Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 2 -- ... And Not a Man to Till the Ground

Title/Preface/TOC

Genesis 1: in the Beginning ...

Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 2

... And Not a Man to Till the Ground

 

Sometimes I think the entire known history of our race on this world is encompassed in the seventh day or phase of the creation, and I think maybe the Gods are now resting and mostly letting their plans play out.

Sometimes. Maybe.

No, there are problems with that idea, especially if taken too literally. But,

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

There are certain senses in which things were not finished, particularly if we insist on wrapping all the stuff in chapter 1 up in six distinct intervals that are all past and gone when we start chapter 2.

Anyway, we can say that the plans and preparation were mostly finished over the course of the six days or phases, and God rested. And God says rest after work is a good thing. 

How long that seventh phase lasted is another question, and whether Adam and Eve were created within the seventh phase or after, is also not really clear.

Oh, and verse 4 contains a case where a day is most definitely not a 24 hour period, or even a single rotation of any planet:

... in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, ...

If that were "in the days" it would fit more easily into an interpretation of six literal days, but day here is singular. 

I have heard that the word for day here in the original language -- or, rather in the language closest to original that we have -- is different from the word for the six days of chapter 1. But we're getting distracted.

(4) These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, (5) And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

Look at verse 5:

And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: ...

Here it is.

What can that be that was done in the six days, but talking about laying out blueprints and such? 

Plans. The first six days were planning sessions.

Maybe. It sort-of works for me, although I do have the impression that primitive plants and animals were physically created during the planning sessions. 

Why?

... and there was not a man to till the ground.

I can interpret this to mean that what grew in chapter 1 was wild, and that the plants in chapter 2 are more of the class of plants that might benefit from human attention. 

Maybe.

I'm not sure what the

... for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, ...

is supposed to indicate. Whether the first six days were all 24 hours or not, it doesn't make sense that there had been no rains of any form during the process. Particularly, when the waters below the firmament were separated from the waters above, precipitation of some sort had to have occurred.

So this is a question I put on the shelf. If the time comes that I need to know, I'm going to trust God to reveal it to me. 

But God causes a mist to cover the ground, ...

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

This verse is one of the places were we can see the usage of the word soul to indicate the spirit and body of man as a single entity.

Dust of the ground?

Carbon, calcium, phosphorus, sulfur, potassium, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, iron, .... These are elements from which our bodies are made. They are also prominent among the elements found in the dust of the earth.

Water, air, and the dust of the earth. What else would we be made of, if we were going to live on the earth and have bodies? Plants grow out of the ground, animals eat the plants and grow bodies out of the elements of the dust of the earth. We eat some of the plants, too, and sometimes we eat some of the animals. Our bodies also are made of the dust of the earth -- indirectly, but of the dust of the ground.

It has been suggested by certain people that the Gods ate of the plants that were growing and then made Adam the same way we make children. I'm not sure I should believe that, but I'm not sure I should not.

We are not Golem, of course.

Consequent to making Adam, they planted a garden of less primitive plants, including plants that produce edible, nutritious, and delicious parts, put Adam in the garden, and let him tend it. Two of the trees mentioned in particular are the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.

Adam was told not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because doing so would make him subject to death.

Certain of our religious philosophers tend to talk about our coming from the presence of God to be born into this world, and they speak as if we were in some state of perfection before we were born. We also talk about the Garden of Eden as if it were a state of perfection.

Some people insist there is only one perfection. Is the absolute perfection of God the only perfection? Or are there lesser perfections?

A number of ancient philosophers and astronomers (astrologers, at the time) perfected a geocentric model that was perfectly self-consistent. It proved not to match the real solar system very well, but it was perfectly self-consistent. 

There are many things that are perfect in a limited sense, even though they do not match reality.

In a similar way, it is my understanding that we each attain a limited, self-consistent sort of perfection as spirits before we are born into this world. It's a limited sort of perfection precisely because we don't have a physical body that can experience the things that would push us past our limits.

