[This is just not working. I'm trying to take a layman's point of view, but my language just is coming out too formalesque, and I'm ending up trying to be too complete in a single rant.
See https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/bible-uncommentary-titleprefacetoc.html for what I hope is a better try.]
Certain critics of the concepts of God and scripture assert that Moses was trying to use esoteric (pseudo-)knowledge to scare the masses into docility when he gave the camp of Israel the first five books of the Bible. Sometimes I think many Bible scholars, religious philosophers, and such who attempt to explain the Bible might as well be in collusion with such critics, because of the mysteries, riddles, puzzles, and paradoxes without explanation that they like to focus on.
Someone I trust recommends drinking upstream from where the cows gather,
rather than downstream. I think it's a good metaphor.
I blog a bit about what I believe, and the more I do so the less inclined I am
to want to wade into the stream upstream from where others are going to drink. My language is not that great, and I seem to
have a hard time making myself understood. It usually seems like it's
going to be more effective and less of a bother to just let everybody believe what they are willing to believe and learn
things on their own.
But I can also see that there is an influence that poisons the well as close
to the source as it can get, using rumors, popular literature, mixed up education policies, advertising, politicking, just anything in
the general domain of public discourse, to mutate the common use of important words and
concepts used and referenced in the scriptures, so that the scriptures do
become an opaque bundle of esoteric knowledge that can be manipulated into
keeping the masses in line.
Which is my excuse for beginning a lay commentary on the Bible, in spite of
not wanting to muddy the stream. So -- if you read what I write, don't take it for
Gospel truth, just take it as something to maybe think about.
And let's dig in.
In the beginning ...
A lot of religious philosophizing and intellectual heat has been wasted on overloading that prepositional phrase. Was this the ultimate beginning, or was it just the beginning of things relative to this world?
When Moses told this to the people of Israel, what do you think was his intent
for them to understand?
Was he really talking about the beginning, or was he talking about God?
This book is called Genesis. Genesis means origins. Of course he's talking
about the beginning. Except,
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.
Maybe Moses is talking as much about God as about beginnings. Maybe talking about origins is talking about God.
And if he isn't talking strictly about beginnings, maybe there isn't all that much of a case for that phrase requiring the heavens and the earth to have begun at the exact same time -- or, especially, for the creation of the earth to have preceded the heavens, as has often been argued.
Now, if you are not willing to consider, for the sake of argument, that there might
be a core of truth in what the Bible records, you might as well not consider
the Bible at all. And you might as well not be reading this.
But if you are willing to consider the Bible, even if just for the sake of argument, think about Moses standing in front of a crowd of the leaders among the descendants of a guy named Jacob and those who had thrown their lot in with the descendants of Jacob -- the camp of Israel. They have picked up a lot of mistaken ideas and bad habits from living in Egypt, and Moses wants to motivate them to examine what they understand about the world. (Borrowing from, and paraphrasing, passages in, for example, Deuteronomy,)
Hear me, oh Israel! You have worshiped idols in Egypt. You have been distracted by the idols of the people we have wandered among.
In particular, most of the idolatrous religions had their own stories of beginnings to justify worship of their made-up deities, and those origin stories tended to contain details that justified such bad practices as temple prostitution, human sacrifice (including child sacrifice), three-fold or n-fold revenge, power being a privilege instead of a responsibility, ultimate power residing with the priests, etc.
Considering passages from other books of the Bible, I
hear Moses starting like this:
I present unto you that being, entity, and set of principles which actually created all these things whose images you have been prone to worship, and even created the humans who imagined them.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and all that in them is. Any creature, being, entity, force, or principle not capable of doing this is not worthy of your worship; neither is any invention of human imagination.
But what survives in Genesis of the presentation he gave was
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.
What he presents from there does not seem to exactly match our current
scientific theories about the origins of the solar system and the earth, but
there is some correlation.
Go out to your garden and dig up a garden scoop full of earth -- dirt, clods, rocks. This was what was floating out there in space, along with hydrogen and hydrogen compounds at very low temperatures. No form. Not a disk, not even a sphere. Loose dirt, a few larger clods and rocks here and there, frozen water, frozen methane, lots of stuff out there floating in space, just spread way out, thin.The earth was without form, and void, and it was dark everywhere in the depths of space.
We don't know if Moses himself had a word for outer space, much less whether
the people he was talking to would have understood had he used it. In fact, we don't know how
much relevant vocabulary, much less the relevant concepts, the people he was
talking to would have understood. (How much of the physics do you and your
friends really understand, even now?)
Relating deep space to the ocean may have been the best he could do.
... darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the power and influence of God moved things around among the clouds of hydrogen, frozen ammonia, methane, water ice and dust, gathering the stuff in the void into clumps.
So these waters are not the oceans of earth. The oceans come later.
What is this power and influence of God that was moving things around?
If God created the heavens and the world, God-ness includes the physical
principles by which the universe was created. In this case, gravity comes to
mind quickly. (But it would not have been the only thing.)
The etymological root of "hydrogen" is "water" in most languages that I am aware of. I tend to read water here as indicating hydrogen and its compounds, thus ammonia, methane, and so forth.
The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters ...
and hydrogen gas gathered into clumps, with heavier stuff being swing outward
as things tended to form rotating clouds, and the hydrogen gas being the most
prominent component anyway. But the people he was talking to probably wouldn't
have understood that, either. But over aeons of time, hydrogen conglomerated into a huge, huge, huge ball of gas, bigger than hundreds of thousands of earths,
And God said, Let there be light ...
Gravity heated things up, the sun ignited, and we had a basic solar system in the process of forming.
I'm not putting everything in. Read along in your copy, to see if you can tolerate my reasoning.
