Lecture

In this second lecture on the Pentateuch, we begin with an outline of the book of Genesis, though most of our time will be spent on the first three chapters with the different problems that those three chapters raise on such things as creation, the subject of evolution, the time of creation, and so forth.

The book of Genesis is an easy book to outline. It has fifty chapters and it can be divided in the middle by the death of Abraham. There are really about four parts that can easily be subdivided. You have the first eleven chapters that would be the times before Abraham and then chapter twelve to twenty-five would be the life of Abraham. Then from twenty-six to thirty-six, would be the times of Isaac and Jacob and thirty-seven begins with Joseph—the life of Joseph and his sale into Egypt. Of course, the life of Jacob overlaps with the life of Joseph, but these major divisions can be established—the first fourth, before Abraham, the next fourth, Abraham, then comes the time of Isaac and Jacob, and then the last part, Joseph down in Egypt and the patriarchal family going down into Egypt.

The first part, chapters one to eleven can, of course, be subdivided and the chapters one to three, particularly deal with creation and the fall. Chapter one begins with the famous words in Hebrew [Spoken in Hebrew], “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” And chapter one tells of the beginning of the world and all things in the six days of creation and the seventh day of rest.

The first three verses of chapter two deal with the generations, the heavens and the earth were finished and the seventh day of rest, and then in verse four, the conclusion of the creation narrative and then the beginning of the creation of Adam and Eve and their being placed in the Garden of Eden.

There have been many problems that have been raised, and of course, these chapters have been studied in great detail. I think I would like to say, first of all, that I would find no contradiction, of course, between chapters one and two. If you take chapter one to include the first three and a half verses, stopping in the middle of verse four…If you take the first verses, you have a reference to the creation of the matter and the world in general, but the later part does not refer, it seems to me, to the creation of the world or to the situation of the world as a whole at all. Some argue that it does; I would argue, and I have written a little article on this in the Evangelical Society Journal, I believe that these verses of chapter two refer actually to Eden and only to the garden of Eden, what we call Paradise.

Now to defend that first a little bit, I would say that the King James Version translation can be improved a little bit in this section. It says in verse five, “And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew.” Now actually this use of the Hebrew particle can better be translated, “And there was no plant of the field in the earth and there was no herb in the field that had grown.” At least not yet. “For the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the land, and there was not a man to till the ground.” But verse six says, “There went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.” Now you’ll notice I said, “not earth” in verse five, “The Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth,” as the King James says, but “The Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the land.” The word [eros] in Hebrew is perfectly equivalent to land or to the whole world. You cannot tell just from the word; you have to tell from the context whether the author is talking about the whole world or just talking about a section of the world, perhaps the land of Canaan, a particular political subdivision or area. It is thought by some that it refers to the whole world and there was no rain on the earth in those days because of verse six. Verse six says, “There went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.” This word mist is only used twice in the Old Testament, once here and once in the book of Job in a rather debatable section.

Well the meaning of this word mist is better known than before. Obviously, it has something to do with water and went up, and since water doesn’t go up, why the King James Version suggested that it was a mist that went up. The Septuagint actually as says “that a fountain went up and watered the whole face of the ground.” The word in Hebrew is [Hebrew word] and this word is very purely a borrowing from the Acadian, the Assyrian language, and in turn, it was borrowed from the Sumerian language and the word rather purely means “river,” a river, but it doesn’t refer therefore to anything going up in the air. It’s a river rising to water the whole face of the ground in a kind of irrigation. This is really what is said in the tenth verse. It says, “A river went out of Eden to water the garden.” What this verse is trying to tell us that verse six like verse ten is that Eden was in place that was watered by rivers. It was an irrigation area, something like the Nile that would go up in the annual inundation and water the ground and fertilize it and so on. So it was in Mesopotamia. There was no rain on the land where the garden of Eden was.

These verses, I believe, do not refer to the planet as a whole. There may well have been rain in many other places in the world and may have been for many, many years before the garden of Eden was established, but we are told here that the garden of Eden in chapter two, verse five and following, that the garden of Eden was not yet planted with plants and herbs, and Adam and all had not been put in there yet, and that the river watered this, it was a natural irrigation area. And then it tells us that the “Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there He put the man whom He had formed. So He formed the garden and then put man in the garden. Planted the garden.

