Genesis 1:14 - what does it indicate?

Faith & Science Conversation
65

It’s a bit more than that. The original audience would have recognized that the writer had followed the Egyptian order of events, but the Egyptian account happened in a brief time, so the moment they heard “the first day” their ears would have perked up even more than God creating light and darkness would have (in the Egyptian account light just exists, it wasn’t made). Once the reader got them to a seventh day and it became clear that this was about YHWH-Elohim making Himself a temple and taking His place in it, that number “7” would drive home the meaning: seven was a sacred number across the ancient near east, and putting God’s implied enthronement on a day numbered seven was a declaration that Earth and everything in it was all holy – as it is written elsewhere, YHWH was in His holy Temple and all the Earth should be silent before Him.

Of course the contrast between the Egyptian version and the composition by the Genesis writer accomplishes something else: in Egyptian mythology time was not necessarily friendly to Heaven (the gods); by dividing the Creation into seven days the story was announcing that time itself is servant to YHWH!

1 Like
66

When it frst came out (and I was at College) the NIV was announced as the most accurate and theologically sound version of the Bible since the RSV and became the standard for academic use, But you obviously [think you] know better. [content removed - and modified - by moderator.]

Richard

67

What are you talking about, I never proclaimed a magical garden, gardens are also very symbolic as is the tree. I’ve been referencing from a point of ancient Hebrew culture, they’ve written the bible in iconography that has relevant meanings to their culture in their time.

Like “it’s raining cats and dogs”, doesn’t mean animals are falling from the sky. But it does suggest heavy rain it has a meaning behind the iconography.

Why are there suddenly lots of angry people on the chat, reading into things that weren’t even suggested?

I never stated any part of the Genesis story is a literal telling of the universe and the human race, so I’m not sure why you’re cropping out what I say and isolating it as singular statements of madness.

Whatever, you carry on

68

And anyway re my circular logic, I said what didn’t exist was accountability once we were separated from god, sin existed before our separation from god, our accountability for it didn’t, just like sin still exists post Jesus death and resurrection but those in Christ are not held accountable, hence forgiven.

69

Whoa! Who is misrepresenting who here?

If not in the garden, where? How can Adam commit the sin if the ingredients for it do not exist?

How are we automatically separated from God? Is that part of His creation?

Instead of taking offence (like everyone else) please just think through what you believe.and check that it actually gels. Not only with itself but the view of a loving, caring and competent God. Or is man so superior that in one fell swipe he can completely disrupt and change the whole dynamics of God’s creation, introducing death and decay? (and sin, but you have already stated that sin already existed so that does not apply here)

At the risk of being shot down in flames (again)

The Garden story claims

  1. God did not want us to have intelligence (eat from the tree of knowledge)
  2. Man stole that intelligence (ate the fruit)
  3. Having got that intelligence man was bannished from Eden.

Now whether that banishment was due to
the act (disobeying God)
or
the consequence (Knowing good and evil)

Is the question in hand.

Original Sin states that it was the act

In reality Eden cannot exist if you have knowledge of Nakedness (etc) So banishment is inevitable.

Richard

70

Sorry :disappointed:

I think the garden is symbolic of a temple, but even if the garden was a garden, I doubt it would be a nice cottage garden featured on Gardeners World. It was a designated holy space, for god to meet with syntax Adam and Eve.

Whether it was a building structure or a plain of land or both, I believe it’s significance was as a temple, being a temple regardless of if building structure or organic material, plants Etc. It celebrated gods creation and tended to the needs of its caretakers. Syntax Adam and Eve.

The “cosmic tree” or trees are not uncommon ancient world narratives. I think they were representative of portals or gateways, connections between earth and heavens. In Eden we have two, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

I don’t think god denied us intellect as we are made in his image I don’t think he wanted humanity to be thick.

I think maybe it was just more awareness

Nakedness isn’t a literal naked where by post “fruit eating” they felt a bit of body shame.
They were naked because they were vulnerable and innocent. They were aware of their nakedness because they became aware of accountability.

