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
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.
