Oct 15 2009
Scholar claims God didn’t “create” the earth
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.
She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world — and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.
Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at Radboud University 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”
Read more here.
[From me]
I’m glad she set us straight. If God didn’t create the Universe then he isn’t omnipotent.
What do you think?
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Well, I’m sure the CBF and iMonk will happy to hear this.
Sounds like someone was trying to get some media attention and it worked. Gee, she’s the first scholar to ever translate Hebrew so she must be right.
As far as I can recall, the ancient Hebrews considered Yahweh the Creator God, not the same as the neighboring gods who showed up in the chaos of the time and set up shop.
She has an interesting hypothesis that needs to be explored and either substantiated or proved incorrect.
It could, perhaps have some bearing on heaven being created twice in the first 8 verses. That will take some reflection.
It is interesting that the same word “Shamayim” is used for heaven in verse 1 as well as 8.
The Christian Scriptures certianly reflect (and I subscribe to) the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, and I doubt this will be much more than a scolastic ripple.
I love this imagery, too.
2 Maccabees 7:28
I beg you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed. And in the same way the human race came into being.
The word is a never ending cornucopia of the Spirit! Fascinating.
The word is a never ending cornucopia of the Spirit! Fascinating
Umm, 2 Macabees isn’t the word. I’m just sayin’
And yet.. there it is in my Bible and the King James Version when it rolled off the presses.
just sayin.