As I understand it, the tree of knowledge of good and evil was both a real tree with real fruit, and a physical symbol of what experience does to our limited perfections.

After Adam is placed in the Garden, the less primitive animals are created and brought to Adam, and Adam gives them names. But animals don't provide the company that Adam needs, and the Gods borrow some genetic material from Adam, remove one of the genes (a "rib" in the genetic structure, as I see, but that may be just me) in Adams genetic makeup, and make Eve with the full set of genes. 

This was part of the plan in the first place, but it was also part of what Adam had to experience, perhaps so we could understand how united the spousal union should be -- not just "one flesh", but entirely one in purpose. 

Okay, I really can't justify the genetic theory about the rib business, but I'm pretty sure no one can prove me wrong. Heh.

Again, the record doesn't say how long this takes. For all we know, Adam and Eve might have been in the Garden of Eden for hundreds of millions of years, and plants from the Garden itself might have spread over much of the surface of the earth.

Wait. Can plants spread without dying? Does it matter, outside philosophies derived from the interpretations of mortal humans of limited perfection?

On the other hand, if death truly was not part of the world until after Adam and Eve were sent away from the garden, time in such a world would simply not have the same meaning it has in ours, and attempts to measure geological ages would result in meaningless measurements. 

More to the point, time measured without a mortal observer is still different from time measured by mortals such as we are.

Chapter 2 has something that looks like a discussion of geography, but it does not match any geography I know of, unless, perhaps, the rivers mentioned became oceans after the flood, when the continents split apart. If that were the case, Adam would have been in the Garden of Eden in geologically very ancient times. 

And why not? He was helping with the work of getting the earth ready for us to live on, too.

What Eden was eastward of is something I have not particularly figured out. Perhaps Moses was simply telling the Camp of Israel that Eden was not in Egypt, the wilderness, or Canaan. Someday, I will be able to ask God what the geography of the world before the flood was, and why it mattered to Moses and the people of Israel, and I suppose then I'll get better understanding.

There's something we might miss in the last verse, if we are not too distracted -- Adam and Eve were clearly in a state of innocence. That's important to remember.

Genesis 3:

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Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 1 -- In the Beginning ...

Title/Preface/TOC 

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.

The name of God is sometimes given as (Latinized to) Jehovah -- or Yahweh. It is also sometimes given as Elohim. Elohim is a plural form. So is Adonai, another name for God found in the Bible. These plural forms are usually explained away as royal plural. This explanation is one of those traditions that we might ought to set aside. No. We really need to set it aside.

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.

Again, there are other possible interpretations, and, before I forget, I should again point out that these are my interpretations. I don't have time to touch on all my beliefs in relation to Genesis 1, either, and I shouldn't. My understanding won't save you.

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

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 An earlier version of this can be found at https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/thoughts-on-bible-genesis-1.html.

Bible Uncommentary: Title/Preface/TOC

"Thou shalt not add to, nor take away ..."

 

Bible Uncommentary

Joel Matthew Rees

Copyright 2022 Joel Matthew Rees

Amagasaki, Japan

Preface

Marion G. Romney sometimes used a rather colorful analogy for scripture study, comparing the dependency on scripture commentary and other interpretive aids to drinking downstream from where the cows are wading. 

(He was not the only apostle to use the metaphor of drinking directly from the source, but others usually used less colorful terms. Oh. For what it might or might not be worth, Elder Romney was a cousin of Mitt Romney's father.)

Like Elder Romney, I recommend drinking from the source, that is, getting your knowledge of scripture from scriptures and prayer. It just makes more sense to prioritize what the scriptures themselves say over what mortal, fallible men and women say about them.

That said, my initial (teenage) attempts to read the scriptures mostly burned out in sleepiness and cognitive dissony. (Let me use dissony here. Cognitive dissonance isn't quite explicit enough.)

I had heard at school, and in Sunday School, so many opinions, ideas, ideologies, traditions, and interpretations that conflicted with what I was reading, that reading sometimes gave me a headache, if it didn't put me to sleep first.

