Shawn C. Madden
https://conanlibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Gen1.1-3-Paper.pdf
Abstract: Genesis 1 has been an enigma to exegetes and scientists since man has read the text and read the heavens. Attempts to reconcile or match the two sources of the creative 1activity of God has garnered discussion and debate, often very heated, for millennia. Each time a new way of interpreting the text or peering more closely at the heavens has advanced the discussion and the attempts at finding or recognizing agreements between the two books God has written – Scripture and Nature. While the books have remained unchanged, the hermeneutical tools aimed at evaluating each, linguistics and science, have advanced. This paper is an attempt at providing yet another effort at seeing the agreements in the two books of God. The long history of such endeavors tempers this effort and the author knows that this will not be the end of the discussion and that this paper may achieve no more than to find itself as another item in the catalog of efforts of the creature attempting to understand and proclaim the glory and majesty of the Creator.
Key Words: Genesis 1:1-3, hermeneutics, text linguistics, discourse analysis, creation, Big Bang, science, physics, Hebrew grammar, day, cosmology, universe, earth.
| The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go. Galileo Galilei (1564- 1642) in his open letter to the Dowager Grand Duchess. | [It is the] glory of God to cause the hiding of a thing and [the] glory of kings to search [for the] thing. Proverbs 25.2 |
Introduction
Though I have read through the Proverbs many times, 25.2 never stuck in my head until my son-in-law mentioned that it was his favorite verse. It strikes me as particularly pertinent to the issue at hand, evaluating and looking for harmonization between the two great works of the God of Abraham, Nature, and Scripture. It appears to indicate that there is curiosity created into the nature of man; a curiosity that sets him on the trek of uncovering what God has covered as part of that nature and its quest. This can be seen in the Scriptures concerning themselves in the plethora of prophecies concerning peoples and events, especially the coming of the Promised Messiah that many point out first appears in the Proto-Evangelium of Genesis 3.15.
This paper will be a short evaluation of the history of hermeneutical approaches to these two texts that God has presented for us to observe, ponder, and interpret. Scripture is understood as the Books of the Christian Bible which includes the thirty nine books of the TaNaK and the twenty seven books of the Gospels and Letters.[1] The key tool employed to interpret and understand Scripture is linguistics and its subcategories and tools. The key tool to interpret and understand Nature is science and its subcategories and tools. The history of both approaches involves the development of knowledge and instruments. This review will be necessarily brief but should, hopefully, give a solid account.
A quick definition from the world of theology and biblical studies that I believe applies nicely with scientific advances in light of Prov. 25.
The term “progressive revelation” is a well known one in especially Christian studies in the Bible and theology. It says that “we understand God to have worked in a process of accomplishing redemption for humanity, revealing himself and his plan gradually, . . .”[2] Often this comes in advances in manuscript discoveries, literary studies, and linguistics. My foray into this subject, having led me to the hard sciences associated with cosmology, shows that it too applies to scientific inquiry, especially in observing technological advances that have allowed us to dig and peer deeper into the processes of the LORD God of this universe in which he has placed us.
[1] These terms are used as the terminology “Old” and “New” can convey a preference for the New over the Old and the Scriptures are not to be so seen and separated.
[2] Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1998), 132ff.
Scientific Advances
A black hole physicist notes that
One of the biggest misconceptions about [the scientific definition of] the Big Bang theory is that it is a theory of the creation of the Universe, but it’s not. The Big Bang Theory describes how the Universe went from an incredibly hot and dense state to evolve to give us the distribution and different shapes of galaxies we see today. It doesn’t explain what happens at the first moment of ‘creation’ when time = 0. Our knowledge of physics allows us to rewind all the way back to when the Universe was a scant 10-36 seconds old (a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second), but before that all our known laws of physics break down.[1]
This position is the latest in the field of science that seeks to understand the universe in which we find ourselves. Man has been looking to the sky and observing the sun, moon, and stars since the beginning and he has been contemplating what it is and what it means. And, how it is.
