Many have interpreted the creation story in Genesis 1 as history in the modern sense of the word. As you know, this interpretation suggests that everything was created within a week, from nothing (ex nihilo). Although there are other interpretations that also interpret the text through the modern worldview, the main alternative suggests that the creation story should be viewed and interpreted through the worldview of the original receivers of the message, the Ancient Near East (ANE) people.
The creation story includes verses that do not fit to the modern understanding of the past but fit well to the worldview of ANE people. Maybe it is (again) time to remind of these details. In my next message, I will lift up particular details in the creation story. I hope others can point to other details that reflect the ANE worldview.
Genesis 1:2 - what do we have in the beginning?
âAnd the earth was formless and desolate emptiness, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.â
At this point, there is clearly something. The verse speaks of a formless/desolate earth and especially about waters. From the viewpoint of modern worldview, this cannot be the beginning of creation because there is already important stuff. However, from the viewpoint of ANE worldview, this is the beginning of creation.
AFAIK, ANE cultures believed that creation started from/in chaotic waters. Because the ANE worldview was not materialistic (matter was not the basis and condition of existence), the chaotic waters were practically ânothingâ. The original receivers of the message would have immediately recognized the primeval waters in verse 2 as the starting point of creation. In verses 6-7 God forms order from the original chaotic waters, or rather within the waters because the ANE worldview believed that earth was surrounded by waters. Sea (or a vast river) surrounded the dry land, there was a sea above and a sea deep below the dry land. Fits perfectly to the ANE worldview but not very well to the modern worldview.
Genesis 1:6-7 - the expanse.
âGod made the expanse, and separated the waters that were below from the waters that were above the expanse; and it was soâ (verse 7).
ANE people, and other ancient cultures, believed that there was a solid dome above the earth. Some cultures believed the âexpanseâ was made of metal, others that it was made from blue stone. The âexpanseâ separated the reality to two compartments. Above the âexpanseâ was a sea and the heavens, the places were heavenly creatures and God lived. Below the âexpanseâ was the earth, the atmosphere above the earth (although the people did not speak of atmosphere), clouds and the animals and humans.
This is all basic ANE worldview. It needs a lot of mental and verbal twisting to try to get this part to agree with the modern worldview. Genesis 1 describes the world according to the ANE worldview. If we want to be faithful to the text, we should accept what the text tells and interpret it through the ANE worldview.
I think it is worth stressing that this is an Ancient Near East worldview, not a specifically Hebrew one. This view was shared with all of the other groups within that region. The Mediterranean was the middle sea in the middle of the Earth, and the oceans around the area were thought of a expansive river that surrounded the whole world.
There are two creation accounts in Genesis and they contradict each other in some important ways. The NIV translation is manipulated to smooth over the contradictions.
The Cosmic Temple interpretation of Genesis 1 says that just as temples in the Ancient Near East were microcosms of the universe, Genesis turns this around and makes the universe a macrocosm of a temple. The 7 days were days of God not bringing material things into existence, but ascribing function to everything that exists. And this âfunctionâ wasnât a scientific function (as obviously, the stars would be burning even before this inauguration occurred), but their function relative to the service of mankind, His image bearers. On the 7th day, God ârestsâ in His temple, as gods did once the inauguration of their temples was finished.
I think it is a brigde too far to say that Genesis 1 does not speak about material creation. That claim seems concordistic to me. But I think the Cosmic Temple view has a lot of merit.
In light of the cosmic sanctuary-construction setting of Genesis 1â2 and cognate ANE motifs, this study argues that the creation of humanity constitutes the temple construction capstone as the installation of Godâs living cult statue in his sanctuary. âŚ
The holistic view of humanity as the image is the most consistent with the biblical literature. The sanctuary context of creation, the general concrete use of ×Öś ×Öś ׌throughout Scripture, and the beth essentiae reading of × ďŹľÖľ ×Ö° ×Öˇ ׌ְ present humanity as the cult statue in Godâs cosmic sanctuary. The accompanying term ×תְ qualifies ×Öś ×Öś ׌so that humanity might not be confused as having a unity of being with its creator. Ancient Near East cultures, with their rituals of opening the mouth of their statues, reflect in a twisted way humanityâs original situation, inverting Godâs intent for humanity by fashioning idols.