Sleep is a useful thing when studying anything. When you're awake, it's easy for your conscious mind to try to force meaning and interpretation into what is familiar and already understood. The sleeping state of the mind is often much more able to deal with conflicts between what you are studying and what you expect. Sometimes you even remember that dream state consciously when you wake up.

Which is to say, not all of the downstream pollution comes from commentary and scripture study guides, etc. Some of the misunderstanding comes from what you think you already understand.

I could compare this to, say, learning in first grade that you can't subtract large numbers from small. It makes sense, really, that you can't take away what isn't there. 

And then another teacher explains about extending the number line in the negative direction from zero, and then another explains about debt and promises to pay back.

And you learn early on that you can't take a square root of a negative number, and then later they mention imaginary numbers -- hopefully in context of a second number line at right angles to the one you've been used to using, so you can see that imaginary numbers are actually real.

Extending your knowledge into the range where the simpler rules you start with change in application can be a source of frustration, dissonance, and just plain getting tired.

I could theorize about education techniques and more careful wording when presenting simpler rules, but language itself is not perfect. Words have meaning, and so does grammar, but the meanings can change in new contexts. And sometimes, ...

When I was in middle school ...

I called it junior high school. In Japanese, it's 中学校 (chūgakkō). 中 (chū) is middle, so that's middle school. But, at the time I'm writing this, most English language materials for Japanese students still translate that to English as junior high school. 

The language changes.

Up until the time I was in middle school, most of the context in which I had heard the word "virgin" used referred to the virgin Mary, and generally in the context that she was pregnant with Jesus -- Christmas, you know. In my mind, virgin was a fancy, maybe polite, way of saying pregnant.

Then, in middle school, a friend and fellow (but disaffected) Christian asked me if I were a virgin. I treated the question with contempt, which I'm afraid led to misunderstanding.

(And that cute cheerleader I had that terrible crush just happened to be there and listening. チェッ。)

Then I went to the trouble of finding out what the word really means, and I was too embarrassed to correct the misunderstanding. I'm afraid I'm going to have to confess that mistake in the resurrection, since I've lost the opportunities to do so in this world.

We aren't perfect. We do not understand things perfectly. Learning comes line-upon-line, precept-upon-precept. And we need to give ourselves and others room to make mistakes -- not just room to make mistakes, but space to correct them.

It took me something like five years of regular scripture study after I had served two years as a missionary to get past the bulk of false assumptions that made it hard to study the scriptures. My first time through each book in our standard works (what some would call our canon) except the Pearl of Great Price was mostly a buzz of concepts that I just missed. Similar to the way listening to a Buddhist priest read お経 (o-kyō) can mostly go in one ear and out the other, the words seemed to go in one eye and out ...

I'm pushing a metaphor too far. But you get the idea. I had to have a fair amount of patience, a certain amount of willingness to let go of things I didn't understand, the first several times through. You might say, a lot of patience. The two years dedicated to missionary service helped establish that habit of patience.

And I still don't expect that I have to understand everything, now. I have a lot of living still to do.

Some people would find fault with me for putting up with the things I don't understand. Some would even call it "submitting to grooming". 

If that's the case, what excuse do we have for any attempts at any sort of education at all? If students shouldn't be patient with the learning processes because it's hard and requires changing the ways we think and do things, what point is there in education, and in life itself? But I don't have time to debate education methods here.

There is a choice to be made, and it may take an entire lifetime to make it:

Do we trust God? Or do we assume that the universe is out to get us?

I personally figure, even if destruction turns out to be our ultimate end, I'm going to look for meaning anyway. And the way I've chosen to look for meaning happens to involve studying the scriptures.

It's gotta be better than just deciding to seek destruction now.

With that apology, I have decided to share some of the things I have learned, and some of the things I have unlearned. 

For the record, Joseph Smith said (and I agree with him), 

We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.

