If the earth is covered in water…how is it empty???
With or without water…it must have a shape, sphere, lumpy, or something…
using tohu and bohu to mean ‘uninhabited and desolate’ is using a later usage to translate an earlier usage – kind of backwards.
How so? I would contend that is the original usage.
This is exactly what happens in Gen 1:1. The first verse is not an action; it is a summary and the rest of the chapter gives the details.
This idea that you refer to several others pointing out, is the latest and greatest in Genesis 1 interpretation. The popular expositors are beating this into our heads as if they have been sent on a mission by God. I don’t recognize any of God’s methods here though. Just the usual human tendency to be thought the smartest in the room. There is just the slightest whiff of Babylonian myth in the use of the word ‘tahom’ for primordial waters; but that’s like the Frenchness of our hearts shown in the use of the words mutton and pork for sheep and pig. I don’t feel very French, and Genesis 1 is not very Babylonian.
Read it for what it says. Jesus thanked God for giving his truth to children and not to the learned. You don’t need to study Hebrew, or ANE myths to understand Genesis 1. You just have to be open to God’s power…Oh, and so you won’t get your hackles up, I’m not arguing for a young earth and all that crazy ‘science’ - that’s a bad scene.
Jeremiah uses it to describe a place on earth. I think of that as later usage. But when was Genesis 1 actually written? I am taking it to have been earlier than Jeremiah, but bible scholars do like to argue about these things.
Desolate and uninhabited is a reasonable translation for Jeremiah or Isaiah, but I think both of those were written later and provide a very different context from Genesis 1. Maybe the idea of a concept is more Greek, but that doesn’t mean that Hebrew can’t deal with it. Do you have a Hebrew lexicon? The standard one is by Brown, Driver, and Briggs. You can find one in a library. Look up tohu, but with Hebrew font. Get someone to help you if you don’t know Hebrew. The translation will be in English.
I think Gen 2:5 lines up with Gen 1:2 and describes tohu and bohu quite well.
No plants, no man, no water. A desolate wilderness like a desert or something similar to the surface of the moon before Theia smashed into Earth. I posted an illustration earlier in this thread.
What would you reference for an earlier usage, outside Genesis 1 itself?
No longer, I cleared out my theology books some decades ago. Before I purged my library, I also had volumes of Eerdmans Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, which would be my starting point if I were to dive in; however, I have done enough homework on this for my own satisfaction. I respect your perspective, I just do not find concordant approaches to exegesis to be compelling. It is like Genesis hid messages in invisible ink, in anticipation that someday we can squeeze the lemon juice of modern cosmology to reveal its secrets.
Purported points of contact such as “water is in a fluid state, plasma in the early universe behaved like a fluid, therefore the Big Bang confirms the waters of Genesis 1”, strike me as really strained. In terms of general progression, I do not think Genesis 1 is incompatible with the Big Bang (24 hour literalists would of course disagree), but that is due to the elegant simplicity of the account and not any deliberate foreshadowing. Genesis 1 reveals a creator not identified with idolatry, and whose creative activity is void of usual animism, turf battles, assaults, adulteries, and deicides between gods that attend most creation stories. The Genesis account therefore shares some of the very general sense of logical progression to man that might be expected in earth history.
I recall a pastor from East Saint Louis who translated it in city terms for his inner-city folks: “vacant and useless” – though the word order should be reversed, that rendition certainly gets the idea across!
That is textually totally bogus – it’s pure fantasy.
Assuming you want to commit the error of reading the two different stories as history, this is also totally bogus textually. Genesis 1:27 is the culmination of a sequence that ends with YHWH-Elohim placing His image as the crown of Creation, His representation in the material world. It has nothing to do with any “man who has already been made”, it is the creation of a creature that was not present before.
Importing New Testament theology to misinterpret the Hebrew text is still misinterpretation.
And you fail to understand what it means that man was created as God’s image: it is not an attribute we can lose, it is a status and responsibility that we cannot shed. We can image Him well, or we can image Him badly, but we cannot shed the status and responsibility.
You’re totally missing Paul’s point: the “first man Adam” is the Adam of Genesis 2, the “last Adam” is Christ. He isn’t talking about spiritual stages in our lives!
No, you made it worse. A fifth-grader can get the plain sense of the two stories, but you totally mangled them.
Microbes have nothing to do with it.
Would everyone please stop trying to make Genesis something it isn’t? It’s insulting to the Holy Spirit and to the writer He chose to yank His ancient literature out of its context and force it into yours! It’s worse than trying to take the “Star Spangled Banner” and force it to be a song about drugs (believe me, there were ‘scholars’ who did that back in the 19060s!) – it throws away what the text actually is and replaces it with something you like better.
