Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 1
In the beginning ...
What beginning?
The beginning of the entire universe, including all the stars in the night sky? I suppose, just from this much, we might think so.
But, let's think for a moment. This is the first chapter of
The First Book of Moses
Called
Genesis
that we are looking at. (That's the title, as given in the Bible.)
Reading along with me will help keep track of what I'm talking about. It'll will also give you a chance to figure out where you might agree with me and where you might not, and why.
For the longest time, I thought "genesis" meant "life". You know, genes, genealogy, ...
Okay, maybe I can't really give a good explanation where that interpretation came from (explain the genesis of my interpretation, hey?). But I had that impression.
All dictionary entries for genesis that I've seen talk about origins. Many talk about "coming into being".
What is the purpose of the book of Genesis?
Near as I can tell from reading the Bible a few times, Moses is trying to explain to the people of the Camp of Israel where they came from. And at least part of the purpose behind that is to try to convince them that the gods of the people in the lands around them were not worth worshiping, any more than the gods of the land they had just left.
Because, you know, it's easier to admire what you can see than what you can't,
and people do like to admire things. I don't think we consider the world they
were living in carefully enough. It was a harsh world, not nearly as much eye
candy as we have in our world. And it's always really tempting to let admiration go beyond admiration as works of art.
So, where they came from.
Not so much where the universe came from, although that also is mentioned, somewhat ambiguously, but where they came from.
The beginning relative to them, and us.
I have to acknowledge, my opinions here are influenced by my having gone several times through the first several chapters of Genesis in parallel with the almost, but not quite identical texts in the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price.
The Pearl of Great Price is one of the standard works of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I also acknowledge that there are people
who raise controversies about it. It is enlightening to me, and that is enough
for me.
So when the text in Genesis says
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
I don't feel any particular need to read that as that it was created all at the same time.
Also, I don't see any reason not to see it as Moses retelling what was shown him, the creation as relevant to him in the world where he was living.
This is about God (and us), not about the universe. It seems to me that Moses is saying
Israel, you have God who created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Why do you need these gods that created nothing, that were instead created by mortal humans no better than yourselves?
As I understand it, Moses himself had seen the creation in vision, and he knew how impressive it was. He was trying to give the people of the Camp something of the vision he had. But the language he had available was just missing vocabulary and phrasing for a lot of important concepts.
It helps to be concrete rather than abstract, so he walked the people through it as best he could, with words and language he thought they could understand.
In the Bible, we don't see it very clearly, but in the Pearl of Great Price,
we see some discussion of the measurement of time in the world where God
resides. I guess Peter does mention this to a certain extent when he says, in 2nd
Peter 3 v. 8,
... one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
I don't think "as a thousand years" must be read as literally "equal to". What we can say is that a day for God, at any rate, is a long time in our reckoning of time.
Moreover, in the first day, the earth itself was without form, and the sun had not yet caught fire. Hard to see the kind of day and night we're familiar with in that kind of environment. It's kind of hard for me to say that first day must be a literal 24 hours or a thousand years, or even any specific time period. And if the first day was not exactly twenty-four hours or exactly one thousand years, what of the next five days?
Words for day are also used in most languages to mean some period of time, rather than some definite
interval. For example, in English, we often say, "in my day" to refer to a
time in the past relevant to ourselves.
With God, all things are possible. The earth and the solar system might have been made in a couple of 24 hour days, and the plants, animals, and man in a few more. Or it might have been several thousand years, six days plus a day of rest according to the planet on which God resides.
Or the earth may have been initially tidally locked to the sun, like the moon is to the
earth, developing an actual rotation period as it developed form, so
that the first day was much longer than the second, and much longer than a thousand years.
Or the six phases of the creation might have taken four billion years, plus or minus, as scientists say
nowadays, and Moses, not having the language to deal with such long intervals
of time, might have just been using night and day as a metaphor for the passage of
time, to delineate the phases of creation.
In the first day or phase, the Spirit of God moved upon the waters.
Waters?
The name of the element hydrogen comes from water in most of our languages. Hydrogen is the most prominent element in universe.
Spirit?
God is the creator of the universe. The laws of physics are God's work. On the one hand, the Spirit of God is metaphor for physical principles like gravity and light. On the other hand, the physical principles are literal expressions of God's personality.
