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.
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.
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, 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.
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)?
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.
Mary, Victor,
Victor is playing a bit with the linguistics of Hebrew. Semitic languages have some peculiarities. One is that all the nouns are supposedly derived from verbs. And a second peculiarity is that all the verbs come as 3-letter roots.
So Victor turned my comment out nouns to direct attention to raqiya` which LXX translates stereoma, and Vulgate translates firmamentum, and KJV translates “firmament”. He draws attention to the verbal root “to spread out”, and makes allusion to the current philological thinking that what we call “the heavens” in ESV, are a noun related to the verb “to spread out”, as in beaten bronze. A lot of this support also comes from other Semitic languages such as Arabic.
Now I don’t deny that we can learn a lot from cognate languages. But ask yourself whether the British “public school” has much in common with the American “public school” and you’ll see the problem. Other words you might look up are “squash”, “hood”, “biscuit”. My Austrian colleague was so upset that when he ordered a “pepperoni” pizza, it came with meat! And Arabic isn’t that close to Hebrew, not that “spreading out” actually explains any of the properties described by Genesis 1.
So what do you do when the linguists can’t help you? Victor doesn’t know, because no linguist has the answer. My argument is precisely that. Texts fail you when the continuity of textual tradition-- one bilingual writer translating to the next living language–is broken. We have many untranslated languages because we have no bilingual texts. The Rosetta stone was famous for being bilingual.
I think I have an answer, and it is really simple. Your average 2 year old is monolingual, and needs to learn his mother tongue without being able to use a dictionary. How does he learn new vocabulary? From a picture book. Abstract verbs are a bit tricky, but he’ll be able to learn them after he masters action verbs and nouns.
And Genesis 1 has the best picture book God could make–the universe. We want to know what raqiya` means? We open the universe and take a look.
For details, my book “The Long Ascent” will be out in the Fall.
There are other pitfalls in comparing languages. One language I know has the word “kaw” for ‘milk’. (Spell it out!) That is a total coincidence. Another example: the word “zigzagi” means “motorbike”. You could imagine that the derivation of that is a lot of wobbly drivers! But it actually comes from “Suzuki”! The world is full of explanations that are fun, but not grounded in good research. Your point about looking at the universe to see God’s picture book is backed up in Romans chapters 1-3. Linguistics is great, scientific thinking is great, philosophical thinking is great. But sometimes to hear what God is saying, there is a time to stop thinking so much. I’m all for enjoying the wonder of God’s creation!
I don’t think that translation is the problem. Translate it from the original language into our own language as it is written. I believe that the problem is the literal approach to understanding what it says in English.
I don’t think you would really want a Bible that was translated this way. It would be worse than the ESV mistakes in the article that Christy quoted above. But there is a very real question for translators as to how far to go with making the text clear to modern readers. It is possible to go too far.
It is not possible to understand the book of Genesis, or decipher in any accurate way, shape, form, meaning of what the author is conveying, unless one reads it in a literal way. I believe what you are referring to, is a WOODEN literal interpretation.
Every physicist knows that Gen. 1:3 should be translated as:
Although there would still be controversy as to whether SI or Gaussian units should be used. We Calvinists don’t care, because we argue that no units are “good” units. They’re all bad.
