Genesis 1:1b Heavens and the Earth

November 27, 2012

Returning back to our search for dinosaurs and everything else, I am excited to share a piece of relevant information I discovered on Thanksgiving day:

A few days after Thanksgiving dinner, a popular tradition calls for two people to grab opposite ends of a dried wishbone and pull until the bone breaks in two.

The irony: The wishbone is special because it's one piece.

The furcula (the technical term for a wishbone) is formed by the fusion of two collarbones at the sternum. The furcula is an important part of a bird's flight mechanics — a connecting point for muscles and a strengthening brace for wings. The bone is elastic and acts as a spring that stores and releases energy during flapping. (Ever try to snap a wishbone before it's been dried?)

Scientists once thought the furcula was unique to birds. Paleontologists now tell us that the bone is also found in to two-legged, meat-eating dinosaurs including the Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor. These reptilian movie stars didn't fly. Their furculas likely served as structural supports as the dinos held their prey.  

                –taken from George Frederick, Life's Little Mysteries

So turkeys are related to the dinosaurs!!!  There you have it; last Thursday you may have well just eaten a piece of history!  Gobble gobble RAWR!

Moving on.

Genesis 1:1b

As part of our introduction last time we looked at the first verse of Genesis in its original Hebrew

בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ.

ha·'a·retz ve·'et a·sha·ma·yim eth e·lo·him ba·ra be·re·shit

read out loud:
bereshit bara elohim et ha’shamayim ve'et ha'aretz

I presented a case that the first half of the verse (bereshit bara elohim) establishes God as precedent to creation, outside of the limits of the physical universe and time, and is the causal force behind Creation itself, and through the act of creation time is born.  We also touched on the important deduction here that God is not “created” and God is not subject to time. 

In the auxiliary reading between the first entry and this text we also examined two other issues: the Apologetic defense of the Assumptive God and the Irrational nature of Scientific Review in the Absence of an assumed God.  These two points become increasingly important as we continue to read our Bible and as we engage with the world and other people around us.   The concept of the Assumptive God indicates that the Bible is written for people who are already predisposed or currently hold a faith in God.  If you don’t have such a predisposition, then you will struggle more than necessary with an already complex story.  The second point that we reviewed was the impact a world view that assumes God has on our interpretation of observed data (i.e. scientific review). A person colored with the disposition that God exists will ultimately see order and no mystery in the abundance of patterns we see in reality, e.g. Fibonacci numbers.  Whereas a person who does not assume a deliberate Creator will be left to interpret the same set of data as a random, perplexing, seemingly absurd-but-it-happens-anyway, type manner – the result of which is to put forth explanations where the mathematical probability of those solutions is so small that they become ludicrous when tested by the very methods of scientific review accepted by both believers and non-believers alike.   

As we continue into the remaining text, know that I assume God.  And I assume the majority of readers do as well.

Shamayim ve’et ha’aretz  (Gen 1:1b)

Heavens and the earth -one phrase not two words

The usual Hebrew word for "heavens" is shamayim, a plural form meaning "heights," "elevations" (Gen 1:1; Gen 2:1). (b) The Hebrew word marom is also used (Psa 68:18; Psa 93:4; Psa 102:19, etc.) as equivalent to shamayim, "high places," "heights."

According to modern Hebrew, Erets is applied in a more or less extended sense-- (1) to the whole world and everything created, ( Genesis 1:1 ) (2) to land as opposed to sea, ( Genesis 1:10 ) (3) to a country, ( Genesis 21:32 ) (4) to a plot of ground, ( Genesis 23:15 ) and (5) to the ground on which a man stands. (Genesis 33:3 ) The two former senses alone concern us, the first involving an inquiry into the opinions of the Hebrews on cosmogony, the second on geography.

-Easton’s Bible Dictionary and Commentaries

So when reading this selection text by itself, in our English speaking minds we see two subjects: heavens and earth.  It becomes easy therefore to run down a rabbit hole (which we will do in a moment) and explore exactly what Genesis means when it reveals the word “Heavens” and then again when it reveals the word “earth”.   And I believe there is some merit to doing this exercise because it will illuminate the comprehensiveness of God’s word.

