Dust comes smaller than any bacteria, small enough that they can ingest it.
No, they’re not, they’re a representation of the abundance God provides when our lives intersect with His will, and the freedom He gives to choose among good things.
Stop trying to make the Bible about science – it’s ludicrous when YEC does it and it’s equally ludicrous when you do it.
That’s among the most bizarre science fiction allegories ever.
The serpent was no single-celled organism! He/it was a nakhash, a “shining one”, a heavenly being who could come into the Garden because the Garden was where heaven and earth overlapped/intersected.
Okay, this science fiction allegory is even sillier.
How about you try to actually study the text instead of making stuff up?
No, it doesn’t, it represents the unity of male and female humans before God.
No, it’s being naked. If it “stands for” anything, it’s openness and trust and innocent confidence in one’s place in God’s provision.
This is the kind of wild fantasy most people only get from drugs, and its guaranteed result will be making people laugh – not because it is amusing, but because it makes the one advocating it look foolish. Most people are smart enough to recognize that the Creation stories aren’t meant to be taken literally, and most people are equally smart enough to know when someone is being just plain silly. YEC is worthy of more respect than this stuff will because at least at first glance the Creation accounts do read like stories (the only difference is that they shred science to force it to fit their modern worldview understanding of the text, while you shred the text to try to force it to fit science – they at least have respect for the text).
Unadulterated speculation: ideas utterly disconnected from reality.
What is there to explain? “They were naked and not ashamed.” One way to explain it would be to say that there is no actual shame in being naked, only in some things you might do when you’re naked, and in the views of some people who have the silly idea that naked = sex.
Worms can’t go through rock. Its bacteria that is critical in soil formation:
No, you need a microscope to see bacteria. You can see dust with the naked eye. Bacteria can break down chemicals in dust, but they don’t have a mouth to eat it.
I like that. I said representation but is not the only thing they represent.
Of course Satan would have us believe that. No, the serpent is not a heavenly being. He transforms himself into an angel of light, not that he is one. He was made of dust.
Gen 3:1 Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.
Made here:
Gen 2:19 Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them.
Serpent does not mean “shining one”. (5175 נָחָשׁ nachash) - a snake (from its hiss) – serpent. From (5172 נָחַשׁ nachash) - to hiss, whisper a, spell, to prognosticate. The “hiss” is the desires our flesh sending signals “whispering” through our nervous system to our brain. Satan is all about satisfying self, selfish desires.
It can represent and can stand for more than one thing.
Wow! I’ve heard people say that being filled with the Holy Spirit is like a drug. I don’t know because I’ve never been on drugs.
It is sad that people laugh at fools. They really do need help… the people laughing that is.
I have complete respect for the text. What it really says is not always pretty though.
Reality being what the world thinks? I have no problem being disconnected from the bondage of popular, prevailing world views. Its the truth that sets us free. I don’t pretend to have all the truth, but what I see makes sense to me. It has truly built my faith! God wrote both the Bible and formed the world with His hands “natural selection”. They don’t contradict.
You need a microscope to see many dust particles; they come in nanometer scale. Nanometer scale particles of clay are important for land reclamation in sandy environments because flooding with water bearing such particles bears those into the sand where they stick to the grains and provide two things: moisture retention and thus a microenvironment where soil bacteria can get to work. Additional flooding with nanoparticles of carbon adds carbon to the clay and enhances the microbiome.
More cunning than – not one, though. A נָּחָשׁ֙ is a “shining one”, which references a heavenly being, not just a serpent. Being more cunning than any beast of the field means he wasn’t just a beast of the field. And being a heavenly being explains why Eve paid any attention in the first place.
According to Job Satan was one of the “sons of God”, i.e. a heavenly being, one of the heavenly council. Any member of that council could qualify as a “shining one” – a נָּחָשׁ֙. The root includes the meaning of shining. This has been known since well before the time of Christ.
What you write has nothing to do with the words of the text.
Reality in this case being the words of the text.
In grad school we called the sort of thing you’re doing to the text “MS”, which stood not for “manuscript” but for " machen Scheiße".
That’s a “tradition of man”; it is not from scripture. God moved men to write, so it’s humans who wrote the Bible.
