While I agree that we have to be very careful to fit the story of Genesis to our present understanding of the cosmos, it does not mean that we can not try to see if the story fit even with our modern understanding of science. Will not that even more amazing?
I believe Gen 1:2 points to a time before the earth was a water world about 4.5 billion years ago. The deep is the magma core and mantle and as the earth cooled the surface solidified and shrouded the light from within and the surface then became dark (besides light from sun) and void, similar to how the moon looks now.
Then God hovered over the deep and faced down the darkness. This was when Theia impacts Earth and forms the moon.
Day 1 then begins about 4.4 billion years ago, with God saying let light be!
It is then after this that late heavy bombardment turns earth into a water world about 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago. Day 2 begins when God starts forming the earths crust (firmament). Here is an interesting article on the late heavy bombardment:
He didn’t – that’s a misperception based on assuming that the kind of literature you think you are reading in English is what it really is rather than stopping to ask what kind of literature it really is – what the author meant it to be.
In actuality the author was brilliant because he told three stories at once – a ‘royal chronicle’, a temple inauguration, and a polemic that could be summed up as telling the Egyptians “all your gods are belong to YHWH!”
Why Egyptian? Because that first Creation account pretty much lifted the Egyptian creation story but changed it: it starts with the same “great deep” of water and darkness and systematically demotes every major Egyptian deity to the status of created things – my favorite part being the sun and the moon; the writer doesn’t even name them, just describes their functions. It was a serious body-slam to Egyptian mythology/theology.
Why would he do that? It fits the time of Moses perfectly; the Hebrews had been living among the Egyptians and would have known the Egyptian variations of the creation story, and the writer was in essence communicating that the Egyptian gods weren’t – weren’t in charge of anything, that is, weren’t even close to being on the same level as YHWH-Elohim because He made them – a way of saying, in case you misunderstood, here’s the deal, here’s how it really is.
At the same time it’s a temple inauguration. I’ll just touch on two details from that: First, the last thing installed in an ancient near eastern temple was the image of the deity, which was there to remind everyone of what that deity was like, to represent the deity to everyone – so when YHWH-Elohim made us in His image, that tells us who we are and what we are to be doing, namely we are His representatives to show everyone what He is like, where “everyone” includes all living things . . . we are meant to treat them the way God would. Second, the last thing to make a temple actually a temple was that the deity whose temple it was would come “take up his/her rest” in the temple, bestowing thereby divine approval and blessing and watching it all work properly, i.e. be “good”.
Last is the ‘royal chronicle’ (I put the semi-quotes because that’s the name I learned for it but scholarship seems to have renamed it to something else). A royal chronicle tells of a mighty accomplishment of a great king, generally conquest of enemies and/or establishing his kingdom, and from that perspective Genesis 1 reads like a battle report.
The ancient Hebrews would have recognized all of these and understood that Yahweh is King of all, that this world was made as His temple, that we are His representatives, and last that the gods of Egypt were created.
The “fit” with science that I find amazing comes from back before Charlemagne when astronomy was the foremost science and it consisted of watching the sky with the human eyeball and some charts, as well as showing up again a bit before Galileo made his first telescope. Some solid Hebrew scholars who grew up with the language concluded from the opening of Genesis that the universe started out “smaller than a grain of mustard” (idiom for “the smallest thing possible”), that it was filled with fluid (i.e. “waters”), that it expanded rapidly beyond comprehension and that as it did the fluid got thinner and thinner until light could shine, at which point God ordered light into existence; that the universe is unimaginably old and the Earth itself is old beyond counting.
It is mind-boggling that this explanation came from the text and did so more than a millennium before a Jesuit priest published his findings and his conclusion got called “the Big Bang”.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
BTW don’t ask me to explain it; the only part I grasp from the Hebrew is why they considered the Earth truly ancient and the universe older still: since God was the only one present to measure anything, they concluded that the "days’ had to be divine days and thus incredibly long.
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Once again, this is sheer science fiction with no basis in the text. It is not interpretation because it relies on changing the meanings of words. Given the kinds of literature the opening Creation account is, this is actually a denial of what the text says.