However we must first look to the phase as a singular.  Does the phrase “heavens and the earth” have a particularly unique definition in Hebrew separate from the definitions of the individual words themselves?  And of course, the answer is “yes”.

The phrase "heaven and earth" is used to indicate the whole universe. Easton makes this claim, and it appears everywhere in modern Christian theodoxy (yes I just made up that word).  But where does he derive this understanding?  Well I searched and found out that in Hebrew the phrase is still in use today.  It is a Hebrew idiom meaning "all things" or “everything”.  If you do an exhaustive search of the phrase in Hebrew literature and spoken speech, you will discover that the idiom displays a conceptual and not necessarily scientific emphasis on this totality. For example, if you were a Jew, living during the time of Moses, and if you had a bad debt and the debt police came and took your house, your things, and your prized donkey, then your neighbor asks, “What did they take?” Your response could be “Shamaim ve’et ha’aretz”, i.e. “the Heavens and the earth” and your neighbor, being fluent in Hebrew would shrug his shoulders, shave his head, tear his clothes, and weep with you knowing that you were wiped out, but also knowing that the police did not actually take the heavens and the earth.

Ok. Seriously, the phrase has value to convey a comprehensive totality.

Dwell on this a moment, Moses is relaying to people recently escaped from Egypt about their history and he says to them “God created everything”.  The early Israelites take this to mean, literally everything.  They are not expected to have a knowledge about atoms, time, light, red shifts, gravity, f=ma, etc.  But they would assume that even the unknown was known to God and created by God.  So consider the same setting and now somehow Einstein is transported back in time to this very moment when the Israelites are being revealed this truth that God created everything.  Einstein suddenly states his theory of relativity and in doing so discusses special relativity and Red Shifts (the bending of Red Light in the presence of a gravitational field).  The Israelite when presented with this information may not understand it, but nevertheless can accept it and account it to being caused by God because red light shifting, if it did occur, would naturally occur because God decided that it should. And this phenomenon is a part of “everything”.

We cannot ignore then that the principal statement of the Genesis account is an arbitrary “everything”. It is even more emphatic than the Hebrew word for everything.  Our Bibles could have been written:  In THE beginning God created EVERYTHING (ha-kohl (הכל)).  Wouldn’t it be easier to have had our Bibles just say this?  The verse then would lay a foundation and a case that all of existence and reality is due to the creative will and power of God.  And the Christian could then credit every piece of science, every observed fact and data point back to God’s work – without argument and confusion.  And yet God saw fit to inspire those tasked with writing down the history of Creation to use a common idiom – which is open to confusion by those who are not native speakers of the language.  So there must be a reason right?  Yes, the phrase is emphatic, it is over the top, and it is in essence the Everything of Everything, Anything, and All things. 

Of course in addition to the overarching inference of “everything”, a deeper study into the words themselves unveils even more detail into God’s comprehensiveness.  (And to think, we are only in the second part of the FIRST verse of the Bible…)

Shamayim

Heavens

Yes it is plural – multiple Heavens. The idea of multiple heavens was clear to the ancient Hebrews and is deduced in Christian doctrine as well (Deut. 10:14; I Kings 18:15). Reading the Hebrew Scriptures and reading carefully through our texts and Apocrypha will reveal seven to ten heavens!  Somewhere in these heavens paradise was placed, and within it the treasures of life and of righteousness for the soul.  Oh, and God currently resides somewhere in there too.

So multiple heavens but is that it?  What IS Heaven?  Let us try to define this for the moment.   Well perhaps we can start by defining what Heaven is not.  It is not hard earth.  It is not ocean water.  It is not electrons.  It is not air, nor gas, nor stratosphere.  I would hazard to say that Heaven is not anything that contains “matter”.

From Dictionary.com

mat·ter

noun

1. the substance or substances of which any physical object consists or is composed: the matter of which the earth is made.