There are several possible approaches to review scientific endeavors and advancements that demonstrate how man has sought to understand and determine his place in the universe he sees all around him; I am going to primarily focus on the cosmological aspect as I find more interest in it than the biological or geological approach, both of which are as equally insightful.
I have been fairly unlearned in this area and just of late have I taken a deeper dive into it, albeit not into the deep waters which require skill and understanding of the more mathematical (especially calculus) approaches. But enough so that I am not drowning.
My primary teachers have been the books by Dean Overman, Andrew Liddle, David Schultz, and Hugh Ross. I first bumped into Dean Overman’s book several years ago when teaching a Sunday School class and this topic came up. I was looking up something concerning theology and science and was researching Wolfhart Pannenberg[2] in this realm, as I had come to find out that one of his interests was in this area. I had learned that he had written the foreword to Overman’s A Case Against Accident and Self Organization. I ordered and read it. I found it to be an excellent and thorought treatment of the statistical problems that are the heart of the fine tuning and intelligent design understanding and arguments.
Most recently, as I began this more in-depth research, I found Andrew Liddle’s, An Introduction to Modern Cosmology[3] which served me as a good introduction to the terms, concepts, issues, and names in the scientific study of the universe. It does have math/maths but not so much that it interferes with a good understanding of the narrative.
In addition, I found another good guide to accompany this trek in David Schultz’s delineation of the history of the cosmological journey in his The Andromeda Galaxy and the Rise of Modern Astronomy.[4]
My own interest in astronomy began in the 1980s when my wife bought me a small, 4 inch reflector telescope. With that I and the Royal Ambassadors of First Baptist Dallas observed Halley’s comet in 1986. I later traded that telescope in for a more capable one (still a 4” reflector) and observed Jupiter and Mars and the moon. My life got busy enough such that I could do little more and as such did not get back into astronomy until 2021 when I traded recreational flying for astronomy as a hobby. I began with an 8 inch Schmidt-Cassegrain and have since added a 127mm and a 51mm refractor and an 8 inch RASA. I have also acquired several astrophotography specific cameras to go with them to image the not very dark Dallas, Texas night sky.
My foray into the field is a bit illustrative of Schultz’s narration. He recounts how what man has gained from looking at the night sky millenia ago has been materially influenced by advances in technology. For me, in addition to the availability of more time due to my semi-retired state, it has meant that, unlike my first telescopes which were manually operated, my newer ones are fully computerized. Even in the brief time in which I have been more seriously involved in the hobby, the technology used to orient the telescope (polar align) and then find the object of my interest (plate solve) and to track it (guiding) has made several leaps and advances. Additionally, I began astrophotography just shortly after advances in more affordable and advanced cameras. The technology has grown such that in many instances amateur astronomers, even those with equipment such as mine, have been making regular cosmological discoveries, including, comets, supernovae and a never before seen blue nebula in the foreground of images (meaning, in our own galaxy) of the Andromeda Galaxy M-31.[5]
Schultz notes that, “We wonder who created the universe, when, why, and for what purpose. Or perhaps we think, as was the case for eons, that humans occupy a central role in the universe.”[6] Man has been pondering the sky since the very earliest times. A recent discovery from the “ancient Nineveh library” revealed “a 5,500-year-old Sumerian star map” which depicted the “Köfel’s impact event observed in 3300 BC.” The clay tablet that was the medium for this depiction, revealed itself to be “an early astrolabe, the segmented star chart offers a glimpse into the celestial knowledge of ancient Mesopotamia, revealing a sophisticated understanding of the night sky.”[7] This shows that even in the most ancient of times man was taking a very serious look at the night sky and trying to depict, analyze, and understand it and our place in it while displaying very sophisticated depiction and evaluation skills.
Schultz provides a review of the people and literature that recorded man’s effort to understand what he saw above him and our place in that vastness. Ancient writers include Aristotle, Thales, Socrates, and Anaximander. Hesiod’s Theogony was a Greek attempt to explain the origins. From the Jewish writers, Moses emerges with the most well know explanation and subject of this paper, Genesis chapter 1.
