Genesis 1
Commentary
Skeptic's Annotated Bible
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.I've often heard people say things like "God is eternal" or in some way "outside of time." It makes me wonder, what was God doing before this beginning? Playing chess against himself? :) I guess you have to start somewhere. It is also a frequent criticism of cosmology that we can't answer with certainty the question of what happened before the Big Bang (if you subscribe to the ever-expanding version of the theory), or account for where everything started in an expansion/contraction model. But just saying "God did it" is not in itself an explanation, it's just a substitution. Whether the universe is infinite or God is infinite, there is still an explanation that needs to be filled in. In fact it's worse, because with the God hypothesis, you introduce a second, unnecessary question that has to be answered: why did God do it?
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said , Let there be light: and there was light. 4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. 5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.Interesting that we have the division of day and night before we have the sun.
6 And God said , Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. 9 And God said , Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear : and it was so. 10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. 11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. 12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 13 And the evening and the morning were the third day. 14 And God said , Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:Let them be for signs? Is this astrology? Or celestial navigation?
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.I could quibble over the fact that the moon is not really a light source, that it's just reflecting the light from the sun; or that it's also visible during the day; but it probably doesn't matter.
17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. 20 And God said , Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth , which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. 23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. 24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. 25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.I wonder about the use of the plural "our image" here; is there more than one God? Or is this just, as they say, a majestic plural?
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.Wait a minute, I thought that God created Adam from dust and Eve from Adam's rib? Here we are in Genesis 1 and God has just created man, but there's no mention of Adam & Eve? I'm sure it's coming; I'm just surprised to see the creation of man here before the Adam & Eve story.
28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful , and multiply , and replenish the earth, and subdue it : and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 29 And God said , Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.Sounds like God wanted all creatures to be vegetarians.
31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
That's the end of Genesis 1. I could go on about all of the ways that this contradicts what we know from science (age of the earth, dinosaurs and other extinct species, yadda yadda), but I don't want to get into a debunking exercise here; that's not the point. There are other sites that do that well.
But I do have a question for my Christian readers: do you take the information presented here literally or metaphorically? Do you believe that God created the earth in exactly this way, in 6 days (and needed to rest afterwards, even though he's omnipotent)? Or do you see this as some sort of morality tale? If so, what is the lesson of Genesis 1? That God created everything? (And, presumably, that you should accept that without questioning?)
I thought I would go back to beginning and read your articles and see if I could see where you are coming from... To answer your questions, yes I believe that the Earth was built in 6 days and on the 7th God decided to take a break and rest. The purpose of Gen 1 is to describe he beginning and to set forth the concept of faith and believing without seeing. As I follow thorugh your comments - The our images many people that I have read state that this could be the first motion of the Trinity (father son and holy spirit). I have read and believe that Adam was the first male, but Eve was not the first female. eve was the first female that was created from man. Adam was the first man and the one to be chosen to be placed in the Garden, and our first leader. God was afraid or could see that Adam would be seen as a god to the animals (and possibly the other human creations) that he created Eve as Man should not be alone. Creating Eve from Adam created a physical bond between the two and from many translations turned into love at first sight. The first females were created from the dust the same as Adam and we do not hear anything else about the other human creatures created or mentioned in verse 1. I gather they were all destroyed in the great flood. Adam and Eve And the original humans were vegetarians meat comes in later.
ReplyDeleteWelcome back.
ReplyDeleteOkay, helpful to know you take these things literally. I guess my next question would be: how do you reconcile a literal interpretation with scientific observations that show, for example, a very old Earth, the evolution of species, etc?
If I may read ahead a bit, I suppose you would say that this is the foundation of faith. But I have two problems with this. First, I don't think it's a positive trait to just believe what you're told without questioning. Otherwise nobody would ever balance their checkbooks, do scientific research or challenge pedophile priests.
But also, why would God want to create a book that explains how he did everything, but create that "everything" so that careful analysis of it reveals that it wasn't created the way it was described? Then create people with the curiosity and intelligence to study it, leading to the conclusion that the book's description is obviously wrong, and then creating eternal punishment for any who dare to draw the conclusion that the book is wrong? That's just twisted.
The book just can't stand up to a literal reading, and you don't have to go that far to find that out. Day and night only make sense if there's a sun. We know that the age of the Earth is about 4.5 billion years, and that life evolved over a long, long time (not created instantaneously). We know that there were species not mentioned here because the authors were unaware of them (dinosaurs are a notable omission), and later there are references to animals that we know are mythical (e.g., unicorns).