Initial Discussion and Reading

[Bio-logical]

The purpose of this bible study is to read the bible in a logical way as a narrative and as a religious text that has shaped the practices of those religions that follow it.

This is not a "Christian" bible study, although people of all religious backgrounds are welcome to participate. It is meant to be a study of the bible as a text, to better understand the book in a scholarly manner.

The discussion of origin is outside the scope of the study - we will not be debating whether something is the word of man or god.

Discussions regarding interpretations of the text are entirely allowed and encouraged, this is the main purpose of the discussion.

Discussions regarding implications of different interpretations may arise but should be kept from disintegrating into which is the correct interpretation.

We will be reading according to the Scholar's Plan, a narratively chronological plan to read the bible so that the stories in it take place in order. We will have assigned reading and will move on when the discussion has reached a conclusion or when it involves few participants, at which point we will ask that they continue it in a separate thread.

The readings are based on the King James Version of the Bible, links to the reading will be posted before starting a new section, but participants are welcome to read whichever translation they prefer and are encouraged to discuss differences in translation.

As for our first reading:

I feel it is appropriate to read Genesis 1- 5, which is approximately equal to "5 days" of reading in the plan but I think it holds much to discuss without mixing the flood into it yet. The reading includes creation through the fall of man, including Cain and Abel and everything up to the introduction of Noah and before the causes of the flood. Feel free to past anything that strikes you as you read it, no need to wait for a particular date.

[Jayhawker Soule]

As noted elsewhere, the rendering of the opening verses of Genesis found in Judaic texts differ markedly from that found in their Christian counterpart, with the latter phrased in such a way as to proclaim creation ex nihilo. So, for example, in his commentary on the following (JPS) translation of Gen. 1:1-3

• When God began to create the heavens and the earth -- the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water -- God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.

Sarna notes:

• create The Hebrew stem b-r-' is used in the Bible exclusively of divine creativity. It signifies that the product is absolutely novel and unexampled, depends solely on God for its coming into existence, and is beyond the human capacity to reproduce. The verb always refers to the completed product, never to the material of which it is made. As Ibn Ezra observed, bara' does not of itself denote the creation of something out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo). This doctrine seems to have been first articulated in the late Second Temple work, 2 Maccabees: "Look up to heaven and earth and see all that there is therein, and know that God made them out of things that did not exist" (7:28). However, the Genesis narrative does contain intimations of such a concept. Precisely because of the indispensable importance of preexisting matter in the pagan cosmologies, the very absence of such mention here is highly significant. This conclusion is reinforced by the idea of creation by divine fiat without reference to any inert matter being present. Also, the repeated biblical emphasis upon God as the exclusive Creator would seem to rule out the possibility of preexisting matter. Finally, if bara' is used only of God's creation, it must be essentially distinct from human creation. The ultimate distinction would be creatio ex nihilo, which has no human parallel and is thus utterly beyond all human comprehension.

Similarly, Alter renders the text ...

• When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God's breath hovering over the waters, God said, "Let there be light."

while Everett Fox offers ...

• At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth, when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters -- God said: "Let there be light!"

Finally, the Etz Hayim commentary argues ...

• 1. When God began to create The conventional English translation reads: "In the begining God created the heaven and the earth." The translation presented here looks to verse 3 for the completion of the sentence and takes verse 2 to be parenthetical, describing the state of things at the time when God first spoke. Support for understanding the text in this way comes from the second half of 2:4 and of 5:1, both of which refer to Creation and begin with the word "when".
  
  2. unformed and void The Hebrew for this phrase (tohu va-vohu) means "desert waste." The point of the narrative is the idea of order that results from divine intent. There is no suggestion here that God made the world out of nothing, which is a much later conception.

On the other hand, it seems to me that Sarna's suggestion of an intimation of creation ex nihilo is strengthened if we take "heavens and earth" to be a merism signifying 'everything.'

Perhaps Etz Hayim has it right when it notes:

• The first letter of the first word in the Torah, "b'reishit" is the Hebrew letter 'bet'. This prompted the Midrash to suggest that, just as the letter 'bet' in enclosed on three sides but open to the front, we are not to speculate on the origins of God or what may have existed before Creation [Gen. R. 1:10]. The purpose of such a comment is not to limit scientific inquiry into the origins of the universe but to discourage efforts to prove the unprovable. ... The Torah begins with 'bet', second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, to summon us to begin even if we cannot begin at the very beginning.