And God saw the light, that it was good.
Stable hydrogen fusion, but, again, it's hard to believe that many of the people Moses was talking to would have understood the concept of fusion.
And God divided the light from the darkness.
I'm not going to be offended if I'm wrong about this; I'm not sure if it's the correct place to interpolate it. But it seems to me that this is roughly where the earth takes enough shape to have parts of it in shadow. But it would not have been rotating fast at this point, especially not once every 24 hours, or the operation of gravity would have been overcome, and the earth could not have formed. It would have remained stretched out in streams and clumps as another asteroid belt.
So that first day would have been a really, really long day, like millions of years in terms of time as we know it. And much of that time, the earth would have been more like a pile of slush, a huge, mushy comet-like soft mass slowing compacting and slowly hardening.
I'm going to guess that the mass was so mushy it really didn't have a regular period of rotation for the first two days, at bare minimum.
During the second day, the earth's form improves, and the core becomes solid and heats up, and the slush remaining on the surface melts, and we get actual atmosphere of some sort.
Are the waters above the firmament clouds? Or is it a reference to methane boiling away and escaping out into space? I'm not sure. Could be both. Anyway, the sky isn't very clear during the second day.
Interpreting the firmament as the sky is not a great stretch, since the
Bible itself says the firmament is heaven, and sky is among the meanings which the word heaven can be used to indicate.
And it's still a very long day.
On the third day, the continents finally begin to emerge from the waters beneath the firmament. The Bible doesn't seem to mention sea plants specifically, but it's not a huge interpolation to include them in the mention of things we would call plants emerging during the third day.
The fourth day take a little extra interpolation, perhaps, but I think not that much. Oxygen is being released into the atmosphere and the skies are clearing up. The sun and then the stars become distinctly visible in the sky. I'm inclined to think that the moon does not just become visible, but is captured by the earth along in this period.
Perhaps the collision that some scientists theorize is what precipitated the atmosphere clearing up. But if that's the case, the rotation of the earth might have suddenly changed to close to the 24-hour period we now know, and the description of the fifth and sixth days doesn't seem really compatible with that. I'm inclined to lean towards a near-miss, in which the gravitational influence of the moon starts the rotation of the earth gradually speeding up. Or perhaps a multi-body collision that leaves the earth speeding up a bit and the moon in close proximity.
But the moon changes lots of things.
Animal life begins in the oceans and sky during the fifth day, and on land during the sixth day. And humans were made during the sixth day, as well.
The wording of the Bible gets a little weird here, if you insist on certain ideas that are usually accepted among the religious philosophers who deal with the Bible.
In one place, the Bible says
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
That is very definitely the first person plural possessive pronoun that God uses here.
Some have proposed that this is an Old Testament example of members of the Trinity discussing things among themselves, which sort-of contradicts the usual interpretations of the Trinity.
On the other hand, interpretations of the Trinity are usually rather hard to pin down.
Some have proposed that God is speaking to the angels, but that requires the angels to also be "in the image of God", and the Bible doesn't come right out and say that anywhere. Only we humans are created in the image of God.
On the other hand, there are a few instances in the Bible of post-mortal humans acting as angels. And there are also hints of some of the angels being pre-mortal humans. Strong hints.
For example, God asks Job,
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
This is usually considered to be a rhetorical question, with the assumed answer that Job wasn't there, but God continues,
... when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Job would be a son of God, so it sounds more like Job was being reminded that he was, in fact, there, rejoicing with the rest.
Very strong hints.
I understand that one of the names of God used in the Bible, Elohim, is plural in form.
I have reason to lean towards the idea that the Father and the pre-mortal Jesus and a number of pre-mortal humans were there, including Job and you and me, when the creation of our world began. But we, including Jesus, if I understand this right, were pre-mortal, with mortality and resurrection still between us and the state of being which could have included us in the plural reference of "Let us create man in our own image."
It gets a little stranger.
So God created man in his (own) image, in his image created he him, male and female created he them.
If we remember that at the time the Bible was translated to English the masculine pronouns did double duty as neutral pronouns, we can partially untangle that, and, indeed, translations into languages other than English do usually opt for gender neutral grammar when referring to God in this verse. But God is still singular in languages that count nouns in the subject position, and the Bible doubles the emphasis on our being created in his image, and then says male and female.
Is God the Father both male and female?
Thinking about the possibility that God might be hermaphrodite is entertaining, but we would then be in partial images of God as males and females, looking forward to, perhaps after the resurrection, attaining the characteristics of the other sex.
But there would then be no real need of becoming "one flesh" with our spouse. Marriage would not be necessary. We would have lost our best means of understanding how we can be different but still be united in our purposes and plans.
Marriage
Sometimes I have wondered whether the Holy Spirit might be the female component, but that really doesn't fit well.
Another example is that directly following the use of the first-person plural pronoun humans are given "dominion" over the earth and pretty much every thing in it.
Dominion is usually used to indicate the right to determine what happens with no reference to responsibility. But other places do talk about our responsibilities towards those things which we are given dominion over. Dominion is clearly about responsibility, not a right to behave arbitrarily.
Vegetables and fruits are given to be our meat in yet another place, but that's actually fairly straightforward. Meat in this case is
Among many members of my church, the prevailing thought is that, at first, the days of the earth are a thousand years according to our present time, and the first through sixth days were primarily planning rather than implementation.
But in the third day, waters under the heavens are drawn off the surface of
the continents, so the form of the earth must be stable by this point. In
fact, it must be stable enough to allow plant life to develop. Even if God has
seed from some other source and doesn't have to use energy from the storms
that raged over the
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I have no problem with differences of opinion, but seriously abusive comments will get removed when I have time.