How would you illustrate Genesis 1:1 and 1:2

Faith & Science Conversation
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How do you manage to come to that conclusion when the text clearly says many times…

“and the evening and the morning were day …X”

If you read the original language, it cannot be taken any other way other than to mean a literal day. The fact that the israelites, over 2000 years after creation, kept the 7 day week exactly as their forefathers had (ie Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) according to what is stated in Genesis Chapter 1…doesnt that tell you that given an entire culture bases its working week around creation means that they are following the original institution as given by God to Adam and Eve?

How could Moses manage to get his history wrong if the literal 7-day creation are not 24-hour days? Are you going to claim that a designer didn’t tell his creation any of this from the beginning even though the bible says that God walked in the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve of an evening? If that is your claim, why then the need for Moses or the judges or the prophets of old at all…the Israelites/Jews could have figured all of this out for themselves via osmosis and trial and error.

I mean lets face it, the Jewish culture is the one that the entire bible is based on is it not? It seems rather absurd to think that that culture would get this wrong for thousands of years…especially given Christ Himself (the incarnate God) also kept the Sabbath according to the tradition!

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I think the original topic was what God was doing —and where — before He created the heavens and the earth. Thus I was focusing on that. St. Augustine, in the early 5th century, wondered aloud how there could be literal 24-hour days at a time when there was not yet an earth and a sun by which those days could be measured. Good question I did mention that commentators generally see the earliest chapters as a rebuttal of other philosophies common to the ANE in that era.

This is another topic. But my main point is that we have no way of knowing, from Scripture, what God was doing before He decided to create the Universe. "The LORD our God has secrets known to no one. We are not accountable for them, but we and our children are accountable forever for all that he has revealed to us, so that we may obey all the terms of these instructions.’ (Deut. 29:29 NLT)

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To some extent i understand that position, however, wouldn’t you agree that God has spent 66 books of the bible, and countless other lost documents, recording through his ministers (ie prophets etc) all about Himself?

Do you, when engaging in an ongoing relationship with other individuals that you know personally, develop an understanding of that person, including their past? Wouldnt you also agree then that God, in spending so much time “face to face” with Moses and communicating with others ;ilkeking David or the other prophets, would also go into great detail about such things?

For me personally, one of the strangest things about Christian theology is i think summed up in the development and acceptance of the doctrine of the trinity. It is essentially a deductive doctrine, there is not direct claim (such as the word trinity) in the bible and yet most Christians follow that doctrine and yet when it comes to the early chapters of Genesis they are at the same time disallowing the same widely biblically referenced contextual methods of deduction used in developing the trinity doctrine, for also developing a belief about knowing God and Creation in the context of this O.P.

There are lots of bible texts that describe God outside of the reality of this earth, just because there isnt a text specifically that says something about the universe prior to Genesis 1:2 it doesnt mean there wasn’t one anymore than just because the word Trinity isn’t found in the bible doesnt mean there isn’t one.

My take on it is that we follow the evidence, in this case obviously the internal evidence because that is where God specifically reveals himself to mankind. I think there is a difference between direct revelation in the bible and, assumed revelation in Scientific theory that looks at a sinful corrupted world for its evidence and interpretations.

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That Abraham was educated by God – that’s not in the text.

A great deal of the belief structure you exhibit here depends on assumptions about the text rather than on the text. This is problematic.

Um, what? None of that has anything to do with the post you snipped a quote from.

Peter’s use of the word Tartarus is hardly irrelevant because it ties the Jewish lore from the book of Enoch to Greek gods, with all that that implies. And it doesn’t “igonre” anything because that’s all Peter says about it.

Saying that Peter’s statement was about Satan and angels who rebelled with him is twisting the statement – if it’s about them, then the Apostles were grandstanding, not casting out demons, because Satan and his demons would have been chained up in darkness. Sinc they plainly aren’t, then the obvious thing to do is to ask what Peter actually meant, and his use of the word Tartarus points to the right direction – he’s talking about beings that considered themselves to be gods who long ago were rounded up and locked away from the world, which is what the book of Enoch describes – and both Jewish and Gentile readers would have known exactly what he meant.

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The beginning of God’s creating the heavens and the earth – the first translation above has that right.
It’s just a very hard thing to translate because Hebrew could do things with grammar that English can’t manage – nor any other Western language as far as I know.

Except what is between evening and morning is not a day, it’s night.

Within the story, yes – but outside of the story, no; it’s not that sort of literature.

There you go leaving the text again – nowhere does the text say anything about God saying a single thing about seven says to Adam and Eve.
Byond that, it doesn’t have to be a literal week for the institution to work, it only has to be a divine week. You may have problems with that but anyone from back then would laugh at your issues.