This is something that I have found in scripture. Physical fact often becomes metaphor for physical fact when principles in one context act similarly toprinciples in another, especially when directly connected to them. The Spirit of God communicates with us through our conscience. The Spirit of God communicates with the planets and other celestial bodies through gravity, or, in other words, gravity is one expression of the Spirit of God.
From a different point of view, the initial or pre-existing parameters that physicists speak of in the theory of the big bang creation are the mind of God, and the forces which derive therefrom are the way the Spirit of God works in the natural world.
So gravity and other physical principles work on the clouds of hydrogen mixed with other stuff (including frozen water and methane) and a huge bunch of it coalesces into one locus until gravity heats it enough and
Let there be light.
And finally we have day. Even though the earth is still not very well formed, probably not rotating very fast, there is also night, and one phase is delineated.
Rocks clump together and gravity clumps more of them together, and gases and frozen water are pulled in towards the big clump of rocks and dirt and separates the hydrogen above the firmament of the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen from the ice mixed in with the rocks and dirt.
Firmament?
What was the word for atmosphere back then? Did they have one?
The rocks at the center of the huge clump are heating up, and the ice melts, and water covers the rocks. And in the second day or phase, the waters (hydrogen) under the primitive atmosphere are separated from the waters (hydrogen) above by the primitive atmosphere, by the firmament or sky.
And the primitive atmosphere is very dense, hardly letting light through at all.
Huge clump of dirt. Huge clump of earth. Bigger than the biggest mountain you've seen. Bigger than thousands of mountains. Bigger than Moses could describe in the language he had available to explain it to the members of the camp.
So huge you can't explore the surface of it all in a single day, or a year,
or, really, in a lifetime. Big enough to be so heavy that it holds you to the
surface and makes the surface feel (relatively) flat.
And our pre-mortal spirits were all there watching, as I understand it, helping in various ways.
What could we do as spirits (since we hadn't yet been
given bodies)? I don't know. We witnessed it. As Job notes (jumping way
ahead in the Bible), we rejoiced because we were going to get a world to experience life
in. (At least, when I read God asking Job where he was, I read it as God
reminding Job that he was there, rejoicing, too.)
(And there are verses in the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the
Doctrine and Covenants that seem to be best interpreted as that we were there,
also.)
And time passed and day turned into night and then into day again. And the atmosphere changed in composition, and the land on the surface started emerging from under the seas, and the land (and the ocean) were being biochemically prepared for plant life. As I read it, there was primitive plant life (grass bearing seed, etc.) developing on the land, and therefore, I must assume, in the continental shelf area under the water, by the time the earth rotated again through night and back into day.
Now the content of the atmosphere changed more, becoming closer to the
oxygen/nitrogen combination we know, and the stars became visible in the night
sky, and the sun was visible in the day sky. The other planets in our solar system would be in the
process of formation, and they would become visible, too. And I'm not sure
whether we should understand that the moon was captured during the fourth
phase, or whether it just became visible. I tend to think it was captured
during the fourth phase, further driving the process we would call, in our
modern language, terraforming. But maybe it just became visible.
In the fifth phase, the seas were prepared for animal life, and primitive
animal life began.
In the sixth phase, the earth was further prepared for animal life, and God and all of us were still helping get things prepared.
Because, truly, even 4,000,000,000 years is not enough for life to come out of random reactions unless there is something influencing the randomness, something preventing at least a few of the random reactions from being followed by sequences of reactions that would completely destroy the "successes" to that point.
Besides, without an observer to give meaning to the reactions, there is no
definition of success. Maybe watching actually was helping.
Why do I say it was being prepared? There are some verses in chapter 2 that
talk about everything being created before it was all created. If we
understand the first six phases of creation as preparatory, those verses make more sense.
Some people go as far as to think that the first six days were planning sessions, and the days
and nights mentioned were on the planet where God and we were parked during
the process. If so, I think that planet must have been some distance away, as we
measure distance -- maybe about 8,300 parsecs away in what is normal space and time to us, perhaps brought
effectively closer by means of something like what we call a wormhole. This is well beyond what I have
confidence in asserting, however. I only mention it as another example of a
possible reading of the days and nights of the creation.
