That is whole topic of discussion by itself, trying to understand what is meant by inspiration of the scriptures, and how that looks. Genesis 1 looks and sounds more like a poetry than not, even though it does not conform to traditional Hebrew poetry, as I understand it. Was it thought to be inspired by the writer at the time? Did it become scripture over time, as God’s people read and found it meaningful? Tough questions. Of course, while Moses may have been the author of some of the source materials, it was almost certainly not the author, editor or redactor of the finished product, which may well not have appeared until around the time of exile, from what I gather.
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You can’t project the future into the past, or apocalyptic literature into the ancient literary genres that comprise the first Creation account.
In most ancient fertile crescent mythology/cosmology light was something that existed on its own apart from the gods. The Genesis writer isn’t reporting events – it’s the wrong literary type – but is providing a theological lesson: light doesn’t exist on its own, it was/is something that YHWH-Elohim created. The initial state of the world was a chaotic, dark ‘deep’, the תְּהוֹם (teh-HOME), generally written t’hom, in which chaos like violent storms was dominated by darkness such as “experienced” in death.
So YHWH-Elohim commanding light into existence was a victory against dark chaos. YHWH-Elohim is portrayed as speaking because that’s how ancient people understood that commands were conveyed; with no air for speech it wouldn’t be literal speaking but that was the best description they could manage – and indeed we can’t manage any better nowadays. After all, when we say “Tom said”, we could be referring to speech, email, texting, or other means of communication – and on that basis it wouldn’t be incorrect to think of this as “And God communicated…”
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More than one doctoral dissertation has been written about it.
Both its literary genres have poetic aspects; some scholars have called the account “poetic prose”. In modern categories both sides of the story can be classed as myth, and myth in the ancient world (indeed up to and somewhat past the year 1000) was heavily poetic.
They may have thought it was “expired”, “breathed out”; that fits the ancient concept of authority better. Their concept of authority didn’t have to do with (objective) accuracy of content but with origin, thus if it told truth about God it must have been breathed out by God.
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Not sure why not? If there is no darkness, but light shone from God in the future, and then I am sure that God was the same in Genesis. I am talking the eternal attribute of God as was discussed above.
I am just saying that when the writer of Genesis (let’s assume Moses) wrote “and God said…” and we know that the bible never took this statement lightly. Either Moses heard and saw God saying that or it was just a man made story borrowing from Egyptian mythology in which case we could discard the book of Genesis or the whole bible which contained untruth statement of God. The issue here is larger than whether Genesis 1 is of what kind of genre. It is whether this simple statement “and God said…” is true or not.
Or, you can see it as a greater story putting God’s creation into words ancient man, and we, can relate to and understand. If you say “And God said” is a literal statement about the physical creative process, you imply God has vocal chords, speaks language of sorts, to who we do not know, and those words vibrate something that creates matter. Or something like that. Ultimately, the physical model breaks down enough that you are left with a more metaphorical meaning, so may as well accept the metaphor from the beginning, and learn that metaphor is perhaps more true than flat literalness. Something Jesus took advantage of with his teaching using parables.
Of course that is not what I meant. God is spirit and He does not need vocal cords to speak to us in a language understandable to the writer. However, as in the whole bible, when a writer wrote “And God said…”, this is never meant to taken metaphorically. (This is almost the same as a vision given to the prophets or apostles in the OT and NT.
Isaiah 6:8
Isaiah’s Commission from the Lord
And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.”
Jeremiah 1:4
The Call of Jeremiah
Now the word of the LORD came to me, saying,
Jeremiah 1:7
But the LORD said to me,
“Do not say, ‘I am only a youth’;
for to all to whom I send you, you shall go,
and whatever I command you, you shall speak.
Acts 10:13
And there came a voice to him: “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.”
While I think this approach is reasonable, I just think that this approach cannot be applied to phrase such as “and God said…”. Have you found an instance in the whole bible where the writer used this metaphorically?