That doesn’t even make sense. First, Moses didn’t write history. Second, you’re assuming a literal 7-day creation; that isn’t in the text.

They didn’t get anything wrong; unlike YECists they understood what kind of literature they were hearing. It wasn’t until humans got the odd notion that for something to be true it has to be scientifically correct that people started mangling the message by turning a masterpiece of literature into a mere work schedule report.

So? That was before the Crucifixion switched things over to the New Covenant and the Resurrection left the Mosaic arrangement in the dust.

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No – He didn’t do that at all, He only told what was necessary for His people’s instruction at various times, all of it aimed at and focused on the coming Incarnation that is the center of history.

No. When the point is a mission that needs to succeed, you don’t waste people’s time or their mental efforts by mixing the message, you stick to the point.

This is something that Michael Heiser and others make a point of: this isn’t just a set of stories, it’s an account of warfare, humans trying to go their own way, heavenly beings disobediently interfering, then God “divorcing” all the nations and picking just one man to start over with, followed by warfare for the land that was promised, spiritual warfare to get enough about what God wants established so when Messiah showed up the setting would be right for Him to get the Kingdom started off right, and so on – all along it’s been about a war, and when you’re in a war you tell your army what they need to know and nothing more.

It’s not relevant – it’s a topic of curiosity that has nothing to do with the job at hand. C.S. Lewis shows this as one of the ways that the Adversary uses to get Christians distracted – get them curious about things that are totally irrelevant but “feel” godly.

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Oh FCOL Adam! Can’t you recognise Poetic licence?

The Creation Story in Genesis 1 was designed to be learned and recited. Structure and form assist that. It has nothing to do with reality.

Richard

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Thanks St Roy… The comment of mine that you referred to …you probably figured it out but I wanted to just note that “what was the beginning” is not a referral to the beginning of God but to when He decided to create the Universe. This is because Adam seemed to want to postulate on something God might have been doing beforehand. “The secret things belong to the Lord” — of course, we would all like to know. But “sorry Charlie” – God isn’t telling and, if He did, it likely would make no sense to us anyway. I hope that Adam understood that much. Have a great Sunday.

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As I said “the secret things belong to the Lord,” Adam…If He has not told us how He [to be obscenely colloquial here] spent His Friday nights before He created the Universe —at which time, of course, Friday did not exist — then He has not told us and does not want or think He needs to.

So, No, the fact that He has [and had in the past] developed “relationships” with folks like Moses, does not mean they went out for beers together. Told each other their lifestories and how angry Moses got at the jerk down the street…“The secret things belong to the Lord” and this has always been true.

I once met a Hare Krishna person --long ago while he was dancing in an airport or some place. I remember him very excitedly telling me that he {the Hare Krishna devotee] knew where God lives and who His mother is and a list of other things.

That definition of God (if generally true of followers of Eastern relgions) is not what the biblical definition of God is…recall various biblical images [even if symbolic – or not–no debates needed on this part please!] of God with “His train filling the temple” --with winged beings covering their faces before Him and crying “holy holy holy” ----or “even the demons believe, and tremble” – if those images or depictions —are even simply “symbolic” of what being in God’s presence actually would be–then, no, He’s never out for a beer with Isaiah or Daniel telling stories about His childhood and how annoyed He is with the Neanderthal…not to mention Isaiah.

“The secret things” — that is it. And I suppose it is characteristic of these conversations that you tossed the Trinity in there.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…” translation of the Biblia Hebraica Leningradensia

“In the beginning” — one commentator noted that “there is a disjunctive accent on the last syllable … which stops the reader and forces him to ponder the nature of the beginning” per Johann Michaelis— and is “a statement of praise” according to another commentator (the two statements are not a contradiction or disagreement between each other) …and then there is lots of discussion about the next pair of words “God created” —the word “God” is plural in Hebrew, and the word translated “created” here is used only of divine activity–per Waltke and I know I have seen the same said elsewhere.

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Subtract one from that – I have enough brain strain thinking on what God has been up to on our side of the beginning.

Yeah. There are some things that cannot be told in human language, and the attempt can lead to madness. I think of it this way: we are like two-dimensional creatures attempting to understand a geometrical form in eight dimensions, and if suddenly we were given the ability to see things in eight dimensions we wouldn’t be able to explain it to anyone – and that’s if the experience didn’t crack our sanity.

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With the caveat that the vowel pointing makes the prefix on that first verb tell us two things: there is no “the” to go with “beginning”, and that it gives the sense of a temporal “in” which in English is best rendered as “when”.
Hebrew can be mind-bending, its grammar doing things that aren’t possible in English.

