How was the last light not in the firmanents - both of them?
No ”light bearers” are mentioned previous to this verse - ”And God said, Let there be lightbearers in the expanse of heaven to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years”
However previous to the fourth day there have been three days in which the seer saw evening and morning three times. I don’t know how he could have noticed ”evening and morning, one day” (v.5), “evening and morning, a second day” (v.8), and “evening and morning, a third day” without the expanse below and the expanse above alternating in light glow. Do you?
it's a rather standard reading that god provided the light personally. look -- this is not a problem *i* created. it's just what the text says. you seem very eager to change the words on the page fit your ideology. i find that very disrespectful.
Also, when you want to talk about the plain meaning of the text, you should notice the separation of day and night has already been arranged on day # 1: “And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness, And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.” (vs. 4,5) So when on day the fourth God’s action with ” . lightbearers, to separate the day from the night” is a repetition of something He has already accompished on the first Day.
not exactly.
quote:
—, - ’—
- ’—, ——
- —— ——
v'y'as elohim et-shani ha-maorot ha-gadolim,
et-ha-maor ha-gadol l'memashelet ha-yom
et-ha-maor ha-qatan l'memashelet ha-layelah
and-made god (d.o.)-two the-lightsources the-big,
(d.o.)-the-lightsource the-big to-govern the-day
and-(d.o.)-the-lightsource the-small to-govern the-night
and god made the two great lights,
the greater light to rule the day
and the lesser light to rule the night
night and day are already separated -- the lights RULE the night and day. they don't divide it. geuss what the word for "appoint" as in appointing a king, is?
—
humeshal. same root as "govern" above. no suprise there. but pay attention to the
grammar.
— —— (paraphrased)
elohim asah ha-maorot
l'memashelet.
god makes the lights
to rule.
he doesn't make the lights rule. he makes them so that they will rule. if he made the lights rule, it would say:
— — elohim humashel ha-maorot.
god makes-rule the lights.
the first implies creation, the second implies prior existance. and even if i'm wrong, and you CAN use "make to govern" that way, their prior existance is explained in the verses directly preceeding this one.
quote:
—, ‘
v'y'amar elohim yehey maorot b'reqia ha-shamim
and-said god, be lightsources in-firmament the-skies
and god said, let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens
he calls them into existance, and commands them to exist. they do not exist before this point.
The common sense that you apply to the ASAH in preparation of a meal, I apply to ASAH in the fourth day yeilding more clearly lightbearers continuing the separating of Day and Night.
no, you are ignoring the grammar, usage, context and
point of the story.
Elsewhere the Hebrew Scriptures say ”The burden of the word of Jehovah concerning Israel. Thus declares Jehovah, who stretches forth the heavens and lays the foundation of the earth and forms the spirit of man within him” (Zech. 12:1) It is hard to imagine God stretching forth an empty expanse where there is nothing and was nothing. It is easier to imaging God stretching forth a heavens filled with hosts and then laying the foundation of the earth.
read the text. god first makes the heavens to separate the water. then he fills it with the sun, and moon and stars. and anyways, if you take the time and diagram the sentance above, including the stars bit (which i left out) it says "god made... the stars."
The same common sense you apply to ASAH in the preparation of a meal we can apply to Genesis in the preparation of lightbearers in the sky to act as signs for seasons and characterize the night and the day.
yes, let's look at that common sense again.
does the meal exist before you prepare it?
Is it so hard to understand that the prophetic seer did not recognize that the source of the diffuse light was a specific lightbearer - the sun, until the fouth day? Is still then a true statement that on that day God set the sun in the heaven to give light on the earth.
that's not what it says. it says god made the sun, the moon, and the stars. you are trying to twist the words of the bible.
It also not hard to imagine that the Spirit of God directed the prophetic writer to use another word besides BARA for this action, namely ASAH. If the Creator God directs and designs interactions of atom which take millionths of a second why would He be less careful in the communicating of His oracles to humans in human language?
you will have to take a history of the bible class for me to explain this properly. the evidence throughout history has been one of revisions, editting, arbitrary exclusion and inclusion, redaction of independent texts together, "continued revelation" beyond the closing of volumes, translation, re-translations, mis-translations, and the occasional typo. yes, typos. i explained a rather famous one in the last noah's ark thread, "gofer-wood" for "kofer-wood" (pitched-wood).
if god was that careful in the original, he sure hasn't kept up.
Light without lightbearers communicates to me as a general light. That is a kind of general glow from an undetected source.
i explained to you, the connotation of the word
is directed light, from a source. before god collected the light, and separated it from dark, there would have been your diffuse light (niether light nor dark).
