How far will you take the literal view of Genesis 1-11?

Faith & Science Conversation
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142

A ‘literal’ translation is the only one that is faithful: it states the meaning of the original, adding as little as possible and losing as little as possible.

Given the example you provided, an epistemic translation butchers the text.

Not in the least: a literal translation adheres to the original literary genre and original worldview. YECists refuse to do that, and most ahteists are equally lazy.

Yes – and they always start with the literal meaning, as the rabbis I’ve known all stated: they insist that unless you start with the literal meaning you’re just making up what you want.

Unless you start with the literal sense of the text, you are tossing that Jewish tradition.

To know that the opening Creation account in Genesis is a royal chronicle, you have to start with the literal meaning. To recognize that the opening Creation account in Genesis is at the same time a temple inauguration account, you also have to start with the literal meaning. To recognize that the opening Creation account in Genesis is a polemic that uses the Egyptian creation story as its outline, you have to start with the literal meaning.

Finding the literal meaning is the hardest part of scholarship because it requires study on the level of a PhD thesis – that’s the only way to grasp what the individual words mean, and what the words mean is the literal meaning. Heck, just grasping the literal meaning of the first word required six years of studying in Hebrew for me to reach that point, plus a couple of hundred additional hours of study, and I’m still not sure I’ve got it right – and that’s before even asking what literary genre it is. Of course along the way I tackled some other terms in that opening Creation account and added a few hundred more hours to study them.

What YECists do is ignore the literal meaning by relying on the English translation and reading it as modern literature from the perspective of a modern worldview. Taking the literal meaning of the text in the biblical language is anathema to them.

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The penny drops. The pagan cosmology begins with a vast body of water with no knowable beginning. Reading Genesis 1:1-2 as “When the lord began creating the heavens and the earth” the same vision is there: a vast body of water with no knowable beginning, with the Spirit of God hovering over it.
Thank you.

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The meaning of the original appears matter-of-fact, since the language of the successive Days of Creation reads like matter-of-fact reportage. If the original meaning is not that God placed a forever supply of rainwater above the firmament, pulled Earth up from beneath the waters, and placed the rest of the visible universe beneath all that water, it is difficult to connect meaning with the Creation as we see it today.

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Clearly, you missed my point. The epistemic translation DOES start with and preserve the literal translation, as is required. That is the reason for calling it an ‘epistemic translation’ and not a ‘new literal translation’. There is no butchering of the original man-made characters that are called ancient Hebrew writing.

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We seem to be dancing around literary and contextual meanings without confronting the main issue. Genesis 1 cannot be scientific (modern) so to try and establish any sort of reality meaning is pointless. It does not matter whether creation came from a void (ex nihilo) or a vast quantity of water. What matters is the God created the universe as we know it. But, what Genesis does seem to say is that God created humanity specifically rather than the more popular Evolutionar progression whereby humanity is a cosmic fluke. The truth of Genesis 1 is that God was in control of his creation right up to Humanity which pours hot coals on any version where nature is left completely to its own devices. If we are going to accept that Scripture has any meaning then we cannot just rule God out of Evolution and claim He sat back and watched it. That is not what Genesis 1 states.

Richard

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Only if you read it in English with no concern for the fact that it was written in ancient Hebrew in an ancient literary form with an ancient worldview.

You’re trying to make it speak modern science again. The writer is using ancient cosmology because his readers understood it (and he didn’t know any other kind) to build an account that is two literary genres at once while being a polemic based on the Egyptian creation story. The details have no meaning in themselves, apart from the story; the meaning is in the story.

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148

But it doesn’t – it changes the original meaning.

Maybe it means more to you if the meaning is changed from the original, but you cannot claim to be believing the original meaning when you do that.
Your “epistemic” translation is just another way to change the meaning to make some audience happy.

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Inasmuch as Genesis is understood as a part of the Christian Scriptures, a New Testament perspective may be helpful. E.g., Wolfhart Pannenberg has noted that the Epistle to the Hebrews (4:3-10) interpreted “the seventh day” eschatologically - as the final consummation that is still beyond us, the final victory of God and the faithful over every evil.

“Others set the final consummation under the sign of the seventh day of God’s sabbath rest. In this regard we may think of Hebrews and its description of the consummation of salvation for which Christians hope as an entry into the rest of God” (Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic Theology, Vol. 2. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1994. P. 144-145).

As the writer of the New Testament epistle treats the “days” of the Genesis creation narratives as different from our usual days, surely, Christians may do the same. The proponents of “literal” interpretation (that is, of the historical-grammatical method, which looks for writer’s original intent and accepts the latter as the normative meaning of the text) sometimes tend to obfuscate the difference between the Old and the New Testaments. For Christians, the meaning of the Old Testament is disclosed in the New Testament, and only there (2 Corinthians 3:14-16).

In this vein, an Old Testament text is either explained by the doctrine-settling New Testament interpretation, or is not significant enough to merit such clarification - and, therefore, may be a subject of legitimate disagreements. For instance, the normative Christian understanding of Genesis 1 is John 1:1-3 (which also implies John 1:14, and John 1:18, and so forth).

Reading the Old Testament through the lens of the New Testament removes a great part of controversies, although not all of them. E.g., there remains a doctrine that God tolerates creatures’ mortality because of the first humans’ sin (Romans 5:12).

Nonetheless, even this doctrine doesn’t need to contradict the dominant scientific account of cosmological and biological evolution if one acknowledges that the motives of a particular divine action may well postdate the action itself because God creates and knows all the times - past, present, and future - at once. But, of course, this is a different and rather complicated issue.