I believe my interpretation works within the meaning of the words and lines up with science. There is no need to rehash our previous discussion here, but for the benefit of @Miekhie and anyone else that missed it here is the link:
Are you saying that the God of the OT was not able to give vision to Moses (or the writer of the Genesis) and Moses needed to copy the eqyptian creation story (which was quite different actually with all the allegory & mystical stuff)? Of all the writers of the Bible, Moses was the one who did spent a lot of time at mount Sinai and I am sure that he was privy to many secrets of the cosmos. Instead of just writing that off hand, we could just take Genesis 1:1-11 literally as the sequences of creation witnessed by the writer (or revealed to the writer) who was probably Moses. I know some physicists who interpreted Gen 1:1-11 just like that, and I don’t see anything wrong with that especially if we can explain how that sequences fit with our modern understanding of science.
I believe that when God gives someone a vision it is not like a movie playing in their mind showing them things the y are not even going to understand, but rather draws up their experiences and impresses upon them. Even our dreams will draw upon experiences. So Moses is going to think of things based on his own world view, what he sees in nature, what he has learned including Egyptian mythology when God impresses upon or inspires him to write Genesis. As an example, with the creation of Adam, God has him think of the smallest thing possible and Moses thinks of dust and then writes that down. God really meant microorganisms but dust works. He knew that we would understand it someday.
“Not able”? You mean not able to remake Moses’ mind so he would write in a way that fits modern Western ideas of how a creation account should read? No – YHWH-Elohim was not able to do that, because it would have been contrary to His character – taking over people’s minds is what demons do, not Yahweh.
When God gives a vision, the writers tell us it was a vision. I will not add to the text by claiming it is something that it does not claim.
“Needed”? No, but it was effective; it was extremely clear communication to people who had left Egypt behind and were still uncertain (as we know they were from the rest of the Pentateuch)
That’s what he changed. He left in the gods but showed that YHWH-Elohim had created them, even demoting them to just things that were supposed to be His servants – it painted Egypt’s pantheon not just as lesser that YHWH-Elohim but as very disobedient servants, something that would have resonated with the people who had left servitude behind and understood the omportance of obedience.
That’s a modern fancy; there’s nothing in the text to suggest it.
So God imposed on Moses’ mind a modern Western literary form?
No one back then would have understood the first Creation story literally, and if you told them that was the way to read it they would have laughed because they would have recognized the three messages from the literary types.
To be blunt, physicists have no expertise in ancient literature, so their opinions are worth little more than that of a drunk on the street. That they can make Genesis fit their science means nothing, any more than the ability of early medieval rabbis and Christian theologians to make it fit their science of four earthly elements of air, earth, fire, and water.
What’s wrong with that is that before trying to fit science to this piece of ancient literature, we first have to understand that literature as the original audience would have, because that is its meaning.
“Our modern understanding” is the key. Those scholars in the Middle Ages could explain how it fit with their understanding of science, with explanations that to a modern Western mind read as ludicrous and even superstitious. It is an error to read any ancient literature as though it was written to fit our worldviews; people have tried to do that down through the centuries and every such attempt has looked to later generations as wasted effort at best, and to contemporaries all too often as heresy (all the Christological heresies of the first half-dozen centuries came from trying to fit the scriptures to fit people’s worldviews, primarily Greek philosophies).
Since this method – trying to make the scriptures fit our worldview(s) – has produced serious heresies in the past it should be avoided. It makes two errors: that the current understanding of the world is correct, and that the scriptures were written to the current generation.
Absolutely.
Of course – that’s how our minds work, and it’s how all dreams and visions work as well: God’s goal in any kind of revelation is to communicate, and that is best done by using what the chosen revelator will understand easily.
Critically here, Moses would have use the accepted forms of communicating truth, including divine truth. Back then it was common to take a story told about another god and re-cast it for one’s own deity as a way of saying, “No, that’s our god!” The first Genesis Creation account not only does that but does it in a way that combines two other literary types, giving not just a theological body-slam to the Egyptian pantheon but two views of YHWH-Elohim that declare His supremacy over all things, that He has conquered chaos and built His own kingdom and that He trampled chaos and built His own temple with us as the key to it as His representatives.
Interesting. Unfortunately “dust” is exactly what was meant: “made of dust” was a way of saying “mortal”; it also may have brought to mind a potter wetting clay to shape it. In terms of creation stories, it also served to say that this servant of the deity is made of the very same stuff that the creation itself was made of. We tend to miss the imagery of Genesis 1 when we literalize it (and often even when we don’t!), but the “Bring forth” command tells us that God commanded the “dust”, that is the ground, to form into living things; thus all living things are made from dust and we are their “brothers/sisters” because we are made from the same stuff. That’s also the message of calling the first man “Adam”, which one Old Testament scholar I knew liked to render as “Dirt-dude” because it comes from the same root as “ground/dirt” in Hebrew.
