"I'm not interpreting it, I'm just reading it!"

Yes, it’s a very methodologically-flawed myth that has become a kind of “tradition” in some American Christian circles in just a few decades. Anybody with some basic linguistics background knows that just because a certain collections of texts (e.g., the Hebrew Old Testament) tends to use a word or phrase in a particular way does NOT mean that there is a rule requiring that alleged restriction.

Of course, that particular alleged rule of Hebrew grammar doesn’t even hold up consistently in the Old Testament itself. (A counter-example comes to mind from the Book of Joel.)

It is also worth mentioning that much of the OT is dealing with the Children of Israel, their kings, and chronologies of events. But in Genesis 1, for example, the context is entirely different. We aren’t looking at the day to day events in the nation of Israel. Indeed, it is not about human events at all. It is about God and his creation. So we would expect some of the words to potentially be used in ways which are different from various other books in the NT. (To give an example in English, I have a shelf of books dealing with Edwardian England, and the word class used in those books almost always refers to social classes. But if I grab one of my biology books, that particular definition of the word class would rarely if ever apply. Instead, class refers to a taxonomic classification of organisms. Context and subject matter can be far more important than some imagined “grammatical rule” created out of thin air to support a theological objective.)

These are topics that tend to raise my blood pressure, so I always have to temper my reactions. I just hate to see misled by poorly-evidenced scholarship.

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