Or maybe God is the Creator, and we shouldn’t read Genesis too literally?
This isn’t actually news to me, I should begin by saying. Anyone with a gram of knowledge about ancient Hebrew texts shouldn’t be surprised by the news that according to the Book of Genesis, God did not create the waters and the Earth. Or, rather, He might have created them…but the book doesn’t actually tell us whether He did or didn’t. Genesis begins in media res, with the spirit of God floating over the face of the waters.
Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew.
Now, granted, I find this claim to be a bit dubious, not because my faith will be inexorably shattered if the translation of Genesis read in exactly the above-highlighted way, but because I find it hard to believe that a translation of the text that has been broadly accepted by Jews and Christians alike for…well…thousands of years, in many languages other than, but also including, English, is actually wrong. Put more plainly, I find it strains credulity to believe that this one professor is right, and thousands of years of Jewish and Christian scholars who have upheld the traditional translation of the text are wrong.
Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia.
She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara”, which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to create” but to “spatially separate”.
The first sentence should now read “in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth”
According to Judeo-Christian tradition, God created the Earth out of nothing.
Of course, most modern scientific theories about the origin of the Universe teach something similar. But let’s not mention that bit, shall we?
Here’s the thing: Genesis 1:1 isn’t actually the first line of a narrative; it’s actually the book’s title. We give the book the title of “Genesis,” but the original manuscript’s title is…well…a bit more descriptive. The real “first line” of Genesis is Genesis 1:2, more or less, and it’s an in media res beginning: God’s spirit is hovering over the face of the waters of a dark and unformed Earth.
Did God create the waters? It doesn’t say…which to me suggests that the author of the ancient text didn’t consider that to be an important point. God goes on the create everything thereafter, leading up to the creation of man; that’s the main point of the text.
Not that it’s a literal account anyhow, of course! It’s a histographical myth (I use the term in its proper, academic meaning), not a historical discourse chronicling the literal events of the world’s first week. So in a broader sense, it really doesn’t matter whether Genesis says God made the waters and the formless Earth; that sequence of events never transpired!
Of course, Prof van Wolde contradicts herself here:
She said technically “bara” does mean “create” but added: “Something was wrong with the verb.
“God was the subject (God created), followed by two or more objects. Why did God not create just one thing or animal, but always more?”
This is the problem with trying to be smarter than you are, good reader. Or, rather, it’s the problem with trying to take your piece of pet knowledge and turn it into something which is meant to refute established theological wisdom, rather than trying to see if there is already an answer for it within that body of knowledge.
Why indeed did God create not just one thing, “but always more?” Well, it could be that God wasn’t actually creating new things, and that He was merely dividing extant things into new categories. Or it could be that God is love, and that the nature of divine love is outwardly directed, life-giving, and principally ordered toward the creation of new ideas, new things, and new beings.
You know…all those things that the Judeo-Christian God is.
Prof van Wolde’s translation work is novel, though probably not correct. But even if it is correct…so what? Genesis can’t be read literally; it was never meant to be read literally! Granted, there’s no harm in reading it that way, but that was not the Spirit’s intent when He inspired the ancient author(s) to reach for the ink and the parchment.
In the end, whether the water was already there at the beginning of the narrative matters not a whit to me, or to my faith, or to the Church…so long as Christ, the Son of God and Second Person of the Trinity, died and rose again three days later. Genesis is an important text…but not so important as Jesus. And novel interpretations of Genesis are…well…novel…but that’s about it. Insofar as those novel translations do not alter our understanding of the nature of Christ, they are utterly unimportant, except as matters of curiosity.
(hat tip)
