How can less educated people understand Genesis?

DeaconKenNY · January 18, 2026, 4:16pm

First and foremost in Genesis, or any other book in the Bible is an accurate translation from the language that it is written in, to the language you understand.

I would say that a majority of the misunderstandings are caused by an inaccurate translation. Biblical Hebrew, to a certain extent, similar to English, relies on word placement and context to determine which one of the multiple meanings of a Hebrew word is applicable in that particular and specific case.

St.Roymond · January 18, 2026, 6:40pm

To quote one of my favorite grad school professors, “There is no such thing as an accurate translation, there are only better or worse approximations”.

Marg · January 20, 2026, 10:52pm

“Can modern people understand Genesis”? Yes. God wrote for the sake of those of us who live today as much as he wrote for the benefit of the ancients.

“will they always mistakenly impose their own modern constructs on it”? Ancients imposed their own ancient constructs on it, now it’s our turn. And it’s no more a mistake for us than it was for them. Having benefitted from the history of ideas, we may come out better.

Christy:

“pretend it tells them things it was never intended to address?” And how do you know for a fact what it was intended to address and what it was never intended to address? Whose intentions are you so sure of?

If we are willing to drop a lot of old, outdated interpretations that have accreted to the text like barnacles to a ship, we can actually see something amazingly important about Genesis1. It actually gives us a generalized account of the history of the earth and the universe from their beginning to the present time. I don’t think I am mistakenly imposing my own modern constructs on the text when I read it this way. It’s just there (the modern cosmology and natural science) in the text if you let it out. But certain old ideas have to go.

For instance, the first verse – in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth – the first verse is not an action. It is an introduction telling us what this account we are going to read is all about. We can see that this is so, because on the second day, God creates the heavens. He would not have created the heavens on the second day if he had already done so in the first verse. If the heavens were not created in the first verse, neither was the earth.

This brings us to verse 2. The earth was void and formless. No shape, no stuff. Sounds like a good way to say nothing there. The earth wasn’t there, not in the physical realm. So where are the “deep” and “the waters”? In God’s realm, the invisible realm, before God began creating.

Then on day one creation begins: let there be light. Not stars, not suns, just light. That happens to be what the big bang brought about – light (electromagnetic energy), darkness (matter in form of subatomic particles), and the pulse of time (evening and morning). If you can’t see God’s work on day one as the opening of the big bang, then you have to be be blind. Day two brings the spreading out of the universe and the coalescing of the heavenly bodies – what we see when we look at the sky.

From then on, it’s straight out of the natural history museums. Continents (which actually rose from a watery earth), oceans, life in the form of one celled “plants”, plants first and later animals; animals and plants that were like their kind, not their parents, leaving room for evolution (“let the land produce…let the seas teem…”). Even the “birds” fit in. The Hebrew word is “flying things,” which is also used for insects. Flying insects showed up at the end of the age of fishes, right where Genesis 1 says “birds” appeared.

It’s there. It’s obvious. Just look. Is it as important as the gospel? No. But it is important. If the Bible starts with a description of how the earth was actually created, something our science has only recently learned, maybe it’s the beginning of a book we should take special notice of. Just saying.

Randy · January 21, 2026, 12:54am

I’m not sure that I follow. I am afraid it could turn out like the KJV only folks, who believe that the errors that the translators made were God given and superseded the original text.

Can you clarify? Thank you.

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Christy · January 21, 2026, 1:06am

I don’t actually think modern people lack ability to understand the text. I just think a lot of modern people think their worldview and education level privileges them, and I find it ethnocentric and condescending to the many, many cultures of the world throughout time and geography who have understood Genesis just fine even though they don’t have the same grasp on modern scientific models of origins.

St.Roymond · January 21, 2026, 2:54am

The two statements are not logically linked: writing can be for our sake without fitting our worldview.

No, they didn’t, because it rests on their concepts; no imposition necessary. Indeed if it had no rested on their concepts, it would not qualify as communication.

Exactly. We either work with the concepts inherent in the original, or we are engaging in arrogance.