Has anyone read Isaac Asimov's book "In The Beginning"? It is a very interesting dissection of Genesis. 

www.amazon.com/Beginning-Science-Faces-B...

 

GENESIS - RETOLD

In the beginning God created Dates. And the date was Moon's Day, July 4, 4004 B.C. And God said, let there be light; and there was light. And when there was Light, God saw the Date, that it was Moon's Day, and he got down to work; for verily, he had a Big Job to do. And God made pottery shards and Silurian mollusks and pre-Cambrian limestone strata; and flints and Jurassic Mastodon tusks and Picanthopus Erectus skulls and Cretaceous placentals made he; and those cave paintings at Lasceaux. And that was that, for the first Work Day.

And God saw that he had made many wondrous things, but that he had not wherein to put it all. And God said, Let the heavens be divided from the earth; and let us bury all of these Things which we have made in the earth; but not too deep. And God buried all the Things which he had made, and that was that. And the morning and the evening and the overtime were Tiwe's Day.

And God said, Let there be water; and let the dry land appear; and that was that. And God called the dry land Real Estate; and the water called he the Sea. And in the land and beneath it put he crude oil, grades one through six; and natural gas put he thereunder, and prehistoric carboniferous forests yielding anthracite and other ligneous matter; and all these called he Resources; and he made them Abundant. And likewise all that was in the sea, even unto two hundred miles from the dry land, called he resources; all that was therein, like manganese nodules, for instance. And the morning unto the evening had been a long day; which he called Wodin's Day.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth abundantly every moving creature I can think of, with or without backbones, with or without wings or feet, or fins or claws, vestigial limbs and all, right now ; and let each one be of a separate species. For lo, I can make whatsoever I like, whensoever I like. And the earth brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, with and without backbones, with and without wings and feet and fins and claws, vestigial limbs and all, from bugs to brontosauruses. But God blessed them all, saying, Be fruitful and multiply and Evolve Not. And God looked upon the species he hath made, and saw that the earth was exceedingly crowded, and he said unto them, Let each species compete for what it needed; for Healthy Competition is My Law. And the species competeth amongst themselves, the cattle and the creeping things; and some madeth it and some didn't; and the dogs ate the dinosaurs and God was pleased. And God took the bones from the dinosaurs, and caused them to appear mighty old; and cast he them about the land and the sea. And he took every tiny creature that had not madeth it, and caused them to become fossils; and cast he them about likewise. And just to put matters beyond the valley of the shadow of a doubt God created carbon dating. And this is the origin of species. And in the Evening of the day which was Thor's Day, God saw that he had put in another good day's work.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, which is tall and well-foormed and pale of hue: and let us also make monkeys, which resembleth us not in any wise, but are short and ill-foormed and hairy. And God added, Let man have dominion over the monkeys and the fowl of the air and every species, endangered or otherwise. So God created Man in His own image; tall and well-formed and pale of hue created He him, and nothing at all like the monkey. And God said, Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of the earth. But ye shalt not smoketh it, lest it giveth you ideas. And to every beast of the earth and every fowl of the air I have given also every green herb, and to them it shall be for meat. But they shall be for you. And the Lord God your Host suggesteth that the flesh of cattle goeth well with that of the fin and the claw; thus shall Surf be wedded unto Turf. And God saw everything he had made, and he saw that it was very good; and God said, It just goes to show Me what the private sector can accomplish. With a lot of fool regulations this could have taken billions of years. And the evening of the fifth day, which had been the roughest day yet, God said, Thank Me it's Freda's Day.

And God made the weekend which he called Saturn's Day and Sun's Day.

While the preaching magazine did not intend to do this, it takes every assumption about Genesis 1 that is so essential to YECism and declares, no way- it's not there- wasn't the author's concern.

I'd concur with King David's claim that "Fools say in their hearts, 'There is no God'".

The wise, and for any number of compelling reasons, would say it out loud.

This week's liturgical readings include a portion of Genesis 1.  I thought I'd post a little bit of the exegesis to show how Biblical Scholars approach this text.

And note, I got this from a preaching magazine, used by many Pastors.  So this is not some kind of off the wall, fringy, kind of treatment of the text, but solid scholarship.



The significant point is that "beginning" in this verse refers not to the beginning of time but to the beginning of a series of actions, that God was doing. The impressive calculations of Archbishop James Ussher notwithstanding, when, calendarially speaking, God's creative work commenced was of no real interest to the writer of Genesis. Such a philosophical question was of no importance to the sixth-century B.C.E. priestly writer of this version of creation, who was introducing the story of the chosen people for the exiles of that people in Babylonia.