BTW, your mention of going “out for a beer” took me back to grad school to an evening out at an awesome bar and grill (where I never had to pay as I was the only on willing to forego beer and be designated driver). We had a ‘newbie’ with us who had a bit of a Puritan streak as far as alcohol went, and he rather nervously asked if we thought that Jesus would go to such a place.
Which for the professor with us became a prompt for a Christological monologue about what the Son being Incarnate meant for the Trinity . . . and along the way what it meant to us. After holding forth for about four minutes, he concluded that yes, Jesus would come and have a beer with us – and in fact was doing so, except He didn’t get to actually have a beer.

Not true. For example, in Joshua 17 it is used to refer to the activity of people cutting wood, and in 2 Samuel it is used for preparing food. Indeed it’s not even true of the Pentateuch; in Exodus 34 it is used to refer to what others than Yahweh have done/made.
Yes, it’s used primarily with YHWH, but that makes sense as almost every such use is reflecting back to Genesis 1:1. Yet is is used with people making things, so sorry, but Waltke is incorrect in his claim (and also when he claims it is a telic verb, one that only refers to a completed process; in Joshua and IIRC in Ezekiel it is used as an imperative, which by its very nature refers to something not even begun).

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Yes…I have seen that “the” is [the] in translations of the text…but left it there for readability…and you and Waltke can talk this out…and Wenham will be on Waltke’s side, it seems…The footnotes in the New Oxford Annotated Bible would interest Adam, maybe, since they say that the beginning phrase “In the beginning God created” might be describing what things were like when God created…" that is, “earth as an uninhabitable mass (submerged in water…)” He wanted to know this, after all…what was it like before…?

Westermann sees that whole first sentence as a statement of praise and quotes Gunkel as saying “There is nothing in the cosmogonies of other peoples which can compare to the first sentence of the Bible”

well…dunno about Joshua but that’s that for awhile

OK

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No, a great deal of my belief comes from a referenced study of the bible.

You are trinitarian are you not? If im wrong, prove the trinity to me by showing me the word trinity in the bible.

Of course, God educated Abraham in the ways of faith… that’s the whole idea of calling him out of Ur of the Chaldees…its more than just leading him to a new physical location…surely you understand this widely understood biblical principle?

A great illustration was Christ calling his disciples to “come follow me”. Christ then spent 3.5 years educating them.

Even the apostle Peter tells us, he received revelation directly from the Father in heaven…and we know that would have also included visions.

Abraham was no different to others after him…such as prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel…they all had visions. If you dont believe that is a divine tool for teaching, then the entire Bible is uninspired…(apart from the 10 commandments and the sentence of Babylonian king Belshazzar, because those are the only things in the bible God wrote with his own finger).

Even you, I’m sure believe that God reveals Himself to us in nature, how would you not also believe he can teach Abraham by asking him to move out of a city? BTW, how did Abraham know God wanted him to leave UR? Don’t you wonder how that question might falsify your claim that I’m making an assumption?

You have to stop this straw-plucking habit you have…your own trinitarian belief falsifies your habit of doing that and using it to rebuff sound biblical theology. You must accept that cross-referencing is a valid method of study. I know God educated Abraham because Christ modeled the Father, and the day of Pentecost gave the disciples the Holy Spirit to help teach them as well…these are all direct biblical support for my statement. Im not making this up, you are clearly just not in the habit of studying using biblical cross-referencing…you are looking for the word “trinity” when determining doctrine. You miss so much by doing that.

Btw, the Israelites spent 40 years in the wilderness being educated by God. The Bible clearly illustrates that they had lost their way, their calling i suppose we might say, because of their time in Egypt. Part of the evidence of this was their continued grumbling about wanting to return to slavery when the going got tough in the desert.

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Exodus 33:11

New International Version
The LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. Then Moses would return to the camp,

Genesis 5:24

“Enoch walked with God”

I am just wondering what you think Moses was trying to illustrate to us about a relationship with God when he wrote the above texts? (in light of the 40 years God spent with Israel leading them by a pillar of cloud during the day and pillar of fire by night throughout those years?)

If God was willing to engage with the Apostle John in telling him about the distant future in the book of Revelation, why would God not also have explored the past with Moses? Logic tells us he did do that. The point is, if Moses didn’t record it, then perhaps that past (that relates to this earth) isn’t billions of years old is it.

God told us all about the war in heaven and Lucifers rebellion and fall from grace…that’s clearly prior to Adam and Eve. A direct example of God engaging in pubtalk about the “jerk down the street”…so there’s that.

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Too bad for them, since the passages I indicated completely falsify the claim.

As far as I can see the claim is an attempt to deceive people unable to read Hebrew, one of those things where preconceived theology drives what on sees in the scriptures.