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Where does it say that physical light is an “eternal attribute?”
False dichotomy – that’s a modern materialistic point of view.
Old Testament writers “stole” a lot of material from their pagan neighbors for a simple reason: their people along with their pagan neighbors would recognize it and recognize that it was talking about theology, and both would understand that it was transferring the claim of some deity and declaring that said claim was the ‘property’ of YHWH-Elohim. In the case of the first Genesis Creation story, the claim being tackled is that the Egyptian gods were anything more than things YHWH-Elohim had created.
You so easily throw away inspiration! Yahweh could inspire someone to write in whatever form of literature seemed useful; that it doesn’t fit your modern worldview is irrelevant; the Holy Spirit has no obligation to force ancient writers to speak in terms convenient to you when the point is to tech something to the writer’s audience.
Neither literary genre used in the first Creation story requires any of the details to be “true” in a modern sense of the word, and it makes no difference to those literary forms whether any details are “true” in a modern sense. What both require is that the details of the story are taken seriously within the story. That’s a weird aspect of ancient thought to us; in the modern view, either a detail is ‘correct’ or it isn’t, but back then they had no problem with a detail being correct within the story but not outside – and when deity was concerned, it was often assumed that none of the details could be correct outside of the story because stories about deity were cast in a human reference frame in order to make the point since the actualities of divine doings could be indescribable in human vocabulary.
But that’s the start of the issue because depending on the genre different definitions of truth apply. We recognize that in terms of poetry, and for those who understand what the word means also in the case of myth, but since we don’t have these other literary genres we don’t recognize that the same is the case with them.
It is true within the story, and it is true theologically. That it is repeated seven times indicates that it is true of how God works outside the story as well: God commands, things happen (which is a point relevant to account of Jesus, the disciples, and the swamping boat – remember what the disciples asked each other in that instance!).
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This brings to mind the matter of “tongues of angels” that Paul mentions. One scholar observed that we have no idea if angels even speak as we understand it, and that Paul was engaging in a bit of sarcasm. Or it may be that heaven has its own language but not one that needs to have sound to work.
Or a congruent meaning, where speech isn’t actually speech but refers instead to the parallel or congruent activity in a different realm. I suppose that counts as analogical speech, not as in “analogy” but rather “analog”, so that in this case whatever God did is the analog of what we call speech.
It will surprise some people who really don’t read the prophets much just how much of Jesus’ parable material builds on or is even taken from Old Testament parables. His parables wouldn’t have been effective among the Romans, but the Jews were effectively primed for them, having used them for teaching for centuries.
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Over-generalization due to failure to take literary genre into account. Though as I noted, the fact that “and God said” is repeated seven times in the first Creation account indicates that this applies outside the story – though context will tell us whether it is congruent to our type of speech or not. Examples of when it is meant literally would be when Yahweh appears on Earth in the form of a man and physically speaks, as with Abraham and with Joshua.
Interesting question. Offhand I can’t think of any genre used in the Old Testament where a metaphorical use would work, so I’m inclined to say “no”. On the other hand, in a broad sense applying the verb “to speak” to God may be metaphorical in that God as spirit has no vocal chords – but then a word within a phrase can be metaphorical while the phrase itself may not be.
I wish I had a Hebrew lexicon with concordance built into my brain!
I am not sure why you accused me of this. I am trying to argue that Gen 1 was more than just an inspiration as it was more like a narrative account of creation observed by the writer. The word such as “and God said…” was more closely resembled the visions received by OT prophets than just a train of inspiration thought that came to the writer based on what he knew. IT was much more than just what the writer knew. It came by revelations. If your position is fixed and you can’t see other way than your way of thinking, than I beg to differ and agree to disagree as it is not useful to argue back and forth just to win our argument.
While perhaps you can apply this to a broad spectrum of ancient literature, I am saying that this should not be the standard interpretation for the Bible. It should be our timeless truth within the story and also outside the story.