For most of history, man’s viewing of the universe above his was restricted to his eyes and the quality of the sky conditions above him. Even with such limitations, achievements were made in observing and describing the heavens above.
The greatest technological advancement came with the invention of the telescope. The first patent for one was first submitted by an eyeglass maker named Hans Lippershey in the Netherlands in 1608. It was a refracting telescope meaning that the light from a distant object passed in a straight line to the observer through a series of glass lenses. The design was further improved by Galileo who also applied it to his astronomical investigations. In that same century, improvements were made by Johannes Kepler and Christian Huygens. Also in the 17th century, Isaac Newton built a reflector telescope and Laurent Cassegrain took Newton’s design and modified it. Reflector telescopes bounced and concentrated the distant light before passing it through a viewing lens. Since that time, improvements have been made in each of these earliest designs.
One other major innovation that helped cosmological investigations was the invention and employment of cameras to supplement the use of telescopes. Earlier observers, such as Galileo and Newton, would make hand drawn sketches of their observations. In 1840, the first astrophotography was taken by John Draper. He made a twenty minute long daguerreotype photo of the moon using a five inch reflector telescope.[8] This was followed by an image of the solar eclipse in 1851 by Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski. Spectroscopic images were made shortly thereafter and in 1880 the first image of the Orion Nebula was made. In 1883 a much better image was made of the same nebula which also revealed stars that were not visible to unassisted observations.
What is striking is how recent this is. Not much over one hundred years from the present we get the first fairly clear and detailed images of celestial objects. This step would lead to increased recognition of the enormity of the universe in which we find ourselves resident. These two tools, the telescope and the camera, would open up the world of scientific investigation to an unprecedented level which looks to be expanding continuously and gaining momentum. At the time of this writing, the James Webb telescope is one million miles from earth and taking the most detailed images of the universe to date with a wide variety of cameras. There is also a camera drone on Mars flying around and taking photographs!
The simple observations were expanded with scientific inquiries using spectroscopy, especially concerning light waves of elements. So too it was possible to observe and measure the doppler shift of the spectroscopic signature of distant objects with an eye to determining their distance and the extent of the universe we were observing. This was coupled with the recognition of the Cepheid varible class of stars by Henrietta Levitt which became a major measuring tool for distant objects and allowed Edwin Hubble to determine that the Andromeda Nebula/Galaxy was in fact outside of the confines of the Milky Way galaxy and very distant from us.[9]
In a similar vein, but looking more to the micro scale, Nucleosynthesis, Stellar Nucleosynthesis, and Super Nova Nucleosynthesis revealed the source of the different elements in the universe. This was a major milestone in that scientists came to realize that the creation of all of the elements ranged from hydrogen coming in the first process of the Big Bang and the heavier elements needing the explosion of stars of ever increasing densities to be formed.
In October 1957 a paper, “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars” by Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler, and Hoyle in Reviews of Modern Physics showed that heavier elements found their origins in the hearts of stars – different elements being produced in different types of stars. The wikipedia site notes that:
Nucleosynthesis is the process that creates new atomic nuclei from pre-existing nucleons (protons and neutrons) and nuclei. According to current theories, the first nuclei were formed a few minutes after the Big Bang, through nuclear reactions in a process called Big Bang nucleosynthesis. After about 20 minutes, the universe had expanded and cooled to a point at which these high-energy collisions among nucleons ended, so only the fastest and simplest reactions occurred, leaving our universe containing hydrogen and helium. The rest is traces of other elements such as lithium and the hydrogen isotope deuterium. Nucleosynthesis in stars and their explosions later produced the variety of elements and isotopes that we have today, in a process called cosmic chemical evolution.[10]
As described by Hugh Ross,
The fusion of most life-essential heavy elements must await the gravitational collapse of gas clouds into giant stars. Only in such collapses can the temperatures necessary for nuclear fusion be achieved again. And only in the cores of such giant stars can elements heavier than boron (such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus—the building blocks of life) be manufactured. In fact, two generations of such stars must burn up in order to build a density of heavier elements sufficient to make life chemistry possible. That is, the universe much be old enough to have produced a third generation of stars, but it must not be too old . . . . .[11]
To state it succinctly, recent discoveries and advances concerning the origin of the universe have noted that within the first moments of the beginning of the universe the light elements emerged and it was only after the formation and destruction of successively heavier stars that we get progressively heavier and heavier elements, many of which are necessary for life.