(per the 11th Article of Faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). I'm laying out some of my beliefs. I do not intend to say anyone else must believe the way I believe.

There is a lot to share, so I'm going to take it a chapter at a time. 

(Yeah, this is going to be a huge project.)

Table of Contents

• Genesis
  
  • Ch. 1 (In the Beginning ...)
    
  • Ch. 2 (... And Not a Man to Till the Ground.)
  • Ch. 3 ()
    
• 
  

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False starts on this project:

• https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/in-beginning-gen-01-not-good-start-on.html
• https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/thoughts-on-bible-genesis-1.html 
  

Books of the New Testament -- 新約聖書の各書

For my personal notes, 

and for an eventual blog post on the 

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John word game:

[personal notes => 個人用の覚書]
[eventual => いつかの、結局の（しばらくして投稿する）]

The Books of the New Testament (in the Bible) with some Japanese annotation:
新約聖書の各書、若干の注釈付き〜
[testament => 誓約、特に遺言の誓約]
[bible (Bible, Holy Bible) => book （聖書）]

1. Matthew [マ・シュー] -- The Gospel according to Matthew
   Or, Saint Matthew's account of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.
   [=> マタイによる福音書]
   [gospel (good news) => 福音（良き知らせ）]
   [saint => 聖者、聖なる]
   [account => 記述、報告、談話、説明など]
2. Mark [マーク] -- The Gospel according to Mark
   [=> マルコによる福音書]
3. Luke [ルーク] -- The Gospel according to Luke
   [=> ルカによる福音書]
4. John [ジョン] -- The Gospel according to John
   [=> ヨハネによる福音書]
5. Acts [アックツ] -- The Acts of the Apostles
   [=> 使徒行伝]
   [act => 行動（修業？）]
   [apostle => 使徒（特に、イエス・キリストの証人の役目）]
6. Romans [ロー・マンズ] -- The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans
   [=> ローマ人への手紙]
   [epistle (letter) => 手紙、指示を含む書簡]
7. Corinthians [コ・リン・シ・アンズ]
   [=> コリント人への手紙]
   1. The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians
   2. The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians
8. Galatians [ガ・レー・シャンズ] -- The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians
   [=> ガラテヤ人への手紙]
9. Ephesians [エ・フィー・ジャンズ] -- The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians
   [=> エペソ人への手紙]
10. Philippians [フィ・リ・ピ・アンズ] -- The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Philippians
    [=> ピリピ人への手紙]
11. Colossians [コ・ロー・ジ・アンズ] -- The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Colossians
    [=> コロサイ人への手紙]
12. Thessalonians [テ・セ・ロー・ニ・アンズ]
    [=> テサロニケ人への手紙]
    1. The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Thessalonians
    2. The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Thessalonians
13. Timothy [ティ・モ・シー]
    [=> テモテへの手紙]
    1. The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to Timothy
    2. The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to Timothy
14. Titus [タイ・タス] -- The Epistle of Paul to Titus
    [=> テトスへの手紙]
15. Philemon [フィ・レ・モン] -- The Epistle of Paul to Philemon
    [=> ピレモンへの手紙]
16. Hebrews [ヒー・ブルーズ] -- The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews
    [=> ヘブル人への手紙]
17. James [ジェームズ] -- The General Epistle of James
    [=> ヤコブの手紙（書簡）]
18. Peter [ピー・ター]
    [=> ペテロの手紙]
    1. The First Epistle General of Peter
    2. The Second Epistle General of Peter
19. John [ジョン]
    [=> ヨハネの手紙]
    1. The First Epistle General of John
    2. The Second Epistle General of John
    3. The Third Epistle General of John
20. Jude [ジュード] -- The General Epistle of Jude
    [=> ユダの手紙]
21. Revelation [レ・ヴェ・レー・ション] -- The Revelation of Saint John the Divine
    [=> ヨハネの黙示録]
    [revelation => 啓示、霊感]
    [divine => 神の、天来の、神授の]