The NOAB is correct; Genesis doesn’t tell us where the material came from, it just presents us with a situation where the t’hom dominated and there was nothing orderly about the Earth.

The question is pointless. If it mattered, we would have been told.

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agree with you on that last thing.

Below from Wikipedia on something else
The Hebrew is as follows:

  • Vocalized: בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ‎
  • Transliterated: Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz.
  1. Bereshit (בְּרֵאשִׁית‎): “In [the] beginning [of something]”. Be is a prepositional prefix, reshit is a noun, “beginning”. The definite article ha (i.e., the Hebrew equivalent of “the”) before reshit is missing, but implied.[1]
  2. bara (בָּרָא‎): “[he] created/creating”. The word is in the masculine singular form, so that “he” is implied; a peculiarity of this verb is that it used only of God.[2]
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I think your original question (way back up the line) was for people’s general impressions of Genesis 1:1 and 1:2…following a discussion you had with your wife while you speculated on what God might have been up to before He began creating.

And the answer you get is that Genesis 1:1, 2 just say that God began to create the universe (heavens and earth) without any real explanation of why, how, whether or not He had spent trillions of years sitting around in the dark eating cake or what-- before doing all this. I am a pretty big believer that if the Bible does not say, then it does not say. The answer will not be found in Sports Illustrated or anywhere else.

The verse in Exodus 33:11 does indeed say that the Lord spoke to Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend.” But then it says in verses 19 and 20 “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name the Lord in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. But, he said, 'you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.:”

Some buddy friend— Moses cannot see God’s face and live. How many friends do you have who will never let you see them? And if you DO happen to see them you die!!

No this is divine condescension when God speaks to Moses this way…but not a casual thing.

I am not being entirely sarcastic here. God speaking to Moses as his Friend was an honor and a mercy that He extended to Moses — despite the fact that Moses was a murderer and that his temper would keep him out of the promised land.

“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God…Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished, he punishes the children and their children for th sins of the fathers in the third and fourth generation” Exodus 34:5-7

This is another topic entirely…and a massive one. Paul, for example, was taken up into the heavens and shown amazing things (see the epistles) but then forbidden to tell anyone about what he had seen. The man wrote a good chunk of the NT but God did not want some things known. Likely the same thing with your question. God does not want to tell us what He was up to, it is none of our business, it may even not make a bit of sense to us if we did know it.

“The secret things belong to the Lord” as it says in Deuteronomy…and that is that. You read Revelation some more. And Ezekiel…and all these passages with God on a throne and His train filling the room…seraphim (I believe) who cover their faces with their wings because He is holy and also superior to them and they cannot look at Him…there are some pretty astounding images of God—so Moses was honored by God to be able to talk with Him “as a friend.”

But God is still God.

There is a lot more. but all for now on that…thunder and lightning here, and no it is not God…well, maybe it is not.

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Why people insist on using the modern Hebrew pronunciation in ancient Hebrew is beyond me; in ancient Hebrew the prefix generally translated “and” was spoken as a “w”, as evidenced by the fact that it was often used as a vowel (with an “o” or “oo” sound), which doesn’t work if it was pronounced as a labial.

It’s only implied if you’re trying to make the Hebrew talk English. The more sensible approach is to ask, “Why no definite article?” which includes “Why did the Masoretes point it to exclude the definite article?”

LOL

It’s still wrong. I left a note to that effect in the Talk section of that article. If no one acts within a few days I’ll edit it myself.

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Logic says . . . why would He do that? What relevance does the past have to the plan of salvation?

It’s not “clearly” anything given that actual scholars disagree.

Besides which, that rebellion and its aftermath are directly related to the spiritual war that God has been engaged in since Babel.

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What does "in the beginning mean, then? Genesis 1:1 and 1:3 declare that God invented or instantiated or created from nothing - all four of time itself, space, matter, and light.

Genesis 1 telescopes Creation into picture form and takes a chapter to do it. To provide the reality of Creation - to the extent that it has revealed itself in the past 250 years - would require a den in your home crammed with myriad PhD theses from most, if not all, of the sciences. Genesis, in one chapter, tells us that God was the uncaused cause behind the Big Bang, then ascribes the Creation of the universe to G*D.
It is theology, not about Creation itself, but about the Creator.

Verse 2 grandfathers in the extant pagan conception of the universe as a timeless and vast body of water. The pagans placed two goddesses and a leviathan in it. At some point in that ageless context Tiamat killed Apsu, then killed the leviathan and split it to create the firmament above and earth below. Genesis corrects those details to show G*D as Creator. This finesses the need for that den full of science.

“Always” is meaningless in the context of “In the beginning” - G*D invented time itself.

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