Genesis 1:1-3 (translation, Isaiah, mythology, church)

Posted for your enjoyment, edification, and thoughts. Christians try to mesh these verses with present scientific cosmology in order to give weight to their beliefs - the problem is that these verses do nothing to support their beliefs - if anything it counters it.

Do these verses speak of an absolute beginning or of a beginnig?

It is important to note that the meaning of the terms bara and yom do not affect the interpretation of either. The real issue is the clause structure of these verses. This is the key to why it can be interpreted in two different ways.

A clause may or may not express a complete thought. Verbs might or might not be present – just understood. An Independent clause expresses a complete thought and stands alone. Ex. Bob rode his bike to the store to get milk. A Dependent clause has an incomplete thought. Ex. When Bob rode his bike to the store to get milk… There is a sense of incompleteness and the thought needs to be finished. This clause is dependent on something else to complete it – which will be either before or after the clause.

So the question is – in Genesis 1:1-3 which ones are independent and dependent?

Two Possible Interpretations:

View #1 – Traditional View – Sequential

Verse 1 - In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Verse 2 – The earth was without form and empty; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Verse 3 – Then God said ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.

What is the role of verse 2 – does it proceed from verse 1. Is it a sequence of chronology? Is verse 1 an Independent clause that is followed by a Dependent clause? The second view would say no. The waw disjunctive on the first word of verse 2 does not allow a linear sequence. It is also prefixed to a noun not a verb and therefore there is no possibility of a gap between verses one and two – it cannot be translated as the verb ‘became’. Verse 2 is a relative clause and is a parenthesis.

View #2 – The Hebrew Syntactical View – The Story View

Verse 1 – When God began to create the heavens and the earth.
Verse 2 – The earth was without form and empty; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Verse 3 – Then God said ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.

Notice that verse one has an incomplete thought. This is how the Jewish Publication translates the verse. The vowel system was created in the 8th century C.E. and if you, as a scribe, wanted to show an absolute or ‘The’ beginning you would use the vowel marker Qamatz, which looks like a T under the letter Bet – ba-re****h (in the beginning). But if you wanted to show that it was a beginning you would use a Shva, which looks like - :– be-re****h.

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א

This is how it is found in the Hebrew texts – be-re****h bara. It lacks the definite article. Zero manuscripts have a Qamatz. You can therefore say ‘When God began to create the heavens and the earth’

The 2nd View has two dependent clauses, verses 1 & 2, leading up to the main idea – verse 3. Verses 1 and 2 declare conditions already in existence when God began to create the heavens and the earth. The first creative act is in verse 3 – light. This fits many ANE cosmologies as well as Hewbrew grammar and syntax.

The attempt by Christian apologist to ‘find’ modern cosmology within these verses is found wanting with this information. These verses add nothing to whether there was an absolute beginning or whether something always existed before God started to create the heavens and the earth to be inhabited as Is.45:18 says – ‘For thus says the YHWH who created the heavens, who is God, who formed the earth and made it, who has established it, who did not create it in vain, who formed it to be inhabited: I am YHWH and there is no other.’

All actions have a cause and an effect. But they also have means and material. All purposeful action is also contextualized by unsatisfactory conditions – otherwise why would any person act in the first place – actions are taken in order to change the present state of affairs or conditions. So why would God begin to act when he alone existed? Furthermore, if creation (Matter and Energy) is wholly separate and ontologically different from the Creator by what means and material did he use to bring this state of affairs about? The usual, and completely unsatisfying response, is that God is all powerful and he created everything by his word – ex nihilo – out of nothing.

Ex-nihilo is a Latin phrase meaning out of nothing –which is logically incoherent – ex nihilo nihil fit – out of nothing nothing comes. Creatio ex nihilo means creation out of nothing. This contrasts with creatio ex materia, creation out of matter, and creatio ex deo – creation out of God (out of the being of God). In the ancient near east and Greek mythologies the gods created out of preexisting material called Chaos.