The guilt and shame and need to hide, are the human emotions felt when you know you’ve done something wrong and you can’t bare to face it.

God clothed Adam and Eve before they left Eden, the animal skin may be a symbolic reference of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to come, who covers sin, but the covering was of the Holy Spirit. Not a reminder to always wear pants.

But again, too much significance is placed on the literal, two naked people in a garden eating fruit off a tree god said don’t touch.

The “ingredients” as you stated do not need to exist so neatly.

Syntax Adam and Eve were tasked with creating/preserving sacred space, there was a designated holy space ordained by god.

In the holy space was a cosmic, mystic thing not of human understanding, god did not want syntax Adam and Eve to touch these cosmic items but they did and they were spiritually separated from god.

God was not accountable for them they were accountable for themselves.

Again this “do not touch” rule was about obedience and free will. We are not in an abusive relationship with god, we can choose to be in a relationship with him or we can choose to be out of one.

Syntax Adam and Eve chose to be separated from god. But god also offered them and humanity a way back to him through Christ

71

…and I think death and decay were already present in the world… maybe we were less vulnerable to it. I don’t know, but the disobedience caused spiritual death… I guess that’s no more free pass to heaven perhaps? I don’t know.

But we know from that one incident that we wee separated from god because Christ had to come and die and rise, to cover our sin.

1 Like
72

They also had multiple literary genres. Remember that Genesis wasn’t written to be read by whoever happened to be literate enough, it was meant to be read by someone literate to an audience that wasn’t – oral tradition passed down with little to no error, now set down so others than the professional story-keepers could deliver it to audiences. So an aspect of story-telling by story-keepers kicks in: different genres were forms that gave their cues to the audience to know what kind of story they were hearing.

Genesis 1:1 is a great example: in the genre I learned as “royal chronicle”, the opening always includes three elements in the very first sentence – a time, a person, and an accomplishment. So we have “In the beginning”, “God”, and "created the heavens and the Earth. That time designation, “in the beginning”, is not a normal time designation, it is one that was common, though, in tales about the gods that took place outside of ordinary time, and since it was “a time unhinged from time” [can’t remember where I got that phrase] it by itself indicated that this account has to do with divine time. So by the end of that first sentence the audience would have known that this is going to be an account of a mighty accomplishment of God, specifically Creation, and that this kind of account will use some memorable structure to help people remember the account for themselves. [This is also important for interpreting the account: since right at the start things were kicked into divine time, then we know from the start that these are divine days.]

Given this, verse 14 takes on a different importance:
“Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years”

The point isn’t quite complete, though, without verse 15:
“And let them serve as lights in the expanse of the sky to shine upon the earth.” And it was so.”

When God created light back at the start, that would have been a bit of a “Perk up!” notice to the first audience since in almost every ancient near eastern mythology, including the Egyptian, light was just something that existed even before the gods appeared, but this account says no, God is greater than light, and the light is not eternal in and of itself because God made it. Now God is, so to speak, gathering in some of that light and attaching it to specific places, “lights in the expanse of the heavens”, so light wasn’t just something unattached and unsourced, now it gets pinned down to sources.
And those sources are given a function: in our terms, they’re a clock marking day and night, seasons (which presupposes a knowledge of astronomy sufficient to recognize that the point where the sun arose each new day changed with the time of year). This isn’t critical by itself, but it becomes so when in verse fifteen the writer tells the audience that these lights shine on the earth.
Things just took a shift from divine time to earthly time. Days one through three were divine days without question, but on day four a new kind of time is introduced; as divine time the length of the days was not measurable, but this new kind of time that is marked by the lights in the sky is theoretically countable. [BTW, I absolutely love this designation of “lights in the sky”: for every culture in the ancient near east, the sun and moon were top deities, but the Genesis writer strips away their names and describes them solely by function; the message is that these two aren’t deities, they’re just parts of YHWH’s clock!]