I believe that the Spirit of God used precision in the different Hebrew words for a purpose.
you do not have the neccessary knowledge of hebrew to maintain that it is a precise language.
i don't have that knowledge, either, but i know a bit more than you. and my experience has been that it is not all that precise. (especially in spelling)
The words BARA, ASAH, and YATZAR have different shades of meaning.
shades, yes. but they all overlap. just like they do in english.
A certain Rabbi Nachman delcalres that no other word beside BARA in Hebrew would convey calling into being without the aid of pre-existing material. But another Hebrew reader points out that the word is not a verb confined to that meaning only. And ASAH signifies to make, fashion, or prepare out of existing material; as, for instance, to build a ship, erect a house, or prepare a meal.
yes. only heaven, earth, man, and apparently "whales" were "poofed" into existance. and even then the case is questioniable (especially since genesis 2 says man was made out of pre-existing material). the sun and moon were formed -- get this -- out of light.
(from) +
(light) =
(lightsource.)
But I agree with you that its important to know why the earth was found in the state it was which I take to be desolation, ruin, void, empty. The two words used there appear together in two other instances in Scripture which are associated with divine judgment and overthrow. The details of which in the Genesis case will probably be flagged as off topic.
you're missing the logic. destruction is creation, backwards. it's god reverting his creation to the state which it was before he created anything. he does this with noah, and there are other instances where it phrases destruction as un-creation. the concept and
importance of the reference depends on you understanding that god is returning his creation to its null, chaotic, and un-formed pre-creation state. they are not words for "destroy." they are words for
before creation. isaiah's reference, or anyone else's usage all refer to genesis 1:2,
NOT vice versa.
if we make it so that god simply destroyed a prior creation in genesis 1:2, we lose the concept of un-creation. god is just destroying stuff, and there is no symmetry. hebrew prophets
love symmetry.
I think that the Bible is God communicating through man’s language concerning Himself and divine purpose. I think He did so in Genesis in a way which could reach people down through different millenia and of different cultures. I think He foreknew everything of the ages of different cultures and languages which would develop on earth. And I think He spoke in a way to convey the essentials of His nature and activities to the maximum amount of people.
then why do you insist on mangling and misinterpretting the hebrew? evidently, god wasn't very good at making his text understandable, if you feel the need to completely override the plain meaning of the text.
But I can see an all powerful God supervising the writing of His prophet in admittedly a mysterious way, so that the words used are to convey shades of different meanings He wants to convey. This is part of the believer’s understanding of the divine inspiration of the Scriptures.
obviously not universally agreed upon, though.
Demons are the dissembodied spirits of some form of pre-Adamic intelligent creatures. They lost their physical bodies. And details are probably off topic in this discussion. Angels are of the good sort and the bad sort. It is possible that the infrastructure of creation before the earth was made waste and void we could hardly comprehend in that it was so different from what we know as the world subject to mankind’s dominion.
wow! you've made up a whole mythology.
and demons are obviously physical entities, in the bible. one of them, in the sinai wilderness, eats goats.
I think that we are as infants in a crib. The parents put little toys on the crib to help develop the childs understanding. One day she may come to understand an automobile, a Personal Computer, a jet plane, a earthquake, a solar system, a galaxy. But at this early stage just some colorful blocks and funny shaped plastic toys.
so why hold on to the child's toys? when i was a child, i spoke as a child, and i thought as a child. but when i became a man, i put away childish things.
your interpretation of the bible is like trying to fit your bottle into the vcr. it's not gonna work. pick one or the other.
To some degree I feel man has to humble himself to receive what God will reveal to us at the stage we are in. But there is much more that we cannot digest at this time.
yes, and i think we should approach the text in way that is honest to what it says, and not try to fit everything together in some grand scheme. just read it. you have to humble yourself, and start reading the bible from scratch, instead of trying to work your ideas into it.
But I believe that another structure of a kingdom existed before things were restored and turned over to a new creature - man.
studdied qabalah any?
I don’t think Job was just using his imagination. I think it was either the prophetic past or the prophetic future in which he was speaking.
job was not a prophet.
in fact, he only heard from god
once and it was through some 30 chapters of taunting and tempting and
daring god to show up. some have even explained job as being a man who was
questioning his faith in god. so he tries to provoke god into showing his face so that job can rest assured in the knowledge that god exists. ie: job might not even believe in god at this point in the story.
you really can't just take things wildly out of context, and call it "prophecy" or a discription of past events.
How does he know God overturns mountains and seals up stars and commands the sun not to give light? Latter God tells Job that he has spoken rightly about Him. Yes God did do those things. Or He showed Job He would in the future do those things.