When it says that man became a living soul, I think even now we might take a moment to say that that the creation of man as given here in verse seven does not refer to a long-time creation over many years through different animal forms. This verse would seem to be very much opposed to the root origin of man. Theistic evolution, you know, has the idea that God created man by a long process. He first made lower animals and plants and then the higher animals, finally fish turned into bird’s vertebrae and the vertebrates grew into all kinds of different forms and from the vertebrates you had finally the higher mammals and man himself. Man developing from some of the simian ancestors. This is the theory of theistic evolution.

I would remark that the word living soul here does not have reference specifically to the spiritual aspect of man. The phrase living soul is used in connection with the animals in chapter one, and what it really says is that man became alive. God formed man out of inanimate matter and he became alive. When he became alive, he was man. It does not say that God took lower forms so life and infused into him a spirit, and he became human. It doesn’t say He took an animal and made him human. It says He took inanimate matter and made him a living man. And so I do feel that the plain statement here of verse seven is that God made man as a special act of creation. I don’t doubt that God could have made man in many different ways. He could have made Adam and Eve the same way, but it says specifically that He did not. It says that He made man this way in a special creation out of inanimate matter and that He made Eve out of the body of man. And so we have here in Genesis 2 a reference to the establishment of the garden of Eden and a reference to the creation of man in it, and so you see the order of the plants and animals and man in their being placed in the garden of Eden does not have any specific reference to the order of creation in the first chapter. In the first chapter it says that plants were made first and then fish and animals were made and then man was made last.

In Genesis 2, the herbs are named first and then though it is not said exactly that they were made, it says then that He planted a garden in verse eight, but it actually says that man was formed and then God planted the garden, and then it says that He took man and made the animals and Adam named the animals, and finally He made Eve. And so it is said by some that there is a contradiction in the order of creation in chapter two and chapter one. There is no contradiction if you remember that chapter two deals only with the establishing of the garden of Eden and placing man, animals, plants, and Eve in that garden of Eden and has nothing to do with the order of animals in the world at large. So here is an old problem that is, I think, relieved greatly by an adequate understanding of what it means when it says that “the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the land,” and not a mist went up from the earth, but the rivers rose and inundated and irrigated the territory where God would establish the garden of Eden. We’ll say more about the place of the garden of Eden a little bit later.

And now I come back to Genesis chapter one. Genesis chapter one tells of the beginning of things. The six days of creation are given here in very dramatic form. God created the heaven and earth first, and I think I should say that the translation here, “In the beginning God created,” is much better than the translation sometimes given that when God began to create the heaven and the earth, the earth was without form and void. That translation really assumes that in the first verse, the verb would be in the infinitive. When God began to create. But it is not in the infinitive in the biblical Hebrew it is a plain, perfect tense and it is preceded by a statement “in the beginning,” not be mere preposition, but by preposition with a noun. So “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” is the overall statement. It would seem as if this is more or less the title or the summary statement and then there is given the successive acts of creation, “The earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters.” God first created matter and then this matter was brought together in certain ways and the book of Genesis, of course, does not give any scientific explanation of how this was done. It simply gives in large strokes the major picture of what happened in those days of creation.

The earth was chaotic, we may say, without form and void. It does not mean that God created it without laws, but it was not of the form and fashion that we see today. It was dark to begin with. “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light.’” What kind of light this was, it does not say. He divided the light from the darkness. The darkness He called the night and the light day. I think we should say that these words do not refer to the twenty-four day which was not yet established, not until the sun and moon were set in the heavens at the fourth day, verse fourteen and following. So we might suppose that this would be cosmic light. I don’t know that we can tell what the first day refers to. Does this refer to nebulae made out in space that astronomers would tell us about or does it refer to after the creation of the universes in the first verse and following? Does it refer rather the agglomeration of matter in one way or another into what we would call our planet or our solar system and there was a certain amount of light. Perhaps even we have a reference here to the earth already formed and light coming in through a blanket of clouds from the sun in primeval days. It doesn’t give us any of the details of the astronomy here. We can’t decide between some nebular hypothesis or some other hypothesis the formation of the planets on the basis of the general statements given here in the book of Genesis.