2. physical or corporeal substance in general, whether solid, liquid, or gaseous, especially as distinguished from incorporeal substance, as spirit or mind, or from qualities, actions, and the like.

3. something that occupies space.

4. a particular kind of substance

 

In fact, as we will consider later (in Gen 1:1c), I believe that all matter is a type of earth.

If we agree that Heaven does not contain matter – then what about “outer space”?  Does it include outer space?  Nope, outer space is filled with stuff.   And besides we learn in the whole tower of Babel portion of our History, and by Christ’s own testimony, that God absolutely does not want us to travel into Heaven by any other means than salvation (ie. The Narrow Road).   Since we have sent men to the moon and hence into outer space, and we have not been “smoted” or “smited”, we can assume that outer space is NOT a type of Heaven.

So then, what are we left to infer?  God created multiple Heavens at the begging of time, and at the same time as he created the earth ( i.e. matter) – yet Heavens are not a type of earth.  Perhaps we have been interpreting this word “shamayim” too narrowly and with too much assumption?

We know through scientific observance today that in addition to matter we have energy and force.   No not the “Use the Force, Luke” type force, true force – gravity, electrical, magnetic, applied, frictional, and atomic, quantum, and many many more…

Force is the observance of the interaction between two different forms of matter in close proximity.  It is because we are able to observe force today, that many people assume a big bang yesterday (and a Higgs Boson tomorrow).    But the actual cause of force is God (or to the secularist, unknown).

So we can observe gravity but have no reasonable resolution to “why” gravity?  Obviously God applies this attribute to matter, but could the application of this attribute be useful in identifying Heaven?  And let me be clear I AM NOT PRESENTING A CASE THAT FORCES ARE HEAVEN.    But I am trying to align our modern assumptions about forces to the reality of what our Bible declares as true.

So let us talk about Shadow effect and multidimensionality.   Shadow effect is what happens when one phenomenon is obscured by another, and the shadow is what occurs at the intersection of the causes.  So when light hits an obtuse object, the object blocks the light and starting at the object and extending outward is a shadow.   By observing the shadow and the outlining light one can deduce an object without ever seeing the object.  Using this concept of shadow effect, modern scientists have deduced that perhaps the observance of forces are not just independent attributes of matter but in actuality the shadow effect of matter interacting with something else.

Hawking claims that forces may be the shadows of matter interacting with other dimensions.  ß note the plural of dimensions, not a singular dimension, but several.  Several dimensions, several Heavens… similar.  In the late 90’s astrophysics and quantum physics merged to this idea that there may be 7 to 10 dimensions in all, or infinite.  Hmmm.  Weird.  But if true, then could the forces that we observe occur help us see the shadows of Heaven?

But let’s go back to the beginning of this essay where we look at the statement that God creates “everything”, under this understanding, wouldn’t other dimensions be considered a part of that everything, and if the mind of Moses, or Adam, or Isaiah, or Peter, or the average Josiah Israelite cannot comprehend “higher planar dimensionality”, “energy to matter conversion theory”  and “sub quark interaction theory” – can it stand to reason that they could comprehend “Heavens”?

Scripture interprets scripture:

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.

 Rom 1:20 NASB

Yes I am presenting a bold interpretation, but it sure is useful in explaining what we mere “things that are made” are observing (, i.e. “clearly seeing”).

And by the way, I find it stupefying and glorious that several thousand years later (and still several hundred years from our present) Paul can understand and reaffirm that there are invisible “attributes” – even with the basic physics known at the time.

So we cannot concretely define what a heaven or the heavens are exactly, but we can improve upon our understanding and see that the can correlate with modern science – and without making a stretch either.   Uhm… but still no dinosaurs… must keep searching.

Perhaps they are in that part about earth?

Next time a “short” essay on matter, earth, atoms, dirt, dust, dark matter, and perhaps water and fluids… as we explore the remaining part of Genesis 1:1c and the beginning of verse 2! Yippee!

Your comments are invited.  Please invite others to read.  Be blessed.

 

Happy Wednesday.