The Hump of the Camel

There is debate nowadays as to whether Genesis 1 teaches ex nihilo creation, or whether it implies that God used pre-existing materials to create. To some extant the answer hinges on whether v1 is a first act of creation, making a formless heaven and earth which he then organises; or whether v1 is a summary, like the subsequent toledot introductions to sections of the book, and that the formless earth is the material he begins to work on.

The two interpretations of this verse have been contested (amiably) since at least the time of St Basil, though the question of creation from something pre-existent seems only to have arisen with the modern trend to attribute primitive or even censored polytheistic theology to Genesis. Continue reading →

The main burden of today’s post has to do with the firmament and the cosmic ocean, since these are the controversial assumptions in the “normal” (goldfish-bowl) view of Hebrew cosmology, to some extent based on the evidence that the Septuagint Greek translators, who knew a thing or two, insisted that the Hebrew raqia meant something very solid, a στερεωμα (translated into Latin as “firmamentum”). But before I go there, let’s look at what St Basil says about the creation of light on Day 2 of the creation account, before the sun. Continue reading →

I thought I’d about wrapped up writing on ANE “cosmology” for now, with a three part series on Wayne Horowitz’s magnum opus in the can. But I got into e-mail conversation with Eddie about a remark I’d made in reply to a BioLogos comment. The comment had suggested that accommodation of the Genesis creation story to everyday knowledge only became necessary with the insights gained through modern science. I had replied that the Church Fathers, mainly raised in a Greek Ptolemaic kind of worldview with a round earth surrounded by crystal spheres, would have maybe had to do plenty of work to harmonize that and Scripture.

My discussion with Eddie piqued my interest in investigating just how they may have done so. Would they impose their science on the text, or sacrifice it to biblical literalism? Would they follow the Septuagint translators in assuming a hard “firmament” under the influence of the Greek teaching on crystalline celestial “spheres”? Continue reading →

Last time I described how Wayne Horowitz’s authoritative book on Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography has no room for the infinite abyss of waters so often claimed to lie above and below the world in “the ANE cosmology”. He stresses this in another passage:

In Enuma Elish, KAR 307 and AO 8196, the highest level of heaven belongs to Anu. Elsewhere, this heaven is identified as the “Heaven of Anu” (šamȗ ša ^danim; šamȗ ^danim). Additional evidence that the Heaven of Anu is the highest heaven is found in The Gilgamesh Epic and The Erra Epic, In Gilg. XI 113-14, gods ascend to the Heaven of Anu in order to escape the terror of the flood on the earth’s surface below:

The gods became frightened by the flood, so they departed, went up to the Heaven of Anu.

It is logical that gods escaping the flood would move as far away from the earth’s surface as possible, so the Heaven of Anu should be the most distant heaven from the earth’s surface, the highest level of heaven.

Continue reading →

I’ve been having a long, but mainly cordial, discussion on BioLogos on the old questions about whether Genesis 1 is really, as Peter Enns and, earlier, Paul H Seely maintain, teaching “old science” that is erroneous. Regular readers will know there are too many posts about that on The Hump to list easily. Why it even matters is well-expressed in a long article by Vern Poythress, to which I would add that, simply in principle, true interpretations lead to truer applications for life and so justify themselves. Poythress also has a couple of more detailed articles on specific issues here and here. Good stuff. Continue reading →