I think you mean, Shakespeare is the first one to suggest the sky is not a firmament… but an expanse of vapors…
I appreciate what you had to say about an aspect based language and imperfects. I speak a language that does this (it is very distantly related to Hebrew!) It takes a lot of getting used to. Even if the story happened a while back, it is told as if it is happening now. Perfects are used for events that are completed within the story framework.
I didn’t quite follow your last two sentences, but I get that we need to step out of our scientific worldview to really understand the world view at the time of Moses. (And the choice of words that they had available to them.)
This is still nonsense, same as the last time you tried to tell us. Please spare us all the sequel. Just a reminder that repeating the same ideas over and over again no matter what the subject, is spam, and will be deleted. We do not need any more information on “change and time are opposite worldviews.”
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Amen and amen. And more amens. Amen.
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Thanks Christy, that is the bit I didn’t get. I didn’t see the previous post.
I agree with godsriddle that predominantly aspect systems are different from predominantly time based systems - but normally in an aspect system, there is still a way to refer to previous time and future time relative to the main events of the narration (even if it is with words like “yesterday”). So the world can’t be neatly divided into two!
I don’t agree with what I think godsriddle is saying, that if an imperfective aspect is used in the original that a similar aspect must be used in the translation. Each grammar has to work within its own rules. But of course extra care needs to be taken to note if something is being lost in translation.
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We let Victor go on and on about his idiosyncratic worldview on this thread: Change and Time in Genesis
He’s proved to be quite impervious to dialogue.
It’s not really in the interest of BioLogos to give any more of a platform than we already have to his ideas.
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Thanks for explaining. And thanks for jumping in as that isn’t really the direction I was hoping the translating Genesis thread would go! I’m pleased with a lot of the responses though.
Victor’s conclusions from the tenses of verbs is a very indirect way to infer much of anything. As every Greek prof will tell you, there isn’t really a whole lot of theology hiding in the aorist verb tense. Hebrew, if anything, is a bit worse than Greek. For one thing, we have shelves full of Greek literature, but in Hebrew we have only the OT. Everything becomes a special case.
But where Victor missed the boat was on the nouns. The nouns are a lot more interesting, for a scientist anyway, than the verbs. Verbs are hard to calibrate, nouns leave artifacts. And the nouns of Genesis are truly astonishing. Finding the meaning of all the nouns in Genesis 1-11 would be a life well-spent.
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Who taught you such a thing? I doubt that you would last 15 minutes with any Rabbi who is fluent in Hebrew.
Even if it were true, it would change virtually nothing.
These aspects of translation have been discussed in many commentaries, and often additional “meaning” is invoked in the process. I have pasted a few comments to illustrate:
1:1. In the beginning. Most of the controversy concerning 1:1 centers around the translation and grammatical import of the first two words in the Hebrew text. The first word (Heb berē˒shīt) is rendered as the above translation. If berē˒shīt is in the absolute state and bara˒ (created) is a finite verb, then the translation is as it has been traditionally rendered, an independent clause: In the beginning God created. This translation is the basis for the view of creatio ex nihilo. If, on the other hand, berē˒shīt is to be understood as being in the construct state, it would be translated as a dependent temporal clause, implying the existence of matter related in verse 2: When God began to create, or In the beginning when God created. Rashi, a well-known Jewish scholar (ca. a.d. 1105), was one of the first to propose the dependent clause translation. There are basically two main differences in interpretation among those who take this stance
KJV Bible commentary. 1997, c1994. Thomas Nelson: Nashville
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I agree about nouns and the aorist, which is not a tense. It literally means without horizons, without any reference to when. Every place in the New Testament when God makes a decision to save someone, the aorist shows up. He chooses, but he does not tell us when he chooses. He had plans to save from the foundation of the world, but the specific point when he chose you for salvation remains ambiguous. Paul said he chose him from his mother’s womb. If Theologians could just focus on those aorist verbs, the theological arguments of both the Calvinists and Arminians would fail.
Genesis 1 uses the noun raqiya nine times, five times on day two and three on day four. The verb form of this word is raqa, to spread out, to stamp out. The noun of the verb to run, is the runner. The noun of the verb to speak is the speaker. The noun of the verb to spread out is the thing that spreads out.
On day two, Elohim continues to command a raqiya to form between the waters above and the waters below. The context shows that the spreading thing is the atmosphere that continued to form between the ice above and the surface waters. The atmosphere was a spreading thing, a raqiya shamayim. The atmosphere, spread out concurrently as the geysers of the deep shot ice clouds into space (See Proverbs 8:28). We can see how this happens on the moon Enceladus as an atmosphere and ice shoots out from geysers.