Yet Christians always point out this absurdity when applied to those who believe that the Universe had a beginning without God – something cannot come from nothing. Nothing in the physics world is not nothing in the philosophical world. It is some quantum state or something else - there is somehting there. Sure, Christians invoke some metaphysical cause but not the means or the material. God is supposed to be ontologically separate from all that he created so how and from what did it come about if it cannot come from pre-existing material or God himself? Stating that God is an all-powerful being and that he spoke it all into existence fails miserably.

Why even attempt an apologetic with such an answer?

So not only does creation ex nihilo fail logically and scientifically - it fails scripturally.

Here is an article that I read before posting. Genesis 1.1-3, Hebrew Grammar, and Translation « Ancient Hebrew Grammar

[whoppers]

Excellent post, Shiloh!

I would like to add a few more arguments to your linguistic analysis, if I may.

But first..... I think you're absolutely correct about the bad practice of some Christians attempting to mesh a scientific/mythological monstrosity out of this first Creative Account of the Priestly Writer. Though attempts at re-interpretation of the days of Creation into non-literal days ("God's" days: ages, eons, a thousand years) had been attempted over time by ancient interpreters (to borrow Kugel's term) for their own theological reasons (to reconcile various prophetic statements that had not quite come to fruition; to reconcile Jesus' predictions of the arrival of the Kingdom during the lifetime of the Apostles with the fact that it didn't; etc.), it was especially with the advent of Darwin and Geological findings of the age of the Earth that has prompted the most attempts at re-interpreting the Account into a harmonious scientific revelation.

Laying the Foundation for Modern Science/Scripture Mixtures

Some writers posited that certain things existed prior to the Creation:

Two thousand years before the world was created, He created the Torah, established the Garden of Eden for the righteous, and Gehenna for the wicked.
(Targum Neophyti Genesis 3:24)

These things, along with the Torah, preceded the world by two thousand years.
(Midrash on Psalms, Psalm 90:3)

These imaginative musings were based on that familiar idea that a day to God is a thousand years to man (a most convenient idea for those wishing to meld science and religion together). Though the phrase was clearly meant to be metaphorical, this has never stopped interpreters (ancient and modern) from turning it into a literal description - never bothering to explain how one is able to tell one of God's "days" from man's "days" in Scripture. It comes from the Psalm above mentioned, but perhaps the context (never provided when being used for apologetics) will be of some use:

O Lord, You have been our refuge in every generation.
Before the mountains came into being,
before You brought forth the earth and the world,
from eternity to eternity You are God.

You return man to dust;
You decreed, "Return you mortals!"
For in Your sight a thousand years
are like yesterday that has passed,
like a watch of the night.
You engulf men in sleep;
at daybreak they are like grass that renews itself;
at daybreak it flourishes anew;
by dusk it withers and dries up.
So we are consumed by Your anger,
terror-struck by Your fury.
You have set our iniquities before You,
our hidden sins in the light of Your face,.
All our days pass away in Your wrath;
we spend our years like a sigh.
The span of our life is seventy years,
or, given the strength, eighty years;
but the best of them are trouble and sorrow.
They pass by speedily and we are in darkness.

Who can know Your furious anger?
Your wrath matches the fear of You.
Teach us to count our days rightly,
that we may obtain a wise heart.
(Psalm 90:1-12, NJPS)

A depressing Psalm, and a dangerous practice to create a literal "rule" out of the verse concerning one of "God's days". The overall Psalm seems to bemoan the fleetingness of mortal life in comparison to God's eternal existence (also see Job for other expressions of this same theme), and how even the best years of one's life tend to be filled with misery due to the Wrath of God.

The first two quotations I cited base their reasoning on this Psalm, and on Proverbs 8:30, in which Wisdom (seen as the Torah by the later interpreters), in speaking of Her existence as the first of God's creations, claims:

I was with Him as a confidant,
A source of delight every day, [literally "a day, a day"]
Rejoicing before Him at all times.

So, the inventive interpreters took the "two days" of Proverbs 8:30, read them through the filter of Psalm 90:3 to arrive at "two thousand years" and voila: God hung out with Wisdom and read the Torah for two thousand years prior to Creation.

But I digress - my main point was to show that the modern attempts of "harmonizing" an old Earth with Scripture's literal 6 Days of Creation were based on the work of previous imaginative exegetes. It's nothing new, but it really got a boost from modern science's findings concerning the age of the Earth.