[Jayhawker Soule]

... with darkness over the surface of the deep

Here Sarna makes what I believe to be the critical point, one that needs to be reiterated throughout the early part of Genesis:

• the deep Hebrew tehom, the cosmic abysmal wateer that enveloped the earth. The text says nothing about how or when this watery mass came into existence. ... In many unrelated mythologies water is the primal element, a notion that most likely arose from its amorphous nature. To the ancients, this characteristic seemed to represent appropriately the state of affairs before chaos was reduced to order and things achieved stable form.
  
  It is instructive that tehom is treated as a Hebrew proper name; like all such names, it never appears with the definite article. Although not feminine in grammatical form, it is frequently employed with a feminine verb or adjective. At times it is personified. ... All these facts suggest that tehom may once have been the name of a mythical being much like the Mesopotamian Tiamat, the female dragonesque personification of the salt-water ocean, representing the aggressive forces of primitive chaos that contended against the god of creativity.
  
  Here in Genesis, tehom is thoroughly demythologized. [emphasis added - JS]

And it is this process of demythologyzing the natural world (the deep, the sun, the moon, etc., etc.) that is so characteristic of Genesis. It is, in fact, the radical introduction of religious naturalism into the pagan world, i.e., the radical denial of animism and the polytheism that evolved from it.

[Bio-logical]

Forgive me for not quoting your post directly, I just want to be sure I am getting what I am supposed to out of it.

What the interpretations you are citing seem to be saying is that Genesis 1:1-3 does not indicate that God created the universe or even the Earth, but instead gave order to it. Am I correct?

I feel, and I know that the majority of Christians agree that the creation in Genesis is allegorical. It is indicated rather directly in the fact that there are 2 different accounts of creation with things being created in order. This, to me, indicates that the author wanted us to know that these are stories meant to convey a history as the people saw it. Even Adam and Eve seem to be representations of human nature and serve to teach a lesson about the consequences of not being happy with what you have. The first sin in the bible is disobedience to God, but it is done so not out of malice but out of our covetous nature. The serpent represents our urges and God represents morality, which are often at odds with each other.

[FinalEnigma]

Forgive me for not quoting your post directly, I just want to be sure I am getting what I am supposed to out of it.

What the interpretations you are citing seem to be saying is that Genesis 1:1-3 does not indicate that God created the universe or even the Earth, but instead gave order to it. Am I correct?

I feel, and I know that the majority of Christians agree that the creation in Genesis is allegorical. It is indicated rather directly in the fact that there are 2 different accounts of creation with things being created in order. This, to me, indicates that the author wanted us to know that these are stories meant to convey a history as the people saw it. Even Adam and Eve seem to be representations of human nature and serve to teach a lesson about the consequences of not being happy with what you have. The first sin in the bible is disobedience to God, but it is done so not out of malice but out of our covetous nature. The serpent represents our urges and God represents morality, which are often at odds with each other.

Would you say that was necessarily covetousness? is covetousness of wisdom a bad thing?(gen 3:6 when the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable as a source of wisdom, she took of its fruit and ate.)

also, just as a note, apparently Eve though they weren't allowed to touch the tree either, that that would also kill them, and according to my study bible, the serpent shook the tree, knocking fruit to the ground, and Eve, seeing him not die from touching it, thought God's whole command wasn't true, so she ate from it, and Adam ate the fruit that Eve gave him because he saw that she hadn't died from eating it.

[Jayhawker Soule]

A couple of points, the first being in response to your reference to "the author."

1. I highly recommend Karel van der Toorn's Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible. One of the many valuable points made is that, when dealing with the works of the ancient Near East, the terms 'book' and 'author' are anachronism, and that what we have, instead, are streams of (initially oral) tradition initially committed to text as an aid to oral tradition. He notes, for example"

   In Israel and Babylonia, texts were an extension, so to speak, of the oral performers. This is not to say that all texts were in origin oral artifacts, but the oral delivery of the texts determined their style, even if they had originated in writing. The traditional texts from Israel and Mesopotamia are full of stylistic devices of oral performance such as rhythm, repetition, stock epithets, standard phrases, and plots consisting of interrelated but relatively independent episodes.