The last phase of temple construction was puting the statue (=image) of the god in it. So in Genesis 1 God places his image (humans) in his temple (all of creation). Just as the god would enter the statue, so God is present (ârestsâ) in creation through us.
Just read the text, folks. It reads like a history. Someone is telling us what happened.
Why does everyone think the earth existed in v.2? Every material object has substance and shape. The earth did not have those in the beginning, it was shapeless and empty. What kind of thing has no shape and no substance? A concept. The earth, you could think about it, but it didnât exist yet. Where was this deep and these waters? In Godâs realm. When God made light he ignited the big bang. When he separated light from darkness, he cooled the tiny hot universe so that light could break free from the plasma, and quarks could join to form subatomic particles which could form atoms, which form matter, the source of darkness. When else did light itself need to be separated from darkness? Think about it. And evolution? The LAND produced vegetation, not God himself. And both plants and animals produced offspring like their KIND, not their parent. Thatâs how evolution works, the offspring is like its kind but a little different from its parent, that way changes can occur and add up over time. Weâre not making scripture talk science. Scripture talks reality, science discovers how it does so and fills in the necessary gaps. Genesis 1 (just chapter 1) is telling us simply what happened. Itâs not rehashing ANE myths or conversing strictly with our ancestors. Itâs talking to us as well. Just listen! And the old complaints about 7 days? Donât you know that time is elastic? Check out Einsteinâs special theory of relativity. Itâs really not that hard.
Marge, you present a beautiful picture that I can relate to, but ultimately must take issue with. Sticking with Genesis 1, I would say it does not read like history, but is in a very stylistic form more like poetry, with repetitive phrases and order, and is much unlike history as we know it.
Also, while it is interesting and fun to see how evolution could be seen in those verses, ultimately the correlation breaks down, and I ultimately feel it is a totally non-concordist account, written for its theologic message.
If you have not read it, I would recommend looking at The Manifold Beauty of Genesis One by Davidson and Turner, It explores different ways of seeing meaning in the verses without involving age of earth issues.
Ditto. I thought the idea was silly when John Walton introduced it, and it hasnât improved with time. That Yahweh brought material things into existence is part of the power of the story: He wasnât restricted to using what was already around, shaping what He wanted, He brought what He wanted into existence by command, thus achieving precisely the things suitable for the functions He desired. Itâs part of what makes Yahwehâs temple altogether superior to any other.
Or as I accidentally typed recently, the âcosmos templeâ.
Which is one reason I think that if sin hadnât happened the Incarnation would have occurred anyway in order to bind human and divine together through a God Who becomes Man and a Man Who was born God.
It appears to read like a history in English translation to those who think they are capable of understanding the scriptures without having to bother with actually studying them.
This is a case of imposing modern Western thought on a piece of ancient literature. The Hebrew terms donât mean what âshapelessâ and âemptyâ do; this is definitely a case of âit loses something in translationâ â but itâs also a case of âit gains something in translationâ especially when the English terms are read as scientific description.
For that matter, âshapelessâ is not what âwithout formâ means. To the ancient Hebrews, âwithout formâ was an accurate description of storms and the ocean; it didnât mean they were shapeless, it meant that instead of order they were ruled by chaos. Interestingly, weather and waves are both regarded as items subject to chaos theory by scientists.
No. The great deep, the תְ×Ö×Öš× (teh-home), usually written as tâhom, in ancient near eastern thought, was all there was initially, a continuum of dark chaos. In the âroyal chronicleâ genre that the first Creation story matches, the Spirit of God hovering/meditating over the waters of the tâhom is a mighty king regarding an enemy or enemy realm.
Donât try to make it fit science.
If youâre going to, thereâs a far better fit that several ancient scholars found: based just on the Hebrew text, they concluded that:
the universe started out as the smallest thing possible, and its content was fluid
it expanded rapidly beyond human comprehension
as it expanded the fluid thinned until it reached a density low enough for light to be able to shine, at which point God commanded light into being
the universe is ancient beyond human counting
the Earth is also almost unimaginably ancient
If youâre wanting to make the text talk science, go with the version those ancient Hebrew scholars made. Youâre doing the common thing of trying to slot the text into modern scientific mode; they ended up with a laymanâs description of the beginning of the universe via the Big Bang, back before Galileo ever got his hands on a telescope and improved it enough to see Jupiterâs four major moons. Assuming our science is correct, thatâs utterly astounding!
