Sounds like you're holding on to a receipt. Why ask me or anyone for something you need to prove to yourself. From what I read from your replies no one has a satisfying answer for you. You want proof right? Yet you seek others to provide you with proof in the way of words. People seem to be your crutch. Until you seek a personal relationship with God, people will just keep giving you disappointing answers.
Ex-Christian, sought a personal relationship with God... eventually concluded there is no God. I should have known better than to post this in Theology, Doctrine, and Dogma. All I'll find here is preaching
Well, friend, you have chosen a particularly difficult example to start with, Gen 1.
Don't despair in finding Christianity unpalatable. Perhaps what you are rejecting is not the real thing, but a distorted objectionable version of it. I suggest you study the sayings of Jesus and try to figure him out. Don't worry if you come to different conclusions from his modern day followers, they could be confused.
Gen 1 is a particular text that I think has to be admitted is particularly difficult. It is hardly a test case for how to interpret the bible, perhaps like the law, hard cases make bad law?
Gen 1 seems to be setting the scene for man's place in the world. It seems to be a cosmological text, setting out the framework for man's understanding of life, and its problem(s) and the hope and promise of redemption from such.
So, the method of interpretation of this text is to understand its purpose. What is the point of it being in the book?
It is to lay the groundwork for the story of man.
It is also necessary to consider who the book is being written to. It is being written to some people at a particular time and situation. These people already have their own ideas about the world and man and his place in it and the gods.
So, the proper method of interpretation for this particular text is to make sense of the text in light of its purpose and its audience context. The text should be relevant to its original audience, and the meaning we take from it should be what it should have meant to them.
For this particular text, I think it is quite difficult. Is Moses the author, writing to set the framework for the law of Moses, the Old Covenant, the Torah? So, is his original audience the people of Israel who came out of the Egyptian bondage?
Or is it written by earlier authors for their own audiences, and somehow transmitted down through time to Moses' hands to include as a prequel to his own books of the law?
According to Jude, Enoch, the seventh generation from Adam wrote a prophecy of the coming of the son of Man in his kingdom against the wicked. But then how do we understand Jude's use of the book he quotes from? It doesn't have to be as an assertion that the book he quoted from was actually penned by Enoch rather than by someone not that long before Jude himself wrote, under his name as a literary device.
Some argue that Adam lived seven years in the garden of Eden before he sinned (based on The Life of Adam and Eve), and 930 years in total, so he had plenty of time to discuss what happened and for the oral transmission of the history to be passed down. But I'm a bit sceptical about that theory.
Works such as The Life of Adam and Eve I think might be more useful in understanding how the earlier generations interpreted Gen 1 and other passages. If earlier generations thought they were about topic X and meant Y then it should be considered fairly seriously.
Working on the theory that Gen 1 was written for and to the Israelites redeemed from Egypt as a prequel and as a cosmological framework for the Law of Moses:
1. The text needs to be considered highlighting the similarities and differences from then contemporary creation narratives. If other narratives have, for example, a pantheon of competing gods, it is significant that Gen 1 and subsequent material portrays a single master God, who has a divine counsel of created gods. It portrays an orderliness and a sovereignty to the single master God, the sole creator.
2. The text is about the framework for law. That is, it is about the social institution of the law, and about its purpose to bring man into covenant with God, and into a social system of peace and flourishing and redemption.
For example, the creation account of Gen 1 teaches that man was created to have dominion over the land, the plants and animals. And that he was to fill the earth and subdue it.
This sets the framework for the laws about management of land, about marriage and families. But to get there requires us to traverse quite some ground.
The main point of Gen 1 is that man was created in the image of God. God, in creation, delegated power to the sun, the moon and the stars, to govern the day and the night. And he delegated man to be his representative, and to bear his image, and to govern his creation.
God delegated to the members of his divine counsel, a role in the government of his creation, and he made man to be his representative in the divine counsel.
But you are probably wondering what is the divine counsel. Most Christians have never heard of it and have no idea what it is and disagree that it even exists. So a brief look at that topic.
The divine counsel members are called sons of God. These came down to contaminate mankind through inter-breeding in Gen 6. These sons of God were present when the creation was done, according to Job 38:4-7. Two meetings of the divine counsel are narrated in Job 1:6 and 2:1.
After the flood, the people were divided into 70 nations, and each nation has their own god. This is referred to in Deut 32
When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the borders of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.
From these 70 nations, God called Abraham and his offspring according to election to be a special nation, belonging to God. Out of the nations, Israel was to be God's own, and not under any of the 70.
Psalm 82 discusses God's plan for the human race: to judge the 70 gods, and to bring mankind back under him:
God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgement:
“How long will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked? Selah
Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;
maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.�
They have neither knowledge nor understanding,
they walk about in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
I said, “You are gods,
sons of the Most High, all of you;
nevertheless, like men you shall die,
and fall like any prince.�
Arise, O God, judge the earth;
for you shall inherit all the nations!
So, this is a brief version of the divine counsel and the sons of God and how it fits into the story.
In Gen 2, we have the place of the divine counsel, the garden of Eden, where man was in fellowship with God in the divine counsel. This garden of eden is a temple, and in temples are images, and man is in the image of God, man is God's image. Man was made mortal, from the dust of the earth, and yet he would join the divine counsel in the temple.
Remember that the surrounding cultures had this concept of competition and jostling between the gods in the pantheon. So, the expectation is that the other gods would be jealous of the man. Accordingly, one of the divine beings sought to deceive the man and have him cast out of the divine counsel. The accuser hatches this plan and springs it on the man and out-wits him, and the man is cast out of the divine counsel.
In order to get to this kind of meaning from this text we have to get back into the mind-set and framework of the Ancient Near East context of its original audience. The snake is not a literal snake, he is the manifestation of one of the divine beings. But the divine beings are the powers in charge of nations and therefore political power and the law. As noted in Psalm 82, the gods would be judged for their oppression and injustice. The law of Moses is the vehicle for God's special people, chosen from among the 70 nations and their gods, to get them started on the road to justice and peace and wholeness. It is a prototype and a forerunner of the social, legal and political salvation that was to come to all the nations when the seed of the woman would crush the seed of the serpent, i.e. when the victory of the rebellious and sinful divine beings would be overturned.
So, getting back to how do we interpret Gen 1. It is setting the cosmological framework and the foundation for the law of Moses. This context and framework is necessary for Israel to have her identity and her special covenant relationship with the creator God, and not the other gods.
Let's look at how this context governs the law of Moses:
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
“You shall have no other gods before me. (Ex 20:2-3)
Israel was redeemed from the nations and from Egypt so YHWH would be her God, and that she would have no other gods. This is a taking back of the powers of the gods that had been given the nations when they were scattered over the earth.
This is also clear from this passage:
And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven. But the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own inheritance, as you are this day. (Deut 4:19-20)
Notice that the sun and the moon and the stars of Gen 1 are no longer delegated to be governing Israel, but they still govern 'all the people under the whole heaven', i.e. the rest of the nations. But, for Israel, God has taken them out from under the domination and government of the god of Egypt.
There is a lot of material in Gen 1-3 as well as the rest of the book that is rich and deep and apparently lost on most Christians. The political, social and legal meaning and implication is, as far as I know, almost entirely lost and missed by modern Christians. I think the right way to interpret the bible is in its legal, political and social context. We should not shy away from that because it is not peripheral, it is the subject matter and the focus of the problem and the solution.