On day four, God continues to command lights in the spreading place of the plural heavens to give light on the Earth. He continues to set the lights (Sun, Moon and stars) in the spreading place of the plural heavens.
Of course the noun spreading thing is not scientific. So the translators of the Septuagint (who believed that crystalline spheres held up the planets) translated this with the Greek word stereoma. Jews could claim the Bible is scientific because it supports the Greek scientific theories that crystalline spheres rotated around the Earth. The Latin continued the tradition with the word firmamentum. The KJV rendered this as firmament. Today many translations make it the expanse, the vast vacuum of space. They do so because crystalline spheres are no longer scientific. Adjusting the Bible to fit science is goes against the grammar.
Yet the grammatical noun raqiya is supported in the visible history of how billions of galaxies spread out from the unformed matter God created first. Billions of galaxies became spreading things, exactly as Elohim continues to command.
Victor
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This is not how Jewish scholars interpreted and translated the word raqiya. So I don’t know where you get yours … other than from the YEC store down the corner.
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Did you just write what I think you did?
" On day two, Elohim continues to command a raqiya to form between the waters above and the waters below. "
So, how are you justifying this idea of “waters above”? Remember, the word for vapor or humidity is not the word for waters.
I’m absolutely fascinated how deep you can dig your linguistic hole…
It does not say vapors above in Proverbs 8:28. This is a chapter about God’s wisdom in creation and in subsequent history.
The springs of the abyss, the tehom, were strengthened when he made rigid the clouds above. This exactly fits the eon events of the second evening and morning. He commanded a spreading atmosphere to form concurrently as waters were separated above the spreading atmosphere and below the spreading atmosphere.
There are 100 geysers on Enceladus right now today ejecting ice into space and atmospheric gases concurrently.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4231
Europa and Ceres are occasionally observed ejecting ice geysers into space. Even some asteroids have ice rings, probably put there when they were actively ejecting water into space.
Notice that the grammatical text has support in our own solar system. Dr Frank from the U. of Iowa, documented years ago that we get hit by 20 house sized snowballs every minute. See the U of Iowa small comets page.
The grammar of Creation has great support in the visible age of the universe as billions of galaxies spread out from the unformed matter God created first. Hebrews 11:3 tells us that by faith we understand that God passively commanded the plural eons to form as light appeared from things not seen, exactly as we observe in visible cosmic history.
Victor
Victor, do you come to BioLogos with the hope that you can convince people of these notions?
Here is a similar verse from Job; it describes treasuries (i.e. warehouses) of snow and hail in the heavens… waiting for the time to use it during a time of need:
Job 38:18-22
Have you comprehended the breadth of the earth?
Tell Me, if you know all this.
“Where is the way to the dwelling of light?
And darkness, where is its place,
That you may take it to its territory,
That you may know the paths to its home?
Do you know it, because you were born then,
Or because the number of your days is great?
“Have you entered the treasury of snow,
Or have you seen the treasury of hail,
Which I have reserved for the time of trouble,
For the day of battle and war?
You aren’t going to explain away the firmament as a vaporous layer of atmosphere between the ocean and Old Faithful or any other terrestrial geysers .
These descriptions come from a time when people speculated as to how things worked, and what was “Up” there …
No!! People tend to imagine a earth history based on their worldview. I am simply pointing out that the literal text has ample support for us to believe it, if we take it grammatically.
In Job 38, the seas came out of the womb, wrapped in thick clouds, when God laid the foundations of the world.
Then water and gases were ejected from geysers to for three separate layers. Ice clouds around the Earth, air between and waters below the air.
Later, on the third day, the surface waters seeped underground, were gathered into one place, so that the single continent appeared.
A spread out atmosphere, is still called that on day five. The subcrustal seas broke up over a period of 190 days during Noah’s world wide cataclysm.
Have a nice day,
Victor
I agree about the verb tense and aspect markers. I speak an aspect based language and the mother tongue speakers of this language have as much awareness of time as anyone - and the ability to express their thinking in their language. They possibly focus more on the past and less on the future than the average European, but that is not really down to their language - it probably reflects more their social and environmental context.
Would you like to give some examples of the nouns you are thinking of? It sounds interesting!
I’d also like to ask a slightly different question to get this thread back to where I started. I asked how to translate Genesis 1 in the light of BioLogos thinking, but a related question is what people think of the attempts of modern translators in English to do justice to Genesis 1. How do the NIV, NLT, The Message etc. do in your eyes (on Genesis 1)?
Did you eject your own geyser of coffee all over your screen?
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Your question is quite insightful !
Let’s just say that in the midst of my steaming hot geyser, a firmament seemed to form in my room, keeping the ‘waters’ of the coffee separate from the nice carpet on the floor.
Unfortunately, my keyboard took a real beating…
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