That’s all well and good. The point is that the larger particles, the ones that can be seen by Moses are still dust particles. They are the smallest from Moses perspective and represent that inspiration that God started creating from something very small. Abiogenesis happened when Adam was formed into the first living organisms, formed from dust, from non-living elementary matter and began tilling the ground and making soil. The soil is made of organic matter, the old dead cells piling up on each other forming the soil. Not a pretty picture but is the reality of dust, the earth, the soil representing mortality as you have done well to point out in previous discussion.
Gen 3:19 In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”
Nothing has really changed here. This is all just from knowing good and evil. Adam didn’t know the difference before (he’s single celled). He lives and dies, multiplies, divides into new cells and whose to say which one is new and which is the original that dies? Adam is the one living, indefinitely, and was placed in the garden to till it.
Emphasis mine:
Gen 2:5 before any plant of the field was in the earth and before any herb of the field had grown. For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; 6 but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground. 7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
Doesn’t say definitively either way.
The truth is that Satan is the flesh, and the flesh speaks its desires to us. The serpent, snake or ameba are a representation, a type, a way of describing him in the story.
Don’t know where you get “shining one” from the definition. But with his shapeshifting ability, yes he appears as an “angel of light” as earlier quoted from Paul. He gives off a false light, kind of like how the moon does not have any light, but just reflects the light of the sun, diming it, distorting it.
No, Job does not definitively say that. Satan came along with the sons of God, not that he was one.
Job 1:6 Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. 7 And the Lord said to Satan, “From where do you come?” So Satan answered the Lord and said, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking back and forth on it.”
“What the heck are you doing here Satan? Where did you come from?” He is from the earth, not a heavenly being. And yet, God used Satan to give a report from the earth.
Job 1:8 Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered My servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil?” 9 So Satan answered the Lord and said, “Does Job fear God for nothing? 10 Have You not made a hedge around him, around his household, and around all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.
God had made a hedge around Job, and he, like Adam was in the garden and worked with his hands.
To me, it seems more like Satan was intruding on God’s council.
It had nothing to do with size, it had to do with death: dust was dead soil, lifeless, and thus indicated mortality. Treating it as bacteria is backwards from the meaning of the text.
The flesh is not a nakhash. The Nakhash of the Garden is not the flesh, it is am agent of heaven casting doubt in what God has said. The entire Garden story revolves about the ability to choose, something your allegory throws out.
The root includes three ‘meanings’ into English: to hiss, to divine (apply wisdom or otherwise search out truth), to shine.
He began as an “angel of light”, to cast first-century usage of “angel” back over a millennium.
He is a heavenly being who roams the Earth. At the point of Job, Satan is not yet the Adversary, only the Questioner/Accuser.
FWIW, some ancient rabbis held that in the Garden, Satan was doing a job for God just as with Job, testing these ‘faithful ones’'. It’s an interesting contrast to the idea that he was jealous of the status of humans and wanted to usurp God’s plans for them.
I have done my own research on this and I will not say the conclusion is 100 % correct I do thing the evidence supports it and I have included it in my new book.
To be brief, Homo sapins diefinitley lived before Adam and Eve were created also as Homo sapiens by God and placed in the Garden of Eden. The Homo sapiens that evolved before to the ones that lived concurrently with Adam were all made in the image of God. This is Chapter 1 in Genesis. Evidence id clear that these people developed language over time depending on their location. Before Adam and Eve they were polytheistic and did not know God. Adam was created (Geneis 2) and knew God because he walked and talked with God in the Garden. The language they used is not known but could have been the language of Mesopotamia which was already in use. God creating Adam had two purposes. The first was God establishing a relationship with man through Adam. Jump ahead to Genesis 4 and we see that when Seth was born Men began to call on the name of the Lord. The second purpose was for Adam to bring sin into the word, i.e., man knowing both good and evil. Before Adam people outside the garden knew gods not the God and man was without the knowledge of sin because they did not know God. (Sin is the commission of evil against God) With Adam God had introduced himself to the world along with the knowledge of sin and the rest of the Bible is His story. It all playsn out over time until God through Jesus made the lasting and final atonement for sin.
I’m familiar with Austriaco’s argument. He leans on the Catechism and ignores Pope Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, which explicitly said the Catholic Church does not forbid the study and acceptance of evolutionary theory in the development of the human body. The only Catholic caveat is the belief in the direct creation of every human soul by God.