I don’t think Job was just giving imaginative musings.
job was describing the capabilities of god, and why you can't win a fight (physically or otherwise) with him.
and then job describes why no one could contend with god. how can you hope to fight with someone who can blink out the sun?
That too. Whoever then was responsible for God wanting to overturn the mountains and black out the sun must have learned a big lesson.
agh, no. it's not a description of past events. it's a description of god's might and power.
Job could have been refering to the flood of Noah. Job could have been refering to something before that. I lean away from thinking that Job was just using his imagination.
job was not describing the flood of noah. job was not describing something before that, either. references are easy to spot -- you don't have to make them up. job was describing the capabilities of god, not the actions of god.
Then again maybe you’re making stuff up to assure yourself that the source of Genesis is of a lesser intelligence than yourself. You stand above the source, superior to the source, on a higher order of knowledge and wisdom than the source.
no, i am not. i'm reading the stuff that's on the page. some of it in the original. i never said the author was stupid -- you are saying that. you're saying that the author doesn't know the difference between creation and revealing the sun. it's not my fault you see a problem with the text as it is written, literally. i do not see a problem at all.
No. I think they said “Egypt is waste and void. Maybe we better obey this God of Moses.”
clearly, egypt was NOT waste and void, and they did NOT obey the god of moses. they didn't even let moses go.
I can’t see the word “CAN” in this passage. Can you?
job is highly poetic. your prooftexting of it is highly inappropriate. this section of job is defining the capabilities and might of the lord.
The only place I see your word CAN is where God does great things which CANNOT be searched and wonderful deeds which CANNOT be numbered.
quote:
3 If one should desire to contend with Him, he could not answer Him one of a thousand.
quote:
12 Behold, He snatcheth away, who can hinder Him? Who will say unto Him: 'What doest Thou?'
you really have to look at the meaning of the whole text. it is comparing the weakness of man to the might of god, and saying that man is no comparison. again, context. it's describing stuff god can do, not stuff he's done or will do.
Yes it is a creation story. But in the story there is an unknown interval of time between verse 1 and verse 2. That is what I believe.
quote:
‘, ‘ —, ,
, ‘
b'reshit bara elohim, et-ha-shamim v'et-ha-eretz, v'ha-eretz hayetah tohu v'bohu...
in-beginning created/creating god (d.o.)-the-skies and-(d.o.)-the-ground, and-the-ground was empty and-waste...
in the beginning god created the skies and that ground -- and the ground was desolate and empty...
-or-
in the beginning of god creating the skies and that ground, the ground was unformed and desolate
both are acceptable readings, because you cannot tell the tense of the verb "bara" in this case. past tense seems more likely, imho, because of the context. but it's one sentance, one continued idea. there is no break in the hebrew. the concept is either that god first created the heavens and the earth with nothing in them, or god's creation is the process of filling the heavens and the earth.
since god creates the heavens a few verses later, i consider the second to be more likely.
but there's no gap. there's no * * * break, like in novels. one idea follows directly from the one before it.
All the details about creation are not given in Genesis. Other major themes of the Bible include other details elsewhere in the Bible then where you would expect everything about them to be discussed.
genesis 1 is complete and consistent in its own right. you may think, for instance, that genesis 2 modifies or expands on a particular section of genesis 1, but they are still unrelated stories. genesis 1 is not missing any details that are important. there may be other traditions, but they are not present in genesis 1 -- otherwise, they'd actually be present!
later interpretations and renderings and references are often based on working things into the genesis traditions, much like comic books and horror movies "retcon" something. for instance, the new superman movie is a sequel to superman 2, and it retcons 3 and 4 out of existance. but you can still watch superman 1-4 and they still make sense and internally consistent.
i find star wars another good analogy (people treat it like a religion). so in star wars episodes 4 and 5, luke is into leia. but later we find out that they're brother and sister. and that retcon's their kiss in the prior movie into, well, being gross. similarly, when we first hear of darth vader, he killed anakin skywalker. lucas made up the idea they were one and the same a little later (though he won't admit to it). so we find the first bit of star wars apologetics, to try and rectify the fact that kenobi
lied to luke. later, we run into many more problems with the prequels -- like yoda not being kenobi's master, etc. yet, you can watch the first star wars, and it makes sense on its own. you can even watch the first trilogy with only a mild bit of apologetics.
likewise, genesis 1 is internally complete and consistent. we may be given information later that alters our understanding of it, but those are later "retcons" of the original tradition -- not present in the original. but you have not even made a good case for that.
Edited by arachnophilia, : "their" for "there", borked hebrew.
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