A sceptical reading of
the Bible – GENESIS ONE & TWO
Chapter One verse by
verse.
If
you are deeply religious creationist point of view, and literally believe in
the book of Genesis being the infallible truth, you may not wish to read this
analysis any further.
1/. We all know it
begins “In The Beginning,” as if the Creation of
our World is the start of time itself. We are given no clues as to the origins
or nature or purpose of the creator God, or how long he contemplated our
creation for before embarking on the exercise. It seems to me that rather a lot
must have happened before the beginning we get here. The big unanswered
question isn’t how, but why? Was he (presuming God is a he) just bored?
2/.
“The Earth was without form and void.” What does that mean? We get this line
right after the planet’s creation. Basically, we have the raw materials, the
ingredients, but nothing has been rolled into shape. We just have a blob of
matter, like pastry waiting to be rolled and moulded into shape.
2/. “And darkness was
upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of
the waters.” Was the ‘deep’ the
same as the ‘waters’? We seem to have an attempt to separate what is dark from
that which God’s spirit moves over.
3/.
“ And God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. “
I
always took this to be the creation of the Sun, but that comes later. Of
course, God wanted light to see by to create the World, though he could work in
darkness couldn’t he? (Being God and all).
Why
also does the Light need to be spoken into existence, like a magician saying
Abracadabra. That the Light is daylight, i.e., Sunlight is made clearer
in the next few lines too.
And
if God talks, who is listening? Angels, archangels? Is God given to
talking to himself?
5/.
“God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was
evening and there was morning, one day.” OK first of six days building
work done – we have a planet, though no clear indication if it’s round or flat.
We have seas, and land, night and day.
Day Two 7/. “ And God made the firmament and separated the waters which
were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it
was so.
8/. And
God called the firmament Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a
second day.”
We
had daylight and night time before we had the sky. Surely the light of day came
from the Sun? Without the heavens, (sky, rather than Paradise) what separated
Earth from its Sun? We’d be fried to the point of evaporation.
9/.
“And God said, "Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into
one place, and let the dry land appear.”
A
passage that makes little sense to me. The waters are not all in one place even
today. The oceans mostly connect, but lots of landlocked lakes are cut off from
them, and the lands are clearly separated as well as keeping waters apart.
Day three. God adds dry land,
vegetation, trees, etc. No problems with that but by Day four things get weird.
“And
God made the two great lights, the greater light to rule the day, and the
lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also.” This is the Sun
& Moon & stars. Hold, on – the Sun! What was that other light then, on
day one? What distinguished day from night before the second Sun was created,
or is that the first Sun?
Day five sees the fish, and birds etc, turn up. God tells them to
multiply. Again, with the ‘God said’, as if the words are magical instructions.
Day six is the big one, with not only the land animals coming into
being but man too. Here we are told that we are in 26-27/. ‘God’s own image.”
Rather presumptuous of us here, given that the Natterjack Toad might easily
jump to the same conclusion. Anti-evolutionists see this rapid creation process as rendering the
evolution of species absurd, but it is the other way round.
27/. Sees the
beginning of the first major contradictions of The
Bible. “[27] So God created man in his own image, in the image
of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Here Adam & Eve,
not yet named, are clearly created simultaneously. This comes from the
Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
As I’ll show shortly, another chapter coming up plainly separates the male and
female creation.
God
then rests after the Creation, giving rise to the Sabbath celebration, though
no specific day of the week is given. Why would an all-powerful omnipotent
deity be tired enough to sleep after creating anything? Surely God should not
get tired.
GENESIS BOOK TWO
Book
2 really gets confusing if taken as following on where book one ended, it
suddenly goes back to day two “In the day that the LORD God made the earth and
the heavens,” and creates rain.
The rain can turn
Earth to mud, and this clay-mud is used to make Adam, and puts him in the lush garden
known as Eden with the trees, including the tree of Knowledge. Adam is given a
gardening job; he has to look after Eden.
Quite why it needs tending when the rest of the World grows wild and free is
undeclared.
God tells Adam not to
eat from the tree of Knowledge too, but gives no reason why the tree is there
or what might happen if it is eaten from. I guess such knowledge would have to
come from the eating. The Serpent due to arrive later is blamed for the
temptation to eat from the three’s fruit, but God is really responsible, given
that he puts it right by Adam & Eve in
the first place.
Adam is there, in
Eden, gardening away, but two things are not – woman or animals. We were told
above that animals preceded Adam and Eve into existence, while the male &
female human were produced together, but Chapter Two contradicts that within a
few pages. In verse 18 we get “Then the LORD God said,
"It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit
for him.”
What
follows this is mind-boggling. The creatures of Earth and air are created one
by one to Adam for naming and for consideration as a mate. If he’d taken
a shine to a Wildebeest our future might have been very different. This also
contradicts the first chapter’s chronological order of the creation process
where the animals are established before Adam & Eve is made. .
20/.
Tells us “but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him.”
Adam
doesn’t fancy taking a wildebeest as a wife, thus the creation of Eve, or
second creation of Eve, from one of Adam’s own ribs.
The
two like one another, and are not ashamed to be naked together, at the close of
the second chapter. Events from Chapter three get ugly of course and I’ll look
at those in a future Hub.
So far we have a lot
of mystery and contradiction.
The second version of the creation myth runs so contrary to the first that
you’d expect editors to run with one or the other, but they run side by side.
Somehow theologians seem to cope with this. I don’t.
All text quotations
from http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/r/rsv/rsv-idx?type=DIV1&byte=1801
Arthur Chappell
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