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For those who missed Burrawang’s “Farewell”:
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For those who don’t understand his double-posting of the same “Farewell”. He said “Goodbye”, … twice. Hollering at him after he’s gone is odd to say the least.
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Looking into the question of when these were written reveals a complex and interesting story by textual scholars of Genesis (with the rest of the Pentateuch) being composed from a number of sources: J, E, D, and P (Yahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly). No didn’t cover this in Seminary, where we only looked at such textual theories when looking at the New Testament. My OT teacher was a Jewish rabbi whose main interests were the messianic movements and the origins of Hassidic Judaism.
If correct, it means the question of when Genesis was written can have many different answers depending on which source a particular part came from.
No, He doesn’t – if His reference is to human beings then His response is pointless. He is referring to Psalm 82, where Yahweh is in the council of elohim, a term that always refers to heavenly beings, not mortal beings. If you make it about mortal beings the Psalm turns to nonsense when it says “You shall die like men”, something that is neither threat nor judgment if those addressed are men, it is rather a foregone conclusion.
“Sons of God” is the original reading; “sons of Israel” makes no sense for two reasons: Israel didn’t even exist at the time referenced, and the nations were never divided up into just twelve groups.
The term “בְנֵי־הָֽאֱלֹהִים֙" dos not appear there. “Firstborn son” was a legal and theological concept in the ANE; especially pertinent is that the pharaoh was considered the firstborn of Amun-Re. This was a challenge, Yahweh making Israel equal to pharaoh and thus saying essentially that if pharaoh would not honor that then Yahweh would go over his head to Amun-Re and the rest of Egypt’s gods – which He proceeded to do with the plagues.
Again the relevant term is not present. This is merely picking up the same idea as above, a legal and theological status.
Ditto the above.
When you are looking at the meaning of a term, you look for that term, you don’t look for pieces. An actually relevant verse is from Job 2 where the actual same term is used: there it is clear that the “בְנֵי־הָֽאֱלֹהִים֙” are not humans but compose God’s heavenly council/court, with ha-satan among them. Besides that, in Psalm 82 the “בְנֵי־הָֽאֱלֹהִים֙” are defined in the first verse as “the council of the gods”.
In other words you replace the actual Hebrew meanings with meanings more suitable to a materialist outlook – which makes the interpretation void from the start.
It’s called reading in context, in this case the literary and historical context.
Huh? You don’t see how that connects to “the abuses of religion for the purpose of power and manipulation”?
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That’s been pretty much trashed though some cling to it. Its point was correct, though; there are numerous signs of editing and sources, they just don’t break down like “the Rainbow Bible” (so called because it used colors to show the assignments of verses to J,E,D, or P by several prominent scholars, demonstrating how wild disagreement was on the source of the great majority of verses). Genesis clearly has sources and shows signs of editing, including secondary editing, as does Judges (the two I’m most familiar with).
Interestingly, there is a decent argument to be made that parts of Judges (e.g. the victory song in ch. 5) are older than parts of Genesis.
No. I do not conceive of Genesis as being a matter of dogma, because it cannot be.
Some perspective on the opening chapters of Genesis:
Chapter 1, verses 1 and 3, state that G*D created time, space, matter, and light, all at one go. Since this resembles the story told by Creation itself, those two verses are worthy for consideration as fact and history.
Day Three demonstrates Earth as being plucked up from vast deeps.
Consider that Creation includes Earth as a globe with a thin crust of continents, surrounded by films of water (seas).
Day Two placed a forever supply of rain above the vault of the skies while Day Four placed the sun, moon, and stars within the heights of the vault of the skies.
Yet none of the celestial objects suffer water damage when the rain falls past them. Earth orbits the nearest star while our moon orbits us.
In Jesus’ day the concept of rigid knowledge did not exist; when David measured his kingdom GD shamed him. Human knowledge of GD’s world led to distrust of GD. Today science has written the "countless scrolls
Given that the Holy Spirit works to a purpose, ask yourself what the purpose of the opening ten chapters + ten verses happens to be. Science, i.e. fully explained facts, would need countless scrolls filled with complex new words in Hebrew for Genesis to contain fact. Genesis loosely describes GD’s actions. Ancient semi-literate Hebrew survivalists, and young children in Sunday School, easily absorb the material of Genesis as describing G*D as the power to create everything, and find that it is “good” - in human terms, perfect.
So perfect that abiogenesis and evolution are baked into that perfect design. We have a superb working understanding of evolution because we see the series of tiny steps needed for “smooth” evolution. Abiogenesis is a harder puzzle to solve, but considerable progress has been made. Don’t look now, but competition between different forms of cell wall, in partnership with competition between various RNA sequences [[ some had the ability to string together other RNAs from ambient materials ]] led to the emergence of cells with almost rigid walls, filled with RNAs that were exceptionally good at making more RNAs. Cell division was haphazard, i.e. in some circumstances the cell walls would accrete more material thus making the cell itself extend many fragile arms - such that a kinetic encounter with something could shatter one cell into many smaller cells, some with a good starting set of RNAs.
We observe enough of these steps in carefully controlled laboratory setups to be aware of the likeliness that evolution occurred in the process of there being a first cell - evolution came first, then life followed.
In Jesus’ day there was no concept of scientific fact. Lessons were learned via illustrative examples; the lessons on Genesis were that GD Created, not what GD Created. Every one of the ~104 New Testament references to Genesis have a theological point. Genesis is theology. Demanding that Genesis satisfy the way the age of science reads a text is, politely, folly.
As to the flood there is evidence of a series of “perfect storms” that resulted in all of Mesopotamia being covered up to thirty feet deep. Afloat on that vast plain would show no mountains anywhere. The pagans of that time, about 5,000 years ago, had to explain it. Those details are piquant but not meaningful here. In order to reach pagan minds with the theology of a perfect GD it was necessary to avoid distracting them by altering “I know what I learned at my mother’s knee” - the universe being a vast body of ageless water with water above the heights of the heavens - so instead Genesis ignored the material facts to focus on Spiritual Truth. GD created everything, for the specific purpose of having a place for humans to live, such that G*ID as Parent could relate to them.
The short message is this: Genesis was GD revealing Himself to His Children, teaching them about Himself, and teaching them how to live a life that pleases GD.
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