The Aggadah of Genesis: In Conflict With Science?

"formed" is a bad translation. there is no sense of physically forming anything in genesis 1. god merely commands things to exist, and they do. the creation is not formative, it is verbal."created" needs not carry ex nihilo context. for instance, when i describe something i made in my sculpture class, and say "i created that sculpture" did i not use raw materials? it's not a trinitarian/non-trinitarian thing. it's simply a grammatical thing. it's just not plural, except in very specific usages.think of it like the english word "deer" or "fish." the plural and singular cases are the same, and we understand the sentance through the verb. if i say "the deer run in the forest" i'm speaking of multiple deer. if i say "the fish swims in the water" i'm speaking of ONE fish. the only real difference is that in english, words like this look singular, whereas this word in hebrew looks plural. (indeed, the origin MAY be plural -- but as used in the hebrew bible, it's singular)there are a lot of strange exceptions to gender and plurality in hebrew, and "god" is one of them. in those cases, we simply use the verb to tell the gender and number of the subject.

---

because... well, it says in genesis 1.the story is etiological. it explains the customs of the hebrew week. no problem.

---

quote:

---

arachnophilia:
so you want to understand hebrew without understanding hebrew?

---

LOL! Hey, that's my line! LOL! I hear you, but I was thinking of others.

i am forced to disagree. starting without a bias, or a need to defend the bible against science -- and a semester or two of hebrew behind me -- i completely fail to see any of this flexibility so many people speak of. words have different usages and connotations and can sometimes mean two completely different things. but that's just a property of language in general. we have the same issue in english, but we still know what people mean, except in some cases ("go left here?" "right." "correct-right or direction-right?")further, i have never heard anyone who actually speaks hebrew talk of the flexibility of the language in this manner. in general, those who talk of this supposed quality of the language do not know very much (if any) of the language, are christian, and are attempting to perform some kind of apologetic for their "literal" belief in the text. i'm not saying this represents your view. it's a stereotype, but it'sa stereotype for a reason. this is probably a mistake. first of all, genesis was not written by nomads. genesis 1 in particular was written relatively late to the redaction of the torah, circa 600 bc. E is a preistly document, and was evidently written while israel/judah was very settled and highly successful society, and almost certainly in the divided kingdom period. gen 2, in contrast, is an earlier story for the J document, and might have it's origins in nomadic tradition.BOTH stories contain very many elements of other creation myths from surrounding "pagan" cultures. to put the hebrew stories in isolation from their cultural and POLITICAL context is quite western. ?() ‘() ‘if — may i humbly suggest that be your next course of study? i've seen a lot in your posts already that seems to be a little lacking in linguistic context and familiarity. i'm hardly a scholar in the language myself, but a little bit of actual education in the language goes a long way. i agree, except for the bit about polarization. the bible is one of the few places i have little respect for the middle-ground. a literal reading of the bible is utterly incompatible with modern science in very, very many ways. keep in mind that i have a bit of a reputation here as being called "overliteral" by the supposed literalists. ...i simply have no problem with the bible being wrong.Edited by arachnophilia, : typo

---

since i typically type the hebrew words in my post in the hebrew alef-bet, any fool here can copy and paste them into that dictionary and get the definition. it even has modern, biblical, literary, and talmudic definitions differentiated for when they differ.i find this far more reliable than a concordance, which merely lists how specific root words are translated. this is often suprisingly deceptive. you also lack the idiomatic, contextual, grammatical, and usage information. this dictionary sometimes provides the idiomatic -- but for the contextual, grammatical, and usage, i guess you just have to learn hebrew.that's why i am.Edited by arachnophilia, : subtitle

---

quote:

---

arachnophilia: "created" needs not carry ex nihilo context. for instance, when i describe something i made in my sculpture class, and say "i created that sculpture" did i not use raw materials?