1 Like
73

So do we. But that is not a scientific term nor is it a scientific claim. ‘Theistic evolution’ is also not a scientific term. The only thing that excludes God from his creation in this context is philosophical naturalism. Please learn the distinction between that mistake which excludes God and methodological naturalism which does not.

1 Like
74

This paragraph demonstrates such a huge ignorance and misunderstanding of science I hardly know where to start! But I’ll go with the most glaring:
“Evolutionary science” makes no claims about the age of the Earth, only about how long life has been around. The age of the Earth is irrelevant to evolutionary theory except insofar as it is old enough to have cooled down sufficiently for liquid water to pool up on the surface.
And the claim in the linked article has nothing to do with evolution – oh, it doesn’t say anything about the age of the earth anyway, so there’s nothing being claimed by “evolutionary science”.

I’ll leave it there, but this leads to a couple of questions: Adam, what was the last actual science class you took? and, Do you actually read articles before making claims about them?

Final comment: this is a refuse-bin source; Popular Mechanics is not a science journal, not even close. What they print as science is selected to grab attention. If this was Popular Science, it might have avoided some errors such as claiming this was based on a “study”; a study generally means there was research conducted, but from the article there’s no indication of any research at all, they just took some old ideas off the shelf, tossed them together with some newer ideas, and ran some calculations. In fact, the authors of the actual journal article say they made a model, pulling together a few different ideas and seeing what difference would be made if those ideas were true, and since one of those ideas is “tired light” I’m not particularly impressed; it would take quite a bit of evidence to make the “tired light” notion plausible (though if there has been such evidence found in the last three decades, I’d love to see it).

I should look into how hard it would be to get there – just sitting on the hillside and looking at those would be awesome!

This pretty much establishes that you didn’t read the article, or at least didn’t understand it – and that you don’t understand science since if you did you’d be aware that seeing how new data fit into theories or models is a big part of what science does. You’re inventing material when you say “6 galaxies and a star are clearly older than 13.54 billiion years”, because that star is not “clearly older” and the issue with the galaxies is not directly their age.

One of my professors went into cosmology because it was where accepted explanations got overturned so often. He loved making models, which doesn’t happen as often in more settled branches of science.
People who regard science as a sort of religion don’t get that finding new data that requires re-thinking things is like hunting for a leaky water pipe in the ground: the big area on the surface that is wet tells you a general area, and you find the actual leak by making a guess and digging, and if that doesn’t land you on the leak you revise your prediction and dig again. This can mean digging quite a few holes that aren’t where the leak is, but every one of them provides information that helps pin down the leak. Sometimes you don’t know if a new hole indicates you’re getting closer or not, but it does give information that will help narrow things down, and sometimes the information indicates that you misinterpreted some previous holes.

A lot^2 of irony since it seems he didn’t even read the article he cited, given how much he got wrong about it.

= - = + = - = + = - = + = - =

I have to ask: have you been listening to or reading John Walton?

2 Likes
75

Great comment!

There’s no reason it can’t be both. The first Creation account in Genesis is two literary genres at once, and one of them is “temple inauguration account”, which boils down to announcing that the entire Earth being God’s temple.
It would be very consistent with ancient near eastern thinking for there to be a more specific, i.e. local temple that illustrated on a small scale what the greater temple was, or was to be, like. And since in ancient near eastern though a temple was where (authorized) people met with God, then by that definition the Garden certainly qualifies as one!

I’m glad you commented; in all my thousands of hours of study of the Creation accounts I never made that link before. Now (of course) it seems obvious. It also provides a link between the two accounts that is more than just putting one story after the other.

I really laughed here because I met someone in my university days who went to a summer Christian nudist camp.

There’s an interesting aspect here: both the two Creation accounts are written so that the details can be taken literally but only for the purpose of expounding on the main point. In the first Creation account they aren’t meant to be take literally at all by themselves but should be in order to understand the main point; in the second story it’s not so clear, which to me suggests we can feel free to go either way.

