Genesis 1:1-2:3: "In the Beginning..."


Hello, and welcome!

These "footnotes" help explain some of the background to the message given in my Newsletter entitled "A Humanist Looks at the Bible."

This week's lesson: Genesis 1:1-2:3: "In the Beginning..."

For more on this project, visit my "About" page.

Enjoy!



Click a word or phrase to see its explanation.


1:1 In the beginning...: Now, modern Hebrew scholars agree that the words, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void… (verses 1 & 2) are a pretty serious mistranslation. It would be better stated something like, "In the beginning of God's creation of the heaven and the earth, the earth was without form and void…"

Thus, it was not the beginning of everything, as some have asserted; it was the time at which he started this particular creation, and allows for other things to have happened before that. It ain't the Big Bang!



1:1 God: Okay, that explains "the beginning." But what about "God?"

Numerous Hebrew words are translated as the proper name of the deity to whom Christians still look. The King James does a masterful job of keeping these straight by using different English words, as well. The two most common are "God" (Hebrew Elohim) and "Lord" or "Jehovah" (Hebrew Yahweh--sort of). The one used here is Elohim.

Which is a sticky problem, because Elohim is a plural. It is sometimes (rarely) translated "gods" or "angels" in addition to its many singular forms: judge, goddess (!), and so on. It may hark back to an earlier Middle Eastern story in which the world was indeed created by gods, not God; but language is conservative, and changing an attribute like "single" or "plural" may have been easier than changing a name. (Think about this: When was the last time you "dialed" or "hung up" a phone? The process has changed, but the language hangs on.)

But by agreement, Elohim is usually (in 2,591 out of its 2,606 appearances) rendered God-in-the-singular, with or without the capital (but always capitalized when referring to the Hebrew deity--2,346 times). (Never mind that in 1:26 this "singular" God says, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…" and that this happens later on as well.)

True Believers say the use of a plural to name God is a hint at the existence of the Trinity--an idea which, though the three "persons" are mentioned together a number of times in the New Testament, is never explicitly stated in the Bible, and was only formulated as a doctrine by the so-called "church fathers" a century or so later.

The use of Elohim is usually a mark of the "Elohist" or "E" source in the documentary hypothesis discussed on the "About" page. This distinguishes it from "the Lord God" (YHWH) of the "Jahwist" ("J") source used in the creation account of Genesis 2, which we'll discuss next week. But the "Priestly" ("P") source also uses Elohim, and the lofty nature of this passage with its transcendent creator (and ritualistic structure) single this out as being from the P source.



1:2 without form, and void: The Hebrew is beautiful, tohu va bohu, which has been translated "formless and empty"--sort of like the scientific description of Earth's "primordial soup" but on a cosmic scale! But it can't be entirely formless and empty, I guess, because "darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." It sounds like there was some kind of form (a face), and something occupying it. But never mind; just keep repeating, "tohu va bohu, tohu va bohu…"



1:3+ And God said: God creates "by fiat"--no, not by an Italian car (that name is an acronym); it means by "authoritative decree." He spoke, it happened. We get the word "fiat" directly from the Latin for "let it be done." That's power!



1:4+ and God saw that it was good: A half-dozen times God sees that what he has created is "good," and once more--after making us--that something is "very good." What does he mean by that?

Well, it would be pretty simple to think that he was mighty pleased with himself. It's like he did a fist-pump and said, "Nailed it!"
But it's more than that. God is here identifying the creation Let's jump ahead to something in the Psalms (19:1): "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows his handiwork." And in Romans 1:20 Paul writes (paraphrased a little), "From the creation of the world God's invisible attributes are clearly seen, his eternal power and Godhead being understood by the things that are made..."

This verges on pantheism, doesn't it? The idea that reality is identical with divinity? That the universe is the body of God? Or at least panentheism, that the divine not only extends beyond space and time, but also pervades and interpenetrates every part of the universe? I'm quite comfortable with the idea that Nature is "god" (with a small "g"), but to the True Believer this would be heresy!



1:5+ the evening and the morning: It's true that the word "day" can have a number of meanings. There is that portion of a 24-hour day which is light: "I worked all day." There is the 24-hour period itself: "The day I was born was a Sunday." And there is some indeterminate period: "I knew him back in the day." Some Biblical literalists ("True Believers") try to wiggle out of a strict interpretation of God's Six Days being literal 24-hour days, using, for example, 2 Peter 3:8, which states that "one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day," thus claiming that it could be an indeterminate amount of time.

But sorry: evening and morning means each day of creation had to be a 24-hour period. (Starting with the evening, by the way, is still the Jewish way of counting time, sundown to sundown. Who knew when midnight struck before clocks?)



1:26 Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: What does it mean to say that humans were made in God's "image" and "likeness"? Interestingly, this verse is as often as not used to read back into the nature of God the attributes of humans! One such list (from Dr. Scofield--see my About page) is that God is "personal, rational, and moral." That is, he is not an impersonal "force"; he is not without thought, feelings, or willpower; and he is not amoral (like, say, gravity).

I'm reminded of the wisecrack of Montesquieu (1689-1755) that "If triangles had a god, they would give him three sides," or the much earlier one of Xenophanes (died 475 BCE) that "The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub–nosed and black; Thracians that they are pale and red-haired" and elsewhere "If cattle and horses and lions had hands and could use their hands to create works as men do, horses would depict the gods' shapes and make their bodies like those of horses, and cattle like cattle, with the sort of form they themselves have."

Xenophanes goes too far. No serious True Believer has suggested that God literally has two eyes and a nose and so forth; any such language is understood to be metaphorical. (Where metaphor stops and literality begins is a question of some debate!)



1:26 and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and so forth: This alludes to concept that in the Middle Ages was described as the Great Chain of Being. In its simplest form, it puts God at the top; then Angelic beings, Humanity, Animals, Plants, and finally Minerals at the bottom. Thus "Man" has dominion (control) over everything from Humanity down.

The modern concept of a web has replaced much of this thinking.



That's that! Come back next week for more excitement!


Posted by
Labels: , , , ,

No comments:

I'd love to hear your thoughts!