---

Correct! But you didn't create ex nihilo the raw materials. You simply fashioned them into a given form.I guess the larger question on this forum is ... were the raw materials already and always present and, if so, did some "force" (God, if you like) sculpt those raw materials into what we perceive to be the universe? Alternately, and please pardon the vulgar wording, did some "force" (God, if you like) actual bring the cosmos into existence ex nihilo by some spermatic ejaculation?Orthodox Jews hold that God spoke and it was. Fine by me. I have no problem with that, because they don't use their theological and cosmological assertions to browbeat people into becoming members of their synagogue. Further, the story of Genesis is just a story. The message is more important than the details, IMO.I submit that the Genesis text can't be used as proof for either the Quasi-Steady State Theory or the Big Bang Theory (et al).However, like George Carlin said about something he found growing in his refrigerator, "Could be meat. Could be cake. Could be meat-cake."One could force the text to support one POV or the other or neither. What's important here is the lesson the story is teaching. In Carlin's case, the moral of his story is ... don't leave stuff in the fridge so long that you can't easily indentify it, let alone eat it. LOL!

out of curiosity then, what exactly are you? are you a secular jew then?i'm an odd mix. i'm a non-denominational christian, and former "near" fundamentalist, though this hardly describes my position. most of my opponents in debates here are christians. i have much more respect for judaism. apparently i should have been jewish, lol. those that relate the bible to reality by redefining words often have something regarding the accuracy of the bible to prove. although (to my knowledge) we have no fundamentalist jews on this board, they do exist. one caused very many problems in my last bible class. i left it a long time ago, after trying just about everything anyone could possibly think of to make it fit. it just doesn't, and in my humble opinion, it's silly to even try to make it. we're not looking a story that's scientifically or historically accurate in any manner of speaking, and it's no different than the sumerian and babylonian myths.

---

is ex-nihilo a topic in this debate here? i would really prefer not to get into it, because (as i said) neither side is defendable. all i mean to say is that "create" contains the connotation of planning as well as executing, and does not neccessarily preclude using raw materials. however, if we were to use a word for creation ex nihilo it would certainly be ‘in this case, the "moral" or etiology of the story is the reasoning behind the hebrew week. it makes little sense if the story is not read literally. you could read the literal as metaphor for something else, but that betrays the meaning of the story.

---

sorry, i was out of town. really, i'd love it if we had someone here more proficient than i. i don't really speak very much hebrew at all. i probably couldn't hold a decent conversation without a dictionary. it's just suprising the number of people that make claims of "the hebrew really means this!" without knowing the first darned thing about the language at all.i wish amlodhi was still around. he actually spoke hebrew. maybe we could get kalimero involved; he lives in israel but i haven't seen him (her?) participate in any religious debates.

---

more likely simply the quality of being alive. it's the same phrase used for us when god breathes into adam, making him alive, and this is before chavah is around. though, "chavah" is the causitive of "life" and that does have a sexual connotation. er, no. is literally "serpent." it's the thing that moshe's staff becomes when he casts it to the ground before pharaoh. ’— are great serpents, that live in the water. the "tan" root is almost certainly related to —, and many midrashim suggest that they are one and the same. i believe it's written in the talmud that god only created two taninm, and slew the other one (see psalm 74). the one left behind appears in job.as a mythological creature, livyatan is a seven-headed, fire-breathing sea-dragon, representing primordial chaos and possibly evil. he's paralleled with lotan in ugaritic myths. as a REAL entity, livyatan is the modern hebrew word for "whale." see, for instance, rennaissance depictions of whales. they are often serpentine in nature. nobody got a good look at whales until somewhat recently in human history.i see no indication of dinosaurs in the hebrew text. i'd like to, really. paleontology is one of my other passing interests. (you'll find that my longer posts here that do not involve hebrew or politics tend to involve feathered dinosaurs) it does not divide up in a way that matches geologic time. for instance, birds appear before land animals. and the timescales do not match.

---

quote:

---

arachnophilia: this is probably a mistake. first of all, genesis was not written by nomads. genesis 1 in particular was written relatively late to the redaction of the torah, circa 600 bc. E is a preistly document, and was evidently written while israel/judah was very settled and highly successful society, and almost certainly in the divided kingdom period. gen 2, in contrast, is an earlier story for the J document, and might have it's origins in nomadic tradition.

​

BOTH stories contain very many elements of other creation myths from surrounding "pagan" cultures. to put the hebrew stories in isolation from their cultural and POLITICAL context is quite western.