Dependent Clause Wins By a Linguistic Landslide!

Your information on the question of whether the initial phrase in Genesis 1:1 is an independent or dependent claus is excellent, by the way! I fear the importance of such an observation was missed by many people, unfortunately.... Plus - the forum bleeped out some of the Hebrew lol!

In case they missed why the question is so important:
By far, the most popular and dominant model of Creation has been the one later called Creatio Ex Nihilo: Creation Out of Nothing. This was based on reading the initial clause as independent:

"In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth".

End sentence! But, as you pointed out, our better understanding of Hebrew, other cognate languages and other ancient Near Eastern Creation Accounts has given us every good reason to reject Creatio Ex Nihilo and accept the initial clause as dependent:

At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth,
(when the earth was wild and waste,
darkness over the face of Ocean,
rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters) -

God said: Let there be light!

It is after this parenthetical statement that Creation/Separation actually begins. Most modern translations accept this way of translating the initial clause as dependent. But you already pointed this all out beautifully and excellently! What I want to add is some small points, and a reference to Isaiah's statement of pure Monotheism in relation to God's Creation.

The Victory Over Chaos and Enuma Elish's Vote for Depdendent Clause






Chaos. That is what pre-existed God's Creative and Separative Acts. In the ancient Near East Chaos was symbolized by two primary things:

1. The Primeval Waters, Flood or Ocean - frequently personified by a great dragon or sea serpent, and
2. The Barren Desert - frequently personified by a land monster.

Both of these things were incapable of sustaining life, and were seen as great symbols of Evil. Chaos equaled Evil. In Semitic Creation Mythology, a popular story or theme was the fight between the Good Gods of Order and the Evil Gods of Chaos, with the Good Gods eventually triumphing and bringing Order and Creation into what had been essentially non-creation. This myth is found frequently in the Hebrew Bible in various places apart from Genesis. While this was a common myth, the Priestly Writer seems to have borrowed most heavily from the Babylonian version of the myth, but with a twist: he was actively demythologizing the myth. Instead of a great conflict, God merely began to create and separate things - he spoke. The Chaotic Waters, the Great Dragon did not need to be subdued and overcome in the P Writer's version - God was THAT powerful. He was preparing the way for Isaiah's great monotheistic statements.






The Bablyonian Creation Myth was called Enuma Elish, and Biblical scholars have long noted the similarites between the P Account of Creation and it. Heidel gave this by-now classic chart (EE=Enuma Elish; Gen=Genesis):

• 1. • EE: Divine spirit and cosmic matter are coexistant and coeternal.
     • Gen: Divine spirit creates cosmic matter and exists independently of it.
  2. • EE: Primeval chaos; Ti'amat enveloped in darkness.
     • Gen: The earth a desolate waste, with darkness covering the deep (tehom - a cognate of Ti'amat).
  3. • EE: Light emanating from the gods.
     • Gen: Light created.
  4. • EE: The creation of the firmanent.
     • Gen: The creation of the firmanent.
  5. • EE: The creation of dry land.
     • Gen: The creation of dry land.
  6. • EE: The creation of [humankind].
     • Gen: The creation of [humankind].
  7. • EE: The gods rest and celebrate.
     • Gen: God rests and sacrifices the seventh day.

As seen above, Heidel summed up nicely the definite parallels in the two accounts - many more details could be given, but that would detract from and unecessarily lengthen an already long post . Batto, in Slaying The Dragon, makes very persuasive arguments for the primacy of the influence of Enuma Elish on the Priestly Writer.

Ephraim Speiser, in his commentary on Genesis, would take your observations on the first verse of Genesis 1 and further prove it's dependent nature linguistically from the parallels with Enuma Elish. He writes:

A closer examination reveals that vs. 2 is a parenthetic clause: "the earth being then a formless waste...," with the main clause coming in vs. 3. The structure of the whole sentence is thus schematically as follows: "(1) When... (2) - at which time... - (3) then..."

