era by claiming their faces intensely changed in unbroken continuity, before they died (God takes them away). If you lived to watch the Mediterranean ocean dry, you would grow thick Neanderthal brows from vast age. (Our skulls are the only part of our skeleton that keeps growing as we age). Neanderthal child skull have the shapes of modern children, yet with striations on baby teeth as though they lived for eons in few days.

Understanding Creation and Earth history using the ancient changing worldview is radically different from a biblical chronology based on the Western notion of time.

Victor, Changing Earth Creationist

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Where do you get your information?

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Don’t you think it’s kind of racist to claim that certain people groups have no notion of time? I certainly do.

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The raqia is tied to the word shamayim, on day two. It is the spreading atmosphere that continues to spread out between the waters above the atmosphere and the surface waters. According to Proverbs 8:28, this water was solid, evidently ice (perhaps as rings like all the outer planets).Hot geysers, from a hot earth would likely shoot out in jets and form an atmosphere and ice rings, the shamayim raqia of day two.

Day two has the noun raqia (raqiya) five times. This is the atmospheric heaven that becomes a spreading thing on day two. The windows of heaven is not an opening in a solid dome. The concept of solid domes came from the pagans. The Septuagint translated the word raqia as stereoma, the word the philosophers used for the crystalline spheres that supposedly rotated around the Earth, holding the planets up. Aristotle thought there were 55 stereoma. The Latins translated stereoma as firmamentum, the solid sky. The KJV continued the tradition by using the word firmament, instead of the noun that spreads out. The concept of a solid dome with windows is not part of the biblical record. However, the Bible does mention a crushed planet 4 times, without allowing for planets as gods.

All icy comets clearly did not come from the Earth. The comet 67P that we landed on last year, had rocks and cliffs. The lander took close up pictures of foliated rock, perhaps sedimentary or volcanic, we do not know. Ice was only visible on a tiny fraction of the comet’s surface.

The 10,000,000 house sized snowballs hitting the Earth every year were photographed by Dr Frank from the University of Iowa. NASA admitted this fact, using their satellites. They have been photographed both from the ground and their UV signatures as the mushed into a vapor cloud entering the Earth’s atmosphere. They are not popular with secular scientists because they seem to fit Noah cataclysm.

By the way, Noah’s calendar is remarkably different from later calendars.

Victor, Changing Earth Creationist

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Well, “racist” implies that we’re talking about a particular race or races of people, and this doesn’t seem to neatly fit that category, but when I called this sort of thinking “exoticist,” it was respectfully hinting in that sort of direction. In general, I suppose the “racist” card should be played sparingly when one is aiming at gracious dialogue, sister. :slight_smile:

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All ancient societies (before the Greek philosophers tried to invent science) shared a worldview about change. They used what changes to organize life and to record their histories. Perhaps, if they could hear us talking about time, they would think we are retarded. A wise person in that era tracked the pulse of nature, not the tick of a clock. Change and time are diametrically opposite ways of understanding the world.

By the way, the best ancient source for understanding how to track nature’s changes, instead of time, is Hesiod. He wrote a poem to his lazy brother: how to watch the changes observed in nature to regulate life, not time, (You can google Hesiod’s Works and Days and read it on line to understand the difference between a “nature changes” worldview and a “time” worldview.

The most common word translate as time in the New Testament is kairos. Hesiod uses this word for the opportune way to live life, in harmony with nature, not time. Homer uses kairos for the opportune way to throw a spear. A contemporary Christians would kairos in Ephesians 5:16 as redeeming the opportunities, not redeeming the time. The concept of time entered the Bible from Catholic philosopher theologians like Augustine.

A wise person in Hesiod’s days carefully monitored how nature continues to change and adjust their activities accordingly. Today, a wise person assumes that clocks measure time. Clocks run our lives and our technology. Yet we can see the past (like looking at frames of a movie film) at many ranges. The earliest atomic clocks tick at less than 1/10th the frequencies of modern atoms. The star streams accelerate out, growing into huge local growth spirals, as the atomic clocks also accelerate. (NASA sent atomic clock based radio signals to four spinning spacecraft, that returned the same signal using transponders. A strange anomaly showed up (Pioneer Anomaly). The returned signal included a component that increased with distance. Evidently local atomic clocks accelerate (relative to distance - the past) just like the atomic clocks in hundreds of billions of galaxies.