And really, this is all quite a bit beyond anything the people of the Camp of Israel could have understood when Moses was trying to explain it. The point that they are supposed to understand is that God was actively involved in the natural processes (and we, with Him).
God could not help but be involved, because God is the source of nature itself. And the naturalness of the processes is not a good reason to abandon the concept that the God of nature was behind it all, and try to worship the works of our own hands.Nature is the expression of God in our universe.
No other God is worthy of our worship but the source of all truth.
And if it is not
true, we have to understand that it is not of God, that it is not God.
In the days of Moses, there were many idols of human invention which people tried to treat as if they were God. In many cases, mortal humans tried to pattern their idols after their understanding and misunderstandings of the real God, but in the end the invented gods are not God.
In the time since then, humans have repeatedly tried to co-opt the real God and dress Him up and remake Him in the image of their limited ideals and philosophies. Same old thing.
Either way there are a lot of false ideas about God in circulation. One of our homework problems while we are here in this life is weeding through the false ideas and setting them aside, and seeking the true understanding of God.
That's part of the reason that God has helped us preserve some of the records left behind by people like Moses who gained a fairly clear understanding of this sort of thing in the past.
In the latter verses of this chapter, God is creating the human race, male and female, and telling them -- us -- that we are to assume responsibility for the earth and the plants and animals on it. (The specific creation of Adam and Eve, the individuals, is described in chapter 2.)
Responsibility.
We have changed the meaning of dominion so that we can try to ignore responsibility and convince ourselves that dominion can be arbitrary -- can allow us to do what we please.
But dominion, in the sense that God gave us dominion, comes with the responsibility to take care of things, along with the requirement that we report to God on our efforts at the end of the day, and at the end of our assignments in mortality, and receive and accept His judgement of what we did with what were were given. (This is also all made clear elsewhere, as are the justice and mercy of God that we can look forward to in the evaluation.)
Dominion is responsibility, not privilege. (Not just privilege? In our present world, it may be better to deny privilege entirely. In a few years, because of changes in the general public dialog, we may need to recognize the privilege aspect again, as part of it, along with the responsibility. So much of communicating correctly depends on context.)
God is creating us, but, again, there are verses in chapter 2 that indicate that chapter 1 is describing some kind of preparatory creation -- including planning, perhaps including giving us our
assignments of what we should do in mortality.
As potential support for the interpretation as six phases in planning, I offer that the last verse of the chapter talks about God seeing that everything was very good. Given that God is not subject to time the way we are as mortals, Moses could be telling us that He was seeing the future relative to us, that His plans would work out very well.
Oh, yeah. He.
He created us in His image. Male and female.
Male and female are also concepts that have been altered in our language; misinterpretations of what it means to be male or female have been woven into our language for millennia, and we have to weed through those, as well.
Until very recently, the neutral gender pronoun in English was formed by putting the masculine pronoun to double use. We have traditionally semantically overloaded the male forms.
The worship of Asherah and other female gods was often associated with a number of idolatrous practices that are best not to follow, and even now it is well to be careful when talking about a female God.
But it would make sense that, if the text says "male and female after the image" of God, it is because there are principles of maleness and femaleness in the principle of Godliness.
Might we need to believe that God the Father is a true hermaphrodite? That was a possibility I considered when I was younger.
I think I prefer to understand that God takes the singular form because neither Father nor Mother are subject to the egoism that would have them competing with each other for superiority and precedence. They would be in such perfect unity that, if one did something, it would be no different than if the other had done it. And it would be such perfect unity that the true worship of the one is identical to the true worship of the other. Thus, one united God.
-- which is quite clearly not the case in the ancient myths about
Asherah and Baal, and their Greek and Roman counterparts, or other
similar religions which claim both male and female gods but continually put them in competition with each other.
Scripture study is about developing your own understanding. It is when we understand the scriptures in our own context that they develop the power to help us, to take us to the next context in our several journeys.
The above is not binding on anyone, and I reserve the right to re-think my understanding. The above ideas should be understood to be personal opinions presented to provoke you to thought and study, and
not considered doctrinal.
Genesis 2 -- ... And Not a Man to Till the Ground
An earlier version of this can be found at https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/thoughts-on-bible-genesis-1.html.
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I have no problem with differences of opinion, but seriously abusive comments will get removed when I have time.