It is, of course, obvious that Genesis is not a book of science. We don’t claim it is. We do claim that the statements in the book of Genesis are in consonance with the best science when the data science are adequately studied and the book of Genesis is clearly and carefully interpreted. We should be careful not to go beyond the statements of the Bible and thus make problems for ourselves when we try to square the statements of Genesis with the scientific statements. Obviously, of course, the statements of Genesis are not given in scientific language. We have to somewhat adjust to the statements here in order to match the various theories of science. I’ve referred to the nebular theory, but the nebular theory has several strokes against it. We are not tied to any one particular theory of creation it would seem. Genesis just gives general statements.

We are, however, tied to the fact of creation. Genesis 1:1 makes it very clear that there was a time when there was no matter and that God made material. He made this space time universe. He established the laws of energy, mass, conservation, whatnot, and He established them by His own mighty Word, and when He spoke it was done. He commanded and it stood fast it says in the Psalms.

So we have the creative act here. Matter is not eternal. There was a time not long ago when many people believed that matter was eternal. I’m sure there are some yet that think that matter is eternal, but actually the ruling theory, I believe, of the beginning of matter is in consonance with the general statements of the book of Genesis. The ruling theory as I understand it is popularly called somewhat in sport, but actually it’s a good description of it, “The Big Bang Theory.” This view has been advocated particularly by George Gamow in his book One, Two, Three…Infinity and other books popular books that he has written, and Gamow has argued that at one time the universe was in one fiery ball in one place and there was a great explosion and the universe has been expanding ever since.

It is perhaps interesting for us to realize that there has been somewhat of an astronomical revolution in our times. It wasn’t too long ago that there was a thought that the universe was what we see it to be, but in the 1920s, Hubble and others discovered because of their observations of the stars, that it appeared that the universe is expanding at a tremendous rate. To go into the technicalities of this is perhaps not necessary. They at least train their telescopes on the distant stars and rather, I think to their surprise, they found these distant stars did not show the same pattern of light that the nearby stars show. Light can be broken up into the details of its spectrum. In the sunlight, for instance, if you look at it through spectroscope, you find characteristic lines of different wavelengths caused by the incandescence of the various metals in the sun. There would be a particular line for calcium and another line for sodium at a particular wavelength, and another line for the other metals—cooper, iron, what not. And on the spectroscope you will see these lines. You would see those same lines in a spectroscope picture taken of light here on the earth. If you had an incandescent mass with calcium, sodium, and these metals in there, you would find these lines at the same places. However, when they turn their telescopes and spectroscopes on these distant stars, they found that these characteristic lines were slightly displaced from their normal position. They were displaced toward the red-end of the spectrum. You know, the spectrum of light as we see it in the rainbow is violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, and the shorter wavelengths are the red and the longer wavelengths the violet. Beyond violet we have what we call ultraviolet and below the red we have what we call infrared. So the light from distant stars showed this characteristic red shift. What did this red shift mean?

Just a word about that. It can be likened somewhat to what you hear in the world of sound, which is more familiar to us. When pass a moving vehicle, a truck or a train, and it happens that they have their horn going or their whistle blowing, just as you pass them, you’ll notice a difference in the tone of the sound. As you go toward the sound, it is higher; as you pass the sound and go away, it is lower. So it’s a change of the sound depending on the speed of the source of the sound. Well, as this happens in sound and you can hear it go eeeooo as you go past the source of sound, so here in astronomy, the same thing happens with light, only, of course, light is going in a much faster speed. The point is if you’re going toward a source of sound, the waves of sound come to you and you cut those waves of sound faster than if you were standing still. As you go on beyond, you go with the sound and you cut the waves of sound slower. And so it is with light. If the source of light is moving rapidly away from you, the light comes to us in lower wavelengths and you have a red shift. So this red shift, called a Doppler effect tells you that these red shift stars are going away at a great rate and their speed can be measured, and it is a very rapid speed. The farther stars are going at a faster rate than the nearby stars. There are a few stars in spiral nebulae which are pinwheel affairs where you can see stars at one end that are going away faster and stars at the other end, because of the motion, that are coming somewhat toward us, although the total effect is to go away.

So this led to the view of an expanding universe. Well the concept of an expanding universe is rather revolutionary and has somewhat revolutionized the astronomical thinking, it seems to me, since the twenties and has some affect, I believe, on the general mentality of people, because people have thought now the universe is so vast and expanding so far and the stars are at such great distances that the man is thought to be so much smaller, we’re just a speck of dust and worthless.