My scientific critique of Austriaco:
“Anatomically Modern Human” is now recognized as a misnomer. The first H. sapiens is from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco 300,000 years ago. The body and small face are identical to ours, but the first sapiens braincase is elongated like Neanderthal and all previous hominins. You could call it an “intermediate” fossil.
I owe a debt to Tattersall, who turned me on to this whole subject, but the “Great Leap Forward” is also now recognized as a misnomer. It would be better characterized as the “Great Onramp Forward,” since it took about 70,000 years to from start to finish, and its roots reach back more than a million years.
Unpacking that comment, what Tattersall couldn’t know and Austriaco ignores is the relatively recent discovery of both the Irhoud fossil and the phenomenon of a globular brain. The modern human brain shape emerged about 100,000 years ago and continued evolving into its present form until about 35,000 years ago.
Modern humans have large and globular brains that distinguish them from their extinct Homo relatives. The characteristic globularity develops during a prenatal and early postnatal period of rapid brain growth critical for neural wiring and cognitive development. However, it remains unknown when and how brain globularity evolved and how it relates to evolutionary brain size increase. On the basis of computed tomographic scans and geometric morphometric analyses, we analyzed endocranial casts of Homo sapiens fossils (N = 20) from different time periods. Our data show that, 300,000 years ago, brain size in early H. sapiens already fell within the range of present-day humans. Brain shape, however, evolved gradually within the H. sapiens lineage, reaching present-day human variation between about 100,000 and 35,000 years ago. This process started only after other key features of craniofacial morphology appeared modern and paralleled the emergence of behavioral modernity as seen from the archeological record. Our findings are consistent with important genetic changes affecting early brain development within the H. sapiens lineage since the origin of the species and before the transition to the Later Stone Age and the Upper Paleolithic that mark full behavioral modernity.
No, the evidence doesn’t suggest an archaic and a modern population of H. sapiens lived side-by-side. It suggests we evolved over time, and the capacity for truly symbolic thinking emerged around 100,000 years ago and continued to develop until it reached current capabilities around 35-40,000 years ago.
Language is only part of the picture. The brain and language co-evolved. The globular brain involved changes in the cerebellum, parietal lobes (Broca’s area), and the PFC.
Tattersall is horribly wrong when he says “culture” appeared 100,000 years ago with symbolic behavior. Culture isn’t art or science; culture is merely socially learned behavior (as opposed to instinctual behavior). Many species of animals exhibit cultural behavior. Chimp groups geographically isolated from one another will have different tool-making and communication cultures. That’s just one example.
Chomsky is horribly wrong, which is his habit. He proposed in the '60s that children were born with an inbuilt “universal grammar,” which is how they were able to learn language so quickly. Wittgenstein had disproved that idea more than a decade earlier. (In learning language, we are learning a “form of life.”) Linguistic research since the '60s has buried Chomsky’s universal grammar six feet under, nevertheless he persists …
“Some genetic modification” rewired one individual’s brain and they began to speak. Hmmm. Sounds like a miracle to me. (Wittgenstein disproved this in his “Private Language” argument.) The capacity for speech was present in H. erectus a million years ago. Language evolution isn’t some unsolvable mystery, and language didn’t suddenly appear on the scene in one individual. It evolved from gestures to rudimentary spoken words to proto-language, just as it does in modern children.
Even in the Bible, nakedness is more linked to vulnerability than shame in many instances. Like with the foundling daughter Zion in Ezekiel 16, her nakedness symbolizes her abandonment and need for a protector, not licientiousness or sinfulness. The contrast with her being bathed and clothed is not shameful vs. honorable, it’s rejected and vulnerable vs cared for and honored.
Ezek 16:8 Then I passed by and saw you, and you were indeed old enough for love. So I spread My cloak over you and covered your nakedness. I pledged Myself to you, entered into a covenant with you, and you became Mine, declares the Lord GOD. 9 Then I bathed you with water, rinsed off your blood, and anointed you with oil. 10 I clothed you in embroidered cloth and gave you sandals of fine leather. I wrapped you in fine linen and covered you with silk. 11 I adorned you with jewelry, and I put bracelets on your wrists and a chain around your neck. 12 I put a ring in your nose, earrings on your ears, and a beautiful crown upon your head.
Today the symbol of a covenant marriage is just with a ring on the finger, but here with God’s symbolic marriage to Jerusalem, I get the feeling that it at one time extended far beyond that. It was with the clothes, the fine linen, all the jewelry. It was all a status symbol, that you are loved, well cared for, and you belong to someone.
