Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 1-3.
Happy New Year
And so we begin a new year, I hope that all of those reading this will spend the new year serving God.
Today I noticed two things which I never thought about before. The first I have heard people touch upon in various ways, but not in the way it struck me today. The second I have never heard anyone mention, not even in passing. So, at the end of chapter one, God tells the people He had created that He had given them every seed bearing plant as a food source and that He had given every green plant as food for all of the other animals (all beings that have breath). This leads to two important conclusions. One of those I have heard talked about before: at Creation everything (particularly humans) were vegetarian. Some people use that as an argument for being vegetarian now, but that is not what really struck me about this. No, what struck me is that this links the chapter one account of Creation to the the Account of the Fall given in chapter three. However, the Account of the Fall grows out of the chapter two Creation account. What makes this significant is the fact that many scholars, and others, see chapter one and chapter two as two completely separate, unrelated Creation accounts. However, if the chapter one account is linked to the Account of the Fall, that means that it is linked to the chapter two Creation account. I just realized that I have not stated what links this to the Account of the Fall. That something is that before the Fall, nothing died. In other words, in order for something to be carnivorous, something must die, but death did not first occur until after Adam and Eve sinned.
Which brings me to the second thing I noticed. When people read the account about the Garden of Eden and try to figure out where on Earth it was located, they assume that current geography bears some resemblance to that which existed right after Creation. The assumption is made that since we “know” where the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers are, that the other two rivers must have been nearby. However, the account we have here declares that all four rivers, including the Tigris and the Euphrates, had their headwaters in the river which flowed through the Garden of Eden, in modern geography, the rivers we know as the Euphrates and the Tigris have separate headwaters and join together shortly before entering the Persian Gulf. Now, it is worth noting that the headwaters of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers are very close to each other, even though the rivers go in remarkably different directions for most of their length. What struck me about the other two rivers is that the words used for the places they are described as flowing through describe places in Africa where those words are used elsewhere in the Bible. Perhaps as importantly, the Hebrew word here which is translated as “Tigris” only appears twice in the Bible: once here and once in the Book of Daniel. As I looked at this, it occurred to me (and I found several references online where others had the same thought) that perhaps these four rivers represented the four rivers where the earliest human civilization arose: the Yellow River in China, the Indus River in India, the Euphrates River in Mesopotamia, and the Nile River in Egypt. The other thing which occurred to me is that the geography of the world would have been massively changed by an event like Noah’s Flood. Going along with that thought was the recollection that modern geological science postulates that at one time in the distant past the positioning of Africa relative to Europe and Asia was massively different. When I started writing this paragraph there was a meaning which connected my thoughts in these two paragraphs which I intended to conclude with. Unfortunately, I have forgotten what that thought was.
I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.
