Hello everyone,
bless you all
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Link gives a 403 error.
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It still doesn’t seem to work.
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An idea based on my own experience: Sharing a link from Google Drive, which you are not trying to do, requires that the file be designated as “Viewable by anyone with the link.”
- That works!
The opening Genesis Creation account is not a parable. It is a battle story in the form of royal chronicle and at the same time is a temple inauguration account – two kinds of literature at once.
I respect your desire to read the text correctly. But that’s not the way I would do it. We know that there are parables in the gospels because Jesus explicitly said that he spoke in parables. But that’s not the case in Genesis 1. Also, taking the meaning of a word in Genesis and saying it has to mean that everywhere else is an arbitrary approach that denies the integrity of the other writings in the Bible.
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If by “a parable” you mean “a text with figurative meaning” than, yes, Genesis 1 is clearly not an objective, factual report. But I’m unconvinced you can approach a human-generated text as if it’s a blueprint for meaning. It’s human communication. There aren’t formulas to unlock meaning. We make guesses about what it was trying to communicate.
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We know Jesus taught using parables. They are either indicated as such in the text or the form of the story tells us it is a parable. Moses also used parables, but you need to prove that Genesis is intended to be a parable. I don’t think that was the intention with the first creation story. You have done a good job examing the trees, but failed to see the forest.
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No. You can’t take a secondary, derived meaning and back-fill into other passages.
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No. The word doesn’t mean firstfruits. It means first. The English translations will use various words to reflect context. “Firstfruits” is one of those words, but the context is very precise. It’s either the first part of a natural harvest, or a description of Jesus’ resurrection (metaphorically the first part of God’s resurrection harvest). Neither of those applies to Genesis 1:1, where the context is time, not a harvest.
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No. Again, you can’t take a derived meaning and backfill with it to cover all uses of a word.
Exactly. Words don’t stand alone, the meaning always depends on context.
As an allegorical interpretation? Sure – go with it; just recognize that you’re doing allegory.
You are proposing a different translation of a single word. But it doesn’t work that way. Genesis 1.1 is a sentence which is part of a larger text. How exactly are you translating the whole sentence? “In the first fruits God created the heavens and the earth.”? What does that even mean?
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As a general run, people ought to be highly suspicious about mystery links posted to forums by persons unknown. It seems not to be a Phishing attempt in this case, but the next one easily could be.
Running a security scan might be a wise idea in any case. 
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I’ve given my reasons why I disagree with your translation. The Bible dictionaries record the core meaning of the opening word as first. First fruits is a secondary meaning and in some dictionaries is bracketed: first-(fruits). In other words that English expression relates to fruit and to harvest contexts. Genesis 1.1 is a very different context, and context matters.
In general, no, I don’t believe the first word of the Bible is a special parable-word that acts as a key for interpreting the rest of scripture. That’s not how literature works.
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No. But when the choice is between a broad range of translations across the centuries, based on a consensus of church scholarship, or a brand new interpretation offered by one individual…
Because that’s not how translation works. Words have a range of meaning, and that range doesn’t always map exactly from one language to another. So context matters. You might just as well argue that the KJV should never have used first fruits because of the way it translated Genesis 1.1. But that would be wrong too. Consistency comes from always using the English word that best matches the Hebrew word(s) in context.
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You wrote:
This approach respects the authority of the text while recognizing its literary form.
But its literary form is not parable.
Nor are you actually treating Genesis 1 as parable, you’re treating it as allegory. And while it wasn’t written as allegory, of the forms we know today that is a decent fit.
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Because nothing in the context suggests such a thing, and the greater context – culture, literature, etc. – points to the meaning “beginning”.
You’ve fallen into the common mistake of thinking that a specific word on one language maps tidily onto a word in another language. That doesn’t even work for such seemingly obvious ones such as “time”, “weather”, “night”, or even colors!
Not in the opening Creation story; he was telling about a mighty accomplishment of a great king while simultaneously telling about a deity Who built His own temple, filled it, and set His own image in it.
It’s a bit of an introduction: it tells Who Yahweh is while telling who humans are.
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To properly illustrate how translation works Venn diagrams are necessary.
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when you see these things