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 don’t mean what “shapeless” and “empty” do; this is definitely a case of “it loses something in translation” – but it’s also a case of “it gains something in translation” especially when the English terms are read as scientific description.
For that matter, “shapeless” is not what “without form” means. To the ancient Hebrews, “without form” was an accurate description of storms and the ocean; it didn’t 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 תְה֑וֹם (teh-home), usually written as t’hom, in ancient near eastern thought, was all there was initially, a continuum of dark chaos. In the ‘royal chronicle’ genre that the first Creation story matches, the Spirit of God hovering/meditating over the waters of the t’hom is a mighty king regarding an enemy or enemy realm.
Don’t try to make it fit science.
If you’re going to, there’s 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 you’re wanting to make the text talk science, go with the version those ancient Hebrew scholars made. You’re doing the common thing of trying to slot the text into modern scientific mode; they ended up with a layman’s 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 Jupiter’s four major moons. Assuming our science is correct, that’s utterly astounding!
Separating light from darkness is part of the theme of king Yahweh ‘carving out’ a realm, shoving aside enemies with ease.
Actually that’s exactly what you’re doing!
But it doesn’t 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.
It’s both rehashing and re-purposing. The writer brilliantly took the Egyptian creation story and changed it to be ‘royal chronicle’ 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 Egypt’s most important deities is masterful: he doesn’t 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 – an thus the meaning is what was in the mind of the writer and his initial audience.
Of course it is – 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 – that’s the “historical” part of the historical-grammatical method.
Relativity doesn’t 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.