Significantly enough, the analogous account (by J) in [Chapter] 2:4b-7 shows the identical construction, with vss. 5-6 constituting a circumstantial description.

Perhaps more important still, the related, and probably normative, arrangement at the beginning of Enuma Elish exhibits exactly the same kind of structure: dependent temporal clause (lines 1-2); parenthetic clauses (3-8); main clause (9).

Thus grammar, context, and parallels point uniformly in one and the same direction.
(Anchor Bible, "Genesis", p. 12, Doubleday, 1962)

So:

Genesis
Dependant Clause: "At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth,"

Parenthetical Clause: "(when the earth was wild and waste,
darkness over the face of Ocean,
rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters) -"

Main Clause: "God said: Let there be light!"

Enuma Elish
Dependant Clause: "When on high no name was given to heaven,
Nor below was the netherworld called by name,"

Parenthetical Clauses: "(Primeval Apsu was their progenitor,
And matrix-Tiamat was she who bore them all,
They were mingling their waters together,
No cane brake was intertwined nor thicket matted close.
When no gods at all had been brought forth,
None called by names, none destinies ordained,)"

Main clause: "Then were the gods formed within these two."

Speiser sums up the different points in favor of reading vs. 1 of Genesis 1 as a dependent clause, and thus removing the idea of Creatio Ex Nihilo. The quotation by Isaiah would come at a point when such ideas could no longer be countenanced (at least - not by Isaiah), and our ideas of Yahweh as THE God of the Universe come mainly from the writings in the book named after him (though technically, it was written by at least 3 separate people over a very long period).

Anyways - I hope that helps, Shiloh! Excellent thread, by the way - these are the threads I really enjoy reading and exploring, as they can lead to so many surprising and interesting conclusions!

Marduk slays Tiamat, who he later separates to separate the waters below from the waters above:

whoppers - great information!

I particularly liked the translation you gave - whose is it? And the info from Speiser, Batto, and Heidel was great - I do not think I read those guys.

I have been studying this stuff (ANE) since about 2003/4 when Heiser was working on his dissertation. I gravitated toward him becuase I was a Christian at the time. I think he has alot good points but ultimately I disagree that the Israelites 'recieved' and had a 'species specific' GOD (YHWH), as he puts it, from the begining - he takes all the monothesitic passages as incomparable monoltary not strict monotheism - he may be right on that but that would still not remove the clear and obvious redaction and similarity to the polytheistic, henotheistic, and monoltarous aspects (including the Divine Council) of the ANE religions that Israel borrowed and modified from in order to arrive at that position.

Anyway, I am still learning so much - Thanks! I have yet to read any of Mark Smith's books but am about to read 'The Preistly Vision of Gensis 1' something you touched on in your excellent post.

Glad someone responded.

[TRANSPONDER]

I am staggered by your erudition. While Theist attempts to wangle Genesis to adapt it to science (as opposed to trying to discredit science so as to hopefully leave Genesis as the default explanation) look suspect, you do a sterling explanation as to what the Hebrew writers (or adapters, not to say editors) of the OT were actually saying about cosmic origins - as they saw it, of course.

Which is, as i understand it, that God did not (according to Genesis) make the Cosmos, but just the flat earth - disk with the sky - dome over it and God in his penthouse palace on the top of it.

[whoppers]

Originally Posted by Shiloh1

whoppers - great information!

I particularly liked the translation you gave - whose is it? And the info from Speiser, Batto, and Heidel was great - I do not think I read those guys.

I have been studying this stuff (ANE) since about 2003/4 when Heiser was working on his dissertation. I gravitated toward him becuase I was a Christian at the time. I think he has alot good points but ultimately I disagree that the Israelites 'recieved' and had a 'species specific' GOD (YHWH), as he puts it, from the begining - he takes all the monothesitic passages as incomparable monoltary not strict monotheism - he may be right on that but that would still not remove the clear and obvious redaction and similarity to the polytheistic, henotheistic, and monoltarous aspects (including the Divine Council) of the ANE religions that Israel borrowed and modified from in order to arrive at that position.

Anyway, I am still learning so much - Thanks! I have yet to read any of Mark Smith's books but am about to read 'The Preistly Vision of Gensis 1' something you touched on in your excellent post.