This is exactly the example why we can’t agree on this. I have shown you how important of the truth “and God said …” phrase was in the bible and it is not taken lightly. It was true because it happened. That was considered as blasphemy in the OT if you said otherwise.
That was another way of saying that it was metaphorical because of your prejudice in interpreting Gen 1. I suggest that when we discussed to find the truth, perhaps we can be more open toward other options of interpretation. I learned about tohuwabohu, your diagram of forming and filling when I was in my seminary training years ago. However, I knew that we were dealing with revelation and we couldn’t dogmatic about such thing. We could only find perhaps possible reasonable interpretations and in the end we might be proven wrong.
It isn’t – it’s ‘royal chronicle’ and temple inauguration with a polemic built in. That doesn’t make it false.
They’re different kinds of literature. I grasp the penchant to read Genesis like a set of newspaper reports, but that’s not what any of it is.
Where does the text say it has more than what the writer knew? Where does it indicate that any of the content “came by revelations”?
It’s ancient literature with what is essentially an alien point of view and way of thinking. Trying to force it into a modern worldview throws away most of the actual messages.
It has nothing to do with any “way of thinking”, it has to do with what the text is: 'royal chronicle" and temple inauguration in literary terms with an additional polemic function. Those are not matters of opinion; those are known literary types that the account fits. That it is two literary types at once with a third function as well shows that the writer was brilliant.
There’s no “broad spectrum of ancient literature”, there are two literary genres. Interpreting according to those is the only way to be honest about the text because the message is determined by the genre. And you get timeless truth from it by doing it that way because that’s what the inspired writer used; anything imposed from outside, not according to the genre, is invention, not interpretation.
Because I take the text seriously enough to consider what someone suggested and not just toss off some knee-jerk response?
You made an assumption about the literary types involved – more accurately, you ignored the fact that different literary genres bring different meanings to words. From that assumption you made an unfounded generalization.
That’s not a definition of truth than can be found in the Old Testament scriptures, it’s from a materialistic worldview that requires “truth” to conform to its narrow (and shallow) definition. In the ancient near east of which Israel was a part, truth was not defined by content but by source, thus the first Creation story was understood to be true because of where it came from.
You mean my prejudice against introducing outside worldview(s) into the text? My prejudice for careful consideration of the text? My prejudice for an honest application of linguistic principles?
Unless you believe that God had vocal chords or in some other manner manipulated atoms to vibrate in such fashion as to form words, then “to speak” can only be metaphorical, or as I noted elsewhere, congruent or analog. When Yahweh showed up as a man, e.g. with Abraham and Joshua, then the phrase “and God said” has no metaphor in it, otherwise it does because “said” in English indicates the formation of sound by vocal chords. But the metaphor lies only in the verb, not necessarily in the clause, which is why I wrote:
And I wished for a Hebrew lexicon with concordance built into my brain so I could verify that my conclusion based on literary genres was correct.
If you’re not at least trying to work only on the basis of what the original audience would have understood from the piece of literature, you’re not interpreting, you’re inventing. There are no other “options of interpretation” that are honest, there is only understanding it in its context and language – what is generally called the “historical-grammatical” method. Documentary hypothesis and any other attempts to chop the text into ‘sources’ may be fun to play with, but they do nothing to help grasp the message; and forcing a different worldview on the text is a path to error, as history has demonstrated – that error led to all the great heresies and more than a few false doctrines that don’t rise to the level of heresy.
Where does it say that it is revelation? All we are told is that it was inspired, and that does not mean that the writer was changed to make him write in some manner that would have been strange to the original audience. There is no reason to exclude inspiration just because you don’t like what kind(s) of literature it is. “Inspired” tells us that it is more than merely human literature, but it does not mean it is ever less than human literature. God has always worked with humans as they are, accommodating to the means of communication known to the people being addressed, and continues to do so even after the ultimate accommodation of becoming flesh, because He treats us with the respect due those created as His image, not less.
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