Similarly, the question of whether God created ex nihilo "from nothing" or from primordial chaos (as verse 2 indicates) would have been of no great concern to the author. The theologoumenon of creatio ex nihilo appears by the time of the intertestamental period (2 Maccabees 7:28, dated somewhere between ca. 104 and 63 B.C.E.; see also Romans 4:17; Hebrews 11:3; and the Pseudepigraphical 2 Enoch 24:2 and the comments by the translator, I. F. Andersen, in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth, vol. 1 [New York: Doubleday, 1983), 142-43), but it is a philosophical interpretation of Genesis 1:2 that has weak support from the OT itself. The plainer meaning of verse 2 is that God brought order out of watery chaos; where the chaos came from was of no interest to the writer of Genesis, and a question for which the writer supplies no answer. From the perspective of the priestly writer, chaos was not only good for nothing, but it was also as good as nothing. Brueggemann (29) suggests that the imagery of verse 2 presupposes a primordial chaos and is traditional, making it likely older, in Brueggemann's opinion, than the more abstract introductory thought of verse 1.

The point of verse 1 is not to counter an atheistic scientism that has no use for a creator. Such an idea, while not an entirely unknown possibility for the author of Genesis (see Psalm 14:1-53:1, "Fools say in their hearts, 'There is no God'"), would nevertheless not have been of great concern in this context because the overriding issue for the priestly writer(s) of Genesis 1:1-2:4a was to provide hope for the believing but disheartened Israelites in Babylonian captivity. The points made in this liturgically structured quasi-narrative are theological, not scientific (the realm of the purely natural) and not mythological (the realm purely of the gods). In the context of the competing theoagonistic creation account of the Babylonians, the Israelite version of a world created as "speech-creature" (the phrase is from Brueggemann, 24) would have been a subversive alternative for its captive (and captivated) hearers.

The Hebrew verb translated "create" (bara`) occurs throughout this story of origins, alternating with the more primitive verb "to make" ('asah), and its first appearance (v. 1) is as part of the construct chain discussed above. While the traditional translation (represented by KJV) is not grammatically impossible (as the text notes in the NRSV indicate), comparison with other similar constructions, both within the Hebrew Bible and with cognate languages, favors the temporal dependent clause, as it is rendered in NRSV.

The second verse, as the JPS correctly translates, is a parenthetical element interrupting the main sequence of actions that extends through the first three verses of Genesis: "When God began to create ... -- the earth being a formless void ... -- God said ... and there was ..." (see the discussion in Speiser, 5). Such a rendering conforms more closely to the rhetorical pattern used in the rest of the passage.

The description of the earth as a "formless void" is NRSV's translation of the Hebrew tohu wa-bohu, a hendiadys of two uncommon nouns that literally says "formlessness and emptiness." The first noun, tohu, is taken by lexicographers to be from a putative root thh, and the noun tehom, a few words later, translated "the deep," is understood to be from the root thm; it is doubtful that the two words tohu and tehom are actually unrelated. The rhyming pair tohu wa-bohu might be translated (by the late professor Henry Fischel of Indiana University) as "waste and schmaste" or (with the NRSV translator in his notes) as "formlessness and normlessness."

The "wind from God" sweeping over the primordial waters is supernatural, not natural ("mighty," as one NRSV alternative translation puts it, had already been rejected by Speiser, 5; see his fuller reasoning for rejecting a naturalistic translation of ruach `elohim on 230-31). The use of the word `elohim as an appellative, while more common in the Yahwist, is not unknown in P and always denotes a divine source.

The Hebrew stem translated "swept" (v. 2) is used in Deuteronomy 32:11 to describe an eagle hovering over its young. The Ugaritic cognate is more forceful, with the sense of "swooping," and it is impossible to say which meaning comes closer to capturing the Genesis image (although a gentle gliding is probably moving in the wrong direction). Common to the root in its various forms, however, is the idea of movement or restlessness, an idea expanded upon later in the tradition (see the passage in 2 Enoch cited above).

With the first divine words in verse 3, "Let there be light," the rhetorical pattern begins that, with slight variations, will form the structure of this account of creation: (a) the deity speaks a creative command ("Let there be . . ."); (b) the command happens; (c) God sees that the result is good; (d) God fine-tunes or supplements the thing(s) created; (e) God names the thing(s) created; and (f) the creative event is date-stamped ("And there was evening and there was morning ..."). Scholars have long suggested that this rhetorical pattern is hymnic or poetic in origin and may have been part of the liturgy for a new year's festival in the temple, an annual reminder of Israel's divine creator and patron.