   Sit at the beach of Tel Aviv on one of those days when a crystal blue sky joins a deep blue Mediterranian at the horizon - blue flowing into blue - and recall that the word for heavens is Shamayim, and for water, Mayim. It is mythopoetic narrative and the truely difficult task is not to understand what some author wrote, but what the listener heard. What was the takeaway? The import of this question will become clear when we discuss such things as the Akedah -- the binding of Isaac.
2. As for creatio ex nihilo, I am not suggesting that the text is reducing Elohim to the status of supreme craftsman. But I also do not believe that the cosmology of nascent Israel envisioned creation of something out of nothing. Rather, Elohim generates/populates Cosmos out of Chaos, and does so by command. Rashi writes:

   But if you wish to explain it according to its simple meaning, explain it thus: “At the beginning of the creation of heaven and earth, the earth was astonishing with emptiness, and darkness…and God said, ‘Let there be light.’� But Scripture did not come to teach the sequence of the Creation, ...

3. Finally, I do not believe that Genesis is meant to be taken allegorically. This becomes the preferred viewpoint as science renders the alternative more problematic. But those hearing the Elohim-centered cosmology and etiology were, I am sure, listening to 'extreme folk history' where a day meant a day and an earth of welter and waste with darkness over the face of the deep meant exactly that. In my opinion, the appeal to allegory is too often our attempt to sidestep embarrassment.

[Jayhawker Soule]

also, just as a note, apparently Eve though they weren't allowed to touch the tree either, that that would also kill them, and according to my study bible, the serpent shook the tree, knocking fruit to the ground, and Eve, seeing him not die from touching it, thought God's whole command wasn't true, so she ate from it, and Adam ate the fruit that Eve gave him because he saw that she hadn't died from eating it.

This is one of the reasons I dislike taking on so much of the text at one time. I hope we can return to Genesis 1 before dealing with Eve's actions, but I also hope that when we get to that point, such creative embellishments as we see above are presented with appropriate citation(s) so that we may deal with it appropriately.

[Bio-logical]

also, just as a note, apparently Eve though they weren't allowed to touch the tree either, that that would also kill them, and according to my study bible, the serpent shook the tree, knocking fruit to the ground, and Eve, seeing him not die from touching it, thought God's whole command wasn't true, so she ate from it, and Adam ate the fruit that Eve gave him because he saw that she hadn't died from eating it.

This is one of the reasons I dislike taking on so much of the text at one time. I hope we can return to Genesis 1 before dealing with Eve's actions, but I also hope that when we get to that point, such creative embellishments as we see above are presented with appropriate citation(s) so that we may deal with it appropriately.

Like I said before, the section of Genesis I chose was entirely arbitrary and I am open to suggestions

[Jayhawker Soule]

Again, Sarna on Genesis 1:2 ...

• unformed and void Hebrew tohu va-vohu. [note the poetry - JS] The compound phrase appears again in the Bible in Jeremiah's prophetic vision of the return to primal chaos (Jer. 4:23-27), thus leaving no doubt that the phrase designates the initial chaotic state of the earth. ... The quintessential point of the [Genesis] narrative is the idea of ordering that is the result of divine intent. It is a fundamental biblical teaching that the original, divinely ordained order in the physical world has its counterpart in the divinely ordained universal moral order to which the human race is subject.

And here, too, we have a critical distinction. Elsewhere the Gods are a demanding and troublesome lot driven by petty squabbles and internecine politics. Here is a God interested in ethics, a God who fashions humanity, male and female, in its image -- a God who eschews mighty Ziggurats and, instead, declares the seventh day as holy. The takeaway is dramatic. The ancient listener would have had no trouble believing in Gods and magic and miracles. But to claim that the average nomad possessed/reflected godliness was remarkable. And this point would become even more explicit when they are told: "Speak to the entire congregation of the children of Israel, and say to them, You shall be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy." Not the priests alone, and not the wealthy alone, but the entire congregation! This was a corporate religion that stood at the cutting edge of egalitarian theology.

[FinalEnigma]

also, just as a note, apparently Eve though they weren't allowed to touch the tree either, that that would also kill them, and according to my study bible, the serpent shook the tree, knocking fruit to the ground, and Eve, seeing him not die from touching it, thought God's whole command wasn't true, so she ate from it, and Adam ate the fruit that Eve gave him because he saw that she hadn't died from eating it.

This is one of the reasons I dislike taking on so much of the text at one time. I hope we can return to Genesis 1 before dealing with Eve's actions, but I also hope that when we get to that point, such creative embellishments as we see above are presented with appropriate citation(s) so that we may deal with it appropriately.

May I ask how one would appropriately cite this? Is there some convention that would make it a useful citation?
I honestly don't know. I could cite it like I would normally cite a passage from a book in one of my English papers, but I doubt that would help:
(Levenson, Jon. "Genesis." The Jewish Study Bible. New York: Jewish Publication Society, 2004. 17. Print. )