Combine this with the discovery or confirmation that there is a universe outside of the Milky Way and we have reached a point markedly different than previous exegetes have had, and now have at our disposal much more specific material discoveries to more closely and specifically evaluate the text of Genesis 1.
For me, this was material in forming my scientific hermenuetic of the Beginning. It greatly informed my linguistic hermenuetic when evaluating the conundrum that is Genesis 1.1-3.
[1] Becky Smethurst, A Brief History of Black Holes (London: Macmillan, 2022), 261.
[2] I had read his Jesus-God and Man years ago and found it to be an outstanding work on Christology.
[3] Andrew Liddle, An Introduction to Modern Cosmology, 3rd ed. (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015).
[4] David Schultz, The Andromeda Galaxy and the Rise of Modern Astronomy (New York: Springer Science+Business Media, 2012).
[5] Koichi Itagaki discovered SN2023ixf, a supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy (M 101). I have taken a picture of it myself with my equipment. The blue nebula (Oiii emission arc) associated with Andromeda Galaxy (M 31) was discovered by Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner, Yann Sainty, Sean Walker, Stefan Kimeswenger, and Robert Fesen after 180 hours of imaging using amateur equipment.
[6] Schultz, 5-6.
[7] https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_K-8538; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Ashurbanipal; https://phys.org/news/2008-03-cuneiform-clay-tablet.html#google_vignette March 31 2008.
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophotography
[9] Schultz, 125-7. E. Hubble, “A spiral nebula as a stellar system, Messier 31.” Astrophysics Journal 79.8 103-64.
[10] Wikipedia contributors, “Nucleosynthesis,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, (accessed October 5, 2024). Article and chart.
[11] Hugh Ross, A Matter of Days, 2nd ed. (Covina, CA: rtb Press, 2015), 230-1.
Linguistic Advances
Standing at the head of arguably the most important book in our possession, Genesis 1.1-3 has received its fair share of investigations and comments. The extent of this paper does not allow a review of those investigations but will rather introduce what I find to be the best tools to investigate and analyze the text. The key to textual hermenduetics is linguistics. Most have been familiar with the orthographical, phonological, and grammatical aspects since childhood. Each of these has been employed to dig deeper into the text. Only of late has a very powerful tool emerged that I have found absolutely essential in this endeavor.
In the field of linguistics, a system known as discourse analysis or text linguistics has emerged and been employed. In my case, its aspect as presented by Robert Longacre in his Joseph: A Story of Divine Providence is paramount.[1]
Robert Longacre was most noted for his developed work in discourse analysis. Discourse analysis is distinguished from the more traditional methods of looking at and analyzing a piece of text in that it goes beyond the bounds of the clause and sentence and attempts to view the text within a larger context, that of the whole pericope within a defined genre. It argues that only from that perspective might the use of grammatical forms and their relationship to each other be best understood. Longacre notes that “A piece of text, especially a literary text . . . cannot be understood by myopically inspecting it verse-by-verse without the study of the whole informing the study of the parts”.[2] In his dissertation, Ray Clendenen (one of Longacre’s students and a linguistic master in his own right) notes that “Discourse typology has been a major emphasis of Longacre, who argues that it is an essential step [my emphasis] in any linguistic analysis of a discourse, ‘Characteristics of individual discourses can be neither described, predicted, nor analyzed without resort to a classification of discourse types. It is pointless to look in a discourse for a feature which is not characteristic of the type to which that discourse belongs.[3] So determinative of detail is the general design of a discourse type that the linguist [or exegete] who ignores discourse typology can only come to grief’”.[4]
To cut to the chase of Longacre’s position and theory, he begins part 2 of his Joseph with a note toward the doing of Hebrew grammar: “Traditionally, within a grammar of a given language all the uses of each tense/aspect or mode of a language are listed and described en bloque in the same section of the grammar”. He presents “a challenge to this time-honored way of describing the functions of the verb forms of a verb system within a language” by positing that “(a) every language has a system of discourse types (e.g., narrative, predictive, hortatory, procedural, expository, and others); (b) each discourse type has its own characteristic constellation of verb forms that figure in that type; (c) the uses of a given tense/aspect/mood form are most surely and concretely described in relation to a given discourse type”. [5]
Longacre goes on to note that, “. . . variation in a text is not random but motivated. In brief, where the author has a choice in regard to a lexical item or a grammatical construction, his particular choice is motivated by pragmatic concerns or discourse structure.” [6] To put it succinctly, the biblical writers knew what they were doing and what they did they did with purpose and on purpose and with purposeful precision. Our lesson is to take the text seriously from linguistic, literary, and theological positions and to glean as much as we can from what the author intended to convey and how he intended for it to be used.
