Hebrew conception of the earth/universe

Faith & Science Conversation
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I am not trying to change the original meaning of the words but reinterpret them. Case in point:

I see modern science as being like a new language, a new tongue that has emerged in the last 200 years or so… So we need to reinterpret the Word of God with the guidance of His Spirit.

  • Acts 2:4 And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

The task is to figure out what it means to the original audience so we can reinterpret it, otherwise it is meaningless to us.

It is the Holy Spirit within us that confirms that the Bible is the Word of God.

  • 2 Tim 3:16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:

It does not say anywhere that it is the waters above. I have search and it is only described as being below. The OP diagrams are not even correct.

So God started out small forming this gap in an endless deep fluid? I don’t believe that. I don’t know where you are getting this from but it is not from scripture. Its completely different from big bang theory also where all matter expanded from a singularity.

qavah 6960 - wait for (probably originally twist, stretch, then of tension of enduring, waiting:

It sounds more like waiting and tension building up pressure to push up and burst forth. The land has to be pushed up. Water is not going to just pile up on the sides without the land being pushed up. There is this thing called gravity.

All matter including the sun, moon, stars and the unformed earth were created in the beginning. The creation days are putting what He created in order. God is just giving them purpose to shine on the earth (land that appeared on day 3) and to be used for time and seasons.

  • Gen 1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

This is narration, telling the reader that God had also created what He is setting in order on day 4, not that He created it right then on day 4. Forcing scripture into saying God didn’t create the celestial bodies until day 4 is calling God a liar, because we know better.

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When we have an understanding of what it means to the original audience, that is completely meaningful to us. No reinterpretation, or more aptly misinterpretation, required.

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No: first, you don’t seem interested in the original message. Second, you’re not interpreting, you’re ham-fistedly altering the concepts.

That doesn’t say “God wrote it” – it says “God-breathed”, not “God-possessed”, which would be the Greek idea behind “God wrote it”.

I don’t know what you’re reading, but Genesis itself tells us that the great deep is both above and below when it says God separated the waters from the waters – waters above the raqia and water below the raqia.

From the meaning of the words! The great deep, the t’hom, extends without limit in every direction.

Except that the description from scholars back before the telescope was even invented concluded from the Hebrew that the universe started out as the smallest thing possible, expanded rapidly beyond comprehension, was filled with fluid, and that this fluid was so thick that light could not shine, then when it thinned enough God ordered light into existence. That’s a superb layman’s description of the Big Bang, so if you’re going to try to make Genesis 1 speak science you should be using an understanding that was not written to try to fit it to science (as you’re doing) yet fits modern cosmology eerily well.

You don’t think that the smallest thing possible sounds like a singularity?

That declares that the inspired writer lied.

You’re not just changing the meanings of nouns, you’re doing it to verbs as well.

That changes the meaning of the verb.

So you think you know better than God what He inspired in the writer whom He chose. I’m not “forcing scripture”, I’m refusing to change it.

Genesis 1 is not about science. It wasn’t written to satisfy your modern curiosity about the universe. “We know better” is just a way to say that you have no respect for the scriptures, only for your own opinions – and so far your opinions are destroying the meaning and replacing it with hash.
Genesis 1 is two literary genres at once, a ‘royal chronicle’ and a temple inauguration. As those it carries serious theological meaning, and none of it is about science.

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And no reinterpretation is even permitted – that’s the work of false prophets who declare things for itching ears who want to hear what fits their understanding.

For any ancient literature, the moment you think it fits your own understanding it’s pretty much a guarantee that you haven’t understood a thing. A good sign of failing to take any ancient writing with respect is when you dig through it and try to force it to fit your own concepts.

And if you want to fit science to it, the Big Band correspondence is a good candidate since the plain language fits so well to a theory that wouldn’t even be thought of for centuries – astoundingly so – and it doesn’t require changing the meaning of anything.

Over and over in church history people have tried to force the scriptures to fit their own understanding, and over and over it has resulted in false teaching or just plain silliness. It is a tried and true way to screw up.