There is no planet in Genesis – period. There is a flat earth-disk with waters above, waters below, and some waters under the solid sky-dome. The “waters” in verse 1:2 are the תְה֑וֹם, (t’home), usually Anglicized as t’hom, which is “the great deep”, a primeval body of water that has no end.
No, it was dark because that’s what there is in the great deep – darkness.
No, 1:3 is when light first existed. It has nothing to do with the earth, it has to do with God giving a command to something that didn’t exist and thus bringing it into existence (as Paul states in Romans, “God who . . . calls into existence things that don’t yet exist”). This is a matter of YHWH-Elohim defeating the darkness; it’s also about denying the pagan idea that light had always existed.
That’s not in the text, either. I know it’s a temptation to define things to fit your worldview, but the text is the text. All we know is that it was inspired, which is not the same thing.
99% of what is written about John’s Apocalypse these days is wrong. We know this because the big reason that this book – which many Christians back then thought should be used to light fires – got into the canon is because Christians back then (primarily in the west end of the empire) read it and saw it was talking about what was happening around them right then.
BTW, saying “there are no final authority on this matter” is not an excuse to make things up.
Who says they’re “events”? You’re assuming that what it looks like to you in English is what it actually is, but it is ancient literature written in an ancient literary form (two, actually; the writer was brilliant) under an ancient worldview.
“Made them up” does not apply; modern categories do not define ancient literature. The first Creation account was written in a form that was used back then to convey truth; God didn’t take over the mind of the writer and force him to use a form that would be comfortable to modern readers – that sort of behavior is what demons do, not Yahweh.
No, it isn’t, it’s an effort to get at the intended meaning. “Without form and void” was based on poor knowledge of the Hebrew, which though it was the best they had at the time does not match what God has brought forth for us today.
Or closer to it than “without form and void”.
This touches on why I never allowed the KJV in my Bible studies: not only is it effectively in a different language, it was based on poor understanding of ancient Hebrew. For what they had available back then it was a pretty good effort (though with some bits rendered as they were for political reasons, not scholarly), but for today it is seriously inadequate. Unfortunately, translation committees are often heavily influenced by traditional translations of popular verses, so bad work persists.
Genesis 1:2
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
We do have to interpret what did it mean 'the earth without form and void" but water was there… I am at the position to understand from the point of view of the writer where if all you see is the expanse of water and nothing else.
oh, and “the earth” is not a planet??
Just think about what you are saying. If there is nothing else but God, then there is no darkness at all. We assume the vacuum or the time where nothing existed was dark, but that was not the case. If only God was there, then actually there are no darkness at all. There is no need for God to command that first light to exist, since the light had shone from God from eternity to eternity.
The only logical explanation might be that this was the time when God was present in His created cosmos where it was dark and was observed.
This is not a temptation to define things, but a logical conclusion about a writing concerning a time when human (who could talk, think and share stories) had not existed. If it is inspired, but there must be some means for that inspiration to come to the writer to the Genesis. That inspiration as we can see in the Genesis 1 did not come with just clever or brilliant thinking, but with precise description of what had happened long before human. Now, you can tell me how that inspiration came about?
Whether you agree with the book of Revelation is your choice, but saying that 99% of what might have happened and have not yet happened is wrong is beyond me. It is like the Jews in Jesus day to the present time who think they know exactly what kind of Messiah that will come.
It is and it isn’t. Hebrew does things with verbs that English can’t manage, and the prefix on the first word is most likely (almost certainly) a temporal one that functions in a way that can’t be replicated in English. Translators have attempted to catch the sense of it by rendering it, “When God began creating…”, but that loses the fact that the verb which follows is third person singular and actually should be rendered as “[he] created”. But “In the beginning God created…” loses the idea of “when”. I once tried, “In the beginning of when God began creating…”, but that is kind of clumsy in English and still fails to include “[he] created”.
So it’s a statement of action, but within a temporal statement of “when”, and does function as a bit of a summary.
This is one reason I love ancient Hebrew: it forces you to really twist your mind in ways modern western languages don’t.
Because God has allowed us abundant knowledge of those times and culture that we didn’t have before.
Often don’t really bother to struggle with the difficulties.
Then you haven’t actually looked. God didn’t choose a writer to write to you and me, He chose him to write to the people back then. That meant using their ways of communicating, which means language, literary types, worldview, culture – in short, exterior context. Without that context there is no way to understand the message – we are reading other people’s mail, so we have to learn to read it the way they did.