This way of understanding and evaluating a text provides a valuable tool that approaches a text as a whole, an approach that recognizes paragraphs, episodes, and book levels. This is well above the singular verse or clause that so many grammars restrict themselves to when doing orthographic or syntactical explanations. My observation has been that there is a severe limitation to the endeavor if those who approach the text restrict themselves to only those tools.
Concerning the text, Genesis 1 is a narrative discourse type with interspersed hortatory discourse passages. Though recognized as a narrative text, many see a poetry to that narration in how the text is presented in the larger structures, especially centering around the term “day.” As such it is best to evaluate it as such and to note how the hortatory passages fit in. Of course, the text is in Hebrew and the evaluation of the text must start there.
A quick note before the detailed evaluation, I am going to be following, for the most part, the Analogical Interpretation of the “days of Genesis 1” as expounded by Mark E. Ross. In his article he references Meredith G. Kline, where he notes Kline’s comment,
“Exegesis indicates that the scheme of the creation week itself is a poetic figure and that the several pictures of creation history are set within the six work-day frames not chronologically but topically. In distinguishing simple description and poetic figure from what is definitively conceptual the only ultimate guide, here as always, is comparison with the rest of Scripture” (Italics added). “Commentary on Genesis,” 82.[7]
Noting that explanation, I would add that its usage appears to be a method of using a well known word to denote and describe a period of specific activities. Of course, the length of that period is key to the discussions swirling around this part of the issue. I find myself in the camp of very long periods of time – millions and billions of years. I also note that the text of Genesis one is very clear and specific concerning what we call a 24 hour day – the means of utilizing that measurement is not mentioned until day four and their mentioning is less of creation than of assigning purpose, i.e., “for signs and for seasons and for days and years.”
Robert Longacre provides the following table presenting the structure of biblical narrative discourse based on verb types and their function in a passage. This table is followed by his cline for Hortatory Discourse. I have presented these two as they are the two discourse types found in Genesis 1.1-5.
[1] Robert Longacre Joseph: A Story of Divine Providence, 2nd ed., (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003). I agree with Ray Clendenen (Revised Malachi) who notes: “I prefer the term text linguistics (or text linguistics) to discourse analysis because of the ambiguity and breadth of the latter term, which is sometimes used of the study of oral speech.” For a helpful survey of various approaches to text linguistics, see Noonan, Advances in the Study of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, 145–69. The appeal to me of Longacre’s approach is especially (1) its attention to linguistic levels above that of the clause and sentence, (2) its attention to both form and function in language, that is, both grammatical structure and semantic structure, (3) its attention to linguistic universals, that is, what the study of the world’s ancient and modern languages have in common, and (4) its insistence on meaning-in-context rather than meaning-in-abstract. While Longacre’s focus was on the nature and significance of discourse types, neither he nor his method ignores “other important discourse features, such as discourse relations and information structure,” as Noonan observes (p. 155).