There is a little child’s prayer that I think is in answer to that. The little child is pictured as saying, “The world is great and wide and wonderful and beautiful and I can’t understand it.” Then when the child kneels at night, “When I kneel to pray, something inside me seems to say, ‘You are more than the world, though you are such a dot. You can love and think and the world cannot.’” There’s a very beautiful section in C. S. Lewis’s book Miracles toward the end of his chapter where he deals with the supernatural and he, in very beautiful language, speaks of the magnitude of the universe and remarks that the magnitude of the universe is not something that tells of the glory of the universe. The glory is what we make of it. The magnitude is simply a matter of numbers. It would be worthwhile to read that section of C. S. Lewis’s great book on miracles.

So we have here the statement, at least in modern science, that there was a beginning to the things some nine, ten billion years ago. They don’t know exactly the time, of course. These are somewhat estimates, but some billions of years ago there was a time apparently when all the matter was tightly packed into a small ball. There was no great space between electrons and neutrons as we have it today, but everything was in what they call a kind of atomic fluid. And this tightly packed material, nobody knows how it got there, whether it fell in from previous heavens that fell together, there’s no evidence for that really, but just at this one moment some explosion was triggered and why it happened just then, again, they don’t know, but the universe began to fly apart and as it flew apart, the neutrons captured certain electrons. And as it captured the material most commonly made would have been hydrogen and vast amounts of hydrogen were made and these products of the explosion went hurdling out into the vast reaches of space have been hurdling out ever since, agglomerating, in the meantime, in to nebulized stars, suns, and planets in their own solar system. How many others? As a matter of conjecture some think there are millions of other planets, but really we know very little about that.

So there was a beginning, and that’s exactly what Genesis 1:1 says. “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” All we need to say is that this original fireball is what God made. Some think there was matter before that fireball, but if there was, it was all erased by the intense heat of that fireball. And there’s nothing we can say about what happened before that great period of some nine, ten billion years ago.

So this is simply a very interesting thing that in recent years we have a support from a scientific angle of the doctrine of the original creation of matter. There was for a while a view a Steady State Theory of Fred O’Hoyle, an astronomer in England who argued that matter did not have a beginning, but that it was springing up spontaneously all over the space of the universe. As I understand it, the discovery of quasars, which are in only some parts of the universe, is rather opposed to the idea of a Steady State Theory and Fred O’Hoyle has taken back some of his earlier theories. So although we do not say that the Bible teaches the Big Bang Theory, we may say that the Bible is at least consonant with the Big Bang Theory and there is no great problem as far as the beginning of matter is concerned. Science does not contradict the first verse of the book of Genesis.

There is one problem, of course, and that is the matter of the date, and we have to take that up too. Now that can be handled, I suppose, by our discussion of the days. There were six days of creation and then the day of rest. And these, of course, have been very much discussed.

Does the Bible teach that Adam was created in 4004 BC as Archbishop Ussher said in the seventeenth century? Or does the Bible have no given date for Adam and Eve? And if we have a date for Adam and Eve, let’s say 4004 BC, does that mean that all the worlds of matter were formed just the week before Adam was formed? There are some who believe in this twenty-four-hour day creation, which would be, I suppose, a natural approach if we didn’t know anything about astronomy and some of our ancestors who, of course, did not know much about astronomy, they may well have believed that there was just one creative week of twenty-four hour days. There are, however, some things in the Bible itself that militate against this idea that the world was created in six days of twenty-four hours, rather in six periods. There are then various views about this, and we must take this up in the next lecture.

First, there is the twenty-four day that says that the astronomy and geology is quite wrong and that the world was created quite recently. Maybe not 4004 BC, but at least very, very recently. And then there is the view that there were periods between these creative days and then there is the view that these days were long periods of time and these periods of time might be called eons or days of different length. The first days may have been very much longer than the later days. It does not specify at all.

And there is another view called the Gap Theory. The Gap Theory would be that there was a creation between chapter one, verse one and verse two and they would translate verse two “The earth became without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” This view used to be, I think, more popular then it is now. Those that hold the world was created very, very recently often hold to what is called A Grown Creation Theory. That is, that the world was created full-grown and what we see as age really is only the way it was create. It was created to look as if it was old. That view has perhaps some philosophical problems, though it has been advance very extensively in recent days.

These are the studies of the first chapter of Genesis that we must take up in our next lecture.