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Ok, let me try again. This is the concept as you present it and I will agree:

This is a depiction of Theia impacting the early Earth which then formed the Moon:

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Am I not keeping the concept intact?

No it doesn’t. It has a surface and God is moving upon the face of it from above. It is even shown in the Hebrew depictions:

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And why then is the same word for deep used to describe the bottom of the Red Sea? It is not bottomless:

  • Exo 15:8 And with the blast of thy nostrils the waters were gathered together, the floods stood upright as an heap, and the depths were congealed in the heart of the sea.

Ok, so we could extend the deep, this fluid to included the sun and stars as well as the earth. The center of the earth is the same composition. So in this way the deep is spread throughout the universe and God hovers over the face of it.

I am not Greek. God “wrote it” means “God breathed” to me. By knowing He inspired the author, the truth of scripture is not questioned.

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“I ate a sandwich.” It is past tense. In reading that, you might conclude that I ate a sandwich today, but I know it was a few days ago that I ate it. It was a really good pulled pork sandwich that my wife made. :yum:

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No, you’re not – you’re playing science fiction games.

Because it’s being used to describe something that is not the תְה֑וֹם.

No, we couldn’t. The sun and stars and earth were not fluid.
You’re working really hard to get around what the text says and make it talk science. Just where in scripture do you find any claim that either of the Creation stories is supposed to be about science?

The Apostles wrote in Greek, therefore their word choices ion Greek have consequences.

The truth of scripture is what the original meaning was, and it should not be changed. Trying to turn it into science changes the meaning, the same way that Roman Catholic interpreters did when they tried to turn scripture into Aristotelian philosophy, and before them when early Christians tried to make the scriptures fit Aristotle and other Greek philosophers (which resulted in all the Christological heresies). Every attempt to force the scriptures to fit some other worldview has resulted in error, even if the error was only to throw away the actual message of the text – and this is no different.

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As you said, this is narration, and it is narration that presents events in order. When it states:

God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens…"

this tells us that there have not been such lights yet; He has just proposed them. The entire chapter uses a sequence of what are called “consecutive imperfects” which indicate that each event as related comes after the previously related one – not necessarily immediately, but definitely after. If using such an imperfect you said, “I went to the picnic” and then “I ate a sandwich”, we would know that you didn’t eat the sandwich before you went to the picnic – we might not know for certain that you ate it at the picnic, but we would know that eating the sandwich came later than going to the picnic.

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I still appreciate the OEC interpretation which places the POV on the surface of the Earth, “the Spirit hovered above the waters.” Light preceded the celestial bodies as the atmosphere went from being translucent to transparent.

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Not science fiction. There is hypothesis and evidence for Theia.

Well it’s not a bottomless pit. It’s just something that is deep.

There is no fluid in the composition of the sun or stars?

I believe its a true account that lines up with science. I’m still finishing up the narrative but will be presenting it in a new thread.

Scripture is true and until we had a fairly accurate worldview from science (which I believe we now do), attempts to line up science with the Bible would result in error. I believe there are things hidden in Scripture that are ready to be revealed.

The order is of completing events. When God sees that something is good, the day is complete. Events can still be mentioned, started and even overlap in a different order. A completed event doesn’t mean that what is created can’t continue to be created even now, such as new stars still being born, but that the process is complete.

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Not in the ancient near eastern literature. Before the t’hom is pushed aside to make room for dry land it is all there is.

The fluid was the universe, in scientific terms a quark-gluon plasma. There is none of that in any star (except perhaps in the core of neutron stars).

Where in the scriptures does it say that any of it is supposed to line up with science?

Attempts to line up science with the Bible – or rather, what you’re doing, trying to force the scriptures to speak science – will ALWAYS result in error because that is not the worldview they were written under. The moment you rip any literature out of its worldview you destroy the meaning. Scripture is literature, so it is not your plaything to twist and change to fit your preferences.

Nope. You’re talking about ancient Hebrew language, not your preferred view of modern thought.