Separating light from darkness is part of the theme of king Yahweh âcarving outâ a realm, shoving aside enemies with ease.
Actually thatâs exactly what youâre doing!
But it doesnât talk about scientific reality, unless you go with what those ancient Hebrew scholars concluded before anyone aimed a telescope at the sky.
That seems to be the case, but only if you read it like it was a modern newspaper report instead of ancient literature.
Itâs both rehashing and re-purposing. The writer brilliantly took the Egyptian creation story and changed it to be âroyal chronicleâ where king Yahweh established His realm, to temple inauguration where Yahweh Himself built and filled His own temple, and a polemic that systematically demotes every Egyptian deity to the status of something that YHWH-Elohim made to serve His purposes.
And that makes excellent sense if Moses wrote it: Israel had just spent generations living in Egypt and would have heard the (several versions of) the Egyptian creation story, so taking it and announcing that they had it wrong would have been a superb way to make very clear that YHWH-Elohim established Creation all by Himself, no assistance needed.
BTW, the knock-down of two of Egyptâs most important deities is masterful: he doesnât even name them, just describes their function!
Depends on what you man by that. The Holy Spirit chose a writer who would use the language of His people in literary forms they would recognize to proclaim some important truths, so the message has to be understood in their terms because those terms are what the Holy Spirit chose to work with â an thus the meaning is what was in the mind of the writer and his initial audience.
Of course it is â and to understand it we have to hear it the way an ordinary Hebrew would all those centuries ago. It is more than human literature, but it is never less than that, and as human literature the meaning is what the original audience understood â thatâs the âhistoricalâ part of the historical-grammatical method.
Relativity doesnât apply because none of the conditions it describes pertain. Hopefully our resident physicist will explain that for us.
The sad thing about trying to back-fit the first Creation account with modern science is that it throws away most of the actual meaning.
I agree. It would be nice if it was that easy, but as I learned all the way back in junior high if you want to understand a story you have to do the homework.
Itâs often used as a prime example of âpoetic proseâ.
I second that recommendation! I also recommend Dr. Michael Heiserâs lecture on Genesis and Creation. I think this is the one I have in mind:
Hereâs a point he makes more than once in his lectures:
My view, as readers know, is that we ought to simply let the text say what it says, and let it be what it is. It was Godâs choice to prompt people living millennia ago to produce this thing we call the Bible, and so we dishonor it when we impose our own interpretive context on it. Our modern evangelical contexts are alien to the Bible. Frankly, any context other than the context in which the biblical writers were moved to write is foreign to the Bible.
I have read The Manifold Beauty of Genesis One and The Lost World of Genesis One and The G3n3sis Debate and many, many others. I have found none of these very useful. I have read Genesis 1 in English several hundred times, and I have read it in Hebrew at least a hundred times. This I have found very useful. I have thought about this for decades.
I find that on this subject, people are baked into their own favorite theory, the latest being one version or other of the ANE myth related theories. None of these hold up to careful scrutiny or proper respect for God as the author of Scripture or an understanding of modern cosmology, which is merely the reading of Godâs General Revelation.
St. Roymond, Iâm sorry but your responses, which I have seen often, are nit-picking, hard-headed, and arrogant. You imply that anyone who doesnât agree with you is uninformed and uneducated. Thatâs insulting. God wrote his book for his people, not for his peopleâs scholars. Mt. 11:25.
Just read the text.
The order of events in the first Creation account matches that of the Egyptian creation story â that is not opinion, it is fact.
The structure of that Creation account matches the âroyal chronicleâ genre â that is not opinion, it is fact.
The structure of that Creation account also matches the temple inauguration genre â that is not opinion, it is fact.
Respect for God requires acknowledging that the first Creation account is what it is â ancient literature that brilliantly weaves two literary genres together while using the structure of the creation account it systematically upends.