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A statement that “God was in control of his creation right up to humanity” does not contradict evolution or any other natural processes with their own logic. It just implies the God who wills the internally consistent creation where events match their circumstances, processes and outcomes depend on their conditions, and so on. To this end, divine action restrains itself, subdues itself to the aforesaid logic of creation instead of just brimming with boundless power.
This very interpretation was elaborated by a number of prominent theologians, from Emil Brunner to John Polkinghorne, who have pointed out that the creative self-humiliation of Jesus Christ as described by the Gospel narratives is characteristic of the way God creates and sustains the world (thus the creation theology connects with the Christian apologetics).

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151

Welcome to the forum, @NicholasB . Great post. We look forward to hearing your voice!

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Thank you! There are a lot of meaningful and captivating discussions at BioLogos; I’ll try to participate here and there, speaking to the point as far as I can.

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The balance and contradictions of omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence has been bounced around quite often with little or no real agreements or conclusions. I guess it is a part of God that is beyond human comprehension. Knowing and acting out of time constraint is almost impossible for linear beings like us to comprehend.

Richard

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Which YECists claim to do but don’t!

If that’s all we’re supposed to see in the opening Creation account, then we’ve thrown away all three of its primary messages.

The New does not abolish the meaning of the Old, it adds to it. The meaning of the old rests on the intent of the writer, especially the literary genre and worldview, and how the original audience would have understood it.

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I have never claimed to believe the original meaning of Genesis. I only claim that the syntax of words produced by the rules of literal translation provides a valid and necessary arrangement for an epistemic translation. The literal translation is an essential foundation for an epistemic translation. It is the original Hebrew writing that remains unchanged as the ancient Hebrew vocabulary had no better words, given the syntax in Genesis, to convey the meaning of an epistemic rendering. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to view the epistemic translation as the fulfillment of the literal translation rather than destroying it. You are focused on keeping the original meaning unchanged while I am focused on just keeping the original Hebrew words unchanged. That would be the purely literal understanding of ‘God’s Word’ remaining intact.

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In other words, you want it to mean something else so you change it. That’s not translation at all. You want it to have really intended to communicate something that makes more sense to you, so you change the meaning.

It’s actually the opposite of epistemic; you can’t arrive at knowledge by changing the information you have to work with.

Yeah, that’s just a fancy way of saying you can make it mean what you want. But the moment you alter the meaning, which is what your example did, you’re not translating any more, you’re making things up.

Call it “epistemic commentary” and stop pretending to be translating.

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Certainly, the issue is extremely complicated. Nevertheless, understanding time as a dimension of the physical universe is a well-founded position. And as we assume that the physical universe is created, the divine creative act that takes logical precedence over the created world must also take logical precedence over its specific dimensions, including time.
Logical precedence is, of course, principally different from temporal precedence. One doesn’t need to be Kant or Carnap to grasp that any “before” implies time; thus, the proposition “before time” is internally inconsistent. The logical precedence of divine creative action over time is super-temporality rather than a-temporality; in other words, God is freely creating and sustaining the entire length of time as well as the entire spread of space.

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  1. I’m far from claiming that YECists are good at exploring the original intent of the Old Testament writers.

  2. Certainly, the New Testament adds something crucially important to the meaning of the Old Testament. But it also refers to the Old Testament narratives, reframes the Old Testament ideas and doctrines, introduces them into the Christ-related contexts. This is a full-fledged interpretative work.

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As Genesis 1 is specifically linear it does not fit the omnipresent God.

Richard

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Human beings have no part in the existence of God’s Creation, but they are the creators of anything called ‘God’s Word’. While audible communication is a feature of all animals, literate language is unique to humans and was created about 7000 years ago. It consists of written characters, letters, alphabets, words and syntax in many different languages to represent the sounds that are made to speak conscious thoughts. The process of making those thoughts available from one language to another requires translation. When there is literate language about God’s creation that is alleged to have divine inspiration, it must not be restricted to literal translation as that would be placing human limitations on the divine. Thus the basis for epistemic translation.
Commentary and paraphrase focus on the meaning of a literal translation with explanations and synonymous phrasing that is intended to enhance the understanding. They involve a deliberate change to the words and syntax of the original written language in an attempt to convey the meaning of the literal translation with alternative words that some reader or listener may better comprehend.
An epistemic translation retains the words and syntax of the original written language. It simply uses a different choice of word in translation that is a valid selection from all words in a modern vocabulary related to the context of the information, guided by the syntax of a literal translation. If a meaning is found that makes sense based on an epistemic understanding of the creation, then the ancient writing gains some credibility as divinely inspired. It does not prove the existence of God or disprove the sacred nature of other writings that lack this credibility.
As for making some audience happy, I suggest that there are no human institutions, political, religious or academic, that exist without the feature of making some audience happy. That feature fails as a basis to dismiss the epistemic translation as invalid. The epistemic process applied to ancient writings fits the process of translation better than it fits commentary or paraphrase. I will continue to refer to it as ‘epistemic translation’.

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Omniscience is a fascinating one because there are places in the Old Testament where God says something is going to happen and then it doesn’t. Perhaps the most obvious is in 1 Samuel 23 where David goes to rescue the town of Keilah: once he has driven off the Philistines he hears that Saul knows where he is so he asks God if Saul is coming after him, and God says yes, so David asks if the people of the town will hand him over to Saul, and God says they will. So there are two things that God said were going to happen.
But David gathers his men and heads out so he won’t get trapped in a town of people so ungrateful they would hand him over to Saul. As a result, Saul doesn’t go to Keilah because he gets told David had left, and David doesn’t get handed over to Saul – so neither of the things God knew ahead of time actually happened.

Dr. Michael Heiser points out a conclusion from this: God’s foreknowledge is not predestination because there are things God foreknew that didn’t happen.

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