That’s your philosophy; it has nothing to do with the scriptures.

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Ok then lets go with that. Your saying this fluid is the starting point for the entire material world. It thins out and condenses to form stars. Its still the same material, the great deep, until God gives it some other name which gives it purpose. The waters above the heavens are never called the great deep but its implied at creation. Correct? So your model is not incompatible with mine.

I don’t think there was a word for science, but… Psalm 19:1 “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”

God created the world. Science shows how God created it. Scripture is God’s Word, so they will line up.

And I’m not doing that. We are discussing and I’m showing you how I’m not.

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  • Thales (fl. c. -585) was the first physicist, as well as the first geometer and the first philosopher (no accident). He started a school in Miletos, then an important Ionian city, on the Asiatic coast of the Mediterranean, now in Turkey. It was apparently he who invented the notion of proving theorems in mathematics. He also invented trigonometry, measuring the height of the great pyramid by measuring the length of its shadow and comparing it to the length of the shadow of a stick of known height.
  • He said (correctly) that though there seem to be many different kinds of matter there is really only one, all the many apparently different kinds of matter being merely different forms of one stuff, any such form being transformable into any other such form. Thales is thus the originator of scientific materialism, as well as of monism. It is implicit in Milesian thought that nothing is either created or destroyed, matter being conserved as it is transformed from one form to another. He called the one stuff “water.” If today we anachronistically read this as an assertion that all matter is composed of H2O molecules, then Thales does not sound like much of a physicist. However, if we read it as saying that fluidity is an essential characteristic of matter, then Thales was right once again. All of the Milesians saw the physical universe not only as composed of some primordial stuff but also as being engaged in an on-going process, a never-ending motion. Perhaps more important, they all thought of it as intelligible and explainable in terms of mathematical concepts, logical analysis and purely natural causes
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I don’t have a model – I’m just pointing out that if you’re going to try to force science onto the scriptures you should go with science that actually fits, and fits amazingly since that understanding of the scriptures came from long before modern cosmology.

There’s a high likelihood that this is referring to Jewish astrology (which is what brought the Magi to Jesus) and its belief that God announced major events in the stars.

They will line up very loosely because not a single literary genre used in the scriptures has any space for science. You’re trying to force foot-wide pegs into inch-wide holes, which is bad for the pegs and the holes – and that’s actually a generous analogy since given the literary genres of the first Creation account the holes are more like 1/16 inch across.

You claim you aren’t but then go back and do it again.

If you were sticking with the original worldview you would not be talking about a globe Earth or geology, you’d be talking about a round earth-disk covered by a solid firmament and what the events being related mean in that context.

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So like Thales that @Terry_Sampson posted, all matter is from this fluidity. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of it shaping all other forms of matter.:+1:

The Creation account is highly condensed and I started explaining it here before the thread was closed.

You responded saying my math was sloppy. I will be reposting in more detail in a new topic but have nothing further to add here. Thanks for all the responses and I found this to be a productive discussion.

God bless!

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I remember having read about a Kabbalist rabbi named Nachmanides from ca. 13th century who interpreted Genesis in a way that is very much like the modern Big Bang model.

My Google-fu is a bit weak today, so I don’t have a great link. I’ll just give you the tease so you can fall down the internet rabbit hole. :wink:

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I’d quite forgotten about Nachmanides, and that he was one with that interpretation. Since I don’t remember if Kabbalism influenced his Genesis 1 interpretation I suppose I’m going to have to

Found this which is very familiar:

At the briefest instant following creation all the matter of the universe was concentrated in a very small place, no larger than a grain of mustard. The matter at this time was so thin, so intangible, that it did not have real substance. It did have, however, a potential to gain substance and form and to become tangible matter. From the initial concentration of this intangible substance in its minute location, the substance expanded, expanding the universe as it did so.

He then wanders away from the view I’ve been recounting here on occasion.

This is supposedly a quote from six hundred years before, which puts it in the seventh century – this I did not know!

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