Today, I am reading and commenting on  Genesis 1-3.

It is so very appropriate to start the year with the Creation story(stories).  We really have two Creation stories here.  However, they are not in conflict, nor do they need to be reconciled because they are about two different things.  In chapter one we have the story about how the entire universe came to be, culminating in the creation of mankind.  I am convinced that the person who first told this story as we have it written down considered themselves to be living on the seventh day, when God rested from creating everything that is.

The second story is about how man came to be and how things came to be as those hearing the story saw the earth to be (and how we see the earth to be).  Today I want to focus on the eating of the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  Before they ate from the tree, Adam and Eve were unable to do evil because they did not know what evil was.  The sin which Adam and Eve committed was to try and be like God.  When confronted by God about their wrongdoing, both Adam and Eve attempted to pass the blame to someone else: Adam blamed Eve, while Eve blamed the serpent.  Interestingly, Eve was not present when God gave the command not to eat the fruit from that particular tree as she had not yet been created (and while I do not think we should put very much theological thought into woman being created after man, I do believe that Eve being created after Adam has a lot to do with understanding the meaning of this story).  And, quite simply, Adam does not really have an out of blaming Eve for picking the fruit and then giving it to him.  Adam was there the entire time while the serpent attempted to convince Eve to eat from the tree.  As for Eve, even though she was not present when God gave the command not to eat the fruit, she knew that He had given that command.  Eve did not share the fruit with Adam because it was so tasty, rather she did so in order to share the blame with him.  To put it simply, Adam and Eve (man and woman) are equally to blame for the sinful state of mankind.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

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.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.  

Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 1-3.

And a new year begins.  I want to begin with a thought experiment I have referred to parts of from time to time.  Let us assume that God as described in the Old Testament exists (I may talk about if and how the New Testament changes our understanding of God later).  So, this God created the Universe and everything in it and takes a personal interest in humans.  And that interest is not just in humans in general, or just a few humans, but each and every human.  I will expand on this as we go along (unless God directs my thoughts in another direction).

Which brings us to my understanding of today’s passage and what I think it means for us.  Part of the above assumption means that God could communicate to humans what happened that they had not witnessed.  However, nothing in my understanding of God suggests that He had any reason for humans to know in detail what happened before He created them.  So, there is no reason to expect that the description of what happened before the creation of human beings is correct in the details.  But there are a couple of things to take from it.  Entropy and death happen because of mankind’s sin.  And what was that sin?  The desire to know the difference between good and evil so as to be like God.  Ultimately all sins come down to attempts to substitute ourselves, or our desires. for God.