---

Please... Let's not even get into the E vs. J thing. That's one pit of quicksand that just doesn't appeal to me. Been there. Done that.I'm just saying that there is much in Judaism that harkens back to ... the Nomadic Tribal Cultus, for lack of a better term. You can take can the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy, if you catch my drift.Each time the pendulum swings toward patrician scholasticism in Judaism, sure as shooting up pops a plebeian champion, like Baal Shem Tov, who tries to swing it the other way.Where is it that the anceint mystics always seemed to go to in order to "get in touch" with the Divine? Why did Moses consult with Jethro? Was Elijah nourish by orevim (Ravens) or aravim (Arabs)...? (Yes, I know the text says ravens, but is this a redaction?) A little time in the desert was a standard back in the day, no? Get out of the city and clear your mind. Difficult to hear the Divine, when you've got the sounds of the marketplace distracting you.Yes, there was influence from pagan cosmologies. Good stories never die, they just get a new coat of paint. However, that "new coat of paint" could have been influenced by "observation of nature" (i.e., the food-chain/pecking-order) or it could have all been cooked up by a Bradbury-esque author and been redacted by a Asimov-esque editor. Or mabye my Lunatic Fringe buddies are right and ETs/Aliens gave us these documents. LOL! I'm kidding. You know I'm kidding, right? Bottom line is ... it's a story with something to teach. I know. I'm repeating myself.

do you mean vs ‘?these are often claiming that someone has made a scribal error, not that the word is flexible.

---

i think proper analysis of the source and redaction of the text is integral to understanding it. the tanakh is a hugely diverse collection of jewish texts. some are almost completely secular, some very very religious. there are many traditions and ideas presented therein, not all of which agree. there are some texts that reflect very nomadic ideas, and some texts that represent very sophisticated ideas of a settled and intellectual society.genesis 1 reflects planning. god PLANS everything before he does it. he knows what man will need before he even creates man. the ordered ideal tells a lot about the society that wrote it. this is NOT a nomadic culture. yes, it gets a little tricky there. i can think of some places where a little redaction went a long way.

---

quote:

---

smadewell: "And ELOHIM (lit. POWERS) formed (bara) the great crocodiles (ha-taninim ha-gadolim)" - Gen. 1:21a.
Thus begins the Permian Period and the appearance of the Terrible Lizards (i.e., dinosaurs), etc.

---

quote:

---

arachnophilia: er, no. is literally "serpent." it's the thing that moshe's staff becomes when he casts it to the ground before pharaoh. ’— are great serpents, that live in the water. the "tan" root is almost certainly related to —, and many midrashim suggest that they are one and the same. i believe it's written in the talmud that god only created two taninm, and slew the other one (see psalm 74). the one left behind appears in job.

​

as a mythological creature, livyatan is a seven-headed, fire-breathing sea-dragon, representing primordial chaos and possibly evil. he's paralleled with lotan in ugaritic myths. as a REAL entity, livyatan is the modern hebrew word for "whale." see, for instance, rennaissance depictions of whales. they are often serpentine in nature. nobody got a good look at whales until somewhat recently in human history.

​

i see no indication of dinosaurs in the hebrew text. i'd like to, really. paleontology is one of my other passing interests. (you'll find that my longer posts here that do not involve hebrew or politics tend to involve feathered dinosaurs)

---

I don't doubt that it can mean and does mean "serpent," but surely you won't deny that the word has also been used for "crocodile." Gesenius' and Jastrow have it meaning "serpent" and "crocodile," etc."Speak, and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I [am] against thee, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers, which hath said, My river [is] mine own, and I have made [it] for myself" - Ezk. 29:3.Same words in Genesis. Is this the author's way of calling the Pharaoh a "big sneaky, domineering croc"...? Oh, man... Maybe I've just been watching too much of Steve Irwin. I'm seeing crocs everywhere. Okay, so maybe the author of Ezk. 29:3 is slamming the Pharaoh by calling him Apep and saying, "Hey! You are your own worst enemy, Dude!" or something. Jewish Encyclopedia link for Crocodile. Dinosaur just means deinos (fearful) + sauros (lizard), right? Yes, I know they ain't lizards. Yes, I know the history behind the coining of the word "dinosaur," but we're stuck with it now.Again, I'm just saying that one could force the text to read "large crocs." Does that meant that I'm saying the author is actually alluding to dinosaurs? NOPE! I'm just saying that one could interpret the words to mean "large crocs" or "large serpents" or "large sea ceatures," etc. Hasn't modern Hebrew adopted this word to mean "crocodile"...?It really doesn't matter to me how one interprets the words. I'm not a literalist. It's an aggadhic tale. There nothing to prevent one from applying remez or derash or sod to the peshat of the text. EEK! Please don't throw me to the super crocs! LOL!Edited by smadewell, : oh felgercarb!Edited by smadewell, : DOH!

arachnophilia, i got so excited talking to someone with a knowledge of Hebrew that i've been rambling. i'm going back up to your other posts and cutting and pasting, so we can take this from the top.