Glad someone responded.

Whoops! I usually put the translation in parenthesis - the one time I forget, someone actually wants to know what it is ha ha! The Genesis translation is Everett Fox's translation from The Five Books of Moses, part of the Schocken Bible (incomplete). I think it's an excellent translation (with some good notes), and it's based on the Buber/Rozenweig tradition (in German) of attempting to make a translation with the Hebraic elements and rhythms more apparant. It's especially helpful, as it retains the Divine Names, normal Hebrew names and points out many Hebrew word plays that might go otherwise unnoticed in an English translation. It also connects words that are originally one word in Hebrew like-this. An example:

The human said:

This-time, she-is-it!
Bone from my bones,
flesh from my flesh!
She shall be called Woman/Isha,
for from Man/Ish she was taken!

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife,
and they become one flesh.

Now the two of them, the human and his wife, were nude, yet they were not ashamed.

Now the snake was more shrewd than all the living-things of the field that YHWH, God, had made.
(Genesis 2:23-3:1a, SB)

Sometimes, the wordplay is not expressly given in the Hebrew (as it was in Ish and Isha), but is expressed in English (the humans were "nude" and the snake was "shrewd" represent an assonance). Even the "wild and waste" is an attempt at expressing the Hebrew "tohu wa bohu (or vohu)". Though some of Fox's translations are open to question, overall it's an excellent translation - and it's available (conveniently enough) at most Barnes and Noble stores. I usually list it as SB when I quote it.

I assume that is the translation you were asking about, and not the Enuma Elish - which I see I neglected to mention as well heh heh! The latter is Benjamin R. Foster's translation from Hallo's The Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World, Vol. I (COS) - which is essentially an updated version of ANET, if you're familiar with that.

Speiser's translation and commentary on Genesis (Doubleday, 1962) in the Anchor Bible series (an overall excellent translation and commentary series started by David Noel Freedman and Frank Moore Cross) is still excellent (if dated in some areas), Claus Westermann's Commentaries (and his separately released Introduction) have been the standard to measure up to for years now and Bernard Batto's Slaying the Dragon: Mythmaking in the Biblical Tradition (Westminster/JohnKnox Press, 1992) is an excellent examination of the Creation stories and their Mesopotamian influences as well as the overall Semitic Dragon vs Deity myth (as well as other subjects) in great detail, but highly readable style. Frank Moore Cross (his epic work Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic contains some good information on the Priestly writer, among a collection of other essays on the Divine Names in the Bible, etc. It is this work that introduced the newer view of the Deuteronomist; I still prefer his view of the P Writer in contradiction to Friedman's later view of P as an entirely separate source, in Who Wrote the Bible?), John Day (Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, named after William Albright's influential Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan) and Mark S. Smith (various) are also very good sources for the subject you seem to be interested in. The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1 - I haven't read that one yet, but it's probably very good, especially if it's from Smith. Heidel's works on Gilgamesh and it's Biblical parallels are still classics, as well.

The interesting aspect of the topic to me is the consequences of seeing of that the P Writer was not advocating Creatio Ex Nihilo. It really does drastically change our ideas of divinity, as well as our understanding of how the Biblical writers perceived their god. Just like anything, ideas change, concepts evolve, and conceptions of divinity change. To chime in with you on Heiser, I would add that there is something that is frequently overlooked by many readers of the Bible - and that is the possibly great divide between the writers of the Biblical books and the Israelites themselves. Literacy was not exactly a common thing back then, and only the most literate would be the ones writing, and this would usually limit the writers to state scribes initially. It would have been their job to write down the business deals, the genealogies and the histories - and these histories almost always involved quite a bit of royal spin in favor of the government's status and gods.

A quick example can be found in the exact tale I mentioned in the earlier post: Enuma Elish (When on High). This tale served to legitimate a ruler's right to rule and his city's god: it established the hegemony of Babylon over all of Mesopotamia. In the myth, the older gods of Chaos face off against the newer gods of Order - but they are powerless, at first. The old gods are so powerful, that many of the newer gods side with them in the conflict. A hero god is eventually elected (or volunteers) to defeat the older gods, but only on condition that he be granted the status of divine king of all the gods.