True – but there’s heavy Egyptian, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Sumerian, and others from back around the time of Moses, and the Hebrew word is a shared one that means what some have called “the great deep”, the primordial waters that filled everything and were themselves filled with darkness.
The Babylonian connection has just been known longer so it still gets the most press, the others are more recent – plus people have some idea what “Babylon” was but won’t recognize Akkadian, Sumerian, or Ugaritic, and the Egyptian connection isn’t that well publicized (despite the fact that it fits the best: the Hebrews had come out of Egypt and using Egyptian ideas to get across truth about God served to say, “Egypt was wrong; here’s the real deal”).
The only way to do that is to know what it says, which you can’t do if you ignore the external context. Trying to fit it to modern science is far, far from reading it for what it says!
There’s no doubt it was written before Jeremiah!
When I was in grad school reading ancient near eastern literature in the originals, the standard position was that Genesis 1 - 3 was written during or after the Exile, which I found strange because of how the first Creation account dismantles the Egyptian pantheon. That was considered coincidence because “obviously” it had Babylonian characteristics. One of my professors was bold enough to date it to the time of the United Kingdom, arguing that the concepts couldn’t belong to just Babylon but had to be common the the ancient near east. It turned out he was right as more literature was unearthed.
But since it was recognized that the first Creation account follows the Egyptian creation story, and the old argument that “the Hebrews didn’t have writing by then” has been found to be bogus, I can’t see how not to put the date right back to Moses. Yes, it got edited some later, but I find myself in agreement with Michael Heiser that the majority is Moses’ own work.
The most interesting part of BDB’s entry is “primary meaning difficult to seize”, which is a scholarly way of saying “it doesn’t occur often enough to really pin down the core sense”. That may no longer be true; BDB was published in 1906 and the oft-promised update is as far as I know still in the works, and the amount of new data in over a century is substantial. Anyway, it reminded me that the IIRC the verse is assigned to P by documentary hypothesis folks, so all those folks are going to assign it a late date.
It’s worth noting that there is little doubt that in Job 6 ‘tohu’ is “desolation” or “empty waste”, and Job may actually go back before Genesis via oral tradition.
Excellent point. Reading science into it is not letting it be what it is. God did not re-wire Moses’ brain to get him to write modern cosmology into Genesis – or for that matter medieval cosmology; scholars back then found it fit perfectly with the science of four elements.
Personally I think this is why God is allowing – or guiding – scholars to find so much ancient near eastern material: our modern worldview has drifted so far from that of the scriptures that we need the help.
I would agree if it weren’t for the fact that Hebrew scholars as early as Charlemagne drew from Genesis 1 what is a darned good layman’s explanation of the Big Bang. Reasoning it backwards from science and trying to make things fit is always suspect (and pointless), but when that science is described well over a millennium before it was first proposed, it’s more than a little impressive.
Yep – it’s ancient near eastern theology/cosmology stripped down to the basics and assigned to YHWH-Elohim.
But with a huge major twist: in Genesis, man is not whipped up to take care of the gods’ needs but is the ‘centerpiece’ of an ancient near eastern temple, YHWH-Elohim’s own image to represent Him (which in my understanding is what set off the adversary so he went after those first “gardeners”).
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
Not in Genesis – there it is as I described above. God did not plant modern cosmology in the writer’s brain to make modern humans happy, He inspired the writer to communicate to the audience alive at the time.
Where is that in the text? The dark waters of the t’hom are already there when Genesis starts the account of God’s efforts. Treating 1:1 as a statement of God’s action only works if you ignore the vowel pointing that every major version agrees on: בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית cannot be translated “In the beginning” because the first vowel (actually the lack of any) is wrong – “in the beginning” would be “ba-reshit”, not “breshit” which the text actually has.
We actually have “In the beginning” because that came down to us through Greek and Latin, and the early translators of Genesis into English didn’t know Hebrew well enough to disagree. That phrase has continued to be used because translators for centuries have avoided disturbing well-known renditions from well-known passages even when they know it’s wrong (this I know from three of my professors who were each on a different translation committee).
So you call the inspired writer a liar because you prefer your personal theology and worldview over the text.
People, this is not some children’s story book that you can twist to make it say what you want! It is inspired text, and we do not stand above inspired text, we must stand below it and ask what it actually says. When the writer chosen by the Holy Spirit set down these words:
> וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֖ים יְהִ֣י א֑וֹר
he meant what he wrote! To get the force of it in English it should be rendered:
And God said, “Light – be!”