Today, what do you think when you see clothes put on a dog? You think, Wow! Someone must really love that dog and it is certainly well cared for… spoiled even. If its lost and you had any thought of stealing it, your not going to think you can take better care of it than its original owner. Better to try to find and return it to its owner.
Its not shameful to take your naked dog for a walk… at least not yet.
Its not about the size, but its the starting point. It is only with the initial creation of mankind that dust is mentioned. Dust has to do with mortality, but also just referencing the ground with the creation of other animals provides the same effect, indicating mortality.
The nakhash is a symbol. Satan is not literally a snake, but is a representation of our sinful flesh nature.
Something casting doubt on what God said is not an agent of heaven. There is still the ability to choose to walk the path God puts us on, or get sidetracked by our flesh.
BDB says “practise divination, divine, observe signs”. The way its used in scripture often has to do with false prophecy, witchcraft, etc… To get “shining one” or “heavenly being” from that… well, its not there.
Where does it say that?
Certainly God used Satan.
Being jealous of the status of humans says nothing about Satan ever having any status.
However with Noah, that is shame to th nth dgree so that the two people helping make sure that they do not look at his nakedness. It is not sexual as such, but it is more than vulnerability or need.
Note however that the problem was not being naked in Noah’s case, it is Ham “seeing his nakedness” which has been debated as to what that means, but this article gives some insight as to possibilities. Not sure I agree with all of it, as rather than incest with Noah, I have read that it was incest with Noah’s wife, but it does raise an interesting argument that makes the passage make a little more sense:
Uncovering your fathers nakedness is a euphemism for having sex with his wife. Cainan (very similar name to Cain) who is cursed is the illegitimate child of Ham and his mother. Noah’s Ark was a floating Garden of Eden, a place of protection in the presence of God. There is a tendency for bad things happening after leaving God’s presence. With Cain it was murder and with Ham it was incest.
An ark holds something important in it. The other ark in the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant represented the presence of God. It was placed in the temple, in the inner sanctuary. The veil was torn, the physical temple destroyed by Jesus at the cross. He rebuilt the temple without hands placing it in our hearts so we are the temple of God.
This is certainly one of the more mystifying passages in the text. Since nothing even talks about Canaan actually doing anything, all we have is pure speculation.
One interpretation is that Canaan saw Noah drunk and naked and then ridiculed him to the rest of the family. The reason for the anger and condemnation is the disrespectful attitude toward Noah who had just saved all of their lives. This understanding is far less difficult to believe than a homosexual molestation of an old man (or some other sexual encounter). It may be hard to accept that mere disrespect would be seen as so worthy of condemnation these days but fits well with attitudes of the past. It also goes well with the fact that Noah praised the sons who covered him up in response, respect in response to this ridicule by Canaan.
Maybe I should have said “heavenly agent”, i.e. someone from the heavenly realm. Indeed the serpent’s question could have been checking to make sure Eve understood the instruction that had been given – an odd thought, perhaps, but one proposed by some ancient rabbis.
TO cite just one scholar, Dr. Eitan Barr:
It comes from a three-letter root—nun-chet-shin—which means:
To hiss like a snake, to divine (as in occult practices), and to shine.
Why BDB overlooks this I couldn’t say; Bullinger already made note of it in 1910, so it should have been known to Brown, Driver, and/or Briggs. For that matter, it can be traced back to ancient rabbis; I can’t confirm just how far back but seemingly in second_temple literature the link was made.
Perhaps the BDB three just weren’t aware of what Bullinger was, but that would just mean that once again more recent scholarship has overtaken BDB.
It’s inherent in the Lucifer account, which has been taken to be talking also about Satan for a very long time by both Christians and Jews.
I agree the point of the story is the fall of Canaan which I believe represents the extinction of dinosaurs 65 mya.
According to my timeline, Shem was born 179 mya and represents our common decent with all mammals. The son of Shem, Arphaxad was born 142 mya representing our common decent with marsupials. Canaan may have been born between that timeframe and could represent the common descendent of modern birds with all theropods ( like T-rex) about 160 mya.
The meaning of the name Canaan is “subdued, brought into synchronicity” so this subduing could be the curse and include the extinction of T-rex, who was once the dominant species on earth, and the remanent modern birds have been brought into balance, synced with the rest of modern life.