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We know tye various methods of divine revelation from biblical examples. I think its highly problematic to believe a teacher taught us and also argue “oh but that teacher didnt use visual imagery in the process of teaching of certain principles therefore the understanding using common reading of language is wrong!”
The problem is, learning builds upon prior learning and knowledge gained from it. What you are doing here is straw plucking…so any bible writer after Moses who agrees with Moses learning/revelation from God, you throw out.
You are trying to argue against established practises…you know the realworld error of that argument right?
The apostle Peter tells us:
Satan and his angels who sinned were cast down to hell,
Noah was saved from a flood that wiped out all life on earth
Lot was saved from the destruction of sodom and gomorah
Clearly your statement makes no difference to the apostle Peter who became the leader of the christian church…he believed the flood was both literal, and global.
So your claim about the biases in concordances is falsified by the OTHER bible writers who agree with Moses (ie the apostle Peter!)
Btw…a concordance is used to enable us to cross reference scripture…it is not purely as a dictionary as it appears you are claiming. If you are going to nitpick they are biased and should not be used for cross referencing scripture, then the world has a big problem with the establised academic practice!
When the “earth was without form and void” is a very interesting and important question.
It is true that the earth was once covered by water (according to those who study such things) and continents arose from the earth’s crust until they were above the water. Not all planets have continents. But we had rock of various densities, so some of it rose to the top.
But I don’t think this is what’s happening in verse 2. I think this is what happens in verse 9, the third day. I am quite certain that in verse 2, the fact that the earth was formless and empty, that it had no shape and no substance, means that it did not exist except as a concept. This is the most reasonable translation of tohu and bohu.
The darkness that was over the surface of the deep and the waters over which God’s spirit hovered, were in God’s realm before he began creation of our universe.
When God said “let there be light” he opened the big bang. It is only at this point that light and darkness were together and needed to be separated. His separating of light from darkness indicates the point in the expansion of the universe when particles began to form and light was free to escape the plasma. This is also the moment at which time (as we know it) began. That is indicated by God calling the light day and the darkness night. We still tell time by the periods of light and darkness we call day and night.
The earth was created on the second day when God made a “firmament” (which the ancients imagined as a large inverted bowl), or the “reach” that separated the heavenly bodies from each other, the waters above (other bodies) from the waters below (waters of earth).This is indicated by the fact that here the text speaks of sky, and of above and below, terms that have no meaning away from a planet.
The fact that this kind of interpretation works all the way through Genesis 1 astounds me. There is no way Genesis 1 is a polemic against other religions - it just doesn’t have the sound or feel of polemical discourse. That God is establishing some sort of temple sounds like a modern myth made up in order to avoid the obvious fit of Genesis 1 with the big bang theory. This fit of Genesis 1 with the big bang is world-breaking. Why can’t anyone see it?
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Correct. I got a little ahead of myself saying the dust meant microbes. The dust was elementary particles that were not living until God forms them into the first living things (microbes) when He breaths the breath of life in them. So, the first generation of Adam (mankind) was microbes. God then places this first man Adam into the garden to start preparing or “tilling” the soil for planting. Microbes release enzymes that make the soil fertile.
This is essentially the position that Reasons to Believe takes. Genesis 1:1 refers to the Big Bang and Genesis 1:2 takes place sometime after Earth’s formation when the planet had cooled enough for oceans to form. Although this is not an unreasonable assumption, and I think it is a valid position if you feel the need to fit modern scientific ideas about cosmic history into Genesis 1, I don’t think it is necessary that there is concordance between the Genesis 1 creation account and what modern science reveals about the history of the universe. Like several others have pointed out in this thread, the Genesis 1 narrative probably wasn’t talking about material creation and the exact language it uses probably reflects ancient Mesopotamian cosmological ideas, like the primordial cosmic waters, than modern ideas about the early Earth. Another issue that might cast doubt on separating Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 in that way is that it doesn’t into account the tendency in Hebrew literature to summarize a narrative and then go onto elaborate on it with more details. The same thing happens with origin of nations and the Tower of Babel story a couple of chapters later in Genesis 10-11.
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Whilst i havent considered the theological implications yet, at face value, this is a pretty good interpretation Marg. Mostly i think what you have written here is quite logical.
I think i will correct the above…
19 formatis igitur Dominus Deus de humo cunctis animantibus terrae et universis volatilibus caeli adduxit ea ad Adam ut videret quid vocaret ea omne enim quod vocavit Adam animae viventis ipsum est nomen eius
And the Lord God having formed out of the ground all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called any living creature the same is its name.