'I sent Anu, he could not confront her,
Nudimmud was afraid and turned back.
Marduk came forward, the sage of the gods, your son,
He has resolved to go against Tiamat.'....


They swarmed together and came.
All the great gods, ordainers of [destinies],
Came before Anshar and were filled with [joy].
One kissed the other in the assembly [ ],
They conversed, sat down at a feast,
On produce of the field they fed, imbided of the vine,
With sweet liquor they made their gullets run,
They felt good from drinking the beer.
Most carefree, their spirits rose,
To Marduk their champion they ordained destiny.

They set out for him a princely dais,
He took his place before his fathers for sovereignity.
"You are the most important among the great gods,
Your destiny is unrivalled, your command is supreme.
O Marduk, you are the most important among the great gods,
Your destiny is unrivalled, your command is supreme!
Henceforth your command cannot be changed,
To raise high, to bring low, this shall be your power..."
(Enuma Elish III:129-IV:8, Trans. Foster, COS)

Nothing settles godly nerves like a nice, strong drink! Anyways - Marduk is victorious. He sends a great wind (frequently compared to the "rushing-spirit/wind of God" in Gen. 1) down Tiamat's throat, and shoots an arrow (the bow and arrow is the typical weapon of the Storm God - compare Baal, Yahweh and Zeus) into her heart. The story goes on, but the point is that Marduk is now the King of the gods, and has edged out the older gods.

Notice how Anu was unable to defeat Tiamat. Anu had been one of the Sumerian "great gods", but we find in this Babylonian story that he is now relegated to lesser status, and the once insignificant god of the city of Babylon - Marduk - becomes the Divine King. Marduk had originally been portrayed as the son of Utu, but the prologue to the Code of Hammurabi gives him a more elevated status:

When lofty Anum, king of the Anunnaki, and Enlil, lord of heaven and earth, the determiner of the destinies of the land, determined for Marduk, the first-born of Enki, the Enlil functions over all mankind, made him great among the Igigi, called Babylon by its exalted name, made it supreme in the world, established for him in its midst an enduring kingship.
(Code of Hammurabi I:1-20)

Now he is the son of Enki (Ea) - the god of Wisdom, and one might recall the line in the presumably later Enuma Elish above that Marduk is now called "the sage of the gods". Going past the prologue to the Code, Enuma Elish established Marduk as the king of all the gods, and Babylon as the city of all cities. This same pattern would be repeated in further recensions of the tale, and is found in other Creation myths. Thorkild Jacobsen, in The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion (1978) gives a fascinating suggestion that the tale also presented the previous political form of the Sumerians (Democracy) as representative of Chaos, while the Babylonian (Monarchic) form was representative of Order. I'm not sure if this can be sustained, but I certainly find it appealing.

The point is that it was common for new gods to become God, essentially, and even in Israelite religion this happens, with Yahweh taking on the aspects of Baal and El eventually, and becoming the great Isaiahic (is that even a word heh heh?) Monotheistic God of the Universe. Such mythic/political forms of power-seizing are not strictly monotheistic, but they certainly are a very rough suggestion of later monotheism. Even the term "monarchy" tends to suggest such a future state. From Heiser's work and others, I'm sure you're aware of how the Divine Council and El/Yahweh's relationship to it are formulated by different Biblical authors. Some have El (God) as the head of the gods, and Yahweh as just one member who was given Israel as his nation to rule, and others portray the seizure of power over the Council by Yahweh and his sentencing them to death. With this latter, we seem to be rapidly approaching the strict monotheism of Isaiah and others.

But now we can get back to the idea of literacy and who had the power to write. Since much of the Bible was the product of royal scribes, or priestly writers working for the official state religion (the Yahweh-Alone party) - we only get a skewed picture of what Israelite religion actually was. Actual Israelite Religion is NOT the religion of the Bible. That is made abundantly clear from the many denunciations of the people's religion by the biblical authors, in those famous passages in which the people "whored themselves after the Baals and the Asherim", etc. Smith has done a remarkable job of tracing how Monotheism rose in Israel (The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheism and the Ugaritic Texts), and William Schiedewind has an excellent book (though I disagree with some of his conclusions) on How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (Cambridge, 2004), which is extremely helpful in discussing literacy in biblical times and, well - exactly what the title implies heh heh! He makes an interesting case for orality over textuality, which I would love to discuss in another thread some day, but his important contribution is to the history of literacy in the Biblical period, and what influences the biblical scribes would have been working under, as well as what they would have known.