Modern cosmology is irrelevant; the only cosmology that matters is the one found in Genesis 1: a flat Earth-disk with a solid dome over it, surrounded by the great deep all around. Retro-fitting modern cosmology to the scripture dishonors it. And yet at the same time the account astoundingly gives a laymanâs summary of the Big Bang â and if youâre going to look for science in it, look at the science that ancient scholars found there before there were even telescopes! (One in the seventh or eighth century {I forget which}, one in the tenth, and one in the fourteenth.)
Iâm sorry, but an honest scholarly analysis is not ânit-pickingâ.
Only if the text is arrogant. I am bound by the text, which means by the facts about it that God has graciously allowed scholars to uncover in these days. The only arrogance would be to disregard those facts and instead make things up that have nothing to do with the text.
The Holy Spirit chose writers to communicate with His people when it was written. That means it was written with literary genres those people would recognize, with the worldview they and the writer shared. It also means that while following those literary genres the writer would utilize customary methods of theological discourse, one of which was to take a story ascribed to another god and rewrite it to be about the writerâs god â for the biblical writer it was a method of reclaiming what the devotees of false gods claimed for their gods, to say in essence, âNo, that doesnât belong to your god, it belongs to Yahweh!â
Then throw away your English translations and your modern Hebrew text and only read it in the original form where there was no punctuation, no vowel pointings, no spaces between words, no chapter or verse divisions, and for that matter no grammar books or lexicons for the language, because all those things are the results of scholars.
Does not apply. If we look at Markâs and Lukeâs presentation of the same discourse we see that the âhidden thingsâ Jesus is talking about are the truths of the proclamation He sent the Twelve out to make â that people should repent and believe the Good News. People only believe the Gospel when they are given that understanding by the Father, as Jesus told Peter.
It doesnât work that way â itâs not possible to read the text without defining it within a worldview. The text does not tell the worldview, thatâs something that has to be found by study. Most people assume that their worldview is shared by the writer of a piece of literature, but that dishonors the writer by tossing out his worldview, the one the text was written within. As Dr. Heiser notes, any context â including worldview and literary type â other than the one in which the Holy Spirit moved the writers to set down their inspired words is foreign to the Bible.
I write as I would speak if addressing a class in grad school when answering questions after making a research presentation. I have tried to change that, but itâs too engrained and I fail. Indeed my gut feeling is that writing that way is a matter of respect; I assume that readers are astute enough to follow objective presentations.
Habits are tough to break. One example of what I said just above is how I resort to âYHWH-Elohimâ repeatedly; thatâs how God was customarily mentioned in a lot of material in grad school.
And BTW, itâs not just a superfluous appellation: âElohimâ designates a heavenly being, while âYHWHâ identifies this particular elohim as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Itâs sort of a way to say, âThere are many elohim, but this one is oursâ.
Have you listened to Dr. Heiserâs lectures? Heâs an example of what scholars ought to be doing, educating the church with the knowledge God has made available â a true gift from the Holy Spirit to the church.
Tim Mackie is another great teacher. I havenât listened to his tlk(s) about Genesis yet but I expect it to be up to his usual high standards.
Itâs been a quarter century since I read it, but I recall that Henri Blocher in his book In the BeginningâĄ. He emphasizes that if we want to understand the Creation accounts then our primary task is to learn what those originally meant to their original audience(s). Really this is just common sense; in a discussion of the book I remember someone making the comparison to reading about battles in ancient Greece and interpreting a cavalry charge as being composed of Leopard tanks â an analogy that seems ridiculous but actually makes a good comparison in how different the worldviews and word meanings are between the ancient Hebrew writings and modern Western worldviews.
I am not interested in continuing dialogue with you, but I have to say that I love Michael Heiser. I am so sorry that he has died. He had so many original and well founded insights. He favored reading the first verse of Gen 1 as a dependent clause, which makes the first action in Gen 1 the making of light. I agree with him on this. What a valuable scholar.
I think those scholars were using âfluidâ as an adjective there rather than a noun, though OTOH it seems to shift to noun status as the universe expands. Maybe it was a philosophical fluid?
Iâm going to have to track down the source or at least direct quotes on this one â Iâm puzzled over it!