[2] Robert E. Longacre, Joseph: A Story of Divine Providence. 2nd ed. (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2003), xii.
[3] Longacre, following Pike, speaks of tagmemes and syntagmemes; the tagmeme being a constituent element of the higher syntagmeme. He represents it like this: Σ = {T1 . . . Tn}, Tf: (Σ). Robert Longacre, The Grammar of Discourse, 2nd ed. (New York: Plenum Press, 1996), 274.
[4] E. Ray Clendenen,. “The Interpretation of Biblical Hebrew Hortatory Texts: A Textlinguistic Approach to the Book of Malachi” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Arlington, 1989), 45.
[5] Robert E. Longacre, Joseph: A Story of Divine Providence, 2nd ed. (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 57.
[6] Longacre, Joseph, xv.
[7] Mark E. Ross, “The Framework Hypothesis: An Interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2:3.” In Joseph A. Pipa, Jr., & David W. Hall, editors, Did God Create in 6 Days? (Powder Springs GA: The Covenant Foundation, 1999, 2005),114, n. 1 and 117, n. 6.
I will be utilizing his scheme for evaluating the text of Genesis 1 and for this paper, I will deal only with the first three verses.
In Hebrew narrative discourse, the mainline of the narration is indicated by the use of the vayyiqtol verb form with the other verb forms providing different levels of separation or support for the mainline. [1] This is what I see as I exegete Genesis 1. In the following pages I have laid it out with the Hebrew text to more visually display the discourse level indentations. I have included a column to show the Chapter/Verse/Clause/Phrase of each line. So too I have included a column to indicate the Discoure Type and Level. As I go through the detailed evaluation I will comment on the linguistics and attempt to coordinate it with my, albeit amatuer, understanding of the Big Bang physics that the text indicates.
The discourse that Longacre in his Joseph first evaluates is the narrative. It is one of the most abundant (if not the most abundant) discourse types in the confines of the Hebrew Bible and thus warrants the closest attention. Moreover, it is consistent enough to serve as an introduction to the concept.
Longacre notes that
A chain of (necessarily verb-initial) clauses that contain preterites [wayiqqtols] is the backbone of any Old Testament story; all other clause types contribute various kinds of supportive, descriptive, and depictive materials. In the cases of clauses that begin with a noun (and therefore cannot contain a verb in the preterite), such background material serves to introduce or highlight something about the noun in question, whether it refers to a participant or to a prop in the story. Clauses that begin with a non-preterite (perfect) verb portray secondary actions; for example, actions what are in some sense subsidiary to the main action, which is described by a following preterite. On occasion, a verb in the perfect (whether or not [the clause] begins with a noun) is repetition or paraphrase of some action already reported as a preterite on the storyline.[2]
He also notes “The special status of hāyâ ‘be’” by writing that “It is immediately necessary, however, to qualify the above hypothesis in one important particular. The verb haya, ‘be’, even in its preterite form wahi ‘and it happened’, does not function on the storyline of a narrative. In this respect, the behavior of Hebrew is similar to that of a great many contemporary languages around the world. . . . This is simple [sic] a peculiarity of the verb be in many languages past and present.”[3]
Below I have just the text laid out according to Longacre’s model in Hebrew and English and then Transliterated Hebrew and English. That is followed by my intertexual evaluation and comments.
[1] The old term was qal imperfect with a vav/waw consecutive. My preference is to designate the form of the word (qatal, yiqtol, vayyiqtol, etc.) without assigning any grammatical value to those structures without reference to a discourse type.
[2] Longacre, Joseph, 57.
[3] Ibid., 66.