Change and science are opposite worldviews.

Victor, Changing earth Creationist

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Well they used sundials, which don’t measure the pulse of nature. They’re artificial measurements of time.

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On the contrary, a sundial tracks the pulse of changing nature. Solomon wrote that the sun rise and sets, and hastens to its place it rise there again. In his system, one got up before dawn and watched which star faded as the Sun rose. The next day that star was higher in the sky at dawn. A year later, the Sun rose next to that stars again. In Solomon’s system, the Sun moves EAST, not west. It passes through all the stars of the ecliptic traveling towards the East, relative to the background stars. Sundials were tracking how the Sun keeps changing, not measuring time, per se.

Babylonians used water clocks for timing a military watch. Clay tablets survived that list how much water to put in a water clock for a summer day watch, versus a summer night watch and visa versa in winter. They adjusted their clocks and the duration of their military watches to coincide with the changes they observed in nature. Tracking change and believing in time are opposite worldviews.

Victor, Changing Earth Creationist

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I agree with you. Thank you.

Whorf thinks Hopi had no concept of duration. They may not have had words for time, but they saw events happening in sequence. They could tell what happened and anticipate what might happen. I contend that especially in early aspectual languages (untainted by the Western system) they did NOT reference events to time framework. They used the changes observed in nature to reference “when.” This is biblical. God said the spreading light in the plural heaves were to shine on the Earth as markers for days and years. He never mentions time. Only how the spreading lights would affect the years and the days.

Philosophers may have invented the concept of a time continuum. They may have done this for mathematical reasons. When trying to solve planet orbits. One can watch how planets change and record omens for what might happen when a particular event occurs (as the Babylonians did). However, mathematical theories require a concept of a time continuum that can be divided into smaller and smaller increments (think of Zeno’s paradoxes).

When we adjust the Bible to a strongly tensed language like English, it sometimes will not fit. The places it does not fit primarily involve Creation and Earth history. The reason creationists struggle with the vast age of the universe in 4000 Old Testament years is primarily because of our notion of time. If one uses change, instead of time, you will find that ONLY the biblical creation account fits the major aspects of Earth geology and the visible history of how the galaxies formed.

Theology is also affected. Augustine had a profound affect on theology with his theory of time. (He interpreted the Bible with Plotinus’ philosophy). Genesis 1:1 does not say in the beginning (of time). It says first in importance or sequence he created the heavens and the earth (all of them - the fourth Hebrew word aleph - tav is not translated by modern Bibles).

Victor, Changing Earth Creationist

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You mentioned the Hopi.

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Everything you said about the Neanderthals is incorrect. Where do you get your information about them?

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33

Indeed! In that case, I agree. :slight_smile: (Since Whorf is dead, it’s pretty safe to call his thinking racist. :slight_smile: Sorry, I misunderstood.)

If anyone’s curious, I should qualify my statements above and say there is a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that seems to have some scientific validity. Language can shape how we perceive and remember reality. If your language only has a small handful of color words, you’re less likely to remember the exact color of something a year later, where someone who has an abundant vocabulary for colors may remember it better because they categorized it with a particular color concept familiar to them. So language can shape the way our brains work… but that’s quite a different thing from saying that speakers of a language “have no notion of time.” :slight_smile:

Have a great weekend.

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It measures arbitrarily selected time durations. It doesn’t track “the pulse of changing nature”. It measures time. Same with water clocks; the markings on a water clock are chosen arbitrarily. The whole point of an artificial timepiece is to measure periods of time which are NOT indicated by natural events.

Sundials and water clocks weren’t invented to tell people that a day had passed, they were invented to enable people to divided days and nights into arbitrary units of time for greater convenience, because people did have a concept of time, and timekeeping was important to them. Sundials and water clocks are tools used to divide time into smaller and smaller increments. Egyptian priests used water clocks to mark the times at which various rituals had to be performed. These water clocks were not following any “pulse of nature”. They weren’t measuring any change in nature at all, they were measuring the amount of time that water took to escape from a cylinder with a hole in it.

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The same holds true for numbers; some languages don’t have many words for numbers.

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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

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

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

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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)

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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?