Latin Vulgate
There is a big difference in the text you have cited between speaking things into existence and forming them with his own hands. We have two scenarios where Genesis chapter 2 and day 5 in Genesis chapter 1. Some here see this as evidence for two difference creation events…i see the second as further explaining the first.
I am not sure what you are correcting with verse 19? I was speaking on verses 5-7. Note that God is just preparing the ground for planting. There is no vegetation growing, no other beasts have been made.
5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. 6 But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. 7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
Water comes up from the ground and waters the whole face of it… a water world. This is day 1 of creation before there was a firmament or any dry ground to rain upon.
I agree, the second is a more detailed account of the first. The first establishes the order and the second is a more loose order in introducing things, being in story mode.
That’s not what “tohu wabohu” means, so it is not “reasonable” at all. “Tohu” is the opposite of “tohar” in usage, and the latter is generally rendered as “glory”, to “tohu” is the opposite of glory – uselessness, chaos, worthlessness, desolation. “Bohu” can be analyzed similarly – though the data is scarcer – and comes up as “empty” or “unorganized”. Neither one suggests nonexistence.
That’s not justified from the text. The darkness and the endless waters are standard ancient near eastern creation fare and are enemies of deity
This would be sheer speculation were it not for the fact that 'way back before Charlemagne at least one Hebrew scholar examined the text of Genesis and concluded that the universe started out smaller than a grain of mustard (i.e. the smallest possible thing), grew immensely rapidly and filled with fluid; that the fluid thinned as the universe expanded until the fluid was thin enough for light to shine, at which point YHWH-Elohim commanded light into existence.
But separating the light from the darkness is not “the point in the expansion of the universe when particles began to form and light was free to escape the plasma”. Separating light and darkness is about defeating darkness by assigning it to its own realm. The message has nothing to do with science, it has to do with theology: in the ancient near east, the culture that Israel shared, darkness was the enemy of the gods, something they had to battle in order to keep existence continuing, so the theology here is "no battle needed; YHWH-Elohim separated the darkness off into its own place, and then he gave it a name – and back then, knowing something’s name gave power over that thing, so by naming the darkness YHWH-Elohim took power over the darkness; so no more being scared of the dark; God owns it, too.
This is a second reason to not try to make the scriptures speak science: we tend to get excited by our own notions and forget that science is not a part of the message of the scriptures. C S Lewis actually talks about this in his novel The Screwtape Letters when a demon gives the advice that if you can’t get Christians to abandon Christ, through other things in their view to distract them – and trying to fit science to the scriptures is a distraction.
That’s because you’re in the wrong culture to recognize what it is.
Moses didn’t write Genesis to you, he wrote it to Israel over a thousand years ago. He didn’t write it in a literary form you recognize without training, he wrote it in a literary form the Hebrews would recognize without training. And they would have very quickly recognized that this account used the Egyptian creation story and was a total slam on all the gods in that story.
Nope – it’s a recognized form of ancient literature that the first Creation account fits. The original audience would have recognized that the moment it gets to day four (literally “a fourth day”) when God is described as filling the space that was created on day one, as per this chart –
– because that was how the standard temple inauguration process went: make the spaces, fill the spaces, etc.
No modern scholar made it up; it’s a form found all across the ancient near east. The awesome thing is that God has made it possible for us to know these things now and thus we can see the richness and brilliance of the literary effort the writer put forth.
It appears “world-breaking” – but a thousand years ago scholars found that the fit of Genesis 1 with the idea of the four elements – air, earth, fire, water – was “world-breaking”.
But though I do give the Big Bang fit a large hunk of credence for reasons I gave above, namely that ancient scholars before they had more than their naked eyeballs to view the universe gave a near-perfect layman’s description of the Big Bang based on the Hebrew text! Back-fitting can seem to make one’s current science fit the scriptures, but when people who didn’t even have telescopes studied the text and described a future scientific theory . . . that’s mind-boggling.
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No. Microbes were not made as God’s image, humans were. This is trying to force the scriptures to speak science when that is not at all part of their purpose. It’s also the kind of thing that makes non-Christians roll their eyes and make jokes, which is not helpful for the Gospel.
This verse can be with lexical and contextual justification translated “desolate and unihabited”, the state existing prior to Eden. Existence as an disembodied abstraction is more of a Greek approach than ancient near east.
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