Exposition of the Text
| The term, “Heavens and Earth” is labeled by many as a merism but I see it more as a specific description of the relationship between the two. The mass and math from the “heavens” are there to make possible the “earth” and the living creatures whom God will call into existence. Cf. esp. Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core (Covina, CA: rtb Press, 2022) and Dean Overman, A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 1997). An interesting intersection of the discussion of the mass and math relationship between universe and planet earth was depicted in the comedy series Young Sheldon, S02, E03 (originating from the earlier series Big Bang Theory) where, on a Texas porch, the genius and atheist youth, while trying to console his devout Christian mother, that he deeply loves, on an issue, notes that even he, as an atheist has to acknowledge that, “if gravity were slightly more powerful the universe would collapse into a ball; also, if gravity were slightly less powerful there would be no stars or planets.” And that, “gravity is as precisely as it needs to be and if the ratio of the electromagnetic force to the strong force wasn’t 1% life wouldn’t exist. What are the odds that would happen all by itself.” Which leads him to note that the “precision of the universe makes it logical to conclude there’s a creator.” Young Sheldon appears to be noting Stephen Hawking who stated, “If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.”[1] In this view, all of creation began at 1.1 and this includes the heavens (or universe) that is necessary for the creation of the earth which will be the focus of God here and in the rest of Scripture as that is where man, his greatest creation, will live. The separation of the two terms is strengthened particularly in chapter 1 as the two are dealt with separately. The use of the terms “the heavens and the earth” do not necessitate that Moses means the final form. In the laying out of the text, this is an introduction to what will follow and is a note that all that will be began here. Think of the conception of a child – that one, first cell is that child, that youth, that adult. |
[1] Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam, 198), 26.
| What is then depicted in vs. 2 is, as I see it from what I have read on the Big Bang Theory, a “. . . seething plasma of subatomic particles” before they “cooled to form hydrogen, the first atoms” as noted above. For me, this is analogous to Jeremiah 1.4-5 where we read, “Now the word of the LORD came to me saying, ‘Before I formed you in the belly[1] I knew you, and before you were brought out from the womb, born I concentrated you . . .” (my translation). The first two phrases are pure nominal clauses simply stating that initial state of the earth, a mass of subatomic particles – formless and void. And in a state of darkness. The third phrase contains a participle, məraḥep̄eṯ, hovering, which some commentators have likened to a hen brooding over her chicks. One of the keys for me was noting the word “waters” and then seeing that stated as a description of the plasma state. “The initial result of the Big Bang was an intensely hot and energetic liquid that was around 4 trillion degrees Fahrenheit (2 trillion degrees Celsius) and existed for mere microseconds. This liquid contained nothing less than the building blocks of all matter. As the universe cooled, the particles decayed or combined, giving rise to … well, everything.”[2] |
[1] There are two Hebrew words in this verse in Jeremiah that the Greek, KJV (Hebrew word here, btn), refers to both the body parts of the man and of the woman to provide their contribution to the formation of a new human being, Jeremiah in this case.
[2] https://www2.lehigh.edu/news/mapping-how-big-bang-produced-quark-gluon-plasma-became-all-matter
| It is in vs. 3 that matter as we see and know it presently “appears” as that is when the material of creation cooled sufficiently to produce atoms and photons. Once I recognized the production of photons in the cooling process I became convinced that it was significant. One physicist described this as a time before the universe became “transparent.”[1] She goes on to note that at that point we have “the first light in the universe . . . in what we call the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation [CMB].” I want to ask, as a liberal arts guy, is this also when Einsteinian physics begins – i.e., space and time? CMB is landmark evidence of the Big Bang theory for the origin of the universe. If my understanding of what I have read is correct, in the Big Bang cosmological models, during the earliest periods, the universe was filled with an opaque fog of dense, hot plasma of sub-atomic particles. From Wikipedia, “As the universe expanded, this plasma cooled to the point where protons and electrons combined to form neutral atoms of mostly hydrogen. Unlike the plasma, these atoms could not scatter thermal radiation by Thomson scattering, and so the universe became transparent. Known as the recombination epoch, this decoupling event released photons to travel freely through space – sometimes referred to as relic radiation. However, the photons have grown less energetic due to the cosmological redshift associated with the expansion of the universe. The surface of last scattering refers to a shell at the right distance in space so photons are now received that were originally emitted at the time of decoupling.”[2] |
According to standard cosmology, the CMB gives a snapshot of the hot early universe at the point in time when the temperature dropped enough to allow electrons and protons to form hydrogen atoms. This event made the universe nearly transparent to radiation because light was no longer being scattered off free electrons. When this occurred some 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the temperature of the universe was about 3,000 K. This corresponds to an ambient energy of about 0.26 eV, which is much less than the 13.6 eV ionization energy of hydrogen. This epoch is generally known as the “time of last scattering” or the period of recombination or decoupling.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRUTnoveZs8. Dr. Becky, “How does the expansion rate of the Universe change with time | DESI 1 year results. 5:41.”