This is what Paul meant when he referred to God speaking to things that were not, i.e. that didn’t exist, calling them into existence.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
No – you think you can see it because you are assuming that you are capable of understanding what kind of literature you’re reading without ever bothering to actually study the matter.
“Precise description” rests on the same presumption as above.
The logical explanation is that God chose the writer and prepared him from childhood to understand the theology God wanted to communicate, then at the right time the Holy Spirit moved him to write, and he wrote using his theological knowledge and his understanding of the universe to communicate using terms from the culture and worldview he lived in, in literary forms his audience would understand.
I do agree with it – which is why I confidently say that 99% of what is written about it these days is wrong. The majority of early Christians agreed it was inspired because they looked around them and saw what it talked about happening right then. The text itself tells us that: the book is about “the things that must soon take place” – not “things that won’t happen for millennia”, but “things that must soon take place”. Again:
And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.”
After what? After the letters he had just set down for the seven churches nearby. Those letters weren’t written for centuries later, they were written “to the seven churches that are in Asia”. Not churches that “will be” in Asia, but churches “that are in Asia” – right then when John was writing. We can be certain of this because a voice “like a trumpet” said:
“Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus and to Smyrna and to Pergamum and to Thyatira and to Sardis and to Philadelphia and to Laodicea.”
Not “save it for centuries and then send it”, but “send it” – as soon as he wrote it.
The visions that follow are about things “soon to come”, things that would happen to the people to whom John was writing – that’s what the text says.
Actually that’s more than a bit of a myth – Jewish scholars had recognized for a long time that Isaiah 53 was about the Messiah; it was just that that wasn’t the kind of Messiah they wanted. They also knew the Messiah had to be prophet, like Moses, and priest, like Melchizedek, and king, like David, but they thought what they really needed was just the king – at least at first; they figured he could get around being prophet and priest after he booted the Romans out.
The trouble was that while they also recognized that the “Son of Man” in Daniel 9 had to be the Messiah, they just didn’t follow through to the conclusion that they should have reached – and some in fact did, recognizing that this Son of Man was the “second YHWH” in the “Two Powers” doctrine of second-Temple Judaism, but they never expected the “second YHWH” to be born as a man, they figured He would just show up in the form of a man like He did all over the Old Testament writings.
They had all the data, and many of them had correctly understood the data; what they could not handle was that someone who had started out as a baby and grown up in (despised) Galilee could be the one it talked about! That God could become man had never occurred to them, so all they saw was a man claiming to be God.
We don’t find this in the histories because the Jewish rabbis in the early second century realized that as long as those known interpretations of their own sacred writings were tolerated then more and more Jews would become Christians – so they declared some heresies and just pretended others never existed.
The real irony? Some of the best books showing that Jews back then really did believe those things are being written by Jewish scholars.
Sorry to insult the Holy Spirit… I’ll give it a rest as we are a bit off topic anyway.
How about we just say it both ways to get the full meaning?..
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and when He began creating, the earth came to be uninhabited and desolate. The surface of its depths became dark, obscured of any light. And the Spirit of God…
I will grant this - the opening act of the Big Bang could not be better summarized than by “Let there be light”. And light does indeed come well before the sun and stars.
But it is possible to get carried away with details and coincidence. The most significant point of agreement between Genesis and science is that there is no steady state - the observable universe had an instant of creation.
I am not referring to the modern understanding of planet to the ancient time. “The earth” in ancient time might refer to everything below the sky. Though it did not have the full understanding of planet, their understanding of land & sea and all created and living being under the heaven (sky) as earth which is planet earth.
please look at the book of Revelation :
Rev 21: 22-25
And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there.
Please tell me how the writer understood the text when he wrote "and God said, “Light - be”. Did he imagine God must have said something for light to have occurred? or was he inspired by the Holy Spirit that God must have said something and he tried to make it personal? or Did he hear it in person that God really did say it?
Ah yes, I am not a scholar as you are in learning the matter in Hebrews, but I do read from other experts in ancient literature and read their differing opinions and read the text itself albeit in English though with Hebrew interlinear. Am I an expert? Definitely not. But, if you are an expert in ancient literature, does it mean that your own opinion is the right one though there are many differing opinions from other experts in ancient literature.
How did the writer (Moses) moved by the Holy Spirit hear what God said when the text said “and God said:…”?
You are right. In Genesis 1 the world already exists but is dark, watery, and chaotic. God organizes it, separating the waters above from the waters below, etc.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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