That sounds like both John Walton and Michael Heiser! It’s something we Westerners tend to edit out of our consciousness: the idea that sometimes a thing is not just that thing but ‘contains’ an intersection with a higher more profound reality. Some have noted that the situation with the tree and fruit in the Garden was sacramental, that of itself the fruit was just fruit like any other fruit, but that when God set it apart it became more than just fruit.
BTW, careful with the text here: God’s command wasn’t “Do not touch!”, it was “Do not eat”. “Do not touch” would be a magical sort of thing; “Do not eat” is sacramental: do not take this and make it part of yourselves! And if it is indeed sacramental, then there is an implied “yet” at the end of the command, with an unstated promise that there will be a day when you are ready for that fruit.

76

Yes, Walton, on the lost world of Adam and Eve, written with N.T Wright, I had a brief listen on Audible and was meant to revisit it, to get anything missed to consider. Sometimes I just Google questions and see what comes up for consideration. Somethings I genuinely believe god just reveals to me… maybe because it’s relevant to things happening in my life.

But I needed to have some understanding of Genesis to have understanding of my faith. The idea of the first ever man and woman, roaming hand in hand through a garden naked, which upon leaving the garden gained a wardrobe seemed a little silly.

….Lol! “A Christian nudist camp,”
And yes agree and noted, “do not eat”.

Regarding the “fruit”. It’s interesting I never noticed that, god intended to give them the “fruit”, one day. Just not yet. …if I’ve understood what you’re saying correctly?

77

Many of these questions fade when you approach each vignette as al illustration of principle not of fact. The image of Adam, Eve, Fruit, Serpent, Fall, Clothing, and Expulsion carry heavy weight in term of theology, morality, consequence, and loss of innocence. The fruit was not an apple because there was no fruit, no serpent, and no nakedness [[ unless you go back a million years or so ]]. There was no Eden, nor an Angel with a flaming sword barring the way back. Every word and phrase of Genesis, at least up to the Tower of Babel, which explained the multiplicity of languages to people who internalized the details of the story? Everything that far is theology, but is separate from fact.

Would you rather God had explained the population of even the most recent parts of earth, in places not known to the ancient Hebrews, to help them intuit the vast expanse of time into which myriad human languages could diversify?

Of course not - Genesis is to establish a basis upon which to understand God. The awe and majesty of full Creation, all 13+ billion years of it, is our gift in these late days. Will Jesus return on clouds of majestic fire within what remains of my lifetime? (Born in 1944) I have no clue. What matters is that Genesis had a mission, and performed / performs it marvelously. Just without needing to be fact.

2 Likes
78

Regarding “in the beginning” and light itself: might one see these two verses as God’s breadcrumb to the age of science, “I am the uncaused first cause, and I am sentient. I caused the Big Bang, and I am GOD.” Verse two, nestled between those majestic verses, roots the physical context so important to any audience: "I made the heavens and the earth, and I present it to you as what you expected, just water.
[[ because my point isn’t to describe what you believe, but to correct the theology connected to what you believe. ]]
The contrast, the theology, was pure, all creating, intentional, and caring God in place of a bevy of promiscuous, fractious, unreliable, improvident, needy, thoughtless embodiments of every human emotion, nearly all of them rising up from the id.

79

“God did not want us to have intelligence”
Rather, God wanted us to be intelligent (how else to be in God’s image) but innocent not knowing evil or the difference between that and good.

80

“I argue against nontheistic evolution that would exclude God from His creation.”