And that helps bring us full-circle to what might have influenced the Priestly Writer to expand on the common Semitic motif of a god bringing Order (Good) to Chaos (Evil). Fascinating subject, and I share your interest in it! Hopefully, more people will chime in on the thread, but many of them tend to have an affinity for threads about this-or-that sect doing this-or-that questionable thing, or whether Jesus ever played Golf or why Atheists don't go to church.... Ah well! I certainly am enjoying your posts on the subject, Shiloh!

[whoppers]

Originally Posted by AREQUIPA

I am staggered by your erudition. While Theist attempts to wangle Genesis to adapt it to science (as opposed to trying to discredit science so as to hopefully leave Genesis as the default explanation) look suspect, you do a sterling explanation as to what the Hebrew writers (or adapters, not to say editors) of the OT were actually saying about cosmic origins - as they saw it, of course.

Which is, as i understand it, that God did not (according to Genesis) make the Cosmos, but just the flat earth - disk with the sky - dome over it and God in his penthouse palace on the top of it.

Yes, his post was excellent! It's an important issue, too, and so fundamental to understanding what the writers were trying to say that everyone should be aware of that detail that seems to slip past most people.

I would add to your comment that God did not technically even make the earth - he merely separates the waters to cause the earth (the dry ground, technically) to appear:

God said:
Let the waters under the heavens be gathered to one place,
and let the dry land be seen!
It was so.
God called the dry land: Earth! and the gathering of the waters he called: Seas!
God saw that it was good.
(Genesis 1:9-10, SB)

Even once we get the idea that God brought Order to Chaos (according to the P Writer), we must see that one of his major "creative" actions was to separate and name things, to make clear distinctions between things (a very Priestly concern - determining what categories belong where, and which ones are holy and which ones not, best seen in the Law Codes) - rather than making things out of whole cloth. If you go through the Account, notice which things he actually "creates" and which things he merely "causes to appear". It's very revealing, and further props up the idea that there was pre-existent matter in the eyes of the P Writer.

[TRANSPONDER]

Indeed. I think that the understanding of the separation of the waters and the idea that they were surrounding the snow-globe of the earth with the sluices in the surrounding mountains ready to be opened to let the 'fountains of the deep' flood the earth, is fundamental to the argument of where the flood - waters came from. The simple mechanism of the winds blowing the waters back through the sluices clears the flood - waters.

Thus the fantastic mechanisms of underground seas and descending comets to magic the flood waters out of nowhere are simply efforts to try to make a myth set in a primitive geography fit what we actually know about how the world is and how it works.

[Fullback32]

Great post Shiloh and the follow-on posts have added much to it. The problem with English translations, particularly that abominable King James Version, is they destroy so much of the original meaning and context of those scriptures. Add to that, the lack of cultural context, those scritpures turn into something they were not intended to be.

I've enjoyed reading these posts!

[theflipflop]

Originally Posted by Fullback32

Great post Shiloh and the follow-on posts have added much to it. The problem with English translations, particularly that abominable King James Version, is they destroy so much of the original meaning and context of those scriptures. Add to that, the lack of cultural context, those scritpures turn into something they were not intended to be.

I've enjoyed reading these posts!

Wasn't it Henry Winkler who so famously said: "correct-a-mundo!"

Shiloh, if you are interested in a translation found acceptable by nearly all living Orthodox Jewery (i.e., normative Judaism), you might consider purchasing a Stone Edition Chumash from a judaica store. I'm about the crankiest guy at this site when it comes to Torah mistranslations, and there isn't a single translation I'd argue with in the Stone chumash.

[Eusebius]

Originally Posted by Shiloh1

. . .

Shiloh, what is matter?