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background
This is, admittedly, an all too brief exposition of the primary texts associated with the LORD’s creative work. It is so by design. It is meant only to present a possible way of understanding the initial text that relates to the initial creative events.
I have done so as a way of giving a theory that I have not encountered while trying to understand and coordinate what I see in the text of Scripture and the text of the Cosmos. I will admit to a paucity of resources due to my position of no longer have the resources of a superb library as close to me as in my past. I have also spent too much time on it as I wanted to get this theory out where others can critique and hopefully use it.
The two great books of the LORD, Scripture, and the cosmos, were written and completed by God and were intended to be read by man. But, as the gulf between the two is great and severe, it should never be nor ever have been understood to be easily read and understood in the first encounter. This is where Proverbs 25.2 is key. I think that it could be safely argued that part of God’s design of man was a need to investigate and discover – a work that he set out before us. Though beyond our complete comprehension, he did provide the impetus to devise and to discover the means to gain a better and fuller understanding of the wonders he laid out before us that declare his glory.
For the book, this development involved the use of language, and then the move to make it written. Then came the desire to observe and evaluate what others had said and written and in that quest came the recognition of the various forms of words, phrases, sentences, and beyond. And then the investigation and comparison of how the various peoples from this side of the tower of Babylon expressed that grammatical and discourse variety. That was then followed by compilations and coalations of patterns of useage that helped to better determine the meaning of the author. This endeavor is ongoing. Most recently many are recognizing the field of discourse grammar/text liguistics as a vital tools in this inquiry and investigation.
For the cosmos, learning and understanding it has been a quest of millenia. Pure eyeball observation and recording (language helps!) was followed and greatly aided by the invention of the telescope which was followed by improvements and enlargements – the eyeball got bigger and better! This was followed by the invention of the camera which too had its “improvements and enlargements” and today we find ourselves with a telescope and multiple cameras parked one million miles into space designed to peer as deeply back into time as was never imagined much less possible even a few decades ago.
In all of this hermeneutics is key. What has been laid down before us in Scripture is absolute but often it gets poorly exegeted by us. So too nature. There is an absoluteness to it but it too often gets poorly interpreted in man’s approach to it – science. Both these cases are born out by the histories of theological and scientific descriptions since men have approached and observed. As such, I find myself in disagreement with Galileo.
Bibliography
Collins, C. John. Genesis 1-4. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2006.
Collins, C. John. Reading Genesis Well. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018.
Hubble, Edwin. The Realm of the Nebulae. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Kant, Immanuel. Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. Trans. Ian Johnston. Arlington: Richer Resources Publications, 2008.
Liddle, Andrew. An Introduction to Modern Cosmology. 3rd ed. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015.
Overman, Dean. A Case Against Accident and Self Organization. New York: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997.
Pipa, Joseph and David W. Hall, editors. Did God Create in 6 Days? Power Springs, GA: The Covenant Foundation, 1999, 2005.
Ross, Hugh. Designed to the Core. Covina, CA: rtb Press. 2022.
Ross, Hugh. Navigating Genesis. Covina, CA: rtb Press. 2014.
Schroeder, Gerald L. Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery of Harmony Between Modern Science and the Bible. New York: Bantam Books, 1990.
Smethurst, Becky. A Brief History of Black Holes. London: Macmillan, 2022.