I see this view as wearing blinders. God created a universe. It is made of a blizzard of odd subatomic things which have strange properties and very VERY strange numeric values attached to them. After the initial expansion of space itself the finite but IMMENSE energy cooled enough for matter to precipitate out (e=-mc^2) as hydrogen and perhaps helium. Stars had to form to fuse those into the rest of the elements up to iron (#26) - making #27 through >#94 ish took spectacular events, likely the collision of neutron stars. These elements exhibit exquisite interactions, i.e. chemistry, such that simple but crucially necessary pre-life compounds formed everywhere, including outer space.
That perfection gave this universe the gift of chemical life. The first step in realizing life was RNAs and a mix of fatty acids and phospholipids, all in abundant supply in Early Earth chemistry, to form a featureless blob barely capable of growing (involuntary splitting was inevitable - evolution would allow First Life to organize ways to gain control and do that when it chose) -
That God invented a universe in which evolution could even happen is mind-blowing. So we ask ourselves whether having defined the universe so cleverly that evolution can happen, why would God need to make it a puppet with strings to pull, rather than an organic success generator?
More than 3.5 billion years later, evolution produced homo sapiens. Next question: given that God knows all, and given that God desired us as a result, and given that God made evolution possible, dare yourself to specify that God would, after the fact, still need those puppet strings to change DNA time after time.
Ask yourself whether evolution would need to “learn on the job” - groping slowly upward from form to form, or was that God learning on the job?

81

I don’t think god was making prototypes, it’s just part of his process for his reasoning.

Really time is nothing to god, so the expectation that he just snapped his fingers and poof, clear the pink smoke and glitter, we have a universe an earth and a pair of humans to populate it becomes even more ridiculous. How can an immortal power not bound by time break a sweat that a plan of creation and evolution is taking too many billions of years. Surly in terms of immortality those billions of years are a relative instant or an irrelevant instant if time means nothing.

We’re holding god to our time boundaries and restrictions.

The whole immortal and endless time concepts is too big for me grasp, I have to imagine circles and spheres to begin to grasp the concept of no starting point and no ending point. Which still doesn’t quite fit the concept, it’s too bigger concept for humans I think, especially in todays society where we’re all so time obsessed, in a hurry, deadlines, appointments, ticking of each phase of life like a to do list. And then we try to impose our weird little time obsessed behaviour on the Almighty, his plan and his creation.

1 Like
82

All hypothesising… but there’s a butterfly that makes its migration across the globe a journey of generations, not just in the lifetime of one butterfly.

So again it’s a very human view to assume a journey is about the individual and not a chain of individuals. People want to get to the goal in a singular lifetime, working your way out of poverty, owning a home Etc. Sometimes these life changes need to happen generationally, with each generation getting a little closer to the goal.

For whatever reason god didn’t see the need to make the first human species the finished and final species. He saw the need to make the human journey a generational one.

Weather species mutated, developed independently or interdependently. I’m sure they all served a purpose and left their mark on the land, The answer may be somewhere in the result of evolution itself. Life evolves to be best suited to be successful in its habitat, the planet evolved not because the first formation was wrong, so we evolved not because our first formation was wrong.

Maybe modern man had to wait for the earth to be ready for his arrival and the earth ready for modern man.

83

[smiling] Modern Man had no agency; God did the waiting. Recall that phrase “n the fullness of time” - The positions of stars and planets in the sky as of the Jewish New Year [[ according to fabulous DVD The Star of Bethlehem, findable on the web ]] of 3BCE. That was a sign in the heavens, placed by God, to alert the “magi” in Babylon that the Holy Spirit had made Mary pregnant. Forty weeks later (my layman’s guess) further signs in the sky told the magi that The Messiah had been born. By 25 December 2 BCE – god DOES have a sense of humor – the magi found Joseph, Mary, and ~six month old Jesus. Think of the precision involved, both to position the planets 4.5 billion years prior, when they coalesced from their individual dust clouds orbiting the sun.
Sorry – keyboard Be Still! The DVD is priceless.

2 Likes
84

It is not in the text. And it would banish them from Eden.

Besides, the whole point of the story is the disobedience and you can’t disobey if the command is not there (or meant)

Whether people like it or not the Garden story is trying to rationalise why the world is unfair and not paradise. Is it God’s design? God’s punishment? Or human failing?

Let’s stop there. (we could go on)

Richard